BOUND BY FANG AND FLAME

OLD WOUNDS

The thing about the archive, Lyra thought three nights later, was that it made it very easy to forget she was supposed to hate all of this — the crown, the court, the low, constant hum of being watched and weighed and found wanting. For three nights running, she and Kaelan had sat across the same table until the candles burned low, chasing clauses through treaties written in three dead dialects, and for three nights running, she had almost forgotten to keep her guard up.

Almost.

"Can I ask you something?" Kaelan said, on the third night, not looking up from the page in front of him, which she'd already learned was his way of asking permission to ask something he suspected she wouldn't want to answer.

"You're going to whether I say yes or not."

"Probably." He looked up then, and there was none of the easy charm in his face this time, just something quieter and more careful. "Voss called you Princess like it was an insult. And you flinched at *prince* earlier, in a way that had nothing to do with me. Someone hurt you. Before all this."

Lyra's hands went still on the page in front of her. She could have deflected. She'd gotten very good, over the years, at redirecting conversations away from the parts of her life she didn't want examined, the way a skilled dancer redirects a partner without either of them noticing the correction. But something about the archive at midnight, about three nights of a dragon prince treating her like a colleague instead of a curiosity, made her tired of redirecting.

"His name was Damon," she said. "Crown Prince of Ashfell. The werewolf kingdom my mother was returning from, the night she was bitten." The irony of that had never stopped tasting bitter. "It was arranged when I was fifteen — a betrothal, meant to be a peace gesture, proof that Noctara and Ashfell could build something out of the same tragedy that made me. I actually believed in it, for a while. I thought maybe I existed for a reason bigger than being an accident nobody planned for."

"What happened?"

"He courted me for two years. Wrote letters. Visited. Told me, more than once, that he didn't care what the court called me, that he saw a person and not a mistake." Her voice stayed level, but it cost her something to keep it that way. "And then, three weeks before the wedding, at a formal ball in front of both courts, his own mother asked him — loudly, deliberately, in front of everyone — whether he was truly prepared to found his line on *tainted blood*. And he laughed. Not cruelly. Almost gently. Like it was obviously a joke. And he said, *of course not, mother, I'm not a fool*, and then he looked at me like he expected me to laugh along with him, because as far as he was concerned, nothing had actually changed. He'd never meant any of it. Or maybe he had, right up until it cost him something to keep meaning it."

Kaelan didn't say he was sorry. She was grateful for that, more grateful than she could have explained — she'd had a lifetime of people saying they were sorry, in tones that made it clear they mostly meant *sorry this happened to you*, which was a different thing entirely from *sorry this happened*. Instead he said, "That's not heartbreak. That's a coward finding out being decent was more expensive than he expected, and deciding not to pay."

Something in Lyra's chest loosened, just slightly, at hearing it named that plainly. "I swore, after that, that I'd never again let anyone convince me I mattered to them if I hadn't seen what they'd risk to prove it. Words are cheap. Damon's were the cheapest I ever heard."

"Then I suppose," Kaelan said, "I'll have to risk something eventually, if I want you to believe a word I say."

"Is that a promise?"

"It's a prediction." He held her gaze across the candlelight, steady, unhurried, none of Damon's practiced warmth in it, something rougher and more honest instead. "I don't make promises I haven't already decided to keep."

Lyra looked away first, because something about the way he'd said it made her pulse do something she didn't have a name for yet, something that felt dangerously like hope, and hope was a currency she'd stopped spending a long time ago.

For a while neither of them spoke. The candles had burned low enough that the archive's high windows had gone fully black, and somewhere beyond them the palace was settling into its nightly quiet — the changing of the outer guard, the distant closing of a door, the ordinary sounds of a kingdom that had no idea one of its princesses was sitting in the dark deciding whether it was safe to hope again.

"Can I tell you something in return?" Kaelan said eventually. "Something I haven't told anyone in this court."

"You don't owe me that."

"I know. I'm offering it anyway." He turned the book in front of him closed, carefully, as if to signal that whatever came next deserved his full attention rather than a divided one. "I wasn't supposed to be the one who came here. My older brother, Ronan, was meant to lead this envoy. He's better at diplomacy than I am — patient, careful, exactly the kind of prince who reads a room before he speaks in it. I've never been that. I say what I think and deal with the consequences after, which has cost me more allies than I'd like to admit."

"So why did you come instead?"

"Because I heard about the sacrifice three weeks before the envoy was scheduled, and Ronan wanted to wait for the official diplomatic channels to raise it properly, and I didn't think a girl who'd survived seventeen years of this court had three more weeks to spare on proper channels." He said it simply, without asking for credit, which somehow made it land harder than if he had. "My father doesn't know I moved the timeline up. He's going to be furious when Ronan tells him, which he will, because Ronan doesn't lie to our father even when I'd very much prefer that he did."

"You broke protocol. For someone you'd never met."

"I broke protocol for a rumor about someone I'd never met," Kaelan corrected. "Which, in hindsight, was either the best decision I've made in years or the kind of decision that gets written into cautionary histories. I haven't decided which yet. Ask me again after the new moon."

Lyra found herself almost smiling, which was a strange enough sensation that she nearly didn't recognize it. "That's not exactly the confidence-inspiring speech I'd expect from a crown prince trying to convince a kingdom's council to trust his judgment."

"I'm not trying to convince the council of anything. I'm trying to convince you." His eyes held hers, steady in the candlelight. "The council I can out-argue with treaties and trade leverage. You I'd actually like to earn."

The word *earn* sat strangely in her chest, warm and unfamiliar, and Lyra realized, with the particular clarity that comes at the end of a long night, that she believed him — not because he'd said anything especially convincing, but because everything about the way he said it cost him something to say, and she'd learned a long time ago that the cost was the only part of anyone's words that actually mattered.