The youngest did not remember the day his mother left.
That absence—of memory, not of her—was the thing that unsettled him most once he grew old enough to understand that something was wrong. Important moments, people said, were supposed to feel sharp, clean, unforgettable. This one didn't. There was no single sound he could point to, no door slamming, no raised voice echoing through marble halls. It was as if she had been thinning out of the world for weeks, stretched finer and finer by time, until one morning she simply wasn't there anymore and everyone else seemed to know before he did.
What remained were fragments.
Her chair at the long table stayed pushed in. No one claimed it. The servants dusted around it carefully, like it might bite if touched. The windows in her private rooms stayed open even when the air turned cold, curtains moving gently, breathing, carrying a scent he sometimes thought he imagined. He learned quickly which corridors no one liked to walk through anymore.
His father avoided them completely.
That was how the boy knew, before anyone explained anything, that something inside the palace had broken. His father—once steady, always present—now chose paths that made no sense, long routes that curved away from light and memory alike. He still wore the crown when duty demanded it. He still sat the throne when the council required it. But something essential had collapsed inward, leaving behind a man who knew how to stand but not how to fill the space he occupied.
The boy stayed close.
Not because anyone told him to. Because distance suddenly felt dangerous.
At night, he climbed into his father's lap even though some servants whispered that he was getting too old for it, and his father would hold him too tightly, fingers pressing into fabric like he was afraid the child might disappear the same way she had.
"You're here," his father whispered once, voice barely more than breath.
"Yes," the boy answered, every time after that, because it felt necessary to confirm it, to anchor something before it drifted away.
Sometimes his father didn't respond. On those nights, the boy stayed awake longer than he should have, counting breaths, listening to the rise and fall of a chest that felt like the last solid thing in the world.
He didn't understand politics.
But he understood blame.
The palace had changed its voice.
Conversations stopped when he entered rooms. Servants bowed deeper than necessary, their politeness stiff, strained, like an apology they couldn't explain. Lords watched him with eyes that lingered too long or slid away too quickly, weighing him, measuring what kind of child he might become.
He heard things he wasn't meant to.
"She abandoned her duty."
"The kingdom cannot survive uncertainty."
"What of the children?"
"What of the King?"
Her title was spoken carefully. Her name almost never.
He learned to recognize it not by sound, but by silence—the way voices faltered just before it, the way sentences were reshaped to avoid saying it outright.
At night, when the palace finally slept, the memory returned without warning.
His mother laughing.
Not the controlled smile she wore in court. Not the distant warmth she gave her children when others were watching. This laughter bent her forward, unguarded, breathless. She leaned into the beastwoman beside her in a way the boy had never seen her lean into anyone before.
Someone had said the beastwoman's name once, back then, casually, as if it meant nothing. He remembered it only because of the way his mother repeated it softly afterward, like a secret she wasn't meant to have.
The boy remembered gripping the bark of a tree so tightly his palms had stung, watching from hiding as his mother rested her forehead against the other woman's, as if the world had finally aligned into something livable.
And the thought had arrived, sudden and terrifying in its clarity.
This happiness has a shape.
And I am not inside it.
Back at the palace, weeks later, raised voices echoed through the council chamber.
The boy sat near the base of the throne, allowed because no one had the heart to send him away, and because the King no longer had the strength to argue.
"She cannot simply return," one lord snapped.
"She is still Queen," another countered.
"She left us," a third voice cut in sharply. "Left the King. Left the realm."
The boy looked up.
His father sat unmoving above him, crown resting heavy on his brow, hand clenched so tightly against the armrest that his knuckles had gone pale.
"She is still their mother," someone said, gesturing vaguely toward the royal children as if they were ideas, not breathing things.
The boy stood.
The sound was small—a soft scrape of shoes against stone—but it cut through the chamber all the same.
"I don't need her," he said.
Every head turned.
His voice trembled, and he hated that it betrayed him, but he didn't take the words back.
"I have my father."
For a moment, no one spoke.
The King reached down then, pulling the boy close, resting a hand at the back of his head.
"My son," someone murmured quietly, not sure whether it was a warning or a prayer.
That night, long after the palace had gone quiet, the King spoke.
"They will say she has the right to return," he said, staring into the dark. "They will use my name. Yours."
The boy thought of the child born of laughter and freedom, a child whose existence had shaped itself around joy instead of duty.
"She doesn't get to choose twice," he said.
His father didn't answer.
Time folded strangely after that. Messengers came and went. Letters arrived sealed with crests that felt heavier than wax. Borders stirred, not with invasion, but uncertainty.
When the Queen returned, it wasn't with ceremony.
It was quiet.
The boy stood in the courtyard when someone whispered, "Your Highness… the Queen has arrived."
He turned.
She looked older. Not broken, not weak. Weighted. Her hair was braided differently. Her eyes carried shadows that hadn't been there before.
She saw him.
"Ca—" someone breathed beside him, then stopped.
She didn't say his name.
Neither did he.
The King came to stand behind him, presence solid, silent.
No words were exchanged.
The palace fractured.
Some argued for restoration. Others demanded abdication. The war that followed began not with blades, but with declarations and refusals. When steel finally rang, it felt almost secondary.
She lived.
Stripped of crown. Stripped of authority. Allowed to remain only because blood could not be undone without tearing the kingdom apart. She was given rooms at the edge of the palace, close enough to watch, far enough to forget.
The child from elsewhere was brought to court.
"Princess," someone announced, voice strained.
She looked nothing like him.
And too much like their mother.
That was the problem.
He watched her once from across the courtyard.
She was laughing.
Not the same.
But close enough.
He turned away.
Later, alone, sitting on the cold stone floor of his chamber, the boy pressed his forehead to his knees and whispered the only truth that stayed.
"I stayed."
It didn't make the ache leave.
It never did.