Aurora left the throne room with her head bowed, her steps heavy with defeat. The echo of her plea still lingered in the walls of the throne room, but the silence that followed had been more cutting than any refusal. She could scarcely explain to herself why she had sought an audience with King Aragon at all. Perhaps it was the memory of the boy she had once known—the boy she had once known in sunlit gardens, who laughed freely, who swore with childish certainty that the world would never change him.
But that boy was long gone. His family had been cast down, his fate uncertain for years, and she had lived too long with doubt gnawing at her heart. She could not spend her life waiting for the ghost of a man she did not know would come back one day.
