Cilia stared at her husband in silence. She was struggling to decide between asking what had happened and just standing there silently while he got the much needed break he needed from the noise of the feast which currently raged within the castle walls.
She put a loving hand on his shoulder in a bid to convince him that she was here for him. He looked up at her and smiled, his crestfallen demeanour improving, somewhat marginally. She had proceeded to rub his back gently in a circular manner.
The entire court knew him to be the all powerful monarch of the north but all she could see was a broken man, saddened by the increased weight of his responsibilities and increasingly pressured by the tensions of a brewing war created not by his own hands but by his father's.
She felt him take a
