The King's Flower

🌸 Chapter 1: Taken

The men came on an ordinary morning.

No warning. No letter the day before. Just the sound of carriage wheels on gravel at a hour when the house was still half asleep, and then voices at the front door that were not asking — they were informing.

Ava heard it from her room. She set down her embroidery and listened to the sound of her world rearranging itself on the other side of the wall.

She had twenty minutes to pack.

The senior man — dark coat, crown insignia on his collar, face that had delivered news like this before and felt nothing about it — stood in the doorway of her room and told her this with the same tone one might use to announce the weather. Twenty minutes. One bag. The carriage was waiting.

"My father —" she started.

"Has been informed," the man said. And then he stepped back into the corridor and waited.

She packed with shaking hands. A dress. Two more. Her mother's small silver hairpin that she kept wrapped in cloth at the bottom of her drawer — the one thing she would not leave without. A book she was halfway through that she would never finish. She stood in the centre of her room for a long moment and looked at it — the narrow bed, the window that faced the garden, the embroidery she had set down and never picked up again.

Then she picked up her bag and walked out.

Her father's study door was closed.

She stood outside it for a moment. Raised her hand. Did not knock.

The front door was open. The carriage was black and large and entirely indifferent to her. She walked toward it because there was nothing else to do. At the last moment she turned and looked back at the house — at the closed front door, the closed study window, the curtain that did not move.

He did not come out.

She got in the carriage.

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Three days of travel with no explanation given and none offered.

She asked, once, on the first morning — carefully, politely, the way she had been taught to ask for things she was not sure she was allowed to want. The man in the dark coat looked at her and said: "You will be informed upon arrival."

She did not ask again.

She watched the landscape change outside the carriage window instead. The flat familiar fields around her father's estate giving way to rolling hills, then to wide stone roads lined with trees so old and tall they blocked the sky. The empire was enormous. She had known this in the way you know things you have read in books — as fact, as distance, as something that exists but does not touch you.

It was touching her now.

She ate the food they gave her without tasting it. She slept in short, shallow stretches and woke with her heart going too fast. She pressed her mother's hairpin between her palms in the dark and breathed until her hands stopped shaking.

She was good at this. Had been practicing it for years.

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The Royal Palace appeared at dusk on the third day.

She saw it before she understood what she was seeing — pale stone towers catching the last light and holding it, glowing faintly gold against the darkening sky. Enormous arched windows. Walls that went on and on. A gate so tall it made the carriage look like a child's toy passing beneath it.

It was the most beautiful building she had ever seen.

It made her feel the size of a sparrow.

The carriage stopped in an inner courtyard. She was helped out by a guard who did not look at her face and handed to a senior maid who also did not look at her face and taken through a side entrance and down three corridors and given a room.

The maids' quarters.

Small, clean, spare. A narrow bed, a washbasin, a window that looked out onto a stone wall.

"Someone will come for you in the morning," the senior maid said. And then she left and closed the door and Ava was alone in the most powerful palace in the empire with one bag, her mother's hairpin, and absolutely no idea what was happening to her.

She sat on the edge of the bed.

She did not cry. Not yet.

She pressed her hands flat on her knees and looked at the stone wall outside the window and breathed slowly and thought: you have survived worse than not knowing. You have survived worse than being afraid. You can survive this too.

Then she lay down on the narrow bed, still dressed, and stared at the ceiling until sleep finally took her.

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She cried on the second day. Quietly, carefully, the way she did everything — face turned toward the wall, one hand pressed over her mouth so the sound wouldn't carry.

She cried for her mother, who had been gone for twelve years and whose absence she still felt like a missing tooth — not always, but whenever something hurt badly enough. She cried for the study door that had stayed closed. She cried for the embroidery still sitting on her chair and the book she would never finish and the garden she would probably never see again.

Then she washed her face and stared at herself in the small mirror above the washbasin until she recognised herself again.

On the third morning she made a decision.

Not a loud one. Not a dramatic one. Just a quiet, internal, entirely private decision — the kind that doesn't announce itself but simply settles into your bones and stays there.

She was going to survive this.

Whatever this was.

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The senior maid came for her after breakfast with a water jug and no explanation and placed her in the doorway of the main dining hall and told her: table three.

So she poured.

Eyes down. Quiet. Invisible in the way she had spent years perfecting — the art of taking up exactly no space, of moving through a room without disturbing it, of being present without being seen.

She was reaching across the last glass at table three when a hand settled on her lower back.

Heavy. Deliberate. Belonging to a man who had been watching her work for the past ten minutes and had apparently decided something about that.

"Pretty little thing," he murmured.

She stepped away. His grip tightened.

The fear was immediate and familiar and she hated both of those things — the fear itself and the familiarity of it, the way her body knew exactly what to do with this particular kind of danger because it had learned long ago. Go still. Don't make a sound. Wait for it to be over.

She did not hear the command.

She only heard the result — boots on marble, sharp and purposeful, a chair scraping violently across stone, the sounds from the corridor afterward that made three women at table three suddenly find their plates very interesting.

Silence dropped over the dining hall like a held breath.

"Bring that here."

She looked up.

He was at the head of the table. She had not noticed him before — or she had noticed him the way you notice something that your instincts file immediately under: do not look directly at this. Tall. Dark haired. Broad shouldered in a way that had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with discipline. An expression like a wall that had never once considered becoming a door.

He nodded at the jug. "Water."

She crossed the room on legs that were not entirely steady and poured. He watched the glass fill and said absolutely nothing about her hands, which were shaking.

"Thank you," she whispered. Because her mother had raised her with manners and some things survive everything.

He didn't respond. Just picked up his glass and looked away — back to the documents beside his plate, back to whatever occupied the mind of a man like this between one breath and the next.

He didn't dismiss her either.

In a palace full of people who had looked straight through her for three days, being allowed to simply stand there felt like something she didn't have a word for yet.

She would learn his name by morning.

Edward Quest. Crown Prince of the Questian Empire.

She stood beside the table with her water jug and her shaking hands and her quiet private decision to survive, and she had absolutely no idea what was coming.

Neither, for that matter, did he.

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End of Chapter One

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🌸🌸I hope you all loved the chapter and it's a good new start so... thankyou for reading 🌸🌸