The truth to summer's lie.
Medieval history lessons say that the queens usually slept in their own chambers with their ladies-in-waiting rather than share their bed permanently with their husband. I suppose Ivalice culture is like that too.
The title is taken from the 31 Days prompt for March 4, 2006.
Ovelia told herself that they had been in love once — they must have been, because that was the only way that they could have gone so far. It was not because she had been blinded by his brilliance, or taken in by his honeyed lies. What they had, it had to have been something pure, something transcendent, something truer than anything she had known in her life at the convent. She was not a victim of his deception, not like the rest of the people he had promised things to and ended up breaking on the wheel, or drawing and quartering by horse, or hanging at the gallows. She was precious to him and she was alive and by his side because he loved her. She was Queen — hisQueen — because he loved her. That had to be it.
Sometimes, when the days were difficult and the nights were too long, Ovelia curled up amidst the sleeping bodies of her handmaidens and tried to recall every memory she had ever had of him before the fall: Delita's face near her own in Orbonne, Delita swearing fealty and eternity in the ruins of a monastery, Delita stabbing an assassin in the back, Delita's thumb on her cheek, Delita's back near the apple tree and how it had looked so small, in need of human touch, Delita's naked form by the window after their first night. She fed on the memories, and kept her soul alive yet another day.