Vows of Fire and Frost

Chapter Six: The First Honest Thing

"Why not?" Sarah asked. It was, she realized, the first question she'd asked him that she genuinely wanted to answer, rather than a blade dressed up as conversation. "You'd have every reason to. It would make you safer. It would make the whole court trust you more."

"Would it." Kael turned the teacup slowly where it sat, not looking at her. "I've spent my whole life being the thing people point to so they don't have to be afraid of anything else. The Demon of Frostmere. It's useful. It ends arguments. I'm not eager to trade it for being the man who exposed his own wife to a court that would burn her for what she can't help being."

"That's not an answer. That's a reason. Tell me the truth."

He looked at her then, and something in his careful control slipped — not much, just enough that she saw, for one unguarded second, a man far younger and far more tired than the legend the war had built around him.

"The truth," he said slowly, as if testing each word for a trap before he set it down, "is that I watched what happened to someone my father loved, when the wrong people learned there was a way to hurt him through her. I decided a long time ago that I would never give anyone that kind of hold over me again — not being loved, not loving. It seemed like the only way to keep the people who mattered safe." He exhaled. "And then, eleven days ago, I rode onto a road expecting to find my wife dead, and discovered I would have burned this entire kingdom down rather than let that happen. So no. I'm not going to tell them what you are. I don't seem to have much say in it anymore."

The silence that followed wasn't comfortable, but it wasn't hostile either — it was the particular, fragile quiet of two people standing at the edge of something neither of them had agreed to want.

"That sounds," Sarah said carefully, "like a confession, Your Highness."

"It sounds," Kael said, "like the first honest thing I've said to anyone in three years." He stood, putting a careful, deliberate distance back between them, as if he'd frightened himself with how close he'd let the moment come. "Get some rest, Princess. Whoever sent those men will try again, and I intend to be ready for it. I mean to start with the one we took alive — he gave me nothing but silence on the road, but a cell and a few days to think about what he's protecting tends to loosen tongues that swords can't. We can discuss the rest of what you are, and what I apparently am no longer able to help feel about, at another time."

He left before she could answer. Sarah sat a long while after the door closed, one hand still pressed to the pendant at her throat, and realized with a small, unwelcome jolt that the danger she needed to guard herself against most carefully was no longer the court, or the assassins, or even her own long-buried gift.

It was the growing, terrifying certainty that the Demon of Frostmere was not nearly as good at keeping people out as he believed himself to be — and that she was in very real danger of becoming the exception he hadn't planned for — and, if she let herself be honest about it for even a moment, of falling for him exactly as helplessly in return.