The Broken Crown

Chapter 45

Jeffroy

 With the war going on across the ocean, the winter had been a long one. The celebrations of the winter solstice had been darkened further by the absence of husbands – men, who would be in battle while their wives attempted to light up the longest night. Candles had been spread, not only within the castles, but on the ocean as well.

 Jeffroy had never been as grateful for the life Lucretia had given him as he was in that moment, as he watched the miniature boats that the women had spent weeks building float over the dark waves.

 Inside each of them a candle had been placed. They stood there for hours, watching the lights spread like stars on the night sky. The idea was to spread their lights to main lands, where they knew their men might be fighting for another minute to live. Maybe they had already lost that fight. Maybe they lay in their tents waiting. There was no way of knowing. And that was the worst.

Lady Anne Valior told him that one the night of the solstice. “You know,” she said as she straightened herself from sending out her candle, “the waiting is by far the worst.”

“Whom did you lose?” he asked, and she smiled sadly.

“Does it really matter, now?” She was right, of course. Whoever he was, he was gone. “I just remember… I just remember the excruciating pain when he wasn’t there, on the boats. But then, as I went to sleep, dreams came so easy to me. I did not dream of him. I could move on, instead of sitting up at night thinking about the endless possibilities…”

He had asked her if she was sure that she should just repress his memory and she had answered, plain and simply, that she did not care. She just needed to forget him and her pain, at least until the war was over.

“It would be unfair to cry now,” she had said. “Men are out there dying and I am here, in shelter. My pain will have to wait.”

Adrianne went into her confinement right after the solstice, and when they celebrated the new year, she went into labour. It lasted three days and three nights, and the celebrations were stretched over many days as a token of support and because no one had anything better to do. By the end of it, she was allegedly shouting that she would die before this child left her. She did not die, and two children left her on the third night of the new year.

The girl came first by some minutes and was named Evelyn. The younger boy was named Raynor, a name that Jeffroy found slightly odd.

“It means stubborn warrior,” she explained the small court one day when Jeffroy followed Lucretia there. “It is an old name, like his house.”

The Queen Dowager smiled. “It is a good name,” she said. As the mother of the new-born child’s father, her acceptance was the closest Adrianne would come to Raymond’s acceptance, so she smiled gratefully.

The children were both fair-haired, which contrasted to their brother’s colouring. The girl had large, blue eyes that resembled her mother’s and had the ladies of the small court under a spell. The boy already showed handsome features, and there was a streak of red in his hair. His brown eyes were warm like his brother’s.

Having one son meant you had an heir, but having two meant security. Everyone knew that a kingdom with only one possible heir was still fragile. Once a king had two sons, he had truly instated himself onto the throne of his realm.

Outside of the castle, there was only flat ground with dried grasses. It was a very small island, and you could walk from one end to the other in little more than an hour. In fact, it was possible to stand on one beach and see all the way to the beach on the other side of the island.