Sworn To Another

The silk was too tight across my ribs, and I decided, in whatever moment was the last hour, I would not say so. "Breathe out," said the seamstress, Ola, who had pinned me into hundreds of gowns over the years and long ago stopped asking. "Just a little more." I exhaled. And the bodice constricted anyway, as if it knew. The light caught the towers of House Virell through the glass panes of the fitting room, pale stone turning to gold. Banners in the still air, Ola's words, the way my mother sometimes smiled when she thought no one saw; all things beautiful, as she always said, like a blade. I had long since stopped noticing the comparison in myself. "Three weeks," my mother said from the corner, not looking up from the ledger in her lap. She counted things like other people counted prayers, steady and unceasing, the way she always had. "The Draven envoy confirms the final terms in three weeks. You'll want to wear the blue for their arrival," she added, and paused there, leveling a glance at me. "Less confrontation than the silver." "I was not aware I was issuing any," I said. "You issue one every time you walk a room, Elira. It's rather the point of you." She said this with infuriating ease, the same manner in which she said all things, as if filing them away in some mental ledger with a sigh. "The prince will demand your presence at his side, as he is bound to do, and you will provide it. He is not marrying a treaty, after all. He is marrying a woman who will stand before his people and lead them into an era of peace, not simply declare it." He is marrying whoever you tell him to, I thought bitterly, and said nothing, because I had learned, in many years of swallowing, that it would not change a single thing. Nor did it especially change now, in the face of my mother's disappointment, though that was not why I said it, not truly. I did it because my mother had taught me--better than she knew--that words spent on unchangeable things were a waste of precious words, which no one had ever had in abundance. Prince Corin of House Draven I did not know, and I only knew of him through the stiff portrait in the library, a youth with my father's stubborn jaw and assessing eyes. In four months' time, I would marry him in a ceremony attended by all of Virell's nobility, and somewhere in the wake of the feasting and the fanfare there would be an end, an official severing from the long war that had bled my grandfather's house and half of Virell's old guard into dust. By any sensible metric, it was a good trade, and I reminded myself of it often. I was beginning to sound like my own mother, when I said it. "Done," said Ola, and straightened with a grunt, and I slipped free of the pins at last, slipping down from the stool into slippers that somehow fit better than most of my life at this moment. It was then the doors to the fitting chamber opened, and the new arrangements of guards filed in to take up their posts for the evening, and I, smoothing the sleeve of the gown over my wrist, caught sight of a stranger already watching me. He did not look away when I met his gaze, which was the first difference I noticed; though it was not a rudeness, really, since there was no other guard in this house who did not lower his eyes to the floor in a careful show of deference. This man looked me over the way he might have looked a door, checking, making sure, to whatever end he had been tasked with. "New," said my mother, not a question. She had returned to her ledger already, fingers tracing the worn leather spine. "Name?" "Kael, my lady." The man inclined his head, voice quiet but not hesitant. "Reassigned from the east wall garrison. Captain Reyes said you wanted more men on princess's detail before the envoy arrives." "I want more men on the princess's detail because someone attempted to kill the Draven messenger two months ago, and I would prefer my daughter not be the next inconvenient casualty," said my mother, in the same tone she always used, the one that might as well have been carved from steel. "Watch the corridors. Watch her windows. Make sure you accomplish neither of these things without being seen doing them." "Yes, my lady." He bowed, precisely, correctly, and when he straightened the next time his gaze drifted to me, it lingered a fraction too long before he moved to take up position near the door. I told myself it meant nothing, as I said often when the guards who did not bow stared too long at me. They were supposed to be guards, after all, and it was their duty to see and not be seen. But something about this was different, though I could not have said how. It was as if he was weighing me, deciding something. "Lady Elira," said Ola, holding up the second gown, silver-blue, for me to step into. "If you'll step back up." I did, and I did not look toward the doors again, not even when the next few hours passed in a near-silent stretch broken only by the rustle of fabric and the distant murmur of voices. It was nearly two hours later, the fittings long since ended and the corridors long since emptied of all but the occasional passing servant, that I found myself speaking with him again, alone for the first time. I had taken to walking in the meanwhile, a habit my mother tolerated (if grudgingly) and which she, in her quiet way, did not especially approve of. I preferred the east balcony, where the gardens sloped down to meet the Virell training ground, and I found Kael waiting there when I reached it, not that he had not been ordered to, but because he had not been ordered to this particular place, it seemed. "You're not meant to be out here alone, my lady," said Kael, when I wandered out to the balcony and found him standing at its base, just inside the doorway. "You're not meant to say things like that to me," I replied. "You're meant to say of course, my lady and pretend you did not notice." There was something like a smile tug at the corner of his mouth, though it vanished almost immediately. "I could do that, if you'd prefer." "I didn't say I'd prefer it." He looked at me then, properly, and something strange flickered across his face that might have been amusement but was not quite. I had the odd sensation of being seen, for once, not as a curiosity or an ideal but as a real person. A stranger, in fact. "You looked like you wanted to say something," I said after a moment, before I could stop myself. "Earlier, in the fitting chamber." "Did I." "You're doing it again." I hesitated, but only for a heartbeat. "Not answering." "I'm a guard, my lady. Not answering is most of the job." "And the rest of it?" He held my gaze for a heartbeat too long. "Standing very still," he said at last, "while people decide things around me." It landed heavier than it should have, perhaps, because something in me understood it, some deep, unspoken, miserable part of me that did not especially wish to be understood. And then his name was being called from below, where the training yard began--posts, it seemed, since he had no idea they were even there--and whatever fragile moment we had shared was over as quickly as it had come. "Kael," I said, and he turned at the sound of it. I don't know why I said it. I think I may have surprised myself. And I am certain I surprised him, because he looked, briefly, as if he might try to stay, to say something, if only to hear his own voice again. And then, when I said nothing else, when I simply stood there, open mouthed and unprepared, he inclined his head once more to me, this time a correct if curt bow, and disappeared into the corridor. "Goodnight, my lady," he said when he finally moved, and I think perhaps--I am certain, actually, now that I think on it--that there was kindness in it, even as he let me off the hook for whatever he had expected me to say. I watched him go until the corridor swallowed him, and then I stood alone on the balcony for some time, telling myself the throb in my chest was only the bodice and nothing more, and knowing, with the same certainty as most other inconvenient truths, that it was not.