7 #2
"Your word." She studied me a moment longer, weighing it, and something in her expression settled into a wary, provisional acceptance. "I'll hold you to it, Your Highness. Formally, if it comes to that."
Something in her expression shifted, not quite hurt, closer to the singular resigned clarity of a woman recalculating a future she'd already spent considerable effort planning around.
"Then I suppose we'll both be watching to see what you decide to do about it.
" She inclined her head, formal again, the mask sliding back into place with practiced ease. "Good afternoon, Your Highness."
She left me standing in the corridor with the distinct, uncomfortable sense that I'd just told a woman I was contracted to marry precisely as much truth as I'd told Yeva two days before, and that the truth, unlike a market square's gossip, had a far shorter distance left to travel before it reached everyone it was going to reach regardless of how carefully I tried to manage its path.
I found Ilinca in the archive wing an hour later, hands deep in the failed shelving, entirely absorbed in work she clearly loved more than she'd let herself admit at supper the night before.
She hadn't heard me in the doorway, which gave me a rare moment simply to watch her — sleeves pushed back, a smear of old wax across one wrist, utterly unguarded in a way I hadn't seen from her since the market, before rank and Council business had started pressing back in around both of us.
"You're staring," she said, without turning around, and I felt caught in a way that had nothing to do with actual wrongdoing and everything to do with how thoroughly she'd apparently learned to sense me in a room.
"I am." No point denying it. "You're good at this. Genuinely good. I don't think I understood how good until I watched you work an hour uninterrupted."
She sat back on her heels, wiping her hands on a rag before she finally turned to face me, and something in her expression shifted when she got a proper look at mine. "What happened?"
"The Council passed a relocation order today.
Every unregistered rogue in the Sorrowmarket, moved to guarded holdings until the Unbound threat is contained.
" I watched the color drop out of her face before I finished the rest of it.
"I claimed you under my personal protection before the vote.
You're exempt, so long as the commission stands.
It's recorded formally now. No magistrate, no Council order, reaches you without going through me first."
For a long moment she said nothing at all, and I couldn't read what was moving behind her eyes — relief, or fear, or something more complicated than either.
"You did that in front of the entire Council."
"I did."
"Without asking me first."
That landed harder than I expected it to, mostly because she was right, and I hadn't let myself fully weigh that particular cost until she'd said it out loud.
"I didn't have time to ask. The vote was moving, and the alternative was letting you become one more name on a relocation list before I'd found a way to warn you it existed. "
"I appreciate that you were trying to help me.
" Her voice had gone careful, precise, the same tone she'd used on the envoy who'd tried to cheat her four days ago.
"I'd also appreciate not becoming a problem the throne has to keep solving for me, one exemption at a time, without my say in any of it. "
"You're not a problem."
"I'm a rogue with no pack and no family currently living inside a castle because a prince decided, twice now, that protecting me mattered more than asking me first." She wasn't angry, exactly — closer to exhausted, the particular tiredness of someone who'd spent six years fighting for every ounce of control over her own life and felt, in one afternoon, a significant piece of it taken out of her hands regardless of the reason behind it.
"I know you meant it kindly. I'm asking you to understand why kindness doesn't erase the part where I still didn't get a vote. "
I hadn't thought of it that way, and hearing her say it, I understood immediately that I should have. "You're right. I should have found you before the session, not after."
She studied me for a long moment, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders at the plain admission, though not all of it. "Thank you. For the protection, even badly delivered. I mean that."
"I'll ask first, next time. If there is a next time."
"There'll be a next time," she said, with a dry, tired certainty that told me she'd already understood, faster than I had, exactly what the day's vote had actually locked into place.
"I couldn't leave Vardain now if I wanted to, not without losing the only thing standing between me and that relocation order.
You can't take the protection back without handing me straight to it.
Neither of us actually has a way out of this anymore, whatever either of us wanted before today. "
She wasn't wrong, and I didn't insult either of us by pretending otherwise.
"Then I suppose," I said, "we'd better make it work."
Something that wasn't quite a smile moved across her face, tired and real. "I suppose we'd better."
Neither of us had chosen this, not really, not the way people usually chose the shape of their own lives.
And neither of us, standing together in a dust-quiet archive wing with the day's vote settling into something permanent between us, currently had any real path left that led anywhere but forward, whatever forward turned out to cost either of us before the end of it.