The room was very quiet.

"I am aware of that," Seralyn said.

"I know you are. I raise it only because I do not know what the answer is, and I would like there to be one before the occasion arises rather than during it."

Seralyn looked at her own reflection. She had spent seven years solving every problem the wings presented. This was the first one for which she did not have even the outline of a solution, and the knowledge of that sat in her chest with a particular quality of weight she did not care to examine too closely.

"I do not know either," she said. It cost her something to say it. Not much. Enough.

Thessaly nodded once. "We will think of something."

"Yes," Seralyn said. "We will."

Neither of them said anything further on the subject.

"You look very well, Your Highness," Thessaly said, after a moment.

Seralyn rose from the chair. In the glass the ivory gown moved with her, its skirts settling back into their clean line the moment she stilled. She looked composed. She looked correct. She looked almost entirely like a woman who was not afraid.

"Thank you, Thessaly," she said, and walked to the door.

The walk from the south tower to the receiving hall took four minutes. It always had. Today it felt like considerably less, which was not a feeling she had any interest in examining.

The receiving hall doors were ahead. Two of her father's household guard stood at either side, straight-backed and expressionless. One caught her eye and inclined his head fractionally. She returned it with the same fraction, set her shoulders, and walked through.

The first thing she saw was her father.

King Orath Duskengrove in a formal setting was a different creature from the man who sat at the family table. He was not a small man in either context, but here he was larger in the way that certain people became larger when observed — every gesture deliberate, every degree of his posture a considered declaration. He stood near the centre of the room speaking with Lord Aldric, and the room organised itself around him.

She was looking at her father, and she was crossing the threshold, and she was composing herself for the position she would take at his right — and then something drew her gaze to the left side of the room, and she found Cassius Halor already watching her.

He was closer than she had expected. Taller than she had estimated from the gallery. He stood with the same quality she had observed from above — not still in the studied way of men performing patience, but settled, as though stillness were simply his natural state and he had never needed to work at it. His eyes were dark and they were on her face with a directness that was not rude and was not performative and was therefore considerably more difficult to dismiss.

She held it for one second. Two.

Then she moved her gaze smoothly to her father, crossed the room at the correct pace, and took her position at his right as though the preceding three seconds had not occurred. Her face was composed. Her hands were loose at her sides. The ivory skirts settled around her without a sound.

She was aware, without looking, that Cassius Halor had not yet looked away.

Her father glanced at her briefly as she took her place. His eyes moved over the ivory gown in the fraction of a second that was all he ever devoted to such things, and she watched him decide, in that same fraction, that it was not worth raising. He returned to Lord Aldric.

Orren materialised at her left shoulder. "You are late," he said, low enough for only her.

"I am precisely on time."

"Mother has been here for ten minutes."

"Then mother was early." She kept her eyes forward. "That is her concern."

Orren was quiet for a moment. "He arrived before us," he said. "All of them did. His entire party was in position before father entered."

"I am aware."

"It speaks well of him."

"It speaks well of someone." She felt, at the periphery of her attention, the particular quality of being observed from across the room. She did not turn toward it. "I have not yet determined if that someone is him."

Orren made a small sound that in a less formal setting would have been a laugh. She did not look at him either.

Her mother stood on her father's left, composed and immaculate in deep green silk — the green she had wanted Seralyn in, worn now as its own quiet statement. Queen Lissavel's eyes found the ivory gown for precisely as long as necessary and then moved elsewhere, and her expression did not change by a single degree, and Seralyn felt the communication land with the accuracy of a thrown blade.

She kept her own expression perfectly still.

The chamberlain was moving toward the centre of the room. The formal introductions were about to begin. In a matter of moments Lord Aldric would speak her name and she would step forward and Cassius Halor would be presented to her at a distance of perhaps three feet, and whatever had passed between them across the width of the room sixty seconds ago would become the business of every pair of eyes present.

She breathed in through her nose, slowly, the way she had learned to breathe when she needed her face to do something her body did not particularly want it to do.

She was ready. She was composed. She was wearing her own gown and she had stretched her wings that morning and she had said aloud that she was not afraid, and if the second time had been less convincing than the first, that was information that belonged to her and Thessaly and no one else in this room.

Lord Aldric cleared his throat.

"Your Majesty," he said. "May I present Young Lord Cassius Halor of House Halor, son and heir to Lord Matthias Halor, Chief Advisor to His Majesty King Bravar Carath of Drevorn."