From across the Great Hall, Charlotte slumped against Adala, sighing in relief as the tendril that had tormented her mother followed the Templar bearing the comb across the hall. Lady Melsinde was taking shallow, uneven breaths, but she was breathing. The dark energy that tormented her had moved on.

Adala wrapped her arms around Charlotte, feeling her friend’s whole body shake against her chest. She didn’t say anything for a long moment. She almost did. There were words that came to mind, that Charlotte’s mother was safe and her brother stood up to protect her, and that it was all going to be all right...

They were the words that she ’should’ say, that a skilled politician would say to comfort someone in their time of need and prove that she was a person who cared... But Adala didn’t think they were the words that Charlotte needed to hear.

Charlotte had been brave for hours tonight. She had earned the right to fall apart, and Adala did not want to pull her out of the falling apart by saying anything that would make her feel that she had to compose herself again. They were both noblewomen who had been trained from their earliest years to say the right things, and to perform pleasantries even while they buried their dead...

If Adala said something, then Charlotte would perform all the right responses, because it’s what she was expected of her... But Adala didn’t want to force Charlotte to perform, not when she’d nearly lost her mother.

So instead Adala held her, shielding her closest friend from the rest of the room while she watched her own family across the hall.

Valeri Leufroy was carrying Betrys in his arms.

Adala had to blink several times before she believed that she wasn’t seeing a phantom, or an apparition made of the dark, smoky energy carrying her mother away, but it really was her father. The same father who refused to carry her back into their manor when she fell playing in the garden as a much younger girl, had stooped to lift his wife from the ground before ordering his knights to clear a path to Sir Ollie...

"The Kingdom of Iron is a place for the strong and hard-hearted, Adala," her father had told her. "I won’t have you embarrassing us with your weakness when the time comes for you to represent us there. Get up and walk if you can, crawl if you must, but the only strength you can truly rely on to save you is the strength you build yourself..."

She had been seven years old, but she’d never forgotten.

One of her fathers shoved an anxious-looking squire aside, knocking him to the floor and forcing the young man to scamper back if he didn’t want to be trampled underfoot.

"He’s never carried me like that," Adala said, the words slipping past her lips before she’d decided to speak them. They were smaller, more fragile words than she could remember using before, but that didn’t mean they weren’t true.

"He stopped when I was very small," she said, shaking her head at the extraordinary display of tenderness her father was making right now. "Does he really care so much? Or is he afraid that Sir Ollie won’t rescue Mother because Father chose to stand with Lord Owain..."

Charlotte’s shaking paused. She lifted her face from Adala’s shoulder, looking at her with red-rimmed eyes and cheeks stained with tears, while her head tilted to one side in obvious confusion.

"I, I don’t think Sir Ollie would refuse to help someone if he could," she said, pointing at the flame-haired knight who was kneeling over one of Baron LeGleau’s stricken knights, cutting the buttons off his tunic one by one.

"He went because Lady Jocelynn asked him to, but he didn’t stop after he saved my mother," Charlotte said. "I, I’m sure he’ll save yours too..."

"I’m sure he will," Adala said softly. "It was never him that I doubted. It’s just... Does my father really love my mother that much?" Adala asked, leaving the rest unsaid.

Part of her wanted to believe that her father was just performing, putting on an act of desperate concern to build a wall of distance between himself and Lord Owain, so he could claim to have been injured too when the time came to be held accountable for his support of the monster who had tried to become their marquis.

She could believe that, because it’s what her father had trained her to do, and because it hurt far less than the alternative... That her father truly loved her mother and couldn’t bear to see her suffer...

She held Charlotte tighter against her, but she did not cry, because she had been told a long time ago that she would have to be stronger than that. Meanwhile, Charlotte wept for both of them, because she knew Adala couldn’t, so she’d do her part too.

The two young ladies, stricken with fear, worry, and the pain of old wounds, were among the lucky ones in the Great Hall. On the far side of the hall, two tables away from where Sir Ollie had turned to help Baroness Betrys, Lady Tosha Saliou was on her knees on the flagstones beside the body of her father-in-law.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Preden Saliou had been the pillar holding their family up ever since her husband’s death. He’d been as unshakable as an oak tree, coming out of retirement to take up the burdens of the barony while her boys were little more than babes.

She’d cried when her husband died. She’d fallen to pieces that felt small enough to slip through the eye of an embroidery needle, and only the need to tend to her children had kept her from following her husband into death as she was overwhelmed by despair.

It had been years before she emerged from the manor to walk among her people again, and when they did, it had been Preden Saliou who had supported her first hesitant steps back into the world. He should have been grieving for his son, but instead, he’d picked up his burdens, helped to raise his grandsons, and never once made her feel like something less than his daughter, just because his son was lost.

And now, in the span of a few heartbeats, the mighty oak who had held up her sky was gone...