ZEPHYR RAVENSWOOD

Zephyr found him waiting at his door, Ser Calix Westerling in the aged glory of the Kingsknights, one, by its very nature, befitting of a lord commander such as himself. But that glory seemed tainted as his lips bore some ill news for the king.

“Your Grace,” the lord commander had greeted first with a casual bow of his head. “I’m afraid I have come bearing ill news from the feast. All went sideways as soon as you’d left.” The words hit Zephyr harder with the grim look the man had upon his square face, which was trimmed along its edges with a clean shaven beard that was as grey as grey could be.

Zephyr felt his chest come together in a perfervid embrace, leaving his heart squeaking between them and his breath without leave from his nose. “What happened?” He managed to mutter at last after a deep exhale that helped calm him a sort. “What is it?”

“Lady Eira gave her daughter’s hand to Prince Damon.” And with Ser Calix’s words, Zephyr felt the calmness he had tried to gain, with nothing short of hard work, vanish quicker than he had gotten it, his weariness arriving just in time to take its place, to seat the abandoned throne. His chest tightening before at the feast he might as well call a teaser, this tightening he had now was the real thing, authentic and true, and not a jape. He felt a noose tense about his neck, none he could see, but he sure as hell felt it. It was tight and it almost seemed to choke whatever air he had left within him out of his lungs. His stomach turned and gurgled, and a bitter taste filled his mouth at once. Bile, he noticed. He was about to vomit. If Damon succeeded in joining hands with the Blackwoods he might die. No. He would die. That one seemed to bear the most enmity towards him. He’s going to stir up war for the throne or something of the sort.

What could he do if war broke out? Zephyr had all sorts of thoughts storming his head, raging and crashing on his walls like the vast blue beneath the windows of his chambers did to the castle walls. There was no way he could let that be. No. He retched. And the Kingsknight duo of father and son gasped in unison, reaching for him as he leaned over clutching his stomach to prevent the chunder that had gathered up in there from escaping. He succeeded.

“And the feast?” Zephyr managed to put in after a battle well fought with his belly and well won, the only one he had managed to win since he’d fallen into this world.

“Are you alright, Your Grace?” Ser Calix had more concern for the king than what had happened at the feast. If his leaning closer to the king in worry was to please him, he failed.

“And the feast?” Zephyr repeated, strongly.

Ser Calix heaved a sigh then followed it up with a soft and gentle clear of his throat as he straightened up. “It has been brought to an end. I had come with the young lord of Claymore, but as you were not in your chambers he hurried away shortly after, bidding me to relay the events to you.”

“And my mother and brother? And Dante?” Zephyr pulled himself up from his bend. “And Audrey?”

“Gone to their chambers most likely. They were advised to do so by Lord Flynn, but we vacated the hall before we could see the queen mother do the same,” Ser Calix answered, but Zephyr was not yet done.

“And the rest?”

“The lords and ladies of the high court have all allowed themselves leave of the castle. Prince Damon wandered off as well, I suspect to his chambers,” that name left a taste bitter than bile on Zephyr’s lips, “the lady Eira of Blackwood and her daughter I saw go to their quarters while Lord Flynn tried to make change of the matter, but it had been all to no avail.”

Zephyr bit his lower lip. He had to do something. There was no way he could win or survive if his tug with this Damon came to what he was thinking. War. What did he know about war? He could not let it come to that. There had to be a way, surely. The military might and the golds of the Blackwoods should not be allowed to fall gracefully into the laps of Damon. His nose did nothing to betray him like it had not done as well on the day he had died in that fire. He smelled trouble, a stench thick and dark.

“You have your leave to your chambers, Ser,” he told the lord commander and whirled about sharply on his feets to face the way he had just come from a few moments ago. “Let’s go, Ser Aaron. To the lady of Blackwood’s chambers.”

It took nothing of a long walk before he arrived at the quarters that had been allocated to the Blackwoods. Before Lady Eira’s chambers stood a guard tall and lanky, with his head covered in a helm well above the top frame of the door bleakly buried in shadows. To any man that would stand before him, he would look no less than a Hyperion. A grey cloaked Hyperion in the body of a man, and they were standing before him now. Zephyr had never felt so little before, but he had a short wonder if the guard’s height would prove a blessing or a curse in a sword fight. Against one of his Kingsknights, and as it burned him to think, even the Lockeheart man, he would place a bet on the latter.

“M’Grace is here to see your lady,” Ser Aaron spoke on the behalf of his king, and Zephyr felt the Hyperion guard peer at them from high above, his eyes unseen.

He took a while before he spoke. “She sleeps,” the guard said, his voice drawn out like his height, and rough and hardened.

“She wakes,” Ser Aaron said. “When the king visits anyone that sleeps, they wake.”

The long guard drew out his silence the same way he drew out his words, but Zephyr had no doubt the man would speak again sooner than later, and so he did. “She sleeps,” he repeated the same words once more, this time a bit more cranky, as his hand went to the hilt of the sword fastened about his waist. He seemed to lack a vast source of vocabulary as he lacked sense. Did the fool intend to fight here? Steer trouble against the king? Zephyr was taken aback by such foolhardiness.

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Ser Aaron put his hand to the stag-headed hilt of his longsword as well, preparing to draw the steel in the black of night if the long man dared to draw his. “She wakes,” he insisted, boldly and hardly.

“Duckett,” a voice called from within the chambers. Lady Eira’s voice. “Cease your foolishness and let the king in. We are in his castle.”

And if we were in yours…? Zephyr thought.

“You in,” the guard said as he pulled the door open, leaning uncomfortably due to his sky-high height. Zephyr did not want to know how that felt, to bend over with such height, but it seemed this Duckett of a man truly had very few words to speak.

“Wait out here,” Zephyr told Ser Aaron, “but do not draw steel against the guard,” he warned as well. “Unless I say so.” Even he did not understand what he meant by what he said. Was he expecting something to happen? He sure hoped not, now that he had spoken those words. A fight between the two houses would only fasten the war he was hoping to prevent, and his death would most likely seem a closer possibility. He shook his head at that and strode into the temporary chambers of Lady Eira of House Blackwood.

“She sleeps,” the long guard had said, but the person he saw now inside this candle-lit chamber had been doing anything but sleeping. Lady Eira was seated before her hearth dressed in her bedrobe, and she was not alone. Seated before her was her daughter, Lady Valora, both seeming to have been in a discussion before his arrival.

“Your Grace,” Grey-robed, freckle-faced, with tousled strawberry-blonde hair, Valora Blackwood greeted.

“Have a seat, Your Grace.” The Lady Eira offered with a gesture at her window cushion, but Zephyr was not here to sit. He had little comfort left in him for that.

“I do not plan to stay long,” he mentioned to her, his voice completely devoid of the hoot he always brought with him whenever he had her presence.

“A shame,” Lady Eira sighed. “What have you come for then, Your Grace?”

Zephyr peered at her as if he was searching for what she kept deep within those plump layers of skin she had all over. “What happened at the feast?” He asked, his tone as placid as he could make it.

The lady of Blackwood warmed her hand over the hearth. “Why ask when you know already?”

Zephyr clenched his chin. “We had come to an agreement, you should not have broken it.” Was he upset or was he scared? Even he couldn’t tell apart what it was that filled him now, and he might never be able to.

“Quite the irony.” Lady Eira blew air into her palms, rubbed them, and put them above the fire again. “You seem to forget you and your father broke a century long agreement between our houses first.” She chuckled ecstatically, but not without spleen.

Zephyr was lost. “I seem to recall we had that amended,” he cleared his throat softly, “on the morn?”

“You had that amended in your favour,” she turned to him with eyes aglow with fire just like the hearth, or maybe they’d become their own hearth, “not mine.”

“And is this in your favour?” Zephyr grimaced sourly. “I promised to betroth your daughter to the man I plan to make the crowned prince. If that is not good enough for you, then what is?”

“I will be the one to choose what is good for me and my household.” Her eyes were strong but small, and they gazed at him relentlessly. “You sadden me, Your Grace, would you not have done the same?”

The tension kept rising and Zephyr was growing tired, but he had to try. He could not lose this Blackwood house to Damon. No, he couldn’t. He tried to speak but before he could make words, Valora spoke up.

“I chose to be betrothed to Damon, Your Grace. It was my choice.” Her choice…? Zephyr thought as he flung his gaze towards Lady Valora. What had Damon done to her mind that she had chosen him on her own. What had he done to both her and her mother? He inhaled deeply.

“And I listen to my daughter,” Lady Eira put in. “What my daughter wants she will get. And I don’t see why it bothers you so much. Damon is as much a Ravenswood as Dante, any of them with my daughter still binds our houses together in good faith, isn’t that what you willed to happen?”

No… Zephyr wanted to voice out. It binds your house and them… “What did he say to you?” Zephyr gently stretched tightness away from his legs. He should sit, he knew, but he chose not to. “What did he promise you?”

Valora was about to speak, that was until Lady Eira cupped her daughter’s hand and kept her silent. “What do you mean, Your Grace?”

Zephyr sighed, one useless if he hoped it would calm him. “He must have told you something, or did he not?”

“I love him,” Valora spoke, seemingly against the wishes of her mother as Lady Eira peered at her daughter with eyes of disapproval smeared with a soft glint of shock. But in the castle as a whole, Zephyr doubted anyone would be as shocked as he was at the moment.

Bloody hell… He intoned. She’s in love…? They have both been in this castle only three days, what sort of love was she talking about…?

Lady Eira exhaled. “And as you have heard. He told us nothing. My daughter is just simply in love… like you were when you chose someone that was not her.” She pinched him with her eyes, skin and heart.

His was not love though, he only sought comfort. At that time he had no one to trust in this castle, and then at the moment of his weariness’ peak, some lady came from a lesser house in the realm with no greed for the throne he sat upon, and he was just to let her go? He didn’t even know he was to wed from the Blackwoods, and even if he did, he might have still made the same decision. If there was anyone that could rid him of all these weariness, then it had to be her, she was a person who had no wish for power, he had seen it then.

Zephyr allowed his eyes to wander through mother and daughter, and daughter and mother, shaking his head with a sigh soon after. There was nothing he could do here. It was not them he should be confronting. He knew who. He had avoided them for so long, but it seemed it had grown to be long enough already. Melisandre words were of nothing but the truth. He had given them enough free reins to steer however they wanted, but if he let that keep up, they would steer him well into the ruins and chaos they were bringing with themselves. Damon was planning war, no doubt, and Zephyr knew all he had to do was stop it.

He turned about on his feets and paced towards the door. “Have a safe trip on the morrow.”

“Why, thank you, Your Grace. We no doubt will.”

He did not bother to turn back to see what expression the lady of Blackwood had on her face, and he did not care. Out the door he went, and the next place he found himself was on the bed in his chambers staring at his room’s plafond while thoughts of what steps he would take rummaged his mind. It was time to act like the king he was.