The months that followed were a slow, intricate war fought in pavilions, feast-tents, chapel entries, and the cramped quarters of coastal cities. Alianor and Aelis circled each other like swordsmen testing distance, trading wounds in the form of compliments so barbed that no one who heard them could quite identify the insult, though everyone knew blood had been drawn.
Aelis, passing Alianor at a council feast, said, “Your surcoat is very fine, Princess. I did not know they made silk in Esberia. I thought it was all wool and rain.”
Alianor smiled coldly. “It is a gift from the Rhomanian envoy. He said it suited a warrior. I am told you prefer gifts of books.”
“I do prefer gifts that broaden the mind rather than the shoulders.”
“And I prefer gifts that can help me kill men. We are neither of us disappointed.”
The camp learned to clear the space between them when they were in the same room. Rydric, caught between them, tried to keep the peace with jokes, deflections and desperate optimism. He did not understand, or would not admit, that their hatred did not come by mistake. Alianor saw Aelis as an invader into her dead mother’s place. Aelis saw Alianor as the living obstacle that kept postponing the marriage.
The marriage had been delayed four times. Publicly, Rydric cited the campaign’s demands, uncertain supply lines, the need to secure the coastal ports before any celebration, and mourning for fallen comrades. Privately, he could not bear to force Alianor under Aelis’s authority while his daughter remained raw with grief for Galeran, half-feral with loss, wearing the misericorde as if it were a holy relic.
Aelis understood perfectly. And she hated it.
“You are not protecting her,” she told Rydric one night, in the inner chamber of his tent, where the maps had been pushed aside and the wine had been poured and the argument had gone on long enough that neither of them was careful anymore. “You are choosing her. Every time you postpone the wedding, you choose her grief over my claim. I am your betrothed. I have been since I was fourteen. I crossed the sea for you and found you glorious, filthy, and in love with my brother already. I was not fool enough to resent that. I knew Felrian before you did. I knew what you gave him and what he gave you. I have waited through sieges and fevers and a dozen battles that could have left me a widow before I was a wife. Still you married that lady without your queen mother’s consent nor any care for my feelings, gave her a daughter, and still you will not give me what I was promised.”
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“I will give you a kingdom.”
“I have a kingdom. My brother rules Valcierre, and I am his nearest useful blood until he marries and breeds sons. I want a husband who does not spoil his daughter.”
“She is my only daughter.”
“She is a knight with a dead lover’s knife and a grudge against any woman who might take her mother’s place. I am not asking you to stop loving her. I am asking you to stop letting her rule you. Find her a good household and free yourself from that burden. I heard Sir Aubrey of Valrens has her hand in sight. Nothing is a better remedy for a broken heart than a newfound love.”
Rydric had no answer for that.
The argument ended as it often did: with Aelis withdrawing to her own pavilion, cold and composed and more dangerous than she had been when she entered, and Rydric sitting alone with maps, wine, and the knowledge that he was failing both of the women he loved.
Felrian watched all of this from a distance. He loved his sister in the complicated way ambitious men loved the women who understood their ambitions: as ally, mirror, and blade. He loved Rydric as the brother he had never had, the friend who made him laugh at himself, the king who made the holy expedition seem not merely a calculation but a sacred purpose. And he loved the three as a dream that might, if guarded fiercely enough, reshape the world.
But patience was not Rydric’s gift. Ruthlessness was not Rydric’s gift. As the campaign wore on, as sieges lengthened, prisoners multiplied, supplies dwindled, and Solymer remained as distant as it had been when they first landed, Felrian saw the dream fraying.
The breaking point came in the grinding spaces between battles. It came in a letter from the west, sealed with the High Luminary’s ring, reminding both kings that their holy expedition oaths required unity of purpose and that any dispute between them would be heard by the ecclesiastical court upon their return. It also came in spoiled grain, in a Valcierran quartermaster accusing the Esberian camp of hoarding, in an Esberian knight drawing his sword on a Valcierran clerk. And it came in Aelis, standing in the doorway of her brother’s tent in the grey hour before dawn, her face wet with tears she refused to acknowledge.
“He has postponed it again,” she said. “The wedding. He says Alianor is not ready. She will never be ready. He will never choose me. He will choose her until one of us dies.”
Felrian looked at his sister: at the tears she was pretending not to shed, at the iron control she had maintained for years while the man she was promised to kept finding reasons not to marry her, and something in him shifted. He looked toward the eastern dark, where Darat al-Bahr waited behind its walls.
“Then we must make him choose,” he said.