I am so sorry for the huge delay in posting these. I decided to post one at a time for a bit, to get them up quicker, but I have a few more nearly ready so I should be updating every day or so for a little while. Hopefully it will make up in part for the long wait. As always, if you have a scene you'd like to see (around this period in LK, since I'm following the timeline of the book) feel free to send me a suggestion. Thanks!
13. Flood
Theirs was a relationship built on everything that wasn't, swift and changing as the tides. He wasn't supposed to fall in love, not with the knowledge that he was as good as betrothed. She wasn't supposed to be there, a young woman at a war camp, certainly not with shield and sword and battle axe. It wasn't supposed to have ever started, wasn't supposed to end like this.
Some small corner of his mind had always known that this was an impossible dream, spinning castles out of clouds. They had talked of marriage, yes, but in the future, and at a time when they had both known how fragile the future could be. Now that the clouds had become thunderheads and the weight of the world was raining down upon him, he couldn't say he hadn't seen it coming. They both had. Perhaps that was part of the appeal; it gave them a safety net, an easy out, and she had needed that. He knew how hard it had been for her, to let herself need someone else.
It didn't make what they had any less real. And it didn't make the dream any less beautiful, even now that it was gone.
He thought he loved her, more than he thought he had loved anyone else before. It was something he would always regret, never having a chance to know for sure, however difficult their path may have been. The moments they had missed- his catching her in his arms as she walked across that iron threshold, for once too tired and relieved to worry about their rules; the sweetness of finding one another in the calm after battle, comparing wounds and feeling the safety of one another's arms. Because what their future might have held, he couldn't begin to guess; but they should have been the ones to decide, together.
The suddenness of it, of all of this mess crashing down upon him at once, that was the hardest to deal with. Returning home, running the fief, taking his father's place- he knew it would happen, yes, but not now. Now that he had finally earned his shield. Now that they were at war. But now was here, and he didn't know what to do. If only his father were still alive, to give him advice. He wasn't ready.
Times like these, when he felt lost upon the current, tugged every which way until up and down, left and right began to blend into an endless flow of forever, were when he needed Kel the most. Because they had been friends first, and she had that gift for making the world stop spinning, making him feel as if he could handle anything. When she had told him he might find happiness in his marriage- that was the first time he had really believed it. And their friendship, it would survive this; it had to. However much time it took, they would find one another again. Because he needed her encouragement to make it through each day, each battle, each war, just like Neal and Roald, Merric and Owen, all of them. They relied on her strength.
The early morning dawn cast a dim light on the path he was to follow, as the skies opened above him and the storm broke overhead. He could handle rain. But this was a flood, and he was drowning.