Sworn To Another

Chapter 2: Small Treasons

I didn't see him for four days. I counted them, which only made it marginally more infuriating than not seeing him at all.

Court kept me occupied in a manner that made me appreciate the luxury of wandering. Envoy preparations kept me busy, plus a dozen more fittings, and one excruciating afternoon spent memorizing the appropriate methods of address for every single ranking member of House Draven's incoming party. Your Grace for the king. Your Highness for the prince. My mother taught me just as she taught everything, with the expectation that love would be found in the doing of it if I only worked hard enough.

"You'll curtsy to King Draven first," she said for the fifth time, already laying out her lesson plan for the day, "then greet the prince. You'll be doing it in that specific order for good reason."

"It would be my pleasure to curtsy to the king, Mother."

"Then stop looking at me like there's reason to expect otherwise."

I didn't even realize I'd been doing it. I forced myself to stop, as I stopped trying to make sense of my bracing shoulders, all the tightness in my posture when I wasn't meant to be standing at attention.

It wasn't until the fifth day --the one afternoon, at least in theory, that I had a moment's repose between being at someone's service that I wandered to the training yard rather than returning to my chambers, as I should have done. I told myself I came for the air, and didn't stop to think about whether or not it was a lie.

The yard was otherwise full of the usual company, as I discovered when I came upon it --pairs of guards sparring, a couple of instructors standing at the far end of the yard barking corrections, the dull thud of practice swords against one another. I stood along the low fence that wrapped around the yard instead, telling myself I would leave as soon as I'd watched for a moment. My gaze swept over the men until it landed on Kael almost immediately, because apparently some small part of me hadn't needed to learn restraint before finding him.

Kael was standing over another man, one much taller and broader, who he was tossing easily onto his backside. It would have been an impressive feat if Tomas, the broad-shouldered guard and Kael's partner, hadn't leveled a single, unimpressed glance at him. "Again," Kael said, offering his hand to help his opponent up. "You're supposed to let the officer's students win occasionally," Tomas muttered, accepting Kael's help. "Morale." "I'll tell you when you stop leading with your right shoulder."

Tomas laughed, shaking his head, apparently willing to accept this particular reprimand in good faith. The two guards fell back to their feet and were already circling one another again when Kael's eyes caught sight of me, and he stopped mid-motion. It was a small enough pause, but it was enough. He said something brief to Tomas, who gave me a grin I wasn't entirely sure was meant to be friendly before jogging over to the barrels at the far end of the yard. Kael crossed the yard to where I stood alone with the low wall without seeming to consider it at all, and leaned over it, palms brushing against the rough wood as he stared at me.

"My lady."

"You're very good at that," I said before I really thought about it. "At fighting."

"It's the only thing they allow us low-born to practice without complaint," he said dryly. "Fighting well is useful. Thinking well is inconvenient."

"I don't find it inconvenient."

"You're not most people in this castle."

It would have sounded like the most idiotic thing he could have possibly said, but it wasn't exactly an unfamiliar position to be in. I didn't have a proper answer for his words, not one that wouldn't have sounded as insufferable as most of the things my mother had said to me over the past four days, so I said nothing at all, and that was probably an adequate substitute for a real reply.

"You've been indoors a great deal this week."

"Have you been keeping track?"

"It's my job to know where you are, my lady."

"That's not what I asked."

His mouth twitched again in that half-smile that I couldn't decide wasn't real. "It's not," he agreed. There was something in the way his gaze lingered on me, something that made my ribs tighten unreasonably, so I turned away. " The envoy arrives in nine days," I said instead of whatever it might have been. "You'll be in attendance for the reception, I assume."

"I assume so. Standing very still," he imitated his earlier words, "while people make decisions."

"You make it sound worse than it is."

"Do I?" He regarded me for a long moment, as if he could see right through me, and I had the sudden, irrational desire to turn and stare him down. "You spent the past four days memorizing forms of address for a man you've never met, in a castle you've never left, and you're telling me it isn't so bad?"

"It's necessary."

"That's not the same thing,"

I hated that it was, but that was probably not an argument to keep pursuing, not when I would rather spend the next nine days continuing our ridiculous conversation instead of doing any of the seventeen other things I was supposed to be doing.

"Lady Elira," one of my mother's runners called from the doorway and I turned back to Kael as he straightened, already putting the proper distance between us. My mother's messenger, a wiry boy of about twelve, was grinning at me over his shoulder as he jogged up to where I stood. "Your mother requests your presence in the east hall. The seamstress has arrived with the ceremonial dress." Of course she had.

"I'm coming," I said, and looked back at Kael. He was already standing tall, the slight angle of his shoulders marking out a space I should have been watching instead. "Go," he said, his voice low but firm, "before someone decides on your behalf."

"Is that concern, Guard Kael?"

"It's practicality, my lady."

And I left him there, wondering what to make of the way his eyes had lingered on me, wondering what it all meant, because it had to mean something, and I would understand it if only I could see it clearly--but, alas, there is no such thing as perspective where the heart is concerned.

--- Inevitably, the ceremonial gown was silver --a compromise on my mother's part, since blue was obviously too dark and House Virell's colors had no place at all during a reception, but I suppose she hadn't wanted to look completely like Virell either.

"You'll be wearing the Virell pendant," she said, holding it up so I could see it, a simple pendant of pale stone on a silver chain. It was old, older than the kingdom's current borders, in fact, and worn by generations of women in the family, if the name stitched into the fabric at the top of the chain was any indication, "it was your grandmother's. She wore it the day the war started, and you'll wear it the day the war ends."

There was an almost unbearably emotional note in her voice, as if she was saying goodbye to something precious. "Did she want the war to end?"

My mother's fingers hesitated on the clasp. "She wanted her son to come home," she said finally, after a long moment. "He didn't. This was the closest she ever got to having that wish granted, knowing it would all end eventually, and that it would end the way it did because of something constructed, not conquered." She fastened the pendant around my neck, its cool weight settling against my throat. "You don't have to want this the way I do, Elira. You only have to do it."

It was, in that moment, the most heartfelt thing my mother had likely said to me in months, and somehow, it made the impending war feel more devastating, because it wasn't love that she was expressing--it was a sort of grief I was unfamiliar with, the grief of loss that hadn't happened yet. That was one of the most frightening feelings I'd ever experienced, I think, because it meant I, too, knew something of the future.

I thought of Kael's words in the library--that's not the same thing-and I understood, for the first time, what he was trying to say, what he had been trying to say all along. Necessary and bearable were not, in fact, synonymous things, and I had spent far too long pretending they were.

--- I didn't see him again until the night before the envoy arrived. It was no longer an accident on either of our parts.

I went to the library rather than to my chambers that night, because my curiosity about Draven customs got the better of me. There wasn't much to see at that hour, save for the single lamp that had been left burning and Kael, sitting with his back to me at the far end of the room. He was staring out the window rather than reading, his expression unreadable as I stepped closer. I told myself it was because he always stood this way when he was alone, but I had no illusions about what it really meant.

"You're not on duty tonight," I said, because it was the truth, as much as I wished it weren't. I knew his schedule by heart, if only because it wasn't terribly difficult to keep track of.

"No," he said simply.

"Then what are you doing here?"

He closed the book in his hands slowly, deliberately, and turned to me. "Same reason you're, I imagine. Can't sleep." It wasn't a complete surprise, but it still took me aback, to hear him say those words. I knew better than to press, but I wanted to, more than anything, simply because I wanted to hear him say something else. Something different. Something not about the war, or the marriage, not about what I had to do.

Still, I crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite him nonetheless, because it was the right thing to do. It was always the right thing to do. Here, here, with the two of us alone in the library, it was a strange, strange sensation to experience, this feeling that I had been lying to myself for the past few weeks.

"You'll curtsy to a king and greet a prince tomorrow," Kael said to me, his eyes studying me in a way that might have been considered reading, if I'd learned anything about that kind of thing. "And I imagine somewhere in that room, I'll be standing against a wall pretending I don't know what your face looks like when you're going to say something you've decided not to."

"What does it look like?" I asked. "What does my face look like?"

"Your jaw sets, mostly," he said, like it was the most sensible answer in the world. "Your right side sets more than the left, but it's barely noticeable. You did it in the fitting room the day we met. You're doing it now."

It hadn't even occurred to me that I was doing it. I forced my expression into something neutral, something not expectant, and was surprised to find myself thinking that perhaps he preferred it that way. I stopped doing it, because I always stopped doing stupid little habits when I thought too much about them, and wondered if he'd noticed.

"What am I not saying, right now?"

Whatever it was, it made something shift in his expression, something in the set of his mouth, the careful way he was watching me. He didn't stop. "I think you know the answer to that better than I do, my lady."

"Elira," I said quietly. "When it's just us. When it's not anyone else's expectations, or orders, or schedules, I'd like- just once-like to be Elira instead of Lady Elira, daughter of Lord Virell."

For a long moment, I thought I'd gone too far, said something that would hurt him in a way I didn't understand. Instead, he smiled at me, slowly, like he was tasting the name in his mouth. "Elira," he said, and it was like music, because it was, for once, entirely his own.