I walk out of the room faster than is strictly dignified, and the corridor air is cooler and less deliberate than what I've just left, and my shoulders drop without my deciding to let them. The rules of pre-wedding conduct, the appropriate distances, the correct angles of deference — all of it delivered as if I arrived here from somewhere that had never developed opinions on the subject. I exhale once, hard, and turn toward the east wing.
Caspian and Darion are in the garden when I reach them, close together, voices low the way you learn to speak in places where sound carries. They see me before I see their faces, and the conversation folds itself away, and they move toward me across the path and the afternoon light catches the lavender along the border and for a moment everything smells like somewhere else.
Darion gets to me first. He wraps his arms around me without asking, the way he always has, and when he pulls back he pushes a strand of hair off my face and studies me the way he's done since we were children — checking for things I haven't told him.
"You look happy," he says.
I push his arm, lightly. "Unbelievable," I say, and mean it in at least two directions.
Caspian falls into step beside me as we move into the garden, hands behind his back, the posture he takes when he's about to say something carefully. "I couldn't come yesterday. There were things to handle."
"I had to go shopping," I tell him. "It worked out."
We walk, the three of us, the gravel soft underfoot. And then Caspian says, quietly: "King Brennan sent dragon riders to the Galadrian border."
I stop.
Not dramatically — just a full halt, one beat, before I look at him. "He actually followed through."
"King Mordain won't move against that," Darion says. "He's not going to take that risk."
I start walking again, and the tight thing that has been sitting under my sternum for weeks loosens slightly, just slightly, and I breathe around it. Galadria is safe. The wedding preparations feel less like a trap and more like a transaction I've already agreed to. Darion says Mira and Kael will arrive in a few days, and I look at him and let myself feel that properly — not the small controlled version, the actual one.
We pass the rose beds and the fountain and eventually I tell them I have somewhere to be and leave them standing in a patch of late afternoon sun, watching me go.
* * *
The attendant at the eastern entrance meets my eyes and tells me, with the practiced neutrality of someone delivering information rather than making conversation, that Prince Ignis is waiting for me in his study.
I thank him and keep my pace even all the way to the west wing.
At the door, I stop. My hand goes to the surface of it — the wood is cool, slightly rough — and I hold it there for a moment that I don't fully account for, then straighten my jacket and knock.
The door opens from the inside. The attendant steps aside and out, and I walk in. The room is west-facing and larger than I'd expected — two chairs near the bookcase, angled toward each other at a distance that's close for a study but would be close for anywhere else, and between them the low table with nothing on it, which means he had someone clear it. The afternoon sun comes through the windows at a low angle that catches the spines of the books along the far wall and turns them gold. Paper and old leather, and underneath that a faint cedar that I clock and don't examine.
Ignis is at the window.
He's watching something outside, or watching nothing — it's hard to tell from here, with the light behind him. His silhouette is clear; his face is not.
"You wanted to see me," I say, and my voice comes out level, which I'm aware is deliberate.
He stands at the window for another beat before he turns. His shoulders move first, then the rest of him, slow enough that I've composed my expression by the time he's fully facing me. We look at each other across the room, and I'm the one who glances away first — down, then to the side — for a reason I can't quite name. Just that holding his gaze felt like something I needed to decide to do, and I hadn't decided yet.
I can't read his face. I never can, and I stopped finding this purely frustrating somewhere around the third day.
"How are the ceremony preparations going?" he asks.
I look back at him from where I've stopped, near the center of the room. "Fine."
He holds my gaze for a moment, then gestures toward the chairs near the bookcase. "You can sit."
I cross the room and settle into the nearer chair, not quite leaning back — my spine stays a few inches from the cushion, which is a habit I notice and don't change. Ignis comes around the other side at his usual pace, unhurried, and takes the chair beside me instead of the one across, and turns it slightly toward me before he sits, which rearranges the geometry of the space in a way I don't remark on.
Our knees are close. Not touching. Close.
He studies me for a moment. "What's happening with Sorin and Lysara?"
The corner of my mouth moves before I can stop it. I press my lips together, get it under control, and say, "Sorin has been spending time with her. I think."
"Just spending time."
Something in the way he says it makes the smile surface again, and I let it go this time because catching it twice would be more obvious than once. "It's funny that you're asking."
Ignis's mouth pulls, brief and sudden — a real smile, faster than his usual expressions, and it changes his face so completely that I find myself looking at him a second longer than I meant to before I remember what I was doing.
"It is a little funny," he says.
We look at each other, both of us with something close to amusement, and then I turn toward the window and he looks at something past my shoulder, and the moment settles.
"Sorin's been behaving strangely for days," he says. "Irritable."
"Lysara's the same way. I think she's—" I pause, press the corner of my lip inward. "She's feeling things she isn't ready to call feelings yet."
Ignis is quiet for a moment. "Feeling things she isn't ready to call feelings yet," he repeats, and his voice is different — not mocking, just careful — and I study the line of the window frame and think about the fact that he chose to repeat exactly that sentence.
"Did Sorin say something to you?" I ask.
"He hasn't said anything specific. But he's been acting differently. And he's been in a bad mood." A pause. "Do you know why?"
I glance at him sidelong. "Sorin's obsessive. He follows Lysara everywhere. Yesterday she wanted him to leave and he just moved to the roof across the way and waited."
His jaw shifted — not quite surprise, closer to recognition — and then he was studying me more directly.
"Are you obsessive?" he asks.
The question lands differently than I expect. I open my mouth, then close it. "I don't think so," I say.
"Why not?" he asks.
"I've never been in love. So I don't know."
The words sit in the air between us.
I feel the heat before I register that I've said something I didn't mean to — it starts at the base of my throat and climbs, and I turn my head away, toward the bookcase, and fix my gaze on the spines there without reading any of the titles.
His hand closes around mine.
Not fast. Gradual enough that I feel it before I see it — his fingers finding mine where they rest on the arm of the chair, certain, and I look down at them and then don't move.
"You're flushed again," he says.
"I'm not flushed," I say, to the bookcase.
He shifts his chair — I feel the movement through the floor before I hear the sound of it — and when I look back he's closer, and our knees are touching now, and he's looking at my face with that patient, collecting attention that gives nothing back and takes everything in.
His free hand moves to my jaw. Two fingers, maybe three, tilting my face up — pressure that asks rather than insists — and I let him, which is a decision I make in the time it takes to exhale.
"You don't need to hide it," he says. His fingers are still at my chin.
I look at him. His eyes move across my face — along my cheekbone, my mouth, back up. His gaze drops to my lips for one beat, then returns to mine, and he holds it there, and I know, in the way you know before anything has happened, what is about to happen.
My next breath doesn't quite finish.
He kisses me.
It's nothing like I expected, which is a thought I have approximately half a second before thought stops being a thing I'm doing. His mouth is warm and certain and moves against mine with an urgency that isn't quite controlled, and I don't know what to do with my hands — they stay where they are for a moment, frozen, and then one of them finds the front of his jacket and grips it, not pulling, just holding, because I need something to hold. The taste of wine. The sound of my own pulse in my ears. His hand shifts from my jaw into my hair and I don't know when that happened.
I try to match him. I don't know if I'm succeeding. I'm aware of my heartbeat everywhere — throat, fingertips, behind my knees — and I can't slow it down and I've stopped trying.
When we finally break apart, I need a full breath before I can do anything else.
I keep my eyes closed for a moment. When I open them, Ignis is watching me, and he's not what I expected — the composure still mostly there but the work of holding it visible now in the set of his jaw, the deliberate pace of his exhale, and there's color in his face that I've never seen before. He breathes out slowly. His jaw is looser than usual.
"I lost control of myself," he says.
I look at him. My hand is still gripping the front of his jacket. I notice this and don't move it. I don't have words yet, just the fact of him, sitting here, saying that, also flushed.
He moves his hands to my face — both of them, his palms against my cheeks — and asks, "Are you all right?"
"Yes," I say. My voice needs adjusting. I adjust it. "I'm fine."
He kisses me again.
This time it's different — slower, chosen. And this time I'm not surprised, which means I'm present for all of it: my hand moving to his hair without my choosing to, warmth spreading up from every point of contact, the weight of him leaning toward me. I notice, distantly, the light changing behind the window. I notice when I stop noticing things and am just there instead.
When we surface the second time, our foreheads come to rest together, and I can hear us both breathing.
"I've wanted to do that since the first time I saw you," he says.
I pull back far enough to see his face. "Really."
"Why are you surprised?"
"You seemed cold," I say. "And like nothing I did was particularly interesting to you."
He draws back slightly, holding my gaze. "I was trying to control myself around you," he says, and he takes my hand as he says it, and the sentence settles with the weight of something it took real effort to say.
I look at him. I look at our hands. I look at the fact that this is the person I'm marrying in a few days and that eight days ago I had never spoken to him and that he just said those words and appears to mean them.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" he asks.
"How am I looking at you?"
"Like you're working something out."
"I'm trying to figure out if this is real," I say.
The line of his mouth changes — quick, decided — and he pulls me toward him, and before I've processed what's happening I'm in his lap with his arms locked around my waist and he's saying against my mouth, "I can convince you," and I have one second of awareness — of the window, the room, the afternoon — before that too dissolves, and then there's nothing but him kissing me like he's making an argument he intends to win.
He makes a convincing case.
We stay like that for a while, my hands in his hair, his arms tight around me, until we both need air and come apart, and by then the light through the window has changed and we're both breathing harder than we were.
I make a move to get up. He doesn't loosen his arms.
I sit back. His chin drops to my shoulder, and I feel his breath against my neck, and I put one hand on his arm where it crosses my waist.
We don't say anything for a moment.
Then I lift my head and study his profile this close — the line of his jaw, the slight tension still in it — and I see the small indentations at the corners of his mouth, which I haven't noticed before. I look at them for a moment — long enough to know whether I'm going to — and then my fingertip finds the left one, lightly.
"I never noticed those before," I say.
He sets his lips to my cheek — not passing, longer than it needs to be — and it registers in my jaw and down the side of my neck. Then I rest my hand flat against his chest and his heartbeat is fast and even under my palm, and I tell him so.
"So is yours," he says, and kisses me again, and I let myself stop keeping score.
Eventually he says "let's eat," and his arms loosen, and I stand.
He stands behind me, and before I've taken a step his arms come around me from behind, his chin at the curve of my shoulder. The full length of him at my back. Then he turns me toward him and lays his lips to my forehead — there and settled, not brief — and when he pulls back he's studying me with a stillness in him, settled.
"You're running a slight fever," he says.
I drive my elbow lightly into his ribs and step back. "You're doing that on purpose."
He looks unrepentant.
I straighten my clothes, and then, without quite deciding to, my hand goes to his hair and pushes it back where it's been disturbed. He goes very still.
"I messed it up," I say, slightly embarrassed.
He laughs — a real one, short and surprised — and I look at him and have no idea what's funny, and then I turn and walk toward the door.
* * *
He catches up to me in two steps and opens the door before I reach it, and in the corridor we fall into step beside each other and he takes my hand immediately, without looking at me or asking — his fingers closing around mine before I've decided whether to offer them.
"People will see," I say.
"We're getting married in a few days," he says, looking ahead. "What exactly will they misunderstand?"
I don't have a good answer for that, so I keep walking and glance at him sideways when I think I can get away with it.
* * *
Alina, Vesper, and Nova are at the table when we walk in, and they all look up, and I watch Alina and Vesper register us — Alina's brow lifts a fraction, Vesper's mouth does the thing it does just before she decides not to say something yet — a conversation in less than a second, years of practice.
I release Ignis's hand and head for my usual seat.
"Nova," Ignis says, and his voice is even, "move to the other side."
Nova looks up. "Why?"
He doesn't say anything else. Just looks at her for a moment with a face that gives nothing, and Nova gets to her feet and relocates without further discussion.
I sit down in the chair that's been freed up, and I don't look at Ignis doing it, which is its own kind of answer to a question no one asked. Ignis comes to stand behind the chair — his hands on the back of it, settling it as I sit, and then his hand rests briefly on my shoulder before he comes around and takes the chair beside me, moving it a few inches closer in the way of someone who considers this already decided.
Lady Vessen begins serving. Alina keeps glancing at us with the expression of someone watching a slow-motion event they have opinions about. Vesper is more direct.
"You look like you've been together for years," she says, pleasantly. "It's very interesting, given the timeline."
Under the table, I press my leg against Ignis's to get him to look somewhere else. He glances at me and a corner of his mouth moves, and then he turns to Vesper. "Is something bothering you?"
"Nothing at all," Vesper says. "I'm just very surprised. Pleasantly."
He reaches under the table and takes my hand, and when I try to pull it back he holds it, and I give up pulling and look at my plate and pick up my fork with my left hand and try to appear like none of this is happening.
Ignis leans slightly toward me. "Stop," he says, low enough for me only.
Alina is watching all of this with a smile that she's not trying very hard to contain. I look at her. She looks delighted.
"You could let her eat," Vesper says to Ignis, amused. "If you wanted to."
He glances at Vesper without expression. Then he turns to me. "Do you want to eat dessert outside? By the pool."
Alina and Vesper look at each other.
He's already standing, already nodding at Lady Vessen. He takes my hand and pulls me to my feet and we're moving toward the door, and I glance back at Alina and Vesper as we leave and catch the full force of their combined surprise before the door swings shut.
* * *
The night air is cooler than the dining room, with the particular openness of outdoor sound — nothing contained, nothing bouncing back. The pool reflects the moon in a broken oval, moving slightly. There's a small table near the edge with the desserts already arriving, and we sit side by side on the stone ledge, close enough that his shoulder is against mine, and I can feel the chill of the stone under my legs and the heat of him next to me.
I pick up a fork and cut into the chocolate tart in front of us, and I hold it out toward him — and I'm aware, in the second I do it, that this is a more exposed gesture than anything I've done all evening. He takes it, watching me, and then I take a piece for myself and eat it and look at the water.
He pulls me toward him by the shoulder and kisses me, and then says, very close to my ear: "Now it tastes like something."
I look at him, and my mouth is doing the thing it does when I can't decide whether to argue or laugh, and then I'm laughing before I've decided — a real one, brief and undignified — and he tucks his arm around my shoulder and I tip against him without meaning to and look up.
The moon. Stars. The harbor, far below, its lights moving.
"Who was the man in the garden with you today?" Ignis asks. "The one with Caspian."
I turn toward him. "My cousin. Darion."
He read my face. "You're close."
"We grew up together."
"What did you talk about?"
I hold his gaze, even. "You can't really be expecting me to tell you that."
"I am," he says, the same tone.
"The armies you sent to our border have arrived. My siblings are coming in a few days." I hold his gaze. "That's what we discussed."
"That's all?"
"Nothing important."
He lays his lips to my hair — brief, placed.
I look at him after a moment. "What are you going to do about Sorin?"
The line of his mouth relaxed — a different version of his face, the one that surfaces when he's not thinking about being watched. "You could call Lysara here. Bring them together."
"Are you sure about that?"
He kisses my cheek — close and specific — and I register it along my jaw and down.
I tell Lysara to come to the pool. She asks if something's wrong, and I tell her no, just come.
Ignis is watching me from an inch away when I look up.
"Did you choose the white dress?" I ask.
His expression shifted — caught, and aware of being caught. "Is that what you've been thinking about?"
"I thought it was you. I wasn't wrong."
"You were very beautiful in it," he says, and then his mouth finds my neck, unhurried and considered, and I sit very still and warmth moves up through my throat and into my face.
We stay like that until movement in the sky catches my eye — two shapes, circling down — and Lysara and Sorin land at the pool's edge in a stir of wings. Lysara's scales catch the moonlight, sapphire deepening to midnight blue along her spine, brilliant where the light hits and dark where it doesn't. Sorin lands close behind her — larger than he seems on a balcony, his scales running gold and crimson, the bronze in them catching red at the edges. He stays close.
Lysara looks at Ignis and then at me with a questioning precision that I recognize.
I get up and go to her, and put my arms around her neck and lay my face against her scales, warm from the flight. "I wanted to see you," I tell her.
Sorin watches us both, then swings his attention to Lysara and holds it there.
Ignis gets to his feet and comes around, and he runs his hand along Lysara's head — she submits to it with the expression of someone being civil — and then he moves to Sorin and presses his lips briefly to the top of Sorin's head. "You look better," he says.
Sorin says nothing. His gaze moves to Lysara.
Lysara looks at me, pointed. Later, her expression says. I want to know everything. Later.
I dip my chin slightly.
She glances at Sorin, then spreads her wings and lifts in one clean motion. Sorin is half a second behind her, rising, and then they're both above us, banking together, and then they're gone.
"She's irritated that I'm here," Ignis says, watching the sky where they disappeared.
I look at him. "She's not irritated. She's just — she's protective."
"She doesn't hide it well."
"She doesn't try to," I say, and lean into him slightly, and his arm comes around me.
We stand there for a moment looking at the water, and then he kisses the side of my neck — slow, placed where he means it — and I hold still and breathe. His mouth moves to just below my ear.
"A few more days," he says quietly, "and you're mine."
I don't move. Not away from him, not toward him — I just stay exactly where I am and let that sentence sit, which takes more effort than it should.
"You don't look like someone I met ten days ago," I say.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone colder. More careful."
He draws back and meets my gaze. "I've been trying to stay controlled around you," he says, and his hand finds mine as he says it. "That's what you were seeing."
I look at him and believe him and don't entirely know what to do with it. Then I lean slightly against his shoulder — registering only after I've done it that I did it without deciding to — and his arm comes around me.
We look at the water.
"Like you still don't know what to make of me," he says. A pause. "That's fair. I'm not sure what to make of you either."
We look at each other, and the admission sits between us without either of us reaching for it, and the space that was tight a moment ago opens slightly.
"I should take you back," he says.
* * *
In the corridor, the lanterns leave amber pools on the stone at intervals, and our footsteps are the only sound. He doesn't take my hand this time. I reach over and take his — and in the moment my fingers touch his I'm not certain he'll take them, and then his hand closes around mine and that uncertainty passes.
He glances at me, sideways. I look ahead.
We walk.
* * *
At my door, I look at him, and then I rise onto the balls of my feet and kiss him.
His response is immediate — his arm comes around me and he kisses back with everything that's been held in check since we left the study, and I have to put my hand against the doorframe to keep my footing. When we ease apart, we're both breathing and standing slightly closer than we started.
I lay my mouth against his throat. His exhale is audible. Under my lips his pulse is quick, and then the tension in his shoulders — the tension I've watched him carry since the first day — drains out degree by degree until the body I'm standing against is different from the one I started with.
I ease back. He looks at me.
"Go inside," he says. "Or I won't be able to leave."
I look at him for a moment — the corridor light making his face unreadable in the way I've grown used to — and then I push the door open behind me and go in and hold his gaze through the narrowing gap.
"Close it," he says. "This is your last chance."
"You go," I say. "I'll close it."
He looks at me for one more second. Then: "Good night, Valeria."
"Good night."
The door clicks shut.
I stand with my back against it and press two fingers to my lips and I'm smiling, which is something I'm not going to examine right now, and I push off and cross to the balcony.
* * *
Lysara is waiting.
Sorin is on the opposite roof. He's watching the balcony with the focused patience of someone who intends to be there until he's told otherwise.
She looks at me with amber eyes that have known every expression I've ever tried to manage, and she says, "How can you trust him?"
I rearrange my face. "I don't," I say.
"I saw how you looked at him."
"We kissed," I say. "That's all."
"It's the first time you've been close to anyone," she says. "And that person has a difficult history with loyalty."
I breathe in. "We're getting married in a few days."
"You're feeling things," she says. "And when you feel things, the other things stop mattering to you."
"I can't stop it," I say. "Not at this point."
She watches me for a long moment, the kind that doesn't give you credit for things you haven't earned. "If he hurts you," she says, "I'll kill him."
I look at her, and something releases in my ribcage — not comfort, exactly, but the specific relief of being known. "I know," I say.
"How's Sorin?" I ask after a moment.
She turns toward him on the opposite roof. He's still watching. Then she looks back at me, and her jaw is slightly tight — the expression she uses when she's not going to say a thing directly but means it entirely.
"Dragons are more reliable," she says.
I smile. "Don't keep him waiting."
She spreads her wings, one clean movement, and goes. Sorin lifts the moment she does, falling into place just behind her, and they climb together until they're only shapes against the dark, and then nothing.
I stand at the railing for a while.
Then I go inside, change, get into bed, and lie there in the dark thinking about Ignis, and then I think about what Lysara said, and then I think about Ignis again, and I can't make the expression leave my face.
I stop trying.