He reached out then, his hand hovering over my injured ribs, and I felt warmth spread through me—not the heat of his touch, but something deeper. Healing. It was like sunlight pouring into my bones, chasing out the cold ache that had taken up residence there. I felt the cracked rib knit itself together, felt the swollen tissue ease, felt the bruises fade from purple-black to yellow to nothing. The pain receded like a tide pulling back from shore, leaving only the memory of where it had been.

  But his hand did not stop there.

  Slowly, almost hesitantly, it moved downward—over my stomach, my hip, coming to rest just above my leg. The leg that had never quite bent right since I was ten. The leg I had learned to favour, to hide, to pretend didn't ache with every step I took up this mountain.

  Something in his expression shifted. The banked fury flickered, but beneath it, something else emerged—a sorrow so deep it looked ancient, worn smooth as river stones by millennia of existence. His jaw worked silently, and when he finally spoke, his voice was rough.

  "This," he said, his palm pressing gently against my crooked leg. "This is old. Very old."

  I couldn't meet his eyes. "It was a long time ago."

  "How?"

  The word was a command, not a question. I had never heard him speak to me like that before—like the king he was, expecting answers.

  I told him. The words came out halting, broken, as fragmented as the bone had been. I told him about the day I was ten, about the frenzy in my mother's eyes, about the crack that had echoed through the hovel and the agony that followed. I told him about the two months of lying on that dirt floor, fevered and delirious, while my leg healed crooked because no healer came. I told him about learning to walk again, about the limp that never quite faded, about the way the village children mocked my gait and the adults looked away.

  When I finished, the silence was absolute.

  He did not speak. But his hand on my leg grew warmer, and I felt that same sunlight-pour of healing, but deeper now—reaching into places that had been wrong for so long I had forgotten what right felt like. Bone shifted, realigned, remembered what it was meant to be. Tendons stretched and settled. The constant, low-grade ache that had been my companion since childhood—the one I had stopped noticing because it was always there—simply... ceased.

  I gasped. The sensation was so foreign, so unexpected, that tears sprang to my eyes unbidden.

  "I have walked through your village a thousand times," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "I have healed your neighbours, your elders, even your mother's headaches when she allowed it. I have been in your home, Giana. I have seen you move. I have seen you favour that leg and thought nothing of it—thought it was simply how you were made."

  He finally looked at me, and the self-loathing in his eyes was a physical blow.

  "I should have known. I should have looked closer. I should have—" He stopped, his jaw working, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick with something I had never heard from him before. Shame.

  "Your mother. When she carried you, she came to me. Did you know that?" He wasn't looking at me now, his gaze fixed on some distant point beyond the mountain. "She begged me to ensure the child lived. She had lost three already, and she could not bear another loss. She clutched my hands and wept and begged, and I... I promised her I would do everything in my power to see you born healthy and strong."

  I stared at him, my heart pounding. I had never known this. Never imagined my mother, even in those early days, capable of such desperate love.

  Stolen story; please report.

  "But I did not see," he continued, his voice dropping lower. "I did not see that she never once begged for your father. Not once, did she ask me to save him. She nursed him, yes—dutifully, tirelessly—but there was no love in it. No desperation. Only obligation." He opened his eyes, and the galaxies within them were dark, turbulent. "I thought nothing of it. Mortal marriages are often cold. I did not question."

  His hand, still resting on my leg, tightened almost imperceptibly.

  "Three children died before you. Three infants, born into that hovel, into that cold, into that woman's exhausted and broken body." His voice dropped to barely a whisper. "I never asked why they died. I accepted it as the way of mortal things—frail lives, easily extinguished. But now..."

  He turned to face me fully, and the anguish in his eyes was almost too much to bear.

  He was silent for a long moment, his gaze distant, as if he were looking not at me but through me, into memories that were not his own.

  "I knew your mother, Giana. Better than you think."

  I stiffened. "What do you mean?"

  "When she carried you, she came to me. Many times." He spoke slowly, carefully, as if each word cost him something. "Not for healing—not for her body, anyway. She came because she needed someone to talk to. Someone who would not judge her, would not whisper about her, would not look at her growing belly knowing that the child inside her is not her lifeless husband.”

  I stared at him, my heart pounding.

  "The madness was already there, lurking beneath the surface. But in those months, it was quieter. She had moments—hours, sometimes—of perfect clarity. And in those moments, she would find me. At first it was about the pregnancy, about fears for the child she carried. But as the weeks passed, she began to speak of other things."

  He paused, his jaw working.

  "She told me about the men. The ones who came before. Traveling merchants, mostly—men who passed through the village and saw a lonely woman in a crumbling hovel, a woman whose husband was little more than a breathing corpse. They did not love her. They did not even pretend to. They used her for warmth and left her with nothing but the consequences."

  His voice hardened, just slightly.

  "She was left alone with a child she could not bear to look at. Each one reminded her of the men who had taken what they wanted and gone. Each one was a mirror reflecting her own desperation, her own worthlessness, her own endless, aching loneliness."

  I felt tears prick my eyes but blinked them back.

  "And then there was your father."

  He looked at me then, really looked, and something in his expression softened.

  "He was different. A trader from the southern valleys—younger than the others, kinder. He stayed in the village for nearly a month, delayed by a broken wagon wheel. He met your mother by chance, helped her carry water from the well, and something passed between them. Not just desire—though that was there too. But recognition. Two lonely people, finding each other in the dark."

  The King's voice grew quieter.

  "She told me about him in those lucid moments. How he would sit with her, not just in her bed, but by the fire. How he listened to her—truly listened—without judgment, without expectation. How he looked at her like she was not just a body, not just a burden, but a person. Worthy of kindness. Worthy of being seen."

  He shook his head slowly.

  "When he left—and he had to leave, his life was elsewhere—he promised to return. She believed him. For weeks then turned months, she watched the road, waiting. But he never came. Perhaps he meant to and couldn't. Perhaps the promise was just another kindness that turned out to be cruel. I do not know. I never learned his name."

  I was crying now, silent tears streaming down my face.

  "But when she realized she was carrying you, something shifted in her. She told me—in one of those rare, clear moments—that you felt different. The others had been burdens, punishments for her weakness. But you... you were hope. Proof that someone had seen her, truly seen her, even if only for a little while."

  He reached out and wiped a tear from my cheek with a gentleness that shattered me.

  "She loved you, Giana. In the only way she could. The madness took her, yes—it twisted that love into something ugly, something violent. But underneath it all, buried so deep she couldn't reach it most days, was the woman who had held you after you were born and whispered that you were the only good thing she had ever made."

  I couldn't speak. Couldn't move. Couldn't do anything but sit there, letting his words wash over me like rain on parched earth.

  "She named you herself, you know. I asked her once what she would call you when you were still in her belly, and she said—" He paused, his voice catching. "She said, 'Giana. Because you are God's precious. And you are mine.'"

  He pulled me into his arms then, holding me as I fell apart.