Chapter 1260: A welcoming fit for kings(4)
The heavy oak doors of the solar groaned open, and the sight he had craved through half a year of blood and ash finally materialized before his eyes. There they stood: his wife and his daughter.
How many times had he conjured their faces in the dark, using them as an anchor before willing himself to do the things that needed to be done?Sleeping in ditches, eating shit, and passing sleepless nights to manage the war?
Throughout the worst of the campaign, he recalled very little of the actual butchery, he had been moved by a cold, systematic rage more than anything else. Yet, as he looked at them, the graceful, haunting words Merelao had uttered in the crimson mud of the Ford came roaring back into his mind.
It is known that the appetite of conquerors is ravenous.
He tried to press the memory down, to forget the slick feel of the reins in his hands and the sound of cracking bone, but it was like trying to hold river water in a clenched fist.
He could only hope his enemies would sate their ravenous hunger with the worms and the mud he had left them to choke on.
The worried, fiercely hopeful expressions on their faces, beautifully framed by their matching, raven-black hair, instantly dispelled the toxic worry that had been settling at the base of his guts. Alpheo let go of the rigid strain in his shoulders, finally allowing himself to sink into the comforting embrace of something he could genuinely call home. What he had feared most in his darkest hours had not come to pass. He was back, he was whole, and he had won.
A fraction of a heartbeat passed before both mother and daughter rose in a blur of silk away from the white sofas where they had been anxiously waiting.
The figure of his wife appeared in full, stunning clarity. Seeing her in true flesh and bone, no longer a fragile memory conjured up in campfire dreams,made a profound warmth awaken in his chest. When they had last traded their bitter farewells, there had been nothing but a fragile hope standing between them. They had taken a desperate jump into the shadows that had plagued their marriage for months.
In the brilliant, blinding light of everything that had happened since, those past grievances seemed so small, so completely harmless and meaningless. What was a few months of awkward, pained silence compared to the eternal danger of a life passed in mourning? What candle could ever be compared to a sunt hat threatened to die?
Her long legs covered the distance of the solar in wide, graceful strides. With a triumphant smile breaking across his scarred face, the King opened his arms wide to receive his queen, only to be left holding empty air as the drifting, intoxicating perfume of winter roses swept past him.
She bypassed him to throw herself to her knees to frantically embrace their son.
He would not lie to himself. It stung. It stung like a fresh lash across the ribs.
"My boy!" the queen cried, her royal composure shattering into a thousand pieces as she buried her face into the boy’s fur collar, her hands gripping his shoulders as if she were trying to mold him back into the safety of her womb where he once came out. "By the five look at you! Look at what your father has done to you! You smell of smoke, cheap ale, and... look how starved you are?!What have you been eating?’’
Almost nothing.
"Mother," Basil squeaked, his voice cracking as his face turned as red as the petals in the streets. He tried to pull back slightly, hyper-aware of his father watching from three feet away, but his mother’s grip was made of pure iron. "Mother, please, Sebastian..."
"Let him look if he wants!" Jasmine snapped, her voice thick with a mother’s fierce, unyielding terror as she pulled back just far enough to cup his face in her hands, her thumbs brushing over his cheeks. "Do you have any idea what you put me through? When the captain told me you had vanished from the capital, when I found out you had smuggled your foolish, reckless self just to ride into a den of vipers... I nearly tore this palace down stone by stone!"
"I’m sorry, Mother," Basil mumbled, completely apologetic this time, his green eyes swimming with guilt and embaressement.
"Don’t you ever dare do that!" Jasmine commanded, her voice dropping into that quiet, terrifying register that could halt a charging battalion faster than a wall of pikes. "Ever again! What would have happened if the worst had come to pass? If the principalities had taken you? If I had been left to bury my own child?Cursed are the mothers made to bury their own children"
Basil did not reply. The young prince simply looked down at his boots, all the grand, romantic illusions of the campaign that had not yet drifted away after the Ford, now evaporating under the scorching heat of his mother’s glare.
Jasmine watched him for a beat, her expression softening as the terror of the past months finally began to recede. She reached out, her fingers gently ruffling his unwashed hair before she leaned in and planted a tender, lingering kiss on his forehead. "But it is not your fault, my sweet boy. You are young and foolish. It is the age of a lad to chase shadows. The blame lies entirely with others who ought to have known better than children!"
As she spat that last word, she threw a venomous snark of a look straight at her husband.
Alpheo, however, was already executing a tactical retreat as he chose this exact moment to thoroughly distract himself with his youngest.
"How’s my little angel?" Alpheo murmured, dropping heavily to one knee so he was at eye level with his five-year-old daughter. The plates of his armor groaned under the sudden movement, but he didn’t care. He leaned forward, moving his nose against hers in a playful, familiar nuzzle.
The little princess let out a bright, melodic laugh, the pure, untainted sound that only children ever managed to gift to their fathers. She reached out with two tiny, clean hands, completely unbothered by the scent of smoke and old leather clinging to him, and gripped his shaven cheeks. He had made sure to make himself look presentable for this reunion.
"And how tall have you grown while I was away?" Alpheo marveled, his hazel eyes crinkling with a warmth that his enemies would never believe he possessed. He gently lifted her by her waist, marveling at how light she felt compared to the longswords he had been swinging in the mud of the FOrd. "Look at this. You are going to be even bigger than t Jarza once you are all grown up. You’ll be standing top all looking down at the whole world."
"I’m already bigger than Basil!" she declared proudly, her small voice echoing through the high ceilings of the solar as she kicked her tiny slippered feet in the air. "He had to hide in a wagon, but I stayed here and guarded the big chairs!"
"Did you now?" Alpheo chuckled, pressing his forehead against hers, completely content to let his wife’s lingering wrath wash over his back so long as he could hold this small piece of peace in his arms. "A far grander duty, my love. A far grander duty indeed."
She laughed, and he laughed with her.
This was how life was meant to be lived. Not in the suffocating damp of a forest trench, nor amidst the frantic screams of dying men, but here, surrounded by this pristine peace and the effortless music of his daughter’s laughter.
Alpheo leaned in closer, his rough beard brushing against her small ear as he whispered a conspiratorial secret.
Rosalind’s eyes widened into perfect, glittering circles. She gasped, her hands flying to her mouth. "Gifts?!"
"Aye," Alpheo said, his voice brimming with a rare, playful warmth. "Brought many back with the baggage train, both for you and your mother." There had been a bounty of fine things to requisition from the Oizenian palace vaults after the surrender. "Yours is being dropped off in your chambers by the servants as we speak. Now, go and greet your brother. I feel like the poor lad needs a desperate rescue from your mama."
The little princess didn’t need to be told twice. She scrambled out of her father’s arms, her small slippers pattering loudly against the stone as she hurried across the solar. She threw her hands out and dived face-first against her eldest brother’s belly, her whole body collapsing into him.
It was deeply warming to see them like this. To see the effortless, instinctual care that passed between them; the gentle, protective way Basil’s hand instinctively went to his sister’s dark hair, and the way she giggled, instantly begging him to abandon his armor and go play a game of hide-and-seek with her in the gallery.
The sight offered Alpheo a quiet, profound reassurance. It proved to him that despite the blood on his hands and the crown on his head, he had not been a total failure of a father. To a man like him, that silent realization was infinitely more meaningful than any scrap of glory the world would ever give him credit for.
He had possessed entirely too many terrible examples in his own life not to learn how to love his own flesh.
Jasmine’s expression softened completely as she watched her children. Her soft, ring-adorned hands drifted down to rest on her daughter’s cheeks, gently pulling her back.
"Perhaps it would be better to go see what magnificent gift your father left for you first, my love?" the Queen murmured. She then looked up, her gaze shifting to Basil. "And I am certain Whitey has been dearly missing you , he’s been looking down since you departed. I am sure the hound would love nothing more than to go for a brisk walk through the courtyards."
She smoothed down the front of Basil’s tunic, her voice carrying a quiet command wrapped in maternal tenderness. "You may take your sister with you and tell her stories of what you did in the south,though mind your sister’s tenderness," she added, throwing Alpheo a brief, sharp warning look. "You will tell those very same stories to me later, over dinner."
Before letting him go, Jasmine leaned forward and pressed one final kiss onto Basil’s forehead. She held it there for a long, quiet moment, longer than she ever had before, as if silently washing away the lingering scent of camp smoke and the terrifying shadow of the war from her boy’s brow.
With a chorus of excited whispers and a flurry of bright silk, the two children turned and made their escape from the solar. Basil walked with a lighter, easier step now, his arm hooked protectively over Rosalind’s small shoulders as she eagerly looked up at him, already demanding to know if he had seen any real dragons in the southern mountains.
And indeed they had, though not of the kind that spit fire.
The door closed rather loudly behind them, and Alpheo turned right on time to see his wife turn on him in an instant, her regal grace vanishing like a flame during a storm.
"Now that the children are away," she said, her voice dropping as she regarded her husband colder than the dozens of chilly night he passed in the forest. "consequences."
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