Chapter 186: More Than Words
Chapter 185: More Than Words
Lyria’s POV
The silence after I finished reading was different from the ones before it.
I lowered the parchment, but I did not look up immediately.
I had read every word of that poem standing before the court and the kingdom, and I had not stumbled once, and some part of me that had been braced since the moment I took the parchment from Duke Valenridge’s hand was only now beginning to understand that.
But that was not what was making it difficult to look up.
Lucian’s poem had been beautiful. Duke Thorncrest’s had been clever and warm and had made the hall laugh. Both had moved me in their own way.
But this one.
I did not want to believe it. I told myself it was coincidence, that the Duke had written what he had written for the competition and nothing more, and that I was reading things into ink and parchment that were not there.
And yet... the thought didn’t stop.
He had found me at the lake when I had been at my lowest. He had sat in the water and looked at me with those pale green eyes and told me without fuss that my eyes were empty and that he could see I was holding on.
I performed composure every single day. Every hour. Every time I walked through a corridor or stood before the Queen or sat in a room where I was not supposed to exist. And he had seen through it immediately, without effort, as though it were perfectly obvious.
He had told me to hold on. He had told me to visit the things and people that kept me standing. He had asked me — with complete seriousness, which I had not known what to do with — to add him to the list.
I had never been permitted to choose anything.
I pressed my lips together.
I was not going to cry.
I was absolutely not going to cry in the middle of this hall before the court and the kingdom and every eye that was currently fixed upon me.
I lifted my gaze then and turned to the Duke, who stared right back with a blank look on his face.
We only held contact for a second, and then I looked away.
I had to admit, he had done better than I had expected.
Considerably better.
The Queen turned to Jacinta then, giving her the signal to speak.
Jacinta cleared her throat lightly and rose.
"Duke Valenridge," she began, her tone smooth and assured, "has written with considerable range."
She stood with her hands loosely clasped before her, her posture without fault.
"The poem opens in a register that is immediately familiar," she continued. "He draws upon the most commonplace understanding of home, the building, the family within it. The sister who is always right. The brother who weeps too easily. The cousin who breaks things."
A faint smile touched her lips.
"It is an opening designed to put the listener at ease before the argument shifts."
She moved slightly, the sunflower gown catching the light.
"From there," she said, "he broadens his meaning. Home is not merely a structure. It is the comfort one finds within a given space. The peace of a room where nothing is required of one."
She inclined her head.
"He uses the infirmary as an example — an unlikely home, he acknowledges, and yet one that some might claim. Not for the walls themselves but for the care found within them."
The King nodded faintly from the dais.
"He then turns to objects of personal significance," Jacinta continued. "A kept toy. A worn bead. A familiar bed. These too, he argues, may serve as home."
She paused.
"And the poem closes by returning its opening question to the listener. He does not provide a singular answer because he does not believe one exists. Home, he argues, is personal. Individual. Something one chooses rather than something assigned."
She looked out at the court with quiet confidence.
"It is a thoughtful and well-constructed piece," she concluded. "One that speaks to the breadth of what home may mean across different lives and different circumstances."
When she finished, the hall was quiet.
My brows furrowed in thought.
She had not been wrong. Everything she had said was present in the poem. The structure, the progression, the examples. She had laid it out neatly and without error.
But she had described the frame.
She had not once touched what was inside it.
The part about hurt that need not be hidden. The part about calm that did not beg to be performed. The part about things that anchor us when staying has become the harder choice. The part about the thread that holds us back from the edge of ourselves.
She had explained the poem the way one might explain a room by listing its furniture, and it was a bit underwhelming for a piece as good as this.
I returned my expression to stillness and said nothing.
Then Duke Valenridge spoke.
"I am most grateful to Your Highness," he said.
Jacinta turned toward him slightly.
"You put the poem’s structure into words with considerable eloquence," he continued, "and have done so with great accuracy."
"However," he said after a pause, "that is not entirely what the poem was about."
The stillness that followed was immediate.
Jacinta’s brows drew together.
The Queen’s expression shifted.
"I beg your pardon, Your Grace?" the Queen said pleasantly.
Duke Valenridge inclined his head toward her with perfect courtesy.
"I mean no disrespect to Her Highness," he said. "Princess Jacinta identified several elements of the poem with admirable precision. The structure. The argument. The use of familiar imagery to draw the reader inward before shifting the ground beneath them."
He paused.
"But the poem was not written as a structural exercise," he continued. "There is a meaning beneath the surface of what Her Highness has described that has not yet been addressed."
The Queen regarded him for a moment.
"Then perhaps," she said, "Your Grace would care to enlighten the court as to what that meaning is."
"I would," he said, but then he turned to me.
"Though perhaps," he said, and his voice had shifted — quieter, more deliberate, the way it had been at the edge of the lake when everything had been too loud and he had spoken directly into the middle of it without raising his voice at all, "before I do so — perhaps Her Highness Princess Lyria might first share with the court what she understood from it."
The hall went very still at his words.
