Across the hall, Emric was engaged in what appeared to be a detailed conversation with the centrepiece arrangement nearest his seat — or possibly with the young page standing beside it, who looked equally uncertain about the exchange. She watched him for a moment. He gestured at something. The page nodded carefully.

"Your youngest brother," Cassius said, beside her.

"Yes."

"What is he explaining."

"I cannot tell from here," she said. "Something he considers important. He has two modes — silence and absolute conviction. There is very little between them."

Cassius watched him for a moment. "How old?"

"Thirteen."

A pause. "He will be formidable," he said.

She looked at Emric — at his too-long limbs and his serious face and his complete indifference to whether or not the page was following along. "Yes," she said. "I believe he will."

The candles burned lower. The music quieted. The guests dispersed in the gradual way of a long evening concluding, and her parents retired, and Orren vanished with characteristic efficiency, and the hall thinned around them until it was only the last of the court and the servants moving between the tables and the two of them still at the high table with the remains of the evening around them.

Cassius poured the last of the wine into her glass without asking. She accepted it without commenting on the presumption, which was itself a kind of comment.

"Well," she said.

"Well," he agreed.

She looked at the hall — the flowers beginning to droop at their edges, the candles melted low, the silver catching the last of the light. Her mother's work. Immaculate.

"It was a good feast," she said.

"It was," he said.

She finished her wine. She set the glass down. Somewhere in the palace, in rooms she had not yet entered as a married woman, Thessaly was waiting, and the night was waiting, and everything that came after the night was waiting beyond that in a long unbroken sequence she had decided, somewhere between the fish course and the final toast, to meet directly.

She pushed back her chair.

"Shall we," she said.

Cassius rose. "Yes," he said. "I think we shall."

The escort was waiting in the corridor — two of her father's household guard, who fell into step ahead of them at a distance that was respectful and entirely transparent in its purpose. Seralyn walked at the correct pace. Cassius walked beside her. Their footsteps fell into the same rhythm without either of them adjusting for it, which she noticed and did not comment on.

The palace was quiet at this hour. The corridors they moved through were the ones she had walked every day of her life, and they looked precisely as they always looked — pale stone, high arched ceilings, the particular quality of torchlight in a space built before anyone thought to consider comfort. She knew every turn before it came. She knew the exact place on the third corridor where the stone floor dipped slightly and the unwary caught their heel, and she stepped over it without thinking, and heard Cassius's step adjust a half-beat behind her, which meant he had not known about it and had recovered quickly.

She did not know why she noticed that. She noticed it.

Neither of them spoke. The silence was not uncomfortable — it was simply full, the way silences were when two people were both thinking and had not decided whether what they were thinking was speakable. She was aware of him beside her with the same peripheral awareness she had developed over eleven days, and she was aware of where they were going, and she was aware that the corridor was ending and the next one would bring them to the south tower stair, and that at the top of the south tower stair were her rooms, and that beyond her rooms was the night.

She had spent three weeks not thinking about this. She had been very disciplined about not thinking about it. The discipline had not, she was discovering, made her any more prepared.

They turned onto the south tower stair. The escort followed. Their footsteps changed quality on the spiral stone — closer, more enclosed — and the torches up here were spaced further apart and the light between them was dimmer, and she kept her hand off the wall because she did not need it and because not needing it was the kind of small, private insistence she made on herself when larger insistences were not available.

At the top of the stair the escort stopped, as protocol required. One of them inclined his head. Seralyn returned it. Cassius said nothing. She unlatched the door and went through and he followed, and the door closed behind them, and the escort's footsteps retreated down the stair.

Her rooms had been prepared with the same thoroughness her mother had applied to the hall — candles on every surface, the fire laid and burning, flowers on the windowsill that had not been there this morning. Someone had left wine on the table by the fire. The bed had been made with a precision that made its purpose unmistakable.

Thessaly was waiting inside. So was Cassius's man — Draven, quiet and efficient, who had been with Cassius from Drevorn and whom Seralyn had seen precisely twice before this evening.

Cassius looked at both of them. "Leave us," he said.

Draven went without a word. Thessaly moved toward Seralyn.

"I am perfectly capable of undressing on my own," Seralyn said.

Thessaly stopped. She looked at Seralyn, and then she stepped back and folded her hands. "Your Highness," she said, and went.

The door closed.

The room was very quiet. The fire made small sounds. Outside the window the city was dark, the sea somewhere beyond it, the same sea she had looked at this morning from the window seat in the grey pre-dawn and thought: today.

She stood near the window and did not turn around.

Behind her she heard Cassius cross to the table. The quiet sound of wine being poured — one glass, then two. Then nothing. He did not approach. She was aware of him standing somewhere near the fire, and she was aware of the bed, and she stood at the window and looked at the city lights and breathed.

She had eleven days of knowing this man. Eleven days, and the dismissal of the maids, and the bed behind her, and nothing she had done in eleven days or three months or twenty-five years of careful preparation had produced a single answer to this particular problem that she could use.

She turned around.