“Happiness,” Aynhard scoffs. “While the kingdom fractures at its seams? While Saxon lords test our borders? You cannot afford to be consumed by a woman who was bred to serve her father’s interests.”
“She serves mine now,” Charles replies flatly.
Aynhard lowers his voice, but not his venom. “You think keeping her constantly at your side will ensure that? You think passion makes loyalty?”
“No,” Charles says. “Control does.”
The word is spoken calmly, without heat.
“I keep her close because the court is a nest of vipers,” he continues. “Because peace depends on her father’s goodwill, and goodwill depends onher. I will not let her be poisoned against me by those who resent her place, or mine.”
“And yet,” Aynhard says, “you protect her as though she were fragile.”
“I protect what is mine,” Charles answers. “And what is necessary.”
Silence stretches between them.
“You are forgetting yourself,” Aynhard says finally. “And worse—you are forgetting her purpose.”
Charles’s voice hardens. “I know exactly why I married her. Do not presume to instruct me on my own designs.”
By the time their footsteps retreat into the noise of the waking camp, my hands are shaking inside my sleeves.
Not because of the cold.
My mind is spinning.
There had always been gifts waiting for me.
In every keep, every lodge, every borrowed chamber along the road—fresh gowns laid out before I arrived, jewels arranged as if by instinct rather than command. Servants reassigned to my service without my asking, their loyalties transferred as easily as cloaks.
“You deserve to be spoiled,” Charles would say, smiling as though indulgence were virtue. “You have given me everything.”
I never knew what he meant by that.
There were small moments when his laughter would turn sharp without warning. A joke interrupted, or a question asked at the wrong time. His jaw would tighten, his eyes darken, and the air around him would seem to shift.
Once, when a servant mentioned Queen Hilde in passing—only a reference, nothing more—Charles’s expression had gone utterly still.
“Do not speak of her,” he said flatly. “It is not your placeto wear her name on your lips.”
The silence that followed had been unbearable.
But then, as always, he recovered quickly. A smile, a touch at my waist, a murmured endearment meant only for me. The moment dissolved as if it had never been, and I told myself I had imagined its weight.
He was magnificent with the people.
Charismatic, generous, beloved. He insisted I stand beside him always, guiding me through villages and halls alike.
“You must see my kingdom,” he would say. “Not through reports or whispers—but with your own eyes.”
And what I saw was joy. Gratitude. Loyalty.
When we spoke of the court, he dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “They poison everything they touch,” he would say lightly. “Here, we are free. Together.”
I had believed him.
He praised me endlessly—my mind, my kindness, my loyalty. He spoke of the future in sweeping terms: reforms he would make, heirs we would raise, a legacy forged by love rather than fear.
