Bound by Blood and Fire

Proof

Kael found it by accident — a small, tarnished ring, half-buried in the lining of an old travel case he hadn't opened since he was sixteen, that he'd forgotten he still owned.

He recognized it instantly. She'd given it to him the last week they'd ever spent together, pressed it into his palm with the particular seriousness only a fourteen-year-old could manage, and told him it was so he'd remember her even if their families ever found out and forbid them from meeting again.

As if I could forget you, he'd told her, and meant it more than he'd understood at the time.

He turned it over in his fingers now, in the quiet of his own chamber, and felt the last thin thread of doubt about who "Emissary Ashcombe" really was finally, completely snap.

It wasn't proof he could show anyone. It wasn't proof of anything except what he already knew in every other way that mattered. But it was proof enough for him — proof that the girl in the border woods and the woman standing across from him in treaty negotiations were the same person, carrying the same six-year-old wound he was.

He should tell her he knew.

He didn't.

Instead he closed his hand around the ring, the way he used to when he was a boy afraid of losing it, and told himself, unconvincingly, that there would be a better time.