A Waltz Without Gloves

Before stepping into the dancing ring, the pipers warmed their bone flutes over the flame of a tin lantern. The air in the high gallery was so bone-dry that every lungful bit like swallowing carding needles. In the corners, stable lads had stoked braziers of larch charcoal, yet their glow barely warmed two paces beyond the iron grates.

Bone pipes and reindeer-hide drums echoed in the high gallery with a heavy, circular beat like iron-rimmed wheels rolling over loose scree. Boreal law was unbending: on the eve of the waning moon, the betrothed were bound to tread the basalt circle bare-handed, stripped of furs or gloves to shield palm from palm. The border priests held that deceit cannot endure the touch of naked skin.

Irene set her gray wool mittens upon the stone rim of a planter where dormant sprigs of wild lavender lay buried in dust. Her fingertips were numb with that dull ache that precedes blinding pain. Her cordwain slippers rasped on the flagged stone. When Fadrique halted before her amidst the gathered lords, the torchlight carved deep hollows of bone-weariness into his features.

"Mind your footing, Irene," he murmured, holding out his open right hand. Across the center of his palm ran a pale white line, the scar of a youthful blood-oath.

"Try not to look like a headsman asking his prisoner for a jig. The council lords are tallying how many times I blink."

She laid her palm against his.

The shock was instantaneous. Fadrique’s flesh lacked the easy, sun-baked warmth of southern farmhands after harvest; instead, it radiated a dry, dense, concentrated heat, like river stones buried beneath the embers of a smith's hearth all day long.

Dancing with the enemy is easy, so long as neither remembers why the music began.

They wheeled. The tempo forced them together until the rough weave of his tunic brushed the green velvet over her ribs, only to break apart in a curt bow where their fingers barely held by the tips. The prince’s gray eyes neither tracked the courtiers nor scanned the archway shadows; they remained locked upon Irene’s mouth with an intensity that scorched the breath in her throat.

"Morvath dispatched two trackers south at daybreak," Fadrique whispered, keeping the measure of his boots flawless. "They mean to verify whether your brother languishes in the border pits or has been hauled down into the drowned lake cells."

"And where is he?"

"In my master armorer's cottage, eating hot onion broth and learning to haft felling axes. If Morvath finds him, my oath is worth less than the muck beneath his falcon mews."

Irene tightened her grip over the back of the prince's hand. She felt the knot of his knuckles and the hard wire of his forearm tendons, taut as strung bowgut.

"Why stake your neck for a stranger whose clan fired your grain barns during the levy?"

"Because your brother never touched the barns, Irene. Morvath’s household guard set the blaze to warrant marching imperial banners into the lower valley. Your father knew it, which is why he drafted the secret rider you carry folded in your coat."

The pipes quickened. Fadrique caught her waist for the final pivot. The solid weight of his forearm across Irene’s back was so unvarnished, so stripped of courtly pretense, that she had to brace her hand against his shoulder to keep her footing. The scent of pine tar and crushed rosemary enveloped her completely.

"They are staring," she whispered, her breath ragged.

"Let them stare," he replied, his cheek dipping close until his warm breath grazed her ear. "Let them see that the false winter bride carries more fire in her glance than this entire court of frost combined."

A final boom of the heavy drum marked the measure. Fadrique released her waist with excruciating slowness, yet the brand of his touch remained burning in the fabric like heated iron.

Irene drew back two deliberate paces, feeling the muttered whispers of the dais court part before her like river reeds before the prow. On the pale cheeks of the upland dames lay no smug mockery now, only the cold shock of realizing the valley stranger had arrived not to beg for crusts, but to contest the hearth.

From the high balcony above, the dark shape of Morvath looked down in cold silence, his iron gauntlet crushing the grip of his dagger until the leather creaked in the dark.