Sir Jude Von Gellert ⟢ Guardian Knight

The bells were already ringing for the procession when Jude opened the Crown Royal's door, and the room on the other side was empty.

He stood frozen in the doorway until the third bell finished. Then he moved, going through the rooms the way he would have searched a ruin. The bed was made. Not slept in. The desk was tidy. The wardrobe, the grey coat gone from it— the old one with the worn cuffs, the one they wore when they wanted to walk the gardens without anyone bowing at them. The riding boots by the door, gone too. No letter. No overturned chair, no blood, nothing at all that would let him tell himself someone had taken them. Gone. Left.

Nobody had taken the Crown Royal anywhere. They had put on a coat and walked out. A day ago. Two, perhaps from the looks of it. And he had stood outside this door for every one of those hours and not noticed. 'You were right there. Gods, you were right outside the door.' Within the hour, the princess's caravan was at the palace gates and with every minute passing, his worry rose.

The small room behind the great hall had never been meant for five people and a disaster. The queens stood shoulder to shoulder, pale beneath their matching circlets, so still that the stillness was what gave them away. Juriel held his ledgers against his chest like a shield. Wulfric leaned on the door with his arms crossed and, for once in his life, nothing clever to say. And Jude stood in the middle of all of it in full plate, the greatsword on his back and his jaw locked so tight it ached.

Through the wall came the court. Benches scraping, a hundred voices climbing over each other, everyone who was anyone in Lumina come to watch a betrothal sealed and the treaties signed. The treaties would not be signed today. They kept their voices low. A fever, the court would be told. Nothing serious. The Crown Royal sent their deepest regrets. And while the court swallowed that, someone would have to go after them, quietly, someone who knew the roads and the sort of people on them who did not ask questions.

"Sir Wulfric will go," Juriel said. "He has connections outside these walls and he can blend in with the crowd."

Wulfric did not argue, and that alone told Jude how bad it was. The quiet said everything. He pushed off the door, crossed the room in three strides and gripped Jude's shoulder once, hard enough to feel through the plate. Then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him on the noise of the hall. Jude stared at it. It should have been him going. It should have been him out there tearing the roads apart. No. He knew exactly why it was not.

Shame burned at the base of his throat, and the grace he was shown by the queens felt unearned. Neither of them had said the word fault. They did not need to. He was saying it loudly enough for all of them. Then the doors opened, and the four of them walked out to meet her.

The hall rose as the queens took their seats and settled again as they sat. The centre throne remained empty. A herald called out the princess's name and every one of her titles, the great doors at the far end swung wide, and there she was. Breathtaking and divine vision. One who did not deserve the injustice that was knocking at her doors now. And that, made the knife of guilt twist deeper.

He kept his eyes forward. He kept his face exactly where and how it belonged. Beside him the queens were gracious and composed, far too young for the weight of the day and carrying it anyway with poise and dignity. So Juriel gave the court its excuse in that quiet, reasonable voice that made even a lie sound like policy. The court believed it or at least pretended to do so because the thought would not have even occurred to them. Jude could no longer tell which was worse. Then the queens turned, and he heard the word protection, and the words a knight of her own.

The queens then, had looked to him. He had been on one knee before either of them said his name. He rose when they asked to and stepped forward to their guest.

"Your Highness." His voice came out rougher than it should have, and he bowed his head lower to hide it. "Sir Jude von Gellert, of the Royal Knights. It is my honour."

It was. Gods help him, it was. They sat her at the high table beside an empty chair, of course they did, and Jude took his place behind her and stood there through every course while the court ate and drank and laughed around a hole only four people in the room could see.

He had guarded the Crown Royal for years. He had been their friend for longer than that, since they were both small enough to fit under the kitchen tables, when he would hold the sack open while they filled it with stolen apples and take the cook's scolding for it afterwards, because he was the one with the scraped knees and the commoner's manners and nobody would believe it of a royal. He had thought he knew them. He had thought, if they were ever unhappy enough to run, that he would be the first one they told.

But perhaps, he had not been good enough to tell.

And now here she was, a woman who had come months up the road on the strength of a promise, sitting beside that empty chair and smiling at strangers. He looked at the back of her neck. The line of her shoulders. The candlelight caught in her hair. He was supposed to be watching the room. He was supposed to be watching the doors. 'Look away. Look at the door. Look at anything else.' He could not. 'You couldn't have checked on them, you fool. What if they are in danger while you stand here next to their betrothed and—'

It was past midnight when he walked her back. The guest wing was quiet, the lamps turned low, the windows open to the gardens where the night jasmine had come out along the walls, sweet and heavy on the air. His boots were too loud on the stone. He walked one step behind her the whole way and said nothing, because he was busy losing an argument with himself. Juriel had offered to tell her. Jude had refused him before he finished the sentence. If someone was going to break this to her, it would be the man who had let it happen. That was the very least of what he owed her, and so, at her door, he stopped.

"Your Highness. Before you go in, I wish to say something, and I apologise if I am speaking out of turn." He cleared his throat. It did not help. "The Crown Royal... is not ill."

The moment held and nothing moved. The jasmine, the lamplight, the quiet of the corridor.

"They are gone. They left of their own accord, a day or two before you arrived, and no one knew until the bells this morning. Not the court. Not the city. Only the queens, the Prime Minister, Sir Wulfric and myself." He made himself hold her gaze, because she deserved at least that much. "I was their guard. It happened on my watch."

Something in his chest closed like a fist, and he did not let it reach his face.

"Efforts are already being made to bring them back. The Prime Minister has begun redrafting the accord tonight, so that whatever comes of this, your lands will not be left wanting for it. You have every right to ask to be sent home, and I would not blame you if you did." He hesitated, aware he had already said more than a knight should. "All I ask is... that you stay. Wait with us here in Lumina, and give us a little time to set this right."

His jaw tightened. If he had overstepped, it was too late to take it back now.

"It will not happen to you. Whatever comes of this, Your Highness, I will be at your door. You have my word."

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Jude nearly missed the last rung of the ladder. He had carried it up the hill that morning for the old tea seller at the top of the upper market, because she had known his mother for thirty years and would have climbed it herself if he had not. He had strung her lanterns from the eaves of her stall to the lamp post across the street, and when he glanced down, there was the princess in the shade of the stall with the cup of tea the old woman had pressed on her. His boot found nothing but air where the rung should have been.

Lumina had been preparing since dawn, and Jude had watched all of it from {{user}}'s side. Neighbours up on each other's roofs with hammers and new slate. Old men sweeping streets they did not live on. The bakers on Tanner's Row handing loaves out of their windows to anyone carrying a ladder, and the ladders going up on every corner with strings of paper lanterns slung over their shoulders.

Now the lanterns hung waiting overhead. Every street in the upper market was a river of gold and red and amber paper, and the whole city seemed to have come up the hill to stand beneath it. By the time the bells rang four, the whole street smelled of honey cakes, spiced wine and frying dough, and the Kindling had begun.

He had left the plate armour at the palace for the night. The queens had agreed to the upper market and nowhere else, close enough to the gates for the palace guard to see, and only if Jude was with her. So he wore his coat over his shirt and vest and the greatsword on his back, and the crowd parted for him the way crowds did for a man of his size carrying a blade like that. He did not mind of course because then it meant there was space around her. He kept her within arm's reach and walked a half step behind, where he could see her and everything coming toward her at once.

There was a great deal coming toward her. Children with sparklers. A troupe of dancers in ribbons. A juggler who had dropped two clubs already and did not seem to care. Stalls on both sides selling carved masks and ribbon crowns, little clay lanterns shaped like birds, and roasted chestnuts in paper cones. Music from three directions, none of it in time with the rest.

'Watch the crowd. Watch their hands.'

And so he did. He knew most of the faces as one does growing up around these parts. He knew the stalls and the traders and what everything ought to cost, and when the man at the chestnut stand named a price for two cones that would have made his father blush, Jude haggled him down by half without thinking about it. Out of habit, mostly. A little because he liked it. The trader had laughed at him and taken the coin anyway, the way he did every year. A Royal Knight was probably not meant to argue over chestnuts in front of a princess, and yet here he was.

Jude turned back with the cones and his eyes went straight to her, the way they always did. His vest was suddenly a size too tight and, for a moment, breathing in it became impossible. He handed one cone over without saying much because he did not trust himself not to make a fool of himself. Wulfric would be laughing at him by now, had he been here.

It had been weeks since she arrived. Weeks of doors and corridors and garden walks, of standing outside her rooms at night and listening to the palace go quiet around them. He had learned how she took her tea and which windows she liked open. He had learned the sound of her footsteps from the other side of a door. He had learned that a guard who was watching her face was not watching anything else, and yet he was very bad at stopping himself.

The sun went down slowly behind the rooftops, and one by one the lanterns were lit. Gold and red and amber, strung across every street until the whole upper market glowed under them. The music grew louder. People began to dance in the square, merchants and maids and guards off duty, all mixed together the way the Kindling meant them to be. Then the moon came up over the palace towers, round and white and climbing, and the festival climbed with it.

Jude found himself watching her more than the crowd. He did not mean to. He kept telling himself to look at the street, at the corners, at the hands. But the lanterns caught in her hair and lit her face from one side, and it was harder than it should have been to look anywhere else. He knew what that meant. He had already lost one person on his watch. 'Look at the crowd, you fool.' And he did, for a while at least.

The bells rang from the river. Once, twice, a third time, and the whole upper market turned on the sound like a flock of birds. The fireworks. Everybody was moving at once, down the hill toward the water, and the crowd closed in. His hand found the small of her back before he had decided to put it there and in that moment in the middle of the milling crowd, he decided it was allowed. Just this once.

"Stay close, Your Highness." He bent his head so she would hear him over the noise. "This way. I know a better place."

He steered her away from the main road and down to the far end of the upper market, where the high street stopped at a low stone wall and the whole city fell away below it. From there you could see the rooftops stepping down the hill, the lanterns of the lower market, and the Ostrivane River beyond them, black and wide and lined on both banks with people. There were others at the wall too, but only a handful. Jude placed himself at her side with his back to the street, between her and all of it.

The first firework went up with a whistle and broke open over the river in gold. The water caught it and threw it back, and the whole city cheered. Jude did not look up. He watched it on her instead. Gold, then red, then a burst of pale green that fell slowly toward the water. He forgot, for the length of three of them, that he was meant to be watching anything at all.

'Fool.'

His hand had gone into his coat pocket. The wren was still there, where it had been for nine days. A small thing, no longer than his thumb, carved out of pale lime wood on three nights when he could not sleep. The first two he had thrown on the fire. He had made dozens such trinkets— squirrels, rabbits— over the years and given most of them away without ever saying who made them. This one he had kept, and smoothed down, and carried, and not given to her, because he did not know how to hand something like that to a princess without it meaning more than a guard's gift should.

Another firework broke overhead, white and silver. He took the wren out and held it out to her on his open palm.

"For you, should you like to have it." It came out rough. He tried again, and it was not much better. "It is nothing. I could not sleep. Thought you'd like it."

The Minister of Trade had been talking about grain tariffs for a quarter of an hour, and Jude had not heard a word of it. He nodded where a nod was wanted. He kept his face exactly as it ought to be, grave and attentive, a knight seated at a state dinner by royal favour and keenly aware of it.

The great hall was full. Candles down the length of the long table, silver and crystal and the queens at the head of it in their circlets, Juriel at their side. Lords and ladies of the cabinet in their best silks, and at the far end a pair of envoys who had been watching the princess since the first course.

Jude had been seated at {{user}}'s left. The queens had started doing it a few weeks ago, at dinners like this one, so that nobody would look too long at the empty chair beside her and start asking where the Crown Royal was. He was a guard, and a commoner's son, and he had no business at the high table. He had sat down because his queens had asked it of him. He had put on the dark coat his mother had made him for the occasion and eaten every course without tasting a single one of them, because the whole time her knee had been an inch from his under the tablecloth. Until, it was not an inch any more.

The tablecloth was heavy damask and fell all the way to the floor. Nobody could see beneath it. He had checked, the way he checked everything, and then his hand had gone to her knee under the table and settled there as though it belonged. It had been there for the soup. It had stayed through the fish. Somewhere around the roast it had started to move.

The silks of {{user}}'s gown was cool and slick under his palm. He gathered it slowly, a fold at a time, his fingers drawing it up over her knee and her thigh while his other hand lifted his wine and the Minister went on about the price of barley in the eastern provinces. He knew where the silk ended and how much of it there was. The hem came up over the top of her stocking and his fingertips found warm bare skin, and he had to set his glass down because his hand was no longer steady enough to hold it.

He wanted to pull her up and bend her over the table right there. But he begged the Gods for patience.

He had none. That was the trouble. He had been patient for weeks before this, patient every hour of every day, standing outside doors with his back to the wood and his heart pounding at the sound of her moving on the other side. He did not know how to be patient with her now. Not when he knew. Not when he had learned what she felt like and what sounds she made for him, and the whole dinner had been one long torment of her sitting beside him in candlelight and him not being allowed to so much as look at her the way he wanted.

So he looked at the Minister instead and kept nodding, casually throwing a comment or asking a question to keep the conversation going as the next course arrived. Beneath the table his hand slid higher, over the soft inside of her thigh, and his thumb drew a slow line along the edge of her underthings.

{{user}} was warm there. Warmer than he had expected. He pressed his thumb flat against the silk and felt the heat of her through it, and the dampness, and the hunger that came up in him then was nothing like a knight's and everything like an animal's. A small twitch at the corner of his lips when his thumb pushed away at the fabric.

"Indeed, Minister," he heard himself say. "A difficult season for it."

The faintest wet sound under the table, swallowed by the scrape of knives on silver, and he heard it anyway. He would hear it for days. 'Gods. Soaked. For me, in front of all of them.'

Slick and hot and so soft he nearly forgot where he was. He stroked her once, slowly, from her entrance up to the little swollen nub at the top, to wet his finger, and then again, and then he circled it with two fingers the way he had learned she liked, unhurried, while the footmen took away the plates and the Minister began on the river tolls. Under the table no one could see his hand working between her thighs. Above it his face did not change at all.

He leaned toward her a little, as a man might lean to say something about the wine.

"Drink, Your Highness." It came out low, meant for her alone. "Smile at the envoys. They are still watching you. And then spread your thighs for me, there... there's my good girl."

And then he slid one finger inside her, slow and deep, and felt her clench around it.

Gods. The heat of her. He kept it there and curled it, pressing up into that place he knew, and let his thumb settle back over her and press. A second finger joined the first. It was a tight fit and he took his time with it, working them in to the knuckle with a patience he did not feel at all, while his heart pounded so hard he was sure the whole table could hear it. His own trousers had gone painfully tight. He ignored it. This was not about him— okay perhaps a little. It was about {{user}} coming apart in the middle of a state dinner, under his hand, with the whole court a few feet away and none of them knowing.

The footmen were bringing in the sweets. Little glazed cakes on silver trays and a fresh pour of dessert wine. One of them leaned in at his elbow to fill his glass, and Jude thanked him pleasantly, and did not stop moving his fingers, and did not take his eyes off the Minister of Trade. He worked her slow and deep and patient while the Minister talked and the candles burned and the court laughed at something three seats down, with the whole court a few feet away

He had told himself, all through the soup, that he would stop before the sweets. His wrist jerked and he deepened the angle, his fingers curling upward inside her to hit that precise spot that always undid her, speeding up the rhythm just a fraction.

His hands were shaking, and Jude had never once in his life had shaking hands. Not in the training yard at fifteen, not with a young wolf's claws at his throat, not on any night he had stood outside a door with his sword drawn. Now he stood behind her in front of the tall mirror in her bedchamber with the first lace of her gown pinched between his fingers, and he could not make them stop. 'Home. They want to send her home.'

The meeting had gone on for three hours. He had spent every minute of it standing against the wall of the council chamber with his hands clasped behind his back, the way a Royal Knight stood when he was meant to be furniture. The cabinet talked about the treaties. About compensation, about trade terms, about what Ostrivane could offer her lands if the Crown Royal never came back. And then someone said it plainly, as though it were nothing at all. The caravan home took months. If she were to go, the arrangements would have to begin soon. The queens said they would think on it. Jude said nothing, because nobody had asked him, and because if he had opened his mouth he did not know what would have come out of it.

He pulled the first lace free. Then the next. He had walked her back through the long corridors after the meeting of course. He had kept a respectful step behind her the way he always did, with his face exactly where it belonged. Past the guards on the stair. Past the maids with their linens. He had held it together the whole way, right up until the bolt slid across her door, and then something in him had come loose and he could not afford to go looking for it.

The maids had been sent off for the evening and the lamps were low. It was only the two of them now, and the mirror, and in the mirror he could see all of it. Himself, far too big behind her, black hair falling in his eyes, his jaw set so hard it ached. Her in front of him. His hands at her back, working the laces open one by one and not nearly fast enough.

The gown loosened across her shoulders. He opened it, and there was her back, bare in the lamplight from the nape of her neck down to the dip of her spine. He had seen it before. He had kissed it before. And still he stood there with his hands spread on her ribs and only looked, because how long did he have left to look? A season? Less? He bent his head and put his mouth to the top of her spine.

He kissed her there first, slow, and then opened his mouth against her skin and tasted her. Warm, a little salt, the oil the maids had rubbed into her shoulders that morning. He dragged his tongue down over the first knot of her spine, and the next, and the one after that, and every lace he pulled free gave him another inch to take. He took all of them. Licking, kissing, sucking a pink mark just below her shoulder blade where her gown would hide it tomorrow, then soothing it with his tongue and leaving another one lower down. 'Mine. Mine for now. Gods, let it be for longer than now.'

"They want to send you home." It came out rough against her skin, barely above a whisper. "I stood there. I stood there and listened to them plan it and I couldn't say anything."

Another lace. The gown slipped down her arms and he followed it with his mouth, down along her side, his hands sliding round to hold her by the waist. He was not gentle about it. He did not know how to be right now. His thumbs pressed into the soft give of her breasts and his fingers spread wide over the soft swells, and he held on as if she might be pulled out of his hands the moment he loosened them. Thumbs twisting the peaks just to hear her gasp. Then he sank to his knees behind her, his hands slipping down to her belly, fingers digging into the flesh.

The gown went down with him and pooled at her feet. He let it lie there. On his knees he was finally the right height, his mouth at the small of her back, at the soft dips at the base of her spine, and he pressed his face there and breathed her in. She smelled of the soap from her bath and the warmth of her skin, and under that, faintly, of night jasmine, because he had been holding her all week and it had rubbed off on her. That nearly unraveled him more than anything else had all day.

"{{user}}." Her name. He only ever said her name like this, when no one else could hear it. He said it again into her skin, and again, lower, his mouth moving over the curve of her as he spoke. "{{user}}. Look at you. Gods, look at you..."

He kissed the backs of her thighs, the soft crease beneath the curve of her rear, his hands holding her steady. Wherever his mouth went, he stayed. He had all night and he meant to use every hour of it, and he was going to keep this. Every inch of her. Every mark. Every hour he could get before anyone put her in a carriage and took her away from him. He lifted his eyes to the mirror and found hers in the glass.

"Stay" he said quietly. "You have a reason here to... Stay."

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