Volume Seven: What the Old Wing Hid
Blood soaked warm through his sleeve beneath her hands, and Isolde pressed the linen harder against the wound and refused, refused absolutely, to let herself think about how close the blade had come to his throat instead.
Stop looking at me like that, Kael said, breath ragged, a ghost of dark humor surfacing even now through the pain. You would think no one had ever bled for you before.
That was well past midnight, deep in the old wing's forgotten rooms. It began three hours earlier, with a locked door and a guard who did not want to let her through it.
She had not seen Kael once in those three days, only heard, through the single guard who occasionally forgot himself enough to speak, rumors that he had gone before the council alone, that Roran's supporters had painted him already as a man compromised beyond trusting, bewitched by an enemy's daughter into betraying his own blood. She had spent the long silent hours composing arguments she would never be allowed to make, testimonies no one had asked her to give, and had come, by the third night, to understand with total clarity that Roran had never intended to let the formal challenge happen at all. A challenge required witnesses, and evidence, and the possibility, however small, that the truth might win. Roran dealt only in certainties.
The three days of her confinement had passed in a narrow room with barred windows and guards who answered no questions, and Isolde had spent them in a fury so complete it had, by the second day, cooled into something colder and far more useful, a patient, methodical rage that catalogued every weakness in her captors' routine and waited. It was Kael who broke the pattern first, arriving on the third night with a guard's uniform borrowed and a key he should not, by any account, have possessed, and it was the sound of fighting in the corridor beyond her door, sudden and vicious, that told her his arrival had not gone unnoticed.
"Roran knows," he said, hauling her door open with a shoulder still slick with someone else's blood. "He set the challenge for tomorrow because he never intended it to happen at all. He means to have you dead tonight and call it an escape attempt gone wrong, and me discredited or dead beside you for interfering. We have to move now."
They ran together through corridors Isolde had never seen, deeper into the old wing of Ravenhold than any hostage had likely ever been permitted, past rooms sealed since some earlier century's disgrace, until a second wave of Roran's men found them in a narrow gallery lined with the portraits of Draven dead, and it was there, defending the only exit with a fury Isolde had never seen him unleash fully before, that a blade meant for her throat found Kael's shoulder instead, driven deep enough that she heard the sound it made against bone even over the ring of steel and her own scream of his name.
The gallery itself became, for the space of a few desperate minutes, a battlefield lit only by the pale eyes of painted ancestors watching from the walls, Kael's shadow magic tearing black and furious through the dark to meet blade after blade while Isolde called what sun fire she could to hold the narrower passage behind them, her arms trembling with an effort she had never before been forced to sustain for so long. She watched him take the first two attackers down with an economy of motion that spoke of years of training she had only ever heard whispered about at court, the Blade of Draven living up, in that gallery, to every fearful rumor the eastern Skylands had ever told about him. It was the third man, faster than the rest and clearly the most practiced, who slipped past his guard in the space of a single distracted heartbeat, the heartbeat in which Kael's eyes had flicked, involuntarily, toward Isolde to be certain she still stood.
He killed the man who had struck him with a single brutal stroke of shadow magic afterward, and then, swaying, allowed her to half drag him the last distance into a hidden chamber behind a false section of the gallery wall, a room built generations ago, he told her later, for exactly this purpose, for a Draven heir to disappear into when the house itself turned against its own blood.
The chamber was small, dust thick on furniture untouched in decades, a single shuttered window letting in a sliver of moon. Isolde tore strips from her own underskirt to bind his shoulder, her hands shaking with an adrenaline that had nowhere left to go now that the running had stopped, and worked in silence for long minutes before either of them spoke again.
"You should not have come for me tonight," she said finally, pressing the makeshift bandage tight enough to make him hiss through his teeth. "You could have waited for the formal challenge. Let the council see the proof honestly."
"There was no honest challenge waiting for us tomorrow. Only a body, and a story already written to explain it." His hand found hers where it worked at his shoulder, stilling her, and in the thin moonlight his eyes held an intensity that had nothing to do with the pain he was clearly, deliberately, refusing to show her fully. "I have spent my whole life believing that control was the only thing keeping the people I love safe. My mother's marriage taught me that feeling too much only gives other people a lever to break you with. I have held to that lesson since I was twelve years old, Isolde, and I have never once, in all that time, regretted it until I met you."
"Kael."
"Let me finish, because I do not know how many more quiet moments we will be given before tomorrow decides everything." His thumb moved against her knuckles, slow, deliberate, the same question she remembered from the archive alcove asked now with none of the earlier hesitation. "I do not know how to promise you safety. I could not keep my own mother safe from a marriage that was supposed to protect her. I could not keep Ronan safe, though he was never mine to protect. I do not know that I can promise you tomorrow will end with both of us alive. But I know that whatever time we have left, tonight or tomorrow or however many days the council's decision leaves us, I do not want to spend another hour of it pretending I do not love you simply because loving you is dangerous."
The word love, spoken aloud for the first time between them, seemed to fill the small dusty chamber entirely, and Isolde felt every careful wall she had built since the crypt beneath the sky temple, since the gates of Ravenhold first closed behind her, come down at once, not shattered but simply, finally, set down, too heavy to carry any further into whatever tomorrow intended to be.
"I have been afraid of exactly this since the corridor, that first night," she admitted, her hand rising to cradle his uninjured shoulder, to draw him carefully closer in the narrow space between them. "Afraid that hating you would have been so much simpler than this. I do not hate you, Kael Draven. I have not hated you in longer than I have been willing to admit, even to myself."
What passed between them after, in the dust and moonlight of a chamber built for hiding rather than tenderness, held none of the earlier alcove's hurried uncertainty. This was slower, deeper, both of them moving with a deliberate, unhurried honesty that spoke less of desire seizing an opportunity and more of two people finally choosing, with clear eyes and full hearts, to stop pretending the choice had not already been made weeks ago. His injured shoulder made him careful in ways that only deepened the tenderness of it, every touch measured, every point of contact a question answered before it was fully asked, and when it was over they lay tangled together in the narrow bed with the shuttered window's thin moonlight falling across them both, neither willing to be the one who spoke first and let the ordinary world back into the room.
It was Kael, eventually, who broke the silence, his fingers tracing an idle, absent pattern against her bare shoulder. "Whatever happens tomorrow," he said quietly, "I do not regret tonight. Not for one moment. I want you to know that, whatever the council decides."
"Then we face tomorrow together, and we make certain there is a tomorrow left to regret or not regret anything in." She meant it as reassurance, and heard, even as she said it, how much like a vow it sounded in the quiet of that hidden room, a promise neither of them had the standing yet to make to the other and both of them, she suspected, intended to keep regardless.
He laughed, low and warm and real, the sound rough with the pain he was still refusing to fully acknowledge, and pressed a kiss to her temple that held more tenderness than either of them had words ready to name.
Dawn found them still tangled together in the narrow bed, the shuttered window beginning to grey at its edges, and it was the sound outside, boots and raised voices and the unmistakable clatter of a search moving room by room through the old wing, that finally broke the fragile peace of the night. Kael was on his feet before Isolde had fully understood what she was hearing, his wounded shoulder forgotten, his hand already closing around the hilt of the blade he had not once set down even in sleep.
"They have found the gallery," he said, low and grim, listening to the voices draw closer through the false wall. "We have perhaps minutes before they find this room as well."
Isolde rose beside him, gathering what courage the night had left her, and heard, unmistakably now, Roran's own voice among the searchers outside, cold and satisfied and very, very close.
"Come out, nephew," Roran called, his voice carrying easily through the thin false wall, pitched for an audience of his own men rather than for any hope of a reply. "There is no honor left in hiding. Bring the girl, and I promise you both a swifter end than the alternative."
Kael's grip tightened on his blade, and for a moment Isolde saw, beneath the exhaustion and the pain he still refused to acknowledge, the full weight of what the next few minutes would likely cost either or both of them. "There is a second passage," he murmured, nodding toward a narrow gap behind the room's single shuttered window, barely wide enough for a body to slip through sideways. "It leads down to the old stables, and from there to the outer wall. It will not hold my uncle off for long once he realizes we are gone, but it may buy us the time we need to reach the council chamber before he can silence us both."
"Then we do not wait here to find out how long his patience lasts."
He caught her hand once more before they moved, and in his eyes, even now, even with the sound of searching boots drawing closer by the second, she saw nothing of regret for the night just passed, only a fierce, unshaken certainty that whatever came next, they would meet it exactly as they had met everything else in Ravenhold. Together, or not at all.