“I cannot bring myself to face that casket. To face his son.”
It is the memory of the way Varian’s scar pulls when he frowns and how his voice grows heavy with his disapproval that keeps her from lunging at the coward dog’s throat. Days dead, and Wrynn is still saving lives.
She refuses the escort. The gryphon, because the beast is uncomfortable and she doesn’t want to abandon Tiris anyways. The women, because if she must listen to a couple of mortal puppies yipping at her heel she will snap and drown them in the Canals before feeding their waterlogged corpses to the Sewer Beast. And the guards will find her, and they will burn her, and the letter with her, and Anduin will not know his father’s words and she will have failed them both again -
If the Gilnean (coward) king howls at all about her disobedience, she ignores it. He is no monarch of hers to demand compliance. Her king is dead, and her king is awaiting her in his Keep.
The walk from the Harbor to the Keep is a travesty of bittersweet familiarity. They pass their apartment, Tiris and she, falling into one of the ruts they’ve carved into the ground that leads from their doorstep to the Royal Keep. The letter curled tightly in Zoen’s gloved fist could be a bounty letter instead of a father’s final words to his beloved son. The weight on her shoulders could be a captured or slain criminal instead of acrid failure. She could almost convince herself that nothing has changed, except mourners dot the face of the Keep like a bunch of weepy freckles, and their grief is too savory on her tongue for her to ignore. As she and Tiris approach the throne room, foreign power crackles at the edge of her perception. The other leaders then, Whisperwind and Stormrage, the dwarves and Mekkatorque. Velen, too, if the migraine she can almost feel is any indication.
There is a tomb. There is a tomb, and she wants to reach out with her free hand and her limitless power, wants to wreathe it in shadows and crack it open with ice, wants the body that isn’t in there to rise up with eyes that smoke like hers, voice that echoes like hers, mind that works like hers, because then he’d be Here and not There and why couldn’t they have gone back to retrieve his body didn’t he deserve better how could they just leave him there like carrion for the ghouls -
She skirts around the tomb, keeping far away from the freshly cut flowers. Curls her empty hand around Tiris’ dark fur. Sees a flash of silver-violet-streak of gold near the throne.
Mother comes unbidden to her mind as her eyes alight on the slim pale figure of Lady Proudmoore standing near those golden lions. She wants to reach for the Archmage, feel her warm and vibrant beneath her (numb) fingertips; she wants to grab her, hide her away beneath the fall of her cloak, the shadows of her home, like another one of her secret treasures stashed away safe from the grasp of thieves.
The Arthasness of the thought drives her breath from her lungs. Her fingers twitch, curl tighter around the missive, tighter in Tiris’ fur. Zoen all but wrenches her attention from Jaina, turns it to a boy who has been made a man years earlier than he ought to have been. She stands before him, her (friend, charge, prince) King, and finds she desires to shove the letter into his chest and walk away from this hall of lords, retrace her steps to the Harbor until she stands safely inside her dark apartment with no one but Tiris witness to her weakness.
But that would be cowardice, and she is not Greymane.
“From Varian,” she says, voice strangely casual, as she holds the letter out. Like the king has sent her from the library to the garden to fetch his adventurous son for him, or she is simply relaying some half-hearted grumblings of Varian’s about their occasional, un-escorted excursions out into the city. Small things, trivial matters. It is enough to make her want to scream.
“Greymane meant to bring it himself, but he’s in a bloody mood.”
