The first letter from Duskmere arrived four months after the visit, addressed in a hand so carefully formed it looked, at first glance, like it had been done by an adult standing over her shoulder.
It hadn’t been.
Kaelen would learn, over the two years of letters that followed, that Seren Duskmere simply wrote everything as though someone important might read it eventually, including letters to a seven-year-old boy she’d known for three days.
You said I don’t have to be flawless with you, the first one read, after the required lines about weather and her family’s health that clearly belonged to the version of her that supervised itself.
So I am telling you that I argued with my tutor yesterday about a translation he’d gotten wrong, and did not apologize afterward even though he is old and important and my mother says I embarrassed her.
I do not feel sorry.
I think you would say that’s allowed.
Kaelen wrote back that it was, in fact, allowed, and told her about Bracken and the ravine, and Finn losing four ring-toss games in a row without once losing his temper about it, and — cautiously, because he’d never put it in words for anyone but Wren and Yvaine — about the dream with no ground in it.
I don’t understand it either, he wrote.
But it doesn’t feel dangerous.
Just old.
Wren thinks it might not even be mine.
The letters came every few months after that, and became, without either of them planning it, a kind of ledger of who they were slowly turning into.
Seren wrote about a second tutor she’d successfully argued into changing his methods, and then a third she’d simply outlasted through sheer stubbornness; about learning to tell, the way Kaelen had once told her about herself on a cold garden bench, which of her family’s smiles were real and which were performed for guests, and finding that the knowing made the performed ones easier to survive rather than harder. Get faster updates on NovelPing.
Kaelen wrote about Yvaine’s lessons, about the slow, unglamorous work of learning to hold his own weather steady in a crowd, about Wren’s law tutor and the argument over the bridge case, careful each time to leave out anything that felt like it belonged only to the people inside Ashgrave’s walls and not to a girl reading by candlelight two provinces away.
You make it sound easy, being known specifically, she wrote once, in a letter that arrived not long after his eighth birthday.
It isn’t, where I am.
My father still introduces me by what house I might someday marry into rather than by anything I’ve done.
I don’t say that to be pitied.
I say it because you’re the only person who’s ever asked me what I wanted instead of telling me what I was for, and I think about that more than I probably should for a letter that’s two years old now.
Kaelen read that one three times before he answered it, and when he did, he didn’t try to fix it, the way he’d learned not to try to fix Wren’s frustration either.
He simply told her the truth: that he thought about the garden bench often too, and that whatever house she eventually belonged to, on paper, he hoped she’d still write to him as the person underneath it, because that was the only version of her he was actually interested in knowing.
Wren, who read most of the letters over his shoulder without much apology for doing so, developed her own private opinion about the correspondence that she voiced only once, apropos of nothing, while the two of them were mucking out the stables one autumn afternoon.
“She’s not like the other visitors,” Wren said.
“The ones who come through with their parents and spend the whole time performing at each other.”
“No,” Kaelen agreed.
“Don’t let it go to your head.
I still don’t fully trust anyone who folds their hands that precisely.
But I liked her.”
It was, from Wren, very close to an endorsement, and Kaelen filed it away the way he filed most things she said without meaning to be sentimental about it.
The letter that mattered most arrived in early spring, just past his ninth birthday, and it was shorter than most of the others, written in a hand that had lost some of its careful formality along the way and gained, in its place, something that read more like actual excitement than performed politeness.
My father says House Duskmere will attend the King’s Founding Assembly this summer, in the capital, and that Ashgrave is very likely to be invited as well given the border settlement between our houses.
I have been trying not to hope about this for a week and failing entirely.
I would very much like to see you again, and not across a garden bench with an audience of fathers negotiating tariffs.
I want to see what four years have done to the strange boy who told a crying stranger she didn’t have to be flawless.
I imagine you’re strange in new ways now.
I look forward to finding out which ones.
Kaelen read it standing in the training yard, sword still in hand, and felt something in his chest do a thing he didn’t yet have a name for — not the deep, ancient loneliness from his dream, and not the ordinary comfortable warmth of Wren or Finn, but something new, bright and a little unsteady, that he suspected he was going to need considerably more practice learning to hold.