The question came out before I could stop it, and I regretted it the instant it landed because it was too blunt, too loaded, too much the king assessing a prospect rather than the man wanting to simply know. But Isolde didn’t flinch. She tilted her head in that small considering gesture she made when she was deciding how much truth to offer.
“I was betrothed once,” she said.
“To whom?”
“Lord Brennan of Astolat. I was nineteen. He was thirty-two and had buried a wife already and needed one with better hips.” Her voice was light, worn smooth by repetition. “My father thought it was an excellent match. Astolat has tin mines, and Corbenic needed trade routes. Between my hips and Brennan’s tin, the alliance made sense on paper.”
“What happened?”
“I met him.” She picked up a stone from the wall, small and pale, and turned it in her fingers. “He arrived for the formal introduction.”
“Was he ugly?”
She shook her head. “No, he was handsome enough, and he was polite. But the problem was that he complimented my embroidery.”
I frowned. “How is that—”
“—I don’t embroider. Then he complimented my singing, which he’d never heard because I don’t sing. He told my father I had excellent carriage and good teeth.” She glanced at me. “I know something about assessing horses—well, enough to know that he was in the market for a broodmare. He didn’t look at my eyes once during the entire dinner. Instead, he looked at my waist and my hips and the space between them where he planned to put his heir.”
I said nothing. She didn’t need anything from me yet.
“I told my father I would rather enter a convent. He said I was being dramatic, that marriage between houses wasn’t about love, and that I’d learn to appreciate Lord Brennan’s qualities.” She threw the stone over the wall. It fell a long way before the river took it. “I told him I’d assessed Lord Brennan’s qualities in the same time it took him to assess mine, and found them insufficient.”
“Your father relented?”
“He negotiated a different trade route through Astolat that didn’t require my reproductive capacity as collateral. It cost him twice the tariffs, though.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “He reminds me of this every year, and I send him an expensive bottle of wine on the anniversary of the broken betrothal.”
The laugh came out of me without warning as I imagined the image of Isolde and her father locked in their annual stubbornness, along with the wine and the silence, the cycle repeating year after year, both of them too proud to end it and too fond of each other to mean it. Isolde looked at me with an expression of open delight, as though she’d been waiting for the sound and it had exceeded what she’d imagined.
The laughter faded, but the warmth of it didn’t.
“After Brennan,” I started, as I moved to the harder question, the one I actually wanted to know. “Corbenic is the most powerful house in the southern territories. You could have had anyone you wanted.”
She was quiet long enough that I heard the river clearly.
“There were offers, of course. Some were Brennan in better packaging: men who wanted Corbenic’s army or Corbenic’s wealth and were willing to tolerate the woman attached to these assets. Some were better.” She paused. “Lord Edric of Badon is one such example. He was kind, genuinely kind. He kept bees and he read poetry. He would have given me a gentle life.”
“So, why not him?”
She turned the question over visibly, as though not searching for the answer but deciding how honestly to deliver it. “Because ‘gentle’ wasn’t enough.” She met my eyes. “I watched my mother manage Corbenic beside my father for fourteen years. They werepartners,equals as much as a woman can be equal to a man. When she spoke, he listened, not out of indulgence but because her counsel was worth something to him. When she disagreed, he argued back with her. He respected her enough to fight his point rather than to concede.” She looked at the river. “They built something together, not a diplomatic alliance and not a comfortable arrangement. They were two people who made each other better.”
The freckles across her nose... I noticed them without meaning to. There were six or maybe seven that were barely visible in the light.
“When Mother died, I watched my father become half of himself. Not because he was weak, but because she was the other half, and without her, the structure couldn’t hold its own weight. He managed. He endured, but he was never again what he was when she was beside him. And I decided I’d rather havethat: the thing that makes you more, or have nothing at all. Lord Edric was kind, and yes, I would have been comfortable. And every single day of that comfortable life, I would have known I’d settled for something smaller than what my mother had.” A pause. “I’m not built for smaller.”
The statement landed in my chest the way a blade finds the gap in armor: not painful, just true. Inevitable. The way things are true when they’ve been true for a long time, and someone finally says them out loud.
She was telling me what she wanted, what she expected. And not with coyness, not with the careful diplomatic framing that would give her deniability if I didn’t respond the way she hoped I would. Instead, she was sitting on a garden wall, telling the King of Logres that she’d rather have nothing than something insufficient, and she was looking at me dead in the eyes while she said it, and the looking wasn’t subtle.
The king in me characterizedit: “Isolde of Corbenic. Unmarried by choice. Demands partnership. Exactly the queen Logres needs.”
The man in me thought:“I wonder if she believes we could have what her parents did?”
The dragon didn’t stir because the dragon didn’t care. And the absence of the dragon’s interference was the strangest part because it meant what I felt was entirely mine: want without contamination, warmth without fire, the clean human recognition of something real, yet knowing it was mine made the distance between us feel like a door rather than a wall.
“Your mother sounds extraordinary,” I said.
Isolde heard everything I didn’t say. She always did. “She was. She would have liked you.” A beat. “She also would have told you that you work too much and don’t eat enough vegetables.”
