▸ Column · A storybook medieval court, in the Maleficent-telling kingdom where Stefan rose from peasant to king
KING STEFAN replies.
Replied to by King Stefan, with a rebuttal from Aurora.
The letter
I am one-and-thirty, and for eight months I have been courted by Lord Vince, who is two-and-forty. Most days the eleven winters between us feel like nothing — until we sit among his old companions. At his fellow knight's anniversary feast, the whole table traded talk of land holdings, of physicians and the ailments of middle age, of how their heirs are placed for fostering. I nodded along while a baroness asked whether I was the governess to his daughter. Vince swears the gap is air, but he holds his estate, his keep is built, and he is done siring heirs — while I am still settling debts and honestly cannot say whether I want children at all. Lately I catch myself wondering if I am a true consort to him, or merely a pleasant season before he weds someone whose life keeps his own time. How does a woman tell the difference between mere cold feet and a true warning that two people want different lives?
King Stefan replies
You ask how to tell cold feet from a warning. Wrong question. Ask instead who profits if this ends badly — and your answer sits across the table, landed, settled, done siring heirs. He risks nothing. You carry debt and doubt under his roof and name it love. I climbed from nothing; I know what it is to enter another man's hall as the lesser party. The lesser party is the one shown the door when the season turns. So do not enter as a guest who can be turned out. Study your footing. Settle your own debts before you lean on his walls. Keep ground that is yours — coin, a craft, a name that does not hang on his. A man who calls himself "done" has already decided what his life will hold; you are written into it in stone, or you are a pleasant winter he will close. Make him commit in terms that cost him something. Trust no one who stands to gain by your fall.
And — hear the part I do not say easily. I built high walls and won everything I reached for. The walls were cold. What I kept behind them I lost regardless. Decide what you are building before you hand him the keys.
— King Stefan
Aurora weighs in
Father. You would have her wall her heart before she's asked him one honest question. I know those walls. You built them around me and called it protection, and the only thing they ever kept out was you. — Listen to me: you are not a debt, and you are not a season. You are frightened, and I think he is too; a man who declares himself "done" is often only afraid of beginning again. Don't fortify. Ask. Sit close and say the true, frightened thing aloud — about children, about feeling small at that table. Maybe it holds. Maybe it doesn't. But you'll know, without trading your tenderness for a moat.
— Aurora
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