Chapter 13

  Feasts

  The constant slush of hooves through snow became a kind of lullaby.

  From the wagon, Elowen heard the muffled calls of riders ahead. Northerners broke the path, horses sinking to their thighs as they churned the road into something passable. Wagons fitted with sled runners creaked after them, groaning over ruts hidden beneath the snow. Somewhere outside, Roderic’s voice carried—calling scouts forward, setting a shoulder to a stuck sledge, redirecting men before the next drift swallowed the trail.

  Elowen sat inside a curtained wagon, braziers glowing low in the corners. The leather walls sweated faint heat. “Propriety,” Roderic had said, when she’d protested. A girl under his protection would not travel on a saddle, however efficient it might be. He’d lasted barely half an hour in the wagon before ducking out and taking a horse.

  Once, when the motion slowed, she pushed back a corner of the curtain and peered out. The cold slapped her across the face, sharp enough to steal her breath. Men at the front stamped and leaned into their horses’ necks. The air glittered with blown ice.

  She dropped the curtain, suddenly grateful for propriety and braziers both.

  She let her head fall back against the padded wall and listened—to the creak of wood, the breath of the oxen, the distant grunt of men digging out a wheel. It tugged at old memories: endless days in the fields, plow handles burning blisters into her palms, the sun a white coin nailed to the sky. She tried to picture the same work under this cold. Frostbitten fingers around a plow-handle. Breath freezing in rags.

  Could anything even grow in this land?

  The wagon jolted to a halt. Voices rose outside. Someone shouted an order; others echoed it down the line. A moment later, the door-latch thumped and swung.

  Roderic stepped inside, shaking off a gust of bitter air. His hair was windswept in every possible direction, his nose flushed red from the cold. It was the closest she had ever seen him to looking undone.

  “We’re stopping here for the night,” he said.

  Elowen’s answering smile came too fast and too wide.

  Roderic blinked, a brief furrow between his brows as if he’d expected annoyance, not gratitude. Then he nodded once and was gone again, the door banging softly behind him.

  —

  The campfire chased back only a small circle of dark.

  Elowen sat almost too close, arms wrapped around her knees, hands held out to the flames. Her cheeks stung where the heat met wind-chapped skin. The snow beyond the fire’s reach glowed faintly, reflecting sparks.

  Roderic crouched beside her with a quiet groan, joints protesting the day. He smelled of cold air and horse and a hint of smoke.

  “You’ll cook yourself,” he said, blowing into his cupped hands before rubbing them together hard. “How are your feet?”

  “Oh, they hate me,” she said. “My toes haven’t forgiven me yet. I’ve seen enough snow to last a lifetime.”

  He huffed, something close to a laugh.

  “There was this one time it snowed when we were little,” she went on, eyes focusing on the fire. “Barely a dusting. We scraped snow from every bush and sill to make proper snowballs. By the time we were done, we were caked in mud and slush. Lucan tracked a trail from the door all the way to the hearth. Our nana nearly threw us out a second time.”

  Her smile faltered. The flames blurred.

  Roderic glanced sideways at her. “Where are your brothers now?”

  She drew breath, slow, as if bracing for a blow. “Theron died in the last war,” she said. “He was my twin. Lucan… I don’t know. He was with me when I was caught. They took me alone to the prison. I like to think he slipped away and made it home. I don’t know if my parents ever learned what happened to either of us.”

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  “How old is he?” Roderic asked.

  “Thirteen, when they took me.” Her throat tightened. “He’d be fifteen now.”

  Roderic’s brows pinched. She watched him realize, belatedly, how much he’d never asked.

  “And you?” he said. “How old are you, Elowen?”

  She almost smiled at that. “Just turned eighteen. Second of Frostwane.”

  Something unreadable crossed his face—guilt, maybe, or the weight of a date he’d let pass unnoticed. In Central, birthdays meant feasts and speeches. For the poor, the seasons were more important than single days. For someone like her—caught between both—who knew.

  “Hmm,” was all he said.

  He pushed to his feet after a while and crossed to another fire, speaking low with Brandt and the quartermaster.

  Elowen stayed where she was, drifting in the warmth and the memory of another table. Crystal catching candlelight. Silver polished to a shine. Nuts and dried fruit piled in glass bowls. She’d slipped into the kitchen that day to help with the pastries, stealing moments with the cooks, hands buried in dough. She hadn’t been allowed, not properly. Lady’s daughters weren’t meant to smell of yeast and sugar. But there was something about turning simple things into something beautiful that soothed her in a way embroidery never had.

  Her stomach growled at the memory—or at the cold reality that they still hadn’t eaten.

  She was just bracing her hands to stand when Roderic and Brandt returned, each balancing chipped wooden bowls.

  They set them down on the snow in front of her like an improvised banquet: stew, hard bread, a handful of dried fruit and nuts, and a leather flask of wine.

  “There.” Roderic swept an arm with mock gravity. “A proper feast for your name-day.”

  For a moment, all she could do was look at him, the simple gesture knocking the air from her lungs more completely than the cold.

  Brandt gave an exaggerated bow. “Captain Brandt, at your service. I’m honored to be included in such a grand affair, my lady. Clearly, you’re someone important.”

  Roderic ignored him with the practiced ease of long acquaintance and offered Elowen the wine first. Her face burned. Her eyes stung in a way that had nothing to do with smoke.

  “Thank you,” she managed, the words thin but honest. She took a sip, handed it back.

  Roderic drank next and passed the wineskin to Brandt, who took a long draught, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and grinned.

  “Now,” Brandt announced, “no feast is official without a terrible song.”

  Roderic’s exhale carried the sound of someone surrendering to the inevitable.

  Brandt cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed:

  “Raise your cups and drown the cold, Drink to the fire and the stories told—”

  A ragged chorus of soldiers around the fire took it up, banging their bowls and boots on the ground, the words already evolving into something cruder. A rueful little laugh escaped Elowen—because how could it not? For a moment the cold receded behind warmth and noise and the easy camaraderie of men who’d seen too much winter together.

  When the shouting died down, Brandt elbowed Roderic. “Your turn, Your Highness. Give us a line with a little music in it.”

  Roderic gave him a look that held both threat and amusement. “No lines go uncrossed with you, do they?”

  “I’d like to hear it—if you don’t mind.”

  She felt the heat rise in her cheeks, but the words were already out. “Truly… I’d like you to.”

  He looked at her. Whatever he saw there made his shoulders tip in the smallest surrender.

  “She insists,” he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else.

  He sat a little straighter, brushed a hand through his chestnut hair as if to clear his thoughts, then hooked his thumb lightly into the edge of his jacket—an unconscious, almost boyish gesture that made something inside her loosen.

  When he spoke, his voice dropped into a rhythm that wasn’t quite song:

  “Do not chase flames that burn too bright And gutter quick when storms draw near. Guard instead the smaller light That learns to burn through doubt and fear.

  When winter winds tear at your door And strip the branches clean and bare, Hold fast to those you stand here for, And kindle what you choose to bear.”

  It wasn’t court polish. The meter wandered, the rhyme stumbled now and then.

  But he meant every word—and that sincerity was far more disarming than a perfect verse.

  His eyes softened over certain phrases, and his jaw tightened briefly, as if something in the lines echoed too close. For a moment she saw not the prince in polished wool, but the boy he must have been, standing in some other winter with too much duty on his shoulders.

  When he finished, the silence that followed felt deliberate. Then Brandt clapped his hands together, breaking the spell.

  “Careful,” Brandt said. “Reciting like that will give folk the wrong idea—you’ll have them thinking you’ve a soul.”

  Elowen ignored him. “Who wrote it?” she asked. “Is it from a famous Central poet?”

  Roderic looked away, heat creeping up his neck. “Not famous,” he said.

  Her grey eyes widened. “You?”

  He made a small, helpless gesture with one hand. Brandt slapped his shoulder.

  “He’s full of surprises,” Brandt said. “Troublesome habit.”

  Elowen pressed her fingers to her mouth, suddenly unsure whether to laugh or cry. “It’s been… a very long time since anyone celebrated my name-day.” She swallowed. “Thank you. It means more than you think.”

  Roderic’s smile then was small and unguarded. It did more to warm her than the fire.

  “Eat,” he said gently. “We ride early.”

  He sent her to her tent soon after, with a promise that his and Brandt’s would be pitched beside it and that guards were posted. She lay awake longer than she meant to, watching shadows move on the canvas, listening to the wind, tasting verses she hadn’t known he carried.