Promised to His Shadow

Chapter Two

What a Crown Costs

Gabriel’s POV

I had buried men before.

Six years on the northern border had taught me how to stand at a graveside without my face doing anything embarrassing. How to let a chaplain’s words wash over me while some separate, colder part of my mind kept running through the things that still needed doing. Supply lines. Troop rotations. A letter to a widow.

None of that training was worth anything today.

Today the body in the ground was Adrien’s. And I was standing at the edge of the family vault in my dress uniform with my hands clasped behind my back, discovering that twenty-five years of being the steady one, the disciplined one, the second son who never embarrassed anyone, had not prepared me for this at all.

Three feet to my left, Elianne de Castelane stood with her spine so straight it looked painful. She hadn’t cried, not here, not in front of all of them. I’d watched her do it in the garden the night before — that terrible tearing sound she hadn’t realized was coming from her own throat — and somehow the absence of it now was worse.

I didn’t let myself look at her.

I’d been not looking at her for two years. I was very good at it.

* * *

My father found me in the stone corridor outside the crypt afterward, where at least the cold air gave a man a reasonable excuse for the redness around his eyes.

"You understand what this means," he said.

No greeting. No room for one.

"I understand Adrien is dead," I said. "If you mean something else, say it plainly. I’m not in the mood for careful today."

He studied me the way he studied balance sheets — quickly, looking for what was missing. "Castelane won’t honor the alliance without a marriage. The duke has made that clear already. There is one match that salvages the treaty without reopening eleven years of negotiation."

He didn’t say it. He didn’t need to.

The corridor tilted slightly beneath my boots.

"She buried him three hours ago," I said.

"I know."

"She’s not a trade agreement."

"No." My father’s voice didn’t rise. It never needed to. "She’s the woman who keeps this border from becoming a battlefield. You will marry her before the season turns. I’m sorry for the manner of it. I am not sorry for the necessity."

He left me in the corridor with the cold and the silence and the terrible understanding that I was going to go find her now, because a letter would have been a coward’s way of doing this, and whatever else I was, I had never managed to be a coward where Elianne was concerned.

* * *

She was exactly where I’d known she would be. The dead garden behind the chapel. The bench no one used in winter. She didn’t turn when she heard my footsteps.

I’d spent two years perfecting the art of not noticing her. The way she’d tilted her head that night at Adrien’s betrothal dinner when she’d said something perfectly timed to a pompous ambassador, leaving the entire table delighted and the man flustered. The way I’d laughed before I had the sense to stop myself. The way Adrien had glanced over, pleased, thinking the laugh was for him.

I’d let him think it. That had been the right thing to do. I’d told myself that every day for two years, and every day it got a little bit heavier to carry.

And now here I was, about to ask his fiancée to become mine instead.

"My father means to announce the betrothal within the week," I said. "Yours and mine."

She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Of course he does."

"Elianne —"

"Don’t." Her voice cracked on it, barely. "Don’t say my name like you’re sorry. You’re not sorry, Gabriel. You’re relieved, because it means the treaty survives and the council stops looking at your father like he’s already half in the ground."

The words landed the way she’d meant them to. I let them.

"I buried my brother three hours ago," I said. "I am not relieved about anything today."

Something in my voice must have reached her. She looked at me for the first time, really looked, and I watched the anger shift into something more complicated. Exhausted. Human. The face of someone who was drowning and had just noticed the person in front of them was drowning too.

"I don’t want to marry you," she said. Not cruel. Just honest. "I want you to know that clearly, before any of this becomes official."

"I know."

"Then why does it feel like you’re going to let it happen anyway?"

Because the alternative is war. Because my father is right and she knows it and I know it. Because the honest answer — the real one, the one I’d been carrying for two years like a stone I’d agreed never to put down — was not something I could say to her in a dead garden three hours after my brother’s funeral.

"You should go," she said finally. "Before someone sees us."

I went. And I walked back to the house and told myself what I’d been telling myself for two years — that what I felt was grief, guilt, duty, anything except the thing it actually was.

I almost believed it. I was getting very good at almost.

* * *

That night I gave myself exactly one candle’s worth of honesty.

I sat alone in my chamber with a fire I hadn’t tended properly and I let myself remember the first time I’d truly noticed her. The betrothal dinner. The ambassador. The laugh I’d been too slow to swallow.

Adrien had looked at me across the table, pleased and oblivious, and I’d smiled back and told myself it meant nothing.

It had never meant nothing. Not for a single day.

And now I was going to marry her. My brother’s betrothed, my brother’s woman, the woman I’d spent two years constructing an elaborate architecture of indifference around, was going to become my wife. And I was supposed to — what. Be grateful? Feel guilty? Feel nothing?

The candle burned down another inch. I let myself have it for exactly that long. Then I pinched it out, went to bed, and started building the indifference back up from scratch.

I had a feeling, lying in the dark, that this time it wasn’t going to hold.

* * *

The morning after the funeral, before anyone else was moving through the palace corridors, I went back to the garden.

I don’t know what I was looking for. She wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t there. She’d be in her chambers, doing what grieving women did, surrounded by maids who didn’t know what to say.

I stood in the dead garden by myself and looked at the stone bench where she’d sat.

Adrien had loved her the way he loved everything — easily, warmly, without much effort or depth. He’d spoken of her with affection and never once used the word brilliant, though she was, clearly, undeniably, the sharpest person in any room she entered. He’d never noticed the way she tilted her head when she was thinking, never caught the particular look she got right before she said something that would leave someone flustered and the rest of the table trying not to laugh.

I had noticed. I had been noticing for two years and building elaborate structures of willful blindness over every single one of those observations.

The structures were in ruins now. Adrien was in the ground and she was going to be my wife, and I was standing in a dead garden at dawn trying to figure out how to want what I’d always wanted without it feeling like stealing from my own brother’s grave.

I went back inside. There were reports to read, a council to address, a kingdom to hold together.

She would be at breakfast. I would be polite and correct and give nothing away.

I was, I told myself, very good at giving nothing away. The fact that Elianne had seen through it in a dead garden at dusk was something I intended to think about considerably less than I currently was.