BOUND TO THE ENEMY KING

The Morning After

I woke before dawn with my hand pressed to my wrist.

The thread was still there. I could feel it even without looking, that low warm hum against my pulse, steady as a second heartbeat that had decided to move in without asking. I lay still for a moment in the grey pre-light and stared at the canopy of dead branches above me and waited for the feeling to bother me more than it did.

It didn't. That bothered me instead.

I sat up.

Aldric was already awake. Of course he was. He was sitting on the other side of the dead fire with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the middle distance, the way a man sits when he has been awake for a while and has run out of things to think about and is simply existing in the quiet. He looked different in the early morning. The court stillness was still there but it sat differently on him out here, less like armor, more like habit.

He looked up when I moved.

Neither of us said good morning. It didn't seem like the right kind of morning for that.

I reached for the water skin and drank and looked at the standing stones at the edge of our camp. In the dawn light they were just stones, dark granite, old and patient, nothing glowing about them. The altar at the center was still. Whatever had moved through that place last night had settled back into the earth, satisfied.

One true thing. Each.

I could still feel where his words had landed. The warlord Karek. The impossible choice. Three years of carrying something he hadn't been able to put down either.

I didn't know what to do with that so I did what I always did, I put it aside and focused on what was in front of me.

"How far to the next site?" I asked.

His eyes came back from the middle distance. "Four days. Southwest, through the Carath valley."

I went still.

Carath. The valley town where my mother's sister had lived. Where I had visited twice as a girl, riding south in the summer with wildflowers in my hair and no concept yet of how quickly everything could be taken.

"I know it," I said, the same way I had said it about everything else on this road. Flat. Controlled.

"I know you do," he said. The same way he had said it yesterday. Without pushing.

I appreciated that more than I wanted to.

I started breaking camp. Rolled my bedroll tight, packed the cooking kit, scattered the ash of the dead fire. Movement helped. It always had, the particular mercy of tasks, of small manageable things to do with your hands when everything else was too large to hold.

He broke camp on his side without being asked, which I had not expected of a king and had been consistently not expecting since we left the palace.

"You didn't sleep," I said. Not a question.

"No."

"The rite?"

A pause. "Partly."

I didn't ask about the other part. I had a feeling I already knew, and knowing felt like more intimacy than I was ready to hold before breakfast.

We rode into the morning in the usual silence, but it was different now and we both knew it.

Before the rite the silence had been a wall, two people on opposite sides of something enormous, maintaining distance by mutual and unspoken agreement. This silence was something else. Not warm exactly. Not comfortable. But different. The silence of two people who have said something real to each other and are still figuring out what that means for every interaction that comes after.

The land around us was still blighted. If anything it was worse further south, the blackness deeper, the air more hollow, the road more empty of any living thing. We passed through a village around midmorning that should have had people in it. The houses were standing. The doors were closed. No smoke from the chimneys.

I pulled my mare to a stop.

"Where did they go?" I asked.

"North." Aldric had stopped beside me. "The outer villages have been evacuating toward the capital since the Hollowing began. The ones who could move, moved."

"And the ones who couldn't?"

He didn't answer immediately. That was answer enough.

I looked at the empty village. At the closed doors and the dead window boxes and a child's shoe sitting in the middle of the road, just one, as though someone had been carried away mid-step.

My people, I thought. This is what it looks like. This is what a year of the Hollowing looks like and we are only days in.

I clicked my mare forward. I did not look at the shoe again.

We stopped at midday in the shelter of a dead tree line where at least the wind was blocked, and I built a small fire while Aldric watered the horses at a stream that was clouded but still moving.

He came back and sat across from me and we ate in the quiet and I turned over what I wanted to say and decided to say it because I had spent three years not saying things and it had not made anything easier.

"Yesterday," I said. "At the altar. What you told me, about Karek."

He looked up from his food.

"I'm not..." I stopped. Tried again. "I'm not ready to forgive you. I want to be clear about that. I don't know if I ever will be. What happened to my people happened. It doesn't become smaller because there was a reason for it."

He held my gaze. "I know."

"But." The word cost me something. "I wanted you to know that I heard it. What you said. I'm still, I'm thinking about it."

Something moved through his expression that I didn't have a name for. It wasn't relief exactly. It was more like, the look of someone who had not expected to be heard and didn't quite know where to put it.

"That's more than I deserve," he said quietly.

"Probably," I agreed.

The fire crackled between us. A small living thing in all that dead landscape, stubborn and warm.

"Carath," he said after a moment. "Your mother's family."

I looked at him.

"The mages compiled records," he said. "Of the southern bloodlines. I read them before we left." A pause. "I know what was there. What might still be there."

I looked back at the fire. "Then you know I haven't let myself think about it."

"Yes."

"Don't." I said it quietly, without heat. "Don't think about it for me either. When we get there I'll manage it. Until then I'd rather not."

He nodded once. No argument. No gentle probing.

We finished eating and kicked out the fire and rode on south, and the valley of Carath was four days away, and I held the thought of it at a careful distance and focused instead on the road, and the thread warm at my wrist, and the sound of two horses moving through a dying and patient world.