They woke to sun in the evening like a rumor—soft, insistent, slipping through curtains and pooling on the floorboard . Lyanna stretched, the small nap clinging to her like a warm shawl, then laughed at herself when Elora's quiet coughing announced that the two maids were awake too. For all the grandeur cradling her now, for all the lessons the castle tried to teach about ceremony and silence, the small human comforts of yawns and slippers and tea still mattered most to her.
"Come," she told them, rising. "The castle walls grow moss if no one walks them."
Elora folded a corner of the bedclothes with the care of someone who always put order over impulse. Mavis tucked a stray curl behind her ear and smoothed flour from the hem of her sleeve—caution and leftover bakery dust, the twin marks of their village life. They shoved chairs in with the clatter of conspirators and set out, light-footed and conspiratorial, to return to Velrathis before the heat of noon bled into mischief. The day felt open, forgiving—an errand to the stables, a walk through the lavender beds—nothing dangerous, nothing decisive.
At first the road back was all the small marvels she had savored the day before: a woman at a stall teaching a child how to plait bread, men who mended nets and laughed like beacons, the smell of roasted fruit that made Lyanna ache with hunger despite breakfast. But after the third twisting lane the village's warmth thinned. A woman who had smiled earlier passed a bowl to the doorway and drew it inward; two children stopped their running to watch the three of them as if someone had told them not to laugh in the presence of strangers. Whispers braided into the air, low and quick, the language of people who sense the weather shifting before anyone else does.
Elora's fingers tightened on Lyanna's sleeve. "Do you feel it?" she asked. Lyanna did: a small prickle at the nape of her neck, like a moth's wings. It was the kind of feeling that said—someone is watching.
They hastened their steps. Footfalls quickened, shoes clacking on cobbles, heartbeats adding percussion to the hush. Lyanna tried to laugh it off—she always had a joke ready to poke a hole in fear—but even the bravest jests felt thin in that sudden, careful quiet. The alleys narrowed, shadows folded themselves deeper into corners, and for the first time the castle's safety seemed like a story from her childhood rather than an assurance.
They were almost across the small square when the first shout came, a rough thing snapped through the air like a twig. Three men emerged from a side lane as if summoned by the mood itself—bearded, quick-handed, shadows slipped over them like cloaks. Bandits, Lyanna thought, and the word fell through her like a stone. The men were not loud with swagger; they were practiced, the sort who moved with appetite and no shame. Their smiles were blunt knives.
"Purse, please," the nearest one said, voice oily. "And no trouble. Kings worry if we take their favorite birds."
Lyanna's hand went to the yellow bundle at her hip—her cookies, tied in cloth, a childish offering to a king whose appetite had become a dangerous curiosity. Mavis pressed close; Elora moved so that the two maids were a slim shield. The bandit's foot slid toward Mavis in a slow, testing step.
Lyanna's mouth found humor because she always found humor until the laugh broke on the harsher edge of fear. "We have nothing of value," she told them, voice bright as a bell—daring them to see beyond her smile. "We only have bread and a few trinkets."
The man laughed. "Bread feeds the stomach. Coins buy warm beds." He moved like he meant it. The second bandit circled, hands brandishing, and the square pressed in—benches, baskets, a child at the edge of the crowd holding his mother's skirts as though the world had turned to something dangerous to touch.
Something heavy entered the lane then, the air shifting the way it does before a storm. From the side, a figure came like a memory—broad-shouldered, stance as steady as a cliff. He bore a blade, yes, but not for show; it sat in his hand like a thing he trusted with his life. The bandits slowed because the world had given them something new to measure. One of them spat, "Another guard? Who sent you?"
Lyanna's breath caught. The man's face was the one she had seen before when she had gone missing—Lucan, the steady-handed guard from her father's house, the one men spoke of with the kind of quiet respect reserved for those who keep their blades clean and their promises cleaner still. He had a bruise at his jaw and a hundred small scar-maps, each a story of someone who had tried to make him fall. He did not scowl at Lyanna as kings sometimes scowl at things meant to obey; instead he nodded once, the little staccato of recognition that meant—I've come for you.
"Step back," he said, voice cold and even. "Lady Lyanna, come with me."
Bandits are greedy and tender to numbers; seeing the certainty in a single man's movement unnerves them. Lucan moved like water finding ground—swift and inevitable. The first bandit lunged and Lucan answered with all the economy of a seasoned blade; steel kissed, a grunt of surprise, a staggered fall. The second shrieked and Lucan's palm found the hilt of his sword, taking the man down before he could flick a second breath. The third tried to run and tripped on the cobbles, cursing as two of Lucan's fellows—men he'd called on from her father's retinue—took him in a net of arms.
It all happened too quickly to be a scene and too perfectly to be a dream. Lyanna stood, rooted, watching the lines of men fall like bad puppets. Her relief was a small hot thing that rose and pricked at her eyes—Lucan, actually here. She called his name without thinking: "Lucan!"
He glanced up, breath fogging in the autumn-length air, and for the first time he allowed something like a smile at the edges of his mouth. "Miss Lyanna," he said, and the way his voice threaded her name was both a promise and an instruction. "You are not to roam beyond the watch."
"I know," she said, suddenly small, the day's adventure denting into consequence. "Father would have words."
"No time for words," Lucan replied. He turned to the bandits—some groaning, others cursing—then to the maids. "Go," he ordered, and his voice left no space for argument. "Head back to the castle. Do not tarry." He fell into step beside Lyanna, one hand brushing the sleeve of her dress as if to ensure she didn't veer into foolishness again. The touch was not gentleness so much as practical anchoring, a mapped route home.
They ran. They ran until the road ended and the king's lacquered wheels loomed into view—an arrival like thunder. A carriage, oddly majestic and severe, stopped with the lazy authority of someone who did not often raise voice; its black lacquer flashed like a blade. The cloth curtains parted as if the air itself had hands, and there he was—Alaric—sudden as a storm and colder than moonlight.
Time hung for a breath. The three girls were marked with mud and flour and the bright, foolish face of poor delight. Mavis clutched her small bundle like a talisman. Elora's eyes were wide and white with worry. Lucan straightened, muscles coiled but ready, and the bandits, sensing the shift in order, tried to slither into the retreat.
Alaric's gaze cut the square in two. He did not waste breath on inquiry; he did not call for reasons or excuses. He brooked no small stories. For a suspended moment he took them in—Lyanna's hair in disarray, the smudge of flour on Mavis's cheek, Lucan's bruise-marked jaw. Then something like a roar built in his chest and spilled out, not quite a sound anyone wanted to hear. "Get in," he commanded. The word was a blade and a benediction.
Lyanna did not need to be told twice. She leapt, almost turned by urgency and the strange, powerful fact of being found. The maids followed, clutching their skirts. Lucan hesitated only long enough to bow—brief, formal, his eyes landing on Lyanna with a sharpness that said, Leave her only with death—and then he stepped back as the carriage doors closed like a judgment.
The ride back to the castle was a chasm of quiet. The horses' hooves beat a steady metronome against the road; the carriage walls sealed them in the scent of leather and straw. Lyanna wanted to speak, to laugh, to apologize with a flourish of words that would glue things back together—anything to unbreak the tautness that had taken the air hostage. But Alaric's profile, carved in the half-light as he sat with his back like a cliff, forbade frivolity. His jaw worked with a patience that was nothing more than coiling. When at last she dared glance at him, his eyes were the color of embers smoldering—brown tempered by the orange of coals. Fury was patient there; fury that planned, measured, and tasted the consequences on his tongue.
She felt small for the first time in his presence—no longer the clever, slightly mocking girl who could make him unravel with a barbed comment but a creature under a frown so heavy it could bend the world. Each mile the carriage ate away was a string tightening. Mavis's breath came small near her ear; Elora's fingers clutched hers like anchors. Lucan shadowed the carriage at a distance, visible only when he folded back into view against a bend of road, an upright sentinel.
When the iron gates of Velrathis yawned, when torches flame-swept the faces and servants fell to hurried bows, Alaric had the look of a god who had been slighted and would answer this slight with a thunderclap. He hauled Lyanna from the carriage as easily as if she were a coat thrown across a shoulder; his hands were sure and cold. His face was cruel with displeasure but managed the mask of control enough to terrify. He ordered the maids detained—simple, efficient words—and their faces drained as a single thought struck them: punishment would be precise.
He moved like an animal that could not be fully tamed back to the familiar place of her chamber, but he did not set her gently upon her bed. Instead he shut the door and turned the key with a slow, ceremonial finality, not for comfort but for containment. Then he began to thrash—the sound reverberated through the wood, a tempest in small scale. Pictures were upturned, a vase toppled, a stack of Lyanna's precious books scattered like fallen leaves. The room that had been safe, playful, a pocket of rebellion, became a small battlefield in seconds. The thrash was not aimless; it was a storm because he had not yet allowed himself to speak the truth aloud—the fear behind his fury.
Lyanna stood against the far wall, knees trembling like small saplings in wind. Her pulse pounded an animal rhythm. The chaos cut deeper than the sight of broken things; it was the sound of a man losing the small faculties that kept him human. She noticed, as any sharp observer would, how the indexes of his temper were precise—he did not touch the painting she'd made earlier; he did not strike the yellow bag. His fury was aimed not at objects but at the fact of her freedom.
"Alaric—" she began, her voice small but startling in the wreckage. "Stop. If you are angry—blame me. Not them." Her words trembled, but she offered herself like a shield: she would collect the blame if only the maids could walk free.
"Punish you?" His laugh was a rasp, humorless and brittle. "Do you think I do not dare?" He moved toward her, hands on her shoulders, and the pressure was not violent so much as full of meaning. He shook her with a force that might have toppled a lesser woman, his fingers leaving hot ghosts on skin.
Lyanna tasted blood—or perhaps it was just the metallic geometry of fear—but she steadied herself. "I know you can," she whispered, and then, in a voice made of stubbornness and something like love that had no name yet, "That is why I ask. Spare them. They meant no harm."
Alaric's laugh dissolved into something harsher, and then into stillness. He cornered her with eyes that had weathered storms; his lips parted, not to mete out punishment but to issue a promise that felt like a threat. "Do you think only they suffer if you are hurt?" His voice was raw. "Lyanna—do you know what it would mean if the world found out the king's chosen had wandered in the open? Do you have any notion what would come of those who let you go?" His fingers pins-and-needles trembled. "No. Lyanna. If anything had happened to you, no single head would fall; many would. I would make those who hurt you wish they had never been born." The words were not the latex of a ruler making threats; they were something more intimate—an obsession that promised ruin to anyone who trespassed on what he considered his.
She watched his face while he spoke—the keen edge in his eyes, the weathered set of his jaw—and felt a tremor that was partly fear and partly a strange, dizzying intimacy. This man, who could erase cities with a whim, was telling her he would erase lives for her. The notion should have been terrifying in itself, and it was, but mixed with it was the dangerous knowledge that she mattered more to him than he would ever confess.
Lyanna's chest tightened. She had always known how to laugh at danger; she had never had to count on a man who would answer violence with obliteration. This was not mercy. It was not tenderness in the soft-sung sense. It was a different, darker currency—a protection paid in iron and blood. She swallowed hard. Somewhere in the rubble of her scattered life she felt a new equation solving itself: safety purchased at the price of another's ruin.
Alaric's hands eased from her shoulders almost as if some private restraint had been enacted. He stepped back, the motion slow, ceremonial—measured as if he had given a sentence and decided, for now, to postpone the retribution. His voice, when it unfurled again, was thin with something like exhaustion. "Do not leave the walls again. Do you hear me?"
Lyanna nodded, the word small as a pebble. Somewhere beyond the door the maids' captured sobs momentarily surfaced like a signal before being swallowed. Lucan had disappeared without a formal goodbye; where he went, she did not know.
Alaric turned then, and for one heartbeat there was something soft in his expression so obscured by storm it might have been imagined: the hint of regret, of an impossible tenderness. He closed the door behind him and the room exhaled. The shards of broken vessels glinted like tiny stars in fading light, and in the hush Lyanna bowed her head—not in repentance so much as in the attempt to catch her breath. He had saved her—had found her—but the cost had been more complicated than the cookies in the yellow bag.
Outside, the castle resumed its slow, watchful ballet, torches guttering as though nothing at all had happened. Inside, Lyanna sat on the edge of her overturned chair and let the sound of her own heartbeat reassemble itself. The day had begun with mischief and ended in an intimation of ruin. She had not thought to bargain—she had only wanted a taste of ordinary life. The taste now lingered on her tongue, and it was both sweeter and far more dangerous than she'd imagined.