King Aldric POV
The elders had been talking for forty minutes.
Aldric had stopped listening after the first five.
Not because they were wrong. That was the problem. They were perfectly, irritatingly correct, every single one of them, and nothing was being said in this room that he hadn't already said to himself in the hour between the altar and now. Elder Cass with her rings and her careful hands. Elder Bram, who smelled like pipe smoke and had been sitting in this council chamber longer than Aldric had been alive. Elder Yven, the youngest of them, had the particular gift of stating brutal things in a very gentle voice.
"A cursed heir is not an heir," Yven said. Gently. "It is a liability."
Aldric looked at the window.
The Sacred Grove was visible from here. What was left of it. The white blossoms were gone, all of them, every tree that had been coaxed into bloom out of season. Dead now. Grey and bare and wrong, as something had reached into them and pulled the life out at the root.
She had done that in thirty seconds.
His daughter. His Ella. Who had been laughing at something Seraphine whispered right up until the moment she destroyed a grove that had survived three wars and a famine and four hundred years of every storm the border forest could throw at them.
Thirty seconds.
He kept thinking about the thirty seconds.
She had brought him wildflowers every morning until she was twelve.
He didn't know why he was thinking about that now. It wasn't useful. It wasn't governance. But it was there anyway, stubborn and unwanted, sitting in the back of his chest while Elder Cass outlined the legal precedent for removing a cursed noble from succession.
Ella used to be up before anyone. Even the kitchen staff. She would slip out through the side garden and come back with her hands full of whatever she'd found, dandelions, mostly, and small purple things that didn't have names, she knew, and she would climb onto the end of his breakfast table and arrange them in his water cup like it was the most important work in the world.
She always looked so pleased with herself.
He had always pretended to be more surprised than he was, because she liked it.
"Your Majesty."
He turned back to the room.
Elder Bram had the papers already prepared. Of course he did. Bram had probably drafted them an hour ago. He was the kind of man who prepared for contingencies that hadn't happened yet and filed them alphabetically.
"The tribe cannot be seen sheltering a cursed heir," Bram said. "The longer she remains in the palace, the more it reads as an endorsement. Or worse desperation."
"I understand," Aldric said.
"The people are frightened. The grove"
"I understand," he said again. Quieter this time.
The room went still.
He looked at the exile papers. Neat stack. His official seal was already stamped at the bottom, waiting only for his signature. Someone had moved very quickly on this. He noted that without expression.
He thought about her face on the altar steps. The way she had looked at her own hands as if they belonged to a stranger. The sound she had made when the flowers died, not a scream exactly, something worse, something he had never heard from her before and hoped very much not to hear again.
He thought about her calling up through the grate an hour ago.
I'm still me. Please just come see me. You don't have to open the door.
He picked up the pen.
He signed his name.
It took less than a minute. He wrote it the same way he wrote everything: clean, decisive, no hesitation in the strokes. A signature that looked like a man who knew what he was doing.
He set the pen down, looked at the papers, and felt nothing he was willing to examine.
"She is not to say goodbye," he said. "Not to the staff. Not to anyone in the household."
Elder Yven glanced up. "Your Majesty, the girl has lived here her whole"
"I know where she has lived." He stood, and everyone in the room straightened automatically. "A farewell is an event. Events draw crowds. Crowds ask questions I have no interest in answering publicly." He moved the signed papers to the edge of the table. "She leaves tonight. Quietly."
He told himself this was a strategy.
He was very good at telling himself things.
He was almost to the door when Bram spoke again.
"The escort. Who do you want leading it?"
Aldric stopped.
This was the decision he had actually been turning over since he left the altar. Not the exile. That had been inevitable the moment the grove started dying; he'd known it even then, in the first few seconds, some cold and practical part of him already running the calculations while the rest of him watched his daughter scream. No. The escort was the piece that required thought.
He needed someone the tribe trusted. Someone whose presence would signal that this was a sanctioned, orderly removal and not a crisis. Someone, Ella wouldn't fight, because fighting would make a scene, and a scene would make this harder than it needed to be.
And he needed to be honest with himself about this, in the private space behind his face where honesty was still allowed, he needed to make sure she didn't hope.
Hope would make her try to stay. Try to appeal. Try to reach people who might be reached. Ella had always been good at reaching people. It was one of the things he'd loved most about her.
It was a problem now.
He needed the one person whose presence would make Ella understand, without any words being said, that it was already over. That there was no door left. That the life she'd had was gone.
He turned back.
"Send Seraphine," he said.
The room was quiet.
"She's twenty years old," Yven said carefully. "She has never led a."
"She doesn't need experience. She needs to show up." He held Yven's gaze until the elder looked down. "Seraphine is the last person in this palace that Ella still believes in. When she sees her leading the guards instead of standing beside her."
He stopped.
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. The people in this room were smart enough to follow it to the end.
He walked to the door.
"Have it ready by morning," he said, and left before anyone could make him say out loud what he was actually doing.
He didn't need to hear it.
He already knew.