Seralyn stood in the small room with the fire and the cold window and the smell of liniment and old stone, and she was alone for the first time since the morning, and she did not know what to do with that. She had been alone every evening of her adult life and had never once found it remarkable. Tonight it had a different quality — temporary.

She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the fire.

She did not have long to wait.

The knock was brief. Cassius did not wait long before the door opened — long enough to be courteous, not long enough to suggest he was uncertain of his welcome in his own room. He was already dressed for bed. Dark linen, plain, practical. He had washed; his hair was damp at the temples. He looked, for the first time since she had known him, slightly less composed than usual — not undone, simply the version of himself that existed when the day's work was finished and there was no performance required of him.

He looked at her.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap and her hair down and the firelight doing things to the room that the daylight did not, and she watched him take her in — a single, unhurried look, the same honest inventory he had given her in the courtyard that morning. It moved over her face, her hair, the set of her shoulders.

Then it moved to her back.

He did not say anything immediately. She watched him notice the line of the binding through the thin linen of her nightgown — the slight rigidity of it, the way it sat differently from fabric alone. His expression did not change exactly, but his attention sharpened and stayed.

"What is that?" he asked.

"A secret," she said. "One I am not ready to share."

He looked at her for a moment. His expression held something that was not suspicion and was not quite confusion — more the look of a man updating an internal picture and finding one of the details did not yet have a category. Then he nodded, once, and let it go.

"All right," he said.

She had expected more. She had braced, without quite realizing it, for more — for the careful diplomatic pressure of a man who had decided he was owed an explanation. He simply crossed to the chair and sat down, and the question folded itself away, and she was left with the peculiar sensation of having prepared for a conversation that had not happened.

He looked at her again. The concern that had been matter-of-fact and logistical on the road was different here — less managed, more direct. He was not hiding it behind practicality.

"How bad is it," he said.

She opened her mouth to say perfectly fine and something in his expression stopped her. He was not asking to be polite. He was not asking because it was the expected question. He was sitting in a chair in a small stone room at the end of a long day and looking at her with the same directness he brought to everything, and there was no audience, and no protocol, and no particular reason to perform anything for him.

"Bad enough," she said.

He nodded. "The liniment will help by morning. The second day is not as difficult as the first, once the body has begun to adjust."

"You said the first day is always the worst."

"It is." A pause. "The second day is merely very bad. There is a distinction."

She looked at him. "That is not especially comforting."

"No," he agreed. "But it is accurate, and I thought you would prefer accuracy."

She would. She did. She looked at the fire and thought that she had been correctly identified in that regard by a man she had known for less than a month, which was either unremarkable or not, and she had not yet decided which.

"The third day is better," he said. "Genuinely. By the end of the first week you will not notice it."

"I will hold you to that."

"You are welcome to." He settled back in the chair. The fire shifted. Outside the window there was nothing — no city noise, no sea, just the dark and the occasional sound of the horses in the yard below. "Is there anything you need. For tonight."

"No." She paused. "The liniment helped. Thank Draven's efficiency."

"I will." A brief pause. "I told him to send it before we left the midday stop. When I saw you adjusting your seat."

She looked at him. "You noticed that early."

"Yes."

"And you said nothing until the afternoon."

"You did not want me to notice," he said. "Saying something earlier would have served no purpose except to make you uncomfortable." He looked at the fire. "The liniment needed to be sent ahead in any case. It was a practical decision."

She held his gaze for a moment. It was the same move he had made on the road — the concern dressed as practicality, offered in a form she could accept. She was beginning to recognize it as a habit of his. She was not certain yet how she felt about being read that clearly.

"You do that," she said.

He looked at her again. "Do what?"

"Reframe things. So they are easier to receive." She said it without accusation. Simply as an observation. "You did it on the road as well. The comment about the column."

He was quiet for a moment. "Is that a complaint?"

"No," she said. "It is an observation." A pause. "I am not certain whether I find it considerate or presumptuous."

"Which way are you leaning."

She looked at the fire. "Considerate," she said. "At present."

He said nothing, but she caught the corner of his mouth move.

"Do not," she said.

"I am not doing anything."

"You were about to."

"I was not." He looked at the fire with an expression of complete neutrality. "I am simply sitting here."

"You are sitting here being pleased with yourself."

"That is a considerable accusation."

"It is an accurate one."

He looked at her then, and he did not bother to stop the corner of his mouth this time, and she felt something shift in her chest — small and sudden and entirely inconvenient. She looked away first. The fire. The window. The grain of the wooden floor.