The proposal had happened in the quiet hours between bloodshed and dawn.
Elaine had dropped to one knee in the corridor of the Alice Dome, dust still clinging to her armor from the hallway battle, hair shorn short and wild around her face. Carmine had laughed—actually laughed, the sound echoing off gothic arches—before pulling her up by the collar and kissing her hard enough to bruise.
"Grow it back," Carmine had said against her mouth. "All of it. Every inch. That's my condition."
Elaine had promised everything.
That had been hours ago. Worlds ago.
Now, Windmere smoked.
Colden saw the fire before he saw the town.
He had ridden hard from Velloria, leaving Francis to pack what little they'd gathered from Charles's manor, leaving behind the political scheming and the ghost of King Noir's name dragged through mud and manipulation. His horse's flanks were dark with sweat. His own throat tasted like copper.
And there, on the horizon—the Everhart Mansion, home, bleeding orange light into the twilight sky.
"No."
The word came out broken. Not a denial. A prayer.
He spurred the horse faster.
The courtyard was a battlefield.
Bodies lay scattered—not maid bodies, thank every god that ever existed, not their bodies—but the armored corpses of Western soldiers, of Clamptous's men, of mercenaries who had thought a town of innkeepers and seamstresses would be easy prey.
Gladis stood at the center of it all.
The good Gladis. The one who had trained beside Carmine, who had laughed too loudly at dinner and cried when she burned her first loaf of bread. She leaned on a sword that was not hers, its blade chipped and stained, and her breathing came in ragged pulls that sounded like drowning.
The maids around her were in similar states. Some sat on the cobblestones, heads in their hands. Others stood guard over the fallen enemy, automatic, mechanical, running on nothing but muscle memory and spite.
They had won.
But victory, Colden realized as he dismounted and his legs nearly buckled beneath him, looked an awful lot like grief.
"Your Majesty."
Gladis's voice cracked on the title. She tried to bow. Her knee gave out.
"Don't—" Colden caught her arm, steadied her. "Don't do that. Just—tell me. Tell me what happened."
She told him between breaths. The siege. The three days of holding the line. The message that Clamptous was dead—assassinated in his own camp, throat slit in the night—and the chaos that followed. The final push. The maids, armed with kitchen knives and farming scythes and the training Carmine had hammered into their muscles until movement became instinct.
"We killed them," Gladis said, and her eyes were glassy, unfocused. "We actually killed them, Your Majesty. All of them. I didn't know I could—I never—"
She didn't finish. She didn't have to.
Colden's chest ached. These were not soldiers. These were girls who had served soup and mopped floors and gossiped about handsome travelers. And now they carried death in their hands like it belonged there.
"Where is everyone?" he asked. "Carmine? My mother? Is she—"
Gladis's face changed.
Something shifted behind her eyes—a flicker of fear, of something worse than fear, and she turned toward the mansion's entrance and Colden followed her gaze and his heart stopped.
Arthur stood in the doorway.
He looked nothing like the prisoner who had languished in the basement, nothing like the shadow that had haunted Francis's warnings. He stood tall, clothing torn and stained, face twisted into something feral and bright. His hair—once neatly combed, once civilized—hung in sweaty ropes across his forehead.
And in front of him, held close enough that the blade kissed the soft skin beneath her jaw, was Queen Isabelle.
Colden's mother.
Her eyes were dry. Her chin lifted. She looked, for the first time in Colden's memory, small.
"Stay where you are."
Arthur's voice carried across the courtyard. Not loud. Not shouting. Quiet. The kind of quiet that preceded terrible things.
"Stay exactly where you are, little King, or I'll open her throat and paint these steps with royal blood."
Colden's body moved before his mind could catch up. One step forward. Two. His hands lifting, palms out—
A grip closed around his wrist.
Francis.
The butler appeared at his side like he had materialized from smoke and ash, his face drawn, his eyes fixed on Arthur with an expression Colden had never seen on him before. Not fear. Not anger. Something older. Something that had been buried for decades and was now digging itself free.
"Don't," Francis said. His voice was barely audible. "Colden. Don't move."
"He has my mother—"
"I know. I know." Francis's grip tightened. "But if you move, she dies. If I move, she dies. If anyone moves—"
"Then we're at an impasse, aren't we?" Arthur smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a man who had nothing left to lose and everything to take. "Though I suppose 'impasse' implies both sides have options. You have none. I have..."
He shifted the blade. Isabelle winced. A thin line of red appeared beneath the steel.
"Everything."
The courtyard held its breath.
Colden could hear his own heartbeat. He could hear the wind. He could hear Gladis's ragged breathing behind him, and the distant sound of someone weeping—one of the maids, maybe, or maybe the sound was coming from inside his own chest.
Arthur began to move.
Slowly. Deliberately. Dragging Isabelle with him, step by step, down the mansion's entrance steps and across the courtyard's bloodied stones. Toward the open gate. Toward freedom.
No one moved.
No one breathed.
Francis's hand on Colden's wrist shook—not from weakness, Colden realized, but from the effort of restraint. From the agony of standing still when every fiber of his being screamed to run, to fight, to tear Arthur apart with his bare hands.
They reached the gate.
Arthur stopped. Turned. Looked back at them—at Colden, at Francis, at the exhausted maids and the bodies and the burning sky—and his smile widened.
"Tell the King," he said, "that prison doesn't hold people like me. It makes us."
He shoved Isabelle forward.
She stumbled, fell to her knees on the cobblestones, and Arthur turned and ran—lurching, limping, moving faster than any injured man had a right to move—
Now.
Francis released Colden's wrist and sprinted.
The butler's aged legs carried him across the courtyard with surprising speed, past Isabelle, past the gate, onto the road beyond. Colden watched, heart hammering, watching Francis chase Arthur's retreating figure toward the tree line, watching the gap between them narrow, narrow, narrow—
And then Arthur reached the carriage.
It had been waiting there, Colden realized later. Waiting in the shadows. Horses trembling, driver poised, wheels already turning as Arthur threw himself inside.
Francis slowed.
Colden saw his shoulders drop. Saw his head bow. Saw him stand there in the middle of the road, carriage receding into the distance, and remain perfectly, utterly still.
The silence that followed was heavier than the battle.
Colden crossed to where Isabelle still knelt, her fine dress torn at the knee, her regal composure shattered into something human and shaking. Blood trickled down her neck, staining her collar, and her hands trembled where they pressed against the stones.
"Mother."
He crouched in front of her. Reached for her shoulder.
"Are you okay?"
Her eyes found his. They were wet now—wet and red-rimmed and full of something he couldn't name. She opened her mouth to speak, and then her gaze dropped past him, to the ground near his feet, and every color drained from her face.
"No—"
Colden frowned. Followed her gaze.
There, half-buried in the ash and blood, lay a wooden box.
Small. Plain. Unremarkable, except for the way Isabelle stared at it like it was a coiled snake, like it was a ghost from her past, like it was the end of everything.
"Don't—" Her voice came out strangled. "Don't touch that. It's—it's—"
"Okay."
Colden said it quietly. Firmly. He didn't look at the box again.
"Okay. I won't."
Isabelle's shoulders sagged. Something passed across her face—relief, maybe, or gratitude, or a grief too old and too large to give a name to. She pressed a hand to her bleeding neck, and when she spoke again, her voice was barely a whisper.
"Thank you."
He helped her to her feet. Supported her weight as they made their way back toward the mansion, toward the maids who were finally beginning to move again, toward Francis, who walked back from the road with his head high and his hands empty.
Around them, Windmere exhaled.
Smoke curled into the darkening sky. Bodies cooled on the stones. Somewhere, a door hung open on broken hinges, swinging in the wind.
And Colden—
Colden remembered.
Marco.
The word slammed into him like a physical force. He had left. He had left, again, always leaving, riding to Velloria while Marco was alone while Marco was hurting while everything fell apart and Marco thought—
"Where is he?"
The question burst out of him, directed at no one and everyone. The maids exchanged glances. Gladis shook her head.
"His room, Your Majesty. Last we saw—he didn't come out during the fighting. We tried to—"
Colden was already running.
The room was empty.
The bed was made. The window stood open, curtains billowing in the evening breeze, and the space where Marco should have been—where Marco always was, the constant point around which Colden's universe rotated—was vacant. Quiet. Wrong.
"Marco?"
No answer.
Colden checked the washroom. The closet. The small chair by the window where Marco sometimes sat reading, knees pulled to his chest, golden hair catching the afternoon light.
Nothing.
The window.
He crossed to it, looked down. The sill was low enough to climb through, the roof of the lower story close enough to reach. Easy escape. Easy exit. Exactly the kind of thing Marco would do when the walls started closing in, when the noise became too much, when he needed—
Lily's grave.
The thought arrived unbidden, certain, and Colden was moving before he could question it.
The inn was dark.
Not destroyed—thank god, not destroyed—but dark, windows shuttered, the warmth and life that usually spilled from its doors extinguished by siege and fear. Colden ran past it, past the familiar sign, past the counter where he had first seen Marco's smile, where he had left dandelions like love letters written in flowers.
The graveyard was small. Tucked behind the oldest building in town, surrounded by a fence that had once been white and was now gray with age and weather. Colden had only been here once—had only stood at Lily's grave once, head bowed, promising a woman he had never met that he would protect her son.
The promise felt thin tonight.
And then he saw him.
Marco stood with his back to the mansion, facing the modest stone that bore his mother's name.
The sun was setting—or perhaps rising, Colden couldn't tell anymore, time had blurred into an endless stretch of crisis and fear—and the light caught in Marco's hair like gold leaf, like honey, like every warm and beautiful thing Colden had ever known. The wind stirred his clothes. He looked small and vast at once, fragile and unbreakable, a boy who had survived nightmares and chosen to greet the dawn anyway.
He turned.
Their eyes met.
And Marco smiled.
"Welcome home."
Two words. Simple. Ordinary. The kind of words people said every day without thinking, without meaning, without feeling—
Colden's vision blurred.
He didn't remember deciding to move. One moment he was standing at the edge of the graveyard, and the next his arms were around Marco, his face pressed into the curve of Marco's neck, his whole body shaking with something that was relief and grief and love so intense it bordered on pain.
"I'm sorry." The words tumbled out broken, wet, desperate. "I'm so sorry. I left you behind. I always—I'm so sorry—"
Marco's arms came up around him. Steady. Warm. Home.
"It's okay."
A pause. Marco's breath against his hair.
"I'm sorry too. I overreacted. It was... it was nothing I should have done. Running away. Hiding. I know that now."
Colden pulled back—just enough to see Marco's face, to map the features he had memorized a thousand times over. The golden eyes. The gentle set of his mouth. The exhaustion underneath it all, carefully hidden but not hidden enough.
"You had every right," Colden said. "After everything—after what I put you through, after the coronation, after I left again—"
"You're here now."
Marco said it simply. Like it was obvious. Like it was all that mattered.
"You're here now. That's enough."
Colden exhaled.
Long. Deep. The kind of breath that came from somewhere below his ribs, releasing tension he hadn't known he was holding. The smoke-filled air filled his lungs, and behind him Windmere stood wounded but standing, and in his arms Marco was solid and real and alive, and somewhere Arthur was fleeing into the darkness but that was a problem for tomorrow, or the next day, or the next—
For now, there was this.
For now, there was them.
The sun flickered over golden hair and weathered stone, and somewhere in the distance the first birdsong of morning pierced through the silence, and Colden held Marco tight and let himself, just for a moment, believe that the worst was over.
(to be continued)