Not in silence. 

Not without ceremony. 

Not without the pressure of gold-stitched banners announcing my arrival three villages ahead. This time, we leave before sunrise — no guards save Kaelis and two riders loyal to him, no fanfare, no visible cause. 

Just a lie. 

The “inspection of border defenses,” as Maelis phrased it. A trip designed to reassure nobles, intimidate dissenters, and reassert control. But I didn’t ask to be reassured. I asked to see what no one shows me. 

Kaelis rides beside me, his cloak dusted with frost, his eyes always scanning the horizon like the road might open its mouth and swallow us whole. He hasn’t spoken much since we left the gates. Not until we reach the treeline that marks the southern ridge, where the palace finally disappears behind a bend in the hills. 

Then, quietly: “You’re still watching the wrong danger.” 

I glance at him. “Eiran?” 

He shakes his head. “Your father.” 

That makes me pause. 

“What do you mean?” 

Kaelis adjusts the grip on his reins. “A king who watches his kingdom fall into rot and calls it strategy... is either preparing to burn it down or let someone else do it.” 

I don’t respond right away.

The wind carries the smell of smoke — not danger, but hearthfires from the farms scattered across the valley below. 

The people we claim to protect. 

The ones I’ve never truly met. 

“I need to see them,” I say. 

Kaelis nods. “We will.”

We reach the village just after midday. 

It isn’t marked on most maps. 

The road veers sharply through a line of dry evergreens before dipping into a shallow, frostbitten hollow — where the homes lean close together like they’ve learned not to trust the wind. Thorne’s Edge. That’s what Kaelis calls it. 

“It used to house scouts and signalmen,” he says as we slow our pace. “Before the war turned east. Now, it’s mostly refugees. Broken farmland. Forgotten names.” 

I nod, silent. 

The people notice us immediately — not because of who I am, but because of how I look. My powder blue riding dress is spotless. My boots are too clean. My gloves are stitched. My horse is fed. 

But I dismount first. 

Kaelis follows a breath later. 

No one bows. 

No one speaks. 

Until a boy — thin, barefoot despite the frost — steps forward and holds out a hand. Not for greeting. For help. He doesn’t know who I am. He just sees a stranger who isn’t starving. 

I give him my gloves. Not because it’s noble. Because it’s right. 

He nods once. Then disappears back into the shadows between homes.

A woman approaches next. Middle-aged, shoulders squared, face hard with the kind of dignity that war can’t starve out. 

“Are you here to count us?” she asks. “Or to listen?” 

“I’m here to see,” I say honestly. “Everything no one’s been showing me.” 

She looks at Kaelis. 

Then back at me. 

“Then you’ll want to start at the edge of the fields,” she says. “Where the graves are too shallow to hold their names.” 

I nod again. 

And I follow her. 

Not as a princess. 

As something quieter. 

Something truer.

The frost doesn’t reach the edge of the fields. 

It should. 

But there’s too little shade, too little life left to hold the cold. 

I walk beside the woman — Mara, she tells me — past broken fences and brittle stalks, the earth gray and thin where crops once stood tall. 

Then I see them. 

The markers. 

They’re not gravestones — not really. Just pieces of driftwood, fence posts, bent iron pulled from collapsed wagons. Each one pressed into the dirt at a slant, some tied with string, others marked with small tokens: a child’s ribbon, a rusted spoon, a scrap of cloth. 

“How many?” I ask her. 

She doesn’t answer right away. 

Then: “We stopped counting after sixty.” 

I kneel beside one. 

There’s no name. Just a smear of charcoal, half-faded. A line from a prayer I recognize — something my mother used to whisper when she thought no one could hear. I reach out, brush snow from the base of the marker. 

My fingers tremble. 

Not from cold. 

From knowing. 

Knowing how many council hours I’ve spent debating grain routes while children were buried in frost-hard dirt. Knowing how many times I let someone else carry the cost of my inaction. 

“I didn’t know,” I say, barely above a whisper. 

Mara watches me. “Now you do.”

I find Kaelis at the edge of the road, where the fields give way to the hollow. He’s sharpening his blade, slow and methodical — not because he expects danger, but because it’s how he waits. 

When he sees my face, he sets the whetstone down. 

“I’ve never seen it like that,” I say. 

Kaelis says nothing. 

So I keep going. “I’ve heard the numbers. Read the ledgers. Approved the relief shipments that never arrived.” I shake my head. “But I didn’t feel it.” 

I sit beside him on the slope. 

The wind cuts across the field in a long, low hush. 

“I thought if I could just outmaneuver them — Eiran, my father, the court — I could change things,” I say. “I thought power meant precision.” 

Kaelis speaks softly. “It means weight.” 

I look at him. 

“You carry it alone long enough,” he adds, “you forget it’s not meant to crush you.” 

My hands are still dirty from the earth. 

I don’t wipe them clean. 

“I want to be different,” I whisper. 

Kaelis doesn’t answer. 

He just reaches over. 

And presses a hand over mine. 

Not to still it. 

Not to stop me from shaking. 

But to share it. 

Just enough.

The sun begins to dip behind the ridge as we prepare to leave. 

I speak with Mara once more — promise nothing, because promises don’t feed children, but I listen. I tell her I will return. And this time, I mean it. 

We ride out just before dusk. 

The trail is narrow, winding between frost-laced trees and low crags where the brush grows wild and uneven. 

The silence here is thick — the kind that absorbs hoofbeats and hangs in the branches like breath. 

Kaelis slows his horse. 

I glance over, and I know the look in his eyes. 

The shift. 

The scent of movement. 

The way the woods go too quiet. 

“What is it?” I ask. 

He doesn’t answer. 

Just scans the ridgeline, head angled slightly, posture loose in the way men become right before they’re ready to move. 

I follow his gaze. 

There — on a distant slope — something glints. 

Briefly. 

A flicker. 

Then gone. 

It might’ve been sunlight on steel. 

Might’ve been nothing. 

But Kaelis doesn’t believe in nothing. 

And neither do I. 

We ride a little faster after that. 

Not enough to show fear. 

Just enough to acknowledge the game has already started.