Chapter 398. Fewer Years Believing You Had to Be Someone Else First
He didn’t need to see the way her shoulders were pulled taut like bowstrings or the way her jaw was locked in a grimace of suppressed fury. He recognized the particular, violent tightness in her posture—the telltale sign of someone who was seconds away from shattering.
He said nothing. There were no questions about why she was late, no polite inquiries about her morning.
He simply stepped into his stance, the familiar clink of his training gear cutting through the morning air. He offered no platitudes, no empty comfort. Instead, he offered the only thing that could truly help her: a target.
A challenge.
A way to translate the unbearable pressure of the palace into something physical, something tangible, something she could finally control.
"Again," he said simply, his voice steady and grounding. "The obsidian..."
"Don’t think... Just strike!"
...
"I needed this," Kaela admitted after the third hour of relentless exertion.
Her voice was hoarse, scraped raw from exertion and the guttural battle cries she had unleashed during their sparring. Her training gear was soaked with sweat and flecked with fresh blood where she had scraped herself against the training dummies.
Her breathing was finally settling into a steady rhythm, no longer the jagged, panicked panting of someone drowning, but the controlled respiration of a warrior who had found her footing. "More than you probably realize."
William wiped sweat from his brow with the back of a scarred hand, his gaze fixed on her. He didn’t offer a patronizing smile or a gentle reassurance.
"I think I realize more than you’d expect, Kaela."
He saw the way she looked at the training yard not as a place of labor, but as a sanctuary where the lies of the court couldn’t penetrate.
On another occasion, the sun was already beginning to dip behind the spires of the palace when Kaela arrived. She was nearly two hours late, and the transformation in her was devastating.
Her eyes were faintly red-rimmed beneath the obvious effort to maintain her royal composure, her jaw set with such force that the muscles in her temples pulsed visibly. She had clearly just emerged from another ordeal.
The afternoon had been spent in the stifling silence of the portrait studio. For five hours, she had been forced to sit motionless as an artist. A man who smelled of turpentine and condescension repeatedly adjusted her chin, her shoulders, and the angle of her hands.
’Smile again, Your Highness.’
’Tilt your head. Soften your eyes.’
’Make it look like you are a woman touched by divine joy at the prospect of this union.’
’Make it look like you want to be bound to him.’
’Make it look like you are not screaming inside until your throat bleeds.’
Every time the artist insisted she needed to smile more "convincingly" for the wedding announcement portraits, a fresh layer of ice seemed to coat her heart.
She had felt like a doll, a beautiful, hollow thing made of porcelain and expectation, being posed for a display she never asked to be part of.
When she finally burst into the training yard, she didn’t greet William. She didn’t even acknowledge his presence at first.
She simply grabbed her weapon, the grip of Tempest Fang biting into her palm, and turned toward the training post with a ferocity that bordered on suicidal.
The sparring session that followed was not a lesson; it was an exorcism.
CRACK THUD.
Her strike missed William’s guard by a hair’s breadth, the displaced air whistling past his ear. She wasn’t aiming for technique anymore; she was aiming for annihilation.
Her movements were vicious, each swing of her weapon carrying the weight of every forced smile and every condescending comment.
"Again!" she screamed, her voice cracking. "More! Give me more!"
William met her fury with controlled resistance. He let her strike, let her exhaust herself against his defenses, but he never let her break.
When her strikes became too wild, too desperate, he would step into her space, using his superior positioning to pin her weapon, forcing her to feel the physical reality of her own imbalance.
"You’re fighting the memory of them, Kaela," William growled as he parried a desperate downward slash that sent sparks cascading across the stone. "Fight the weapon."
"Fight me! Stay in the present, or you’ll break yourself before the enemy even gets a chance."
She gritted her teeth through a spray of saliva and sweat, her eyes blazing.
"Then make me stay here!" she challenged, lunging forward in a low sweep that forced him to leap back.
Each session chipped away, bit by bit, at the suffocating weight that the rest of her days carried.
William watched from the sidelines of her transformation with a quiet, protective satisfaction. He saw what the court could not or would not see.
He saw how the training yard was slowly stitching her back together.
He noticed the subtle, profound shifts in her. He saw how her posture changed the moment her boots touched the gravel of the yard; the shoulders that had been carried with the rigid, painful formality of a prisoner gradually loosened into the relaxed readiness of a predator.
He saw the careful, practiced smile that hollow mask she wore for advisors and dignitaries slowly dissolve, giving way to something considerably more genuine: a look of fierce, unvarnished determination.
In the palace, they were trying to erase her, to smooth out her edges until she was nothing but a perfect, obedient shape. But here, under the open sky and the sting of exertion, Kaela was becoming something sharper.
Something dangerous. Something real.
...
The afternoon sun hung heavy and molten over the training yard, casting elongated, jagged shadows across the blood-stained cobblestones. Kaela lay sprawled on her back for several minutes after their last exchange, her chest heaving in desperate, shuddering gasps.
Her ribs burned where William’s gauntlet had connected during a particularly vicious clinch, and a thin trickle of blood from a split lip had dried into a rusty crust along her jaw.
Every muscle in her body screamed in protest. Her left forearm was already beginning to bruise a deep purple where she had taken a punishing blow to deflect a strike, and the metallic tang of blood and sweat filled her mouth.
’My bones feel like they’re made of glass.’
’Every breath is a knife in my lungs.’
’But the noise... the screaming noise in my head from this morning’s council meeting... it’s finally gone.’
’For the first time in weeks, there is only the pain. And the pain is honest.’
William stood over her, not gloating, but watching her with that unsettlingly perceptive stillness. His own breathing was controlled, though sweat soaked through his shirt and streaked through the dust on his skin.
He offered her a hand, his grip calloused and unyielding as he hauled her upright.
Kaela accepted it, but she didn’t immediately return to her stance.
Instead, she leaned against one of the wooden weapon racks, wiping blood from her mouth with the back of a shaking hand. The adrenaline was receding, leaving behind a raw, vulnerable exhaustion.
"Do you ever wonder?" she asked suddenly, her voice cracking, barely more than a whisper against the wind that swept through the yard.
She looked away from him, staring at the distant spires of the palace that loomed over them like silent executioners. "Whether I’d have turned out entirely different... if I’d been allowed to train like this my whole life?"
"If I hadn’t been forced to spend every waking moment perfecting a lie?"
She turned her gaze back to him, her eyes bright with a sudden, fierce vulnerability. "If I had been given steel instead of silk from the beginning... would I even recognize the person standing here now?"
William didn’t answer immediately. He watched her, seeing not just the princess but the warrior who was clawing her way out from under layers of royal expectation.
He saw the bruises, the cuts, and the fire that refused to be extinguished.
"I think you’d still be exactly who you are," William said quietly, his voice carrying the weight of absolute certainty. "Just with fewer years spent believing you had to be someone else first."
Kaela froze. The words seemed to strike her harder than any physical blow he had delivered during their sparring.
She stared at him, searching his face for mockery, for pity, or for some hidden political angle. But she found none.
There was only the blunt, unvarnished truth in his scarred features.
’Fewer years believing I had to be someone else.’
’God. How many years have I wasted pretending?’
’How many pieces of myself have I buried under protocol and politeness?’
’He sees me. Not the crown, not the bride, not the asset. Just... me.’
A long silence stretched between them, filled only by the distant cry of a hawk and the fading echo of their own labored breathing. A strange, thoughtful stillness settled behind her eyes, a moment of genuine self-reflection that she rarely allowed herself in the halls of power.
"That’s a kinder answer than I expected," she finally said, a ghost of a smile genuine and weary touching her lips.
"It’s the true one," William said simply.
He stepped back, adjusting his grip on his weapon, the steel gleaming wickedly in the fading light. "Now enough talking."
"Your guard is dropping."