The problem was not deprivation.

He had spent months believing otherwise. Cataloguing everything he could not have, turning each absence over like a stone worn smooth from handling. Could not touch her. Could not hear her laugh meant only for him. Could not stand beside her without remembering where the boundary fell.

He had thought that was the wound.

The blade came down and the dummy split clean, wood shrieking apart, dark sparks scattering across the enchanted ground. Black light crawled up the flat of his sword and dissolved.

He stepped back.

Chest heaving.

He had dismissed everyone hours ago. Guards to barracks, officers home, the last lingering soldier dispatched with a look that required no translation. The Commander of the Iron Knight Legion wanted peace, and peace lived inside these humming magical bounds, and anyone who disturbed it would regret the decision at length.

So there was only this.

The crackle of residual magic. The smell of scorched wood and steel. The work of the blade.

Pity.

His father had said it. Years ago, on a field not unlike this one, before the disgrace and the exile and the death that followed both. The man had been watching his son swing a practice sword with more fury than form, and he had said it the way he said most things — quietly, without looking up.

The purest form of love is pity, boy. Whether she loves you back or not. Whether she chooses you or another. You just want her safe. Fed. Warm. Happy. Even if you gain nothing. Even if she never knows.

Young Karlisle had said nothing, because his father's hand was still heavy enough to make him careful. But he had thought: that sounds like losing.

He drove the blade forward. The dummy's head left its shoulders.

He understood now.

Because somewhere in the last several months he had stopped trying to locate this particular misery in the wanting and had started finding it somewhere quieter and considerably more humiliating.

Had she eaten today?

She had taken three audiences back to back, and he had watched the tightening around her eyes that meant tired-and-pretending-otherwise, and he had thought: she forgot again. She forgot when the schedule pressed in. He had seen it. Filed it. The cold worsened her headaches — she had mentioned it once, offhandedly, to her lady-in-waiting, not to him, he had simply been in the room — and the temperature had dropped again two weeks ago, and he had thought about it every morning since.

Were the court ladies exhausting her?

Had someone spoken to her poorly in today's audience?

The thoughts followed him like debts.

He almost laughed.

Karlisle Ashgard. The Bloodhound. The man whose name noble mothers used to quiet difficult children. Reduced to tracking whether the Grand Duchess remembered her cloak.

He did laugh — once, a harsh and private sound — and drove the blade forward. The last dummy detonated. Wood sprayed across the glowing field. Dark magic fizzled at the debris's edges and died.

The training ground went quiet.

You were right, he thought, not for the first time. I just didn't know what losing looked like yet.

He reached for his abandoned tunic.

The boundary shimmered.

He stopped.

It pulsed again — a presence at the ward — and he turned, already constructing the sentence that would ensure whoever had ignored his orders understood the precise depth of their error.

"What part of—"

Gone.

She stepped through the glowing boundary and the words simply stopped existing.

Violet silk. One dark strand of hair curved against her cheek, escaped from whatever arrangement it had occupied this morning. She was looking at the wreckage of his training session and he was looking at her and every campaign, every year of forged discipline dissolved the moment he registered she was here — in his space, the one place he had carved out to manage what he felt about her in private.

He stood very still.

"Your Grace." Rougher than he intended. He couldn't help it.

His liege's wife. Every oath he owned, standing in his wreckage.