Paper Rings XVII

November 2995

When Marie and Ariana entered the council chamber, Caleb and Leo were already there. They were sitting in silence, Caleb leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, and Leo pacing in front of the windows that looked down on the village. One of them was open, a butterfly fluttering around the windowsill. The echo of the Queen’s heels on the wood floor was like thunder, but neither man looked their way as the door shut behind them. 

Ariana cleared her throat. “Hello.”

Leo stopped, and Caleb opened his eyes. His eyebrows furrowed as his mouth fell slightly open. He was quick to shut it, his jaw tensing, but Marie didn’t miss the emotions that had flashed across his face. Even as he smiled weakly at her, his mask would never be enough to cover up his uncertainty. 

Ariana’s hand was soft on her back, guiding her to the large table in the middle of the room. Leo had wandered to its head, where he was standing with his hands on the back of his chair. Caleb was seated on his right, and Ariana took a seat to his left, guiding Marie to sit beside her.

Caleb still had his eyes trained on Marie. They had gone blank, but the gears in his head were turning. She stared back at him, wondering if he would let her see something. But his mother was staring at him too, and seeming to feel her gaze, he looked up at her instead. 

His face twisted in a way Marie had never seen before. The look he wore radiated annoyance and confusion at the same time. His lips puckered as he bit the inside of his lip, and his nose scrunched. Ariana flicked her hand as she mouthed something to him, the gesture pointed. Caleb’s face untwisted, and he sat back. 

Leo’s head didn’t move as his eyes flicked between them. He scoffed and directed his attention at Marie. “Well,” he said, “hello.”

He smiled with sparkly white teeth. His voice was higher than usual. Leo being happy to see her wasn’t right, but he sounded sincere.

She managed a smile back at him, hoping he couldn’t see her eye twitch. “Hi.”

Still smiling, although his eyes had darkened, Leo looked between Caleb and Ariana. “This is more than I get from you people nowadays.”

Caleb rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest. Ariana didn’t react. In public, they would both have smiled as if it were a joke. In private, they didn’t even try.

Leo pressed his lips into a thin line as he narrowed his eyes at his wife. “So, have you filled her in or what? What is this?”

Even if she was lost, Marie knew Ariana knew exactly what Leo meant. “What is what? I want her to learn how things work.”

“They’re not married yet,” Leo said blankly.

“So?”

“So she has nothing to keep her from running off and telling whoever she wants about what we talk about.” 

Leo’s tone was condescending, but for once, Marie didn’t blame him. Rather, she had the same questions he did, and as he and Ariana argued back and forth, she wondered what the point of stirring things up was. Ariana certainly knew what she was doing.

Caleb ignored them with the expertise of a master craftsman. He kept his jaw set and his breathing conscious. But his shoulders slumped when she locked eyes with him. 

He looked like he wanted to say something, and she waited for him to lean over and whisper something in her ear, but he never did. Instead, she felt the light tap of his foot against hers under the table. He kept it there. It was the closest they could get to holding hands.

It was weird to see him in this setting, even knowing it was more familiar to him than anything else. He was the same, yet completely different. His face was more serious, and any optimism he dared to hold was nowhere in sight. If she thought about it hard enough, she could turn his chair into a throne and envision a crown on his head. The thought made her cold. 

There was nothing simple about the crown. As much as she loved Caleb and knew he wanted to be a good king, she knew that. There was no such thing as a purely benevolent ruler. Politics made things much crueler than that.

“Hey.” Marie flinched and turned her attention swiftly back to Leo. He was pointing straight at her with a stiff finger. “You cannot talk about this with anyone. Anyone! Understood?”

“Yes,” she managed, her voice small and mousy.

Caleb glared at his father but didn’t say anything. As Leo sat down, Ariana closed her eyes and took a breath. Her face had sunk a bit, and her shoulders were no longer as straight as usual, though they still harbored tension.

“Leo,” Ariana said when Leo had settled himself. “You’re meeting with the council tonight?”

Leo groaned like her brother Theo when their mother asked him to do anything, even something as simple as disposing of his own trash. “Yes.”

For years, Marie had thought of the King as a man on the level of gods. The few times she had seen him, he had seemed like the picture of strength and regality. Now, his attitude and thinning frame made him seem like nothing more than an unruly teenager. It felt wrong in every way she could imagine.

“I’ll just sit there and smile like an idiot while they yap at me like a bunch of useless fools,” Leo said. “Just like I always do.”

Ariana sighed. “You should at least consider listening to them.”

Leo scoffed.

“They’re supposed to be your advisors,” Caleb said.

“I don’t need advisors.”

“Yes, you do. Nobody can do this job without help,” Ariana said. “That’s how we get the awful kings whose deaths are celebrated instead of mourned.”

Leo shot her a dark look. “So you think I’m incompetent?”

Yes, Caleb mouthed across the table as Ariana said, “That’s not what I said.”

“It’s what I heard,” Leo said. “I listened to them for the first fifteen years I’ve spent on the throne and where has that gotten me? Hmm? My reign has been boring and lame. I want some action. And I’m going to get it. They’ll say no. So I say: I. Don’t. Care.”

Looking between Caleb and Ariana, Marie frowned. Leo’s attitude was unbecoming of a king, and difficult for her to believe. But to them, there was nothing unusual about it. If anything, he might have been trying to behave better because she was present, even if he still clearly had less self-control than in public. 

She thought maybe she should say something, but before she could decide what to contribute, Leo directed his attention at her.

“If someone is giving you bad advice,” he asked, “do you keep listening to them?”

The last thing she wanted was to feed into whatever Leo’s delusions were, but she said, “No.”

Leo grinned. “Exactly.”

“Dad.” 

Caleb’s eyes were burning holes through Leo’s face, his tone stern like that of a father.

“What?” Leo almost sounded sarcastic.

“Leave her out of it.”

“No.” Eyes wild, Leo almost laughed. “You want her to be your wife? Fine. That means these matters are as much her concern as they are yours.”

Caleb’s chest rose and fell slowly as he clenched his teeth. His face was red, and she could almost feel the angry heat radiating off of him. But he kept his mouth shut.

Leo looked back at Marie. “See, I haven’t done anything interesting because my advisors all suck. So I’m going to make a name for myself, for history, whether they like it or not. They don’t tell me no anymore. They don’t control me.”

“What exactly are they trying to control?” Marie met Leo’s eyes. Her heart thundered, but she didn’t let it stop her. She needed to look at Leo, really look at him. And she saw him now. She saw the way his eyes went dark and his mouth twisted into a firm line. His face changed the same way Caleb’s did when he was upset.

“We have had poor trade relations with the Northern Lands for decades,” Leo said. “And there are constant skirmishes at the border. I’m going to fix that.”

She waited for Caleb or Ariana to react, but neither did. Caleb stared at the table instead, Ariana watching him with a guarded expression.

“How?” Marie asked. She had spent months trying to get answers about the King’s thought process from Caleb to no avail. If he wasn’t going to stop her, she would take the chance to get information straight from the source instead.

“Well, first, I will try to reason with them.” Though he was answering Marie’s question, Leo focused on Ariana. His words were tight and pointed. “As I have been doing for quite some time.”

Ariana’s head snapped up so quickly she must have pinched a nerve in her neck. “Yes, that is called diplomacy. And it’s a better way than killing people to solve whatever problem you seem to think we have.”

“It is not a problem I ‘seem to think’ we have,” Leo said, making air quotes with his fingers. “It’s a problem we do have.”

“Okay, well, you should try to negotiate if you want to solve it.”

“I have tried. I am trying.” Out of the corner of her eye, Marie saw Caleb shake his head. “But it is weak and ineffective. I want results. I am not getting results with words and niceties. I will get results with my army.”

Caleb laughed bitterly. “You just want to be a wartime king.”

“I want to have a heroic legacy,” Leo spat, the veins in his neck flaring. “I want to be one of the Greats.”

“War or not, you won’t be.”

The room went cold. Leo’s eyes burned through Caleb. In the silence, his breathing was heavy. Marie’s heart thundered in her throat, but Caleb stayed still, his face set like a stone statue. He sat up straighter, his eyes meeting his father’s.

Leo leaned forward in his chair and pressed a pointed finger against Caleb’s chest, hard enough to push his son back. “I am the king,” he said, voice low and raspy. “You are not.”

Caleb kept staring at him. Neither he nor Ariana moved, although Marie could tell that she wanted to. She was sitting on the edge of her chair, grasping the table with white knuckles. Leo had the power, and young as he was, Caleb was a grown man, not a child. That was all that kept her from getting between them without a second thought.

Unsure of what to do, Marie resigned herself to following the Queen. For now, that meant doing nothing.

Leo brought his hand back down, and Ariana let the table go. But he wasn’t done.

He pushed his chair back so hard it fell backward, hitting the floor with a clean smack. As he looked at the three of them, his face twisted. “You’re becoming just as useless as my so-called advisors on that council,” he said and turned his back.

The door slammed behind him. Marie flinched.

Caleb was already staring at his mother, a prayer in his eyes. “He’s going to stop listening.”

“I know,” Ariana said. 

Her voice was smaller than Marie had ever heard it, her eyes still fixed on the door. Her hand shook slightly as she pushed herself out of her chair and looked down at Marie.

She touched her cheek with a smooth hand. “Thank you for coming.” 

She appeared to be genuinely grateful, but for what, Marie didn’t know. The entire chain of events she had experienced that day still didn’t make complete sense to her. Ariana sending a message summoning her to the palace, the two of them spending time together without Caleb’s knowledge, showing up to the meeting with Ariana unannounced, Leo’s tangent. As she watched the Queen move around the table and kiss Caleb on the cheek, she couldn’t help but feel like it was all one big mind game. 

Still, the more she got to know Ariana, the more it became clear that even if she wasn’t the warmest, she did care. She loved her children, and she did what she could to protect them. And she would do the same for her future daughter-in-law. Marie knew her own children would always be safe as long as their grandmother was there.

The moment Ariana was gone, Caleb slouched forward and rested his head in his hands. Marie’s chest felt heavy as she crossed the room and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. Her engagement ring sparkled in the sunlight.

He looked up at her, eyes red. She wrapped her arms around him and lowered herself into his lap. 

The room was quiet. Faint voices and footsteps could be heard from the hallway, and the clink of armor drifted in through the open window. Within the room’s four walls, there was only their breathing and the brush of Marie’s hand running through Caleb’s thick hair. Leo’s chair was still lying on the ground. 

“What is your father going to do?” Marie whispered.

“Start a war,” Caleb said, resting his cheek against her chest, “and probably get us all killed.”