The Rules of the Knot

By morning, you have learned four things about the Concord Knot, and you hate all of them.

One: what hurts him hurts you. Not the whole of it. A dull echo, maybe half, like hearing a song through a wall.

You learn this when the healer tightens his bandage and you yelp from across the room.

Two: you can feel his heart. Always. A second beat under yours, faint as a moth against glass when he's calm, loud as a drum when he isn't. You can't turn it off. You've tried, lying in his bed at dawn while he pretended to sleep in his chair, counting your own breaths to drown it out. It doesn't drown.

Three: he can feel yours.

"Stop that, Ava," he says, around the third hour of the healers poking at you both.

"Stop what?"

"Your pulse keeps jumping. Every time Healer Aerwen comes near you with a needle." He doesn't look up from the report he's reading. "It's distracting."

"I'm so sorry my heart is inconvenient for you, Highness."

"Apology accepted."

Four, and this is the one that makes you want to scream: you can't leave.

You find that out at noon, when the healers finally let you walk and you march straight out of his chambers, down the long gallery, past the guards, down a spiral stair, across a garden and halfway to the stables before the knot on your wrist goes from warm to scorching. It's like a hook in your ribs. It pulls. You stagger, and somewhere far behind you, through the bond, you feel him stagger too.

When you limp back, furious, he's leaning in the doorway of his chambers with one hand pressed to his chest and an expression of pure, polished outrage.

"About a mile," he says. "Good to know. Would you like to try the other direction?"

The healers confirm it, in long anxious elven sentences. A treaty binding. An oath binding. The knot ties itself to the oath you were swearing when it was cast, the oath of truce, which promised peace, which means it will hold until that peace is sealed. Until the treaty is signed in both your bloods on the Lethwen Bridge, in thirty days or forty or however long two hateful courts take to agree.

Until then, you are his and he is yours, in the stupidest possible sense.

"There's no other way to break it?" you ask.

The eldest healer looks at the knot on your wrist for a long moment. "Not one I know," she says. Then she adds, more carefully, "Not one I'd want to try."

That afternoon, there's a council.

The King's council chamber is a round room open to the treetops, with a table carved from one slab of white wood. King Caradhel sits at its head. Chancellor Maelor sits at his right hand. Lady Ilvaris sits nowhere, but she's standing by the window as if she owns it. A dozen elven lords line the walls, and every one of them is looking at the knot on your wrist and then at the matching one on their prince's.

"Explain it to me, Ava Ravelwood," the King says. "Simply."

You explain it. Simply. Shared pain, shared heartbeat, a mile's leash, until the treaty is sealed.

"And if we sent her home?" a lord asks.

"Then I'd be dragged after her into Thistlewick by the ribs," Thalion says pleasantly. "Which I'm told is very pretty in summer."

"There are colder solutions," Maelor murmurs. He's toying with a silver pen. He doesn't look at you. "Bindings break when they're no longer needed. If one party were, say, kept in a cell, safely, quietly, for the duration…"

"Then I'd feel every hour of it," Thalion says. "Cousin."

Maelor smiles. "Of course. Forgive me. I'm only thinking of your safety."

You feel it then, under your own pulse: the prince's heart, which has been steady and cool for the whole council, gives one hard kick. Not fear. Anger. He keeps his face perfectly bored.

The King looks at you for a long time. Then he looks at his son.

"The witch stays close," he says. "Guest rooms in the prince's wing. Guarded. The summit continues. If the coven had nothing to do with this, she'll have no objection."

"I have plenty of objections," you say. "I'll stay anyway."

"Noted," says the King, and for one second he sounds exactly like his son.

The guest rooms connect to Thalion's chambers by a single door of pale carved wood. It has a lock on both sides. You lock yours immediately and loudly.

"I heard that," he says through the wood.

"You were meant to."

"I want it on record that this was not my idea."

"Nothing's your idea. You're an elf. You were born with all your ideas already in you, like furniture."

Silence. Then, faintly, what might be a breath through the nose. A laugh, strangled before it could live.

You lie down on the bed in your clothes and stare at the ceiling. It's carved like branches. Everything here is carved like branches. Your arm aches. Your wrist burns. Wynna's been sent to sleep in the delegation's rooms across the gallery with a guard outside her door. You haven't had a single word from home.

My chest is bad again, your mother wrote.

You push the thought away.

At some point you start talking to the door. You don't mean to. You're tired, and furious, and the second heartbeat under yours won't stop. "Your court thinks I did this."

"Half my court thinks you did this." His voice is closer. He's sitting against the other side of the door, you realize. "The other half thinks your mother did."

You don't answer that.

"For the record," he says after a moment, "I don't think a witch would cut herself on her own assassin's blade. You'd have to be an idiot. Whatever else you are, you aren't an idiot."

"Was that a compliment?"

"It was an observation. I keep a list."

"Of what?"

He doesn't answer. After a while you hear him get up. "Stop shouting through my door at night, witch," he says. "Some of us have councils in the morning."

"I wasn't shouting!"

"You will be."

There's a soft scrape. Something slides under the door: a leaf. A single silver leaf the size of your palm, so thin the lamplight shows through it, veins like fine wire.

"From the Mother Tree," his voice says. "It has a twin. Write on it with a fingertip and the words appear on mine. Elves use them for battle orders and love letters. You'll use it to stop shouting."

You pick it up. It's cool and faintly humming, like a struck glass.

"Why would I want to write to you?"

"You won't," he says. "I'm told it's mostly for emergencies. Goodnight, Ava."

His footsteps go away. You feel his heartbeat settle, slow, steady, somewhere on the other side of the wall.

You put the leaf on the pillow beside you and close your eyes, and you are almost asleep when your own pulse gives a stupid little jump at nothing, at the memory of green eyes and a nearly-laugh behind a door.

Beside your head, the silver leaf begins to glow.