Aerik Cladinae never imagined his reward for battlefield valor would be a bride like Miesa Esquillre. When the king bestowed his own sister’s hand in marriage, Aerik anticipated grace and nobility—not this broken creature who crawled on palace floors, her dress stained with spilled meals, her speech reduced to incoherent shrieks. The princess’s madness, born from years of her brother’s cruel torment, manifested in grotesque displays that repelled the court. Yet in rare, unguarded moments, Aerik glimpsed something unsettling—a sharp, calculating intelligence flickering behind Miesa’s glassy stare, vanishing as quickly as it appeared. The more he observed her erratic behavior, the more he questioned whether her madness was performance rather than affliction. Those fleeting sparks of awareness suggested the drooling, limping woman might be the kingdom’s most dangerous player, hiding in plain sight behind a mask of insanity. The realization left Aerik torn between pity and suspicion, wondering what secrets lay buried beneath her fractured exterior. If her madness was indeed feigned, what terrible knowledge forced her to maintain such an elaborate ruse? And what might happen if she ever chose to drop the act completely? The court saw only a broken princess, but Aerik began seeing something far more unsettling—a woman who might be saner than anyone suspected.
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