I found Torin on the same porch where we'd sat together the night my father first brought his proof, the desert cooling around us under a sky clearing slowly of the tension that had gripped this whole territory for months.
"I came into this marriage as a debt paid in blood," I said, echoing words I'd carried privately since the night of the binding, finally ready to say them out loud. "I don't think either of us actually believes that's what it still is."
"No," Torin said, reaching for my hand the way he had at the altar, except this time no ritual forced the gesture and no ledger demanded it, nothing standing between us but the two of us choosing it freely, deliberately, for its own sake. "I think it became something neither of our fathers ever intended, and something considerably bette
