Epilogue
One Year Later
I carved in the open square of Castle Ironmoor on a bright autumn morning, hood down, my true name given freely to anyone who asked it, my hands moving through a warding pattern I no longer had any reason to carve small.
"You're drawing a crowd," Kason observed, settling onto the bench beside me with the particular ease of a man who'd learned, over a full year of marriage, exactly how to make himself useful without making himself intrusive — today, that meant simply holding the spare tools while I worked, and occasionally fetching tea exactly the way I liked it.
"I'm restoring the market wards for the autumn festival.
A crowd's rather the point." I glanced up at him, warmth blooming easy and familiar in my chest the way it always did now, no longer new but no less precious for its familiarity.
"Though I notice you didn't actually answer whether you're here to help or simply to watch. "
"Can't it be both?"
I let him stay, the way I let him stay most mornings now, and worked through the pattern with a steadiness that still, some days, surprised me — the, hard-won ease of a woman who'd finally stopped waiting for someone to take her craft away from her.
Dobrin found us at midday, considerably more prosperous-looking than the fisherman I'd known in the Sorrowmarket, his own stall now employing two assistants to manage the trade he'd built partly on the strength of a royal wedding's considerable publicity.
Petra walked beside him, her belly rounded with a pregnancy they'd announced with more joy than either of them had managed to contain properly for more than a week before the whole castle knew.
"You're glowing," I told her, embracing them both.
"I'm exhausted, and far larger than I was six months ago, but I'll accept glowing as the kinder description.
" Petra laughed, warm and easy. "Dobrin insists on carrying everything for me now, which I've decided to allow purely because watching a fisherman struggle with a basket of yarn is more entertaining than I have any right to expect from married life. "
"I'm not struggling," Dobrin protested, with the wounded dignity of a man very obviously struggling with the basket in question, and I laughed harder than I had in weeks, the specific easy joy of watching two people I loved build a life considerably happier than either had dared hope for a year before.
Lady Sorcha found us near the fountain an hour later, her own husband — a Voivode's second son from a western pack, chosen entirely on her own terms once the political pressure of the Draguvane arrangement had finally lifted — trailing behind her with an easy, contented warmth that told me plainly how well that particular match had actually turned out.
"The wardsmith," she said, the old formal address now carrying nothing but genuine affection between us. "I hear the autumn festival wards are much stronger than last year's. The market traders are already talking."
"I had a full year to improve on my rushed first attempt. I'd hope for some improvement."
"You'd be surprised how rarely improvement actually follows opportunity, in my experience of this court." She embraced me briefly, warm and genuine, before moving on to find Yeva somewhere in the festival crowd.
Yeva herself found us near dusk, Teodor at her side with the particular easy familiarity of two people who'd spent a full year growing considerably closer than either had initially let themselves acknowledge, though neither had yet made anything formal of it beyond the plain fact of always, somehow, finding their way to each other's company.
"The Council's confirmed the northern border's held steady for six months now," Yeva reported, settling beside us with the easy warmth that had never once wavered across the entire year.
"The Unbound's scattered remnants haven't regrouped meaningfully since Ossendrei fell.
Teodor believes what's left poses no organized threat, though he's recommended we keep watching regardless. "
"Some things are worth watching regardless of the immediate danger," Teodor said, and something in the look he exchanged with Yeva suggested he wasn't entirely speaking about border security alone.
I let that particular thread lie, filing it away with the same careful, fond attention I gave everything about the family I'd found my way into, and turned my face up toward a sky going gold and rose with the day's slow ending, Kason's arm warm around my shoulders, the whole of Castle Ironmoor's autumn festival spread out before us in noise and light and the, hard-won peace of a kingdom finally, fully at rest.
I thought of Katra, sometimes, on evenings like this one — of a hollow oak and a promise made in the dark, of a woman who'd died never knowing whether her sacrifice would actually matter.
I hoped, watching my husband laugh at something Dobrin had said, watching Yeva's careful, unacknowledged warmth toward a man who'd earned it a hundred times over, watching an entire festival's worth of ordinary people living ordinary lives beneath wards I'd carved with my own two hands, that she somehow knew.
You were loved before you ever knew whose blood you carried, she'd told me, in the last words she'd ever managed to give me.
I understood now, a year into a life I'd never once let myself imagine possible, that she'd been entirely right — and that the loving had never once stopped, not for a single day since, growing instead into something significantly larger than either of us could have dreamed for, standing together, in the hollow of an oak tree neither of us had lived to see grow old.