Layla
The city beyond the castle was a wholly different world, of hardship and the grinding symphony of decay and of endurance and cold cutting winds.
Not white marble and golden domes like the nobles' world.
Stone buildings with mud thatched roofs, smoke curling like broken prayers from shattered chimneys, reaching for a sky that offers no mercy. The air smelled like despair.
Children played barefoot in the mud spattered streets, their laughter thin as ice. Mothers stirred pots of watery soup over hearths, their faces strained with hunger.
The people moved with the slow, heavy weariness of those who'd forgotten what it meant to hope, what it felt like to believe in a future.
Belstram strode through it all like a shadow given form, a dark figure against the ruined remnant of a city.
No crown adorned his head here.
No fanfare announced his presence.
Only heavy, absolute silence that seemed to follow him.
No one knelt as we passed. No one looks them in the eyes, either. Their gazes skittered away, fixed on the ground, on anything but the man who ruled them.
It felt wrong, fundamentally, on a level that rattled deep in her bones.
A king should be followed by cheers, by the clamor of welcome, by the love of his people.
Not silence that screamed of fear, of suffering, of something fundamentally broken.
They crossed the broken market square, overgrown with weeds. booths little more than crumbled stalls leaning against each other like tired old men. And there, just beyond the stalls, she saw them:
A woman, huddled against a crumbling wall, cradling her son. The boy was a bundle of bones and sweat, his small body drenched, it looked like a raging fever.
The woman flinched the moment she stopped, hugging the boy closer to her.
Layla didn't think, she just dropped her knees in the cold, unforgiving dirt. instinct and training taking over her actions.
He didn't stop her. She felt him walk away, eyes still protectively on her, didn't get in her way and didn't stop her.
The woman's eyes widened with fresh tears, spilling down her cheeks. Layla reached for the boy slowly, voice soft.
"It's alright," she whispered, looking straight into the woman's eyes.
"I'm here to help. Just let me see him." Her hand hovered over the boy waiting for her acquiescence. Finally she nodded.
His skin was fired under her hand, burning with the kind of heat that kills quickly even in a proper hospital. In a place like this…
Her eyes scanned the square—desperate now—catching on stubborn little clusters of weeds growing through the cracks in the forgotten stone. Heart skipping a beat when her eyes snagged on something familiar.
Yarrow.
There.
And there—elderwort.
Not perfect, not the modern medicine she was used to administering to her patients on earth. She didn't have the luxury of lowering his temperature. She needed to stabilise him first.
She moved fast then, driven by desperation to save the boy's life. She tore the plants from the dirt. The woman handed her a metal tin that was beside her.
Layla used a wooden stick to crush the herbs until the bitter, green scent filled the air. Drop them into a dented metal pot left over a brazier.
The mixture hissed and bubbled over the dying embers, that was not a normal response . Someone nearby gasped, a sharp sound of disbelief and fear.
But she kept going, focused only on the boy, on the task.
She ripped a strip off her cloak, the heavy black linen in the steaming brew, it had cooled down halfway. Pressed it gently to the boy's burning brow. And slipped some drops between his lips.
He whimpered once—then stilled beneath her touch, shallow breath easing. A quiet sigh as the fevers' relentless fire seemed to loosen its grip.
She tucked the damp cloth at his neck. "Change it often," she told the mother, her voice still soft, steady. "Let him drink when he wakes. Just a little. It will help."
The mother could only nod, tears silently tracing new paths through the dust on her cheeks, her eyes wide with dawning hope.
"I will check on him tomorrow," she said standing up.
And then, she turned around.
The square was silent. A hundred eyes,no less, were watching.
Not with suspicion, not with fear, not with the cruel hunger of the court.
Something else.
Something older than fear, deeper than despair.
Hope. Fragile, terrifying, undeniable hope reflected in the hollowed faces around her.
Belstram watched her from the edge of the square, his face unreadable in the dying light—a figure carved from shadow, but his eyes…
God.
That look.
Not anger. Not desire for her body.
Something else entirely. Like he was seeing something he hadn't believed in, not for a long, long time. Something lost. Something that had been dead.
Something found.
Something more dangerous than any weapon in his arsenal.
Something that looked like love.
Belstram
He had seen a hundred healers throughout his reign. Listened to their boasts, watched their rituals, paid their exorbitant fees.
None of them knelt in the cold dirt of a forgotten market square without flinching.
None of them tore a strip from their own cloak without a blink, hands steady and sure even as the wind bit hard at the ragged edges of this city.
None of them summoned power from withered weeds and boiled river water, like some half-forgotten queen from the old tales who had once bled starlight onto the earth and now dared to breathe life back into a corpse of a kingdom he thought was beyond saving.
But she did.
And god help him, he watched her. Watched his defiant Layla, his wild starling, kneel in the ruin of his city and offer the impossible gift of life.
And in that breathless, cursed moment, standing there in the shadow of his own failure, the scales shifted again. The balance tilted.
Not broken yet.
But close.
So god damned close to believing in her, to breaking himself upon the hope she offered, he could almost taste it on his tongue. Settling over his soul like a shroud.
"Come," he said, the word rough, low. Not an order this time. Not a command from king to queen: A whisper. A plea scraped raw with something ancient and vulnerable he refused to name, refused to give any name to.
And when she turned from the awestruck faces of the city, from the fragile dawning of their hope, and stepped toward him.
Something in his chest fractured—something jagged and fragile and ancient. The armor he wore cracked further open.
Because the wolves of his court would follow her, he knew then, with a gut-deep certainty that shook him to his animal core.
They would follow the woman who knelt in the dirt.
Not because she commanded them with threats and power, as he did.
But because she healed them with kindness and impossible light.
And the kingdom—his kingdom—rotting from the inside out, starving for a different kind of power, had been waiting for her without even knowing it. It had been starving for its Queen.