Chapter 142: Visit Of The Young Prince

Chapter 142: Chapter 142: Visit Of The Young Prince

The chamber had not seen daylight in two weeks, not truly, though the shutters had been opened every morning by servants who no longer knew what else to do. Pronoia sat in the corner where the light did not reach and shadows pooled thick against the stone, and let the world move past her like water around a stone that had forgotten how to be washed downstream.

She could not see any of it and had never seen any of it, not since the fever that took her sight in infancy, but in these last fourteen days she had stopped even listening for it. The chamber had become the entire shape of her existence: the cold seep of stone through her thin dress, the particular hollow silence of a room that had once held her mother’s breathing and now held only her own, ragged and thin and growing thinner by the hour.

Her mother had died in this room with her hand curled loosely in Pronoia’s own, her voice fading like a candle guttering in a draft, until there was nothing left but the echoes of the last words she had spoken. *Be a good girl. Always obey the king.* Words meant as an anchor, perhaps, or as a blessing, or as the only inheritance a dying woman with nothing left to give could still offer her blind daughter. Pronoia had turned those words over and over in the weeks since, worn them smooth with handling, and still she could not make herself rise. Could not make her body understand that grief, however vast, was not the same as ceasing to exist.

She was dying by inches and she knew it. Knew it in the way her wrists had grown thin enough that she could circle them entirely with her own fingers, in the way her heartbeat had begun to flutter unevenly against her ribs like a bird throwing itself against a cage it no longer had the strength to fight. She had heard the healers whisper when they thought her insensate. She had heard the particular note of fear that entered the king’s voice when he knelt beside her and begged.

"Pronoia. You need to eat. Please."

He had said it so many times that the words had lost their shape, had become a kind of weather she simply endured, the way one endures rain. She did not answer him. What answer was there? He was a king with a kingdom to steer, and sons to raise and courtiers to manage with a life that would go on turning regardless of what happened in this small cold room. She was a girl who had lost the only person who had ever loved her without condition, without expectation, without the constant unspoken weight of *what use is a blind child.* There was no bridge wide enough to cross that distance. She did not try to build one.

The food came and went, untouched. She could smell it each time, the warm yeast of the bread, the low mineral richness of the broth, and each time her stomach clenched with a hunger she refused to acknowledge as her own. Hunger was just another voice demanding things of her, and she had grown skilled, in her years of blindness and otherness, at silencing voices that asked for more than she was willing to give. The water sat beside her in its clay cup until it grew stale and was carried away again. Her lips had cracked. And her throat had become a raw and papery thing. She noticed these facts the way one notices weather happening to someone else.

She wrapped her arms around her own ribs, because there was no one left to hold her, and pressed her forehead down until her whole body curled into the shape of a question with no answer. *Mother.* She said it aloud sometimes, when she still had the strength to shape her mouth around it, and other times she only thought it, over and over, a prayer worn down to its barest syllables. The word had stopped being a name and become instead the only proof she had that she was still capable of wanting something.

*Mother is gone,* she thought, and the thought landed each time with the same fresh violence it had the first day, as though grief refused to be dulled by repetition, as though her mind kept forgetting so that it could keep breaking all over again. *What does anything else matter.*

It was into this stillness, on the fourteenth day, that the footsteps came.

She heard them before she consciously registered that she was listening, some animal part of her still tuned to the world despite everything else in her having gone quiet. She had learned, in her blindness, to read footsteps the way sighted people read faces. The healers walked with a particular flat-footed briskness, all duty and no hesitation. The servants shuffled, apologetic, as though sound itself might be an intrusion. The king’s tread was heavy and deliberate, a man who had learned long ago that kings do not hurry even when they are afraid.

These footsteps were none of those. They were light. Quick, and then hesitant, as though their owner kept losing his nerve and finding it again with each step. Young.

She knew them and had heard them before, hovering at the edges of the room on nights she had been too far gone in her grief to acknowledge, a small presence that came and sat nearby and said nothing and eventually left again, as though testing whether his company was wanted without ever being brave enough to ask. The young prince. The king’s second son, the one the servants spoke of in careful, complicated tones she had never fully understood until now, sitting here, three years his elder in age but a lifetime behind him in this particular, singular grief.

She heard the door ease open. Heard the soft whisper of his robes, heard him pause in the doorway the way a person pauses before stepping into water whose temperature they do not trust. She heard him breathing, quick and shallow, a boy gathering courage he was not certain he possessed.

Then, slowly, carefully, as though approaching something wounded and unpredictable, he crossed the room and lowered himself down beside her. Close enough that she caught the scent of him, soap and clean linen and beneath it something that was simply his, warm and childlike and achingly alive in a room that had smelled of nothing but stillness for two weeks.

For a long moment neither of them spoke. She could feel the shape of his attention on her, careful and unsure, and some small, stubborn, still-living part of her noted that he had not brought food, had not begged her to eat, had not tried at all to fix her. He had only come and sat, as though her grief did not require solving, only company.

Then he spoke, and his voice, when it came, was quiet in a way that suggested the words cost him something to say.

"I lost my mother too."

Pronoia went utterly still.

The sentence moved through her like a blade slipped between ribs, precise and unexpected, finding some nerve she had thought long since gone numb. Her breath caught. Her heart, already fluttering and uneven, seemed to stutter entirely before lurching back into its broken rhythm. Something inside her that had frozen solid over the last fourteen days shifted, just slightly, the way ice shifts before it finally begins to crack.

Her head turned toward him on its own, before she had decided to move it at all.

"What?" The word emerged cracked and small, hardly recognizable as her own voice, hoarse from disuse and days of whispered prayer. It was the first thing she had said to another living person in longer than she could measure, and some distant part of her registered the strangeness of that, the fact that grief had a way of making even speech feel like a foreign language relearned.

She felt him look down. Felt the shift of his weight, heard the small catch in his breath before he continued, his voice dropping lower still, as though the words were easier to say to the floor than to her face.

"I never met her. She died when I was born."

"When you were only born?" Her own voice was quieter now, but steadier, drawn forward by something she did not yet understand.

"Yes."

"You never got the chance to know her at all."

He shook his head. She could not see the motion but she felt it, the small displacement of air and the silence that followed it, heavier than the words themselves. "No."

That single syllable carried more weight than she would have thought possible. She heard in it the shape of an entire childhood built around an absence, a boy who had never known his mother’s voice or her hands or the particular safety of her arms, who had grown up with a hole where that certainty should have been and had somehow had to learn to live around its edges the way a tree grows around a buried stone...