Saving the Immortal

Chapter Four: The Journey North

We departed that same evening, under a moon veiled thinly by cloud, in a carriage bearing the crest of the Northern Reach.

I had said my farewells to my mother in the privacy of my chambers, her arms around me longer and tighter than propriety generally allowed, and had left my father's embrace with a composure I did not, in truth, feel even slightly. The kingdom I had known my entire life shrank behind us as the carriage rolled north, torchlight from the castle windows dimming into the dark until there was nothing left of home but memory.

Ruselon sat across from me.

He said little during those first hours, and I was, if I am honest, grateful for the silence. My mind had no room left for conversation. It was entirely occupied with a single dread that had been building since the maids' quiet conversations reached my ears months before, whispered in corners of the palace where they believed no one of consequence was listening.

I had heard things.

Not kind things. Not gentle accounts, offered with any tenderness toward the girls who'd shared them. I had heard of wedding nights spoken of with a particular flatness, a resignation that had unsettled me more than outrage might have — as though the thing itself was simply something to be endured, survived, gotten through rather than anything approaching what the poets claimed it should be.

I had built, in the months since, an entirely separate dread from the one I carried about Ruselon's nature. A dread that had nothing to do with horns or claws or the shape of a demon's true form, and everything to do with what would be expected of me once we reached whatever chambers awaited at the end of this journey.

I resolved, somewhere in the dark of that carriage, that I would do whatever proved necessary to delay it.

"You have said nothing for some hours," Ruselon observed eventually, his voice quiet against the rhythm of the wheels on the road. "Are you unwell?"

"I am simply tired," I said, which was not entirely untrue, though it was also not the whole of it.

He studied me for a long moment in the dim carriage light.

"You need not fear me," he said, with a directness that startled me slightly. "I am aware of what is generally expected on nights such as this one. I do not intend to press you toward anything you are not prepared for."

I looked at him properly then.

"You cannot know what I fear," I said, carefully.

"No," he agreed. "But I can guess a great deal of it, having lived long enough to understand the particular terror that arranged marriages hold for young women who have been given no say in them."

I did not know how to answer that.

"I have heard things," I admitted finally, the words coming reluctantly, "from women in my mother's household. About what a wedding night generally entails. None of it was spoken of kindly."

Something shifted in his expression — not quite surprise, but a careful attentiveness that felt genuine in a way his earlier smile at the feast had not.

"Then whatever you were told," he said, "was likely spoken by women who had no say in the matter either, and no husband inclined to consider whether they wished for such things at all."

"And you are different," I said, my voice edged with more challenge than I had intended.

"I have no intention," he said quietly, "of being anything like what you fear, Ivy."

It was the first time he had spoken my name.

We arrived at a modest hunting lodge some hours before the border, the specific stopping point Ruselon's household had evidently arranged in advance for the first night of our journey, and I was shown to a chamber of my own — separate from his, a detail I noted with a relief I did not entirely bother concealing.

"You will have this room to yourself," Ruselon said, at the doorway, his manner formal, almost distant. "I will take the chamber across the hall. There is no obligation between us tonight, nor any night before you feel some measure of readiness for it, whenever that may come, if it comes at all."

"You mean that," I said, unable to keep the disbelief from my voice.

"I have very little use for anything I do not mean," he said. "Words spent carelessly are, in my experience, rarely worth the breath they cost."

He inclined his head slightly, the specific small courtesy of a man taking his leave, and turned to go.

"Ruselon," I said.

He paused.

"Thank you," I said quietly. "For that, at least."

Something in his dark eyes softened, briefly, before the careful composure returned to shutter it away again.

"Sleep well, Ivy," he said.

He left me to the quiet of the chamber, and I sat for a long while by the small fire, turning his words over in my mind — no obligation between us tonight, nor any night before you feel some measure of readiness for it — uncertain whether to trust a promise so easily given, or whether trust itself was a luxury I could not yet afford to extend to a man the entire kingdom still called a monster.

I did not sleep for some time.

But when sleep finally came, it came without the specific dread I had carried since the carriage first departed, and I found myself grateful, however cautiously, for that small mercy.