Chapter 113: Skargardian Keep
The Skargardian Keep rose beside the main royal castle like a second heart of the kingdom, older in spirit if not in stone. It was a vast square-shaped structure with high white walls and corner towers that caught the evening light long after the lower buildings had surrendered it. Even from the outer approach, it carried a different presence from the palace itself. The royal castle was built to govern. The Keep had been built to be remembered.
Its history was old enough that people repeated it over the centuries. A thousand years ago, when the kingdom was first founded, the land belonged to two figures who later passed into legend: a male elf and a human woman, both of whom were counted among the important members of the Resistance against the Demons. They had also fought in the war against the Demons along with the Human God, Kaelor, and after his death, they carved out a kingdom of their own there. Their child, born of both bloodlines, became the first true king of Skargardia.
That origin had never been forgotten.
Even now, the Skargardian royal line took pride in its elven descent, and it showed in them often enough. Their ears bore none of the pointed shape of true elves, yet the resemblance remained everywhere else: the finer bone structure, the clearer skin, the proud lines of the face, the sort of beauty that looked almost too exact to be wholly human.
The Keep itself had been born from that same founding pride. It had not originally been raised for war, administration, or defense. It had been built for a wedding. Before the royal castle had taken shape around it, before the later expansions and halls and state rooms, the founders had wanted a magnificent place in which to celebrate their union, and so the Keep had been made first. Since then, the tradition had endured. Royal weddings were held there. Major ceremonies were held there. Any event meant to carry the weight of the crown eventually passed through those marble halls.
Tonight was no exception.
Princess Camellia Van Skargardia’s coming-of-age celebration and birthday ceremony was being held inside the Keep, and by the time Ulrich and the sisters reached its entrance, the grounds were already alive with noble traffic and torchlight.
The moment they stepped down and approached, the knights stationed at the entrance recognized Ulrich and immediately moved aside to admit him. There was no delay, no fumbling with names, no hesitation once the Rubenhart crest and Ulrich himself had been seen together.
"Are we the last ones?" Hermione asked under her breath, glancing toward the line of already parked carriages.
There were many of them. Too many for the question to be foolish. Judging from the number of noble coaches arranged across the grounds and the steady hum of voices drifting from within, they really did seem to be among the final arrivals.
She looked at Ulrich’s back.
He did not seem bothered in the slightest.
"He did it on purpose," Airam said quietly beside her.
Hermione blinked and turned her head. "Airam?"
Esther looked at her too.
Airam kept her gaze forward. "He came late so that when we enter, everyone will already be there to see us."
For a moment, Hermione could only stare at her.
Then she looked back at Ulrich again, at the calm, straight line of his shoulders, at the way he continued walking ahead without even needing to turn to make it obvious he had heard them.
He had done it purposefully.
Of course, he had.
Hermione felt the complaint rise at once and bit it back just as quickly. It was annoying, if not cruel. It was also, she hated to admit, sensible. If the worst moment of the evening was going to be their entrance, then facing it immediately might be better than spending an hour dreading it while standing half-hidden at the edge of the hall.
She still wanted to be angry.
But she understood.
So the three sisters went on without further protest, keeping close behind Ulrich as they were led inside by one of the castle knights.
At the very least, his presence ahead of them helped.
The Keep’s interior was as grand as its exterior promised. They passed through long, ornamented corridors lined with white stone and sublime wood, the walls broken by tall mirrors, old portraits, banners, and silver-bracketed lamps that cast warm light across the marble floor. Their footsteps sounded quieter there than they should have, smothered by thick runners and the sheer scale of the place. Servants moved in the distance. Guards stood at intervals along the halls. Every turn of the corridor revealed another piece of royal excess, another reminder that they had stepped into the very center of Skargardian power.
Then the knight guiding them turned one last corner and stopped before a pair of tall wooden doors.
They were richly carved, the surface worked with old royal designs and climbing patterns that had likely been restored again and again over the centuries. Even through the thickness of the wood, the sound from the other side reached them clearly enough: voices layered over voices, laughter, the low swell of conversation, the bright thread of music carried by bards and court musicians somewhere deeper in the hall.
The event was right there.
Just beyond those doors.
Esther’s fingers tightened slightly in the fabric of her skirt. Hermione lifted her chin. Airam’s face did not change.
Ulrich did not look back at them immediately. For one brief moment, he only stood there, as if listening to the sound on the other side, then he spoke in a low voice.
"Don’t embarrass me."
A vein twitched at Hermione’s forehead.
She said nothing.
That alone showed how tense she was.
The knights on either side of the doors exchanged one confirming glance with Ulrich, then each reached for a handle. With a strong motion, they pulled the doors open.
The first thing that struck them was the light.
It poured outward in such brightness that Esther blinked hard at once, and even Hermione had to narrow her eyes for a moment. The second thing was the sound. Music, voices, crystal, cloth, movement, everything spilled together at once into a rich, noisy swell.
Ulrich had already stepped forward.
Airam followed first behind him, then Hermione, then Esther. Their eyes adjusted quickly as they crossed the threshold into the great hall itself.
It was enormous.
Gold light fell from the chandeliers high overhead. Noble guests filled the space in glittering clusters, silk and jewels and military dress uniforms mixing beneath vaulted ceilings and towering windows now dark with night. Musicians played at one side of the hall. Servants moved with trays through the crowd. The porcelain tiles floor reflected hems, shoes, and light in blurred brilliance.
For one brief instant, the noise continued unchanged.
Then the doors closed behind them.
And the hall shifted.
Conversation thinned first nearest the entrance, then further out. Heads turned one by one, then in groups, until the movement spread across the room in a visible wave. Laughter died. Words cut off mid-sentence. Fans paused halfway to painted mouths. Men and women alike turned to look toward the new arrivals.
Their attention fixed first, as expected, on Ulrich.
The Count Ulrich Van Rubenhart had entered.
That alone was enough to still a room.
And then, just as quickly, their eyes moved past him to the three girls following at his back in blue, red, and shadow-dark purple, and the silence in the hall deepened as Ulrich advanced across the threshold and led them fully inside.
The sisters fidgeted slightly beneath the stunning silence that had fallen over the hall.
Ulrich’s arrival alone could have drawn attention. That much was expected. The Count Ulrich Van Rubenhart was not the sort of man who entered a room unnoticed, especially not a room full of nobles already alert to rank, danger, and reputation. But this silence, this sudden death of voices, this way even the musicians faltered for a beat before recovering, was not because of him alone.
It was because of the three girls standing behind him.
Eurich Van Rubenhart had only ever had one son. Everyone in the hall knew that. No one could mistake these girls for cousins or younger sisters hidden somewhere in the family line. And everyone also knew the rumor, no, by now it was far beyond rumor, it was official that Ulrich had adopted three witches shortly after erasing a witch village from the map.
Even the dullest noble in the hall could connect those facts.
Those three girls in noble gowns, walking behind Ulrich beneath the crest of House Rubenhart, could only be the witches he had taken in.
That was what held the room still.
No one spoke.
No one dared.
The silence itself had teeth to it now.
Ulrich ignored all of them.
He did not spare a glance for the faces turning toward him, nor for the fans frozen in jeweled hands, nor for the men whose expressions failed to settle between offense, curiosity, and disbelief. His gaze moved past the crowd toward the far end of the hall, where two thrones had been placed on the raised dais beneath the royal banners.
He found Kaliantha and Antonias there immediately.
Etiquette came before everything else. However, tonight unfolded, the first duty was to greet the sovereign.
So Ulrich walked forward.
Airam followed first, moving at his back with the same calm she had worn since stepping out of the carriage. Hermione remained frozen for half a second longer, still adjusting to the weight of every gaze in the hall, then quickly reached for Esther’s hand and tugged her along before she could lose herself entirely in nerves.
Their footsteps sounded too clear in the silence.
Blue silk. Red silk. Dark purple, nearly black. All of it moved behind Ulrich through the parted attention of the court.
At last, he stopped at the proper distance from the dais.
He raised his gaze and spared Antonias only the briefest acknowledgment before looking directly at Kaliantha.
She was, as ever, breathtakingly beautiful.
There was no one in the world who matched her beauty, perhaps in Sylphira, the floating lands of Elves, but Kaliantha was definitely the most beautiful woman in the human world.
Her platinum-pink hair had been drawn up in an elaborate royal style and crowned in gold, the arrangement exposing the long, elegant line of her neck and the fine structure of her face. Her eyes remained the same rare mismatched pair that made people remember her after seeing her only once: one sapphire blue, one emerald green, bright and cold beneath pale pink lashes. The old elven blood in Skargardia’s royal line had favored her strongly, and it showed in every detail of her beauty.
A stranger who knew nothing of her would never have guessed she was the mother of a grown son, and teenage girl. She looked barely beyond her mid-twenties, perhaps younger in stillness, if not for the authority in her bearing and the weight in her gaze. Her beauty was too regal to be mistaken for youth. The calm in her eyes made that impossible.
Ulrich did not linger on her longer than necessary.
He lowered his head slightly and placed one hand against his chest.
"Your Majesty."
Hermione reacted at once. So did Esther. Both of them dropped to one knee without hesitation, one hand against their chest just as Elana had drilled into them again and again for formal presentation.
"Your Majesty," Hermione said.
"Your Majesty," Esther followed more softly.
There was perhaps no strict need to kneel so deeply for this greeting in such a setting, but Elana had insisted on it. Better to show too much humility than too little. Better to make the first impression one of discipline, respect, and clear submission to the crown. For witches brought into the heart of the Skargardian court, that mattered more than almost anything else.
A faint tension rose anyway.
Hermione felt it before she even looked to the side.
Airam was still standing.
She had not moved.
She stared at Kaliantha from where she stood, her face unreadable but her stillness saying enough. Airam did not hide what she felt well when it came to things she truly hated, and the kingdom that had hunted witches for generations sat at the center of those hatreds. The royal family stood above the system that had burned, chased, and butchered women like them for centuries. The royal family, which had found their village and ordered its annihilation, they were the real responsible for their mother’s death.
Whatever restraint she had shown all evening, it strained here.
"Airam," Hermione whispered with a pleading expression.
Airam’s eyes shifted, not to Kaliantha now, but downward toward Hermione. Then to Esther, whose anxious face had gone visibly pale beneath all the effort spent preparing her. Esther looked close to panic again, one frightened breath away from believing everything was about to go wrong at once.
Airam’s teeth clenched faintly.
Then, at last, she bent.
She lowered herself to one knee as well, the dark folds of her gown spreading around her in a beautiful halo, and placed her hand against her chest in the same formal gesture as her sisters.
But unlike them, she said nothing.