Beatrice read that line three times.
The grief and loneliness will turn that power into something dangerous — something to be feared.
She thought about the tremors beneath the palace floor. The news about monsters gathering at the border villages. The ominous energy surrounding the royal palace, reaching outward into the surrounding land like poison spreading through water.
She thought about three hundred years of darkness and chains and silence.
And she understood, with a clarity that settled in her chest like something heavy and permanent, that whoever had put those chains on him had not done it because he was born dangerous.
They had done it because they had made him that way.
Beatrice heaved a long sigh to calm down her emotions and continued.
I want to tell you about Lucian as I knew him. Not the monster the histories will eventually make him. Not the cautionary tale. Not the thing in the dark that children will be threatened with when they misbehave.
The man.
He was — and I say this with full awareness of how it sounds — the most genuinely kind person I have ever known.
Not soft. He was not soft. He had been raised in a palace that treated him as a problem to be managed, and that leaves marks. He was guarded and direct and sometimes sharp in a way that startled people who didn't know him. He didn't perform warmth. He didn't know how.
But when he trusted you — when he actually, truly decided that you were safe — he was the most attentive, the most careful, the most quietly devoted person.
He remembered everything I ever told him. Every small thing. A passing comment about a fruit I disliked, a color I found beautiful, a memory I'd mentioned once in passing. He stored all of it somewhere and then produced it at unexpected moments in ways that made me feel — for the first time in my life — genuinely seen.
I grew up in a poor family of noble.We barely had enough to feed the mouths of six. I had to work from young age to make ends meet.
Lucian noticed that.
About a month after the day in the courtyard, he came to find me in the west wing corridor. He had something in his hand — a small paper bag, twisted at the top.
"What is this?" I asked.
"Winter cherries," he said, in that direct, unadorned way he had. "You mentioned once that you hadn't had them since you were a child."
I had mentioned it once. In passing. Weeks earlier, while we were talking about something else entirely.
He had remembered.
I stood in the corridor holding a bag of winter cherries and felt something happen to my heart that I had not been warned about and was entirely unprepared for.
"Thank you," I managed.
He shrugged one shoulder in that way he had, as though the gesture cost him nothing, and walked away.
But I saw — just before he turned the corner — the small, careful smile he was trying not to let me see.
The other time, by the following spring, we were spending every evening we could manage in the palace library — he would pull books from shelves and hand them to me without comment, and I would read passages aloud and he would argue with the authors in that direct, quietly passionate way he had when something genuinely engaged him.
By the summer, he had started leaving things for me. Small things. Winter cherries and a particular blue ribbon I had admired and once, memorably, a book he had spent three weeks sourcing from a merchant in the capital because I had mentioned offhandedly that I had been looking for it for years.
By the autumn, I had stopped pretending to myself that any of it was simple.
I loved him.
I loved him completely and without reservation and in full knowledge of everything it was going to cost, because I had always been able to see the shape of my own future even when I couldn't see the details.
And he —
Lucian had never been loved before.
Not by his family. Not by the court. Not by anyone who knew what he was and stayed anyway.
I knew what he was.
I stayed.
And watching him understand that — watching the slow, careful, disbelieving process of a person learning for the first time that they are worth staying for — was the most beautiful and the most heartbreaking thing I have ever witnessed.
He didn't know what to do with it at first.
He kept waiting for the condition. The catch. The moment I would reveal what I actually wanted from him, because in his experience, people who got close to him always wanted something.
I didn't want anything.
I just wanted him.
It took him a long time to believe that.
When he finally did —
Beatrice's breath caught.
She turned the page with hands that were not quite steady.
When he finally did, he came to find me in the garden.
It was an evening in late autumn — cold, the first real chill of the season — and I was cutting the last of the year's flowers for the west wing vases. He appeared at the garden gate and stood there for a long moment without speaking, which was unusual for him. Lucian was direct. Lucian always said exactly what he meant.
He was nervous.
I set down the flowers and waited.
"I don't know how to do this," he said finally. "I've never — I don't have a template for this conversation." A pause. "I'm aware that's a deeply unromantic thing to say."
I laughed.
He let out a breath.
"You're not leaving," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"No," I said.
"Even knowing everything—"
"Everything," I confirmed.
He crossed the garden in three steps and took my face in his hands — those enormous, careful hands — and looked at me for a long moment like someone checking that something is real before allowing themselves to believe in it.
Then he pressed his forehead against mine.
"I don't deserve this," he said quietly.
"No," I agreed. "You deserve more than this. But I'm what you have, so."
A soft smile of relief crept up on his lips that undid me completely.
That was Lucian.
That was the person they'll eventually seal beneath the palace and call him monster.
Beatrice realized she was crying.
Not dramatically — not sobbing, not making any sound at all. Simply sitting in the window seat with the book open in her lap and tears running quietly down her face, entirely without her permission, because she had no defenses against this.
She wiped them away with the back of her hand.
Then turned the page.
I should also tell you about the politics. Because without the politics, none of what happened makes sense.
The Avelangia Empire, three centuries before the time you are reading this, was not what it has since become. It was larger, more fractured, held together by a complicated network of alliances and obligations that required constant maintenance. The Emperor — Aldous von Devereux, Lucian's father — was a pragmatic man. Not cruel by nature, but ruthless by necessity, in the way that rulers of large unstable empires tend to become.
He had thirteen children.
Thirteen.
The older ones were assets — pieces on a board, to be placed strategically and used to cement alliances and secure borders and produce heirs at the appropriate time. This was simply how things worked and everyone, including the older children themselves, understood it.
Lucian was the thirteenth.
By the time you reach the thirteenth child, the strategic usefulness of any additional piece is limited. He was not needed for alliances — those had been arranged. He was not needed for the succession — there were twelve people ahead of him. He was not needed for anything in particular.
Except he was born with dark magic.
And dark magic, in a royal bloodline, is not useless.
It is terrifying.
Not to an enemy. To the family.
Because dark magic in sufficient strength can do things that no army and no political alliance can do. It can destabilize. It can reach places that swords cannot. It can, in the hands of someone sufficiently motivated and sufficiently skilled, undo the very power structures that keep people like Emperor Aldous in their thrones.
Lucian was never going to use it that way. I knew that. Anyone who actually knew him knew that.
But Emperor Aldous did not actually know his thirteenth son.
He only knew what the priests told him.
And the priests were afraid.
Beatrice paused.
She looked up at the ceiling, breathing steadily, processing.
The priests. The same people who performed their rites over the sealed chamber. The same people whose seal had to be reinforced every decade because whatever they had put in place three hundred years ago was never meant to be permanent — only to last long enough for the thing inside to stop being a problem.
They had never intended for him to survive this long.
She looked back at the page.
The priests were afraid because Lucian's power had been growing since his sixteenth year and showed no sign of slowing. By the time he was twenty-three — the year I met him in the courtyard — he was, by any honest assessment, the most powerful magic user in the empire.
More powerful than the court mages.
More powerful than the high priest himself.
And what will happen later will not be an accident and it will never be justice.
It will be a preemptive strike from people who were afraid of being outgrown.
Beatrice closed the book.
Not because she didn't want to continue. Because she needed a moment — just one moment — before she read what came next. Before she read about the last good season ending. Before she read about cold stone and iron and blood and the blade she already knew was coming because she had felt it every single night for seven months in a dream she couldn't escape.
She pressed the book against her chest and looked at the snow outside.
The garden below was completely white now. Still and quiet and completely covered. The fountain had stopped entirely, its surface frozen over in the cold.
She thought about a man sitting in the rain because it was quieter when people went inside.
She thought about winter cherries.
She thought about a voice in the walls whispering her name with three hundred years of waiting behind it.
....My Beatrice.
Her throat tightened.
"I'm here," she whispered, to the snow and the frozen garden and the deep quiet below the palace floor. "I'm reading. I'm going to understand all of it."
The pull beneath her feet warmed — just slightly, just briefly — like a hand pressed gently against the other side of a wall.
She opened the book again.
And kept reading.