The cold war that followed their confrontation was a masterpiece of polite devastation. Hadrian and Seraphina moved through the palace like two opposing celestial bodies, their orbits precise, their gravitational pull only felt in the subtle, chilling avoidance of collision. They attended state dinners, exchanged necessary information about the children and the kingdoms, and slept on opposite sides of a bed that felt as wide as the ocean.
Hadrian threw himself into the construction of Freya's observatory. The folly rose quickly in a secluded corner of the palace gardens, a slender finger of pale limestone pointing at the sky. It was, he thought with grim satisfaction, the most emotionally honest thing he'd ever built. It was a monument to yearning, to the desperate human need to connect across impossible distances. Every graceful line was a plea.
He was there one evening, inspecting the installation of the polished brass telescope mechanism, when he heard light footsteps on the spiral staircase. It was Freya herself. She wore a simple grey gown, her astronomer's eyes, usually fixed on far horizons, taking in the details of the dome with a quiet intensity.
"Prince Hadrian. I came to see the progress. Rian said it was nearing completion."
"It is," he said, wiping his hands on a cloth. "The dome should be operational by tomorrow night. You'll have an unfettered view of the Helix Nebula."
A faint, genuine smile touched her lips. "You remembered."
"Rian mentioned it." The name sat between them, a shared, complicated truth.
Freya walked to the arched window that looked back toward the main palace, its lights twinkling in the gathering dusk. "He speaks of you often. He admires you greatly, you know. Your certainty. Your ability to make ideas solid."
Hadrian gave a short, humorless laugh. "My certainty seems to be rather brittle these days."
She glanced at him, her gaze sharp, analytical. "Certainty often is. The universe is not certain. It is probability and mystery. It is beautiful because we cannot pin it down." She turned back to the window. "My marriage to Rian is a nebula. All gas and distant light. Beautiful to observe from afar, cold and empty to inhabit."
The starkness of her confession shocked him. This was the "distant star" Seraphina had written of, confessing her own chill.
"He tries," Hadrian found himself saying, defending his cousin, the man who was, molecule by molecule, dissolving his own marriage.
"Oh, I know," Freya sighed, a sound of infinite weariness. "He tries so very hard. He is the most considerate man I have ever known. He remembers my favorite tea, he commissions observatories, he asks about my work. But he asks as a diplomat asks about a foreign land—with polite interest, not with a thirst to explore it himself. His deepest conversations, his real self… that is reserved for elsewhere."
She didn't say Seraphina's name. She didn't need to.
"And you?" Hadrian asked, his voice low. "Where is your real self reserved?"
Freya's smile was spectral. "For the stars, Prince Hadrian. They ask nothing of me but to be observed. And for Sultan Argenthelm, who, for all his booming tales of deserts, asks with a passion that feels… terrestrial. Immediate." She looked at him directly. "We are all of us, it seems, building observatories to watch the loves we cannot hold."
She left him then, ascending the final steps to the dome chamber, seeking her cold solace in the unreachable heavens.
Hadrian stood in the half-built tower, Freya's words echoing. "His deepest conversations, his real self… that is reserved for elsewhere." He thought of the tide pool, the shared laughter. Rian wasn't a mustache-twirling villain. He was a man drowning in his own silent marriage, who had found another drowning soul. And in clinging to each other for air, they were pulling each other deeper, dragging their spouses down with them.
He left the gardens not for his studio, but for the Royal Marine Institute. It was late, but a light burned in Seraphina's office window. He didn't go in. He stood across the cobbled street, hidden in shadow, and watched.
Through the large glass window, he saw her. She was not alone. Rian was there, leaning against her desk, arms crossed. Seraphina was pacing, gesticulating, clearly upset. About the reef, about the council, he couldn't hear. Rian listened, his head bowed in that attentive way he had. Then Seraphina stopped, her shoulders slumping. Rian didn't move to hug her, didn't offer a pat. He simply reached out and placed a hand, very briefly, on the stack of papers she'd been waving. A gesture of solidarity. Of I am here in this mess with you.
It was nothing. It was everything.
Hadrian turned away, the cold resolve hardening into something like despair. The villain was not a person, but a pattern. A circuit of loneliness that had closed, bypassing the official connections. Rian and Seraphina. Freya and the stars (and perhaps the attentive Sultan). Himself and his blueprints. Margaret and her risky flirtations. Maila and her clear, lonely boundaries.
They were all trapped in a beautiful, terrible system of their own design.