After the Battle of the Gullet · Claw Isle
He didn’t crash ashore so much as collapse into it.
The sea delivered him half-dead, torn and sunburnt, salt still clinging like a second skin. His armor had long since been swallowed by the deep, but the prince’s rings remained — twisted on swelling fingers, one cracked, one still bearing the blackened crest of his house.
She found him at low tide.
He looked like driftwood — long, pale, ruined — until he coughed saltwater and the blood came with it.
Her first instinct was to walk away. You didn’t survive on Claw Isle by being soft. But something in her paused: the sharp angle of his shoulder blade, the pulse just visible in his throat, the way his hand twitched toward nothing — like a man still reaching for a sword that wasn’t there.
So she rolled her eyes. And dragged him inland.
⸻
She was no lady, not truly. A bastard born to a Celtigar cousin and left behind with nothing but copper-colored hair and an uncanny sense for tides and storms. Her home was a cliffside cottage too small to matter on a map. But it was dry. And stocked with honey, salt, and a stubbornness deeper than the sea.
It took hours to clean his wounds. Two days before the fever broke. Five before he stopped flinching at shadows. She said little. He said less.
He didn’t tell her his name. He didn’t need to.
The first time he stood — barefoot, wincing, one arm braced against her table — she handed him a cane made from ashwood, carved with a dragon at the curve.
He blinked at it.
“You didn’t have to.”
“I didn’t want you bleeding on my floor.”
⸻
Days passed in quiet rhythms.
He mended nets. She gathered herbs. Sometimes they sat by the fire and said nothing, just listened to the wind batter the shutters like it was trying to get in.
He dreamt often. She could tell. He muttered names in his sleep: Luke. Vermax. Mother. War. She never asked.
Once, she found him in the dark, pacing the shore with one hand pressed over his side like the pain was something he could trap there. When she asked if he wanted company, he only said: “Not yet.”
⸻
By the twentieth day, he smiled.
Once. Just once.
She was threading new rope when he glanced up and said, “The sea didn’t kill me. Neither did you. I think I owe you something.”
She scoffed. “You owe me clean dishes and no more sulking.”
That earned a low chuckle.
He didn’t say it, but something shifted in him after that. He took more care with his steps. Stopped favoring the side with the worst scar. Sat with her longer. Helped with the rain barrels. One morning, she woke to find him hanging new shutters.
“I thought you were resting.”
“I thought you’d stop talking,” he replied, then added, “Your hinges were rusted.”
She let him stay.
⸻
They never kissed.
Not at first.
Not when he handed her a braid of dried lavender. Not when she stitched up the rip in his only shirt. Not even when he traced the edge of her knuckles without thinking, both of them watching the tide roll in like it might take them both.
Then one morning, he was gone.
No note. No noise. Just the cane resting against the door and his absence like smoke.
She didn’t go looking. He hadn’t been hers to keep.
But three days later, the sea brought him back again.
He looked soaked through, hair plastered to his face, eyes bloodshot from salt or something else. In one hand was the cane she’d carved. In the other, a red-stained cloth — a peace banner, torn from something royal.
She opened the door.
“I went to the mainland,” he said. “I told myself I was ready.”
“And?”
“I wasn’t,” he said simply. “I thought I had to be a prince again. But all I could think of was the sound your shutters make in the rain.”
Her brows knit. “You came back for that?”
“I came back because I don’t feel like a ghost here.”
He stepped forward. “And because I think I forgot how to ask for something I want.”
Her voice was low. “What do you want?”
He answered without hesitation.
“You.”