Chapter 3 – The Hunting Accident

  The Departure

  Hunts are for men who need the forest to tell them they’re still kings.

  At dawn the courtyard was all steam and noise—the horses stamping like they owned the cobbles, the hounds baying as if someone had whispered treason in their ears. Frost clung to the iron grates and turned every breath into a ghost. I stood above it all on the east balcony with my hands curled around the cold stone, the little princess who had learned to keep her mouth shut and her eyes open.

  Father—King Corin, for the benefit of people who needed titles to remember who they were—looked better than he had in months. Morning made him younger. He wore the red leather hunting coat he loved, the one rubbed soft at the cuffs, and he laughed when Marshal Brenek fussed over the bowstring as if the wood might take offense. The laugh hit me like a memory I hadn’t agreed to have. It flashed too bright, then was gone, the way sunlight slips off a blade.

  Lady Morienne hovered at his side in a riding cloak the green of deep water. The hood framed her face like a reliquary for a saint I didn’t trust. She rested a hand on his arm—light, affectionate, perfectly placed for the watching court. From above I could see the tendons in her fingers stand under the skin. Lovers don’t grip like that. Knives do.

  Father kissed the air near her cheek. She tilted her face and gave him the smile that had taught half the castle to forget what it knew. When he turned to greet the nobles—the ones with hawks on their wrists and appetites in their eyes—her smile slipped. Not a fall, just a crack down the middle where the real face watched through. Then she smoothed it, the way you smooth a wrinkle from silk: one practiced stroke and it never happened.

  Beside me, Elayne shivered in her gray cloak. Even her shivers were polite. Her freckles had gone pale, and she smelled of the starch the new maids drowned our clothes in. Selindra had taken the balcony’s other corner like it was a throne she was trying on; her braid was pinned with emeralds that matched her mother’s and her smirk matched even better.

  “They say boar this year,” Selindra murmured, picking dirt from her nail as if the word blood were just another color of varnish. “Very dangerous.”

  “That’s the point,” I said. “It’s not a hunt if it doesn’t try to kill you.”

  “Morbid,” she said. “How charming.”

  She drifted away to admire herself in the window’s reflection. Elayne edged closer, eyes pinned to the bustle below like she could hold back disaster by staring it down.

  Morienne floated through the chaos arranging it. She plucked a feathered cap off a page boy’s head and set it at a better angle, took the reins from a nervous groom and handed them to a calmer pair of hands, adjusted the strap at Father’s shoulder as if fastening him to a story. She discovered a way to touch everything without being caught holding it. That’s a talent. So is making people grateful for it.

  “Princess,” she called, looking up. The word glinted. “Will you wish us swift fortune?”

  I leaned on my elbows and put on my best court smile, the one that says darling, I’m listening while I count your mistakes. “Of course, Stepmother. May the woods be generous.”

  “Generosity is overrated,” she said, and laughed with Father again. He didn’t hear the edge. Of course he didn’t.

  The horn sounded—one bright, foolish note—and the hounds went wild. Brenek was barking orders, grooms leading out a fresh string of mounts. The men wore velvet like armor and cologne like prayer. Father swung up into the saddle, easy as if the horse had grown there for him, and turned to salute the balcony. The sun lit him like a benediction. For a breath I wanted very much to be eight again and believe in blessings.

  His eyes found me. I lifted my chin. If he saw the warning in it, he mistook it for pride.

  Morienne’s hand slid to his wrist, possessive as a shackle. She looked up too—right at me—and smiled with all her teeth. She had the kind of beauty that makes people forgive the bite.

  “Elayne,” I said softly, without taking my gaze from the courtyard. “If he doesn’t come back, we’ll know why.”

  She flinched like I’d struck her. “Don’t say that.”

  “I didn’t,” I told her. “I just arranged the words.”

  Below, Selindra called down something sweet and useless; Father laughed again and blew her a kiss. He didn’t blow one to me. That’s fine. I wasn’t a daughter this morning. I was a witness.

  Morienne stepped back, making room for him to lead. The huntsmen fell in—a rustle of leather, a clatter of hooves, the silver flash of spearheads catching the cold. Father raised his bow in salute, and the court cheered as if sound could throw itself around him like a net and keep him safe.

  They thundered out through the gate: red coat, black cloak, green eyes, a tide of dogs. The frost took their hoofprints and made them pretty.

  Selindra sighed theatrically, already bored of danger that hadn’t performed for her. Elayne’s hand crept into mine, small and cold; I let her keep it. We stood together while the noise unraveled into distance and the courtyard remembered it was only stone.

  When silence finally reclaimed the place, I could still feel Morienne’s grip tightening on Father’s arm—a memory in my skin, a bruise that hadn’t bloomed yet.

  “Swift fortune,” I said to the empty gate, tasting the words. “Show us which way you turn.”

  The News Returns

  They came back without horns. That was how I knew.

  At dusk the gates groaned open, and the horses stumbled in, foam caked white at their mouths, hooves striking sparks off stone like they’d been fleeing fire. The riders were grim-faced, their tabards stained a dark red that wasn’t theirs. They carried Father’s bow lashed across one saddle. The wood was split down the middle, clean as a snapped bone.

  The courtyard stilled. No cheering, no laughter, not even the baying of hounds. Just the crunch of hooves and the sound of something important breaking in the air.

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  “His Majesty,” one of them called, his voice already draped in mourning, “was thrown from his horse. A tragic fall.”

  I watched him choose the word tragic with the care of a man selecting which noose to wear.

  Behind me, Elayne gasped and covered her mouth, as if her small hands could hold the world together. Selindra pressed a handkerchief delicately to her lips and made her eyes water just enough to glitter. She had always been a fast study.

  And Lady Morienne?

  She accepted the news with a sigh, soft as a curtain falling. Her emerald eyes glistened, her mouth trembled, her hand went to her chest in a gesture perfect enough to make marble statues clap. Only her tears didn’t fall. Not one.

  I stared at her across the courtyard, through the hush of stunned courtiers and servants who already knew to look at her before they decided what to feel. The faintest curl tugged at the corner of her mouth before she smoothed it away. A secret smile, like a cat who’s finally caught the bird it’s been waiting for.

  “Of course,” I thought. “Of course it was today.”

  Father’s bow slid from the saddle and clattered onto the stones. I flinched at the sound. Everyone else flinched too, but for me it was different: I wasn’t mourning the man they’d lost. I was cataloging the lies, and the woman who wore them like jewels.

  That night, the halls filled with wails and black drapery. Candles guttered under the press of too much grief, courtiers clung to each other in performance of sorrow. And I sat very still in the shadows, my small hands folded, watching Lady Morienne glide among them like a queen already crowned.

  If anyone noticed that my eyes were dry, they mistook it for shock.

  It wasn’t.

  It was clarity.

  The Funeral Games

  The cathedral was drowning in black. Drapes smothered the windows, candles guttered under their own smoke, and the choir’s voices dragged like chains. Father lay in his coffin at the altar, dressed in hunting red, a crown perched too carefully on his brow—as if he were going to rise at any moment and ask why we’d bothered dressing him like a toy soldier.

  Lady Morienne wept beautifully. She dabbed at her eyes with a lace kerchief that never seemed to stain. Her sobs came in practiced swells, rising just enough to be heard by the nearest noble, never loud enough to spoil the elegance of her grief. Beside her, Selindra imitated every gesture like a puppet made of silk and envy, her little gasps pitched high to pierce the silence.

  Elayne cried too, but hers were the raw, ugly kind—the kind that come from truth. She trembled in her gray gown, her shoulders hitching. Morienne rested a gloved hand on her arm, not to comfort, but to remind her that honesty had no place here. Elayne bit her lip until it bled.

  And me? I didn’t cry. Not a single tear.

  The courtiers whispered about it, I heard them: Such composure for one so young. Such dignity.

  I wanted to laugh in their faces. Dignity? Please. I just wasn’t stupid enough to hand Lady Morienne the tears she wanted to drink.

  I stood beside the coffin, small fists folded neatly, and watched Father’s face gone slack with death. My lips twisted into what the priests mistook for a solemn line, but inside my thoughts were sharp little knives.

  Look at her, I told myself. She’s the star of her own play, and everyone here bought a ticket. And Father? He played his role too well. Walked right into her stage directions.

  When they lowered him into the crypt, Morienne let out one last sob, a perfect crescendo. Selindra followed, her handkerchief fluttering like a white flag. The nobles clutched each other and nodded sagely at her tragedy.

  I smirked. Not because I was happy. Not because I was strong. But because I was already learning the game.

  And I would not play it by their rules.

  A New Order

  The castle didn’t wait long to decide who it belonged to.

  Father was barely in the ground when Lady Morienne took the high seat “for stability’s sake.” Stability, apparently, meant silencing every voice that wasn’t hers. The council bowed, the priests blessed, and the servants adapted faster than ivy crawling up stone.

  I was no longer “little star.” I was “the girl.”

  The seamstress who once fussed over my silks now brought me plain wool gowns—scratchy, colorless, the kind that blurred me into the background. My chair at the high table was shifted lower, farther down, until I sat with the courtiers’ children, ignored and invisible. The servants who once scurried to fetch me honey-cakes now snickered when I asked for bread.

  And the sisters? Selindra shone brighter than ever, always at her mother’s side, her smirk honed into a blade. Elayne lingered near me, hesitant, guilty, but too afraid to stand against the current.

  One evening, in the great hall, Selindra lifted her goblet and said sweetly, “Sister, the wine.”

  The word sister was poison dressed as sugar. Everyone at the table turned to look. Morienne’s lips curved, waiting.

  I picked up the pitcher, walked it to her, and poured. Slowly. Carefully. The dark red stained the silver rim of her goblet. Selindra watched me, that smirk daring me to falter.

  I leaned close and said, my voice smooth as silk:

  “Careful—it might not be poisoned. This time.”

  The color drained from her face for the briefest heartbeat. Then she laughed, loud and false, and the courtiers laughed with her, though some shifted uneasily in their seats. Morienne’s gaze caught mine, cold and sharp, but I smiled back as if I’d just wished her daughter health.

  After that, they didn’t call me to pour again. But the whispers followed: Sharp little tongue. Too clever for her own good.

  Good. Let them whisper. Words were the only weapons they hadn’t stripped from me.

  And I was learning how to wield them.

  The Mask of the Princess

  Grief makes some people louder. It made me quiet.

  The court liked to pretend I was composed—still waters, steady gaze, dignity beyond my years. That’s what they whispered in the galleries, the kind of thing that sounds like praise but feels like chains. They didn’t see the truth: silence wasn’t dignity. Silence was strategy.

  Every word in this castle was bait. If I cried, Selindra laughed. If I flinched, Morienne smiled. If I asked for kindness, the servants carried tales to the wrong ears. So I learned to say nothing at all.

  And when I was forced to speak, I learned to make it hurt.

  “Smile, Princess,” one lordling taunted once, drunk on too much wine and his own importance.

  I tilted my head, sweet as cream, and answered: “Why? So you can see what it looks like to be relevant?”

  He went red. The courtiers gasped, laughed, and whispered. I bowed as if I’d meant it kindly. They never asked me to smile again.

  The mask grew heavier by the day. My laughter—when it came—was sharp-edged, more blade than balm. My eyes learned to roll without effort. My tongue sharpened faster than the knives at supper. They called me difficult. They called me cruel. Good. Better to be cruel than weak.

  But behind the mask, in the quiet places, the grief still lived. Some nights I lay awake and pressed my face into the thin pillows of my new chamber, whispering jokes to the shadows just to hear my own voice.

  “Lucky me,” I’d murmur to the rafters. “With such a family, who needs enemies?”

  The rafters didn’t answer.

  So I became my own echo.

  And in the silence between the words, something inside me began to harden—like a seed buried deep, waiting for fire.

  Seeds of Defiance

  The palace had learned to forget my mother. I refused to.

  At night, when the corridors fell quiet and the incense smoke thinned into nothing, I slipped barefoot through the cold halls. Morienne’s guards dozed at their posts, and Selindra’s laughter faded behind shut doors. Only Elayne sometimes stirred, catching my sleeve in passing, whispering, “Don’t.” But she never stopped me. Maybe she understood I was already too far gone.

  I always ended in the same place: my mother’s solar.

  They had stripped it bare after her death—her books gone, her charms locked away—but I knew where I had hidden the necklace. Beneath the loose stone at the corner of the hearth, where no servant thought to sweep.

  I would kneel there, fingertips trembling against the cold, and draw it out. The silver chain still glimmered faintly, as if it remembered her skin. The pendant was small, unimpressive to anyone else, but to me it was everything: proof she had existed, proof she had loved me, proof that not all magic killed.

  I looped it around my fingers and whispered my jokes into the silence.

  “Lucky me,” I told the empty air. “With such a family, who needs enemies?”

  The words echoed off stone, bitter and small. Still, I said them again, louder this time, just to feel the sting of my own tongue.

  Some nights, the necklace pulsed faintly in the dark, as though answering me. My heart would lurch, and I’d press it flat to my chest. No one else noticed. No one else cared. But I did.

  And in that secret glow, I felt the first stirrings of something that wasn’t grief or bitterness but fire.

  They thought they had broken me. They thought I was quiet because I was weak.

  But weakness doesn’t whisper back to you in the dark.