HER CROWN, HIS FLAME
Part I: Betrayal, Blood Oaths & Forbidden Feelings
CHAPTER THREE: THE PRINCE'S PROMISE
The proclamation reached the house on the back of Finn's tongue before it reached anyone's ears properly, because Finn had never once in his very long life managed to deliver bad news without also managing to sound faintly delighted by the drama of delivering it.
"They've named you a kinslayer," he announced, dropping onto the bench by the cold hearth with the breathless satisfaction of a man who had run the last mile purely to be first with the story. He was younger looking than his brothers, sandy haired and sea eyed, with a restlessness to him that made even sitting still look like a temporary arrangement. "And a thief. Apparently you also made off with half the royal treasury on your way out the window, which is impressive work for a woman who arrived here with nothing but a torn dress and an arrow wound."
"That's not funny," Olivia said.
"It isn't meant to be funny. It's meant to be true, according to every crier between here and the eastern gate." Finn shrugged, though something more serious moved briefly behind the performance. "Ellia's grieving-widow act is playing very well with the crowds. Dead king, murderous princess, everyone weeps for the poor stepmother left to hold the kingdom together. It's good theatre. I almost admired it."
Olivia sat very still by the fire, feeling the words settle into her like stones dropped into still water, each one sending out a ring that reached a little further than the last. Kinslayer. Thief. Every lie stacked on top of the last one, building a version of her that had never existed and would now, regardless, be the only version most of Rone ever knew.
"Then I have to go back," she said. "I have to stand in front of them and tell the truth."
"With what army," Elliot said, from the doorway, in the flat, unhurried tone of a man who had heard a great many doomed plans in his very long life and had stopped being surprised by any of them. He was the eldest, gray haired and broad shouldered, and when he spoke the whole room seemed to arrange itself around the weight of his opinion whether it wanted to or not. "You have no soldiers, no coin, and no throne. You have a torn gown and the goodwill of exactly two people in this house, and I am being generous in that count."
"I'll find a way."
"You'll find a grave," Elliot said, not unkindly, which somehow made it worse. "The kind of truth you're describing doesn't win against a queen who controls every crier, every gate guard, and every soldier between here and the capital. Not yet. Perhaps not for a long time."
Olivia's hands curled into fists in her lap. "Then what am I supposed to do? Sit in this forest and let her rewrite my whole life without me?"
No one answered that immediately, and into the silence, before she could stop herself, Olivia said the name that had been sitting behind her teeth since the moment Finn walked through the door.
"Jullius will help me."
❖ ❖ ❖
She felt the shift in the room the instant she said it, the particular quality of silence that meant several people had simultaneously decided not to say what they were thinking.
"Jullius," Adam repeated, from where he was cleaning a blade near the window, not looking up. "The Valorian prince."
"He's loved me since we were children. He always said that one day he'd take me away from all the scheming, that we'd rule somewhere the games didn't matter." The memory rose up warm and certain as she spoke it, Jullius at sixteen with sun bright hair and a way of looking at her like she was the only interesting thing in any room he entered, his voice low and solemn in the garden the summer her mother's portrait had finally been taken down from the great hall. One day, Olivia. One day I'll take you somewhere none of this can reach us. "If I send word, if I explain what's happened, he'll bring Valoria's army to Rone's gates. He'll help me take back what's mine."
Adam's laugh was short, and entirely without humour. "He'll help you take back a throne he can then marry into. That's not devotion, Princess. That's arithmetic."
"You don't know him."
"I don't need to. I know men who fall in love with crowns and call it falling in love with a woman." He set the blade down with a click that was slightly too sharp for the gentleness of the motion. "Tell me something true about him that isn't about how he made you feel. Not what he promised. Not how he looked at you. What does he actually know about you that has nothing to do with the fact that you'll one day wear a very expensive hat."
Olivia opened her mouth, and found, to her own furious surprise, that she could not immediately answer.
"That's what I thought," Adam said, and walked out before she could gather the words to prove him wrong.
❖ ❖ ❖
Theo did not gloat. Theo never gloated, which was, Olivia was beginning to understand, somehow worse than if he had.
He found her later that afternoon at the edge of the training clearing, arms wrapped around her knees, staring at nothing in particular, and he did not say I told you so, and he did not repeat any part of what Adam had already said. He simply sat down beside her, close enough that she could feel the quiet, steady warmth of him, and asked the one question she had not braced herself for.
"Are you certain you love him," he said. "Or are you certain you loved being rescued."
Olivia turned to look at him, ready to be angry, and found that the anger had nowhere to land, because there was no cruelty in his face at all, only a patient, careful curiosity, the same expression he wore when he was trying to identify an unfamiliar plant.
"That's not fair," she said.
"It might not be. I'm not trying to be fair. I'm trying to understand what you're actually grieving." His pale green gold eyes held hers steadily. "You grew up in a palace that made you perform a version of yourself for every room you walked into. Jullius let you stop performing for a few hours at a time. That's not nothing, Olivia. But it isn't the same thing as him knowing who you are underneath the performance."
"And you think you know the difference. After two weeks."
"I think I know what it looks like when someone finally stops flinching every time they speak," Theo said, quietly. "I've watched it happen to you exactly twice. Once, the night you told me about the loneliest room in your father's palace. And once, this morning, gathering water, when you were furious and covered in mud and didn't once try to make it look graceful for anyone watching." A small, private smile touched his mouth. "I don't think Jullius has ever seen either version of you. I think that might be the actual thing you're mourning."
Olivia did not have an answer for that either, and the not having of it frightened her more than anything Adam had said, because Adam's cruelty was easy to dismiss as cruelty. Theo's gentleness left her nowhere at all to hide.
❖ ❖ ❖
They went to gather herbs before the fear could finish settling into something she would have to examine properly, because moving her body had always been easier than sitting still with her own mind, and Theo, to his credit, did not press her further. He simply handed her a woven basket and led her deeper into the trees, naming plants as they walked in a voice that asked nothing of her except to listen.
Adam came with them. He did not say why, and Olivia did not ask, though she noticed he walked with one hand never quite far from the hilt of a blade, scanning the tree line with the automatic, restless vigilance of a man who did not know how to simply exist in a forest without also guarding it.
It was Adam's vigilance, in the end, that saved none of them the trouble of finding out how close the danger actually was.
The creature came out of a tangle of undergrowth with no warning at all, a thing of matted fur and too many teeth that moved like something built out of hunger rather than muscle, and it went, with the particular cruelty of chance, not for Olivia, who screamed and stumbled backward, but for Adam, who had turned half a second too late.
He went down hard beneath the weight of a falling, rotted tree trunk the creature's charge dislodged from its resting place, one leg pinned beneath a mass of wood too heavy for even his strength to shift quickly, and for one endless, suspended moment, Olivia watched the creature turn its attention toward him, jaws opening, and understood that Theo, several strides further off, would not reach him in time.
She did not decide to move. Her body simply moved, faster than thought, snatching up the fallen branch Adam had knocked loose in his fall and swinging it into the creature's flank with a scream that tore something raw in her own throat.
It was not a killing blow. It did not need to be. It bought Adam a single, precious second, long enough for him to wrench his leg free and drive his own blade up into the thing's exposed underside, and then Theo was there too, an arrow finding its throat, and the creature collapsed into the leaf litter and did not move again.
Olivia stood over Adam, chest heaving, branch still raised, and only then understood what she had just done, and why.
"You came back," Adam said, from the ground, staring up at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before, something stripped bare of all its usual armour. "For me."
"You were pinned," Olivia said, as though that explained anything, as though her body had not made the decision several full seconds before her mind had caught up to justify it.
Adam did not answer that. He simply looked at her, and looked, and looked, until Theo's voice, quiet and strangely rough, broke the moment from a few feet away.
"Are you hurt," Theo asked, and Olivia could not have said, afterward, whether the question had been meant for Adam, or for her, or for something in himself that he had not expected the last two minutes to reveal.
❖ ❖ ❖
Theo did not speak again for the whole walk back.
He watched Olivia instead, out of the corner of his eye, watched the easy, unthinking way she checked over her shoulder to make sure Adam was still walking steadily beside her, the small, furious concern in her face when Adam brushed off her offer to help him limp the last stretch home. He had known, in some distant, theoretical way, that Olivia was brave. He had not understood, until this exact moment, that her bravery was not a performance either, not a thing she reached for when she remembered someone was watching.
She had not looked back to see if anyone was watching. She had simply turned, and run toward the danger, for a man who had spent two weeks telling her, in every way he knew how, that he despised everything she was.
Something in Theo's chest, quiet and unfamiliar, turned over slowly, like a stone shifting at the bottom of a stream, and he understood, with the sudden, unwelcome clarity of a man realising he has been standing in deeper water than he meant to wade into, that whatever he felt for Olivia Bennett had stopped, somewhere in the last two weeks, being simple.
He did not know yet what to do with that understanding. He only knew that watching her throw herself between his brother and something with teeth had not felt, in that moment, anything like compassion.
❖ ❖ ❖
The letter was waiting on the doorstep when they returned, weighted down against the evening wind by a smooth grey river stone, with no messenger in sight and no tracks leading to or from it that even Theo, crouching low over the mud, could fully account for.
Olivia recognised the seal before she had even broken it. A rearing sapphire horse pressed into blue wax, the crest of the Valorian crown, and beneath it, in handwriting she had once spent an entire summer memorising the shape of, four lines that made her breath catch somewhere behind her ribs.
I have heard what they are saying about you, and none of it is true, and I intend to prove it. Come to the old chapel at the western wall of Valoria, three nights from now, past midnight. Come alone. I can give you back everything they have taken, but only if no one else knows you have gone.
There was no signature. There did not need to be one.
Olivia stood very still in the doorway, the letter trembling faintly in her hand, and felt the ground that had only just begun to feel solid beneath her shift again, quietly and completely, exactly the way it had every single time she had allowed herself to believe, even for a moment, that she might finally be standing on something that would not give way.