In my room, I peel off the day like a sticker.

Face wash. Ponytail. Pajama top that claims I like mornings. The window rattles once, considering rain, and decides against it. The dorm breathes through the walls: a laugh down the hall, a kettle clicking off, someone’s music turned low.

I climb into bed and exhale long enough to feel my body remember how to be a body.

Me: home✅

Geon-woo: good. hydrate.

Me: sir yes sir

Geon-woo: also eat a real breakfast tomorrow

Me: define real

Geon-woo: not coffee

Me: rude. [sends 🥊]

Geon-woo: [sends 🛡️]

I stare at the tiny shield too long for a sane person and then put the phone face down like it might tell on me.

My calves still hum with phantom canter. My palms remember leather that isn’t here. When I close my eyes, the darkness isn’t empty—it’s textured, like fabric in a museum you aren’t allowed to touch.

And that’s the problem.

The dream didn’t fade like dreams are supposed to. It didn’t dissolve into nonsense and morning breath. It stayed.

It stayed in my muscles. It stayed in my pulse. It stayed in the way my chest lifts when I think of cold stone corridors and candlelight and a meadow washed in silver.

I tell myself, as if saying it will make it harmless, “It was just a dream.”

A really good one.

Too good.

And maybe—this is the part I don’t say out loud because it sounds insane even inside my own room—maybe that’s why I keep finding it. Maybe that’s why my brain opens that door so easily now. Not because I’m lost.

Because I’m choosing it.

Because there, in that place that should not belong to me, I feel… unafraid in a way I can’t replicate here.

Because the person I am in the dream stands straighter.

Breathes deeper.

Lives.

I swallow hard, the emotion sharp and stupid.

“So let’s hope tonight is as good as last night,” I whisper to the ceiling, as if I’m bargaining with the dark.

I set my phone face down. Alarms, plural. I turn on my side and listen to the dorm breathe, listen to Seoul sigh beyond the glass.

Sleep walks up and knocks politely.

This time, I don’t pretend I’m reluctant.

I open the door.

The dream opens like a door I forgot I owned.

Cool air slips under my cloak; candles gutter in alcoves like they’re telling secrets. A bell counts the hour somewhere beyond the chapel. Three, four, I can’t tell. Sound moves differently here. I step into a corridor carved of pale stone and feel that little click inside me, the one that says home when it has no right.

“Demoiselle!”

Elise appears as if the wall decided to be generous. Her cap is slightly askew, illegal in her personal code, her eyes wide with relief that flashes into worry.

“Ah...” She catches herself, softens her voice. “Mademoiselle de Vervaux. You are...” Her gaze skims my face, counting color, light, breath. “... Well?”

“Well.” I echo, smiling. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because you have not come out for a fortnight,” she blurts, then claps a hand to her mouth as if she’s dropped a plate. “Forgive me. I mean, your headaches… they said you were resting. In prayer.”

A fortnight.

My body says last night. My hands would still smell like noraebang microphones and barbecue smoke that the dream politely edits into beeswax and bread.

“Two weeks?” I say too lightly. “It hardly feels like it.”

Elise peers at me from beneath her lashes, suspicious of time and women both. “We were worried,” she whispers. “Monsieur Richard most of all.”

Of course he was. Dawn comes to mind: a meadow silver with mist, my mare’s ears flicking, my brother’s voice like math.

“I’m well.” I tell her, and tuck a stray curl back under her cap just to see her blush. “Truly.”

She presses her lips together, deciding to accept the lie for the pleasure of it.

“The knights train in the lower yard,” she offers, conspirator and servant both. “Monsieur Étienne is with them. The Chevalier also.”

The Chevalier. The word lights in my ribs and stays.

“Thank you.” I say, and slip past her before she can fetch sense to put in my pocket.

The gallery above the training yard is a rib cage of arches. I slide behind a tapestry where saints hunt lions with patience and pity, and peer down through a slit into a world built out of noise: the thud of boots, the clap of wood on wood, the short, gruff commands of men who measure time in drills.

Sun has found the yard and stays there, caught between walls. Men move in pairs, bind, press, yield, retreat. Breath pluming, sweat darkening linen. The air is leather and dust. A boy drops his guard and takes a whack to the shoulder that will bloom purple by supper; he bites back the yelp because boys who wish to be men learn early about swallowing pain.

And then him.

The Chevalier de Clairmont, Jean, though some stubborn part of my mind still wants to call him Shawn, doesn’t so much stand as occupy. He’s bareheaded today, hair too long for court fashions, far too handsome for my peace. He moves like a decision, no flourish, no noise, just clean lines that the eye wants to trace. He corrects a stance with two fingers on a spine. He turns a squire’s wrist and the blade that was wrong becomes right. He demonstrates a bind-withdrawal with the inevitability of gravity. When he laughs, once, brief and carved thin, a boy finds his courage again.

A squire charges him too hard and too high. The Chevalier slides inside the blow as if folding into weather and taps the boy’s throat with his wooden blade, gentle enough not to bruise, precise enough to teach.

“Your guard is not a confession.” He says. His voice carries up to me with infuriating clarity. “It is a promise. Keep it.”

He steps back, gives the yard a slow sweep, counting, cataloguing, strategist and shepherd. His gaze lifts to the gallery, skims over the arches, and stops with the certainty of a hawk.

On me.

My heart has the bad manners to throw itself at my ribs. I plaster myself to a tapestry saint and consider learning to dissolve.

His head tilts. For a beat I am not in a castle. I am on a city street, caught staring at a stranger who has decided not to pretend he didn’t notice. Then he says, quiet enough only his nearest men hear, “Continue.” and hands his blade to a squire.

I scramble away from the slit, gather a handful of gown, and flee as gracefully as someone fleeing in silk can. I choose a corridor that pretends to be private and finds, instead, a landing of light. He is already there.

Of course he is. He is the sort of man who finds the shortest line between two points and then improves it.

“Mademoiselle de Vervaux...” he says, and bows, exact, correct. Up close, his eyes are darker than the leather at his wrists, and there’s a salt-white nick at the edge of his lower lip I did not earn, which feels unfair.

“Chevalier.” I answer, striving for the kind of cool that belongs in a glass cabinet.

“Spying,” He observes. Not accusation, but taxonomy.

“Observing.” I correct, which is spying after a bath.

“From behind a tapestry.”

“Saints and I have similar hobbies.”

He looks as if he could smile if his job description allowed it.

“You have been absent,” he says instead. “A fortnight and two days, to be exact.”

Two days, too. My heart fumbles. “Have I?” My dreams seems connected but always have some random time between.

He studies me, and I have the stupid urge to check if my hair is doing something flattering.

“Have you been unwell?” he asks. “There were… reports.”

“Headaches.” I say, because Elise gave me the script. “Prayer.”

He says nothing for a moment, and everything in his nothing suggests he is cataloguing the lie and filing it under later.

“The training yard is not safe for noblewomen.” He says, returning us to law. “Splinters fly. Blades… sometimes slip.”

“Men sometimes slip.” I say. “Blades go where hands tell them.”

“Men with blades,” he says dryly, “are a category you should treat with respect, Mademoiselle.”

My French wants to be rude, I sit on it.

“Forgive me,” I say, carefully formal. “Pardonnez-moi, Chevalier. I meant no insult.”

He inclines his head, acknowledgment and acceptance in one.

“If you wish to watch, there is a balcony over the north wall where the angle is safe. Ask a maid. Do not… lurk in an archer’s slit.”

“Archer’s slit?” I echo, delighted. “How romantic.”

“Only until someone uses it.” He replies, bland as water.

I should go. I don’t. The corridor is made of shadow and sun and the quiet hum of people doing their work. He smells like leather, like horse, like clean sweat and a breath of iron. His presence rearranges the space the way a table does when you move it back to where it belonged all along.

“You have a way of appearing when one misbehaves.” I say, too lightly.

“I prefer to appear before.” he says. “But you keep me… busy.”

“Annoyed?” I ask.

“Employed.” He corrects.

I let a smile happen, small and private.

“My brother intends to ride with me soon. In the south meadow. Again at dawn.”

One of his eyebrows considers this. “Does he.”

“He intends to judge me.” I say. “Not teach.”

“For once,” he says, and something like approval warms his voice. “Sensible.”

We stand there, two people pretending we aren’t looking. He glances down the stair as if he can see the yard through stone.

“If you will insist on observing,” he says, “come. The drill after next is clean work. You might even find it… instructive.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“It is a compromise with reality.”

“Then I accept.”

He offers his arm the way men do when they are being polite to trouble. I set my hand to the leather at his sleeve and the contact is nothing, a form, a thing no one could remark on.

My skin does not care for facts. It remembers.

He leads me through a door I would not have noticed and out onto the north balcony, a shelf of stone with a waist-high parapet and a view that drops into the yard like a decision. A page hovers three paces behind us, officially chaperone, effectively invisible.

Below, wooden blades clap again. The Chevalier rests his forearms on the stone and calls down, voice cutting the air into obedient pieces.

“Measure. Not heroics. On my Count, un, deux, trois.”

Pairs shift, settlings and resets. He nods.

“Now, bind. Feel the line. do not invent it. Yield. Answer. Again.”

He doesn’t look at me as he speaks, but I feel addressed anyway. The men move, and what had been noise becomes… language. My breath matches their rhythm without permission. I can see, oddly, the invisible thread between each pair, the give and take, the ways of not dying dressed as choreography.

A younger squire lunges too far. The Chevalier steps to the edge of the balcony, projects without shouting. “Stop. You are giving away your center. Do you wish to live?”

“No, Chevalier.” the boy blurts, then goes red. “I mean, yes.”

“Then keep the truth of your body,” he says. “Do not tell lies with your weight.”

“Do not tell lies with your weight,” I murmur, tasting it.

He hears me, though he shouldn’t at this distance.

“You took the chestnut too fast last time.” He says without looking sideways. “You told me a lie with your speed that your balance could not defend.”

I tilt my head, oddly pleased he noticed, oddly annoyed he noticed. “You recognized me from the gallery.” I say.

He lets the silence answer: Of course.

We watch. The drill shifts into a controlled exchange. Three beats, trade, three beats, stop. Controlled violence looks almost like prayer. When two blades catch just wrong and a splinter flies, it arcs toward the wall below us and kisses stone instead of skin. He gives me a look that says, See?

“Thank you,” I say, formal again. “For the safer view.”

“I prefer my charges unbloodied.” He says.

“Am I a charge?”

“Until you marry.” He says, and the word hangs like a coin thrown in a well, making no sound when it lands. “After which you will be someone else’s problem.”

My laugh is not kind. “How cheerful.”

“It is order.” He says. “It does not require your consent to exist.”

“It may have to.” I say softly, and beneath us a squire finds his stance and holds it and a tiny thing inside me stands straighter in sympathy.

He glances at me then, properly, as if he heard something other than my words. The look is brief. It lands anyway.

The drill ends. Men stumble into lines, panting, grinning, knuckles bruised, happy in the way only tired and useful makes you. He hands the count to his serjeant with two words and turns toward the stair.

“Wait.” I say, surprising both of us. “You said, two weeks.”

“And two days.” He confirms.

“It felt like… a night.” The truth slips out, dressed as confusion. “I dreamed of this place yesterday.” I was here. “Now everyone speaks as if I left you waiting.”

For a heartbeat his face is open in a particular way, curiosity with its hand on the hilt. Then the shutters close.

“Time is untidy in houses this size.” He says mildly. “News walks as fast as feet allow. Perhaps your chamber curtains were drawn too long. Perhaps a migraine. Perhaps rumor.”

“Perhaps.” I say. The lie is friendly enough to pass for a guest.

“Do not vanish so thoroughly again.” He adds, almost as an afterthought. “It makes people… inefficient.”

“People?”

He doesn’t spare me the dignity of pretending he means someone else.

“Your brother. Your maid. The boy who sweeps the yard and cannot be convinced you did not die.”

“I will try.” I say, and then because the words rise uninvited: “Do not… ride into anything fatal while I’m reckless elsewhere.”

The flicker at the corner of his mouth is not permission to flirt. It is also not not that.

“I do not make a habit of fatal.”

He leaves me with a brief bow, which somehow feels like more than if he had kissed my hand, and descends into his work.

I stay. I watch the yard breathe men back into themselves. I lean on the stone until my elbows memorize it. The page pretends to be a statue and is paid accordingly.

“Annabel!”

Philippe materializes at my hip like mischief on legs, cheeks pink, hair a bramble. He is out of breath with not running.

“You are out,” he announces, both accusation and celebration. “Everyone lied and said you were praying forever.”

“Only a very long prayer.” I say gravely. “For peace and patience.”

“You don’t have any.” he says, approving. “Can we see the colts after supper?”

“If you use both hands at table.” I bargain.

“Both?” He is scandalized. “All of them?”

“All of them,” I decree.

He eyes the yard, then me.

“You missed a lot.” He says, ruthless in the way of little brothers. “Two weeks is forever.”

“Is it,” I murmur, and my bones, Annabel’s bones, ask, How long passes when my eyes are closed?

Philippe tugs my sleeve.

“Come before anyone sees,” he whispers. “We’ll go the stairs only I know.”

I let him lead me, because love looks like following sometimes, and the gallery gives us up to a narrower stair that smells like stone thinking.

Somewhere far away, an alarm will become morning, and I will wake to a room that believes in clocks. Here, sunlight lays a warm palm on the yard, and a knight looks up only once, to the empty balcony, and then back to his work.