The riding clothes arrived the evening before departure, after Seralyn was already asleep.

Thessaly set them out the following morning on the dressing chair without comment, which was her version of comment when she had opinions she had decided not to lead with. A blouse in dark cream, well-made and practical. Fitted riding trousers in a deep charcoal wool. Tall boots with a modest heel, already broken in by someone at Cassius's instruction — that detail had been noted in the accompanying message from his steward, and Seralyn had read it twice before setting it down. A cloak, heavy and dark, with a deep hood. Leather gloves.

She looked at all of it for a moment.

"He sent the measurements ahead," Thessaly said. "Before the wedding. He retrieved them from the seamstress's records, apparently."

"I see."

"They will fit."

"I have no doubt." She picked up the trousers and examined the cut. They were well made. That was not the problem. "Have you seen the route?"

"I have seen what the steward shared with the household staff." Thessaly moved to the wardrobe and began the work of sorting what was to be packed and what was to be left behind. "Three weeks, he estimates. Possibly less if the weather holds."

Three weeks on a horse. Seralyn set the trousers down.

She was not a poor rider. She wanted to be precise about that, at least in the privacy of her own assessment. She had been taught correctly, had ridden throughout her adolescence, and could manage a horse without incident or embarrassment. What she could not do was ride for six or eight hours a day across three weeks of variable terrain without arriving at the other end of each day feeling as though she had been taken apart and incorrectly reassembled. That was not a skill she possessed. It was not a skill anyone had ever considered she might need.

He had told her, in fact. That was the honest accounting of it. He had come to her in the library four days before the wedding with the directness she had come to recognize as his default mode when he had something to say that he did not expect to be well received, and he had told her that the return journey would be made on horseback. The terrain between Aelundra and Drevorn did not accommodate carriages reliably past the Selvar crossing, he had explained. The roads through the upland country were not roads in any sense the Solathis would recognize — they were tracks, some of them, and in early autumn they could be soft enough that a carriage's wheels would be sunk to the axle within half a day. He had apologized. It had been a genuine apology, straightforward and without decoration, and she had told him she understood, and she did understand, and neither of those things made the prospect easier to inhabit.

What she had not told him was that her experience of riding amounted to pleasant circuits of the Solathis grounds on well-mannered horses over surfaces that had never once threatened to swallow a wheel. She had not told him because it had not seemed relevant at the time and because there had been a wedding to get through and because she was not in the habit of volunteering information about her own limitations to people she had known for less than a fortnight.

She pulled the blouse on over her head and worked it down into place.

It was well made. She had already conceded this. It sat close through the shoulders and the waist in the way that riding clothes were required to sit, and she stood in front of the glass and looked at herself with the detached assessment she applied to most things and thought: this is fine. She was a grown woman. She had a figure. These were not new facts.

The trousers were the more honest garment of the two.

She put them on, worked the buttons at the waist, and stood back.

The wool sat against her hips and thighs with exactly the degree of candor she had anticipated. There was nothing wrong with them. They fit correctly. They were simply not a gown, and the difference between what a gown communicated and what these communicated was the difference between a closed door and an open window.

"Well," she said.

Thessaly, behind her, said nothing for a moment. Then: "You look extremely well."

"That is not what I asked."

"You did not ask anything."

"I was about to."

"The answer is still extremely well." Thessaly came to stand beside her and examined the fit with the critical eye of someone whose professional investment in Seralyn's presentation was both genuine and considerable. "The blouse sits correctly over the binding. There is no visible line. No suggestion of anything underneath."

That, at least, was the important question answered. Seralyn turned slightly and checked the angle in the glass. Thessaly was right — the binding was invisible. The blouse was cut full enough through the back to account for it without pulling.

She looked at the rest of herself.

"He is going to see me like this every day for three weeks," she said.

"He is your husband," Thessaly said. "That is, generally speaking, the arrangement."

"I am aware of the arrangement."

"Then I am not certain what the concern is."

Seralyn said nothing immediately. She turned back to face front and looked at the woman in the glass — the riding clothes, the good boots set beside the chair, the cloak on its hook. She looked capable. She looked, if she was being fair about it, rather well. She also looked like someone who had spent her adult life moving through the world in gowns cut for a specific kind of presence, and who was about to spend three weeks in wool trousers on the back of a horse in front of a man whose opinion she had not yet decided she cared about and strongly suspected she was beginning to.

"The concern," she said, "is nothing in particular."

Thessaly met her eyes in the glass. "Of course," she said, in the tone that meant the opposite.

Seralyn reached for the cloak.