Chapter 5 - Maeve

                                        

                                              
Dedicated to @afuqiao  for being an absolute encouragement while I write this 온라인카지노게임.
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The palace always looked grandest at dusk.
That was the cruel part of it — how beauty softened everything it hid. How gold-streaked towers and marble halls could deceive even the most suspicious eye. How the world thought it must be a gift to be raised in silk and shadowed by crowns.
But tonight, Maeve could only see the cracks.
They ran not through the stones, but through people — through their veiled words, trimmed reports, and gloved hands that offered lies as though they were favours. She had smiled through it all, sat through the pleasantries and the proposals, but her mind had long left the room.
Instead, it wandered back to the trees. To her own decision to walk alone.
She commanded her soldiers to leave. And not all of them had taken it well. They had questioned. They had protested with loyalty in their eyes, and yet it wasn't them who she had distrusted.
It was the weight of their presence. The noise of it. The way they might have tried to shield her from what she needed to see.
She needed clarity. And clarity, she had learned, was earned in silence.
Besides, she hadn't gone for them.
She went for herself. She had gone for the flower.
Not that anyone else truly believed in it. In hushed chambers, it was spoken of like a myth. But not to her. Not when she'd seen her mother reach for it in dreams — whispering the name she'd never share. Not when her father had once mentioned it as a last resort, voice heavy, eyes hollow, grief visible.
And then there was the forest.
The man.
The mistake of a conversation that now lingered like a bruise beneath her skin.
The stranger from the forest.
His reminder tasted like something forbidden — like a memory she didn't want, but couldn't quite let go of.
She had dismissed him. She walked away.
But why did her thoughts not follow?
Why, when she sat down now to draft letters — some true, some false — did his voice linger in her thoughts? Why did she keep replaying that moment when he didn't strike, didn't lie, didn't retreat?
There was something in him that stopped him from pretending.
In her world of lies and deceit, he looked honest and determined.
And that together frightened her more than lies ever could.
She turned the page.
A list was beginning to form—small names, subtle changes. Ministers who repeated numbers too neatly. Merchants who curtsied too low. Silences that echoed louder than words. A thread, just barely visible, was starting to show.
If she tugged too hard, it might snap.
If she didn't, it would strangle them all.
And so, Maeve did what her mother used to do — she wrote in ink and silence. Let the palace think her idle, ornamental. All the better. It was easier to outthink someone when they believed you incapable of thinking at all. Maeve thrived in underestimation.
She set the letter down and stood, pacing toward the long windows that overlooked the west garden.
Her father found her there. He didn't announce himself—he never did. The weight of him always arrived first: a shadow at her shoulder, a familiar ache in the air. Never a man with subtlety, his presence was all too commanding in whichever space he occupied.