Chapter 3

Three months later, news of victory in the North returned to Wolf Keep.

Rowan Blackwood led fewer than two thousand remaining soldiers, held the Blood Wall for seventeen days, personally cut off the head of the vampire vanguard commander, and forced back a vampire army several times his own number.

The Wolf King named him First General of the North.

The nobles who had once mocked that he would not survive the winter all changed their tune, as if they had never discussed abandoning his legion. On the very day the battle report arrived, Vivian ordered the wedding dress kept for years to be brought out.

“Replace all the rubies with Northern black diamonds.” She stood before the mirror instructing her maids. “Rowan is now a hero of the kingdom. My wedding cannot lose to the princess’s.”

I quietly placed the last letter into the wooden box.

Over three years, Vivian had paid me nine hundred and sixty gold coins in total. Together with what remained after selling the brooch, it was enough to redeem the herb shop my mother had left in the southern district.

At last I could leave the Reed family.

“The wedding is in seven days.” Vivian watched me in the mirror. “You had better leave that very day.”

“Why?”

She turned around, her gaze falling on my wooden box.

“Rowan received too many letters. If you stay, what if you let something slip?”

I said softly, “I will not use your name again.”

“Best not.” She smiled. “The general fell in love with me. As for you, you merely held the pen for me for a few years.”

I did not argue.

I had already told myself that sentence countless times.

On the day the triumphant procession entered the city, the whole of Wolf Keep was packed with people. Black military banners crossed the long street, their corners still bearing dark red bloodstains that could not be washed away. The Frost Fang Legion had only one third of the men who had left, yet not one of them bowed his head.

Rowan rode at the very front.

After three years, he was taller and broader than in his portrait. His silver-black armor was covered with blade marks, and a new scar ran across his left brow. Cheers shook the window lattices, but his expression remained cold until Vivian, in a snow-white gown, went to meet him.

“Rowan.”

She opened her arms and smiled with perfect grace.

Rowan dismounted, but did not immediately embrace her.

He looked at her for a moment, as if confirming something, then said in a low voice, “Vivian.”

I stood in the shadows on the second floor, and my heart violently contracted.

That was the name I had written on countless letters, yet now that he spoke it, it felt so unfamiliar that it shamed me.

Vivian took his arm and led him into the banquet prepared for the hero. Rowan was surrounded by nobles, but several times he looked past the crowd toward the upper floor.

I stepped back and hid behind the curtain.

That night, Vivian went to him on her own for the first time.

Half an hour later, she returned with an ugly expression and threw her gloves onto the table.

“He asked me whether I still light three lamps on thunderstorm nights.”

My fingertips paused.

That was a secret I had told him in a letter during the first summer. After my mother died, I was afraid of thunder, so I always lit one lamp by the window, one by the bed, and one by the door, pretending someone was guarding me.

“How did you answer?” I asked.

“Of course I said I am no longer afraid.” Vivian glared at me irritably. “Why did you write even such a small thing to him?”

Because at that time, he had just suffered a terrible defeat.

In his letter, he said that thunder in the North sounded like the city wall collapsing, and every time he woke in fright, he thought vampires had already entered the camp.

I told him that being afraid was not shameful.

But those words, I could no longer say.

In the days that followed, Rowan kept sending gifts. A black diamond necklace, a Northern silver-fox shawl, and a chest of letters he had brought back from the battlefield.

When that wooden chest was carried into Vivian’s room, I recognized the knife marks on it at once.

Inside were every letter I had written.

Some were stained with mud, some with blood. The oldest pages were worn and curled at the edges, yet all were kept neat and complete.

Vivian casually opened one, read two lines, and tossed it back.

“So many words. No wonder he always asks strange questions.”

I crouched down and straightened that letter.

On the paper was exactly a sentence I had once written to him.

When you return, I will go live my own life.

Now he really had returned.

And I should fulfill that promise.

On the eve of the wedding, I packed the gold coins into my bag and took only a few old clothes and the herbal notebook my mother had left. The steward, following Vivian’s orders, arranged a carriage without a family crest for me.

On the wedding day, it would take me out through the side gate.

No one would know that the gentle letters of the hero’s bride had come from the hand of a bastard daughter.

Still less would anyone know that I had truly loved him.