Chapter 1: Chapter 1
The cold bit deeper than any blade Jared had ever felt. It was a clean, honest cold, the kind that numbed your fingers and clouded your breath in the courtyard’s silver-blue gloom. He preferred it to the heat inside—the cloying scent of perfumed nobles, the roar of forced laughter, the sticky weight of his dress uniform. From his post atop the western wall, he could see the feast hall’s brilliant windows, hear the muffled pulse of music and celebration. His wedding celebration.
His jaw tightened. A political alliance, they called it. A strengthening of the crown’s bond with its military lineage. To him, it was a sentence. His bride, the Princess Clara, was a specter in gilded rooms. A creature of rumor so vile they stuck in his throat: a cruel, manipulating witch who’d driven three previous betrothed to ruin, or to flight, simply for her amusement. He’d seen her maybe twice in a decade, a pale flash behind a lattice screen, a murmur in a corridor quickly hushed.
He moved along the battlement, his boots grinding on frost-stone. His duty was the perimeter, but his eyes kept drifting inward, to the private, walled garden below the princess’s apartments. A gilded cage for a vicious bird. It was empty, as always. Moonlight bled onto the pristine snow, making it glow an unreal blue. The marble statues—gods and heroes—looked like mourners frozen in time.
A flicker. There, by the far wall where the old kennels stood.
Not a guard. The shape was wrong. Too small, too still.
Jared was down the tower stairs in a breath, his hand on the hilt of his sword. He moved silently across the main yard, slipped through the servants’ gate into the walled garden. The air was different here. Stiller. The music from the hall was a distant, mocking hum.
He saw her.
A figure in a thin, white sleeping shift, barefoot in the snow. She was crouched by the broken door of a storage shed, once a kennel. Her back was to him, a curtain of dark hair hanging over her shoulders, trembling. Not from the cold, he realized. From effort.
He stepped closer, the snow muffling his steps. A low, pained whimper cut the air.
“Hush,” a voice whispered, ragged and soft. “Hush now, they’ll hear us.”
Jared stopped. He knew that voice. Commanding, yet layered with a fear so acute it was almost a scent. The Princess.
He saw her press a frost-reddened hand against the flank of a massive, wounded hound. The animal was bleeding from a gash on its leg, its breath pluming in frantic bursts. She’d torn a strip from the hem of her shift and was trying, with shaking, clumsy fingers, to staunch the flow.
Above them, a window burst open. Warm light and a wave of raucous laughter tumbled into the garden. A man’s voice, slurred with wine, shouted something obscene. The Crown Prince’s voice. The princess flinched as if struck, curling in on herself over the dog.
The motion broke Jared’s stillness. “Your Highness.”
She whirled, stumbling back into the shed wall. Her face was a shock. Not the haughty, painted mask from the court portraits. This was a girl, all huge, dark eyes and sharp cheekbones touched with the blush of frost. Fear lived in those eyes, a raw, animal terror that vanished almost instantly, smothered under a wave of icy contempt.
“Captain.” The word was a shard of glass. She straightened, trying to draw the tattered shift around her. It was futile. She was freezing. “You are intruding.”
“You are outside your chambers.” His own voice sounded flat. “And barefoot in the snow. With a wounded animal.”
“Your powers of observation are remarkable.” She turned back to the hound, dismissing him. Her hands, now that he saw them clearly, were a mess. Nails broken, skin scraped raw from the ice, fingertips waxy and pale. Frostbite.
A fresh peal of laughter echoed down. “Clara! You little ghoul, where are you hiding? Come toast your fiancé!” the Prince bellowed.
She went perfectly rigid. For a second, Jared saw the terror again, naked and consuming. Then she was just a princess again, cruel and remote.
“You should go, Captain. Your beloved Crown Prince calls for me. We wouldn’t want you to miss your own celebration.”
“The dog,” Jared said, not moving.
“What of it?”
“How did it get hurt?”
Her laugh was a short, bitter sound. “I stabbed it, of course. For amusement. It’s what I do, isn’t it?”
She was quoting the rumors. His rumors. The ones he’d half-believed. He looked at the dog. It licked her injured hand, a low whine in its throat. It wasn’t cowering from her. It was leaning into her touch.
“You’ll lose those fingers,” he said, nodding at her hand.
“A small price to pay.”
“For what?”
That seemed to stump her. She looked from the dog to her hand, then up at the blazing windows. Her defiance seemed to leach out into the cold air, leaving only a profound exhaustion. “For a moment of quiet,” she murmured, almost to herself.
Jared moved then. He shrugged out of his heavy wool cloak. Before she could protest, he draped it around her shoulders. The weight of it staggered her. It smelled of winter air and polished steel. He then knelt beside the hound, examining the gash. It was clean, deep. A blade wound.
“This needs stitching,” he said. “And you need a physician.”
“No physicians.” The command was immediate, sharp with panic. “No one. They’ll tell him. They’ll tell my brother.”
“The Prince did this?”
She didn’t answer. She pulled the cloak tighter, sinking into its warmth. “He was aiming for me. He’s… in his cups. The dog got in the way.” She said it so matter-of-factly, as if explaining a commonplace of the weather.
Jared felt the world tilt slightly on its axis. The rumors. The three broken engagements. The stories of her cruelty. He saw the high, barred windows of her apartments from the outside. He saw the untouched snow in this garden, a perfect prison yard. He saw her, just a girl, risking mutilation to comfort a dog no one else would miss.
“Why are you out here?” he asked, his voice quieter.
She looked at him, and the mask was gone, too tired to hold up. “Because the walls inside are closer. And at least out here, the air is real.” She glanced at his face, at the confusion and dawning horror he couldn’t quite hide. A sad, knowing smile touched her lips. “Don’t look so surprised, Captain. You’re marrying a monster, remember? It’s easier for everyone that way.”
From above, the music swelled. A toast was being called. Their toast.
Jared made a decision. It was reckless, possibly treasonous. He bent and, with careful hands, lifted the wounded hound. It was heavy, but it settled against his chest. He looked at the princess, this fragile, fierce creature shrouded in his cloak.
“Come with me,” he said.
“Where?” she whispered.
“Somewhere with walls that aren’t so close.”
He turned and walked toward the garden’s darkest corner, where a small, disused postern gate was hidden by overgrown ivy. He didn’t look back to see if she followed. He only listened.
A moment later, he heard the soft, desperate crunch of bare feet in snow, hurrying to catch up.
A moment later, he heard the soft, desperate crunch of bare feet in snow, hurrying to catch up.
He didn’t turn. He just shifted the dog’s weight in his arms and pushed through the curtain of dead ivy, the brittle vines snapping like old bones. The postern gate groaned on hinges that hadn’t tasted oil in years. Beyond it was not freedom, just another, darker part of the cage: a narrow alley between the palace wall and the old barracks, stacked with forgotten barrels and choked with shadows.
“In here,” he muttered, angling his body toward a low doorway half-buried in masonry.
It was an abandoned guard post, a single stone room smelling of dust, damp wool, and old smoke. He laid the dog gently on a rough-hewn bench that served as a bed, shrugging out of his formal jacket to bundle under the animal’s head. Only then did he turn.
She stood framed in the doorway, a ghost in his too-large cloak, her breath coming in quick, visible puffs. The moonlight caught the wild spark of confusion in her eyes. She was looking at him like he was a puzzle that might be a trap.
“You’ll bar the door,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
He slid the heavy iron bolt home. The thunk of it echoed in the small space. The world outside muted, but it didn’t disappear. The feast was a dull throb through the stone.
“Sit,” he said, nodding to a three-legged stool by a dead hearth. “Your hands.”
“The dog first.”
“The dog is stable. You are not.” He rummaged in a rusted cabinet, finding a dented canteen of water, relatively clean rags, and a small jar of medicinal salve—bitter-smelling stuff used for blade cuts. Standard kit. “Your brother will notice your absence.”
“He’s three bottles of port into the evening. He’ll notice nothing but his own wit until dawn.” She said it flatly, but she didn’t move from the doorway. “Why are you doing this?”
Jared paused, the jar cold in his hand. Why was he? Duty was a twisted path here. Protecting a royal included protecting her from her own family, it seemed. And she was, technically, his betrothed. The thought was still a foreign, uncomfortable weight.
“You’re bleeding on the floor,” he said finally.
She looked down. A thin smear of crimson from the dog’s wound marked the stones where she’d stood. A faint, almost hysterical laugh escaped her. “A terrible habit of mine.”
Slowly, as if approaching a skittish animal, she moved to the stool and sat. She laid her hands in her lap, palms up. The damage was worse in the steady light from the single, high window. The frostbite was a worrying blotch of white and angry red, the scrapes raw.
Jared pulled the stool closer and knelt. He took the canteen and poured water over a rag. “This will hurt.”
“I’m familiar with the concept.”
He began to clean the grime and blood from her skin. She didn’t flinch. Her stillness was more unnerving than any jerk of pain would have been. It was the stillness of someone who had learned that reaction invited more attention.
“You saw me,” she whispered, watching his hands work. “With the dog. You could have just… walked the other way. Reported me for wandering. It would have been easier.”
“Yes.”
“So?”
He dabbed the salve on the worst of the scrapes. Her skin was ice. “The Prince is a poor shot. But even a poor shot doesn’t miss by that wide a margin unless his target moves. The dog jumped in front of you.”
Her breathing hitched, just once. The only admission he’d get.
“You named him,” Jared stated, not looking up.
A long silence. The wind whistled through a crack in the wall.
“Finn,” she said, the word barely audible. “When he was a pup. He’d sneak into the garden through a hole in the masonry. I’d save scraps. No one else… no one else really looked at him. Or at me.”
He finished wrapping her left hand with a clean strip of rag, his movements methodical. He started on the right.
“Three betrothals,” he said, his voice low. “Lord Tellman fled the city. Lord Soren joined a monastery on the frontier. And General Valen’s son… renounced his title and joined a merchant crew.”
“You’ve done your research.”
“I was considering my own exits.”
That pulled a genuine, if watery, smile from her. “And what did your research conclude, Captain?”
He met her eyes then. They were endless, dark pools in the pale canvas of her face. “It concluded that Tellman was a coward in debt to the Crown Prince. Soren preferred scripture to women, and his family needed a royal connection to cover his proclivities. And Valen’s boy was always desperate for the sea. Their departures had nothing to do with you.”
Her composure cracked. A single tear escaped, tracing a clean line through the palace dust on her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. “And everything to do with my father’s need to bind restless houses to the crown with a worthless piece.” She glanced at their hands, his large and calloused, hers small and bandaged in his grasp. “You’re bound now, Captain. Do you feel restless?”
He tied off the bandage. He didn’t let go of her hand immediately. Her fingers were gradually warming.
“I feel,” he said carefully, “that I’ve been guarding the wrong walls.”
A shout echoed from the main courtyard, distant but sharp. A voice calling his name. The Chief Steward. His absence had been noted.
Clara’s face shut down again, the moment of vulnerability sealed behind a pane of glass. She pulled her hand back and stood, adjusting the cloak. “You should go. They’ll come looking for you soon. I’ll… I’ll stay with Finn.”
“You can’t stay here. It’s freezing.”
“I’m always freezing.” She walked to the bench, sitting on the floor beside the dog, her bandaged hand resting on its steady flank. “Thank you for the momentary mutiny, Sir Jared. It was almost thrilling.”
He knew a dismissal when he heard one. He moved to the door, sliding the bolt back. The sounds of the palace rushed in—laughter, clattering plates, the relentless festive drone.
He looked back. She was a silhouette against the grey stone, head bowed toward the animal, looking more like a sentinel guarding a tomb than a princess. His princess. The wrong walls.
“I’ll be on the western battlement until relief comes at dawn,” he said, his voice rough. “The postern gate will remain unbolted. There is a brazier there. It’s… less cold.”
She didn’t turn. But her head tilted, just slightly, in acknowledgment.
He slipped out into the alley, leaving the door slightly ajar behind him. He walked back into the roar of the celebratory prison, the scent of jasmine and rust clinging to his clothes, the feel of her icy fingers imprinted on his own.