fic: the flower of carnage (crown duel) (1/2)
the flower of carnage
crown duel. successful rescues do not always ensure successful futures. the marquis of shevraeth rescues mel from certain danger -- their story unravels from there. mel/shevraeth. 11,887 words.
notes: LOL MY LIFE. writing fic for a series i read over a decade ago (and loved to bits lol). THIS IS FOR YOU, SISI. (also I apologize for the lack of the Duke. sequel?!) basically, while i loved these books when i was younger, rereading them at this age left me desiring something more? (porn? obvs. gratuitous violence? definitely). um, spoilers for the books? guess that goes without saying?
-- I’m saying your name on
the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal
covered with frost, --
RICHARD SIKEN
1.
My gaze dropped to the knife embedded squarely in his chest, which seemed to have sprouted there. But knives don’t sprout, even in dungeons, I thought hazily, as the torturer fell heavily at my feet. I turned my head, half rising from the chair --
And saw the Marquis of Shevraeth standing framed in the doorway. At his back were four of his liveried equerries, with swords drawn and ready.
CROWN DUEL; Sherwood Smith
2.
The thing about stories -- those cliche stories, those stories told to thrill and excite you as opposed to report events accurately -- is that rescue arrives just at the most desperate moment of danger.
This isn’t going to be that kind of story.
Mel grew up on those stories, the sort of stories old Julen would have scowled all the deeper if she knew it was her own daughter serving the role as storyteller. A barefoot countess educated solely on tales of knightly rescue and demented supernatural villains.
Those tales really aren’t coming in handy right now, because here’s the tragic thing:
Lady Meliara, the barefoot countess of Tlanth, has no idea who to expect to fulfill the role of knightly rescue.
3.
The iron cast into the fire sizzles with absorbed heat. Mel shivers.
The past few days, let alone weeks, have held more low points than Mel was aware a person’s life could be filled with. But this? This is pretty low.
No one ever speaks of the fortress Chovilun without a certain amount of fascinated dread.
With all the hot pokers roasting in the huge fire before her, she has to admit she expected worse than this, worse than the hot iron pressed against her forearm.
It hurts. It hurts a lot. To say it burns feels like a gross understatement, but it does burn. It stings, and Mel thinks she must already be half out of her mind not to be absolutely horrified by the stench of her own burning flesh. Because the thing is, she’s not really that horrified. Hell, she doesn’t even feel like she’s completely all there -- bound in irons to a damp wooden chair in a torture chamber waiting for the Baron himself to reappear and rend her limb for limb, or whatever it is that happens in a royal torture chamber.
What she does know is that she can handle this.
She can handle this.
The torturer (she wonders dimly if he has a name; he must, all men, even torturers, have names, but how strange it would be were this man to have a mild name, say, Bob, Bob the Torturer; Mel’s mouth parts and she almost starts to laugh, hysterical and feverish) frowns down at her before he smiles. It’s a truly terrible smile -- missing teeth, and the teeth he is left with rotted and sharp looking, as though he has filed them down to points.
That’s when he presses the iron down firmer against her already charred skin.
That’s when Mel finally screams.
And that’s when Mel notices the knife protruding from Bob the Torturer’s chest. She blinks rapidly, listens to the clang the hot iron makes as it hits the floor, moments before the torturer himself falls to his knees with a wet, fleshy sound.
Behind her, a man clears his throat.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she hears herself say.
The Marquis of Shevraeth only smirks.
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire?” he asks her, and she has no idea what that’s even supposed to imply.
The question dies stillborn in her throat as a fleet of the Baron’s men enters the room, swords drawn and at the ready.
4.
Mel is pretty sure there was a plan here. What little she has learned of the Marquis in the limited time they have shared together is that he’s the sort to have the next ten steps mapped out before he even takes one.
As sure as she is that there was a plan, she is just as sure that this definitely wasn’t it.
The men the Marquis came with are killed, the Baron’s men not nearly as inept as rumor has it, or perhaps simply lucky. Mel’s wrists are still clasped in iron, binding her to the seat. Mel wriggles there, trying in vain to break free, the metal biting at her already raw and bloody wrists. The clang of steel on steel is deafening, interrupted by the sharp shouts of men and her own ragged breathing. She looks up wild-eyed and terrified, her hair sticking to her forehead, catching in her eyes.
It will strike her later, but not now (no time for it now), that until this point, she had never actually witnessed battle. Sure, they had planned, and sure, Khesot had trained her and the townsfolk they gathered as soldiers for war, but the only blood she had seen shed had been her own.
Shevraeth is an entire different man with a sword in his hand. Gone is the empty, glassed-over expression to his face, gone is the easy carriage of his body. Instead he himself appears as much a weapon as the blade he wields. He is swift, merciless, and Mel is unsure what she imagined an actual duel would entail, what happens when a sword finds a sheath inside another man’s body, but she had not expected this. The entire room stinks of blood and shit and something entirely animal -- entrails exposed and left to coil on the dungeon’s floor, slick and near black with blood. Shevraeth does not stumble, not once, not until a mailed fist catches him at the temple and his entire body lurches sideways. He recovers quickly, skewers the man who struck him, and Mel continues to watch dumbly.
Suddenly, they are alone. The dead litter the floor around him -- his men and the Baron’s -- and in the distance she can hear shouts, movements within the fortress. He turns to face her, and she blanches slightly. It’s like knowing two men, she thinks, but then she has never truly known him at all. The entire left side of his face is drenched in blood, a wound at his temple bleeding freely, trailing thick and sticky down his neck and beneath his collar. It’s not just the blood though (and there is blood everywhere, all over him, and she’s not sure which is his and what belongs to the fallen; she can’t remember if she saw him take a hit, if he is wounded, and if it all ends for her here). It’s the way he is looking at her, eyes bright and wild, his jaw clenched, not an ounce of humor to him. Footsteps pound above their heads, and she watches him, more helpless than she has ever felt, and he watches her, his breath still labored.
“We need to leave,” he finally says. The courtly drawl is gone, and she is reminded of her cell at Galdran’s keep when he came to her the night before her execution. Her eyes widen; of all the things she expected him to say to her, this did not even rank.
“You’re not -- ” she starts to say, but her voice creaks. Her throat aches; she has not spoken since her capture. “You’re not going to kill me too?” she asks him, and even to her, she sounds incredibly small.
His confusion gives way to what looks like frustrated amusement, an expression so out of place in a royal torture chamber, but it renders him familiar to her again. He arches an eyebrow, which looks like it hurts.
“You think I went through the trouble of this slaughter only to kill you myself?” He leans down and grabs the keys from the guard’s belt nearest her. “Your rescue has arrived, Lady Meliara” he murmurs, almost teasingly, as he unlocks her wrists. His face is close to hers, and his eyes drift to her black eye then down to her cracked lips, the blood dried there.
Her wrists feel numb and she moves her hands gingerly, curling and then uncurling her fingers into fists.
“Can you stand?” he asks her.
She looks up at him. This close to her, she can see that the wound at his temple is not the only one he has collected for his efforts. There is a short but deep cut at the base of his neck bleeding freely and along his left side there is a gash in his tunic, the fabric darkened and clinging to his skin.
“How do I know I can trust you?” she asks him. The Baron’s men are approaching -- she can hear them, she can sense Shevraeth’s restlessness growing.
“You don’t,” he says, but he offers her his hand.
She takes it.
5.
She won’t let him carry her.
Instead, he half drags her out of the dungeon, his fingers digging into her ribs as he pulls her alongside him.
She stumbles to her knees when they finally emerge into the night, the gloom swallowing them up. “That’s enough,” she hears Shevraeth say, the words gritted out between his teeth. She is about to protest, but suddenly the ground is that much farther away and her entire left side is pressed against very, very human warmth.
The brand on her arm still stings, and the cold night rain isn’t helping. She thinks she would be more resentful of allowing Shevraeth to carry her as they leave the fortress, but she’s pretty sure she lacks the strength to even keep her head upright.
The horses have all run free, save for his. He jostles her easily, though clumsily, into the saddle and then mounts up behind her. As he spurs the horse on, Mel takes on last glance behind her and watches, at first stupidly and then with dawning recognition, a multiplying number of torches collect and then follow their trail.
They ride with his arm wrapped around her waist. She can feel the blood from the wound at his side dampening her back, the blood on his hands smearing against her already filthy tunic. She lets her body lull back against his chest and the arm around her waist tightens. She feels lightheaded and her head tips back, her forehead brushing against the left side of his jaw, and she can feel his body stiffen slightly behind her. She can feel the stubble that has grown in prickly, and she rears quickly away from him, jerking forward, leaving her dizzy, and with a streak of his blood across her forehead.
The horse runs at a gallop, hard and fast, and Shevraeth keeps his body leaning forward, bearing down on her. His breathing is steady, hot against her neck, but she can feel his heart -- pounding almost in time with the horse’s hooves.
6.
They ride through most of the night. She dozes without meaning to -- her eyes slipping shut and then opening to a completely foreign landscape. She wakes to them crashing through a creekbed, to his body jostling against hers as they climb a rocky summit. Her eyes close to a seemingly black blank forest and open to the same.
“Where are you taking me?” she finally asks. Either the sound of her voice is swallowed by the rain, or he simply chooses not to answer her.
She is almost positive it’s the latter.
She wakes this time to the sound of the horse’s hooves striking cobblestone. They are in a town, a town as anonymous and familiar as the same town she hid from the very man holding her in this moment. He slows the horse to a mild cant and brings them behind an inn.
He helps her down, and she scowls up at him. “Don’t get any ideas,” she says. She doesn’t move from him though, afraid that a step forward with her head still swimming would lead to nothing short of another embarrassing stumble forward. He looks down at her, half his face bathed in shadow.
“Ideas? Countess?” he asks mildly, and it’s almost impressive how easily he can slip back into that court drawl, especially considering the events preceding.
“I don’t need you . . . rescuing me, like I’m, I’m some damsel and you’re my dashing knight, or whatever you think you are to me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he replies dryly. He indicates the door leading from the stable into the inn. “By all means,” he says.
Mel takes a mincing step forward, the wound at her ankle opened yet again (those damned traps; she is over half sure that her main desire to return home is solely to be able to clock Bran about the head and shout that she was right, she was so right, about those ridiculous traps), but she makes it to the door without his help. It’s a small victory, and it’s out of disdain more than anything that leads her to glance back over her shoulder at him, prepared to gloat.
He is not looking at her, however: he is looking behind, the muscled cords at his throat pulled tight, his jawline severe and bloodied.
Mel turns back around quickly and all but runs into the innkeeper eyeing her warily.
7.
She catches sight of herself in the looking glass mounted on the wall of the inn. Her clothes are starched from the caked mud and her own sweat, but his blood is still tacky and damp on her. She rubs at her forehead, but the stain remains, smears across her hand.
“Come quickly,” the innkeeper tells them.
He looks to her over his shoulder, and for just a beat, he looks as hollowed out and exhausted as she feels.
As she follows him down the darkened hall, she wonders why escape has not even been a thought that crossed her mind until now.
She expected a finely furnished room, something befitting his station, but instead the innkeeper leads them to the back of the building to what she imagines are the servants quarters.
“Best we can do, my lord,” he says by way of explanation -- an explanation Mel doesn’t understand, but then she doesn’t understand much of what has transpired in the hours since her capture.
“It’ll do,” Shevraeth says. “My thanks.”
The room is small and barren. A servant returns with two bedrolls, a basin of water, a parcel of nondescript clothing, and a tray with what appears to be cold leftovers from dinner. The servant looks at the both of them and asks if they are in need of a healer; Shevraeth demurs, but requests that the servant return with bandages and keem leaves, and bristic or listerbloom, should they have any in stock.
Mel has not said a word this entire time but instead has stood off to the corner watching him warily.
After the servant returns a second time and the heavy wood door shuts, Shevraeth turns to her. “I imagine you have questions,” he says conversationally.
“What the fuc -- ” she starts. She stops when she catches the way the lines at the corners of his mouth deepen, though he does not smile, and how his posture relaxes. “Who are you?” she asks instead, her tone firm and almost authoritative.
His mouth flattens slightly. “You know who I am,” he says quietly.
She shakes her head, and then immediately regrets it as her vision swims. “No,” she says. “No, I really don’t.”
“Vidanric of House Renselaeus,” he says, mockingly, as though introducing himself before some invisible court. “Marquis of Shevraeth.”
“That’s not what I asked.” The surliness had returned to her tone, as had, she notices, the exhaustion to his face.
“It’s a lengthy tale,” he says. “To cut to the heart of it, you and I have been playing for the same side.” He peels his blood-sodden gloves off, first one, and then the other. “Only some of us have kept our true allegiances hidden. Until now.”
“Until now,” she echoes. Despite the rescue, despite the fact Shevraeth has all but proclaimed that she is safe with him, that she is among allies instead of enemies, Mel can feel an intense fury bubbling up inside of her. She feels played. She feels a fool. “Why didn’t you just -- ” And then she stops. At what point in this charade had he the opportunity to make his true intentions known? At what point would she have believed him?
He smiles, genuine and small, understanding yet still guarded.
“Get cleaned up, change, and I’ll see to that ankle.”
Her mouth turns down in a sour frown. The prospect of that seems far less then appealing.
“Yeah? And who’s going to see to -- whatever you have going on there?” She motions towards him, half his face still coated in blood, his neck red with it. She asks the question without considering the obvious answer, intending to sting, to annoy him, but misses the mark clear off.
His grin this time is almost cruel, dangerous. He steps to the door, but not before saying:
“I guess said responsibility falls to you.”
8.
Clean -- or as clean as she is likely to get considering the circumstances -- and drowning in the tunic offered her, she hobbles out into the small, dark hallway to allow Shevraeth the same privacy he afforded her.
She can hear him behind the door though. She can hear the sound his wet clothes make against his skin as he peels them off, the irritated and almost surprised gasp of pain he makes at one point, the splash of the water inside the basin; she finds her cheeks flushed high with color.
He opens the door for her when he is finished.
She lets him wrap her ankle. She hisses as the keem leaves press against her skin, and his bare hand holds her steady by the calf, his fingers hot against her chilled skin. He rubs some sort of salve onto the burn on her arm, and she glares.
“I could do that,” she says.
“Too late,” he smirks.
There is no mirror in the room, and he requires her help with his head and neck. The cut at his temple is surprisingly deep, and the skin around the wound has already begun to blossom into a dark bruise. He sucks in a quick breath when she presses her fingers against it, leaving her feeling equal parts triumphant and . . . concerned? No, that doesn’t seem right. She ignores whatever trail of thought she had stumbled upon and dips her fingers into the pot of salve and applies it at his temple.
As she cleans up his neck, she realizes that she is practically sitting in his lap, her hurt leg extended alongside him, her thigh cast over his.
“Um, sorry,” she murmurs, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t smile either, but his eyes are bright with repressed laughter.
His amusement only grows as he takes off his shirt, and she is blushing furiously now. She’s seen men in states of undress before. Tlanth isn’t some puritanical, tight-laced principality. She’s just, well, never touched a man in a state of undress. Or really touched any man for that matter. His chest is muscled and defined, which isn’t terribly surprising considering the ease and fluidity with which he fought back at the fortress. She knows what it feels like to cross blades, the strength it takes to parry and thrust, the shock that travels straight through the arm with each impact. He made it look entirely natural. The sword caught him along his ribs, curving down towards his abdomen.
“You need to clean it,” he says tightly, belying his own discomfort. “I’d do it, but.” He does not trail off. He merely stops his statement there. And she gets it. The second that bristic hits the opened flesh he’s not going to be anything close to helpful in terms of fixing himself up.
She tidies him up, knots the bandage around his torso, as quickly as she can.
When she is done, he reaches for her and something impossible tightens in her chest.
With the pad of his thumb he wipes at her forehead. His skin comes away reddened with his own blood.
9.
The people of Tlanth believe Mel dead.
She learns it first from a baker’s boy who passes her the heel of yesterday’s bread out in the alley.
The people of Tlanth, and the rest of the realm, believe Mel is dead --
and at Shevraeth’s hand nonetheless.
She punches Shevraeth hard in the shoulder when she finds him waiting for her outside the stable. He frowns at her, but he barely flinched at the impact of her small fist against his arm.
“I beg your pardon,” he drawls.
Mel braces her fists on her hips (one fist, she would be loath to admit, aching slightly; it’s like his muscles are made of forged iron or something inhuman and crazy). “I have just been informed,” she says, loftily, “that apparently, as rumor would have it, somewhere outside of the Chovilun fortress, you murdered me and left my body for the crows.”
It is a rare thing to catch the Marquis off-guard. She is learning this. In this moment, she has succeeded. She catalogs it away, what it looks like when he is confused, what his face does when surprised.
He recovers quickly.
“It seems the teeming masses shockingly have been ill-informed.” He pauses, and then blatantly looks her up and down. “Or, you might just been the best looking corpse I have ever laid eyes upon.”
For whatever reason (she is totally not looking into it), Mel blushes.
“If anyone is doing any bit of killing, I think you’ll find our roles reversed.” Shevraeth raises both eyebrows. He doesn’t even need to say anything. She saw what he could do with a sword. It’s a stupid taunt that he does not even bother responding to.
His gaze has hardened, and he stares off into the distance.
“What?” she finally asks.
He shakes his head and returns his gaze to her. “This new information complicates much already in motion.”
“Elaborate.”
She gathers that he is a man unused to commands, but he answers her anyway.
“Previous to our most recent . . . ah, reacquaintance, an alliance had been in the works between Tlanth and Renselaeus.”
“An alliance,” she repeats blankly.
“An alliance, yes. As I have already explained to you, both your people and my people share a similar goal. We all wish Galdran removed from the throne. And while your people’s . . . public manifesto and zeal is quite admirable, our methods have been more covert.”
“And me being fake-dead is a problem?”
“You being ‘fake-dead,’ as you put it, is a problem, especially if it is believed it was because of my hand.”
“More likely your sword, but sure.”
His eyes narrow in amusement.
“You do see the problem?”
Mel nods. “I doubt my brother is going to want to hitch his wagon to your ride if he thinks you viciously murdered me. A truce coming from you would seem pretty disingenuous.”
“Indeed.”
“So, my would-be assassin, what’s the plan?”
For the second time during this exchange, he appears surprised, even if only for a blink of the eye.
“We use your believed demise to our advantage. No one will be searching the roads for you, which bodes well for us. We return to Renselaeus -- ”
“No,” she interrupts.
“No?”
“I want to go home.”
“Consider home a later leg of our journey.”
“We’re travel companions now?” she asks, petulant and sour.
He ignores her. “We will return to Renselaeus, where I will rally the standing army waiting there. For Renselaeus, we will march towards Tlanth, where the both of us can treat with your brother.”
“You want to march on Tlanth?” she asks. Horror dawns on her suddenly that she has been played this entire time. That Shevraeth’s goal is the same as Galdran’s: to take the color woods.
He must recognize her entire train of thought on her face, because he holds up a hand. “Under a white flag. I mean no harm to Tlanth.” The silence shared between them is taut with a whole lot of stockpiled tension. He makes her feel fragile in a way she has never known, and that leaves her resentful -- leaves her nervous and skittish.
“Why should I even trust you?” She thinks of her father and of that burnt out library. She thinks of how her fate has been cast from one man to the next, with this man as the source of most of her trouble.
His face is blank and shuttered when she looks at him. His mouth is held tight, but she catches the slight tic at his jaw as he clenches his teeth together and then releases.
“I am not sure what more proof you require, Lady Meliara.” She narrows her eyes slightly. He only ever seems to invoke her title when he is cross with her, or purposefully attempting to place distance between the both of them. “I have laid bare my own intentions, and I do apologize for the original context of our, uh, original acquaintance, as it were.”
“You apologize?” she scoffs.
He breathes deeply. “Even my patience has its limits, Lady Meliara. I know this war has been most unkind to you, but that unkindness did not stem from me. I will take you home. I will take you to your brother. But not just yet.”
“Using me is part of your plan, is that it?”
Shevraeth all but rolls his eyes at her.
“That is what people do, is it not,” he says plainly. “We both desire the same ends. If you are the one key I am missing to find peace throughout the realm, then, yes, I will use you.”
His frankness leaves her unsettled. His words I will use you feel wildly intimate, and she looks away from him quickly.
“When do we leave?” she asks quietly, her words cautious and measured.
He nods towards the horse next to his own gray.
“Saddle up,” he tells her.
10.
Renselaeus is farther than she thought.
She realizes quickly the import of what her rumored death has brought to the country at large.
In short: civil war. They pass through ravaged, hollowed-out towns. They find survivors wandering the side of the road, all they could take with them rolled up into a rucksack on their backs.
Shevraeth does not comment on any of it. He doesn’t rub her face in it. But then, that might be an inclination all her own.
That aside, the two of them fight -- a lot. Actually, she tries to fight and he rebuffs each advance. Each parry from her is met with a bland retort from him, cruelty masquerading under a courtly facade.
She is realizing though how quick and how intelligent he is, how she has unfairly discounted him at every turn, perhaps to her own disadvantage. He tolerates her own ignorance, and seems to have an answer to each challenge she posits against him -- be it the crown, the government, taxation and the people, her own family history. There are few stones the Marquis has left uncovered, and she feels foolish for expecting otherwise.
They ride for days on end, their progress constantly rerouted, be it demolished bridges, skirmishes waiting in the woods, or unfriendly towns.
He grows a beard over the course of their travel. It lends himself a more unkempt, rangy look than his reputation would ever allow. She keeps her own long hair wound up loosely in a braid and tries to keep her face clean, still painfully aware that she was described as a dockside beggar rat.
Mel isn’t sure what it says about her, but the idea that Shevraeth would agree with that description at large is more than just slightly humiliating.
They ride for days on end. For a long while, they keep to the woods, two transients who fit in with every other refugee scurrying through the realm. The difference, she finds, is that Mel and Shevraeth are headed in the opposite direction. They are headed towards the source of strife, which, if word of mouth is to be trusted, is Shevraeth’s own homestead.
He betrays nothing at learning Renselaeus has more or less devolved into a state of anarchy and bloodshed. He blinks once, and that is all. He asks the man who informs them of this who is manning the gate.
The man responds: what gate?
The only indication that this news troubles Shevraeth is that he hurries them along that much quicker. He tires their horses, brings both horse and rider to the brink of exhaustion. Sometime during the seventh day on the road, Mel’s fever returns. The cold weather does nothing but exacerbate her symptoms, and it pleases her in a perverse way to see that Shevraeth does not look any better -- his nose reddened, cheeks pale, eyes watery and glassy.
They have burnt through their supplies, and the water they drink from a nearby stream is run thick with debris and mud. Mel chokes on the handful of water she tries to swallow, and then freezes, drops her hands and glares at the Marquis.
“Enough,” she says. Her voice is hoarse, and her next words get caught up in a racking cough. “We need to stop. Somewhere. We need at least one good night,” she says.
She expects him to argue with her, or, maybe, perhaps finally crack a little. If it was her home that was under siege, if they were her people at each others’ throats, hell or high water wouldn’t stop her from returning as swiftly as she could manage.
Instead, his shoulders slump sightly. He rubs at the beard grown in along his jaw and stares out at the horizon, the crest of a bluff in the distance and the evening fog rolling in against it.
“There’s a town ahead. Arbelle, or Anbell.” He shakes his head slightly, coughs quietly, seemingly unsettled he cannot remember the exact name of the town ahead. “We can stop the night there.”
They do. The town’s name in fact Andell, and the inn they stop at is called The King’s Arms. Mel knows a bad omen when she sees one, and two traitors-cum-fugitives staying at a place called The King’s Arms certainly does not bode well.
The innkeeper is a plump older woman who gives both Mel and the Marquis the eye as they enter.
She clucks her tongue at them. “This ain’t that sorta establishment,” she says in a low croak of a voice, eyeing the gap of space between Mel and Shevraeth as though she is privy to some scandalous secret the rest of them cannot see.
“She is my wife,” Shevraeth says tightly beside her. And just what.
Mel whips her head around to face him, and just as quickly, she can feel the palm of his hand cradling the back of her neck, turning her to face the innkeep instead of him.
“This bitty little thing?” The innkeep marvels. “Look like you could break that little bird apart, I reckon, mercy.”
Mel chances a glance at Shevraeth, quietly fuming under her breath, and finds him on the verge of laughter. His hand still rests at the back of her neck, and she finds her anger mounting, at both Shevraeth and this presumptuous old hag.
“Stronger than she looks,” Shevraeth drawls. The innkeep laughs, and Mel blushes. She’s not completely sheltered and naive -- she knows exactly what they both are talking about, and it is humiliating and preposterous.
“A room then?” Mel asks, staring straight at the innkeeper and refusing to look at Shevraeth. The palm of his hand is heavy against her skin; it makes her feel twitchy, too large for her own skin, and he really has no right making her feel this way.
“Sure, sure,” the innkeeper says as she waddles back behind the counter. “I suspecting you be wanting a supper too.”
“Thank you kindly,” Shevraeth says. The innkeep shrugs.
“It’s lamb stew without the lamb.”
“Delicious,” he drawls.
For whatever reason, Mel blushes again.
The room they share that night is small and cold. There are no Fire Sticks in the room, and according to the innkeeper, none to be found in the town.
“The Fire Sticks go first,” she told them, “then the lamb.”
Shevraeth insists on sleeping on the floor, as though there is some honor and nobility to be found in such a gesture. Mel rolls her eyes and tells him, whatever.
It feels good though to rest on a bed instead of a patch of leaves. It feels even better to have clean water to wash up with, to drink, to be able to change her bandages and feel almost slightly human and normal again.
But it is unbelievably bizarre to sleep this close to him. Even with him on the floor and Mel tucked up in the bed, the room is too small to achieve much in the way of distance between them. And it’s not as though she hasn’t slept near him before. It’s just, in the field, one would take the watch while the other slept. In the field, the intimacy, the shared loneliness between them wasn’t so readily apparent.
She can’t remember ever hearing the heavy, patterned sound of his breath as he slept in the woods.
It’s deafening in their small room at the inn, and Mel rolls away so she does not have to face him.
She wakes curled alongside the bed closest to him. She decides she hates herself almost as much as she hates him, and Galdran, and that stupid innkeeper, and Bran and his damnable traps that brought her here in the first place.
11.
After Andell, they do not stop. Their brief off-road respite seems to have renewed Shevraeth’s drive to reach Renselaeus, and they ride hard towards his home.
Their travel is largely without incident until they near Renselaeus.
As they near the principality, they witness more and more remains of what must have been a skirmish passed through before their arrival. The spilled blood stains the muddy sticky and black, and Mel blanches at the dead horses they pass.
Fires burn more and more frequently among the trees, and the smoke is thick and acrid. The both of them choke on it as they ride through. Their horses spook easily, and with each crack of a tree branch heard in the woods, Mel freezes.
Before they left The King’s Arms, Shevraeth had offered her a small dirk to carry on her person.
“Won’t do you much good in all out battle, but it’s better than nothing,” he told her. Mel had slipped it back into its leather sheath and took it all the same. She had eyed the greatsword at Shevraeth’s waist, and she knew just from looking at it she’d need two hands to wield it, and likely be gored through and through before she could even land a blow.
They ride in silence, and Mel allows her attention to wander. It is as she is distracted, thinking of her brother, thinking of Tlanth, maybe even thinking of the Marquis, that she hears it -- a whistle through the air, as though the wind has gathered speed and been whittled down to a single point.
She realizes exactly what that sound is the same second that the arrow pierces her horse’s flank and bucks her off.
She falls to the ground hard. She gasps as she lands on her side and all her breath rushes out of her. She can hear someone calling her name, and it takes her a beat too long to clear her head. Rain has begun to fall again, coming down sooty and gray as it mixes with the thick smoke. Mel smears a dirty hand over her face and blinks up into the rain as six armed soldiers descend upon them.
This is bad, she thinks. This is incredibly, really, super bad. One soldier charges for Shevraeth, his sword raised, and Shevraeth meets the blow easily, his horse’s hooves slipping in the mud.
“Mel!” he calls to her again, and she rises unsteadily to her feet. “Mel! Run! Run!”
She doesn’t even think.
She runs.
She runs as fast as she can, errant tree branches and brambles scratching at her face and legs as she goes. The run uphill leaves her winded and gasping for breath, but no one follows her. Above the sound of her own labored breathing and her pulse in her ears, over the rain and the distant roll of thunder, she can hear the crash of steel on steel. She can hear the men she left behind, and when she reaches the top of the hill she stops, bracing both hands on her knees as she gasps for breath.
At the top of the hill, Mel does the worst thing she could possibly do: she looks back.
She glances back, just as she reaches the summit of a shaded hill. She can still see them down below. Two of the men are down, but four still circle Shevraeth. Even from this far back she can see what’s happening. He’s losing. There’s too many of them.
She takes another deep breath and wipes the rain from her eyes. She curses under her breath, curses her ankle that is starting to twinge again, and above all curses the Marquis of Shevraeth.
She runs back down the hill.
She makes a point to be as nimble and quiet as possible as she races back the way she came. She gasps in pain as a barbed branch catches against her cheek, but she does not slow her progress, not even when she can feel the blood start to spill down her face.
As she nears, she can hear them -- grunting and cursing, a horse neighing pitiably.
She isn’t even thinking anymore, but instead operating solely on instinct. She scampers up a nearby tree and prays that the branch will hold her weight, an enemy soldier just under it, aiming for Shevraeth’s back. Silently, she pulls the dirk from her waistband and slips the handle into her mouth.
She drops down onto the back of the horse easily, and before the solider has any time she react she stabs him messily in the back of the neck. Somewhere in the back of her mind she is aware that she’s never killed a man before. The way he gurgles and spits up his own blood, such a dark red it is almost black, horrifies her, and when she pulls the blade from his neck, the arterial spray catches her and she can taste the dying man’s blood.
The sudden surprise of her arrival buys Shevraeth more time and more ground. Mel pushes the man from the saddle and he lands with a heavy thump in a puddle, and the dead man’s horse dances in a circle as she tries to control the reins. Mel holds the reins in one hand and the dirk in the other, raised and at the ready, but there is no need for it. Shevraeth kills two of the remaining three -- taking the head off of one and slicing the other in half, from navel to collarbone -- and the third flees, back the way Mel had come.
Shevraeth whirls to face her, and Mel suddenly feels so small and inconsequential. It’s as though he is the very personification of power and strength, and then there she is -- the dockside beggar rat, drenched in a dead man’s blood, looking like something conjured up from a child’s nightmare.
The rain still falls, and for a moment that is the only sound.
His anger runs cold, she sees. It’s such a contrast to her. She is hot-blooded all the way through, her mouth running strides ahead of her better sense. She burns hot and fast, indiscriminate with her rage, but he is different. His anger is focused, almost calculated, and it makes her wonder if all courtiers are this way -- trained to compartmentalize, keep their emotions not only in check but separate.
Actually, it just makes her want to goad him.
“What, no thanks?” she asks. She bats at her hair, stringy and wet, as it clings to her forehead.
“I told you to run on,” he says through his teeth. It’s as close to a snarl as she has ever heard from him. She sways in her saddle, her mount pawing at the soft earth.
“And I did,” she snips. “And then I came back.”
Shevraeth’s face does not so much as soften as it darkens. His mouth remains firm and tight, but she catches the way he swallows. She doesn’t know what that means. She doesn’t know what that look in his eyes means either. Bit by bit she is finding that his mask is hardly solid, but rather porous. Bits of himself leak through, bits of himself escape the tight rein he holds on himself. It’s funny that way, she thinks. How he is nowhere near the fashionable court fop his reputation makes him out to be.
No, the funny part is that he not only tolerates such a reputation, but encourages it.
“You came back.” He repeats her words, and when said by him, her words in his mouth, they sound entirely too serious. Too heavy a thing for her to ever said, but he repeats her, he mimics her, she said the words first.
“I came back,” she says slowly.
She tries to shrug it off, but finds she can’t.
C O N T ' D
crown duel. successful rescues do not always ensure successful futures. the marquis of shevraeth rescues mel from certain danger -- their story unravels from there. mel/shevraeth. 11,887 words.
notes: LOL MY LIFE. writing fic for a series i read over a decade ago (and loved to bits lol). THIS IS FOR YOU, SISI. (also I apologize for the lack of the Duke. sequel?!) basically, while i loved these books when i was younger, rereading them at this age left me desiring something more? (porn? obvs. gratuitous violence? definitely). um, spoilers for the books? guess that goes without saying?
-- I’m saying your name on
the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal
covered with frost, --
RICHARD SIKEN
1.
My gaze dropped to the knife embedded squarely in his chest, which seemed to have sprouted there. But knives don’t sprout, even in dungeons, I thought hazily, as the torturer fell heavily at my feet. I turned my head, half rising from the chair --
And saw the Marquis of Shevraeth standing framed in the doorway. At his back were four of his liveried equerries, with swords drawn and ready.
CROWN DUEL; Sherwood Smith
2.
The thing about stories -- those cliche stories, those stories told to thrill and excite you as opposed to report events accurately -- is that rescue arrives just at the most desperate moment of danger.
This isn’t going to be that kind of story.
Mel grew up on those stories, the sort of stories old Julen would have scowled all the deeper if she knew it was her own daughter serving the role as storyteller. A barefoot countess educated solely on tales of knightly rescue and demented supernatural villains.
Those tales really aren’t coming in handy right now, because here’s the tragic thing:
Lady Meliara, the barefoot countess of Tlanth, has no idea who to expect to fulfill the role of knightly rescue.
3.
The iron cast into the fire sizzles with absorbed heat. Mel shivers.
The past few days, let alone weeks, have held more low points than Mel was aware a person’s life could be filled with. But this? This is pretty low.
No one ever speaks of the fortress Chovilun without a certain amount of fascinated dread.
With all the hot pokers roasting in the huge fire before her, she has to admit she expected worse than this, worse than the hot iron pressed against her forearm.
It hurts. It hurts a lot. To say it burns feels like a gross understatement, but it does burn. It stings, and Mel thinks she must already be half out of her mind not to be absolutely horrified by the stench of her own burning flesh. Because the thing is, she’s not really that horrified. Hell, she doesn’t even feel like she’s completely all there -- bound in irons to a damp wooden chair in a torture chamber waiting for the Baron himself to reappear and rend her limb for limb, or whatever it is that happens in a royal torture chamber.
What she does know is that she can handle this.
She can handle this.
The torturer (she wonders dimly if he has a name; he must, all men, even torturers, have names, but how strange it would be were this man to have a mild name, say, Bob, Bob the Torturer; Mel’s mouth parts and she almost starts to laugh, hysterical and feverish) frowns down at her before he smiles. It’s a truly terrible smile -- missing teeth, and the teeth he is left with rotted and sharp looking, as though he has filed them down to points.
That’s when he presses the iron down firmer against her already charred skin.
That’s when Mel finally screams.
And that’s when Mel notices the knife protruding from Bob the Torturer’s chest. She blinks rapidly, listens to the clang the hot iron makes as it hits the floor, moments before the torturer himself falls to his knees with a wet, fleshy sound.
Behind her, a man clears his throat.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she hears herself say.
The Marquis of Shevraeth only smirks.
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire?” he asks her, and she has no idea what that’s even supposed to imply.
The question dies stillborn in her throat as a fleet of the Baron’s men enters the room, swords drawn and at the ready.
4.
Mel is pretty sure there was a plan here. What little she has learned of the Marquis in the limited time they have shared together is that he’s the sort to have the next ten steps mapped out before he even takes one.
As sure as she is that there was a plan, she is just as sure that this definitely wasn’t it.
The men the Marquis came with are killed, the Baron’s men not nearly as inept as rumor has it, or perhaps simply lucky. Mel’s wrists are still clasped in iron, binding her to the seat. Mel wriggles there, trying in vain to break free, the metal biting at her already raw and bloody wrists. The clang of steel on steel is deafening, interrupted by the sharp shouts of men and her own ragged breathing. She looks up wild-eyed and terrified, her hair sticking to her forehead, catching in her eyes.
It will strike her later, but not now (no time for it now), that until this point, she had never actually witnessed battle. Sure, they had planned, and sure, Khesot had trained her and the townsfolk they gathered as soldiers for war, but the only blood she had seen shed had been her own.
Shevraeth is an entire different man with a sword in his hand. Gone is the empty, glassed-over expression to his face, gone is the easy carriage of his body. Instead he himself appears as much a weapon as the blade he wields. He is swift, merciless, and Mel is unsure what she imagined an actual duel would entail, what happens when a sword finds a sheath inside another man’s body, but she had not expected this. The entire room stinks of blood and shit and something entirely animal -- entrails exposed and left to coil on the dungeon’s floor, slick and near black with blood. Shevraeth does not stumble, not once, not until a mailed fist catches him at the temple and his entire body lurches sideways. He recovers quickly, skewers the man who struck him, and Mel continues to watch dumbly.
Suddenly, they are alone. The dead litter the floor around him -- his men and the Baron’s -- and in the distance she can hear shouts, movements within the fortress. He turns to face her, and she blanches slightly. It’s like knowing two men, she thinks, but then she has never truly known him at all. The entire left side of his face is drenched in blood, a wound at his temple bleeding freely, trailing thick and sticky down his neck and beneath his collar. It’s not just the blood though (and there is blood everywhere, all over him, and she’s not sure which is his and what belongs to the fallen; she can’t remember if she saw him take a hit, if he is wounded, and if it all ends for her here). It’s the way he is looking at her, eyes bright and wild, his jaw clenched, not an ounce of humor to him. Footsteps pound above their heads, and she watches him, more helpless than she has ever felt, and he watches her, his breath still labored.
“We need to leave,” he finally says. The courtly drawl is gone, and she is reminded of her cell at Galdran’s keep when he came to her the night before her execution. Her eyes widen; of all the things she expected him to say to her, this did not even rank.
“You’re not -- ” she starts to say, but her voice creaks. Her throat aches; she has not spoken since her capture. “You’re not going to kill me too?” she asks him, and even to her, she sounds incredibly small.
His confusion gives way to what looks like frustrated amusement, an expression so out of place in a royal torture chamber, but it renders him familiar to her again. He arches an eyebrow, which looks like it hurts.
“You think I went through the trouble of this slaughter only to kill you myself?” He leans down and grabs the keys from the guard’s belt nearest her. “Your rescue has arrived, Lady Meliara” he murmurs, almost teasingly, as he unlocks her wrists. His face is close to hers, and his eyes drift to her black eye then down to her cracked lips, the blood dried there.
Her wrists feel numb and she moves her hands gingerly, curling and then uncurling her fingers into fists.
“Can you stand?” he asks her.
She looks up at him. This close to her, she can see that the wound at his temple is not the only one he has collected for his efforts. There is a short but deep cut at the base of his neck bleeding freely and along his left side there is a gash in his tunic, the fabric darkened and clinging to his skin.
“How do I know I can trust you?” she asks him. The Baron’s men are approaching -- she can hear them, she can sense Shevraeth’s restlessness growing.
“You don’t,” he says, but he offers her his hand.
She takes it.
5.
She won’t let him carry her.
Instead, he half drags her out of the dungeon, his fingers digging into her ribs as he pulls her alongside him.
She stumbles to her knees when they finally emerge into the night, the gloom swallowing them up. “That’s enough,” she hears Shevraeth say, the words gritted out between his teeth. She is about to protest, but suddenly the ground is that much farther away and her entire left side is pressed against very, very human warmth.
The brand on her arm still stings, and the cold night rain isn’t helping. She thinks she would be more resentful of allowing Shevraeth to carry her as they leave the fortress, but she’s pretty sure she lacks the strength to even keep her head upright.
The horses have all run free, save for his. He jostles her easily, though clumsily, into the saddle and then mounts up behind her. As he spurs the horse on, Mel takes on last glance behind her and watches, at first stupidly and then with dawning recognition, a multiplying number of torches collect and then follow their trail.
They ride with his arm wrapped around her waist. She can feel the blood from the wound at his side dampening her back, the blood on his hands smearing against her already filthy tunic. She lets her body lull back against his chest and the arm around her waist tightens. She feels lightheaded and her head tips back, her forehead brushing against the left side of his jaw, and she can feel his body stiffen slightly behind her. She can feel the stubble that has grown in prickly, and she rears quickly away from him, jerking forward, leaving her dizzy, and with a streak of his blood across her forehead.
The horse runs at a gallop, hard and fast, and Shevraeth keeps his body leaning forward, bearing down on her. His breathing is steady, hot against her neck, but she can feel his heart -- pounding almost in time with the horse’s hooves.
6.
They ride through most of the night. She dozes without meaning to -- her eyes slipping shut and then opening to a completely foreign landscape. She wakes to them crashing through a creekbed, to his body jostling against hers as they climb a rocky summit. Her eyes close to a seemingly black blank forest and open to the same.
“Where are you taking me?” she finally asks. Either the sound of her voice is swallowed by the rain, or he simply chooses not to answer her.
She is almost positive it’s the latter.
She wakes this time to the sound of the horse’s hooves striking cobblestone. They are in a town, a town as anonymous and familiar as the same town she hid from the very man holding her in this moment. He slows the horse to a mild cant and brings them behind an inn.
He helps her down, and she scowls up at him. “Don’t get any ideas,” she says. She doesn’t move from him though, afraid that a step forward with her head still swimming would lead to nothing short of another embarrassing stumble forward. He looks down at her, half his face bathed in shadow.
“Ideas? Countess?” he asks mildly, and it’s almost impressive how easily he can slip back into that court drawl, especially considering the events preceding.
“I don’t need you . . . rescuing me, like I’m, I’m some damsel and you’re my dashing knight, or whatever you think you are to me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he replies dryly. He indicates the door leading from the stable into the inn. “By all means,” he says.
Mel takes a mincing step forward, the wound at her ankle opened yet again (those damned traps; she is over half sure that her main desire to return home is solely to be able to clock Bran about the head and shout that she was right, she was so right, about those ridiculous traps), but she makes it to the door without his help. It’s a small victory, and it’s out of disdain more than anything that leads her to glance back over her shoulder at him, prepared to gloat.
He is not looking at her, however: he is looking behind, the muscled cords at his throat pulled tight, his jawline severe and bloodied.
Mel turns back around quickly and all but runs into the innkeeper eyeing her warily.
7.
She catches sight of herself in the looking glass mounted on the wall of the inn. Her clothes are starched from the caked mud and her own sweat, but his blood is still tacky and damp on her. She rubs at her forehead, but the stain remains, smears across her hand.
“Come quickly,” the innkeeper tells them.
He looks to her over his shoulder, and for just a beat, he looks as hollowed out and exhausted as she feels.
As she follows him down the darkened hall, she wonders why escape has not even been a thought that crossed her mind until now.
She expected a finely furnished room, something befitting his station, but instead the innkeeper leads them to the back of the building to what she imagines are the servants quarters.
“Best we can do, my lord,” he says by way of explanation -- an explanation Mel doesn’t understand, but then she doesn’t understand much of what has transpired in the hours since her capture.
“It’ll do,” Shevraeth says. “My thanks.”
The room is small and barren. A servant returns with two bedrolls, a basin of water, a parcel of nondescript clothing, and a tray with what appears to be cold leftovers from dinner. The servant looks at the both of them and asks if they are in need of a healer; Shevraeth demurs, but requests that the servant return with bandages and keem leaves, and bristic or listerbloom, should they have any in stock.
Mel has not said a word this entire time but instead has stood off to the corner watching him warily.
After the servant returns a second time and the heavy wood door shuts, Shevraeth turns to her. “I imagine you have questions,” he says conversationally.
“What the fuc -- ” she starts. She stops when she catches the way the lines at the corners of his mouth deepen, though he does not smile, and how his posture relaxes. “Who are you?” she asks instead, her tone firm and almost authoritative.
His mouth flattens slightly. “You know who I am,” he says quietly.
She shakes her head, and then immediately regrets it as her vision swims. “No,” she says. “No, I really don’t.”
“Vidanric of House Renselaeus,” he says, mockingly, as though introducing himself before some invisible court. “Marquis of Shevraeth.”
“That’s not what I asked.” The surliness had returned to her tone, as had, she notices, the exhaustion to his face.
“It’s a lengthy tale,” he says. “To cut to the heart of it, you and I have been playing for the same side.” He peels his blood-sodden gloves off, first one, and then the other. “Only some of us have kept our true allegiances hidden. Until now.”
“Until now,” she echoes. Despite the rescue, despite the fact Shevraeth has all but proclaimed that she is safe with him, that she is among allies instead of enemies, Mel can feel an intense fury bubbling up inside of her. She feels played. She feels a fool. “Why didn’t you just -- ” And then she stops. At what point in this charade had he the opportunity to make his true intentions known? At what point would she have believed him?
He smiles, genuine and small, understanding yet still guarded.
“Get cleaned up, change, and I’ll see to that ankle.”
Her mouth turns down in a sour frown. The prospect of that seems far less then appealing.
“Yeah? And who’s going to see to -- whatever you have going on there?” She motions towards him, half his face still coated in blood, his neck red with it. She asks the question without considering the obvious answer, intending to sting, to annoy him, but misses the mark clear off.
His grin this time is almost cruel, dangerous. He steps to the door, but not before saying:
“I guess said responsibility falls to you.”
8.
Clean -- or as clean as she is likely to get considering the circumstances -- and drowning in the tunic offered her, she hobbles out into the small, dark hallway to allow Shevraeth the same privacy he afforded her.
She can hear him behind the door though. She can hear the sound his wet clothes make against his skin as he peels them off, the irritated and almost surprised gasp of pain he makes at one point, the splash of the water inside the basin; she finds her cheeks flushed high with color.
He opens the door for her when he is finished.
She lets him wrap her ankle. She hisses as the keem leaves press against her skin, and his bare hand holds her steady by the calf, his fingers hot against her chilled skin. He rubs some sort of salve onto the burn on her arm, and she glares.
“I could do that,” she says.
“Too late,” he smirks.
There is no mirror in the room, and he requires her help with his head and neck. The cut at his temple is surprisingly deep, and the skin around the wound has already begun to blossom into a dark bruise. He sucks in a quick breath when she presses her fingers against it, leaving her feeling equal parts triumphant and . . . concerned? No, that doesn’t seem right. She ignores whatever trail of thought she had stumbled upon and dips her fingers into the pot of salve and applies it at his temple.
As she cleans up his neck, she realizes that she is practically sitting in his lap, her hurt leg extended alongside him, her thigh cast over his.
“Um, sorry,” she murmurs, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t smile either, but his eyes are bright with repressed laughter.
His amusement only grows as he takes off his shirt, and she is blushing furiously now. She’s seen men in states of undress before. Tlanth isn’t some puritanical, tight-laced principality. She’s just, well, never touched a man in a state of undress. Or really touched any man for that matter. His chest is muscled and defined, which isn’t terribly surprising considering the ease and fluidity with which he fought back at the fortress. She knows what it feels like to cross blades, the strength it takes to parry and thrust, the shock that travels straight through the arm with each impact. He made it look entirely natural. The sword caught him along his ribs, curving down towards his abdomen.
“You need to clean it,” he says tightly, belying his own discomfort. “I’d do it, but.” He does not trail off. He merely stops his statement there. And she gets it. The second that bristic hits the opened flesh he’s not going to be anything close to helpful in terms of fixing himself up.
She tidies him up, knots the bandage around his torso, as quickly as she can.
When she is done, he reaches for her and something impossible tightens in her chest.
With the pad of his thumb he wipes at her forehead. His skin comes away reddened with his own blood.
9.
The people of Tlanth believe Mel dead.
She learns it first from a baker’s boy who passes her the heel of yesterday’s bread out in the alley.
The people of Tlanth, and the rest of the realm, believe Mel is dead --
and at Shevraeth’s hand nonetheless.
She punches Shevraeth hard in the shoulder when she finds him waiting for her outside the stable. He frowns at her, but he barely flinched at the impact of her small fist against his arm.
“I beg your pardon,” he drawls.
Mel braces her fists on her hips (one fist, she would be loath to admit, aching slightly; it’s like his muscles are made of forged iron or something inhuman and crazy). “I have just been informed,” she says, loftily, “that apparently, as rumor would have it, somewhere outside of the Chovilun fortress, you murdered me and left my body for the crows.”
It is a rare thing to catch the Marquis off-guard. She is learning this. In this moment, she has succeeded. She catalogs it away, what it looks like when he is confused, what his face does when surprised.
He recovers quickly.
“It seems the teeming masses shockingly have been ill-informed.” He pauses, and then blatantly looks her up and down. “Or, you might just been the best looking corpse I have ever laid eyes upon.”
For whatever reason (she is totally not looking into it), Mel blushes.
“If anyone is doing any bit of killing, I think you’ll find our roles reversed.” Shevraeth raises both eyebrows. He doesn’t even need to say anything. She saw what he could do with a sword. It’s a stupid taunt that he does not even bother responding to.
His gaze has hardened, and he stares off into the distance.
“What?” she finally asks.
He shakes his head and returns his gaze to her. “This new information complicates much already in motion.”
“Elaborate.”
She gathers that he is a man unused to commands, but he answers her anyway.
“Previous to our most recent . . . ah, reacquaintance, an alliance had been in the works between Tlanth and Renselaeus.”
“An alliance,” she repeats blankly.
“An alliance, yes. As I have already explained to you, both your people and my people share a similar goal. We all wish Galdran removed from the throne. And while your people’s . . . public manifesto and zeal is quite admirable, our methods have been more covert.”
“And me being fake-dead is a problem?”
“You being ‘fake-dead,’ as you put it, is a problem, especially if it is believed it was because of my hand.”
“More likely your sword, but sure.”
His eyes narrow in amusement.
“You do see the problem?”
Mel nods. “I doubt my brother is going to want to hitch his wagon to your ride if he thinks you viciously murdered me. A truce coming from you would seem pretty disingenuous.”
“Indeed.”
“So, my would-be assassin, what’s the plan?”
For the second time during this exchange, he appears surprised, even if only for a blink of the eye.
“We use your believed demise to our advantage. No one will be searching the roads for you, which bodes well for us. We return to Renselaeus -- ”
“No,” she interrupts.
“No?”
“I want to go home.”
“Consider home a later leg of our journey.”
“We’re travel companions now?” she asks, petulant and sour.
He ignores her. “We will return to Renselaeus, where I will rally the standing army waiting there. For Renselaeus, we will march towards Tlanth, where the both of us can treat with your brother.”
“You want to march on Tlanth?” she asks. Horror dawns on her suddenly that she has been played this entire time. That Shevraeth’s goal is the same as Galdran’s: to take the color woods.
He must recognize her entire train of thought on her face, because he holds up a hand. “Under a white flag. I mean no harm to Tlanth.” The silence shared between them is taut with a whole lot of stockpiled tension. He makes her feel fragile in a way she has never known, and that leaves her resentful -- leaves her nervous and skittish.
“Why should I even trust you?” She thinks of her father and of that burnt out library. She thinks of how her fate has been cast from one man to the next, with this man as the source of most of her trouble.
His face is blank and shuttered when she looks at him. His mouth is held tight, but she catches the slight tic at his jaw as he clenches his teeth together and then releases.
“I am not sure what more proof you require, Lady Meliara.” She narrows her eyes slightly. He only ever seems to invoke her title when he is cross with her, or purposefully attempting to place distance between the both of them. “I have laid bare my own intentions, and I do apologize for the original context of our, uh, original acquaintance, as it were.”
“You apologize?” she scoffs.
He breathes deeply. “Even my patience has its limits, Lady Meliara. I know this war has been most unkind to you, but that unkindness did not stem from me. I will take you home. I will take you to your brother. But not just yet.”
“Using me is part of your plan, is that it?”
Shevraeth all but rolls his eyes at her.
“That is what people do, is it not,” he says plainly. “We both desire the same ends. If you are the one key I am missing to find peace throughout the realm, then, yes, I will use you.”
His frankness leaves her unsettled. His words I will use you feel wildly intimate, and she looks away from him quickly.
“When do we leave?” she asks quietly, her words cautious and measured.
He nods towards the horse next to his own gray.
“Saddle up,” he tells her.
10.
Renselaeus is farther than she thought.
She realizes quickly the import of what her rumored death has brought to the country at large.
In short: civil war. They pass through ravaged, hollowed-out towns. They find survivors wandering the side of the road, all they could take with them rolled up into a rucksack on their backs.
Shevraeth does not comment on any of it. He doesn’t rub her face in it. But then, that might be an inclination all her own.
That aside, the two of them fight -- a lot. Actually, she tries to fight and he rebuffs each advance. Each parry from her is met with a bland retort from him, cruelty masquerading under a courtly facade.
She is realizing though how quick and how intelligent he is, how she has unfairly discounted him at every turn, perhaps to her own disadvantage. He tolerates her own ignorance, and seems to have an answer to each challenge she posits against him -- be it the crown, the government, taxation and the people, her own family history. There are few stones the Marquis has left uncovered, and she feels foolish for expecting otherwise.
They ride for days on end, their progress constantly rerouted, be it demolished bridges, skirmishes waiting in the woods, or unfriendly towns.
He grows a beard over the course of their travel. It lends himself a more unkempt, rangy look than his reputation would ever allow. She keeps her own long hair wound up loosely in a braid and tries to keep her face clean, still painfully aware that she was described as a dockside beggar rat.
Mel isn’t sure what it says about her, but the idea that Shevraeth would agree with that description at large is more than just slightly humiliating.
They ride for days on end. For a long while, they keep to the woods, two transients who fit in with every other refugee scurrying through the realm. The difference, she finds, is that Mel and Shevraeth are headed in the opposite direction. They are headed towards the source of strife, which, if word of mouth is to be trusted, is Shevraeth’s own homestead.
He betrays nothing at learning Renselaeus has more or less devolved into a state of anarchy and bloodshed. He blinks once, and that is all. He asks the man who informs them of this who is manning the gate.
The man responds: what gate?
The only indication that this news troubles Shevraeth is that he hurries them along that much quicker. He tires their horses, brings both horse and rider to the brink of exhaustion. Sometime during the seventh day on the road, Mel’s fever returns. The cold weather does nothing but exacerbate her symptoms, and it pleases her in a perverse way to see that Shevraeth does not look any better -- his nose reddened, cheeks pale, eyes watery and glassy.
They have burnt through their supplies, and the water they drink from a nearby stream is run thick with debris and mud. Mel chokes on the handful of water she tries to swallow, and then freezes, drops her hands and glares at the Marquis.
“Enough,” she says. Her voice is hoarse, and her next words get caught up in a racking cough. “We need to stop. Somewhere. We need at least one good night,” she says.
She expects him to argue with her, or, maybe, perhaps finally crack a little. If it was her home that was under siege, if they were her people at each others’ throats, hell or high water wouldn’t stop her from returning as swiftly as she could manage.
Instead, his shoulders slump sightly. He rubs at the beard grown in along his jaw and stares out at the horizon, the crest of a bluff in the distance and the evening fog rolling in against it.
“There’s a town ahead. Arbelle, or Anbell.” He shakes his head slightly, coughs quietly, seemingly unsettled he cannot remember the exact name of the town ahead. “We can stop the night there.”
They do. The town’s name in fact Andell, and the inn they stop at is called The King’s Arms. Mel knows a bad omen when she sees one, and two traitors-cum-fugitives staying at a place called The King’s Arms certainly does not bode well.
The innkeeper is a plump older woman who gives both Mel and the Marquis the eye as they enter.
She clucks her tongue at them. “This ain’t that sorta establishment,” she says in a low croak of a voice, eyeing the gap of space between Mel and Shevraeth as though she is privy to some scandalous secret the rest of them cannot see.
“She is my wife,” Shevraeth says tightly beside her. And just what.
Mel whips her head around to face him, and just as quickly, she can feel the palm of his hand cradling the back of her neck, turning her to face the innkeep instead of him.
“This bitty little thing?” The innkeep marvels. “Look like you could break that little bird apart, I reckon, mercy.”
Mel chances a glance at Shevraeth, quietly fuming under her breath, and finds him on the verge of laughter. His hand still rests at the back of her neck, and she finds her anger mounting, at both Shevraeth and this presumptuous old hag.
“Stronger than she looks,” Shevraeth drawls. The innkeep laughs, and Mel blushes. She’s not completely sheltered and naive -- she knows exactly what they both are talking about, and it is humiliating and preposterous.
“A room then?” Mel asks, staring straight at the innkeeper and refusing to look at Shevraeth. The palm of his hand is heavy against her skin; it makes her feel twitchy, too large for her own skin, and he really has no right making her feel this way.
“Sure, sure,” the innkeeper says as she waddles back behind the counter. “I suspecting you be wanting a supper too.”
“Thank you kindly,” Shevraeth says. The innkeep shrugs.
“It’s lamb stew without the lamb.”
“Delicious,” he drawls.
For whatever reason, Mel blushes again.
The room they share that night is small and cold. There are no Fire Sticks in the room, and according to the innkeeper, none to be found in the town.
“The Fire Sticks go first,” she told them, “then the lamb.”
Shevraeth insists on sleeping on the floor, as though there is some honor and nobility to be found in such a gesture. Mel rolls her eyes and tells him, whatever.
It feels good though to rest on a bed instead of a patch of leaves. It feels even better to have clean water to wash up with, to drink, to be able to change her bandages and feel almost slightly human and normal again.
But it is unbelievably bizarre to sleep this close to him. Even with him on the floor and Mel tucked up in the bed, the room is too small to achieve much in the way of distance between them. And it’s not as though she hasn’t slept near him before. It’s just, in the field, one would take the watch while the other slept. In the field, the intimacy, the shared loneliness between them wasn’t so readily apparent.
She can’t remember ever hearing the heavy, patterned sound of his breath as he slept in the woods.
It’s deafening in their small room at the inn, and Mel rolls away so she does not have to face him.
She wakes curled alongside the bed closest to him. She decides she hates herself almost as much as she hates him, and Galdran, and that stupid innkeeper, and Bran and his damnable traps that brought her here in the first place.
11.
After Andell, they do not stop. Their brief off-road respite seems to have renewed Shevraeth’s drive to reach Renselaeus, and they ride hard towards his home.
Their travel is largely without incident until they near Renselaeus.
As they near the principality, they witness more and more remains of what must have been a skirmish passed through before their arrival. The spilled blood stains the muddy sticky and black, and Mel blanches at the dead horses they pass.
Fires burn more and more frequently among the trees, and the smoke is thick and acrid. The both of them choke on it as they ride through. Their horses spook easily, and with each crack of a tree branch heard in the woods, Mel freezes.
Before they left The King’s Arms, Shevraeth had offered her a small dirk to carry on her person.
“Won’t do you much good in all out battle, but it’s better than nothing,” he told her. Mel had slipped it back into its leather sheath and took it all the same. She had eyed the greatsword at Shevraeth’s waist, and she knew just from looking at it she’d need two hands to wield it, and likely be gored through and through before she could even land a blow.
They ride in silence, and Mel allows her attention to wander. It is as she is distracted, thinking of her brother, thinking of Tlanth, maybe even thinking of the Marquis, that she hears it -- a whistle through the air, as though the wind has gathered speed and been whittled down to a single point.
She realizes exactly what that sound is the same second that the arrow pierces her horse’s flank and bucks her off.
She falls to the ground hard. She gasps as she lands on her side and all her breath rushes out of her. She can hear someone calling her name, and it takes her a beat too long to clear her head. Rain has begun to fall again, coming down sooty and gray as it mixes with the thick smoke. Mel smears a dirty hand over her face and blinks up into the rain as six armed soldiers descend upon them.
This is bad, she thinks. This is incredibly, really, super bad. One soldier charges for Shevraeth, his sword raised, and Shevraeth meets the blow easily, his horse’s hooves slipping in the mud.
“Mel!” he calls to her again, and she rises unsteadily to her feet. “Mel! Run! Run!”
She doesn’t even think.
She runs.
She runs as fast as she can, errant tree branches and brambles scratching at her face and legs as she goes. The run uphill leaves her winded and gasping for breath, but no one follows her. Above the sound of her own labored breathing and her pulse in her ears, over the rain and the distant roll of thunder, she can hear the crash of steel on steel. She can hear the men she left behind, and when she reaches the top of the hill she stops, bracing both hands on her knees as she gasps for breath.
At the top of the hill, Mel does the worst thing she could possibly do: she looks back.
She glances back, just as she reaches the summit of a shaded hill. She can still see them down below. Two of the men are down, but four still circle Shevraeth. Even from this far back she can see what’s happening. He’s losing. There’s too many of them.
She takes another deep breath and wipes the rain from her eyes. She curses under her breath, curses her ankle that is starting to twinge again, and above all curses the Marquis of Shevraeth.
She runs back down the hill.
She makes a point to be as nimble and quiet as possible as she races back the way she came. She gasps in pain as a barbed branch catches against her cheek, but she does not slow her progress, not even when she can feel the blood start to spill down her face.
As she nears, she can hear them -- grunting and cursing, a horse neighing pitiably.
She isn’t even thinking anymore, but instead operating solely on instinct. She scampers up a nearby tree and prays that the branch will hold her weight, an enemy soldier just under it, aiming for Shevraeth’s back. Silently, she pulls the dirk from her waistband and slips the handle into her mouth.
She drops down onto the back of the horse easily, and before the solider has any time she react she stabs him messily in the back of the neck. Somewhere in the back of her mind she is aware that she’s never killed a man before. The way he gurgles and spits up his own blood, such a dark red it is almost black, horrifies her, and when she pulls the blade from his neck, the arterial spray catches her and she can taste the dying man’s blood.
The sudden surprise of her arrival buys Shevraeth more time and more ground. Mel pushes the man from the saddle and he lands with a heavy thump in a puddle, and the dead man’s horse dances in a circle as she tries to control the reins. Mel holds the reins in one hand and the dirk in the other, raised and at the ready, but there is no need for it. Shevraeth kills two of the remaining three -- taking the head off of one and slicing the other in half, from navel to collarbone -- and the third flees, back the way Mel had come.
Shevraeth whirls to face her, and Mel suddenly feels so small and inconsequential. It’s as though he is the very personification of power and strength, and then there she is -- the dockside beggar rat, drenched in a dead man’s blood, looking like something conjured up from a child’s nightmare.
The rain still falls, and for a moment that is the only sound.
His anger runs cold, she sees. It’s such a contrast to her. She is hot-blooded all the way through, her mouth running strides ahead of her better sense. She burns hot and fast, indiscriminate with her rage, but he is different. His anger is focused, almost calculated, and it makes her wonder if all courtiers are this way -- trained to compartmentalize, keep their emotions not only in check but separate.
Actually, it just makes her want to goad him.
“What, no thanks?” she asks. She bats at her hair, stringy and wet, as it clings to her forehead.
“I told you to run on,” he says through his teeth. It’s as close to a snarl as she has ever heard from him. She sways in her saddle, her mount pawing at the soft earth.
“And I did,” she snips. “And then I came back.”
Shevraeth’s face does not so much as soften as it darkens. His mouth remains firm and tight, but she catches the way he swallows. She doesn’t know what that means. She doesn’t know what that look in his eyes means either. Bit by bit she is finding that his mask is hardly solid, but rather porous. Bits of himself leak through, bits of himself escape the tight rein he holds on himself. It’s funny that way, she thinks. How he is nowhere near the fashionable court fop his reputation makes him out to be.
No, the funny part is that he not only tolerates such a reputation, but encourages it.
“You came back.” He repeats her words, and when said by him, her words in his mouth, they sound entirely too serious. Too heavy a thing for her to ever said, but he repeats her, he mimics her, she said the words first.
“I came back,” she says slowly.
She tries to shrug it off, but finds she can’t.
C O N T ' D