Hoofbeats threaded the street. She turned a page and didn’t read it, because Slate’s soft gray eye had already found her over the top of the paper, hopeful as a child.
“Lost in a book again, I see,” Jayce called.
She marked her place with the red ribbon, tucked the book away, and slid down to meet the gelding’s nose with both palms. Slate huffed forgiveness. A larger breath pressed her sternum—black, curious, insistent. She looked up into a warhorse’s warm brown stare.
“Onyx,” Jayce said, grinning. “Ky, your horse is cheating on you.”
“He likes attention,” came a voice from the saddle—rough at the edges, half-muffled behind bandages. “Sounds like he’s getting some for once.”
Heat jumped through her, quick and unhelpful. She took his measure without staring: head bowed, helm under an arm, one cheek wrapped, the other already shadowing to bruise. A woman in Shadowguard leather sat her bay like still water at his flank—hands steady, eyes taking the street apart, then putting it back together safer.
“Shall we go back to the house?” Kairi said, voice even. “You can stable them out back.”
She walked them the short turn behind the smithy, unlatched the familiar gate, and let the yard receive them. Slate nosed his stall with the air of someone returning to a favorite chair; she laughed under her breath and set his halter. By the time she turned, Jayce had led the other two in. She reached for the bay’s reins while he worked Onyx’s girth.
“How was the road?” she asked, keeping it simple.
“Too lively near Miller’s Creek,” Jayce said. “We argued it down.” He flicked a look toward Kylar—toward the bandage more than the man. “He’ll be fine. Strong. Stubborn.” Then, lighter: “Also, I’m dropping two problems on you. Tessa and Ky are staying when I ride back. Don’t be afraid to boss them.”
She made a face. “You say that like I’m bossy.”
“I say that like you get things done.”
They crossed the little court together. Tessa had already guided Kylar to the low bench near the rosemary, set his gloves in his lap, and was speaking in the clean grammar of her hands. Kairi watched two beats, then realized: not just speaking—letting him ride the words with his touch, her fingers steady under his own as she shaped them.
“She can’t talk?” Kairi asked softly.
Jayce shook his head. “Old throat injury. She prefers her hands. Good that you know yours—courtesy of your dream boy.”
Kairi’s mouth tilted; she didn’t answer that. Jayce was already fishing envelopes from his coat.
“First, from Prince Damon.” He set it in her palm.
She blinked. “I expected Dato’s… why Damon?”
Tessa snapped once, sharp as a match, and signed with a wicked economy:
Kairi’s laugh rang bright and honest. “All right. And the third?”
Jayce hesitated, then kept his letter safe in his pocket. “Let me help you start dinner before Rush gets back.”
Kairi slipped the letters into her pouch, fingers lingering a heartbeat longer on the one with the neat, blue seal. She turned toward the door and, out of reflex as much as welcome, touched Kylar’s shoulder, light, asking. He didn’t startle. Good. “Come in,” she said, and the little house opened its cool, mint-scented air to travelers and trouble both.
Kylar let the chair take him and tried to let the room teach him where it began and ended. Knives on a board. A pot set down the careful way people do when they’re thinking about someone else. Her voice, talking Jayce through the small, ordinary since-last-time things, and his chest answering to the laugh he hadn’t been prepared to hear this close in daylight.
He couldn’t see her. The world was cloth and dark and the ache in his face that flared when he forgot to be still. So he counted what he could: mint rising from a jar she must have opened; the faint iron memory of a kettle; the soft scuff of her slipper against the floorboards when she shifted weight.
“Kylar?”
He flinched out of the listening. “What?”
“Zoning out?” Jayce, amused. “I asked which prince’s letter she should read first.”
Her answer came nearer, too near for dignity, exactly right for comfort. “In your honest opinion,” she said, close enough that warmth came with the words, “who deserves to be read first?”
“Sorry,” she added, laugh catching when he startled.
His shoulder had learned that hand in another country; it wanted to lean. He made his voice behave. “Read Prince Damon’s,” he said. “I’m sure it’s full of stories that are only half true.”
Jayce barked a laugh. “Please tell us the stories, Kairi.”
A chair rasped, wood on wood, and settled very near his knee. He didn’t reach. Paper breathed; a seal gave.
Kairi read Damon’s letter. Damon had written like he was better at being decent than dazzling now, like he could make loud halls smaller and find doorways that stayed clear. Kylar listened to her mouth shape his brother’s promises and had the disloyal thought that Damon sounded…good. Useful. He was almost annoyed by it, and then he wasn’t, because if someone else had to be decent to her, let it be Damon.
She asked why the princes already knew, and Jayce answered about archives and guesswork and patterns. Plates stacked. A spoon tapped the rim of a pot twice and stilled.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
“Now Prince Dato’s,” she said, lighter, and he heard the second seal snap.
She read. His words, careful, trying not to be stiff, came back to him truer in her voice. Autumn, and the roofline forests. Under-armor first reach. An hour to forget a crown in the city. Questions he had pretended were casual and weren’t. When she reached the line about the sketch by his lamp, heat crawled under the bandages and made him grateful for the dark.
“High praise for me,” Jayce said, aggrieved and pleased. “I’ll remind him to actually give it.”
Kairi smiled into the room. “May I tell him why I wrote?”
“What would you say?” Jayce asked, wary and entertained at once.
“That you told me to,” she said. “Your captain insisted I write to you, Prince Dato.”
Kylar let himself laugh. “Jayce, you requested she write to the prince?”
A cough that wasn’t quite an answer. Kylar eased, maybe she didn’t know; maybe he could have these next days plain.
The door opened; Rush’s voice met Jayce’s. Boots, a draft, the house measuring a new arrival and approving. Beside Kylar, her breath changed, caught, as if she had just remembered something heavy and set it carefully back down.
“You okay?” he asked, keeping it for the small circle between them.
A pause, then the smallest nod in her tone. “I’m okay,” she whispered, and, as if answering the question he hadn’t dared ask, she found his hand where it rested on his thigh and took three of his fingers, a light, deliberate squeeze, before she stood and pushed her chair in.
It might have been comfort for the blinded guard. It might have been I see you. He swallowed around both possibilities and sat very still while the house went on being kind.
Rush’s boots hit the threshold and the house shifted around him, quieter somehow, steadier. He took the room in one practiced sweep: bandage high across the guard’s face, Tessa’s reddened palms wrapped rough, Jayce’s road-creased coat, Kairi’s braid not quite tidy. His gaze paused on Kairi long enough to confirm color in her cheeks, then moved on.
“Welcome,” he said to the room at large, and to Jayce, “You’re late.”
“Bandits with ideas,” Jayce answered, setting his satchel down. “We argued them out of it.”
Rush’s eyes slid to the stranger’s damaged helm and the purple shadow already creeping at the cheek. “What happened to him?”
“Archer high left, fake victim in the road,” Jayce said. “He stepped in when the trick turned. Wind and fire—hit like a mule, threw him into a tree.”
Rush’s brows tipped once toward Kylar, then the corners of his mouth thought about moving and changed their minds. “And the tree?”
“Won,” Kylar said dryly. Rush nodded at that and glanced back to Jayce. "Hungry?"
Kairi’s mouth tugged; she held the laugh in with her teeth and busied herself with the stove. “Sit,” she told Jayce and Tessa, tone like an order people are glad to obey. “I’ll scrounge dinner faster if no one helps until asked.”
Tessa got up and followed then tapped Kairi’s elbow and turned her bandaged palms up: let me. Kairi nodded, slid onions under Tessa’s knife, then paused when Tessa flexed burned fingers. The soft healer-hum came out of Kairi without thinking. “After we eat—salve for those.”
Tessa’s mouth shaped thanks and mischief both.
Rush drifted to the chair where Kylar sat. “Guard,” he said, respect tipping the word. “Thank you for not dying on my floor.”
Kylar angled the bandage toward him. “My pleasure. It would’ve been rude.”
Rush’s hand settled for a breath on the chairback, permission to be in the man’s air, and then he moved on to bowls and ladle and heat.
Cooking moved like weather: oil and onion; mint brightening the room when Kairi opened a jar; Tessa’s knife keeping even time; Rush steady at the flame; Jayce fetching without being told. Kylar sat inside the making and learned the house by its small truths: the chair that complained on the third shift; a thread-thin draft at the windowsill; Kairi’s footfall, easy to separate from anyone else’s because she walked like she was listening.
“Water,” she said at his shoulder, and set the cup against his fingers. He hadn’t heard her cross to him, only felt, again, the unstartled way she touched him: shoulder, then the brief bridge of her hand to his.
“Thank you,” he said, and drank.
They ate at the small table, knees bumping, no one minding. Jayce told it short; Rush asked the right questions and got the longer version. Tessa signed the missing edges in clean cuts:
When the bowls were empty, Kairi wiped her hands and turned to Kylar. “May I look?” She stayed still where he’d feel her there and not there.
He wet his mouth. “Yes,” he said carefully. “Please.”
Her fingers were clinical and kind. She checked knots, pressed near the edges to feel for heat. “Binding’s clean,” she murmured for him as much as for herself. “Good work.” She paused at his jaw; her breath warmed the knuckles of the hand he hadn’t realized had found the chair arm. “I won’t unwrap; the healer said stillness. But I can ease the burns underneath a little. It will feel like cool water.”
“If it doesn’t cost you more than you want to spend,” he said, because asks have shapes.
“It won’t,” she said, and he believed her.
The magic came like a window opened in a stuffy room. Pain remembered itself smaller. His hand had closed on the edge of her sleeve; he let go, flushed, and she patted his fingers once, the way you soothe a startled bird.
“Better?” she asked.
“Better,” he said, and heard Rush’s chair ease back an inch, like a fist letting go. Rush just watched them for a moment and then looked away.
Kairi turned to Tessa next, palms up, gentle as law. “Your turn.” She cupped the bandaged hands, let cool creep into raw heat until Tessa’s shoulders dropped, then smoothed salve where the skin would tolerate it and rewrapped with a competence that made Rush nod to himself.
They set sleeping arrangements with the cheerful brutality of travelers. Jayce took the couch without ceremony. Tessa unrolled by the door with a knife within reach. Rush steered Kylar’s chair toward the back room and the narrow cot. Kairi shook out a spare quilt and laid it within easy reach.
Rush murmured at the threshold to Jayce, low and practical, “Roads in the morning. Then you ride.”
“Aye,” Jayce said.
Kairi walked Jayce to the couch with a cup and a hand to his sleeve. He caught her fingers, squeezed once, and let go. "Sleep well."
She dipped her head. “I will” she whispered back. She smiled and he returned the gesture and nodded to the back room. "Be sure to tell Kylar good night. Tuck him in all nice too." She giggled and rolled her eyes. "Using me to embarrass your guards?" Jayce smug. " Always"
Kylar lay on the cot and learned the room by sound until it felt less like a stranger. The quilt’s weight near his feet. A faint board-shift at the doorway: someone there, pausing.
“Do you need anything?” Kairi whispered.
“No,” he said. Then, because the ground was good, “Thank you.”
She hesitated and crossed in. The mattress dipped; fabric whispered; the quilt slid higher and tucked, a small, careful promise.
His hand lifted, fumbled air, searched, until his fingers found her wrist. He let out a quiet, rueful breath. “Not being able to see is… a pain.”
Her pulse beat steady under his touch. “If you’ll let me,” she offered, soft, “I can ease more of it tomorrow. Slowly. I won’t undo the healer’s work.”
“I’ll think on it,” he said, and meant it.
She leaned closer so her breath warmed his ear and whispered. “Sleep, Kylar.”
He let go of her wrist and turned his face toward her voice, careful, offering a warmth he couldn’t aim with sight, a small smile.
She was glad he couldn’t see the color rise in her cheeks. For a heartbeat she almost bent to kiss him, just a small one, just hello-and-here, but the rule she’d written for herself tonight held.
“Goodnight, Kylar,” she said, barely louder than the quilt.
“Goodnight, Kairi,” he answered, as the room remembered how to be dark and kind.
He let the dark be dark and not a verdict. Somewhere between one breath and the next, the ache stopped arguing, and his body chose the practical thing.
The house dimmed to lamplight, then banked coals. Night drew its small map: Tessa’s even breath by the door; Jayce turning once and not again; Rush stepping into the yard for a minute to listen to the stars and then, sensibly, coming back to bed.
In the other room, two letters lay like a compass. Kairi stacked Damon’s under Dato’s. Her fingers found her mouth and remembered salt and laughter and a wave that had tried to steal a kiss; her mind reacting to hearing his voice. Was it a blessing he couldn't see her? Or did he recognize her voice instantly, like she recognized his.
She pulled paper out and worked on replying to each Prince and then went to sleep.