Evelyne didn’t answer right away.
Her focus remained on the path ahead, but her mind drifted to a nivalen long ago, when she was small enough that the palace corridors still felt like a maze.
“The first time I went to Calveran, I was nine,” she said quietly. “It was during a famine year. The grain stores had spoiled in the northern provinces, and the southern merchants were hoarding what was left.”
She paused, her gloved fingers tightening slightly.
“My father took me to observe the relief efforts. That was what he called them. ‘Observe.’ Just watch and remember.”
The memory flickered behind her eyes—sharp with frost, thick with smoke.
“There were children lined along the road when we arrived. Thin. Blue-lipped. One girl couldn’t have been older than me. Her hands were cracked and bleeding from the cold, but she still tried to bow when she saw our carriage pass.”
Her tone thinned, controlled but fragile.
“I had a pearl hairpin in my cloak. I gave it to her when the guards weren’t looking. She beamed like I’d handed her the moon.”
She fell silent for a breath. The wind stirred branches above them.
“My father noticed, of course. He always noticed.”
A faint, bitter smile touched her lips. “He told me that giving away wealth without protection was a cruelty. That someone would take it from her—and likely hurt her to do it. I didn’t believe him.” Her gaze was distant now, fixed somewhere past the hedges. “Until the next morning. They found her in the gutter. The pin was gone. So were her shoes.”
She inhaled slowly, as if pulling herself back into the present.
“That was the day I stopped believing kindness was simple.”
Alaric remained silent for a moment, his expression unreadable. When he finally spoke, his tone had softened.
“In Solmara, when I was ten, a boy about my age tried to pick my pocket.”
He glanced at her, just once, before looking down at the path beneath their feet. “He wasn’t good at it. His hands were shaking. He’d barely touched the edge of my belt before the guards had him on the ground.”
Evelyne said nothing, but she was listening.
“I told them to let him go. Said he hadn’t taken anything. One of the officers said it didn’t matter. That intent was enough. That if they didn’t punish him, he’d grow up bolder.”
His jaw shifted slightly, as if he still remembered the feel of it locking in protest.
“I argued. My grandfather intervened before it became a scene. The boy was released—but not before they made sure he couldn’t run again for a while.”
He broke off.
“I found out later that his brother was sick. He hadn’t eaten in two days. I asked my tutor how a kingdom could call itself civilized while beating starving children.”
Evelyne looked at him then, surprised.
“What did he say?”
Alaric’s mouth twisted into a faint, bitter curve.
“He said: ‘That’s not your question to ask. Your duty is to rule it better.’”
“It’s good advice,” she paused, then added. “We spend too much time studying other rulers’ victories. We write odes to kings and carve their faces in stone. But it’s their failures that show us where the cracks are.”
Alaric studied her, curiosity flickering across his features.
“Success is circumstance,” she went on. “A battlefield with the wind at your back. But failure—” she glanced at him then, steady and calm, “—failure teaches you where the walls crack.”
