Chapter 26
Steel met steel with a sound like thunder.
Elodie pressed herself against Miles’s side and watched two men try to kill each other in the gray light of dawn.
She’d seen Gareth fight before in the training yard, sparring with his men, but this was different.
This was real. This was fury and grief and three years of silence channeled into every strike.
Alaric was good. That was the terrifying thing. He moved with the fluid grace of a man who’d trained since childhood, who’d fought in tournaments and border skirmishes and God knew what else. His blade wove patterns in the air that Elodie couldn’t follow, seeking openings, testing defenses.
But Gareth was better. He’d always been better, she knew that now, watching him. The difference between them wasn’t skill, but something deeper. Alaric fought like a man proving a point. Gareth fought like a man with nothing left to lose.
Their swords clashed again, and Alaric stumbled back a step. His composure cracked, just slightly, and Elodie saw something flicker in his eyes. Fear? No—shock. The shock of a man who’d expected to win and was suddenly realizing he might not.
“Is this what you’ve been doing for three years?” Alaric’s voice was still smooth, but there was an edge to it now. “Training in your little ruin? Waiting for this moment?” He lunged, was parried, retreated. “How touching. The silent knight, dreaming of revenge.”
Gareth didn’t respond. His face was a mask of deadly focus, every ounce of his attention on the man before him. He pressed forward, forcing Alaric back toward the courtyard wall, his strikes coming faster, harder, more precise.
Around them, the soldiers held position. Whatever honor existed among killers, it kept them from interfering. This was between their lords now, and they would wait for the outcome.
Most of them, anyway. Movement caught Elodie’s eye. One of Alaric’s men, young, eager, stupid, was edging around the perimeter of the fight. His attention fixed on Gareth’s unprotected back.
“Miles—” she started, but Miles was already moving to intercept a different threat, two soldiers testing the line to his left.
The young soldier drew his sword. Ten feet from Gareth. Eight. Six.
Elodie didn’t think. She grabbed the first thing she could reach, a torch guttering in a wall bracket, half-fallen from the earlier fighting, and lunged.
Elodie wasn’t graceful or skilled. She was a medieval history professor from Manchester who’d never held a weapon in her life, and she swung that torch like a cricket bat at a particularly offensive ball.
It connected with the soldier’s helmet with a clang that rattled her teeth. He staggered sideways, more surprised than hurt, and she hit him again, across the shoulders, the arm, anywhere she could reach. Fire scattered across the stones.
“Cheese and crackers, stay down—”
He went down. Not from her wild assault, but from Miles’sword hilt cracking against his skull as the knight appeared at her side.
“My lady.” Miles’ voice was caught somewhere between horror and admiration. “Perhaps stay behind me?”
She retreated, her hands shaking so badly she nearly dropped the smoldering torch. Not a warrior. Definitely not a warrior. Just a woman who refused to watch the man she loved die.
The fight had shifted while she wasn’t watching. Alaric was struggling now, his movements growing desperate. Sweat darkened his fine clothes. His perfect hair hung loose around his face.
“You should have died in that clearing,” he hissed, blocking a strike that visibly numbed his arm. “You should have bled out in the mud like the dog you are.”
Gareth pressed harder. His blade was everywhere—high, low, feinting left and striking right. Silent and relentless as the tide.
“You were the best thing I ever made.” The words tore out of Alaric between ragged breaths. “Better than any knight I trained.” He parried, barely, stumbling back another step. “And you never understood—”
A slash opened a line across his forearm. He hissed in pain.
“—that’s why I had to destroy you.” His voice cracked, something raw bleeding through the aristocratic polish. “Because you weren’t supposed to be better than me. Greywatch was supposed to be mine.”
For just a moment, Gareth’s rhythm faltered.
Then his sword moved faster. The sequence was too quick to follow—a feint, a parry, a step that put him inside Alaric’s guard.
His elbow caught his enemy’s chin, snapping his head back.
His foot hooked behind Alaric’s ankle. And then Alaric was on the ground, his sword clattering across the stones, and Gareth’s blade was at his throat.
Silence descended over the courtyard. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
Alaric lay in the dirt, his fine clothes stained with dust and sweat, and for the first time since Elodie had met him, he looked small.
Not afraid—not exactly. Just... diminished.
A man who’d built his whole life on jealousy and found it wasn’t enough.
“Go ahead,” he rasped. “Finish it. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Kill me. Prove you’re the monster everyone says you are.”
Gareth’s sword hand trembled. Not with weakness—with restraint. With the effort of holding back three years of fury, of denying the darkness that demanded blood.
“Gareth.” Elodie’s voice cut through the tension. She stepped forward despite Miles’ grab for her arm. “Gareth, look at me.”
His eyes—slate-gray and hard as winter—flicked to her. Something lurked beneath the cold rage. Question. Uncertainty.
“You already won,” she said. “You survived, built something good. You loved—” Her voice cracked, but she pushed on. “Don’t let him take that from you.”
For a long moment, Gareth didn’t move. His sword stayed at Alaric’s throat, his body coiled with deadly tension.
Then Alaric moved. A hidden blade, a slim dagger drawn from his boot while everyone watched his face, slashed upward toward Gareth’s exposed side.
His reaction was pure instinct. He twisted, brought his sword down, and—
The sound was awful. Wet and final. Alaric’s eyes went wide. He looked down at the blade embedded in his chest, then up at Gareth, and his lips twisted in something that might have been a smile or a grimace.
“Always... too soft,” he wheezed. “I knew you wouldn’t do it, so I made you...”
His head fell back against the stones. His body shuddered once, twice, and then went still. The silence that followed was absolute. Elodie stared at Alaric’s body, at the blood spreading across the courtyard stones, and felt nothing. No triumph. No horror. Just a vast, exhausted emptiness.
Gareth stood over his fallen enemy like a statue carved from grief and steel.
His sword hung loosely at his side. His shoulders rose and fell with ragged breaths.
And when he turned to look at Elodie, his eyes were wet.
She didn’t remember crossing the space between them.
One moment she was standing by Miles, and the next she was in Gareth’s arms, her face pressed against his leather jerkin, his heart pounding against her cheek.
His arms came around her so tightly she could barely breathe. She didn’t care, just wrapped herself around him and held on, and the world narrowed to the warmth of his body and the sound of his breathing and the solid, living reality of him.
He’s alive. We’re alive. We made it.
“My lord.” Miles’ voice, rough with emotion. “The keep is ours. What are your orders?”
Gareth released her reluctantly, his hands lingering on her shoulders, and turned to face his men.
His fingers shaped signs with a steadiness that belied the tremor she’d felt in his arms. Secure the keep.
Tend the wounded. Prisoners to be held until the crown decides their fate.
He paused, then added. We ride for Greywatch at first light. Our people will want to know it’s over.
The men dispersed to follow orders. Around them, the courtyard filled with the controlled chaos of the aftermath—soldiers binding the wounded, servants emerging from hiding, the slow process of turning a battlefield back into a functioning keep.
Elodie reached for Gareth’s hand. His fingers intertwined with hers, squeezing once.
“You’re bleeding. Are you hurt?”
He shook his head. Signed back. Are you?
She thought about the bruises on her wrists, the ache in her skull where Cecily’s soldiers had struck her, the torch-burned palm she hadn’t even noticed until now. None of it mattered.
“I’m fine. I’m—”
She stopped. Her hands dropped to her sides. There was something she needed to say, something she’d promised herself in the darkness of that cell.
“I love you,” she said. “I should have said it a hundred times. I was scared and stupid and—” She laughed, a sound that was half sob. “And I’m done being scared. I’m done pretending I might leave. I’m staying. Here. With you. If you’ll have me.”
Gareth stared at her. His face was still unreadable, but something was shifting beneath it—something warm and bright and terrifying in its intensity.
He reached for her. Cupped her face in his bloody, calloused hands.
Drew her close until their foreheads touched, until she could feel his breath warm against her lips, until the whole world narrowed to the space between them.
And then he spoke.
One word. Forced through a throat scarred by violence and years of silence. Rough and broken and raw—more growl than speech.
“Mine.”
The sound of it undid her completely. Elodie laughed and cried and threw her arms around his neck. “Yours,” she managed against his lips. “Always. In any century. In any—”
He kissed her. Not gently, certainly not the careful, questioning kiss of a man unsure of his welcome.
This was a claiming—fierce and desperate.
His mouth slanted over hers like he was drowning and she was air, like he’d been starving for this single moment since the day she’d fallen out of the sky at his feet.
Elodie melted into him. There were no other words for it.
Her bones turned to honey, her thoughts scattered like startled birds, and all that remained was sensation.
The rough scrape of his stubble against her chin, the taste of him (salt and copper and something darker, something that was just Gareth), the way his hands trembled where they cradled her face like she was something precious, something breakable, something he couldn’t quite believe was real.
She made a sound against his mouth, a half gasp, half whimper, and felt his breath hitch in response.
His fingers slid into her hair, tangling in the wild mess of curls, tilting her head back to deepen the kiss.
His other hand splayed across her lower back, pressing her closer until there was no space left between them, until she could feel his heart hammering against her chest in a rhythm that matched her own.
This, she thought dizzily. This is what the poems are about. This is what people die for.
She’d been kissed before. Forgettable fumbles at university parties, a few disappointing relationships that had fizzled before they’d properly begun.
Nothing, nothing had prepared her for this.
For the way his mouth moved against hers like a conversation, like a promise, like every word he’d been unable to speak for three years poured into a single point of connection.
When his teeth caught her lower lip, she gasped. When his tongue swept against hers, she forgot her own name. When he finally pulled back just far enough to breathe, she chased his mouth without meaning to, and the low, broken sound he made in response sent heat pooling through her entire body.
“Gareth.” His name came out ragged, wrecked. “I—”
He kissed her again. Softer this time, but no less consuming.
A gentle brush of lips that turned into something deeper, something slower, something that felt less like desperation and more like devotion.
Like he was memorizing the shape of her.
Like he intended to spend the rest of his life learning every way there was to kiss her, and this was only the beginning.
Around them, the world existed in distant fragments—the scrape of soldiers’ boots on stone, the crackle of dying torches, the first golden rays of sunlight spilling over the courtyard walls.
None of it mattered. None of it was real.
There was only his mouth on hers, his hands in her hair, his heart beating against her palm where she’d pressed it to his chest without remembering how it got there.
When they finally broke apart, both of them breathing hard, his eyes were still wet—but he was smiling. Actually smiling, a real smile that transformed his scarred face into something beautiful. Something radiant. Something that made her chest ache with a sweetness that bordered on pain.
She reached up and touched his face. Traced the edge of his scar with trembling fingers. Felt the smile widen beneath her touch.
“You kissed me,” she whispered, because apparently she’d lost the ability to say anything intelligent.
His shoulders shook with silent laughter. He signed one-handed, the other still tangled in her hair. You kissed me back.
“I did.” She was grinning now, helpless to stop. “I very much did.”
Somewhere behind them, she heard the distinct sound of coins changing hands and Miles’s voice muttering something about “finally” and “about bloody time.” She didn’t care.
Let them watch. Let the whole kingdom watch.
She’d just been kissed senseless by the man she loved, and she intended to do it again at the earliest opportunity.
Gareth must have had the same thought, because he leaned down and pressed one more kiss to her lips, quick and sweet, a promise of more to come, before pulling back with visible reluctance.
We should go home, he signed.
“Home.” The word tasted different now. Fuller. Warmer. A word that meant grey stone walls and roaring fires and this man’s arms around her. A word that meant forever.
His arm came around her shoulders, solid and warm.
She leaned into him, fitting herself against his side like she’d been made to go there.
They walked together through the courtyard, past the body of the man who’d tried to destroy them, past the soldiers who’d fought to save her, past the wreckage of a battle finally won.