IWJACM Chapter 8

What Elise had pictured—something no bigger than a small creek—turned out a little off the mark. Cutting through the forest, they came out on a lake fed by a curtain of falling water.

"The water will be cold. Will you manage it?"

"I'll manage."

"Mind the wound doesn't get wet."

"All right."

Elise answered docile, her eyes fixed unblinking on his.

Rezet Kyrstan's face hadn't changed much from the day they first met. Eyes unmoved by most things; a nose-bridge and jawline giving off a sense of nothing wanting, nothing lacking, stubbornly shut. His speech, still just as blunt.

And yet, a few dawns back, this man had, unmistakably, taken her into his arms. Elise still remembered, vivid, the heat that had come off a body built of thick muscle.

"……"

'One thing to test, maybe.'

Elise let go the cloak's collar, standing there before him.

The cloak slid loose off her shoulders and thumped softly to the ground.

The dress she'd worn fleeing Argan had long since gone stiff with dried blood. But there was no woman's clothing to be had in an army made up entirely of men, so Elise had been given, instead, the fine linen shirt and breeches issued to knights.

Whose they'd once been wasn't hard to guess. His, most likely. He'd hardly hand her some other man's clothes.

But Rezet's clothes could never fit her right, so Elise's shape looked graceless, swallowed up like a sack.

The man only watched as she began working the buttons open at her collar. No word to stop her, and no turning away either.

'Still can't tell. What's in this man's head.'

The only time she'd ever caught a clear feeling in those eyes, at a glance, was the day she'd driven a dagger into her own shoulder.

What about this time?

Elise kept her eyes locked on eyes deeper than the lake beneath them and undid the second button. Her slim, straight collarbone came into view.

By the third button, the modest curve of her chest showed; by the fourth, the narrow line of her waist, and skin gleaming smooth under the moonlight.

At last the linen shirt slid past her slim thighs and drifted down, light as a fallen petal, onto the cloak already crumpled in the grass.

Bare, with nothing left to hide her, gooseflesh rose fine across her skin.

Was it the man before her, who hadn't blinked once looking down at her—or the still-cold night air? Elise couldn't tell which.

He showed no reaction at all. But she could tell—his gaze was moving over her body.

Wherever his eyes lingered, a chill crept under her skin. Elise's cheeks colored, slow, and deeper.

But having started, she had to see it through to the end. Restless, hands seizing on nothing but empty air—poor undeserving air—she finally hooked her fingers into the waistband hanging precarious between waist and hip.

The instant she meant to draw the last cloth down, her hand was caught.

"……!"

Elise flinched, startled. Only then did she realize she'd stopped breathing.

The man before her, eyes far too overbearing, spoke low.

"The air's still cold."

"…I want to wash."

"The water's cold too. And it's not been three days since your fever broke."

"……"

"And."

His low voice seemed to scrape down her bare skin.

Something deep in her belly pulled tight with tension. Her fingertips twitched, her toes curled on their own. Every place bared to the cold air and another's eyes went twice, three times as sensitive.

Elise bit the inside of her lip and just barely stood against the sheer presence of the man before her. She wanted badly to raise her arms, cover her bared chest—but forced herself, with everything in her, to choke the shame down instead. It took everything she had not to look away from eyes that seemed to lick over her.

But Elise held.

Rezet finally lowered his eyes. His voice came out low, thick, as if choking back a groan.

"Don't test me, Your Highness."

"……"

"I told you plain—I can't help you."

It was the second time, in the month she'd known him, that she'd seen that storm in his blue eyes.

The big hand covering both of hers at once carried heat inside it. The man drew one slow, deep breath, then shut his eyes fully.

"The rocks will be slick with moss."

"……"

"And tomorrow we reach a town with an inn. Can you not wait just one more day?"

"……"

"Fall ill again, and this time it won't be in my discretion to delay the schedule. You know that already. Putting off our arrival in Van Yela—that won't do anymore."

This man, the Grand Duke Kyrstan, had never once strung together so many words before.

Elise glanced down at her own body. Standing before a stranger with her chest bared clean, stripped down like this, struck her, of a sudden, as almost funny.

The last princess of Argan, of all people, standing this cheap before the enemy nation's supreme commander. Not one bit different from a whore who sold her body for coin.

She was putting herself on display, cheap as goods, and the man across from her stood upright, a knight who knew his own honor.

Neither words nor temptation moved him.

She didn't know whether to feel relief or despair. Well—she'd never really expected anything, to begin with, so nothing left to do but give it up.

And yet…

"…I'll wash just my hands and feet."

Elise opened her tight throat and murmured, small. Something in what Rezet Kyrstan had said—out of character for him, all those words—had left her stirred up.

This time, he'd said, it wouldn't be in his discretion to delay the schedule.

'This time…'

Her heart began, quiet, to beat. Elise washed her hands and feet in the lake and came back, wrapped once more in his cloak, to the campfire.

Even after she came back, she went on thinking those words over, a long while.

And she let herself hold, just once, a small hope—that maybe, just maybe, once she reached Van Yela and did whatever it was she meant to do, that man might forgive her for it.

After the incident at the lake, time passed quickly. And at last, in the middle of March—a month and a half since Elise had been captured by the Van Yela army—

Elise arrived in Van Yela, the great power of the continent's northwest.

2. A Planned Lie

Unwelcome guests had already arrived at the Van Yela capital ahead of them.

No sooner had the Grand Duke's army crossed the drawbridge into the capital than soldiers in foreign-looking armor, dark-skinned, moved to block their path.

"Ughel savages."

Ruben muttered, sour. Discomfort showed plain on the faces of the Van Yela knights. Ruben drew rein and pulled up alongside Rezet.

"The fourth prince of the Ughel Kingdom. Yanok Sihat. Didn't expect him to come all this way out here…"

A flicker of discomfort crossed Rezet's blank face, there and gone. Yanok Sihat—he knew the name. The one who'd helped his elder brother, the first prince, strike Argan's capital.

Van Yela had sent only reinforcements—the ten thousand troops under Rezet's own command had handled Argan's allied states along its western flank. He'd never once stood face to face with the Ughel forces who struck Argan's capital itself, the empire's very heart.

"You the Grand Duke Kyrstan, then?"

Yanok Sihat stabbed a finger at Rezet and grinned, lips peeling wide. Yellow teeth showed between them.

"Caught the princess running off from Argan's west border, they tell me. That her, in the cart there?"

Rezet glanced back over his shoulder. The prisoner's cart sat draped in purple silk, its inside hidden from view. But whatever was said out here would carry in well enough.

Elise sat curled up small inside the cart.

Ughel savages.

Before her eyes flashed the gleam of a curved single-edged blade, blood still bright on it.

Only three months back, savages armored in rough hide and fur had smashed through Argan's gates and poured through like a tidal wave.

They'd hacked their broad, curved single-edged swords down without mercy, cutting Argan's soldiers apart. The captain of the Argan imperial guard, the man who'd helped her flee, went down under one of those blades, his neck struck open.

The savages spared no one—not the youngest of the attendants, not the oldest of the servants. That same blade had likely taken Andrei's head too.

Elise's hands and feet shook, violent, as fear and fury rose in her together. The man on the other side of that cloth was Argan's blood enemy.

"Went to all that trouble breaking into the palace just to get a look at that famous face of Argan's princess. And what d'you know—already hightailed it, she had. 'A face you gotta see once before you die,' they say—damn shame I missed it. So I put in a request to the master of Van Yela. Bring her to me nice 'n gentle, not a hair on her head touched."

Yanok Sihat swaggered up closer to the cart. A faint crease crossed Rezet's face.

"Seeing as the Grand Duke of our brother nation went and caught the princess himself, I'll gladly take her off your hands. Brought her in one piece, did you?"

Elise glared hard enough to tear the purple silk of the cart clean through.

'Bring her here unharmed'—was that what the Emperor of Van Yela had meant, all along? Hand her over alive, to be tossed as a plaything to savages? In the end, the Emperor was no different from these Ughel savages.

If she was handed to Ughel this fast, her plan would run aground before it had even begun. Elise ground her teeth.

The swaggering footsteps drew closer.

'Fine. Come on, then. Come and lay your hands on me!'

The instant that filthy finger touched her, she'd trigger the magic carved into her body. As a companion to walk into the afterlife with, an enemy prince wouldn't be a bad choice at all. If she was fated to die regardless, she'd die for something worth the price.

A fist thick with hair seized the silk covering the cart. The cloth was wrenched up, and raw sunlight shoved its way into the dark inside.

The light crossed Elise's slender body and shoulders, cutting a sharp diagonal line to her narrow jaw and lips pressed hard shut—just as—

A clash of armor rang out close by. A flat, unmoved voice followed.

"Back off."