"His Majesty has left for Turga."
That was what greeted me upon my return to the palace. I had been aching to see his face for hours, and he was not there.
The foreboding that took root in my chest immediately was not subtle about it. It settled in and refused to be dislodged.
He had gone to Turga himself. The only explanation that made sense was also the one I liked least: he had gone to receive the Princess of Furha.
If I wanted to see him, the practical solution was simple — I had been to Turga, I had a clear anchor for it, teleportation would take seconds. But every time I reached for the intention and tried to hold it steady, something in me wavered. And wavering is fatal to that kind of working. The anchor requires resolution, a clear and settled mind, and mine was neither. It kept snagging on the same question: *what will I find when I get there?*
I did not know. And not knowing made me afraid to look.
So I waited.
Hours became days. Days accumulated into weeks. Two full weeks passed before he returned, and the waiting was its own particular form of suffering — not dramatic, not sharp, just the dull and grinding discomfort of someone who wants one simple thing and cannot have it.
He sent a message by courier in the middle of the second week.
*My cousin has asked me to show her around Turga, as it is her first time at a port town. I will return with her as soon as possible.*
His cousin. I read the word twice, then set the letter down.
The two weeks were a kind of torment I was not proud of. The knowledge that he was spending time with someone else — with her, specifically — produced a pain I could not easily justify to myself and could not make stop either. I retreated to my chambers and largely stayed there, emerging only when I had to, passing the time in the particular suspended state of someone waiting for something they cannot accelerate.
Then one morning Rora came in with her voice pitched higher than usual.
"His Majesty has reached the third wall, my lady."
Four hours.
I got up, called for the maids, and let them dress me. They chose a golden saree, jewellery that caught the light and gave it back multiplied. When they were finished I looked at the result in the mirror and felt, despite everything, like a spent thing — a husk wearing beautiful clothes, the inside hollowed out by two weeks of waiting and worrying and the accumulated weight of everything the past months had become.
I went to stand at the castle gates.
I stood there until the great doors finally groaned open and Arvid's entourage rolled through — carriages raising thin clouds of sandy dust across the imperial garden, the horses slowing as they entered the grounds.
His carriage door opened.
He stepped down, and my breath caught, because I had missed him with a specificity that I hadn't fully understood until I was looking at him again.
But he didn't turn toward me. He turned back toward the carriage and raised his hand.
A hand took his. Pale — alabaster pale, with the kind of luminosity that looks almost like moonlight given form. Silver jewellery at the wrist, diamonds catching the last of the evening light. And then the rest of her came into view as she descended.
I had thought, at various points in my life, that I had a reasonable understanding of what beauty looked like. I had met Aiona, who was extraordinary. I had looked at my own reflection in a dragon's silver eyes. I had seen Arvid, who was by any honest measure a genuinely beautiful man.
None of that had prepared me for this.
She was perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Silver hair that did not look like hair so much as spun light, falling in perfect arrangement. Sapphire eyes, clear and deep. Skin that seemed to carry its own luminescence, pale without being cold, radiant without effort. A black silk gown that knew exactly what it was doing. Silver and white gold jewellery, diamonds, everything working together with the seamless precision of someone who has always known how to present themselves and has never had to try particularly hard at it.
She was breathtaking. There was no other word for it.
And my husband's hand was in hers as she stepped down and they walked toward me together.
I felt something in my chest go cold and hard at the same moment.
The restraint I had been keeping over my power had been holding adequately until this point. Now it began to strain. My jaw clenched. My hands closed at my sides, tight enough that I felt the pressure of my own nails. The air around me shifted — very slightly, just at the edges of perception, magic seeping through the cracks in my composure the way smoke finds the gaps in a sealed room. I pulled it back. Hold it. Kept my face exactly where it was.
He released her hand when they reached the platform where I stood.
And then he walked toward me, and he was smiling — warm and easy, the smile he gave me when he was genuinely glad to see me and was not performing it.
"Have you been waiting long, my love?" he asked.
I said nothing immediately. I was still working on my face.
"Allow me to introduce you," he said, turning slightly. "My cousin — Princess Zaria of Furha, from my mother's kingdom." He looked at her, then back at me. "And Zaria — my wife, the Empress of Selon, Queen of Draga, and the mother of the new age of dragons. Rhiaenne Sarenna Draga Seyak."
*Cousin.*
The word landed and stayed, rearranging several things simultaneously.
Princess Zaria curtsied, and it was a perfect curtsy — graceful, appropriately deep, executed with the ease of someone who has been doing this since childhood. When she straightened, she was smiling. Not the smile of someone performing politeness over something else, but the open, uncalculated smile of someone who means it.
"It is an honour to meet you, your Majesty," she said. Her voice was warm.
I stood there and absorbed the fact that I had spent two weeks constructing elaborate anxieties about a woman who was currently smiling at me with genuine warmth and no discernible agenda, and tried to reassemble my composure into something appropriate.
"The honour is mutual, Princess Zaria," I said, and my voice came out steady, which was more than I deserved given the state of my interior. "I have heard a great deal about you."
Her smile took on a small, recognising quality. "I hope only the good things, your Majesty."
"Of course," I said.
---
I escorted them to the banquet hall, where the kitchens had prepared light refreshments — cold drinks, small dishes, the kind of spread that says *welcome, you have been travelling, you should eat something* without requiring anyone to commit to a full dinner before they were ready.
Arvid stayed briefly, drank half a glass of lemonade, offered some remark to his cousin that made her laugh, and then excused himself — something requiring his attention after two weeks away, which was inevitable and also convenient, because it left me alone with her.
She ate with genuine appreciation, complimenting each dish in the particular way of someone who is actually tasting things rather than performing gratitude. Nothing about her was sharp or guarded or strategic. She was simply pleasant, in the easy, undefended way of someone who has not been given many reasons to build walls.
I watched her for a little while, and then I decided.
"I understand you wrote letters to my husband when you were young," I said, picking up my lemonade and keeping my voice conversational. I looked at her directly. The question underneath the statement was visible, I was sure of it. I wasn't trying to hide it.
She went very still for a moment.
Then colour rose into her pale cheeks, swift and comprehensive.
"Your Majesty." She looked at me with the expression of someone confronting something they had hoped had been quietly forgotten by history. "That was a very long time ago. I was young and rather naive, and — if it's any comfort — I was rejected quite clearly." A brief, self-aware breath of laughter. "It was a necessary lesson. I came to understand, a long time ago, that brother Arvid did not and would not see me in that way. I made my peace with it thoroughly." She met my eyes with a steadiness that was not defiance but simply honesty. "Please believe me when I say I hold nothing in my heart now beyond what a cousin should hold. Nothing more than that."
I looked at her.
She was telling the truth. I could not have explained precisely how I knew this with such certainty, but I knew it — the way you know certain things when your senses have been sharpened to a degree that human language was not originally designed to describe.
"I believe you," I said.
And I did.