I didn’t react as I heard the knock on my door, focusing on the pages of my journal as I flipped through them. Just to confirm Tritetia and I were the only ones who remembered, I had tried to show my mother when she came to visit me, but she only told me my drawings were getting better. She couldn’t quite tell me what she thought it was, but it was clear that she couldn’t see the neatly written lines where I had recounted everything I knew about the previous timeline.

  “Pardon me, Young Star,” my head snapped up as I heard Yssac’s voice, and the first thing I noticed were the bandages around his neck. Tritetia had mentioned Yssac getting burned from carrying me back to the palace, but I hadn’t seen him since. The sight of him standing in my doorway, bandaged and awkward in posture, pulled something strange and tight behind my ribs. His usual arrogance had been stripped down to something quiet—he looked thinner, his shoulders less squared, and he wasn’t wearing his formal aide’s coat. Just a loose linen shirt tucked sloppily into his trousers, the sleeves pushed to his elbows like he’d stopped halfway dressing and never finished.

  “You look terrible,” I said automatically, my voice flatter than it needed to be.

  Yssac gave a crooked grin, his weight shifting unevenly as he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “Apparently good enough for you to not be worried.”

  I frowned. Was I worried about Yssac? No, not really; he had done what I needed him to do, and that was develop an antidote for a poison that had none, saving Caspian’s life and by extension my mother’s. Trietia had never given any indication that his burns were life threatening and even if they had been, would I have done anything differently? He was no longer the man who had ordered my mother’s death, but he still wasn’t someone I wanted to be close to or care about.

  Yssac didn’t seem bothered by my silence. He walked further into the room and closed the door gently, as if he didn’t want anyone to know he was here. “I came to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye?” My grip on the journal tightened slightly, and I let my gaze drift back to the pages. The lines of writing were still clear to me, clean and neat even when they blurred a little around the edges from the light. Yssac took a deep breath, his hands flexing slightly at his sides like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. His eyes drifted toward my desk, then toward the window, then finally landed on the edge of my bed—anywhere but directly on me.

  “I’ve been… recalled home. A ‘family emergency’, my father is calling it,” something in his voice sounded resigned, as if he knew it was going to happen. “Caspian made his recovery public while you were out the second time. They didn’t mention the poison, but he did credit me with helping with his recovery, to give me a bit more standing with the Emperor and Empress.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I could feel the tension in the room shift. The Marquess had wasted no time; we all knew he would have been able to put together that Yssac was the one to cure the crown prince, but with Caspian admitting it, it was no surprise Yssac was being called home. Since we hadn’t told him or Isadora the truth about the poison, Caspian decision made sense; by giving Yssac credit, Yssac would not only be proven as a worthy aide, but invaluable when it came to navigating court.

  “Then why are you going?” I asked, not bothering to look up from the journal again. The question slipped out sharper than I intended, and I could feel the weight of it land between us. “You know what’s waiting for you.”

  “I do.” Yssac’s voice didn’t flinch. If anything, it was steadier than it had been moments ago. “But I’ve spent my whole life running from him. Letting him shape every piece of me so I’d be more useful to his plans, not mine. If I don’t go now, if I don’t face him on my own terms, then nothing ever really changes.”

  His words made me finally look up again, and I was surprised by what I saw in his ice blue eyes. There was a calm there; not the forced composure he usually wore in court, or the weary smugness he used to hide behind in his early days at the palace. No, this calm was something quieter, sadder. Like a storm that had already hit and left only the broken scaffolding behind.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “I’m not going to win, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he added with a small shrug, like he was trying to beat me to the obvious conclusion. “I know how this will go. There’ll be shouting, probably worse, but… at least this time I’m choosing to stand in front of him.”

  “You’re an idiot,” I muttered, slamming the journal shut and tossing it onto my desk. I didn’t want to look at it anymore.

  “Probably,” Yssac agreed without argument, and that was what made it worse. I could tell he wasn’t being dramatic or trying to earn sympathy. He had already accepted whatever would happen, as if it was a storm he’d chosen to walk into because the waiting was worse than the damage. He took another step forward, close enough now that I could see where the bandages reached up the side of his neck. The burn wasn’t visible, but the skin around the edge looked raw, and the collar of his shirt was uneven where he kept pulling at it unconsciously, like it itched beneath the gauze. “But this is worth being an idiot about.”

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to that. Yssac had made a choice. One that didn’t have anything to do with me, and yet somehow still reached inside and twisted things I didn’t want to feel. The burn tugged at the skin along his neck, the cloth of his shirt clearly bothering it, but he didn’t flinch from it. He stood still, with the same useless kind of calm Caspian always had. It was an armor that didn’t suit him.

  “Caspian gave me a leave, not a dismissal. I’m technically still his aide,” Yssac continued, his tone trying to carry some kind of reassurance, though his mouth twisted like he didn’t believe the words himself. “It’s not permanent. At least, it doesn’t have to be.”

  “Do you really think your father will–”

  “Yes. Don’t underestimate how much he doesn’t want to see Caspian become Emperor,” Yssac interrupted me before I could finish the question, and when he did, I felt a flicker of something low and cold settle into my chest. It wasn’t doubt—I already knew what the Marquess was capable of—but something quieter. A small, grim certainty that Yssac might not walk away from this as easily as he wanted me to believe.

  He must have seen something in my face, because he dropped his gaze to the floor and rubbed the back of his neck, fingers brushing over the edge of the bandage. “You and your mother were put in danger because of my father’s schemes. The least I can do is try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  There was a long pause, and I simply stared at the man in front of me. He was both the man who laughed while ordering my mother’s death and yet… he was never that person. That Yssac had been destroyed, erased as soon as I made my wish, and instead I was seeing who he could have been without his father. A man who wanted connection, but didn’t quite know how to grab it, who kept reaching out with hands still bandaged from the last time he tried. I watched him, the silence stretching longer than it probably should have, until the air between us felt tight.

  I wanted to yell at him, to ask where all this determination had been in the first timeline, but instead I stood. “Make sure you come back.”

  Yssac blinked. He looked like he hadn’t expected me to say anything at all, much less that. His hand stilled on the back of his neck, and for the first time since he walked into the room, I saw something flicker across his face—something close to relief, tempered by the weight of everything else pressing down on him.

  “I will,” he said quietly. “I don’t know when, but… I want to.”

  There was no dramatic promise, no stupid noble oath. It wasn’t certainty, but it was more than I expected. Yssac turned to leave then, and I didn’t stop him. He paused at the door, one hand resting on the frame like he needed a second to steady himself before opening it. His fingers curled, then released, and he looked back at me one last time.

  “I pray to be of more use upon my return, Young Star.”

  The door clicked shut behind him, and the room was quiet again. I stayed still for a moment, letting the silence settle around me like ash. I didn’t want to think about what the Marquess would do to him, if the same Marquess who had puppetted me for his own gain was willing to be just as cruel to the son he wanted to be Emperor. A part of me knew he was, another part hoped that if Yssac had managed to do what three men were afraid to, he could survive it.

  I let out a breath, sharp and slow, letting it hiss through my teeth as I crossed back to the desk and ran my thumb over the corner of the journal. I could feel that Cyldri had arrived back in my palace and I sat back down, my thoughts still racing as I waited.