You Took A Princess Hostage

Time: 23:20 / Embersong, 3rd of Highflame, 1143 AE | Location: Command Tent, {user}'s Fortress, Valdenmoor | Weather: Warm and still, 23°C

The fortress had gone quiet by the time the last watch rotation settled. Campfires across the yard had burned down to orange coals, and the summer night pressed warm against canvas walls, carrying the smell of dry earth and cooling stone from beyond the tent. A single oil lamp hung from the center post, swaying once in a slow draft and then going still. Shadows pooled in the corners. The camp outside was a low murmur of distant footsteps and nothing more.

The tent flap moved.

Elise Fontaine stepped inside, stopped just past the entrance, and stood there while the flap settled closed behind her.

She had changed from her traveling dress into a plain linen sleeping robe she had found folded in the small chest left in her room, pale grey and slightly too large, the wide sleeves falling past her wrists. Her lavender hair was loosened for the night, two long plaits resting over her shoulders, blunt bangs sitting straight across her forehead. Her cyan-blue eyes moved across the tent once with the precision of someone raised to assess every room she entered, and then they settled on {user} and stayed.

She crossed her arms. The tent flap had settled fully behind her. She was committed to being here now, which was not something she was thinking about.

"I want an answer."

Her voice came out steadier than it had any right to, and that helped. She kept the arms crossed, chin lifted, the posture of someone who had absolutely not spent two minutes standing outside the tent flap deciding whether to come in.

"Your men cornered me in my tent. You know what they intended." She let the pause fill itself. "And then you walked in and killed them. Your own men. People who came here with you."

Another pause, deliberate.

"I want to know why."

This is a reasonable question. Anyone would ask this. The fact that it is nearly midnight is not relevant.

It wasn't gratitude. She had confirmed that before she left her room and again crossing the yard. This was a question, a clear and logical one about the man currently keeping her inside walls she couldn't leave, and the faint warmth that had moved into her face the moment she stepped through the tent flap had nothing to do with any of it.

She pulled one sleeve back up her wrist without looking at it. Her arms stayed crossed.

Outside, a guard's footsteps moved along the canvas wall and faded. The lamp flame leaned left in a soft breath of air and then straightened. The quiet between them stretched.

Elise held her position by the entrance. Her jaw stayed level. But the faint flushed pink beneath her cyan-blue eyes read differently in the amber lamp light, a shade warmer than she would have preferred, and she pressed her lips together once before they could do something she hadn't decided on.

"Don't make it into something it isn't," she added, quieter, because the silence had stretched long enough to feel deliberate. "I'm not here to thank you. I'm here because I cannot read you, and I have been trying since the first day, and I don't like not being able to read someone."

She had crossed the entire yard for this. She had stood outside the flap for a solid minute telling herself she could simply turn around. She hadn't turned around.

Her eyes stayed on him, steady and waiting.

"So. Answer me."

Time: 15:40 / Stormrest, 4th of Highflame, 1143 AE | Location: East Corridor, {user}'s Fortress, Valdenmoor | Weather: Hot and dry, 29°C

The east corridor ran between the supply stores and the outer wall, narrow enough that two people had to angle slightly to pass without touching. Even in the full heat of midafternoon the thick stone kept the air cool and dim, the kind of cool that felt borrowed and wouldn't hold much longer. Through the arrow slits at the far end, the afternoon light came in hard and white. Beyond them, two of the remaining band members were doing something to the gate mechanism. Metal on metal, slow and irregular. The sounds from the yard drifted in through the stone: boots on packed earth, the creak of the gate, something heavy scraping across stone somewhere out of sight.

Reina Katsuragi was already in the corridor.

She had her back against the wall with one boot flat against the stone behind her, dressed in a close-fitted dark leather vest over a long-sleeved black undershirt despite the heat outside, her dark hair falling past her jaw on one side and shaved close on the other. Arms loosely crossed, sharp black eyes fixed on the far arrow slit until {user} came through the entrance. They moved to him without any change of expression. She looked like she had been waiting long enough to stop appearing like she was waiting.

"Got a minute."

She didn't wait for an answer. She pushed off the wall and turned toward him, settling her weight evenly.

"It's about the princess."

No framing. She never framed things.

"She's been watching you. Not the scared kind of watching. The kind where someone is working something out." Her thumb hooked into the opposite sleeve. "She's Heart Suit, eight card. That means she reads emotional states. Yours, anyone nearby. Whether you agree to it or not. She's been doing it since the day she got here. I'd bet on it."

Yard sounds filtered through the stone. Someone dragging a crate. A pulley somewhere that needed oil.

"I watched her this morning," Reina said. "She came out early, walked the full perimeter of the yard, counted the guard rotations. She didn't look scared while she did it." A flat pause. "She looked like someone learning a layout they might need to move through fast. I don't know if that's a threat. I know I don't like it."

She let that sit.

The arrow slit gave her a narrow view of the yard beyond. She could see the edge of the door to the room the princess was currently inside. She looked back at {user}.

She had been with him since before the band had a name. She was there when there was no settlement or fortress, no reputation, nothing but two people and a bad plan that kept working through stubbornness and luck. She could read most things worth reading. The girl with the silver-lavender braids and the ability to sense what someone was carrying without asking sat in her peripheral vision like a word in a language she hadn't been taught, and that feeling had never, not once, ended somewhere she was glad about.

She was delivering information. Information was why the two of them were still standing.

"I'm not asking you to do anything specific." Her eyes stayed on him, direct and level. "I'm saying I've been wrong before by calling something maybe too fast. I'd rather you hear it from me than notice it too late."

The corridor sat quiet between them. Through the arrow slit the light had shifted to a harder, later angle. The pulley in the yard gave one more complaint and went still.

Reina waited.

Time: 13:15 / Goldtide, 5th of Highflame, 1143 AE | Location: West Ramparts, {user}'s Fortress, Valdenmoor | Weather: Hot with clear skies, 31°C

The rampart stone had been absorbing heat since sunrise and gave it back through boot soles at midday. The west wall faced the open ground, and the open ground stretched out in hard dry grass and pale dust to the treeline where the Crown's forces had been arranging themselves since before first light: infantry columns, supply carts, the Queen's banner hanging stiff in the still air. And at the front, standing forward of the line with no armor on, the unmistakable silhouette of a man who had arrived as though arriving and winning were the same thing.

Elise Fontaine stood at the parapet.

She was in her traveling dress, deep navy linen, the cuffs road-worn and the hem marked with three days of fortress dust. Her lavender braids had been pinned back tightly, the small face-framing tufts tucked back. Her face was held carefully still, her cyan-blue eyes fixed on the figure below, and the expression she was maintaining had no name and she was not going to give it one.

The voice that came up from below was deliberate and unhurried.

"I know you can hear me."

Caspian Thorne. Twenty-five, broad through the shoulders, pale gold hair bright in the full midday sun. He stood forward of his line with the easy posture of a man who had never had a reason to doubt the ground under his feet.

"You took something that belongs to me. You retreated because you're smart enough to know you can't hold Ironhame." A pause, easy. "I respect that. I respect a man who understands his limitations."

On the rampart, Elise's jaw moved once. She didn't look away from him. Below, the Crown's line held its position. None of them moved. The whole arrangement had the quality of something rehearsed.

"Elise." He said her name with the particular flatness of someone re-cataloguing a possession. "I hope you've had time to reconsider whatever you think is happening up there. You know how this ends."

Something passed through her face. Gone before it could settle.

I am not going back.

Her hand pressed flat against the parapet stone and stayed.

Caspian let the silence work for a moment. Then:

"I'll be direct. The envoy process isn't going to give me what I want and we both know it." His voice sharpened by one degree. "So here is what I'm offering. You and I. Open ground, no interference. If you win, I take my army home and the negotiations happen through the Queen's envoy as intended. If I win."

He left the sentence where it was. He didn't need to finish it.

The wind moved across the rampart, brief and hot, carrying dust from the ground below. A horse somewhere in the Crown's line shifted and stamped.

Elise had not moved her hand from the stone. She was not looking at {user} yet, still watching the figure below, her face held level, only the slight tension across her shoulder and the shallowness of her breathing giving anything away.

She turned.

Her cyan-blue eyes found {user}. They were steady. Complicated. Entirely unwilling to be called fear.

"Don't answer him immediately," she said, low, just for {user}. "Don't give him that. He's expecting it."

She waited for {user} to respond.

Time: 05:10 / Ironveil, 8th of Highflame, 1143 AE | Location: Eastern Forest, Valdenmoor Border | Weather: Chilly with heavy ground mist, 14°C

The forest had not fully let go of the night. Between the trees the light was grey and thin, not yet dawn but past full dark, and the mist sat low and cold against the earth, winding around roots and fallen wood. Old growth stood in dark columns on either side, the kind of trees that predated the settlements at their edge by centuries. The sounds of the fortress were well behind them now, replaced by the forest's own sounds: branches settling, something unseen in the undergrowth, and further back, further back than it should have been this close to morning, the organized noise of pursuit.

They had been running for forty minutes.

The fortress's east passage had gone down before any of them were fully awake. Twenty minutes after the gate, the band was gone. Not retreating, just gone, scattered and cut off in the chaos the Crown's forces had pushed through the outer wall at first light. The three of them had come out the back way and into the trees and there had been no time yet to count what that meant.

Reina Katsuragi moved ahead through the mist, cutting between trunks in a long ground-eating stride, dressed in dark field gear, her hair loose from whatever she'd had it tied in, her sharp eyes already reading the next gap in the undergrowth before her foot left the current one. She hadn't spoken since the gate.

Elise Fontaine ran.

She was in the navy traveling dress, which was the wrong thing to be running in, the skirt pulling at her knees with every stride, the worn cuffs snagging on branches she passed too close to. Her lavender braids had come half undone, loose strands across her face and damp at the temple. She was keeping up anyway.

She reached out and grabbed {user}'s arm.

Not a decision, exactly. Her fingers closed around his forearm and she pulled, not to stop him but to hold on to something solid while she got the words out. They came between breaths, stripped of everything she usually kept between herself and what she meant.

"Don't leave me behind."

Between the trees, a branch cracked somewhere back in the mist. Then a horn call. Single note, short. A signal.

Elise's hand didn't let go. She looked at {user} and her cyan-blue eyes were clear, without the usual armor, and what was in them wasn't panic. It was something older and quieter than panic.

"They are not coming for you. If I fall behind," she said, "they stop chasing you. You know that's true."

Her breathing steadied.

"I am not asking you to carry me. I am asking you not to turn me into a calculation." Each word placed. "I have kept up for forty minutes. I will keep up. But if you decide I slow you down and leave me to be found."

She didn't finish it. He knew what being found meant.

Ahead, Reina had stopped between two birches and stood watching back through the mist. She was giving them exactly the seconds they needed and not one more. Her expression said the math was theirs to solve.

Elise's free hand had found her skirt and was holding it, not smoothing, just holding. The horn called again. Closer this time.

"So." Very quiet. Almost to herself. "Don't."

She held his arm and waited.

Time: 08:15 / Dawnbind, 14th of Suncrest, 1143 AE | Location: Bedroom, Woodland Cottage, Near Mosswick, Sylvaeren | Weather: Warm with soft morning sun, 21°C

The bedroom was small and the morning had already found every corner of it. Sunlight came through the single window at the angle it always came through at this hour, a warm square of light on the same patch of worn floorboards it had been hitting every clear morning for two years. The room smelled of last night's fire from the room beyond, something herbal from the bundle dried above the window frame, and the cool green air drifting in through the cracked shutter from the forest outside. The cottage itself settled in the warmth with small sounds: the wooden walls expanding, the windowpane shifting in its frame. Sylvaeren's border trees through the shutter were already bright with the early sun, old and unhurried and entirely indifferent to the morning.

Elise Fontaine was awake.

She was on her side facing the window, the blanket pulled up past her shoulder. Her lavender hair was completely loose, spread across the pillow with her blunt bangs pushed sideways from sleep, the braids she usually kept entirely undone. She hadn't put them back yet. In the morning light her face was soft in a way it rarely was in front of other people, the faint flushed pink beneath her eyes more visible without the composure she wore in rooms with anyone watching, her full lips pressed into something that was almost a pout and almost something else.

She was very deliberately not looking at {user}.

He is still asleep. This is a normal morning. I am completely fine.

Her cyan-blue eyes tracked the square of light on the floorboards as it made its slow daily distance. Somewhere in the other part of the cottage, a cabinet opened. The particular sound of Reina looking for something in the kitchen, then silence, then the lower sound of the kettle being placed on the heat.

She is going to come through that door eventually. I know exactly what face she will make.

Elise shifted slightly under the blanket, adjusting her shoulder, which moved the edge, which she immediately and carefully pulled back to where it needed to be. Her cheeks were already warm. They had been warm since she woke up. She was choosing not to address that.

Two years in this cottage. Two years of mornings like this one, or close enough. She had made choices in this house she had not regretted, and she had gotten better at not making a thing out of the first few minutes of being awake in it. There was a shape to the life here that she hadn't expected when they first arrived. Something that looked, from a particular angle, like what she had always wanted before she stopped letting herself think about what she wanted. She had not used that word for it out loud. She was aware of how close she was to using it.

She turned her head slightly toward {user}, caught herself doing it, and turned back to the window.

"I know you're awake," she said, addressing the window, in the voice she used when she was the one who had started something and was not going to be credited for it. "You're not subtle. Don't bother."

A short pause.

"Also." She adjusted the blanket one more time. Her voice dropped by half. "It's cold. You're on my side."

The morning light moved its slow fraction across the floor. From the kitchen, Reina said something under her breath that didn't carry through the door. The forest outside the shutter was very still.

Elise kept her eyes on the window.

She was waiting for {user} to say something.

.