2 #2
"You're not going to Sorrowmarket for the road," Teodor said, once the chamber had emptied and it was only the two of us and the map nobody had bothered to roll back up.
"I'm going to Sorrowmarket for the road."
"Kason." He only used my name when the guard captain in him had stepped aside for the rest of it — the boy who'd trained beside me since we were both twelve, who'd been in the room the night Emil died and had never once, in ten years, let me carry that alone even when I'd wanted to.
"You've been pacing your own skin for three weeks.
I've watched you do it in council, at supper, standing at a window doing absolutely nothing for twenty minutes at a stretch. That's not a road you're chasing."
"I don't know what it is." That much, at least, was entirely true, and saying it out loud to the one person who'd earn the truth from me eventually anyway cost less than I'd expected it to. "I only know it's gotten worse, not better, and it started around the same time the Unbound did."
Teodor studied me for a long moment, the specific assessing look he gave a battlefield before he trusted it. "Then maybe you find your answer on that road."
"Maybe."
"And maybe," he added, already turning for the door, already letting the captain slide back over the friend, "you tell Lady Sorcha's father his daughter's wedding date is going to keep waiting a little longer than any of us are currently admitting to."
I didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer yet that wouldn't have been a lie in one direction or the other, and I'd told enough of those to a room full of Voivodes for one afternoon.
I stood alone in the council chamber after he'd gone, in front of the map, one finger tracing the thin ink line of the road that ran down out of the mountains and into the Sorrowmarket crossing, and underneath the plain, reasonable, entirely truthful reasons I'd given the council for wanting to see that road myself, something else moved — quiet, certain, patient in a way my wolf had not been patient about anything in three weeks.
Soon, it said, without a single word for what it meant by that, and for the first time in ten years, I didn't try to argue it back down.
Yeva was waiting at the stables when I came down before dawn, still in her bedclothes with a cloak thrown over them and her dark hair unbraided, which meant she'd either not slept or had woken specifically to catch me before I left. With Yeva it was rarely obvious which.
"You didn't say goodbye at supper," she said, by way of greeting, arms crossed against the cold.
"I didn't want an audience for it."
"You didn't want Father asking why you're personally escorting a supply convoy to a market town when you have a guard captain literally paid to do that for you.
" She said it without heat, watching me check the girth on my horse with the particular attention of a woman gathering evidence for an argument she intended to win later.
"Teodor told me you've been strange for weeks. "
"Teodor talks too much."
"Teodor loves you too much, which is a different thing, and considerably more annoying for the rest of us who'd like a straight answer occasionally.
" She came closer, dropped the teasing for a moment, and underneath it she looked younger than her nineteen years, in the gray half-light, the way she sometimes did when she forgot to perform the confidence she wore everywhere else.
"You're allowed to want something for yourself, you know.
Even now. Even with Sorcha's father breathing down the treaty's neck. Emil would have wanted that for you."
I didn't answer that immediately, because she'd said the one name that still, all these years later, cost me something to hear before breakfast.
"Emil would have told me not to be reckless the week before my own wedding gets announced," I said finally.
"Emil would have told you that, and then done something twice as reckless the next morning, because he was your brother and the two of you were impossible in exactly the same ways.
" She smiled, small and real, and reached up to fix the collar of my coat, an old habit from childhood neither of us had ever quite let go of.
"Go look at your road, Kason. Come back and tell me what you actually found out there.
Not the version you'll give the Council. "
"That's a dangerous request to make of a prince."
"I'm not asking the prince." She stepped back and looked up at me with an expression that was pure Yeva — fond, sharp, entirely too observant for anyone's comfort. "I'm asking my brother. There's a difference. I'd like to keep being able to tell them apart."
I thought about that the whole ride down out of the mountains, my wolf quieter than it had managed in three weeks, the road unspooling gray and cold in the hour before sunrise, and didn't have an answer for her yet either.
I left for the Sorrowmarket at dawn, my convoy small and unremarkable behind me, the mineral bite of glacier-melt riding under the pine on the wind, and something under my sternum that had been pacing for three weeks finally, finally going still.