Deleted Scene: The Letter Aria Never Sent

There is a letter that exists in two of my drafting folders and nowhere else in the world.

It was supposed to be the close of Iron and Flame, in place of what is now Aria's bedside vigil for Darius. In the version I cut, Darius woke from the Nightsbane in chapter twenty-one rather than chapter twenty, and the final chapter was a long, quiet correspondence between Aria and her cousin Darian Stormborn at the Monastery of the Eternal Vigil — a letter she wrote and never sent, because by the time she had finished it she did not need to.

The version below is the letter, restored from my draft notes. It takes place in the night between the Korrathi treaty and the homecoming march back to Crownhaven. Aria is forty-one. The war is over. Marcus is six weeks old. Darius is asleep in the next room, breathing again, with eight inches of fresh pink scar tissue above his collarbone where the Korrathi interrogator's brand finally healed.

I cut it because Aria is not a letter-writer. She never has been. The series is built on a woman who acts and tells you about it afterwards in clipped, internal monologue. A long contemplative letter to a cousin she has not seen since childhood broke the voice. My editor was right to make me cut it. But I have always loved it, and the BTS pipeline finally gave me a place to put it down where it could be read instead of filed.

This is non-canon. It did not happen. It is a thing Aria would have written, in another world where she had been raised to write rather than to fight.

Crownhaven Camp, the Twelfth Night After Treaty

Cousin —

I have been trying to write you this letter since the night Theron's standard came down outside the canvas of the war tent. I have started it nine times. I have a basket of false starts at my feet that the wind keeps trying to scatter, and I have been letting it. I think a kinder cousin would have sent something by now. I think any other Stormborn would have. I don't know what kind of Stormborn I am at this point, Darian, and that is part of what I am writing to ask you.

The treaty is signed. The empire is going home. Marius — and you would not believe me if I told you what Marius is like in person, so I will not try — has gone east with his army intact and one of my advisors as a hostage of good faith, which was his idea, and which I assented to because the man volunteered. The volunteers, in this war, were the only currency I had. I spent them all.

Darius is asleep two paces from me. I am writing this on the small folding desk Edmund gave me before he died — the one with the iron hinges that the smith at Riverside cut to spec, the one Lyra used to leave half-finished maps on. The desk is too small for a queen. I have refused, in three years now, to use the larger one. I do not know what that says about me but I notice it.

Darius's breathing is even tonight. It was not, last night. The night before that, I sat awake until dawn with my hand on his chest because I had decided that the moment I took my hand away was the moment he would stop, and I have always been a superstitious woman pretending to be a logical one. The Korrathi interrogators left him with a scar on his shoulder that I trace in the dark sometimes. He does not know I do this. He does not know a great many things. I have decided that the part of being a wife I am best at is the part that involves keeping him warm and stupid about the inside of my head.

Marcus is six weeks old today. He has Darius's mouth and my temper and a healer's stipend's worth of medicines on a shelf above his cradle because his lungs were not finished cooking when he came into the world. I had him in a forest camp under canvas, Darian, and I held him in my arms for the first time and I thought — and this is what I came to write to you about — I thought, I have done this wrong.

I do not mean the birth. The birth was as messy and as ordinary as everyone's. I mean the kingdom. I mean the marrow of the thing I have been doing for three years. I have been on a horse. I have been in a tent. I have been in a chamber arguing with a merchant about audit rights and a clansman about kill rights and a priest about marriage rights and I have not — not once, Darian, not for one full hour — sat in my own home and watched dust move in a window. I will be forty-two next spring and I have a son and a daughter and I have not lived in either of their lives.

Father did. Do you remember? Do you remember the gardens at Stormgate? The mornings he made us all sit at the long table even when there were dispatches piling up at the door. He used to say — and I have only this year understood it — that the dispatches would still be there at noon, and we would not. He died at his own table, Darian. They came for him over the breakfast plates. I had thought, for a long time, that this was a lesson about vigilance. I think now it was a lesson about something else. I think he was telling us, in the only way that man knew how, that he had decided where his time would be spent.

I do not know where my time has been spent.

I am going to write something now that I have not said aloud, and I am going to write it because you are a man in a monastery six hundred miles from any court that matters, and because I trust you with what cannot be taken back.

I am tired, Darian.

I have been tired since the West Wing. I have been tired since Millbrook. I have been tired since the merchant's ledger in Crownhaven where I sold my father's legacy for seventy-five thousand gold. I have been tired in a way that no sleep undoes and no victory thins. I have led an army of eight thousand to Valley of Sorrows and read the names of the dead aloud to my husband one at a time and I am tired in a place under all of those things, in a place I am beginning to suspect is me.

I do not know what to do with this. I do not think there is anything to do with it. The kingdom needs me on the throne for another twelve years at least, until Elena is old enough to take it. Marcus needs his mother. Darius needs his wife. Thorald needs his Clan-sister. Lyra needs the woman who stood at her cell door in Crownhaven prison with a stolen guard's tabard and a lie. I cannot put any of this down.

What I came to write to you about, I think, is permission.

Father is dead. Mother is dead. The boys are dead. The Stormborn line that will read this letter is, in essence, you and me and a six-week-old infant in a wicker cradle. I have been ruling, for three years, as though my parents were watching from somewhere just over my shoulder, grading the work. I have been afraid of disappointing the dead.

I want — and this is the thing I cannot say in court because in court a queen cannot want anything she does not also have a plan for — I want to be allowed to be tired. I want to be allowed to do this badly some days. I want, on the morning my son first laughs, to set my dispatches aside and sit in a window and watch dust move, and not have an army of dead Stormborn behind my chair telling me I have failed them.

Cousin — give me the rite of release.

I know it is not normally given to the living. I know it is meant for the dead at the funeral pyre, the formal letting-go of a soul that has finished its accounting. I know I am asking for something that is not, technically, mine to ask for. But you are the only Vigilist I have, and I have been carrying my dead for twenty-two years, and I would like to set them down for one afternoon and see if I can be a wife in a quiet room. I would like to know what that feels like. I would like to know what I feel like when there is nothing in the room with me but my own breath and a sleeping man and an infant and the small unimportant noise of the wind in the canvas.

Write me back when you can. Or do not write me back. Send a stone, send a feather, send nothing — I will know.

I love you, Darian. I have not said that to anyone in this family in twenty years and there is no one left to say it to but you, so I am saying it here, in writing, while my hand is still steady. I love you. I am sorry I could not protect the boys. I am sorry I could not be the kind of cousin who wrote to a monastery. I am sorry — and this is the last thing — that I did not understand, until tonight, that what we were trying to do all along was not to keep the throne but to keep the house, and the house is not the throne, the house is the people in the room with you when the night is quiet and the lamp is low.

Sleep well in the Vigil. The candles, I am told, are tended by a brother from Greymarsh who used to be a fisherman. Tell him a queen who has been north on bad horses thanks him for keeping the light.

— Aria

She did not send the letter. Marcus woke at the third hour and would not settle, and by the time she had walked him back to sleep along the canvas wall of the tent the lamp had burned out, and the letter was still on the folding desk in the dark, and Aria slept against Darius's shoulder until the camp horns blew.

In the morning she folded the pages into the iron-bound chest at the foot of the bed and forgot them.

She found them again, twenty-two years later, when Elena was packing the chest down for the funeral. They are, in the imagined post-canon of Fallen Hearts, the only piece of writing in Aria's hand that survives her.

If you have ever wondered what a queen who never permitted herself a single day off would have asked for if she had been brave enough to ask — there it is. Folded into a wicker chest under a winter cloak, in the hand of a woman who decided, at forty-one, that the dust in the window could wait another twelve years.

— Elara