The council chamber smelled of old parchment and sweat, though its walls were draped with brocade and its windows rimmed in gold. The long oak table stretched from one end to the other, crowded with noblemen and stewards elbowing one another for space, their rings clicking against wood as they gestured too broadly, too often.

Aerion sprawled in his father’s chair as though he had been born to it, one leg thrown over the armrest, a quill twirling in his fingers. His gaze was fixed on the painted ceiling, studying cherubs as though they alone deserved his attention.

“Taxes must be raised,” droned the steward of the eastern fief. “If we are to keep the roads secure, the people must—”

“The people must bleed, must they?” Aerion interrupted, the quill snapping from his fingers and rolling across the table. He sat forward suddenly, fingers steepled, eyes gleaming. “Or perhaps the nobility should trim its feasts and tighten its belts. Your lands see more wine than wheat, Lord Halford, yet you would pluck the bread from farmers’ mouths?”

The room stilled. Lord Halford flushed scarlet.

Aerion’s lips curled, sharp as a blade. “I propose we levy the wine trade, not the plow. If you drink half as much as you boast, the coffers will be overflowing by winter.”

A ripple of nervous laughter passed around the table. Quills scratched as men jotted hurried notes. No one dared contradict him.

Clyde stood at the wall behind him, arms crossed, face impassive. He watched Aerion dismantle lords with a flick of his tongue, his words wrapped in disdain but sharpened with precision. Clyde saw the mind beneath the mockery, the calculation hidden in every barb. He said nothing. He always said nothing.

The tension in the chamber lingered after Lord Halford sank into silence, his jaw working uselessly as if chewing on a retort he dared not voice. The other nobles shifted, eyes averted.

It was Lord Branvel, a grey-bearded vassal with fingers heavy in gold, who cleared his throat next. “A sharp tongue, my lord, but even sharper would be a wedding band. Your father grows weaker by the day. Valemont needs stability, and stability requires heirs.”

A murmur of agreement stirred the chamber, chairs creaking as men leaned in, eager now that someone else had broached the subject.

Aerion leaned back in his chair, stretching like a cat across silk cushions, boredom painted across his face. “Ah, yes. Marriage. The universal cure to all ills. Harvests failing? Marry. Bandits raiding? Marry. The moon turns red? Gods forbid, marry. You’d have me bedding a bride every fortnight just to keep the weather fair.”

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.

Another day, another council meeting. Their words—marriage, heirs, stability—still circled like crows in Aerion's skull, their wings beating against his temples.

He hated that they lingered. Hated that he cared enough to feel the sting of them at all.

He paced his chambers restlessly, one hand dragging through his hair, the other fiddling with the quill he’d nearly abandoned on the council table before storming out. He should have let it lie there, a symbol of his contempt. Instead he’d pocketed it, as though some part of him couldn’t let the matter rest.

Love? What did they think he was, some wide-eyed boy scribbling sonnets to a milkmaid? He believed in appetite, in laughter, in fire and fleeting pleasure. Not vows. Not permanence. The very idea of binding himself to one person, one body, one life… his skin crawled at the thought.

And yet their words gnawed at him. Securing the line. Prudence. An heir must be made.

As if he were a horse to be bred, a pawn to be paired and paraded.

The more they pushed, the less he wanted it. He could almost taste the bitterness of it on his tongue.

“Marriage,” he muttered, stripping off his doublet with a violent tug. It landed across the back of a chair in a sprawl of blue silk and gold thread. “Marriage, marriage, marriage. As though it were the cure for rot and rust. Perhaps I should marry Lord Branvel’s daughter. I hear she speaks five words a day, all of them dull.”

The handmaidens exchanged nervous glances but said nothing as they moved around him, laying out fresh attire for the evening. Aerion caught his reflection in the mirror: bare-chested, collarbones catching the light, hair tousled from his pacing. He smirked at himself, though the smile wavered.

“Love,” he scoffed aloud, tilting his head at his reflection. “I don’t even believe in it.”

But the silence that followed swallowed the words whole, and for a fleeting moment, he wondered if the mask was cracking.

When he emerged an hour later, he was draped in obsidian silk, the robe fitted scandalously close, its low bodice shimmering with dusted gold powder. A sheer midnight cape trailed behind him, embroidered with silver stars. Every detail screamed defiance, daring the council to choke on its prudence.

If they wanted a stud horse, he would give them a peacock instead.

Clyde waited by the door, hand resting on the hilt of his sword, his expression carved from stone. His eyes flicked once over Aerion, but if he had a thought about the finery, or about the fury simmering just beneath it, he did not speak it.

Aerion brushed past him, perfume sharp in the air. “Do try to look impressed, Hound. Tonight, I am irresistible.”

And as they left for the ballroom, Aerion kept his chin high, his smile sharp, while deep inside, the vassals’ words still gnawed like crows, no matter how he tried to laugh them away.