Chapter 20: Anger.
POV: Rudra Suryavanshi.
Rudra had not lost. He needed that distinction clear in his own head before anything else, before the rest of the evening’s noise settled into something he’d have to actually sit with. He had not lost. Vale hadn’t finished the exchange in his favor, technically, but she also hadn’t finished it in anyone’s favor—she’d simply stopped, satisfied with whatever she’d seen, and walked away before he’d had the chance to press the advantage he was certain, certain, had been building.
That did not feel like victory.
It also, infuriatingly, did not feel like the clean loss he could have processed and discarded by now.
His room, private, as befit his station, a concession Lucenhall had made without needing to be asked twice given exactly whose son he was—sat quiet around him.
The kind of quiet that in Meruvarsha would have been filled with attendants, tutors, the low constant hum of a palace that never fully slept. Here there was only the sound of his own breathing, and the memory of a boy who’d fallen sideways by accident and somehow turned it into the single cleanest evasion Rudra had seen from anyone in a long while.
He hadn’t fallen in a long time. Not once in his long eleven years of training, not against instructors twice his size, not against cousins who’d spent their whole childhoods trying to knock the heir apparent down a rung.
He remembered the exact age he’d stopped falling—seven, the year his father had stood over him in the training courts of the Suryavanshi estate and told him, without any particular cruelty, that a prince of the solar line did not need to be caught, because a prince of the solar line did not fall.
He had taken that sentence and built a decade of discipline on top of it, brick by brick, until falling simply wasn’t an available outcome for his body anymore. Not fear of falling. Just the plain, structural absence of it as a possibility, drilled so deep it had stopped feeling like effort at all.
And Elian Valcourt had fallen, on his first real day of training, and it had worked better than anything Rudra had thrown that entire session.
He sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing in particular, turning the shape of that unfairness over and over like a stone he couldn’t put down.
It wasn’t envy.
He was careful with that distinction, because envy implied wanting something someone else had, and he did not want to fall over by accident and be praised for it.
What he wanted—what actually sat in his chest like a coal he refused to acknowledge—was simpler and considerably more humiliating.
He wanted to have been the one Vale looked at like that.
In Meruvarsha, his worth had never once been in question, not openly, not where anyone could see it questioned.
Suryavanshi blood meant something specific and unambiguous there—a line of sun-descended rulers going back further than most nations bothered keeping records, every child of it raised from the first breath to be undeniable.
He had never had to wonder whether he belonged in a room. He had simply always belonged, by right of blood, by right of the sheer inherited weight of his name—and privately, in the part of himself he rarely let surface even in his own head, that had never once felt like enough.
Being handed belonging wasn’t the same as earning it, and some quiet, relentless part of him had spent eleven years terrified of the difference, certain that the moment he stopped proving it, someone would finally notice the crown had been doing the work his own hands hadn’t.
So he trained until his palms split. Memorized every recorded duel of every royal predecessor back four generations, not because anyone required it of him but because he required it of himself. Turned down rest more times than his tutors had approved of, because rest felt, to him, indistinguishable from admitting the discipline wasn’t actually necessary—and if it wasn’t necessary, then what exactly was he, underneath the name.
And then he’d come to Lucenhall, the one place meant to prove all of it on a stage large enough to matter beyond his own borders, and the person Vale had singled out, twice now, was a minor house’s spare son who’d apparently unlocked his entire power by tripping.
It wasn’t rational, the anger. He knew that much about himself, at least.
Elian hadn’t done anything to him directly—hadn’t postured, hadn’t claimed superiority, had in fact looked faintly embarrassed by his own success in a way Rudra found almost more infuriating than confidence would have been, because it meant Elian hadn’t even had to earn the humility Rudra had spent a decade failing to fake convincingly.
That wasn’t the wound, not really.
The wound was quieter than that, older than today, and considerably more personal: it was the specific, cold suspicion that everything he’d spent his whole life deliberately building—the discipline, the control, the refusal to ever let himself be caught unprepared—might simply be the wrong answer to a question Rudra hadn’t even known he was being asked.
He lay back against the pillows without bothering to change, staring up at a ceiling considerably plainer than the one back home, and made himself breathe through it the way his tutors had drilled into him a decade ago.
Control the breath. Control the mind. The body follows.
It didn’t help tonight, not entirely.
Some small, ugly part of him kept replaying the moment Elian’s staff had flared bright over an accident, kept replaying the half-second where Vale’s expression had shifted into something that looked, unmistakably, like genuine interest—the exact expression he’d spent eleven years trying to earn from people considerably less discerning than her, and never quite managing.
I will not lose to him again, he told himself, firm, final, the closest thing to a vow he allowed himself before sleep.
Whatever he is. Whatever that staff is doing for him. I will not let an accident be the reason he’s remembered and I’m not.
Sleep came slower than he would have liked, and when it finally did, it didn’t feel like rest so much as a temporary cessation of an argument he’d already, quietly, started losing to himself.