Chapter 53

The party wound down as dawn slipped away, and the great hall that had roared with music and laughter sank into a comfortable hush. Carriages rolled away beneath banners that still fluttered like sleepy memories; emissaries and visiting kings had been fed, toasted, and sent back to their own lands with gifts and protocol. Servants moved through the palace corridors like a quiet tide — extinguishing lanterns, stacking goblets, rolling carpets, wiping the last traces of feast from the long tables. The marble gleamed in the early morning light where ale and wine had dried into dark rings. A single broom scraped back and forth, brisk and efficient, sweeping the last confetti and crushed petals into neat piles.

Lucien’s procession back to his chambers had been a study in restraint; he accepted the compliments, inclined his head to the elders and to the cheering crowds, and politely declined the fluttering invitations of well-meaning young noblewomen. His steps, however, were light with a private unrest. The memory of the fleeting figure at the garden’s edge — the golden hair, the blue eyes — was a small flame that refused to be snuffed. He lay down on the bed in his chamber with the incense still in his hair, the crown’s weight set aside in the antechamber, and let his mind roll over the night like a tide. How many times had he seen a face and forgotten it? How many times had the grand theatricalities of the court passed without finding any purchase in his heart? Yet this face — this shadow — had rooted itself in him. He turned the question inward until the thought exhausted him and sleep finally claimed him.

In the queen’s apartments, Freda moved through the familiar end-of-day rituals that had become part of her calm: a bath warmed with herbs Zerach preferred for his own aches, lavender strewn into the steaming water. She had given thanks to the gods — privately, in the small pocket of belief she kept for herself — for the smooth coronation, for Lucien’s safe evening, for the laughter that had come back to their halls. She dressed in the nightshirt Zerach had gifted her long ago, the pale fabric soft against her skin, the embroidery catching a memory. It was a simple garment, meant to be safe and quiet, and yet Zerach treated it as a treasure the way men do when memory and love twist together.

A knock came at the door — soft, familiar. Freda paused in the half-dark, her hand on the latch.

“Who is it?” she murmured.

“It is I, my love,” Zerach replied, the voice low and warm as a hearth. He crossed the threshold and glanced at her with that mixture of mischief and exhaustion he had learned to show when he meant to be gentle. “My queen,” he said, noticing the nightwear, “this is the very shirt I gave you years ago. You promised never to wear it. Are you attempting to seduce an aging king, or has my stubborn heart finally convinced you?”

Freda smiled, a brief, genuine curve. “Perhaps I was saving it for the king whose hands have stopped shaking when he holds me,” she answered. “Or perhaps I simply wanted to sleep in something that reminded me of you.”

He closed the distance between them with a few long strides. Zerach’s fingers found her hands first, warm and firm, the calluses of a warrior softened by years of care and late nights of worry. He kissed each knuckled finger — a small ceremony — then allowed his hand to slip up along her wrist, feeling the steady pulse there as if it were the kingdom’s own heartbeat. He lifted his gaze to her face, taking her in: the line of her cheek, the glint at the corner of her smile, the tired brightness in her eyes. He pressed his lips to her shoulder, light as dusk, then trailed kisses up the curve of her neck, small, reverent, until he reached her lips.

The kiss was not hurried. It held memory and apology and simple thanksgiving all at once. Zerach’s mouth sought hers as if affirming that she was real, that she breathed under the same roof as he did, that their history — the terrible and the tender — had brought them here to this gentle present. The world dwindled to the two of them: the warmth of her skin under his hands, the steady rise and fall of her breath. He took her face between his hands and kissed her again, deeper now, slow enough that neither needed to rush. It was a kiss that acknowledged the past he could not change and the future he had dared to hope for.

Freda’s arms came around his neck. There was humor in her eyes, but also an unspoken plea for normality — for nights that were only theirs and not the court’s, for a husband who would not always be the king, for a man who could still be a lover. They settled together on the bed in a tangled, comfortable heap: Zerach’s cloak hung on a chair, the crown left in the next room, and beyond the thick walls, the city murmured in a distance that felt protected by their closeness.

He pressed kisses along the line of her collarbone. She sighed, and the sound told him things he did not need to be told. For a while the palace’s old stones could be fooled into believing the world had not shifted; their hours were small and soft and full of private laughter. Zerach’s hands moved with the tenderness of a man careful not to hurt what he cherished most. They undressed not with the crude haste of appetite but with the careful reverence of two people reacquainting themselves with the map of a life rebuilt. Where once grief had made them flinch from textures and touch, tonight they found comfort in the language of closeness — braiding fingers, the press of foreheads, whispered names in the dark.

They sank beneath the covers, and the silence that followed was full, complete, not empty. Words were scarce; notes of warm contentment hummed between them. Zerach rested his cheek against Freda’s hair and told her, softly, of the small things he had loved in the evening — the way Kael had tumbled and laughed, how Lucien had accepted the ceremony with a measured grace. She smiled against his lips, and for a few hours the palace belonged to them alone.

But nights of peace between two people often open doors in both their hearts. Zerach spoke of fear, and she steadied him; Freda confessed small, silly hopes and he promised to try to make them true. They lay together until sleep took them: bodies close, hands entwined, two rulers wrapped in the fragile armor of each other’s love.

Meanwhile, Lucien’s dream pulled him away from the palace with the inexorable force of something older than law or lineage. In the dream he had gone far beyond the world he knew, beyond the gardens and the torches and the cheers, into a place of dim halls carved of stone and crowned with obscured firelight. Pale banners — not of any house he recognized — hung from the rafters. Figures moved there, more shadow than flesh, and they bent their heads as one when he stepped onto a dais he had never seen before.

“You have completed seventeen years, Lucien,” a voice said, and when he turned the speaker’s face was hidden beneath a mask of bone and black cloth. The voice was neither young nor old; it was as if the cavern itself spoke through a throat not given of breath.

Lucien tried to laugh at the absurdity of being addressed so formally in a dream, but the laughter died on his tongue because the figures knew him. “How do you know my name?” he demanded, and the masked man’s response came as if it had been waiting for him for a long time.

“Because you are our prince,” the man said. “We have waited for centuries. At last, with you, we may come into the light. We may walk openly among the living, and no longer will we cower.”

Lucien felt a coldness press down on his chest. The men around the dais — or people, he could not yet tell — drew nearer. They were beautiful in the way that things of the dark are beautiful: their movements were too smooth, their eyes glittered with a practiced hunger, and everything about them suggested exile and patient cunning. The masked speaker tipped his head in an elaborate, ceremonial motion and continued.

“You will be the one to destroy the land of the living and build a place for us to stay,” he intoned. “You will be our prince and our pride. You will destroy all the people in your land.”

The phrase repeated itself low and terrible through the chamber like a litany, dulling Lucien’s defenses. At first he thought it the echo in the stone, harmless. Then the voice leaned in — a whisper that settled like ash in his ears.

“You will destroy all the people in your land.”

“You will destroy all the people in your land.”

“You will destroy all the people in your land.”

“You will destroy all the people in your land.”

By the last repeat it was not the chorus of a dream but a command pressed into his very bones. Lucien woke with a jagged intake of breath, sheets twisted about his legs, the taste of iron in his mouth. Sweat slicked his hair to his forehead. His heart thudded a drum of panic against his ribs. For a moment he could not recall where he was or which century he breathed in. His mind clung to the echo, the shapeless faces bent toward him, and the certainty that some inheritance he had never asked to carry had just been named.

He sat up, fingers fumbling for the torch on the wall. Moonlight spilled in thin bands across the floorboards. The room was as it always was: the carved chest at the foot of his bed, the banners with the king’s sigil, his training sword set in its resting place. Nothing in the waking world matched the pressure he had felt in the dream. Yet the echo remained like a bruise: you will destroy all the people in your land.

He washed his face with water from a jug, the cold burning his skin and bringing him back to the present. He thought of Kael’s laughing face — of Freda’s hands smoothing the linens after the feast — and, painfully, of his father’s old, haunted eyes. The words in the dream sat heavy, as if already a part of him. He could not tell whether the dream had been a prophecy, a manipulation, or the groaning of some older power finally noticing his existence. The only thing he knew for certain was that the dream had changed the night’s taste. It had taken the honey of celebration and laced it with something metallic and sharp.

Lucien dressed quickly and walked to the balcony, the cold stone under his feet steady and hard. He watched the sun crown the city and thought of the people who slept beyond the palace walls. He could not shake the tremor in his hands. The bond he felt — the pull toward a shadowed girl and the whispering people of the dream — braided together in a way he did not understand. He had not felt like this for any of the women who had tried to catch his eye through childhood, and yet here he was, certain of the pull of one he had only caught a glimpse of.

Freda and Zerach woke in the warm afterglow of the night. Freda stirred first, smoothing the blanket over their joined hands. Zerach turned, watched her softly, and then rose to his feet like a man in full armor