I heard Melody's soft voice drifting out of her rooms as I strode back through the halls of the Winter Palace, my mind in relentless motion after everything that had transpired in the course of Luka's little favor. The spymaster still had not arrived to give me his opinion of the settlement, but it was an inevitable eventuality. I stopped in my tracks to listen. Even just the sound of Melody's voice could calm me down when I was like this, frustrated with the world I was surrounded by. Part of it was her nature, the inherent magic of her voice, but more of it was the comfort I associated with her presence.

"You seem so perplexed, Shira." Melody's laugh rang in the air like the pealing of silver bells. There was something otherworldly about even the smallest hints of her voice. "Let me offer you a piece of advice: you will find most around the Undying Court have many faces. Lady Aleyr is no exception. With one hand, she takes life, with the other, she gives kindness. Sometimes they are one and the same."

There was an unpleasant tightening in my stomach as I thought of the boy with sunflower eyes. I banished the thought almost as quickly has it had come. Once upon a time, they haunted me for months. Now? The memories of my challengers faded within days, leaving only the bitter anger at their mistreatment behind.

"Shall I spin you a story of her?" Now Melody's tone was practically conspiratorial. She loved stories, both the hearing and the telling. "Ask and ye shall receive."

A brief pause hung in the air, no doubt Shira asking her question by the flicking of her fingers. It didn't surprise me that Melody could understand her, not when her gift and hobby was languages. I envied her talent often.

The delicate woman cleared her throat for dramatic effect. "Surely you know that once upon a time, the King in Black was mortal. Rusans say that he was Iskandar the Great's personal wizard, but if you want my opinion, that's absolute rubbish. Their kings can't abide the idea that their greatest foe came from humble origins, the son of a merchant who could only rub enough silver together to buy his son the lessons needed for literacy."

I leaned against the wall outside of Melody's room and closed my eyes, letting the spell of her voice smooth over all my frustrations.

"It is a long story, Shira. I will spare you many of the details, fascinating though they are, for the sake of time." I knew that when Melody said such things, what she really meant was that she would omit details that might be dangerous for Shira to know. "But picture this boy, taking to the written word as a wyrm hatchling to flight. His hunger for knowledge was insatiable. People say that he met the Devil in the woods one day, walking the merchant's road, and that was when he learned his first spell. However it began, that too he took to. He found he had a gift for it, and the second that first flicker of power touched his fingertips, around it crystallized an ambition you cannot imagine."

Truth be told, it was difficult for me to think back so far into the past, except around the pieces my bond kept crystallized. Mortal memories are such fallible things. The King in Black recalled everything with perfect clarity, his whole self preserved perfectly by undeath, in some ways the same and in other ways wholly changed.

"The stories they tell in Rusa say that the King found a use for this boy and his gift, sending him with the army against kingdom after kingdom, defeating each ancient enemy in turn with the help of his growing magic. Perhaps they paint so to illustrate hubris: a king feeding his own defeat with the suffering of his enemies, never recognizing the serpent held to his breast, the serpent fed by his own ambition. Whether that is the truth, who can say? The history has been told and retold, written and rewritten, so many times. What I will tell you is my favorite part of the story."

I hesitated, looking at the crack of the open door. Depending on which version Melody was telling, how close to the actual truth it was, interrupting was potentially important. I trusted her, but some versions were harder on my heart than others.

"The part where Aleyr Frostborn enters the scene, of course. In the Rusan tellings, granted. You see, the danger was noticed very well by some in the Court. They whispered of the wizard's growing power and ambition. For their answer, they turned to the scion of a disgraced house who was reduced to a scullery maid. She would act as their assassin, in the name of the greater good. Who would expect a girl?"

I relaxed slightly. This was a version I knew well. The Rusan nobility hated the idea of my foreign blood overcoming them as much as they hated the common origins of the King in Black. Both were erased from their stories.

"The girl slipped into the wizard's room in the dead of night, well aware that no one can cast spells while sleeping. All magic requires will, awareness, purpose. They say her hands on the knife were so tight that they trembled like branches in the sea winds. She went to the edge of the bed and raised the knife over his heart to strike, but in that moment, he awoke. They stayed like for a moment that was like a thousand years, would-be mage slayer and mage looking deeply into each other's eyes. That is how one knows their soulmate, in the old folktales, isn't it?"

I almost laughed at the ludicrousness of it all. As if we had known in the moment of our meeting what our futures would hold, what we would become to each other. I held a memory so much different than that of our meeting. Even though I knew I would regret it, I closed my eyes, submerging myself into it.

Sweet spring breezes blew through the apple blossoms, hanging heavy off the branches over my head as I walked through the orchard, hunting for any climbing ivy to trim away before it could strangle the trees. It was my favorite task, one that kept me far from my lord. I had no expectation of being bothered that day. In the distance came the shouts of men as they prepared for the Festival of Green Grasses.

I rounded a trunk and almost tripped over the young man sitting there, his nose buried in a leather-bound book. He looked up, the sun striking his eyes, clever and bright like a sparrow's. "I'm sorry," he said in his strange accent. The apology came immediately, reflexively, as he dropped his book into his lap. He was scruffy at best, his doublet worn and weathered, his pants in dire need of new stitching to repair old holes. Barely better than falling apart, even his boots looked as though he had walked a thousand miles.

I steadied myself on the tree and took a step back. "You're foreign," I said automatically. "Like me."

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

He squinted at me. "You sound Luth'alen."

I dropped my pruning knife into the basket I held against my waist with one arm. "Not any more." A tinge of heartache ached in my tone. They had taken me from the northern mountains, a captive in battle, daughter of a thane reduced to a common servant. The winter still sang in my blood, calling me to war, but I was a girl not old enough and not strong enough to heed it.

"I didn't mean to hurt you," he said earnestly. "I'm Shana'ai myself."

My eyes widened slightly. "You came from across the sea?" It was hard not to sound incredulous, with the dangers that those waves posed.

He smiled. "It's not half the distance from here to the mountains."

"But there are sea monsters and storms." I straightened up and cocked my head slightly, taking in his hunched posture and ink-stained sleeves. "What are you reading, anyway?"

He went red in the face and tried to hide the book, but I snatched it away first, faster in reaction. To my disappointment, there were no pictures, only the squiggling little writing of the lowlanders. I only knew half of my own homeland's runic script, some of the sounds the characters made, and couldn't have written a sentence if my life depended on it. "Hey!"

"What is it?" I asked, holding the book behind my back. I felt a kinship with him, even if we came from different worlds, because neither of us were in a place we belonged.

"It's..." He mumbled something almost inaudible, but I heard it all the same. "...poems."

I could feel the emblem of a rose on the cover under my fingers, worked into the leather cover. "Love poems?" I teased, elongating each word for maximum effect.

His blush worsened, starting at the tips of his ears and spreading like a fire across his cheeks. I knew I was right, my triumph only checked by my curiosity. My people sang songs of battle and fire. Winning fair maidens and such was more a Rusan fashion. "Give it back," he grumbled. There was an edge of play to his voice though, like he didn't mind the teasing. That was strange.

I never considered myself a pretty girl, let alone beautiful.

"Give me your name, and I'll give you the book." I spoke with confidence, since I was standing with my bargaining chip firmly.

He stood up as quickly as he could to try to reclaim it, but I moved faster, almost darting around him as he struggled in his ungainly way to recover his stolen property. He moved like a scholar, someone used to spending hours in the same stooped position, not like me, not like a war-dancer. "You first, book-thief!"

I laughed, dodging his grab. "My name is Aleyr. Now what's yours?"

It was a feint. His real motion trapped me against the tree between his arms, though I maintained my hold on the book. After more than a year of scrubbing floors, my grip was much stronger than that of someone who was accustomed to a pen. "Give it back, or I'll—"

"I'm not afraid of any boy who hides in an orchard reading love poems."

His face was flushed, but now I wondered how much of it was embarrassment at the tease and how much was our proximity. He had to press me against the tree to keep me from wriggling off with his book, which put him against me. "I shouldn't give you my name," he said. There was a moment of hesitation, and then he mumbled again, "Names have power."

"I gave you mine," I pointed out.

The moment I knew was not the moment our eyes met. It was when he looked away shyly, plucking an apple blossom, and then whispered his name against my ear.

When I emerged out of the memory, preserved as it was in that perfect moment by the magic of our connection, the grief I felt ripped my heart, destroying it all over again. I walked away with quick and quiet steps, Melody's voice vanishing behind me. I headed straight for my rooms with the grief as a black hole consuming all of the peace and light anything had any power to instill in me. There were no tears, not anymore. All such things fade in time, even though the pain stayed as this knotted thing inside my throat.

Haven met me as I crossed the main hall. "You seem upset, my lady," he observed.

Gods how I envied them in moments like these. How I envied him! What a blessing to not feel, to not even know that the feeling was absent. No wonder so many had taken to undeath. "I am fine, Haven," I said evenly, my voice operating off some script read by a different person, a different Aleyr.

"His Majesty sent over his gift for you."

I had forgotten utterly, contending with Shira and then Luka's problem. "Show me," I said to Haven, so I wouldn't have to be alone when the wave struck me again.

We walked together out into the gardens beside my room. There, at the center of an artful courtyard edged by blooming, uncorrupted roses, was a gnarled apple sapling. Not in bloom, but alive and well.

His magic touching it would have corrupted it in an instant. This had been carried, loved and tended to, by living hands. For miles upon miles as it crossed the bleak wasteland that was the Eternal Kingdom.

It would have hurt less if he'd stabbed me, but I held fast to my grief.

Does it displease you? The soft whispering voice of wind through bone echoed in my ears, completely beyond Haven's hearing. I felt the King in Black's presence envelop me, his power crackle in my bones. The ring melded with my hand burned with a freezing fire.

"No," I whispered, feeling the tears that would never fall building behind my eyes. "It's beautiful."

As are you, my rose.

The words struck like the blow of a lance against my chest. I kept my bearings and my balance, though. This was an ache I knew well. "Thank you, Your Majesty."

I wished he was there. I wished I could touch his fingers and feel warmth again. I wished I could lean my head against his shoulder and weep away all the pains of all the years, of all the sacrifices. I wished my kiss against his cheek was more than just an echo of a love that had burned so powerfully within us both that it had set whole kingdoms aflame.

As if in answer, there was a whisper of a cold touch against my cheek. All power requires sacrifice, my rose. Think of all we have achieved.

I pulled in a deep, sharp breath. "I know," I whispered, fighting the urge to press my cheek into the cold. It wouldn't work, and I knew it. I hardened again and let the years settle over my grief like the almost unbearable weight they were, crushing every bit of sorrow into something hard and cold, like a diamond, under their incredible pressure. We had come so far. We had fought so hard. We had done the impossible, and I was concerning myself with the mere emotion stirred by a tree? Wasn't it the ends that mattered, not the means?

Besides, why cry over spilt salt? He wasn't here with me. He wasn't the boy in the apple orchard. He wasn't even the man I had pledged I would follow to the ends of the earth and beyond.

He was the King in Black, and I was his Beloved.