CHAPTER 21 - RULES OF THE ROOM
Sleep does not come.
It circles me. Teases me. Hovers just out of reach like something that would gladly take me if only I were foolish enough to feel safe.
But safety does not live in this room.
Not in the enormous bed with its dark carved posts and heavy curtains.
Not in the low-burning fire reduced to red embers.
Not in the moonlight stretched thin across stone floors.
And certainly not in the knowledge that the man sleeping or not sleeping somewhere beyond these blankets is the same man entire kingdoms speak of in lowered voices.
I lie on my back at first, then my side, then my other side, trying to find a position where my thoughts do not feel so loud.
The sheets are soft, far softer than anything I slept in at my father's palace, where comfort was often rationed according to legitimacy.
The mattress gives under my weight like a hand trying to soothe me.
It does not work.
Tomorrow court begins again.
Tomorrow the strange, suspended quiet of these three weeks ends.
Tomorrow I return to that terrible throne room where every noble watches with the hungry attention of wolves waiting to see which part of the deer limps first. Tomorrow I must sit beside the king and pretend that I know how to breathe in a room where men are pinned to pillars, threatened with knives, or silenced with a single glance.
Tomorrow I must be queen in public again.
The thought churns restlessly inside me.
And beneath it, quieter but sharper, is another thought.
He will come back eventually.
He always does.
Late. Silent. Like a shadow returning to claim the room after I have already surrendered it.
I stare at the canopy above me until the carved pattern blurs.
Somewhere outside, wind brushes the windows.
The palace settles around me in tiny sounds the old timber hidden beneath stone shifting in the cool of night, the distant muffled echo of a guard's boots, a draft slipping beneath a door somewhere far down the corridor.
Then
The latch turns.
My entire body goes still.
The door opens slowly enough that the sound feels deliberate. Not loud. Not careless. Simply inevitable. A dark shape moves through the doorway and closes it behind him with a quiet click.
Achilles.
I know it from the weight of his steps alone.
They are not hurried. Not cautious. He moves as though every room he enters has already been informed of his arrival and adjusted itself accordingly. The sound of his boots crossing the chamber floor reaches me in slow, measured intervals.
I let my eyes fall shut immediately.
Perhaps if he thinks I am asleep, he will leave me in peace.
It is a childish hope, but I cling to it anyway.
Fabric rustles.
Something wooden opens a drawer, perhaps.
There is the faint metallic knock of objects being set down. Then silence. I count my own breaths, trying to make them seem natural, not too shallow, not too careful. It is astonishing how difficult pretending to sleep becomes when one is terrified.
Water begins to pour somewhere behind the carved bathing screen.
He is bathing.
I remain absolutely still.
The sound of water continues, a low steady splash that should be soothing but is not.
Instead, it heightens my awareness of everything else.
His presence. The room. The distance between the bed and the couch.
The fact that I know the exact place on the floor where he stood the morning he put a dagger to my throat.
I had almost forgotten that for a few hours this afternoon.
Not entirely. Never entirely.
But enough that I walked through the garden and gathered flowers and read books and pretended the palace contained more than fear.
Now memory returns in full.
The glint of steel.
The cold kiss of the blade against my skin.
The look in his eyes before recognition replaced instinct.
I swallow carefully beneath the blanket.
The water stops.
Silence.
Then footsteps return, slower this time, softened perhaps by bare feet or damp skin.
A drawer opens again. Fabric shifts. Another pause.
I picture him somewhere across the room toweling water from his hair, fastening the loose dark clothing he sleeps in, moving with that same unthinking authority he brings into court. It makes my pulse stumble.
The couch creaks softly under his weight.
A breath leaves me before I can stop it.
Too relieved. Too obvious.
I hope he does not hear it.
I wait.
One heartbeat. Two. Ten.
If I remain still long enough, perhaps he will think I truly slept through all of it.
Perhaps
"I know you're not sleeping."
The words cut through the dark so suddenly that I jolt hard enough to nearly tangle myself in the sheets.
I sit upright at once.
"I'm sorry!"
The apology bursts out of me before my mind can catch up. "I didn't mean to disturb you, I just—I wasn't—"
His sigh sounds like a blade dragged slowly across stone.
"You don't need to pretend."
The moonlight coming through the tall windows catches him only in fragments.
He sits on the couch with one arm stretched along the back, the other braced on his knee.
The scars on the right side of his face look deeper at night, all ridge and shadow.
His expression is unreadable in the dimness except for the tired irritation that seems to live permanently around his mouth.
"I wasn't pretending," I say, then immediately hear how false it sounds.
One dark eyebrow lifts.
I falter.
"I mean—I—"
"You were." His voice is flat. Certain. "Badly."
Heat rises into my face despite the chill in my hands.
"I'm sorry."
Another sigh.
"Stop apologizing."
The command is not raised. That somehow makes it worse.
I nod quickly. "I'm sorry, Maj—"
His eyes narrow.
I stop.
He rises from the couch in one fluid motion and crosses to the cabinet near the window.
My body tightens automatically as he moves.
He opens the doors, retrieves a dark bottle and two glasses, then returns.
The firelight, low as it is, flashes briefly across the glass as he pours.
Red wine glimmers like something much darker.
He walks to the side of the bed.
I grip the blanket harder.
He extends one of the glasses toward me.
For a second I can only stare at it.
At him.
At his hand.
At the deep red liquid moving softly inside the crystal.
I do not reach for it.
He notices, of course.
Nothing escapes him. That is perhaps the most frightening thing about him how little one can hide while he appears half-bored and wholly uninterested.
He takes the glass, lifts it, and drinks from it without breaking eye contact.
Then he lowers it slightly.
"See," he says, his tone dry and roughened by exhaustion, "it's not poisoned."
The words are absurd enough that under any other circumstances they might have made me smile.
Instead they only remind me how very possible poisoning must be in a life like his if that joke occurs to him so naturally.
My fingers tremble as I finally take the offered glass.
The stem is cool and smooth beneath my hand. I sip very carefully. The wine is rich and sharp, warmer than I expect, and stronger. It spreads through me quickly, loosening some of the tension in my chest but not enough.
"Thank you," I whisper. "Your Majesty."
He shuts his eyes briefly and rubs the heel of his hand over his brow.
"We need rules," he says.
My back straightens instinctively.
"Yes, Your Maj—"
His head turns.
"Stop."
The single word freezes in the air.
I stop.
"That," he says, pointing at me with the hand holding his glass, "is one of the rules."
My throat tightens. "I don't understand."
"The 'Your Majesty' nonsense." He gestures lazily around the room. "In court, fine. In front of the nobles, fine. In here, no."
I blink.
No?
He seems to read the confusion on my face and look more irritated by it.
"In this room," he says slowly, as though speaking to someone much younger than she has any right to be, "you use my name."
The room seems to go quieter around that sentence.
His name.
Just like that.
As if names are harmless things.
As if saying Achilles in private won't feel like stepping barefoot onto a blade.
I wet my lips. "I..."
His expression hardens slightly.
"Do not make me repeat myself."
My pulse jumps. "Yes."
He waits.
I understand.
The word feels awkward and dangerous in my mouth.
"Yes... Achilles."
Something unreadable flickers across his face. Satisfaction, perhaps. Or merely relief that he no longer has to listen to another title from me before midnight.
He takes another drink of wine and moves away, settling himself not on the couch but on the broad windowsill where the moonlight reaches him more clearly.
One boot rests against the stone, one arm folded loosely across his middle, the glass hanging low in the other hand.
He looks less like a husband than a king taking inventory of a conquered room.
"Tomorrow court resumes," he says.
"Yes."
"And tomorrow you stop behaving like a startled rabbit every time someone breathes near you."
The words sting, not because they are false but because they are true.
I lower my gaze to the wine.
He continues.
"When we are in court, you may disagree with me all you like." His voice is cool. Measured. "You may hate every word I say. You may think me cruel, stupid, unreasonable, whatever else you've probably already decided."
I am suddenly very interested in the rim of my glass.
"But you are not to show it," he says.
I look up.
His expression has sharpened.
"I do not care what your feelings are," he continues, "as long as the court never sees a divide between us.
They will look for one. They will hope for one.
The moment they believe they can place a crack between the throne and the queen's seat, they will drive knives into it until the whole structure splits. "
A shiver moves down my spine.
"I understand."
"Good." He studies me for another second. "If you need something, ask."
I almost laugh from nerves, but catch it before it forms.
"Do not sit there starving yourself because you think speaking might irritate me," he says. "Do not lie and say you are not tired when you've clearly been awake half the night. Do not pretend to be asleep because you're afraid I'll be inconvenienced by consciousness."
My cheeks heat.
"I wasn't—"
His look stops me.
"Yes," I say softly. "I understand."
"And stop being so jumpy."
That is harder.
"I'm trying."
"If I truly wanted to hurt you," he says, with that same terrible calm he uses for everything, "you would know."
The words settle heavily in the room.
I believe him.
That is the problem.
He says such things as facts, not threats. Facts are harder to argue with.
I nod because my throat feels too tight to do anything else.
"Good."
He drains half his glass and then regards me over the rim. The moonlight catches in his scar and makes the healed flesh gleam silver at the edges.
Then he says, "In this room, you may speak freely."
I blink.
"Within reason," he adds.
Immediately my mind begins trying to calculate what within reason means to a man who pins nobles to walls and throws daggers without looking.
He sees the calculation happening and sighs.
"Do not overthink it."
I almost say How?
I do not.
"If you want to ask something," he says, "ask."
Then he falls quiet.
The room goes still around the invitation.
He is waiting.
I know he is waiting because his gaze does not leave me, and because for all his laziness in posture there is an alertness in him that never fades, not even here, not even now. He can feel silence the way other men feel changes in temperature.
I lower my eyes, then raise them again, then lower them once more.
The courage it takes to ask him anything at all feels absurdly large.
My voice, when it comes, is barely above a whisper.
"How old are you?"
He doesn't answer at first.
Instead he pushes himself off the windowsill and crosses to the bed. My pulse leaps. He sits on the very edge, not close enough to touch me, but close enough that the mattress dips under his weight and reminds me how large he is, how easily his presence changes the shape of space.
"You mumble," he says. "I can hear you. You don't need to speak like you're confessing to murder."
I force myself to look at him.
"How old are you?" I ask again, a little louder.
"Thirty-two."
The answer comes easily.
Then his head tilts.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-six."
He pauses.
Actually pauses.
The surprise on his face is subtle, but it is there.
"Twenty-six?"
"Yes."
"I thought you were younger."
I frown before I can stop myself. "Why?"
"The way you behave." His eyes move over me in open assessment. "I assumed nineteen. Maybe twenty."
The words strike deeper than they should.
"I'm sorry if my behavior gave the wrong impression."
His expression changes very slightly not softer, exactly, but less cutting.
"I don't care about your age," he says. "If anything, I prefer it."
My confusion must show because he adds, "The younger ones were easier for the court to move around like pieces on a board."
The younger ones.
His former wives.
The dead queens.
The room cools around those unspoken names.
He says it so matter-of-factly, as if remembering weather from a different season.
I tighten my fingers around the glass.
Then he looks at me again, still waiting, still patient in his own unnerving way.
"What else?" he asks.
The question hangs between us.
And despite the fear, despite everything, I realize this is the longest conversation we have ever had.