Free Web NovelChapter 344: Chapter 344
"Have you spoken to Elka recently? Visited her to see how she is faring, perhaps?" Nheera asked her son over breakfast.
It was just the two of them at the long dining table, with Hairan seated a few chairs away from his mother rather than beside her. Two guards stood watch by the entrance of the dining hall, unmoving and silent, and without them, the vast chamber almost felt empty.
Their cutlery clinked against their plates, the sound loud as though trying to cover up the obvious lack of communication.
Usually, whenever their mother deemed it necessary to spend time with any one of them, she always found a way to rope the other two into the occasion as well. With all of them present, her scrutiny felt diluted, shared equally among the three of them and not just directed at one person. This time, however, Azul and Jayran were absent, sent from the palace to attend to official matters, which left Hairan alone to face her.
He had half a mind to spin on his heels and leave the moment he realized it would be just the two of them. Especially when he still hadn’t forgiven Nheera for forcing him into a marriage alliance with a woman he could barely tolerate. He disliked his brothers’ company on most days, but their presence served one crucial purpose: it drew some of the queen’s attention away from him. freeweɓnovel.cѳm
Now, with every sign of a lecture looming on the horizon, Hairan found himself almost grateful that his younger brothers were not there to witness it, to watch him squirm under their mother’s gaze and quietly bask in his discomfort.
"Why should I?" he replied curtly. "I can barely stomach a conversation with her, much less the sight of her. And besides, I see no reason to visit her when we all know she is perfectly fine and healed." He spoke without lifting his eyes from his plate. "But you can always go yourself, since you’re so concerned."
Nheera slowly lowered her fork back onto her plate. The faint scrape of metal against porcelain sounded far louder than it should have. A stern look overtook her features, but Hairan pointedly ignored it, focusing instead on cutting his food into pieces he had no intention of eating now that his appetite had all but vanished.
"If making a compromise to marry Elka, a woman you seemingly dislike, feels like such an impossible feat to you," Nheera said bluntly, "then perhaps you truly aren’t ready for the throne."
The words struck their mark.
Hairan’s head snapped up, and for the first time in ten minutes, he locked eyes with her. His scowl was immediate, bitterness and frustration swirling together into a toxic concoction that seemed to burn through his chest.
"So just because I won’t marry the woman you handpicked for me, I’m suddenly no longer fit to be king?" he demanded.
Nheera regarded him with the same unwavering sternness, as though he were still a child throwing a petulant tantrum rather than a grown man challenging her authority.
"Kings make sacrifices," she said evenly. "They do so to gain leverage, to win the loyalty of their subjects, who will, in turn, lay everything they have at their king’s feet. They understand that sometimes they must do things they loathe in order to reach the position they desire. They understand that without such sacrifices, a king is nothing." Her gaze hardened. "And you are wrong, Hairan. You will marry her. The preparations are already underway. Do I need to remind you that your wedding is set for two weeks from now?"
Hairan could only grit his teeth, his jaw tightening until it ached.
"Forgetting it would be a luxury," he muttered. "How could I, when you make a point of bringing it up every five minutes?"
He wasn’t entirely sure why the situation upset him as much as it did. Nheera had controlled his life in every way she saw fit since the day he was born. She had structured his entire existence to fit the image she envisioned for him, molding him carefully into a version of what she wanted.
He was whoever and whatever she wanted him to be, and she had always made it happen through a series of skillful manipulations. He lived and breathed at her discretion, and it never seemed to end. It wasn’t shocking that she would want a say in whom he married as well, not when she had exerted absolute control over everything else for so many years.
Hairan gripped his cutlery so tightly he worried he might bend the silverware. His fingers ached with the effort. In that moment, he craved the comforting burn of strong liquor sliding down his throat. Interactions with his mother always left him yearning for the mind-numbing haze that only heavy intoxication could provide. He had no doubt that this was where his day was headed, drunk and passed out in some forgotten corner of the palace.
And tomorrow, it would begin again. And the day after that as well. An endless, suffocating cycle with no end in sight.
"You speak so much about sacrifices," Hairan said at last, his voice low and sharp, "yet from what I know, you have never made a single one. Unless you count issuing orders from the high throne as a sacrifice."
Growing up, he would never have dreamed of speaking to her in such a distasteful manner. Back then, the very thought would have had him shaking with nerves. That had been during a time when he idolized both his parents, when he placed them on impossibly high pedestals and cared enough to pretend to perform the role his mother wanted from a son.
Now he was old enough to see all the things about her that had been invisible to him as a child. Old enough to recognize the cost of her ambition.
Now, he found that he couldn’t bring himself to care what she thought of him anymore and he found that it was undeniably freeing.
Her expression hadn’t changed.
"Do you think I simply woke up one day and became queen of this kingdom?" she asked calmly, her voice even, almost conversational. "Do you believe that I—a daughter of a minor lord—could achieve something like this without careful calculation? My father was a drunk, a wastrel, and a cruel man to both me and my sister. Do you think that if I had left the choice of my husband to someone like him, I would be sitting here now? Do you imagine I married your father because I found him irresistible or charming?"Her lips curved, though there was no warmth in it. "Quite the opposite, actually. I despised him, but I also wanted to become queen. I have wanted it since I was still a girl, and so I made it happen. Enduring Zeriel was simply another price I had to pay for my ambitions."
When she was very young, Nheera had made a vow to herself in the dead hours of the night. It had been after her father had delivered his latest punishments, his rage a frightening thing while he was drunk. She had fled to her chambers, tears leaking freely down her cheeks as she burrowed beneath her blankets, desperate to shut out the world. There, with her face pressed into her pillow and her body trembling, she had sworn that if she ever had children of her own, not one of them would live through a single day of the hell that had been her life.
Even now, the memory remained painfully vivid. That night had marked the moment everything shifted, when suffering transformed into resolve, and a clear path toward her future finally revealed itself.
Hairan’s lips curled into a sharp, humorless smile.
"And how did that work out for you in the end?" he asked. The question dripped with sarcasm.
The queen recognized the provocation immediately, yet she did not rise to it. Instead, she smiled and gestured languidly around the opulent dining hall, to the gilded pillars that rose toward the vaulted ceiling.
"I am a queen, am I not?" she said smoothly. "And you are a prince—one who has never lacked a single thing since birth. Hundreds of servants at your beck and call, comfort and privilege granted to you at every hour of the day." Her gaze settled on him, steady and unflinching. "I would say it all turned out very well for me."
At that moment, the doors to the hall were pushed open. Her lady-in-waiting, Seraphine, stepped inside and crossed the room quickly. She stopped beside the queen, noting that nearly half the food on her plate remained untouched.
Seraphine inclined her head in a respectful bow toward Hairan before leaning closer to the queen, her voice lowered to a discreet whisper.
"Your Majesty," she murmured, "Lord Aeron Tavish is here and he wishes to have a word with you."
