The Proposal

Isolde had both hands in the frozen dirt of the kitchen garden, working a turnip loose by the stubborn root, when Garrick came at a jog to tell her something. The General of Caldreth was riding up the north road with twenty men and no banner.

She didn’t stop working the turnip free. “No banner means he doesn’t want to be recognized until he’s already inside the gate.”

“Or he’s not proud of what he’s bringing.” Garrick crouched beside her, keeping his voice low even though there was no one within a hundred feet who didn’t already know who ruled this keep, and who had taken it from her. “Twenty men isn’t an army, Majesty. It isn’t even a proper escort. It’s a man who wants to talk.”

“Ashgrove doesn’t talk. He decides things and then informs people.” She sat back on her heels and looked at her hands, cracked at the knuckles from three winters of this exact kind of work. Three years ago, barely into her twenty-third year, those hands had signed treaties. Now, twenty-six and considerably less inclined to trust anyone’s good intentions, they pulled turnips so the household would eat through Thornmoor’s long, unforgiving cold. “Get Petra to put out the good cups. If he’s come all this way himself, I want him to see we still have good cups.”

She changed out of the garden dress for something with a spine in it, dark wool with the Marrow gray at the collar. She would be caught dead before she stopped wearing her own house’s color inside her own house’s walls, however small that house had become. By the time she came down to the hall, the riders were already through the gate, and she could hear Garrick’s men trying to look like more than they were.

Thane Ashgrove came in without waiting to be announced, which told her everything about how the last three years had gone for him too.

He was bigger than she remembered, or maybe just closer than she’d let him get since the coronation she hadn’t attended. Gray at one temple that hadn’t been there before. A scar along his jaw that was new, or new to her — she hadn’t looked at his face in three years, except in the one portrait she kept so she could hate it properly. He stopped a careful distance from her, close enough for courtesy, far enough that neither of them had to acknowledge how close was too close.

“Your Majesty.” He said it like a man handling something that might still bite.

“General.” She let the silence sit as long as it needed to before she added, “You’ve lost weight. Ruling doesn’t agree with you.”

“Ruling was never the part I wanted.” His eyes went once around the hall: the bare stone, the two threadbare banners, the fire built small to save wood. They came back to her without a flicker of pity, which she appreciated more than she’d admit. “You’ve made this place hard to feel sorry for you in.”

“I didn’t build it for your sympathy.”

“No.” A short breath, almost a laugh, gone before it became one. “You built it to prove you don’t need it.”

Garrick shifted his weight by the door in a way that meant his hand was near his belt. Isolde didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on Thane, on the road dust still on his boots. He’d come without ceremony, because ceremony would have given her time to prepare a face for him, and he’d wanted her unprepared.

“You rode two weeks to tell me I look thin,” she said. “Say the rest, General, and then leave before the roads freeze.”

He didn’t sit, though she hadn’t offered him a chair, and she didn’t offer one on principle. “I’ve come to propose a marriage.”

The word landed in the cold hall like a dropped blade, flat and ringing.

For one full breath she believed she had misheard him. Then she understood that she hadn’t. The understanding arrived with a heat that had nothing to do with wanting him and everything to do with wanting to strike him. “Garrick.”

“Majesty.”

“Escort the General back to his horse.”

“Isolde—“

“You don’t have that.” Her voice didn’t rise. It went colder instead, which was worse, and she watched it land on him the way she’d meant it to. “You do not have my name in your mouth. You gave that up the night you put my father in the ground and called it necessary.”

“I know what I gave up.” For the first time something in his face moved that wasn’t careful. “I’m not here to ask for it back. I’m here because Caldreth is dying by inches and I have run out of ways to stop it alone.”

“Then find a general to marry. I hear you’re fond of promoting them.” She turned for the stair, done, already composing the version of this evening she’d tell herself before sleep — the one where she’d been magnificent and he’d been small. Garrick moved to block the door out of habit more than instruction. Two of Thane’s men shifted. For one ugly second the whole hall balanced on the edge of becoming something none of them could take back.

“The thornwood is spreading south of Highmarrow,” Thane said, fast, before she reached the second step. “Twelve miles past where your father’s maps put its old border. It’s not just trees anymore. It’s in the water south of the old capital. It’s in a curse language none of my scholars can read. If I don’t find a way to stop it inside a year, it reaches the river towns. Yours, as much as mine, whatever either of us calls ourselves.”

Isolde stopped with her hand on the banister.

She didn’t turn around immediately. She let the fire pop, let the sound of one of the guards outside stamping cold feet fill the space he’d left open. If she turned around too fast, he would see how hard that had landed.

“The thornwood has bordered Highmarrow since before my grandmother’s grandmother,” she said, to the stairs, not to him. “It doesn’t spread. It creeps a handful of feet a decade and everyone with sense stays clear of it.”

“It’s spread eleven miles in three years.” His voice had dropped, lost the careful formality, gone plain and tired in a way that unsettled her more than any amount of posturing would have. “Since the coup, if you want it said outright. I’ve had scholars from every corner of what’s left of the kingdom look at it. The only thing any of them agree on is that whatever’s driving it lives in the old blood-rites, and the old blood-rites answer to Marrow blood. Not to mine. I can throw every soldier I have at that border and it will not slow down for a single one of them.”

She turned around then.

He looked, in that moment, less like the man who’d ended her father’s reign and more like a man who had spent three years alone with a problem too large for one pair of hands. That was somehow more infuriating than if he’d looked triumphant. She wanted him triumphant. Triumphant she knew how to hate cleanly.

“And your solution,” she said slowly, testing the shape of it before she let it fully into the room. “Is to marry the last Marrow blood you can find. So the crown you stole has something to point at the curse.”

“My solution is that I need a Marrow willing to work the old rites, and the old rites won’t answer to a stranger brought to court under guard. They answer to a queen. A real one, not a hostage.” He held her eyes, and she made herself not look away first, though it cost her more than she wanted to spend on him. “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to help me save something you clearly still care enough about to be freezing in a garden over turnips.”

“That’s not romance, General. That’s a very long way to ask for my blood.”

“I’m not offering romance.” Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, not quite humor, closer to relief that she’d said the true thing aloud so he didn’t have to be the one who did. “I’m offering a crown. A place at the table where the decisions get made, instead of a keep at the edge of the map. A real chance to stop the thing that’s eating the kingdom your family built. Whatever you think of me personally can stay where it is. I’m not fool enough to ask for more than that.”

Isolde looked past him, out through the narrow window where the last gray light was catching on the distant thorn-line, closer than she remembered it, closer than it should have been in three short years. She thought of the villages along that border, the ones that used to send grain south every harvest. Her father had sworn a coronation oath to protect them, before the man now standing in her hall put an end to that promise along with everything else.

“If I say yes,” she said, “it is not forgiveness. It is not trust. It is a working arrangement with a hard border around it, and the first time you mistake my cooperation for something softer, this ends.”

“Understood.”

“I mean that as coldly as it sounds.”

“I’d expect nothing less from you.” He said it without mockery, which was somehow worse than if he’d meant it as a jab, because it sounded uncomfortably close to respect. “Think on it. I’m not asking for an answer tonight.”

“You’ll have one before you finish your wine,” she said, and gestured for Garrick to bring the good cups after all.

· · ·Scene break

Later, after the twenty men had been fed and bedded in the outer hall and Thane had been given the one decent guest room Thornmoor still had, Isolde climbed to the north wall. Her cloak was too thin for the wind. Thornmoor sat at the ragged edge of what used to be a kingdom — a border province, an embarrassment, or a cage with excellent views, depending on who was asked. This was the view: on a clear night the dark smudge of the old thornwood pressed against the horizon like a bruise that hadn’t decided whether to heal. She had trained herself not to look at it most days. It never used to change enough to be worth the ache. Tonight, for the first time in longer than she could name, she made herself look anyway.

Petra found her there near midnight, holding two mugs of something hot that smelled more like courage than tea. “Garrick says you haven’t slept properly in three days, Majesty, and that’s before a general rode up asking you to marry him over turnips.”

“He didn’t ask over turnips. He asked in the hall, like a man delivering a supply report.” Isolde took the mug anyway, wrapped both hands around it for the warmth as much as anything to do while she thought. “The turnips were incidental.”

“Is it true, then? About the wood?”

“I don’t know yet. I intend to see it with my own eyes before I decide anything else.” She looked at the dark line on the horizon, at the place where her father’s kingdom had once ended in ordinary trees and now ended in something with a hunger to it. “If even half of what he said is true, I can’t sit in this keep growing turnips while it swallows the river towns to spite the man who’s asking for my help.”

“And if it’s a trick? To get you back under his roof where he can watch you?”

Isolde’s mouth curved, thin and without warmth, the closest she’d come to smiling since the riders came through the gate. “Then he’ll learn how much of a hostage a queen makes.”

She stayed on the wall until the cold drove her in, turning her mother’s ring once around her finger the way she did when a decision needed weighing rather than felt. By the time she climbed back to her cold, narrow room, she already knew what she would tell him in the morning. She only needed the night to be certain she could say it without her voice shaking, one way or the other.

· · ·Scene break

He was already in the courtyard when she came down, checking a girth strap that didn’t need checking, giving his hands something to do while he waited for a verdict he couldn’t rush. His men stood ready around him, breath smoking in the cold, and Garrick hovered near the gate with the particular stillness of a man who had already decided he wasn’t going to like whatever happened next.

“You didn’t sleep,” Thane said, not quite a question.

“Neither did you. Your eyes are worse than mine.” Isolde stopped an arm’s length away, close enough to see the tiredness under the scar, far enough that she could still call the distance deliberate. “I’m not giving you an answer today.”

Something in his jaw tightened, brief and controlled. “You said before I finished my wine.”

“I lied. It’s a skill I picked up from watching you rule.” She let that land before she went on. She wanted him to feel the full weight of it before she softened anything. “I’ll come with you to the border. I want to see what you’re describing with my own eyes, in daylight, without a general’s report smoothing the worst of it away. If it’s as bad as you say, we talk terms. If it isn’t, you ride home with a story about how the deposed queen wasted your morning, and you can tell it however flatters you.”

“That’s not an answer. That’s a delay with conditions.”

“It’s the only kind of answer I have to give a man I don’t trust yet.” She held his gaze, steady, refusing to let the cold or the audience put a shake into her voice. “You want my blood for your rites and my name on your marriage contract. The least you owe me is proof before either.”

For a moment he looked as though he might argue it, might list every reason her caution cost him time he didn’t have. She braced for the general in him to win out over whatever else was there. Instead he exhaled, and the tightness went out of his shoulders in a way that looked almost like relief.

“Three years,” he said quietly, “and you still bargain like your father never lost a war.”

“My father lost everything.” The words came out flatter than she meant them to, more honest than she’d planned for this particular morning. “I’m not interested in losing the same way twice.”

He nodded once, accepting it, and turned to signal his men toward the horses rather than pressing her further. She noted that and filed it away — either good instinct or good strategy, undecided which. Garrick brought her own mare around without being asked, already saddled. He’d guessed her answer before she’d given it, and prepared for it in silence, the way he always had.

“Two days’ ride,” Thane said, swinging up. “The weather won’t be kind.”

“I’ve buried turnips in worse.” She took the reins from Garrick, met his steady, worried eyes for one breath, and mounted before either man could talk her out of a decision she hadn’t fully talked herself into. “Lead on, General. Let’s see this curse of yours before it decides for both of us.”