Dawn came like warm honey through the shutters, slow and golden. Josephine woke to the familiar weight at her side — Xavi's chest rising and falling under the soft rumple of the sheets, his arm thrown over her waist. For a breath she stayed there, eyes half-closed, the memory of last night still coiling pleasantly through her limbs. He smelled like cedarwood and night air; the bed was still warm where they had lain together.
She slid her palm over the nape of his neck, feather-light, then down the wide planes of his back. He groaned softly and turned into her touch. Josephine pressed a small, careful kiss to the corner of his mouth, then another to the stubbled jaw. When she moved to sit up, the room explained itself in small, domestic details — a stray ribbon of hair tucked behind his ear by the same hand that had fallen asleep against his chest; the curl of his fingers from the pillow; the faint silver-blue of dawn on the floor. She took the blanket and tucked it around him, fingers lingering on his shoulder before she slipped from the bed.
Hot water was a remedy she favored. She let the shower clear the last of sleep from her hair and the heaviness from her skin. Then, wrapped in a simple robe, she padded down to the kitchens where the castle's hearth was already alive, and began to move with the steady, practiced grace of someone who loved feeding people. Pots simmered; loaves browned; the house smell of oregano and roasted roots filled the corridor. Josephine's hands moved as if they knew every tile and pan by memory. She hummed tunelessly while she worked.
Adris was asleep in his small bed on the landing when she found him. His lashes were still damp from sleep; he was sixteen months of concentrated mischief and sunlight. She lifted him as if he were a feather and carried him to her bathing room, the boy murmuring in his sleep into the crook of her neck. She washed him with the same tenderness she reserved for seedlings she tended — gentle, precise — shampooing, drying, dressing him in soft linen. In the dining hall she settled him into his high chair and fed him spoon by spoon, the little boy opening his mouth for each bite as if his appetite was a ceremony. When Josephine tipped the spoon aside and laughed at the smear of porridge on his chin, he squashed his face against her hand and said, with the blunt honesty of children: "I love you, Adris said and she smiled at him.
She kissed both his cheeks, one after the other. The family, already gathering, looked on in a warm, shifting silence.
Velara watched from the shadow of an archway across the hall, fingers clenched until the knuckles went white. Her eyes were a small, hard thing: not grief but calculation. In the dark inner gallery of her thoughts she rehearsed the words that had made her heart ice over years ago. I will take my husband and son back, she vowed inwardly, the sentence like a blade. Even if it means taking you out of the way. I will be Xavi's queen.
Xoni caught her eye and gave a thin, private smile — not of kindness, but of complicity. Velara's fist tightened. The whole scene—Josephine with Adris, Xavi glancing up across that loving domesticity—was a tinderbox to her resolve.
Xavi, for his part, woke with the light in his eyes and a memory of last night's hush flickering across his face like a smile. He moved into the day like a man who had found something precious and would not misplace it. There was a soft rap at his door while he dressed. Xoni slipped in and sat on the edge of the bed, steady as a shadow.
"Velara is planning something," she said without preface. "Looks like she's aiming at Josephine."
Xavi's jaw set. There was a spark in his gaze that sharpened his features. "If she touches her—if she touches a hair—" He began, and the rest of the sentence hovered and fell into more brutal clarity: "I will kill her."
"We need a full plan," Xoni said calmly. "Velara wants to worm her way back into this castle — to you, to Adris. She intends to use him as crown bait."
They moved down to the main hall together.
The table was an island of warmth. Josephine had made more than enough: a feast for a family that filled every chair. Kendra reached for a platter and tasted, then shut her eyes with that small delighted sound that meant something like reverence. "Oh my goodness. This food is amazing, my dear Queen — your hands are blessed."
Josephine gave a modest smile and kept serving. Remus watched from across the table with an intensity that belonged equally to fascination and something darker; his gaze returned again and again to Josephine's face, the small curve of her jaw, the way her hands moved. Even during the wedding his eyes had not left her for long. There was a calculation in his look that Xavi noted and did not like.
"Mama, up please," Adris said, squirming until Josephine lifted him to her lap. The boy curled into her like a little sea stone. Around them sat thirteen family members: cousins and warriors, mages and creatures whose blood mixed old magics. Eight men, five women — a tangle of loyalties and old promises:
Zaria, a werewolf whose silence held storms.
Ahsa, half-elf, half-wolf, with wary, thoughtful eyes.
Yora, a vampire whose laugh was a forked thing.
Seika, half-witch, half-wolf, hands always stained with herbs.
Celine and Celeste, twin girls: Celine bent to wandcraft and charms, Celeste colder, a born vampire.
The men: Emeric (half-vampire, half-siren), Amory (half-demon, half-vampire), Remus (werewolf), Garvy (a wizard), Morvan (demon), Reve (half-wizard, half-wolf), Avic (vampire), and Arkin (half-demon, half-wolf).
It was a family stitched together on battlefields and bargains. They honored their king — "All hail King Xavi!" flared up when he entered — but they watched one another, too. Alliances were not only shown in words.
Josephine moved with measured, unfussy grace. She set a plate in front of Xavi and he, very gently, took her wrist and made the universal, private gesture — "Sit." He saw her incline to accept and then someone shoved past.
Velara lurched into the space without ceremony. She pushed Josephine aside as if protocol were a thing you could elbow through in anger. The room sliced open.
Xavi was a wolf in his reply. He caught Josephine before she could lose balance and there was a fierceness in him that folded the air. "Are you stupid?" he asked, but the force behind the words did not just bruise Velara's pride — it silenced a hall. He covered Josephine's ears with callused hands as if protecting the child again, though she was fully grown.
Josephine's eyes squeezed closed at the volume; sound became a pressure behind her lids. Xavi's voice in the cavern of that moment commanded: "Move from my wife. Sit. Now."
The family trembled from the vibration of his authority; the room rearranged itself politely around his demand. Queen Kendra stood and, with the courtly weight of her station, dismissed Velara with a cold, precise look. "Move from there," she said to Velara, and the woman backed away as if the queen's eye were a lever.
"Sorry, sweetheart," Xavi murmured. Josephine, who had been startled, gave him an apologetic, almost guilty smile as she sat and accepted the medicine he had prepared for her. She made that face that always made him laugh — the little puppy-dog expression that found crooked edges in his defenses and smoothed them.
"Drink it all," he said.
She looked up at him with those imploring hands they both used when words would not do. "Promise to show me your form later?" she mouthed. She wanted validation of something quietly held between them — a secret, perhaps, or a promise that she could see him fully.
"I promise," Xavi answered, and the depth of his tone was all a vow needed.
She took the medicine like a warrior drinking a draught before battle — one breath, tilt, swallow. Her face wrinkled at the flavor and the private, internal "Ewwww!" escaped her as thought. Xavi heard it like a bell. Remus smirked; Xavi saw, slid his hand across the table and gripped Josephine's palm until the smirk fell away.
Later, Xavi sat upon his throne cradling Adris, a little boy heavy enough to sag a king's shoulder in the most comfortable way. Josephine carried a basket heavy with flowers — the ones she tended from a plot of earth near the eastern wall. She'd grown them for Xavi: starry blooms in his favorite blue-black hue. She moved through the hall like someone with peace sewn into her pockets.
Remus lingered near the arches, voice low and venom-laced. "Don't get any funny ideas," Morvan warned, not kindly. Avic added, blunt and stony, "We don't know what she's capable of." There was a real fear of the unknown among them — Josephine's power, whatever it might be, sat like an unopened instrument in the center of the room.
"Let him be," Celine snapped. "She is special to Xavi and his wife. Let him be, Remus, or he will kill you this time."
Remus's reply was a step away and a plan. "I'd like to see him try," he said smoothly, then turned and left.
Xavi's sensory edges were keener than usual. His hearing sharpened; a detail that would have been soft the day prior now glinted like a wire. He watched Josephine pick flowers beneath a sky that harrumphed with heavy clouds despite the hour. He thought of the first time he had seen her bending over the soil, of the way she softened the world by giving it herbs and color.
Remus's hunger for the throne was no secret. He had tried once and lost to Xavi in the royal battle — a public, brutal placing of claim. Velara had seen the vacuum and stepped toward it, eyes bright with a plan: if she could place Adris on a path that led away from Xavi, perhaps the line would bend to her favor. But she had underestimated the entanglement of father and son's devotion, and she had underestimated Josephine.
The royal family and the retinue flowed through the hall like a parade of shifting loyalties. Velara's gaze pinned itself on the vacant throne at Xavi's side. Josephine moved along the edge of the room with her basket; Assia and Lyra — newly married and utterly fond of Josephine — helped her with garlands, their smiles bright as new coins. Josephine had always treated them like daughters of her own choosing; they returned the kindness with unabashed devotion.
When Josephine knelt in the small room that had, by custom, become hers, she placed flowers with the careful, almost ritual attention of someone who knew how to make beauty hold: each bloom rotated, stems trimmed to fit, petals brushed for perfect repose. Ceillie's picture — the one that hung crooked on the wall and had been straightened by more hands than one — watched like an old, soft guardian.
"All hail King Xavi!" Caius intoned and the hall answered. They bowed; the ritual of respect moved like a tide around the father-king. Xavi sat, legs crossed, hand to chin in a pose that married thought and ease. The morning became business: cases presented, petitions filed, meetings set. He handled them all with the same clean efficiency he used in battle. Paperwork, war strategy, small domestic quarrels — his mind stitched them together with an almost cruel ease.
"Set the council meetings," he said, voice even. "Meetings with the neighboring kings and queens on the eighth of April." The date hung in the air like a plan carved in stone.
He leaned toward his grandmother, his respect and the soft glow he kept for her lighting his face. "I want to start preparing for Josephine's coronation," he said quietly. His tone left no room for debate. "She will be my queen."
Kendra turned a face that had seen the arc of the house and all the storms that came with it. "Did she pass all your tests?" she asked, words wrapped in guile and the queen's ancient politeness.
"Yes. Even my mother's tests — without her knowing." Xavi's pride was thinly veiled in the way he looked at Josephine.
Kendra's response was dry as old parchment. "Fine. But you know Velara wouldn't let this happen."
Xavi's eyes curved into something fierce and small. "She won't have to know," he said. "We'll simply watch it happen in her eyes." The part of his voice that hoped to unsettle his rival was visible; he wanted Velara to see the coronation and feel the cold of having been outmaneuvered. "I hope she's satiated," he added under his breath. "Then she will realize she cannot challenge what she has already lost."
When Xavi entered the room where Josephine had been laying out flowers, the light caught her hair and made a crown of gold out of the ordinary. She smiled and handed him the bouquet. He inhaled; the scent unfurled something like contentment across his face. He kissed her, the press of lips a public seal as much as a private one.
"Kara!" she said in her mind when the younger woman bounded in like a gust of sunlight. Kara hugged Josephine with the energy of someone who refused to be still. The two women spoke in excited whispers about the libraries and maps, about arcane things that might point them towards whatever Josephine and Kara sought — a map, a weapon, a name, a truth.
"Any new weapons yet?" Kara asked, hopeful.
Josephine shook her head. "Maybe we'll wait," Kara said, holding her like an anchor. Josephine's brow shadowed. The search had been fruitless so far; shelves had been moved, ledgers read, secrets teased, and the library remained stubborn.
"Xavi told me about his ex," Kara said abruptly. "She's going to be trouble."
Josephine's chest tightened, the shape of a memory that smelled of old wine and sharper knives. She will take Adris away from me, Josephine thought, and the thought passed like a stone in water. Xavi, hearing the tremor in her thought, answered for both of them — the low, steady tone that was his private shield: "Nobody will take him from you, Jojo."
"Yes. Absolutely nobody will," Kara confirmed, and Josephine let that promise sit in the warmth between them like an ember.
The house hummed with the small, essential mid-morning orchestration of family life: a page here, a plot there, a heated inflection and then a laugh. But under the noise, scheming clenched its jaw. Velara plotted. Remus watched. Some wanted crowns; others wanted safety. And in the middle of it all, Josephine arranged flowers and bathed her son, and Xavi — king, lover, warrior — planned a coronation, and promised, with the soft iron of his will, that nothing and no one would take what he had found.
At dusk the sky leaned into violet. Josephine pressed her forehead against the window and watched Adris sleep in his small bed down the corridor. Xavi stood in the doorway and did not disturb her. For a long moment neither spoke. Words would have been redundant; their quiet was an agreement. Later, she knew, there would be plans to make and enemies to outwit. For now, she let herself keep the scent of his kiss and the memory of his hands.
In the colder rooms where politics lived and perfumed threats were traded like coins, Velara paced and pictured the crown at her palm. Remus, somewhere in the castle's shadows, planned an angle — friendships to bend, favors to call upon. But the greatest plan of all, Josephine thought as she closed her eyes, was one that did not depend on war or cunning: it was the steady accumulation of days — the bowls of porridge, the promise-keeping kisses, the coronation preparations — small loyalties made manifest until they were too strong to pluck.
She breathed out and, for a moment, allowed herself a private laugh: she would show Xavi that form later. He, who had earned the right to see her whole, had also taught her how to be wholly loved.
Outside, the wind made the flagstones sing. Inside, someone tuned a lute. The castle, with its bruises and its beauty, kept turning like a planet around the small, fierce light of their family.
And somewhere, unseen, a plan began to move — Velara's teeth bared to seize something she thought was owed. But the morning had already given Josephine something Velara could never truly take: the knowledge that she was seen, beloved, and ready to stand.