The chain around her neck was new, the old one had left green copper marks on her skin but she hadn’t changed it until it snapped; the two rings that were threaded onto the chain however, she had carried there for years. They were warm under her shirt or her armour from where they pressed against her sternum. She always carried two rings on a chain around her neck. Two rings for two men she’d never marry.
The first was a simple bronze band, cheap but lovingly carved with branches. Nelaross’s ring. She had not wanted to marry him, had not been impressed when she first met him, had thought him meek and unassuming. After watching him bleed out in front of her though, brave and defiant, she had thought that someday she could have fallen in love with him if she had just been given the chance. She had not, but she had picked the ring up from his cooling corpse and wiped the blood on her tattered dress. A reminder of a brave man she would never know.
The second was better quality than the first and it seemed to contain some amount of actual gold, though the percentage was likely low. It was Orzamarrian in style and if she thought back she could probably pinpoint the moment it was purchased despite not noticing at the time. She had found it nestled in her packs that first night at Vigil’s Keep, wrapped in a scrap of blue fabric, had held it with trembling fingers.
‘I wanted to marry you,’ Alistair had said the night of the landsmeet, he had not been crying but there was a wet edge to his voice that belied the effort it took him not to.
‘I wanted to marry you,’ he had said, but she had made him King instead. Had traded his and their future in hope of better treatment for her people. Had broken her own heart.
Her hands flit to the rings every now and then, to rub them through her clothes, or worry them with her fingers. She has never tried them on, she was not meant for marriage apparently, but as she watches Alistair make excuses to Bann Alfstana and slip away from the milling crowds, and as she herself disappears not too long after she thinks, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t meant for love.