After some deliberation, I settled on the Moon Palace for our guest.
It was the only unoccupied palace within the castle grounds that was truly worthy of the name — second only to the Rose Palace in its splendour, and distinctive in a way that made it feel like a genuine offering rather than an afterthought. It had been built from rare white marble, its silhouette somehow suggesting the moon itself in shape and in the quality of light it produced, and the gardens surrounding it had been planted with flowers that opened only at night, as though the whole place had been designed to do justice to its name after dark rather than during the day.
I had found it on one of my early walks around the castle grounds — tucked away in a corner, slightly removed from the bustle of the main palaces, as though it had decided privacy was its natural condition. The discovery had moved me then. A place built with the careful, specific devotion of a man who loved a woman — you could feel it in the proportions, in the choices made at every level of its construction. Someone had wanted to make something beautiful for someone specific, and had succeeded.
The distance was another recommendation. The Moon Palace sat at a comfortable remove from both the Diamond Palace and the Rose Palace, which meant our guest would have genuine privacy, and we would have ours.
I told myself that was the only reason I had chosen it.
I was not fully convinced by myself.
The truth, which I was less willing to look at directly, was that Arvid had gone to Turga himself to receive her — had spent two weeks there, in her company, while I waited at the palace and tried to find useful ways to occupy my time and largely failed. That still sat in me, quietly and persistently, like a splinter that hadn't been removed. It would pass. She had told me honestly that her feelings were in the past and I had believed her. I did believe her.
But belief and feeling are not always the same thing, and what I felt was something that had not entirely resolved.
Things between Arvid and me had not returned to what they were before I understood the full shape of him. Perhaps they never would. What we had now was something more complicated than what we'd had then — more honest in certain ways, more careful in others, carrying the weight of what had been revealed and the question of what could be built on the other side of it. I had been trying. I thought he had been trying.
And then he had gone to Turga for two weeks.
It had not helped.
Zaria, for her part, was delighted with the Moon Palace — her eyes had lit when she saw it, and her gratitude was warm and genuine, the kind that doesn't require performance because it simply is what it appears to be. I assigned her additional maids alongside the two she had brought from Furha, and left her to settle in.
Then I walked back through the castle grounds toward the Rose Palace, and found myself stopping at the Diamond Palace without quite having decided to.
I had not had any real time alone with Arvid since his return. The formalities of welcome, the dinner arrangements, the business of settling a royal guest — all of it had kept us in company rather than conversation. I wanted to see him. Not the public version, not the version that smiled at me in front of other people — simply him, in a quiet room, without an audience.
I decided the formality of announcing myself could wait, and teleported directly into his bedchamber.
He wasn't there. But voices carried from the adjoining room — his study, the inner chamber where he worked through the documents and decisions that didn't require a formal setting. The door was ajar. I moved toward it quietly, meaning to surprise him, the way I had been meaning to do since I'd seen him step out of that carriage.
The words reached me before I reached the door.
I stopped.
"Is this a good idea, your Majesty?" The voice was a man's — a minister, from the sound of him. Someone whose face I had registered in passing without ever properly meeting. He was present at certain gatherings, never central to them, a figure who occupied the peripheral vision without demanding anything more. But the ease with which he was speaking in Arvid's private study suggested a proximity I hadn't known about.
"It is the only viable way forward, given the circumstances." Arvid's voice, calm and measured, the tone he used for practical assessments. "An heir is the priority. A double royal heir with unquestionable legitimacy. How I acquire one is a secondary matter."
A pause.
"But the empress—" the minister began.
"Would have made this simpler, yes. But she hasn't." A brief pause, in which I heard nothing but my own heartbeat. "So someone else must. Zaria has already agreed. She will serve as concubine, and the empress will adopt the child. It's a clean solution. There's no legitimate argument against the heir's claim."
The words entered me and kept going, past the point where words usually stop.
I stood very still in the bedchamber and listened to my own breathing and tried to understand what I had just heard.
*He said he would wait for me.*
He had said it in the library, looking directly at me, stripped of every performance. I had believed him. I had built something fragile and important on the foundation of believing him, and I had been trying, these past weeks, to find my way back to him from the other side of everything I now knew.
And he had made this arrangement during two weeks in Turga.
*It's a dream,* something in me said, with the desperation of a thought that knows it's wrong before it's finished forming. *This isn't real. None of this is real.*
My head began to spin.
The control I maintained over my power at all times — the constant, low-level effort of keeping what I was contained within the form I was wearing — simply dissolved. Not gradually, the way it sometimes did when I was tired. All at once, the way a held breath releases.
A faint, high buzzing filled my ears.
The magic came out of me in waves. Not directed, not deliberate — the kind of release that has nothing to do with intention and everything to do with what happens when something breaks. It rolled outward from me in concentric pressures, finding the air of the room and changing it, solidifying into the form it knew best, the form that had always come most naturally from the deep, iced-over heart of where I had started.
Snow began to fall in the Diamond Palace.
A snowstorm, slow at first and then gathering, filling the room with white — in the middle of the desert, in the heart of the Selon empire, in the bedchamber of the man who had just told someone else that his wife had failed to comply and so someone else would have to do.
I stood in the centre of it and felt the cold that couldn't touch me, and could not make myself move, and could not make myself stop.