Archive of Our Own

In the second year of the war, Scanra grew desperate, and it turned its gaze on Dunlath. The northerly pass was narrow, but Dunlath’s industry was largely to the south of the fief, and Maggur Rathhausak, clinging to his throne like a tick on a deer while his clanchiefs lost warriors and trust, was smart enough to send his men through in ones and twos, was smart enough to realize Dunlath fell in a place the king’s mages couldn’t scry. He sent them over the mountains and not through the pass, even if it must have left some of his men climbing past their dead comrades. Smart, efficient, and brutal.

He wasn’t smart enough to believe legends. Maura received word from the pack when a pair of men set up camp in her woods, and more word whenever another man or two came through, until there was a force of twenty on Tortallan soil and she’d sent an irascible message to General Vanget asking if there might be aid for her, since her garrison could watch the pass, but not the whole of her heavily forested northern border.

General Vanget’s help arrived with spears in hand two days later: a squad and a half of the King’s Own. The commander, a tall man with dark hair and a grin that said he was used to ladies finding him charming, hopped off his horse and executed a bow so perfect Maura had to hold back a snort. “The general’s compliments, your Grace. He says there’s an invasion your men can’t see off?”

Maura nodded. “The pass is a bottleneck and they were too smart to let us pick them off one by one, but they decided our fields are worth the resources to come the hard way, it seems. Now they’re spread out, and my scouts know exactly where they all are, but we’re not well-placed or trained for that kind of operation. The Own, however, is, if not quite as much as a Rider group.”

The commander grimaced. “Rider groups are spread thin on the border this year, with the Wildmage less able to help us all. We work with a fair amount of Riders, though. We’ll sweep your woods, and we’re seconded to Dunlath for at least a month, if not longer, if you’ll have us.”

A half-company of ordinary soldiers Maura might have expected. A squad and a half of the Own was more surprising. She gestured for her steward to take charge of the squad and their horses, to feed and water them since the Scanrans weren’t moving to attack if Maura wasn’t hearing howling. “Is there a reason they sent you?” she asked when the bustle of household organization had covered the awkward gap for long enough.

On closer inspection, the commander, who really ought to have introduced himself by now, looked tired, as any man might after a year and a half of war, and at least three years of escalating attacks before that. “My squad took heavy fire in the first battle of the season, lost four men, including a corporal. Another squad lost all its officers and half its men. For the moment, when we have no time to recruit, the two squads have been combined, and I’ve promoted one corporal and had a spare one foisted on me. If we can’t work as a unit, we’re dead. Dunlath is our proving ground.”

“You’re of no use to me if you die on your first outing.”

“Credit me with more ability than that, your Grace.”

She was growing used to picking out ranks from the insignia she would have found incomprehensible years ago. He was a sergeant, but he spoke to her with the ease of one who was used to nobles, so he was likely one of the Own’s omnipresent second sons, rather than a merchant’s son with ambitions or someone else who could afford a warhorse and a warrior’s training. “What’s your name, sergeant?”

His grimace was elaborate. “My lord would scold me for that. My apologies. Sergeant Domitan of Masbolle, at your service, my lady. With the Third Company of the Own. I’ll introduce my men to your hall at dinner, if you like.”

He might have forgotten to introduce himself, but Domitan of Masbolle kept up on his noble gossip. He would know that Dunlath had recent reason to be nervous of strange warriors turning up, even ones sworn directly to the king. Especially her immortal residents, who had been the subject of scrutiny and fear often, in the early days when she’d had to help them convince Sir Douglass they were worth protecting, when she had been too young to do much herself. “I’ll introduce you at dinner, and if your men could all provide strips of fabric from something they’ve worn recently, I’ll let the wolves know who you are too.” At his expression, she grinned. “I hope you’ll enjoy Dunlath, Sergeant Domitan. It’s fair strange, but we do well here.”

“And better, I imagine, when strangers don’t fuss about the differences.” To his credit, he grinned right back. “Very well. We’ve been riding hard from Giantkiller, where we picked up our new corporal. Do you get a sense that the Scanrans are planning a move? Or shall I plan to let my men sleep and get them out of your downy mattresses at dawn?”

“I think they’re waiting on more, if they haven’t attacked yet. They’d be fools to risk stormwings and ogres, even civilian ones, with as few men as they have.” She squinted at him, pondering how far to push, just what to say. “We have two ogres in our garrison. They are ordinary soldiers. Anyone else is a civilian. What they choose to do is up to them, and some may choose to fight, but they aren’t soldiers. Nor are the wolves, or any of the other animals who have ways to communicate with us.”

Sergeant Domitan shrugged, though there was something serious behind the charm. A sign that, perhaps, he wasn’t some noble’s feckless son whiling away his time until his parents could find another occupation for him, or waiting out his years of service until he could have a pension. “I’m not in the habit of asking anyone for help who doesn’t volunteer. Sometimes civilians want to help whether we will or no, I could tell you hair-raising stories about the road to Rathhausak, but I don’t make a business of conscripting when I have competent men at my back.”

Obvious bait, but no less interesting for it. Maura had, as everyone on the border had, heard of Lady Knight Keladry of Mindelan’s desperate gambit, the trip across the border that only wasn’t treason because she’d triumphed so decisively. She’d heard, as everyone had, that a squad of the Own had gone with her, because the Own were less complicated and weighty heroes in that circumstance. Had it been Domitan of Masbolle, then, and his men, to help strike down a man Queen Barzha called a fool and a heretic? Dunlath had seen only one killing device, early in the war, and it was the only time the bulk of the stormwings had bestirred themselves to action: they’d fallen on the thing like crows on carrion and ripped it to pieces. The language they’d used, in the aftermath, had made Maura want to take notes for the first time in years. “Good. Then I’ll trust your judgment, and see what you can do with those Scanrans.”

“Before you trust my competence?” he inquired, but he was smiling. Good. A great many men got offended when Maura didn’t trust them automatically, or throw herself in their arms begging for aid, or whatever it was young lords seemed to think ladies who’d been running dukedoms for years with the specter of treason hanging over their heads would do.

“I have perfect faith in the competence of any officer trained under Raoul of Goldenlake,” she assured him. Her guardian had been Lord Raoul’s squire, she could hardly have avoided the hero worship. “I simply prefer not to applaud in advance.”

“Then I’ll have to earn the applause,” he said, and deftly changed the subject to the fief’s defenses and asked a few canny questions about how he could add his men to her rotations without stepping on anyone’s feet.

Dinner that night went nearly as well. Queen Barzha and Lord Hebakh attended, perched on the metal bars she’d had installed outside the windows of the great hall, with one of the Gifted among the staff making a small breeze to push the pervasive smell out the windows instead of in. The men of the Own held up bravely to the unusual dinner guests, and Sergeant Domitan smiled at them both specifically when introducing his soldiers to the crowd. Maura had had more important guests do much worse, she considered, and decided to like Domitan.

Maura was an early riser, but the Own had her beat. When she woke in the morning, indulged in a strong cup of tea, and descended to see what help she could offer them, they’d already gone. Her quartermaster told her they’d supplied late at night and had hailed the gate guards on their way out when the sky was still grey, and that the sergeant told her he hoped to be home for dinner.

Given the size of Dunlath and Maggur’s irritating habits of spreading his people out, making Tortall fight on so many fronts they couldn’t help but weaken forces that had been trained to fight in open battle, a day was an optimistic estimate. Maura might have believed it for a Rider squad, when they were more comfortable with those techniques, but the Own always seemed over-polished for that kind of work, clanking along in heavy armor. Daine had once conveyed, her voice trembling with suppressed laughter, Frostfur’s disdain for hunters who made a great deal of noise and expected their prey to stay still in the meantime, when Sir Douglass had led a hunt for a dangerous boar in full plate. Maura had stifled her own laughter, but she’d never forgotten that it was the pack that brought the boar down in the end.

Her skepticism was, as it turned out, unwarranted. Sunset was just starting to lose its color when the bird watch reported warriors on the border road. The gate guard blew the horn only a few minutes later, the three short blasts that meant those coming back were friendly.

Maura met them at the gate, with hostlers, cool clear water, and the keep’s hedgewitch, Gwyn. The squad, when Maura squinted at them, looked well enough, if tired. One was leading his horse instead of riding it, and another was cradling his arm against his side. Sergeant Domitan had a puncture in his armor, but the arrow didn’t seem to have traveled deep, since he dismounted with energy. They had, to her relief, all worn leather armor with only a bit of metal in the most important places. Good. It made her think better of Lord Raoul and them both.

“Injuries?” she asked, used to making such demands of her garrison captain.

“Cracked ribs and a deep bruise from a fall, some minor scratches and sprains, one concussion.” He rolled his shoulder where the puncture was. “I might need a splinter or two picked out of me, I’m lucky a Scanran got startled by a howl mid-draw. My compliments to your friends. Can I send them a haunch of something as thanks?”

The wolves could be odd about gifts. Daine said it was one of the stranger things about them. Any sensible animal took food when it was offered, unless they had reason to suspect a trap. It was energy they didn’t have to spend hunting. Dunlath’s wolves, though, had pride, and enough knowledge of humans to know that gifts could be traps. “We’ll see what can be arranged,” she said nonetheless, because thinking of the wolves as people to recompense for their aid was exactly the kind of thing she wanted to encourage, and she didn’t expect Sergeant Domitan to be around long enough to need to know about interspecies politics anyway.

He gave her a piercing look that said she wasn’t quite hiding that there were complications he wasn’t aware of, but things were moving too fast in the courtyard to discuss it. Gwyn was escorting away his injured men, the hostlers were taking the horses to wipe them down, and Maura and the sergeant both had reports to make on the fallout. He gave her a grin, and she gave him a much tighter smile in return, and the two of them parted without words to take care of what needed doing.

In the months that followed, it set the pattern, while Sergeant Domitan, who garnered an affectionate “Sergeant Dom” from everyone in the keep within a week, quietly commanded the small Dunlath front of the war while the border slowly eased up. Messengers said the battles were less frequent but bloodier, said that sieges were breaking up and down the border, that Maggur had faced three assassination attempts from his own men, and he kept sending small groups to harry Maura. Their intent was to raid for food more than to attack, after the first group, and Maura asked the Own to start taking prisoners, which they did. Maura didn’t have the heart to kill men for starving, and from his lack of comment, Sergeant Dom agreed, even if it meant Maura’s garrison became more of a prison, since there wasn’t anywhere else to put foreign warriors.

Most days, when he wasn’t on patrol, she saw him at least twice, once at dinner and once in the morning for a crisp update on the security of her fief, where he somehow adroitly managed to avoid stepping on both her toes and those of her garrison commander. When she made requests, he didn’t second-guess them, and when she asked after his trust in her, he laughed and told her he’d spent too much time around Buriram Tourakom and Keladry of Mindelan to treat any woman in charge as though she were anything less than competent.

It spoke well of him, she decided, that he had such faith in Lady Knight Keladry, who must have been nearly a decade his junior and who he had known as a squire, before she’d flowered into a heroine who was the talk of the border and likely to be granted a fief before her thirtieth birthday if she kept on the track she was on. He bragged about her nearly as much as he did about his cousin Jessamine, who apparently had started a university training course for battlefield medics without the Gift.

Maura had kept herself carefully away from Corus, since the trial and Traitor’s Hill. Nobody important blamed her for Yolane’s treason, she knew that. Daine and Alanna wouldn’t have stood for it, but King Jonathan had been kind even without them, treated her as a cousin and gave her a guardian who would be better than a jailer. Still, she was unpolished enough as it was, without having to talk around the shadow of treason. She’d refused every invitation south, and gone to the Minchis for what court polish she could manage before the threat to the border sent all the northern lords worth their salt home to build up their defenses.

As a result, Corus was something of a legend to her, something Daine had laughed at her for on her most recent visit, teasing her that Dunlath was a legend in Corus, with its ogres and stormwings and strange animals. With Sergeant Dom, though, Corus and the palace became commonplace, full of recurring figures too real to be heroic: Lord Raoul hiding in corners at parties, Prince Roald and his bashful courtship with Princess Shinkokami, Evin Larse of the Riders in and out of beds all over the palace grounds. She lapped up the stories with embarrassing eagerness, and he never acted as though she was as hopelessly rusticated as she knew herself to be, never acted as though it were a favor he was condescending to grant her. Instead, he just told her more.

The day the messenger came from Fort Mastiff and brought word that Maggur Rathhausak was dead, that a council of clanchiefs had signed a peace with King Jonathan, that the war with Scanra was over and the two countries would be bound into a true peace, Maura invited all of Dunlath who cared to come to a banquet. So many came that they spilled from the great hall and into the courtyard, where most of the immortals had ended up, in deference to the stormwing smell making it difficult for mortals to eat around them.

Everyone was drunk and laughing, flirting and dancing. It was autumn, and Maura didn’t want to use too much of her stores, when they’d had years of scant harvests since she didn’t want people in unprotected fields, but they all needed the celebration, and she let herself celebrate with them, even if her cheeks flared nearly as pink as her Gift after a mug or two of brandy. She kept a mug in her hands at all times anyway, and wandered table to table, rejoiced in the likely return of sons who had joined the army, congratulated men from the garrison who’d used their uniforms to woo their sweethearts and finally wanted to wed. Even the hostages, who had received word that Scanra would ransom them, were allowed a mug of hard cider each, and were escorted to the feast.

Eventually, Maura wandered out to the courtyard, where she spoke with some of the ogres, with Queen Barzha and Hebakh, with any of Dunlath’s immortal residents who cared to talk to her. Most of them did. They didn’t think of her as a duchess, when most of them had centuries outnumbering her years, but she hoped, after years of fighting for them as fiercely as she knew how, they thought of her as a friend.

When, coming around a corner, she heard Dom’s voice, she stopped. Eavesdropping was an instinct she’d never allowed herself to lose, after Yolane and Belden, and it was a rare visitor to Dunlath who chose to speak to its immortal residents when it wasn’t a matter of politics. Even Daine and Numair were still uneasy with Barzha and her flock.

“You can’t tell me you don’t dance,” Dom was saying, with the sort of warm insinuation Maura recognized but that she was never on the receiving end of. People weren’t generally brave enough to flirt with the strangest duchess in Tortall, especially when she wasn’t pretty enough to make up for her reputation. “If I could fly, I’d certainly dance.”

“Well, I can’t dance with you, ground-pounder,” said a vaguely familiar voice. One of the Stone Tree Nation, to use that particular epithet. Yuizha, Maura was fairly sure. Some stormwings had joined Stone Tree during the war, either to soak up the fear or because Barzha’s fame had tempted them away from their homes, and Yuizha was one. “I’d cut you up into tasty little pieces.”

“I’d like to see you do it, though. Even if I couldn’t join in.”

Yuizha’s cackle got the attention of some other nearby stormwings, and Maura, before she could be caught by beings who didn’t care in the least about manners and would happily let the whole keep know that the duchess was listening in on a flirtation, came around the corner. Dom was sitting on the edge of a fountain Maura hadn’t bothered to run for years, the kind of affectation that had been built by a great-grandfather who’d wanted to make much of his Conté connections but that wasn’t practical for the north. Yuizha was perched nearby on one of the iron railings that Maura had had built when they proved very practical indeed, and a few of Dom’s men were nearby, watching the banter with their eyes wide. Another stormwing was perched on the edge of a nearby outbuilding, in the dark enough that Maura couldn’t tell who it was.

A show. They were putting on a show somehow, the two of them, and Maura smiled to see it. “Sergeant Domitan, I was wondering where you are. Joining the revels out here?”

“Trying to convince Lady Yuizha to dance,” he said easily enough. His eyes weren’t even streaming. It had taken Maura years to get used to the sensory assault of stormwings, even with the trick of dabbing perfume under her nose. It really just gave one a different smell to distract from the worse one, it didn’t replace it.

“I thought perhaps you might not want your nice pretty soldier all cut up,” Yuizha said, just as easily. She’d stretched her wings out, arched her neck, was displaying herself just as Maura often saw Hebakh do for Barzha.

“It would be a shame to have the last casualty of the war be a soldier killed by an ally during the celebrations,” Maura agreed. She tried to keep her voice just as light and arch, but she’d never had the talent for that. It was something the Minchis couldn’t really teach her, when she was close kin to a good many of them and when she turned beetroot-pink when anyone made even the slightest attempt. “Do you think the Stone Tree Nation would like it if I sent some musicians outside, though, Yuizha? Is there music you all might like to dance to?”

Yuizha tilted her head, falling out of her flirtatious pose. “Humans weren’t this interesting the last time I was in the mortal realms, were they?” she asked the sky, or the stormwing watching above, or any of the ones who might be listening nearby.

“I am a very unusual kind of human,” said Dom, with the easy confidence of someone who’d been told something similar plenty of times. “So is the duchess,” he said, with a grin at Maura that invited her in on the joke.

Maura couldn’t say she disagreed with that. Anyone raised the way she had been was bound to be a least a little unusual. “Daine talks sometimes about how her magic makes the People a little different,” she offered. “I think often that it’s true of humans too.”

Yuizha snorted while Dom tilted his head, giving her a penetrating look Maura didn’t quite know what to do about. “It might well be true. She does set things on their ear.”

“Enough to make you all dance, if I sent out musicians? Do you think they can play what you need to dance?”

Yuizha laughed, and then with a flash of steel wings in the moonlight, launched herself into the sky. “We can make our own music,” she said, and started a high, keening cry that other stormwings took up all around the courtyard, more and more of them joining her, catching the air currents but not flying as high as Maura knew they usually did for pleasure.

Most people who saw stormwings wheeling overhead were unlucky. They were soldiers pushed to a battle who knew that they wouldn’t be able to deal with their dead and dying comrades before the stormwings found them. But Maura had been lucky enough, over the last few years, to see them fly for pleasure or joy or courtship. Now Dom and his soldiers joined the group, and she walked over to him, tilted her head up to see what he could see. The soldiers that were watching were elbowing each other, gape-mouthed and wondering, but Dom was simply smiling like he’d gotten exactly what he wanted.

“You could make the first noble marriage to an immortal, the legal precedents would be fascinating,” she offered.

Dom’s laugh was startled and ungraceful. “At least we wouldn’t have to worry about the disposition of the fief, since I’m youngest. But you sound just like my grandmother, ready to marry me off at the first flirtation. I can’t even dance with her.” He looked up at the sky, and a little wistfully, added “I’d have to learn to fly first.”

Maura had no excuse to fly in slings held in stormwing claws, not anymore, no emergency to make it necessary now that she was too old to interest them much. It had been years since she thought of it, and watching the stormwings wheel on high, making the eerie keening sounds she’d never known before to interpret as song, she missed it keenly. “I’ve always envied Daine, being able to turn into a bird like she can,” she said. “I don’t know if it ever occurred to me to envy the stormwings.”

“It almost makes up for the smell,” he said, and she covered her mouth with her hand to hide her smile and elbowed him.

Dom, with the instinct of a well-trained warrior, caught the elbow, and with the instinct of a well-trained flirt, he somehow managed to transmute the motion into holding her arm as though they were at some sort of courtly function. When he started moving, she nearly tripped over her skirt hem before falling into step with him. “Where exactly are we going?”

“I want more people to see this. My men, at least. Tortall might finally have a chance to breathe, with Scanra gone quiet, and that means we’re going to have to reckon with the last war at last.” He tipped his chin to the sky. “That’s one way of doing it, to my mind.”

Maura’s people were still uneasy with the stormwings. The ogres they accepted, and the wilder immortals, the ones who kept to the woods, but stormwings, with their crass and cruel words, with the scent of them, with the way they’d been reintroduced to the world, still made people nervous. It could do no harm, for them to see the display. She let Dom lead her inside, to the warmth and the rush of noise, and when it would have been easier to split apart, she let him keep her arm, let him lead her around the room.

When they met one of his soldiers, Dom could be a commander, could say “Go outside and look up, it’s worth seeing,” and be listened to even when his men were drunk or flirting. All the better if they were flirting, really, since it meant whoever they were flirting with could go with them.

Maura took a more delicate tack with her farmholders, her master miners, the three adepts from the City of the Gods who’d been stranded at Dunlath ever since the siege began and had been glad to stay for the chance to experiment with Dunlath’s opals. She told them there was a rare sight outside, if they cared to see. A celebration of the end of the war, by the grace of some of Dunlath’s residents.

Most of them went, and where some went, others followed, until there were only a few people left in the great hall, stubborn holdouts or those who preferred to stay close and warm by the fire even at summer’s end, and Maura let Dom lead her back outside.

The stormwings were still dancing, wheeling and glinting in the moonlight. In the middle of the whirl of them, Barzha and Hebakh were together, close and dangerous, the sharp sides of their wings at each other’s throats. Maura caught her breath, watching the way they knew each other, matched each other and missed each other by half-inches. She’d watched the king and queen dance, once, when she’d had to be in Corus for the trials, and it had felt like that. Not the danger, but the knowing.

One of the fiddlers had come outside, and somehow made a tune out of what had seemed to Maura to be formless keening and the whistle of wind rattling metal. If it was or wasn’t what the stormwings thought of as appropriate dance music, it didn’t seem to matter to them that much. The music still made them fly higher and faster, wheeling down closer so the sound could carry to them more easily. Another musician caught the strange melody on a repeat, and then one of the keep’s braver singers, a kitchen maid who often sang over the vegetables she washed in the courtyard tub.

“Thank you for this,” said Maura under the cover of the growing sound. “I’ve known them for years now, and I know they’re not what people think they are, but I didn’t think of them dancing.”

Dom hummed, thoughtful, and kept his head tipped up to the sky. “I’m glad I got to see it before I leave.”

“Are you leaving?” Maura inquired, and knew immediately how stupid a question that was. There was no reason for a squad and a half of the King’s Own to stay in Dunlath with the war ended. Only the fact that she was of Conté blood had kept them there as long as they were, and even then the opals were likely to be the bigger factor.

“I expect orders from my lord within the week,” he said, and where she might have expected him to be relieved, excited for the next adventure, instead he mostly sounded tired. It had been a long war. They all were long, Maura supposed, if not in days. “Since no one here can firespeak, as fast as word can make it from Mastiff or Giantkiller, most likely. Wherever he was when they surrendered.”

“Where will you go?” she asked, and hoped her voice sounded as casual as she meant it to. She’d grown used to working closely with a respectful commander. Dom, who hadn’t known her as a terrified girl without help or hope or anything resembling grace, treated her like a woman in ways Dunlath wasn’t quite used to yet. There was a reason, Maura had sometimes wryly thought, that most heirs lived away from their fiefs during their most awkward years.

“If I had to guess, Third Company will ride the border to mop up any last raiders who haven’t heard the word or have decided to turn bandit instead of going home, and then we’ll go south.” His mouth went flat and grim. “We have to recruit, and all the men are owed a long leave. I’ll go to Masbolle, most likely, to be fussed over, before riding out to see if I can convince any mothers to let their sons join us.”

After two bloody wars within a decade, and another barely older than Maura herself, with a famine and a nearly-averted civil war included, even noble houses were stretched thin. Dom’s worries were reasonable. During King Jasson’s wars, the ones that had conjured Dunlath out of a loose collection of fur trappers and farmers that didn’t even bother to call themselves a clan in what Scanra had once owned, he’d opened the King’s Own to merchants’ sons, traders, any man wealthy enough to kit himself out and fit enough to use what he’d paid for. King Jonathan had spoken to the Bazhir, and now a headman’s brother was one of Dom’s corporals. She wondered who he would try to recruit next. A stormwing squad, perhaps.

It was only when Dom spoke into the silence that she realized she’d let it go on too long. She was usually a better host than that. “Will you go south?” he asked, as though it was a reasonable question, as though Maura hadn’t been avoiding it for years now.

“What for?” she asked, startled and graceless, all of her attention lapsing away from the dance above them.

“The usual reasons. Council meetings, I’d think. You’re a young duchess, but you’re a duchess, and people should know what you’re doing here, with the immortals. And, well—forgive my indelicacy, your Grace, but you’re a young duchess.”

And of the Conté lineage, no less. King Jonathan had done a great deal to repopulate the house, but Maura and her children still represented both a threat and an opportunity. He would want her to marry, but he’d want her to marry someone who would do better than Belden at keeping an eye on his Dunlath duchess. “I suppose I must.” She looked up again. Did the stormwings dance over Corus? Would she see ogres at Midwinter dinner? She thought not, but that was Dom’s point, after all. “Will I see you there?”

“Save me a dance,” he said by way of answer, and she heard from the direction of his voice that he was looking at her, not at the stormwings, moving in endless and beautiful combinations to the sound of music from below.

“Excuse me, gentlemen, but the duchess owes me a dance.”

The voice was so out of context that for a moment Maura couldn’t for the life of her recognize it. When she turned, though, she found Domitan of Masbolle, clean and fresh and wearing a rich green tunic that almost tricked a person into thinking his eyes were the same shade. She blinked a few times, and then frowned at him when he noticed and grinned at her. “Lord Domitan,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster. He wasn’t wearing the Own’s insignia, so he’d come to the Midwinter party as a son of Masbolle.

“Duchess Maura,” he said, with a sweep of a bow, and turned to the collection of second sons with avaricious eyes who she’d been stiffly conversing with. The king and queen had encouraged her to attend parties while she stayed the winter in Corus, but while her title made her popular, her awkwardness meant that the men who spent time around her were more interested in her opals than anything else. “You won’t mind me stealing her too much, will you? We’re old friends, and it’s been an age since we caught up.”

There wasn’t much any of them could say to prevent her departure, even if she thought one or two of them might like to. There was some Runnerspring cousin who’d been pursuing her devotedly and with all the enthusiasm of a donkey being prodded up a hill, and she could see the panic in his eyes as he tried one last strike. “The duchess generally doesn’t dance. You could join our conversation. We were discussing the Scanran peace talks.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Dom, peaceably enough, and extended his hand to Maura. She took it without thinking. “The duchess hears about that enough at the negotiating tables, I’m sure. If she doesn’t dance, you aren’t asking nicely enough.”

Maura let him lead her away from the resulting stunned silence before she spoke, trying not to let her mirth brim over into a laugh and covering it with her best severe glare. “You didn’t ask at all, my lord. People are going to think they just haven’t been masterful enough with me, and all these ambitious young lords are going to get even more obnoxious than they already are. One of the new knights whose family is rich enough that he’s a second son tried to flirt with me the day he got his shield, if you’ll fancy it. I don’t need him deciding to try to pull me out to the dance floor.”

“Your trials are legion,” Dom agreed, solemn and certainly laughing at her, and did pull her out to the dance floor. “You’re well? I was glad to hear you’re part of the peace talks, and surprised you were planning to stay the winter in Corus.”

Maura shrugged, a motion her old nanny and the lady of haMinch would scold her for, since it ruined the graceful movements of the dance they were beginning. “It was pointed out to me that I’m a young duchess, and I have a duty.”

He frowned, some of the light leaving his eyes. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“You weren’t wrong. Either that I should involve myself in council business or that I ought to marry. Right now I’m focusing more on council business. His Majesty wants me to talk about being on the northern border all the time, as part of the peace talks. Mostly when he wants the Scanrans to give him a concession.”

“Any word on how they plan to bind the peace?”

Maura winced. “One of the younger princes, probably. Scanra’s likely to go back to not having a king, so sending Lianne or Vania up past the border wouldn’t get what we want, even if we wanted to send one of them into a place we’re having trouble trusting. Carthak was bad enough. No, it’s going to be Liam or Jasson, and my guess is Liam.”

“I wondered if it would be you, inviting some Scanran warrior down to rule Dunlath with you and straddle the border.”

“One of the delegates mentioned it as a possibility. I wouldn’t have minded, I know how little fertile farmland they have and Dunlath could help them, but they heard about my immortals and they were a good deal less enthused about the match after that.” Numair, in his usual vague-but-not-really way, had been the one to bring them up. He protected her for Daine’s sake, when everyone thought it wise to keep Daine away from the negotiating table. She wasn’t a great believer in compromise.

Dom led her through a turn in thoughtful silence. “I’m glad to hear they haven’t asked it of you. I hope the prince will be happy in his match, though. It seems like Empress Kalasin was lucky, and Prince Roald certainly was. Maybe their luck will remain good.”

“So mote it be,” said Maura.

There was a moment when she thought he would ask about her marriage again, push until she admitted that no match yet pleased her, that the few knights who weren’t heirs in their own right acted as though they would treat her as an equal and all the scholarly second sons, the mages and stewards and academics, seemed too soft for Dunlath’s needs. The stormwings wouldn’t need anything but words to cut any of them to ribbons. Dom didn’t ask, though. He had a good instinct for when she could be pushed and when she couldn’t bear to be. “So mote it be,” he said, and when the dance was over, he just happened to have the excuse to introduce her to a retiring sergeant of the Own, brother to the lord of Linden.

The Own’s Third Company was at the palace for most of the winter, only riding out a few times to aid Rider groups in the Royal Forest or to send a few squads out to fiefs and towns that might have people they could recruit. Maura heard all about their adventures, because it seemed that Dom was at a good half the parties she attended, and when he wasn’t, even Lord Raoul sometimes updated her on their doings. Dom danced with her at least once at every party they attended, and asked her about the Scanran peace talks, about her negotiations with a clan of centaurs thinking of moving north, about this and that sight in Corus she had or hadn’t seen. He even sought her out with a grin on his face when he returned from a recruitment trip with news that one of the younger daughters of Fief Irimor had become the first woman recruited to the Own and would be joining his squad.

“Seems you’ve made a friend,” Daine said when Maura was in her rooms one afternoon playing with baby Sarralyn, who was crawling ambitiously and had become a menace in the process.

Maura scowled at Daine and returned her attention to Sarralyn, who was watching with her head cocked. As her divine grandmother had scolded her to do, she’d stayed faithfully in one form since her first Midsummer, but sometimes her expressions, her movements, felt more animal than anything else. Maura remembered Runt, and how he’d always cocked his head in just that way when he wanted to understand something better. “I’m making lots of friends,” she said, which wasn’t necessarily true. She was making valuable alliances and connections in the council chambers, but the only one of them she’d really call a friend was Lord Seaver of Tasride, who was still young enough that he preferred “Sir” to “Lord.” They were the two youngest of those who held fiefs, at least those who attended council meetings.

“Tongues are wagging,” Daine continued, inevitable as snow in winter. “What’s this Domitan of Masbolle like, then? I hear he’s fair handsome.”

“He’s King’s Own, so he’s single and determined to remain so.” Maura sighed when Daine just raised her eyebrows. Daine didn’t care about institutional traditions, and she’d push hard, if she was worried about Maura. For all Daine was always too busy to spend much time with her, Maura was never left wondering if she still cared. Her hen-clucking protectiveness since Maura had come to Corus shouldn’t have been a surprise. “It will be another twenty years before he’s ready to retire, and I should have a whole brood of Dunlaths by then. And anyway, we are friends, but that just means I trust his introductions when he presents me to other unattached men.”

Which he did, constantly. Men who had left or were leaving the Own, usually a bit older than Maura really wanted, but sober and steady and kind. Men from neighboring fiefs of his who had gone to university to study agriculture or magical uses for stone or international relations. Each and every one of them was a good match, and Maura was happy to talk to all of them once, and to talk to some of them more than once.

If Dom was the only one of them she enjoyed talking with often enough to be introduced around by, she was trying hard not to think of it, when he had a career to think of. The very fact that he was introducing her to others told her that he wasn’t an option himself, so she wouldn’t think of it.

Daine made a dissatisfied noise, as though she’d heard all of that. “Just be careful with yourself, Maura,” she requested, and Maura agreed and made a point of turning her attention to Sarralyn.

There was a certain sense of relief at the celebration ball that followed Prince Liam’s wedding to his Scanran bride that made Maura understood why so many elderly nobles took up matchmaking. She’d been involved in the match since its very inception, had tried to gentle the cousin she hardly knew into expressing a preference instead of grim duty and then had picked the daughter of one of the more sensible clanchiefs when the gentling failed. She’d been the one to welcome Vierka to Tortall, to try and fail gentling again and at least support her in what ways she could as she settled in at court and ignored her future husband nearly as much as he ignored her.

They were married now, though, without the option to ignore each other further. Maura thought that perhaps with time they might make the best of it, but regardless, the alliance was secure, and they were both pigheaded enough to refuse to let Tortall’s newest duchy of New Hope fail or flounder under their guard, so they’d have to be some kind of partner to each other.

The fresh freedom from that particular task, however, left her free to contemplate her own matrimony, which she knew was late for a noblewoman but still couldn’t force herself to hurry along.

Of course, the problem with waiting was that people thought that for one reason or another Maura must be desperate, and thus willing to entertain some very ill matches indeed. After months of wrapping all her attention up in launching Vierka’s life in court as best she could, Maura found herself dancing with a King’s Reach cousin twenty years her senior with half a mastery in Mithran magic and an avaricious gleam in his eye.

“Life on the Scanran border must be so difficult for a young woman alone,” he said, attempting some kind of sympathy and not really landing there. Maura wished that Daine and Numair hadn’t decamped for his tower in Pirate’s Swoop with the circus of a royal wedding on the horizon. Daine would have turned into a wolf and bitten him for the way he kept touching her shoulder with his clammy hand.

“On the contrary,” she said with her best smile. “I’m surrounded by friends and allies, and the King’s Own protected Dunlath in the latter part of the war.”

“But nonetheless, administering a fief with so many unique challenges must be hard. Especially without the expert assistance of someone who’s been studying immortals since they first burst back into our world.”

“Oh, I assure you, Numair Salmalin has given me all possible assistance.” And he did it without saying “immortals” in a tone that really meant “monsters.” It was still so early in the dance, and Maura couldn’t walk off the dance floor. “Were you caught in the siege at the City of the Gods, my lord? I hear you had a much more difficult time there than I had in Dunlath.”

“In point of fact, no, I’d gone south to see my cousins not long before the siege began.”

Maura bit her tongue on several pointed questions. He was really a very minor cousin, but King’s Reach was really a very major fief. She doubted King Jonathan would care if she snubbed him, but he might, given the Countess of King’s Reach had been the one to educate Princess Kalasin and the Conté line no doubt owed them a few favors as a result. Maura only hoped that her marriage wasn’t one of those favors. Queen Barzha would eat this man alive. Instead, she asked politely about King’s Reach, and spent the rest of the dance hearing how wealthy they were, how prosperous, how trusted by the king and his family. He referred several times to “dear Kalasin,” and even Maura, who’d only met her cousin twice, could tell that she would have punched him in the nose for the odious tone he used when he said it.

“I’ll do myself the honor of getting you a drink,” he declared officiously when the dance drew at last to its close after what Maura felt conservatively might have been a thousand years.

She would have to reject him. If she had to deal with his dinner conversation at Dunlath’s table for a week, let alone a lifetime, she would murder him, and then King Jonathan really would be mad at her. Maura opened her mouth to do so, and heard a relief of a voice from behind her instead. “It might be extraneous, alas, I’d noticed the duchess looked parched and took the liberty of fetching her some mead.”

Maura turned and tried to express her gratitude to Dom with her eyes, though she couldn’t make that obvious either. Someone was always watching at court, and someone was always listening. “Sergeant Domitan, I didn’t know you’d made it back to the palace in time for the wedding.”

“Only barely. I’ve been out recruiting again.”

“You’ll have to tell me about your travels.” With very little guilt, Maura turned back to the King’s Reach cousin, who was practically pouting, something that made him even less appealing. “My lord, you’ll have to forgive me, Sergeant Domitan was the leader of the Own who protected Dunlath during the war, and we’re old friends. I hadn’t thought to see him here today.”

There was very little the man could do in the face of that, which was one of the nicer things about court. He bowed and took his leave with a frown that was very nearly a scowl on his face, muttered several things she chose not to hear that were unflattering both about her bloodline and her looks, and went off to no doubt harass some other heiress.

Dom, the moment he was out of earshot, grinned and handed her a glass of the delicious mead Scanra had sent as their contribution to the wedding festivities, other than the bride, of course. “This is the kind of gentleman you introduce yourself to when I’m not around? You need to improve your taste, your Grace.”

“I wasn’t the one who sought the acquaintance out,” she assured him. “I was serious about asking about your travels, though. You were in hill country, weren’t you? It must have been a fast trip, to have you back so soon.” She’d last seen him only a month before, when she’d invited him to a picnic to keep trying to make Vierka more comfortable, which had both worked well and not at all given Liam hadn’t showed up and Vierka had ended up chatting with Keladry of Mindelan, who she seemed actively afraid of.

“It was a fast trip. My lord wanted us to try it, but we didn’t expect to get any recruits this time, at least not noble ones. There’s a lad from Malven that might suit in a few years, but it all remains to be seen.”

Maura asked her usual polite questions. Dom seemed tired, and she wasn’t sure if it was the long travel or the recruiting. He talked like he was older than he was sometimes, as he had every right to after living through two wars, but it made her worry about him. She wasn’t yet sure she had the right to worry about him. When sets began to form for the next dance, she frowned at him, considering. “Would you care to dance? Or do you need a rest?”

“I must look tired, if you’re asking that. Of course I want to dance with you, Maura. Why else would I have come to the party?”

“The mead,” she offered, raising her glass and finishing it in a few long swallows. He didn’t mirror the gesture, and that meant he didn’t have any. Either he’d seen Maura with the King’s Reach cousin and got her refreshment without thinking of his own, or he’d seen her and come to her rescue, somehow known she needed rescue, and gave her a glass he’d sipped from, or had been about to. Both options made something squirm in her stomach in a way she couldn’t acknowledge, wouldn’t acknowledge. Dom was so terribly good at giving her options, and none of them were him. Not for more than a dance.

“The mead is delicious,” he offered, rescuing her from her own awkward silence as surely as he’d rescued her from a suitor, “but a dance sounds better.”

Maura was just beginning to develop just enough court reflexes that You’re flattering me was her instinctual response, but she stifled the words before they could come out as an accusation rather than a continuation of flirtation as they were meant to be. Dom was a flirt. Everyone said so, when she couldn’t help overhearing rumors about him or when Daine sometimes said pointed things, since she was broody as a mother hen now that she had baby Rikash as well as Sarralyn to fuss over. “Then let’s dance,” she said after an inexcusable gap, and put her glass down on the nearest windowsill.

Dom was unusually quiet as they took their place in the set, and as they began dancing. Maura wasn’t quite yet used to court dances. Northern ones were a little faster, and the point of them was mostly to hold your partner’s waist and whirl until you were both flushed and laughing. In Corus, they danced slow, met and parted and met again, making up a hodgepodge of conversation that anyone could overhear. Normally Dom chattered away and didn’t worry that Maura said two words to his dozen. He didn’t have much to say today, though, and it worried Maura.

“You’re well?” she finally asked, and said it politely but meant it holistically.

“Third Company is leaving,” he said, which she might have known, if she’d let herself think of it. Lord Raoul never liked to stay at court long. It was nearly legendary. He’d spent half of Third Company’s recruiting drive off at Malorie’s Peak with Commander Buri, who everyone still called that after her resignation since she’d threatened to gut someone who’d tried calling her Lady Buriram. “North for the winter on bandit watch. I think we’re out Frasrlund way to start, or I’d be asking if you need escort back to Dunlath.”

“I’ll be going back soon,” she admitted, “but not by way of Frasrlund. You’ll be gone soon, then?”

“A week to resupply, then north on the coast road. I’ll at least be able to ride out of the way and stop in at Masbolle while I go.”

“Safe travels. And if you end up inland, Dunlath is always happy to welcome Third Company.” She tried out a smile and hoped it was successful. “The stormwings must be pining for you. Yuizha mentioned you twice after you left.”

“Oh?” A grin flickered onto his face. “What did she say about me?”

That someone who wouldn’t cut him to ribbons should swive him since Yuizha wasn’t going to, but Maura wasn’t about to say that in polite company, or to Dom at all. “Only the nicest things,” she said, which was strictly true.

“Well, perhaps I’ll visit. For Yuizha.”

The conversation lapsed again, as Dom so rarely allowed it to do. Maura didn’t try to rekindle it. They were hardly the only silent couple on the dance floor. The principals in the day’s wedding were a sight worse, dancing every third dance together to avoid suspicion and spending each and every one utterly silent. New Hope wasn’t terribly far from Dunlath. At least Vierka would have somewhere to go, if the relationship remained cold, or grew dangerous. Though Maura wasn’t sure Vierka knew the invitation was open, and she would snap like a cornered wolf if Maura made it more explicit.

When the dance ended and there was no excuse to stay together, Maura fought the childish urge to cling to Dom’s arm, to ask him to stay just a moment longer, to try to convince him to tell her what was wrong, when he’d never really done it before. As a duchess, he respected her, laid problems of logistics and policy out for her to weigh in on, but as a friend, he liked to hear her troubles more than he liked to share his own. She wasn’t certain what to do about it, or if there was anything to do.

“I’ll hope to see you at least once more before you leave,” she tried, when the music stopped and so did they.

“I may be busy, my lord has been giving me more responsibilities while he’s been at Malorie’s Peak and seems to expect me to keep them, but surely he won’t begrudge me time for such a good friend.” He smiled a little and tucked a bit of hair that had fallen out of her chignon behind her ear. Maura, who’d given up trying to control her flushes, ducked her head instead. “Do me a favor, Maura?”

Maura smiled and looked up from beneath her lashes less because she wished to flirt and more because she thought if she looked at him head on she would lose the battle to keep herself from demanding that he stay. Maybe he would ask her to write. It would be nice, she thought, to have someone besides her steward and dutiful cousins looking to maintain connections with Tortall’s youngest duchess to write to. “What sort of favor?”

“Just … don’t do anything because you think you should. You’re the duchess of Dunlath, with ogres in her barracks and stormwings on her keep walls.”

The King’s Reach cousin again. “I know,” said Maura, voice low. “I won’t marry him. But you know I must marry someone.”

“This year?”

“Probably not. I’ve been in Corus too long, with this match.” She gestured around the room. Vierka and Liam seemed to be stiffly saying goodbye to his younger siblings. She didn’t let her attention snag on them for too long. She’d done what she could, and all she could do now was watch and offer a listening ear and a refuge if they were needed. “Dunlath needs me.”

“Dunlath is lucky,” he said, and took his leave, leaving her unaccountably stung and a little heartsore.

Queen Thayet found her the next time she went to the mead table, long enough later that the slight giddiness from the first glass was leaving her. “It all went off well,” she said, looking around the ballroom like a general surveying her battlefield. From what Alanna said, the queen was much more comfortable with the battlefield part of things, but as far as Maura was concerned, she was an expert in the ballroom too. “Well enough, anyway.”

“They’ll manage it,” said Maura, and hoped it was true. Roald and Shinkokami were happy, if quietly so, and already had an heir. Empress Kalasin was, by all accounts, taking Carthak by storm. Princess Lianne was newly and, as far as anyone could tell, happily engaged. It seemed unfair for Liam to have only stiff duty awaiting him, and even more unfair for Vierka to have to be someone’s duty.

“And you?”

Maura blinked, and discovered that she was in the middle of a much different conversation than the one she thought she’d been having. She liked the queen well enough, but she hadn’t really tried to be an aunt to Maura, just an interested and kind presence when they were near each other. Personal interest was rare. “And me what?”

“I’ve been loath to make suggestions to you. A queen’s suggestions generally aren’t taken as such, you see. And I’ve never been much of a matchmaker anyway. It’s not how I care to rule.”

Maura tried not to feel humiliated. She knew she was older than most court ladies when they got married by a few years, but most court ladies weren’t trying to run a very complicated duchy. “I’ve been introduced to any number of men.”

“You’re a catch. I hope you’ll find one you like. And not …” A delicate pause. “King’s Reach did us a great service, caring for Kalasin while she prepared for marriage. We intend to reward that service with a prestigious posting for their eldest son—it’s only a pity he’s the heir, he’s nearly competent enough to keep up with you.”

Humiliating and kind all at once, then. It was harder to accept that combination from the queen than from Dom. “I had no intention of anything serious with that gentleman, though he might not agree.”

The queen gave her a long, direct look that made it clear that she wasn’t trying to imply or dance around a point when she spoke again. “On the other hand, Masbolle has now done us competent and faithful service in two wars, and they’re connected to the Queenscoves, who we can never reward highly enough for all their hard work on Tortall’s behalf.”

Embarrassing again, but a relief too, for someone to say it out loud. Dom didn’t. Maura couldn’t. Even Daine, who tried her best to pretend not to fret over Maura, was worried more about her heart than her marriage. Maura was worried about both, and she’d rather have people worrying about the marriage part of it. She could deal with her heart herself. “He’s made no offer, and he has a career that would be ended if he took up with me properly.”

Queen Thayet hummed, picked up a glass of mead, and proceeded to drink the whole thing in three neat gulps. “I could be wrong, of course, I don’t know him at all, but when you were dancing, I can’t say he looked like a man who was thinking much about his career.”

“It doesn’t matter, your Majesty,” Maura said around the unavoidable lump in her throat, and dropped a curtsy. “He’s leaving in a week.”

“Well, if you ever want help finding someone else, or even a listening ear …”

Maura would never take her up on the offer, and both of them knew it, but that made it more kind, as far as she was concerned, not less. There weren’t many women at court who understood what it was to be the one with power in a relationship. Even Queen Thayet, co-ruler though she might be, might not know it in the way Maura did, but she could understand more than most, anyway. “Thank you,” she said, with as much sincerity as she could manage, and excused herself to rescue Tkaa from the scowling lord of Runnerspring.

It was the muddy season when a messenger came to Dunlath to ask if the Third Company of the King’s Own could rest on their land for a week as a stop on a trip to the City of the Gods. Maura fluttered a little about it, stupidly, in the privacy of her rooms, before she politely warned the immortals, the wolves, and the rest of her people that there would be a hundred warriors eating up the last of their winter stores, though Dunlath rarely struggled with those. Not when the ogres had farming techniques that tripled their yield, not when Tate and the wolves between them managed the deer and the boars in the woods so well they might as well have been livestock.

Nearly all of them asked about Dom and his squad as soon as they heard Third Company was coming, though unlike in Corus it was fond memories and interested questions, not pointed matchmaking, so Maura could bear up under it more easily. The stormwings were ribald, but they were ribald about everyone, practically, except Maura, and that was just because they’d known her as a child.

Third Company arrived three days later, with stores of their own to supplement what Dunlath would provide, and descended on Dunlath with good will and cheer, having heard about it from Dom’s squad. They’d heard Dunlath was rebuilding a bridge near the Scanran border now that it was less likely to encourage raiders, and they were more than willing to aid them. They’d arrived with plans and expertise and a willingness to pitch in with Maura’s carpenters after only a few hours to stop and set up camp that shocked her.

“In peacetime, this is what we do more than anything else,” said Lord Raoul when he came to greet her with a clap on the shoulder and a kiss on the forehead. Commander Buri wasn’t in evidence with the group, but it was altogether possible she’d ridden ahead, or gone south early. Maura would have to ask. “Rebuild bridges and village walls, deal with the aftermath of disaster. More pleasant work, and only slightly muddier.”

The mud had been a familiar refrain with Dom’s men. Maura had always thought warriors were likely to give odes to their own glory, maybe to distract themselves from the terror, but the Own didn’t. They’d gotten it from their leader, it seemed. “I’ll know who to send for the next time we get flooding, then,” she said. “But please, let me know anything you and your men need. I don’t think there’s space for another hundred in the hall every night, but we can set up a rota, and I’d be happy to have your officers for dinner some evening this week.”

“We’ll take the royal treatment.” He frowned at her a little, this man she’d known since she was a child, and she couldn’t quite read the frown. “We’ll find a suitable night,” he promised. “And I’ll find you when I have a free hour, too. I haven’t heard much about you since Douglass went back to Veldine.”

She asked polite questions about Sir Douglass, and he gave her polite answers, and the weight of whatever he was thinking about her was almost but not quite unbearable.

Dom’s absence was a step worse. Or not his absence—she was used to that, since she had no claim on his time—but the lack of him even when he was present. He greeted her happily enough, introduced her proudly to the woman in his squad, and then all but disappeared, only caught for brief glimpses out of the corner of her eye. He was always organizing something or someone, even more than the other sergeants, and she wasn’t sure if it was because Lord Raoul was still entrusting him with extra responsibilities or if he was avoiding her.

In the end, Lord Raoul found his free hour before she found enough free time and bravery to find Dom and ask if she’d upset him. He asked pleasant questions about Dunlath and its stranger residents, about Daine, about how Maura had enjoyed helping out with the Scanran treaty and with Vierka. Third Company had stopped at New Hope midway through the winter to offer cheer and help, and had found the lord and the lady working cordially, if not warmly, as a team, and Lord Raoul’s relief at that was only slightly less than Maura’s own.

Lord Raoul liked her. Maura was confident in that. He’d always been friendly, when he made excuses to stop by Dunlath. There was something a little reserved in him this time, though, as though he were upset, or maybe confused, and eventually she clutched the fabric of her skirt and asked about it. He sighed and sat back in his chair, looked at the fire in her office fireplace. “I’m not angry,” he said. “Miffed, at best. I put a lot of work into Dom, you know.”

Maura’s laundresses would disapprove of the wrinkles she was pressing into her dress with her damp-palmed clenched fists. “Is there something amiss with him?”

“There was for a while. I hope less, now.” Lord Raoul heaved a sigh. “I was grooming him to be Captain of Third Company someday. Especially when he and Kel get along so well. They’re both the kind of commander people enjoy following.”

“But?”

“But he hasn’t been happy. Not since Maggur kept wasting lives even after he lost, I think. Lost the heart for it.”

Maura thought of Dom, of how weary he looked when he went out on his recruitment drives, of how when he was in the palace he spent more time attending parties than with his men. She’d flattered herself that maybe he cared that much about their friendship, but maybe that hadn’t been his only motivation. “I’m sorry to hear it. I wish I’d known. I thought about offering to write him but that seemed—complicated.”

From his expression, Lord Raoul had a great many thoughts about that, but whatever they were, he didn’t seem inclined to say them out loud. “I’d thought perhaps you had been writing, or I might have been more discreet,” he said at length. “You should speak to him, not me, then. Just be careful with him, will you? He’s not some charming court flower, but I worry about him anyway.”

The whole of Tortall knew how fond Lord Raoul was of hopeless causes. The one who’d forced Lerant of Eldorne into some measure of acceptance in warrior circles, the one who’d taken on Keladry of Mindelan as a squire when no one else would. Dom never seemed like a hopeless cause, but maybe he had been when Lord Raoul had found him, or maybe he’d become one, somewhere along the line. “I try not to hurt people,” she said, since one had to say something, and was relieved when he let that lie and changed the subject to what northern plants could go on the banks of the river near the new bridge to prevent it from washing away.

Maura wanted to go directly from their meeting to Dom, to beg him to explain, to ask what Lord Raoul meant, because she had a thought, but she couldn’t be sure of it, and could be even less sure of the other thoughts that followed it. She didn’t. He was still avoiding her, and chasing him down before he was ready would do her no good at all.

Instead, she set herself to work. She spoke with the man in charge of Third Company’s provisions and traded some of Dunlath’s stores for some of theirs, since winter didn’t starve them for anything but variety these days and Third Company’s dried southern fruits and salted tinned fish could provide that. She set the keep’s maids to mending gambesons and other clothes that had seen a hard winter’s use, and joined in for an hour herself to make sure some stitching happened in between the inevitable flirting. She took shed stormwing feathers to Third Company’s chief fletcher.

And then, duties discharged, Maura went to the woods. It wasn’t long before a wolf fell silently into step next to her. Callfar, one of Frostfur’s last pups, a good deal friendlier than her dam. Maura often regretted that she couldn’t speak to them as Daine could, but she liked their company, when she walked, and they must like hers, since there was no way she could have found them if they hadn’t wanted to be found.

She was never quite sure how much of human speech they understood. Some, yes, words that were important to them, some names, but not fluent language. She spoke to them anyway, as she might to any member of her council, and they always listened. Callfar, to Maura’s embarrassment, heard a great many of Maura’s fears and frets about Dom as they walked, when Maura had so many other things she could say, but if she minded, she at least didn’t leave Maura until her trail looped around and she left the woods for the keep again.

Dom was sitting on one of the low walls in the keep courtyard, his head bowed, his hands buried in his pockets. The courtyard was too busy for him to look up at every set of passing footsteps, but when he saw the tips of her boots in the field of his vision, he looked up then.

Maura let herself study him. There was a strain around his eyes, the bruised look that meant long lack of sleep and excess of worry. He’d looked like that before he left Corus too, but it was nothing like his ease and grins on his first visit to Dunlath. She wondered which was closer to his true nature, if he hadn’t known her well enough to be honest the first time or if he’d been worn away from his natural contentment since the end of the war. “Maura,” he said, and then, with a bit of shocking pink in his cheeks, “Your Grace.”

“None of that,” she chided, and sat next to him, mostly because she found she couldn’t look him directly in the eye for the conversation that would follow. It was late March, but the stone still felt like a block of ice even through four layers of fabric, two of them woolen. “We’re friends. You haven’t needed to call me that in ages.”

“We’re friends,” he agreed, but there was something hesitant in it she didn’t like, the same truth Lord Raoul had talked around. “But right now I’m also a supplicant to the lady of Dunlath. It’s a slightly awkward position.”

“You know whatever I can do to help you, I’ll do.”

“Don’t say that yet,” he warned, but something in his voice relaxed anyway, like he wanted the reminder. “But I’d like—if you’ll grant it, I’d like to stay at Dunlath a while.”

Maura turned to him with a puzzled frown. “You have another leave? You’re welcome, of course, but wouldn’t you like to go back to Masbolle instead, or Queenscove to see your cousin?”

“Neal’s in Corus, nearly always is,” said Dom, as though that had been her primary point. He was fidgety too, another thing that made Maura nervous. “And no. I mean, I do hope to visit Masbolle, and Neal and Yuki too, but that’s not urgent. This isn’t a leave. It’s …” He let out a poor excuse for a laugh. “I’m retiring from the Own.”

There it was, what she’d hoped for and felt wretchedly guilty hoping for, what Lord Raoul had implied and she hadn’t allowed herself to assume, because if the reasons were wrong, it could break much of what she’d tried to build for herself. “Oh,” she said, inane, and then mustered up the most important and impertinent question. “Why?”

Some little-girl-romantic part of her wanted him to say For you, Maura, just you, but everything in her that was an adult and Dunlath’s duchess rebelled at the thought, so it was a relief when he began with “I’m tired” and bowed his head again, like the admission itself had exhausted him more. “I joined up almost as soon as I could, and got a war straight out of legends for my efforts, lost two cousins I couldn’t protect with my sword, and then as soon as I started feeling recovered, there was another. I can’t do a third.”

Maura could have reassured him that Tortall had come out of the Scanran war strong and with few enemies, but that wasn’t the point. Galla could have a revolution and begin to push that border. Tusaine could have a dry summer and try to get the Drell Valley back. Tyra could realize how many mercenaries its coffers could buy and start going looking for farmland instead of buying in the majority of their crops. The only way to stay out of a war was to leave the army. “Of course you shouldn’t,” she said, awkward as she always was around emotions. “No one should have to.”

“I suppose it’s cowardice,” he said grimly, as though he hadn’t heard her. “My lord had the same two, only he also had Tusaine and the Coronation Day battle and all the cleaning up of traitors afterwards.”

“You’re allowed to want something different. Dunlath welcomes you, Dom. People here care about you—Domitan of Masbolle, Sergeant Dom, that doesn’t matter.” She mustered her courage and put a comforting hand on his knee. “Whatever you want to do, and you don’t have to decide yet. You can fight Captain Thor for the command of my barracks, or learn to whittle, or take over from Tate hunting when he admits his knees are giving out on him.”

His hand landed over hers, and he looked at her with the kind of weight she could feel until she met his eyes. There was a moment when she thought he would say Are those my only options, Maura? Or is there another? She could hear the cadence of his voice saying it, and it would have been that easy, to take the implication as a question. “Thank you, your Grace,” he said instead. And then, with a wry smile that made him look something more like himself, “I know. Maura. I just had to say it once more, so you knew I meant it.”

There were many men who used the words like they were a scoff. Men who didn’t like that she was the test case for girls inheriting fiefs outright without the aid of a husband. Men who didn’t like that she acted like their equal. Men who didn’t like her because she wasn’t pretty and didn’t care to play at being so. Dom had never, from his first day in Dunlath, said it like that. “You always do,” said Maura, and the words came out awkward and warm. “Consider Dunlath your home as long you want it to be so, and consider yourself free to leave should you want to and not a moment before.”

“Then I might be here for a while.”

It was almost, almost enough to assume. His color was high, and it wasn’t all the biting early-spring wind, and he didn’t say anything else, didn’t go the last step. Maybe he was frightened, like Maura was. Maybe he always had been, like she had.

But Dom had taken a brave step. Maura could take one too. Not that day, not when everything was new and raw and shaky between them, not when a curious stormwing or corporal of the King’s Own could be listening to them fumble their last steps to a partnership. He was making her life easy, solving her problems as he always seemed to want to, and Maura wanted to make his life easy too. Offering him sanctuary was only the first step.

“Last chance to change your mind.”

It didn’t surprise Dom that Lord Raoul found him on the keep’s walls while the Own was packing up and doing last checks on tack and horses in the courtyard down below. Dom had said his goodbyes over breakfast, and his men were solemn and worried about a decision that must have seemed sudden to them. He hoped it had seemed sudden to them, that he’d been a good enough commander not to let his increasing weariness show to them. Sebila, who would make corporal within a year at her current rate, had cried into his shoulder. Hasim, who was replacing Dom as sergeant, did too, which was actually less surprising than Sebila doing it, when she made up for being one of only two women in the Own by being nearly as stoic as Kel most days.

“I’m not going to,” said Dom, and found that he had shockingly few regrets about it. Two years before, he’d thought he’d be in the Own as long as his body allowed it, and then perhaps find a widow to marry and settle down, or just return to Masbolle and help raise his brother’s children, or to Queenscove so Neal’s had someone with sense around. At least there was Yuki for that. Two years before, he’d assumed he might make captain someday, and be a stalwart support for Kel when she inevitably inherited command of the Own. He wished he knew why it had stopped seeming like an appealing future.

“I know.” Raoul gusted out a sigh. “I’d hoped to promote you soon. You might have had to move to Second for a few years, but you could have been second captain there until Third was ready for your return. Flyndan won’t last forever, much as it can seem like it sometimes.”

“I wish I could do that for you. I wanted to.” Dom looked up. There was almost always a stormwing or two wheeling overhead. Queen Barzha’s nation wasn’t the only one in Tortall, but nowhere else had he seen them so involved in the life of a fief. Mostly he saw them on ocean cliffs, or glints of metal in deep forests, when he wasn’t seeing them flying over battles. Only in Dunlath were they part of the community rather than a bad omen. “Are you angry?” he asked, like the child he’d nearly been when Raoul had come to him when he was barely trained, incredibly green, and told him Cathal was dead. When Raoul had held him like a father until he could stop crying.

“No. Not even that disappointed, not really. So a fief on a dangerous border gets a good commander instead of the Own. The king will be thrilled.” Raoul put a hand on his shoulder. “And I’m happy for you, Dom. Really I am. Your heart hasn’t been in it for a while now, and that’s dangerous.”

Dom wanted to give a thousand explanations and excuses, but there wasn’t much point in it. They’d both seen recruits join the own with fire in their eyes, with duty and glory in their hearts, and come to them a month or a year later and apologize, say they were marrying the woman they thought they couldn’t stomach after all, say their older brother needed a steward, just say they couldn’t anymore. Dom had always thought it was one of the finest things about Lord Raoul as a commander that he never blamed them, never scolded them, never forced them to stay. “You’re what I’ll miss most,” he said, the kind of emotion a sergeant of the King’s Own never would have expressed. “I wouldn’t be half the man or the commander I am without you, my lord.”

“Yes, you would.” Raoul grinned at him. “Just might have taken more time, that’s all. And don’t think this is the last you’ll see of me. If I ever have a green officer who needs some extra training and attention, I’ll ship him off to Dunlath, to get educated by you and your terrifying lady.”

Dom might have objected to the phrasing, the “your” that wasn’t quite true as long as Dom kept tripping over his tongue like a green boy whenever Maura passed him in the hall and gave him yet another crisp update about the room she was assigning him, the ways he could make himself useful to Dunlath while choosing a path. “I don’t mind the thought of having a training school for officers,” he admitted. “Though you might as well send them off with Kel, come to that.”

“Kel’s busy enough as it is. You’re rusticating, so I’m happy to give you something extra to do with your time. Not all the time. Just often enough to keep you on your toes.”

Dom laughed. “As though I’ll need it, between stormwings and wolves and ogres and Maura.”

“I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear herself mentioned in such august company. Practically poetry, that. You get it from your cousin, don’t you?”

It was impossible to imagine what Neal would do if asked to write poetry comparing a lady to a stormwing. Horrifyingly, he might actually try it instead of sniffing at it. The odd challenges were the ones he was best at. “With all the respect due to the Knight Commander of the King’s Own, my lord, shut up.”

“You’re already sounding more like yourself,” said Raoul, and finally let go of his shoulder. “I should go get the troops moving, or it will be noon and we’ll still be here and Dunlath will feel obliged to give us lunch, and then we’ll need to do all of our sentimental leave-taking all over again.”

“Better to go, then,” Dom agreed, and allowed himself a grin. “Keep them in line, won’t you? And I hope you’ll be sending me Sebila for officer training, one of these years.”

“Of course the first woman in the Own is named after my worst great-aunt,” said Raoul with a put-upon sigh. “Blessings on you, Dom. If there’s good news to be had, write us about it. We’ll ride back at all speed before we go down to Corus, or come back up if you choose to wait a little while—though not too long. She’s got a reputation to protect.”

“As soon as there’s anything to know, you’ll know it,” Dom promised.

The rest of their leave-taking was quiet, and Dom chose to remain on the walls, to watch from above as his past walked away from him, or rather rode away in a clatter of hooves and a clank of armor. He wasn’t the only one watching the departure. Half of Dunlath was arrested in its progress, watching Third Company ride away. Gwyn the healer, a basket propped on her hip. Ivraju, an ogre who worked with the keep’s food stores, in the midst of sorting through a basket of root vegetables that had survived the winter to make sure all was well. Queen Barzha’s consort Hebakh, head tilted with thought as he perched on one of the iron rails Dunlath bristled with.

Dom stood there and watched them all start moving again, returning to their tasks, and then he stood there longer, well after the glint of armor had disappeared into the trees.

“You could still catch up,” Maura said from behind him, when it had been so long that he’d felt the angle of the shadows move. He’d seen her at the keep gate, saying a gracious farewell to Lord Raoul and the other officers, and seen her leave instead of lingering, but it still startled him to hear her. Not a day out of the Own and he’d already lost all of his situational awareness.

Sometime in the week the Own had stayed at Dunlath, spring had reached the north. There was still a chill in the air, but Maura had left off her heavy cloak for a light woolen shawl, something bright he thought a friend in Corus might have given her, since she rarely bought pretty things for herself but had started wearing it often sometime the previous winter. “I don’t want to,” he said, and was relieved enough that it was the truth that it let him pull together some semblance of flirtation for her, to turn away from the wall and take a few steps in her direction. “Are you glad to have some quiet to yourself, after dealing with the rabble for a week?”

Maura shrugged. “There are merits to company, and there are merits to quiet. Certainly I’m glad my roadways will stop being churned up by two hundred extra horses, we’re going to be mired in knee-deep mud for the next week. I need to speak to the ogres about quarrying more gravel for them.”

“Would you allow me to go with you? I feel I don’t know the ogres well, yet, they largely retreated up the slopes during the war.”

Her mouth quirked a little. Maura was a serious woman, serious enough to make Dom feel frivolous most days, but every once in a while, it seemed that she had some kind of joke with herself, a tiny smile she didn’t care to elucidate. On the rare occasions she did, Dom was always honored by it, treasured the window into her lighter side, not the side that had learned from a sister’s treason and made sure to focus on duty to the exclusion of almost everything else ever since. “Of course. They’ll be curious to meet you.”

“Will they?”

“They’re curious to meet anyone new who chooses to come to Dunlath, and I’m sure the stormwings gossip about us terribly even if they’d deny it, so I’d assume they’ve heard your name.”

It was hard to find the right rhythm with Maura, who declined to be coquettish, who would flirt but largely seemed to express her affection and interest through forthright honesty that could disarm a man. “Then I’ll have to give a better impression than the one the stormwings no doubt passed on.”

“They like you. The stormwings. Most of my people do.”

Dom swallowed. He knew he had a question to be asking. He even knew what the answer would be. Somehow it still felt like an impossible chasm, when he’d just given up his life’s work and didn’t know what he could offer her, when he’d trained to be a military commander and she already had one in her own barracks. “Maura—”

“Do you need time, Dom? I know you’ve been unhappy, and someday I hope you’ll tell me what it’s been like for you. If you need time, we’ll take it, plain and simple.”

She wouldn’t want an easy answer. Not when they weren’t on a dance floor, not when it was the rest of their lives. He turned the thought over. It would have been easier, less pressure on both of them, if Dom had seen out the rest of Third Company’s tour of the north and left them the next time they went through Corus. It was what most men leaving did. He could have met Maura the next time she returned to the palace, or written her, and let things take their natural course.

And yet, when Raoul had told him, not-quite-offhand, that they were routing through Dunlath on their way to the City of the Gods, Dom had tendered his resignation within a day. “I don’t need time,” Dom said, and hoped he sounded as sure as he felt. “I just don’t know how to say it.”

“I can,” said Maura, and before he could demur, or blurt the words out, or otherwise put his foot in the situation as badly as Neal had ever done to earn the nickname Meathead, she continued, inexorable as ever. “Will you marry me, Dom? Be the lord of Dunlath and my duke-consort? I know it’s a somewhat annoying title, but it is what his Majesty has ruled as appropriate for my spouse since I hold Dunlath in my own right.”

Dom laughed, which was perhaps the last thing he’d expected about his own marriage proposal. Or the second to last, since he’d also expected to be the one making it. Why, though, should Maura do anything otherwise than take brisk control of the situation? It would be beyond presumptuous, after all, for the mere son of a country lord, however well-connected, to propose to a royal duchess. Dom didn’t exactly like to think of himself as the ingenuous and ingenious court lady maneuvering a great catch into offering for him through strong use of hints, but it wasn’t inaccurate, either. “Oh, I don’t mean to laugh at you,” he said when he caught her nettled and nervous expression. “It’s only that you’re wonderful.”

“Most times when I think someone is wonderful I don’t laugh at them,” she said, just sourly enough that he coughed out another brief laugh before he could quite master it.

“No, my lady, please, it’s just—I was finding it so hard, thinking of the right words to say that wouldn’t make a hash of it, and then you went and said them instead, and, well, I suppose that’s why I want to marry you, in part. You make things easier, just being around you.”

Maura blinked a little, startled or thinking or something else he couldn’t quite interpret, not yet. “That’s what I keep thinking about you,” she said in a rush after a few seconds of nerve-wracking silence. “Whenever I see you, it seems like you’re helping me. Dispatching Scanrans, flirting with stormwings, saving me from the more annoying suitors in Corus and finding me the better ones, though none quite as good as you. That’s why I want you. I don’t know if anyone else could be my partner the way you can, even if the king will insist on you being a consort.”

“I’d like to see his and the queen’s faces if we started calling her Queen-Consort Thayet, or all the lords’ faces if their wives suddenly became baroness-consorts, or countess-consorts. If you’re to be made an example of, though, I suppose they’d better get used to it sooner rather than later.” Dom, when Maura looked steadily at him, serious and expectant, realized he was getting off-track and hoped that his flush could be written off as a reaction to the crisp spring breeze. He doubted it, but Maura was given to blushes. She wouldn’t tease him for a rare one. “Forgive me, I know there’s a question on the table. I was never taught to accept proposals, only give them, so I don’t know the script.”

“It’s fairly simple. You have the easier role, really, there are only two possible answers.”

“One, Maura. You know there’s only really one.”

“I’d like to hear it anyway.”

Dom closed the distance between them and took her hands. “Yes. Of course. If you’ll have me, I would be a fool to say no.”

“And it’s not just because …” She stopped and wrinkled her nose, her hands squeezing tighter around his. “You want me and Dunlath, I hope?”

If he were romancing her in Corus, he would make a charming comment about how she was much more important, but that would only scare her. “All of it, because it wouldn’t be the same without you and you wouldn’t be the same without it.” Parts of it were intimidating, not least the part where the terrifying Wildmage and her equally-terrifying family were liable to turn up for visits, and certainly not least the fact that he suspected if he hurt her, he might be torn apart by wolves, but there wasn’t a piece of it he would change. “I mean this, Maura. Even if I made you ask.”

“I wanted to ask. I don’t want you to always be the one rescuing me.”

“Then we’ll rescue each other. I like the thought of that.” He ducked in close to give her a fast, sweet kiss. When he pulled back, she was watching him wide-eyed, color high in her cheeks so at least they matched. If Dom was going to blush, he didn’t mind as much if he was keeping such good company. “I like the thought of doing that again, too.”

“Me too,” she said, a little dazed, and then blinked a few times and cleared her throat, a warm smile taking over her face. “Perhaps indoors, though? Under a roof? You never know who might be watching.”

She tilted her head up a little, and Dom looked up and laughed, caught sight of the bright glint of steel, a few stormwings flying overhead. Maybe they’d seen, but they weren’t jeering, so Dom thought perhaps they hadn’t. Another kiss, though, and they might. And while no doubt he would get used to stormwings making fun of his affection for his lady wife, perhaps he didn’t have to subject himself to it on the first day.

“Indoors,” he said. “And then you can talk to me about going to meet the ogres, and—the rest of it. Figuring out what a duke-consort does with his days.”

“Tortall hasn’t had one before. I’m sure we can make it whatever we please.” She smiled at him, and let go of one of his hands to pull him towards the nearest door. “But tomorrow’s soon enough. Surely we can have one day to enjoy it.”

One day, and then another, and another. Dom followed along behind her, let her guide him, and moved from one imagined future into a much happier one with ease.