She looked at the boy…truly looked at him.
For the first few moments, she searched his face for traces of the man she had once loved, but there were none. His features bore no echo of her husband's sharp jawline or commanding gaze, save for that mark in the exact same place as her husband's. Instead, he had wide, beautiful eyes that almost seemed too soft for court, and when he smiled, hesitant, fleeting, that was when she saw it.
The resemblance.
Not to him.
To her.
To Aralyn.
The realization struck her like a slap. Those eyes, that gentle smile… it was as if Aralyn herself stood before her in the boy's skin. She forced herself to speak to him, to test the measure of the child fate had thrown into her path. And she was stunned to discover that Aralyn's son, the child her dying husband had spoken of with trembling urgency, had ended up in the royal family of Kaltharion, living not as an heir to Vaeloria, but as their Crown Prince.
But the boy… was nothing.
