The hall is quiet after council. Too quiet.

The torches have burned low, and the marble beneath my boots holds the echo of voices that no longer remain. My father’s words still seem to cling to the air—sharp, decisive, final. They fill the space even in absence, the way winter air lingers after snow.

At the far end of the corridor she stands—alone, a still figure haloed by the dim light of the lanterns. Her gown gathers like liquid silver around her feet; her hands are folded loosely at her waist, not in grace, but in uncertainty. It is the way she looks at the great doors before her—as though they might open into somewhere kinder—that arrests me.

She has worn the crown of Greenwood for months now, and yet her eyes hold the same quiet bewilderment as they did on the day of her arrival. It is not fear, nor vanity, nor pride. It is loneliness.

There are courtiers enough who bow when she passes, who call her my lady with practiced warmth. But none of them see what I do in that moment: the way she turns slightly, as if to speak to someone who is not there; the way her shoulders tighten before she remembers that no one will answer.

My father is a man of stone and ceremony. He calls her queen but never beloved. He gives her halls, not home. And she—she endures it as though endurance were her birthright.

I should not linger. Yet something in her stillness draws me nearer, like a moth mistaking sorrow for flame. When she finally senses me there, she lifts her chin, and for a heartbeat her composure wavers.

The sadness in her eyes is the kind that knows itself too well—quiet, practiced, impossible to comfort. If I were wise, I would bow and move on.

Instead, I stand beneath the wavering light of the lanterns, and I look at her the way one looks at the last leaf before winter takes it.