The BloodBound Crown

A Mile of Rope

They tested the bond properly two days later, because Roan insisted, and because Larke, though she’d rather have eaten glass than admit it, wanted to know the shape of the leash she was now wearing. A mile, Ysolde had said, give or take, based on a record three hundred years old that had never accounted for two people who might, for reasons of their own, actively try to test its limits out of stubbornness. They chose the eastern road, mostly because it was the one stretch of Ashvale land wide and empty enough that neither court would notice two royal heirs riding out together without an obvious excuse, and partly, though neither of them said this aloud, because it put actual distance between the ache in Larke’s chest and anyone who might ask questions about her face while she felt it. You don’t have to do the noble half mile thing, Roan said, riding a length ahead of her, glancing back. We can just stop when it starts to hurt. I want to know exactly where it starts to hurt, Larke said. Guessing gets people killed. I’d rather have the number. That’s either extremely sensible or deeply alarming, and I haven’t decided which. Both, she said. It’s usually both, with me.

That got a real laugh out of him, short and surprised, like it had escaped before he’d approved it, and Larke felt something in her chest that had nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the unwelcome discovery that she liked the sound of it more than she had any right to. Before they’d left, Ysolde had caught them at the stables with news that had settled uneasily in Larke’s stomach ever since. The gray robed man had a name, or at least a role, an under clerk attached to the treaty archive, the kind of post so minor no one bothered remembering the faces attached to it. He’d requested access to the Second Archive three times in the past month, each time on an authorization bearing Lord Castellan Bren’s own seal, and each time, when Ysolde had quietly asked Bren’s steward about it that morning, the answer had come back that the Lord Castellan recalled signing no such thing. Either someone forged his seal, Ysolde had said, or someone close enough to him to have access to it used it without asking, and I genuinely could not tell you, Your Highnesses, which of those frightens me more. Roan had gone very quiet at that, the particular quiet of a man doing arithmetic he didn’t like the answer to, because it meant the thread no longer pointed cleanly toward Veyra, or cleanly toward anyone at all. It pointed somewhere inside his own house, close enough to his uncle to borrow his authority, and that was a different kind of danger than a stranger in the crowd.

They rode until the ache became a pull, and the pull became a weight, and at what Roan’s steward later paced out to be just under a mile, Larke felt the air go out of her lungs all at once, like a hand closing around something behind her sternum. She didn’t fall, she’d trained too long for that, her body simply refusing the indignity of it even as everything in her chest screamed to turn around, but she heard Roan’s horse wheel hard behind her, heard him say her name in a voice stripped of every ounce of diplomat’s polish, and by the time he reached her she’d already turned the horse herself, jaw locked, refusing to be the one who needed catching. That’s close enough, he said, low, once they were riding back together and the weight had eased into its usual dull hum. I’m fine. You went white as parchment, Larke. I said I’m fine. You’re allowed to not be fine, he said. I nearly went to my knees the first time I tested it alone, before I dragged you out here to make it a joint effort. He said it lightly, but there was an edge underneath it, something that sounded almost like worry, which was such an unfamiliar thing to hear from him that she didn’t immediately know what to do with it. I’m not trying to win an argument, he added. I’m trying to figure out how far I can send a messenger before it becomes a problem, not prove either of us can survive testing our own limits out of spite. That’s uncharacteristically responsible of you. I contain multitudes, he said, and this time when the corner of his mouth lifted, she let herself, just once, not glare at it.

They rode back in something that wasn’t quite comfortable silence but wasn’t hostility either, a third thing, newer, that Larke didn’t have a name for yet and wasn’t sure she wanted one. It was Roan who broke it, a mile or so from the keep, his voice careful in a way that told her he’d been building up to the question the whole ride. Ysolde said the bond changes people. The longer it holds. I remember. Have you noticed anything, he asked, not looking at her when he asked it, which she suspected was deliberate, giving her room to lie if she needed to. Different. Since the Rite. Larke considered lying. It would have been easy, and a week ago it would have been instinctive, the two of them had spent eleven years perfecting the art of giving each other nothing to work with. But she was tired, and the ache in her chest had settled into something that felt less like a wound and more, disturbingly, like company, and she found she didn’t have the energy tonight to keep pretending otherwise. I keep waiting to hate you as much as I did a week ago, she said. And it isn’t happening the way I expect it to. Roan didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice had lost every trace of the easy banter from earlier, gone quiet and honest in a way she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard from him, not once, not even on the terrace. Neither is mine, he said.

Neither of them said anything else the rest of the way back. They didn’t need to. The bond between them, humming low and steady in the dark, said enough, and underneath it, unspoken, sat the other thing neither of them had said aloud yet either, that somewhere in Ashvale’s own halls, someone wearing Bren’s authority like a borrowed coat had wanted this exact result, and neither of them yet knew if that meant a stranger had simply been clever, or if the danger they were riding back toward had a face one of them already trusted.