Not Mine To Want

Aldermere Castle wakes slowly in winter. The river mist that rises most mornings has not yet burned off by the hour the household stirs, and it lies low over the bailey, softening the shapes of gatehouse and stable roof into grey suggestions of themselves, while frost rims the chapel steps in a fine, brittle lace, and somewhere below, in the kennels, the hounds set up the racket that means they have caught the scent of breakfast and hold decided opinions about the delay.

He has walked at her shoulder since the turn of the year, and in that time has come to know the exact weight and rhythm of her step upon 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, without seeming to notice she does it, to trail her fingers along the stone as she climbs; slower on the western stair, which holds no warmth at any hour and which she has never once complained of, complaint being a thing that does not seem to live in her.

This morning it is the chapel stair, narrow, worn into a soft hollow by four generations of the family’s knees before hers, and she climbs two steps ahead of him in the grey light, her hood fallen back despite the cold, for she has never had much patience for hoods; her hair, gold gone paler than honey and darker than straw, hangs loose down the length of her spine in a single heavy plait already coming undone at its end, as it always does well before midmorning.

His gaze holds to the hem of her cloak, to the stone beneath her climbing feet, disciplined by long practice into that narrow and dutiful circuit; and still the colour of her hair reaches him regardless, the way warmth from a fire reaches a man who has turned his back to it and gone on standing there.

She is slight of build, made for grace rather than strength, the particular slenderness that inclines a man twice her width to walk a half-step nearer than strict necessity requires, in case the wind coming off the river should prove unkind to her. Beside him she comes up to somewhere below his shoulder; in full plate, the pauldrons squaring him further than nature alone had managed, the difference between them is very nearly comic, and she has told him so more than once, with the particular relish she reserves for pointing out the things he would rather she left unremarked.

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 before, and his hand closes about her elbow before the thought of moving has finished arriving in him; his body answers these moments faster than his mind ever troubles to catch it, and he has come, over the past six months, to be quietly grateful for the arrangement, for a hand that moves ahead of thought has no interval in which to hesitate, and no hesitation left over for anyone to read.

“There you are,” she says, recovering herself, laughing a little at her own clumsiness. “My loyal stone.”

He gives her no answer beyond the pressure of his hand, which remains at her elbow through the wool of her cloak — a courtesy, ostensibly, and a duty, the precise and correct response of a man paid to keep her upright on worn stone, and also, in that same instant, the entire occupation of his attention, narrowed to the single point where his fingers meet her arm, to the warmth of her reaching him even through wool and the leather beneath his gauntlet.

Something in him wants, absurdly, urgently, to tighten that grip rather than loosen it, to feel the whole of her weight settle against him the way it settled for half an instant when she stumbled; he does not permit it. He counts instead, has taken of late to counting without quite deciding to, a private discipline that puts a number to a thing rather than a name.

One. Two. At three he lets her go, because three is what propriety allows a man in his position, and in all this while he has not once permitted himself four.

“Thank you,” she says, and looks up at him, has to look up, considerably, the angle of it faintly absurd to her.

The morning air around him seems, in the half-instant before she finds his eyes beneath the brow of the helm, to answer to his scale alone, as though a man built on that order of magnitude altered the weather of a place simply by standing in it. The steel of his pauldron sits cold-looking and very close to her shoulder. Her pulse does something undignified and quick, as it has taken to doing, with a regularity she finds increasingly difficult to forgive it, whenever he stands this near.

She waits, as she sometimes does, for something more than a nod.

He gives her the nod, and nothing more, though behind the visor his jaw has gone tight enough to ache, and it costs him a great deal more than the nod will ever show to leave it at that.

She gathers her skirts and continues on toward the chapel door, and he falls into step a pace behind and to the left, the place he has kept for the whole of his time in her father’s household, and will go on keeping for as long as her father requires it of him.

At the chapel door he does what he does nowhere else within the castle walls: 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 beneath 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, worn longer than fashion favours among the household knights, pushed back from a face weathered by rather more years and rather more weather than her own; a hard jaw; a nose that has clearly been broken and reset at least once; eyes the colour of a winter sky just before snow. A scar runs through one eyebrow, and she has wondered about it and never once asked.

He looks at the door, his breath held a moment longer than the small ritual requires, and beneath the calm of his expression something works to hold itself very still, the way a man holds himself still who has learned that stillness is the only apology available to him for wanting what he is looking at.

She has seen his face perhaps a dozen times in all the months he has walked at her shoulder, and it costs her, every single time, a half-second of composure to recover from the sight of it.

“You are very serious this morning,” she says, mostly to have something to say.

“I am serious every morning, milady,” he says, and his voice, low, rough about its edges, moves through her more than she would care to admit, though she gives no more sign of it than the faint colour that rises and is gone again before he can be certain he saw it.

Beneath the words, held down where she cannot see it, is the effort of a man keeping his voice as flat and unremarkable as he has just now made it, when every other part of him would rather it were not flat at all.

“Yes,” she says, and there is something in the word that is almost fond, almost exasperated, entirely innocent of what it has just cost him to sound so unremarkable. “I had noticed.”

She pushes the chapel door herself, for she will not have his help with doors, never has, and the cold morning light comes in around her as it swings open, catching the gold in her hair and setting it briefly alight, and he watches her pass through into it and thinks the thought he thinks every morning at this same hour, in these same words, and has never once let travel further than the inside of his own skull.

Not mine to want.

His jaw sets, briefly, around the thought, the way it sets around most things he does not allow himself to keep. He settles the helm back over his head before the thought can go any further, because the helm, at least, is a thing he can close.

Beyond her, past the line of the chapel roof, the lower bailey has begun to fill with the ordinary industry of a household roused early: grooms leading horses out to be shod, a boy hauling water in buckets too large for him, two men-at-arms arguing cheerfully over something near the smithy door.

Further out, past the curtain wall, the practice yard has stood marked with rope and stakes since before first light, the lists laid out for the day’s tournament, the one her father has spent the better part of a month preparing to host.

The world narrows again to its familiar slot of grey light, and he follows her in.