Chapter 8
EIGHT
The bolt on her door was new. She was sure of it.
November stood in front of the door between her bedroom and the corridor, her fingers resting on the iron latch.
The wood around the bolt plate was lighter than the rest of the frame — freshly cut, the edges still sharp where a chisel had carved the recess.
Someone had installed it recently. Within the last few days, if she had to guess. Possibly within the last few hours.
She slid the bolt home. It moved smooth and silent, well-oiled, seated perfectly.
He had done this for her. Not the groundskeeper, not one of the household staff following standing orders.
Rhaezon. He had looked at this door and seen what she would see when she stood in front of it alone for the first time: a door she could not lock from her side. And he had fixed it before she arrived.
November pressed her palm flat against the wood.
Warm from the day's heat, or maybe everything on Aelthar held warmth differently.
The grain was rough under her fingers. She thought about his shaking hands that first day.
She thought about the corridor, three nights running, his back against her door.
The blanket he hadn't asked for but had pulled around his shoulders.
Rhaezon was not safe. She understood that with the part of her brain that had spent fifteen years reading the bodies of animals that could kill her — the part that catalogued weight and reach and speed before she ever entered a paddock.
He was at least six and a half feet tall.
He was built like fortress architecture.
He was not safe. But he made her feel safe. The bolt installed on her door was just the most recent reason why.
She undressed, washed her face in the stone basin, and lay down in the wide bed that smelled like clean linen and something herbal she couldn't identify.
Both stars were visible through the deep-set window, one amber, one pale white, and the light they cast across the ceiling was unlike anything she had a reference for.
Sleep didn't come.
She lay still for twenty minutes. Then she swung her legs over the side, pulled on the loose trousers and tunic that had been left folded on the chest at the foot of her bed — someone's idea of nightclothes, soft and too long in the leg — and went to find the kitchen.
The kitchen at night was a different animal than the kitchen Rhaezon had shown her that afternoon.
Empty of staff, the hearth banked to embers, the long preparation surfaces scrubbed clean.
It was the largest room on the ground floor, built around a central stone island with a smoothed-down quality from being worked on for generations.
Copper pots hung from an iron rack overhead.
The whole space smelled like bread and wood smoke and the dried herbs bundled along the far wall.
November found the kettle by instinct. She found the water by following the sound of it — a gravity-fed line from somewhere above, channeled through a copper spout into a stone basin.
The tea was harder. She opened four canisters before she discovered something that looked plausible: dark, dried, curled tight, with a smell that was somewhere between bergamot and black pepper.
She boiled the water. She steeped the leaves. She wrapped both hands around the cup and stood in the dark kitchen breathing in alien steam and thought about absolutely nothing for the first time in weeks.
Then she went upstairs to find the library.
Rhaezon had pointed it out during the tour — second floor, east corridor, a double-width door of dark wood.
It was unlocked. The room beyond was larger than she'd expected: two stories of shelving, the upper level accessed by a narrow gallery, and a deep silence that only rooms full of books ever achieve.
The amber star had set, but the white one was still above the ridge, and its light came through the tall windows in a pale wash that was enough to see by.
November bypassed every chair in the room.
There were several — heavy, high-backed, the kind that demanded a certain posture.
She walked past them to the rug in front of the cold hearth, lowered herself to the floor, crossed her legs, and set her tea beside her on the stone.
Chairs were formal. Floors were honest. She'd never been able to explain this to anyone who didn't already understand it.
She reached over and pulled a book from the lowest shelf.
It was heavy, leather-bound, with pages that were thick and slightly rough-edged.
The text was incomprehensible. Her nanite translator, the small silver dot implanted behind her left ear, parsed the characters and returned nothing useful — fragments, half-meanings, the linguistic equivalent of static.
Whatever language this was, the translator didn't have a full matrix for it.
The illustrations, though.
November turned the pages in the pale starlight and found animals, dozens of them, rendered in painstaking detail that suggested the artist had sat in front of each one for hours.
Six-limbed creatures she recognized as the kethral from the stables.
Smaller things that might have been predators: low-slung, with heavy jaws and forward-facing eyes.
Birds with doubled wingspans. Something aquatic and enormous and covered in what looked like bioluminescent spots.
She bent closer to a drawing of a heavily scaled mountain creature, thick through the chest, with forelimbs that ended in curved gripping claws. The detail was extraordinary. Someone had cared about this animal enough to render every scale individually.
She was humming. She didn't know when she'd started. Low, tuneless, the sound she always made when her hands were busy or her mind was working sideways — not a song, just warmth made audible. It filled the space between the book and the silence.
A shadow passed the doorway.
November didn't look up. She'd been absorbed in a two-page spread of something that looked like a cross between an elk and a porcupine, but she registered the movement. Registered the size of the shadow. Registered that it paused, held, and then moved on without a word.
Rhaezon.
She turned another page. The next animal had wings.
Morning light on Aelthar was gold with an edge of copper to it, the amber star already high and dominant. November followed the smell of food down the main staircase and through the corridor to the kitchen, where the long table near the hearth was already occupied.
Davn sat at the far end, eating with unhurried efficiency. He had a plate of something dense and grain-based in front of him, a cup of the same dark tea she'd made last night, and a reader propped against the salt cellar. He glanced up when she entered. One nod. Back to the reader.
Rhaezon was standing at the preparation island with his back to her.
He turned when he heard her footsteps, and for one second something happened to his face.
The severe lines of it rearranged themselves into an expression she couldn't quite name before his control reasserted itself.
He picked up a plate he'd already prepared and brought it to the table, setting it down at the place across from Davn.
"There's grain porridge. Fruit from the lower orchard. And…" he paused, the sentence stalling like an engine catching, "Mathen makes a cured meat. You don't have to eat it if the texture is —"
"This looks incredible. Thank you."
He sat down at the head of the table. Picked up his own cup. Put it down. Adjusted the angle of his plate. Picked up the cup again.
November ate. The porridge was nuttier than anything she'd had on Earth, with a slightly sweet undertone.
The fruit was small, dusky purple, and burst against her tongue with a flavor somewhere between fig and plum.
She ate three of them before she noticed Rhaezon watching her eat the third one, his own breakfast untouched.
He looked away.
The silence wasn't uncomfortable. Davn turned a page on his reader. November ate her porridge. Rhaezon moved his cup two inches to the left, then back.
His chair scraped the stone floor.
"I have business with Vasek regarding the north perimeter." He stood, already moving. "If you need anything, the kitchen staff can —"
"Rhaezon?"
He stopped in the doorway, shoulders set, his spine rigid.
"Thank you for breakfast."
He gave a single nod, then disappeared down the corridor, his footsteps receding until even the echo was gone.
November stared at the empty doorway. Her spoon hung motionless above the porridge. Something cold and familiar settled in her stomach — the quiet certainty that she'd miscalculated, said the wrong thing, been too much of something or not enough of something else.
"Don't take it personally."
She looked across the table. Davn hadn't lifted his eyes from the reader.
"He's not used to being around... people."
The pause before people carried weight. November watched Davn's face for more. His expression gave her nothing. He turned another page.
She finished her breakfast.
The tree was ancient. Its bark was dark, almost black, with a texture like cracked stone.
Its leaves were the silver-green she'd seen from the transport window: broad, thick, casting a shade that was cool and deep and smelled like crushed eucalyptus.
November had found it beyond the east garden wall, its roots breaking through a low stone fence at an angle that created a natural backrest. Perfect.
She'd been reading for an hour when the shadow fell across her page.
Rhaezon stood three paces away, holding a plate and a cup. The plate held bread, more of the purple fruit, and a wedge of something that might have been cheese. The cup was steaming.
"You missed the midday meal."
November looked up. The white star was past zenith. She'd been out here longer than she'd thought.
"You brought me lunch?"