When the winter came a large portion of the Sarkanian army left Chaverne, leaving behind only a thousand or so. They returned along the exact path they used to get there, a symbolic gesture to retread the steps of their victory back to their original place of peace. There were no leaves on the trees now, and the ground was cold and hard and often covered in frost or light sprinklings of snow.

When they finally returned to the vaise valley several weeks later, there had still been no significant snowfall. It snowed often, but never enough to make marching difficult, or threaten the soldiers with truly freezing. It was afternoon when they climbed over the eastern hill to look down upon the valley to the west, and the grass was short and spotted with white flecks. There were few signs it had ever been a battlefield; no bodies, or blood, or the moaning of wounded and dying men. It was clean again, but not pure, and seeped into that ground was death.

“In some ways I’m glad I missed it,” Caden said to Arian as they rode on down into the valley, the two of them the first and followed by a contingent of mounted knights.

“Part of me wishes I had, but then I wouldn’t be a man,” replied Arian.

“Do you feel like one now?” Caden asked, looking at him.

“Not really.”

There was silence for a moment, then the two of them laughed at Arian’s remark as they reached the valley floor. “I think that’s the problem with most men,” Caden explained as their laughter died. “They care so much about feeling like a man, and being seen as a man, that they forget to be a man.”

Arian didn’t answer, and instead looked around the valley field as they rode onwards. In the distance he could see the top of the western hill, where they had made their camp, and at the base he could make out where their battle-lines had been formed. Further to the north he could even see the exact spot that Caden and Alaric had dueled, though there were no distinguishing features to separate it from the rest of the field.

Caden pointed out with his gloved hand. “It’s still there,” he said to Arian, pointing to where, about 200 yards away from them, a small collection of swords, axes and spears protruded from the cold ground. There were about 20 weapons in total, each spaced half a yard from one another in any direction, and they were a memorial to those who had fallen there that day. They weren’t graves, just reminders - markers to show that men had died there on that otherwise empty field.

“I think some are missing,” said Arian. “Relatives maybe. Thieves would have taken them all.”

As they approached the grim markers, it began to snow again. White fell upon Caden’s face, chilling his already pale complexion as he looked to the grey sky. Then he dismounted, and took from his saddlebag a beautiful sword with a red-jewelled hilt that was sheathed in a case of black leather. It had been his father’s ceremonial sword, and was Caden’s now, but Caden didn’t want it. It did nothing but remind him of what he had lost, and he felt unworthy of it.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Arian asked him. “Someone will steal it eventually.”

“It deserves to be here. It should be here,” Caden replied, and he pulled a cloak of brown fur around himself to keep warm. Taking the sheathed sword, he walked to the middle of the other markers and drew the blade - nearly silver how perfect the steel was - and then thrust the tip into the ground and kept pushing until several inches of the blade was gone. When it was done he stepped back from the sword and admired the jewelled hilt, and the crossguard of lion’s heads that roared in opposite directions.

From the mounted contingent rode Wulfsurd, looking like a great bear atop a horse in the fur that he wore, and he passed the knights until coming to a halt by Caden and Arian. His horse stomped, and vapour came from its nostrils just as from Wulfsurd’s own nose. “You’re really leaving it here?” He asked Caden, his tone one of clear disapproval. “That is a king’s sword. It should be entombed with him, not left abandoned out here for opportunistic scavengers to take.”

Caden sighed and blinked at him, the snow that fell into his brown hair as white as his eyes now were. “I know that, deep down, my father hated war. I don’t think he would want it buried with him - I think he would want it to stay here, at the field where he finally fell. What better relic for the place of his death than the sword he was holding?”

“I see no relic or memorial here,” Wulfsurd replied. “Just a boy throwing away his father’s most prized tool. The tool he used to forge the peace that we now enjoy, and the tool that saved his life on many occasions.”

“Harik,” Arian said, looking at the older man. “It’s fine.”

“Is it?” Asked Wulfsurd.

“It won’t just be left here,” Caden revealed. “I’ll leave some men here to watch it, and we’ll build a church here to honour the battle and the end of the war. We’ll dedicate the church to Arfeyr, and when it’s finished my father’s sword will be moved inside as the temple relic. The others will be replanted in the church grounds, each a reminder of what was sacrificed here that day.”

“You believe that will please them, I assume,” said Wulfsurd. “That Arfeyr and your father will smile on you for it, and thank you, and perhaps even bless you?”

“I only want to pay my respects. Something permanent should stand here as a monument to our victory.”

“What do you mean, our victory?” Asked Wulfsurd.

Arian looked at him then, suddenly, with eyes that were alight like great warning beacons. “What are you saying, Harik? Remember that Caden is my brother, and we almost lost him here.”

“I mean that he was not victorious here. We were victorious, Arian. Me, and you, and your father, and all the soldiers who fought the battle, and then marched to Chaverne to finish his plans. Caden not only wasn’t here to share that victory, but he hasn’t had victory in anything since he lost that morning,” Wulfsurd explained. His voice was flat, and full of resentment.

“You speak out of place Harik,” Caden replied, his voice dangerous.

“But is it not the truth? What exactly have you accomplished these past few months? What victories can you count as yours, and not the Philosopher King’s? What exactly have you done except flail, and make foolish mistakes, and create plots like a petulant child - plots that the likes of Armand would concoct - and then then fail even at those? Our victory isn’t because of you, Caden, it is despite you - and because others decided that you were not allowed to lose. You endangered your brother, you still haven’t discovered who tried to poison me, and it was only through the intervention of the foreigners that kept any of us alive the night we were attacked. Right when we had victory you almost lost us everything, and now you are indebted to some strange king in some strange land that we do not even know.”

Wulfsurd’s words were like the stinging bites of a beloved pet, a betrayal of teeth dripping with the poison of truth. It was not just that it was Wulfsurd who said them that hurt Caden, it was the fact that he was right. “Why do you hate me so much, Wulfsurd? You were like my father’s brother - you are an uncle to me. I see you as family,” said Caden.

Wulfsurd looked away from him; angry, frustrated, and yet almost ashamed. “I do not hate you, Caden. But you returned with black fingers wrapped around your soul, and I cannot watch as those fingers squeeze you until you destroy everything your father built. I cannot let you hurt Arian. I cannot let you corrupt the soul of our country because of the advice of a sorceress whose opinion you now seem to value over even my own.”

Several of the mounted knights nearby seemed incredibly uncomfortable at the conversation, but they kept silent, and many were still far enough away that it could not be heard at all.

“Stop this now,” said Arian. “You’re both being ridiculous.”

Arian was ignored. “So what will you do?” Caden asked him. “Murder me?”

There was a shocked silence then, with even Wulfsurd taken aback by the suggestion. “I will leave,” he said. “I will go back to my estate.”

“If that’s what you wish,” said Caden as he re-mounted his horse and nodded to the two of them. He was hurt now, far more deeply than he would ever admit, and any trace of joy or friendliness he had shared on their ride down into the valley had been drained from him like the winter drains the land’s warmth.

“This is stupid,” Arian said again. “This argument between the two of you needs to stop, it’s what our enemies want. Kedora could be making plans against us at this very moment, and how are we going to stop them if we are not co-operating? You both need one another. We all need one another.”

“There are men besides me who can lead the army,” replied Wulfsurd, sticking strictly to the side of the argument that he had taken out of pride more than true conviction.

Yet Caden didn’t reply at all, and he rode away from them and back up to where the rest of the army was marching along the road that ran around the valley’s northern edge. He climbed the slope, and several knights turned their horses to follow him, and before long he was at the top of the ridge where Jaqueline sat waiting for him on her own horse.

She wore a silver tiara, and an unmarked cloak of beautiful white fur over a brown winter dress. She gave a wave when she saw Caden approach, and he waved back at her and moved closer. Whenever he saw her, he saw the letter that had been addressed to her, and the betrayal that she represented. Yet when confronted with her beauty, and her smile, and the way she spoke to him with such sweetness, he forgot her wrongdoings. He forgot all of those underhanded things, and remembered only that she was now his wife, and would be the mother of his future children, and the queen who would sit at his side as he ruled over their two nations.

“How did it go?” She asked him as his horse settled in by her own, and the two began to move off again down the road alongside a column of men-at-arms.

“Bittersweet,” he admitted.

“Did you tell them about the church idea?” She asked, her voice as regal now as it was soft, and somehow as pure as the snow.

“I did. Arian liked it.”

“And Sir Wulfsurd?”

“He’ll come around.”

She smiled as several mounted knights took position around the two of them. They were Lavellan knights - the Knights of the Stag - and had been her father’s personal guard. They were hers now, and were accompanying her on her journey to Sarkana. “Remember,” she told her husband, “that this church is to remember the Lavellan dead as much as the Sarkanian. We need to move forward as one nation if we are to truly become so.”

Caden nodded, silently agreeing. “Are you nervous about the coronation?” He asked.

“A little,” she replied. “I just hope that I meet the expectations of the people.”

“You will,” said Caden. “Even in Sarkana they love the Lady of Lavell.”

She seemed to blush, though perhaps it was the snow causing her cheeks to go red. “What about you? Are you nervous?”

“It’s the first time I will have been home since the war began. And perhaps the last for many months,” Caden answered her. He had told her that he had been ordered to go with the Philosopher King in the coming spring, and though it had supposedly saddened her she accepted it in the way a dutiful wife was supposed to accept such things. Perhaps there was some scheme in that, some opportunity for her.

“I mean about the crown itself, about being finally named king.”

“No, not particularly. I’ve been acting as king since the battle. What worries me most is finally burying my father - I fear I have disrespected his body leaving it for so long.”

Jaqueline shook her head, not exactly pleased with the way the discussion had turned. Yet still she humoured it. “He is preserved, is he not? Though even so, I do not understand why you did not send him back to Sarkana months ago.”

“I wanted him to see our peace finally achieved. I wanted him to be there, even if his spirit had left. Also... I could not spare the men to take him, and the roads were dangerous.”

“Will he be interned in the Necropolis of Kings?” Jaqueline asked. “I’ve heard it is an awe-inspiring place.”

“It is,” said Caden. “The kings of Sarkana have been laid to rest there since the people who live there have had kings. There are even some Kedoran and Levallan there, and even some from beyond the mountains if you believe it.”

“I don’t. What would kings from beyond the mountain be doing buried in Sarkana?”

“Who knows?”

“All this travelling is tiring. When will we camp?”

“Not yet,” said Caden, knowing that just around that western hill was the village he had woken in. His life had been given back to him there; given new purpose, and new hardships, and he never wanted to step foot in that place again. The inn there would have been far more comfortable a place to sleep for a queen than a tent, but even though it was growing deep in the afternoon he would not consider it.

So they marched around the village, and he ignored Jaqueline’s questions as to why, and then they marched several miles more until it was well and truly behind them. The army finally camped when the sun had already gone down, and the night was freezing cold and lit by torches and braziers set around the field they had chosen. Tents were erected, and mountains of fur and leather were unrolled from wagons and used to insulate the ground and keep the men warm. Some even slept on those wagons, stretching canvas over the tops and then sleeping in them with the hay like stowaways.

A few hours later Caden and Jaqueline were in their tent, half-sleeping in a bed-like cot covered in furs. The cold had drawn them close together for warmth, and despite their clothes and the fire that was to warm them their breaths were cold and steamy. They spoke for a while of politics, and Caden’s upcoming journey, and then of nothing important until Jaqueline fell asleep against him.

On that frigid winter night, she was the only thing that seemed to warm him. The cold bit the fingers and the toes, and it caused a quiet in the camp that was like the quiet of the dead. He lay there unable to sleep, trying to listen to anything at all… But there was nothing, not even Jaqueline’s breathing. And soon, he realized, not even her warmth.

“Hello again, my king,” said a voice like honeyed poison, like hot snow, like a dreadful and beautiful paradox.. Caden strained his eyes in the dark, following the light of the fire that had now ceased to flicker until he realized that a woman stood in the darkest corner of his tent. Her white hair fell over her chest, and her lips were as black as her eyes, and she wore a long black gown of some silky substance around her shoulders; open and making no attempt to hide her nakedness beneath it.

Caden sat up a little, and felt Jaqueline’s cold skin fall away from his own. “Who are you?” He asked her, and watched as the woman’s eyes found the scar on his chest that had killed him.

“Do you not remember?” She asked him, taking a step into the light so that he could see how pale her skin was. “We are lovers, are we not? We shared an immeasurable pleasure together…”

Caden wanted to get out of his bed, or to call for his guards, but found himself unable to do so. It was as though a predetermined thread of fate was set before him, and that no matter how hard he tried he could not go against it, or choose another to pluck. The woman was walking towards him now and soon she was by his bed, reaching out a hand to trace a cold finger down his scar.

“You belonged to me, my king. And… I was so close to having you forever,” she said, pressing the very tip of her black nail into Caden’s skin. “But now you are here again, half stuck in this world, your heart and soul pulled from two different directions and so very fragile… So very likely to tear.”

She paused for a moment, removing her nail from the scar over Caden’s heart and leaning down to place her ear against it instead. She listened to his heartbeat, her skin somehow devoid of cold as well as warmth, and gasped softly before pulling her head back from him. “Ahh… Now I understand,” she whispered. “A witch has stolen you… Dragged you where you no longer belong, and fastened you here with her own life. Two hearts beat in your chest, my love, and two hearts beat in hers. She is the anchor that keeps you from me, and desires you nearly as much as I do.”

Her presence terrified Caden, and yet her voice was like some enchantment or spell that stopped that terror from overtaking him. She was the source of an anxiety too great to describe, yet simultaneously the thing that prevented him from breaking.

Finally she stepped back from him, and finally Caden could speak again. “What do you want?” He asked her.

“The same thing you want from me.”

Suddenly the fire began to flicker again, and the light and shadows alongside it, and after Caden realized this he realized too that the woman was no longer there. There was only Jaqueline’s soft breathing beside him, and the distant snores of sleeping soldiers.

A knife suddenly sped towards Caden’s face, and if it had not been for his white eyes he would never have seen it to dodge. He shifted his entire body-weight to his side, the knife thudding into the headboard of his bed as he rolled out and fell to the ground. Jaqueline murmured at the sound, and Caden grabbed a long dagger from a nearby table and clambered up to his feet. Another knife whizzed towards him, and somehow he managed to knock it out of the air with his blade.

It was then he saw the aggressor. It was a pale, skinny man, wearing little more than short, bleached hair and a pair of dark trousers. He was covered in scars, and his face was painted to resemble some kind of skull, and his eyes were awake and red with madness. He wrestled with another knife that he readied to throw, but Caden was moving on him with his dagger and when the third blade was flung through the air, Caden stepped around it and closed in to thrust his dagger deep into the assassin’s heart.

Jaqueline screamed from behind him, but Caden pushed the man to the ground and held his knife there as he squirmed and groaned and clutched around like some rabid beast. Finally, with another good push on the dagger, the assassin fell still.

“What’s happening? Caden?!” Jaqueline asked, her voice as frantic as it was terrified. But Caden did not answer - his only thought was for Ethelyn, who he knew in his soul was also in danger.

He stood and ran half-naked from his tent, his feet pounding into grass now covered in a thin layer of frost and snow, and kept running even as guards and soldiers woke to Jaqueline’s screams. He passed a central fire, passed soldiers now alarmed and gathering weapons to rush to Caden’s tent, but did not stop until Ethelyn’s tent was in view.

Caden burst in, panting from his exhaustion, his lungs burning from the cold, to see Ethelyn standing over a second assassin who looked almost the same as the first. Ethelyn stood there in a winter night-gown that had been torn in the attack, and the assassin’s knife had scratched the flesh of her chest beneath it just enough to draw red.

“Ethelyn, are you okay?” Caden asked as she covered her breast with one arm for decency, a sharp knife in her other hand. Below her the assassin lay there with his throat cut open, the flesh of the wound seared and burning as though caught aflame.

“I’m fine,” she answered him, her voice somehow numb as though the reality of the event had not yet come clear. Caden took a step closer and hugged her, and she dropped her knife to the ground, and a moment later three soldiers came running into the tent to see what had happened.