Episode 46

Tears, hot and stinging, traced paths through the grime on Mihnea’s cheeks. His mother. The image, a phantom conjured by the ache in his soul, flickered behind his eyes: her slender form, a fragile bird against the stark stone, plummeting from the high turrets. The Arges, a silver ribbon far below, had swallowed her cry, her life, her very existence. *Why, Mother?* he whispered into the suffocating silence of his grief. *Why were you so frail? Why did it have to happen?*

He remembered the hushed arguments, the longing in his father’s voice when he spoke of her, a longing that had ultimately, tragically, led to this. They had missed her. The cloistered life, the sterile purity of the convent, had been deemed insufficient for the vibrant warmth she brought. His father, the fearsome Voivode, had desired her presence, her smile, even if it meant a calculated risk. A risk that had cost them everything. He saw her now, not as the spectral figure falling, but as she was before – a gentle presence, her laughter like the chime of distant bells, her touch a balm to his young spirit. But even then, a shadow had clung to her, a whisper of a vulnerability that now felt like a cruel premonition. He had been too young to understand the whispers of danger, too small to grasp the precariousness of her position, a woman of humble origins loved by a man of immense power and even greater enemies. If only she had been kept hidden, safe within the convent walls, away from the machinations of men and the jealousies of courts. But their yearning, their need for her light, had drawn her out into the unforgiving glare of their world, and the Arges had claimed her, a watery grave for a love that dared to bloom in forbidden soil.