I'm awake before the light changes.
Not because of a sound or a dream or any particular reason I can name — just that familiar restlessness that comes from sleeping in a place that isn't yet mine, eyes opening to a ceiling I still have to remember before I recognize it. The harbor lights are still visible through the balcony doors, but the sky above them has shifted from black to the grey-blue of the hour before dawn, and the city below is beginning to stir in the slow, uncertain way cities do when they haven't quite decided to start yet.
I get dressed in the dark without waking Eira, pull my hair back with my fingers rather than a comb, and slip out through the corridor before I can talk myself into staying in bed.
The garden paths are lit by lanterns that cast more shadow than light at this hour, small amber pools on the gravel between stretches of dark, and I walk with my arms folded across my chest against the chill that the sea air carries even in summer. The roses on either side of the path are closed still, their petals holding tight, and the lavender releases its smell more strongly in the cool — something about the cold drawing it out, or maybe just that there's nothing else competing with it yet. I keep my eyes on the path rather than the garden because it's easier to think when there's nothing interesting to look at, and I'm trying not to think at all, which is exactly what I'm doing instead.
Octavia's hand on his chest. The easy angle of her body toward him. The way she'd touched the embroidery at his lapel like she'd done it a hundred times before and fully intended to do it a hundred times more.
My pace picks up without my deciding to let it, the gravel crunching louder under my feet, and I make myself slow down because the garden is quiet and I'd rather not advertise whatever this is.
I don't hear the horse until it's close — my own footsteps covering the sound until he's nearly caught up with me — and when I finally register the soft rhythm of hooves on the path, I tell myself I'm not going to look. I'm not going to turn around and confirm what I already suspect, because confirming it means having to do something about it, and I have not yet decided what that something is.
I turn around anyway.
Ignis is on a dark horse — bay, I think, though the light makes everything approximate — and he's not dressed the way he would be for a formal morning. His collar isn't fastened all the way, his sleeves pushed up despite the chill, his hair falling slightly wrong like he didn't consult a mirror before he left wherever he came from. He looks like someone who woke up and made a decision quickly and acted on it before the practical arguments could catch up.
He pulls the horse to a stop a few feet from where I'm standing.
For a moment, neither of us says anything. He looks at me from that height, and I look up at him, and the lantern light catches the left side of his face and leaves the right in shadow, and I can read approximately nothing from his expression, which is nothing new but somehow more frustrating at this particular hour.
"Where are you going?" he asks.
"Nowhere specific," I say, which is true and also slightly embarrassing to admit out loud.
He considers this for a silence that lasts longer than it needs to. Then he shifts the reins to one hand and extends the other toward me — not a demand, not quite an offer, somewhere in the uncomfortable middle ground between those two things — and says, "I know somewhere worth going. If you want."
I look at his hand.
I know what the correct answer is. I have known it since the moment I turned around on this path and saw him sitting there on that horse in the grey pre-dawn, looking like he'd come out here on purpose and was trying to appear as though he hadn't.
"All right," I say, and take his hand.
His fingers close around mine — not at the wrist but the palm, warm and certain — and he draws me up in a single clean motion that leaves me seated in front of him with his chest at my back and absolutely nowhere to put that fact except directly in front of me where it has to be acknowledged. I tuck my hands into my lap, fingers laced together, and fix my gaze on the trees lining the path ahead, and I concentrate on keeping my breathing even, which is harder than it should be.
The horse moves forward.
Ignis's breath comes warm against my hair — the height difference, the angle of things — and I feel it more than hear it, a faint exhale that registers along my scalp and makes the thought I was in the middle of dissolve completely. I have no idea what I was thinking about. Something. I redirect my attention to the way the lantern light moves through the leaves, anything with enough visual interest to occupy the front of my mind while the back of it handles other things.
The morning air is cold on my face and arms, but my back is warm. Specifically the left side — the side facing him — is warmer than the right, and I note this with the detached precision of someone filing information they have no intention of acting on.
We ride in silence through the garden and out through a gate I hadn't found in my reconnaissance, onto a wider path that climbs gradually through a stand of trees. The city falls away below and to our left, and above the tree line the sky is beginning to differentiate itself — the grey separating into lighter and darker layers, a faint suggestion of color building at the horizon.
"Did you sleep?" he asks, and his voice arrives low and close, closer than I keep forgetting to account for.
I angle my head toward him without fully turning — a compromise between answering and looking at him, which I've held to with some effort this morning. "No. Did you?"
"Not much."
"It shows," I say. "Your eyes."
A silence. "That obvious?"
"You look like someone who spent several hours making a decision and then acted on it at dawn."
The silence this time carries a different weight — longer, more considered. "You're observant," he says, which is not a confirmation and not a denial, and I let it sit there because pushing it would require me to explain why I was paying enough attention to draw that conclusion.
The path crests through the trees and opens, suddenly, onto a wide plateau that looks out over the city from above — the harbor, the layers of pale stone buildings stepping down toward the water, the ships with their amber sails furled for the night, and beyond all of it the sea, which is still dark but beginning to hold light where it meets the horizon. The sky above the water is doing something remarkable — purple and grey giving way to gold in thin horizontal bands, the color not yet arrived but clearly on its way.
Ignis brings the horse to a stop.
I don't say anything. Neither does he. We just look at it, and the looking is enough.
His hands at my waist when he lifts me down. I'd caught his shoulder — instinct, fingers closing on the fabric before I'd chosen to reach for anything — and when my feet find the ground and my weight settles back into myself, his hands don't move immediately. They stay where they are for one count, two, and I feel the warmth of them through my jacket, and then I look down at them and say, "Your hands."
He removes them. Steps back.
We sit at the edge of the plateau, close enough to the drop that the city spreads below us like something designed to be looked at, and Ignis folds himself onto the ground beside me with the efficiency of someone who has done this before, in this place, probably more than once. His right shoulder is closer to me than his left — angled slightly in, which I catch but say nothing about.
The sun is not yet up but the sky is working on it, the gold thickening at the horizon, the sea beginning to hold light on its surface in thin, broken lines.
"It's better than Galadria," I say, and then I add, "Don't tell Lysara I said that," which pulls the corner of his mouth once, brief and controlled.
He doesn't say anything. He tips his head slightly toward the water, and we watch in silence as the light builds, and I notice at some point that I've stopped managing my breathing and it seems to be happening at a normal rate on its own.
Then I feel his hand in my hair.
Not a reach or a gesture — just his fingers, already there, moving through the end of a slow pass from somewhere above my ear, and by the time I register what's happening he's already pulling back, and he says, "There was something in your hair," in a voice that carries a particular quality of neutrality, the kind that costs something to hold.
I turn to look at him.
We're closer than I'd measured, and I catch his eyes before my expression has finished rearranging itself into anything useful — and for one moment he sees whatever is actually there. His gaze stops. Not a flicker, not a look away — it just stops, holds, and something behind his eyes goes very still in the way things go still when they're paying close attention, and I watch him take in whatever it is he's seeing while I'm still trying to recover the ground I've lost.
"Was there," I say.
It doesn't come out like a question.
He holds my gaze for another moment, and then he looks at the water again, and I look at the water again, and the sun breaks the horizon in a long clean line of gold that turns everything it touches a different color.
Neither of us moves.
After a while he gets to his feet and offers me his hand, and I take it, and he pulls me up in one motion that brings me closer than standing requires. I find myself looking at his face at near distance — the line of his jaw, the green of his eyes in this light, warmer than the banquet, the gold in them more visible out here — and my gaze drops to his mouth.
It stays there for half a breath before I pull it back.
He's already seen it. The corner of his mouth curves — barely, once — and heat moves up the back of my neck, fast and inconvenient, and I step back first because one of us has to.
He doesn't step back.
"You flush easily," he says.
"I don't flush at all," I say, fixing my gaze somewhere past his left shoulder.
He tilts his head. "Your face suggests otherwise."
I meet his eyes, level and direct. "Does it."
No inflection. The best I can manage right now.
He looks at me for a moment longer, and then the steadiness in his expression shifts — the faintest change in the quality of his attention, something loosening at the edges — and he drops his gaze first, turning toward the horse, and I exhale quietly.
He holds the stirrup for me to mount, and when I'm settled he swings up behind me and takes the reins on either side, and we start back down the path at a pace slow enough that the city reveals itself gradually as we descend.
"Can I ask you something?" I say, to the horse's ears, to the gravel below.
"Yes," he says. Behind me. Close.
I don't turn. "Octavia." I keep my voice even and light, the way I'd talk about something that doesn't cost me anything. "I understand what we're doing and I understand that there are things in your life that predate me, and none of that is something I'm asking you to explain." I make myself continue. "But at a public event — ten days before we stand in a cathedral in front of everyone who matters — I need you to be more careful. Not for me. For what it looks like."
He is still for long enough that I start to wonder if he's going to answer at all.
"Octavia isn't something I chose to have there," he says. Low. "She arrived. I didn't invite her, and I have no interest in whatever she came to accomplish. But I hear you." A pause. "I'll be more attentive."
"That's all I'm asking for," I say.
"Is it?"
I don't answer.
The question sits between us while the path winds down through the trees and the city opens up below in pieces — rooftop by rooftop, the harbor's mast-tops appearing first, then the pale stone of the buildings, then the water itself, catching the morning light. His weight behind me is very still. He doesn't push the question, and I don't fill the silence, and we ride like that for a stretch that has its own particular weight, neither of us reaching for the next word.
Then he says, "Andrea told you about her," and it doesn't come out like a question.
"Your cousin volunteered it, yes."
"What exactly did he volunteer?"
"That she's old family. That the two of you have history." I keep my voice even. "That was enough."
"When you want to know something about me," he says, his voice lower now, arriving closer than before — "ask me."
I look at the trees on either side of the path. "And you'll answer?"
"I'll answer."
I let that sit, because it's not a small thing to offer and we both know it.
"That works both ways," I say.
"I know," he says. And then, after a silence: "You're paying attention to the wrong things."
I angle my head — not a full turn, just enough to catch his voice more directly. "What does that mean?"
He doesn't answer.
We ride without speaking for a stretch I stop measuring after a while, the city growing around us as we descend, the lanterns swallowed by morning light, pale and certain and entirely unlike the grey we'd started in.
When we reach the stable yard he dismounts first and lifts me down — his hands steady at my waist, the same grip that has caught me twice now — and sets me on my feet and steps back, and I stand in the morning light with my hands at my sides and my face warmer than the temperature accounts for.
I press my palm briefly to my cheek, then drop it.
"Thank you," I say, to something slightly to the left of his face. "For showing me."
I turn toward the palace entrance.
Three steps. Four. And then I stop — some pull I haven't decided to act on — and I turn around.
Ignis is standing exactly where I left him. His jaw is set, a muscle tight along the line of it, and his right hand is closed at his side — not quite a fist, not quite open, held somewhere in between that costs something to maintain. He's watching me with an expression that is completely still, the composure he wears everywhere else entirely absent, and I look at him for a moment that I shouldn't take, long enough to understand that what's on his face right now has been there for longer than just this morning.
Then our eyes meet and I turn back around and walk inside quickly, and I don't stop.
---
The fitting takes longer than expected, and by the time we're back in the carriage the afternoon light has gone flat and golden in the way it does in the last hour before it starts its proper descent.
Alina sits beside me, close enough that our arms nearly touch at the turns, and Vesper takes the seat across from us with the ease of someone who is always exactly where she intends to be. The city moves past the windows in pieces — stone archways, market stalls being folded in for the afternoon, a man with a cart of yellow flowers who doesn't look up as we pass. Alina is talking about the shopping district, which families prefer which quarter and why, and I'm tracking it with the part of my attention that handles useful information while the rest of me watches the street outside.
"We saw you this morning," Vesper says.
She's already smiling when I turn toward her, which tells me she's been waiting to say it. My fingers stilled against the fabric in my lap — one beat, just one — before I angled my head toward her with what I hoped was an expression that cost me nothing.
"Did you."
"In the garden. With Ignis." A pause. "Were you arguing? About Octavia?"
"No," I say, and I say it smoothly, which I'm aware is slightly too smooth. "We walked. That's all."
Alina's mouth curves — not a full smile, just the corner of it — and she turns toward the window like she's giving me the courtesy of not watching directly while I finish the sentence.
"There's nothing happening between us," I add. "We're both just trying to adjust to this."
Vesper's smile takes on a quality I don't particularly like.
The image surfaces anyway — the stable yard this morning, his jaw set, his hand not quite closed at his side — and I redirect my attention to the street outside before it can settle. Alina glances at Vesper. Vesper raises one eyebrow, a fraction. Alina looks back out the window and a small smile surfaces and gets quietly put away. No words. Years of practice.
I watch this and say nothing, and the carriage turns, and the amber light shifts across the seats.
* * *
The shop is on a narrow street tucked between a glassblower's and an apothecary that smells of dried herbs even from outside. When the door opens, the street noise cuts away — not gradually, but all at once, like stepping through a held breath. Inside: high windows letting long rectangles of afternoon sun fall across the floor, the scent of old wood and something faintly floral underneath it. The silence here is purchased. You can tell.
The proprietor is old and moves without hurrying, the way people do when they've learned that rushing reads as desperation. He inclines his head as we enter. "Your Highness. Everything you requested has arrived."
"We'll see all of it," Alina says, and he gestures to his attendants and they move.
Vesper takes the velvet armchair nearest the window — deep green, worn to a softness that comes from age rather than use — and drops into it with the ease of someone who has sat there before. I take the one beside her and watch Alina move along the hanging garments with the brisk focus of someone confirming a decision already made.
The attendants bring things for me without asking. Two dresses across the viewing table — dark blue, deep amber, both cut with the clean lines that Aurelian fashion favors. They step back and wait with the politely expectant look of people who want a reaction but won't request one.
I reach out and touch the blue one at the shoulder seam, just my fingertips against the fabric, feeling the weight. Good material. Heavier than it looks. I draw my hand back without saying anything.
Alina and Vesper confer quietly over a third piece — pale green, embroidery at the cuffs — and I catch the low sound of them laughing together about something, a private exchange that ends with Alina nodding once. A moment later, without ceremony, three items appear in the pile designated for my rooms, chosen without asking me.
I consider whether this is a test or simply efficiency, conclude I'm not sure, and set it aside. Neither answer makes it easier to know what to do with the dresses.
We visit two more shops before the light begins its final descent, and by the time we're back in the carriage the city outside has gone amber and long-shadowed.
* * *
Vesper and Alina are speaking to each other on the way back — a dinner next week, someone's cousin, something that makes Alina laugh — their voices a steady texture I mostly don't follow. I watch the harbor through the window as we climb toward the palace, the water going darker, and I don't think about the morning, which is to say I think about it continuously.
The image that keeps surfacing isn't the tepe or the sunrise or his hand in my hair. It's the last one: the stable yard, after I walked away, before he knew I'd turned back. I put it somewhere out of reach and watch the harbor disappear behind a row of buildings.
When the carriage stops at the eastern entrance, Vesper and Alina climb out and move toward the main corridor at a pace that is, I notice after a moment, definitively not inviting me to follow. Their heads tilt slightly toward each other as they walk, and they round the corner and are gone before I've finished stepping down.
I stand there for a moment in the amber light.
Deliberate. I file it and head for the tower stairs.
* * *
"Lysara," I call, and push open the balcony door.
What meets me: Lysara on her rail — and Sorin arranged across the considerable portion of the balcony that Lysara has not claimed, which is to say most of it. He is too large for this space in the way some things are simply too large for where they've ended up. The last of the sun has turned his bronze scales something between copper and burning, and he regards me with his red eyes with the air of someone who has been here a while and would like that understood.
I look at Lysara.
"Why did you bring him?" I ask.
Lysara glances at Sorin. "He follows me," she says.
Sorin takes a step closer to her. I study him for a moment, then: "Sorin. Why are you here?"
He doesn't answer.
Lysara looks at him with an expression that contains a significant quantity of something. "How entertaining," she says. "He's been with me all day."
I cross toward Sorin and rest my hand against the top of his head, between the ridges above his eye socket where the scales are finer and still warm from the sun. He goes very still. "Come back when we're done," I tell him.
He turns his head toward Lysara. "I won't tell Ignis," he says.
Lysara doesn't look at him. "Don't you have anyone else? Why won't you leave me alone?"
"I'm showing you the city," Sorin says.
I look between them. "What's going on between you two?"
Neither answers. Both look in different directions.
I step between them and run my hand briefly along each of their backs — Lysara tense under my palm, Sorin very still — and then Sorin turns those red eyes toward me, head tilting slightly down.
"Ignis won't mind you being close to me," I tell him, and I'm smiling when I say it.
His expression shifts. "How are things between you two?"
"You expect me to discuss that with you?"
"You could," Sorin says.
"She won't," Lysara says immediately. "Not with you."
Sorin extends his neck toward her, slow and deliberate. "I won't tell him."
"You follow me around gathering information," Lysara says. "Don't pretend otherwise."
"That's not why I'm here," Sorin says, and the speed of it is the most honest thing he's said.
I look between them and find myself smiling despite myself.
"Whatever this is," I say, "don't fight about it. Not again."
"She doesn't understand me," Sorin says.
"I don't have to," Lysara says, without looking at him.
I step back and face them both. "Have you been together all day?"
"Unfortunately," Lysara says.
Sorin watches her without moving his eyes from her at all.
"Are you in love with each other?" I ask.
Lysara's head swings toward me immediately. "I am absolutely not in love with him."
Sorin watches her, silent.
"Don't look at me like that," Lysara says.
I sit down across from them and watch, and something in the scene in front of me — Lysara's studied indifference, Sorin's absolute stillness — earns a laugh I don't entirely try to stop.
Lysara narrows her eyes at me. Sorin looks at Lysara. Lysara looks at Sorin and narrows them further.
"Give us a little while," Lysara says finally, turning to Sorin. "I'll come find you after."
Sorin extends his neck toward her. "You're not lying."
"Dragons don't lie."
"You might," Sorin says, "to get rid of me."
"I'll come," Lysara says. "Go."
Sorin looks at me once, then back at Lysara with a look that in a person would mean *I'm holding you to that.* Then his wings open — slow, sure — and he lifts from the balcony and the adjoining roof in one movement, rises past the roofline, and is gone.
I stare after him.
"Change your expression," Lysara says.
I kiss the top of her head instead, between the ridge of her scales, and say, "How did you get here in only a few days?"
She looks faintly mortified. "He goes everywhere I go."
"Does Ignis know?"
"Probably not."
The laugh comes out before I can stop it — a real one, full and undignified — and Lysara gives me the look she reserves for my worst moments.
"You're insufferable," she says.
"You have feelings for him," I say, still laughing.
"I do not."
I wrap my arms around her neck and lean against the warmth of her scales, the sun still stored in them. "I've never seen you like this."
She turns to look at me with an expression that could strip paint. I kiss her again anyway.
After a moment she says, "What's happening with you and Ignis?"
"I don't know."
"Do you actually not know, or are you saying that?"
I turn my face toward her scales. "I actually don't know."
She's quiet for a while. Then: "Tell me what you talked about this morning."
I tell her — the garden, the path, the tepe, the sunrise, the things said and not said and the one thing that happened after. Lysara listens without interrupting, which she only does when she's paying close attention.
When I finish, she says, "Don't do something you'll regret."
"I know."
"In either direction," she says.
I lift my head and look at her, and she looks back at me with those amber eyes that have been watching me since I was thirteen years old and have seen every expression I've ever tried to conceal.
"I know," I say.
We stay like that for a while — the harbor going dark below us, the last light pulling out of the sky — and I'm tired in the way that has nothing to do with the hour. The accumulated weight of a day spent being watched, of managing every small expression, of carrying a version of yourself that runs slightly heavier than the real one.
I have my head against Lysara's neck when I hear it — not quite a sound, but the anticipation of one — and I lift my eyes to the rooftop across the way.
Sorin is there. He has arranged himself with the careful stillness of something that has absolutely not been waiting and merely happens to be stationary in that particular direction. His tail is wrapped once around a chimney stack. His eyes, when the last light catches them, are fixed on our balcony.
"Yours is back," I say.
Lysara turns to look. "So annoying," she says.
"You won't be bored with him around."
She studies Sorin on his chimney stack. "Look how much of the roof he's taking up," she says.
I get to my feet, smiling, and move toward the door. "I'll see you tomorrow."
Lysara dips her head once. Then she lifts off the rail — one clean movement, wings spreading wide — and rises into the darkening sky, and Sorin is already moving before she's cleared the roofline, falling into place just behind her.
I stand at the balcony door and watch them go, two shapes getting smaller against the last of the light, until they're gone.