Chapter - 10 A Song For Hercules

Flare woke up to the rhythmic sway of a carriage and a pain in her skull that arrived with every breath—sharp enough that she nearly stopped breathing altogether just to avoid it.

The world came back to her slowly, in pieces. Wooden walls. A narrow window shuttered against the light. The creak of wheels over uneven ground. Across from her, two women sat slumped against the carriage’s padded seat, both asleep sitting upright, their heads lolling with the motion of the road, their faces exhausted.

She tried to sit up. Fire lanced through her chest the moment she did, and she froze there, half-risen, breath caught between her throat and lungs, waiting for the pain to recede so that she could think past it.

She looked down at herself.

She was naked under a thin blanket someone had drawn up to her collarbone, her skin bandaged in overlapping bands from just below her breasts to her hips, dark patches of dried blood soaked through in uneven blooms along the wrapping, resembling a rose garden. On her left thigh, the Champion’s mark pulsed with a weak light—the same sigil she’d carried since puberty, though she had never once seen it look this dim, as if whatever fueled it had been drawn down to embers.
Her abdomen beneath the bandaging felt incorrect. It felt packed full with tight fabric beneath the wrapping, like something had been stuffed inside the wound to hold her together.

It struck her all at once.

The woman’s face beneath the mask. The villagers, torn apart at the fences. Eva, run through by roots in an instant. Hercules …

“Hercules!” she shouted, or tried to—the sound that actually left her throat came out raw and thin, more animal than word, but it was enough to jolt both women awake at once.

They came alert with matching gasps, blinking against sleep, and the moment their eyes found Flare upright and conscious, both their faces broke open with visible relief. The younger of the two—barely older than Flare herself, by the look of her—burst into tears immediately, pressing both hands to her mouth. The other reached for a folded stack of clothes tucked into a bag beneath the seat.

“Miss Champion,” the older woman said, motioning to the clothes. “Thank the gods. Thank every god there is.”

Flare opened her mouth to ask—about Hercules, the village, about anything at all—and found the words simply wouldn’t come, her throat working uselessly around sounds that wouldn’t form themselves into anything coherent.

“Rest,” the woman urged gingerly, easing her back down with careful hands while the younger one helped guide fresh cloth around her shoulders. “Please, Miss Champion. There will be time for questions. Not now. Please, just rest.”

Flare tried once more, but her voice betrayed her completely, and eventually the fight drained out of her. Beaten, she understood this had nothing to do with her body. She let herself be dressed, let herself be laid back against the carriage seat, and she slept.

When she woke again, she was back home in the capital.

The ceiling above her was the one she’d stared at every night: high and majestic, painted with a faded mural of constellations her mother had commissioned before Flare was even born. The bed she lay on was her own. And yet, nothing about waking up in it felt like relief.

Healers came and went over the following days in a rotation. Different faces and hands, all of them murmuring incantations over her abdomen, drawing visibly on their own reserves until sweat beaded along their temples and their voices thinned with the effort. By the fourth day, the wound that had once opened straight through her had closed entirely, leaving behind nothing but a smooth, unnaturally pinkish line of new skin.

Her appetite didn’t come back with it. Trays arrived three times a day, arranged with the careful, coaxing presentation reserved for the very sick or the very young, and Flare managed, at her best, a bite or two before the food turned to ash in her mouth and she pushed the tray away.

Her father visited daily, and every visit followed the same pattern. He would sit at her bedside, ask after her pain, and watch a healer’s hands move over her with an expression carefully made into something reassuring. And every time Flare asked him, he would find some sudden, urgent reason to be elsewhere—some paper to review, some matter requiring his attention—his eyes sliding past hers in a way she’d never once seen from him before.

The healers wouldn’t answer either. Neither would the servants, no matter how she pressed, their faces closing the moment his name left her lips, offering only soft, worthless murmurs about rest and healing and time.

She understood, in the end, before they ever said it.

***

Seven days after she woke in the carriage, they dressed her in black.

The mourning gown was heavier than anything Flare had worn in her life: layered wool and dark silk designed for a body that should be able to bear its weight without complaint, and even now, mostly healed, she felt every ounce of it pressing down on shoulders that hadn’t fully recovered their strength. Two attendants guided her through the halls of the mansion and out into grounds she could hear—long before she could see them—thick with a crowd larger than any she’d ever stood before.

A thousand people, she guessed, gathered outside the mansion gates alone, spilling down the avenue in a dense, silent mass. Hundreds more filled the family graveyard itself, standing in neat, mournful rows between the old stone markers—heads bowed, faces wet or hollow or terribly still.

She didn’t need anyone to tell her whose funeral this was. The size of the crowd told her everything, more honestly than her father ever had.

She scanned the gathered faces as the attendants led her forward, recognizing some, not others. Her mother stood near the front, larger than she remembered, swollen and sweating despite the winter cold, leaning hard on the arm of a servant just to remain upright. Her father stood beside her, jaw set, eyes fixed on some point past the gathered crowd that let him avoid meeting anyone’s gaze directly. Government officials she recognized from formal ceremonies stood in a cluster near the graveside, expressions of practiced solemnity worn by people whose grief was at least partly performance.

And then, apart from all of them, a woman Flare had met only once before, years ago, at a ceremony too formal for either of them to speak more than a few polite words.

Silver hair fell in a single unbound stream down her back, curls catching what little winter light broke through the clouds, and her ears rose to points within it, marking a bloodline older than most of the human nobility gathered around her. An antique. Taller than anyone here. She wore black as deeply as anyone in that graveyard, and yet somehow the silver of her hair only sharpened against it, making her look less like a mourner among mourners and more like a piece carved from an entirely different material than everyone else present.

Hercules’s mother. Lady Borghanai.

She stood alone—solemn, unmoving—and Flare found she couldn’t look away from her for longer than a breath at a time.

The coffin came next, carried by six men in the formal blacks of the Champion’s Guard, and the crowd’s voices died completely the moment it came into view.

They lowered it before the open grave, and the mourning rite began. One by one, mourners approached to speak a quiet word or bow their heads, each taking a handful of dark soil from the clay pot set beside the grave and letting it fall into the earth below. An old elven custom, Flare knew.

Came from soil, and back to soil.

The line moved forward steadily, mourner after mourner, until it was Flare’s turn to step up to the grave.

She hesitated.

Everything came rushing back at once, unbidden, refusing to wait for a better time. Hercules dropping into the snow, his hand gone, his throat opened by a blade. The villagers torn apart at the fences while she knelt powerless. Eva, impaled and still breathing, finished with something almost like mercy. All of it happening while she was supposed to be the one strong enough to stop it.

What Champion am I? she thought, the words arriving with a bitterness that tasted like blood. Who couldn’t even save one person.

She bit down hard on her lip; blood welled immediately, coppery against her tongue. A healer standing near the graveside noticed and started forward, hand lifting to offer a quick word of magic to close the small wound.

Flare stopped her with a single shake of her head.

She wanted to feel it. It seemed, in that moment, like the only honest thing left to her. She stepped forward and looked down into the coffin.

Hercules had always carried a warmth in his skin, an olive glow that made him look, even in stillness, like someone about to laugh. That warmth was gone entirely now, his face drained to a color almost ashen, his cheeks hollowed in a way that made him look older and younger than he’d ever looked in life, all at once.

Mine are probably sunken too, she thought, absurdly. Brother and sister after all.

She reached into the clay pot, took a handful of soil, and let it fall into the open grave below.

It should have been simple: a single small motion, the same one many mourners before her had already made. Instead, the moment the soil left her fingers, grief crashed over her all at once. A wave she had no strength left to brace against, and the composure in her chest held steady through silence and seven days of being lied to by omission finally, completely gave way.
She didn’t manage to hold the sound in. It tore out of her in an ugly sob, her hands flying up to cover her face as if that might somehow contain her tears, her shoulders shaking with a force that felt like it might crack her.

I’m the Champion. Look at me. Look at what I am—crying in front of a thousand people like a child.

A hand settled on her shoulder.

She looked up through blurred, stinging eyes and found Lady Borghanai beside her, close enough that Flare could see, even through her own tears, the fine lines etched into the elf’s otherwise ageless face. Without a word and without asking, Lady Borghanai drew her into an embrace, one arm wrapping firm and steady around Flare’s shaking shoulders.

Flare closed her eyes and let herself be held.

It was warm—warmer than she expected, warmer than the cold, warmer than anything she’d felt since waking in that carriage. For a moment, just a moment, the weight of the last week eased, and she could breathe through it instead of drowning in it.

When they finally broke apart, Flare’s face was blotched and red, her eyes swollen, looking every bit the overwhelmed child she’d been so afraid of appearing. Lady Borghanai studied her for a long moment, unreadable behind her gorgeous face and ancient eyes, and then, softly, took both of Flare’s hands in her own.

She led her back into the crowd without a word, and the crowd parted for them as they passed, murmurs rising and falling in their wake.

Trumpets sounded somewhere behind them, mournful, marking the moment the coffin was finally lowered fully into the earth. And then came the soil: the full, overwhelming weight of a thousand mourners each adding their own share, until the grave was filled again.

“They had to widen it,” Flare heard someone mumble nearby, reverently. “The grave was dug twice over, just to hold everyone who’d come to give him back to the ground.”

He was gone. Truly, finally gone, buried now beneath more soil than ten graves.
Even in death, it seemed, Hercules had managed to leave behind one more legend the world wouldn’t let go of.