Spring Hills Hold No Autumn

Three days had passed when I awoke again.

The wound on my forehead had been treated, yet it still throbbed with a dull, persistent ache.

“Miss.”

My maid Mila knelt beside the bed, her eyes rimmed with red.

Eva pushed upright. “Mila—my father. Their bodies?”

Mila could not meet her gaze. “His Majesty has decreed… he says you may only collect your family’s remains… after you have carried out the public flogging of the corpses.”

Eva’s fingernails dug deep into her palms.

The taste of copper filled her mouth. “How dare he?”

A trickle of blood escaped the corner of her lip. Mila grasped her hand, weeping. “Miss, you must take care of yourself. Your family… you’re all that’s left.”

A tremor ran through Eva’s heart.

One hundred and two souls. Now, only she remained.

And all this ruin… because she had loved the wrong man.

Eva closed her eyes. When she opened them again, nothing remained but a bone-deep cold.

Since the mistake was hers to make…

Then she would be the one to end it.

In the darkness behind her eyelids, a pattern only she could perceive slowly formed—a diagram of deep, bloody crimson.

Until it was complete, she could not leave Dylan.

Ten days. That was all she had left.

She would use that time to settle some debts.

“Mila,” she said, forcing the tremor from her voice. “Go to Jacob, the rice merchant in the west market. Tell him to spread the word. Tell everyone how my family was slaughtered and left to rot.”

“My father spent our entire fortune to save those refugees. Dylan may have forgotten his debt, but the people haven’t.”

Dylan had just ascended the throne. He could not afford to ignore the people’s wrath.

Two days later, the capital’s main thoroughfare was packed with mourners in white hemp.

Merchants and farmers who owed their lives to Eva’s family knelt before the palace gates, holding petitions written in blood. Even the most urgent military dispatches from the border spoke of crumbling morale. The Imperial Censor delivered a death-defying remonstrance at court, declaring that only a tyrant would desecrate the dead.

Cornered, Dylan finally ordered the heads taken down from the city wall. The bodies were dumped without ceremony into a mass grave.

Soon after, he had Eva brought before the throne.

Her wound still raw, Eva’s face was as pale as parchment. Dylan looked right through her.

“Those rumors spreading through the city. Your doing?”

A faint, bitter smile touched Eva’s lips.

“Since Your Majesty already knows, why ask?”

“Audacious!” Dylan hurled an inkstone at her.

*Thud.* It struck her squarely in the chest.

A dull pain radiated from the impact, but Eva laughed.

“Your Majesty might as well kill me, too.”

Susan coiled around Dylan’s side like a water snake, her voice a sugary purr. “There goes Sister Eva, threatening His Majesty with death again. If you truly wished to die, why control the force of your headlong dash so… precisely?”

Eva almost laughed aloud.

She had seen the wound herself—a hole that deep was no mere performance.

But Dylan only believed Susan now.

He cast a cold glance at Eva. “Since you care nothing for the title of Empress, then kneel outside the door and listen well. Hear for yourself whether I am truly lost without you!”

Sweeping Susan into his arms, he strode toward the bedchamber.

“Guards! Throw her out! Let her kneel—she does not rise without my command!”

The storm that night came without warning.

Eva knelt on the white marble steps, listening to Susan’s breathy moans from within the chamber.

Icy rain drenched her in moments.

Thunder rumbled, mingling with Dylan’s low growls. A flash of lightning illuminated Eva’s face—waxen, fragile, devoid of life.

She knelt the entire night. She listened the entire night.

Memories surfaced: of her time with Dylan in Eva’s Village.

He had knelt outside her family’s ancestral hall for three days and three nights, begging her grandfather for permission to marry her.

He would silently drape his cloak over her shoulders while she studied the stars.

On her birthday, he had walked twenty miles of mountain trails just to bring her a single wildflower he’d picked himself.

He had once said, voice thick with feeling, “If my Eva frowns, my heart aches.”

And that same man now let her grow cold, inch by icy inch, in the pouring rain.

It was not until the first grey light of dawn that the bedchamber door finally opened.