Page 107 of Beds and Blades

“It is generally considered a useful starting condition.”

Her mouth shifted slightly. Not a smile, but close enough to prove the argument had not entirely failed.

Then her expression settled.

“I have not let a man close in years,” she said. Her fingers tightened around the flask. “I was claimed once.”

The words were quiet, but they changed the air between us.

“He was a soldier here. We had been together for two years.” She looked toward the mountains rather than the yard. “I loved him. The bond was real.”

I said nothing.

“There was an incursion. He was taken. They brought him back three days later. Everyone believed he was ill. They said the fever would pass.”

“But you knew?”

“I felt the bond change.”

Her voice remained even, though the hand around her flask had gone rigid.

“The warmth was still there, but it was wrong. It still reached me, but what moved through it was no longer him.”

The claiming bond carried emotion. Presence. The intimate, bodily truth of another person. I had never considered what it would feel like to receive a more horrifying transmission.

“I knew what the dark bond did,” Varia continued. “I knew that darkness was overwriting him. But I could not say it to Scipio. I could not say it to the garrison. I could barely form the thought in my own mind.”

She watched Gaius move through the sequence, though I doubted she was seeing him now.

“I watched his eyes change. The color went wrong first. The warmth disappeared. He grew pale. He sweated profusely. Eventually, the person I loved was gone.”

“I killed him myself.” She drew a slow breath. “If I had let the dark bond take him, then his soul would have been trapped inside it. I could not allow that. I could not leave him imprisoned in the thing that had already stolen everything else from him.”

Her voice remained steady. “It was my responsibility to set him free.”

I sat beside her in silence.

“The bond broke when it was done. I had already felt it being corrupted, but the final rupture was different.” Her gaze dropped to the flask in her hands. “There was pain. Then nothing. A silence where another person had existed.”

The snow continued falling beyond the wall.

“I decided I would never open myself that way again. I would not give someone access to that part of me, and I would not enter that part of anyone else. I would not risk feeling those three days again.”

She spoke as though she were reciting an order.

I looked across the yard at Gaius.

“He reminds you of him?”

Varia shook her head. “In the way he moves.”

I rested my forearms on my knees.

“I came here with a similar decision already made. I had decided that wanting someone intensely was an unacceptable risk.” My ring caught the pale morning light. “I knew what I wanted. I had developed a detailed specification. Then I categorized the entire thing as aspirational so I would never have to risk anything for it.”

“That sounds like you.”

“It was an extremely sophisticated avoidance system.”