“Yes, my lord,” Heston replied, unfazed.
When the door closed again, Aerion exhaled, long and sharp, as if he had fought a battle and lost. He set the quill aside, poured himself more wine, and told himself the ache in his chest was hunger.
By the time the courier found him, Clyde’s hands were still wet with blood, hours old now, but no matter how often he rinsed them in snowmelt, it clung. It worked its way into the creases of his knuckles, stained beneath his nails. It felt like the stink of battle never left him.
The war had barely begun, but already the Eastern Front was showing its teeth. Three nights earlier, they’d been ambushed by a swarm of demonic beasts—things of shadow and fang, not natural, not meant for these lands. Their hides turned blades, their claws split armour. Clyde had cut until his arms shook, until the ground was slick and steaming. Half a dozen men had been dragged screaming into the trees. They never came back.
It had taken every torch they had to drive the creatures off. Even now, Clyde could hear their snarls echoing in the branches.
So, when the courier thrust a sealed letter into his hand, wax red against white snow, Clyde stared at it as if it were something alive. He recognized the mark at once.
Lord Aerion.
He retreated to the edge of camp, sank down onto a broken log, and cracked the seal with careful fingers. Aerion’s handwriting stared back; sharp, impatient, playful, edged with venom and something softer hidden beneath. Clyde read it once. Then again. Then a third time, his mouth twitching in something dangerously close to a smile.
The ache in his chest didn’t ease. But it changed shape.
“Oi,” came a voice behind him. Sir Marreck, his fellow knight, broad as a bear and twice as loud, clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to jolt the letter. “What’s that, then? Looks like someone back home’s thinking of you.”
Clyde slid the parchment half-folded, shielding it with his palm. “Nothing of note.”
Marreck leaned, squinting, grin splitting his beard. “A woman, eh? Got a sweetheart waiting? No wonder you fight like the damned—you’re eager to get back in one piece.”
Clyde snorted, the sound low in his throat. “Something like that.”
Marreck laughed, booming enough to turn a few heads. “She must be fierce, to chain the Hound of Blackholt. Tell me her name, at least. I’ll drink to her.”
Clyde shook his head, tucking the letter into his cloak. “Not for your tongue.”
Marreck groaned in mock offence, throwing his hands wide. “Ah, you wound me. Fine, keep your secrets. But if she writes you again, you read it aloud—I’ll be the judge of her worth.”
Clyde gave him a flat look. “You’d blush through your beard.”
That earned another roar of laughter. “Hells, now I believe it. She must be wicked.”
When Marreck wandered off, still chuckling, Clyde let the mask slip. His hand brushed the pocket where Aerion’s words lay hidden. Wicked, yes. Vain. Vicious. Infuriating.
And yet—his.
For a moment, Clyde forgot the blood, forgot the beasts, forgot the taste of fear in the back of his throat.
Aerion had written. And that was enough.
It was hours later when he finally had the strength of mind to write back. A wind cut low through the trees, carrying with it the sharp, metallic tang of blood that no snow could quite cover. Men huddled around dying fires, their laughter brittle, too loud, too brief. Horses stamped in the slush, restless.
Clyde sat on a crate outside his tent, quill in hand, parchment balanced against his knee. His gloves lay discarded, fingers numb from cold and stiff from old cuts, but still he wrote.
Ink blotted too thick at first. His hand shook. He pressed harder until the lines steadied, until the act of writing felt like a kind of control.
He thought of the truth—of the beasts they’d faced, of men torn apart, of the dread that gnawed at his gut when he closed his eyes. He thought of how the war had only begun and already felt lost. He thought of Aerion, alone in Valemont, and how the thought of that bright, poisonous voice silenced forever was worse than any battlefield.
But he did not write that.
Instead:
My lord,
We march steadily. The weather grows colder, but the men hold their ground. Spirits rise when the fires burn high, and I see steel in their eyes that makes me believe we can outlast the winter.
