Queensmen

Chapter 1

~If I Remain~

Sometimes you needed to think like a soldier to act like a queen. Oris learnt this the moment she had raised the golden sceptre in her hand and faced the royal court the morning after her coronation.

With the weight of a jeweled crown on your head it was hard to fawn over the entitled officials that had secretly plotted your rise to power and demise even when your life depended on it. And it was much harder to lead when it felt as though it was your head about to roll the next second.

The intrigues of the court and politics had been lost to her then. All she had to do was nod and smile, a puppet ruler more than anything. Now, when disaster was heading for the state all her puppeteers had scurried off, leaving her the master of her own strings—a wish she had almost forgotten.

Being a soldier meant expecting a war before your eyes the moment you woke up to the rising sun. It meant living everyday like a battle and using your life to fight for something you believed in.

In the end as a queen she was different, she believed in nothing and hence had no conviction, and despite being of the firm belief that all men were equal, Oris had never once expected to die—no one ever did, until the moment turning back was no longer an option.

After years of struggling to keep herself upright, the crown had finally proven too heavy—the exact weight of the world she had once borne on her shoulders. It had toppled off her head in the early hours of the morning and now lay on its side by her throne beside her broken sceptre.

Now it was noon. Oris had sat here for eight hours waiting for this exact moment. She should have felt prepared.

She didn't.

"My Queen! My Queen!"

She looked up from the volume in her hands, surprised that it was her personal guard yelling for her. Not because yelling was prohibited in the hallways but because he had never managed to say 'queen' once since the first day he had been assigned as her knight.

"It is Your Majesty to you," she answered, knowing that he would not hear her. The man found it easier to say majesty than queen. There was something about the 'q' that threw his tongue out of order, he once told her, his smile bitter.

Oris shut the book and turned her gaze in the direction of the great doors that opened into the throne room. Despite the fact that they were currently shut, she could still hear Sir Rodholf's heavy footsteps and constant hollering through it so she knew that the news had finally arrived—because running through the hallways was also not permitted.

There were certain rules in place that the attendants in the castle needed to follow for reasons long forgotten, but Oris still remembered the story she was told as a child of how great men had slipped on the waxed marble floors and broken their necks by accident. The following embarrassment was covered up later in stories where they died in quests to slay fire-eating dragons from beyond the Great Sea—dragons that were never conquered in the event that another hero's name needed to be preserved.

When the doors finally burst open, she set the heavy tome on the step below her. A step, because despite having a throne she chose to sit atop the stairs. She sat on the stairs because she knew the throne meant nothing. It never had.

She could not rule a kingdom already conquered, so why pretend to be more lofty than what she was? A defeated queen.

"M-My Qu-. . . Qu-" the panting knight struggled for words as he fell to one knee in front of Oris and she, despite the situation, found herself smiling.