Kai
Ione was already wearing a ring when he met her the next day, a single pearl wreathed in silver leaves.“Oh, this,” she said, lifting her hand to the dim light of the altarhouse.“I thought it best to announce ourselves quickly, and I already had a ring I liked.But – yes.”She took it off and handed it to him.“You can put it on me.”
A political marriage wasn’t precisely what he’d envisioned for himself.Actually, he wasn’t sure what he’d envisioned, but it wasn’t slipping a ring he didn’t even buy onto the finger of a woman who tolerated him at best.
But as she looked up at him, Kai thought that he liked the way she did.Like she saw him, accepted what she saw with a tenuous, wary sort of trust.I’m in your hands, her eyes said:Don’t fuck it up.
It wasn’t nice or sweet.None of it was.But he’d made a deal and he’d do right by it.
She regarded the ring briefly before lifting her hand again, expectant.Struck by an unpleasant jolt of something he would later categorise as sympathy, Kai bypassed her hand and kissed her forehead, which might’ve been nice or sweet if he didn’t lurch back, startled by the heat of her skin.
“You’ve a fever.”He touched her forehead with the backs of his fingers.“You well?”
She waved him off and strode ahead to the lunarium where Saros and her parents took their breakfast.“A headache,” she said simply.“I get them sometimes.”
He hurried after her.“And it’s definitely not, ah…” He gestured at her, and when she didn’t respond he added, a mite desperately, “I mean, I don’t need to be getting you a tonic, right?”
“A headache the next day isnota symptom of pregnancy, you cretin.”She sighed, ever suffering.“I assure you, I already took a tonic.It’s just a headcold.Maybe Saros coughed on me.”She shuddered.“I was joking, but it’s probably true and now I’m upset.”
She stopped before the glass doors to the lunarium and faced him, and limned by the early morning sunlight, Kai saw how pallid she was.Mournful.
“You’re certain it’s a headcold?”
Ione lowered her eyes.“I’m just… very sad.I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking about…” She hugged her arms as though chilled.“I still don’t like it.The suddenness, I mean.I keep expecting her to return, to explain herself.For it all to make perfect sense.”
Frankly, it didn’t make sense to Kai, either.While Lina hadn’t gone into detail about it, he had surmised that it was Castor who had burned her.So why return after hearing he’d survived the Leviathos’s raid?
Whatever the reason was benign, he supposed, although that wouldn’t do much to help the fact that she’d gone and Ione was hurt.The binding ward still held over her – he could feel it, dimly – so if she’d had it in her mind to cause any trouble, it would serve its purpose.
“If she’s returned to Soliz,” Kai began, watching her.“I might run into her.Eventually.”
She issued him a hateful look.“And you will leave her.Unharmed.”
“I mightn’t have a choice, Ione.”He clasped her shoulder.“We’ll come out the other side of this.But you have to understand it won’t be with peace.”
The fire dulled as reality set in, making her seem small, withered.And because Kai wasn’t nearly as heartless as he would’ve liked, he opened his arms, let her nestle into them, too-warm.
“I just feel very hollow,” she whispered into his shoulder.“My stomach, my chest.Scooped-out, empty.Lina made me feel…” She trembled, he sensed, with a self-loathing he was only too familiar with.“And it is all so stupid.Stupid to be so sad, stupid to think we can avoid bloodshed.”
“It’s not stupid to be kind, Ineen.”He rested his chin on her head.“Naïve and pointless, maybe, but not stupid.”
He heard her suppress a snicker and smiled.“Oh, go to hell,” she said, although her voice was fond.
It was not lost on him that he had hurt people in similar ways.He hadn’t yet decided how River would react to their engagement – possibly with violence; he could only hope – but he could imagine how smug River would feel to know that Kai felt bad.
He squeezed her once and released her, kissing her forehead again for good measure.“Well, then,” he said, mustering a smile.“Will we go ruin your parents’ day?”
She smiled back, wistful but genuine, and let Kai open the door for her and usher her into the lunarium.
The air drooped with humidity, even at this early hour; each leaf and petal glistened with dewdrops, making the plants seem crystallised, suspended in time.Ione lifted her chin, leading Kai through the flagstone paths lined with summer foliage.She was a queen again, steely and untouchable, neither happy nor sad.
And he, her royal guard, her right hand, her sword, followed.
This was what he wanted.Power, prestige, his name remembered for centuries to come.Not the end of his father’s era, but the start of a new one.
“Good morning, River,” Ione said, like this was any other day and not one where Kai might finally get stabbed.
River screeched to a halt before them, an empty tray slung under one arm – playing busboy for Saros again, wasted talent – and glanced between Kai and Ione like he was trying to piece together a particularly abhorrent puzzle.Kai’s mouth went dry, every spiteful thing he’d wanted to say to piss River off, prove River right, dying at the way River looked at him.
