The Missing Year

I told Aldric the truth, or as close to it as I could manage without sounding like I'd lost my mind. I got close. Something went wrong. I couldn't explain what.

He didn't shout. That was almost worse. He sat very still behind his desk, listening to me describe a dragon that hadn't attacked and a king who'd disarmed me without killing me, and by the time I finished, his face had gone colder than I'd ever seen it, colder than the night he first found me half-frozen outside a border village and decided a starving child might still be useful.

"You had a clean strike," he said, quiet, controlled. "You've told me that yourself. And you're telling me you simply failed to take it."

"I'm telling you something about that room stopped working the way it should have."

"That's not an answer, General." He stood, slow, and I watched seventeen years of earned rank get stripped away in the space of a single sentence. "You will surrender your insignia. You will report to the front lines under Commander Vane's command by the end of the week, as a common soldier, and you will earn back whatever rank you believe you're still owed the same way every soldier in this kingdom has to earn it. In blood."

I didn't argue. There wasn't a version of arguing that would have changed anything, and some old, buried part of me — the part that had spent seventeen years chasing this man's approval like it was the only inheritance available to an orphan with no name of her own — understood that I'd already failed the only test that had ever mattered to him.

The front lines were exactly as brutal as I remembered from the stories older soldiers told when they thought I wasn't listening. Mud, cold, the particular exhaustion of fighting for ground that changed hands every few weeks without ever meaning anything lasting. Isolde didn't gloat, which surprised me. She simply assigned me to the worst duties without comment, the way you'd assign any soldier who'd disgraced themselves, and let the work speak for whatever satisfaction she was too disciplined to show on her face.

It was during those weeks, exhausted and stripped of everything I'd built, that I started noticing things I'd spent my whole career too busy to see.

An older soldier flinched, actually flinched, when a black-bladed weapon came up in casual conversation around a campfire, and changed the subject so fast it left an uncomfortable silence behind it. When I asked a quartermaster for records on my own recruitment, hoping to find anything about the village I'd come from, I found my birth year missing entirely from an archive that otherwise kept meticulous account of every orphan the crown had ever taken in. And once, late at night, I overheard two officers arguing in low voices about something they called "the purge," cutting the conversation short the moment they realized I was close enough to hear.

None of it added up to anything I could name. All of it sat wrong in a way I couldn't shake, humming under my skin the same way that strange blade had hummed against my ribs the night I rode into Ashvale territory.

I didn't get the chance to dig further before the war caught up with me again.

Three weeks into front-line duty, my unit was sent to hold a supply line along the southern ridge, and Ashvale's forces hit us harder and faster than any skirmish I'd fought in years. I lost track of my own squad within the first few minutes, fighting in mud and smoke thick enough to hide friend from enemy, and it was in that chaos that I found myself suddenly, impossibly, face to face with the black dragon from Rhaegar's chambers, wings spread wide enough to blot out what little daylight had made it through the smoke.

I braced for the strike that would end me.

It didn't come. The dragon banked hard, driving back a wave of Vaelmoor soldiers bearing down on my position, and through the chaos I saw Rhaegar himself on the ground, blade in hand, cutting a path directly toward me with an intensity that had nothing careful or gentle left in it.

"Move," he said, when he reached me, grabbing my arm hard enough to bruise. "Now, unless you'd rather explain to Isolde Vane why the enemy king personally dragged you off this field alive."

"You're pulling me out of my own war."

"I'm keeping you breathing." His grip didn't loosen. Around us, the fighting hadn't stopped, and I could see, over his shoulder, Isolde's banner advancing through the smoke, close enough that recognition would only take a few more seconds. "You can hate me for it after. Right now you can either come with me or die proving a point neither of us has time for."

I went. I told myself later it was tactical, that a soldier stripped of rank and surrounded by enemy forces had exactly one reasonable choice, and that had nothing to do with the way his hand had felt closing around my arm like he genuinely couldn't bear the alternative.

He got me clear of the fighting through a narrow ravine only his forces seemed to know existed, Kaelis circling overhead the entire way like a living shield, and it wasn't until we'd put real distance between ourselves and the battlefield that the full weight of what had just happened settled into my chest.

The enemy king had pulled me out of a battlefield with his own hands, in front of soldiers from both sides, and I had let him.

"You're going to have questions," Rhaegar said, once we'd stopped in the shelter of the ravine, both of us breathing hard, blood and mud streaked across both our uniforms. "I'm going to answer as many as I can. But not here, and not tonight." He looked at me with an expression that finally, for the first time since that first night in his chambers, looked less like a king and more like a man carrying something heavy he'd been waiting a long time to set down.

"You're going to hide me," I said slowly, "in your own camp. Under enemy lines. While your court watches."

"Yes."

"Your own people will call it treason."

"They already do." Something moved behind his eyes, tired and certain at once. "I've called it worse things than treason in my own head every night since your blade touched my throat, General, and I still can't make myself regret a single choice that's led to this moment."