Page 1 of Broken Vow

Chapter 1

Life is not a fairytale.

My old teacher used to say it like a prayer every morning before lessons, the same words drilled into us as though repetition could prepare us for the hardship she was certain was coming. She had not been wrong, exactly. She was an old woman who had buried two husbands and a daughter, the only adult in my village who treated me, a quiet girl with no inheritance and strange silver hair, as though I might be worth the trouble of warning. I was a child, she was the only one looking, and I believed her.

Yet here I was, fully alive, the warm spring air moving across my skin as I parted the cascading plumes of cherry blossom and led the way deeper into the grove.

The first time I came into the grove I was thirteen and angry at my mother about something long forgotten. The elders had said the grove was forbidden, using the heavy voice adults relied on when they wanted obedience without explanation. I walked into the trees because they said I could not, and I stayed because no creature emerged from the cherry blossoms to punish me for the trespass. I decided that afternoon that I would let the village keep its forbidden grove, and I would have my own quiet place to be unwatched.

I learned to mark the trunks that same day, leaving a small cut on the eastern side of each tree I passed. The notches guided me back, a quiet system that carried me into the grove a hundred times since. The cherry blossoms became my private cathedral, and I walked their pink-shadowed aisles in the only season the grove ever seemed to allow.

Today I needed to remember the marks more than usual. My heart kept pace with the hooves of my horse, and the love of my life, a man I would have sworn could never take an interest in someone like me, was riding two lengths behind on the same trail. The warm air that caressed my skin a moment ago now pressed against the fabric of his shirt. It was starsky velvet, woven by the most exclusive craftsmen of the glass desert continent, worth more than my village’s temple offerings for a full year.

He had told me this the first time I touched it, my fingertips trembling at my own audacity. He caught my hand against his chest, held it there, and laughed, saying the shirt had cost him nothing he could not afford to give me. I decided then that I would never apologize again for touching anything of his.

I looked back over my shoulder, teasing him, and caught my own reflection in his eyes. They were dark, nearly iridescent, holding my image at two horse-lengths’ distance with startling clarity. The mare beneath me snorted at the pace I asked her to keep. She had been bred for plows and for the slow, patient work of the carts that moved between villages. She ran because I asked her to, because she trusted me, though she had never been built for the forest gallop the royal stallions accomplished without effort.

Drystan could catch me whenever he wanted to. We both knew it.

He was letting me win.

I laughed, the sound bright against the quiet wood. His readiness to play along with whatever game I invented was one of the most precious things about him. A man of his power always had something else to attend to. A council waiting, a missive to dictate, a decision that could not be delayed. He carried it visibly, even in his moments of leisure. I saw it in the distracted set of his jaw when his mind drifted to the empire he ruled, or the reflexive turn of his head when a horse approached behind him, as though he still expected attendants to interrupt.

Not today. Today the only problem he intended to solve was to convince me that he was not, for once, in full command of the situation. He pressed his thighs into the heaving flanks of his stallion and accelerated just enough to keep the illusion alive. He was gaining, never quite catching me. His eyes laughed in a way the court had never been permitted to see, a private expression meant for me alone that landed somewhere deep under my ribs.

I urged the mare on. The deeper part of the grove fell away behind us as the cherry blossom trees began to thin. Petals drifted across the path in pink eddies, catching in the mare’s mane, brushing against my cheek, and settling for a moment in the loose tie of my hair before the wind took them again.

The forest opened.

The trail emerged into the wide clearing, taking a piece of my breath the way it always did. Gentle-sloped and grass-floored, the space was ringed by cherry blossom trees whose petals drifted across the open ground in soft pink falls. A circular hollow in the earth was shaped like something once violent and now quiet, the crater of a long-dead volcano where old magicians of the southern kingdoms might once have studied, and which the village had decided to forget. At the far end, the cliff face rose. Water fell down the rock in three long ribbons, dropping into a lower pool that caught the morning light and turned it silver.

I had been coming here since I was thirteen, and the clearing had not changed. I was not sure I had ever brought another person to it, and I was certain I had never brought a man.

I drew the mare to a halt and slid from the saddle before he could reach me. The wind undid my hair tie completely. Silver-white strands clung to my cheeks and the corner of my mouth, and I pushed them back with the side of my hand, breathing harder than I realized.

I turned to watch him arrive.

Drystan.

It still sounded unreal when I said his name, even in my own thoughts. He was the most powerful man in the empire. Drystan of House Aurelian. The family had not always held the throne, though they ruled now as if they always had, learning to wear a stolen thing until it looked like their own skin. My mother had taught me this distinction once with a care I had not understood at the time. The empire is one thing, she had said, and the Aurelians are the family that rules it. Do not confuse them. She said it the way she taught me the names of herbs that could heal and herbs that could kill, as though the lesson would matter someday, though she could not say why.

He brought his stallion to a halt at the edge of the clearing and dismounted with the easy precision of a man who had been on horseback since childhood. The dark velvet of his shirt caught the light differently in the open, drinking the sun rather than reflecting it. His hair fell partly loose from where he kept it bound at the nape, a single dark strand resting across his forehead. He pushed it back with the small, unconscious gesture I had learned to watch for, the movement he made when he was about to say something he had not entirely planned.

He was tall. I had grown up in a village of farmers, stonemasons, and tradesmen, men whose bodies were shaped by hard labour, and I thought I knew what it meant for a man to be formidable. Drystan was something else, bred for it across generations. The breadth of his shoulders, the length of his stride, and the way he carried himself as though every room had been built to accommodate him were not the result of toil. They were the mark of a line that had ruled the empire for three hundred years, perfecting the physical presence of a sovereign.

His face was the first thing I ever found beautiful in a man, though it took me a long time to recognize that I was looking at beauty rather than danger. It was defined by sharp angles, a jaw that read as carved rather than grown, and cheekbones that had been the subject of a thousand court portraits. A thin, well-healed scar cut through his left eyebrow from a duel in his youth, a story he told differently to different people. He had not yet told me the true version, and I stopped expecting to hear it.

His eyes met mine across the clearing, and the laughter in them vanished.

I tied down the mare while he closed the distance between us, settling his stallion beside her with a casual gesture I envied. He never had to work to tie his horse down, for the animal simply stayed where he left it. His knack for command applied to all living creatures, not only to men. When I asked him once how he did it, he looked at me as though the question had never occurred to him, so I stopped asking.

He reached past me for the mare’s reins.

“Let me.”

The gesture was as much an excuse to be near me as it was a help. Over the past weeks, I had learned the difference between the courtesies he performed for court and the courtesies driven by desire. I let him take the reins, allowing his arm to brush against mine.

His scent reached me before his hand did. He had applied a fragrance to his neck after his morning shave, used so sparingly that I would not have known it was there had I not been close enough to feel his breath. The men of my village took pride in their hygiene, smelling of clean skin and the soaps women made from river-salt and goat fat, but none of them could dream of affording what Drystan carried at his collar. It smelled of distant countries, flowers that did not grow in the empire, and spices the village knew only through rumour. Beneath it all was the scent of his own skin, something I had begun to know intimately.