Chapter Text
This is how it begins for Kain Highwind:
He does not attend their wedding, the wedding of his best friend and his best beloved, because he cannot stand himself. And then, having missed their wedding and their coronation, he does not know how to come back.
Rosa sends him letters, and they reach him wherever he travels, somehow. Perhaps it is magic. Perhaps it is just her.
Sometimes her words summon him back, and he comes. They greet him without anger but with welcome. They call him an honored guest. Cecil talks to him as he would to a friend, as though there was not a great gulf between them of what he did to them. Rosa smiles at him with her eyes and her mouth and the whole posture of her body, as though he had never had her bound to a wall.
They cannot have any idea that this is far worse for him than if they had screamed at him.
So he leaves again and stays away until her words draw him back. And so he goes, a pendulum, driven away by his guilt and grief, drawn back by his love for both of them. He cannot find equilibrium; he cannot be happy either with them or without them.
He wanders. He learns the world, the height of every mountain, the farthest reaches of the oceans, the deep caverns beneath, the thick heart of the woods. He wanders and searches for peace and knows even as he does that peace lies in the stone walls of Baron, but that he cannot go back for it because it is guarded by the fangs of his own personal dragon.
So he moves wind-restless, passing through the world and leaving no mark, no footstep, no memories except his own.
Until the day he receives the letter bound in black ribbon, and he knows even before he opens it what has happened, and that he will go back again.
This is how it begins for Queen Rosa of Baron:
She loves her husband wholly and without reserve, but she misses her friend. It is a small shard of ice in the middle of the warmth of her heart, that he could not be there for her wedding day, although she understands why he could not. But as she walks the grounds of Castle Baron, the halls and the courtyards, the fountains, the rose garden, the tower rooms, she feels that it is out of balance. There should be three of them: Cecil, bright and strong and often too noble for his own good; Kain, clever and sharp and the shadow that should be the equal opposite of every light; and herself in the center, at the hinge between the light and the dark, her husband and her friend.
That was as it was meant to be.
So she writes to him, long letters to share her life with him and to tell him that she misses him. He comes back, stays a while, and then leaves again without a word.
It falls into a pattern, a rhythm, and she begins to think that her metaphor was wrong. She is the earth and Cecil the moon, and Kain is the restless tide.
So it goes until one day Cecil goes away to stop a feud between two villages, and is killed instantly when a rioter's thrown rock hits his head.
For the space of a year she grieves, grieves and must rule as well, for she is the Queen of Baron—the queen now clad in black, veiled, her heart a garden in winter. During that time she thrice sits down and begins a letter to Kain, to tell him, and cannot do it. The tears blur her eyes and her hand shakes, and she puts aside quill and paper.
Until a year has passed and she feels the first spring tendril rising from the dormant briars. She considers it, walking in her gardens, standing on her ramparts, and as the tendril grows she takes off her veil, and then later trades her heavy-mourning black for the grey-trimmed lavender of half-mourning. Finally the wildrose growing in the garden of her heart puts out new leaves and then a bud, and she puts aside half-mourning for the gold and rose and white of her reign, and sits to write a letter to Kain.