Not Mine To Have

Please note this is the sequel to 'Not Mine To Want.' Make sure you read it first. I never expected my little story to reach so many of you, thank you all so much! Enjoy, my lovelies.

Ser Geralt stood at the back of the chapel with his shoulders set against the cold stone, the width of him leaving a full pace of bare floor on either side that no one had asked for and no one dared close. The mantle they had given him for the occasion pulled tight across his back, and did nothing to disguise what a life spent with a sword and a saddle had made of him.

The men-at-arms along the wall would not meet his eyes, and the two ladies nearest the door had gone quiet the moment he entered, their fans stilling, their eyes finding the floor with a speed that told him what had already been said of him in this hall. The Butcher of Carrow Fen. He had heard the name murmured twice already this evening, once by a page who very nearly dropped his tray of rings at the sight of him.

He let them look. He had stopped minding it years ago.

They had ridden in silence since dawn. It was not the careful, correct silence of the journey behind them, a horse-length kept between them because propriety demanded it and because neither entirely trusted what might happen if it did not; it was a new kind of silence, one that had stopped bothering to keep the distance.

Somewhere in the grey hour before sunrise his knee had found hers at a narrow turn in the path, and neither moved to correct it. When she passed him her waterskin near the second mile marker, her fingers stayed a moment longer against his than the exchange required, and he let them. Neither said a word about it. There was nothing left worth saying that the silence had not already said more honestly.

Isabelle rode with her hood raised against a wind that did not need keeping out, her spine as straight as it ever was, her eyes fixed somewhere past the road’s next bend as though not looking at him were itself a labour. He understood the labour; he was engaged in the same one.

By midday the castle had shown its towers over the tree line, and something in her had gone very still in a way he recognised as dread doing its best impression of composure, and something in him had gone grim in a way he did not bother disguising, and the two of them rode the last miles with their stirrups nearly touching, neither pulling away.

He had frowned for most of it, and could not stop, not even when she turned to him once, past the last river crossing, with a look he could not name, something that might have been fear, or its opposite, and found he could not return it, because if he let himself look at her the way he wanted to, he was not entirely certain he would survive the rest of the ride.

Now she stood at the altar in ivory and pale gold, her hair dressed high and threaded through with pearls, and Geralt understood, watching her, that he had never seen her look more like herself and less like herself at once, not until this evening had set her inside a candlelit hall and called it a wedding.

He kept his eyes where a guard’s eyes belonged: on the door, on the crowd, on nothing at all. He failed, within the minute, to keep them there.

Her spine was very straight. He knew that spine; he had watched it straighten under a hundred smaller griefs before this one, had come to read the set of it the way other men read a face. Her chin sat at the angle he had seen her use on her father, on suitors, on outlaws with a blade at her throat: the angle that meant the world would not see her afraid, not today, not for the length of this ceremony.

His eyes travelled, once, to the gold cord wound twice at her waist, and the memory arrived before he could bar the door against it: his own hands there the night before, the give of her breath against his jaw, a sound she had made that he would carry to his grave and had no right to. His hand closed at his side. He made himself open it again.

Lord Mortimer stood beside her, and Geralt noted, with the same flat surprise he might have given a change in the weather, that the man was not old. He had built some vague figure in his mind on the ride here: a man twice her age, thick through the middle, settled into his wealth the way old men settle into old chairs.

This man was none of that. He looked, at a glance, to be within a handful of years of Geralt’s own age, and something about that sat worse in his chest than the alternative would have. Beyond that Geralt took in very little: a dark coat, an unhurried stillness, a voice pitched low enough that he caught its cadence and none of its words. He did not care to look closer. Something in him, the instinct that read ground before a battle, told him there would be time enough later to learn this man properly, and that he would take no pleasure in it.

The priest’s voice rolled on above the assembly, Latin giving way to the vernacular for the vows themselves, and a steward or cousin of the house, sashed and pleased with himself, leaned close enough that his breath stirred the candle smoke between them, as if proximity to danger might pass for friendship with it.

“A fine match,” the man murmured, watching the altar with the pleasure of someone admiring his own furniture. “The roads are wicked this season, I am told, thick with outlaws clear to the coast, and yet here she stands without a hair out of place. His lordship chose well, sending you. And what a waist to have kept out of harm’s way, is it not? A man could lose all sense of duty entirely, guarding a woman built like that for days on end.”

Geralt’s hand closed at his side before he had decided to close it.

“Mm,” said Geralt, and let his eyes return to the altar.

The man waited, visibly, for more. When none came, his smile thinned, and he found somewhere else to look, and Geralt let the quiet settle back into place, glad of it.

“Do you, Lord Mortimer, take this woman to be your wife,” the priest said, “to have and to hold, in health and in sickness, until death divides you?”

“I do,” said Mortimer, and his voice rolled through the chapel the way a bell rolls through a room after the ringing has already stopped: low, even, a voice that had plainly never once had to ask twice for anything in its life.

Geralt’s jaw set. He felt his own pulse for the first time that evening, a hard, unhelpful drum at the base of his throat.

“And do you, Isabelle, take this man to be your husband?”

The pause before she answered was so brief that no one else in the chapel seemed to mark it. Geralt marked it. He had spent all those months learning the length of her silences the way another man might learn a blade’s balance, and this one lasted exactly as long as it took her to lift her chin the fraction further it required, and no longer.

“I do,” she said, and her voice did not shake, and something in Geralt’s chest came apart quietly enough that no one standing near him would ever know it had happened.

It was somewhere in the murmur that followed the vows, the priest’s blessing, the rustle of silk as the hall exhaled its held breath, that the rest of it surfaced in him, cold and complete, the way a wound announces itself only once the fighting has stopped.

Her father had told him that morning, while the horses were being saddled, in the flat, final tone he kept for orders: Geralt’s service to this house ended with the ceremony. He was to ride out before the feast concluded. There was no place, he had said, not unkindly, for a household knight in a married woman’s household.

Geralt had known the words were coming since dawn, had carried them the whole silent ride here the way a man carries a stone in his boot: small enough to ignore with effort, impossible to forget entirely. He had not accounted, somehow, for how much worse it would be to hear them confirmed with her a dozen paces away and another man’s ring already on her hand.

He watched her turn to face the hall on Mortimer’s arm, and felt something in him that had held through the whole journey come close to failing outright. It was not one thing. It was the way Mortimer’s hand settled at the small of her back as though the space had always belonged to him, and the way she let it settle there, her shoulders schooled into the same dutiful stillness she wore for her father, for suitors, for anyone owed the appearance of an ease she did not feel.

It was the candlelight catching the pearls in her hair. It was watching a man who had known her the length of a single dowry negotiation lay claim, before the whole hall, to what Geralt had earned by inches and been permitted to touch only once.

His breath had gone short; he registered it only once it had already happened. His jaw ached from the effort of holding his face where he had put it. Something gave way behind his ribs and did not settle back into place, and he made himself keep watching anyway, because he owed her that much if he owed her nothing else.

By the time the priest raised his hands for the final blessing, Geralt had arrived, without quite deciding to, at the outline of something.

He could ride home tonight, as ordered, and spend what remained of his life a knight of modest land and no name worth repeating: the guard who had once, for a single evening, forgotten his place.

Or he could ride the other way entirely, toward the tournament circuits, toward purses and ransoms and a reputation a man could build with nothing but a lance and the will to be struck down and get up again, and come back as someone who could stand in a hall like this one without a soul thinking it strange.

He was already a knight. That much no one could take from him. Everything else, the wealth and the name and the right to stand precisely where Mortimer now stood, was still to be won, and Geralt had never in his life met an opponent he could not put on the ground if the stakes rose high enough.

He would not tell her.

The thought arrived with the same flat finality as the rest of it.

A man could be forgotten and survive it; a woman married to a lord who kept her the way he kept his ledgers could not survive being caught hoping.

If Mortimer ever came to believe his wife was waiting on a knight’s return, no plea and no good service would save her from what followed. He would rather she believed herself abandoned entirely than hope, openly, for a knight who might spend years chasing a name worth returning with, and never earn it.

The priest pronounced them wed. The hall broke into a bright, relieved wave of noise, rings knocking against goblets, someone already calling for the doors to the feast hall to be opened.

Geralt did not applaud. For one moment, before the crowd’s movement swallowed the space between them, Isabelle’s eyes found his across the width of the chapel and held there, not by accident, he thought, though he would spend the ride home telling himself otherwise.

It could not have been a long look, not with her hand on Mortimer’s sleeve and half the hall watching her face for the smile a new bride owed her guests. But it was long enough for him to see that whatever she had decided to let the world read in her, it was not, in that half-second before she remembered herself, at peace.

Long enough for something to pass between them that had no name and needed none.

Then her chin lifted, the angle he knew, and she turned back to the hall, and Mortimer’s hand found the small of her back and turned her the rest of the way toward the doors, and the moment closed like a hand closing, and Geralt straightened away from the wall.