Chapter 22: The Weight Of Being A Royal.
Ferran left without much need for convincing, Oizys could trust him enough to come up with a reasonable explanation that would last her until the next correspondence in the coming week.
She sat with the closed letter a while longer before finally breaking the seal, because putting it off wouldn’t change what was written inside, and she’d learned a long time ago that dread accomplished nothing her mother’s handwriting couldn’t accomplish faster.
It was, as expected, mostly court business—trade negotiations with the eastern provinces, a minor scandal involving a duke’s second son that would blow over before the ink dried.
The usual accounting of a kingdom that ran, as it always had, with or without her direct attention. Her mother had built Selenoire into something that didn’t require its heir to be present for every decision, which Oizys understood, intellectually, as a mercy.
It rarely felt like one.
She was the crown princess of a kingdom that measured its worth in discipline and restraint—Selenoire’s whole cultural mythology built around the idea that true strength revealed itself quietly, the way the moon didn’t compete with the sun so much as simply persist after it left.
It made for elegant poetry.
It made for a considerably harder standard to actually live inside, day after day, when every visible crack in your composure got read as a crack in the kingdom’s foundation by extension.
She had been three years old the first time a court tutor corrected her posture.
Five, the first time she’d been told that a future queen did not cry where the staff could see her.
By ten she’d stopped needing the corrections at all, the discipline settling so deep into her that it no longer registered as discipline, just as her, the only version of herself she had real memory of being.
Somewhere in there, the distinction between composed and herself had simply stopped existing, and she wasn’t entirely sure, some nights, whether that had been a loss or not.
Because you couldn’t properly mourn a version of yourself you couldn’t remember well enough to miss.
Her mother’s letter mentioned the succession match again, buried three paragraphs deep beneath the trade negotiations, worded with the specific delicacy Queen Isolde Selenoire reserved for things she considered non-negotiable dressed as suggestions.
House Valcourt remains a sound alliance, whatever recent developments have complicated its details. I trust you to manage it accordingly.
Oizys set the letter down and looked, for a long moment, at nothing in particular.
The match had never been about Roderic specifically—she was honest enough with herself to admit that much. She didn’t really care about the man enough to make it about, genius or not.
It had been about the house, the bloodline, the old useful fiction that a marriage between Selenoire’s crown and a respected battle-mage line would read as strength to the border provinces still nervous about the kingdom’s reputation.
Roderic had simply been the name attached to the arrangement because Roderic had always been the Valcourt heir, golden and uncomplicated and exactly legible enough to make good copy for court announcements.
Nobody had accounted for the staff nobody could wield. Nobody had accounted for the spare son cracking two hundred years of dormancy in front of an academy scout, turning House Valcourt from a quiet, useful alliance into something considerably more visible, considerably more interesting, in ways that made her mother’s careful political arithmetic wobble for the first time in years.
It was... interesting to say the least, the whole of it.
Elian Valcourt is not what the reports suggested, she’d written, hours ago, and she still hadn’t decided what to do with that sentence.
She was not naive about what her mother’s letter actually meant, underneath the careful phrasing.
Manage the optics accordingly was, in the dialect of court correspondence Oizys had been fluent in since childhood, an instruction to keep her options open.
To watch both Valcourt sons closely enough that Selenoire could pivot the arrangement toward whichever one proved more strategically valuable, without ever having to admit out loud that the pivot was happening.
It was, by any reasonable measure, exactly the kind of cold, practical calculation she’d been raised to make herself, without flinching, the same way she’d learned not to cry where the staff could see.
Which she found, sitting alone in a room considerably plainer than her chambers back home, a decision that she didn’t especially want to make tonight.
Oizys folded the letter closed, set it aside unanswered for now, and allowed herself—carefully, deliberately, the way she allowed herself very little else—a few minutes of simply not managing anything at all before she finally put out the lamp and let the day end.