Chapter 5 - The Meeting at the Summit
The northern cavalry crested the ridge like an avalanche of iron and fur. Their armor was blackened steel, designed to withstand the crushing weight of northern beasts, and their capes were woven from the hides of white mountain wolves. At their head rode Prince Kaelen.
He was a mountain of a man, broad-shouldered and bearded, with eyes the color of a winter storm and a scar running from his left temple down to his jawline. He reined in his massive black charger barely ten paces from where Elara stood alone in the snow.
For a long moment, the two armies watched in dead silence.
Kaelen looked down at the young woman standing before him in a simple travel cloak, her dark hair crowned by the luminous, shifting light of the Ice Crown. He had come prepared to negotiate a marriage of convenience with a broken, bitter princess traded away by a desperate king.
Instead, he found a sovereign.
"You are Princess Elara," Kaelen said, his voice deep and gravelly, carrying the rhythmic cadence of the northern tongue. "Or so the scouts claim. Word reached my camp three days ago that the old throne room in the south had frozen over and shattered."
"The throne room didn't shatter, Prince Kaelen," Elara replied, taking a steady step forward, her chin tilted up. "It woke up. Just as I did."
Kaelen dismounted with surprising agility for a man of his bulk. He landed heavily in the snow, his boots crunching against the crust. He walked slowly toward her, his hand resting casually on the hilt of a broadsword slung across his back, his sharp eyes scanning every detail of the crown upon her head.
"Your father’s envoys promised me a compliant wife who would cement a trade alliance," Kaelen said, stopping two paces away. A faint, ironic smirk touched the corner of his scarred lips. "They did not mention that she would carry the literal soul of winter on her brow."
"My father doesn't know what I carry," Elara said evenly. "He only knows how to count soldiers and sign away daughters. If you came here for a quiet submission, Prince Kaelen, you have ridden to the wrong mountain."
Kaelen stared at her for a long, intense moment. The wind whipped his dark hair across his scarred face, but he did not blink. Then, slowly, a deep, genuine laugh rumbled up from his chest—a sound like grinding stones that startled the horses behind him.
"Submission?" Kaelen scoffed good-naturedly. "In Drakonsgard, we do not marry women who submit, Princess. We marry women who can hold the line when the frost demons howl at the gates."
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He dropped to one knee in the snow—not in subjugation, but in formal northern greeting, resting his fist against his breastplate.
"Welcome to the north, Elara of the Ice Crown," Kaelen said, his voice ringing loud across the plateau. "Let us see if our combined frost is enough to freeze the old king out of his throne for good."
