Twelve days.
That was all they needed, twelve days before House Tasan would lose another daughter, only this time it would not be through some political arrangement forced upon her by men who had never once asked what she wanted from her own life; this time it would be by her own choosing. For the first time in sixteen years Aleel found herself counting the days not with the dread that had followed her through every arranged meeting, every banquet where she was paraded before visiting dignitaries like a prized mare, but with something dangerously close to hope. Each sunrise meant that she was one day closer to a life that belonged entirely to her, and each sunset meant that one less day stood between her and the small, unremarkable freedom she had never allowed herself to dream of before now. She had lived within these estate walls for so long that she had forgotten, or perhaps had simply never known, how beautiful the most ordinary things could be until she began to see them through the eyes of someone who was finally, truly, about to leave them behind.
She noticed things now that she had walked past a thousand times without a second glance. The old gardener hummed some half-remembered tune to himself while pruning the roses along the eastern wall, utterly unaware that anyone was listening. The cooks in the kitchen bickering daily over how much pepper belonged in a broth, as though the fate of the entire household rested upon the outcome. The laughter of children playing somewhere beyond the estate's high walls, their voices carrying over the stone as though mocking her for how long she had been trapped inside listening to it from a distance. Even the wind itself seemed to carry something different now, something lighter, something that smelled faintly of the open road and of a future she had only recently allowed herself to imagine.
"You've been smiling a great deal lately," her lady-in-waiting remarked one evening, her fingers carefully working a set of jade hairpins into Aleel's dark hair.
Aleel blinked, caught somewhat off guard by the observation. "Have I?"
The older woman chuckled softly under her breath as she continued her work. "It's nice to see. I don't believe I've seen you smile quite like this since—" She stopped herself abruptly, as though realizing too late where the sentence had been heading.
Aleel understood well enough what she had left unsaid. "Since Mother passed," she finished quietly, without bitterness.
The maid lowered her eyes, murmuring a soft apology, but Aleel only offered her a small, genuine smile in return. She wasn't angry, not truly, not anymore. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she felt as though the future was something that actually belonged to her, rather than something dictated entirely by the whims of her father and the ambitions of a house that had never once considered her happiness worth accounting for.
Every evening, once her duties had been discharged and the household had settled into its usual quiet, she slipped away toward the plum tree that grew near the western wall, far enough from the main residence that no one thought to look for her there. Caelan was always waiting for her beneath its branches, sometimes with a small loaf of bread he had saved from his own meager portion, sometimes with rough sketches he had drawn during whatever spare moments his work as the estate's under-gardener afforded him, and sometimes with nothing more than stories he had overheard from merchants passing through the nearby market.
"I spoke with a trader from Mazvak today," he told her one evening, practically bursting with the news before she had even fully settled onto the grass beside him.
"The northern kingdom?" she asked, genuinely curious despite herself.
He nodded eagerly and spread out a rough sketch across the grass between them, the lines uneven and the proportions clearly guessed at rather than measured, yet somehow full of a kind of earnest life that made it more charming than any polished architectural drawing could have been. "They build their homes differently there. The roofs are much steeper than ours, so that whatever falls upon them slides away instead of gathering and weighing the structure down."
"You truly remembered all of that just from one conversation?" she asked, leaning closer to examine his sketch with genuine interest.
"I asked him three times to be certain I understood it correctly."
She laughed, the sound light and unguarded in a way it rarely was within the walls of her father's estate. "Knowing you, I think you asked him closer to thirty times."
"...Perhaps," he admitted, grinning sheepishly in a way that made something warm settle in her chest.
His drawings were never particularly skilled. The lines wandered where they shouldn't, the measurements were almost certainly wrong, and no craftsman would have taken any of his sketches seriously as an actual blueprint. But whenever he spoke about the little cloth shop they intended to build together, describing the shelves and the counter and the door that would creak just slightly whenever it opened, she found that she could see it as clearly as if it already existed somewhere just beyond the horizon, waiting patiently for the two of them to arrive and claim it.
"We'll have flowers planted just outside the entrance," Aleel declared one evening, quite pleased with herself for having thought of it.
"Flowers don't sell cloth," Caelan pointed out, though the corner of his mouth was already curving upward in anticipation of the argument to come.
"They sell happiness, which is worth far more."
"Happiness doesn't pay rent, Aleel."
She folded her arms with mock severity. "I own half the shop. I'm entitled to insist on flowers."
He sighed dramatically, throwing his head back as though she had just delivered some grave injustice upon him. "So terribly unreasonable, this woman I've chosen to spend my life with.