Vows of Fire and Frost

Chapter Eight: Two Traitors

"Do you know what they call me, back home, now?" Sarah asked. They were in the solar this time, the fire burned low, the guards were dismissed to the outer hall — a habit that had become, without either of them quite naming it, a nightly ritual. "The men in Thorne's camp. Not to my face. But Mira hears things, even from here."

"Tell me."

"The Frost Traitor." She said it lightly, the way people said things they'd practiced saying lightly so many times, the weight had worn smoothly. "The princess who married her brother's murderer to save her own skin. Never mind that I did it because my father asked me to. Never mind that I've spent every night since wondering if there was a version of this where I refused and let the war eat another generation instead." She turned the teacup in her hands, not drinking from it, the same habit he'd noticed in himself. "I used to belong somewhere, Kaelen. Now I don't think I belong to either kingdom at all."

He didn't offer her comfort. She'd have known if it was false, and he found — with some discomfort — that he didn't want to give her anything false.

"My mother used to say something like that," he said instead. "Near the end. That she'd stopped being able to tell which parts of the court loved her and which parts were only pretending to, because my father loved her so completely that pretending had become the safest performance in the castle." He stared into the fire rather than at her. "Someone decided the surest way to wound my father was to go through her instead of through him. They were right. It worked better than an army would have."

"Is that why," Sarah asked carefully, "You've spent this marriage keeping such a careful distance from me? In case I turn out to be a door someone can walk through?"

He looked at her then, and something in his face — the same c***k she'd glimpsed the night of the ambush — opened a little wider.

"I don't know how to be loved without being afraid of what it costs the person doing the loving," he admitted. "I've never had to know. Until, apparently, now."

"That's not an answer either," Sarah said softly. "But it's an honest one. I'll allow it."

For the first time since the bridge at Frostmere, she found herself wanting to reach for his hand, and did not let herself, and noticed — with a small, private ache — that he seemed to be fighting the exact same instinct across the same three feet of firelit space.

It would have been so easy, in that moment, to close the distance herself. She catalogued every reason not to instead, the way she'd once catalogued exits and guards in an unfamiliar castle: that Varek's spies watched them both closer than either of them could prove, that Wyndemere still had a word for what she'd be if she let herself want this, that whatever grew between them now would only make it harder, later, if the peace ever failed and one of them was left holding the wreckage alone.

"You're doing the thing again," Kael said quietly, watching her face.

"What thing?"

"Building a wall out of reasons before you've even asked yourself whether you want one."

"And you're not?" She managed something that was almost a laugh. "I watched you put an entire castle's worth of distance between us the moment you realized you'd said something true."

"I'm aware of the irony." He didn't move closer. Neither did she. But something in the space between them had shifted all the same — no longer merely charged, but chosen, both of them standing at the edge of it with their eyes open. "I'm not asking you to trust this tonight, Sarah. I'm only telling you it's there, so that whatever you decide to do with it, you're deciding with the truth in front of you instead of without it."

"That's a very careful way of saying something reckless."

"I contain multitudes," Kael said, dry enough that she laughed at herself, soft and startled, and some of the ache in her chest eased into something that felt, for the first time in longer than she could remember, almost like hope.