Margarite had trained herself to go without thinking of Sarg, and Sarg had never once gone to her.
Three years of silence lay between them.
There was no clear answer to how that silence should be broken.
“I trust you have been well.”
Sarg opened with the most conventional greeting possible when at last he stood before his former charge. But even those harmless words did nothing to dent the heavy quiet in the room.
Margarite was looking only at the baby, watching the small hands move and fidget. Sarg pressed on.
“I am truly sorry for not coming to see you sooner—”
Waaaah—
The baby broke into sudden wailing. Margarite checked her with slightly stiff hands. The swaddling was dry. She was hungry.
“Turn away.”
Margarite said it, then settled the baby to her breast. Sarg turned his back and stood there, and thought—privately—that he might need to sigh very soon.
When the crying stopped, an awkward hush settled back over the room.
I want to flee this room, Sarg thought. But he did not act on the desire.
“I am deeply sorry for the loss of your children.”
“…”
“I was told the circumstances. I won’t press—please don’t feel you need to be guarded around me. Things will be set in motion soon enough. There is no need to worry.”
Margarite gave a short, edged laugh.
“I must look quite pathetic to you. There I was, defending him—and now I’m asking you to kill him. Go ahead and laugh at me.”
“I have no interest in judging what has passed. If anything, I owe you an apology. For what I said to you that day… I have wanted to say that for a long time.”
Time has a strange character. Some things it sharpens; others it fades.
Whatever remained of the old hostility between Sarg and Margarite had lost most of its colour.
Sarg looked at her—thin as old wood, worn down to almost nothing—and felt a quiet, painful pity. And Margarite had at last allowed herself to accept what he had been telling her all along.
“…Don’t say things like that. I was no better.”
Margarite replied in a softer tone and straightened herself. She patted the sufficiently fed royal infant on the back and held her upright. Sarg asked quietly:
“Your Highness. How did you come to know that the previous attempt on your life was carried out by His Majesty the King? Is there physical evidence?”
“Nothing like that…”
She was clearly reluctant. Sarg waited in silence. Margarite pressed her eyes shut, then spoke abruptly.
“I came to know through circumstance.”
“What circumstance?”
Margarite drew the baby closer against her chest.
“I saw him try to kill Beronis—the third one.”
That evening, king and queen dined with their guests.
The royal wet nurse reached out her arms to take Princess Beronis, but Hyderlin declined. Instead she passed the baby unceremoniously to Sarg and murmured:
“Earn your childcare fees.”
“…”
Sarg sighed. He laid the baby beside him on the chair and watched her out of the corner of his eye.
“The head cook must have taken some pains when he heard Lord and Lady Gloriosa were coming. Please enjoy everything.”
Hyderlin stared at the bean soup and the stuffed goose with barely concealed misery.
Not being able to eat was torment in these situations. To sit before a magnificent spread and feel this particular kind of wretchedness—this was the second time in her life.
The first? Dinner with Leone Colozzo. Killing someone during a meal was not an experience she would recommend. It ruined the appetite, disturbed the stomach, and left one with no appetite for the rest of the evening.
Not killing anyone tonight and still having no appetite—that was a different variety of misery altogether.
I really, really do not want to eat this.
But she could hardly sit there doing nothing while everyone else raised their cutlery. When the others began to eat, Hyderlin picked up her spoon and made a passable show of tasting things.
“I’m burning with curiosity—indulge me, please. How did the two of you meet? I simply must hear this.”
Chesa stared at Hyderlin. His smile was warm. His eyes were not—they were watching her, assessing every detail.
Hyderlin pulled the corners of her mouth upward.
“It’s quite an ordinary story. I’d be embarrassed to tell it.”
“Don’t be modest—it’s just us here. Margarite, don’t you want to know? How did the utterly impenetrable Sarg Gloriosa end up giving his heart away?”
“Don’t drag me into your curiosity.”
Margarite said it coolly. That thin voice of hers was, in that moment, unusually firm.
Chesa looked at his queen with an expression of polished, practiced regret. He was genuinely uncomfortable. The embarrassment and the discomposure were right there, carefully packed below the surface of his courtesy.
When a host found himself in an awkward moment, it fell to the guest to ease it. Hyderlin stepped into the role.
There was no time to compose the lie carefully. It came out before she was ready—and what followed was something closer to the truth.
“To be honest—I have admired Lord Sarg Gloriosa for a very long time.”
“I could only watch from a distance for years. He was so far above the world I moved in. It seemed presumptuous to imagine closing that distance.”
He had been clean in ways that nothing around him was. She had not wanted to touch that—had wanted, for a long time, only to look at it from where she stood.
“And then one day, I found I had the courage. So I walked up to him where he was sitting in a tavern and introduced myself. And somehow that one meeting has led to this.”
She finished with a modest smile. Sarg reached across and laid his hand over hers on the table.
“Meeting you that day was the greatest stroke of luck in my life,” he said quietly.
Under the table, Hyderlin put her full weight onto his foot. Sarg turned a scorching look at her, which she ignored as she said with becoming shyness:
“You’ll make me blush, honestly…”
The false couple was entirely, effortlessly convincing. Chesa smiled broadly.
“Now isn’t that a lovely story. Isn’t it, Margarite? We were that young once, too…”
Margarite said nothing. Chesa paid no heed and applied himself to keeping the mood pleasant, as was his duty as host.
The dinner proceeded far more peacefully than Hyderlin had anticipated.
Margarite, who had been picking at her soup, suddenly spoke.
“Lord Sarg Gloriosa. The baby is crying.”
Sarg looked at Margarite. Hyderlin looked at Margarite. Chesa looked at Margarite.
In a silence where the only sounds were cutlery and quiet conversation—nothing else, no other sound at all—Margarite alone said:
“She must be hungry. It may be a little early, but it’s nearly time to introduce soft foods. Soup like this should be alright.”
“Margarite,” Chesa said, with a tired undercurrent.
Sarg looked at her and said nothing. Hyderlin could only look in turn at all three of them.
“Go on then, child, and ask the kitchen to prepare something soft enough for the baby to eat.”
“Margarite.”
“The baby is crying. Lord Sarg. Hys. Please settle her.”
“The baby is asleep, Margarite.”
“What are you talking about? She’s been crying this whole—”
Margarite stopped mid-sentence. Her amber eyes shook with sudden violence.
Chesa moved without alarm, as if this were something he had seen many times before. He rose from his chair.
“Margarite. It would be better if you went and rested.”
“No.”
“Come along. You’ll feel better once you sleep.”
“No, no I won’t—!”
“Please wait a moment.”
“Chesa! You’re doing it again, you’re always trying to—!”
Margarite screamed in a voice that split the air. Chesa lifted her bodily and carried her out of the room with long, steady strides—not a single stagger, even as she fought him. The two of them disappeared beyond the door.
Hyderlin and Sarg sat in the faint aftermath of the shock, staring at the empty doorway. Sarg put his face in both hands and let out something between a groan and a whisper.
“Mac… how did it come to this…”
He looked exhausted to his bones. Hyderlin had no idea what to say. She reached toward his shoulder—and withdrew without touching him.
She folded her arms across her chest and fixed her gaze on the doorway where Chesa had gone.
“…I’m sorry you had to see that.”
Chesa returned several minutes later. A visible scratch ran down one of his cheeks. There was something faint and sad in his black eyes.
It was Sarg—who had been unable to look away from Margarite throughout—who spoke first.
“Does this happen often?”
“…Yes. It has grown much worse since Beronis was born. She believes I killed our children. She has come to believe it.”
Neither Hyderlin nor Sarg had expected those words from him.
They exchanged a startled glance. Hyderlin said:
“Forgive the intrusive question—but what do you mean by that?”
“It’s a story you would hear within a day of staying here anyway, so there is nothing to hide…”
Chesa’s bitter smile came and went. He poured wine into his cup and drank it in one go, then another. He was borrowing courage from the alcohol.
“As I said. She believes I murdered the first and the second. She has even convinced herself that I tried to kill the third.”
Chesa’s face clouded over as he refilled his cup.
“But the first was a miscarriage. Caused, they said, by the effects of the poisoning—and Margarite believes that the poison was given by me, not Countess Biche.”
“…”
“The second was premature. The baby did not live long after it was born. Margarite has been telling people I strangled it.”
Chesa drained the second cup and pressed the back of his hand against his mouth, as if wiping something away.
“And then—one day—she ran off with Beronis. We found her eventually and brought her back, but Beronis was gone. She told me the child had died. She kept the truth from me until the very end. She refused to say where the baby was. So I don’t even know where my own daughter is.”
By the time he reached the last sentence his voice was barely audible. Something wet had appeared at the corners of Chesa’s black eyes.
“Not knowing where she is—that my daughter is somewhere I can’t find her—it feels as though my chest is being torn open…”
It was a rare thing for a man to expose such weakness without any self-consciousness. Rarer still for a high-ranking noble. For a king, it was something close to extraordinary. And so the tears Chesa showed affected Hyderlin and Sarg in spite of themselves.
For Hyderlin, especially.
I never taught you to be like this.
Chesa wiped the corner of his eye.
“Forgive me. I should go back and stay with Margarite. Please—enjoy the rest of your meal.”
