The bond pulls, sharp and insistent. Rhystan somewhere in the castle, probably already back in the library. Not because I told him to. Because he decided he's going to fight for us whether I want him to or not.
I should hate that.
I don't.
When I finish eating, I move toward the bed—and stop.
It's been freshly made, clean sheets pulled tight, but underneath the lavender they used to air out the room, I can still smell him. Faint but unmistakable. Smoke and cedar and something darker, muskier. The scent of the man who slept here for weeks, breathing in my lingering presence the same way I'm now breathing in his.
I should ask for different sheets. Should demand they scrub every trace of him from this room.
Instead I crawl into the bed and pull the covers up around me. His scent wraps around me like an embrace I didn't ask for, and some traitorous part of me relaxes into it. The twins settle, calmed by the familiar smell of their father.
I hate that it feels like safety.
Tomorrow the real work begins. The library. The research. Hours in the same space as the man who broke my heart, searching for words that might save my daughter or kill me trying.
Tonight, surrounded by his scent, I let myself rest.
30
Rhystan
Twenty-three days.
I mark each one by the fading of her scent on the sheets, by the way morning light hits the empty pillow beside me, by the particular silence of chambers that used to hold her breathing. The bond aches like a wound that won't close—not sharp anymore, just a constant low throb that I've learned to carry the way soldiers learn to carry old injuries.
Something is wrong with the pregnancy. I know that much through the connection we share, though she's given me nothing concrete—no words, no images, just a weight of fear bleeding through the distance that wasn't there before she left. She's terrified of something she won't name. And every day that passes without her reaching out, I search a little more desperately for answers to questions I don't fully understand.
The restricted archives have become my territory these past weeks. I've pulled every text on cursed bloodlines, every fragment about pregnancy complications, every reference to the War God's magic that the priests didn't manage to burn. Dust coats my fingers by midday. My eyes ache from reading faded script by candlelight. Most of what I find is useless—propaganda, incomplete records, deliberate misinformation designed to obscure rather than illuminate.
When the castle archives turn up nothing complete, I send riders further. Every monastery within ten days' travel, every temple archive that might have escaped the priests' purges, every private collection rumored to hold forbidden texts. I don't know exactly what I'm looking for—just that something is wrong, and somewhere there must be answers.
But some of what I find hints at darker things.
Curses that pass to children like poison in the blood. Bloodlines that turn toxic in the womb. Heirs who carry their fathers' sins in ways that destroy them before they're born.
I don't know if any of it applies to her. To our child. But I keep searching because it's the only thing I can do besides lie awake at night and wonder if she's thinking of me at all.
The bed still smells like her.
Fainter now than it was three weeks ago—I have to press my face into the pillows to catch it, have to breathe deep and hold it in my lungs like something precious. Her chambers, her sheets, the space where she used to lie beside me while I mapped the geography of her body with my hands. The servants change the bedding every few days but her scent lingers in the mattress itself, soaked into the fibers, into the very walls.
I should stop sleeping here. Should return to my own chambers and let her ghost fade into memory where it belongs.
Instead I curl into the hollow her body left and breathe her in and tell myself tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll move back to my own rooms. Tomorrow I'll stop torturing myself with traces of something I destroyed.
Tomorrow never seems to come.
I've been in the archives since dawn, surrounded by the particular mustiness of ancient vellum and the cold dregs of tea someone brought hours ago, when Corvith appears in the doorway.
"Your Majesty." He has the look of a man bearing news he's not sure how to deliver—shoulders slightly hunched, weight shifting between his feet. "There's movement on the mountain pass. The scouts report a woman traveling alone. Pregnant."
The book in my hands hits the table hard enough to scatter loose pages.
"How far?"
"Half a day's walk from the gates. Maybe less if she's moving quickly."
