Chapter Three: Correspondence

He left within the week, called home by his father's failing health, and Isolde told herself it was a relief. Diplomats did not fall for foreign princes. Princesses of Frostmere did not lie awake replaying a conversation about ice-roses. She had duties, treaties, a coronation to prepare for eventually, and none of it had room in it for a man with fire under his skin and something dangerously like understanding in his eyes.

And yet.

The first letter arrived a month later, sealed in red wax stamped with a small, unofficial sigil — not the Ashwind crest, just a flame, drawn freehand, almost like a joke.

Isolde —

My father is dying slower than expected, which the physicians tell me is either good news or very bad news, depending on which day you ask them. I find myself thinking of frost gardens, which is inconvenient, since we have none here, and also of a particular argument about summers and winters that I have not managed to win in my head even once since I left.

Tell me something true. Not diplomatic. True.

She should not have answered. She told herself this while she was already writing the reply.

Kaelan —

Something true: I have never once, in my entire life, been allowed to lose an argument. My tutors let me win. My father's ministers let me win. You did not let me win, and I have thought about that more than I would like to admit.

Something else true: the ice-roses are dying earlier this year. The winters are getting shorter. No one else has noticed yet, but I have. I don't know what that means for us, but I don't like it.

— I.

The letters became a habit, then a hunger. Isolde found herself waiting for the courier's bell with an eagerness she despised in herself and could not stop. Kaelan wrote about his father's slow decline, about the weight of a crown he wasn't ready for, about a childhood spent being the spare, the third son, the one no one expected anything of — and how strange it was to suddenly matter. Isolde wrote about the loneliness of being the only daughter of a house that measured love in composure, about a mother who died when she was seven and a father who had never once asked her what she wanted.

They were not diplomatic letters. They were the truest things either of them had ever put to paper.

I think, Kaelan wrote, six months in, that I have been in love with you since the frost garden, and I have been trying very hard not to say so, because you are the crown princess of a nation that has spent three hundred years distrusting mine, and because saying it makes it real, and real things can be taken away.

I am saying it anyway. Do with it what you will.

Isolde read that letter eleven times before she allowed herself to cry — the first time in sixteen years — and then she wrote back four words:

Come back. I'm cold.

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