Page 10 of Oath
A few nervous chuckles rippled around the table, but the lords pressed on.
“Your line must be secured, my lord,” said another, Lord Darrick, whose beard was short and bristled like a hedgehog. “Without heirs, the duchy will falter. Your father’s strength wanes, and the king himself looks for signs of prudence from Valemont. You would do well to show it.”
“Prudence?” he echoed. “Tell me, Lord Darrick, was it prudence that married you to a woman with the charm of a boiled turnip and the wit to match? I should think not. I’ll take my chances.”
Snorts of laughter broke from the younger nobles before being smothered into coughs.
Lord Branvel’s frown deepened. “This is no jest, my lord. There is a ball in a fortnight’s time. Half the noble daughters of the realm will be in attendance. It would be… sensible… to dance, to court, to select.”
Aerion tilted his head, resting his cheek in his palm as though the very suggestion exhausted him. “To select,” he repeated dryly. “As though one might pluck a goose from the market. White feathers, good hips, lays three eggs a day.”
“An heir must be made,” Lord Branvel insisted.
“And you’d have me breed like livestock,” Aerion said, his voice softening but growing sharper for it. “My thanks, my lords, but I’ll not be paraded about like a stud horse. If I attend your precious ball, it will be to drink the wine and mock the fiddlers.”
Gasps of dismay fluttered through the room. Some tried to object, but Aerion silenced them with a sudden flick of his hand, the sharp edge of a smile cutting across his face.
“Now, unless one of you has a solution that does not involve shoving me into a marriage bed, we are finished here.”
The council dissolved into uneasy murmurs.
From his place at the wall, Clyde watched—expression unreadable, shoulders square, eyes steady. He did not speak. But he noted the ripple in Aerion’s voice when the word heir was spoken, the brittle spark behind his smile, the way his quill still lay abandoned on the table.
The days fell into a rhythm so steady it might almost have been mistaken for peace. Each morning, Aerion announced he was “taking a light stroll” through the estate—his tone always bored, as though the Archduke’s son had nothing better to do than wander gravel paths and scuff his boots in the dew.
But Clyde knew better.
It was no stroll. It was inspection.
Aerion’s eyes were too quick, too sharp for idleness. He noted the pale fleck on a rose leaf and snapped at the gardener to burn the blighted vines. He brushed his fingers across a barrel of grain and told the steward to dry it again, lest damp ruin the whole lot. He paused at the stables to greet a mare by name, then turned and asked after the boy mucking stalls, remembering not only his name but that of his ailing mother in the village beyond the wall.
Clyde followed always a pace behind, hand on the pommel of his sword, grey eyes cataloguing the cataloguer.
He had guarded lords, briefly, before, men fat on their own importance, whose only knowledge of their households was how many wine barrels remained in the cellar. But Aerion… Lord Aerion disguised thoroughness as disdain. He wielded sarcasm like a lash, as though he feared that if he showed care openly, someone might twist it into weakness.
It was a strange kind of armour, Clyde thought.
In the afternoons, Aerion disappeared into the solar, draped in silks and lounging across his father’s chair while he bent over parchment. Ledgers, petitions, letters from vassals near and far—he read them all. He listened to the chamberlain’s reports without flinching, even when the news soured: unrest in the east, taxes gone unpaid, a merchant caravan ambushed by bandits.
Aerion answered with barbed wit and icy composure, but beneath it, Clyde heard the steel. He was a man who saw everything, and who carried more than he let show.
Clyde couldn’t understand why he hid it so carefully. Why sneer at a thing that deserved pride? Why sharpen every kindness into cruelty before letting anyone glimpse it?
Then again, Clyde had served more than half his life on the battlefield. He had seen the ways men chose to live with loss. Some shouted, drank, or cursed until their throats bled. Clyde had chosen silence.
Perhaps Aerion had chosen scorn.
And still—
When Aerion lifted his cup each night and poured wine until the world blurred, Clyde saw something else. Saw the face not of a peacock lord, not of the Archduke’s gilded heir, but of a man who had already lost too much. A man drinking not for pleasure, but for forgetting.
Clyde wondered, as he stood guard by the chamber doors while the heir laughed too loudly at nothing, who it was that Aerion had lost.
A mother, perhaps, for Clyde had never heard her name spoken. Or something less obvious, quieter: a dream never granted, a freedom never given.
Whatever it was, Clyde recognized the shape of it. He had carried his own griefs long enough to know the weight of another man’s.
And so he watched, silent, steady, always one pace behind.
