He looks at it for a moment longer. Then he reaches for the letter again. It is the only memory he has that brings him anything close to calm. He has returned to it more times than he would admit.
He has never known who she was.
It Begins
COLSAR
He searches every part of the grounds he has not yet covered, moving through outer corridors, gardens, and the far wings of the palace with the focus of someone who has stopped caring how it looks, and finds nothing. No trace of her. No one who has seen her in the last hour. The grounds give him back only quiet and the smell of evening coming in over the walls, and he is standing in the outer courtyard trying to decide where else to look when it reaches him.
Her. Faint, but unmistakable.
She is back inside the palace. He shifts from his siakar form and moves, and Arabar is waiting for him at the inner door with the particular stillness of a man who has been waiting for some time and has something to say.
"Majesty."
Colsar looks at him.
"The Queen is at this evening's ball."
He absorbs that for a moment. "Oh?" The word comes out measured, which is more than the feeling behind it deserves.
"I believe she arrived on her own, Majesty." A brief pause. "Though it seems most of her attention this evening has gone to Lord Enovar and Lord Kentan."
Colsar says nothing. He turns and goes to his chambers in the main palace, the old ones, and calls for water and does not speak to anyone while he waits for it. The bath is quick, functional, and he is out of it and reaching for clean clothes before the heat has fully left the room.
He does not know what he feels. That is the honest answer, and he is not accustomed to honest answers about himself. There is guilt in it, he knows that much, sitting low and uncomfortable in a way he has no practice managing. There is anger too, and jealousy, and beneath both of those something that feels uncomfortably close to hurt, and he cannot determine which of them is loudest because they are all speaking at once.
What he knows is that whatever it is his father told him to hold back from, whatever it is he has been keeping carefully behind a door these past weeks, the door is no longer there. Something in him gave way today, somewhere between the empty dining room and the pools and the courtyard and the long hour of searching for her through a palace she had apparently left entirely, and the only thing on the other side of it is her.
She had threatened to leave him today.
The thought sits in him with a weight he does not know what to do with. And last night, where had she been last night? He missed her. That is the truth of it, stripped of everything else. He missed her voice and the particular way she looked at him whenshe had already decided something and was waiting for him to catch up. He missed the way she laughed, missed the specific quality of having her near him, and he had been living inside that absence for weeks and calling it discipline.
He did not like explaining himself or apologizing. He had built a considerable portion of his life around not having to do either, and the fact that both were now necessary sat on him with the particular discomfort of things that are undeniably true. He closed his eyes while he worked the buttons of his shirt and thought of Ari and Kiss, the smallness of their hands, the way they smelled when he held them, and something in his chest loosened just slightly. They were here. They were perfect and they were here and they were alive, and they were alive because of her, because of what she had gone through to bring them into the world. He had everything he wanted, yet had spent the better part of his time in Shalvar behaving as though it required nothing from him in return.
He straightened his collar and went downstairs.
The ballroom reached him before he entered it, music and light spilling out into the corridor, the warmth of a room full of people who have been drinking long enough to forget they are performing. He moved through the doors and his eyes found her immediately, the way they had always done without his permission.
She was holding a glass of wine and she was beautiful in a way he had never learned to be casual about. There had always been something in her that was unlike anything else, a quality that sat just beside innocence without ever being mistaken for it. It had not been worn down or shaped into caution by the world the way it had been in others. It was here tonight, present in the way she stood and the slight angle of her head when she listened. Shehad stolen the room without trying for it, the way she always did. He could see it happening, the way the men nearby kept finding reasons to look back at her, drawn without understanding why.
She was laughing at something his uncle was saying, her head tipped back slightly, and Enovar was watching her with the particular fondness of someone who has decided to be thoroughly charmed and has no complicated feelings about it. It was almost brotherly, the way Enovar looked at her. That he could manage.
Kentan was different.
Colsar felt the anger move through him and held it where it was, because he had already done enough today and this was not the place. The look Kentan had was not the look of a man who had set out to want something that was not his. He knew that look, he had seen it before, and this was not it. This was something quieter and more helpless than that, the look of someone who had spent too many mornings in the same quiet place as someone irresistible and had not noticed what was happening until it was too late. He could understand it completely, and he hated that he could.
She felt him looking. He saw it happen, the small shift in her before she turned, and then her eyes found him across the room and he could not read her face. Whatever she felt about seeing him tonight she had put somewhere he could not access it, and she watched him cross the room toward her with an expression that gave him nothing.
He nodded at Enovar. He gave Kentan a greeting that was technically polite and nothing else, and Kentan absorbed it with the particular disappointment of someone who had hoped for a different outcome despite knowing better.
"My queen," Colsar said.
Asharin bent into a curtsy, her eyes dropping briefly. "Your Majesty." Her voice was composed, careful, and it cost him something to hear her use his title.
He held out his hand. He did not know, in the moment between offering it and her response, what he would do if she refused him. He did not let himself think about it. He held out his hand and he waited, and something in him that had been wound tightly all day held its breath.
She took it.
