Varder came out of his room after he freshened up and the corridor was empty.
He walked to their chambers,their chamber door was open. He pushed it wider and looked inside and the room was exactly as he had left it — the rumpled bed, the morning light, the crushed dress no longer on the floor where she had finally shed it at some point in the night.
She was gone.
He looked at the guard posted at the end of the corridor. "Where is she."
Not a question. The guard understood the distinction.
"The east garden, Your Highness. She left approximately twenty minutes ago."
He said nothing.
He walked toward the east garden.
He had been going to tell her about the gala.
That was all. A practical matter requiring her presence and her compliance and a minimum of conversation between them. The Royal Gala was this evening and appearances were required and his wife's absence from it would generate the specific kind of speculation he had no interest in managing on top of everything else the morning had already produced.
He had been going to tell her that.
He had a reason for going to the garden that had nothing to do with the guilt or the splinter he couldn't locate or the word from the pillow or any of the things he had been standing under cold water not examining.
He told himself that.
He turned the corner into the east garden.
He saw them before they saw him.
Ava was sitting on the stone bench beneath the far wall where the climbing roses had been growing since before either of them was born. She had changed into another set of clothes but what she had found to replace it was not much better, something plain and too large that she had clearly taken from wherever was available rather than wherever was appropriate.
Her head was on Simon's shoulder.
He was a Gamma's son. Varder had seen him before without registering him specifically — one of dozens of young pack men who moved through the palace in various capacities, unremarkable, unimportant, the kind of person the architecture of rank made invisible to the people above him in it.
He was not invisible now.
Simon's hand was in Ava's hair. Not moving. Just resting there with the specific ease of someone whose hand had been in that particular place enough times that it belonged there without requiring thought or permission or the careful negotiation of new territory.
Ava was crying.
Not the trained silent crying that Varder had watched her do in the arena — the efficient, contained, I-have-been-practicing grief that absorbed everything without letting it show. This was different.
This was the sound of someone who had found the one place they were allowed to be undone and was being undone completely, her shoulders moving, her breath coming in the uneven rhythm of someone who had been holding something for a very long time and had finally found somewhere safe enough to put it down.
She was giving Simon her tears and it did something to him.
The thought arrived before Varder had decided to think it and it landed with a force that had nothing to do with the calculation and everything to do with something underneath the calculation that he had been standing at windows and sitting in chairs and showering in cold water all morning trying not to look at directly.
She had given Varder one word from a pillow and a straight spine and eyes that filed him away and she had walked out of his chamber at the first available opportunity and found this man in this garden and she had put her head on his shoulder and she had come apart completely and Simon's hand was in her hair like it had always been in her hair and always would be and Varder was standing at the entrance to the garden in his clean clothes with his guilt and his practical gala announcement feeling something he had no name for that was rapidly being overtaken by something he had a very clear name for.
Rage.
Not the cold tactical kind. Something hotter and less manageable than that. The specific rage of a man who had claimed something publicly and killed for it and married it in a ruined dress and stood at a window all night and come back to face it and arrived in a garden to find it on someone else's shoulder crying the tears it had never cried for him.
He walked forward.
They heard him coming.
Simon's head came up first — the instinct of a man who understood that being found in this specific situation had specific consequences and whose body had registered the footsteps before his mind had finished processing what they meant. He started to lift his hand from Ava's hair.
Ava turned. Her face was wet. Her eyes found Varder's and he watched them do the thing — the filing, the assessing — and then he watched something else move through them that was not filing or assessing. Something that looked uncomfortably like guilt and something else alongside it that looked uncomfortably like defiance.
She did not move away from Simon.
That was the detail that completed whatever the rage needed to become complete.
She did not move away from him.
Varder looked at Simon.
Simon looked back at him with the specific expression of a man running a calculation with very few good options and understanding all of them simultaneously.
"Your Highness," Simon said. His voice was steady. Varder gave him that.
Varder looked at him for a long moment, the rage in him bursting to the surface.
He looked at the guard who had followed him from the corridor at the standard three-pace distance and he said two words.
"Take him."
The guard moved immediately.
Simon stood — not in resistance, he was not a foolish man — but he looked at Ava before the guard reached him. One look. Brief and private and carrying everything that looks carried between people who had twelve years of history to compress into a single glance.
Ava made a sound.
"Varder please" she started.
"The dungeon," Varder said. Still looking at Simon. "Until I decide otherwise."
"He didn't do anything," Ava said. Her voice going shaky and the trained control was gone from it entirely — "He was just—"
"I know what he was doing, he was touching my wife" Varder said.
Ava wanted to counter him but he cut her off sharply, "is this what you do when you're given a little freedom, He spat, his lips twisting with disgust. " You whore, embracing another man just a few hours after being wedded.
"Guards, make sure you follow her every where she goes to, do not let her out of your sight even for a second, do not let anyone she knows visit her, is that clear??
" Yes your highness " The guard who accompanied him answered.
"We attend the Royal Gala this evening," he continued. His voice was completely level. "You will be present. You will be appropriately dressed. You will stand beside me and you will perform whatever is required of a prince's wife at a public function."
He turned and walked back towards the palace, leaving her standing there.