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Neal had told Graeme that he was required to be on duty in the healing tent during the progress’s endless tourneys, as the least experienced healer traveling with them. It was even, he considered as he listened to the roar of the crowd as someone else did something needlessly risky, mostly true. Neal was a wet-behind-the-ears university graduate with a great deal of theoretical knowledge and not a lot of practical experience, and his supervisors in the healing tent wanted him there as often as he could be.
If he’d asked, though. If he’d said that his only brother was fighting in a tourney for the first time since he’d nearly lost an arm and his life in the Immortals War, they would have let him go.
Graeme knew that, of course. Their father was one of the healers who sternly kept telling Neal to stop flirting with the progress’s ladies and go back to bespell another batch of headache powder, and their father absolutely would have allowed him liberty. But Graeme hadn’t pushed. Graeme never did.
And so Neal was banging around the infirmary unsure if he was angrier at himself or at Graeme, knowing it would have meant something for Graeme to have Neal there, knowing that Neal might have been sick at the sight of a weapon aiming for Graeme’s heart, padding and armor and shields or not.
There were a hundred things he could have been doing. There always were. Neal tried to do all of them, which meant he did none of them effectively, and he was very grateful that the other healer on duty, Riana of Meron, was too exasperated with his youth and his general attitude to do anything besides roll her eyes.
He was interrupted by the eruption of the crowd at the tourney field. Not a happy eruption, a favorite winning or a surprise overturning of a less-liked champion. Something was wrong. Neal, in the middle of purifying some of their distilled water, nearly spilled some and sat up straight. He didn’t know the order of the fights. It could have been Graeme.
There was another cheer, a happier one, not two minutes later, and Neal still hadn’t been able to force himself to move. “Think we’ll have company?” he asked, and knew he didn’t sound half as casual as he meant to.
“We usually do, on tourney days,” Riana replied, mildly enough, but she was listening hard too.
They got their answer within five minutes, when one of the queen’s ladies found them at something that was only a shade too dignified to be called a trot. “Her Majesty asks for someone at the ready to care for a wounded squire,” she said, and Neal tried not to relax. Graeme wasn’t a squire.
“We’re at the ready,” Neal said, and belatedly caught up to how unusual the request was. Knights got bruises and sprained muscles often enough in tourneys. Squires got them still more often. Usually their friends helped them stagger to the healers, and if they were too badly off for that, he’d never heard of Queen Thayet taking a personal interest. “What’s toward?”
“Keladry of Mindelan was injured on the field.” The lady’s lips thinned in clear disapproval. “It seems likely to have been deliberate.”
The whole progress knew Keladry of Mindelan, or at least knew of her. She was hard to miss, at her height, and she was very visible, given who her knight-master was. The griffin, of all things, helped too, for anyone who might otherwise have been inclined to miss her. Neal hadn’t met her, only seen her, though Graeme had when he’d worked with the third company of the King’s Own a time or two, but he knew that if she was hurt, if someone had hurt her, it had very certainly been deliberate. He’d have to have his fingers in his ears from dawn to dark to miss that the conservatives were fruitlessly trying to scare her off. “How badly?”
“She was well enough to force him to yield,” she said with a certain measure of vicious satisfaction, and then sobered again. “But she took a blow to the chest. Her mother and the queen and a few others are escorting her here. I was sent ahead to make sure everything was ready.”
Neal winced and looked at Riana. “I’m happy to go, if there are worries about reputation, since she is who she is—”
“You’re a healer. If anyone tries to gossip, they can go whistle. I’ll be here to see to proprieties, anyway.”
Neal beamed at her briefly, charmed by the grudging sign of trust, and started preparing a table, listening for the sound of a group approaching the tent from the direction of the tourney field.
Keladry of Mindelan was the eye of a very worried hurricane the first time he saw her close up. She was glassy-eyed with pain or concussion, but she was still and she was calm as the ladies around her fussed in a mass of brightly colored skirts. She focused in on Neal immediately, while everyone else was chattering around her, and her brows immediately knit in confusion or disapproval. “Your face is wrong,” she said, to his utter bafflement.
“Let’s get you down on this table,” he said, defaulting to routine when he couldn’t think of how else to respond. “And I’ll check for concussion. Are you likely to fight me? Your warrior types do like fighting.”
“Oh, you aren’t Dom,” she said, which explained more than it didn’t. Of course she would catch the resemblance he bore to someone she had to see often, traveling with Lord Raoul. That was of significantly less concern than her taking a dislike to his face. “And no. Mama would hit me with her fan.”
That was lucid enough, at least, and it made her mother snort a little in the midst of her concern. Her mother wasn’t one of the fussy ones. She just held on to her daughter’s hand and met Neal’s eyes. “Nealan. A pleasure to see you again. You’ll fix this?”
That was a diplomat’s wife all over, remembering the name of a younger son she’d only met a few times when his mother had dragged him to parties. “I’ll look at her right now. Don’t worry, Squire Keladry, we’ll get you sorted out in no time.”
The conversation went on around him, but Neal sank himself into diagnosing Keladry, finding what was causing the worst of her pain. It was easy to get distracted by smaller injuries, the bruises any fighter picked up while training, the scratches and bites that had to be the reality behind the legendary image of the griffin, but he went seeking what was newest, and found a spreading bruise that told the tale of just how close her opponent had come to doing her a serious injury. Her brain, thank the gods, was largely well, only a little rattled, so Neal concentrated on her ribs, especially the few that were cracked, and tuned out the world around them.
When he looked up, she was watching him, half-asleep with the energy of the healing, and fighting a little bit to stay awake. Neal, his Gift busily at work making sure none of the cracks in her ribs were actually breaks, took a moment to quirk an eyebrow in inquiry. “Can I help you?”
“Sorry,” she said, her cheeks a little pink. “For mistaking you.”
Neal smiled at her, charmed. “Don’t worry. I’m much more handsome and charming than Dom, but I’m sure you’ll come to realize that if you get to know me.”
“Is that why he calls you Meathead?” she inquired, and took the last word in the conversation by promptly falling asleep.
“Nobody respects healers anymore,” he said to himself or the gods or Ilane of Mindelan, whose lips were twitching as she valiantly tried to hold in a smile, and sank more deeply into concentration.
*
If Neal found an excuse to visit his beloved cousin a few days later, when the progress was moving on, nobody would blame him. He and Dom were friendly, after all, and wrote often. Dom couldn’t do without a Queenscove cousin badgering him, or so he said, even if Neal hadn’t been the cousin chosen often, when he was young. Just because they hardly had a chance to see each other on the progress didn’t mean that had to always be the case.
“You want something,” Dom surmised when Neal said just that in answer to Dom’s unflattering surprise when Neal fell in riding next to his squad.
“You wound me. Didn’t I just tell you that you’re my favorite cousin?”
“I trust this less and less,” Dom said conversationally to one of his corporals, riding behind him.
“Truly, he cuts me to the quick,” Neal said to the same corporal. Two could play at that game. “He dismisses my cousinly gestures, he maligns my motives, he shares childhood nicknames with people wholly unrelated to us—”
Dom laughed at him, merry and irritating. “Kel said she’d been subjected to your bedside manner. What do you want with her?”
“I want to know why you shared a nickname with her when you swore it would remain inside the family forever.”
There was a flicker of expression that said it was a long story and that Neal wasn’t going to hear all of it possibly ever but definitely not while they were riding in public. “You’re only jealous that I’m sharing my witticisms with people who aren’t you,” said Dom, peacably enough. “Kel’s fine, though, if you’re here to poke your nose in about your old patient. Another stop or two to recover and probably she’ll join the lists again, if what my lord says is true. And the griffin’s gone at last, so that’s one thing off her shoulders.”
“Right, of course, she can go be recreationally injured some more. The glories of knighthood. Or aspiring knighthood.” Graeme had won his bout. He’d sought Neal out to tell him so. Neal knew his congratulations hadn’t been adequate, because their father had had to be the one to tell him that Graeme had signed himself up as a regular for the sword and staff matches.
Dom sighed at him like he was being very stupid. Neal scowled at him. “She had it proved to her twice over that if she doesn’t sign up for the lists they’ll just challenge her. This is the safer option. Meathead.”
That wasn’t just said for Neal’s benefit. Dom’s squad of the Own was at one of the progress’s flanks for the day, and he’d said it loud enough that some of the people riding along would have caught it, and might pass the gossip along. Dom had always had a good ear for that. “Well, if she gets injured again, she knows where to find me.”
“Careful,” Dom warned him, and it could have been about the dip in the road just ahead, but Neal wasn’t foolish enough to think that was all or even half of it.
*
While Neal couldn’t deny he was intrigued by Keladry, when he met her again, it wasn’t on purpose. He was in the healing tent again when she arrived, and when he turned from his last patient to find her standing there, hands clasped awkwardly in front of her, he smiled. “Oh, hello there. Not another cracked rib, I hope?”
“No, Lord Nealan. My lord anticipates having a headache tonight, so I’ve come looking for a powder. He says it’s better on the progress than any he’s had before.”
Neal tried not to preen. She had no way of knowing she was giving him a compliment. “Then I’ll make sure he has some. And there’s no need to call me by my title, unless you’re very attached to being Squire Keladry. Neal will do. You’re friends with my cousin, so you’re practically family.”
“Neal,” she said carefully, and went a little pink. “And I don’t quite—it’s hazy. But if I said anything when you were healing me—it’s just that you do look a lot like your cousin.”
Much as Neal wanted to tease her, he worried that she might combust. She didn’t seem like a young woman used to being teased. He turned away to start making up some headache powder instead, still rather smug about the indirect compliment. Some of his teachers at the university had derided his focus on medicines as herbwifery instead of modern medicine, but none of them could argue with his results. “Everyone says so,” he agreed while he did. “I look more like Dom than I do like my own brother. I think you’ve met Graeme a time or two?”
“He traveled with the Own, but I don’t think he’d remember me. You’re right, though, you don’t look much alike.”
Everyone knew who Keladry of Mindelan was. Maybe in a generation or three, a lady squire would be unremarkable, and knights working with them briefly would forget about them as soon as they met them. Unfortunately for her, Keladry of Mindelan didn’t get that luxury. He wasn’t sure if it was shyness or plain stubbornness that kept her from admitting it. “He takes after our mother.” He finished up the headache medicine and handed it to her. “Sure you don’t need some of this yourself? Traveling with my cousin is enough to give anyone headaches.”
She went even pinker. “I’m quite well, thank you. Neal.”
Neal tried very hard not to grin. She’d take it as him laughing at her and not his honest delight in who she seemed to be despite the maelstrom of gossip that surrounded her. “Then let’s talk about dosage so you can give Lord Raoul the right amount and at the right time,” he said, and was glad when the talk of business made her relax a little. When she was talking business, she had a clear, pleasant voice and an air of unshakable calm that would have made her a very good healer if she’d wanted to be one.
When she left, she gave him a tiny sliver of a smile that was more delightful than if she’d grinned at him, called him Neal one more time, and left him feeling slightly, stupidly breathless in her wake.
*
Neal did the only logical thing, and the next day that Graeme and Keladry were both on the lists for bouts, he begged his father for the day off.
Baird gave it to him, of course. He wanted so badly for Graeme to have his family’s support, to an extent that it was almost unfair to mislead him, or to halfway do it. Baird attended himself, dragging Neal much closer to the action than he really wanted to be, since Wilina was being entertained by the lady of the local fief and couldn’t politely get away.
Neal was on the embarrassing receiving end of a few raised eyebrows from those who knew him, when he’d perhaps spent a bit more time than he’d meant to complaining about war games and how that was an oxymoron and a stupid thing to do besides. He ignored them, and did his best to make polite conversation while his father sank deep into political discussion with the Prime Minister about the implications of something they’d both noticed about the local infrastructure.
The sword and staff bouts were first, because the tilting tended to churn the ground up. Neal took refuge in dusting off his rusty knowledge of sword work and counted off a soothing litany of the well-known and accepted moves of a courtly bout. Page training wasn’t as strict about students learning the precise forms under Lord Wyldon, Sir Gary confided across Baird, given how useless the forms were against spidrens and hurroks, but it still did his heart good to see the knights who hadn’t trained under Wyldon use them.
Neal had learned the forms when he was younger, even though he’d scorned page training. He’d kept up with them for a long time, to have something in common with his brothers. He said something he hoped was polite to Sir Gary and fixed his eyes on the field.
Graeme, some time later, lost his bout to a Wellam cousin when his bad arm buckled, but it was an honorable loss after a hard fight, and Neal could honestly applaud him and tell him he did well when Graeme came by to see them.
“I’ll win the next one you come to,” Graeme promised him, a little too serious. He always had been, and Neal didn’t know how to temper that, so he only got more serious year by year.
Neal, as he too often did, took refuge in frivolity. “Is it the done thing to exchange favors between brothers? I’m sure I have a handkerchief somewhere—”
Graeme gave him a sliver of a smile. It was better than nothing. There’d been a long time when he hadn’t smiled at all. “It’s not, and you know it. I don’t need your favor. Just your support.”
“Well, you’ve got that.” Neal swallowed. “Whether I’m here or not.”
Their father intervened then, congratulating Graeme on a match well fought, and Graeme only acknowledged Neal’s words with a flicker of an expression. He knew Neal wouldn’t come often. Neal tried not to feel like a failure for it.
When Graeme left to speak to some friends, Neal surprised his father by not leaving as the last few sword matches ended and the field was set up for tilting. The crowd grew, as it always did for the jousts. They were much more exciting to watch, since they were much more dangerous. Especially when the progress was still buzzing with gossip about Keladry and Sir Voelden, the disgrace to the noble institution of knighthood who’d tried to kill her. Rumor had it his liege lord had strongly encouraged his presence on the Scanran border to see off raiders.
Neal couldn’t profess to enjoy the violence of the jousts. Far too much crashing and splintering and clanking of armor, and all of it reminded him of things he didn’t want to remember. Baird threw him sidelong looks, confused that he didn’t leave even though Graeme was done, and Neal avoided his eyes and waited for Keladry of Mindelan’s name to be called.
Her bout was an exhibition, not to settle a difference the way it had been before, so there was a comforting amount of padding present. Neal still couldn’t force himself to watch the moments of impact as she and her opponent took their three runs down the field, but he could watch the lead-up to them, the way she moved with the simple confidence of a person who knew she knew what she was doing and the way her horse moved just the same way.
He’d read a poem, a year or two ago, when searching for inspiration to allow him to complete a poem for a visiting mage from the Bazhir magic school, that some besotted lord had written for his knightly ladylove almost three hundred years before. Neal had been caught by it, by the way the poet wrote about the glint of light on steel as passionately as if he were writing about the gleam of jewels. The sun-bright light that heralds her, the moon-cold light in her eyes, he’d written, and Neal caught the edge of that feeling then.
Just as fast as he’d had the thought, the bout was over. Both combatants were still ahorse and were shaking out sore wrists, as the master of the lists shouted out a victory for Mindelan. The stands around Neal erupted in applause, though there were a few who wore sore faces, and some of the farther-out stands were likewise unimpressed. If the progress’s tourneys were good for one thing, it was assessing alliances, and Neal’s look crossed Sir Gary’s as he made his own assessment.
“Raoul tells me he’s already winning money on her, and I should start doing the same,” said Sir Gary, more to Neal than to Baird.
“Gambling isn’t generally among my vices, but perhaps I should start.”
“He already counts cards when he plays,” Baird said, betraying his son’s secrets with a shake of his head. “I dread to think what he’d manage if he started betting on this kind of thing.”
Neal, his objectives for the day both met, sniffed and stood up as the field was reset for the next jousters. “I don’t need to stay here and be maligned. I shall go and find whoever’s taking the money, and make bets for the next day of jousting, now that I have tips from a knight.”
Neal’s father laughed him off, and Sir Gary turned to his other side to make a comment to Lady Cythera, and Neal wandered away and wondered how far he ought to push his luck. Keladry was being ushered away by Lord Raoul, who was much more animated when he wasn’t attending a court party, and a young man in the palace’s livery who was already holding her helmet, and he could perhaps catch her, but he wasn’t quite sure what he’d say. The kind of polite flirtation he might visit on another lady her age would no doubt have horrified her.
Duty is more fair than all else, and honor fairer still, he thought, another theft from that long-dead poet, the first line if he wasn’t mistaken, and gave up on the thought.
At least for the time being.
*
It was delightfully easy to keep a friendly eye on Keladry of Mindelan, as it turned out. Her parents were highly favored diplomats. Her knight-master was commander of the Own and was showing every sign of planning to invest in her career even after her four years at his side. The crown prince was visibly friendly with her whenever they crossed paths. And, on top of all of that, she seemed to be dear friends with both Princess Shinkokami and one of her ladies in waiting, Lady Yukimi, who was always happy to share a gossip or a flirt with Neal on the strict understanding that she had obligations, and a duke’s second son didn’t quite fit them.
Neal didn’t do anything so gauche as to ask about her. He just made a point to be interested when she came up, and was rewarded with a dizzying array of condemnations, approbations, and spurious gossip. The first and the last he largely ignored, as the first was generally put to him by people whose opinions he wouldn’t trust on the color of a tunic, let alone the character of a person, and the last was either lurid or impossible to prove. If she were the lover of every squire in her cohort, that wasn’t any of his business, and if the griffin had been a sign of divine favor, that was nothing to do with him either.
Jessamine, the third or fourth time he prompted her to elaborate on one of her friends’ envy or approval of Keladry, sighed at him. “Really, Neal? Last I heard, it was the Maren ambassador’s sister.”
Lady Hesla was very beautiful and clearly steering all of her brother’s policy decisions from behind the scenes, and Neal had been too intimidated by her to write any poetry. “I am your elder, and you should keep your nose out of my affairs,” he said.
“I would, if they were actually affairs. But you’re quite notorious for mooning and not doing a thing.” She poked him in the arm. “Her reputation suffers enough, around all those men.”
“Is a man not allowed to find a woman interesting?” Neal complained. “And I have no intention of harming her reputation.”
“You never do. And you never have, I’ll credit you with that, but your usual taste runs to women whose reputations couldn’t possibly be troubled by the subpar poetry of a young lord who should stick to his medicines.” And when Neal gaped at her, offended past speech, she gave him a severe expression she’d picked up from their mother. “If you want to court her, well—I doubt there’d be objections. She has friends, as you’ve no doubt picked up, and it might suit them to see her allied to Queenscove, though you’ll have to wait until she’s knighted to be overt about it. But if she’s another one like the Wildmage, or Lady Helsa, or the queen …”
“I like her,” Neal said, nettled. He liked women in general, that was true enough, and he never minded his family’s teasing about that. He just also liked Keladry in specific, how quiet she was, the way there always seemed to be far more going on behind her eyes than she would let just anyone see. It tempted him to try to see some of it, if she would let him.
“Respect her,” Jessamine advised. “That will get you farther.”
“I respect her plenty. If nothing else, like any other knight in training, she could likely chop me to bits before I could do much about it. It’s hard not to have a healthy respect under those circumstances.” Jessamine didn’t look satisfied, and Neal certainly didn’t feel that way. He sighed, and tried his best to be conciliatory. “I keep plenty to myself, you know. Even things in a similar vein to this. And you’re right, that even if there’s going to be anything serious to this it can’t happen for years yet. But surely I can be friendly. Polite, even.”
Jessamine allowed herself a small smile. “Can you? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you do it, but there’s a first time for everything.”
“You care about respect for others, but for your elder brother? None at all,” said Neal, and Jessamine smiled and teased him as only younger siblings could, and Neal resolved to be a bit more discreet about his friendly interest in Keladry of Mindelan.
*
A week or two later, when Neal had watched another joust and watched Keladry lose publicly for the first time and Graeme, to his relief, win a bout of his own, he almost stumbled over her and a mountain of a redheaded squire in a shortcut behind several tents.
Both of them, when they realized they weren’t alone, set about pretending they hadn’t been doing what they clearly had been. Neal, who understood how little privacy there was on the progress, just smiled at them amiably. “Lovely night,” he commented, and walked on when they both mumbled a greeting.
That, he decided, put paid to that. He made it his business to identify Cleon of Kennan the next time he fought in the lists, and only sighed a little over the loss of opportunity. Keladry offered him a shy smile the next time he saw her, and on the rare occasion he rode with Dom she sometimes rode nearby and called him Neal, and it was something like a friendship, and it was more than enough and just what Jessamine could have wanted from him.
If he still sometimes saw her riding along on her bad-tempered horse with a sword hilt gleaming in its sheath beside her and thought Duty is more fair than all else, and honor fairer still, that was just him entertaining himself.
*
The palace was all in upheaval over midwinter. The Chamber of the Ordeal first tortured one squire (who Neal heard richly deserved it, though he’d missed the public spectacle) and then killed another, in between doing quite routine things like allowing the crown prince and Keladry’s sweetheart to be knighted. Neal, who felt queasy at the very thought of a room full of ancient magic that did things no knight would talk about, steered well clear of it, and tried to distract Graeme, who went grave and distant whenever anybody mentioned the Chamber.
Graeme, though, Neal was delighted to see, was also doing a very good job of distracting himself. Entertainments were scarce, largely kept to small scattered parties throughout the palace, but at one of the scattered parties, or perhaps on the progress, he seemed to have made the acquaintance of Princess Shinkokami’s other lady-in-waiting, Lady Haname. There weren’t declarations, or not that Graeme confided in his feckless little brother, but there were many walks in the snowy gardens, their heads bent together as they discussed things, and rides in the snowy forests, as though their rear ends weren’t already tired from the progress.
Whether it was that or simply the political tides flowing, the Queenscove family was invited to the Conté family’s “private” celebration of Roald’s knighting and seated with the Yamani delegation. Baird and Wilina were trying hard not to overwhelm Lady Haname with questions when Graeme hadn’t even declared intentions, so the Baron and Baroness of Mindelan, Keladry’s parents, facilitated conversation.
After asking Lady Yukimi a few casual questions about recent interactions with Sir Jonthair of Trebond and Lord Thom of Pirate’s Swoop, both closely connected to the crown if not terribly powerful fiefs, and Jessamine about the architecture class she was auditing at the university, Lady Ilane turned her gaze to Neal. “You’re one of the progress’s healers until its end, of course,” she said. “Do you have particular plans after that, Lord Nealan?”
“I’m often busy helping to make medicines. Lady Eleni of Olau is teaching me traditional recipes and only rolling her eyes a bit when I vary them.” And she’d roll her eyes even more if she caught Neal referring to her by her title.
“He’s being modest,” Graeme said, to Neal’s great surprise. “Father says he’ll be making medicines for half of Tortall by the time he’s thirty, and the other half within a decade after that. One of his papers about herbwifery as a valuable skill for the modern mage might be republished in Carthak.”
Lord Piers asked a question about where he might find a copy of the article to send home to his son for Mindelan’s herbwife, Lady Yukimi asked a question about whether he was supervising translations into Old Thak, and Neal tried not to be too flustered by the interest. “How are your own children?” he asked the Mindelans in a gap in the conversation. “I met Squire Keladry at the progress, of course, but the others?”
Lady Ilane’s look was a little more penetrating than he was entirely comfortable with, but she obliged with a summary of the many accomplishments of her dizzying amount of children and finished by saying “And Kel, of course, has had a somewhat tumultuous Midwinter, but we have hopes that the progress will be easier on her.”
Neal hadn’t heard Keladry’s name much in recent days, but then again, he’d been trying to ignore most things surrounding the death of one squire and disgrace of another, and anything that had been difficult for her was likely bound up in one of those. Given the political positions of the lords of Stone Mountain and Genlith, he thought it unlikely that she’d been friends with either, but the downfall of enemies could be difficult too. “Give her my best then, if she remembers me,” he said, and hoped it sounded entirely casual, as it should be.
“I’m sure she will,” said Lady Ilane, and with a smile Neal couldn’t feel entirely comfortable with, turned to ask Lady Haname about whether she might favor a future gathering with performance on a Yamani instrument she was apparently very good at.
*
When Neal met Keladry again, he was wholly unprepared for her. He’d just barely caught up with the progress after staying back with one of the Bazhir tribes to ask their shaman about some of his herbal medicines, and then had stayed even longer when one of the women had a difficult birth at the same time a child came down with a cough that could easily have spread without the attention of a healer. He was sandy in places he didn’t care to think about, exhausted, at perhaps half his magical capacity, and he stopped short on the way to the room he’d been assigned in Persepolis when he found Keladry, red-eyed, staring out a window.
“Are you okay?” he asked, and knew she wouldn’t tell him. All the gossip he’d gleaned about her before he virtuously stopped said she was close-mouthed.
She frowned at him. “Are you?”
Neal shrugged. “I’ll be better after a bath and a hot meal. I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out how to keep an illness from passing through tent walls, which is an interesting thought experiment for the medical establishment to deal with, particularly in cases of field hospitals, but which was difficult to consider in the heat of the moment.”
After a considering moment, she nodded. He thought that would be the end of it, but then she spoke. “My sparrow died. Sparrows, I mean. Two of them now. It’s stupid, but they were my first friends in the palace, before everybody got used to me.”
The set of her chin, beneath the blank expression he’d noted on anyone who’d spent much time in the Yamani Isles, dared him to mock her. Instead, Neal was struck by the helpless wish to go back in time, to come up from the university in Corus to visit his father more often, to help Keladry be a little less lonely. He’d never made friends easily, but he hadn’t ever been lonely enough to befriend a sparrow, either. “My condolences,” he said, and winced, because people tended to think he was mocking them even when he wasn’t. He scrambled for further words. “Sorla haMinch, fifty or sixty years ago, she wrote a very affecting poem about the loss of a cat that had been her mother’s that she’d inherited. And liked better than she’d liked her mother, by implication, but you might look up her poetry, if you want someone who understands.”
She stared at him. “Poetry’s never seemed very understandable to me, much less like it would understand me in turn.”
Neal shook his head, exhaustion forgotten. “Then you haven’t had the right teachers in the subject. What do you like to read? Sorla haMinch aside, I’m sure I can find a few poets you’ll enjoy. I’ll badger you with recitations for the rest of the progress, if you like.”
“Why would you do that?”
Neal considered the question. He was often given to saying and doing things without giving much thought to his own motives, largely because he didn’t want to admit to them even to himself, but Keladry didn’t seem the sort to let him get away with that. “Because anyone who mourns sparrows,” he said at length, “has at least a little bit of poetry in her soul.”
Keladry opened her mouth and shut it again. “I don’t know if you’re right,” she finally replied. “But I’ll look up Sorla haMinch.”
“And I’ll see what other poets might tempt you. What do you enjoy reading?”
She tilted her head, considering. “Military history. Strategy guides. My lord lent me a book about the inventor of the siege catapult, I liked that.” And, smiling a little at his poorly-hidden horror, “They don’t give pages or squires much time to read the kind of thing you mean. I always liked it when Mama recited Yamani poetry for me back in the Isles. The sounds were always nice, and I liked the descriptions of nature.”
“Nature and nice sounds I can do, or Yamani-inspired poetry, since there’s a fad for it at present. I’ll think on the matter and find some recommendations for you,” he said, and sketched a bow for her.
Smiling a little wider, she sketched her own bow in return. “Thank you for the recommendations. And the sympathy. Lord—Neal.”
“Thank you for at least pretending interest, Keladry.”
“My friends call me Kel. If I’m to call you Neal,” she said, going a little pink again, and then the view out at the sunset was the most interesting thing in the hallway again, and Neal, not wanting to press his luck, bid her farewell using the name she chose and went to find his bath and meal in a much better mood.
*
Kel found him as the progress rode away from Persepolis, where he’d seen very little of her. She hadn’t been on the lists, and Jessamine had told him about the refused challenge that had incensed the conservatives, but she’d only rarely been seen attending her knight-master either, or cheering on her friends or her sweetheart when they took their turn in the lists.
The sweetheart, scowling mightily, and several other friends were riding more or less near her, several of them goggling as she fell in with Neal. “The library at Persepolis had the Sorla haMinch poem, and some of her others,” she said. “Thank you, for recommending it. I’m not sure I understood all of it, but I did like it.”
“I haven’t had time to write you a list of other recommendations, but I’ll do so happily as we travel,” he said. “Tell me what you liked about the haMinch, and what you didn’t.”
They only rode along discussing poetry for fifteen minutes or so before Kennan’s scowl started looking too thunderous, so Neal turned his attention to the young lord of Tasride, who he’d patched up sometime during the first year of the progress after an unfortunate burn during a banquet, and made polite conversation until the squires melted into the progress, leaving him to find another conversation partner and devote only half his attention to them while he considered and discarded what poems might most impress Keladry of Mindelan.
*
They weren’t anything like the dearest and closest of friends after that, but he did see her more often. When he chose to ride with Dom for a while, she would often spend a bit of time with them, especially if she was riding her nicer horse, and she would let Neal recommend her a poem or two, or ask him about his medicines, when Dom mentioned them to her. In turn, he asked her about her sparrows, and then when he learned more about her, her dog, her former griffin, and her worse horse, who she loved beyond all reason.
He wasn’t altogether surprised when his parents invited him for a private dinner as the progress worked its way north from Persepolis. The first course, as he’d expected, was largely devoted to discussions from the healers’ tents between him and his father. His mother rarely struck until the second course, and when she did, she always got to the point quickly.
“Nobody is asking me about you and Squire Keladry,” she said, sure enough, the moment the cover came off the main course, “but it’s clear that several people would like to. Including, quite rightly, the young woman’s mother. Are you considering a courtship?”
“I can’t honorably do that until she’s a knight,” he said, and held up a hand when Wilina scowled at him for avoiding the question. “I had to say that first, you’d have been just as annoyed if I hadn’t. Jess reminded me of it sometime back, when I asked about her, and she’s right. I want to get to know her, but that can’t possibly be formal, or public, until she has her shield.”
“You do want to, then,” said Baird, his eyebrows climbing.
“I like her,” he said, with a helpless shrug at the inadequacy of that. “She’s stupidly noble, and kinder than she has any right to be, and she thinks most rhyming poetry is forced, and she’s much funnier than anybody gives her credit for. I don’t know if that’s the kind of grand romance marriages are built on.”
His parents exchanged a look. “In noble marriages,” Wilina said, “grand romance is a relief, when it comes, but it’s not expected. Liking, though. That matters a great deal.”
“You approve? If I do decide to ask her, in a year or two?” He ducked his head. “I think she has a sweetheart, among her friends, and I don’t want to get in the way of that. I haven’t been nosy enough to find out if he has a match arranged elsewhere. Especially since I haven’t been sure I wanted to try.”
“We approve,” said Wilina, who handled most of the noble politics in the family. Neal had learned plenty, hanging onto her skirts as a child, but then he’d missed several years in the palace while he floundered his way through the university curriculum and discovered his strengths as a healer. “Politically, there are plenty of reasons. Personally, I like what I know of her, and more than that, I like what you just said of her.”
“You have time to consider, clearly,” said Baird. “And while Graeme is still courting himself, it wouldn’t be appropriate for you to do anything overt either. If he and Lady Haname do decide to make a match of it, we’d end up very intimately tied to the Yamani alliance, but that’s not to the bad, given we’ll have a Yamani queen someday, and there’s still Jessamine after you both, to make her own alliances.”
“We’re just talking about poetry, for now. There truly isn’t anything else to it, no matter what gossip says.”
“Gossip, surprisingly, says that, largely. You’re both fairly visible, and while the conservatives would love to connect you in more private ways, they haven’t quite managed to do it.” Wilina smiled. “You’ve handled this all quite well. Just keep doing so. Public places, short conversations. Nothing could be more appropriate than poetry, as long as you’re wise about your choices. Show the court she’s worthy of being treated like any other young noblewoman.”
It was a tall order, and a large expectation. Neal nodded anyway. “I’ll do my best, and be careful. And if she and her sweetheart do seem to be something lasting, or if neither of us ends up interested in the end, she’s still worthy of friendship. And poetry recommendations to broaden her tragically small horizons.”
Baird had to bite down on his smile. “We could ask for nothing more.”
*
As they traveled north, Neal’s brief conversations with Kel about poetry and, as time went on, about everything else, became the highlight of his days. The mood in the progress became increasingly nervous the closer they got to Scanra, and Neal saw the marks of fear in the faces they passed. The people of the north were waiting for war.
Wars needed healers. Nobody could force or assign him, the way they would Graeme, the way they had for Graeme, and not just for Graeme either. Baird had gone to the front when they went to war with Tusaine, but that was his choice. An encouraged one, an influenced one, but his choice nonetheless.
When immortals had tried to overrun Corus in the last horrible weeks of the war, that long awful summer he couldn’t look at straight on in his own memories, Neal and his cohort had gone out. They’d visited soldiers at their posts, shared power with healers who knew how to fix wounds that they couldn’t. Neal had come out of it doubly determined to never feel so powerless again, and had committed to his studies at a fever pitch.
He didn’t talk to Baird about it, afraid it would turn into an argument. He didn’t talk to Graeme about it, because he and Graeme didn’t know how to talk about those months. He went to Dom instead.
“They’ve got that warlord they’re all excited about,” Dom admitted as they rode along on their way, ironically enough, to Mindelan. “Yes, we’ll be at war within a few years. Not sure why we aren’t already, but I’ll take the reprieve as long as we’ve got one.”
“They’ll need healers if it comes to that, won’t they?” Neal swallowed. “And there might be some value in having someone who specializes in strengthening medicines up north?”
Dom sighed. “I’d love to tell you that’s not true, and there will be healers aplenty when it comes to it, but I’ve never been a very good liar. We’ll need you up there. Or people like you, anyway. Tortall has fewer healers than it should, you know that.”
“Father says it goes back to the Sweating Sickness, and the Duke of Conté. We still haven’t recovered.” Neal looked off north, imagining the Scanrans gathering like stormclouds, though they were miles and miles away from the border. “I should start preparing, then.”
“I suppose so.” Dom’s face was tight with stress and worry, but he didn’t try to gainsay Neal. It was why Neal had gone to him first. “You’ll be careful with yourself, won’t you? Promise me that.”
“Only if you promise me the same,” Neal parried, knowing that it was a promise nobody could really make, if they were choosing to put themselves in reach of an enemy army.
Dom’s conspicuous silence told him his point was made, and they rode along, neither of them able to dig the other out of his misery, at some distance from the rest of Dom’s squad, who hadn’t commented when they’d drifted off to travel in parallel with the progress instead of directly in line with it.
It was Kel who rode over to them in the end. Her face was as mild and expressionless as ever. “I didn’t know what to make of the latest poem you recommended me,” she told Neal. “You should explain it some more. I know the wind is meant to stand for something, but I can’t tell what.”
Neal’s heart battled between gratitude and resentment from the rescue, and Dom beat him to responding with a laugh that only rang a little bit false. “If you two are talking about poetry again, we may as well rejoin the progress. I don’t need to hear about wind metaphors.”
“That’s because you have a prosaic soul,” Neal told him. “I got all the poetry in this family.”
They rode back into the progress, and Neal talked about the wind as a metaphor for change and struggle in K’miri poetic translations and tried not to clench his fists around the reins. When Kel finally admitted that she’d liked the parts of the poem that hadn’t confused her, that the author felt about riding his pony like she felt riding the improbably named Peachblossom, Neal even managed a smile, and recommended her another poem from the same collection, which she’d apparently borrowed from a friendly Rider after he’d recommended it to her.
“Thank you,” he told her when the progress stopped for the day and he had to go set up the healing tent, since it was his turn to sleep in it.
Kel shrugged, looking away. She was uncomfortable with thanks just as she was uncomfortable with compliments, at least from him. He’d overheard a few of Cleon of Kennan’s compliments, and considered emulating the over-the-top style before dismissing the idea. “You did it for me, once,” she said. “And I didn’t even have some poetry to recommend.”
“What would you recommend, then, if not poetry?”
She bestowed one of her brief and slightly wicked smiles on him. “I know a healer who makes a good headache powder. Seems like that might help.”
With any other lady, he might have kissed her hand for that. Instead, Neal put his hand to his heart and bowed. “My lady, your advice is as practical and wise as ever. I’ll have to speak to this healer. I’m sure he’s very wise. And intelligent. And handsome. And his taste in poetry—”
“His hair is sticking up,” said Kel, blushing again, and abandoned him while he patted uselessly at it.
*
If Cleon of Kennan, who wasn’t very friendly to men who were friendly to Kel, hadn’t already left the progress weeks before it ended, Neal might not have had the courage for the next step in a courtship that wasn’t and couldn’t be a courtship. Even if he was growing increasingly sure he wanted it to be one.
Neal, his parents’ advice in mind, approached Kel as soon as he heard the Third Company was leaving the progress before it returned to Corus, and found her while she was riding with her knight master. Lord Raoul was friendly enough, outside of large parties, but the somewhat severe look he gave Neal when he rode up next to them was a sign that he hadn’t missed any of what was going on. “Lord Neal,” he said with a nod.
“Lord Raoul,” said Neal with a nod of his own. “I thought I’d see Kel for a few minutes before the two of you leave the progress.” He made polite conversation with both of them for a few minutes, engaging Kel when he could, asking about their travel plans and offering to hand off a bag of his special medicines to Dom if he stopped by the healing tent before Third Company took off.
That mollified Raoul enough to relax a little and to grin at Kel. “I’ll ride ahead a little, shall I? Check in with Buri before we leave, see if the Riders have noticed anything afoot that we could help with.”
Kel frowned severely at her knight-master in a way that Neal tried hard not to pretend was adorable, but she couldn’t very well argue with him. He didn’t ride very fast or far, either, probably to see if he could eavesdrop a bit before he moved on. “Well?” Kel asked, maybe noting the same thing.
“I was wondering if you might like to continue our discussions of poetry by mail, once you’ve gone,” said Neal, and tried to make it sound perfectly casual. It could be, after all. Friends wrote each other letters all the time. There was even sometimes poetry involved. “I understand that you’re busy and wouldn’t be able to write often, but it seems a shame to stop expanding your horizons right when I’m about to be reunited with the university library.”
For a moment, there was silence while Kel gave him a sidelong look. Lord Raoul, his eavesdropping done, encouraged his horse to a slightly faster pace so he could in fact go run his errand. Clearly Neal had done a good enough job sounding casual, if he was willing to leave them alone. “What would you want to hear back?” she asked eventually. “I won’t be able to recommend you poetry in return. There isn’t much time to read on the road.”
“Tell me how you are, and what you’re up to. Tell me how your sparrows are. Or how my cousin is. Send the poems I send you back with commentary on them so I know what to send you next.”
“Why?”
Neal looked at her. Her chin was set and mulish, like she would challenge him on the spot if he avoided the question, but there was fear behind the look too. She already had a sweetheart, and she wasn’t the sort to start something with someone else when there hadn’t been a parting. “You’re my friend,” he said, which was true even if it wasn’t the whole of the truth. “I like knowing how my friends are. This might shock you to know, but a lot of people find me abrasive and annoying. It makes me value the people who don’t all the more.”
Another sidelong look, with her chin still set. She had to guess that there were reasons beyond that, but she wasn’t yet ready to push for them, because when she spoke, all she said was “You’ll write me about things besides poetry, won’t you?”
“If you wish it,” said Neal, only half-joking, “I’ll write you about every petal of every flower I see in the palace gardens.”
“That sounds a bit much. Maybe just how you are, what medicines you’re working on, that kind of thing,” she said, but she was smiling. “Write if you will, then. I’ll answer if I can.”
“I’ll treasure every letter,” Neal said, more honest than he meant to be, and let her ride to catch up to Lord Raoul while he went to find Graeme and Lady Haname, who continued to spend all their free time together and make no commitments where Neal could hear them.
*
The progress seemed even more dispirited with Third Company gone and others trickling away to wash the dust of the road off in their home fiefs or to go to new assignments now that it had become obvious that war was coming to Tortall. Neal missed Dom and Kel terribly, and was very strict with himself so he didn’t fill whole mailbags with his letters to them.
When they reached Corus in time for Midsummer, Neal dove into work in the university stillrooms to start stocking medicines and returned to working with the lady of Olau. Mistress Cooper approved of the experience he’d gained working away from her, and treated him less as an apprentice and more as a colleague, especially when he admitted he was beginning the work of training himself for war.
To relieve himself of the responsibility, he spent a good amount of time among the poetry books in the university and palace libraries. He sent Kel a poem almost as soon as he was back, an old chestnut about homecomings, and followed that a week later with a Marenite poet’s musings on frost on a windowpane to make up for a horribly hot summer.
Kel, when she wrote at last, informed him that she’d read the first in page training and hadn’t liked it and that she didn’t see much point in writing about frost, even if it was a metaphor. Her style, when she told him about her days, was much like a crisp military report, the kind of letters Neal’s grandfather had written when he still lived, with a shockingly funny story tacked on the end about her horse wreaking havoc when someone tried to convince him to be hitched to a plowhorse to haul away some fallen logs.
Neal wrote out a careful copy of a poem about spidrens in the woods the poet had grown up playing in, and his son having to play closer to the house, and spun her stories of his days, working by turns under Mistress Cooper and the palace healers. As the summer passed and started chilling into autumn, he copied out poem after poem: about nature, about family, about the stars and the sea and duty. He steered clear of love poetry, at least the overt kind, and couldn’t decide from letter to letter whether that was the right choice.
He learned Kel’s taste in poetry until every one he sent her received appreciation instead of polite bafflement, and he continued learning who she was. She was competent, clearly being trained in command in preparation for her star rising. She was kind, with her soft heart for adopting animals. She was smart, and once she stopped being impatient with metaphor she was very clever at deciphering it.
Neal had started paying attention to Keladry of Mindelan expecting one of his lightning-strike infatuations: fast to arrive, passionate, and as infatuations went fast to go again. That wasn’t what he’d ended up with at all, and he was at a loss with what to do about any of it.
*
Autumn brought the announcement of Graeme’s betrothal. He and Lady Haname told the family over dinner sitting in adjacent chairs, just close enough for their arms to touch, and there weren’t any passionate declarations, but Graeme smiled more than Neal had seen him do in years, and Lady Haname’s cool expression melted into something a little more animated whenever she met his eyes. “I hope to get to know all of you better,” she said when Graeme was done speaking. “I have the greatest respect for healers and your craft, and what I know of all of you speaks well of you.”
“I’m looking forward to having you in the family, my dear,” said Wilina, and reached out to touch her husband’s hand. “If there’s anything we can do to make you welcome, don’t hesitate to ask us.”
Lady Haname, not shockingly, demurred, and the conversation turned to wedding plans. Princess Shinkokami and Roald were waiting a little longer, to give the illusion of courtship and choice (though of course Haname was much too diplomatic to say it like that), but Haname was a little older, and had been given permission to marry before her lady, as soon as the winter.
“We hope to have it soon after Midwinter if it can be arranged,” said Graeme. “We could spend the rest of the season at Queenscove before any assignments might come in the spring.”
“So soon!” said Wilina, but she thrived on needing to do quick work, so it was only minutes before she and Jessamine were planning everything out, pulling Graeme in to discuss guests and Baird in to remind him to speak to Princess Shinkokami about official marriage agreements.
Neal turned to Haname, who didn’t seem to have any opinions on her wedding strong enough to overrule her future mother- and sister-in-law, and smiled. “I hope to get to know you better in the coming months, if you’re joining the family,” he said. “I was busy in the healing tents on progress, so I’m afraid we never had much chance to know each other.”
“As I said, I have nothing but respect for your work, and thus for you.” Her expression was unreadable, the perfected version of the one Kel sometimes used, usually when something was upsetting her. “And I know you by reputation. My colleague Lady Yukimi and the esteemed lady of Mindelan both speak highly of you, and say you enjoy poetry. Do you know the Yamani forms at all?”
Neal took a gape-mouthed second to read between the lines and realize that she was as good as telling him that Kel told at least a few people in her life about their poetic correspondence and that all of those people, herself included, approved. “Very few,” he managed at last. “Squire Keladry and Lady Yukimi agreed that it translates poorly, and I’ve focused my language studies on Old Thak.”
“I agree with them. Of the delegation, though, I am the most familiar with poetry. If any translations I consider acceptable are released, I’ll tell you about them, so you have the chance to share those you enjoy.”
An even stronger show of approval. Neal bowed his head in thanks. “Nobody else in the family appreciates poetry, my lady, so I can already see there will be a lot of good conversations in our future.”
“I look forward to them.” She turned with unerring timing to Wilina and Jessamine. “Not, I think, a Mithran service, but we can speak about priests that might do for both of us,” she said, and immersed herself in wedding planning.
Neal didn’t join in, but he watched Graeme’s small but steady smile with relief. Lady Haname might not be particularly cheerful or vivacious, but if she made Graeme look like that, she was the right choice.
*
Kel received the news about Graeme’s engagement with every evidence of happiness, and the accompanying poem he dared to include about a poet’s joy on her wedding morning with every evidence of tolerating it if not being overjoyed by it. That was the first letter where she attached a poem of her own, a translation her oldest sister had made of a Yamani poem when she was being courted by the Yamani lord she eventually married. It was only a few lines, and largely about the moon, but Neal could see the appeal, of how much was communicated and how subtly.
He shared the poem with Graeme over breakfast, who shared it with Haname on one of their rides, and she rewarded him by extemporizing a few translations from a book she had in her room, which Neal wrote down and sent right back to Kel, even if the quiet meditations on leaves and streams somehow seemed more intimate than anything he’d sent her before.
Her response came quicker than they often did, with the explanation that Third Company was on its way back to the palace to rest and recruit for winter. She approved heartily of the translations and praised Haname’s facility with them, and wrote in a Bazhir poem that one of the Own’s men had apparently recited for her.
Apparently they all think I’m a poetry expert, thanks to you, she wrote at the end of the letter. I could fill a book with the ones you’ve sent me.
Well, that was practically an invitation. Neal went down to the markets in Corus at his next opportunity and found a bound blank book with an embossed leather cover with some of the Yamani cherry blossoms that had become popular to decorate with in honor of the princess. That done, he used his best handwriting to fill the first part of the book with the poems Kel had seemed to like best, from the Sorla haMinch poem about her cat to Lady Haname’s translations of the great Yamani poets.
After some consideration, Neal picked a new poem to add into the book. It was a bit more romantic than he usually dared for her, though it wasn’t a passionate declaration by any means. It was the poet writing about the sights he saw on his last day of riding home from a long journey to his bride of less than a year, and it was perhaps a little presumptuous, but Neal did truly think that she would like the clear and practical affection in it, and the way the poet decided not to pick flowers from the roadside not far from his house so his bride would have the joy of looking at them in the ground the next time she went out for a walk.
The book was less than half full, and that was perhaps a little presumptuous too, but Neal was beginning to hope that Kel wouldn’t mind a bit of presumption.
*
When Kel returned, the snow was on the ground and Neal was spending all his time in the infirmary dealing with one case of the sniffles after another, until he felt that he could have burned the disease out and provided the correct herbal teas in his sleep.
He didn’t know she was back until Dom showed up to the Queenscove apartments with congratulations for Graeme and Haname, and then, of course, he was distracted by the family celebration. In the few weeks of leave he received, Dom was going to Masbolle for Midwinter, so he was only in and out, bringing cheer with him, and leaving Neal with the awkward question of how to seek Kel out when she was a squire and couldn’t really attend parties.
Even more than that, the palace was having another quiet Midwinter. Everyone was still recovering from the progress, and Princess Shinkokami’s introduction to Tortall had been Princess Kalasin’s farewell to it. Her parents didn’t have much motivation to host balls when they would be sending their eldest daughter away as soon as the seas calmed from the worst of the winter storms.
Neal was still fretting when Lord Raoul cut through his worries by inviting the Queenscoves to a gathering on the first night of Midwinter.
“Well, it seems he approves,” said Wilina when she showed Neal the invitation over breakfast. “I rather thought he might, but it’s a relief nonetheless.”
“It’s still a year before there’s anything to approve of,” said Neal, though he knew it was a losing battle. “And even then I’m more concerned about whether she’ll approve of it.”
Baird looked up from the papers a courier had delivered that morning from Queenscove and smiled at him. “A young woman who doesn’t particularly like poetry has allowed you to spend nearly half a year sending her poetry. I don’t think that’s as big a concern as you might fear.”
Neal wanted to argue, and would even have been right to, he thought. Kel, like Haname, had spent her childhood in the Yamani court, and she was polite to a fault. He could absolutely see her humoring him to the point of maintaining a correspondence for months. Still, his parents were smiling warmly at each other, and he didn’t have it in his heart to ruin their happiness with his crisis of confidence.
The whole family went to Lord Raoul’s party that night. One didn’t turn down an invitation from the commander of the King’s Own, and they all liked him. Even Haname came, and she and Graeme weren’t demonstrative, but she stayed close at his side as they walked into the warm and friendly room.
Kel, of course, was neatly dressed in the green and gold of Goldenlake, which suited her very well, and carrying a tray of food, which she offered to his family as they came in. Neal feared she would duck her head or blush to be greeted by guests, knowing how formal she was, but they’d arrived after Commander Tourakom, several officers of the Own, and any number of other people who weren’t the sort to stand on ceremony, so maybe she was inured to it. “Good to see you, Lord Neal,” she said when she reached him, very properly greeting him last after he’d endured Lord Raoul’s bone-crushing handshake and penetrating stare.
“And very good to see you, Squire Kel,” he said. “I hope you aren’t sick of me, I’d love to have a chat a little more efficiently than letters will allow.”
“I’m working,” she said, and glanced at Lord Raoul. “But maybe.”
Neal could take a hint when he got one, so he moved out into the gathering. Prince Roald was there, without his betrothed, but he had a conversation with Haname in Yamani, and Neal was surprised to hear Graeme chime in, a little halting but clearly doing his best. Neal made the rounds, talking to mages and some of Dom’s friends, including a man named Qasim who winked and mentioned poetry, which had to make him the one who taught Kel the Bazhir poem.
Eventually, though, he had to admit that the only person he really wanted to speak to was still serving drinks and food to the guests. At a more formal party, that might be a quandary. At Lord Raoul’s party, where Sir Gary was threatening to stand on a table to demonstrate some story from his and Lord Raoul’s squire years, Neal just picked up one of the trays Kel kept swapping out and went to join her.
She, of course, frowned at him as soon as she saw him. “I am fairly sure you don’t work for my lord.”
“No, but you’re the most interesting company here, and if I trail around after you like a duckling I’ll feel quite useless. Thus, helping.” He belatedly looked at what he was carrying. Some manner of small tart, it looked like. He tried one, considered it, and decided it was worthy of handing out. “Tell me how you’ve been, your letters aren’t illuminating.”
“I’m working,” she objected, but when Neal made it clear both that he was staying unless she sent him away in much stronger language than that and that he wasn’t going to hamper her and in fact intended to help her, she gave in and started telling him about her work with the Own, skillfully eliding the parts that had to be worse and dwelling on the nicer parts until she finally got sick of talking about herself. “You spend most of your letters on poetry,” she said as they passed Lady Cythera, with absolutely no idea how much she’d just helped Neal’s cause as well as her own by picking that moment to change the subject, “so you should tell me what you’ve been doing too.”
Neal obliged, skipping over the autumn outbreak of sweating sickness that had had him hopping for weeks and his continued independent studies in field medicine, focusing on his work with Mistress Cooper and Graeme’s wedding planning. He even made her laugh with a story about one of the palace roosters who seemed to be courting one of the ladies’ lapdogs.
Lord Raoul, when he heard the laugh, found them in the crowd. “That’s enough for tonight, Kel, people can find the food on their own at this point, I’d say. Spend some time with Neal, or go out and find your friends if you like.”
Much as Neal was reassured that Kel enjoyed his company, he also knew how little free time squires got. He expected her to excuse herself politely and be off like a shot to see her friends or her parents or any of a dozen other people who might be more interesting to her than the man who insisted on sending her poems even though he knew she already had a sweetheart. Instead, she gave Neal a flustered look. “You must have other people to talk to, things to do.”
“On the contrary,” he said. “I’m just here being decorative until my family decides it’s time to leave. You’d be doing me a favor, continuing our conversation.”
“If you’re sure,” she said, and to his surprise, abandoned her tray on a nearby table and then was happy to lean on a wall and continue their conversation without the work to do.
Neal was happy to monopolize her, since all the faces around were friendly and could hear that their conversations were entirely appropriate for a courting couple fifty years before, let alone in the modern day. By the time he left, he was all but walking on air.
Maybe he’d never win her affections away from Cleon of Kennan, but at least he was secure in her friendship, and he was more grateful for that than he cared to examine.
*
When Midwinter gifts arrived, Neal had his usual gifts from family and tokens from friends and colleagues, but two gifts stood out. The first was from Haname, who had taken the time and care to write out translations of ten of her favorite poems and put them in a little book for him to read and to use, and Neal exclaimed over it and was more relieved than he cared to express that he and his sister-in-law-to-be had at least a few things in common.
The second was from Kel. He’d wrapped her book up in colorful cloth and sent it off to her with his best wishes, but he wasn’t sure he expected anything back. Squires were frequently insolvent, and even if they weren’t, she traveled with the Own, which meant very little time at markets to get gifts for family, let alone new friends.
When he unwrapped it, it was a ceramic cat with one paw raised to wave. These are common in the Isles, as a sign of good luck, she said in the accompanying note. The poem by Sorla haMinch made me think of them, and this one is from my personal collection. I hope you don’t mind that it isn’t new.
Neal, charmed and delighted, rearranged the mantel in the sitting room until he could fit the cat there in pride of place. It would be some time, if ever, before Kel saw it, but he would see it every day, and that mattered more.
When Haname came to spend some time with Graeme and thank them for her gifts, she spotted it almost immediately and her eyes fell on Neal. “Someone wishes you happiness and good fortune,” she said. “A fine gift.”
“It is,” said Neal, and spent most of the rest of the day smiling and not caring at all who saw.
*
Kel found him at the knighting ceremony for the Irenroha heir. She was in Goldenlake colors, but didn’t appear to be actively on duty, or at least didn’t seem to be in a hurry to return to her knight-master’s side if she was. “Thank you for the gift,” she said. “Is the space for me to write future ones down?”
“Or me, if you prefer. You can hand it back to me when you come back to the palace and I’ll update it with all the newest poems you’ve seemed to dislike least.” He liked that thought, giving her a reason to come back. “I liked your gift too. It even looks like the one haMinch described.”
“It’s why I picked that one.” She hesitated. “And I do like them. The poems. It’s not disliking them least, it’s liking them. I understand them better, with you to tell me what I’m missing.”
That was as good as a plea not to stop writing, from someone as close-mouthed and hesitant to express emotion as Keladry of Mindelan. Neal beamed at her. “You shouldn’t encourage me, you know. Everyone agrees I’m insufferable when I get going.”
She shrugged. “I don’t agree, so I’m not everyone. And it sounds like you should spend less time with ‘everyone’ and more time with people who like you.”
Neal had a loving family, and colleagues who were friendly and respectful, and peers who fell anywhere on a spectrum from barely tolerating him to sometimes remembering to invite him when they all went out for dinner. He wasn’t used to being liked. That Kel liked him was better than if she’d been blushing and flirting with him. “Squire Keladry, you might make a man swoon, complimenting him so kindly.”
“Nonsense,” she said, but she stayed at his side for a few minutes before she spotted Lord Raoul across the room and vanished to make sure that his cup was full or his boots were polished or whatever it was squires did for their knight-masters at parties where food wasn’t involved.
Jessamine, when she saw him, teased him quietly before swanning off to make eyes at Sir Zahir ibn Alnaz, and most times Neal would have objected both to the teasing and to the flirting with a man who he’d spotted glowering at Kel more than once, but he was in too good a mood to care.
*
Good things, unfortunately, couldn’t last. A week after Midwinter ended, and two days after Dom returned from Masbolle and his own celebrations, Third Company left Corus. Dom sent the family a note to warn them, and Kel sent a note to Neal, and they were off.
Neal allowed himself one day to sulk and be sad, since he’d seen Kel nearly every day since Midwinter and was only enjoying her company more every time they spent time together, but plans for Graeme’s wedding, only a matter of weeks away, were a helpful distraction.
Neither Graeme nor Haname were given to ostentation, and while their marriage was the first secure bond in the Yamani alliance and had to be some measure of public spectacle, they were both assiduous in turning down anything that might push it further than the necessities. Haname’s family couldn’t be there, and Graeme’s was, Neal knew better than anyone, smaller than it had once been. They kept their lists of attendants small, and the list of guests as small as they could when the whole Conté family was coming in support of the alliance.
“It’s too bad Dom had to leave,” Neal commented to Graeme over breakfast one morning when their parents and Jessamine had gone out to the market. “You must have wanted him to attend you.”
“It would have been less fraught than picking between my friends,” Graeme agreed. He’d picked Merovec of Nond, in the end, partly because they were good friends and partly because Merovec’s wife Adalia was Haname’s second attendant, because she was Kel’s sister and had decided to support the alliance her parents had brokered by befriending the member of the Yamani delegation her youngest sister knew the least. “But we knew odds were that Dom wouldn’t be able to make it. He’ll make Captain within a decade, the way Lord Raoul relies on him.”
And that was excuse enough for missing Graeme’s wedding, judging by Graeme’s small smile. That warrior pride was something Neal had never really had in common with his brothers and cousins. “Still, I’m sorry you’re stuck with me.”
“More like stuck with Merovec, it’s not like you wouldn’t have been my chief attendant anyway.” He kicked Neal gently under the table for whatever his face showed. “You’re my brother.”
Neal stared at his plate. He’d meant to make a little joke at his own expense, but he’d forgotten that of all his relatives, Graeme had the least patience for that. He had a dangerous talent for pulling sincerity out of people. “I’m not the brother you might have wanted to be your chief attendant, though.”
There was an awful silence. Neal kept staring at his eggs. Eventually, Graeme let out a long, slow breath. “I lost all chance of that years ago. And if I was closer to Cathal, it was no reflection on you. Just an accident of age. Surely you know that.”
“Cathal …” Neal’s voice caught. He swallowed and forced himself to continue. “He was an easier person. He’d be of more help.”
“We don’t talk about him,” said Graeme, less an accusation than a realization. Neal looked up at him and then quickly away again. “We don’t have to. But he wasn’t perfect. He and I had such arguments over the philosophies our teachers were trying to teach us, and whenever he ran through his laundry too fast in our page years, he tried to steal my livery even though it didn’t fit. But he was still my brother and I loved him, just as I do you.”
“I never feel like I’m doing enough.” Neal shoved his plate away from him. “I was so terrified when you were hurt not two weeks after … I couldn’t have filled in those gaps. I can’t even fill in Cathal’s.”
“Some gaps you can’t fill,” Graeme said simply, and reached out to squeeze Neal’s hand for a moment. “And you’d have been worthy duke, but I’m glad it won’t fall on your shoulders.”
“Scanra—”
“—is a fighting force of mortals. I’ll be in danger, yes, when war is declared. It’s a knight’s responsibility. But I’m more careful than I was, and I’m not likely to be fighting hurroks and spidrens this time.” Neal looked up at Graeme, who had inherited their father’s soothing healer’s manner even if Neal was the one who’d inherited the power. He was watching Neal steadily, grave as ever. “I can’t help the wars I’m called to. But maybe, once Haname and I have had a chance to come to know each other privately, you’ll visit Queenscove for a few weeks? You’re my heir for at least a little while longer. I’ll teach you what I can.”
Neal wanted to blurt out a lot of things about his half-formed plans to go north when they started defending it in force, about Kel and his plans and how he would have to wait until he was no longer Queenscove’s direct heir to enact them because she was a lot of things, but a duchess wasn’t one of them. He nodded instead. “I haven’t visited Queenscove in too long. I’d like to see it with you, if it doesn’t bother Haname.”
“Haname likes you,” Graeme said, easy and surprising, smiling a little at the return to easier conversational waters. “She says you’re interesting and surprisingly sensible behind all the talking. Not in so many words, of course, but she does say it.”
“I knew she had excellent taste.”
Graeme chuckled and leaned back in his chair. “If you don’t mind going for a ride this morning, I’m happy to have you along. I’ll tell you about trying to flirt with a young lady during Midwinter banquet service and the way Cathal ruined it.”
It had been hard enough just saying his name, but Graeme was right. They didn’t talk about Cathal, and perhaps they should. Neal forced himself to sigh impatiently. “I suppose if I can’t convince you stay inside where it’s warm, that’s an acceptable alternative.”
“And you can tell me about the time Squire Keladry’s horse bit you on progress,” said Graeme, standing up and abandoning the end of his own lunch.
“She swore nobody would ever know about that!”
“I’m sure she did. Unfortunately, a good half of Dom’s squad witnessed it.”
Neal complained about the indignity half the way to the stables, and rode out with Graeme, to talk about Cathal and all the other things they only rarely discussed across the gap between them.
*
The wedding, after all the negotiations and all the fretting and Graeme having an uncharacteristic panic the night before that he might forget the words of his oaths, managed to be lovely. The principals were both solemn, with not a single hair out of place, but there was joy to the proceedings too, in the way they’d chosen a blend of Tortallan and Yamani ceremonies, and the way Princess Shinkokami and Prince Roald exchanged besotted looks from where they sat next to his parents in the front row of the room.
Neal walked in and out with Lady Yukimi, who seemed close to losing her composure and either laughing or happily crying both times, and then did his duty by his brother dancing with nearly every lady at the wedding, from Princess Kalasin, who less than a month from her departure was trying not to show her nerves and expressed that through quizzing Neal on the latest medicines he was making, to Lady Adalia, who politely asked a dizzying array of questions about Neal’s tastes, skills, and future plans before going to have a quiet and terrifying conference with her mother in a corner.
When it was all over and Graeme and Haname had set off in the Queenscove carriage for a month or two of marital bliss, Neal went to his room and wrote to Kel.
You were missed, he said, plain as he could bring himself to be. Your family was all there, and Lady Yukimi mentioned you, and I would have been glad of someone to talk with, and perhaps dance with, if you could be convinced.
That was edging too close, perhaps, but Neal wasn’t being subtle. Surely Kel had guessed what he hoped for. Still, he didn’t want to push. If her seeming ignorance was real ignorance, a letter was no way for her to find out, and if her seeming ignorance was a gentle rejection, he didn’t want to overstep her bounds. He described the wedding instead, and asked her questions about Yamani parties, since Haname had discussed moon-viewing parties as preferable to balls even as she’d asked Neal to teach her dance steps since Graeme was a dreadful dancer.
With all the news, there was barely space for a poem. Neal, after some thought, didn’t choose a romantic one with the wedding as an excuse. He sent one from a hill poet, since the most recent news had Third Company in the southeast, about waves of dead grass on the hills in the autumn before the last haying. Kel liked poems about scenery, he’d discovered, and it had broadened his own taste finding new ones for her.
He wanted to write that, that she’d changed his taste in poetry as indelibly as he hoped he was doing for her, but that was pushing again. He asked a few questions about her travels instead, and sealed the letter to be sent off to her.
*
The winter moved on. Princess Kalasin left as soon as the deepest and coldest part of it was over, when the seas were safe to travel, and there was one last lavish banquet before her departure where Neal was almost certain that in the distance he spotted a girl or two among the pages swarming around with dishes. He wrote Kel that, and got back a flood of questions about whether two of them were named Fianola and Yvette, and if they seemed to be doing well.
He didn’t have a chance to learn. Padraig haMinch, the new training master, took the pages out for a winter training camp at the old Conté fief, and Neal spent weeks in the lower city dealing with the usual winter outbreaks of coughs and sniffles. By the time those were under control and the pages were back, Graeme had written to tell Neal that if he still wanted to come, Queenscove would welcome him.
Neal apologized to Kel, sent her a poem written about the Shang Hyena and her adventures to give her at least some news about a warrior woman, centuries old though it might be, and took his leave of Corus to ride through the snow and then the slush to the coast and Queenscove.
Graeme and Haname, by the time he arrived, seemed to have set up quite the idyllic household and fallen into a domestic rhythm that Neal’s presence did very little to disarrange.
Their mornings were spent on estate business, Graeme riding the fief or shut up with the steward while Haname talked to the housekeeper or caught up on the flood of correspondence that had come to them after their wedding. Their afternoons usually involved a walk or a ride as Graeme slowly introduced his wife to all of Queenscove’s pockets and corners, and Graeme had always been an able sailor, so they talked about taking out a windskipper out when the weather improved. In the evening, Haname played her instrument, something like an oddly-tuned lap harp, or she and Graeme played card or dice games, or they quietly excused themselves and left Neal with his books.
Neal fell into their rhythms easily enough. Most mornings he spent with Graeme, learning Queenscove’s business to help share it with him someday, and the mornings he didn’t, he went out into the fief to offer healing where it was needed. Queenscove’s people were taken care of well, with their duke one of the most powerful healers in the country, but they were curious enough about Neal to bring him their rope burns and sore knees.
Rarely, Haname asked if he had correspondence to write, an invitation Neal was never fool enough to turn down, so he introduced Kel to some of the poems in Queenscove’s library and caught up on recent articles about advances in healing.
The rest of the day, he tried to alternate between giving the newlyweds privacy and accompanying them on their adventures, or when it was raining and snowing in their indoor activities. It was a quieter winter than any he’d spent since he’d entered the university, but it was pleasant, too. Graeme and Haname went out of their way to make him welcome, and were so deft at it that Neal couldn’t even feel awkward or resentful that the impetus behind that was his conversation with Graeme just before the wedding.
When Dom wrote that Third Company would be traveling through Queenscove lands on their way to Corus as spring started coming, Graeme looked once at Neal, once at Haname, and immediately invited them to break their journey for a day.
Neal thought about trying to pretend his gladness was all about Dom, but he wasn’t that good at lying. He just said, as mildly as he could, that he hoped they would come, and tried not to hope too much.
*
Lord Raoul, to Neal’s surprise, wrote back an acceptance almost immediately, and less than a week later, the resplendent company of the Own, armor polished to inspection-day shin, turned up at the gates to Queenscove’s keep.
“I was hoping to talk to you anyway, Sir Graeme,” Lord Raoul said. Neal tried to keep his face straight as he attempted to greet Dom, Kel, and the very prickly Lerant of Eldorne all at once. “Perhaps you can give me a little time before I take advantage of your hospitality?”
Graeme had worked with the Own before. He had worked with them as a young knight during the Immortals War, even, when knights on their own were in too much danger and they were put in military groups for support. If Lord Raoul wanted to talk to him, it was about Scanra, and a possible posting on the border.
Neal’s look crossed Haname’s, but she was as blank-faced as ever, and he tried, for once, to emulate her.
Dom clapped Neal on the shoulder. “Come on, show Kel and me around the keep. And Lerant, if you think you can be civil.”
“I’m always civil,” Neal and Lerant said together, and exchanged a frown before Neal decided to do as Dom said and collected those who wanted a tour and the steward started arranging the company’s men into shifts for a luncheon.
Most of the men were more interested in the luncheon than the tour, so it was just the four of them who went. Neal wasn’t entirely sure why Lerant of Eldorne wanted to come along, but Dom seemed to be using him both as a source of amusement and a buffer so he had the excuse to lag back and let Neal walk Kel around, showing her things she absolutely didn’t care about.
She’d spent plenty of time in the sun during her time in the south, he could tell that. She was freckled like she’d been in Persepolis, but more rested than she’d been then. He also kept catching her looking at him out of the corner of his eye, long looks like she was trying to figure something out. Neal talked about portraits and defenses and tried not to fear that she was trying to think of how to tell him to stop writing her.
They stopped at the best view in the keep, where the ramparts looked out both over the gardens and the ocean. The gardens weren’t yet green with spring, but the ocean, at least, was never a disappointing sight. “It’s beautiful,” Kel said, though her fingers flexed a little against the wall and she was looking as far out to the horizon as she could.
Dom, on her other side, gave Neal a quick shake of the head. “If you’re here long enough, you should walk down to the beach. Is it still too slippery, Neal?”
“Not if you take the less steep path and try to stay on the sand, or pick a warmer day,” said Neal, a bit perplexed, but he knew how to take a hint when he got one. Kel didn’t like something about the view, and since Mindelan was by the ocean, it probably wasn’t that. The height, maybe, though that seemed like a strange thing to bother someone as brave as she was. “I’ll happily take you down in the afternoon if you want, Kel.”
“If my lord doesn’t need me,” she said, which could have been a refusal or as close to enthusiastic agreement as she ever seemed to get.
Lerant of Eldorne scoffed. “I can handle my lord’s needs for one afternoon while you frolic around, Mindelan. You and your—”
He cut off with a grunt and a glare, which was probably due to Dom kicking him. Though Dom’s grin said that perhaps the invitation to Lerant might have been so he’d say just such a thing. Neal didn’t pretend to understand any of what was going on, but since it seemed likely to give him his way if Kel agreed, he decided he didn’t care. “Kel? You might want to relax, of course. But if you’d like to see a southern sea, there’s no place nicer than Queenscove.”
“See a southern sea,” she said thoughtfully, and then smiled at him, small and devastating. “That sounds almost like poetry.”
*
Third Company was staying overnight, Neal was informed when he and his companions made it to the hall for the last round of luncheon, and when they left, the household would go with them. Neal, hearing that, winced and went to find Haname, who would be less busy than Graeme. “Lord Raoul came with orders, then?”
“An offer, more.” She was still so serene. Neal sometimes wished he could do that, pack everything he was feeling away behind a soothing mask so nobody could judge it or be hurt by it. “Lord Raoul doesn’t think they’ll be ordered north quite yet, but he’s planning to use his own motivation and go a few months early so they have a chance to settle in. They’ll be in Corus a month or so to resupply, and then they’ll go.”
“With Graeme along?”
“He has a duty.”
She was serene, but either she felt so much that it fought past the mask or she let him see past it, just enough to see the fear and the sorrow underneath it all for a few seconds. Neal took a breath and hoped it didn’t shake. “You and I will just have to worry about him together, then, when you aren’t busy with Princess Shinkokami.”
“We will. I can think of no worthier companion.” She gave him a long look. “However long you stay.”
The field medicine books in his room, and his correspondence with some Maren scholars who were trying to make a more effective sanitizing agent than spirits. Haname wasn’t a fool. “A while longer, yet. Long enough to share some comfort,” he said, and left her to find Kel, who’d agreed to go down to the beach after all.
When he found her, she’d had the time to change into off-duty clothes, something he’d only seen her in rarely on the progress. It was just as plain and practical as her livery, of course, but with some embroidery at the sleeve cuffs, a touch of surprising whimsy that charmed him. “My old maid,” she said when she caught him looking, fidgeting with her cuff. “She’s got a shop now, for sewing dresses, and she insists on making all my clothes, still. She adds things like this, even though I tell her she needn’t.”
Neal made a show of inspecting it. “I’ll have to recommend her to my family, if they don’t already use her. What’s her name?”
“Lalasa Isran. And a lot of the ladies commission her these days. Even the queen sometimes.”
He couldn’t help raising his eyebrows. Kel really did know the most interesting people. “Tell me about her,” he prompted, and led her down to the beach while hearing a story that was sad around the edges but that Kel seemed determined to make into a story only of Lalasa’s triumphs.
The ocean, though, seemed to silence Kel, even if it was a sight she was used to from her childhood. Her story trailed off into silence, and Neal didn’t fill in with one of his own, so they were left staring out to sea, watching the few brave fisherman willing to go out in the end of winter bring their boats back. “I’m glad you got to see this,” he finally said. “I know you must see it at Mindelan whenever you visit, but even so.”
“I hardly know Mindelan,” she admitted, turning away from the ocean. “I left when I was so small I barely remember it as a child, and since then I’ve only been there a few months at a time. The only time I’ve seen it since I became a squire was the few days we spent on progress, and—and other people knew my nieces and nephews more than I did.”
Neal had made it his business to find out that Cleon of Kennan had been squire to one of Kel’s brothers. He wasn’t sure if it was good or bad that Kel had refused to name him. “I’m rarely in Queenscove either,” he admitted in his turn. “Father has always been so busy at court, and liked to have his family close, and then I was in university. Corus is my home.”
Kel nodded. “I’m not sure where mine is.”
It was hard not to say something foolish at that, something that even if Kel did reciprocate his feelings would merely make her frown severely at him for bringing poetry into a sensible conversation. “You’ll find out,” he said instead. “It might just take being knighted, so you have a bit more freedom to make your own choices.”
“Young knights always travel,” she said, dismissing that, though she was watching him in a way that made him think maybe she wanted to be argued with. “And I’ll be … there’s Scanra to worry about.”
“You should still have somewhere, or at least something, to come home to. Even if it’s just the palace for now.”
The tide was coming in, and a wave crashed on a nearby rock with particular force, sending them both skittering to the side in automatic avoidance. Kel, with her usual unthinking chivalry, braced his elbow with her hand, and the two of them stood there, caught, for a very long time.
Neal felt as though even breathing might ruin the moment, so he grit his teeth and was rewarded when Kel swayed toward him just a little bit, eyes flicking down to his mouth, before another wave crashed on the shore and she hissed in a breath and backed up several steps. “Kel,” Neal said, not sure what argument he wanted to make but knowing he wanted to make one.
Kel shook her head. “I’m not free. I’m not yet a knight, I can’t—what you want of me, I can’t. And even if I were …”
Even if she were, there was Cleon of Kennan, who kissed her behind tents and hated any man who was too kind to her. Neal could easily come to hate him in return, though it wasn’t Kennan’s fault if Kel preferred him. He could at least comfort himself that Kel trusted that he wanted something more than a tumble, from what she was saying. “I understand,” he said, and it tasted bitter. “I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want to give.”
She gave him a miserable look. She did, then, or part of her did. Neal wouldn’t push her, though. She’d come to hate him if he tempted her into violating her sense of honor. “We should go back.”
“We should.” He’d somehow have to smile for Graeme and Dom and all of the Own as they rode north to Corus. At least Haname was too discerning to waste the effort of pretending on. He anticipated a lot of time riding next to her and moping. “I’m still your friend. That was never just a stepping stone to anything else. But if you want me to stop writing …”
“No,” she said, surprisingly strong. “Don’t do that.”
*
The way north to Corus was predictably unhappy, though Neal had better company in his misery than he feared he might. Third Company knew, for all the order hadn’t been given officially, that they were going up north to the border when the road was clear enough that their horses wouldn’t churn the roads into mud, and not all of them hid their fear of war as well as Dom did.
Neal saw Kel a few times a day in the three days they traveled, and she was so determinedly friendly that it hurt to speak to her. He did it anyway. Mostly, he rode with Haname, two civilians among soldiers, Graeme absorbed into the rank and file. Haname rode as if she might be riding to market, and Neal tried his best to emulate her.
Everything in Corus seemed unchanged when they arrived. Entertainments were picking up for the spring, Prince Roald and his lady continued their long public courtship, and some of the livelier ladies tried to fill in the gap Princess Kalasin had left while Princess Lianne was still a bit too young to do it. Baird greeted his sons and daughter-in-law kindly and didn’t mention how Graeme had come in leading a column of the Own. Wilina and Jessamine caught them up on the gossip while Wilina held Graeme’s hand like he might float away if she let go of him.
Neal settled back in, and went back to his rotation of healing and palace life with renewed fervor. He made medicines, talked to colleagues about the Marenite improvements on sanitizers, and improved his technique at stitching up wounds when a nearly-retired member of the Own who was resistant to healing got his arm sliced open. Baird was there when he volunteered, and he looked sick, but he didn’t ask.
He hardly saw Kel, not that he expected to. She was busy preparing the way north while Lord Raoul pretended Third Company was planning a nice long stay in Corus, since he and the king seemed to be having some kind of long-term power struggle that annoyed Neal every time he thought about it. When he did see her, she smiled in a way he could tell was pasted on, but she always stopped to say hello, and once she even told him that she’d read a poem her mother had recommended her and that he might like it.
When the whole palace was suddenly discussing that Third Company was going north, and Graeme of Queenscove with them, Neal knew it wouldn’t be long. Not when Graeme was packing, and when he and Haname disappeared into their room as frequently as they could. The date circulated not long after, less than a week hence, and Neal grit his teeth through it and redoubled his studies and expanded his hours in the city clinics with Mistress Cooper.
The night before Third Company left, Neal wasn’t quite surprised when Kel just happened to run into him on his way back from the palace infirmary. The Own was stocking some of his medicines, after all. “You’re leaving tomorrow,” he said by way of greeting. One of them might as well begin there.
“I am. I hope you’ll write.”
“As long as you want me to,” he said rashly, and then frowned and leaned against a wall, not sure she’d come with him if he started walking. “It might get harder when the war starts properly, but I’ll likely be closer then.”
Her awkwardness immediately fell away into a penetrating stare. “Why would you be closer?”
Neal winced. He hadn’t quite mentioned his plans to Kel, because he hadn’t quite mentioned them to anyone, and he was pretty sure most of his household guessed anyway. “The war needs healers even more than it needs knights,” he said. “They’ll need me up there.”
“But you aren’t a warrior. You can’t protect yourself!”
Her clear worry would perhaps make him feel better later, but for the moment, it only made him more upset. “I know enough of the sword to protect myself, and anyway, even Scanrans aren’t likely to slay a healer on the field, or in the hospital, which is where the people who brew medicines usually end up.”
“You shouldn’t—people will need you here too. You should stay.”
“Not as much as up there. It’s what I can do.” Neal closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure he could look at her for what he would have to say someday and might as well say now. “I wasn’t trained enough when my brother Cathal died that I could have helped him, but I wasn’t close enough to him to try, either. I can’t let that happen with Graeme. I’m not meant to be a duke. My father will go too, just like he did for Tusaine, and like he did at Legann, but he’s older now. I want to give him my help.”
“My lord told me about your brother,” she said after a short silence. “What he said—I’m not sure even your father could have helped that.”
“Probably not,” Neal agreed, and opened his eyes. “But I could help Graeme, or someone else. You, for instance. This is the compromise I’ve reached.” Kel was watching him, and she always seemed to see right down to his heart and ribs, and he found himself continuing, saying something he’d never even said to his father. “When we thought we might lose Graeme too, I thought about joining page training. I’d have been old for it—I think I’d have been in your year, funny as that is to consider—but I would have done it, if we lost both of them. When we didn’t, I decided they could do without one insubordinate page, but I still want to serve somehow. This is what I can do. Please say you’ll forgive me for doing it.”
“I won’t stand between you and your duty. Just … please stay safe. The border is so long.”
It was pushing a boundary, and Neal had promised not to do that, but Kel’s fear was pushing out from behind her trained Yamani calm, and he was terrified for her in his own turn. He stepped forward just far enough to take her hand so he could press a kiss to the back of it. “I’ll do my best if you promise the same.”
“I’ll try,” she said, voice a lot softer than usual, and he dropped her hand so they could move apart, but to his surprise, she grabbed his sleeve write away. “And I was serious, before. Don’t stop writing. The mail will be slow, but I want to hear from you.”
“You won’t be able to shut me up,” he promised, a much easier promise to make, and they released each other to go back to their respective errands.
*
The next morning, barely an hour past dawn, Neal stood with his parents, Jessamine, and Haname, watching Graeme ride out with the Third Company of the King’s Own. His eyes strayed often to Kel, at the front of the column with her knight-master, her terrible horse walking easily in the morning, her bulging saddlebag holding a dog, her sparrows flecks of brown around her as they moved down the road. She was something out of a legend or poem, the lady-knight-to-be, and Neal thought of the old well-worn poem again. He’d nearly memorized it, it came to his mind so often.
He stayed a long time, watching them all go out of sight, long after his parents and sister went inside to their solemn breakfast, until it was just he and Haname and the other forlorn sweethearts of the men who had just left. When the last gleam of armor winked from sight, Haname reached out and gripped his wrist with shocking force. When he glanced at her, he wasn’t sure which of them she was trying to reassure. “He’ll be fine. He’s careful, and he has something to come home to,” Neal said, and winced for the triteness of it.
“War doesn’t care. But he’ll come, I pray, for Midwinter, when Keladry does.”
By Midwinter, knights just like Graeme would have been flooding north for months. Just because Scanra hadn’t declared a war didn’t mean they weren’t planning one, and King Jonathan wasn’t a fool. They’d be staffing the border with every able-bodied knight they had, and Graeme wasn’t an exception just because his father had already lost one son. “Maybe. He’ll at least try. Going up early might give him an excuse for leave.”
“If that doesn’t, I’m told that new fathers, especially of firstborns, are often given a leave to meet their heirs,” said Haname, and when he snapped to look at her, shocked, her lips were curved in the closest thing he ever saw to her true smile. “It’s early days, I know that and he does, but we have hopes.”
“Anything you need from me,” Neal promised.
“Stay long enough to help me at the birth. That’s enough. Then you can go too. I would go to him, if I would be of any use like you will. You should go to her.”
Neal swallowed. “She practically begged me to stay here, to be safe. I’m going anyway, but I won’t be going to her.”
“You’re going to both of them, and they’ll be glad of your presence even if they worry. Bring them both back.”
“I will,” said Neal, even though it was a rash and impossible promise, and let Haname lead him back inside.
Later that day, not sure how much good it would do but determined to try anyway, Neal pulled out a piece of paper and a new book of poetry to start writing Kel’s first letter.
*
Spring seemed to slip away in no time at all. Neal, Jessamine, and Haname conspired to keep Baird and Wilina from fretting about Graeme as much as they could, and Baird and Wilina tolerated it because the conspiracy kept the younger generation from fretting themselves. Baird and Wilina also had the distraction of their first grandchild, though Neal was shocked at how long Haname went without telling them, leaving him sitting on the secret alone.
Neal split his time almost evenly between the city’s clinics and the university laboratory where he worked with a team making and developing medicines. His father was training a replacement among the palace healers, and Neal kept himself away both because it didn’t feel as important as the other parts of his work and because the replacement always seemed to be on her mettle around Neal, just waiting to be ousted in his favor, as though Neal wanted to have to play politics along with his healing. He didn’t know how his father did it.
With Graeme married, Neal was also a popular guest of those who made sport of matchmaking among the young nobility. Jessamine and Haname tended to attend with him, and he was embarrassed and grateful both at how much both of them subtly defended him from the more persistent of the matchmaking. He did his duty dancing, and found that some of the young knights Kel had known tended to seek him out to say hello between dances. That was promising, he thought, though he hated to think what rumors might make it north to Cleon of Kennan.
Neal did see, and wrote to Kel about seeing, the girl pages, sometime in April. They’d all started a year or two later than the boys usually did, and were all first-years together, and he only met them in the end because one of them fell off a horse and happened to come in to see Baird when Neal was visiting him with a cracked rib from falling poorly. He told them he knew Kel for the utterly shameless reason that he knew it would make them open up so then he could report on them to her, and was able to write Kel a three-page letter with all of their personalities and interests and strengths in page training.
He used one of Haname’s Yamani translations in that letter, four quiet lines about a mother teaching her daughter how to hold a glaive.
That letter garnered him a long response full of comments and questions and advice Neal wouldn’t realistically have the chance to pass on. He was grateful for it anyway, because Kel’s letters, that spring, were rare and short. She would respond to the poems with her usual thoughtful dissection, and ask him a few questions about mutual acquaintances, but she spoke little of herself. Some of that, he knew, was that couriers brave enough to go to the northern front were rare and the Own couldn’t spare people to come south to meet them often. Letters from Graeme and Dom were only a little more frequent than those from Kel.
The rest of it, he feared, was that she might regret telling him to keep writing her. She was too guilty to stop him, or too guilty to end things with Kennan, and as an end result was making herself miserable for others’ sake.
Neal tried to strike a balance between honesty and lack of pressure. He didn’t avoid romantic poems as much as he had previously, when she knew what he wanted, but didn’t use any that begged a response, or any about the early passionate throes about love. He cultivated an interest in the poems that wives and husbands wrote about each other after decades together, and was encouraged when Kel responded to them just as thoughtfully as she did those about scenery or animals, though even then her letters were half the length of his at best.
If you ever change your mind about what you said before you left, you can tell me, he wrote in a self-pitying mood when Midsummer had come and passed and Kel’s latest letter had proved to be two paragraphs of criticism of a poem he’d thought she would like with one question about whether Haname spoke of how Pricess Shinkokami and Lady Yukimi were doing tacked on the end. I’d hate to be an obligation to you, and I know things got awkward in those last days.
*
Correspondence from and to the north took long enough that their replies often lagged a few letters behind. Neal wasn’t shocked that he got a letter only a week later that referenced the another poem and, to his relief, included a few paragraphs of commentary on her sparrows and their arguments and alliances with sparrow flocks of the north. He regretted his self-pitying missive a little at that, but words about her sparrows weren’t words about her, so the worry stood enough that he didn’t write a retraction.
After the letter about sparrows, though, there was a long, awful silence. She wasn’t hurt or killed, letters from Graeme and Dom both mentioned her competence frequently even as their letters also grew shorter as the border heated up with summer. She was just silent. Maybe it was her answer to his letter. Maybe he was simply less important to her than he hoped.
Haname, getting her own letters from her husband that she didn’t care to share with her family, told him that Corus was too hot for her when she was with child and all but ordered him to escort her to Queenscove again. Neal went, and spent a few weeks with her and some of the local sailors, both of them learning together when she all but dared the sailors to leave her out due to her condition.
He’d been trying his best to decrease his frequency of letters to Kel during her silence, in case he really was pushing too hard, but he thought she’d like to hear about the sailing, and instead of a poem, he sent her a rhyme that sailors taught their apprentices to help them remember the names of sailing knots and how to tie them. She’d like that, the practicality of it.
“In Yaman,” Haname said quietly one night, not looking up from her needlework after dinner, “it is thought honorable not to encourage suitors if you aren’t sure all will be well with the match. There are many dramatic tales of young women who are sick, or being called by the Wave-Walker, or whose parents wish them to marry a man forty years their senior, who make the honorable choice to send a man away who they very much want close to them.”
“It doesn’t really help, knowing it’s the honorable thing.”
“No.” She made a few precise stitches. “I did it. Princess Chisokami, who died in the earthquake, was the dearest friend of my childhood. I loved her, and the match with Tortall was thought auspicious after Ilane of Mindelan’s heroism, so I committed myself to the Tortallan alliance. Later, when Chisokami died, young men sought me out, and there was one I liked very much. But I’d committed myself already, not to a named princess, but to an alliance. And now I am married to a man I like even more.”
Neal considered the story, what she might be saying with it. “That might help even less, actually.”
“I’m not trying to create an analogy. You Tortallans love morals and lessons. I am saying that she’s doing the honorable thing to wait, and not to get your hopes up. However, I am confident that, even if courtship must wait until she’s been knighted, she will understand that there are no barriers of honor to forming an attachment to you.”
“And barriers of affection?”
Haname finally looked up and gave him a long, cool stare. “Keladry of Mindelan has allowed you to send her poems of vastly varying quality for years now. I think you can safely dispose of your worries about those.”
Neal wanted to argue, wanted to point to the gap of silence, to the sweetheart she still had as far as he knew. But Haname returned to her needlework, and he wanted to hope too, so he decided to keep his arguments to himself and went back to puzzling through a letter from an up-and-coming Carthaki healer with a recipe to treat heatstroke.
*
Kel’s next letter arrived when Neal and Haname were back in Corus. The pages were returning, and Baird commented, after examining them all for existing illnesses in a process the new training master had decided to implement and which he heartily approved of, that he could chart worries about war from how large or small a training class was. Kel’s year had been small, with parents too worried about immortals to part with their children, and the year or two after the Tusaine War and after King Jonathan’s coronation had been small too. With the Scanran war on the horizon, there were only seven pages.
One, Neal was pleased to report to Kel, was a girl, a Nond cousin who had apparently scandalized her family by choosing to try. The training master, resigned more than pleased, had theorized to Baird that more would come when Kel passed her Ordeal, and he passed that report on as well. He considered, as he did increasingly often, including the poem that he’d first associated with Kel, but it was too deep a feeling when she hadn’t written him in too long. It smacked of desperation. He included instead a poem about a seamstress sitting by a sunny window at her work and said it reminded her of what she’d said of Lalasa Isran.
As if to reward him, he got letters from not just Kel, but Graeme and Dom as well, the next day. Dom had written to Baird and Jessamine as well, and Graeme short letters to everyone else in the family and a longer one to Haname.
Neal only thought to be nervous when he checked the dates on the letters and they were less than two weeks old. Mail only traveled that fast away from a war zone if it was stuffed in a messenger’s pack with urgent missives that needed to get to where they were going as fast as a gallop could take them.
Normally, he opened Kel’s letters as soon as he got them, and ignored his family’s teasing. But with everyone else rushing to their letters from Graeme, connecting the dots that something was wrong faster than he did, he started with Graeme’s. It was short, and short on information: he told them only that he was safe, and so were Dom and Kel, but that Dom had been injured. Lord Raoul had told them all to keep any communications that weren’t coded sparse on information, but he would say more when he returned to Corus with Raoul and Kel.
Any other day, Neal might have felt warm at the way Graeme referred to Kel as though she were part of the family. Instead, he ripped open Dom’s letter, to find much the same, with more reassurances that Dom was healthy and healed up, and with the new information that Kel had taken command of his squad when he’d been injured, and that she’d saved the day from whatever the threat they couldn’t name was.
Kel’s letter was longer than the other two, and contained no information whatsoever about the threat they’d faced. Instead, it began I meant it when I said I didn’t want to stop writing, and I’m sorry I haven’t lived up to that. Everything I want to say sounds like an excuse, so perhaps I shouldn’t try, but I keep thinking about you coming up here. It’s more dangerous by the week here, as Maggur Rathhausak learns new tricks, and then the other day there was something I’m not allowed to describe, but I don’t want to think about you anywhere close to it. But if you’re coming anyway, and if I might get killed before that even becomes a problem, it seems silly to try not to think about it. I’ll do better.
That was the opposite of comforting. Perhaps she meant it to be. Still, she continued with two careful close-written pages about the poems she’d missed responding to, with a few stories about Dom and Graeme thrown in, and a flurry of questions about Neal himself, as well as his family, that he suspected was about half interest and half proving to him that his letters hadn’t gone unopened.
I promise, she said at the end, that I won’t go so long without writing again. Any day where a letter arrives from you is a better one.
Neal looked up, relieved, and found the rest of his family watching Haname as she finished her letter from Graeme, close-written in Yamani script. Coded, at least as far as most of Scanra would be concerned.
With one hand pressed to her belly, she looked up at all of them. “I’m going to make some tea,” she said, “and then I’ll tell you.”
*
The days after Neal found out about the metal monster that Kel had somehow killed passed in fits and starts. He wrote wholly inadequate letters back to the Scanran border that didn’t mention the monster but had to scream his terror out to three people who knew him very well, and found himself watching people at the few parties he forced himself to attend, wondering who had been the recipient of a coded or indiscreet message from the rushed mailbag.
Several members of his family asked him, concerned, why he was so quiet before he could shake himself out of it, and even then he only managed it because Haname had some false labor pains and insisted that Neal treat her even though Baird was there nearly vibrating with the willingness to help.
When that was sorted and Jessamine and the other Yamani ladies were clucking over her while she lay annoyed in bed, all four of them planning an elaborately quilted blanked for the baby, Neal finally made himself sit down and write letters in return. They were terribly composed, and he couldn’t even muster a poem for Kel, but he wanted to write her, to show her that he wasn’t lastingly hurt or angry. He wrote her about the worries traveling around the palace, about any rumors he could glean about the lady pages, and sent it off without burdening her with his worries.
His father, trying hard not to lurk around and cluck like a mother hen over his impending grandchild, caught Neal on his way back from mailing his letters out. “Are you feeling better? Your mother and I have worried, these past few days.”
“Somewhat. It’s fairly terrifying that there are metal monsters to contend with in the battle to come.” And Neal was still planning to go north the following year, when Graeme and Kel would go back after their winter home. “You’re preparing to go north, aren’t you?”
“I am. Wilina and I talked about it. There aren’t enough healers, and I want to be close in case Graeme … we already almost lost him once.” Baird took a deep breath. “You’re planning to go too.”
Neal shrugged, helpless. “I don’t want to lose him any more than you do. Or anyone else. I couldn’t be a knight like him, or like … like Kel, but I can at least do this.”
Baird put a hand on his shoulder, probably hearing the echo of Cathal’s name as Neal avoided it to prevent his voice from cracking. “I think you would make a better knight than you think, but I’m grateful to have you carrying on my legacy, and carrying it further. If this is where you feel your duty lies, I’ll be proud to go north at your side.”
Neal nodded and swallowed. “It might take Mother and Jess a while to forgive us, and I don’t know what Haname will think, but I’ll be glad to be somewhere near you.”
“And Kel,” Baird said, a little wry, giving them both permission to make the conversation a little lighter. “I really must have her and the Mindelans for dinner sometime this winter.”
Neal wisely decided to flee before he could be pulled deeper into that conversation.
*
Neal’s next letter from Kel, two weeks later, was still a bit behind the times, but it was warmer and friendlier than he’d heard from her since last Midwinter, and Neal was grateful, if baffled. She told an improbable story about Lord Raoul defeating a giant nigh-singlehanded and then an even more improbable one about one falling in love with him in the lead-up to the Immortals War. She even included a poem from a book she’d bought from some merchants the Own had saved from an attack earlier in the summer, a narrative about a thief and a knight and the Dominion Jewel that purported be about Miache and Zefrem but actually seemed to be thinly-veiled commentary on Sir Alanna and Baron George, to Neal’s delight.
Normally, a letter from Kel was the most interesting that might be delivered for Neal to open over breakfast or dinner on a given day. That day, though, Graeme and Dom both wrote too, and he sighed and prepared himself to hear that Kel was trying to hide something awful from him.
Instead, he got two letters that tried very hard to be subtle, talking about how the fort was doing and how the Scanran attacks seemed to be trailing off a little, though they were worried about protecting what harvest the northerners had managed to keep in their fields despite frequent raids. In between questions about Haname and the baby (Graeme, who despaired of his wife’s subtlety) and whether the ladies of the palace were pining for him (Dom, who was probably joking), both of them just happened to mention that Cleon of Kennan had come to visit Third Company’s fort. He’d had letters for the commander, but had stayed overnight to carry messages.
He’d arrived in a good mood, both of them said, and left in a sour one almost before breakfast was over. A breakfast Kel, they both just happened to note, hadn’t attended at all, though Dom mentioned he’d caught her smiling while doing a sword drill later that day.
Virtuously, Neal replied to the letters from his brother and cousin first, and didn’t deign to respond to gossip, though Graeme had clearly mentioned it in his much longer epistle to Haname, since she asked Neal if he needed any more poetry translated while Baird was encouraging her to keep from having too much excitement in the last months of her pregnancy.
Neal turned her down, went to his room, and spent several hours trying not to tear his hair out as he tried to find the correct poem for the occasion.
There wasn’t one, he eventually decided. But, when he’d been admiring a new woman every month, he’d written fairly terrible adolescent poetry. He’d given it up a year or two before he’d met Kel, embarrassed at the melodrama of his efforts, but he’d learned better since. Or if he hadn’t, he would learn better very quickly.
He didn’t write a love poem, or not in the traditional sense. He tried a Yamani form, since Kel appreciated those, though she also lamented that they were never quite right in Tortallan. Maybe one originally written in Tortallan would be better, he thought optimistically, and spent hours scrawling all over at least half a dozen sheets of paper to write six lines. They were paltry, an attempt at a description of what he felt when a letter from Kel arrived, the anticipation and the joy at hearing all the small parts of her life she allowed him to share.
It was either genius or absolute drivel, he decided, and tried to make the rest of his letter as normal as possible, without mentioning Cleon of Kennan at all, before he signed and sealed it and sent it off before he could think better of it.
*
When Kel wrote her response to that, it was the warmest letter he’d yet had from her. She teased him a little for the liberties he took with Yamani forms, which he’d expected, but she praised his work too, and told him that when he wrote her favorites for the year in her notebook, he had better put that among them.
She also told him that she and Graeme and Lord Raoul were all coming back together, for her Ordeal and for Graeme’s leave to see his child. They were planning to travel less-traveled roads, she warned him, so letters he sent weren’t likely to reach her, but she would be in Corus again with more than a month to spare before her Ordeal.
The weeks between that letter and her arrival seemed to drag on. Baird and Wilina’s relief began as soon as Graeme’s letter warning that he was about to leave the front came, but Haname only grew more tense as the baby grew restless. “I’m worried it might try to race him here,” she told Neal and Jessamine one afternoon when she’d ordered them to escort her to the gardens, her mistress and Lady Yukimi having banished her from their presence so they could work on a present for the baby in secret.
“As long as they don’t arrive at the same time,” Jessamine said with a laugh, and turned to tease Neal about Kel, a pastime she’d taken up with delight that he didn’t quite have the heart to talk her out of, though he of course would do his best before she actually spent time with both of them together.
Neal, despite him impatience, made sure to give his work as much attention as he could, and that made the time past faster than anything else, to his relief.
That did, however, mean that when he ran into Kel mere hours after her arrival, he’d spent most of the previous day assisting Mistress Cooper and one of her other apprentices with a delicate surgery that had left him without enough power to banish his own headache and with his personal supply of headache powder far away in his room. She was, of all things, walking through the stable block when Neal was bringing his horse back, and both of them drew up and stared at each other for a long second when they stumbled into each other, until Neal’s horse nudged him. “You were settling in your bruiser, I take it?” Neal managed to ask, and hoped his grin wasn’t too silly.
“He’s not that bad,” said Kel, but she’d allowed a grin of her own. “I was just going to send you a note telling you I’m back, but it seems I don’t need to. Not that you wouldn’t have known, of course, with Sir Graeme back as well.”
“He beat his heir, for which we can all only be grateful. You’re well? I know you couldn’t tell me half of what you went through this summer.”
She was already shaking her head before he could finish speaking. “This isn’t the time for that. I’m here and unhurt.”
“That monster—”
“I’m not borrowing trouble. We survived it, and we know how to kill the next one.” He didn’t bother questioning that there would be a next one. “And you? You’ve been busy, with Lady Haname and with work. And with writing me.”
“That last is one of my favorite things to do,” he assured her, too happy to care about being discreet. “And Haname is a dear friend at this point. Work has been busy, though, and will only get busier.” Her face fell. Neal winced and hastened to continue. “And that’s not a conversation for this moment either. We’ve got plenty of time to fret about each other, I’m just happy to see you. Are you free for a walk in the garden, or do you need to get back to Lord Raoul?”
“He said he’d see me tomorrow, he wants to settle in, so I can take a walk.” She frowned at him. “If you can stay upright that long. What have you been doing?”
At least he’d cleaned himself up before riding back up to the palace. Neal sighed and started walking them out of the stable block. “A heart procedure on a woman whose heart wasn’t pumping enough blood. I’ll spare you the details, but I’ve been at it for hours. Tell me about your journey, that sounds much more pleasant.”
Kel, after a moment and a searching look, fell into step next to him and obliged with soothing discussions of autumn leaves and the story of Lord Raoul and Graeme arguing about whether Graeme should be Kel’s second instructor before her Ordeal of Knighthood. Graeme, Neal was touched and delighted to hear, had won the argument.
Neal relished listening to her clear, calm voice and the way it got warmer when she was amused, as they walked around some of the less busy areas of the gardens, until he yawned one time too many and she leapt into action and sent him back to his rooms.
“It was good to see you,” he said when their paths diverged in one of the palace hallways. The words were inadequate, but they were also as much as she would allow. Even if she was free of commitments to Cleon of Kennan, she was still a squire. “You won’t be a stranger, I hope? It’s silly to write when we’re sharing a roof, however large the roof, so that means I’ll simply have to inflict myself upon you.”
“I won’t be a stranger,” Kel agreed.
There was a strange beat, a moment where he might have tried to kiss her if he didn’t know how fiercely she held her honor, if he didn’t have the all-too-fresh memory of her pulling away on a beach in Queenscove, before she smiled at him and turned on her heel to walk away.
*
It wasn’t easy, as it turned out, to find moments when Neal’s schedule overlapped with Kel’s. They both had duties during the day, and at meals she was either with her knight-master or in one of the military messes Neal might have been able to win an invitation to but wouldn’t have felt very comfortable in. In the evenings, as a squire, she wasn’t invited to the parties he was at, and Lord Raoul only seemed to care to host during Midwinter, so he couldn’t even rely on helping her serve again.
He saw her most, in fact, in his own family quarters. Haname, to her clear annoyance, had been encouraged to rest in bed as much as possible by Baird, and Princess Shinkokami had made a healer’s worries into a royal edict. That meant that when the princess was working on wedding planning and wanted the opinion of her chief lady in waiting, the planning happened in the Queenscove quarters. And, since Kel, who for someone who hated politics had dizzyingly excellent connections, was a childhood friend of Shinkokami and Lady Yukimi, she was often there. The four of them chatted away in Yamani at far too great a rate for Neal to follow, but when he heard Kel chime in, it was rarely and with a certain level of exasperation he was coming to recognize.
Neal’s family all seemed to realize that Kel spent time there as well, as they would have to. Graeme knew her well enough, after months in the north with her, but more than once, Neal found his father offering her tea, his mother inquiring about her plans for her knighthood assuming a favorable outcome of the Scanran war, his traitorous sister telling embarrassing stories from Neal’s foolish youth.
It wasn’t entirely a surprise when Neal started running into Mindelans seemingly whenever he came around a corner. On the rare occasion Neal attended a party that included dancing, in the month that followed, Ladies Adalia and Oranie developed an alarming habit of creating situations that required him to ask them to dance and then took to interrogating him about his interests, skills, and prospects. Baron Piers developed chronic headaches that cleared up as soon as he had the chance to start discussing ways Neal could make money from his strong medicines while still making sure they were affordable for Tortall’s poorest citizens. Baroness Ilane didn’t ask him questions, but she and his mother started having the occasional tea together.
It was even less of a surprise when Lord Raoul just happened to fall in next to him when Neal was walking by from the Olau townhouse one day after walking Mistress Cooper home. “My lord, what a surprise,” he said, because someone who couldn’t appreciate sarcasm would never have promoted Dom.
“It seems to me,” Lord Raoul said with admirable directness, “that you and I should have a chat while Kel is still under my protection. And frankly, the way gossip travels, you’ll probably be better off if I can reassure Sir Alanna that you and I have already had this conversation.”
That was a remarkably graceful threat from someone who famously hated court politicking. Neal took it with the gravity it was intended, and cut to answering the question that had to be foremost in Raoul’s mind. “I take this seriously. Take her seriously. I won’t be proposing the moment she has her shield, but I want to court her properly.” He took a breath. “I plan to go north when my father does, probably in the spring. I’ve already discussed that with Kel, and she doesn’t like it, but I think she’ll accept it in the end.”
“Good. We need healers up there. Especially with those gods-cursed machines.” A quick look. They weren’t precisely supposed to be common knowledge, but the way he said it pre-supposed that Neal knew. “No promises, of course, of sweethearts being stationed close together.”
“I wouldn’t expect there to be,” Neal said, though the thought of being at the City of the Gods while Kel was at Frasrlund made him want to scream.
“And after the war …” Raoul put his hands in his pockets as they walked. “Kel will never be the kind of knight who rides occasional border patrols and drinks at court for leisurely months in between. She takes duty seriously, and she’ll volunteer to be in the field as much as she’s allowed. Beyond that, if all goes well on the Scanran border, gods willing, they’ll want her to do her duty, and give her commands that will make it hard for her to set up a steady household, have children, do what other noblewomen do. When I retire, which will be sooner than I like to think about even if I have a good few years in me yet, I hope to convince Jon to give her my job.”
Neal wanted to make a passionate defense of how serious he was, how he knew from Dom and a bit from Graeme that Kel’s future was bright if only the king was willing to stop pandering to the conservatives, and that it was part of what he so admired in her. Lord Raoul didn’t care about his admiration, though, that was clear enough. He wanted to know for sure that Neal was walking in with his eyes open, and would never try to make Kel less than what she was. Neal wondered, guiltily, if he’d said the same to Cleon of Kennan, and what his answer was. “Do you intend to introduce women to the Own before your retirement, so she’s not an exception again?” he inquired while he tried for a more full answer.
Lord Raoul answered with a crack of laughter. “Oh, I like you. My standard-bearer was just implying a few months ago that there’s a cousin of his who didn’t think page training would suit her given family history but who is trained in weapons. Discussing her and cases like her is some of what I hope to do this winter, though most policy changes will have to wait until after the war.”
That piece of honesty made it easier for Neal to share his own. “Then it’s not my business what she wants to do or not do. If I were a noblewoman, and she a man, you wouldn’t have needed to say any of that to me. If my sister-in-law can wait and fret at home sometimes, then so can I. And since I’m a healer, sometimes I can vary things and wait in a field hospital and fret instead. Children …” Neal shrugged. “Anyone will tell you I’m too frivolous and annoying to be a good father. If Kel doesn’t want them, I can dote on my hopefully-numerous nieces and nephews.”
“I’d ask if you’re sure, but none of us can see the future.” Raoul heaved a long sigh. “There is a reason squires can’t court, Nealan. Joren of Stone Mountain’s death two years ago is only one of them. Even people who live come out of the Chamber changed. Not totally different people, but sometimes your priorities change.”
Neal had always attributed his brothers’ changes to war. The Chamber sounded like a nightmare, but not a lasting one, not if it left knights able to go off to war. Maybe Neal had been mistaken about that. “I’ll keep it in mind, sir,” he said. “But the last thing I want is to make Kel feel like she has to give me anything she doesn’t want to give.”
“If I didn’t believe that, we’d be having a very different conversation.” They walked a street or to, up into the Temple District. “As long as you keep in mind that she’s not going to bend her life to you, I think you two will get along well together. For what it’s worth, Nealan, you have my blessing. It’s a relief, honestly, Dom would have been very disappointed.”
Neal smiled and tried to show less relief than he felt. “I’m glad to hear it, sir. And I’ll never take her affection for granted once she chooses to give it, I can promise you that.”
“It’s a lofty goal,” said Lord Raoul, and excused himself when they reached the gates of Mithros’s temple to leave Neal to go the rest of the way back up to the palace himself.
*
The baby came three weeks before Midwinter, in the depths of the season’s first snowstorm. Neal and his father took shifts through a long night while the rest of the family paced outside the infirmary, until Neal could place an angrily crying baby girl on Haname’s chest before cleaning himself off and letting Baird fetch Graeme.
The baby, named Ailith in echo of her lost uncle, captivated the household as well as those adjacent to it. Wedding planning sessions stopped having anything to do with the wedding and had more to do with murmuring over Ailith’s every move and sound. Neal, after all his experience in Mistress Cooper’s clinics and being the member of his household most likely to stay up late reading, was frequently trusted with her care when Haname and Graeme were busy or resting.
Much as he wanted to be a doting uncle, though, Neal made sure he kept as much time for Kel as he could. The closer Midwinter got, the less Lord Raoul asked of her, but the more she seemed to want to do. Anytime Neal asked her about nerves, she dismissed the thought, but he caught her staring into nothingness whenever he left too long a gap of silence, and soon learned to talk even more incessantly than he usually did. It couldn’t always make her smile, but she never ignored him, either.
Neal purloined the poetry book back from her and was delighted to find that she’d clearly read it a few times since he’d given it to her. The spine was flexible, and a few pages had water damage or smudges of dirt at the corners. One page at the back, in the blank section, was ripped out. Neal took care picking the poems she’d liked best for the year, and put his own work in as well, before returning it to her a week before Midwinter.
“You could save it for the day,” she said when he did, running a proprietary hand over the cover.
“But I have a different present for you. This is last year’s,” he said, and grinned when she only made token arguments on the subject.
Some days, it worried him a little that she wouldn’t talk to him about the bigger things, about Scanra and the machines and the Ordeal. Other days, he was grateful for stories about the Yamani Isles, and when she was in a serious mood, about the injustices she’d been forced to swallow as a page and a squire and all the ways she wanted to change them for the next girls to come through.
“Things are changing, or there wouldn’t be four girls among the pages after more than a decade with none,” Neal said when she mentioned that. “It’s not all you, but things are different now. There are the Riders, and you and Sir Alanna, and the Wildmage, and Maura of Dunlath ruling a fief in all but name. And she might rule it in name soon, too, the king quietly congratulated Graeme on his heir, which is a relief to me, let me tell you.”
“Duchess Ailith,” Kel said, and smiled. She liked babies but had no idea what to do with them, Neal had found, and he was trying hard not to be endeared by it. “Maybe she’ll be a knight too.”
She’ll have an aunt as an example of how to do it, I hope, Neal didn’t say. “Or a healer. Or both,” he said instead. And then, because he was coming to understand what would make her smile, “Perhaps wait for her third birthday to give her a sword, though.”
*
Kel, in a show of very poor luck, was assigned to have her Ordeal last of her cohort. When Midwinter arrived, she seemed to spend it in an agony of worry that she refused to allow anyone to help with, no matter what busywork Lord Raoul gave her or distractions Neal showered her with.
Neal gave her his gift, a shawl woven by one of the best Queenscove weavers, with a note telling her it might keep her warm in the evenings on the border. She gave him a helm that wouldn’t get too badly in his way with a note telling him it might keep him safe from danger on the border.
“You probably even think it’s sweet,” said Jessamine with asperity.
It was awful, and horribly necessary, a precaution healers didn’t usually take that he would for Kel’s sake. It was Kel all over, a practical gesture that at heart meant she wanted to keep him safe the same way he wanted to make her happy. It was hope, of an awful kind, for their future, if they both survived the coming war. “Well, next year I might give her a few hints about the kind of hats I prefer,” he allowed. “And she doesn’t quite understand what colors look best on me. Still, I’m sure I’ll wear it.”
“A kind gift,” said Graeme, but he frowned whenever Neal talked about going north and he was frowning then.
Haname put a hand on Graeme’s leg and then their daughter in his lap, which helped, and Neal put his helm away to the side and did his duty exclaiming over the embroidered silk ribbon Lady Cythera had sent his mother. Everything moved on happily enough, before they all split up to the duties of the day before the night’s party, but Neal wasn’t really surprised when Graeme caught him before he could go out to find Kel.
“You’re serious about going north, then. And it’s not just to be close to Kel?”
“No. Father went to the Tusaine front, and he’ll go to the Scanran front too. I need to go, this time, and not just for Kel, though she’s part of it.” Neal swallowed. “For you, maybe. For Haname, who can’t come but wants to know you’re safe in more detail than you’ll write her. For Cathal, and the young knights like him.”
For a long moment, Graeme just watched him. They’d never understood each other, the last two Queenscove sons, not really. Not without Cathal between them to soften Neal’s acid comments and jolly away Graeme’s natural gravity. They were better at it, though, than they’d once been, and eventually Graeme smiled, rueful and small. “You’re worth a dozen of them,” he said. “And I’d better warn General Vanget that you need someone sensible riding herd on you. Perhaps babysitting healers is a duty they’d give a practical young knight.”
Kel would hate that kind of duty, and Graeme knew it, but Neal didn’t mind it as a peace offering. He made a show out of rolling his eyes. “Someone sensible? I’m not the one who hits people with sticks for a living, I’m plenty sensible,” he said, and both of them managed to end the conversation smiling.
Neal found Kel wearing his shawl over her livery as she did sums for Lord Raoul and clasped her hands to thank her for the helm and for everything it meant, and she invited him to sit down and help her price out medicines for a company and its support staff assuming a month of frequent battle without a resupply.
It wasn’t romantic, but it might be something better, and Neal settled into help.
*
The day of Kel’s Ordeal, she went missing.
Not precisely missing, of course. That would have been almost easier to bear. She just left the palace with her terrifying horse and her flock of sparrows, and Lord Raoul told Neal apologetically when he turned up at the door to their rooms that Kel was wont to do that kind of thing, that she liked to prepare herself for difficult times in solitude.
Neal fretted his way back to the Queenscove rooms, since he’d foolishly taken the days surrounding Kel’s Ordeal away from the clinic, in hope or fear or something else he couldn’t name. Haname shook her head at him and gave him Ailith to occupy himself with while she played a bit of music for both of them.
In the afternoon, when Haname and Ailith had long since gone to take a nap, there was a knock at the suite door, and Neal found Kel standing on the other side, shawl clutched around her shoulders and his book of poetry tucked under her arm. “I can’t stay long,” she said before he could muster words.
“Come in,” he said, and thought about offering her tea, but she didn’t even sit down, just stood barely inside the door, all of her tense with nerves or fear or something else. “I was worried about you,” he admitted when she didn’t speak. “I tried to find you this morning, to see if you wanted to go down to Corus or out for a ride, but you were gone. Foolish of me not to ask you yesterday, I suppose.”
Kel winced. “I didn’t think of it. I just … everyone is so sympathetic and concerned, and my year-mates are all so relieved, and I wanted to get away. Not from you.”
“That’s a relief. Did it help?”
“I think so. If nothing else, it helped me decide …” Kel, who usually didn’t start sentences she didn’t finish, thrust the book out to him, the familiar and worn leather of it that he’d just closed and handed back to her with a fresh batch of poems inside. “Read that tonight? When I’m at my vigil, not before.”
And then, cutting off Neal’s flood of confusion and hope before it could turn into questions, she kissed him. It wasn’t tentative or quiet, like the one on the beach at Queenscove might have been. Kel kissed him like she was going to die, or like he was. When he dared to put an arm around her to draw her in closer, the shawl was soft against his palm.
Kel was the first to pull away, and it was all Neal could do not to follow her. “Thank you,” she said. “For healing me that day. For recommending me a poem in Persepolis. For writing me.”
“Thank you for writing me back.”
She kissed him once more, brief and much shyer than the first kiss, leaving his heart pounding, and excused herself and left before he could find anything else to say.
*
That night, when Graeme had returned from instructing Kel after her ritual bath and promised that she’d done everything perfectly and with great solemnity, when everyone had stayed up late and talked about everything but vigils and Ordeals before yawning and, one by one, leaving him to get rest. Neal didn’t blame them. He knew he wouldn’t be alone getting up before dawn to watch the Chamber door open.
When he was alone, after Jessamine kissed his forehead and told him that it was all past fretting about and he should try to sleep, Neal took out the book of poetry he knew so well and started from the beginning. He charted their growing closeness and his knowledge of her taste and paid close attention to the poems that the spine fell open at most easily.
On the last page he’d written on, his few lines of poetry taking up barely half the sheet, Kel had added six lines of her own, in the same form. They were, he discovered after reading them twice because the first time the words didn’t penetrate through his joyful surprise, a response to his own poem, tentative and sweet. He’d written about his feelings whenever he got a letter, and she’d done the same, writing about the rustle of paper making her smile even when it was just supply reports, because it made her think of him.
Neal knew enough about those raised in Yaman to know that it was as close to a declaration of love as he was likely to hear from Kel before their fifth wedding anniversary. He allowed himself a minute to do a few very foolish things, like press the book to his chest and close his eyes and think about Kel kissing him, and then he considered how best to respond.
There was no way, despite Jessamine’s well-meaning advice, that Neal would be able to sleep until he’d seen Kel. Instead, Neal took out a sheet of paper and copied Kel’s poem for him down in his best handwriting before shutting it in a tome of poetry that was too flowery even for him, the book in his room that his family was least likely to snoop in.
He had to respond somehow, to make sure that when Kel came out of the Chamber of the Ordeal a knight, she could know and believe that he loved her. One night wasn’t enough time to write a poem that encompassed everything he felt, and even if it was, it would have embarrassed her.
Instead, Neal pulled out a collection of old poetry he’d bought because of one single entry in it, the poem that he’d first associated with Kel and that he’d never wanted to scare her by sending her in a letter. It seemed like the only adequate response, though.
Duty is more fair than all else, and honor fairer still, he wrote in the book next to the barely-dry ink of her own words, after carefully scribing down the title and author, and wrote it all out for her before, at the bottom, adding a few prose words of his own.
This has reminded me of you for a long time, but I was never sure before if you would want to read it, he wrote. Consider it a placeholder, lady knight, until I can write some more of my own.
*
In the morning, with a cold pre-dawn glow filtering through the windows, when Neal had leafed through Kel’s poetry collection a dozen times and found new lines to delight in every time, the Queenscove family went to the Chamber of the Ordeal.
Wilina stayed with Ailith, promising the rest of them tea on their return, and Neal tucked the poetry book under his arm traveled in a comforting knot of family to fit in among and around the rest of Kel’s numerous friends. Her year-mates had come, and the whole Yamani delegation, as well as all of the Mindelans in the palace, including at least one brother Neal hadn’t met before. Lord Raoul was there, eyes heavy with the long night, and he gestured Neal forward to the crowded front row of spectators where the rest of his family wouldn’t fit but he could find a space between Prince Roald and Raoul himself.
They didn’t have to wait long. Dawn’s light came through the chapel’s window, and as the first rays of sun hit a medallion at the center of the room, the iron door swung open without anyone touching it.
Graeme had been crying when he walked out. Cathal had walked with his head down, avoiding everyone’s eyes. Kel stumbled out after a long horrible second, dazed but dry-eyed, and Raoul stepped forward to catch her, murmuring something Neal didn’t catch as the room burst into relief and gossip.
Kel’s face shuttered fast, as Neal had known it would. She hated for strangers to see her showing anything like weakness, and there were strangers aplenty in the room. The mask of neutrality was less perfect than usual, though. He could see something that promised trouble in the set of her chin, and desperation in her eyes as her gaze flickered around and finally settled on him.
Neal didn’t choose to step forward so much as his feet propelled him, and her shoulders dropped with relief, like he’d been the one in a room with a dangerous elemental instead of him. “You’re safe,” she said, and flushed when Raoul cleared his throat.
“So are you,” Neal agreed, and decided to worry about that later. Instead, he held out her book. “You have to go, I know, but I didn’t want you to be without this. You should read it, when you have the time.”
“I will,” she said, taking it and clutching it in her free hand, before her parents and her friends all converged on her and Lord Raoul tried to extract her for privacy and rest.
Neal stayed there until she was gone, and then until the crowd started to thin, and then until Haname and Graeme came up on either side of him. “Come along,” said Haname. “You’ve done what you needed to do, and seen her safe. Now you should rest, if you’re going to see her knighted tonight.”
Neal let them escort him away, and, his worries for the moment assuaged, fell into bed.
*
Neal didn’t expect to see Kel until her knighting ceremony, but Kel lived to thwart expectations, so there was a knock at the Queenscove suite door late that afternoon. Wilina sent Jessamine to answer it, and Jessamine announced Kel’s arrival in a voice that only barely managed to suppress its amusement. Neal shot to his feet, looked around at his loving and rather nosy family arrayed around the room, and all but ran to the door. “Let me get my boots and something warm,” he said, “and I’ll take you for a walk wherever you like.”
Kel, once Jessamine was out of the way, was exhausted but clear-eyed, dressed in her own fief colors for once, a sight he wasn’t used to but enjoyed, and dressed warm, like she’d anticipated a walk too. She relaxed a little when their eyes met, and offered him a small smile. “A walk sounds nice.”
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” Neal promised, gave his family a warning glower, and all but sprinted into his room to get ready for an outing. It couldn’t be too long of one, if both he and Kel needed to change before her knighting ceremony, but that she had something to say to him that couldn’t wait was encouraging.
When he emerged, dressed for the winter chill, Kel and his siblings were engaged in a conversation about going to see a play down in the city sometime in the next few weeks, and Neal interrupted them even though he thought the idea was a good one. Kel, at least, seemed more than willing to be interrupted, and Neal led her away and then let her choose the route.
She chose the practice courts, deserted on the last day of the holiday, and it wasn’t as pretty as the gardens, even in the snow, but it was Kel all over, so he was charmed by the choice anyway.
“I hope the poem wasn’t too much,” he said, because one of them had to start somewhere.
“It wasn’t. Not after what I wrote. You said it reminded you of me for a long time.”
Neal considered dissembling. It was still possible that he could scare her away, that his feelings would be too big or too much, that she’d heard the rumors about how he had a history of admiring women from afar and then moving on to the next one and took the poetry as evidence of that still being true. “Almost as soon as I met you,” he admitted anyway. If he was going to scare her away, better for both of them to know it now. “It’s just that I’ve been feeling it more seriously as time went on.”
“I’m not really the sort of person people write poetry about,” she said, a little wry, a little nervous.
Neal stopped walking. The walk was an excuse and they both knew it, so he stopped and took her hand and tugged until she was facing him properly. “If that’s the case, other poets are very foolish. I happen to think the best poems are about women who unflinchingly do their duty even when it’s hard, who are kind to animals and fight for justice and have beautiful hazel eyes.”
“You don’t have to flatter me just because—”
“I love you, Kel. And I don’t expect you to return the sentiment when you’ve had less time to get used to it than I have, and when you’ve been free to love people for less than a day by the code you live by. It’s still true, though.”
Kel was always so much braver than he was. He’d been sure, and accepted, that she wouldn’t say it for a long time, that her Yamani training would make the words too embarrassing for her. But she was Tortallan too, and more than that, she was herself, so she tangled her fingers more tightly with his and said “I love you too. I thought I did this spring, and I knew I did when you almost stopped writing.”
There were some things a man couldn’t hear from his beloved without kissing her. It turned out that was one of them.
When they parted at the inquisitive cheep of a sparrow overhead, Kel looked dazed in a much more pleasant way than she had that morning, but she shook herself a little and frowned. “You haven’t asked, but I want to make sure I’m clear. I have duties, and a war to fight with Scanra, and other things to do. That I must do. And I need to prove myself as me, not as anyone else.”
Not, she was too kind to say, as part of the more powerful Queenscove family. If Jessamine had been the one to want to start knight training, she’d have had a hard time, but it would have been easier than the one Kel had. “I won’t ask you,” he promised. “Not until you tell me you’re ready, even if it’s never and we just scandalize the court for the rest of our lives like the Wildmage and Master Numair. Whatever you give me is enough.”
Kel kissed him for that, and Neal thought foggily that he would have to start collecting information on what made her kiss him the same way he did on what poems she liked best before he gave himself entirely over to the kiss.
They didn’t leave themselves much time to change before the knighting ceremony.
*
Kel’s expression when she knelt before her liege to be declared a knight of the realm was what Neal imagined her expression must be before she told her horse to charge in a joust. Other knights might reflect on what they’d already accomplished, but not she. She was determined, looking forward, changing the angle of her strike so she could send the things opposing her flying.
Neal considered, during the brief ceremony that King Jonathan was making a bit of a drama of for the larger-than-usual audience, whether trying to make a poem of that observation would make Kel blush, and whether that was a reason to do it or not to do it.
“Rise, Lady Knight Keladry of Mindelan, and take your shield,” said the king, and Neal put the worry aside for a later time. There was a flicker of a smile on Kel’s face at her full title, and a bit of smugness from Lord Raoul, who must have told King Jonathan that she would prefer it to the “Sir” that the Lioness used to style herself.
That was a statement. What followed was an even greater one. Usually, the queen would assist members of the new knight’s family in presenting him with a shield, the device that was unique to each knight. It wasn’t just Queen Thayet, though, who joined Ilane of Mindelan in revealing the shield, but Princess Shinkokami as well, in a show of great royal favor. Kel’s shield, with its crossed glaives and the distaff border that even Sir Alanna didn’t claim, was another pointed message. The crown was done having patience with those standing against progress, and that commitment extended to the next generation. Neal wouldn’t pretend that the change would be as fast or as drastic as it should be, but it would come.
Kel held her shield with a sheen in her eyes, and Neal cheered with the rest of the court.
It took a long time to find a moment with Kel. Neal wasn’t the only one who recognized the gesture, and she was the woman of the hour as people reaffirmed their loyalty. Kel was predictably disgusted with all of it, and Neal felt no shame whatsoever about rescuing her from her Nond in-laws after the people who actually liked her were done congratulating her.
“Lady knight, you’re about to set the world by its ear,” he told her, and kissed her hand for good measure. The court understood that sort of gesture, and Neal had played by the rules for years. Nobody seemed shocked or annoyed.
“I’m about to do border duty like any young knight, which is exactly what I want,” she said, but he thought she liked the compliment.
Neal could have explained, since she cared nothing at all for the politics of ballrooms, what he meant by it, but that would only annoy her, so he left it for a later time. “And you’ll do it well. Especially with a healer to keep you safe.”
“You can’t promise that,” she said, frowning at him, at the reminder of his plans, which were only more important now that they’d committed to each other. “Any more than I can promise to keep you safe.”
“But I can try.”
She took his hand, a little too earnest, but he didn’t mind. He felt a little too earnest too. “And I’ll try too. I just don’t want to make promises. You know what’s waiting for us up there.”
Metal monsters. A war. All the horrors attendant on both of those things. The odds of a separation that would make all their hopeful promises moot. But, if they were lucky, there might be poetry too. Neal was already wondering how much of his luggage could reasonably be given over to books. “Then perhaps the only promise we should make tonight is that whatever comes, we’ll help each other through it.”
Kel hesitated for a moment, something flashing across her face before she suppressed it. “I can promise that,” she said, at last.
There was more to talk about, more futures to plan, more poems to write. But they were in a ballroom full of people who wished Kel well, and Neal wasn’t selfish enough to keep her to himself. “Right now, for instance,” he said, “I’ll fetch you a glass of whatever you like best for courage before you go receive my family’s congratulations. I warn you, they’ve drawn their conclusions about our walk this afternoon.”
To his surprise, she threaded her arm through his. “I’d rather have you there,” she admitted. “That will be better for my courage than cider, I think.”
Neal beamed at her, another poem half-forming itself in his head. “Lead on, lady knight,” he said, and put aside thoughts of the worrying future for the joys of the present.