5
Kason
Teodor waited exactly two days before he brought it to me formally, which was two days longer than I'd expected and told me he'd spent that time gathering more than gossip.
"Her name's circulating," he said, closing the flap of my supply tent behind him with more care than the gesture strictly required.
"Ilinca Hollow. Wardsmith, six years in the Sorrowmarket, no pack affiliation, no family anyone's been able to name.
Keeps to herself, by every account, except that half the market seems fond of her anyway, which tells you something. "
"Tells me what, exactly."
"That people don't get fond of someone who's actually as unremarkable as she's clearly trying to appear.
" He sat across from me, dropping the captain's formality now that the tent flap was closed.
"I also found out that word of the market incident reached the local magistrate's office within the hour.
He hasn't done anything with it yet. But he knows a prince used Command voice on a rogue trader in the middle of his market square, and men in that position tend to eventually decide that kind of knowledge is worth something to somebody. "
That settled colder in my chest than I wanted it to. "What do you recommend."
"Honestly? I recommend you tell me what you're planning to do about her before some magistrate with ambitions decides to do something about her for you.
" He held my gaze, steady, the way he had since we were both boys learning the same blade drills under the same tired instructor.
"I've known you eight years, Kason. I've watched you turn down every convenient excuse to break the Sorcha arrangement even when breaking it would have been easier than keeping it.
I don't think you're capable of walking away from whatever this is.
I need to know if you're capable of protecting it quietly, because quietly is the only way it survives contact with that Council. "
"I don't have a plan yet."
"Then make one. Fast." He didn't stand yet, weighing something further before he let the conversation close. "Can I ask you something, as your friend and not your captain?"
"You've never once asked permission for that distinction before. I doubt you need it now."
"Fair." A ghost of a smile, gone as quickly as it came. "Is it real? The bond, I mean — not the politics of it, not what it costs you with Sorcha's father or the Council. Just, underneath all of that. Is it real, the way the old stories describe it?"
I thought of a market wind carrying wet stone and clove-smoke three miles before I'd seen her face.
I thought of two words landing somewhere in her I hadn't known existed until I'd already reached it.
I thought of the particular, unfamiliar quiet that had settled under my ribs the moment she said her name out loud instead of refusing it.
"Yes," I said, and found, saying it out loud to the one person who'd earn the truth from me regardless, that the admission cost substantially less than I'd expected it to. "It's real."
Teodor nodded slowly, like a man confirming a suspicion he'd rather not have had confirmed, given the timing. "Then we'd better find you a plan that doesn't get her killed by the time the Council finds out."
"Then make one. Fast." He stood, business concluding as abruptly as it had opened. "Because the convoy's due to head back inside four days, and whatever you decide, you're deciding it before we ride."
He left me with that, and I sat alone in a supply tent that smelled faintly of canvas and mountain cold and turned the problem over from every angle I could find, none of which offered anything close to an easy answer.
Claiming her outright, before the Council had so much as met her, was a political disaster dressed up as a romantic gesture — it would hand every Voivode currently negotiating the Sorcha alliance a reason to question my judgment at the exact moment I needed their trust most. Halmar alone would use it to argue I'd let personal want override a decade of careful diplomacy, and he wouldn't entirely be wrong.
Leaving her here, unprotected, with a magistrate who now had reason to look twice at a rogue trader the crown had personally taken an interest in, was its own kind of disaster, slower, quieter, and considerably more dangerous to her specifically than to me.
A prince survived scandal. A rogue wardsmith with no pack and no protection did not survive a magistrate deciding she was worth reporting to the wrong Voivode.
Neither option kept her safe. Neither option kept anything I currently wanted intact, and for the first time in ten years of learning to want nothing the crown couldn't also afford, I found myself entirely unwilling to accept that as the final shape of my choices.
I was still turning it over, unproductively, when Yeva walked into my tent without announcing herself, which told me my sister had ridden two days down a mountain road on a horse she barely tolerated for a reason that had nothing to do with supply logistics.
"You look terrible," she said, by way of greeting, dropping into the chair Teodor had vacated with the disregard for royal protocol she reserved exclusively for family. "Teodor's letters have been getting steadily less coherent for two days. I decided that meant I should come see for myself."
"You rode two days on a horse you hate to check on my coherence."
"I rode two days on a horse I hate because my brother apparently found his mate in a market town and told exactly one person about it, and that person is not me, which I consider a personal insult given how thoroughly I helped you leave the castle in the first place.
" She said it lightly, but her eyes, when they found mine, were doing the sharp, careful reading she'd inherited from our father and mostly used to unsettling effect.
"Teodor didn't say the word. He didn't have to.
I know you, Kason. I know what it means when you go quiet like this. "
I didn't bother denying it. There was no version of that conversation with Yeva that ended anywhere but here.
"Her name's Ilinca," I said. "She's a wardsmith.
Rogue, no pack, keeps to herself, and in four days I'm supposed to ride back to a castle full of Voivodes who'll want to know why the Sorcha wedding still doesn't have a date, and I don't currently have a single plan that gets her out of this market without putting a target on her that wasn't there before I walked into it. "
"Have you told her what she means? What the bond actually is, for us?"
"No." The admission cost more than I expected. "I've barely let myself think the word, let alone say it to a woman who's known me two days and has every reason not to trust a wolf noble telling her she's suddenly the center of a political catastrophe."
"Good," Yeva said, which surprised me. "Don't. Not yet. She needs a reason to trust you that has nothing to do with fate deciding it for her, or the whole thing collapses the first time she wonders whether you'd have looked at her twice without the bond doing the deciding for you."
That landed with more weight than I expected from my younger sister, delivered with the specific certainty of someone who'd clearly given the matter more thought on a two-day ride than I'd managed in the same span of time standing still.
Yeva was quiet for a moment, turning the larger problem over with the same careful attention she gave everything that actually mattered to her. "What if I put the target on myself instead."
"What?"
"I commission her." She said it like the idea had arrived fully formed, which knowing my sister it probably had, sometime during the ride down.
"The castle archive wing's been in need of proper restoration wards for years — Father's been putting it off because no one currently on staff has the old bone-and-wood craft anymore, only the newer metal-work styles.
If a wardsmith with genuine skill happened to be found in a border market and invited to consult on a royal commission, that's not a prince claiming a rogue.
That's a princess hiring a craftswoman. No one questions that. No one even looks twice at it."
I stared at my sister with something that was equal parts relief and the particular unease of watching someone markedly better at this kind of maneuvering than I currently was.
"You'd be lying to the entire Council."
"I'd be commissioning genuine work from a genuinely skilled tradeswoman, which happens to also solve your problem." She shrugged, unbothered. "I'm not above a convenient truth, Kason. Neither are you, most days. You've just forgotten how to use one on your own behalf."
"And if she says no?"
"Then she says no, and you're no worse off than you currently are.
" Yeva stood, already halfway to the tent flap, already moving with the decisiveness that had made her, at nineteen, considerably more effective at court politics than half the Voivodes twice her age.
"But I don't think she will. Not once she understands what's coming for rogue traders in this town if the Council's registration order goes through the way it's currently written.
A royal commission isn't just an excuse, Kason.
It's the safest place in the kingdom for someone the Council hasn't decided to look at twice yet. "
She was gone before I could ask how she already knew about the registration order, though knowing Yeva, she'd probably read the notice herself on the ride in and drawn every conclusion I'd spent two days failing to draw on my own.
I found them together the next morning, my sister and the woman I still hadn't stopped thinking about since the moment her scent first hit me on a market wind, deep in conversation at Ilinca's stall like two old friends instead of strangers who'd met an hour before.
Yeva had that effect on people. She always had.