eve.

They packed my marriage into six lacquered trunks.

Silk first. Then jade combs wrapped in cotton. Then winter furs, though the capital sat in a warmer country and would have no use for half of what my mother had chosen before she died. Pearls in a shallow box. Gold pins. Letters of introduction. Medicinal herbs tied in paper packets with my aunt’s careful hand. At the very bottom of the last trunk, beneath two folded robes and a brush set carved from pale bone, lay the treaty copy that had arranged my life into a road.

My father had sealed it with blue wax three weeks ago.

He still had not looked me in the eye for longer than a breath.

I stood in the middle of my chamber while my maid fastened my traveling cloak at the throat and felt like cargo with a pulse.

“Too tight,” I said.

Her fingers flew to the clasp at once. “Forgive me.”

“It was not a condemnation.”

“No,” she said, though she still loosened it.

Everyone had been speaking to me as if I were already halfway gone. Too gently. Too carefully. As though one careless word might send me running barefoot into the surf and ruin a season’s worth of negotiations.

The truth was less dramatic. I had nowhere to run. My father governed a stretch of northern coast too small to matter until a map was set beside another map and a line had to be drawn through both. The Fire Nation wanted trade steadied before winter. My father wanted protection for our ships and a name large enough to discourage the men who had lately begun circling our waters like sharks scenting weakness. Somewhere between those desires, somebody had decided a daughter would do nicely.

So here I was.

Betrothed to a man I had never seen.

The Fire Lord.

The title had no face in my mind. Only heat, banners, old stories, and the quiet way people at court stopped speaking whenever I entered a room these last few weeks, as if the word husband had become too sacred or too ugly to survive being said in front of me.

A knock sounded.

Not the hesitant brush of a servant. My father.

My maid stepped away at once. I told her to finish the clasp. She pretended not to hear me and curtsied herself from the room with her eyes on the floor.

Coward.

My father entered already dressed for the harbor wind in dark wool and sealskin at the collar. He smelled faintly of cedar smoke and the oil he used on the hinges of things he could not trust other hands to maintain. There had been more gray in his hair this winter than last. More around his mouth too. He looked like a man who had slept badly and intended to continue.

“You're late,” I said.

“You're dressed.”

“I can manage many miracles before breakfast.”

A breath that might have become a smile in a kinder season touched his face and passed on. He closed the door behind him. In his hand he carried the family signet I had not worn since my mother’s death. He turned it once between thumb and forefinger before holding it out to me.

“You should have this on the road.”

I took it. The metal was cold. “For sentiment.”

“For authority.”

“You have spent twenty-three years teaching me the difference.”

His gaze lifted at last and met mine. Guilt sat in it so plainly that for one brief terrible second my irritation faltered. Then I remembered the treaty waiting in the last trunk and the feeling passed.

“You will not be alone,” he said. “The Fire Lord has sent an escort from the capital. They arrived before dawn.”

An escort.

I slid the ring onto my finger and watched it settle there as though it belonged to another woman. “How flattering.”

“He is trusted.”

“By whom.”

“By the palace.”

“Then I am reassured beyond measure.”

His jaw set. That old sign. The one that meant patience was being chosen over temper by force rather than inclination. “You may use your wit on me if you like. I would prefer you did not use it on the man responsible for bringing you safely south.”

I looked up. “Responsible for bringing me.”

“Safely.”

“No,” I said. “That was not the word I objected to.”

Outside, a horse stamped. Harness rang. My father glanced once toward the window as though the hour itself might intervene and save him from finishing the conversation. It did not.

“He will ride at your side,” he said. “You will listen to him if there is danger. You will not dismiss him because you dislike being watched.”

“I dislike being traded. The watching is merely decorative.”

That one landed. He took it in the chest and did not show the bruise. A talent of his. One of many I had inherited badly.

“The world is not made of what we prefer.”

“No,” I said softly. “Only what men arrange.”

Silence opened between us with all our dead standing in it. My mother gone three winters. My brothers drowned before they learned to shave. Every woman who had ever been told to call necessity by prettier names.

My father looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its authority and become only tired.

“I would have chosen differently if I could.”

“Would you?”

He did not answer.

Someone knocked again. A man this time. Two measured raps. My father’s face changed before he reached the door. Changed into something nearer to formality, though too alert for any ordinary guest. He opened it at once.

The man beyond the threshold bowed only slightly.

That was the first thing I noticed.

Not because the bow was insolent. Because it was not. It held a precision to it that felt stranger than offense would have. A man who understood rank perfectly well and declined to abase himself anyway. He wore traveling black from throat to boot, the cut plain enough to pass anywhere and expensive enough not to. A dark cloak hung from broad shoulders. Leather gloves. Sword at the hip. The lower half of his face was covered by a wrap drawn high, more common on winter roads than in noble houses, and the hood shadowed the rest. I could see only the line of his cheekbone, a mouth half-hidden beneath dark cloth, and eyes the color of old amber if amber had learned severity.

He did not look at me first.

He looked at the room.

Windows, door, trunks, distance to the hearth poker, the servant passage half-concealed behind the screen.

By the time his gaze reached me, I already disliked him for being so difficult to ignore.

“My lord,” he said to my father.

Not captain. Not messenger. Nothing that explained him.

My father stepped aside. “Come in.”

The man entered without haste. Cold followed him into the room in a clean salt-edged draft. Up close, he smelled of horse, wind, and smoke faint enough to belong to old fire clinging to cloth.

“This is my daughter,” my father said.

The stranger inclined his head to me. “My lady.”

His voice sat low and roughened at the edges, as if it had seen hard use and resented being summoned indoors. Not old, not young either. Somewhere in the age where a man has already learned what he is willing to become.

“And you are,” I said, “the nameless shadow sent to deliver me to my husband.”

My father made a sound under his breath. Warning.

The man’s eyes remained on my face. Steady. Entirely unoffended. “I am the man tasked with getting you safely to the capital, yes.”

“Then you have the easier part of the bargain.”

At that, something changed at the corner of his gaze. It wasn't amusement. The idea of it, perhaps. Gone before it could settle.

“You may call me Lieutenant... Lee,” he said.

I almost smiled. The falsehood of it was too neat by half. No one with that posture had ever been merely anybody’s lieutenant.

“May I,” I said. “How generous.”

My father moved past him toward the trunk nearest the door. “The tide will turn within the hour. We should leave.”

We.

Interesting. My father had intended to see us to the harbor himself. I looked back at the stranger. He had gone still in that unnerving way men do when stillness is not idleness but attention gathered into a blade. His gaze had dropped to my hand.

The signet.

Only for a second. Yet I saw it. Recognition of the seal. Recognition, too, of what it meant now that I wore it again. Daughter. Bargaining piece. Bride.

“You will travel with six riders and two wagons,” my father said. “You will take the inland road after the third crossing.”

“No,” said Lieutenant Lee.

My father stopped.

The word had not been rude. It had only been final.

“The inland road narrows at White Pine,” he continued. “Too easy to box a carriage there. We take the coast as far as Hama’s Cut, then turn south.”

My father stared at him as though surprised enough to forget himself. “That will add a day.”

“It will add safety.”

I watched the exchange carefully. My father was not a man easily overruled in his own house. Yet the argument died in him almost as soon as it began. He nodded once.

“As you think best.”

I felt my brows rise. My father saw and looked away.

Very interesting.

Lieutenant Lee turned to me again. “You should wear the heavier cloak.”

“I am wearing a cloak.”

“The heavier one.”

The nerve of him.

Before I could answer, he crossed to the chest at the foot of my bed, lifted the fur-lined traveling mantle my aunt had insisted I pack, and held it out. The motion was so matter-of-fact that for one infuriating second my body nearly obeyed before my pride caught up.

“I do not take orders from strange men in my chambers.”

His gaze lowered to the clasp at my throat, then rose again. “Then take advice from one. The wind will sharpen after noon.”

“You have a great deal to say for someone employed to watch the road.”

“And you have very little sense of weather for someone born to the coast.”

My father turned away abruptly and became very interested in whether the trunk latch had been secured.

Traitor.

I stepped forward and took the heavier cloak from the stranger’s hand harder than necessary. His fingers brushed mine through the wool.

Warm. Even through the glove. Even through my irritation.

It annoyed me out of all proportion.

“You seem remarkably comfortable in my father’s house,”

“I’m comfortable anywhere with exits.”

That answer should not have pleased me. It did, faintly, like the first sip of something bitter enough to be good for the blood.

I fastened the heavier cloak without help. By the time I looked up, he had moved to the window and lifted the curtain by a finger’s width to scan the courtyard below. His profile sharpened against the silver light. The wrap hid his mouth. The hood, his hair. Still something about the line of him seemed wrong for obscurity. Too self-contained. Too accustomed to being obeyed.

“What danger,” I asked, “do you expect on a road lined with my father’s own guard and watched from one harbor to the next.”

He let the curtain fall. “The sort that likes certainty.”

Not helpful. Also not foolish.

My father gathered himself with the visible effort of a man stepping back into a role after nearly losing it. “Enough. The wagons are loaded.”

He came to me then, close enough for me to see the small burst capillaries at the edges of his eyes. He put a hand on my shoulder and hesitated there. Fathers are given too little training for farewell when the daughter remains alive.

“The capital is not your enemy,” he said.

“No,” I answered. “Only where you sent me.”

Pain crossed his face in a quick quiet line and was gone. He bent and kissed my brow anyway. His beard smelled of salt and cedar and home.

When he stepped back, Lieutenant Lee had turned away to give us privacy.

That, more than courtesy would have, unsettled me.

We descended together.

The house had become a corridor of lowered eyes. Servants bowed. My aunt clutched my hands and pressed a prayer charm into my palm hard enough to leave its imprint. One of the stable boys wept openly until someone cuffed him behind the ear. Outside, the courtyard rang with preparation. Gulls wheeled overhead. A wet wind came off the harbor and found its way under every seam.

My carriage stood ready between the wagons, dark blue lacquer, iron-bound, practical enough to survive the road and just handsome enough to remind everyone whose daughter rode inside. Six mounted guards waited by the gate. Two of them wore my father’s crest. Four did not.

They all looked toward Lieutenant Lee when he emerged from the doorway.

Every one of them.

Not openly. That would have been too obvious. Yet their attention bent in his direction with the unconscious precision of men who know exactly where command lives even when it is dressed in ordinary cloth.

He checked the harness himself. Touched one wheel spoke. Spoke briefly to the driver. Moved along the line of riders and said something too low for me to catch. A path opened around him without anyone seeming to make way.

The wind tugged his hood back a fraction as he turned. For a heartbeat I saw dark hair at his temple and, beneath the edge of the wrap, a glimpse of scarred skin high on one cheekbone before the cloth shifted again.

I stared.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. His hand rose at once to settle the hood more firmly.

“A charming mystery,” I said when he came near enough to hear.

The glance he gave me held dry patience. “A road is kinder when people know less about you.”

“I am discovering that everyone in this house knows more than I do.”

He looked at my father standing near the gate, then back to me. “That will not kill you.”

“No,” I said. “Marriage may, though.”

That did it.

It wasn't a smile, he did not seem to spend those lightly. But something in his gaze shifted and warmed with unwilling interest.

“You speak very freely for a bride.”

“I speak honestly for a woman being sent away.”

His eyes stayed on mine for one beat too long.

Then, quietly, “Keep doing that.”

It was not flirtation. That would have been easier. It was something stranger and therefore more dangerous. Approval from a man who seemed to despise useless noise. Approval that landed like a hand briefly at the back of my neck.

He turned to the carriage and held out a gloved hand to help me inside.

I looked at it, then at him. “If I fall to my death from the step, at least my father will have to renegotiate.”

“That is one strategy.”

“You disapprove?”

“I dislike paperwork.”

The answer escaped me before caution could intervene. A laugh, bright and unwilling. It vanished into the wind almost at once. Still, he heard it. I knew he had because his hand remained where it was, steady, patient, while the corner of his covered mouth shifted beneath the wrap as though some private thought had nearly reached the surface and been denied entry.

I placed my hand in his.

He helped me up with effortless care. No overbearing grip. No performative gentleness. Only a sure controlled lift that left me more aware of my own body than the act warranted. Irritating. The road had not even begun and already I was being inconvenienced by nerves that ought to have shown better breeding.

Before the footman closed the carriage door, I leaned back out.

“Lieutenant.”

He looked up.

“What sort of man is the Fire Lord?”

There. Let him answer that. Let the palace shadow speak of the palace sun.

The wind moved through the yard and pressed his cloak briefly to his frame. Somewhere above us, rigging clattered in the harbor. My father had gone very still at the gate.

Lieutenant Lee’s gaze held mine with that grave impossible steadiness of his.

“That,” he said after a moment, “depends who is asking.”

Then he stepped back and signaled the driver to move.

The gate opened.

My father became smaller between the stone posts. The house, then the courtyard, then the line of roofs fell behind us as the wheels found the road and the harbor wind struck hard enough to rattle the shutters. Ahead lay the coast, the turn south, the capital, the wedding fire, the stranger waiting at the end of all of it.

Beside the carriage, my escort rode in silence with his face half-hidden from the world.

I watched him through the glass until the house disappeared.

By noon, I had already begun to understand two things.

The first was that my father had entrusted me to no ordinary guard.

The second was worse.

I was beginning to want the truth from him more than I wanted the road behind me.

to be continued.