The day passed in a terrible kind of ordinary.
She trained in the courtyard. He observed from the upper walkway for twenty minutes before she caught him watching and he disappeared without acknowledgment. She reviewed supply routes for the northern border — her final assignment, she reminded herself. He corrected her notes in red ink and left them outside her door, which she found both aggravating and, in the part of herself she was learning to despise, oddly intimate.
At dinner, they sat at opposite ends of a table built for thirty.
Halfway through the meal, he moved his plate to the seat beside her without explanation.
She did not comment. She did not trust herself to.
"Tell me something true," he said, out of nowhere, between courses.
Lyra looked sideways at him. "What?"
"You've been in this court for three years. I know what you are capable of, what you prefer to eat, how you fight, and what makes you laugh when you think no one is watching." Something shifted in his expression. "I don't know what you want. After this. When you leave."
The when landed like a stone dropped into still water.
"I haven't decided," she said honestly.
"Liar."
She almost smiled. "I want to see the coast. The Aravian Sea. I've never been." She turned her wine glass slowly. "I want a room that belongs to me. I want to wake up without a contract. Without owing anything to anyone."
Caelindor was quiet for a moment.
"And what if someone wanted to give you those things," he said carefully, "without requiring anything in return?"
The firelight between them felt very warm suddenly.
"No one gives things freely," Lyra said. "Not in this world. Not in yours."
"No," he agreed softly. "Not usually."
He was looking at her the way he had last night — that slipped-mask look, the one that undid three years of careful emotional architecture. She set her wine down before she could do something with her hands that she'd regret.
"Caelindor—"
"Don't," he said. Not unkindly. "Not yet."
She didn't know what yet meant. She was terrified it meant something.
She was more terrified that she wanted it to