The weeks crawled.

The war churned forward like an ancient, hungry beast—slow, inevitable, devouring land and lives without care. Snow began to fall along the edges of the Eastern Front, layering tents and corpses alike in soft, mocking white. Food spoiled in the damp. Armour rusted if left unwiped for even an hour. Men woke coughing blood from the cold, and more than one never woke at all.

Clyde lived inside it.

Every morning began with steel. He drilled the men until their hands blistered, until they cursed him beneath their breath, until their arms shook too much to raise a shield. Then he drilled them again. He rode the lines, checked the scouts, mapped the terrain where birches stood like rows of spears and marshes swallowed horses whole.

And when the trumpets sounded, he fought.

Battle at the front was no grand charge of banners and horns. It was mud and blood and cold breath searing the lungs. It was men clawing at each other in snow up to their knees, blades sticking in frozen flesh. It was arrows striking without sound, disappearing into fog, leaving men gasping red into the frost.

Clyde’s sword arm ached with the endless rhythm—parry, strike, kill. He lost count of how many he’d cut down. He stopped looking at faces, stopped trying to remember voices. The only ones that mattered were the ones still standing at his side.

But some nights, when he cleaned his blade beneath a guttering torch, he thought of Aerion. He thought of the lord’s hands, all jewelled elegance, yet quick to grip his wrist with unexpected strength. He thought of lips that smirked more often than they smiled, lips that still burned against his own. He thought of the way Aerion’s laughter filled every chamber of the keep, and how silence swallowed it now.

The letters kept him tethered.

They came crumpled, smudged, carried in the saddlebag of some half-frozen courier who looked more corpse than man. Clyde read them by firelight, holding the parchment close so the ink wouldn’t blur in the snow. Aerion’s words were flippant, barbed, proud—but between the lines, Clyde read loneliness, yearning, a voice trying to laugh at its own echo.

And when he could, he wrote back. Not poetry. Not charm. Just truths scratched onto rough parchment with a blunt quill.

Sometimes weeks apart. Sometimes only days.

But always, they came.

And with them, Clyde endured.

Clyde, I watched a hawk take a dove mid-flight today. It reminded me of you, in a way. Sudden. Merciless. Beautiful.

The court misses your silence. They whisper louder now, as if filling your absence with idiocy. I’ve taken to walking alone at night. The halls remember you more than I’d like.

Tell me something real. —A

At Valemont, Aerion wrote the letter while sprawled across a velvet chaise, the fire roaring in the marble hearth. He’d eaten too much roasted pheasant that evening, drunk too much of the Archduke’s wine, but his stomach ached all the same, empty in ways food couldn’t reach.

The keep glittered with candlelight. Floors polished so brightly they mirrored every step. Courtiers busied themselves with dances, wagers, gossip about gowns and lovers, all eager to be seen and heard. Their laughter floated through the halls like perfume, cloying and false.

Aerion played his part when required. He arrived in the hall with a flourish, rings catching firelight, a smirk cutting through conversation like a blade. He sneered at Lord Branvel’s pompous speeches, teased a baroness until she flushed scarlet, left two young men quarrelling over which of them he’d favoured with a wink. But once the spectacle bored him—and it always did—he slipped away, vanishing into the quieter corners of the keep where only the servants followed.

“More wine, my lord?” asked Heston, his butler, an older man with shoulders bent by years of service. He entered quietly, as if afraid to disrupt whatever sharp thought lived behind Aerion’s eyes.

Aerion waved him over with a languid hand. “Fill it until I drown, Heston. And if you bring me another bird drowned in grease, I’ll have the cooks roasted instead.”

“Yes, my lord,” Heston said evenly, though his mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. He poured the wine with practised care.

Not long after, the chamberlain appeared—Lord Mertens, stiff-backed and severe, parchment clutched like a weapon. “The council petitions your presence tomorrow. Matters of levies and border tariffs.”

Aerion didn’t even glance at him. He tapped his quill against the parchment in front of him, eyes narrowed at a half-formed sentence. “Tell them to levy their own grandmothers. I’m busy.”

“With what, my lord?” the chamberlain asked, his tone edged.

Aerion finally looked up, sapphire eyes glittering. “With the impossible task of keeping myself entertained in a mausoleum. Surely that counts as governance.”

Mertens pressed his lips thin, but bowed stiffly. “As you say.” He left with the sound of his disapproval echoing long after his boots had gone.

Aerion sighed, swirling his goblet. The chamberlain was right, of course, there were duties waiting, decisions to be made. But the hall felt too wide without Clyde’s shadow trailing at his shoulder, too hollow without that infuriating, steady silence.

So he turned back to the page.

He tried not to think of it as baring himself, but each letter felt like blood on the parchment. Each word, too sharp, too dangerous. He hated that he couldn’t stop.

The fire had burned low by the time Aerion finally dismissed Heston with a sharp flick of his hand and a muttered, “Go polish something that isn’t my nerves.” The butler bowed without offense, retreating on soft steps.

Left alone, Aerion dipped his quill. Ink bled black against the parchment, the silence around him broken only by the occasional pop of wood in the hearth.

He began, as always, with mockery.

Clyde, Your last letter was smudged. You’ll forgive me for assuming you let a snowstorm sit on it for an hour before remembering you had a lord waiting for your words. Truly, your sense of timing is worse than your manners.

Valemont is intolerable. Without your silence looming at my back, the courtiers whisper like rats in a granary. My chamberlain insists I must hear three petitions before breakfast tomorrow—three!—as if I have the stomach for bread and bureaucracy together. My butler looks at me like I am a wayward child. (He may be right.)

I nearly told them all to go to hell and followed, but then I remembered hell is where you are, and I’d rather not intrude on your little holiday.

You commanded me once to live. I command you now to write again. Often. If I must suffer the dullards of court, you must suffer my letters. That’s fairness, isn’t it?

—A

He leaned back, reread it once, and smirked. Too sharp, too glib, but then, that was safer. He would not hand Clyde his soft underbelly, not on paper.

A knock at the door.

“My lord?” The chamberlain again, muffled through the wood.

“Go away,” Aerion snapped. “I’m busy making history.”

Silence. Then retreating steps.

Aerion dipped the quill once more, added a single line beneath his name.

PS. I walked the gardens today. The last roses are blooming of autumn are blooming late. They miss you. As do I, though I’ll deny it if you breathe a word.

He sanded the ink, sealed it with wax, and pressed the letter into Heston’s hand when the butler returned.

“If this courier loses it, he’ll lose his head,” Aerion said.

“Yes, my lord,” Heston replied, unfazed.

When the door closed again, Aerion exhaled, long and sharp, as if he had fought a battle and lost. He set the quill aside, poured himself more wine, and told himself the ache in his chest was hunger.

By the time the courier found him, Clyde’s hands were still wet with blood, hours old now, but no matter how often he rinsed them in snowmelt, it clung. It worked its way into the creases of his knuckles, stained beneath his nails. It felt like the stink of battle never left him.

The war had barely begun, but already the Eastern Front was showing its teeth. Three nights earlier, they’d been ambushed by a swarm of demonic beasts—things of shadow and fang, not natural, not meant for these lands. Their hides turned blades, their claws split armour. Clyde had cut until his arms shook, until the ground was slick and steaming. Half a dozen men had been dragged screaming into the trees. They never came back.

It had taken every torch they had to drive the creatures off. Even now, Clyde could hear their snarls echoing in the branches.

So, when the courier thrust a sealed letter into his hand, wax red against white snow, Clyde stared at it as if it were something alive. He recognized the mark at once.

Lord Aerion.

He retreated to the edge of camp, sank down onto a broken log, and cracked the seal with careful fingers. Aerion’s handwriting stared back; sharp, impatient, playful, edged with venom and something softer hidden beneath. Clyde read it once. Then again. Then a third time, his mouth twitching in something dangerously close to a smile.

The ache in his chest didn’t ease. But it changed shape.

“Oi,” came a voice behind him. Sir Marreck, his fellow knight, broad as a bear and twice as loud, clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to jolt the letter. “What’s that, then? Looks like someone back home’s thinking of you.”

Clyde slid the parchment half-folded, shielding it with his palm. “Nothing of note.”

Marreck leaned, squinting, grin splitting his beard. “A woman, eh? Got a sweetheart waiting? No wonder you fight like the damned—you’re eager to get back in one piece.”

Clyde snorted, the sound low in his throat. “Something like that.”

Marreck laughed, booming enough to turn a few heads. “She must be fierce, to chain the Hound of Blackholt. Tell me her name, at least. I’ll drink to her.”

Clyde shook his head, tucking the letter into his cloak. “Not for your tongue.”

Marreck groaned in mock offence, throwing his hands wide. “Ah, you wound me. Fine, keep your secrets. But if she writes you again, you read it aloud—I’ll be the judge of her worth.”

Clyde gave him a flat look. “You’d blush through your beard.”

That earned another roar of laughter. “Hells, now I believe it. She must be wicked.”

When Marreck wandered off, still chuckling, Clyde let the mask slip. His hand brushed the pocket where Aerion’s words lay hidden. Wicked, yes. Vain. Vicious. Infuriating.

And yet—his.

For a moment, Clyde forgot the blood, forgot the beasts, forgot the taste of fear in the back of his throat.

Aerion had written. And that was enough.

It was hours later when he finally had the strength of mind to write back. A wind cut low through the trees, carrying with it the sharp, metallic tang of blood that no snow could quite cover. Men huddled around dying fires, their laughter brittle, too loud, too brief. Horses stamped in the slush, restless.

Clyde sat on a crate outside his tent, quill in hand, parchment balanced against his knee. His gloves lay discarded, fingers numb from cold and stiff from old cuts, but still he wrote.

Ink blotted too thick at first. His hand shook. He pressed harder until the lines steadied, until the act of writing felt like a kind of control.

He thought of the truth—of the beasts they’d faced, of men torn apart, of the dread that gnawed at his gut when he closed his eyes. He thought of how the war had only begun and already felt lost. He thought of Aerion, alone in Valemont, and how the thought of that bright, poisonous voice silenced forever was worse than any battlefield.

But he did not write that.

Instead:

My lord,

We march steadily. The weather grows colder, but the men hold their ground. Spirits rise when the fires burn high, and I see steel in their eyes that makes me believe we can outlast the winter.

We pass through forests where the birches stand white and unyielding. At dusk, their trunks catch the light and look like lines of silver pikes, all in formation. I thought you’d like that. Order out of chaos. A parade of trees for no one but us.

I am well. I keep my blade sharp, my men sharper. If the Eastern Reaches mean to test us, they will find we do not bend easily.

Something true, as you asked: the stars look brighter here, though the nights are darker. Perhaps because there are fewer lamps to fight them. I thought of you when I saw them. They reminded me of your halls—all glitter, all fire, and yet a cold between that burns worse than frost.

I’ll write again when the chance allows. —C

Clyde stared at the letter long after the ink dried.

It was a lie, mostly. He had softened the edges, hidden the despair, scrubbed clean the blood that still clung to his nails. He’d written for Aerion’s sake, not his own. A shield in words, as much as his sword was in battle.

But the last line, about the stars, slipped out before he could stop it. Too much truth. Too close to what he couldn’t say aloud.

He folded the parchment carefully, sealed it with wax, and took it to the courier with a warning sharp enough to cut.

Then he returned to his tent, lay down with his sword at his side, and closed his eyes to the sound of the wind clawing at the canvas.