He was standing by the fire, not near the bed, one glass in each hand. He extended one toward her. She crossed the room and took it. Their fingers did not touch. He stepped back to a comfortable distance and looked at her.

She looked back.

The fire settled. A candle on the mantle guttered in some unfelt draft and steadied again. Neither of them spoke, and the silence accumulated, and she held her wine and waited.

"I am not going to ask that of you," he said.

She held his gaze.

"Not tonight," he said. "Not like this." He looked at his glass briefly and then back at her. "We have known each other for eleven days. That is not enough. Not for me." A pause. "I would prefer to earn it."

The fire made a sound. Somewhere below the window the city was quiet.

She looked at him — at his face, which was as composed and direct as it always was, the plain fact of what he had said sitting between them without decoration.

"That is not the expectation," she said carefully.

"I am aware of what the expectation is." He took a drink of his wine. "The expectation was arranged without consulting either of us. I see no reason to be governed by it in this."

She said nothing immediately. She looked at the fire. She thought about Lady Vethena saying you can see it, and Cassius turning to include her in the Fareth conversation without being asked, and his thumb moving once across her knuckle during the cord binding, brief and deliberate. She thought about eleven days of corridors and shared meals and the distance he had kept, which he had apologised for today, in a whisper, facing a priest.

"And if I had wished otherwise," she said.

He looked at her for a moment, direct and unhurried. "You are not difficult to look at, Seralyn," he said. "If you had wished otherwise, I would not have found it a hardship." A pause, brief and without apology. "I am choosing this. I want to be clear about that. It is a choice, not an absence."

The room was very quiet.

She looked at him. She looked at the fire. She took a drink of her wine, which was very good, and set the glass down on the table between them with a precision that was mostly steadiness and partly something else she was not going to examine.

"You are not concerned," she said, "with what people will assume."

"No one will ask me," he said. "And you are not obligated to tell anyone anything."

She turned the glass in her hands once. He was watching her without impatience, without expectation, simply present in the room the way he was present in most rooms — occupying exactly the space he was in and no more.

"Sit down," she said. "If you would like."

He sat. She sat across from him, and the fire was between them, and outside the window the city was quiet and the sea was somewhere in the dark doing what it always did.

She looked at him for a moment. There was a great deal she did not know about this man. There was a great deal she was not yet prepared to offer him in return. But she was sitting here, and the night was long, and she had spent the whole of the day being managed and arranged and observed, and she wanted, for whatever remained of this evening, simply to talk.

"Tell me about your sister," she said.

He looked at her. Then he settled back in the chair and began.

His sister's name was Elia. She was twenty-one and had been, according to Cassius, constitutionally incapable of punctuality since approximately the age of four, when she had arrived late to her own naming ceremony and their mother had taken it as an omen and been correct. She read everything she could reach and had opinions that arrived before she did and stayed longer. She had once argued a visiting scholar into a full retreat over a point of Drevornian agricultural history and then apologised so thoroughly afterward that the scholar had come back the next day specifically to continue the argument, which she had considered a victory on both fronts.

Seralyn listened. She asked questions — practical ones, specific ones, the kind that required real answers. What did she read. What did she argue about. Was she close with their mother, their father. Cassius answered each one with the same directness he brought to everything, and somewhere in the asking and the answering she noticed that the glass in her hand had been refilled at some point without her registering it, and that the candles had burned lower, and that the fire had settled from its earlier height into something quieter and steadier.

"She will like you," he said, at some point.

"You cannot know that."

"I can estimate." He looked at her across the fire. "She will try to argue with you. Within the first week. She does it with everyone she respects. If she does not argue with you, that is when you should be concerned."

"And if I argue back."

"Then she will follow you around for a month," he said. "I speak from experience."

She looked at him. "Do you argue with her."

"Constantly," he said. "She is usually right. I find it extremely irritating."

She felt her mouth shift. She brought it back under governance and looked at the fire. "And yet you told me about it."

"It seemed relevant," he said. "You are going to live in the same house."

She considered this. The fire. The wine. The candle on the far table burning lower than the rest. Outside, the sea, invisible and constant.

"I have three brothers," she said. "Orren argues with me occasionally and concedes immediately, which is more frustrating than not arguing at all. Coryn does not argue so much as physically collide with every surface in a room until something gives way. Emric does not argue. He simply waits until you have finished and then explains, very quietly, exactly where you went wrong."

Cassius looked at her. "Which one is most like you."

She did not answer immediately. She looked at the fire and thought about it with the seriousness it deserved. "Emric," she said, finally. "Though he is kinder about it than I am."

"You are not unkind," he said.

She looked at him. "You have known me for eleven days."

"Yes," he said. "I have been paying attention."

The room was quiet. She did not know what to do with that, so she looked at the last of her wine and then set the glass down and looked at the candle on the far table, which was very close to its end.

"It is late," she said.

"It is," he said.

She rose. He rose. They stood on opposite sides of the fire for a moment, and she thought that she had walked into this room an hour ago braced for something entirely different, and that what had actually happened was that she had sat by a fire and talked, and that this was either a very small thing or not small at all and she did not yet know which.

There was a brief, entirely functional exchange about which side of the bed she preferred, and he said he had no preference, and she chose the left because she had always slept on the left, and then the candles were out and the fire had settled to embers and the room was dark and quiet and she was lying on her back looking at the ceiling.

"Cassius," she said.

"Yes."

"Thank you."

A pause. The embers shifted. "You are welcome," he said.

She closed her eyes. The binding was still on — there had been no way to manage it, not tonight, not with everything that tonight had been, and so she lay with the familiar pressure of it and listened to the fire and thought that eleven days was not very long, and that three weeks on a horse was a very long time, and that she did not know this man and was beginning, with some caution and more interest than she had anticipated, to want to.

It was, she decided, not the worst thing.