Vows of Fire and Frost

Chapter Five: What the Frost Hides

The ambush came eleven days later, on the eastern road, when a delegation meant to be routine — Sarah, two guards, and a wedding gift returning to her father as a gesture of goodwill — was met instead by a dozen riders wearing no house colors at all.

Kael was three miles out on a training circuit when the horn sounded, and he did not remember the ride back so much as the fact of arriving, sword already drawn, into a scene that should have ended in her death and somehow hadn't.

Sarah stood in the center of the road, both guards down but breathing, most of the attackers scattered in a wide, frost-blackened circle around her as if something enormous had exhaled winter across the clearing — all but three, who'd been standing too far back when the frost tore through the others, and who were closing on her now with blades raised while she stood locked in place, one hand clamped white-knuckled over the pendant at her throat, her whole body shaking with the effort of holding the rest of it back.

Kael didn't slow down to take in the strangeness of it. He simply put himself between her and the nearest blade.

The first man died fast — a mistake born of overconfidence against a target he hadn't expected to already be moving by the time he arrived. The second lasted three exchanges longer, better trained, giving ground steadily toward the tree line under a series of strikes that left him no room to do anything but defend, until Kael's blade found the gap between guard and shoulder and ended it. The third threw down his sword rather than test his chances further, hands raised — and Kael put him on his knees in the frozen mud with a boot behind his leg and the point of a blade resting light against the base of his skull.

"Who sent you," he said. It wasn't a question so much as a promise of what would happen if the man refused to answer it.

The man said nothing — the particular, stubborn silence of someone more afraid of whoever had hired him than of the sword at his throat. Kael's grip tightened by a fraction, weighing exactly how far he was willing to go to get an answer in front of his own guards.

"Kael." Sarah's voice, hoarse and unsteady, reached him before he decided. "Enough. Look at him — he's already chosen to die rather than talk. Don't give him the satisfaction of turning you into something you'll regret, over a man who isn't worth it."

He held the position one heartbeat longer than he strictly needed to, then stepped back and let his men bind the prisoner's hands instead of finishing what his instincts had wanted to.

Only then did he let himself actually look at her.

Kael took in the frost-burned grass, the ice crusting the fallen men's blades, the terror in her face that had nothing to do with the attackers and everything to do with him seeing this, and understood, in the space of one held breath, that the princess he'd married was not what either kingdom believed her to be.

He made a choice he didn't examine too closely until much later.

"Guards," he said, loud enough to carry, already moving between Sarah and the men climbing back to their feet. "Lightning struck the tree line. I saw it from the ridge. Get the princess back inside the walls."

It was a lie so poor a child could have seen through it. Not one guard argued with him.

He didn't speak to her again until they were alone in her chambers, the door barred, her hands still trembling around a teacup she wasn't drinking from.

"You're going to ask," she said, before he could.

"I'm going to ask," he agreed, and sat, and made himself go still and unthreatening in a way he hadn't bothered with in years. "What are you, Sarah?"

She looked up at him — really looked, the way she hadn't since the bridge — searching his face for the cruelty she still half expected to find there.

"Something in both our kingdoms burns on sight," she said quietly. "Are you going to tell them?"

Kael thought of his mother, loved and marked and destroyed by exactly the kind of secret that made a person a target. He thought of ten years spent making sure no one ever had that kind of power over him again.

And he found, to his own considerable surprise, that his answer came without hesitation.

"No," he said. "I'm not."