"Henry."
His name escaped her as a splintered sound, a fracture in the fabric of the moment. Gisela swayed toward him, her movements slow and drugged, fighting an invisible current. Her hand lifted, trembling as if with palsy, and clutched his. Her fingers were shards of ice against his passive skin, her grip a frantic, silent scream. Her eyes, wide and scalpel-sharp with pristine horror, locked onto his.
He did not return the pressure. He let her hand cling to his inert one, a hollow pantomime of supplication. He tilted his head, his gaze dissecting, clinical.
"Do you appreciate your gift, little one?"
His voice was a low, intimate frost, meant for her ears alone, each syllable honed to a vicious, elegant point. There was no anger in it, no passion—only the serene, absolute gratification of a lesson impeccably delivered. He watched the comprehension detonate behind her eyes, the instant she realized the promised surprise was not an object, but an orchestrated atrocity. Her anguish was not collateral; it was the intended target. And he had secured her a private box for the show.
"Henry, I beg you—stop this." Gisela's voice was a shadow, a threadbare whisper unraveling into the suffocating silence.
" You will stand beside me and watch her burn," he decreed, the words falling like a final gavel in a frozen court. Gisela's body went rigid, a statue of terror, her marrow turned to ice by his cold resolve.
"Not her… take me. Please—" A solitary tear escaped, not from grief, but from the unbearable weight of her failing spirit.
"Precisely," Queen Caroline's voice sliced the air, cold and surgical. "Let history record this death as your creation. You planted the seed of her destruction."
Henry's gaze ensnared Gisela's, a chilling trap. He raised his voice, and it carried over the courtyard like a frigid wind. "Bind her. Light the pyre."
"NO! HENRY, DON'T!" Her scream was primal, stripped of all humanity, echoing with a desperation meant for the confines of dark tombs, not the stark, pitiless light before a kingdom.
He turned back to her, his hand rising, not in rage, but in a grotesque facsimile of tenderness. He cupped her face, absorbing the warmth from her skin. His thumb caught the tear, smearing it across her cheek like a brand of ownership.
"My love," he whispered, the intimacy laced with malevolence. "Know this: every scream that escapes her lips… is your name etched into eternity."
Hilda's eyes found Gisela's one final time—a silent, desperate communion across the smoke-fouled air. Then the guards stripped the last rag from her body, leaving her naked and trembling before the ravenous crowd. Coarse ropes sawed into her flesh as they lashed her to the thick, soot-blackened stake. Tinder-dry hay mounded around her feet, whispering of the end to come.
A torch dipped. The fire caught with a soft, eager whump.
Then it roared to life.
Hilda's first scream was not a sound but an event—a high, piercing shriek of pure, animal agony that tore the air and hushed the mob for one horrific second. The flames leapt, kissing her ankles, then climbing her legs with terrible, rapturous grace.
"Burn… burn… BURN!" The chant began, a low, guttural drumbeat, then swelled into a deafening, rhythmic roar. It was a beast with a thousand throats, feasting on her suffering.
Gisela did not scream. She imploded. Her legs dissolved as if the bones had been powdered, and she collapsed onto the cold balcony stone, a marionette with severed strings. She lay motionless, but her eyes were wide, unblinking, devouring the horror—the violent arch of Hilda's spine against the ropes, the skin bubbling and blackening, the sweet, greasy stench of burning hair and flesh that already rode the wind.
Henry's voice cut through the din, cool and intimate at her ear. "It was scheduled for Smithfield. A common butcher's yard. But I had it moved here, to our home. So you could observe without… obstruction." He spoke as one might note the rain, as Hilda's screams twisted into something beyond sound, a noise that seemed to flay the soul from anyone who heard it. "I wanted you to understand the exact economy of disobedience."
"Go on. Take her back to her chambers. Restrain her thoroughly. I will not endure another display."
Henry's command was delivered without heat, with the chilling finality of a man ordering a soiled garment removed.
Two guards moved with grim proficiency. They did not lift Gisela from where she had melted upon the stone. They hooked their hands under her arms and dragged her, her body a boneless weight, her slippers scraping twin trails of oblivion. Her head lolled back, baring the white, vulnerable column of her throat, her eyes still fixed on some private scorching etched into the air.
As they hauled her away, the silk of her gown sighing against the balcony, Henry watched, his gaze analytical. He observed the total abdication in her limbs, the terrifying emptiness in her face. There was no resistance left, only the limp, unnerving stillness of a shock so absolute it had erased her.
The guards' hands were impersonal, their duty mundane. They were not escorting a queen; they were disposing of evidence—a shattered object to be stored before it could further disrupt the peace. They left him standing amidst the dying echoes of the crowd's fervor and the ghostly, clinging scent of cooked meat, taking his silent, vanquished lesson away to be bound and shelved, already as inert as stone.
---
Click.
The sound was not an opening, but the metallic snap of a lock disengaging. Henry's form filled the doorway, a shadow sheared from the torchlight at his back.
Inside, Gisela sat bound to a straight-backed chair. Ropes bit into the delicate bones of her wrists and cinched her torso—a queen trussed like a sacrifice. Her body was a still life, but her face was a fresco of silent agony. Tears fell in a continuous, soundless stream, each one anointing the memory she could not scour clean: Hilda's final, widening eyes, the moment before the flames swallowed them whole.
"The tailor is here," Henry said, his voice flat, devoid of color. "Your measurements were conveyed. All that remains is the fitting. The gown must be perfection."
She did not turn. Her gaze remained anchored to the cold wall, as if she could still see the afterimage of the pyre. A faint, broken sigh escaped her—the sound of a last interior string snapping.
He stepped forward until the polished leather of his boot entered her lowered sightline. With two cold fingers, he tilted her chin upward, forcing her glazed, red-rimmed eyes to meet his. He studied the tear tracks as a jeweler might assess flaws in a cracked gem.
"I expect you will look… remarkable in the dress," he said, the compliment falling from his lips like a stone.
He moved behind her. His hands worked at the knots, not with haste, but with deliberate precision. The ropes loosened and fell away, leaving behind deep, cruel impressions in her flesh. Gisela did not move. She was a statue of resignation, her body present but her spirit extinguished.
"Sweetheart," he murmured, his palm coming to rest against her cheek. His touch was dry, cool—the touch of a mortician. "I know this feels… severe. But a garden cannot flourish with poison at its roots." His voice dropped to a intimate, chilling whisper near her ear. "I merely uprooted the weed. So my rose might remember how to bloom."
His hand slid from her cheek, down the column of her throat, and came to rest on her shoulder. Then it drifted lower, tracing the line of her spine through the thin fabric of her shift. She felt nothing. No shiver, no revulsion, no life. The pain had grown so vast it had become its own void, swallowing all sensation.
He turned and gestured to the corridor. The royal tailor and two attendants stood waiting, a cataract of blood-red silk pooled in their arms. Their expressions were carefully void. The dress they held was not a garment—it was an instrument of correction, and this fitting was not an honor, but the next phase of her sentence.
In the heavy quiet of the chamber, the luxurious fabric looked less like silk and more like a freshly dyed winding sheet, waiting to be tailored into a permanent skin. Henry watched, his gaze unwavering, as they advanced. The fitting would proceed. She would be laced into the color of fire and violence, a walking memorial to the death she had just witnessed, stitched tightly into the next chapter of her punishment.