THE WINTER AND THE CROWN // Harry Styles (#TCTM2)

Remember Me

This chapter is 8.9k word long with a bit of sexual content.

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The ringing of swords echoed among trees. Reyna raised her blade high in the air and blocked her opponent's full-powered attack. Her eyes widened as they met Lance's, and her opponent took the chance to kick her in the knees. Her sword fell away from her grip and she collapsed onto a pile of snow.

"Stop!" Lance shouted, marching toward them. The Queen's opponent – the new commander – bowed his head to Lance as Reyna propped herself on her elbow and laughed. "What madness is this?" Lance asked the commander. The man quickly got down on his knees beside Reyna to help her up, but she refused to take his hand and reached for her sword.

"We're in the middle of training." She winced. Lance saw a red drop fall upon the white snow, and she forestalled his concern with, "It's just a scratch." The Commander, in seeing that he'd cut the Queen by accident, stood rigid with his jaw tight and hands behind his back. "I asked him to give me his best. He was just following orders," Reyna said dryly.

Lance scoffed. "This is insane, Reyna. You can't just tell people to go ahead and hurt you. You're a queen."

"I trust Commander Robert," she said, giving the commander a dismissive wave. Lance could tell that Robert could not wait to be excused; he bowed his head and walked off as fast as he could, probably thinking the Queen had lost her mind. And maybe she had. Too bad she was Lance's problem now.

Lance took a step back as she thrust her sword into the snow and leaned onto it to stand. He was ready to catch her when she fell, but she managed to keep her balance and gave him an apologetic smile — one he'd seen so often in the last couple of months; at first, it'd been a sign of hope, but at this point, it only concerned him.

They both stood under falling snow with bare heads, and Reyna was only wearing a thin blouse with trousers and boots. Lance wondered if growing up here had given her immunity to the cold or she simply didn't care if she'd freeze to death right on this field. As she put away her sword and wrapped both arms around herself, he concluded that it was the latter.

Lance cursed under his breath, shrugged off his black fur coat and threw it over her shoulders. She didn't protest and let him wrap her up as her gaze stayed fixed on the red streams trickling down her white fingers.

"Let's go," he said, holding her by the shoulders, and together they staggered back to the gate.

It'd been ten months since Harry had gone missing. At least that was what Reyna believed. Lance and everyone else knew that there was no way Harry could still be alive.

At first, he'd been convinced by Reyna that there had been a possibility that Harry had been kidnapped, that someone had known about him and Reyna and wanted to use him to hurt her. And so they had waited every day for a ransom letter or for Harry's headless corpse to be delivered to the castle. But it had been ten months, the folks were still protesting, villages were still burned, and Harry's life had become no one's concern but Reyna's, Lance's and Jo's.

Lance didn't know how long Reyna would continue this hopeless search. For the first couple of weeks, she would be so eager when the search team returned at the end of the day even if there was no news at all. But lately, she hadn't bothered to ask about what they'd found or hadn't, for she knew she'd only receive the same disappointing answer.

Nothing.

No matter what she said, Lance knew that deep down she knew they were looking for a ghost. Harry would never come back to her, and it was only a matter of time until she allowed her heart to accept it. It was easier to cling to false hope than face cruel reality and move on. Lance might be the only one who understood what she was going through. He'd held Daliah's cold corpse in his arms and put her into the ground himself, and yet he still couldn't accept that she was dead. It had taken him years to get over it. So he was going to try to help Reyna to do the same.