The Tyrant's Obsession *she is my cure*

— CAELAN —

I have never once considered myself a cruel man.

Cruel implies enjoyment. Implies a particular relationship with suffering — someone else's suffering — that I have never had. What I am is efficient. What I am is precise. What I am is a king who learned, very early and at significant cost, that sentiment is a luxury kingdoms cannot afford and that men who confuse kindness with weakness end up ruling neither.

The people who fear me are not wrong to fear me.

They are simply afraid of the wrong things.

They fear my silence. My stillness. The particular quality of my attention when something has gone wrong and I am working out whose fault it is. They fear the things I have done — and I have done things, real things, things I decided to do with full knowledge of what they were — and they build a version of me out of those things and call it a tyrant.

They are not entirely incorrect.

What they don't fear, because they don't know about it, is the thing that has been happening inside my skull for seven years.

That is the thing that should frighten them.

Seven Years

The poison started as headaches.

I didn't know it was poison then. I didn't know it was anything except the ordinary cost of ruling a kingdom at twenty-two with no one to show me how. Headaches seemed like the least of my problems.

Then the headaches became something else.

The pressure built in waves — behind my eyes, at the base of my skull, spreading until my whole upper body was a locked and aching thing. On bad days the light hurt. On worse days sound hurt. On the worst days I lost hours — not to sleep, not to unconsciousness, but to something in between, a grey static that sat over everything and turned the world into shapes and noise I couldn't interpret correctly.

I have cleared a council chamber by standing up too quickly. I have said things in moments of particular pain that I cannot unsay. I am aware of all of it. Awareness does not fix it. It just means I watch myself do it and add it to the list of costs.

The physicians renamed it every year and prescribed things that did nothing. I stopped telling them when it got worse. What was the point.

I managed. That is what I do.

The problem — the thing I have never said aloud to anyone — is that managing has a cost. Seven years of pain makes a man shorter. Shorter with people. Shorter with time. Shorter with the distance between what he's thinking and what comes out of his mouth.

The kingdom fears me.

Most of the time, that is useful.

The Banquet

The Haverford anniversary banquet was the fourth court event this month and I attended because I had no legitimate reason not to. Lord Haverford had pledged military support to the northern campaign. Men who give you armies expect to see your face at their celebrations. That is the transaction.

I had been there for forty minutes when the pain started.

Not gradually. All at once and total, the fist closing behind my eyes before I finished processing it was coming. The candlelight fractured at the edges of my vision. Sound became too much — the music, the conversation, the particular pitch of laughter from across the room.

I set my wine down on a servant's tray — I never drink at these events, one of many small management strategies no one knows about — and started moving toward the exit with the controlled pace of a man who is leaving because he chooses to.

Lord Vane intercepted me before I reached it.

He was a minor lord with the specific confidence of a man who has concluded that proximity to power protects him from consequences. He stepped directly into my path with a glass of wine extended and a smile that was working very hard.

"Your Majesty. Before you go — a toast. To the northern campaign."

"I don't drink at events," I said.

"Just this once, Your Majesty. It would honour—"

The pain was very loud. His smile was making something worse. Taking the glass was faster than the conversation refusing would require.

I took it. I drank it. I walked out.

I made it to the garden.

The east garden was dark and quiet and had no people in it, which was everything I needed. I sat on the bench nearest the fountain, bent forward with my elbows on my knees, and breathed and waited for the worst of it to pass the way I always waited.

Then the wine hit me.

Not the pain — something else. Something warm and disorienting that moved through me from the inside out. I recognised it distantly, the way you recognise something you have read about but never experienced. It spread outward from my chest and downward through my limbs, and the pain and this new warmth were happening simultaneously, fighting each other, and thinking became very difficult.

I understood, slowly, that the wine had been spiked.

And I understood, a moment after that, that I was not — in any meaningful sense of the word — in control of myself.

In twenty-two years of living and nine years of ruling, I had always been in control of myself. Even on the worst days of the pain, even in the grey static, there was a version of me standing slightly apart, observing, managing.

Tonight that version of me was somewhere very far away.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed.

And that was when I heard footsteps on the garden path.

She Was Not Supposed to Be There

I heard her before I saw her — light footsteps, unhurried, the walk of someone who had also escaped the celebration and was not particularly concerned about being found.

I looked up.

A woman stood at the bend in the path, half in shadow, a shawl pulled around her shoulders that was slightly too large — clearly grabbed from the nearest available hook on her way out. Hair partially undone. The look of someone who had made a decision and wasn't second-guessing it.

She saw me at the same moment I saw her.

She assessed me the way you assess a stranger on a path — quickly, practically — and said, "Sorry. I didn't realize anyone was out here."

Most people, when I failed to respond, stepped back.

She stepped closer.

"Are you alright?" she asked. Direct. No ceremony.

I looked at her. The warmth from the wine was moving through me in ways I could not manage and the pain was sitting on top of it and forming words required resources I was currently very short on.

"Fine," I said.

She looked at me with an expression that communicated, very clearly and without any words at all, that she did not believe me.

"You're pressing your fingers against your eye," she said.

I lowered my hand. I hadn't noticed.

"Headache," I said.

"Behind the eyes or the base of the skull?"

I stared at her. That was not a question most people asked.

"Both," I said.

She crossed the remaining distance between us without asking permission, moved behind me, and before I could object her hands found the base of my skull with a precision that stopped my breath. Not tentative. Not exploratory. Certain — the way a person is certain when they have done something a thousand times and their hands know the way without being told.

The pressure she applied worked against something that had been locked inside my skull for so long I had stopped registering it as tension and had simply accepted it as the permanent shape of things.

Something shifted. The pain at the back of my skull began — fractionally, impossibly — to ease.

I went very still.

She worked in silence. Moving along my shoulders, finding every place the tension had locked itself in. She had the focused attention of someone solving a specific problem. She was not afraid of me. She was not performing anything. She was simply there, doing what she was doing, with a completeness of presence I had not encountered in another person in longer than I could accurately calculate.

After a while she stepped back and came around to face me.

"Better?" she asked.

The pain at the back of my skull was quieter. The pressure behind my eyes had eased from something deafening to something I could think through.

But the warmth from the wine was still there.

Hotter than before.

I looked at her face in the low light and I thought, with the part of me that was still capable of thought: I should tell her to go. I should stand up and walk away and manage this the way I manage everything — alone, efficiently, without witnesses.

No.

What I was thinking was not something a king thought. What I was feeling was not something I had protocols for. The warmth had spread into my hands and my chest and it was not pain and it was not the grey static and I did not know what to do with it because I had never not known what to do with something before.

She started to turn away.

I reached out.

I caught her hand before I finished deciding to — my fingers closing around hers, not gently, not with any of the control I was supposed to have — and she went still and looked down at where I was holding her and then looked up at my face.

I knew what my face looked like in that moment. I could feel it — the heat in my skin, the unmanaged expression, everything I kept behind closed doors standing in the open doorway.

I was the king of Valdris.

I had ruled for nine years. I had never — not once, not in crisis, not in pain, not in the worst hours of the worst nights — asked anyone for help.

I looked up at her.

"Please," I said. My voice came out wrong. Rough and honest and nothing like the voice I used in council chambers. "Please help me."