The room was small. That was the first thing — smaller than she had anticipated, though she had not anticipated much beyond the word Cassius had used. Basic. It was basic in the way that things were basic when the person describing them had spent their life in a keep built for function and not impression. There was a bed, a washstand, a chair, a narrow window through which the last of the evening light was thinning to nothing. A fire had been laid and lit. The liniment was already on the table beside the washstand, which meant Cassius's steward was efficient or had been given very clear instructions, and she suspected both.

Thessaly closed the door behind them.

Seralyn took three steps toward the bed, stopped, and said: "May the gods have mercy."

Thessaly looked at her.

"Do not," Seralyn said.

"I was not going to say anything."

"You were composing something."

"I was not." Thessaly set her bag down and moved to the washstand to check the water. "Sit. Before you fall."

"I am not going to fall."

"Sit anyway."

She sat, which was its own small ordeal — the chair catching her at an angle that made the muscles along her left hip register a very specific objection. She breathed through it. The fire was warm and the room smelled of old stone and pine resin from the logs, and she sat with her hands in her lap and felt, comprehensively, every hour of the day.

Thessaly came to her and began working the fastenings of her cloak without being asked. Her hands were efficient and quiet.

"The bath is cold," Thessaly said. "There was not enough time to heat more water. I am sorry."

"It does not matter."

"It will help regardless. Cold is better than nothing for the muscles."

"I know." She let the cloak be taken from her. "I am not complaining."

"You swore at the gods."

"That was not a complaint. That was an observation."

Thessaly said nothing to this. She moved behind her and began on the riding jacket, working the buttons from the collar down. Seralyn sat still and looked at the fire and allowed herself, in this room with no one watching, to simply feel how tired she was. It was not a dramatic tiredness. It was thorough. It had settled into her bones somewhere around the fifth hour and had not left.

The jacket came away. The blouse beneath it. Thessaly worked with the same careful efficiency she always brought to this — no unnecessary commentary, no false brightness. She knew when Seralyn needed quiet and she provided it without being asked, which was one of the things Seralyn valued most about her and had never found a way to say.

The riding trousers were the worst of it. Getting them off required a degree of movement that her hips declined to participate in gracefully, and she made a sound she was not proud of somewhere in the middle of it, and Thessaly steadied her by the elbow without comment and helped work them the rest of the way down.

She stood in her shift beside the washstand and looked at the basin of cold water.

"In," Thessaly said.

It was a cloth bath — the room had no tub — and it was cold, and it was exactly what was needed even if needed and wanted were two entirely different things. Thessaly worked methodically, wringing the cloth and applying it to the worst of it — the long muscles of her thighs, the small of her back, her hips. The cold made her breath come short. After a few minutes her body stopped arguing with it and simply accepted it, and then it began, incrementally, to help.

When it was done Thessaly dried her and reached for the liniment.

"Cassius's steward sent it," Seralyn said.

"I know. I sent word ahead at the midday stop." She opened the jar. It smelled sharp and medicinal and faintly of something resinous she could not identify. "This will be unpleasant for a moment."

It was. She breathed through it. Thessaly applied it with the same careful precision she applied to everything, and after the initial unpleasantness there was a warmth that spread outward from each point of contact and loosened something that had been locked tight since the third hour of the afternoon. She let out a slow breath.

"Better," she said.

"Good." Thessaly recapped the jar and set it aside. She lifted the nightgown from the bed — plain, warm, well-made — and held it ready. "Arms up."

The nightgown settled over her. Seralyn smoothed it at the waist and looked at herself briefly in the small glass above the washstand. She looked tired. That was accurate.

"The binding," Thessaly said, already moving toward her bag.

"Yes. Put it back on."

Thessaly stopped. She turned. "Your Highness."

"I am aware of what I said."

A pause. Thessaly's expression did not change precisely, but something in it shifted — a recalibration, careful and private. "He has already — that is, I had assumed that the first night —"

"Put it back on, Thessaly."

Another pause. Shorter this time. Thessaly moved to her bag and retrieved the linen strips without further comment. She was too loyal and too perceptive to press it, and the question she was not asking sat in the room between them for exactly as long as it took her to begin the first wrap.

The pressure returned in increments. Seralyn breathed through it — different from the liniment, familiar in a way the liniment was not. By the last wrap it was simply the permanent condition of her existence again.

"There," Thessaly said. She stepped back and looked at her with the expression she wore when she had decided something was not her business. "You look well."

"I look exhausted."

"You look well for someone exhausted." She gathered the riding clothes from the floor and folded them over the chair. "I will be just down the hall. Send word if you need anything in the night."

"I will not need anything."

"Send word regardless." She picked up her bag. At the door she paused, and looked back, and for a moment her expression was something other than composed. "Goodnight, Your Highness."

"Goodnight, Thessaly."

The door closed.