Derman woke up from a nightmare, vaguely he remembered that in it he kept punching his brother over and over and over in the face. But what he remembered most from the nightmare though was his brother's smirking face, the look he gave him just before Derman was informed of the attack on Sura.
The feeling of overwhelming rage, he vividly remembered how that felt, the feeling of the fire surging inside of him, burning him, demanding blood.
He did not want to think more about it, the conclusions that he already reached about what that were as confusing as much as they were terrifying, and they were not good for their already fragile position.
Derman felt a stab of sorrow over Sura's death, she was the closest to family that he ever had. And now he had lost her, he always wondered about how some people could happily live with no family. With no people to love them unconditionally.
Even if a person had all the power and riches in the world, it won't really matter if he had no one to share it with, the same happened with his father, he had heard stories about him, from the time before his mother's death, on how he was so happy and cheerful, but when she died he broke. And, instead of clinging to his children and loving them as he loved their mother, he distanced himself from them and closed off his heart, most likely because they made him think of her, and thinking of her must have been painful. For the first time in his life, Derman felt that he understood his father, and even forgave him a little for his absence.
Squinting his eyes at the ceiling, it was shrouded in darkness, dawn has not come yet.
He got out of bed. He knew that he would not be sleeping if he remained lying down, that way, he would just start thinking of death and destroy himself with guilt.
He should have protected her better, should have knew that Kalan would go after her with all his power, but as she always said to him when he was a kid and kept nagging her with questions about his mother, and about why she was not there with him. 'What is dead is gone, focus on the living and focus on making the ones that you lost proud of you, honor their memory that way'
He had many regrets, and her death will be his greatest regret but he will make her proud, and he will wish if she was still here to see it, he knew that, and accepted it.
Taking a deep breath, he dropped to the ground to do some pushups, every morning when he wakes up he would do five hundred, it was not not his limit, he knew he could do double that if he wanted and even more, and now, until dawn, he planned to find out how much he could actually do.
Losing himself in the motions, he noticed rays of light entering the chamber, he did not know how much time he kept doing the pushups, he had lost count at two thousand and just kept going after. A cough from behind interrupted him, after one final pushup he stood up, wiped the sweat from his face with his shirt, and looked at Angar, he had a dark blue coat on and black trousers.
Yesterday, after what happened, he officially appointed him as his personal secretary and asked him to take care of everything for him.
Derman honestly felt ashamed, he had left the man working the whole night while he was sleeping in his chambers, however, it was for the better. Yesterday, his mind was muddled and frayed with loss and fury, so his decisions would not have very been reliable.
"Angar, I'm sorry for leaving you to take care of this mess that I put us into, I promise I won't do that again" He sincerely said.
The man just smiled, he looked at him for a moment and said with a tinge of amusement, "you do know that you're basically the king now don't you?" he grinned, "that's the king's job, sitting down and letting others take care of their stuff for them"
Derman chuckled, "Then what are we going to do about…what happened" he asked, humour fading from his face, it was obvious that their biggest problem right now was his brother's death. By law, royal blood does not get spilled, the only way for a royal to be executed was by a court, he must stand and be judged by the great families.
Normally, the king himself would head that trial, with his word being the final one, but now the king was dead, and Derman killed a Royal with impunity, with no trial.
The nobles will not let go of the opportunity to make demands of him in exchange for their cooperation, and he would have to submit to their demands, Angar's duty through the night was to find out what those demands were and try to negotiate for a better position. 'If only there were no witnesses', he thought, but there was no benefit in ifs now, what happened, happened, and they must do what they could to salvage this situation.
"I spoke with all of them, explained to them that the prince was killed by the same assassin who killed the king, and made sure that they realized we are currently at war with the empire, and that we could not afford to have any internal conflicts, I also made sure that the guards would forget about what…about how the prince died, and made sure that the young nobles who witnessed what happened would tell their families none of it"
"And how did you convince them to do that", he asked curiously.
The man grinned and said, "They all had many skeletons in their closet, I just pointed out to them that if any of them talked, then those skeletons would walk out and whisper in everyone's ears"