Pairing: Knight!Leon Kennedy x Princess!reader
Synopsis: A princess bound by duty. A knight bound by oath. And a love that was never meant to survive either.
Tags: knight!Leon, princess reader, slow burn, mutual pining, forbidden love, angst, yearning, arranged marriage, bittersweet ending
Warnings: angst, no happy ending, emotional damage
Words: 19k
A/N: sorry i basically ghosted this account for two months. work was beating me to the ground :') please enjoy this! this is a bit different to my usual style so feedback welcomed!
It was not in your nature to be unkind to those beneath your station, and yet you found yourself, upon that grey morning in the castle’s eastern hall, possessed of an unkindness you could not entirely account for.
It sat strangely upon you, like a garment ill-fitted, neither comfortable nor easily cast aside.
“Father,” you said, with the particular patience one reserves for a parent who has, once again, made a decision without the courtesy of consulting you, “I have managed perfectly well these three years without a guard who follows me from room to room as though I were made of glass.”
“You have managed,” the King replied, not looking up from the parchment before him, “to be nearly abducted twice, and to wander unescorted into the lower town on no fewer than four occasions that I am aware of, and likely several more that I am not.”
You opened your mouth to dispute this and found, with some irritation, that you could not.
“It is not a punishment,” your father continued, setting down his quill at last and regarding you with the particular weariness he reserved for conversations he had clearly anticipated and dreaded in equal measure. “It is sense. You are not merely my daughter. You are the future of this kingdom, whether you have yet reconciled yourself to the fact or not.”
“I am perfectly reconciled to it,” you said. “I object only to being treated as though I cannot be trusted to walk from the library to my own chambers without incident.”
“You were trusted to do precisely that,” he said, “and the incident found you regardless.”
There was, in this, an unfairness you could not easily forgive, that danger should be permitted to exist independent of fault, that one might behave with perfect reason and still be met with consequence.
You had no ready answer for it.
“There is also the matter,” your father went on, more gently now, “of what is to come. The council grows impatient for an announcement of your betrothal, and impatience of that kind has a way of making men careless of propriety, and occasionally of safety. I will not have you exposed to whatever foolishness ambition might inspire in a man who fancies his prospects improved by your absence rather than your hand.”
You felt something tighten, faint but insistent.
“You speak of it as though it were already decided,” you said quietly. “The betrothal.”
“It is not decided.” He held your gaze with the steadiness he had always shown you, even as a child, even when the truth he carried was not a comfortable one. “But it will be decided, in time, and you know as well as I that the kingdom’s future does not rest on my shoulders alone forever. It will rest on yours. I would have you carry that weight prepared, and whole, rather than diminished by some misfortune I might have prevented with a single guard at your side.”
Prepared.
Whole.
Words so reasonable they admitted no argument, and yet so heavy they left little room for anything else.
You looked away from him, toward the window, where the grey morning light fell without particular warmth upon the stone floor. You knew he was not wrong. You had known it, in truth, before you had ever opened your mouth to argue, for arguing with your father on matters of the kingdom had become, in recent years, less a matter of conviction than of habit, a small assertion of will in the one arena where your will was still permitted to assert itself at all.
“Very well,” you said, with the particular grace of the thoroughly outmanoeuvred. “I shall submit to your guard. Though I make no promise of submitting gracefully.”
The faintest suggestion of a smile crossed your father’s face, the first softness he had shown all morning. “I would expect nothing less of you.”
It was then that the door opened, announced by nothing more than the soft click of the latch, for the man who entered did not seem given to announcing himself in any other fashion.
You had heard of him, of course.
One could not spend a fortnight in that castle without hearing of him.
The servants spoke his name in the hushed, half-admiring, half-wary tones usually reserved for weather that might yet turn violent. Leon Kennedy. A man, it was said, who had survived things that ought not to have been survivable, and who had returned from each of them a little less inclined to speak of it. There were rumours of villages emptied of something worse than soldiers, of nights he would not account for even to his commanding officers, of a composure so complete that some among the staff had taken to wondering, in whispers never quite low enough, whether he felt anything at all.
You had dismissed most of it.
Men were often made into legends when silence left room for invention.
And yet-
He was younger than you had imagined, though nothing in his bearing suggested youth. He crossed the hall with the economy of movement of a man who had long ago decided that no step ought to be wasted, and when he reached the dais, he went down on one knee before you with a precision so absolute it seemed less an act of courtesy than one of architecture.
“Your Highness.”
His voice was low, unhurried, entirely without inflection.
“I am assigned to your protection, by order of the King.”
You looked down at the crown of his bowed head and felt, absurdly, as though you were the one being inspected.
“You may rise,” you said, because it seemed expected of you, and because you found you did not much like the sight of him kneeling, though you could not, at that moment, have said why.
He rose.
And here you waited, as one does, instinctively, upon meeting a stranger, for some small softening of the face, some token gesture of goodwill, however practiced or false. A smile, perhaps. The sort every courtier in that castle had perfected before the age of ten, the sort your father himself had just shown you, brief as it had been.
None came.
His expression remained as it had been throughout: composed, watchful, entirely unreadable, his eyes meeting yours with a directness that was not quite insolence but came near enough to it that you felt your spine straighten of its own accord.
There was nothing cold in it, precisely.
It was simply closed.
In the manner of a house with all its shutters drawn, giving no indication of what might be occurring within.
“I have not asked for a guard,” you said, rather more sharply than courtesy strictly permitted, your father’s words still fresh enough to sting rather than soothe.
“No, Your Highness.”
Nothing in his tone suggested this troubled him in the least.
“I was not given to understand that you had.”
You waited.
For explanation. For apology. For anything that might make him less immovable.
He offered nothing.
He simply stood, some careful distance away, with the patient stillness of a man entirely accustomed to being unwanted in rooms he was nonetheless required to occupy.
It was, you would later admit, the stillness that unsettled you most.
“You understand the duty,” your father said to him, “is not a temporary one. Wherever the princess goes, you go. Whatever is asked of her, you are to anticipate before it is asked of you. I will have no repeat of past incidents.”
“Understood, Your Majesty.”
If the weight of such a charge affected him at all, nothing in his bearing betrayed it.
“I will not fail in it.”
There was no boast in the words. Only certainty.
“See that you don’t,” your father said, though not unkindly, and returned his attention to the parchment before him with the satisfied air of a man who considered the matter closed.
“Very well,” you said at last, for there seemed nothing else to say. “We shall see how long you last.”
Something flickered, very briefly, at the corner of his mouth. You were quite certain it was not a smile. But it was gone before you could determine what it had been.
“Yes, Your Highness,” he said.
He took up his position by the door, as though he had occupied that exact spot for the whole of his life and intended to occupy it for the whole of what remained.
You did not look at him again before quitting the hall.
You told yourself this was indifference.
You did not, at that time, consider the possibility that it might instead be caution, for there was something in Sir Leon Kennedy’s presence that suggested not intrusion, nor even authority, but inevitability.
And inevitability, you had long suspected, was far more difficult to resist.
It did not take a fortnight before you began to suspect that Sir Leon Kennedy had taken the measure of your life with greater thoroughness than you yourself had ever troubled to attempt.
At first, it presented itself in such small and reasonable ways that to remark upon it would have seemed an indulgence of vanity.
The mornings began, as they had always begun, with chapel, that small grey hour before the rest of the castle had fully woken, when even the servants moved more quietly, as though unwilling to disturb whatever fragile peace lingered between night and day. You knelt upon the cold stone and offered up whatever prayers seemed owed that particular morning, sometimes with sincerity, sometimes with habit, and sometimes, with the vague hope that the act itself might suffice in place of belief.
You had expected him to wait without, as guards customarily did, the business of God being no concern of swordsmen.
Instead, he took up a position just inside the door.
Not obtrusive, nor even particularly noticeable, but placed with such deliberate unobtrusiveness that he might, at a careless glance, have been mistaken for part of the wall itself. He did not shift, did not sigh, did not betray the smallest sign of impatience. He existed in that quiet space with the same composed stillness he brought to every other, and in time you found that his presence did not intrude upon your prayers so much as disappear within them.
More mornings than not, you forgot he was there at all.
Until you rose.
And found him already risen before you.
As though he had anticipated, not merely the conclusion of your prayers, but the precise moment at which you would abandon them.
“You needn’t come in,” you told him, on the third such morning, not unkindly. “It is hardly the sort of place that wants guarding.”
“It is the sort of place a man might wait outside a window,” he said, “and I have known worse men to attempt worse things in better-guarded rooms.”
He did not say this as though it troubled him. He said it as a man reporting weather, inevitable, impersonal, not worth remarking upon beyond acknowledgment.
“I will remain, Your Highness, if it is permitted.”
It was permitted.
You found, in time, that nearly everything he proposed was the sort of thing one permitted without quite recalling having agreed to it.
From the chapel you proceeded to the council chamber, where you were not yet entitled to speak but were entitled, by your father’s long-standing insistence, to observe, that you might learn, he said, the shape of governance before you were ever asked to wear it.
Leon took his place along the chamber wall among the other guards, indistinguishable from them in posture and dress, and yet not, somehow, indistinguishable at all.
There were other men there, older, broader, louder in their breathing, more visibly alert in the manner of men who wished it to be known they were so. And yet your eye, against your own intention, did not seek them.
It sought him.
You told yourself this was merely because he was new.
It did not, you found, cease with familiarity.
When some lord’s argument grew sufficiently tedious as to test the limits of your composure, when the language of treaties and tariffs began to blur into something dangerously resembling sleep, your gaze would drift, quite without instruction, toward that particular corner of the wall.
And find his already upon you.
Not with curiosity. Not with reproach. Not even, precisely, with concern.
But with the quiet attentiveness of a man who had marked, perhaps, how long you might be relied upon to hold your tongue before the holding became a visible effort.
It was an observation so precise it bordered upon intrusion.
He never once, in all those mornings, looked away first.
The correspondence came after, in your private study, where the business of governance became less public and no less tiresome. Letters requiring your hand were answered; those that did not were passed along. It was solitary work, requiring more patience than you often possessed by that hour.
And yet,
You noticed, slowly, as one notices the shift in a season rather than the arrival of a storm, that the room was always prepared before you entered it.
The fire built, not too high, not wasteful, but sufficient to ease the particular chill that study held in the mornings. The window latched against the draft that troubled the left-hand side of the desk and no other. The ink refreshed. The chair placed at precisely the angle you preferred, though you had never, to your knowledge, articulated that preference aloud.
You had mentioned the draft exactly once, weeks prior, to no one in particular, in the manner of idle complaint that expects no remedy.
You had not mentioned it since.
You did not need to.
“Did you ask the steward to see to this?” you asked him once, gesturing vaguely at the latched window, the laid fire.
“No, Your Highness.”
“Then who-”
“I have hands,” he said.
It was not quite an answer.
And yet it was the only one you received.
You found yourself, against some inclination to press further, simply accepting it.
There was something in his manner that rendered further inquiry… unnecessary. Or perhaps futile.
The gardens, in the early afternoon, were where you took what little freedom your days permitted, a walk among the roses, ostensibly for air, though you suspected your father permitted it chiefly because it kept you from brooding indoors.
Leon walked some several paces behind you there, as was proper.
You came to notice that he never once allowed you to round a corner of hedge before he had already glanced beyond it. Nor permitted you to pause beside the fountain without some small, unhurried repositioning of himself that placed his back to whatever direction posed the greater risk.
You did not ask him how he had determined which direction that was.
You suspected, by then, that he simply knew, in the manner that some men know the hour by the slant of the light.
It was in the gardens, too, that he first revealed, though you could not afterward recall having told him, that you preferred the white roses to the red.
“You have not looked at the red ones in three days,” he said, when you paused, once more, beside the pale blooms.
“And that constitutes preference?” you asked.
“It constitutes pattern.”
“And pattern is enough?”
“For me,” he said.
You regarded him then, more directly than you had in some days.
“And my tea?” you asked, as though the question had only just occurred to you.
“Without sugar,” he said.
“You have seen me take it so?”
“No.”
You waited.
He added, after the smallest pause, “You do not finish it when it is prepared otherwise.”
There was no pride in the observation.
No suggestion that he expected praise for it.
Only the quiet certainty of a man who had noticed,and remembered.
Your studies followed, in the long afternoons,history, statecraft, the dry particulars of treaties signed generations before your birth, delivered by a tutor whose patience for distraction was, at best, theoretical.
Leon stood near the door through these hours as well.
You found, on the days your concentration faltered most badly, that some quiet word from him, offered low enough that the tutor did not hear it, had a curious way of returning your attention to the page.
“You answered that question correctly a fortnight ago, Your Highness,” he murmured once, as you faltered over a passage you had no wish to recall. “You have only forgotten that you know it.”
It was not encouragement, precisely.
He did not seem a man given to encouragement.
But it accomplished, somehow, what encouragement was meant to.
The charity audiences, last of all, taxed you more than any other duty of your day, the long line of petitioners, each with some grief or want too small for the council’s notice and too large to bear alone, each requiring of you a patience and a tenderness you did not always feel equal to summoning by that hour of the evening.
Leon never spoke during these audiences.
When some petitioner’s story ran longer than the hour allowed, or grew distressing enough to test your composure, he had a way of stepping forward.
Not to interrupt.
Never that.
Simply to be present at your shoulder.
A quiet, unspoken reminder that you were not entirely alone in the bearing of it.
It was not comfort.
It was something steadier than comfort.
By the second week, he required no instruction as to where you would be, nor when.
He arrived before you at the chapel door each dawn, and stood ready at your study each forenoon, and matched his pace to yours in the gardens without once being told the hour you preferred to walk them. He adjusted to you, not with the obsequiousness of a servant, nor the presumption of an equal, but with the careful, unwavering attention of a man to whom your movements had become, quite simply, the central fact of the world.
He had learned the whole architecture of your days.
Not from any account given him, for you had given him none, but from simple observation, patiently and silently accumulated, as a man learns a country he intends never to leave.
You found this, in those early weeks, faintly unsettling.
You did not yet understand that you would come, before very long, to find it something else entirely.
For there is a particular kind of loneliness in being known only in part, in being admired for what is seen, and overlooked for what is not.
And there is, perhaps, something far more dangerous in being known… completely.
Even when the man who knows you has never once smiled.
It was, you came to think, rather like attempting to draw water from a well whose depth you could not determine, every question lowered down into him returned, more often than not, with nothing attached to it at all.
And yet, the absence itself became its own kind of answer.
You had not set out, precisely, to know him.
It had begun, as idle curiosities often do, in one of those unclaimed hours of the afternoon when duty loosened its hold just enough to allow the mind to wander without quite daring to rest. Your tutor had been called away on some matter of greater urgency than your education, your correspondence sat finished before you, and the room, so recently occupied by ink and obligation, had settled into a quiet that felt almost… permissive.
Leon stood, as he always stood, some careful distance from your chair.
Not near enough to intrude. Not far enough to neglect.
His attention was fixed upon that middle space between yourself and the door, in that manner peculiar to men who have trained themselves never to be taken unawares, and who therefore learn to look not at what is, but at what might yet be.
“You are from the south,” you said.
It was not quite a question, for something in his vowels betrayed it, however carefully he had smoothed them.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
You waited.
Nothing further came.
There was, you began to suspect, an art to his silences.
“And your family,” you tried again, leaning back slightly in your chair as though the posture might lend your question greater casualness, “are they-”
“I have none living that concern Your Highness’s safety.”
The answer was delivered with the same composure he brought to all things, which was to say: it did not feel like an answer at all, but rather the careful redirection of one.
It did not escape your notice that he had not said they did not exist.
Only that they did not concern you.
You might have abandoned the attempt entirely, had you been a princess of less obstinate temperament.
But obstinacy had long been remarked upon as your particular fault, by every governess you had ever exhausted, by every tutor who had mistaken compliance for understanding, and you found that you were not yet prepared to surrender the field to a man who would not so much as grant you his county of birth.
“You needn’t treat every question as an interrogation, Sir Kennedy,” you said. “I am not attempting to extract state secrets. I am attempting to make conversation.”
Something passed behind his eyes then.
Not quite discomfort, for he did not seem a man easily discomfited, but something adjacent to it. The look, perhaps, of a man recalculating a distance he had thought already measured, and finding it… altered.
“I was not aware Your Highness required conversation of me,” he said. “I was given to understand my duty was protection.”
“Your duty,” you said, “is whatever I determine it to be, within reason, and I have determined that I would like to know something of the man who stands three paces behind me at every hour of my waking life.”
There was a pause then.
Not long. Not dramatic.
But deliberate.
He considered your words with the same gravity he seemed to bring to every decision, however small, as though each one might alter something essential if mishandled.
“There is little to know, Your Highness.”
You tilted your head slightly, studying him.
“I find that very difficult to believe.”
“Nonetheless,” he said, “it is so.”
You regarded him a moment longer, the set of his jaw, the careful neutrality he wore as other men wore armour, and wore, you suspected, for much the same reason.
It occurred to you, then, that his silence was not merely habit.
It was construction.
“Very well,” you said at last, with the air of one conceding a single battle while making no secret of her intentions toward the war. “Then I shall simply have to discover it for myself, by whatever means remain to me.”
“Your Highness is, of course, at liberty to attempt whatever she wishes.”
There was something in his voice then.
Not quite amusement, for he did not seem a man given to amusement either, but some faint cousin of it, something dry and fleeting and gone again before you could be certain you had heard it at all.
“I would only caution,” he added, “that Your Highness may find the effort poorly rewarded.”
“I have never yet been deterred by poor odds,” you said. “I do not intend to begin with you.”
He said nothing further to this.
But you noted, carefully, as one note the smallest shift in a horizon long studied, that the corner of his mouth had not quite returned to its customary stillness.
You did not abandon the campaign in the days that followed, though you altered its strategy somewhat, having learned that direct assault gained less ground than patient siege.
You took to asking him smaller things.
Not the great, unanswerable questions of family and history, but questions a man might answer without feeling himself undone by the answering.
“Do you prefer the rain,” you asked him once, walking the gardens beneath a sky that threatened it, “or its absence?”
He seemed, for a moment, faintly surprised to have been asked something so unburdened by consequence.
“Its absence,” he said. “Rain makes for poor visibility. A man cannot watch what he cannot see clearly.”
“That is not an answer about preference,” you said. “That is an answer about duty.”
“They are not always different things, Your Highness.”
“They are tonight,” you said. “For I am not asking the guard. I am asking the man.”
He was silent long enough that you thought he might not answer at all.
The wind stirred lightly through the hedges. Somewhere, a branch creaked. The first promise of rain lingered in the air without yet committing itself.
“I have not been asked to distinguish between the two in some time,” he said finally.
There was something in the admission, quiet, almost reluctant, that told you it had cost him more than the words themselves suggested.
You did not press him further.
“Then I shall ask you again, another day,” you said, “until you grow accustomed to the distinction.”
And you did.
You asked him again, and again, and again.
Small things. Harmless things. Questions that might pass, to any observer, for idle conversation, and yet were, to your mind, carefully placed stones in the slow construction of something not yet named.
Whether he preferred the company of dogs or horses.
What manner of meal he found least objectionable among the castle’s offerings.
Whether he had ever, in all his years of service, been so unfortunate as to find himself genuinely afraid.
To this last he did not answer at all, for a long moment.
You thought, then, that you had pressed too far, that you had reached, at last, the edge of what he would permit, and perhaps gone a step beyond it.
Quietly, without quite meeting your eye:
“Once or twice.”
You did not move.
“Will you tell me of it?”
“No.”
Not unkindly. Simply, finally. As a door closing.
It was not victory, precisely.
You understood enough of sieges, from your studies, to know that a single conversation rarely won them, nor a fortnight of conversations either. Walls built over years do not fall for want of a question well-placed.
But you had found, you thought, the first hairline cracks in what had seemed, on the morning of his arrival, an entirely seamless wall.
He still did not smile at you, not properly, not in the open, easy way the courtiers smiled, with nothing behind it but the wish to be liked.
But you had begun to notice the things that came near to it.
The held glance that lingered a fraction longer than duty required.
The almost-twitch at the corner of his mouth when you said something that amused you, swiftly suppressed but never quite swift enough.
The particular stillness that came over him when you asked, for the third or fourth time, some question he had no intention of answering, not the stillness of irritation, you had come to understand, but something closer to a man holding very carefully to a wall he was no longer entirely certain he wished to keep standing.
You did not yet know how long that wall would take to fall.
Nor what it would cost him when at least it did.
But you found, in those weeks, that you had stopped minding the wait at all.
Indeed. You had begun, quite without intending to, to look forward to it.
The argument began, as so many of your arguments with your father had begun of late, over a matter that ought to have required no argument at all. “I am not suggesting you rule imprudently,” your father said, with the particular tiredness of a man repeating himself for the third time within the same conversation, his hand resting flat upon the table as though to steady not the discussion but his patience. “I am suggesting you cannot rule alone. No queen has done so in this kingdom’s history, and I will not have you be the first merely to prove a point.” You felt the familiar spark of resistance rise within you at once, sharp and immediate, though it carried with it something heavier than defiance alone. “Then perhaps it is time,” you said, “that someone was the first.” The words left you more forcefully than you had intended, though you did not regret them, and as you spoke you became aware that you had risen from your chair without quite meaning to, as though the argument itself had drawn you upward into it.
“This is not a matter of pride.” “Is it not?” you replied, stepping closer to the table, your hands resting against its surface as though you required something solid to press against. “You speak of history as though it were scripture, Father, immovable and beyond question, but history is only what men have permitted to happen, and I do not see why I must be bound by what other women were never permitted to attempt.” Your father regarded you steadily, and though there was no anger in his expression, there was a firmness that had never yet been moved by argument alone. “Because the council will not follow a queen without a king beside her,” he said, “because the neighbouring houses will smell weakness in it, whatever weakness may or may not exist in truth, and because I have spent the whole of my reign securing this kingdom’s borders, and I will not see it unravelled in a single generation for the sake of your pride.” The word stung, not for its harshness but for its imprecision. “My pride,” you said, the syllables tightening despite your effort to keep them even, “or my judgment? For I begin to wonder, Father, whether you have ever once considered that I might be capable of the thing you insist I require a husband to accomplish for me.”
“I have considered it,” he said, and though the words were immediate, there was something in his tone that softened them, a note you might have recognised had you not already been too deep within the argument to hear it clearly. “I have considered it more than you know, but I am asked to weigh what I believe of you against what the realm will accept of you, and those are not always the same arithmetic.” “Then the realm’s arithmetic is wrong.” “Perhaps,” he allowed, though the concession did not alter the conclusion, “but it is the arithmetic I must govern by until the day it is yours instead to govern.” You felt then the frustration sharpens into something closer to anger, not at him alone but at the quiet inevitability of the position itself. “And on that day,” you said, your composure faltering not in weakness but in the strain of being perpetually almost believed, “will I be permitted to govern it as I see fit, or will there be some husband standing beside me even then, decided for me before I had so much as a say in the choosing?” Your father did not answer, and the absence of his answer carried more weight than any words he might have spoken, settling into the space between you with a finality that left no room for argument.
You did not remain to hear what might have followed it. You turned and left the chamber with as much dignity as the trembling in your hands permitted, the echo of your own footsteps too loud in the corridor beyond, as though the castle itself had taken note of your departure. By the time you reached your rooms, your anger had begun to cool into something heavier and more difficult to bear, and the familiarity of the space, the same walls, the same quiet, the same unchanging arrangement of objects that had witnessed every small concession of the past years, felt suddenly intolerable. It was not rest you required, nor solitude of the kind those rooms offered, and before the thought had fully formed, you had already turned toward the hidden passage behind the tapestry of your grandmother’s hunting party, descending the narrow stair with the certainty of long memory guiding your steps.
You did not stop until you reached the old garden wall at the castle’s eastern edge, where the stones had long ago given way to ivy and neglect, and where, as a child, you had sought refuge from expectations you had not yet been old enough to name. The night air was cold and clear, and the stillness of it might have been called peace, had it not seemed instead to magnify every thought you had hoped to escape. You stood there for some time, uncertain how long, before the sound of footsteps on the gravel reached you, unhurried and unmistakable even before you turned. “You ought not to be here alone,” Leon said, his voice carrying neither reprimand nor urgency, but something steadier, as though he were stating not a command but a fact. “I am aware,” you replied, not fully turning toward him. “I find I do not much care, tonight, what I ought to do.”
He did not insist that you return, nor did he move to guide you back toward the castle as you had half expected. Instead, he came to stand beside you at a respectful distance, his gaze directed outward over the darkened garden, and for a time he said nothing at all. The silence was not uncomfortable, though you could not have said why, and when he spoke again it was with the same quiet deliberation he brought to all things. “I heard the argument,” he said. “Through the chamber door. I was not eavesdropping. The walls in that hall are not what they ought to be.” You let out a quiet breath. “Then you heard my father tell me I cannot be trusted to govern without a husband beside me.” “I heard him say the realm would not accept it,” Leon replied. “Those are not the same thing.” The distinction was offered so plainly that it startled you, and you turned to look at him properly then, for it was the first time he had spoken on a matter so far beyond his duty.
“No,” he said, after a moment’s consideration, “they are not.” He spoke then more fully than you had ever heard him speak before, his words measured not by hesitation but by care. He told you what he had seen of you in the council chamber, of your memory, your judgment, your understanding of the men who surrounded your father and the decisions they struggled to shape, and he spoke without ornament or flattery, as a man stating what he believed to be true and nothing more. There was no performance in it, no attempt to comfort you for its own sake, and perhaps for that reason it reached you more deeply than comfort might have done. When he said at last that you did not require a husband to govern well, but only the chance to attempt it, the words seemed to settle into you with a weight that was not burden but steadiness.
“You have never said so much to me at once,” you said quietly when he had finished, and he inclined his head slightly, as though acknowledging a fact rather than a remark. When you asked him why he had chosen to speak now, he did not answer at once, but when he did it was with the same quiet honesty that had marked the rest. He told you that you had looked, upon leaving that chamber, like a woman who had been told her judgment did not signify, and that he found he could not stand by and allow you to believe that, whatever else his duty required of his silence. It was not a declaration, nor anything so easily named, but there was something within it that altered the air between you all the same.
You thanked him, though the words felt insufficient, and when he answered that he was assigned to your protection, the phrase did not carry the same distance it once had. There was something else within it now, something unspoken and perhaps unintended, that neither of you chose to examine too closely. You remained there together for some time, saying little more, until at least the sky began to pale toward morning, and when you returned to the castle, it was with the quiet understanding that something between you had shifted, not suddenly, nor dramatically, but in that gradual and irrevocable manner by which a single loosened stone may, in time, bring down an entire wall.
The council chamber, that particular morning, was fuller than you had grown accustomed to seeing it, the long table lined with lords who rarely troubled themselves with your father’s smaller business, now present in full ceremonial dress, their expressions arranged into the careful neutrality of men who believed themselves about to witness something of consequence and wished, above all, to be seen witnessing it properly. The air itself seemed altered by their presence, heavier, more deliberate, as though the room had been prepared not merely for discussion but for decision, and you understood, the moment you crossed its threshold, precisely what manner of consequence they anticipated.
“Three names have been put forward for Her Highness’s consideration,” your father said, once the customary formalities had been dispensed with, his tone composed, almost impersonal, as though he spoke not of his daughter but of a matter already half removed from the realm of feeling. You felt the words settle over you with the particular weight of a sentence long anticipated and no less dreadful for having been expected. “Lord Aldric of the eastern provinces. The second son of the Duke of Verrow. And Prince Hael of the neighbouring kingdom, whose father has expressed considerable interest in the alliance such a match would secure.” You sat very still through the recitation of each man’s particular merits, their lands, their armies, their bloodlines, each quality weighed and discussed before the full council with a precision that would have done credit to any negotiation of trade or treaty, and you answered what questions were put to you with the composure your years of training had instilled, though you were aware, beneath that composure, of a hollowing sensation that had opened within you the moment the first name had been spoken, as though something essential had been quietly removed and no one in that room had thought it necessary to remark upon its absence.
It was only later, in the privacy of the corridor beyond the chamber, that the composure began to slip, not all at once, but in that gradual and treacherous way by which control gives way first at its edges. “You needn’t decide tonight,” your father said, falling into step beside you, his voice gentler now, as though the conclusion of the formal proceedings permitted him some return to the role of father rather than king. “These matters are rarely settled in a single sitting.” “And yet they will be settled,” you said, your gaze fixed ahead, unwilling to look at him lest the steadiness you had maintained thus far abandon you entirely. “Whatever grace you extend me in the timing of it.” “They must be,” he replied, and though there was no harshness in the words, there was no yielding either. “You know this as well as I.” You did know it. You had known it, in truth, your whole life, had understood since girlhood that your hand would one day be weighed and traded as every princess’s hand was weighed and traded, for the good of borders and bloodlines that had nothing whatsoever to do with your own preference in the matter, but knowing a thing in the abstract, you discovered, was a very different burden from hearing it spoken aloud, in a chamber full of lords, as though it were already as good as decided.
You did not see Leon until you had nearly reached your own chambers, where he fell into step beside you as he always did, silent, precise, unannounced, and yet you noticed, that evening, that his silence held a different quality than its usual stillness. It was not the absence of speech alone, but the presence of something held back, something contained with effort rather than simply unspoken, and it altered the air between you in a way you could not immediately name. “You heard,” you said, for there seemed little purpose in pretending otherwise. “I was present, Your Highness,” he replied, his voice even, too even, you thought, the particular evenness of a man exercising care not merely in what he said, but in how much of what he felt might be allowed to reach his tone. “I could hardly have failed to hear.” “And what do you make of it?” you asked, turning the question upon him more directly than you might once have done.
He did not answer at once, and the hesitation, brief though it was, struck you more sharply than any immediate refusal might have done. You had grown accustomed, in the weeks since the night at the garden wall, to a certain ease that had crept, almost unnoticed, into the spaces between you, a quiet allowance of small truths and smaller observations that had made his company something less rigid than it had been at the outset, but that ease seemed, in this moment, to have withdrawn again, leaving behind something more guarded in its place. “It is not my place to make anything of it,” he said at last. “You said as much to me once before,” you replied, “and then told me precisely what you made of it regardless. I would ask the same honesty of you now.” At that, something in his jaw tightened, the small movement visible despite the discipline he applied to every other part of himself, and you understood, with a clarity that unsettled you, that whatever answer he held was not one he found easy to give.
“Lord Aldric is reputed a hard man with his tenants,” he said at length, selecting, you understood at once, the safest path available to him. “The Duke’s son is young yet and untested. The Prince-” He stopped there, the unfinished thought hanging between you with more weight than any completed sentence. “The Prince?” you prompted, more softly now. “I have heard nothing ill of him,” Leon said, and the careful flatness of the admission told you that it cost him more to say than any criticism would have done. “Which is, perhaps, the worst that can be said against him, for a man with nothing ill said of him is usually a man no one has yet troubled to look at closely.” You almost smiled, despite the heaviness sitting in your chest, for there was something so distinctly him in the observation, dry, precise, and edged with a truth he did not quite permit himself to state outright. “That is hardly a fair accusation to level against a stranger.” “No,” he agreed, “it is not.”
You walked some distance in silence after that, the torches along the corridor casting long shadows that shifted with each step, and you found yourself, against your better judgment, unwilling to let the matter rest entirely where it lay. “You told me once,” you said, “that I did not require a husband to govern well. Did you mean it?” “I meant it,” he said, without hesitation, the answer immediate in a way none of his others had been that evening. “Then why,” you asked, more quietly now, “does no one else appear to believe it?” He did not answer at once, and when he did, his voice had changed, lowered not in volume but in restraint, as though something within it pressed closer to the surface than he was accustomed to allowing.
“Because it is easier,” he said, “for men who have never had to prove themselves equal to anything to believe that no woman could be equal to everything.” He continued then, more fully than you had expected, his words gathering not speed but weight as he spoke, each one set with care and yet carrying more feeling than he had ever permitted himself before. He spoke of what he had seen of you in the council chamber, of your patience, your memory, your understanding of the men around you and the decisions they struggled to make, and there was no flattery in it, no attempt to soften or embellish what he said, only the steady certainty of a man stating what he knew to be true. “You do not require Lord Aldric, nor the Duke’s son, nor any prince of any neighbouring kingdom to tell you how a realm ought to be governed,” he said at last. “You require only that the men deciding your future might, for once, trust the judgment they have spent three years watching you exercise.”
You stopped walking entirely, the force of his words arresting you more effectively than any command might have done, and he halted beside you, seeming, in the silence that followed, faintly aware of the distance he had stepped beyond his usual restraint. “Forgive me, Your Highness,” he said, the careful evenness returning to his voice as though he were drawing some loosened part of himself back into place. “That was not mine to say.” “I asked you to say it,” you replied, and found, to your own surprise, that the words came not in irritation but in something closer to gratitude. “You asked my opinion of the suitors,” he said. “Not a sermon on the injustice of your circumstance.” “I am glad you offered the sermon regardless,” you said, and you meant it.
He did not answer, and the silence that followed was not the easy quiet you had come to know, but something heavier, as though the words that had been spoken could not easily be set aside again. You noticed, as you resumed your walk toward your chambers, that his hand, which usually rested easy near the hilt of his sword, had drawn slightly inward, the fingers curling into something nearer a fist before slowly, almost reluctantly, loosening again. You did not understand, that evening, the full shape of what troubled him, nor the extent to which the conversation had unsettled something he had long kept firmly in place. You understood only that something in him had strained against whatever wall he maintained so carefully, and that the strain, however brief, had not gone unnoticed by you, even if its cause remained, for the moment, just beyond your reach.
You would understand it soon enough, and with that understanding would come a clarity neither of you had yet begun to reckon with. Still, as you reached your chamber door and turned to dismiss him for the night, you found that the weight in your chest had shifted, not lessened, but altered in its nature, as though it had been joined by something else entirely, something quieter, steadier, and perhaps, in its own way, far more dangerous.
The news arrived before dawn, carried by a rider whose horse had been ridden nearly to ruin in the carrying of it, the animal lathered and trembling beneath him as though it understood, as keenly as its master, the urgency of what had been borne upon its back. A border garrison overrun in the night, the eastern villages exposed, and every able commander of the King’s guard summoned to ride within the hour, these were the words that passed from mouth to mouth before the sun had yet risen fully above the horizon, and though none had been spoken to you directly, you felt their weight all the same, settling into the fabric of the castle with a swiftness that permitted no ignorance.
You learned of it not from your father, who was already closeted with his war council before you had risen, but from the unmistakable sound of armour being readied in the courtyard below your window, the sharp, metallic rhythm of it carrying upward through the cold morning air. It was a sound you had heard all your life without particular thought, a necessary accompaniment to a kingdom maintained by steel as much as by law, and yet that morning it struck you differently, each fastening and adjustment echoing with a significance you had never before been required to consider. You found, with a clarity that unsettled you, that you dreaded it entirely.
You found Leon in the armoury, the low, stone-vaulted room beneath the eastern tower where the household guard kept their gear, and where you had never once before had cause to enter. The air within was cool and faintly metallic, the scent of oiled steel and leather lingering heavily, and for a moment you remained just inside the doorway, unobserved, watching him as he worked. He did not hear you at first, his attention fixed upon the buckles of his breastplate, his movements possessed of a brisk, economical efficiency that told you this was not the first such morning of his life, however much it might be the first you had witnessed. There was nothing hurried in his actions, and yet there was no wasted motion either, every fastening completed with the certainty of long practice, as though the act itself required no thought beyond the execution of it.
“You are to ride within the hour,” you said at last, and he turned, and something flickered across his face at the sight of you there- surprise, you thought, and beneath it something else you could not immediately name, gone again before you could fix upon it. “Your Highness ought not to be here,” he said, though he did not ask you to leave, his voice steady despite the interruption. “The armoury is no place for-” “I am aware of what the armoury is no place for,” you said, crossing the space between you with more determination than grace. “I find I do not much care this morning, either.” He held your gaze for a moment, as though weighing whether to press the argument further, and then, with a small inclination of his head that served as both acknowledgment and surrender, returned to the work of his buckles.
You found yourself, without quite deciding to, stepping closer still. “Allow me,” you said, reaching for the strap at his shoulder that sat slightly askew beneath his hand, his attention divided between the fastening and whatever protest he had half prepared. “Your Highness need not-” “I am aware of what I need not do,” you replied, echoing his own words back to him, and for the briefest instant something shifted in his expression, a near-shadow of that almost-smile you had come to recognise, though it faded as quickly as it had appeared. He let you finish the strap. He did not protest further.
You worked in silence for some moments, fastening what remained to be fastened, your hands steadier than you felt entirely capable of, given the particular tightness that had settled in your chest since the courtyard’s first clamour had woken you. It was strange, you thought, to see him thus prepared, not merely as the man who stood quietly at doorways and walked some careful pace behind you through gardens, but as what he had always been beneath that quieter duty: a soldier, a man who had ridden to wars before you had ever known his name, and would ride to this one whether you wished it or not. The knowledge of it seemed, suddenly, intolerably real.
“You will be careful,” you said at last, when the final buckle had been secured, and there remained nothing further to occupy your hands. “I am always careful, Your Highness.” “You will be more careful than usual,” you said, meeting his gaze directly, “on my particular instruction.” Something in his expression gentled then, the careful soldier’s composure giving way, if only for a moment, to something softer beneath it. “I will return,” he said. “You need not fear otherwise.” “I am not certain that is a promise within your power to make.” “No,” he admitted, “it is not. But I intend to keep it regardless.”
You looked up at him then, and found him already looking at you with an intensity that, on any other morning, you might have called him to account for, but the morning was not an ordinary one, and you found you had no wish to call him to account for anything at all. “Why must it be you?” you asked, more quietly now. “Surely my father has other commanders equal to the task.” “He does,” Leon said. “But I am assigned to your protection, Your Highness, and your protection does not end at the kingdom’s borders. If the eastern villages fall, the threat does not remain in the east. I would rather meet it there than wait for it to arrive at your door.” “That is not what I asked.” He fell silent then, his hands stilling at his side, and when he spoke again it was with a weight that settled differently than anything he had said before. “I am assigned to only you, Princess,” he said, low, and there was something in the saying of it that no longer resembled the recitation of duty you had once heard in those words, but something nearer to a vow, offered without quite intending it. “Wherever the danger lies that threatens you, that is where I am required to be. Tonight, that danger lies east.”
You did not trust yourself to answer this immediately. The horn sounded in the courtyard below before you were required to. “I must go,” he said. “I know.” He held your gaze a moment longer than duty strictly required, and then, with a final incline of his head that was not quite a bow and not quite anything else you had a name for, he turned and was gone from the armoury before you had gathered yourself enough to say whatever it was you had wished, in that final moment, to say. You did not know, watching from your window as the company rode out beneath a sky only just beginning to lighten, what that unsaid thing had been. You knew only that its absence sat in your chest like a stone, and did not lift for many days after.
The days that followed were the longest you could recall living through. You attended your duties as you always attended them, chapel, council, correspondence, the gardens you no longer walked with any particular pleasure, for every guard who now flanked you in Leon’s stead was competent, and courteous, and entirely unable to fill the particular silence his absence had left behind. You found yourself listening, at every hour, for news from the east, and receiving, for the better part of a week, nothing more substantial than rumour, a skirmish here, a garrison reclaimed there, nothing that named the men involved nor confirmed which among them yet lived. You did not sleep well, those nights, and told yourself this was concern of a general nature, the natural worry any sovereign’s daughter might feel for soldiers riding to defend her kingdom’s borders, though you suspected, even then, that the explanation did not bear the weight you placed upon it.
It was on the eighth day that the company returned, dust-worn and diminished in number, and you were standing in the courtyard before you had entirely decided to go there, drawn by some instinct stronger than reason, your eyes moving across the returning riders with a desperation you made no particular effort to disguise. The gates had scarcely finished opening when the first of them passed beneath the arch, their banners dulled with road-dust, their armour marked with the quiet evidence of use, and there was, even before you began to count, a wrongness to their number that settled low and heavy in your chest. They rode not as men returning in triumph, nor even in simple order, but in that particular subdued formation that spoke of losses acknowledged but not yet named, their silence more telling than any shouted report might have been.
You searched for him without admitting, even to yourself, that it was him you searched for, your gaze moving from face to face with increasing urgency as each unfamiliar figure resolved itself into someone else entirely. It was only when your attention reached the rear of the company that you found him at last, upright in his saddle, his posture as composed as it had ever been, and your relief at the sight of him was so immediate and so complete that it seemed, for a moment, to rob you of breath entirely. He had returned. Whatever else had been lost, he had returned.
It was a moment before the rest of it followed.
The dark stain along his side. The way he held himself too carefully, as though each movement had been measured in advance and approved only with reluctance. The pallor beneath the dust and sweat of the road, visible even at that distance once you knew to look for it. You felt the relief shift within you, not vanish, but alter, sharpen into something far less steady.
“Leon-”
Whatever composure you had carried through eight days of careful waiting abandoned you entirely in that moment. You did not recall crossing the courtyard, only that you were suddenly there, moving past startled attendants and guards who did not dare to restrain you, the sound of your own footsteps loud against the stone, your attention fixed entirely upon the one figure who seemed, even now, determined to stand as though nothing at all were amiss.
He dismounted as you reached him, though not with his usual ease, and you saw, in the brief hesitation as his boots met the ground, the exact moment at which his body failed to obey him without question. His knees did not quite give way, but they considered it, and that was enough.
“You are wounded,” you said, your hands finding him without thought, at his arm, his shoulder, anywhere that might steady him, though you were not entirely certain whether it was he or you who required the steadiness more. Your voice, despite your effort, did not hold. “Why did no rider come ahead to say so?”
“It is not so grave as it appears, Your Highness,” he replied, and even now he attempted the same careful composure he always wore, though it sat rather more poorly upon him than it ever had before, the words shaped by habit rather than strength. There was a tightness to his breath that betrayed him more surely than any outward sign.
“It is grave enough that you can barely stand,” you said, your grip tightening before you could think to moderate it. “Do not attempt to manage me, Leon Kennedy. Not tonight.”
It was only later that you would realise it was the first time you had spoken his name without title, but in that moment, the distinction did not occur to you at all. He seemed to register it, nonetheless, something flickering across his face, brief and unguarded, as though the sound of it had reached him somewhere beyond exhaustion, before the effort of remaining upright reclaimed his attention, and he said nothing to correct you.
“Come,” you said, more quietly now, though the urgency had not lessened. “You will not walk there alone.”
“I am capable-”
“You are not,” you said, and there was something in your tone that did not invite argument. “Not today.”
He did not argue further.
You saw him to the physician’s rooms yourself, dismissing with a look any attendant who attempted to relieve you of the duty, your hand remaining at his arm as though it had forgotten how to release him, guiding rather than supporting, though you felt, more than once along the way, the subtle shift of his weight toward you when his strength wavered. He bore it in silence, as he bore all things, but you did not mistake the effort it cost him.
The hour that followed stretched longer than any you had lived through in the preceding eight days. You remained beside him as the physician worked, the wound laid bare, cleaned, and stitched with a precision that admitted no haste, though you would have hastened it if you could. You did not look away, though there were moments you thought you might, your hand finding his and holding fast to it, not as a courtesy but as something nearer necessity. You could not afterward have said which of you had reached for the other first. You knew only that once found, neither of you let go.
He did not cry out, not once, though there were moments when his grip tightened around yours in a way that spoke plainly enough of what the silence concealed, and you felt each of those moments as though they had been inflicted upon you in equal measure. The room smelled faintly of iron and tinctures, the low murmur of the physician’s instructions filling the spaces where neither of you spoke, and still you remained, unwilling to leave even for a moment, as though your absence might undo something the physician’s skill could not mend.
When at last it was finished, when the bandages had been secured, and the physician had withdrawn with assurances you only half heard, the room settled into a quiet that felt, after the long hour, almost unreal.
He did not release your hand.
“You ought not to have come,” he said at last, his voice roughened by exhaustion and the strain of holding himself together through more than he would ever willingly admit. “A princess in a physician’s room, at a guard’s side. It will be remarked upon.”
“Let it be remarked upon,” you said, and found that you meant it entirely. “I find I have very little care left, tonight, for what is remarked upon and what is not.”
Something in his expression shifted at that, not quite a smile, not quite anything so easily named, but something that acknowledged, if only for a moment, the shared abandonment of whatever rules had governed you both before this day.
He was quiet a moment, his gaze resting not upon the room but upon you, with an openness that would not have been permitted him under any other circumstance.
“I thought of you,” he said quietly, the words emerging not with hesitation, but with the inevitability of something that had been held back too long to be contained any longer. “More than I ought to have, in the east. A soldier who thinks of anything beyond the battle before him endangers himself, and those beside him. I have known this all my life.” His fingers tightened, faintly, around yours. “And yet I found, each night, that I could not keep myself from it.”
You did not interrupt him. You did not trust yourself to.
“I am not telling you this to burden you with it,” he continued, though there was something in his voice that suggested the burden had already been shared, whether he intended it or not. “Only that I came nearer to not returning than I have allowed the physician to report, and I find I cannot account, any longer, for keeping every true thing from you simply because it is what duty requires.”
The candle beside the bed guttered faintly, its light unsteady, and in that small, shifting glow the distance that had existed between you since the morning of his arrival seemed, at last, to falter.
“I am glad,” you said at last, softly, “that you did not keep it from me tonight.”
He did not answer, not in words. But his hand tightened, very slightly, around yours, and you understood, sitting there in the low, unsteady candlelight, that whatever wall had stood between you on the morning of his arrival had, in that moment, been brought very near to its end.
What remained of it, you thought, would not stand much longer at all.
He had been a fortnight recovering, and a fortnight, you had observed with some private despair, was apparently sufficient time for a man to rebuild every wall he had allowed to fall in a physician’s candlelit room. The slow hours you had spent at his bedside, the quiet confessions drawn from him by exhaustion and pain, the unguarded way in which his hand had remained in yours as though it had forgotten entirely the careful discipline that governed every other aspect of him, might have been imagined, so thoroughly had he resumed the composure that had defined him before the east. He returned to his duties the moment the wound permitted it, and resumed alongside them the measured distance, the unfailing propriety, the particular stillness that gave away nothing of whatever he had said to you that night, nor whatever you had revealed in return by the simple act of remaining. You did not entirely blame him for it, for you understood, better perhaps than he credited you for understanding, that a man who has said too much in a moment of weakness will spend a great while afterward attempting to restore himself through silence alone, but understanding it did not prevent you from resenting it, nor from finding yourself, a fortnight on, rather determined to see that unguarded man again.
“I should like to ride this morning,” you informed him, on a day bright enough to render the request entirely reasonable, though the intention behind it was anything but casual, “and I should like to ride without the whole of the household guard trailing behind me as though I were a parcel requiring delivery.” “Your Highness’s safety requires-” “Your Highness’s safety,” you interrupted, with a firmness that permitted little room for negotiation, “requires precisely one capable swordsman, which I am reliably informed you remain, wound notwithstanding. The rest may remain behind and trouble themselves with whatever else guards trouble themselves with in my absence.” He began, as you knew he would, to object on grounds of propriety, and you fixed him with a look that had, over the course of three years, proven more effective than argument in silencing such objections. “One hour,” you said. “The eastern meadow. I will not be dissuaded, Leon, and I would rather you accompany me than discover, an hour hence, that I have gone without you.” He regarded you with an expression that suggested he understood perfectly well when a battle was already lost, and after a brief pause that served as his final protest, he inclined his head slightly. “One hour,” he said. “And Your Highness will remain within sight of the tree line.” “I make no promises,” you replied, already turning toward the stables, “but I shall consider the suggestion.”
The eastern meadow lay gold and open beneath a sky so clear it seemed almost a defiance of the grey that had hung over the castle for so much of that season, and you felt something within you loosen the moment your horse’s hooves left the confines of stone for the softness of open ground. Leon rode beside you with the same careful watchfulness he brought to every outing, his gaze moving not with the easy appreciation of the landscape but with the measured assessment of a man for whom every open space must first be considered for its dangers, and you found, after a fortnight of his restored composure, that you had very little patience left for it. “You are meant to be enjoying this,” you informed him, turning slightly in your saddle. “Not surveying it for threats.” “I am capable of doing both, Your Highness.” “I do not believe you are capable of the first at all,” you said, “which is precisely the difficulty I intend to remedy this morning.” Before he could inquire what remedy you had in mind, you had already urged your horse forward, the sudden freedom of speed drawing laughter from you before you had fully registered it, the sound carrying back across the meadow as the distance between you widened.
“Your Highness-” His voice followed, sharper now with something between alarm and reluctant amusement, and you heard the thunder of hooves behind you as he gave chase, closing the distance with an ease that told you he had been holding himself carefully in check all along. “You will have to catch me first,” you called back, the wind tugging loose strands of your hair free from their careful arrangement, “before you may scold me for it.” He did catch you, of course, his horse faster, his control surer, and you suspected that even now he was permitting you more advantage than strict ability required, but when he drew alongside you there was something in his expression that had not been there when you set out, something lighter, less guarded, as though the simple act of pursuit had unsettled the careful discipline he had spent the past fortnight rebuilding. “That was reckless,” he said, though the words carried far less censure than their meaning implied. “It was glorious,” you corrected, breathless, your laughter not yet fully spent. “Admit it, Leon. You have not ridden like that in a great while.” “I have not been permitted to,” he said, “given that my duties generally require me to remain upright and watchful, rather than racing a princess across an open meadow with no thought for what might lie beyond the tree line.” “Nothing lies beyond the tree line but more meadow,” you said, “and I have had quite enough of men who think only of what might go wrong. I should like, for one hour, the company of a man who remembers what it is to do something simply because it pleases him.”
Something in his expression shifted then, subtle but unmistakable, the rigidity in his shoulders easing by degrees as though he had, without quite intending to, permitted himself to set something down. “And what would please you this morning, Your Highness?” he asked, and there was, at last, a trace of something warmer in his voice. “This,” you said, gesturing lightly to the meadow, the sky, the absence of walls and watchful eyes. “This pleases me a great deal.” You did not allow him time to retreat again into formality, but set off at a slower pace, letting the horses wander as they pleased, and he followed beside you without protest, his attention no longer fixed so entirely upon the unseen dangers at the edges of the world but, at least in part, upon the moment itself.
It was near the far edge of the meadow, where the grass grew long beneath an old oak that had clearly stood longer than the castle itself, that you drew your horse to a halt and slipped from the saddle before he could assist you. “Your Highness ought not to dismount without-” “Leon,” you said, looking up at him with a steadiness that carried more intent than the words alone. “Come down. Just for a moment. No one is watching. No one will ever know.” He hesitated, and in that hesitation, you saw the full weight of the discipline he had imposed upon himself since his return, the instinct to refuse warring with something quieter but no less insistent, until at last he yielded, dismounting with a reluctant grace that suggested he had chosen, knowingly, to step beyond what he considered safe. You sat first, the grass soft beneath you, and when he remained standing a moment longer, you reached up without ceremony and caught at the sleeve of his arm. “Sit,” you said, “or I shall consider it a personal insult.”
“You are entirely insufferable, Your Highness.”
“And yet you remain,” you returned lightly, tilting your head back to look up at him where he stood over you beneath the oak. “One begins to suspect it is less duty than poor judgment that keeps you in my company.”
“My judgment,” he said, with that dry steadiness you had come to recognise as the closest thing he permitted himself to humour, “has kept you alive on more than one occasion. I would hesitate to condemn it so readily.”
“Ah, but that is precisely the difficulty,” you said, shifting slightly in the grass, propping yourself on one elbow. “You apply it to everything. There is not a single moment in which you allow yourself to forget it. Not even now.”
“Now,” he said, “is precisely when it is required.”
“There is no one here to require anything of you,” you said. “No court. No council. No father. Only me.” You paused, studying him with a deliberateness that was not entirely playful. “And I am asking you, for once, not to be reasonable.”
“That is a dangerous request,” he replied, though there was something in his voice, faint, reluctant, that suggested the danger was not entirely unwelcome.
“Then refuse it,” you said. “You are very good at refusing things.”
“I am good at refusing things that ought to be refused.”
“And this ought to be?”
He did not answer at once, and the hesitation alone was answer enough to encourage you. You shifted again, reaching without ceremony to tug at his sleeve. “Sit,” you said. “Or must I drag you down beside me like some unruly recruit?”
“Your Highness would find that more difficult than anticipated,” he said, though he did not step away.
“Would I?” You caught his sleeve more firmly and gave it a sharper pull. “Shall we test it?”
There was a moment in which he might still have refused. Instead, with a faint exhale that was not quite resignation and not quite amusement, he allowed himself to be drawn down, though not without upsetting your balance in return, and you found yourself shifting backward into the long grass.
“You see,” you said, breath catching slightly with the movement, “perfectly manageable.”
“You have unbalanced the situation,” he returned, settling beside you. “It is not the same thing.”
“It is precisely the same thing,” you said. “You are seated. You have not perished. I consider the matter resolved.”
“I was not aware it was in dispute.”
“It is always in dispute, with you.”
“Not everything,” he said quietly.
You glanced at him, but whatever followed that thought did not come, and the moment slipped instead into something lighter.
“You are too serious,” you said. “I do not believe you were always so.”
“You have no knowledge of what I was always.”
“I have three years’ worth of observation,” you replied. “It is quite sufficient.”
“And what judgment have you formed?”
“That you are the most relentlessly disciplined man I have ever known,” you said. “And that I should very much like to see what you might be if you were not.”
“I do not believe that is a condition I have ever experienced.”
“Then it is long overdue,” you said, and before he could anticipate it, you reached across and pushed lightly at his shoulder.
It was not enough to topple him, but it was enough to unsettle him, and in the movement, he caught at your wrist to steady himself, the momentum carrying both of you sideways into the long grass.
“You will regret that,” he said, though there was unmistakable laughter beneath the words now.
“I regret nothing,” you returned, already attempting to escape, rolling away with a breathless laugh that felt entirely unfamiliar and entirely necessary.
He followed without thought.
There was no calculation in it, no restraint, only instinct, swift and unguarded, and you found yourself caught again a moment later, his hand closing briefly around your wrist, not roughly but with a certainty that stilled you all the same. The laughter between you rose unchecked, unrestrained, the sound of it carrying across the quiet meadow in a way that felt almost foreign, as though neither of you had remembered, until now, that such a thing was permitted.
It faded slowly.
You turned your head, still catching your breath, and found him already looking at you.
Not the measured gaze he allowed himself in corridors and council chambers, but something open, unshielded, entirely without its usual restraint. His hair was disordered from the grass, the trace of laughter still softening his mouth, and for a single, fragile moment, there was nothing guarded left in him at all.
“Leon,” you said, very softly.
Something flickered across his face, clear, unmistakable. Want. It was there and gone again almost at once, overtaken by the instinct that governed him so completely, and you watched, with a sudden, sharp awareness, as that instinct reasserted itself.
The wall came back.
“We shall return,” he said, his voice lower now, the ease gone from it, his gaze breaking from yours as though it cost him something to do so. “Your Highness will be missed.”
The words landed harder than they ought to have.
For a moment, you said nothing. Then, with a small, almost imperceptible shift, the warmth that had filled the space between you cooled, replaced by something far less steady. You pushed yourself upright too quickly, brushing at your skirts with hands that were not quite as composed as you would have liked, unwilling, suddenly, sharply, to remain where he had just refused you.
“Of course,” you said, too lightly. “We should not neglect our duties.”
You did not look at him again.
You turned instead toward the horses, crossing the meadow with a speed that might have passed for purpose, though it was something nearer to retreat, the echo of his restraint settling somewhere uncomfortably beneath your ribs.
Behind you, he did not follow at once.
Leon remained where he was for a moment longer, still in the grass where you had been, as though the act of rising required more from him than he had yet gathered. Slowly, almost without conscious thought, his hand drifted outward, brushing lightly over the place where you had lain moments before. The grass bent beneath his touch, springing back again in its wake, and he stilled there, his fingers lingering just long enough to betray what the rest of him refused to.
Then, with a quiet breath that did not quite steady him, he closed his hand and rose.
By the time he reached you, his composure had returned.
You mounted without assistance. He did not offer it.
You rode back to the castle in silence, the easy laughter of the meadow replaced by something heavier, something neither of you named, and as the walls rose once more before you, closing in around that brief and unguarded hour, you understood, though you did not yet wish to, that something had shifted irrevocably between you.
And that neither of you, now, would be permitted to forget it.
It was Prince Hael, in the end, the choice your father had made with the particular practicality of a man weighing alliances rather than affections, and the choice, you suspected, that had been least objectionable to the council from the very first sitting, however carefully its presentation had been delayed to preserve some illusion of consideration. You learned of it formally on a morning indistinguishable, in every outward respect, from a hundred mornings that had preceded it, the same council chamber, the same gathered lords, the same careful ceremony that had attended the first reading of the suitors’ names some weeks before. Only this time there was no list of three, no pretence of deliberation still underway; there was only the single name, spoken with the particular finality of a decision already made and merely awaiting its public declaration. “The contracts have been drawn,” your father said before the full assembly, his tone measured, composed, entirely removed from the personal consequence of what he announced, “and will be signed within the fortnight. The wedding itself shall take place in the autumn, once the formalities between our two houses have been properly observed.” You sat very still through the whole of it, your hands folded in your lap with a composure you had spent your entire life cultivating for precisely such occasions, and you did not, you were reasonably certain, betray to the watching lords the hollowing sensation that spread through your chest at the sound of the words autumn and signed, spoken so plainly, as though they described nothing more consequential than the turning of a season.
You did not look toward the chamber wall, where Leon stood among the other guards in his customary place. You did not trust yourself to look at him at all, for you suspected, with a clarity that unsettled you, that if you did, the composure you had so carefully maintained would fracture in a way no training could conceal. It was only afterward, in the privacy of your own chambers, that the restraint you had carried through the announcement finally abandoned you, not in tears, for you had never been a woman much given to weeping, but in a stillness that felt heavier than any outward grief. You sat for a long while at your window, looking out over a garden you no longer had any particular desire to walk, and felt the full weight of what had been decided settle over you like a stone long anticipated and yet somehow still unbearable in its arrival. You thought of the meadow, of grass-stained laughter beneath an old oak tree, of a hand that had not released yours even under the sharp insistence of a physician’s needle, and of a voice, low and unguarded with exhaustion, confessing that it had thought of you more than it ought. You thought of all of it, and understood, with a clarity that offered no comfort whatsoever, that whatever had grown between you across three years of quiet observation and one reckless hour of honesty now possessed an ending already written for it, however unwritten its beginning had felt.
You did not see Leon again until the following evening, when he resumed his post outside your chamber door as though the world had not, in the space of a single morning, rearranged itself entirely around you both. He said nothing of the announcement when you first passed him in the corridor, and you said nothing of it either, for there seemed, in that first raw day, nothing adequate to the scale of what had been lost. But you noticed, because you had grown exceedingly skilled at noticing the smallest deviations in him, that something in his bearing had altered. He stood straighter, if such a thing were possible, his composure drawn tighter than you had seen it even on the morning of his arrival, as though he had taken every loosened stone of the wall between you and set each one, with great and deliberate care, back into its place, sealing it not merely against intrusion but against collapse.
It was you, in the end, who could not bear the silence. “You have said nothing,” you said, finding him at his post one evening when the castle had quieted for the night, the corridors empty save for the faint echo of your own footsteps. “Of the announcement.” “It is not my place to say anything of it, Your Highness.” His voice was even, too even, the particular evenness you had learned, by now, to recognize as effort rather than ease. “The matter is decided. My opinion of it changes nothing.” “It would change something to me,” you said, more softly, “to hear it.” He did not look at you. His gaze remained fixed somewhere beyond your shoulder, as though the act of meeting your eyes might undo whatever discipline he had summoned to contain himself. “Then you already have it,” he said at last, quietly. “You have had it since the meadow, Your Highness, if you were attending closely enough to hear it.”
“Leon—” “Prince Hael is, by every account, an honourable man,” he said, cutting across your words with a precision that felt less like interruption and more like defence, his tone gaining a brittleness that betrayed the strain beneath it. “He will treat you well. He will give the kingdom the alliance it requires, and give you, in time, whatever security a crown can offer a woman who has spent her whole life being told her judgment requires a husband’s confirmation before it may be trusted. It is, by every reasonable measure, a good match.” “You have not answered what I asked you.” “I have answered what I am able to answer,” he replied, and there, finally, you heard it, the fracture beneath the composure, the effort with which he held himself within its bounds. “What more would you have of me, Your Highness?”
“The truth,” you said, quietly, though the word carried more weight than any raised voice might have done. “As you gave it to me in the physician’s room. As you gave it to me beneath the oak tree, before you thought better of it.” Something in his face broke then, briefly and unguarded, not into anything so simple as tears, for he was not a man who permitted himself such expressions, but into a rawness you had glimpsed only twice before, and each time watched him retreat from it as swiftly as though it had burned him. “The truth,” he said, low, “is not mine to give you. Not now. Perhaps it was never mine to give you at all, and I was a fool to permit myself, even for an hour in a meadow, to forget it.” He drew a breath, and when he spoke again, the careful composure had reasserted itself, though it sat upon him now with a visible strain. “You are to be married, Your Highness. I am your guard. Whatever passed between us was a kindness I did not deserve, and one I have no right to ask you to remember once your wedding day has come.”
“And if I do not wish to forget it?” The question left you more quietly than you had intended, and yet it seemed to strike him harder than anything you had said before. For a moment he said nothing at all, and in that silence, you saw, with painful clarity, the full measure of the restraint he held upon himself. “Then I would ask,” he said at last, his voice nearly breaking despite every effort to contain it, “that you not tell me so. For I am not certain, tonight, how much more of your kindness I am able to bear without forgetting myself entirely.” He said nothing further after that. He returned his gaze to the corridor, his posture once more the careful, watchful stillness of a guard at his post, as though the conversation had not taken place at all, though you noticed, before you finally turned away, that his hand, resting near the hilt of his sword, did not entirely cease its trembling.
You did not sleep that night either. You lay awake long after the candles had burned down to nothing, staring into the dark and thinking of an autumn wedding already contracted. Of a man standing guard outside your door who loved you, there was no longer any use in denying it, exactly as much as he had no right to, and exactly as much as you could no longer pretend you did not wish him to. There seemed, in that quiet hour, no path forward that did not end in grief for one of you, or both, and though you did not yet know how soon the choice would be forced upon you, you understood, with a certainty that settled deep and immovable within you, that when it came, it would not be a choice either of you would be permitted to make freely, nor one either of you would escape unbroken.
You had not wanted, that evening, to take any particular care over your appearance. There seemed little purpose in it, a ball held in honour of an alliance you had not chosen, attended by a court that would spend the whole of the evening regarding you as something already settled, already spoken for, a treaty in silk rather than a woman within it, and yet your maid had insisted, with a quiet determination that was difficult to refuse, and you had not the heart, that evening, to deny her the small satisfaction of her work, and so you had stood through the long hour of lacing and pinning with a patience you did not entirely feel, your hands resting lightly against the table as she worked, your reflection taking shape in increments that felt increasingly distant from anything you recognised as your own. The gown, when it was finished, was finer than any you had worn in recent memory, pale as moonlight and worked through with silver thread that caught the candlelight at every turn, the skirts falling in a manner that restored, if only outwardly, the image the court expected of you, the image your father required, the image that had already been promised elsewhere, and you looked, you thought, precisely as you were meant to look, composed, adorned, and already given.
You opened your chamber door to find Leon waiting, as he always waited, in the corridor beyond, and you watched, with a small and private satisfaction you were not entirely proud of, his composure falter for the briefest of moments at the sight of you, the shift so slight that no one but you would have marked it, and yet unmistakable all the same—the faint widening of his eyes, the near-imperceptible pause in his breath, the momentary stilling of a man who had forgotten, for a single heartbeat, how to guard himself. He recovered almost at once, the careful stillness returning with the speed of long practice, but not quite quickly enough to conceal what you had seen, and the knowledge of it lingered between you, unspoken and dangerous. “Your Highness,” he said, his voice even but not untouched by effort. “You look—” He stopped, correcting himself, replacing whatever truth had risen unbidden with something safer. “The gown becomes you well.” “Thank you,” you said, and the smile that answered him came more easily than you expected, though it carried with it something more fragile than it once might have done. “Shall we?”
He offered his arm, and you took it, and he escorted you through the long corridors toward the ballroom with a correctness so absolute it might have convinced a stranger that nothing at all lay between you, though you felt the strain of it in every step, in the deliberate distance he maintained, in the way his arm remained steady beneath your hand without ever once shifting closer than necessary, as though the smallest deviation might betray something neither of you could afford. The ballroom itself was already ablaze with candlelight and conversation when you entered, the court gathered in its full splendour, the air thick with anticipation and satisfaction in equal measure, and you moved through it as required, accepting greetings, offering replies, stepping into dances with the composure that had been expected of you since childhood, though throughout it all you remained aware of him without ever needing to look.
He had taken his place against the far wall, as he always did, removed from the movement of the room, present only in the manner his duty required, and though he did not approach, did not speak, did not permit himself the smallest deviation from his role, you felt his attention as surely as if it had been placed upon your shoulder, steady and unrelenting. You danced with one lord, and then another, smiled when expected, spoke when required, and still your awareness of him did not waver, and when at last your eyes did find his across the crowded room, you saw not the composure he showed the rest of the court, but the effort beneath it, the quiet strain of a man holding himself in place by force alone, and it unsettled you more than you had prepared yourself to be unsettled.
It was he who left first.
You did not at first understand what you were seeing, only that the space he occupied against the wall was suddenly empty, that the careful stillness that had anchored your awareness of the room had vanished without warning, and it was only when you turned, subtly, too quickly to be entirely concealed, that you caught sight of him at the edge of the hall, moving toward the doors with a purpose too controlled to be mistaken for anything but deliberate retreat. He did not look back. He did not hesitate. He simply left.
You endured, perhaps, a handful of moments more, though you could not afterward have said what was said to you or what steps you completed, only that the absence of him altered something fundamental in your ability to remain where you were, and when the next opportunity presented itself, a shift in the music, a distraction among the gathered guests, you took it without hesitation, withdrawing from the floor with a composure that held only until you were beyond the immediate attention of the court, and then not at all. You did not think, not in any structured sense; you followed.
The corridors beyond the ballroom were cooler, quieter, the sound of music fading with each step, and you moved through them with a purpose that bordered on urgency, guided less by sight than by certainty, and when at last you reached the gardens, the night air meeting you with a sudden and welcome clarity, you slowed only enough to find him already there, standing some distance along the gravel path, his back to you, his posture rigid in a way that spoke less of duty than of restraint worn thin.
“You left,” you said, and your voice carried farther in the quiet than you had intended.
He turned then, not startled, he was never startled, but with the measured awareness of a man who had known, perhaps, that you would follow. “Your Highness ought not to be unescorted,” he said, though the words lacked any true reprimand, worn thin by whatever had driven him from the hall in the first place.
“I am not unescorted,” you replied, coming to stand before him. “You have only chosen to arrive first.”
Something in his expression shifted at that, subtle but unmistakable, and for a moment neither of you spoke, the faint music from within drifting out to meet the quiet of the garden, distant enough to feel almost unreal, and when you looked at him fully, without the interference of candlelight or courtly expectation, you saw more clearly than you had in the crowded hall the strain he had attempted to conceal, the effort it cost him to stand before you now with any semblance of composure at all.
“You never dance,” you said at last, your voice softer now, though no less steady.
“It is not my place,” he replied.
“There are a great many things you tell me are not your place,” you said, “and yet you say them to me regardless, when the night is dark enough and no one else is near to hear it.”
He did not deny it.
“What would Your Highness have of me tonight?” he asked, and there was something in the question, quiet, restrained, and yet unmistakably open, that made the answer feel inevitable.
“A dance,” you said. “Just one. No one will see us here.”
He hesitated, and you saw it plainly, the struggle between restraint and something far more dangerous, something that seemed, for a moment, to root him to the spot as though the simple act of reaching for you required more resolve than any battle he had faced, and you thought, just for that fleeting instant, that he might refuse you, might retreat once more behind the wall he had rebuilt so carefully, might deny both of you even this small defiance of the world that had already decided too much for you, but then, slowly, as though the motion were drawn from him against his better judgment, he extended his hand, and you took it, your fingers fitting against his with a familiarity that sent something unsteady through your chest before you could think to stop it, and he drew you closer, into a hold that felt less like something learned for courtly display and more like something instinctive, something remembered from a life neither of you had ever lived, his hand settling at your waist with a steadiness that betrayed none of the tension you could feel beneath it, your own coming to rest against him as though it had always known its place there, though such closeness would have been unthinkable within the crowded brightness of the hall.
He began to move with you, slowly at first, the rhythm uncertain only for a moment before it settled into something quiet and unspoken, guided less by the faint music drifting from the ballroom than by the measured awareness of each other’s presence, the muffled strains of strings and distant laughter softened by stone and distance until they seemed almost imagined, a ghost of sound rather than something truly heard, and yet it was enough, enough to carry the motion of it, enough to lend shape to the silence that stretched between you, broken only by the faint shift of gravel beneath your feet and the subtle cadence of shared breath.
The world beyond the garden seemed to fall away, reduced to the dim glow of candlelight spilling through tall windows and the occasional echo of voices that did not belong to you, and in its place there was only this, the steady warmth of his hand at your waist, the quiet strength of his other holding yours, the careful precision of each step taken as though he feared, not misstep, but the consequence of coming too close to something neither of you had yet named. You felt it in the way he held himself, in the slight tension that never fully left his shoulders, in the fraction of space he preserved even as he drew you nearer, as though he walked a narrow line between what he allowed himself and what he refused, and yet there were moments, brief, fleeting, impossible to mistake, when that distance faltered, when his hand tightened just slightly, when your steps aligned too perfectly, when the space between you ceased to exist at all.
You became aware, gradually, of the details that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, the warmth of him beneath your hand, the faint rise and fall of his breath, the way the fabric of his sleeve shifted beneath your fingers as he guided you through the turn, the brush of your skirts against his leg with each measured step, the quiet steadiness of his presence so close to you that it felt, for a moment, as though the years of distance and restraint had been something imagined rather than lived. The scent of him, clean, faintly metallic beneath the night air, lingered in the space between you, grounding and unsettling all at once, and you found yourself, without quite meaning to, drawing closer into it, as though proximity alone might answer something you had not yet dared to ask.
He did not speak, and neither did you, but the silence was not empty; it was full, charged with the weight of everything that had been held back, everything that had been said in fragments and half-admissions and careful restraint, and everything that remained suspended now between one breath and the next. His gaze, when it met yours, did not fall away at once as it so often did within the walls of the castle; instead it lingered, steady and searching, as though in the dimness of the garden he permitted himself, if only for this moment, to look without fear of being seen, and there was something in it, something unguarded, something that had nothing to do with duty, that made it suddenly difficult to remember how to breathe.
You turned with him again, slower now, the movement almost imperceptible, and the music, if it could still be called that, seemed to fade further into the distance, until it was no longer guiding you at all, until the dance existed only in the space between you, shaped by instinct and held together by the fragile, unspoken understanding that neither of you would allow it to last longer than it should. And still, for that suspended moment, it felt as though time itself had been drawn thin around you, stretched to accommodate something neither of you had been permitted before, something quiet and fleeting and dangerously close to everything you had both spent three years refusing to name.
And in that stillness, with his hand steady at your waist and yours resting against him, with the faint echo of music dissolving into the night and the warmth of him impossibly close, you understood, without needing to speak it, that this was not merely a dance, but a kind of surrender, small and temporary and already ending even as it unfolded, and that when it did end, as it must, you would carry the weight of it long after the music had faded entirely.
It was Leon who broke the silence, his voice low and rough, as though the words had long been waiting and had at last found their moment to be spoken. “Forgive me, Your Highness,” he said, “but I find I can no longer endure hearing that word spoken as though it ought to silence every misery.”
You stilled slightly in his hold, though he did not release you. “What word?”
“Forgive,” he said, his jaw tightening. “I have begged your forgiveness for so much, these past weeks, that I have nearly convinced myself the asking of it absolves me of whatever I have felt beneath it. It does not. I find, tonight, that it has never absolved me of anything at all.”
You did not interrupt him again. You did not trust yourself to.
“I have stood beside you for three years,” he continued, the words gathering strength not in haste but in inevitability, “and I have watched you surrender every wish, every freedom, every small happiness demanded of you in the name of duty, and each time you bore it with more grace than anyone has ever deserved of you.”
His hand remained at your waist, steady despite the intensity in his gaze as it fixed upon you without the usual restraint. “You are my princess. My sworn duty. I should sooner cut out my own heart than burden you with such feelings.” His voice lowered, almost breaking despite his effort to steady it. “Yet I find I cannot repent of them.”
The music drifted faintly on, indifferent to what had just been laid bare between you. You did not move. You did not dare to.
“But before I bury this forever,” he said, “you must allow me the selfishness of telling you that there has never been a moment, since the morning I first knelt before you, in which my heart did not belong entirely to you.”
The words settled over you with a weight that was both longed for and devastating, for here at last was the truth you had known, and here too was the certainty that it had come too late to alter anything at all.
“Leon,” you said, your voice unsteady despite yourself, “I am to be married within the season.” “I know it,” he said, and something in his expression seemed to fracture beneath the acknowledgement.
“I do not tell you this to alter what has been decided. I am not so foolish as to believe a guard’s confession could unmake a royal contract. I tell you only because I cannot stand before you, knowing what awaits you, and allow you to go to it believing yourself unloved.”
“I have never believed myself unloved,” you said softly. “Only loved by the one man I could never be permitted to have.” His hand tightened, very slightly. “Then we are agreed, at least, in our misery.” “It is poor comfort,” you said. “It is the only comfort I have to offer,” he replied.
You stood together a long moment in the dark, neither moving to resume the dance nor to part from it, and when you searched his face for something more, for defiance, for refusal, for anything that might change what lay ahead, you found instead only the quiet resignation of a man who had long since accepted that loving you and keeping you were never destined to be the same thing.
“What would you have me do?” you asked, very quietly. “If I were free to choose it.” “Nothing,” he said, though the word cost him, “for I have no right to ask anything of you at all.” His hand rose, slowly, to your cheek, the first touch that was not born of duty, and it undid you more completely than any word he had spoken. “But if I permitted myself one selfish wish,” he continued, “I would wish only that you remember, whatever comes after tonight, that you were loved. Truly, and entirely, by a man who had no right to love you, and loved you regardless.”
You closed your eyes, leaning into the warmth of his hand for one unguarded moment. “I will remember it,” you whispered. “I do not believe I shall ever forget it.” Neither of you spoke again for a long while, the music fading, the candles within the ballroom burning low, and still you remained there, his hand at your cheek and yours resting lightly against his chest where you could feel the unsteady rhythm of his heart. You did not kiss him, though the desire to do so lingered between you with an intensity that might have undone you both entirely, and some last fragment of restraint held you back, a shared understanding that to cross that final distance would only deepen the wound already set to follow.
So, you stood instead, in the quiet and the dark, allowing the silence to carry what neither of you could bring yourselves to say, and understood, even then, that it was the closest thing to happiness you would ever be permitted with him, and that it would have to be enough.
The chapel was full to its very last pew, the autumn light falling gold and unremarkable through the high windows, as though the day itself had not the slightest understanding of what it asked of you, or of the particular cost it would demand before it was done. There was something almost cruel in the ordinariness of it, the way the light touched the stone as it always had, the way the murmured voices of the assembled court rose and fell in quiet expectation, the way everything continued precisely as it must, untouched by the weight that pressed so heavily upon your chest. You had dressed that morning in a silence you had not requested but had not the heart to break, your maid’s hands steady and practiced at your back as she laced you into a gown finer than any you had ever worn, finer even than the one you had worn on the night of the ball, though you found you could take no particular pleasure in the noticing of it. You had thought, in the weeks since the garden, that you had already grieved the whole of what this day would cost you, had believed yourself prepared, in some small and careful way, for the inevitability of it. You understood, standing at last before the great doors with your father’s arm offered beside you, that you had grieved only a portion of it, and that the greater part remained, waiting for you now beyond the threshold.
The doors opened. The assembled court rose. And you began, with your father’s steady arm beneath your hand, the long walk toward the altar where Prince Hael waited, an honourable man by every account, his expression composed into the easy warmth of one who stood on the advantageous side of this union. You did not look for Leon. You had told yourself, in the quiet of your chambers that morning, that you would not, that some mercies were better left untested, some composures better left unbroken by the sight of him. But resolve proved itself fragile against instinct, and somewhere between one step and the next your gaze lifted of its own accord, drawn not by will but by certainty.
He was there. He would always be there, wherever duty placed him, however dearly that duty might cost. He stood as he had always stood, straight-backed, composed, his hand resting near the hilt of his sword in that same easy readiness you had watched through three years of mornings and evenings, of council chambers and quiet walks, of all the small, unremarkable hours in which something far from unremarkable had taken root between you. To any other eye in that crowded chapel, he was precisely what he appeared to be: a guard at his post, dutiful and unmoved. But you had spent too long learning to read what lay beneath that stillness to be deceived by it now, and what you saw there in that single unguarded moment very nearly undid you.
His eyes were bright, too bright, held there by sheer will, and his composure, though outwardly unchanged, seemed thinner somehow, stretched to its limit. He did not look away. Nor did you. For the span of perhaps three steps, three steps that felt longer than the entirety of the three years that had preceded them, you held each other’s gaze across that crowded chapel, and in that silence, there passed between you everything that had ever mattered, everything that had ever been spoken and everything that had not. I remember, you told him without sound. I have not forgotten. And something in his expression answered you with equal certainty. Nor have I. Nor shall I ever.
Then your father’s arm guided you onward, and the moment broke, dissolving back into the steady rhythm of ceremony, the priest’s voice, the witnesses, the vows you spoke with a composure that cost you more than any soul present would ever understand. You accepted the ring placed upon your hand by a man who would, in time, perhaps come to know some portion of your heart, though never, you understood even then, the whole of it. You did not look toward the chapel wall again. You did not trust yourself to.
The day passed as such days must, through ceremony and celebration and obligation, each moment unfolding with the same relentless inevitability as the one before it. You fulfilled every expectation placed upon you, spoke every required word, offered every measured smile, and yet it seemed to you, even as you moved through it all, that something essential had been left behind in that moment between one step and the next, something that could not be reclaimed by any vow or duty that followed.
You did not see him that evening. Nor the next.
At first, you told yourself it was nothing, that duty had placed him elsewhere, that the rhythms of the guard had shifted as they always did, but there was a quiet wrongness in the absence that you could not ignore, a hollow where something constant had always been. Days passed, and still he did not return to his post outside your chambers, nor to the quiet spaces he had once occupied at your side, and it was not until the end of that first week that you understood, not by being told but by the careful silence of those who might have told you, that his absence was no accident.
He had been reassigned. It was done, you realised, with the same quiet efficiency that had arranged your marriage, with the same unspoken understanding of what must be removed in order for everything else to remain undisturbed.
The corridors felt different after that, emptier in a way no number of attendants could remedy, and the gardens, when you walked them, seemed altered without him, as though the very shape of them had changed. Still, you carried on as you had always been taught to do, fulfilling every duty, speaking every word, offering every measured smile, and if anyone noticed the quietness that had settled over you, they were kind enough not to name it.
At night, when the castle stilled, you found yourself listening for footsteps that would never come, for the familiar presence that had once existed just beyond your door, and it was in those quiet hours that the truth of it settled most fully, that there would be no farewell, no final word, no last moment granted to you beyond the one you had already taken without knowing it would be the last.
He was gone. Not dead, not lost, not beyond reach in any physical sense and yet more absent than if he had been.
And yet, in sleep, when the world loosened its hold on duty, and the careful shape of your life no longer pressed so tightly around you, you found him again. Not as he had stood in that chapel, distant and restrained and already leaving you, but as he had been in the quiet moments stolen between obligation and truth: beneath the oak, laughter unguarded; in the garden, his hand warm at your waist; in the dim light of memory, looking at you as though the world beyond you did not exist at all.
In your dreams, he did not turn away. In your dreams, there was no chapel, no vows, no distance placed between you by duty or decree. He remained where he had always belonged, beside you, close enough that you could feel the steady rhythm of his breath, the quiet certainty of his presence, the unspoken promise of a life that might have been.
And always, just as the moment lingered long enough to feel real, long enough to almost convince you that it had not all been lost, you woke.
The castle returned. The silence returned. And he did not.
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