Chapter 147: What Winter Brings

The weather was particularly nice today.

Ilaria stepped into the palace gardens with a newfound grace, her presence composed for the day and the last traces of the morning’s intimacy tucked neatly beneath layers of silk. Her gown, a soft winter blue, caught the pale, pearlescent light of the overcast sky, while silver embroidery curled like frost along her sleeves and whispering of the season.

The cold had settled properly now.

Snow drifted down in unhurried spirals, gathering along the stone paths and settling in gentle hushes over the garden beds. The last of autumn’s vibrant blooms had long since surrendered, buried beneath a pristine layer of white. What remained were the sturdy winter shrubs and the skeletal arches of trellises, standing like patient sentinels.

Behind her, Melyn followed with careful precision, her arms occupied with a stack of parchments and a velvet folder sealed with the royal crest. Every so often, she adjusted her hold against the drifting flakes, her sharp eyes trailing the Princess.

“The council convened early this morning,” Melyn remarked, her voice cutting through the muffled silence. “His Highness had already been called for before the second bell.”

Ilaria nodded faintly, a small, private smile ghosting her lips. They had taken breakfast together before that, a meal filled with lingering glances and the heavy awareness of his touch still warming her skin.

“He mentioned it,” she replied softly. Her gloved fingers adjusted a crease in her sleeve that dod not truly exist, her movements fluid and light, as if she were walking on air rather than stone.

“…Does it always snow this quietly?” She asked, tilting her face toward the drifting sky. Snow caught briefly in her lashes, sparkling like diamonds before melting away.

Melyn glanced up, as if only just noticing the snowfall beyond its inconvenience. “In the palace? Often, yes. It tends to come gently before it decides to be troublesome.”

“It feels polite,” Ilaria mused, extending a hand to catch a few flakes. “As though it knows it is interrupting.”

Melyn blinked, her lips pressing together. “I’m not certain the snow has ever been accused of manners before.”

That earned a soft, unguarded laugh from Ilaria, a sound so bright and melodic it seemed to ripple through the stillness of the winter air. “Well, it should be. If it arrived in a storm without warning, I would consider it terribly rude.”

Melyn watched her, a flicker of suspicion crossing her face. There was an ethereal quality to Ilaria that she could not quite pin down. There was a softness in her eyes, a certain glow that the winter chill could not account for. It was as if a light had been switched on behind her ribs.

Suddenly, Ilaria let out a tiny, delighted gasp. Without a thought for her silk skirts or her royal dignity, she crouched down by a low boxwood hedge, her fingers hovering over the fresh powder.

“Look, Melyn! It’s perfectly tucked in,” she chirped, her voice bubbling with a girlish, infectious energy. She began to gently pat the snow atop the bush, fussing over it as if the plant were a sleeping child. “It looks like a little white hat. We mustn’t disturb it.”

Melyn stood frozen, the heavy ledger nearly slipping from her grip. She stared down at the Princess, who was currently giggling at a shrub. There was a literal radiance about her. The Princess was usually witty, yes, and occasionally mischievous, but this… this was a woman who looked as though she had just discovered the secret to the sun.

“Your Highness,” Melyn began slowly, her eyes narrowing as she took in the flush on Ilaria’s cheeks. “You seem… exceptionally fond of the weather today. Did something particularly pleasant happen at breakfast? Or perhaps… before it?”

Ilaria stilled for a heartbeat, her hand still resting on the snowy “hat” of the bush. She did not look up, but the pink in her cheeks deepened to a brilliant rose.

“The coffee was simply very good this morning, Melyn,” she murmured, her voice trailing off into another small, tell-tale hum of happiness.

Melyn adjusted the parchments, a knowing, slightly stunned expression finally settling on her face. Coffee, indeed.

The handmaiden’s mind flickered back to the brief glimpse she had had of the Prince earlier that morning. He had passed through the secondary hall toward the Council chamber, his stride as lethal and certain as ever, yet there had been something different in the set of his shoulders.

His usual stony mask had not been quite so impenetrable. In fact, there had been a terrifyingly handsome softness to his mouth that had caused the younger maids to trip over their own hems.

Melyn looked at the Princess, who was currently whispering to a snow-covered boxwood, and then thought of the Prince’s uncharacteristic, golden-eyed calm.

Something is definitely in the water, Melyn thought, a dry, incredulous smile tugging at her lips. But she decided, for the sake of her own sanity and the Princess’s fragile composure, to let the coffee excuse stand for now. One did not simply interrogate a woman who was radiating enough joy to melt the palace’s outer walls.

“If the coffee is truly that miraculous, I shall have to find the merchant and buy out his entire stock,” Melyn remarked, her tone perfectly neutral despite the twinkle in her eye.

She gestured toward the winding path ahead. “But for now, perhaps we should move toward the gazebo? You mentioned earlier that you wanted to finally reply to your sister’s letters before the afternoon session begins.”

Ilaria straightened, smoothing her skirts with a distracted, airy grace. “Yes. Letters! Right. My sister would never forgive me if I left her waiting another week. She already thinks the weather has turned me into a block of ice.”

Melyn led the way toward the stone structure, the heavy velvet folder clutched to her chest. As they approached the gazebo, a sanctuary now draped in a lace of white frost, the silence of the gardens felt less like a void and more like a secret they were both in on.

Ilaria settled onto the stone bench, her movements light and almost buoyant. As Melyn arranged the thick wool throw around her, the Princess took the pen and parchment with a dazed, lovely sort of focus, her mind already racing. She was overflowing with an uncharacteristic enthusiasm to pour out the chaotic, glittering details of the past few days.

She wanted to tell Serenya about the banquet, the way the light had caught the silver in the Great Hall, and the subtle, earth-shattering ways her life in the Noctharis had shifted from a repetitive mundane task into something beautiful. Something that made her heart feel far too large for her ribs.

With a soft, expectant hum, she reached for the letter she had received from her sister, the only piece of home she truly had left.

Ilaria began to read, a smile tugging at her lips as she moved through the lines. She could almost hear Serenya’s voice in the elegant, loopy script, imagining her sister’s animated expressions as she narrated the mundane dramas of the southern court. It was a familiar comfort, a bridge across the miles of snow and stone that separated them.

But then, her eyes snagged on a paragraph near the end.

“I have been a little unwell of late, dearest Aria. There was a lingering heaviness in my chest that the High Priest call a winter chill, but please, do not fret. I am still quite okay, and the healers have given me a tonic that tastes of nothing but boiled grass…”

The smile on Ilaria’s face faded immediately. Though the words were light and dismissive, a coldness that had nothing to do with the falling snow began to seep into Ilaria’s bones.

Unwell.

Serenya was never unwell. She was the steady one, the stronger one, the one who remained standing when the world shook.

A sharp fragment of a memory suddenly surfaced with the force of a physical blow.

The Blithe.

The name of the sickness felt like a curse in her mind. The dream suddenly came back to her all at once. Ilaria’s hand trembled, the parchment crinkling beneath her gloved thumb. The glitter that had seemed to surround her only moments ago was snuffed out by an unwelcome, suffocating dread.

She looked out at the pristine white of the gardens, but she no longer saw the polite snow. She saw a shroud.

“Your Highness?” Melyn’s voice was cautious, her sharp eyes catching the sudden rigidity in Ilaria’s posture. “Is the news from your sister not what you expected?”

Ilaria did not look up. Her gaze was anchored to that one word — unwell.

“She… She says she is fine,” Ilaria whispered, her voice sounding thin and fragile in the cold air. “But Serenya would say the sun was shining even if the sky were falling, just to keep me from worrying.”

​A desperate, frantic need to reach out seized her. A hunger to see her sister’s face, to touch her hand, and to ensure the shadow of the Blithe was not truly reaching for the very last of her kin. The memory of the plague’s first quiet signs felt like a cold ghost pressing its palm against her heart, dragging her back to a darkened room in Caelwyn.

She could still hear her father’s rasping assurance that it was “just a summer fever,” and see the way her mother had smiled through the exhaustion, promising they would be well by the next moon. They had said they were sick, too, just a little unwell, just a lingering chill… until the sickness unmade them, leaving Ilaria and Serenya standing alone in a silent palace.

​To Serenya, “unwell” was a word used to shield. To Ilaria, it was the sound of the soil hitting a coffin. Now the ink on her pen, once destined for a letter of joy, felt like a dark, heavy weight.

She did not look at the gardens. She did not look at the snow. She turned her head slowly toward her handmaiden, the vibrant, glowing woman of the morning replaced by a girl who looked as though the winter had finally, truly moved inside her.

Two hot, heavy tears spilled over her lashes, tracing a path through the faint rose of her cheeks.

“Melyn…” her voice was a broken, fragile thread that barely carried over the wind. “Serenya is sick…”

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