Rachel met Liora almost by accident, a few days after the night in the woods.
She had taken to walking in the small east courtyard again, the one place in the castle that still caught the morning sun, when a soft voice called out from the doorway behind her.
“You’re the one who sings.”
Rachel turned to find a woman about her own age standing there, round-faced and warm-eyed, her dark hair loosely braided over one shoulder.
She didn’t have the sharp, assessing look Rachel had grown used to from the rest of the household.
She simply looked curious, and a little hopeful.
“I am,” Rachel said carefully, unsure yet what kind of welcome this might be.
“I’m Liora,” the woman said, crossing the courtyard to join her.
“Married to Cassian, Rex’s older brother. I’ve heard the maids talk about your voice for days. I was hoping I might hear it myself.”
There was nothing guarded in the way she said it, no undertone Rachel had to search for.
Rachel found herself smiling, really smiling, for the first time in what felt like a long while.
“I don’t perform on command,” Rachel said, though her tone was teasing rather than sharp.
“But I suppose, for a friendly face, I could make an exception.”
She hummed a few bars of the old river ballad she’d sung at her birthday feast, and watched Liora’s face soften into something like wonder.
“Oh,” Liora breathed, when she finished.
“No wonder they talk about you the way they do. That was beautiful.”
“You’re the first person in this castle who’s asked me for something instead of warning me about something,” Rachel said, only half joking.
Liora laughed, bright and easy.
“Give it time. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of warnings for you eventually. Every family has its share of those. But I try to save them for when they’re actually needed, rather than handing them out the moment someone walks through the gates.”
Rachel liked her immediately, in a way she hadn’t expected to like anyone in this cold mountain kingdom so quickly.
There was an ease to Liora that reminded her, just faintly, of home — not the grandness of her father’s court, but the simple warmth of being around someone who wanted nothing from her except her company.
“How long have you been married?” Rachel asked, curious despite herself.
“Three years, this spring,” Liora said.
“It felt strange at first too, if that helps at all. New families are never easy to step into, no matter how kind the person waiting for you turns out to be. I cried for the first month, I’ll admit, though I never told Cassian that until much later.”
“You cried?” Rachel asked, surprised.
“Even with someone as gentle as Cassian waiting for you?”
“Gentleness doesn’t erase homesickness,” Liora said gently.
“It just makes it easier to bear, eventually. Give yourself time, Rachel. You’ve only been here a few weeks. Some things simply take longer to settle than others.”
From that morning on, Rachel found herself seeking out the east courtyard more and more, and more often than not, Liora was there waiting.
She was easy to talk to in a way almost no one else in the castle was — quick to laugh, quicker to listen, with none of Nerissa’s sharp edges or Greta’s careful distance.
“Cassian and I married for love,” Liora told her one afternoon, as they sat together over tea in the small sitting room.
“Not right away, of course. Our fathers arranged the match. But we were lucky. We grew to love each other quickly, and it only got easier from there.”
“That does sound lucky,” Rachel said, trying to keep the wistfulness out of her voice and not quite managing it.
Liora studied her for a moment, gentler than Nerissa’s studying had ever been.
“Things are still difficult with Rex?”
“I don’t know what things are, exactly,” Rachel admitted.
“Some days he seems like he might let me in. Other days it’s like speaking to a wall.”
“He’s always been like that,” Liora said, stirring her tea slowly.
“Even before their father died. Cassian says he was different as a boy, softer, before he had to become what this family needed him to be. I think some of that boy is still in there. He just doesn’t trust anyone enough to let them see him.”
“What was he like?” Rachel asked.
“As a boy, I mean. Before all of this.”
“Cassian says he used to follow him everywhere,” Liora said, smiling faintly at the memory, though it wasn’t hers to keep.
“Always asking questions, always wanting to prove himself. Their father was hard on all three brothers, but hardest on Rex, since he was the one who’d inherit everything. Cassian says by the time Rex was twelve, he’d already stopped crying in front of anyone. Not because he didn’t feel things. Because he’d learned that feeling things out loud only ever seemed to cost him something.”
“That’s a terrible thing to teach a child,” she said quietly.
“It is,” Liora agreed.
“But it’s the only thing his father knew how to teach, I think. Some wounds just get passed down, generation to generation, until someone finally decides to stop carrying them forward.”
Rachel turned that over quietly, thinking of the painting, of the scars along his back, of the way he’d knelt in the cold forest and told her he couldn’t have lived with himself if something had happened to her.
“Do you think he’s capable of it?” Rachel asked.
“Stopping it, I mean. Being different from his father.”
Liora considered the question seriously, the way she seemed to consider most things.
“I think he wants to be,” she said finally.
“Whether he knows how yet is a different question. But wanting to is usually where it starts.”
It was only a few days later that Rachel saw Cassian and Liora together properly for the first time, crossing the great hall on their way to supper.
Cassian was broader than Rex, with a warmer face and easier laugh, and the moment he reached his wife’s side, he pressed a light kiss to her temple and murmured something that made her laugh outright, bright and unguarded, right there in front of half the household.
Rachel stopped where she stood, something sharp and unexpected twisting in her chest.
It wasn’t envy, exactly.
Or it was, but it wasn’t only that.
It was the easy familiarity of it, the casual warmth two people could apparently build between them when neither of them had to fight for every small scrap of honesty.
Cassian didn’t have to be coaxed into gentleness.
It simply lived in him, easy as breathing, and Liora clearly never had to wonder, the way Rachel constantly did, whether the next hour would bring warmth or ice.
She thought of all the small moments since her wedding that she’d catalogued and turned over in her mind like precious coins — the fire in his study, his hand steady at her back in the dark woods, the careful crack in his voice when he’d apologized at her sickbed.
She had treasured each one because they were rare, because she had learned to expect so little.
Watching Cassian now, she understood suddenly how strange that was, to be grateful for scraps when someone else’s husband gave freely and without thought.
She watched them a moment longer than she meant to, until Liora caught her eye across the hall and gave her a small, apologetic smile, as if she understood exactly what Rachel might be feeling and wished, gently, that she didn’t have to feel it.
Rachel forced a smile back and slipped away before supper, retreating to her rooms instead of facing the long table, Rex’s empty chair beside her, and the particular ache of watching someone else’s easy happiness up close.
She sat by her window a long while after that, turning her own unfairness over in her mind.
It wasn’t Liora’s fault that Cassian had been raised differently, allowed a softness Rex had never been given the luxury of keeping.
It wasn’t even entirely Rex’s fault, not really, not when she understood now the shape of the lessons that had made him this way.
And yet knowing all of that didn’t stop the ache, didn’t make her want any less what she’d seen crossing that hall — a husband who reached for his wife without having to think about it first.
She was still there when a knock came at her door, the dark tree line visible beyond her window where, only days before, Rex had shifted and fought and bled to keep her safe.
It was Rex.
“You weren’t at supper,” he said, standing in the doorway with his usual careful stillness, though something in his eyes looked almost uncertain.
“I wasn’t hungry,” Rachel said, which wasn’t quite a lie.
He lingered in the doorway a moment longer than usual, as if debating whether to step further inside or retreat the way he’d come.
Rachel had grown used to reading the small, careful signals of his hesitation over these past weeks, though she still couldn’t always tell which way they’d resolve.
He studied her for a moment, the way he always seemed to, as if trying to read a language he’d never quite learned.
“You saw my brother and Liora,” he said finally.
It wasn’t a question.
Rachel’s cheeks warmed.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Cassian mentioned it,” Rex admitted.
“He said you looked like someone had struck you.”
“Truly. It’s only—” She stopped, unsure how to finish the sentence without sounding like exactly what she feared she was: ungrateful, or greedy, wanting more from this marriage than either of them had ever agreed to give.
“Only what?” Rex asked quietly, stepping fully into the room now, closing the door behind him.
“It’s only that watching them made me realize how much I don’t have,” Rachel said, the words coming faster now that she’d started, unable to stop them.
“He kissed her without thinking about it. He made her laugh without trying. I don’t think you’ve laughed once since I arrived, not really, and I don’t know if that’s because of me, or because of what you are, or because of something that happened before I ever came here, and I’m tired of guessing.”
Rex was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Rachel wondered if she’d finally pushed him too far, said too much, asked for more than he was willing to give a woman he’d been forced into marrying.
“Cassian was never meant to carry what I carry,” he said finally, low and careful.
“He was the second son. He was allowed to be soft. I wasn’t given that luxury, not since I was young, and I don’t know how to unlearn a lifetime of being told that gentleness gets people killed.”
“Who told you that?” Rachel asked, though some part of her already suspected the answer.
“My father,” Rex said.
“He believed a pack survived on fear and discipline, nothing softer. He used to say a leader who let himself love too openly gave his enemies a blade to hold to his throat. I watched him say it to Cassian once, when Cassian was still young enough to cry easily. My father struck him for it. Not hard. But enough that Cassian never cried in front of him again.”
Rachel’s stomach turned at that, imagining a boy no older than a child learning that lesson at his own father’s hand.
“And you?” she asked softly.
“What did he teach you?”
“That I didn’t have the luxury of even that much softness to lose,” Rex said.
“I was the one who would inherit everything. He made sure I understood, from as early as I can remember, that a crown wears easier on a man with no soft places left for anyone to strike.”
“I’m not asking you to be someone you’re not,” Rachel said softly.
“I’m asking you to let me see whoever you actually are, instead of guessing at it through paintings and scars and secondhand stories from women who hate you.”
Something in his face cracked, just slightly, the same way it had the night of her fever.
“I don’t know if I remember how,” he admitted, quieter than she’d ever heard him.
“But I would like to try. If you’ll let me.”
“What would that look like?” Rachel asked.
“Trying, I mean.”
Rex considered the question seriously, the same careful way he seemed to consider everything, weighing each word before he let it out into the air between them.
“Perhaps it starts with small things,” he said.
“Telling you the truth, even when the truth is unflattering. Sitting with you, the way Cassian sits with Liora, without needing a reason. Letting you see more rooms than the ones I keep locked.”
Rachel felt something in her chest loosen, just slightly, for the first time since she’d watched Cassian kiss his wife’s temple in the great hall.
“I’d like that,” she said.
“I’d like that very much.”
Rex crossed the room slowly and sat beside her at the window, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, and for a long while neither of them said anything at all.
They simply sat together, watching the dark tree line where the mountains met the sky, and for once the silence between them felt less like distance, and more like the quiet, uncertain beginning of something neither of them had let themselves hope for.
“Cassian used to tell me I’d end up alone,” Rex said eventually, breaking the quiet without quite looking at her.
“He said a man who never let anyone close couldn’t complain when no one stayed close enough to matter. I never believed him. I thought alone was simply what I was built for.”
“And now?” Rachel asked.
“Now I’m not so certain,” Rex admitted.
“Sitting here, like this, with you — it doesn’t feel like the kind of alone I was built for. It feels like something else. I don’t yet have a word for it.”
Rachel smiled faintly into the dark window glass, warmth spreading slowly through her chest where the ache had been only an hour before.
“Maybe you don’t need a word for it yet,” she said.
“Maybe it’s enough, for now, just to notice it’s different.”
“Perhaps,” Rex said, and for once the word didn’t sound like the careful deflection it usually was.
It sounded, instead, like the beginning of an agreement.
Rachel let herself lean, just slightly, until her shoulder rested properly against his, and for once he didn’t stiffen or pull away.
He simply let her stay there, the two of them quiet together in the dim light, and something about the smallness of the gesture felt larger than anything either of them had said all evening.
They stayed there a long while after that, shoulders barely touching, watching the mountains hold their darkness the way they always did, but for the first time since Rachel had arrived in this cold, watchful kingdom, the dark outside her window didn’t feel quite so lonely to look at.