Chapter 143: The Young Prince shall one day rule

Chapter 143: Chapter 143: The Young Prince shall one day rule

She said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not sound thin and useless against a grief that old.

He went on anyway, and she understood, somewhere in the listening, that he needed to say the rest of it as much as she needed to hear it.

"Some people hated me for it. In the past." A pause, and she heard him swallow, heard the faint tremor threading through his next words. "They whisper behind my back. They say I’m the one who killed her."

Something in Pronoia’s chest twisted sharply, a physical ache that had nothing to do with hunger or thirst. She had known cruelty herself, had felt the particular sting of being blamed for things she had never chosen, her blindness, her strangeness, the quiet way people looked at her as though she were a misfortune rather than a girl. But this. A child blamed for the simple, blameless act of being born. It was a cruelty so specific and so unearned that she felt it lodge somewhere beneath her ribs and stay there.

"They say that even though she gave her life so I could live," the prince continued, his voice thinning further, "there was nothing special about me to make it worth it."

Pronoia lowered her head. She understood, more than she wanted to, what it was to be told your existence was a debt no one believed you had repaid.

She understood because she had lived some shadow version of it herself. Not the same grief, never the same, but a grief with the same shape at its center, the same accusing whispers, the same sense of being watched and found wanting for reasons that had never been hers to control. The color of her sightless eyes. The strangeness that clung to her since her mother’s illness had left her marked in ways the healers could not fully explain. She knew what it was to be a child made to carry blame that belonged to fate instead.

*He understands,* she thought, and the thought arrived with a kind of ache that was almost tender. *He knows what it is to be alone in a room full of people.*

The silence that followed was not empty. It was full, weighted with two griefs recognizing each other across the dark, and in that moment Pronoia felt something in her chest loosen, only slightly, enough to let air move through it again.

And then, without warning, the vision took her.

It arrived the way it always did, without permission, without mercy, a riptide dragging her under before she could so much as brace herself. The room dissolved. Her body remained folded in the corner but her awareness scattered into something outside of time, fragments of light and pressure and sound that were not sound, images that were not seen so much as felt directly against the inside of her skull.

She felt the prince, but grown. Older, taller, the boyish uncertainty burned away and replaced with something harder and forged. She felt the vastness of a kingdom stretched out before him, felt the weight of a thousand eyes turned toward him in hope and fear both, felt the particular gravity of a future balanced on shoulders that had once been narrow and shaking beside her in a dim, grief-soaked room.

She felt him seated. Felt the cold circlet of a crown settle against his brow, its edges biting faintly into skin, its weight nothing like the fabric of the boy’s robe she could smell now beside her, and yet somehow inevitable, as though the crown had always been waiting for exactly this boy to grow into it.

He ruled. She felt the kingdom bend and steady beneath his hand, years compress into a single unbearable instant of certainty.

Then the vision released her, and she came back into her body with a violent gasp, her chest heaving, sweat gone cold and slick along her spine, her hands trembling where they had clutched at nothing.

"What is it?" The prince’s voice cut through immediately, sharp with alarm. She felt his hand hover near her arm, uncertain whether touching her would help or harm, the same hesitance he had carried since he first walked in.

Pronoia let out a slow breath and, unexpectedly, felt her mouth curve into the first smile she had managed in two weeks. Small. Fragile. But real.

"You don’t have to worry," she said.

"About what?"

"About what they say. What those people whisper." She drew in another breath, steadier now, her voice gathering a strength that startled even her. "You’re destined for greater things than that."

She felt him go still beside her, the shock of it ripple through his small frame. "How could you possibly know that?" His voice had dropped, half laughing, half unsettled, the sound of a boy trying to dismiss something he could not quite dismiss. "It isn’t as though you can see the future."

She did not answer that directly. The truth was too strange, too dangerous a thing to hand to a child, however gently he had just handed her his own grief. But she could give him this much, at least. A kindness. A small seed of hope planted in a boy who had been given so little of it.

"You don’t need to worry," she said again, softer now.

He was quiet for a long moment, and then she heard something in his breathing ease, his shoulders dropping with the release of a tension she had not fully realized he was carrying. "Okay," he said simply, as though her certainty, however unexplained, was enough.

He rose. She heard the rustle of fabric as he stood, the soft pad of his feet turning toward the door, and then he paused.

"You’ve been here for weeks now." His voice, when he turned back, carried a concern that felt entirely unrehearsed, entirely his own. "Shouldn’t you eat something? At least a little?"

Pronoia sat with the question longer than its size seemed to warrant. She thought of the food that had come and gone, untouched, day after day. She thought of her own body, quietly dismantling itself in the dark. She thought, most of all, of her mother’s voice in that final hour, worn thin but urgent. *Be a good girl and always obey the king.*

*Mother is gone,* she thought, and the words still cut, still would always cut. But beneath the grief, something else surfaced now, something she had been too buried to hear until this moment. Her mother had not given her those words so that she might waste away in a corner. She had given them so that Pronoia would live. Would go on and become something more than the sum of everything she had lost.

The realization moved through her like warmth returning to numbed limbs, painful and welcome all at once.

"All right," she said quietly.

She heard the prince’s answering smile in the sudden lightness of his breath. "Come, then."

He extended his hand. She heard the whisper of his sleeve, felt the warmth of his palm hovering near hers, patient, waiting for her to close the distance herself rather than reaching for her outright. She found his fingers by touch, small, smaller than she had expected for a hand that had just steadied her entire world, but warm, and sure.

She took it.

When she rose, her legs betrayed her instantly, weeks of stillness collapsing into a single dizzying wave, and she swayed hard enough that she would have fallen if his grip had not tightened around hers, holding steady, holding her upright with a strength that surprised them both. He did not let go. He waited, patient as stone, until her balance returned to her.

Together, they walked from the chamber.

The hallway beyond was a country she did not know, filled with unfamiliar echoes and unfamiliar smells, warm stone and distant kitchen fires and, somewhere far off, the sound of birds she could not name. She felt the sun’s warmth reach through an open window and touch her face for the first time in two weeks, and something in her chest ached at the simple, undeserved kindness of it.

She was leaving the corner where her mother had died. leaving the tomb she had built for herself out of grief and stillness and the terrible, seductive comfort of giving up.

Her mother was gone. That would never change, would never stop being true no matter how many years passed or how far she walked from this room. But the promise remained, and she understood now that it was hers to keep, not as a burden dragging her back into the dark, but as a light she could choose to carry forward.

She did not yet know how deeply her life and the prince’s would come to be woven together, could not see the years ahead, the trials neither of them could yet imagine, the moments of joy and devastation still waiting somewhere past the edge of what her gift allowed her to glimpse. She knew only what the vision had shown her: a boy who would become a king, and somehow, impossibly, a place for herself within that future.

The thought settled into her like a seed pressed gently into dark soil, small and fragile and full of a possibility she did not yet have words for.

*Mother,* she thought, walking hand in hand with the prince toward the warm, uncertain light spilling down the corridor, *I will make you proud.*

She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.

And together, they walked towards the dinning hall.