BOUND TO THE ENEMY KING

THE LAND GETS DARKER

He was already in the courtyard when I arrived.

I had expected to wait, kings were late by tradition, by privilege, by the simple fact that no one had ever taught them that other people's time had value. But Aldric of Vael was standing beside two saddled horses in the grey pre-dawn light, speaking quietly to a soldier, and he looked up when I came through the door with my pack on my shoulder as though he had simply been expecting me and not early himself.

I didn't comment on it. He didn't either.

The soldier finished whatever report he was delivering and stepped back. The king dismissed him with a word and turned to the horses.

"Can you ride?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Well?"

I looked at him. "My father had horses. Before."

A pause. He handed me the reins of the grey mare without another word.

She was a good horse, steady-eyed, solid through the shoulder, the kind of animal that didn't startle easily. I appreciated that. I ran my hand down her nose and she exhaled against my palm and I felt, briefly and inconveniently, the threat of something I could not afford, so I put my foot in the stirrup and mounted and arranged my pack and looked straight ahead.

The palace gates opened.

We rode out into a city that was already wrong.

I had not been outside the palace walls in fourteen months.

I had not thought about that fact very much, because thinking about it made the walls feel closer, and I had enough to manage without adding that. But riding through the capital now, in the thin early light, I understood how thoroughly I had been kept from seeing what was happening outside them.

The city's market quarter should have been stirring at this hour, vendors setting up, the smell of bread from the bakeries, the low noise of a place waking up. Instead the streets were quiet in the way that felt wrong, not peaceful. A woman stood in a doorway watching us pass with an expression I recognized because I had worn it myself: the expression of someone waiting for the next bad thing.

The flower boxes under the windows were black.

Every one of them.

A child sat on a front step, turning something over in her hands. As we rode past I saw it was a peach, and every inch of its skin had gone the color of rot.

I looked away.

We passed through the city gates as the sun came up, pale and thin, and the road south stretched ahead of us through fields that should have been showing the first green of the season.

They were not green.

As far as I could see in either direction, the fields were black and flat and silent. No birds. No insects. The air had that same hollow quality I'd noticed from the palace window, an absence of smell that was itself a smell, the way a room smells when something that was alive in it no longer is.

I had not been back south in three years.

I had not expected to come back like this.

We did not speak for a long time.

That was fine with me. I had spent three years in a court where silence was a skill and I had become very good at it. I rode and watched the land and catalogued what I saw with the careful detached part of my mind, the part that had learned to observe without feeling, because feeling was something I did privately and later, alone, when no one could see what it cost me.

The king rode well. I noticed that the way I noticed everything about him, carefully, because information was the only currency I'd had for three years and old habits didn't break easily. He sat easy in the saddle, not showy, the kind of rider who had learned on horseback rather than been taught in a ring. He didn't ride ahead of me. That surprised me more than it should have.

Around midmorning we crested a low hill and I pulled my mare to a stop without meaning to.

Below us, the road curved through what had been farmland. I knew this stretch. I had traveled it twice as a girl, riding south with my mother to visit her sister in the valley town of Carath. The farms here had been prosperous, wide fields, fat orchards, a mill by the river.

The mill was still standing. The river beside it was black.

The orchards were leafless and dark, every tree stripped of color, branches reaching up like hands.

My mare shifted beneath me. I realized I had gone very still.

"You know this area." The king's voice, beside me. Not a question.

"I passed through it as a child," I said. My voice came out even. I was proud of that.

He didn't say anything. Didn't offer anything hollow and unwanted like I'm sorry or this will be restored. He just sat with me for a moment in silence while I looked at the dead orchards, and then he clicked his horse forward and waited at the bottom of the hill for me to follow.

I followed.

We stopped at midday by a stream that was not yet fully black, still running, but clouded, the color of old pewter. The horses drank cautiously. I filled my water skin from the supplies we'd brought, not from the stream, and sat on a flat rock and ate the bread from my pack without tasting it.

The king sat a few feet away, doing the same.

"The first site," he said, not looking at me. "The mages marked it on the map. Three days' ride south, near the old standing stones at the Aethmoor border."

"I know the stones," I said.

"Of course you do." He said it without condescension, which I hadn't expected.

I tore a piece of bread. "What did the mages tell you about the rites? The full version."

"What they told the council."

"The council got a careful version. What did they tell you privately."

A pause. He looked at me then, a measuring look, the kind that might have made someone else uncomfortable. I looked back.

"The rites require genuine feeling," he said finally. "Not performed. The curse is old enough to know the difference."

I had suspected as much. "And the first rite. Truth."

"Yes."

"One true thing. Each."

"Yes."

I looked at the clouded stream. At the pewter water moving slowly over grey stones.

"You should know," I said, "that I am very good at not telling the truth. I have been doing it for three years in your palace and no one has noticed."

"I noticed," he said.

I looked at him.

His expression was even, controlled, but there was something in it that was not quite comfortable. "I noticed," he said again, quieter. "I simply didn't, " He stopped. Looked away. "It doesn't matter."

It did matter. I filed it away and said nothing.

We finished eating in silence and packed up and rode south, and the land got darker the further we went, and I held myself very straight in the saddle and breathed through my nose and did not think about my mother's kitchen or the smell of the orchards in summer or anything else I couldn't afford.

By evening the road had narrowed to a track through dead woodland, and the sky above us was the deep bruised purple of a storm that hadn't broken yet, and we made camp in a clearing where nothing grew and nothing moved and the silence was total.

He built the fire. I unpacked the bedrolls to opposite sides of it without discussion.

The flames caught and pushed the dark back a little. The golden thread at my wrist caught the light and pulsed once, gently, like a reminder.

I pulled my sleeve down over it.

Across the fire, the king was looking into the flames with an expression I had never seen on his face in three years of watching him from the edges of rooms.

He looked, very briefly and very privately, like someone who wasn't sure he deserved to save anything at all.

I looked away before he could catch me seeing it.

"Sleep," I said. "I'll take first watch."

He didn't argue. That surprised me too.

I sat with my back to the dead trees and my face to the fire and the dark pressing in all around us, and I watched the road we'd come from and thought about the orchards, and the pewter river, and the look on his face, and I did not sleep for a very long time.