The Oath of Blood and Iron

By this instrument the man Kael of Verask … is bound in blood-geas to the person of Vesperina, Princess of Eldavar, that he shall preserve her body and continuance while he draws breath.

Provision — should the protected predecease the bound: ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓

— Instrument of Binding, 17 Emberwane, 318 CR. The final clause inked out after signing.

Kael

I try to run before the oath can take root.

It isn’t clean. A shoulder into a guard’s throat, a stolen breath of open corridor, blood at my wrists as I wrench hard enough to tear skin. For three heartbeats, the conquered captain of Verask is almost free.

Then the geas catches me.

The magic snaps tight around my throat and ribs. My stride breaks. One knee hits the black marble. Every torch in the antechamber gutters blue-white as the oath brands itself beneath the iron collar locked at my neck.

“Try again,” King Damarion says from the dais, coldly entertained, “and it will drag you back by the bones. You are not being asked to protect my daughter, Captain. You are being made useful.”

I force myself up by inches. My copper hair hangs loose over my scarred brow. The rest of me is torn linen, bruised pride, and murder held behind my teeth.

Up. He doesn’t get the knee.

“Generous,” I rasp. “Most kings settle for a dungeon.”

The nearest oath-mage flinches. Damarion does not.

“Bring Princess Vesperina,” the king orders.

The room goes colder. Guards exchange looks and move for the doors, and none of them looks eager to be the one sent after her. I read it off their backs: summoning her is the easy part. Keeping her where she’s told to stay is something else.

The geas pulls at me again, toward the absent shape of the girl I’ve been bound to protect. The magic knows her before I do. It drags my attention toward the sealed doors and the corridor beyond, and my body leans after it before I can stop it.

His daughter. I’ve never seen her face, and my blood already answers to her.

Damarion waits on the dais. The oath-mages wait with their hands still trembling. I wait in chains, half-starved and collared, furious enough that I must still look dangerous. The brand under the iron throbs with my pulse. My wrists drip onto the marble. I keep my shoulders square and my eyes on the king. Where I put my eyes is the last thing in this room that belongs to me.

Beyond the doors, footsteps begin to answer the summons.

Then a woman’s voice, carrying down the whole corridor: “If he’s marrying me off, tell them I bite!”

One of the oath-mages winces. The king doesn’t so much as blink.

Gods above. They’ve bound me to a madwoman.

Vesperina

I push through the heavy doors harder than I need to, palm still stinging where the wood resisted. I’d been halfway to the armory, finally, to collect the parcel Branna had smuggled in, when Father’s summons hooked me. I told his guard what I thought of it, loud enough for the whole corridor. My mood was already black. Then I step inside, and it gets worse.

I stop just past the threshold.

The room stinks of blood, burnt spellwork and sweat. Oath-mages line the walls. And before the dais, swaying but fighting to stay upright, is a man in chains.

No. Not just chains. A collar.

Oh, Father, what did you do.

He’s broad-shouldered even in ruin, torn linen and bruised skin, copper hair hanging wild over a scarred face. The iron at his wrists is bloody. The black metal at his throat is worse. Something in it hums at the edge of my senses. Geas-magic, I think, still settling into bone, and I can almost taste it from here.

My father watches from above with the look he gets when he’s turned a problem into a possession.

I make myself walk forward and let my face settle into the sourness I know he hates. “I am here, Father.”

I look from him to the stranger. For a moment, real curiosity cuts through my irritation. This isn’t a guardsman. Guardsmen don’t come collared and bleeding into antechambers. They don’t look at a king like that.

A sigh slips out before I can stop it. “What have you gotten up to now, Father?”

I fold my arms and tilt my head at the prisoner. “Let me guess. My last protector cracked, so you’ve skipped the hiring and simply... acquired one.” My gaze flicks to the oath-mages, then back to the stranger’s pale, furious eyes. “Charming. Nothing says fatherly affection like magical indenture and an iron collar. Is he meant to follow me, fetch on command, or is this the new court entertainment?”

Father sits very still, fingers flat against the gilded armrest. Torchlight catches the crown’s black iron and the cold assessment in his eyes.

“Vesperina.” His voice carries the weight of command used so often it no longer needs force. “You will speak to your king with the deference owed your blood, or you will find your chambers barred from the outside until winter.”

Winter. He’d do it, too.

He stands. The cloak swings, heavy velvet lined with fur. To his left, a plump noblewoman with dark curly hair and a freckled face shifts on light feet, silks whispering. She holds a goblet of wine she never lifts to her lips and watches all of it with brisk impatience.

“Your last guard,” Father continues, descending the steps, “begged reassignment to the salt mines. The one before him took vows. You are not merely difficult, daughter. You are expensive.” He stops beside the prisoner and doesn’t so much as glance at him. “This is Kael of Verask. He is bound by geas to your protection and proximity. He cannot resign. He cannot flee. He cannot refuse.”

The name slides straight past me. I’m stuck on cannot refuse.

Father turns his head. His gaze finds me.

“You require competence,” he says. “Whether you welcome it or not. Someone who will not faint at your temper. Someone who has survived worse than your tongue.” He gestures to a guard. The remaining chains at the prisoner’s wrists are unlocked and clatter to the floor. The collar stays. “He is not a gift. He is a condition. Where you go, he follows. Where you are harmed, the oath answers. If you try to vanish through your little rat-routes again, the geas will drag him after you. He will feel every stretched inch of it.”

So he knows about the routes. Of course he knows.

My nails find my palms. I keep my face sour and my mouth shut. Anything I say now goes on the tally against me.

Father climbs back to the dais, each footfall echoing.

“Take him to your wing,” he says over his shoulder. “If he displeases you, discipline him. If you cannot manage that, I will begin to wonder what use you are to this family beyond ornament.”

Ornament. In front of the mages, the guards, the woman with the wine, and a stranger in chains. My cheeks burn.

He settles back onto the throne. The dismissal is absolute.

The prisoner steps forward. Broken iron scrapes under his boot, and the oath-mages shrink from him. The freckled woman shifts her weight; he doesn’t spare her a glance. His eyes find me.

“Discipline me,” he says. Low, scraped raw. He lifts his chin to bare the collar. “Try. The last man who struck me thinking to break a Veraskan captain died with my knee in his throat.” His mouth twists. “If your father wanted a lapdog, Princess, he should have bought something bred for it.”

Something flickers at his throat, a pulse of heat under the iron, and his jaw locks around it.

I press my fingers to my temples and knead slow, irritated circles, trying to work the headache out of my skull by force. “Thank you, Father,” I say, clipped and hollow. “For your boundless generosity. Truly, I am overcome.”

There’s no use arguing with him when he wears that look, the one that says he’s already moved the pieces and expects me to occupy the square he’s chosen. I drop my hand and step forward, boot heels clicking too loud against the marble. I pass the oath-mages with a glower hot enough to scorch their velvet robes. Cowards, hiding behind clauses and seals.

I stop in front of him and have to tilt my chin up to meet his eyes. He’s tall, broad, furious, reeking of blood and burnt spellwork. I do not step back. I let him see the fire in mine.

Big. Fine. Don’t blink.

“Neither of us wants this,” I say, low and sharp. “Don’t get in my way and there won’t be a need. And if you start calling yourself my guard dog, I will find a ribbon and make the insult worse.”

And then I feel it. A thin tug beneath my ribs, some invisible thread that’s found him and decided I should know exactly where he stands. The awareness settles at the edge of instinct, quiet and maddeningly certain.

I could shut my eyes and still point straight at him. Father said he’d feel it if I ran. He didn’t say I’d feel anything, standing still, in front of the whole court, with my chin up and my temper showing. So I’m on the leash too. Of course I am.

No. Absolutely not.

Kael

At this distance the geas unclenches, and the relief of it disgusts me more than the pain did. She smells of wind and horse, not court oils, and the mismatch grates against the story I’d prepared. Spoiled girl. Velvet cage. Easy contempt. She speaks to a king with real edge in her voice, and I almost recognize the defiance. It doesn’t matter. She is still of this court, still wrapped in the privilege of a realm that razed my homeland and called the ashes peace.

She’s small. That’s the first wrong thing. The top of her head wouldn’t reach my chin, and the voice that just talked back to a king came out of all of it. Dark hair, near black, worn loose down her back nearly to her knees, with a red sheen where the torchlight hits. Wine-colored silk. A face made for portraits, and a chin set like she’s daring the painter. Dark eyes that don’t drop.

She’s beautiful. I notice, and I hate that I notice, as much as I hate the relief in the geas.

Then her eyes flicker with recognition, and I understand she felt the binding answer back.

Dangerous. Not her defiance; I have seen that in better men. But a royal who tastes geas-work? That is something else.

“Don’t talk to me about us.” I lift my ruined wrists between us and let her see where the iron gnawed them raw. “You get a locked door. I get a collar. So spare me your sympathy, Princess.”

I drop my hands. Behind me, the freckled noblewoman sets down her goblet; crystal clicks against marble, too loud. My eyes stay on Vesperina, tracing the tension in her shoulders, the places a blade would slide cleanest. Habit. Survival. The geas thrums, content now, a warm leash pulling me toward her heat.

Hate that the geas likes being near her.

I don’t know its rules yet. How far it lets me go. How hard it pulls. What it does if I put my hands on the wrong person. I’ll learn them, one bruise at a time if I have to, and then I’ll find where it gives.

Days in their cells, and my legs still aren’t steady under me. My wrists throb in time with my pulse. My knees want the floor again, and I give them nothing. If she came to look at a beaten man, she can look somewhere else. Whatever the king thinks he bought, he gets it standing up.

Stay on your feet. Make her walk first.

“Your father said take me to your wing.” A sentence passed, not a request. “Move. The magic already has its teeth in me. I don’t need yours too. Whistle if you want me to heel, Princess. It’ll save us both the courtesy.”

She sighs through gritted teeth and shakes her head once, sharp.

“I hope you can keep up,” she says over her shoulder, and she’s already turning on her heel. She doesn’t wait for the king’s dismissal, or his nod, or for me. Her boot heels crack against the marble, hard and deliberate, and she makes sure the whole court hears her go.

The geas hooks behind my ribs when she takes the corridor too fast. I swallow the snarl and follow, counting turns, mapping my own cage. A sharp left past the oath-mages’ alcove. Under the heavy drapery of a south passage. Through an old portrait gallery where the drafts smell of dust and linseed. Down a narrow servant stair, boots ringing on stone. Past a kitchen annex where roasting garlic reminds my stomach it exists. Back passages, blind corners, escape routes and ambush alleys. A palace built to keep prisoners as well as thrones.

She’s testing the leash. Let her.

Every time she pulls ahead, the leash goes taut and my legs answer before I’ve decided anything. Quicker step, longer stride, close the gap. My body takes her orders now and nobody asked me. That turns my stomach worse than the pain does.

Learn the length of it. Then use it.

A covered colonnade, and the air changes, cooler, carrying iron and oil. She pushes through a heavy door onto an armory walk and the pressure eases. I step into the yard behind her. Across the drill square, a grizzled woman in a leather apron straightens from a blade rack. Her eyes narrow. Not at the princess. At me. At the collar. She weighs my stance for balance.

I stop at Vesperina’s shoulder, close enough that the geas quiets. I fold my arms, raw wrists plain in the torchlight.

“Your back routes end in a yard with no roof and no rear gate,” I say. Flat. “If you mean to lose me, Princess, you’ll need better than back stairs. The leash won’t let you.”

I glance toward the armory master, then back. “Or do Eldavaran princesses always storm toward armories when they need to sulk?”

Vesperina

Branna sets the whetstone aside. Oil lingers in the creases of her knuckles. She rises from the trough, leather apron creaking, and watches me cut across the drill square. My stride is too quick for ceremony and my shoulders are stiff, and she sees both. Her jaw tightens.

She’s heard. Of course she’s heard. Servants’ whispers crawl up the east stair faster than any herald: a Veraskan captain, a collar, a working sworn in blood beneath the throne wing. From the set of her mouth, she’d hoped I’d wait for the dust to settle before coming to collect. No such luck.

She wipes her hands on her apron and steps into the open, boots scraping gravel. She stops an arm’s length from us, her gaze raking him from crown to boot. I watch her clock his stance as wrong for a palace guardsman. Too square. Too ready.

“Princess,” Branna says, her voice all gravel. She does not bow. Her eyes stay on his face. “Word came down the servant stairs that His Majesty found himself a new watchdog. Didn’t mention he’d be wearing crown iron.”

She spits to the side and folds her arms.

“I don’t know what business you’re about, bringing that kind of attention to my yard. But if you’re here for what I set aside, Princess, I won’t put it in your hand with crown iron breathing over your shoulder.” Her gaze cuts to the collar again, then back to me. “Oathbound means he can’t put a hand to your harm. Everyone with sense knows that. It doesn’t mean I trust a bound stranger standing close enough to see what your father isn’t meant to know about.”

The bundle wrapped in canvas stays where it lies, half-buried beneath a rag near the blade rack. I know exactly which rag. The steel under it is silent. New steel always is. My eyes want to go to it. I keep them on Branna. He’s watching everything, and he’d follow my look straight there.

So close. Two strides and a rag.

It’s fair, what she’s saying. That’s the worst of it. Branna keeps my secrets by being careful, and now I’ve walked my father’s newest leash right into her yard.

The smile I flash her is sharp, gone before it can mean anything polite. “I was headed here when Father decided to hook me through the gills,” I say. “So now I’m stuck with this one. Unlike the others, at least the hired ones could be dismissed.”

I jerk my thumb toward the Veraskan without looking at him. Let him loom there. I have more pressing problems. My neck goes hot above the lace and I hate that he can probably see it. Branna’s never once made me feel small in this yard. Tonight she’s got every right to.

“You know what I came for,” I tell her, low and quick. “Don’t make me say it with him standing there.”

Please don’t make me beg in front of him.

Branna’s face doesn’t change. It never does. That’s half of why I trust her, and right now it’s making me sweat.

Fine. I’ll talk around it. I’ve had years of practice talking around things in this palace.

I flick a glance toward him, then back to her. “And now I need the usual, too. For him. Castle wear on top, something respectable enough to keep Father’s people bored. Under it, quiet, close-fitted, useful. No steel yet. Just the places for it.”

I dig the pouch from my belt and press it into her palm, heavy, clinking, absurd. My family never pays what discretion costs, and I won’t let her suffer for my disasters. “Plenty extra for the rush.” I hold her gaze. “I need both before morning. Julian should be back.”

“You speak of useful things,” the Veraskan says, voice rough. “Close-fitted. Quiet.” His eyes move between us. “You outfit a man for work you won’t name in front of him. Either you think me stupid, or you think me deaf.”

My hand opens and closes at my side, nails biting crescents into my palm. The whole evening has curdled to rot.

He notices too much.

Worse, he’s right. Branna and I talk in half-sentences across this yard and nobody bothers to listen. He’s been here a handful of minutes and he’s already picking at the seams.

“If you’re dressing me for bloodwork,” he says, lower, “save your coin. Your father’s men took my blades when they put me in this cage. I’d rather have what’s mine than whatever steel they permit me.” His gaze settles on me. “Think you can get them back, Princess?”

Don’t give him anything else.

Branna’s watching me now too. Waiting to see if I crack in front of him. I won’t. Not here, not with my father’s leash standing in her yard.

“I don’t even know your name,” I snap, and tilt my chin up, braced for him to bite back. “Not that you’ve earned one. You’re just the latest disaster my father chained to my ankle.”

Shit. That came out meaner than I meant. Fine. He’s a stranger in crown iron, and mean is all I’ve got left tonight.

“And don’t lecture me about coin. My coin, not yours. The people who keep my secrets need it. Your blades are wherever Father’s men decided trophies belong, so I’m ordering clothes, not arming you because you snarled prettily in the right direction.” My cheeks are burning. I’d bet he can see it in the forge light, which is the last thing I need.

My fist clenches again, court silk straining. “I came here for one thing. One. And instead I’ve inherited a headache in crown iron who wants to philosophize about blades. So give me a name to curse, or keep standing there looking murderous. But do it quietly. I have had enough barking for one evening.”

Kael

My jaw tightens. The collar shifts against my throat as I tilt my head. “You heard it. You simply weren’t listening past your own temper.” I step nearer, boots scraping gravel, and the pressure behind my ribs eases. I swallow against the comfort of it. “Kael of Verask. Same name I held when I broke Eldavaran lines on the Ashford ridge. Before your father’s mages decided I’d look better in crown iron than left to rot.”

I glance at the smith, then back. “And if my blades are trophies now, that’s Eldavar’s habit. They conquer, display the looted steel, and call it civilization.”

The princess’s fist is still clenched in her silk. I note it. Hit something, then. Not me. She won’t. Not with the smith watching.

“But you’re right about one thing. I am a disaster. Not yours, though. Your father broke my kingdom and dumped what was left at your door. So curse the name, Princess. I’ve cursed yours since the first torch on Veraskan farmland.”

Giving her the name costs more than it should. It’s about the last thing of mine her father hasn’t taken, and I’ve just handed it over. She asked badly, and I’m too tired to make her ask well.

Should’ve made her work for it.

Too late now. Said is said. My wrists throb where the dried blood pulls, and I’m suddenly aware of how long I’ve been standing.

“Now collect your secrets and your parcels. The geas drags me where you lead. Doesn’t make me blind. Doesn’t make me heel pretty, either.”

The smith turns before either of us can drag her into it. She crosses the yard to the blade rack, drops to one knee in the dirt, and pulls a canvas bundle from beneath a pile of oily rags. She tucks it under her arm and whistles sharp through her teeth, and a lanky apprentice comes out of the forge-glow. She tells him to rouse the seamsters and warn the night-watch that lamps will burn past midnight. The boy bolts. She spits into the dust and walks back with the parcel held close.

That’s the secret. A bundle under rags.

“Gods below, if I wanted to hear dogs bark, I’d visit the kennels,” she says, stopping before Vesperina. She holds out the bundle with clear reluctance, angling her body to block the view from the yard’s edges. From me, mostly. “Take what you came for. No point letting it rust while you two sort out who’s the bigger prisoner.”

She jerks her chin at me. “You. Hold still or bite. The seamsters are coming either way, and I’ve no interest in your pride.”

Footfalls scrape from the armory’s side door. Two women in linen smocks come out into the torchlight, one tall and gray at the temples, the other stout and heavy-eyed. They carry tape and chalk and look dragged from warm pallets. The tall one reaches for my shoulder. I shift half a step back before she can touch me, torn linen dragging over my bloodied wrists.

“Do not,” I say.

The seamstress looks me up and down, unhurried. “Arms out.”

My mouth twists. “Find another post to decorate.”

The smith snorts. “Princess bought you clothes, not dignity. Arms out.”

I think about making them drag the measurements out of me inch by inch. Then I look at the closed yard, and I think about the clothes I’ll need before dawn. My jaw flexes. Slowly, hatefully, I lift my arms.

The tall seamstress snaps the tape across my shoulders. Every muscle I have goes rigid. When the shorter woman ducks around to mark my hip, I turn just enough to make her click her tongue, and she shoves me back into place with two fingers at my belt.

“Touch me again,” I say, low.

“Stand still the first time,” she answers, marking the length of my sleeve without looking up.

The smith watches with open satisfaction while they circle me: breadth of back, wrist, throat, inseam, shoulder to heel. My temper’s just another seam to them. Hands on me in a foreign yard, my arms up, and nothing to do about it.

Breathe. It’s only tape.

Behind me the princess laughs, one sharp breath of it, swallowed fast.

By the time the seamstresses retreat through the side door, I’ve been carved down to restraint. I breathe through my nose with murder in my eyes and nowhere to put it.

The smith wipes her hands on her apron and turns back to Vesperina. “His kit will be in your chamber before you head out in the morning. Castle cloth on top, close leather beneath. No steel.” She folds her arms. “Now take your parcel and your shadow off my yard, Princess. I’ve got steel to temper, and my patience is spent.”

Vesperina tucks the bundle tighter under her arm. Some of the wire goes out of her shoulders when she turns to the older woman.

“Thank you,” she says, and she looks like she means it. Then, quieter: “And I’m sorry. For dragging crown iron to your door. For the hour.” Her chin jerks toward me.

The smith waves her off. The pouch stays where it was pressed.

Then the princess looks at me, stubborn as ever. “I missed supper,” she says, and right on cue her stomach growls loud enough to echo off the armory stones. Color climbs her neck. She lifts her chin over it. “My sitting room. Try not to bite anyone between here and there. I refuse to explain teeth marks before supper.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer.

The geas reels me across the yard before my pride finishes screaming. Back through the colonnade, past the kitchen annex, up the narrow stair, my eyes on her back and the bundle under her arm. She doesn’t slow until she’s shouldered through the door of her suite and the inner door beyond it.

I halt at the threshold only long enough for the geas to pinch my ribs. Then I enter. Tall windows bleed violet night across pale stone. Velvet seats, writing tables, locked cabinets. I put my back to the wall between a draped curtain and a cabinet. My gaze sweeps and snags: a clean nick in the table edge. A book spine worn wrong for its neighbors. Small rebellions hidden in plain sight.

Somebody throws knives in here.

Knives in the sitting room, parcels from the armory after dark. I don’t know what that makes her yet.

My stomach’s been empty so long it stopped complaining hours ago. She said supper in the yard and woke it back up, and I hate her a little for that too.

Eat if they feed you. Thank nobody.

The geas sits low now we’ve stopped, waiting on her next step. So am I.

“You missed supper,” I say. “So did I. Your father’s mercy doesn’t extend to feeding his leashed dogs.”

I do not sit. The room smells of lavender and wax, nothing like the armory. “You told me not to bite anyone. I haven’t. Yet.”

She drops into the chair at her writing desk, the bundle settling in her lap, her fingers on its edge. She doesn’t look at me.

“Not one bite,” she says to the book spines on the far wall. “Your self-control is truly inspiring.”

She reaches for a servant cord hidden in the drapery and pulls it twice, short and sharp. A bell chimes beyond the panel. “Supper for two,” she calls toward the door. “Here. Now.”

Then her gaze drags over me. The grime in my knuckles. The blood stiffening at my wrists. Whatever she sees there tightens her jaw.

“There’s a bath through that door,” she says, jerking her chin toward an inner passage. “Hot. Soap that doesn’t smell like the cells. And clothes in the bodyguard’s... well. I suppose it’s the Oathguard’s Chamber now. Through the bath, the far door. Simple, soft. Better than whatever rags they threw at you in the cells.” She turns back to the desk and flips open a heavy lineage book with a snap of paper. “Food will be here when you’re done. Or not. Sit in your own filth and starve for pride if it pleases you. It won’t spite anyone but you. I assume you’d rather eat.”

Her thumbs work at the twine on the bundle. Her shoulders curve over the desk, screening it.

“Go,” she says, without looking up from the bundle. “Before I decide you’re another piece of furniture I have to tolerate.”

I watch her curve over that desk. My gaze finds the nick in the table edge again. She isn’t only hiding the parcel from me. She’s hiding it from the room itself.

“You handle secrets like a woman who’s been caught before,” I say. “In Eldavar, even the furniture carries blades.”

My shoulders ache from the day’s chains. The servant cord still sways. “Supper for two. Soap. Soft clothes. It’s still a cage, Princess. Feeding the dog doesn’t make it yours.”

My stomach twists, hollow and humiliating. Dried blood cracks on my wrists when I shift. I won’t sit in filth to spite her. I won’t starve to prove a point she’s too sheltered to comprehend.

Wash. Eat. Think after.

Simple orders. The kind I’d give a man half-dead on his feet. That’s what I am tonight, whether I like it or not, and pride won’t hold me up much longer than the next hour.

I push off the wall. The geas pulses, warm and complicit, as I cross to the inner passage. I stop at the threshold and don’t look back. “I’ll wash. Not as your guest. Because I won’t smell like your father’s cells while his magic drags me through your halls.” The corridor beyond breathes damp steam. “If there’s poison in the meal, the geas will make me bleed for you. Don’t mistake that for gratitude.”

I step into the dark.

Steam clouds the marble. Candle-flame fractures in the water. The collar stays, black iron that won’t yield to soap or heat. I tear the ruined linen from my shoulders and it drops wetly. Scars old and new catch the light: the brow, the cheek, the pitted mark above my heart where an Eldavaran spear failed to kill me. I sink into the water. It scalds. I do not make a sound.

Softness. Her gift, her father’s leash. Same trap.

The heat gets into the bruises and loosens them, and that’s worse than the scald. A warm body starts believing it’s safe. Mine has no business believing anything in this palace. I keep my shoulders tight against it till the water wins and they let go on their own.

Don’t get comfortable. Don’t close your eyes.

I scrub the cell grime from my skin with the pale green soap. My wrists sting where the iron ate through. I scrub around them, not over. The skin’s too raw to take it, and I need these hands working tomorrow. The water goes brown around me, days of cell and blood coming off in layers.

Through the door, muffled: her voice cutting low, then the whisper of canvas shifting. I tilt my head back against the tub’s lip and watch the door. I am naked in enemy territory. If someone comes through it, I’ve got my hands and the water and nothing else. I’ve fought with less. Not often.

Vesperina

My face drops into my hands. Elbows hit the desk with a dull crack. “Gods below,” I mutter into my palms. “What a spectacular disaster. Father binding a Veraskan to my shadow, half the court waiting for me to behave, and I can’t even collect a parcel without an audience.”

The tears come hot and stupid, sliding down my nose and pooling against my fingers. I don’t sob. I haven’t sobbed since I was twelve and learned it changed nothing. But they leak out anyway, frustrated, traitorous, born of exhaustion and the certainty that I’ve lost another inch of myself. I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until stars burst behind the dark, until the heat subsides and my breath steadies.

Not now. He’s one door away.

I wipe my face on my sleeve, roughly, punishing the silk for witnessing it.

The knots in the canvas twine give way with a few sharp tugs, and the wrapping falls open across the desk.

Ten of them, nestled in oiled leather sheaths Branna must have worked herself. Small, perfectly, insultingly small, blades no longer than my palm, quill-slim, each hilt wrapped in dark suede that will grip even when my hands sweat. The steel gleams candle-blue. The balance is exquisite. I lift one, then another, testing the weight, and a breath escapes me that sounds almost like longing.

“Gorgeous,” I whisper. “Absolutely gorgeous, you nasty little things.”

I mean to sheathe it. My hands know better; they’ve known better since I was ten. But I’m shaking, still frayed from the antechamber and the yard. The blade turns in my grip, kisses the pad of my thumb, and a bright bead of blood wells up before I can flinch.

I stare at it. Shallow, precise, insulting.

“Idiot,” I breathe. “You know better than that.”

But the metal hums. I feel it through the sting, a low resonance that runs up my arm and settles beneath my breastbone, distinct from the geas, older and hungrier. First blood. They want it. All of them.

I glance toward the bath chamber door. Water shifts beyond the marble. Only a few heartbeats before he comes out. Fine. If they want a taste, they get one. I press my thumb to each blade in turn, a drop of my blood to the steel, quick and deliberate. The metal drinks. The hum deepens, a silent chord only I can hear, binding them to my pulse.

“There,” I whisper, wiping each one clean on the canvas. “You’ve eaten. Now you’re mine. Behave.”

I work fast, slotting the sheaths into places only I know: two into the hidden lining of my bodice, one against each forearm beneath the silk, two into the stays of my left boot, one into my hair, braided now and coiled up out of the way, another strapped to my thigh beneath the garter, the last two slipped into the small of my back. They settle against my skin.

The canvas I fold and shove beneath the grate of the cold hearth, under ash and a half-burned log. Gone.

My medical supplies are in the bottom drawer, wrapped in linen. I tend my thumb and the smaller nicks on my fingertips: antiseptic sting, clean cloth, tight bindings tucked beneath my sleeves. The cuts are nothing. I’ve survived worse.

As I wind the last strip around my thumb, the bathwater shifts again, and the geas tugs beneath my ribs to remind me I am not alone. I straighten and turn my face toward the door.

“Still alive in there, Veraskan?” I call, voice barbed again, scraped clean of the tears. “Or did the soap finally finish what the war started?”

Kael

Steam still rises from my shoulders as I come through from the oathguard’s chamber. My hair, darkened to wet bronze, clings to the scars at my neck. The clothes set aside for me in the oathguard’s chamber hang loose, undyed linen, soft as a concession, refusing to feel like my own. I left the shirt half-laced. The collar stays visible, black iron against clean skin. I won’t let her pretend I’m a guest.

The sitting room carries a new tension beneath the lavender. She sits too straight at the desk, and her thumb is wrapped in linen with a spot of red near the joint. The canvas has vanished. The hearth ash has been disturbed. Through the door I’d heard the catch of breath, the smothered sound of someone breaking apart in private. Now she wears her armor again, all barbs and brittle composure.

Cried, then hid it. Fast about it, too.

None of my business. I tell myself so, and it doesn’t take. One bath and the promise of a meal, and already I’m noticing things about her I’ve got no use for.

“Still breathing,” I say, rougher in the quiet. I stop at the edge of the rug. Water drips from my hair onto the linen at my collarbone. “Your soap smells like flowers and defeat. If this is how Eldavar breaks its prisoners, I prefer the dungeon.”

My eyes drop to her bandaged thumb, then lift to her face. “You cut yourself. Not deep, but clean.” A pause. “Hiding your secrets that poorly, or did you mean to leave a trail?”

A shrug rolls through her shoulders, sharp and dismissive. “If I left a trail, it would lead somewhere more interesting than your questions. Sit, stand, drip on the rug. I don’t care which, so long as you’re quiet about it.”

The servants slip through the passage before the silence can settle, balancing trays, flat and efficient, people who know better than to linger. Two servings on the table: warm bread, roasted fowl, a pitcher of water. She thanks them. They vanish behind the panel.

She drops into the nearer chair and lifts the lid from her plate, then tears a piece of bread into crumbs she doesn’t eat. Her fork goes down before she’s touched the meat.

“There’s another setting,” she says to the candle flame. “Eat here, or take your supper to the corner and glower. The geas keeps you close. Food is still food, and I’d rather not spend the evening listening to your stomach argue with your pride.”

I pull out the chair across from her, not beside, keeping the wall to my back and the doors where I can watch them. The velvet catches damp from my hair. I tear bread, crust first, and force myself to chew slow. Hunger cuts the proud deepest, but I won’t hunch over the plate and shovel it in.

The bread’s still warm. My hands want to shake around it and I make them stop. Each mouthful sits heavy in a belly that’s forgotten what to do with food. Slow, then. Small bites. A man who bolts his first real meal after a cell spends the night sick on the floor, and I won’t hand her that either.

Chew. Swallow. Again.

She’s watching me eat. Let her. A man chewing bread is nothing worth the effort.

“Your servants move like they’ve seen a princess’s temper.” I watch the panel they vanished through. “Quick feet. No eyes.” My gaze drops to the crumbs scattered across her plate. “Like you. Destroying your own supper rather than swallowing it.”

I lift the water pitcher and drink from the rim rather than the glass. A small sovereignty. The fowl steams between us. My hands stay on the table. Gods, it smells good. Wait. Let her watch me sit across from meat and not lunge for it. It’s a stupid thing to hold on to. It’s also about all I’ve got left to hold.

“The geas keeps me within reach. It doesn’t make me grateful for the cage, or the cook, or the company.”

“Grateful,” she says, and the word sits between us, souring. “For the cage, the collar, the king who thinks chains are the same as love. We’re both his dogs, Captain. I just wear a prettier leash.”

She tears the rest of her bread and forces the last bites of fowl past her teeth. Then she shoves the plate across the table. It scrapes loud against the wood.

“Eat,” she says. “You’ve been gnawing on pride and dungeon air for days. I’d rather not watch you fold at dawn because you’re too stubborn to take food from my hand.”

Her eyes go to the open lace at my collarbones and stay there a moment. Her face changes. Then she’s on her feet, chair legs shrieking against stone, crossing to a cabinet beneath the window. The lock gives under her fingers with a tired groan. Too easy. Her own cabinet, and she picks it. Odd. I set that beside the knife nicks and the parcel. She pulls out a wrapped medical kit and lets it hit the sideboard.

I eat. The fowl goes first, then the bread, steady, no wasted motion. When the plate holds only bone, I push it aside and look at the kit. Gauze, needle, thread. Supplies for closing holes that shouldn’t have been made.

Needle and thread. For whom.

I know the answer. I’ve had worse sewn shut by worse hands in worse light, and I didn’t thank them either.

Full belly, first time in days. It makes me warm and slow, and I can feel the edge going off me while I sit here. That’s the danger in kindness from these people. It works. Give a starved man supper and soap and a soft chair, and half his anger goes to sleep without asking him.

Get up. Stay sharp.

I stand and move to the window where the candlelight thins. The geas shifts with me, no more than a low awareness. Cold comes off the glass. Better. It clears my head. Out past it there’s nothing but dark roofs and a few lit windows. Somebody’s still awake in this palace. Somebody always is.

“Treat your own hand. I don’t need a nurse, and you don’t need another reason to call me ungrateful.” I turn from the glass. “Your thumb will stiffen by morning. Wrap it clean, or don’t. Either way, I won’t carry you if your hand fails you.”

I keep my hands at my sides. The wrists are throbbing again now the food’s done its work, and I’d rather she didn’t notice.

Vesperina

He’s skin over bone under that shirt. I saw it when he sat down, the collarbones standing out under the open lace, and I’d sat at my desk fussing over my own parcel while he stood against my wall half-starved and bleeding. Lovely. Very gracious of me. And his wrists are the worse problem. I saw them in the antechamber, and again in the yard, and soap hasn’t done them any favors. Wounds that deep go bad fast if nobody cleans them properly, and I’d bet my good boots nobody in those cells bothered.

I should’ve done this an hour ago.

I snatch the kit up and close the distance before he can retreat into another wall of silence. “Oh, give me your arm. I’m not asking.”

When he pulls back, my hand snaps around his wrist and holds, hard and sudden. I haul him toward the light. “Don’t. I haven’t got the patience for another wrestling match tonight, and that wrist is not going to mend itself.”

Nearly to the bone. Who let this happen.

The kit cracks open on the table beside us. I go to work. The antiseptic must burn when I swipe it across the raw furrows the iron left, but my hands are steady and quick. Let him wonder where they learned it.

“This entire war was idiotic. Your kingdom and mine, two starving dogs thrown into a pit while nobles placed bets from velvet seats. And now my father decides the best solution is more chains, more humiliation, more broken men wearing crown iron like brooches.” I wind gauze around his torn wrist, tight and exact. “I didn’t ask for the geas tugging beneath my ribs. I didn’t ask for crown iron in my rooms, or another pair of eyes tracking every step I take. I didn’t ask to become the reason a stranger wears a collar. But Damarion doesn’t ask. He takes, and he breaks, and he calls it mercy.”

I knot the bandage with a sharp jerk and reach for his other arm. “So stand there and suffer my charity, Captain. Not because you’ve earned it, you’ve been perfectly insufferable, but because I refuse to let my father’s brutality fester in my own rooms while you pretend pride’s going to heal it.”

His jaw has locked. He draws air through his teeth at the antiseptic and doesn’t flinch, and he doesn’t pull away either. His pulse is running fast under my thumb.

“You speak of your father’s brutality,” he says, low and scraped. He’s watching my hands. “Yet your linen is his. Your room. Your fire.” His eyes lift to mine. “Easy to be generous with stolen coin.”

Then he offers the second arm, slow and stiff. “Wrap it tight. I won’t give your father the satisfaction of seeing it split open again.”

Another breath escapes me. Gods above, I’m tired of sighing tonight. I pull his second arm into the light. “Yes. Stolen linen. Stolen fire. Stolen roof. I was born into the theft, Captain. Every meal I’ve eaten, every wall that’s kept the rain off me, every stitch on my back. It all came from the same bloody hands that put that collar on your throat.”

I swipe the antiseptic on with the same unsentimental efficiency I’d use on a horse’s girth gall, and his breath hisses. Good. At least he’s feeling something besides self-righteousness.

“I can’t help what my father has done. I can’t undo the war, or your chains, or the kingdom he broke to build this pretty prison.” I wind the gauze tight. “But I can wrap a wound that shouldn’t exist. I can feed a man who’s been starved. I can use what was stolen from others to keep one more person from bleeding out on marble. That’s not charity. It’s the least I can do.”

I knot the bandage and don’t let go of his arm. My eyes lift to his and hold. “So stop flinching from my hands. I didn’t choose the palace any more than you chose the collar.”

I release his wrist and reach for the kit. “Sit. You’ve got more than your arms torn up.”

He doesn’t sit. Of course he doesn’t. I bite back the curse and gesture sharply at the chair. “Sit, or I’m climbing you like a siege ladder, and neither of us wants that.”

He lowers himself an inch. Not enough. I make a disgusted sound and step closer, until the damp from his hair reaches my forehead. The scars across his chest are worse than the ones on his face: raised, ridged, old enough to have gone pale but never quiet. The one above his heart looks like it nearly ended him. I clean around it with careful, deliberate strokes.

Don’t press. Don’t look at his face.

The ones on his face are harder. They’re older, faded to silver, but I have to rise onto my toes to reach the worst of them, the furrow that cuts across his brow. My balance shifts. One hand braces against his jaw without thinking, thumb skirting the edge of the scar on his cheek, and for a half-breath I am close enough to feel the heat coming off his damp skin and the geas tugging beneath my ribs.

Clean, he’s harder to ignore. Standing, he has a head and more on me. Under the bruises it’s long, lean muscle, a fighter’s build, and the face under my hand is all hard angles: high cheekbones, a jaw set like a door. His eyes are pale gray-blue, and this close they’re on me. Even like this, he’s something to look at.

Don’t you dare, Vesperina.

My eyes stay furious. They’ve been furious all night. It isn’t aimed where he thinks. It’s aimed at the antechamber. At the throne. At the man who signed the order. If Kael reads it as hostility, fine.

“There,” I say, stepping back. My hands are steady. My pulse is not. “You’ll live. Try not to reopen them before morning.”

I turn away before he can answer and carry the kit back to the sideboard. My own thumb gets a fresh dressing, cleaner this time, tighter. The old linen joins the used gauze in a small bloody pile. I kneel at the hearth and feed the waste into the low coals. The fabric catches, curls, and blackens. The blood burns to nothing.

I lock the kit back inside the cabinet. When I straighten, my hands are clean and my face has settled back into the mask I wear for the palace: composed, sharp, unapproachable.

“You already found the oathguard’s chamber,” I say, nodding toward the inner door without looking at him. “Use it. The bed is too fine, the linens are too soft, and the whole room is furnished nearly as well as mine, which is exactly the sort of insult my father would mistake for mercy.”

My mouth tightens. “The geas will tell you if I move, and I won’t. Not tonight. But before the sun rises, we are going out. Be ready.”

I cross to my own door and pause with my fingers on the handle. “And Kael.” The name sits strange in my mouth, too new to be comfortable. “The next time someone chains you in my presence, I won’t just wrap the wounds after.”

I leave him to parse that. The door closes behind me, and the lock turns.

The door bites into my shoulder blades. The lock holds. The room holds. Everything in this gods-forsaken palace holds except me, and the tears come back hot and fast before I can stop them. I hate them. I hate the salt of them. They make me twelve again, screaming at a locked door that didn’t care then and won’t care now.

“Stop it,” I hiss at myself. “Stop it.”

They don’t stop. They never stop when I need them to, only when I don’t need anything at all. Tonight I need too much. Sleep. Silence. One hour without the geas pulling through the wall or a stranger’s scars under my fingertips.

His jaw. The ridge of scar tissue under my thumb. The heat of him, damp and alive and furious, and how he didn’t flinch when I touched the worst of it.

I shove off the door. The balcony is three strides and a fumble with the latch, and then the night swallows me whole.

Cool air hits my wet face. I grip the railing, iron, cold, solid, real, and breathe until my lungs stop shaking. Below, the palace gardens drop away into darkness, and beyond them Auremont sprawls in pinpricks of torchlight. The autumn wind carries woodsmoke and the distant lowing of cattle from the lower wards. Julian will be closing up the stables about now, checking the horses. Out there, the world still makes sense.

The scream builds from my gut. I open my mouth and let it tear out of me, raw, ugly, wordless, scraping my throat on the way up. It echoes off the stone balustrade and falls into the dark. Below, a guard shifts his weight. A window opens, closes. The palace has heard this before. The difficult princess, screaming at the stars again. Let them think I’m mad. Let them think I’m broken. Let them think anything that keeps them from looking closer.

My knuckles go white on the railing. The wind dries the tears to salt tracks.

Right. That’s out. Go in.

The latch clicks. The curtains fall shut. The room is warm and close and smells of lavender and supper and the faint copper ghost of burned blood from the hearth.

I yank at the laces of my gown. The silk resists, then gives, and I peel it off my shoulders. “I hate you,” I mutter at it. “I hate every stitch. I hate the seamstress who sewed you. I hate the court that requires you.”

The gown hits the floor in a heap of wine-dark silk. I step on it. Deliberately.

The daggers come out one by one from the places I hid them, bodice and forearms and boot, hair, thigh, the small of my back, until I’m holding all ten across my palms and forearms, the steel still carrying the faint hum of my blood. Beautiful. Lethal. Mine. The resonance runs low and content, and for a moment the noise in my chest goes quiet.

Then I open the cabinet by my bed, the one with the false back that no servant has ever cleaned, and nestle them into their felt-lined grooves. The lid closes. The lock turns. The hum fades to a whisper, then to nothing.

The rest follows: undergown, stockings, the thin chain with the royal seal I’m supposed to wear even to sleep. I drop it all in a pile I’ll deal with when I care, which is not now and may not be tomorrow.

Last, I pull my leathers from the wardrobe and drape them over the chair beside it. We go out before the sun.

Naked, I stand in the middle of my chamber and shiver at having nothing between my skin and the world.

The bed is vast and soft and absurd. I climb in, pull the covers to my chin, and stare up. The canopy brocade shows my ancestors in heroic poses: conquering, ruling, binding. One of them has her foot on a Veraskan shield. I turn my back to her.

Not tonight, you smug old thing.

Sleep comes in pieces. The sound of chains hitting marble. His voice saying your soap smells like flowers and defeat. My thumb pressed to each blade.

I dream of iron and horses and a man with copper hair standing between me and a door that won’t open. When I reach for him, my hand passes through his chest and finds the scar above his heart, and the scar opens like a mouth and says something I can’t hear over the screaming.

I wake twice. Once to wind in the balcony curtains. Once to silence so complete I press my hand to my own throat to check for a collar that isn’t there.

The clock on the mantel ticks toward morning. Three hours. Maybe four. The daggers sit silent in their cabinet, patient.

Sleep finds me again, eventually. It is not kind.

Kael

The lock clicks shut. I stand where she left me, gauze tight around both wrists, antiseptic still stinging.

Her thumb on my jaw. The warmth of her, so near the geas went quiet. Field hands. Not a courtier’s careful ministering. A princess doesn’t pick that up in embroidery lessons.

I go through to the oathguard’s chamber. The bed is too soft, the linens too clean. I sit on the floor instead with my back against the wall, facing the bath door, the one room between hers and mine, and listen to the palace settle into its false sleep. The geas rests quiet in my chest, a low pulse confirming she is near, she is still, she has not moved.

Before the sun rises, we are going out.

A soldier’s order: a time, a direction, and the assumption I’d be ready.

The collar presses cold against my throat. I close my eyes, not to sleep. A princess who burns her own blood in the hearth so no one counts the cuts.

Not a spoiled girl. Something else.

The floor’s cold through my trousers and the wall’s hard at my back. Good. Cold keeps me awake, and I’m not handing this palace my sleep tonight.

I’m still there, mapping the palace by sound, the guard rotation in the corridor, the creak of the servant passage, the settle of old stone, when the scream comes through the bath between our chambers. Raw. Wordless. The sound a person makes when they’ve run out of words and still have too much left inside.

I’m up before my mind catches up. My palm is flat on the bath door before I understand she isn’t under attack. The geas hasn’t stirred. If someone had a blade on her, it would be burning by now. She is screaming. On a balcony. Into the dark. Grief, not danger, and the magic doesn’t answer grief. That’s left to me.

I force my hand down. Stand in the dark. Breathe until my pulse slows.

The scream fades. A latch, faint, past the bath. Then silence. Then something softer I can’t make out. I step back from the door anyway. Whatever she’s doing over there isn’t mine to witness.

Not a spoiled girl’s tantrum. A spoiled girl screams to be heard. That wasn’t for anyone’s ears. She threw it into the dark and came back inside like she’d only stepped out for air.

I sit again. The geas settles as she goes still, a low pulse confirming near, and its silence saying unharmed. It doesn’t confirm calm. It doesn’t confirm sleeping.

My wrists ache beneath the gauze. I turn my hands over in the dark and find the edges of the bandages by touch, where she knotted them. Tight. Clean. No wasted motion. She’s done this before, recently, and on wounds worse than mine.

What are you?

The question sits unanswered. I let it.

The hours pass. The guard rotation shifts twice. A draft slides beneath the door, carrying the last of the supper smell and a thread of lavender. I doze in fragments, Veraskan ridgelines, the weight of a blade I no longer own, then surface to check the geas. Still near. Still quiet. Still there.

When the first gray light creeps under the shutter, I’m already awake. I stand, roll the stiffness from my shoulders, and test the gauze. It holds. The linen shirt is wrinkled from the wall. I don’t care. I push my hair back from my scarred brow and wait for the sound of her door.

Vesperina

I come awake with a scream already tearing out of me.

My hands slam against the mattress. My back arches. The canopy brocade swims above me, ancestors and their conquered shields, and for three heartbeats I’m still in the dream, still reaching through a chest that isn’t there, still hearing a voice I can’t make out over my own terror.

Then the room resolves. My room. My bed. Faint gray dawn pressing through the balcony curtains. The hum of ten blades sleeping in their cabinet.

My breath comes in ragged strips. Sweat slicks my spine. My hands are shaking, and I hate the shaking more than the dream.

“Fine,” I tell the ceiling. “I’m fine."

I am not fine. I am never fine at this hour. This is the hour the nightmare always comes, same time, same grip, same cold sweat, a bell my own head keeps ringing no matter how many times I smash it.

I shove the covers off and slide out of bed. My feet hit cold stone and the shock helps. I stand there, naked and shivering, pressing my palms flat against my thighs until the trembling stops being visible. Through the wall, the thread under my ribs points straight at him. He probably heard the scream.

The leathers wait where I left them last night, over the chair by the wardrobe, dark wine and black, fitted close, built for movement and concealment. I take them and a thin towel from the linen press and pad barefoot to the Marble Bath. I shoot the bolt on his door first.

I run the water cold and lower into it, and my gasp has nothing to do with the nightmare and everything to do with survival. Cold cuts through the fog and the sweat and the residue of mouths in scars and doors that won’t open. I stay until my skin prickles and my teeth threaten to chatter, then press my forehead to the wet marble and breathe.

The tension goes in slow, ugly stages. Shoulders. Jaw. Then the locked fist in my chest I didn’t know I’d been holding since the antechamber. The water runs over my scars, the training ones no one knows about, thin white lines along my forearms and ribs and the flat of my shoulder where a blade caught me wrong at fourteen.

When the shaking stops, I climb out and pull the stopper.

The towel is rough and I’m not gentle with it. Hair first, wrung until the water runs thin, then braided tight and pinned at the back of my skull with the leather cord I keep on the bath shelf. No loose strands. Nothing to grab in a fight. I learned that at twelve, when my trainer caught me by the braid and threw me on my back so hard I couldn’t breathe for a full count.

The leathers go on piece by piece, each one settling where it always does. Trousers, reinforced at the inner thigh where a sheath rides. The vest, laced tight up the sides, stiff enough to stop a glancing blade. The bracers, buckled over my forearms with their hidden channels for thin steel. My good boots, the ones Julian keeps oiled and silent, laced to the knee, the two empty sheaths snug at my ankle.

I check every seam and buckle in the mirror. I test the range of my arms, drop into a half-crouch, rise again. The leathers move with me, not against me. Good.

Back in my bedchamber, the cabinet waits.

I kneel and work the lock with fingers that no longer shake. The false back slides aside. The daggers gleam in their felt grooves and hum up at me, ten silver voices rising in greeting, warm and eager and mine.

I lift the first. The suede grip settles into my palm. I press my thumb to the flat of the blade and the hum deepens, running up my arm to sit beneath my breastbone where the geas also lives. For a moment the two threads braid together, steel and oath, blade and binding, and I have to close my eyes and breathe through it.

“Morning,” I whisper to them. “Behave.”

I sheathe them in their places. The weight settles across my body, and the trembling is gone, and the nightmare is gone, and the girl who screamed on the balcony is gone too. What’s left is harder and quieter, and it knows exactly where every blade sits and how fast each one can clear its sheath.

I catch my reflection in the wardrobe glass: dark leathers, tight braid, hidden steel, a face that has shed the softness of court silk.

I cross the sitting room to his door and knock, two sharp raps.

“Kael.” My voice is steady now, clipped and low. “We’re leaving soon. Hope you slept better than I did. I need you sharp, not sulking.”

I turn to the outer door and check the corridor through the peephole I carved into the paneling at thirteen. Empty. The guard rotation won’t pass for another four minutes.

Let’s go..