Bound by Blood and Fire

The Garden

Kael didn't go back to his own chambers right away.

He told himself he was walking to clear his head, nothing more — but his feet carried him toward the eastern gardens, the quietest corner of the court at this hour, and some honest part of him had to admit he wasn't surprised to find Ravenna already there, sitting on the low stone wall with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring out at nothing in particular.

She didn't look up right away. "Come to manage me, Your Highness?"

"Would it work if I tried?"

"It never did before." The ghost of something almost fond crossed her face before she caught it and put it away again. "Why are you actually here, Kael?"

He almost told her everything, right then — the surveyors, the wellspring, his father's exact words about using the bond as a tool to get what the throne wanted. The confession sat right at the back of his throat, dangerously close to spilling out.

"I don't entirely know," he said instead, which was, at least, half true. "I think I just wanted five minutes where I didn't have to be careful."

Something in her posture eased, just slightly, like she recognized the sentiment more than she wanted to admit. "Five minutes," she agreed. "I can manage that much."

He sat, keeping careful distance between them on the stone wall, and for a while neither of them said anything at all. It was, he thought, the closest either of them had come to honest in six years.

"I heard something strange today," she said eventually, watching him carefully as she said it. "Rumors about lights near the old border stream. Men in your colors who don't belong to any patrol."

Something in Kael's chest went very still. "Court gossip isn't always reliable."

"No," she agreed. "But it's usually pointed at something real, even when the details get twisted." She turned to look at him directly. "Do you know anything about it?"

*Tell her,* he thought, with a sudden, fierce clarity that surprised him. *Tell her now, before this becomes one more thing you let happen to her instead of something you chose to stop.*

"Ravenna—" he started, and got no further, because that was the exact moment Ren rounded the garden path with two of the court guard trailing behind him, expression carefully, deliberately pleasant.

"There you both are." Ren's gaze moved between them with an ease that felt anything but casual. "I was hoping to find you together, actually. Saves me the trouble of two separate conversations."

"Ren." Kael's voice went flat and formal, the diplomat's mask sliding back into place so fast it was almost violent. "Is there something you need?"

"Only a moment of the emissary's time." Ren's smile didn't reach his eyes as he turned it on Ravenna. "I've been doing a bit of reading. Old court records, mostly — treaties, border incidents, that sort of thing. Fascinating what turns up when you actually look."

Ravenna's spine straightened, though her expression gave away nothing. "I imagine old records make for dry reading."

"Some of it, certainly." Ren circled closer, unhurried, clearly enjoying himself. "Though I did find one entry rather interesting. A border raid, six years past. Wolf casualties, dragon scouts blamed, and a wolf pack's daughter quietly removed from public life shortly afterward under circumstances the official record is oddly vague about." He tilted his head. "Would you happen to know anything about that, Emissary Ashcombe?"

The garden went very quiet.

Kael felt every muscle in his body go tight, torn between the urge to intervene and the certain knowledge that stepping in too quickly would only confirm exactly what Ren was fishing for.

"I know a great deal of history," Ravenna said, evenly, giving nothing away in her voice even as Kael watched her hands curl slightly tighter around her own knees. "Most border regions have one raid or another in their past. I'm not sure which specific incident you mean."

"No," Ren said, softly, clearly not believing her for a second. "I don't suppose you are."

He held her gaze a moment longer, long enough to make the silence uncomfortable, before finally inclining his head toward them both and turning to leave, guards falling into step behind him. "Do enjoy the gardens. I find they're an excellent place to think."

Neither of them spoke until his footsteps had faded completely.

"He knows," Ravenna said quietly, once they were alone again. "Or he's close enough to knowing that it hardly matters."

"He suspects," Kael said. "Suspecting and knowing aren't the same thing. Not yet."

"How long do you think that distinction will hold?"

He didn't have an answer for her. That, more than anything else that had happened in the garden, felt like its own kind of confession — the fact that he had no reassurance left to offer her, and both of them knew it.

"Ravenna," he said again, quieter this time, the same unfinished sentence from before rising back up in his chest. "There's something I need to tell you. About the alliance. About why I'm really here."

She went very still, watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read — hope and dread tangled together so completely that even he couldn't tell which one was winning.

"Then tell me," she said.

He opened his mouth to do exactly that.

And that was when the garden bell rang, sharp and sudden across the grounds — the summons for the evening council session, the one meeting neither of them was permitted to miss.

Kael closed his eyes briefly, feeling the moment slip through his fingers exactly the way it always seemed to, right when it mattered most.

"Later," he said, and hated how much it sounded like every other excuse he'd made to himself over the past six years. "I promise you. Later."

Ravenna didn't answer. She just watched him go, one hand pressed flat against the scar at her collarbone, wondering how many more "laters" either of them actually had left before the truth found its own way out — with or without his help.