She turned with quiet grace, her steps unhurried, and walked away before she could see the flinch.
But she felt it.
Chapter 43
Evelyne hadn’t meant to walk so far. But the castle had grown too loud with silence, and her father’s stillness had said everything she could no longer bear to hear. So she stepped out into the gravel path that wound through the castle gardens, where she could breathe.
Ravik had lied. She had given him the chance, one simple opening to prove her wrong.
He hadn’t taken it.
And her father had let it happen. Again.
The sunlight was too bright. The air was too clean. Everything felt dishonest in the way only beauty could.
Vesena joined her at the gate without being asked and followed a step behind. Neither spoke.
The garden stretched in perfect order: hedges trimmed to submission, fountains glinting as if nothing had ever gone wrong here. Her charcoal gown caught the light like ash instead of silk. Even her gloves felt tight, as though her body didn’t want to be dressed for performance anymore.
She made her way toward a smaller, more secluded section of the gardens, where a cluster of delicate white flowers swayed in the gentle breeze. The blooms had taken root in this unlikely place, despite every warning from the castle gardeners that they would never survive. Yet here they were, their pale blossoms standing defiant against the odds.
Her mother’s flowers.Selanthers.
They had been brought from Lysitha, one of the few things her father had ever given out of care. They were rare, fragile things, unsuited to the harsher climate of Edrathen, yet they had endured.
Just as her mother had, for a time.
The flowers had been planted at the base of an old statue: a tall, robed woman with her head bowed in sorrow, arms folded gently beneath draping sleeves. The features were worn soft by weather and years, the once-ivory stone now grayer. A long crack split one side of her face, ivy curling up from the base to cradle her broken profile like a secret.
No plaque remained. If there had ever been one, it had long since been claimed by time. But the selanthers still bloomed at her feet—quiet, persistent, and uninvited.
Evelyne reached out and traced the edge of a petal. She remembered plucking them, arranging them in a porcelain vase as the days waned into nights, when sickness had stolen the color from her mother’s cheeks.
She had been young then, barely able to reach the bedside without standing on the tips of her toes. Her mother had been everything to her in those days, telling stories of her homeland, her hands braiding her hair before bed.
Evelyne had promised she would visit Lysitha one day. Her mother had only smiled, her fingers brushing over Evelyne’s cheek in a touch so gentle it had felt like air.
“You will go far beyond, my little doe,” she had said.
And now, Evelyne supposed, that was true. She was not to go to Lysitha, but to Varantia. A land unknown. A future uncertain.
She thought of Ysara then. Evelyne had been twelve when her father announced he would marry again. The whispers at court had been swift and exacting: Rhaedor needed a son.
Ysara from house Lenvale was younger than Rhaedor by twenty years, bred in the hush of the Grimhollow Range where people worked in the mines.
And she was the one who made sure the selanthers were covered on frost nights.
A gust of wind stirred through the garden, lifting strands of Evelyne’s hair from her shoulders. She closed her eyes for a moment, inhaling the faint, cool scent of the blossoms.
Then she blinked hard, banishing the ghost of her mother’s touch. Grief could wait. Resolve could not.
Varantia would not ask her who she might have been. It would demand she become who she needed to be. And perhaps, Evelyne thought, that was the only real fortune she’d ever been given.
Those in power loved to speak of strength—as if they had invented it. As if it belonged only to the battlefield and the council floor, loud and lunging, draped in steel and declared with ink on treaties.
But Isildeth had been right.
Real strength lived in the moments no one noticed—the ones women had learned to master centuries ago, because they had no other choice.
