Chapter 3: The Gambit Begins
The cheer that went up from the pavilion was a physical wave, crashing against the silent calculation coiling in my gut. The returning column was a river of steel and sweat and churning dust. At its head, riding a destrier the color of fresh cream, was Prince Theon.
He shone. His hair was a banner of gold under the dusk sun, his armor intricately engraved, catching the light in deliberate, dazzling flashes. He rode with one hand raised, a practiced, gracious smile on his face, the perfect heir receiving his due. His eyes, even from this distance, swept the crowd. Searching. They found me, a dark blot against the bright silks, and fastened.
There it was. That look. A hunter spotting known game. It wasn’t just recognition; it was possession, anticipatory and smug. My skin prickled, the ghost-memory of his fingers in my hair, the clinical coldness in his gaze as he watched me die, superimposing itself over the handsome, smiling prince. The nausea was sudden and sharp, a taste of old poison at the back of my throat.
I held his gaze. I did not smile. I did not blush or look away as the old Isolde would have. I let my face remain a calm, unmoved mask. His smile didn’t falter, but I saw the minute hesitation in his wave, the slight tightening of his jaw. Confusion, quickly masked by arrogance. He assumed I was playing a game, a coy delay of the inevitable.
Then my eyes left him.
I looked past the prince, past the glittering knights of his personal guard, to where the standard of the king’s household flew. The man riding beneath it was a study in contrasted shadow. Lord Alaric.
He rode a tall, black stallion that moved with restless, contained power. His armor was functional, polished steel without frivolous engraving, scarred in places from honest use. He wasn’t smiling. His gaze took in the pavilion, the court, his brother the king stepping forward to greet Theon, with an expression of detached assessment. The dying sun glinted off the grey of his eyes, turning them the color of a winter sea. This was the man who, in another life, had held my broken body and wept. This was the man who, in this life, did not know me from any other noble daughter.
Theon dismounted first, with a flourish. He knelt before the king, his voice ringing out with practiced humility. “Your Majesty. By your grace and the strength of your arms, we return victorious.” The court erupted in applause again. He rose, embraced his father, and then his path turned, unerringly, toward me.
He moved through the throng of courtiers like a ship parting a gilded sea, every eye upon him, his smile a weapon he wielded with casual precision. I stood my ground, the lavender scent from my chambers still a ghost on my skin, a fragile shield against the memory of his betrayal. My heart was a frantic, trapped thing, but my hands, folded before me, were utterly still.
“Lady Isolde,” Theon said, his voice carrying just enough to be heard by those nearest. He stopped an arm’s length away, the warmth of his body and the smell of horse and metal pushing at my space. “You waited.” His tone implied it was a foregone conclusion, a minor act of obedience he barely deigned to notice.
I inclined my head, a gesture of bare courtesy. “The court waited, Your Highness. For the victors.” I kept my eyes on the intricate dragon etched on his breastplate, not on his face. It was safer.
He chuckled, a low, intimate sound meant for me alone, a parody of shared secrets. “Always so precise with your words.” From his belt, he untied a slender silk favour, a strip of deep blue embroidered with golden thread. It was the one a knight traditionally bestowed upon the lady whose favour he carried into battle. A public declaration. My muscles locked. In her last life, she thought he planned to walk towards her but at the last second gave it to Elara.
He held it lightly between his fingers, his gaze boring into mine, watching for the flicker of hope, the anticipation he was so accustomed to crushing. The old hurt, young and desperate, throbbed for a second in my chest—that girl who had loved him so fiercely she only tried to earn his affection but it only made him pull away more. Since they turned 16 he had stopped seeing her as his friend and started calling her his annoying shadow.
Now, I held a serene smile. It felt like carving ice on my face. I let my gaze drift past his shoulder, as if mildly interested in the fluttering banners. Theon always brushed her off. This was just another performance.
His confidence wavered for a heartbeat, my reaction all wrong. Then, with a shrug so slight it was almost insulting, he turned. He took two deliberate steps to his left, where Lady Elara stood blushing amidst her sisters. “My lady,” he said, his voice now pitched for an audience, warm and generous. “Your colours brought me fortune.” He pressed the silk into her stunned hands.
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Eyes darted from Elara’s radiant shock to my composed, smiling face. The slight was calculated, exquisite, meant to reduce me to a husk of public humiliation. It was the same move, from a different angle. The music of courtly gossip began tuning its instruments behind fans and gloved hands.
I let the murmur peak. I let Theon’s satisfied glance swing back to me, expecting tears, or rage, or at least a broken stare. I met his eyes and my smile softened, genuine in its utter indifference. It unsettled him more than any tantrum would have. His brow furrowed.
Then I moved.
Turning my back on a prince was an act of quiet treason. The gasp this time was sharper, sucked in through a dozen teeth. I didn’t walk toward the sanctuary of the palace. I walked toward the black stallion being led away by a squire, toward the man who was unbuckling his helm with the focused weariness of a soldier, not a performer.
Alaric sensed the approach before he saw me. His shoulders tensed, his grey eyes lifting from the strap in his hands. He watched me come, his expression unreadable, a closed door.
I stopped before him, the noise of the court a distant fog. The scent of him was different: cold steel, leather, and the faint, clean sweat of a long journey. I curtsied, deep and formal, my skirts pooling in the dust of the courtyard. When I rose, I spoke, my voice clear and carrying just enough.
When I rose, I spoke, my voice clear and carrying just enough. “Welcome home, Lord Alaric. The court is happier for your safe return.” I meant every word, but they sounded formal, brittle. He studied my face, his own a landscape of exhaustion and wariness.
“Thank you, Lady Isolde,” he said. His voice was gravel, worn thin from commands and campfire smoke. He did not smile. “Success is measured in lives not lost. The accounting was… sufficient.” He looked past me then, over my shoulder, and the brief tension in his jaw told me everything.
Theon’s gaze was a physical weight, a burning brand between my shoulder blades. I could feel its heat, its possessive anger. Alaric felt it too; his grey eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly before flicking back to mine, a silent question hanging in the air between us. Why was I here, inviting that fire?
“I must see to my men,” he said, a dismissal as solid as a shut door. He gave a curt nod and turned away, his focus already elsewhere. The rebuff stung, but it was the expected sting of a dart hitting armor. I had hoped for a crack, a glimpse of the man who wept, but this was the man who survived the court.
I turned to find my sister, Amelia, already at my elbow, her eyes wide with scandalized curiosity. She linked her arm through mine and pulled me swiftly toward a gap in the flowing silks of the retinue. “By all the forgotten gods, Izzy, what was that?” she hissed, her voice a low thrill.
The crowds were blurring around us, a murmur of silk and speculation. I waited until we reached the relative quiet of a colonnade, the marble cool and shadowed. “It was mathematics,” I said, my own voice quiet and flat.
“Mathematics?” Amelia’s nose wrinkled. She snatched two glasses of wine from a passing servant’s tray and thrust one into my hand. “It looked like insanity. You publicly slighted the crown prince for a man who looked at you like a mildly confusing military report.”
I took a long drink, the wine bitter on my tongue. I watched Alaric across the courtyard, his head bent in conversation with a grizzled captain, his profile stark against the torchlight. “I had a realization, watching them ride in,” I said.
“Which was?”
“Lord Alaric is far more handsome than Theon.” I said it plainly, a stated fact about the weather.
Amelia choked on her wine. She coughed, dabbing at her lips with a sleeve, her eyes streaming. “Have you gone completely mad? He’s made of stone and silence! People call him ‘the Sentinel’ because he’s as warm and approachable as a gargoyle. Theon is the sun.”
“The sun burns you, Amelia.” I finally looked at her, letting the cool mask I’d worn for Theon melt into something tired and real. “Theon just gave Elara my favor. In front of everyone. Again. He expects me to stand there forever, waiting for his occasional, condescending scraps.” I finished the wine, the glass suddenly heavy. “A gargoyle doesn’t pretend to be anything else. There’s a honesty in that. And you’re wrong—he’s not stone. He’s obsidian. Hard, yes. But sharper.”
She was silent, for once, staring at me as if I’d spoken in a foreign tongue. The raucous celebration swelled from the pavilion, Theon’s laughter ringing above it all, a bright, cruel sound. My eyes found Alaric again. He was looking straight at me, a dark, still figure against the celebratory fray. He gave no nod, no smile. Just that look, intense and unreadable, before turning away and vanishing into the crowd.
Amelia followed my gaze, then looked back at my face. She sighed, a long, surrendering sound. “Oh, Izzy,” she whispered. “What have you started?”
If only Amelia knew the Hell I had endured for the last five years, then she would understand.
I'd never tell her though, she'd think me mad.
I finished the wine and placed the glass on a nearby table. "Come on, Mia. We need to go change before the feast!" I began dragging her back to our tent.
I had a performance to prepare for.