Act I, Chapter 2: What the Ghost Wore on the First Moonless Night

Three weeks is long enough to learn that grief does not diminish. It reorganizes.

Aldric had catalogued this reorganization with the same clinical precision he had once applied to diplomatic correspondence — observing it from a slight remove, as though grief were a neighboring estate whose property lines he needed to map. In the first days after the execution, it had arrived as a physical weight distributed across his sternum, a pressure that made breathing a minor act of will. By the second week it had relocated upward, settling behind his eyes like cold water held in a vessel slightly too small for its contents. By the third week it had done something worse: it had become architectural. It had become part of the structure of every thought, indistinguishable from the scaffolding that held all other considerations upright.

He slept badly when he slept at all. The court had noticed this, and the court had assigned it a flattering interpretation — grief rendered a young man sleepless, nothing sinister in that, poor Aldric, always so devoted to his father, one almost forgot he was the traitor's son until one saw those hollowed eyes. He had cultivated the hollowed eyes with the same careful intention he would later bring to other performances. What the court did not observe was that he spent his sleepless hours on Castle Morren's battlements, in the cold, working through calculations.