The Arrival
NOX
Rathmor Palace
Nox steps down from the carriage with the kind of care that comes from not wanting to ruin good boots on wet stone. The rain is steady and inconsiderate. The fog presses low across the courtyard like it has something to prove. She draws a slow breath through it and immediately regrets the decision.
She crosses into the court with quiet purpose when a figure steps into her path. Red hair. Damp. Familiar in the way minor inconveniences tend to be. At first, the face means nothing. Then she reaches.
Brinette's mind opens without resistance, offering the answer immediately and with more enthusiasm than the situation warrants.
Edrin. A page. Young, loyal, the sort of person who still believed those two qualities were virtues.
Nox adjusts her posture without thinking, borrowing Brinette's habits like an ill-fitting coat.
The lowered chin. The softened expression.
The particular way the girl held herself, as though the world deserved her gentleness.
It didn’t, but Edrin didn't need to know that.
"My lady." He says it with that hopeful tone people use when they haven't yet learned that hope is largely decorative. "The king has summoned you. Immediately."
To his chambers. Alone.
A slow, dark interest moves through her, immediate and entirely without apology.
She had not taken him for subtle, and she did not expect gentleness from men like him.
Power like that does not ask. It simply assumes, which she had always found at least honest, if nothing else.
For a brief, pleasant moment she lets herself imagine exactly how that would go — feral, rough, the sort of encounter that left marks and required no conversation afterward.
That, she could work with, especially if he was as attractive as the rumors claimed.
"Now?" she asks, keeping her voice controlled because Brinette would have.
"Yes, my lady." He lingers, which suggests he has more to say and insufficient awareness that she does not care. "Any letters from the princess?"
Brinette's memory supplies the answer readily enough.
No word. Nothing. Nox delivers it with the appropriate softness, watches Edrin's face do something small and quietly devastated, and moves on before she has to witness the rest of it.
He was attached to things that should not matter, and attachment was a problem she had no interest in inheriting along with the girl's mannerisms.
"The king is waiting," he adds, because apparently the conversation required a conclusion.
"I would not keep him," she replies, and moves past before he can think of something else to say.
She reaches again, this time with actual intent, and Brinette's memory answers immediately.
Tables covered in fabric. Arranged with the kind of care that suggested someone nearby had far too much time and far too sincere an investment in color coordination.
Brinette standing there, taking it seriously, treating the whole exercise as though it mattered, as though choosing the right shade of something could constitute an act of kindness.
What would she like? The king would ask, and mean it, which was somehow worse. Not what he wanted. What Asharin would like. As though the question redeemed the situation it was embedded in.
The interest dies quietly, leaving something colder and considerably less entertaining in its place.
She moves through the rest of the memory with the grim efficiency of someone cataloguing damage.
Servants whispering that Asharin had not come willingly.
That she had no choice. That the dinners stretched long and ended in silences nobody was permitted to explain.
Brinette absorbing all of it, feeling appropriately terrible, and then continuing anyway with the quiet persistence of someone who had mistaken guilt for conscience.
Nox had a great deal of patience for cruelty. Very little for cowardice dressed up as helplessness.
Brinette had tried once, to her credit. I would like to see her, she had said, careful and precise. If I am to choose well, it would help to know what she prefers.
No.
Back to the fabric. Back to the careful selections. Back to the performance of consideration without the inconvenience of actually reconsidering anything.
Nox exhales as she walks, the last of her earlier interest gone, replaced with something considerably colder.
A summons for this. Clothing and presentation and control wearing thoughtfulness like a costume, which was honestly more insulting than anything else he could have done. She had expected better. She was not sure why. She should know better than to expect better.
By the time she reaches his chambers the guards step aside without question, the doors open without hesitation, and she walks through carrying Brinette's memories alongside the quiet certainty that whatever performance he expects from her tonight, he has made a spectacular miscalculation in casting.