THORNBOUND

The Girl Who Ran

The horse didn't ask permission before it jumped the hedge, and neither did Princess Isolde Varenne.

Wind tore her braid loose as she leaned low over the mare's neck, laughing at nothing and everything, at the way the palace walls shrank behind her and the world opened up green and wet and hers. Behind her, three guards shouted her name in three different tones of panic. She didn't slow down. She never did.

By the time she reined in at the old stone bridge past the orchard, her guards were half a mile back and cursing her ancestry. Isolde swung down from the saddle, boots hitting the moss with a satisfying thud, and allowed herself exactly one full breath of freedom before the guilt arrived. It always arrived. Twenty-four years old and still sneaking out like a child — her mother would have plenty to say about it at supper.

She didn't care. That was the problem, according to everyone who'd ever tried to raise her.

"You're going to break your neck one day, Your Highness."

She spun. A man stood at the treeline with a training blade slung across his back, sweat darkening his collar, an unimpressed set to his jaw that no one in this kingdom but him would have dared wear in front of her.

"Kellan Ashworth." She said his name like an accusation and a delight at once. "Spying on me now?"

"Guarding the eastern wood. You're the one who rode into it." He didn't bow. He rarely did when it was just the two of them, and she'd stopped correcting him for it years ago — first out of amusement, then out of something she hadn't examined closely enough to name.

Isolde looked at him the way she always did and pretended she wasn't looking at all. He'd grown into his shoulders since the last time she'd paid proper attention, and there was a new scar along his jaw that made her want to ask questions she had no right to ask. He was a knight. Not even a highborn one — the son of a blacksmith who'd earned his place through the kind of grit that couldn't be bought or inherited, which was, in its own irritating way, more impressive than anything a title could hand a person.

"I needed air," she said.

"You needed to not be caught." Kellan crossed the bridge toward her, and she hated how her pulse picked up at something as small as footsteps. "Your mother's already sent riders twice this week. The council's asking why the future queen keeps vanishing before her engagement's even announced."

The word *engagement* landed like a stone in still water.

"Prince Rowan of Meridale," she said flatly. "A man I've met four times and could not pick out of a crowd of five."

"He's said to be a fair ruler."

"He's said to be *fair*, full stop. Fair hair, fair face, fair everything, including his opinions, which is another word for having none." She kicked a loose stone off the bridge and watched it vanish into the water below. "I'm to marry a portrait, Kellan. A very well-dressed portrait."

Something shifted in his expression — there and gone before she could hold onto it. "That's not my business to have thoughts on."

"Since when has that stopped you?"

"Since you started listening less to my thoughts and more to whatever's convenient." But he was almost smiling when he said it, that rare crack in the stone he kept himself carved from, and it was enough to make her feel like she'd won something.

They'd known each other twelve years. He'd been a scrawny recruit assigned to the training yard the same summer she'd decided, at twelve years old, that she would rather learn swordplay than embroidery, and no tutor alive had been able to talk her out of it. Her father had assigned Kellan — barely older than her, hungry to prove himself — to keep her from cutting off her own fingers. He'd done more than that. He'd taught her to fall without breaking, to get back up faster than the pain could catch her, to hold a blade like it was an extension of her own will instead of a toy.

Somewhere in those twelve years, without her permission, he'd become the only person in the castle who spoke to her like she was a person and not a crown waiting to be worn.

She hadn't let herself think too hard about what that meant. Princesses didn't get to.

"Walk with me," she said, already moving, already assuming he'd follow, because he always did, because twelve years had taught her that much. "Just to the ridge. I'm not ready to go back and be lectured."

Kellan hesitated — she saw it, the flicker of *I shouldn't* that crossed his face more often lately, as though something had changed on his end too and he was working very hard to pretend it hadn't. But he fell into step beside her anyway, the way he always did, and for a while neither of them said anything, and the silence between them felt more honest than every conversation she'd have at supper that night.

At the top of the ridge, the whole valley spread out gold and green in the fading light, and Isolde felt, not for the first time, that the life waiting for her back at the castle belonged to someone else. Someone smaller. Someone who hadn't spent twelve years learning that freedom felt like this — like wind, like danger, like standing next to a man she wasn't allowed to want.

"What are you thinking?" Kellan asked, watching her instead of the view.

She almost told him. The truth sat right at the edge of her teeth, sharp and reckless, the same recklessness that had put her on a horse and over a hedge that morning.

Instead she smiled, and said nothing, and let the wind answer for her.

She had time. She was sure of it.

She was wrong.

The Weight of a Name

The announcement reached the training yard before Isolde did.

Kellan heard it first from one of the stable boys, who delivered it the way boys that age delivered everything — breathless, thrilled, utterly indifferent to who it might wound. *The princess is to marry Prince Rowan. It's official. There's to be a ball.* He said it between mouthfuls of bread, already moving on to some other piece of gossip, and Kellan stood there gripping a wooden practice sword so hard his knuckles went white.

He told himself it changed nothing. He'd known this was coming since the day he was old enough to understand what she was and what he wasn't. A blacksmith's son didn't get to be surprised by a princess's engagement. He'd had twelve years to prepare for this exact morning, and still it landed in his chest like a blade slipping past his guard.

"You're going to snap that in half," said Garrick, the older knight who'd trained beside him since they w