Chapter Text
"One thing I should make clear, my heart," Kain says, six months after that first night.
"Yes?" Rosa looks up from the breakfast table, to Kain where he stands buckling on his distinctive soft-palmed gauntlets. His new squadron of dragoons was proving both small and green, but Kain was himself proving to be an excellent teacher.
"I will not be king. I would be a terrible king, you are an excellent queen, and anyway I do not want the job. I will do anything you ask, except that."
She rises, her dressing-gown whispering in the breeze from the open tower window, and comes to help him buckle the second gauntlet. "I believe I can live with that," she says. "Would you consent to be consort, then?"
He takes her hand in both of his, her fingers small and delicate against the leather and blued steel of his armor. He lifts it, kisses her wrist where the blood pulses beneath the skin, and says, "Yes."