Chapter 365. Was I a Person, or Just a Prize to Be Won?

The evening sky bled crimson and violet across the horizon as the sun began its slow, inevitable descent. The training yard was quiet now, the echoes of Kaela’s earlier drills still seeming to vibrate in the cooling air.

After hours of relentless training, a physical exorcism of her own frustration, and a mounting, gnawing impatience for Grock’s promised equipment, Kaela found herself alone.

She sat on the low stone bench at the yard’s edge, her muscles aching with a satisfying, deep-seated burn. Her gaze was fixed on the fading light, her expression uncharacteristically still, stripped of the restless energy that usually defined her.

She heard his footsteps before she saw him steady, deliberate, and familiar. William didn’t announce himself.

He simply approached and settled beside her on the stone bench. For several long minutes, neither spoke.

They simply existed in that comfortable, shared silence that only comes after genuine exertion, watching the shadows stretch across the courtyard like grasping fingers.

"Can I tell you something?" Kaela finally asked.

Her voice was quiet, almost lost to the wind, breaking the stillness like a stone dropped into a still pond.

"Always," William replied without hesitation.

Kaela stared at the horizon, her knuckles still red and slightly swollen from the day’s work.

"This yard," she said, gesturing vaguely at the stone walls that hemmed them in, "used to be the only place in this entire goddamn palace where I actually felt like myself."

"When I was growing up, I mean." A bitter smile touched her lips. "Everywhere else was a performance."

"Perfect posture, perfect diction, and perfect little practiced smiles at exactly the right moments during those endless, suffocating formal dinners."

"I’d sit there across from visiting dignitaries who couldn’t have cared less whether I was happy, or bored, or drowning inside, as long as I looked like a proper princess."

William remained silent, his presence a solid, unmoving anchor beside her. He didn’t interrupt; he simply gave her the space she needed to unspool the words.

"But out here," Kaela continued, her voice gaining a raw edge of emotion, "nobody expected anything from me except effort."

"I could be loud, I could be messy, and I could be as wild and unhinged as I actually felt inside."

"I didn’t have to be the composed, porcelain doll everyone wanted to see." She let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a shudder. "I think I spent more hours of my childhood in this yard than anywhere else in the palace."

"Sneaking away whenever I could manage it, hiding from tutors who eventually just stopped looking for me because they knew exactly where I’d gone anyway."

"This... was my sanctuary."

"That sounds like it mattered a great deal to you," William said gently, his voice cutting through her melancholy with genuine understanding.

"It did," Kaela said, turning to glance at him. "It still does, apparently."

"Given how quickly I came running back here the second everything got too heavy to carry alone." Her gaze softened, something vulnerable and deeply grateful flickering in her eyes. "Thank you, Instructor Wade... For this morning."

"And for not forcing me to talk about Delmore."

"I know it probably wasn’t what you expected to be doing discovering my secret fistfighting talent instead of discussing state secrets and political ramifications."

William turned his head to meet her eyes.

"I figured you’d talk about it when you were ready," he said simply. "Sometimes, Kaela, the body has to process something before the mind can catch up."

"I’ve seen it countless times: soldiers who couldn’t sit still, who couldn’t speak a word about their trauma until they had bled off the adrenaline through training."

"They needed to move before they could think."

Kaela studied his profile, sensing the weight behind his words. "Is that from your old life again?"

A faint, rueful smile ghosted across William’s features.

"Most of my useful advice seems to be, at this point." His expression turned contemplative. "I trained many young soldiers who needed exactly this kind of outlet, this physical release, before they could sit still long enough to actually confront whatever was eating at them."

"You’re not so different from most of them, honestly... Just born to considerably nicer accommodations."

Kaela let out a genuine laugh, the sound bright and clear in the gathering dusk. "I’ll take that as a compliment, I think."

"It was meant as one," William said quietly, and as the last sliver of sun vanished beneath the world, the silence between them felt less like an absence of words and more like a shared understanding.

The sky continued its slow, bruised transformation, shifting from fiery amber to deep, melancholic violets as the stars began to pierce through the gathering dusk.

They sat in that suspended moment between day and night, the air growing crisp and carrying the faint scent of damp stone and evening dew.

Kaela seemed to have found a strange, cathartic rhythm; now that the dam of her composure had been breached, the memories began to flow as vivid, unguarded fragments of a childhood she rarely allowed herself to revisit.

"There was this stable hand," she said suddenly, her voice carrying a rare note of genuine fondness.

A soft smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. "Years ago."

"He used to sneak me out to the stables for extra riding lessons when my formal tutors weren’t looking."

"He could see it... he could tell I was suffocating in those endless etiquette classes."

"He knew I was infinitely happier on horseback, feeling the wind instead of the stuffy air of a lecture hall." Her expression darkened slightly. "My father found out eventually."

"He was furious. He nearly had the poor man dismissed on the spot for undermining royal protocol."

"I had to throw an absolute hell of a tantrum, screaming until my throat burned, threatening to run away and live in the stables myself if he touched him." She let out a short, dry laugh. "My father backed down."

"I think that was the first time I realized I actually held some kind of leverage in this family, even when I was barely tall enough to reach the reins."

William watched her, a genuine grin breaking through his usual stoicism. "That sounds exactly like the kind of reckless defiance I’ve come to expect from you."

"Well, you need to get used to it," Kaela countered immediately.

She threw his own signature phrase back at him with deliberate, teasing delight, her eyes sparking with mischief in the fading light.

William burst into a proper laugh, a rare, unguarded sound that seemed to surprise even him. "I swear, you’ve all decided that’s a communal phrase now."

"I can’t say it without someone throwing it back in my face."

"It’s a good phrase, Instructor Wade," she teased, leaning closer into his space. "Very versatile. Very... dramatic."

"I’m starting to regret ever saying it for the first time," he admitted, shaking his head with obvious amusement.

"Too late now," Kaela said cheerfully, nudging his shoulder with hers. "It’s part of the group vocabulary now."

"You’re stuck with us."

William settled more comfortably against the stone, his curiosity piqued. The usual walls she kept between herself and the world seemed to have crumbled, leaving something raw and fascinating beneath.

"Tell me more," he said softly, his tone shifting from playful to genuinely invested. "About growing up here."

"I’ve heard fragments mostly through your colorful complaints about lessons and courtly nonsense, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard the real shape of your life."

"What it was truly like."

Kaela fell silent for a moment, considering the question. She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms loosely around them in an unguarded, almost childlike posture.

To William, it was startling; she looked smaller somehow, less like a warrior princess and more like the girl she had been before the crown became a burden. It was the most honest she had been since Alden’s arrival.

"It was lonely, Instructor Wade," she said finally, her voice dropping to a vulnerable murmur. "Mostly, if I’m being completely honest."

"Not in the obvious way; I wasn’t neglected."

"My parents genuinely loved me; they still do, I think, after everything we learned last night."

"But being a princess means everyone around you is performing something, too... The performance never stops."

She stared at her hands, picking at a nonexistent speck of dirt on her knee. "The other noble children I grew up with... they were never just children."

"They were always so careful, so calculated. Every word they spoke, every smile they offered, was measured against how much my favor might affect their own family’s standing in the future."

"They weren’t playing games; they were practicing politics." A bitter edge crept into her words. "I never really knew, growing up, who actually liked me for who I was—the girl who liked to fight and ride and make messes and who just liked what I represented."

"I spent my whole life wondering if I was a person to them or just a prize to be won."