The Maren girl was an odd one, that was for sure. Bruised and scraped, dragged at knifepoint from the wreck of her posh caravan through bramble and rain, yet not once had she cried.

Even sitting in that sorry excuse for a cave, with a sorrier excuse for a fire coughing smoke in her face whenever the rain blew in, she just stared into its embers. Legs tucked up under her muddied skirt, a bruise starting on her cheek where one of the boys had been fool enough to hit her – and had the boss ever bruised him for that, both of his cheeks black and swollen as snakebite – but her eyes were still dry.

Those eyes they said all the Maren had, though he’d only ever seen this one, a deep blue-green that would be worth a man’s life if it were cut into jewels instead of shining between her lashes. She was a beautiful one, no doubt about it, even bloodied and half-drowned by the rain. Full and rosy as an apple ripened on the branch, with a face that looked as if it should have been wet with tears, the face of a woman they said had been cloistered and coddled ever since she’d been a girl.

A cherub’s face, blithe and sweet, except for how she stared. What had they taught her in the cloister, that she didn’t know how to cry? Didn’t know to weep when she was snatched away from her new life by men who would only sell her back to it for a king’s ransom?

“I’ll wager this isn’t how you thought you’d spend your night,” he said, just to make her do something other than stare. “Never slept in anything less than silk and feather down, have you? Only the finest for the prince’s little bride.”

Not so much as a tremble of her lip. Was she so sure the royals would open their purses for her? Odds did seem in favour of them sweeping in with the ransom, but still, that cold look on her pretty young face…

“Could be you’re better off with us,” he tried. “You know what they say about the king? That he wants Maren blood so badly, he’ll get it by knife or heir. He must be tired of going to your people hat in hand and asking them to tame the sea for him. Ten crowns says you’re hardly in the door before he sets his son on you. He’ll try to breed an army off you, and when your babes are old enough to go to sea, where do you guess he’ll send them?”

Whispers in every crossroads inn and back-alley brewhole said the same. Pairing the prince with a Maren girl might put off the war, but it would only be bloodier when it came. Maybe she hadn’t heard those whispers in the gilded cage where they’d kept her – maybe they’d got her convinced she would be the great and powerful queen that brought the Marens and royal Rafes together and peace to the land.

“You know they mark their wives with the blooming rose, too, right? It’s an old pact, means that…”

All at once, just as he’d almost forgot he was trying for, the Maren girl put her face in her hands. Hell. That had been a little harsh for his aims, hadn’t it? He had just wanted to see a tear well in her eye, to wash away that cold stare. Her shoulders shook with silent sobs, her left sleeve cut through and drooping away from scratched skin, and he left his place by the fire to sit down beside her instead.

He wasn’t even half enough a fool to ruin her, of course. The boss would do far worse than bruise him for that. But there was pleasure to be had just in putting his arm around a pretty, weeping girl, feeling her lean into him as the only comfort in her torn, bloodied world.

“Here, now,” he said. “Don’t cry. It might not be all that bad. Kept like a pretty pet with lots of lovely little children running around your knees. Could be that’s just the thing for you.”

The girl mumbled something into her hands, too quiet and miserable for him to hear. He leaned in closer, no rule saying he couldn’t squeeze her just a little tighter, let his fingers slip in through that rip in her sleeve.

“What was that, sweetheart?” he asked. “I didn’t-”

His voice stopped up with a wet cough, a hitch in his chest as he tried to hack it free. A gurgle and wheeze, a hitch in the world, it felt like, his thoughts and breath broken off on the wrong side of it. He looked down at where that cold crack in the world seemed to run through, and his own stupidly shocked face stared back at him, reflected in the flat of his knife.

He tried to swallow, and it stopped cold halfway down his throat. A thin curtain of blood closed over his reflection, flowing from where most of the blade must have been buried in…in-

He hadn’t even thought of it hanging on his belt. Hadn’t thought-

“I said, I’ll see to it that the king doesn’t launch a single ship,” the girl whispered in his ear. From the corner of his eye, he could just see the cold glitter of hers, eyes to drown in.

Then she pulled the knife free, and the last he saw was the loose spray of his blood burning and hissing in the fire.