Adelinde didn’t notice how many days passed since Aurik died. It could be as short as a week, or as long as a month; she wouldn’t know.
She still jumped when someone walked down the hallway, made up excuses on why she never left her room. Every other time she laid down or woke up, she expected Aurik to just…walk in. Whether he still tried to apologize or held a knife depended on her general train of thought.
She honestly didn’t know what she did all day to both lessen her anxiety and entertain herself. She just noticed her score book was full, but she could hardly recall ever writing down so many songs; she had a few novels in the desk, but opening the first page told her she had already read them. She couldn’t even confirm how many times she went into Matteo’s room just to hold him in relative silence.
She laid on her bed, just…contemplating it—and every time she thought of Aurik she winced, and fell into a cyclical and anxious thought process that only ended when someone knocked on her door.
Adelinde froze and waited for the other person to say anything. They knocked again, then apparently tried the door—it seemed about halfway through they remembered the locks and stopped, and from that she knew who it was before he spoke.
“May I come in?”
She had to stop herself from the immediate response of ‘no,’ considering Mark was the only person she still considered to be trustworthy.
“You may,” Adelinde responded after a moment, sitting up.
Her brother murmured some agreement, tried the door again, then let out a sheepish chuckle.
“Could you unlock the door so I can come in?”
Adelinde got off her bed and walked to the door, then undid each lock one by one. Mark quietly counted each click on the other side, but she couldn’t tell if he was teasing or just trying to see if she had gotten better or worse since the day before.
When she was done with the locks, she opened the door and stepped back. Mark gently offered a small tray with some fruits.
“I assume you haven’t eaten since yesterday,” he said.
Adelinde lightly shook her head, hesitated, then accepted the tray with a little murmur of thanks. She retreated back to her bed and sat down—Mark noticed the rushed movement and stayed at the door to respect the decision. Being within arm’s reach of anyone terrified her at the moment. It helped that, while he never used it, she knew that Mark had a little knife hidden somewhere on his person.
Mark spoke up when she slowly began eating, alternating between looking at her and observing her room for any telltale signs of distress or damage.
“It’s been ten days,” he said quietly.
“I couldn’t tell,” Adelinde admitted, her own gaze staying on her small meal. The more she thought about it, the less she believed she could finish it. “It’s felt like less and more time than that.”
He murmured some kind of agreement, then continued a bit more insistently but still kind. “I’ve been standing in for you since the execution without official acknowledgment. I don’t mind helping you—you’re not in the mental state Father imagined when he named you heir—but I need a statement from you regardless. Either you need to leave your room and do what’s expected of the queen, or you need to actually appoint a substitute until you’re ready.”
Adelinde sighed. “…I honestly can’t picture myself sitting in that council room; I can argue from here, but I can’t meet with them. I know nothing will happen—I know that, at worst, I’ll just have to hear his name whenever they need to mention him—but…”
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“You’re still scared,” Mark responded, frowning a bit but not quite at her. He readjusted himself a bit as she sat aside the tray, only having eaten two pieces but having no desire to continue. “How soon do you think you can work again?”
“I don’t know. At this rate it can be anywhere between tomorrow and another year.”
“Can you write up a request for it?” Mark asked. “Name whoever you want to substitute for you, and the minimum time you think you’ll need with some kind of ‘until prepared’ clause for the end date. I can bring it to the council for you.”
Adelinde nodded, standing up and wandering over to her desk. She wrote it like a letter—every legal proposal was made to be like a letter—and essentially wrote that she wanted Mark as her substitute, effective as soon as it was approved, lasting at least one month but subject to change. To avoid being voted back into work when she wasn’t ready, she decided to make it so both her and her substitute had to agree for her to return to full power.
Once she was done, she walked up to Mark and gave it to him. He read it over and nodded.
“I’ll let you know when it’s approved,” he said. He smiled at her, trying to seem friendly; if her thoughts were any darker, she likely would have labeled it as condescending instead. “Please consider leaving your room soon. I miss seeing you in daylight hours.”
“I make no promises,” Adelinde replied honestly.
Mark waited for a second, gave some wave of goodbye, then left and closed the door behind him. She stayed there so she could lock it again, then returned to her bed and earlier contemplation.
…
At some point in the evening—she didn’t know the exact time, just that the sun was setting—Matteo started crying. She got to him before any of his caretakers, solely because they were eating at the time and Adelinde’s room was right next to the nursery. As soon as she held him, he fell silent.
If one could compare how she spent her days in her room to the time she spent taking care of her son, they wouldn’t think they were the same person—or, at the very least, not at the same time. She took it as a good sign; she wasn’t completely stuck.
The nursery was the only place Adelinde could stay in without the door being locked. She assumed it was because the nursery was one of the few rooms she could never remember being in, or because the others that came—Matteo’s caretakers—were mostly women she had grown up with to different extents, meaning they would’ve hurt her long ago if they wanted to.
It likely helped that just looking at Matteo left barely any room for her thoughts to wander and frighten her. The only thing she worried about with him was that she couldn’t manage to be whatever kind of mother he needed.
She looked up when the door slowly opened, no longer holding Matteo but just sitting next to his crib. For a second, she panicked—she managed to convince herself to breathe when she saw it was just Mark. He must have saw some fraction of that fear before it faded; he gave her a kind of sympathetic look, but didn’t comment on it directly.
Instead, he walked over to Matteo and chuckled.
“Kid’s gonna be a hellion,” he said confidently, albeit jokingly. “I can feel it.”
Adelinde surprised herself with her own little chuckle, somehow able to joke back.
“Only if he spends too much time around you.”
“Oh, sure, I’m the crazy one?”
“You said as much when I told you I was pregnant—something along the lines of how you needed to spoil him, because Mother and Father aren’t here to do it instead?”
Mark laughed and accepted defeat, then glanced at her.
“The council agreed to the request, by the way—unanimously, for once.” He paused for a second, then sighed. “Please say you at least intend on actually talking to people more as Matteo grows up.”
“I’ll try,” Adelinde promised, albeit frowning a bit. “I’ll be damned if I ruin Matteo’s life just by being reclusive in mine—even if that means just going out for his sake.”
“At least you have a plan,” Mark reasoned. “Hopefully something comes up or someone comes along to help the process go by smoother.”
She could picture what he meant—something or someone that encouraged her to move on, aside from Matteo—but couldn’t imagine herself in that situation. It was easy—which itself was partially reassuring, partially frightening—to imagine that all she really needed to do was blink, then her life would be different or the same depending on what happened in the time she had her eyes closed.