9
Kason
Two weeks into Ilinca's residence at Castle Ironmoor, I learned that she took her tea nearly black, with exactly one drop of honey stirred in and never two, and that she tapped her carving knife twice against whatever surface was nearest before she started any new piece of work, a habit so unconscious she didn't seem to notice she was doing it at all.
I noticed everything. That was, increasingly, the problem.
The castle had settled around her presence faster than I'd expected, in the way large households eventually absorb any new fixture that proves useful enough to justify itself.
The kitchen staff had learned her tea preference within the first three days and simply began preparing it without being asked.
The younger guards had stopped treating her with the wary formality reserved for outsiders and started, instead, treating her the way they treated Yeva — with the particular relaxed deference of people who'd decided, collectively and without discussion, that she belonged here regardless of what the Council's formal records said about the nature of her stay.
I found myself, most mornings, timing my own schedule around the moment she'd cross the east courtyard on her way to the archive wing, telling myself it was coincidence for exactly as long as coincidence remained a plausible explanation, which was not especially long.
"You've started taking breakfast an hour earlier," Yeva observed, on one of those mornings, watching me over the rim of her own cup with an expression that suggested she'd already worked out precisely why.
"You used to sleep until the second bell most days.
I can't recall the last time you managed to be awake and dressed before the sun properly cleared the ridge. "
"I have more council business than I used to."
"You have considerably less council business than you had a month ago, if anything, given how thoroughly the relocation order settled the immediate crisis.
" She didn't press further, though the knowing look she gave me over her tea said everything her silence didn't. "I think it's good for you.
In case you were wondering whether anyone approved. "
I told myself, in the beginning, that my attention was simple vigilance — a wolf keeping watch over what mattered to him, nothing more complicated than that.
Two weeks in, I no longer entirely believed my own explanation.
I found reasons to walk past the archive wing that had nothing to do with council business.
I found myself listening for the rhythm of her knife against wood the way another man might listen for music, and catching myself doing it, and not stopping regardless.
"You're doing it again," Teodor said, one afternoon, catching me mid-detour toward the east wing under the thin pretext of checking on a supply requisition that could easily have waited until evening.
"Doing what."
"Finding your way toward the archive wing for the third time today.
" He didn't bother hiding his amusement, which I found significantly more irritating than if he'd simply said nothing at all.
"I'm not judging you for it. I'm simply noting, as your captain and occasionally your friend, that a man managing a Council still deeply unsettled by an unprecedented exemption vote might want to exercise slightly more discretion about where he spends his afternoons. "
"I have legitimate business in the archive wing."
"You have a wardsmith in the archive wing, and you have found legitimate business there roughly nine times in the past week by my count, which is considerably more legitimate business than that wing has generated in the previous three years combined.
" He said it lightly, though something more serious sat underneath the teasing.
"I'm not telling you to stop, Kason. I'm telling you Halmar's people are watching for exactly this kind of pattern, and the more visible it becomes, the harder it gets to argue the commission is purely professional when the Sorcha question comes up again. "
"The Sorcha question is going to come up regardless of how I spend my afternoons."
"Maybe. But you'd rather it come up on your terms than because a Voivode's spy noticed you spending three hours a day watching a woman carve wood, wouldn't you?
" Teodor's voice had gone quieter, more serious, dropping the easy teasing entirely.
"I told you I'd help you find a plan that doesn't get her killed.
I meant that. But a plan requires you to actually decide something, eventually, rather than simply enjoying the archive wing's company for as long as the Council allows it. "
"I know."
"Do you? Because from where I'm standing, it looks noticeably more like a man hoping the decision solves itself if he simply doesn't look at it directly.
" He said it without cruelty, the singular blunt honesty of a friend who'd earned the right to say difficult things plainly.
"I'm not going to keep pushing today. Just — decide something, Kason.
Soon. Before someone else decides it for you. "
He wasn't wrong, and knowing that didn't make the walk toward the east wing feel any less inevitable once he'd said his piece and gone.
I stopped first at the lower hall, where a dispute between two border wardens had escalated enough to require formal arbitration, and settled it in the space of ten minutes with the same flat, unhurried authority I'd used on the grazing quarrel weeks before — no raised voice, no visible effort, only the particular stillness that told both men, and everyone else in the hall watching, that the matter was decided and further argument would not be entertained.
I watched them lower their eyes before they left, the old, familiar deference settling back over the room the moment I turned to go, and felt, as I always did, the strange hollowness of authority that worked exactly as intended and still cost something none of the Voivodes watching would ever think to ask about.
No one in that hall would have recognized the man who walked into the archive wing twenty minutes later.
That was, I'd come to understand, precisely the point of her — the one place in the entire castle where I didn't have to hold the crown's particular stillness, where I could simply be a man who'd noticed a woman's tea habit and found himself absurdly, helplessly glad of the excuse to bring it up.
I found her exactly where I knew I would, cross-legged on the floor among a fresh stack of restored folios, sunlight through the tall windows catching dust motes in a slow drift around her, and something in my chest did the unsteady thing it had taken to doing whenever I found her like this — absorbed, unguarded, entirely herself in a way she rarely allowed when she remembered anyone important might be watching.
"You're staring again," she said, without looking up, and I'd stopped being surprised by how reliably she sensed me before I'd made a single sound.
"I am."
"You do realize a prince has considerably more productive uses for his time than watching a wardsmith sort old paper."
"I've been told that today, actually. More than once.
" I settled into the chair near her workspace, the one that had, somewhere in the last two weeks, become unofficially mine, and watched her set down the folio she'd been examining to reach for a fresh block of wood.
Her knife tapped twice against the workbench before she began, the same habit I'd noticed the very first week, and something about watching it happen in front of me, knowing now what it meant, settled warm and dangerously familiar in my chest.
"Careful, little blade," I said, watching her test the wood's grain with more force than the piece strictly needed. "You'll take your own thumb off before you take the ward's edge down."
"I've been carving longer than you've been giving me nicknames I never agreed to." But she eased her grip regardless, and didn't tell me to stop using it, which I'd come to understand, over three weeks, was as close to permission as she currently allowed herself to give anyone.
"What are you working on?"
"A restoration piece. This section's original warding is nearly gone — I'm rebuilding the pattern from what's left before it fails completely.
" She held up the block, half-carved, the ghost of an old script emerging slowly under her hands.
"It's slower work than carving new. You have to think like the person who came before you.
Understand what they were trying to protect before you can protect it properly yourself. "
"That sounds like more than craft."
"It is more than craft." She glanced up at that, something thoughtful crossing her face. "Katra used to say restoration work teaches you humility a new carving never will. You can't impose your own vision on someone else's ward. You have to actually listen to what it's telling you it needs."
It was the first time in two weeks she'd said Katra's name to me directly, unprompted, without the careful deflection she usually wrapped around anything from before the Sorrowmarket, and I understood, without her needing to say so, that something in the easy quiet of the afternoon had loosened a door she usually kept firmly shut.
"Tell me about her," I said, carefully, aware I was asking for something she rarely offered.
Ilinca's hands stilled on the wood. For a long moment I thought I'd pushed too far, too soon, and started to retract the question, and then she spoke, quiet and unhurried, the words coming like something long held back finally finding a safe enough place to land.