Vows of Fire and Frost

Chapter Four: The Quiet Between Enemies

Ashgrave Castle was built of dark stone and older fires, nothing like the pale, wind-scoured halls of home, and Sarah spent her first week there learning its architecture the way she'd once learned battle maps — memorizing exits, counting guards, cataloguing which servants watched her too closely to be simple curiosity.

Kael, for his part, gave her a wing of the castle to herself and did not visit it.

She told herself she was relieved. She told herself that every night for six nights, and on the seventh, when she couldn't sleep and went walking the ramparts alone rather than lie awake counting the ways this marriage could still kill her, she found him already there — sitting on the cold stone with a cup he wasn't drinking from, looking out at a border he'd bled for more times than she wanted to imagine.

"Can't sleep in enemy territory either, Princess?" he asked, without turning.

"This is my home now. Apparently." She came to stand beside him anyway, because retreating would have felt like conceding something. "You could have said that with less irony."

"I could have. I find I don't have much practice at gentler things." He glanced up at her, and in the moonlight his face lost some of the careful blankness he wore in front of the court. "You're allowed to hate this. I'd rather you say so than perform contentment for my father's spies."

"Would you prefer I hated you to your face, then?"

"I'd prefer honesty to whatever this is." He gestured, vaguely, at the space between them — the cord-marks still faintly visible on both their wrists, the whole absurd architecture of a marriage built on a battlefield. "You don't have to like me. You don't even have to trust me. But I won't insult you with performances, and I'd ask the same courtesy."

It was, Sarah thought, the strangest kindness anyone had offered her in months — not comfort, not flattery, just a blunt refusal to lie to her. She found she didn't know what to do with it.

"Very well," she said. "Honestly, then. I think about my brother every time I look at you."

"Good," Kael said, and it cost him something to say it — she could hear the cost in his voice. "You should. I do."

She hadn't expected that either. She studied his profile in the dark, the sharp line of his jaw, the particular stillness of a man who had trained himself not to give anything away and was, apparently, choosing this one moment not to.

"They call you the Demon," she said. "I keep waiting to see it."

"Careful, Princess." Something almost wry touched his voice. "Wait long enough, and you might get your wish."

"Is that meant to frighten me?"

"It's meant to be honest. I've found the two aren't always separable, where I'm concerned." He turned his head, studying her more directly than he had all evening. "Most people who spend enough time near me eventually see it. My own father still flinches, some days, at what I became after Frostmere."

"I'm not your father. And I've stood closer to you tonight than most of your own court manages in a month." She held his gaze, refusing to let the dare in her own voice waver. "So tell me plainly — should I be afraid of you, Kaelen Ashgrave?"

"No," he said, and the word came without hesitation, low and certain in a way that seemed to surprise them both. "Whatever else I am, I've never been a danger to anyone who wasn't already trying to kill me. You're safer standing this close to me than you'd have been in half the courts I've visited."

"That's a strange kind of comfort, from a man they call a demon."

"It's the only kind I know how to give." Something in his voice roughened, unguarded for just a moment. "I'm not accustomed to offering it. You'll have to tell me if I'm doing it badly."

"You're doing well enough," Sarah admitted, quieter than she meant to. "Better than I expected, certainly."

"Careful, Princess," he said again, softer this time, something almost fond threaded through the warning. "Keep saying things like that, and you'll ruin my reputation entirely."

"I don't think I will," she said, surprising herself with how certain it sounded, and left him on the ramparts before either of them could decide what to make of that.