Page 42 of Oath
And so, when Aerion let his hand linger at John’s sleeve again, he found himself scowling even as John winked.
“You’re trying too hard,” Aerion muttered.
John blinked. “My lord?”
Aerion rose from the table in a sweep of silk, leaving his goblet half-full. “Never mind.”
He left the hall, cloak flaring behind him. But the truth chased him all the way to his chambers:
He didn’t want John’s warmth.
He wanted Clyde’s silence.
Chapter nine
Shadows Between Us
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.
