My Loyal Stone
[In a hurry? Head straight to Chapter 5 for the road trip.]
Aldermere Castle wakes slowly in winter. The mist that comes up off the river most mornings has not yet burned away, and it sits low over the bailey, softening the shapes of the gatehouse and the stable roofs into grey suggestions of themselves. Frost rimes the chapel steps. Somewhere below, in the kennels, the hounds are making the particular racket that means they have smelled breakfast and have opinions about the delay.
He has been her shadow for six months now, and in six months he has learned the precise weight of her step on stone: quicker on the eastern stair, where the morning light comes slanting through the arrow-slit windows and warms the wall enough that she likes to trail her fingers along it as she climbs; slower on the western, which is dark and cold and which she has never once complained about, because complaining is not a thing Isabelle does.
This morning it is the chapel stair, narrow and worn into a soft hollow by four generations of the family’s knees before hers, and she is two steps ahead of him in the grey light, her hood fallen back despite the cold because she has never much cared for hoods, her hair — gold, paler than honey, darker than straw, the kind of color that seems to hold what light there is and give some of it back — loose down her spine in a single heavy plait that has come half undone at the end, the way it always does by midmorning. He watches the hem of her cloak. The stair beneath her feet. He does not watch the hair, though he is aware of it the way a man is aware of a fire at his back.
She is slight, built for grace rather than strength, the kind of slender that makes a man twice her width feel obliged to walk a half-step closer than he otherwise would in case the wind off the river decides to be unkind to her. Beside him, she comes up to somewhere below his shoulder. In full plate, with the pauldrons squaring him out further than nature alone managed, the difference is almost comic. She has told him so, more than once, with the particular delight she takes in pointing out things he would rather not have pointed out.
She stumbles on the third step from the bottom, where the stone has worn into a shallow lip that has caught more careless feet than hers, and his hand is at her elbow before the thought of moving has finished arriving. Six months of this, his body answering faster than his mind, which he has decided is the only mercy in the arrangement, because it leaves no room for hesitation and therefore no room for anyone to read what the hesitation would mean.
There you are, she says, recovering, laughing a little at herself. My loyal stone.
He says nothing. He is occupied.
His hand is at her elbow through the wool of her cloak, and it is nothing: a courtesy, a duty, the precise and correct response of a man paid to keep her upright. And it is also the entire content of his attention, narrowed down to the place where his fingers meet her arm, to the warmth of her even through the wool. He counts. He has started counting, lately, without deciding to. A private discipline, a way of putting a number on a thing rather than a feeling. *One. Two.* At three he releases her, because three is what propriety allows and he has never once, in six months, taken four.
Thank you, she says, and looks up at him — has to look up, considerably, the angle of it always faintly absurd to her, she has remarked on it before with the easy good humor she brings to most things.
She is aware, in the half-second it takes to find his eyes beneath the brow of the helm, of the particular effect he has on the morning air around him, as though a man built on that scale changes the weather of a room simply by occupying it. The steel of his pauldron is cold-looking and very close to her shoulder. Her own pulse does something undignified and quick, the way it has done, with increasing and irritating regularity, for several months now.
She waits, as she sometimes does, for something more than a nod.
He gives her the nod.
Something crosses her face. Not hurt exactly, she is not so easily hurt as that, but a small flicker of something he has learned to recognize and cannot afford to examine too closely. She gathers her skirts and continues toward the chapel door, and he falls into step a pace behind and to the left, where he has stood for six months, where he will stand for as long as her father requires it of him.
At the chapel door he does what he does nowhere else in the castle: he removes the helm.
It is a small courtesy, offered to no one but the building itself, and it means that for the length of one held breath, in the grey light pooling under the porch, she can see the whole of his face rather than the dark slot of the visor she has grown so accustomed to addressing. Pale hair, longer than fashion favors among the household knights, pushed back from a face weathered by more years and more weather than hers. A hard jaw, a nose that has clearly been broken and reset at least once, eyes the color of a winter sky just before snow. There is a scar through one eyebrow that she has wondered about and never asked after. He does not look at her while he does this. He looks at the door.
She has seen his face perhaps a dozen times in six months. It still, every time, costs her a half-second of composure to recover from.
You are very serious this morning, she says, partly to have something to say.
I am serious every morning, milady, he says, and his voice, low, rough at the edges, moves through her more than she would like to admit.
Yes, she says, and there is something in it that is almost fond, almost exasperated, entirely unaware of what it costs him to keep his own voice as flat and unremarkable as he has just made it. I had noticed.
She pushes the chapel door herself (she would refuse his help with it, she always does with doors, prefers her own hands free) and the cold morning light comes in around her as it opens, catching the gold of her hair, and he watches her go through and thinks the thought he thinks every day at approximately this hour, in approximately these words.
*Not mine to want.*
Beyond her, past the chapel roofline, the lower bailey is already filling with the particular industry of a household roused early: grooms leading horses out to be shod, a boy hauling water, two men-at-arms arguing cheerfully about something near the smithy. Further out, beyond the curtain wall, the practice yard has been marked since dawn with rope and stakes; the lists laid out for the day’s tournament, the one her father has spent a month preparing for.
He settles the helm back over his head, and the world narrows again to its familiar slot of grey light, and he follows her in.
