21
Ilinca
The guards outside my door had become a fixture I no longer questioned by the fourth day, the way anything becomes ordinary through sheer repetition, though the ordinariness of it didn't stop me noticing, every single morning, exactly how much smaller my world had grown since Costin Drell's name first entered it.
I couldn't cross the courtyard without an escort now.
I couldn't work in the archive wing without a guard stationed at the corridor's end, close enough to hear my knife against wood, far enough to pretend he wasn't listening.
I couldn't even walk to the kitchens for tea without someone's polite, watchful presence trailing three steps behind, and I understood every reason for it — understood, better than most people currently managing my safety, exactly what a man like Costin Drell was capable of — and understood, too, with a familiar, sinking clarity, that I had traded one careful smallness for another, dressed up now in guards and Council protection instead of a hood and a market stall's obscurity.
A letter from Dobrin arrived that morning, and I read it twice before I trusted myself to set it aside.
Word's reached even the Sorrowmarket about the Gathering, he'd written, in his familiar cramped hand.
Half the town's talking about the wardsmith who turned out to be royalty, though most of them still don't believe it's you they're discussing.
I hope you're being careful. I hope someone up there is being careful FOR you, given how thoroughly you've always resisted being careful on your own account.
Write back and tell me you're not doing anything reckless.
I hadn't yet found the words to answer him honestly, uncertain, myself, whether reckless was the correct word for whatever careful, guarded existence I was currently living.
"You're doing the thing again," Yeva said, finding me at my workbench with a folio I hadn't actually looked at in twenty minutes, my hands still on the wood, my mind circling somewhere else entirely.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet and start looking at walls like they've personally offended you." She settled onto the bench across from me, her own expression carrying more caution than her usual easy warmth. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know, precisely. Something's been happening the last two days that I can't quite name — closed doors, hushed conversations that stop the moment I walk into a room, Kason coming to find me later and later each evening, always with the same careful, exhausted apology.
" I set the folio down, finally admitting to myself the shape of the unease I'd been carrying.
"It feels familiar, Yeva. It feels like six weeks ago, watching him carry something he wasn't telling me, except this time I don't know what the something is. "
Something flickered across Yeva's face, quick and guilty, gone before I could fully name it. "There's a Council matter under discussion. Security-related, given the Costin Drell threat. I don't think it's my place to say more than that."
"That's precisely the answer that worries me most." I held her gaze, watching her weigh loyalty to her brother against whatever honesty she owed me.
"You told me yourself, weeks ago, that avoidance doesn't make anything smaller.
That it simply delays the moment someone has to look at the whole size of it at once.
I'd rather look at it now, Yeva, whatever it is, than wait for it to arrive on its own timeline. "
"I know." She said it quietly, some genuine distress moving behind her usual composure. "I think you should ask Kason directly. It's not entirely my secret to give you, even if I disagree with the choice being made about how to handle telling you."
"You disagree with it."
"I do. Strongly." That admission cost her something, I could see it plainly, her hands twisting together in her lap in a way I'd never once seen from her before.
"I watched my father make choices about your entire life for eighteen years, telling himself each one was mercy.
I watched my brother do the same thing for six weeks, telling himself the same story.
I don't want to watch either of them make that mistake a third time, dressed up now in a different justification simply because the stakes have grown larger and more frightening.
I've said as much, to both my father and my brother, more than once this week.
They haven't listened yet. I'm hoping, if I say it to you as well, someone finally does. "
"Thank you. For telling me that much, even if you won't tell me the rest."
"I wish I could tell you more. I think you deserve to hear it from him regardless — not because I'm protecting some Council secret, but because I think the manner of the telling matters noticeably more this time than the content of it does.
" She reached across and squeezed my hand, brief and fierce.
"Go find him. Tonight, before whatever they're planning gets any further along without you in the room deciding it. "
I found Kason in the war room that evening, later than I'd meant to seek him out, drawn by a restlessness I could no longer settle through work alone.
He looked up from a map spread across the table, exhaustion carved plain into his face, and something in his expression shifted, guilty and careful, the moment he registered who'd walked in.
"You look tired," I said, keeping my voice light despite the growing certainty settling cold in my stomach.
"It's been a difficult week." He straightened, crossing toward me with the specific deliberate warmth he always offered, though I caught, underneath it, a tension that hadn't been there two nights ago. "Is something wrong?"
"That's precisely the question I came to ask you.
" I held his gaze, refusing to let the familiar warmth of his presence soften the edge I needed to keep in my voice.
"Yeva told me there's a Council matter under discussion.
Security-related. She said it wasn't hers to tell me, and that I should ask you directly. "
Something crossed his face — not quite panic, closer to a man caught between two competing loyalties he hadn't yet found a way to reconcile.
"There's a proposal being considered. I haven't agreed to anything final yet.
I wanted to wait until the details were settled before bringing it to you, so I could give you a complete picture rather than a half-formed plan that might frighten you unnecessarily. "
The particular, careful architecture of that sentence landed with a weight I recognized immediately, cold and familiar, the exact shape of a pattern I'd hoped, seven weeks ago in a lamplit archive wing, we'd both finally learned to leave behind.
"You're doing it again," I said, quiet, more devastated by the recognition than angry, at least in that first moment. "The same thing. Deciding what I need to know and when, managing the timing of my own life without asking me first, telling yourself it's kindness rather than control."
"That's not—" He stopped himself, some honest part of him apparently unwilling to finish a denial he didn't fully believe. "I promised you better than this. I know I did."
"Then tell me. Now. Whatever it is, however unfinished, I'd rather have the unfinished truth than another careful, complete version delivered on your timeline instead of mine."
He was quiet a long moment, weighing something behind eyes that had gone distant and troubled, and I understood, watching him, that whatever he was about to tell me had cost him considerably more than the simple reluctance of an unfinished plan.
"The Council believes there's a way to draw Costin Drell into a trap," he said finally, low and careful.
"A controlled setting, heavy guard presence disguised as ordinary Gathering business, where his approach could be anticipated and intercepted before he reaches you directly.
It requires you to be visible. Present, in a specific location, at a specific time, with the appearance of ordinary vulnerability. "
"You want to use me as bait."
"I want to end this threat before it costs you your life through some means I can't fully predict or control.
" His voice carried real anguish, though it did nothing, in that moment, to soften the cold spreading through my chest. "I haven't agreed to it.
I've been arguing against it for two days, precisely because I don't want to make this choice for you the way I've already made too many choices for you without asking. "
"And yet you didn't tell me it existed at all, until I forced the question myself.
" I stepped back, needing the distance, needing to think clearly through a fury I could feel building faster than I wanted it to.
"Kason. I understand you're frightened. I understand every version of this that frightens you enough to consider managing it around me instead of with me.
But I told you, plainly, in that same archive wing, that I wanted a voice in decisions concerning my own life.
Not eventually. Not once the plan was finished enough to present cleanly.
Now. Every time. That was the entire promise. "
"I know." He said it quietly, no defense left in his voice at all. "I'm sorry."
"I believe that you're sorry. I'm no longer certain sorry is enough, when the pattern keeps repeating regardless of how sincerely you mean the apology each time it does.
" I turned toward the door, needing air, needing space to think that this room, with him standing in it, no longer offered me.
"I need to be alone tonight, Kason. I'll speak with you tomorrow, once I've decided what I actually think about all of this. "
I left him standing alone among his maps and his careful, unfinished plans, and walked back to my own chambers with a grief building that had nothing to do with fear of Costin Drell and everything to do with the specific, familiar ache of loving someone whose instinct to protect kept, over and over, curdling into a version of control neither of us seemed fully able to name until it had already cost something.
I sat a long while at my window, watching the mountains go dark against a sky still holding the last thin light of evening, and turned the whole shape of it over — six weeks of one withheld truth, and now, seven weeks later, a second pattern rising in its place, dressed in better intentions and substantially higher stakes, but built from the same old material regardless.
I did not doubt that Kason loved me. I had never once doubted that, not through the withholding, not through tonight's careful, unfinished confession.
What I doubted, sitting alone with the last of the daylight fading, was whether love alone was sufficient to break a pattern this deeply set into a man raised his entire life to believe that protecting people meant deciding things on their behalf.
I finally answered Dobrin's letter before I let myself sleep, shorter than I meant it to be, telling him only that the castle had grown considerably more complicated than either of us could have predicted seven weeks ago, and that I missed, more than I expected to, a life where the only decisions that needed making were mine alone to make.
I did not tell him about Costin Drell, or the bait proposal, or the particular grief currently sitting heavy in my chest. Some things, I understood, sealing the letter, still needed to be worked through in person, by the people who'd actually caused them, before they were ready to be carried anywhere else.
I did not sleep well that night, turning the question over long past the hour any reasonable rest required — not whether I loved him, which I no longer doubted at all, but whether loving him meant accepting, over and over, a pattern that cost me pieces of my own agency every time fear grew large enough to justify it in his mind.
I did not yet have an answer by morning. I understood only that I intended to keep asking the question until one of us finally changed.