Her lips part as if to argue, but she sees the steel in your eyes and falls silent. Only a single tear escapes before she turns away.
You mount your horse, the guide falling in behind you. The city gates shrink in the distance, swallowed by the dust of your departure. Ahead, the road bends toward Moravice’s heart. The crow beats its wings within you, not in triumph, but in grim cadence.
By dusk, the land flattens into marshy lowlands. There, at a fork in the road, a lone rider waits beneath a shattered oak. His cloak is threadbare, but when he lowers his hood, recognition strikes you like a blade.
“Lord Radovan,” you whisper. He was once captain of your father’s guard.
He bows from the saddle, eyes heavy with sorrow. “Heir of Moravice,” he says, his voice low but steady. “I scarcely believed the rumors that you yet lived. But seeing you here…” His tone falters. “I bring ill news.”
Your throat tightens. “My parents?”
Radovan lowers his gaze, jaw clenched. “Your father, the Duke, stood to the last before the throne. He would not bend the knee. He fell there, cut down by Ignacjusz’s men. Your mother, the Duchess, refused to abandon him. She fought at his side, and… she fell beside him.”
The words rip through you like iron hooks. For a heartbeat you cannot breathe. Then the dam breaks. You double over in the saddle, sobs tearing out of you, raw and ungoverned. Tears burn your face as the world blurs, salt and grief flooding together.
Radovan does not look away. He grips your arm, firm, anchoring. “They died as sovereigns,” he says, voice fierce with loyalty. “And Moravice yet breathes, waiting for its heir.”
The crow’s wings flare within you, black fire filling your veins.
Radovan’s words echo in your skull like tolling bells. The tears will not stop; your body convulses with them, your chest tight, your breath ragged. You clutch the reins as if they might hold you to the earth itself, though the world feels as though it has already ended.
Your parents—your anchor, your duty, your pride—gone. Slain in the halls where you once chased echoes as a child. You see their faces: your father’s stern gaze, your mother’s steady smile, both now swallowed by the grave.
And then another face surfaces. Margaret.
Her tearful pleas in the marketplace, her trembling words: I don’t know where they are.
But she must have known. If Radovan has heard this tale, if loyalists whisper it along the borderlands, then a noblewoman bound to Ignacjusz’s court could not have been blind. She walked through those halls, past those banners of crimson and iron, with her retinue and her gilded carriage. She saw. She knew.
Your stomach twists, grief searing into anger. Why didn’t she tell you? Why cloak her silence in trembling hands and broken-voiced confessions? Was it mercy—or manipulation? Perhaps she thought to spare you pain. Perhaps she thought to bind you tighter with half-truths, to draw you away into her exile of velvet and lies.
The crow within you thrashes, wings scraping your ribs, feeding on your suspicion. Why trust her? it whispers, not in words but in the heat it breathes into your veins. She left you once. She hid the truth now. Her lips are soft, but her words are poison.
You taste iron where you have bitten your lip. Love, once a balm, curdles into doubt. In the ashes of Moravice, what word from Margaret’s mouth could you ever trust again?
You ride on towards Moravice.
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