He gave her the house tour in pieces, the way he’d have shown a guest.
"Kitchen," he said, gesturing through the doorway. "Fair warning, I can cook approximately four things, and one of them is toast."
"Generous, considering the state of most noble sons," Isolde said. "Half of them can’t tell a stove from a heating rune."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It’s an observation." But there was the faintest shift at the corner of her mouth. It felt like the shape of a smile but none formed and he moved on.
The study earned a longer look from her than the kitchen had. She wheeled herself to the empty shelves and studied them the way a commander might study an unfamiliar map.
"Not much of a library," she said.
"Wasn’t much of a house before this week. My family didn’t exactly throw a budget at it." He leaned against the doorframe. "I can get books, if you want them. Tell me what you actually read and I’ll see what I can find."
She glanced back at him, something unreadable passing over her face before she caught it and put it away. "Strategy texts. Rift-containment field reports, if you can find the unclassified ones. Not romance novels, if that’s your instinct."
"Wasn’t going to insult you like that."
"Most people do, eventually."
He didn’t have an answer for that one. He let the silence sit instead of filling it with something hollow, and something about that the not filling it seemed to earn him a fraction more of her patience.
Last was the bedroom. He watched her take in the rails along the wall, the lowered bed, and braced for the comment he was sure was coming about pity, about being handled, about the indignity of it all laid out in iron fixtures.
Instead, she just nodded, once, businesslike. "Better than what I had at the estate. Someone actually asked the right measurements."
"I asked your household for them directly. Figured you’d rather that than a guess."
"You’d be surprised how few people bother to guess right, let alone ask." She said it lightly, but something in it landed heavier.
Dinner that night was quiet in the way that two strangers sharing a table tend to be quiet. Emeric had cooked, badly, and apologized for it twice before Isolde told him, with something close to amusement, that she’d eaten army rations for six years and his burnt vegetables were an improvement.
It was the first thing close to a joke that either of them had made. He held onto it longer than he probably should have.
"Can I ask you something?" he said, mostly to fill the quiet that followed, and immediately regretted the opening. It sounded, even to him, like the start of a question about her legs, her magic, the collapse and all the things he’d promised himself he wouldn’t ask on the first night, if ever.
She must have heard the same thing in it, because her expression shuttered slightly. "That depends on the question."
"Why storm magic. Out of everything you could have specialized in." Not the question she’d braced for. Her shoulders eased, fractionally. "I’ve read that most battle-mages pick something more, well; controllable. Easier to aim."
She considered him for a moment, like she was deciding whether the question deserved a real answer.
"Because storms are what they are," she said finally. "They just happen, and everyone has to deal with the consequences whether they’re ready or not. I liked that about it. Still do, actually, even now that I can’t call so much as a spark." She paused, realizing she may have said too much. "That’s the most honest answer you’re getting out of me tonight, so don’t push your luck further."
"Wasn’t planning to." He meant it. "Thank you. For answering anyway."
She didn’t respond to that, but she also didn’t look away first, and he counted it as something.
The dinner lasted no more than twenty minutes. Isolde wheeled herself into the bedroom without a word and he felt the shift in the atmosphere.
The part neither of them had said out loud all day arrived at the end of it anyway: bedtime, and everything practical that came with it.
The house settled into its evening quiet around him, unfamiliar creaks in unfamiliar places, and somewhere past the kitchen doorway he could hear the faint, careful sound of her chair moving across the bedroom floor, getting herself as far into the evening’s routine as she could manage alone before she’d need him for the rest of it.
He didn’t go to her right away. He stood at there a moment longer than the dishes required, staring at nothing in particular, and let himself have the thought he’d been keeping at arm’s length since the registrar had stamped that parchment.
I married a stranger today.
He had spoken to Isolde Rowan exactly twice in his life — once as a boy of seventeen, watching her from across a crowded courtyard while she was celebrated as something close to a legend, and once today, when a driver deposited her wheelchair in front of a house neither of them had chosen.
He knew her favorite reading material now. Strategy texts. Field reports. He knew she didn’t want to be pitied and would rather correct him bluntly than let him fumble around a mistake out of politeness. He knew the shape of one careful, half-offered truth about why she’d once chosen storm magic. That was the entire sum of a woman he was now bound to, legally and otherwise, for however long either of their families intended to enforce it.
He wondered, not for the first time, whether Isolde’s family had handled the news to her with any more warmth than his had shown him, and suspected, from the careful distance she kept even in casual conversation, that the answer was no.
It should have felt like a burden. In some ways it did — the sudden weight of a stranger’s wellbeing dropped into his hands with no instructions. But underneath that, he was feeling an odd sense of purpose.
He didn’t know what to do with that yet. He wasn’t sure he was allowed to feel it this early.
He dried his hands, squared his shoulders without meaning to, attempting to calm his nerves.
His mind was running wild with different kinds of thoughts. He was twenty two and he had never had this kind of experience. Would they consummate the marriage now? Could she even do that?
Ah, damn it. These were questions he needed to know before now.
"I can manage from here," Isolde said, breaking the silence as she began wheeling herself to the doorway of the bedroom. There was an edge in her voice that hadn’t been there over dinner. It felt like something more guarded, bracing for a fight she’d clearly had before, with other people.
"Alright," Emeric said. "I’ll be right outside if you need anything."
He meant to leave it there. He almost did. But the rails only ran along one side of the bed, and the bed itself sat higher than the chair, and thirty seconds later he heard something that sounded like the controlled sound of effort that didn’t quite finish the way it was supposed to and then silence that lasted a beat too long.