Page 88 of Oath
He read it a second time and then again aloud, the cadence of the words striking the room like blows. The repetition—those fragmentary “You. You. You.” stacked like stones—unroofed him. Aerion’s throat closed; for a breath he could not feel the air. The cup in front of him clinked as Isolde set her pencil down.
He did not cry at once. He sat very still, the paper trembling in his hand, the small room full of evening light and the smell of pipe smoke from the servant below. Then something in the chest where he kept his fury and his tenderness broke loose. The sound that came from him wasn’t a sob so much as the release of several held-at-their-teeth things at once: grief, relief, fury, and a need so old it startled him.
Isolde was in his lap before he realized she’d moved. She smoothed his sleeve with a pale, chubby hand and looked up at him with an expression too grave for her years.
“Papa?” she asked as if naming the obvious.
He drew her closer until her head tucked beneath his chin, breath warm against the damp of his face. He pressed the letter to his lips, as if to meet Clyde in the inked strokes, and when he folded it, he took care not to crease those lines that had saved him.
He let the words settle in the small, private hollows of his body. Then, steadied by the child sleeping against his chest and the bizarre, simple fact of the letter in his hand, he did what he had always done when a decision pressed against him: he wrote.
The quill shook at first, his handwriting cramped. Isolde watched from his shoulder, small fingers tracing his wrist.
My love,
I have watched the horizon for years and thought every bird that crossed the horizon might be you.
You lived. You wrote. You kept your ribbon. You are a fool and a god.
Come home. Live long enough to be punished for it. Let me see you staggering in the hall, smell of smoke and mud, swearing at the roses. Let me tell you how useless you make me and mean it. Let me be the one to scold you for leaving me.
Isolde tuckered herself into my lap to hear my answer before I wrote it. She says the war must stop because princes need to come home to tea. I agree. So come. Come back to me.
—A
He did not seal that note immediately. He folded it once, then twice, and pressed it between the pages of the small devotional book he kept in his desk. He pressed his thumb to the ink where Clyde had written “You,” and for a long minute let the smell of the road—ash and dirt and sweat—rise faint and intimate from the page. It was not much; a small proof that the man who had been broken on Hollow Ridge still carried the same private, ridiculous habits that had first made Aerion both laugh and wound.
At last he summoned Heston. The butler’s face was polite but taut with the worry of a man who has watched a lord change and cannot mend what’s cracked at the bone. “Send this on the first hawk,” Aerion said, voice steady now. “See that it flies fast.”
Heston inclined his head and moved with the efficiency of a man who had learned to carry other people’s heartbreaks. Aerion returned to the window, Isolde curled in his arms, and for the first time in months the sea beyond the cliffs looked less like a threat and more like a path—toward a man who had carved a name into wood with a blooded hand and then, impossibly, lived to tell it.
Chapter twenty-one
The Long Walk
The war was over.
The words felt strange in Aerion’s mouth, even when he spoke them aloud at council. They tasted unreal, like fruit out of season—sweet, but fragile, as though one hard frost might undo it all.
The council chamber hummed with cautious relief. Maps were cleared from the tables, quills dipped now into ledgers for grain shipments instead of casualty counts. Yet where one burden lifted, another settled.
“We must prepare to receive them,” Lord Baedwin said, his quill tapping against his ledger. “The knights will march home soon, and Valemont must greet them with the honours they are due.”
Aerion lounged in his chair, fingers drumming against the carved armrest. He wore black, still—mourning his father, mourning too many things to name. But his eyes were sharp, and when they lifted, the lords fell silent.
“A banquet,” he said, voice slow, deliberate. “Large enough to rival the king’s own halls. Let the walls ring with it, let the wine flow red, let every widow and child eat their fill. No one who bled for Valemont will return to an empty table.”
There were murmurs of approval, scribbling quills.
“And a cemetery,” Aerion continued. His tone was colder now, his gaze fixed on the far wall where old Valemont Archdukes stared down from painted canvas. “Not a mass grave in a muddy field. A true cemetery. With names. With stones. With a wall that will outlast us all. They will not be forgotten.”
The chamberlain shifted. “The expense will be—”
Aerion cut him off with a glance so sharp the man fell silent. “The expense,” he said softly, “is the price of war. And it has already been paid in blood. See that the stones are quarried.”
The matter closed there.
When the council adjourned, Aerion lingered alone in the echoing hall, his hand pressed against the cold oak of his father’s chair. The mask of command felt heavy on his face, but inside—beneath the velvet and the venom—something restless clawed at him.
