2
The room smelled cleaner now. Gone was the sour, stagnant stink of fever and rot—replaced with the sharp bite of alcohol, the soft burn of fresh bandages, and the faint metallic tang of healing draughts left uncorked by the bed.
Tomas wrung out a fresh cloth at the basin, watching the faint steam still rising from Sir Justin’s skin—but it was lighter now. Not the roaring furnace it had been days ago.
“He’s cooler today,” Tomas said quietly, not daring to hope too much. He cast a cautious glance at Eliane, still seated by the bedside, her hands knotted tightly in her lap.
“If he survives this... it will be because of you, Your Highness.”
Eliane said nothing. She only kept her gaze fixed on the man in the bed, as if willing him back through sheer stubbornness.
She knew better than to mistake the cooler skin or the steadier breath for true healing. No magic, no potion, no prayer had been able to touch the root of it.
The fever never truly broke. Some days it dulled, retreated to a low, burning thrum—but it was always there, constant and consuming. The burns, the crushed leg, the scars on his face—none of it mended the way it should have.
Healing spells barely touched the worst of it. The deeper wounds refused to close, the flesh staying wrong, brittle, broken. Every salve and spell they poured into him only held the ruin at bay for a little while longer. A tide held back by a wall of sand. Nothing more.
And yet she stayed. Because even if the court had given up, even if the healers whispered behind closed doors, even if the kingdom itself forgot—she would not. She could not.
Justin shifted weakly beneath the light coverings, the fever still clinging to his skin like mist. A breath caught in his throat, raspy and raw. The movement was so slight it would have gone unnoticed—if not for the way Eliane leaned forward instantly, one hand half-extended before she caught herself.
His only hand—the left—twitched weakly atop the blanket, fingers curling, uncertain.
Tomas moved first, whispering, cautious, as if afraid to frighten him back into the dark. “My lord...?”
A low, broken sound escaped him—not words yet, but something struggling upward from the drowning silence. His eyes fluttered open—just barely. Gray, clouded with fever, trying to focus in the brightness of the room.
He flinched. The light cut sharp against his injured eye—a shallow scrape across the cornea that left it raw, too sensitive. He turned his head away with a faint, pained grimace.
Tomas sprang up, rushing to dim the curtains. The sudden hush of the room felt like holding breath underwater.
Justin blinked slowly, disoriented. His mouth opened, working around words he couldn’t find. Only a hoarse rasp came at first—the sound of a man dragging himself back from somewhere too deep.
Eliane reached for him then—careful, slow—her hand wrapping gently around his. “I’m here,” she said, her voice a steady anchor against the spinning room.
He struggled again, lips cracking with the effort. “M-my lady...” he breathed, barely more than a whisper, broken by reverence even now.
Eliane squeezed his hand tighter, fierce and silent.
For a moment—a single, shivering moment—something like recognition flickered across his battered face.
Then the fever seized him again. His fingers slipped from hers as his body sagged back into the thin mattress, breath rattling, the shallow strength gone almost as quickly as it had come. The amulet jerked slightly where it hung against his chest, before settling back into stillness.
Eliane bowed her head, the ache behind her eyes threatening to break loose, but she kept her face composed.
Tomas sat heavily back into his chair, staring helplessly at the bed.
The room, though darker now, felt no less cruelly bright.
The afternoon was warm, the kind of slow, heavy warmth that made the edges of the world feel softer.
Justin planted his boots carefully into the loamy earth, driving the fence post down a fraction deeper with the weight of his body. The stubborn thing wobbled anyway, refusing to settle straight.
He stepped back, squinting at the crooked line he’d made across the meadow. He blew out a breath and dragged a dusty hand through his hair, leaving it standing at odd angles.
Behind him, Castella laughed—not cruelly, not mockingly, but the kind of laugh that people gave each other when the world wasn’t too sharp.
“You’ll break it if you keep wrestling it like a knight,” she said, a basket of firewood balanced easily against her hip.
Justin turned, shading his eyes from the sunlight. His mouth tugged into a crooked smile—wry, self-deprecating.
“And here I thought strength solved everything,” he said.
She grinned back at him, stepping closer to inspect the fence line. “Strength’s good for dragons. Less useful for fences.”
Justin chuckled under his breath, an easy, rusty sound. “You say that now. But you haven’t seen my fencing technique.”
Castella made a show of inspecting the sagging posts, lips pursed in mock seriousness. “If this is your finest work, Sir Knight, the villagers are doomed.”
He feigned a wounded look, pressing a hand theatrically to his chest. “You wound me, my lady.”
The words slipped out without thought—natural, light—and for a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Castella laughed again, softer this time, and set her basket down in the grass.
Justin crouched, adjusting the nearest post with more care, muttering half-hearted curses under his breath. He glanced up once—caught her watching him—and grinned like a boy caught stealing apples.
The world around them moved slow and forgiving.
Birds stirred somewhere high in the trees.
The river caught the late sun in long, shimmering strands.
When the fence was finally standing—crooked, stubborn, but upright—Justin dropped into the grass, bracing his arms across his knees.
Castella lowered herself beside him, her skirts whispering against the tall grass, and for a long moment they simply watched the wind ripple across the meadow.
Justin glanced sideways, catching the way the sunlight tangled in her hair—wild, alive in a way he no longer knew how to be.
“You live in a good place,” he said, voice low.
She smiled, faint but genuine, eyes still on the horizon. “It’s not much. But it’s enough.”
Justin tilted his head back, letting the sun press against his face, heavy and kind.
“I’m starting to think that’s all I ever wanted,” he said.
The words slipped out before he could weigh them. He regretted them the instant they fell between them, raw and too small.
Castella turned her head toward him then, studying him with a curious tilt of her brow.
“You didn’t want to be a knight?” she asked.
Justin gave a short, rough laugh. “I think... I wanted to be what they wanted me to be. I just thought it was the same thing.”
He didn’t look at her. The wind stirred around them, soft as breath.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Castella asked, her voice low, almost careful.
For a moment he said nothing, only watched the meadow ripple and roll under the sun.
“The ones who raised me,” he said finally. “The ones who decided what I was good for.”
The words tasted bitter in his mouth, like something he had bitten down on too long and too hard.
He half-expected her to answer—to question, to pity, to turn the wound over in her hands. But Castella only lowered her gaze, as if honoring something she understood too well to speak of.
Castella said nothing. She only reached down and plucked a single wildflower from the grass—white, with a thin, reaching stem—and twirled it absently between her fingers.
The silence between them wasn’t heavy. It breathed. It belonged.
And for the first time he could remember, Justin wasn’t rushing to fill it—wasn’t bracing for the next demand, the next test, the next need to prove he deserved to stay.
He was simply... here.
A man among fields and rivers and sunlight, not a weapon polished for someone else’s hand.
He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the sound of the river drown out the distant drums of battles he could no longer name.
The sun pressed against his shoulders, seeping through his bones, wrapping him in a gentleness he’d never known.
The warmth clung to him even as he floated in something softer than pain—a lingering weightlessness, a sense of sun on his skin, of something kind brushing close. He reached for it blindly, desperate to hold onto whatever it was. But the ground shifted beneath him, and the warmth tore away, leaving only the ache behind.
Justin woke with a sharp, tearing breath. The world he opened his eyes to was gray and heavy and wrong.
Pain flared immediately—not clean pain, but the fever-born burn that turned every shallow breath into fire. His body ached with a deep, dragging weight. His skin felt too tight, his right side raw and hollow where there should have been an arm. The chamber around him was cold—stone walls, old air—but it barely touched the furnace still eating him from within.
He squeezed his eyes shut against the stabbing light that filtered through the heavy curtains. Even the dimness seared his grazed eye, sending another pulse of agony down his battered frame.
Somewhere outside the thin walls, voices floated through, sharp and clear enough that he knew he was awake.
“...unsettling, that’s what it is,” someone muttered, voice pitched low. “No one survives a dragon curse. Not properly. Not like this.”
Another answered, tone dry and careless. “He’s pretending. Convenient, isn’t it? ‘Losing’ his memory just when everyone needs a scapegoat.”
A third, more bitter, followed. “Crawled back just enough to be a burden. We lost the south because of him—and now we’re wasting healers and potions trying to stitch a corpse back together.”
A harsh laugh cut through the air. “But Her Highness insists. Can’t let the court’s golden favorite slip away too easily, can we?”
Justin lay still beneath the thin linen, every word carving slow and deliberate into the raw, exposed places fever had left behind. He couldn’t summon the strength to move, to call out, to deny them. He couldn’t even lift his hand. The voices drifted away, but the damage they left behind settled deep.
He turned inward instead, reaching blindly for the warmth that had already slipped from him. But it was gone, torn away like everything else, and all that remained was the burning pain.
By the time the heavy door creaked open again, the light outside had shifted—softer now, bleeding into the sickroom in muted golds and silvers.
Justin stirred weakly at the sound, but he didn’t lift his head. He couldn’t even if he wanted to. The fever still pressed heavy against his skin, pulling every shallow breath from him like a weight.
Footsteps crossed the stone floor—not the harsh, hurried steps of the healers or the heavy tread of guards. These steps were careful. Familiar.
Eliane knelt beside the bed without ceremony, the folds of her simple gown whispering against the floor. She set a small bundle on the side table, things Tomas had brought—fresh linens, clean bandages, a shallow bowl filled with the faint shimmer of healing magic.
“You’re awake,” she said softly.
Justin turned his head slightly toward the sound of her voice. His vision blurred at the edges, but he knew her—by voice, by presence, by the way the room somehow steadied itself when she spoke.
“My lady...” His voice cracked with the effort. He managed no more than a whisper.
“You don’t need to speak,” Eliane said. “Just rest.”
She dipped her hands into the magic-infused water, drawing faint, glowing runes across her fingers, then pressed her palms lightly over the worst of his burns. The healing magic hummed low against his skin, dulling the sharpest edges of pain, easing the fever’s bite for a little while—but the deeper wounds remained untouched, stubborn beneath the surface.
Justin flinched, not from pain but from shame. He tried to pull away, but his body betrayed him—too weak, too broken to escape even kindness.
“Don’t...” His breath caught, thin and shaking. “...waste it. Not... me.”
Eliane stilled her hands but did not move away. “You’re not a waste,” she said.
Justin shut his eyes. He had heard words like that before—sharp and bright and too easily broken.
It was a boy’s memory—hazy at the edges, but still sharp enough to cut.
A younger Justin, no more than twelve, sparring in the training courts of Aurelle’s royal keep. His small frame pitched again and again into the sand by the heavier, stronger blows of Prince Leonard. Rising every time. Bruised every time. Silent every time.
On the edge of the court, Swordmaster de Laurant stood with arms folded, his face set in its usual mask of stern approval.
“You are not his brother,” said the man who took him in, voice low enough that only Justin could hear. “You are his sword. His shield. His failure, should you fall. Nothing more.”
Justin bit his lip until it bled, nodded once, and rose again.
Justin opened his eyes to Eliane’s patient, steady gaze.
She smoothed a cloth across his brow, slow and careful, as if touching something fragile enough to break with a breath.
“Justin,” she said gently. “Do you remember what happened?”
He struggled against the weight in his mind, reaching for something, anything. The fever, the scattered images of fire and blood, the sickening snap of bone—they all blurred together into a hollow ache he could not make sense of. He shook his head, a small, broken motion.
Eliane’s gaze dropped to the chain around his neck, barely visible against the torn edges of the bandages. A glint of deep red caught the light—a small amulet, dull and heavy against his chest.
“I didn’t know you had this,” she said softly. Her fingers brushed the edge of the chain, careful, hesitant, as if afraid to disturb something sacred.
Justin shifted weakly, a faint tremor in his fingers, but he was too weak to move.
Eliane, seeing the struggle, reached out without hesitation and gently guided his hand to the amulet lying against his chest.
For a moment, her fingers lingered against his—careful, steady, far too familiar for something that was never meant to be.
Shame flickered faintly through him, an old instinct too worn to rise. He felt her hand guiding his—too closely, too easily—and hated how helpless he was to resist it, as his fingers curled around the amulet with slow, clumsy effort.
The touch grounded him, faint but real—not memory, not thought, only a quiet, aching certainty that it mattered.
He frowned, trying to summon some explanation, but there was nothing. Only the vague, stubborn sense that whatever it was, it belonged to him now.
“I don’t...” His voice broke off, too rough to finish.
Eliane didn’t press him. She let her hand fall back to her lap, her eyes steady and searching.
“What about Castella?” Eliane asked quietly. “You’ve been saying the name in your dreams.”
The name floated in the hush between them.
Justin’s brow knit deeper this time, and a flicker of pain crossed his face—a tightening around his eyes, the barest grimace before he forced it down.
Eliane saw it. Her heart twisted sharp and guilty. She had asked too much.
She touched his hand lightly, enough to steady him without demanding more. “It’s all right,” she said, her voice soft. “You don’t have to remember now.”
Justin shifted faintly against the sheets, his fingers tightening around the amulet in a weak, unsteady clutch.
Still, he searched the broken hollows of his mind, reaching for something he could not find. The name stirred no memory, no face. Only the lingering ache of something lost too deep to reach.
“No,” he rasped at last, shame threading the single word.
Eliane only nodded, her touch steady on his hand.
Justin let the quiet settle between them, too tired to fight it. His fingers remained curled against the amulet’s weight, feeling the faint, grounding pull of it against his skin.
Whatever else had been taken from him, whatever pieces of himself he could not find—this, at least, had stayed.