V.2:Ch.58 (Patreon)

The road home ran under iron wheels and tired horses.

We rode together in the same wagon. My father. My mother. My grandfather. Theo on the bench outside with the driver. Cendre and Isolde had been given another wagon behind us, close enough that I could hear its creak when the wind shifted.

For the first miles, no one spoke. The only sounds were the groan of the frame, the clank of harness, the steady drum of hooves. Light came in through the shutters in pale stripes. Dust hung in it and floated whenever the wheels hit a rut. Somewhere ahead, a driver coughed. Somewhere behind, a horse snorted and shook its head.

Fields slid past in narrow glimpses: stubbled earth greening at the edges, low stone walls, the occasional thin plume of smoke from a cottage that hadn’t burned yet. The city and its shouting stone felt very far away. The echo of the King’s voice didn’t.

My father broke first.

“What,” he said, voice tight, “was the meaning of that, Henry?”

I didn’t look away from the window at once. The strip of road in view seemed suddenly very interesting. “You’ll have to be more specific,” I said. “There was a great deal of ‘that.’”

“Do not play stupid with me.” His temper flared fast, the way it always did when fear was close enough to smell. “All of it. Every step planned as your true aim from the very beginning. The salt pans. The shipyard. The talk of ships. Remy’s death. You called Beaumont a traitor to my face and now you drag him into this scheme. Every step. You expect me to believe you simply wandered into that? That you did not plan it months ago? Years?”

My mother lifted a hand. “Frederick,” she said quietly. “Please. Perhaps we should all breathe. The boy has just been—”

“He is not ‘the boy’ any longer,” my grandfather said. His voice cut clean through hers. “And your father is right to be angry. This time you went too far, Henry. I told you about pirates as a warning, not as an invitation. Now you’ve not only put yourself in danger, but all of us. Your mother. Your brother. Your sister. This house.”

The wagon rocked over a rut. The jolt snapped through my knees. I steadied myself with one hand on the frame and took my time looking at each of them.

My mother’s eyes shone wet already, lashes clumped together. My father’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle ticked in his cheek. My grandfather’s gaze came like a weight, heavy and measuring, testing how much stone I was worth before he carved my name off it.

“When the fields were poisoned,” I said at last, “and I found a way to cleanse them, none of you spoke like this. You didn’t ask whether I’d planned too far ahead while the roots rotted under your boots. When ore was found and I learned how to use it better, no one accused me of scheming when the first clean bars came out of the forge. When the sickness came and the city began to choke, when my mother, Roderic, Elizabeth and a hundred others lay near death, did any of you complain when I pushed for a cure? When miners started coughing blood and I proposed the salt farms, when I made something new and sold it to keep food in the streets…” I shook my head. “I didn’t hear your outrage then. You were glad to let me fix it, as long as you didn’t have to look too closely at the parts that moved.”

Memory slid in on the edges of the words: blackened stalks breaking in my hands, a boy’s chest rattling in a fevered breath, the sting of brine in a new-cut pond. All the times they’d watched from a safe distance while I crawled through the gears.

My father’s face flushed dark. “You think you can speak to your elders like that?” he snapped.

“No.” Heat rose in me faster than I expected. This time I did raise my voice. “I think your age has nothing to do with whether you’re blind. When the land was poisoned, why did no one come to help us? Where was the King? Why did a plague appear in the city with no warning? Have you ever asked yourself that? Truly?”

“Of course I have,” he said. “Do you think—”

“If you had,” I said, “and if you’d been half as clever as you believe, you might’ve seen what I did. From the start I’ve been trying to protect this family. When I cleaned the soil. When I pushed the city forward. You were more worried about staying ‘honourable’ than about what that honour cost us.”

My father’s hand curled into a fist on his knee. The leather of his glove creaked. “Mind your tongue.”

“If you want the short answer,” I went on, “yes. This was my plan. I brought Raymond here. I put him over the works. Cendre was the one who killed them all. Remy. His wife. His son. They kept her under their heel and she saw a moment to push back. I could’ve stopped her. I didn’t. I watched. Now I’ve dragged Beaumont into this project because I mean to use him. I’ll drain his strength and the strength of anyone like him until there is no lord in the western block stronger than House Godfrey. When that day comes, our family will be beyond easy reach.”

The words sat between us like something that had crawled in from under the wheels and died on the floorboards.

My father stared at me like he’d never seen me before. “Do you hear yourself?” he said. “You toy with lives. With fathers, sons, wives. You speak of draining power like none of them are real. There is no honour in that. No decency. People will lose children, parents, husbands. For what?”

“For them?” I shrugged. “Nothing. For Elizabeth never having to see a plague cart and ask why it smells like the neighbours. For Roderic marching under Janisarion colours knowing the house behind his name can’t be erased with a seal. For you and my mother growing old without watching everything you built sold by weight. For that, I’ll play their game. I won’t bring a sword to a board already crowded with knives. If I have to put my pride aside to do it, I will.”

Silence cracked over us. Hoofbeats still pounded outside. The axle still complained. Inside the wagon, every breath sounded too loud.

My mother pressed her fingers to her eyes until the knuckles went white. My grandfather looked at me, torn between disgust and pity, weighing which would hurt less to feel.

Inside, another thought moved, quieter.

I hate Lugo, I thought. He hates me. Yet he looked the King in the eye and lied for me. That was not my hand. That was not my plan. I don’t understand why. And that makes me nervous.

I saw again the scar on his cheek, the way his gaze had gone flat and distant while he spoke for me. No warmth. No fondness. Just a decision made somewhere I couldn’t see.

My father’s voice dragged me back.

“You’re raving,” he said. “This is madness. I didn’t raise you to be like this. You were supposed to be better than this.”

“No,” I said. The word came out flat. “If the world looked the way you wish it did, you might be right. There’d be no sick children in the street. No men starving beside full granaries. No lords who let pirates buy safety while their neighbours drown. In that world, your rules would work. But that isn’t where we live. If you keep playing by the rules in your head instead of the ones in front of you, there’ll come a day when even the world you dream about is gone.”

My grandfather opened his mouth. Closed it again. Whatever lecture he’d been preparing withered before it reached his tongue.

My father stared at me like he expected the boards beneath us to open and swallow me whole. My mother turned her face away and sobbed softly into her sleeve, shoulders shaking with the effort of keeping the sound small.

After that, we rode in silence. We still spoke, of course, over the next ten days. We asked for salt, for water, for another blanket when the nights ran cold. My mother reminded my father to eat when he forgot. My grandfather asked Theo about the horses and cursed the state of the roads. At one inn, my father paid a courier to carry a short letter to Roderic. I watched him hesitate before he signed his name at the bottom.

But the warmth had gone. Every word carried a careful distance. It felt like we all lived in different wagons and had only leaned out of separate windows to shout when something couldn’t be ignored.

On the tenth morning, the walls of Godfrey’s Cross rose ahead of us, grey against a washed-out sky.

I stepped down from the wagon before anyone else. My boots hit the packed earth with a dull thud. The yard had the same smell as always: straw, sweat, a faint hint of soap drifting from the workshops. The same tower watched the road. The same banners hung from the stone, bright falcon colours that said nothing about poisoned fields or pirate sentences.

Servants moved to meet us, heads bowed, hands reaching for luggage, for reins, for instructions that didn’t come fast enough.

“Henry,” my mother called after me as I turned away. “My prince. My son. Where are you going?”

I looked back over my shoulder. Her eyes were red-rimmed. My father stood beside her, one hand on the wagon frame, holding it like he needed it to keep his balance. My grandfather sat without rising, cane across his knees.

“I have things to draw,” I said. “Things to plan. I won’t be out of my room for some time.”

I didn’t wait for their answer.

Inside, the corridors felt narrower than when I’d left, the stone seeming to have crept inward while we were gone. Servants bowed and scurried past with armfuls of cloth and ledgers. Somewhere far below, a door slammed. Somewhere above, someone laughed and cut the sound short when they saw me.

I reached my room, shut the door behind me, and let my back rest against the wood for a breath. Then I crossed to the desk and unrolled a blank sheet. Ink waited in the well. The quill lay where I’d left it, clean and sharp, looking like it had been waiting for this since the moment I first spoke about harbours.

I hadn’t yet dipped the tip when someone knocked.

“Come in,” I said.

The door opened and Isolde slipped through. She wore plain dark cloth, no jewellery, hair tied back. Her eyes were sharper than any blade on my wall, weighing everything in a glance and filing it away somewhere secret.

“If the King had given Tharlyn another minute,” she said, “everything might’ve come apart. As it is, we escaped with most of what we wanted. Now you have a pirate problem.” She leaned a shoulder against the door. “I have to ask: since you somehow managed to tug a Janisarion captain to your side, why did you start talking about harbours and corsairs at all?”

I felt my mouth pull into a smile. “Because I was trying to save my own skin,” I said. “And Lugo wasn’t part of the plan.”

That gave her pause. The lines around her eyes tightened, then eased.

“Interesting,” she said. “Very interesting. ThePlanner didn’t send me any note. The Order said nothing. No quiet whispers, no coded crumbs. If a Janisarion moves outside the usual lines, I expect to hear about it from somewhere. I didn’t. As far as I know, only the King can give them new orders. And from where I was standing, the King didn’t look fond of you.”

“He didn’t,” I said. “Which is why Lugo’s little story bothers me. Someone told him to help. Or he chose to do it on his own. I don’t like either of those possibilities.”

I turned the quill in my fingers and looked down at the empty page. Lines of coast lived in my head already, dots for harbours and crosses for where pirates liked to feed.

“Something else is moving,” I said. “I can smell it, even if I cannot name it yet.”

I smiled again, thin this time, more for myself than for her.

“And until I do,” I said, “I would rather be the one drawing maps than the one they forget to warn.”