His hand stilled over the paper he was reading. A beat. Then he resumed writing, and she left, and she was still thinking about the wordwifewhen she reached the bottom of the staircase and could no longer hear his pen on parchment.
She foundDavn in the secondary building he used as a workspace, cleaning a piece of equipment she couldn't identify. His white hands moved with precision, his attention on the task, though she'd learned by now that Davn's attention was never limited to what his hands were doing. The black stripes along his forearms shifted as the muscles worked.
"He gave me household authority," she said, leaning against the doorframe. She held up the documents. "Signing power, staff management, the lot."
Davn did not look up. "I know."
"It seems like a lot for someone who's only here for six weeks."
Davn set down the piece he was cleaning, reached for a cloth, and wiped his hands. He dried each finger individually before he spoke.
"He had Vasek draw those up the day after you agreed. Before we were on the transport."
He picked up the next component and resumed cleaning. The dismissal was gentle, but it was a dismissal. He had delivered the information. He was done.
November stood in the doorway with the documents pressed against her chest and no one to say the next thing to. She stared at the back of Davn's white head for a moment, then turned and walked toward the stables.
The day after she agreed. Before the transport. Before the three-day journey, before the corridor and the blankets, before the kitchen and the kethral and the bandage on his shoulder and the wordwifesitting in his study like a piece of furniture that had always been there.
He had been planning what she would need before he knew what she liked for breakfast. Before he knew any of the things about her that she had assumed were the things that made people decide to be generous. He hadn't been generous because he knew her. He had been generous because she was under his roof and that was enough.
She put that far away in the back of her mind along with the growing stack of information about Rhaezon Vaethari that she was not examining yet because examining it all would require admitting that she was paying a particular kind of attention to all the information she was gathering about him. The stack was getting tall. She kept walking.
That midafternoon,she used her signing authority for the first time.
The groundskeeper's cottage sat at the edge of the kitchen garden, low-roofed and solid, built from the same dark stone as everything else on the plateau. Vasek opened the door before she had finished knocking.
"Lady Vaethari."
"November. Please. I brought some jam from the kitchen. The cook said you'd finished your last jar."
Vasek took the jar with a small bow and stepped aside. "Ah, Mathen's award-winning spread. Maren will be pleased. Come in."
The cottage was warm and a little dim, lit by the long windows along the western wall and a low fire in the hearth. Maren sat in a chair by the fire with a basket of mending in her lap. She rose when November entered, and November waved her back down before she got halfway up.
"Don't get up. Please."
Maren settled back into the chair with a soft exhale that was almost a cough. Her hair and her hands were thin across the knuckles, but her smile was warm.
"Lady November. Vasek said you were settling in well."
They talked for a while about nothing important — the cook's jam, the kitchen garden, the weather shifting over the ridge. Maren coughed twice into the back of her hand, light and dry, and waved it off when November's eyes flicked toward her.
"The air up here. Never agreed with my chest."
November eye caught on the window behind Maren's chair. A strip of dark fabric had been wadded into the seam where the frame met the stone. The cloth was stained at the edges from weather.
"That window."
Vasek turned. "Ah. That. It's done that for years. The frame shifted over time and now it doesn't seal properly. We keep meaning to get to it. " He shrugged, the movement small and dismissive. "It's nothing. A draft. We have it handled."
"It gets cold at night this high up."
"We manage."
November set her cup down on the low table and pulled the small notebook from her back pocket. She wrote two lines, tore the page out, and folded it once.
"I'll have someone out tomorrow. The stonemason the cook mentioned — Erran? I'll have him look at the frame and the seal both."
