Chapter One: Water That Forgets

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The clothes no longer fit the way they once had.

Aric Boderian stood at the edge of Vaelrith in the plain brown tunic and worn travelling breeches that Lirien had bought him twenty years ago, on a warm afternoon at a market stall when they had nothing more pressing to do than argue about fabric. She had held the tunic up against his chest and tilted her head and said it would do, and he had worn it that same evening and she had laughed at how different he looked without the crown. The fabric had thinned at the elbows since then. The collar had begun to fray, the stitching slowly surrendering to time the way everything eventually surrendered to time. The tunic hung differently now across his shoulders. He had been a leaner man then. Lighter in more ways than one.

He had left the citadel before dawn, slipping past his guards the way only a man who had built his own prison knew how to. No carriage. No sword. Just the clothes and the walk he had made more times than he could honestly count, down through the quiet hills south of Vyreholm, through the silver birch trees that smelled of wet earth and morning, until the trees parted and Vaelrith appeared.

The lake was still.

It was always still. That was the thing about Vaelrith that no painting ever captured and no poet had ever adequately described, not its color which shifted between pale grey and deep green depending on the light, nor its size which was modest by the standards of Thaloria's great bodies of water. It was the stillness. A stillness that felt deliberate. Earned. As though the water had seen everything there was to see and had simply decided to be quiet about it.

The locals called it the water that forgets.

Aric had never believed that. Water remembered everything. It just kept the secret below the surface.

He lowered himself onto the flat rock at the water's edge, his rock he had always thought of it as, though he had no more claim to a rock than any other man, and looked out across the pale surface. The sun was barely risen, a thin gold thread along the eastern hills, and the lake caught it without enthusiasm.

She had been standing right there.

He did not look at the spot directly. He never did. He looked slightly to the left of it, the way you looked slightly away from something too bright, and let his peripheral vision do the work of remembering. A girl of seventeen in a green dress that was slightly too fine for a market and slightly too plain for a court, standing at the water's edge throwing small stones and watching them skip. She had not known he was watching. Or perhaps she had and simply had not cared, which he had found, still found, remarkable.

He had been twenty two years old. Not yet a king. Not yet anything, really, except the second son of a man who had not yet decided what to do with him. He had ridden out that morning with no particular destination, which was the luxury of second sons, and somehow arrived at Vaelrith the way people sometimes arrived at the places they were always going to end up.

She had skipped a stone seven times across the surface of Vaelrith and turned to find him staring and said, without ceremony or curtsy, "You look like a man who has forgotten how to do nothing."

He had laughed. He could not remember the last time he had laughed before that moment or how long it had been since someone had spoken to him without measuring their words first.

That was thirty years ago.

He reached down and picked up a flat stone from beside the rock. Turned it over in his fingers. It was cold and smooth and fit neatly in his palm the way the right stone always did. He looked at the water. He drew his arm back.

He held it there for a long moment.

Then he set the stone down and looked at the lake.

He was fifty two years old now. He had a kingdom that would outlast him and two children who would outlast the kingdom and a wife sleeping in the citadel who had come to him from a brothel and whom he had given his name and who had given him, genuinely, without performance, something that resembled peace. He was not ungrateful for Amitha. He wanted to be clear about that, even in his own private thoughts. She had not replaced Lirien. Nothing replaced Lirien. But she had filled a different space, a space that had been dark and getting darker, and she had done it without asking for anything he could not give. She had listened without judging. She had offered advice without demanding it be taken. She had known about Lirien from the very beginning and had never once made him feel that loving a dead woman was something to be ashamed of.

He suspected she knew about these visits to the lake.

She had never asked.

He owed her more than he had ever properly said.

He owed many people things he had never properly said.

He shifted on the rock. The cold had worked its way through the fabric, through the worn breeches, into the bone. He had not noticed until now. He noticed most things too late.

Eloar.

His son's name arrived in his mind the way it always did these days, quietly, with weight. Eloar had been six years old at the Fortress. Six years old and close enough to see what Aric had seen, close enough that the image had never left him and never would. Aric had arrived minutes too late. He had told himself for twelve years that minutes were nothing, that no man could have moved faster, that the outcome would have been the same regardless. He had told himself this so many times it had worn smooth like river stone, all the sharp edges gone, and yet it never quite convinced him the way he needed it to.

If he had been faster.

If he had gotten there first.

He stopped the thought. He was practiced at stopping that thought.

What he allowed himself instead was the image of his son as he was now. Eighteen. Tall, like Lirien's father had been tall. Quiet in the way that men were quiet when they had decided the world did not deserve their words. There was something in Eloar's eyes that had not left since the Fortress, a watchfulness that went beyond his years, a habit of standing with his back to walls and his face to doors. Aric had tried, in the early years, to reach him. He was not certain he had succeeded. He was not certain he deserved to succeed.

He looked down at his hands. The knuckles had thickened over the years, the skin thinning the way skin did on men who had stopped being young without noticing. Lirien had once taken his hands in hers and told him they were the ugliest hands she had ever seen on a man she did not entirely dislike. He had pretended to be offended. She had not pretended to care.

He almost smiled at that.

Elena was easier. Elena was loudly easier. She had come into the world and seemed to have decided entirely on her own that she would make enough noise for everyone. She was sixteen now and wanted to use her magic at dinner parties and argued with her tutors and moved through Vyreholm Citadel like a small cheerful storm. He loved her in a way that sometimes frightened him with its ferocity. She looked nothing like Lirien. She looked, somehow, like the best parts of himself that he had stopped believing still existed.

Behind him, somewhere in the birch trees, something moved through the undergrowth and went still. He did not turn to look. Whatever it was, it did not come closer.

He looked at the lake.

He thought, as he sometimes allowed himself to think, about Aron.

Not with hatred. He had tried hatred once, in the early years after the Fortress, and found it too exhausting to maintain and too dishonest to believe in fully. What he felt when he thought about his brother was something quieter and more difficult to name. He missed him. He was not proud of that. A man whose betrayal had cost so many people so much did not deserve to be missed, and yet the brother Aric missed was not the man who had done those things. The brother he missed was the one who had taught him to ride, who had stolen wine from their father's cellar and gotten them both spectacularly sick, who had once sat beside him at a feast and whispered observations about the lords present that had made Aric bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.

That man and the man at the Fortress were separated by something Aric had never fully understood. He suspected he never would.

Aron did not exist anymore. Not officially. Their father had seen to that with the thoroughness of a man who understood that the most dangerous histories were the ones people remembered. The banishment, the ruins, the spell that kept him there, all of it buried under silence until even the silence had been forgotten. Eloar did not know he had an uncle. Elena did not know. Only Amitha knew the whole of it, because Amitha had listened on a night when the wine had been too good and the dark had been too heavy, and she had taken the secret and kept it without being asked.

Those who forgot their history, his father had once said, were doomed to repeat it.

His father had then proceeded to erase a piece of history entirely.

He realized his hand had closed around the flat stone again without him deciding to pick it up. He looked at it. Set it down carefully, like something that needed to be handled with intention.

He picked up the stone again.

This time he threw it.

It skipped twice and sank.

She would have laughed at that. Seven times, Aric. It is not difficult. And she would have demonstrated, and hers would have skipped exactly seven times, and she would have turned to him with an expression that was not quite a smile because Lirien had never wasted a full smile on something she considered obvious.

He looked at where the stone had disappeared.

Across the water a bird called once and went silent.

Then it fell.

It came down without drama, without any of the violence one might expect from a living thing suddenly becoming otherwise. It simply dropped from somewhere in the pale sky above the far bank and landed at the water's edge, small and still and absolute. A songbird. Brown and unremarkable except for the fact that a moment ago it had been alive and now it was not, and there was no wind, no hawk, no reason visible to the eye of a man who had been watching that sky.

Aric did not move for a long moment.

The bird had not fallen the way birds fell when they were struck. No spin, no tumble, no last desperate beat of wings. It had simply stopped. As though something had reached up from beneath the pale surface of Vaelrith and extinguished it the way you extinguished a candle. Clean. Deliberate. Without explanation.

He had been a second son once, free to ride without destination and arrive at lakes and laugh at girls who skipped stones without ceremony. He had not believed in omens then. He had believed in very little except the particular pleasure of an unscheduled morning.

He was a king now. And kings could not afford the luxury of disbelief.

He rose from his rock. He brushed the earth from the fraying breeches. He looked once more at the bird, small and motionless at the water's edge, and then he looked at the lake itself, pale and still and keeping its secrets the way it always had.

The celebration would begin at sundown.

He was not looking forward to it the way he once might have. The lords would come with their smiles and their calculations and their quiet hunger, and he would sit above them in his hall and perform the version of himself they needed to believe in, and somewhere beneath all of it, beneath the wine and the music and the careful words, the thing he had been refusing to name for years would continue its patient work of becoming undeniable.

He turned and walked back through the silver birch trees toward Vyreholm.

Behind him, Vaelrith returned to its stillness.

It was very good at that.

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End of Chapter One

Queen Among Kings, Volume I, continues.

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