But slowly, sluggishly, Elara took a step back, never breaking eye contact. “Yes,” she said dully, pushing the balcony door open with one hand.
They stepped out together, Coriane holding Elara by the shoulder, keeping her from wavering. Outside, the night was sticky hot, the last gasps of summer in the upper river valley. Coriane felt none of it. Elara’s eyes were the only things in her mind.
“Have you been playing with my mind?” she asked, cutting directly to her intentions.
“Not for a while,” Elara replied, her eyes faraway.
“When was the last time?”
“Your wedding day.”
Coriane blinked, startled. So long ago. “What? What did you do?”
“I made you trip.” A dreamy smile crossed Elara’s features. “I made you trip on your dress.”
“That—that’s it?”
“Yes.”
“And the dreams? The nightmares?”
Elara said nothing. Because there’s nothing for her to say, Coriane knew. She sucked in a breath, fighting the urge to cry. These fears are my own. They always have been. They always will be. I was wrong before I came to court, and I’m still wrong long after.
“Go back inside,” she finally hissed. “Remember none of this.” Then she turned away, breaking the eye contact she so desperately needed to keep Elara under her control.
Like a person waking up, Elara blinked rapidly. She cast a single confused glance at the queen before hurrying away, back into the party.
Coriane moved in the opposite direction, toward the stone bannister ringing the balcony. She leaned over it, trying to catch her breath, trying not to scream. Greenery stretched below her, a garden of fountains and stone more than forty feet down. For a single, paralyzing second, she fought the urge to jump.
The next day, she took a guard into her service, to defend her from any Silver ability someone might use against her. If not Elara, than surely someone else of House Merandus. Coriane simply could not believe how her mind seemed to spin out of control, happy one second and then distraught the next, bouncing between emotions like a kite in a gale.
The guard was of House Arven, the silent house. His name was Rane, a savior clad in white, and he swore to defend his queen against all forces.
They named the baby Tiberias, as was custom. Coriane didn’t care for the name, but acquiesced at Tibe’s request, and his assurance that they would name the next after Julian. He was a fat baby, smiling early, laughing often, growing bigger by leaps and bounds. She nicknamed him Cal to distinguish him from his father and grandfather. It stuck.
The boy was the sun in Coriane’s sky. On hard days, he split the darkness. On good days, he lit the world. When Tibe went away to the front, for weeks at a time now that the war ran hot again, Cal kept her safe. Only a few months old and better than any shield in the kingdom.
Julian doted on the boy, bringing him toys, reading to him. Cal was apt to break things apart and jam them back together incorrectly, to Coriane’s delight. She spent long hours piecing his smashed gifts back together, amusing him as well as herself.
“He’ll be bigger than his father,” Sara said. Not only was she Coriane’s chief lady-in-waiting, she was also her physician. “He’s a strong boy.”
While any mother would revel in those words, Coriane feared them. Bigger than his father, a strong boy. She knew what that meant for a Calore prince, an heir to the Burning Crown.
He will not be a soldier, she wrote in her newest diary. I owe him that much. Too long the sons and daughters of House Calore have been fighting, too long has this country had a warrior king. Too long have we been at war, on the front and—and also within. It might be a crime to write such things, but I am a queen. I am the queen. I can say and write what I think.
As the months passed, Coriane thought more and more of her childhood home. The estate was gone, demolished by the Provos governors, emptied of her memories and ghosts. It was too close to the Lakelander border for proper Silvers to live, even though the fighting was contained to the bombed-out territories of the Choke. Even though few Silvers died, despite the Reds dying by the thousands. Conscripted from every corner of the kingdom, forced to serve and fight. My kingdom, Coriane knew. My husband signs every conscription renewal, never stopping the cycle, only complaining about the cramp in his hand.
She watched her son on the floor, smiling with a single tooth, bashing a pair of wooden blocks together. He will not be the same, she told herself.
The nightmares returned in earnest. This time they were of her baby grown, wearing armor, leading soldiers, sending them into a curtain of smoke. He followed and never returned.
With dark circles beneath her eyes, she wrote what would become the second-to-last entry into her diary. The words seemed to be carved into the page. She had not slept in three days, unable to face another dream of her son dying.
The Calores are children of fire, as strong and destructive as their flame, but Cal will not be like the others before. Fire can destroy, fire can kill, but it can also create. Forest burned in the summer will be green by spring, better and stronger than before. Cal’s flame will build and bring roots from the ashes of war. The guns will quiet, the smoke will clear, and the soldiers, Red and Silver both, will come home. One hundred years of war, and my son will bring peace. He will not die fighting. He will not. HE WILL NOT.
Tibe was gone, at Fort Patriot in Harbor Bay. But Arven stood just outside her door, his presence forming a bubble of relief. Nothing can touch me while he is here, she thought, smoothing the downy hair on Cal’s head. The only person in my head is me.
The nurse who came to collect the baby noticed the queen’s agitated manner, her twitching hands, the glazed eyes, but said nothing. It was not her place.
Another night came and went. No sleep, but one last entry in Coriane’s diary. She had drawn flowers around each word—magnolia blossoms.
The only person in my head is me.
Tibe is not the same. The crown has changed him, as you feared it would. The fire is in him, the fire that will burn all the world. And it is in your son, in the prince who will never change his blood and will never sit a throne.
The only person in my head is me.
The only person who has not changed is you. You are still the little girl in a dusty room, forgotten, unwanted, out of place. You are queen of everything, mother to a beautiful son, wife to a king who loves you, and still you cannot find it in yourself to smile.
Still you make nothing.
Still you are empty.
The only person in your head is you.
And she is no one of any importance.
She is nothing.
The next morning, a maid found her bridal crown broken on the floor, an explosion of pearls and twisted gold. There was silver on it, blood dark from the passing hours.
And her bathwater was black with it.
The diary ended unfinished, unseen by any who deserved to read it.
Only Elara saw its pages, and the slow unraveling of the woman inside.
She destroyed the book like she destroyed Coriane.
And she dreamed of nothing.