They love him dearly.
Perhaps that’s his greatest lesson, even more than mine. That the thing the world fears most can sit in a chapel pew, bouncing a toddler on his knee, crying at his daughter’s wedding, and still be the best father I’ve ever seen.
The doors open.
Maren steps through.
Ivory silk wraps her, simple and clean, her dark hair pinned in the same practical twist I wore the day I married her father. No jewels. No elaborate braids. Just Maren, plain and simple.
Beside me, Vale goes still, wearing an expression so full it could flood the chapel. His hand finds mine on the pew betweenus. His fingers lace through mine—warm, steady, trembling just slightly—and squeeze.
I squeeze back.
“She’s so beautiful,” he whispers, his voice cracking at the seams. “She looks like you.” He turns to take me in, and the green of his eyes is bright, impossibly bright, swimming with decades of moments exactly like this one. “Thank you.”
“What for?”
His thumb traces across my knuckle, slow and deliberate, the way he’s done a thousand times in a thousand quiet moments across twenty years. “For making me choose this.”
The organ swells. Maren reaches the altar. Edmund shrieks with delight at something only toddlers can see, and Rowan leans forward in his seat, watching his sister with the quiet, steady attention of a boy who’s already learning how to hold the weight of things that matter.
I rest my head against Vale’s shoulder and watch our daughter begin her life. This. All of this.The perfect happy ending.
Worth every grain of sand.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Death
Golden light pours through the open windows of the royal chamber, pooling on the quilt, warming the thin hands that rest on top of it. Her hands. When did they become so frail?
The knuckles are prominent now, the veins raised beneath papery skin. They don’t look like the hands that once gripped a shovel for hours, or clawed at my cloak, or held our firstborn against her chest.
And yet they are. Every line, every age spot, every creak in the joints is a record of something she touched, something she held, something she refused to let go of.
I hold one of them now. My skeletal thumb traces across her knuckles with the same slow rhythm I used to comb through her hair all those mornings ago. The skin is looser than it was. Softer. I could map the years across it like a cartographer, pinpointing the exact ridge where she gripped the reins too hard the winter Edmund was born, the small scar on her index finger from a pruning knife in Queen Maeryn’s greenhouse.
I look at her dimming aura.
One-thousand-two.
One-thousand-one.
It’s not the guttering fade of the sick or the sudden snuffing of the young. This is gentler. A candle burning low in a room where it’s been burning for a long, long time, the flame still steady, still warm, just…quieter. Smaller. Finding its way to the bottom of the wick with a grace that most mortals don’t get.
She’s not in pain; I’ve made certain of that—the only nudge she allowed me, a slight easing of the body’s last tensions, smoothing the rough edges of the passage the way one might polish glass so the grains won’t catch.
“You’re staring again,” she rasps, her voice thin as old parchment.
“Admiring.” My thumb continues its circuit. “There’s a difference.”
Her mouth curves. Weak, but real. Even now, even at the bottom of the wick, she smiles at me the way she always has. Like I’m ridiculous, and she’s chosen to find it endearing rather than insufferable.
The children are here. All of them.
Maren stands at the foot of the bed, her arms wrapped around herself, her dark hair streaked with silver at forty. Shehas her mother’s pragmatism and my stubbornness, and she’s not crying. Not yet. She’s holding it the way Elara taught her: steady, with both hands, until the job is done.
