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Whatever Harry Percy had been expecting when he got outside, escaping from the chatter and the hideous politics he would never understand; escaping from the too-hot fires and his father and the terrible, brittle thing that even he knew was a kind of beauty, it had not been this.
Katherine Mortimer, bent over double and leaning sideways against the cold damp stone of the upper walls; and sobbing her heart out against her rain-sodden knees, not like a lady, but like a broken man at the end of a battle, rough and cursing and furious with herself and the world that had led her to such an inward betrayal.
It was the cursing that made him respond, for he knew what came next, and that was violence, and alone as she was, it would only be done to herself.
He was just in time to catch her hand before it hit the stone.
"Don’t," was all he said, but she looked up at him as though he had taken a pike to her prize stallion before her eyes.
"And that is all any man will tell me," she said hoarsely.
"I’ll tell you to be hitting me afore the wall," Harry offered. He’d made that offer many a time. Sometimes it got taken up. Sometimes it brought the man to his senses, and made him stand, have some dignity to him, and walk away. Katherine Mortimer was no man, but she swore like one and she wept like one and she raged like one, and he’d seen a thousand of her (and she, he already knew from that rough, defiant little statement, was worth a thousand of them).
"I’d break your jaw," she snapped, but the wildness was gone; all cold steel, Katherine Mortimer had become in that moment, amidst the damp and the rain and the weeping stone that she had, for some reason, joined—
Christ, has it even stopped raining in all those years since the Queen died?
— and Harry laughed at it, for the dignity of walking away would never be this one’s to wear, oh no. She was a tourney of her own, and knew nothing other than to respond to the challenge, and tilt in the lists, and her armour was a glory to behold.
"Or your hand," he pointed out. "I’m told my skull’s harder than any mortal thing."
"I think he said thicker."
Oh. Well, most of the hall had heard that one, he didn’t know why it should have surprised him that she should have been one of the many, or made him uncomfortable that she had repeated it. But it had. Both.
"I was using — licence," he faltered out, and why should he be the one wrong-footed? He, after all, had not been the one found sobbing and cursing against a wall, ready to smash their hand into splinters for the sake of letting something out that could never be said in front of anyone, not even one’s own self.
No reason for him to be wrong-footed, no, and yet he was, because he was crouched there, dressed in something he’d been told to wear — as though it would have made any difference to how they all viewed him no matter how his instructions had refined him! — and talking to a court-lady as if he had the right.
He had no courtliness in his whole nature, and she’d made him feel it; whatever might have passed for botched gallantry in his actions had been erased by her bluntness, and he was ashamed.
"Licence is one step away from something I have had enough of tonight," she said, and he sighed. This was why he rarely came from the Borders. This. He had no skill for it nor understanding of it, and Christ! Give him a sword any day rather than his own tongue for the art of survival.
"I have no wordplay in me. You’ll need to speak plain." It was as much concession as he was willing to make.
"Licentiousness," spat Katherine Mortimer, and he understood. Understood all too well, my God! — and the words ripped out of him before he could call them back.
"Aye, and so where, in all his uselessness, is your fucking brother? That you should have had to run—" And then he realised the words he'd used, and though they were no worse than some of those he'd heard her sobbing out against her drenched skirts, he still reddened like some gawking boy, fresh from his nursery and overheard by his Mam.
"I didn't run," snarled Katherine, and oh, even red-eyed and glaring at him and soaked through and still crouched over her knees, she still had all her armour, "not like you're implying. I got away from wanting to kill them. I wanted to," she added, and for the first time, she was a girl, and not a battle-weary soldier. "I wanted to so much, but you can't. I can't. And if I say how I feel, if I tell anyone, they say —"
"Don't," Harry finished at the same time as her. He'd heard it often enough himself. "They do at that."
"To you?" She laughed. "I know who you are, Hotspur. No man would dare say don't to you."
"But they do." Here, at least, he could be honest. "Out there —" he gestured wide, meaning out in the field, out where I am free, out where I belong "no, you're right. And then, I come back. And I am told — don't. All that I do, all that I have skill for — don't. My father —"
"You father terrifies me," Katherine said suddenly. "We've never even spoken before now, and he's bartering for me."
"My father —" His mind stuck, hard. Bartering for her? Bartering for her for what?
And the answer came to him, clear and cold as a sword-stroke.
Me.
"He has no right," he said, as rough and rasping and hoarse as she had been when she first spoke to him. "He has no —"
"He does," Katherine said, and her wet hair lost the battle with its pins and forced curls and fell heavily down her back and over his hand, where it still gripped hers. He hadn't noticed that he'd never let her go, after her abortive strike at the wall. For some reason, he still kept hold of her cold fingers, even now he was aware of what he was and was not doing. "He does. For us both."
"But we —" We've never even spoken before now. It suddenly made sense. "I'm sorry," he said inadequately.
Katherine sniffed, and dragged her long, bedraggled sleeve across her face. Harry thought that her dress had probably been a fine one, before her flight into the rain and the night and the saturated stone. "Doesn't matter," she said in a small voice.
Harry had never understood anyone so completely. He knew now why she had been weeping and swearing and defeated, huddled in the rain and lashing out at stone walls. He knew why she had lost all sense of self, all sense of dignity, all sense of behaviour. If he could have left her there, and ridden off, and begun some senseless new patrol-battle for the sheer mindlessness of it, he would have done so. But he could not, because he had seen her, and he had spoken to her, and this was his father's doing, and so now he too bore responsibility.
He put out his other hand, and touched clumsy fingers to her wet, clenched jaw, making her look at him again.
"It matters," he said.
He had never meant anything more in his life.
Very, very slowly, her hard mouth softened, and trembled a little, and almost smiled.
"Thank you," she said, small and clear amidst the sounds of the rain and the indecipherable voices inside; cutting through the smoulder of the almost-extinguished torches and the water-laden air. "I didn't think — no-one ever told me —"
Harry felt himself starting to grin with sheer perplexity. "Told you what?"
"You're a good man," said Katherine Mortimer simply, and moved her head, very gently, so that his fingers were touching only air. "I think — perhaps it won't be so bad, Hotspur."
He got to his feet, drawing her with him, since he still held the hand he had saved from the wall within his own, and looked down into a face that he thought might one day come to mean beauty to him, and a better sort that the tenuous, jangling one inside the walls, as well.
"Harry," he said. "If we're to be wed — and if my father says we shall, then we will be — then I'm thinking I'll be Harry to you, if you please."
"Then I'm Katherine."
Simple. Blunt. Perfect.
No.
"Kate," Harry said, not a negation of her permission, but a warming little heartbeat of a word; a syllable of praise for the armour he still saw about her; affection of a strange kind, such as he might give to one of his men; and never a hint of diminution to it. What words he had to him, he would use as it pleased him. "My Lady Kate."
"Your Lady?" Her eyebrows arched, teasing, and he laughed into the rain, full-throated and open-mouthed and delighted to be challenged.
"So I've been told," he agreed, and was genuinely happy when she smiled properly in return, her lips pulling apart a little and the tips of her teeth showing for a second, a hint of the raw soul he had first seen, peering through her careful facade — not in rage and unhappiness, this time, but in a sudden startled pleasure that he thought might have started to match his own.
"I should go in —"
Harry had still not let go of her hand.
"No," he said, and as her eyes went wide, he summoned up every ounce and trace of firmness he had ever needed on a battlefield, and said, "We should go in."
When they appeared in the doorway to the Hall, soaked and dishevelled and altogether disreputable-looking, their hands still firmly linked and defiant smiles upon their faces, his father's expression was everything he could have possibly hoped for.
From the triumphant gleam in Kate's eyes, he thought it might well have done the same for her.
And without thinking, seeing that look in her eyes, and feeling all other eyes upon them, and defiance burning suddenly and unexpectedly bright within him, making his blood run hot against his skin, he bent his head, and kissed her lips.
Her blood, throbbing within the softness of her mouth's flesh to the hard rhythm of her pulse, burnt as hot as his, and he knew in that moment, as surely as he knew the sound of steel on steel, he knew.
Whether by their choice or not, they had found one another's match.