Ch5. When She Began to Want.

After the banquet, Anna's mood had lifted, if only slightly—lifted because she had, for the first time, fought for something on her own behalf, and because her father had, for the first time, acknowledged her demands with even a fraction of genuine consideration.

But three months. Not long. Not short either.

What was she going to do with that time?

Was she going to do something for herself? No—she had no idea yet.

But when three months were up, was she truly going to marry Prince Geelong?

No. She didn't want that.

Then what did she want?

She had no answer.

The night pressed the palace's silhouette into a heavy ink-dark cutout against the sky. Stars hung above it in loose, scattered clusters, as if someone had flung a handful up there and couldn't be bothered to arrange them.

Jeffery's first night in the city, he settled into an unremarkable inn on the eastern side.

Not the cheapest one, not the most expensive. He had his own habit when choosing a room—somewhere toward the back courtyard, with a window, a window that faced at least two alleys. Seven years on the road had made this instinct as natural as skin; it required no thought, only execution. He propped his sword against the headboard, draped his coat over the chair, then sat on the windowsill and drew out the inner pocket, setting it on his knee.

He looked at it for a long time.

The knife was hers. The stone he had picked up himself. Both were light, yet they pressed on something in him—pressed hard enough that he had no desire to sleep. He ran the side of his thumb across the worn patch on the knife's hilt; the texture felt like a question with no answer, one that had no intention of disappearing.

Three months.

He laid that number out in his mind and looked at it. What she intended to do with those three months, he didn't know. Perhaps she didn't know either—but she had asked for them all the same. That alone said something. A person who wants nothing doesn't bother to fight for time. Time is for people who still have things left to do.

The corner of his mouth moved, barely, then settled back.

Outside, the night watchman passed by with his lantern, striking the bronze gong twice; the sound sank into the dark.

Jeffery tucked the pocket back against his chest, rose, walked to the table, and lit the stub of a candle. In the dim yellow light, he turned over everything he had gathered that day, sorting it in his mind.

The palace's side door. The hours the supply servants came and went. How often the gate guards rotated. The direction of the ruined tower from within the palace walls, and roughly how high it stood when seen from outside.

He was a wandering knight, not a spy, not an assassin. But seven years on the road had taught him far more than swordsmanship—he had learned how to read a city, how to map unfamiliar ground as quickly as possible, how to make himself a grain of sand in any given place: staying, watching, leaving no impression.

The image of Geelong's eyes fixed on her surfaced once more in his mind.

He blew out the candle.

Darkness settled back down. He leaned against the chair, eyes open in the blackness, looking at the ceiling he couldn't see. His breathing was steady. His heartbeat was steady. Only that slow-burning coal deep in his chest, never quite extinguished, with nowhere to go—

She didn't yet know what she wanted.

That was all right.

He had time enough to wait while she figured it out.

And until she did, there was only one thing he needed to do.

His eyes narrowed slightly in the dark, like a creature lying very still in the grass, quiet but awake—

Stay.

A few days passed. Anna's life fell back into its old rhythms—proper, ceremonious, and dull—but there was a little breathing room in it now that hadn't existed before. She stood at her bedpost and scored a new mark into the wood with a fresh letter opener, counting the days.

Eighty-five days left.

Her grip tightened around the hilt—then she paused.

Right. This one was new. This wasn't the same knife—not the one she had picked up and put down so many times before, the one that had been with her every time she'd thought about ending things and then quietly set it aside.

“I forgot… I gave that knife to him.”

She set the unfamiliar letter opener down and thought of Jeffery—the man she had met twice, spoken to for only a handful of minutes, yet who had somehow understood her in ways she couldn't account for. She couldn't remember his name, though. She knew he had said it, that night beneath the tower when he'd called up to her, when he'd offered to help fix the roof. She turned the memory over and came up empty.

She let out a small breath. "Never mind. I won't see him again anyway."

She gathered herself and called for Addie. "Addie—could you go out to the city and buy me those pastries you used to bring back? The ones you'd bring from your hometown when you had time off." Her eyes brightened, a look they hadn't worn in some time. "You said it wasn't far from the palace, didn't you?"

Morning on the eastern side of the city carried a sleepy, lived-in warmth—the white steam rising from the tofu stall mingling with the charred fragrance drifting from the flatbread baker next door, both rolling in from opposite ends of the lane until the whole street was steeped in a drowsy, comfortable heat.

Jeffery sat on a long bench outside the inn, a bowl of hot soup untouched in front of him, a piece of firewood in his hand. He was carving it slowly with his small knife—not making anything useful, just giving his hands something to do, letting anyone who glanced at him conclude that here was a man idling away time, not worth a second look.

He had been in this city a few days now. In that time, he had learned the alleys from east to west well enough to navigate them without thought: which lane led to the palace's supply entrance, which stall owner talked too much and therefore knew everything, which hour of the gate rotation the guards dozed off in the archway. He had logged all of it in his memory, not a word committed to paper.

In these few days he had not gone looking for news of Anna. Not because he didn't want to—but because asking too often drew attention. He simply sat each morning on this stretch of street, an appropriate distance from the palace's side door, watching the foot traffic the way a dust-covered stone watches: no one remembers it is there, yet it records every face that passes through.

He had whittled the firewood to a blunt round nub when the side door opened.

A young woman came out—early twenties, hair pinned in the style common to palace maids, a basket hanging from her arm, her step light. She didn't have the hunched, preoccupied air of the supply servants; there was something almost breezy about her, the particular looseness of someone given a rare errand they were happy to run.

Jeffery's hand paused. He kept carving.

He didn't rise immediately—only marked the direction she had taken from beneath half-lowered eyelids. Not toward the main market. Toward the pastry shop in the eastern quarter. He ran through the routes he had walked and recalled that there was only one way to reach it, threading through a stretch of narrow lane flanked on both sides by high walls, rarely traveled.

He set the half-carved wood down, rolled his knuckles, and stood. He pushed the soup bowl aside without hurrying, the motion of a man who merely felt like a walk.

He got to the lane's entrance before she did and leaned against the wall to wait. When the woman with the empty basket turned the corner, he spoke—quiet enough for one person to hear:

"Excuse me, miss."

She startled, stepped back half a pace, and looked at him with open wariness. Jeffery didn't move toward her. He stood where he was, hands at his sides, posture open, no pressure in it at all—the stance of someone accustomed to letting strangers form their own assessment of whether he was dangerous.

He studied her face, cross-referencing it against several days of quiet observation. Palace maids came in varieties: the timid ones, the smooth-tongued practical ones, and a third kind—those who had served a trusted mistress long enough to carry a little of her mistress's manner. This woman had come out through the side door, not the servants' door, which meant she was trusted enough to rate it. Her step was quick, which meant this errand was one she'd chosen to do. An errand, but not a burden.

The corner of his mouth curved, just barely. He worked the silver coin out of his sleeve and turned it once in the light.

"I was passing through this city a few days ago, and outside the gate—" He paused, as if choosing his words, though in fact he was watching her expression. "—I met a young woman. She was kind enough to point me toward lodgings in the city, and I left without thanking her properly. It's been nagging at me. I only remember that she seemed to have some connection to the palace."

Every word of it was a lie, but he told it the way a man tells a simple, true thing—without effort, without ornament.

His amber eyes rested on the maid's face, gentle, not threatening, but carrying a fine, invisible needle that waited quietly for her to speak.

When Addie heard a voice addressing her, she lifted the empty basket to her chest and took a half-step back, scanning the speaker's face.

Then she recognized him.

It was him—the man she had exchanged a frantic glance with in the corridor, the one who had climbed the tower and stopped her mistress from doing something she couldn't take back.

"It's you!" Addie exclaimed, startled. "You—from that day."

Jeffery went still.

Only for a fraction of a second—less than one—but he did. His amber eyes swept her face, and memory turned its pages: that morning, the corridor by the ruined tower, the chaos in the moments before the guards arrived—a maid, eyes wide, who had caught his gaze and said nothing.

Her.

He pressed the momentary lapse flat, and his expression settled back into calm, but the quality of light in his eyes shifted slightly, like a thin beam coming through a crack in a shutter—narrow, yet bright.

He also quietly put away the lie he had prepared. There was no point telling it to someone who already knew his face. He rolled the coin back between his fingers and changed his approach, his voice dropping half a register, carrying more directness than before.

"It is."

He didn't explain what he was doing here, and he didn't resume the story he had started. Lying to someone who had already recognized you was both wasteful and risky. His gaze stayed on the maid's face—unhurried, no threat in it, no evasion either—the look of someone who has nothing to hide and isn't asking her to stay, only not to run.

He shifted half a step sideways, clearing the path she had come from, lowering his whole posture into something easier, like a tree that simply isn't in the way.

"I don't mean any harm." He let a beat pass, then set the next sentence out slowly, weighing each word before releasing it. "She—"

At that single syllable, something in his voice changed almost imperceptibly—as if a string had been plucked very lightly by someone passing, the faintest vibration, barely audible but real.

"Is she all right?"

Just that. No follow-up, no question about the wounds on her back, no question about the banquet, about Geelong, about whatever had happened inside that study. He pressed everything else he wanted to ask beneath this one sentence and let only this one surface.

His right hand hung at his side, his thumb moving quietly against the knuckle of his forefinger—betraying, just slightly, the restlessness he was keeping buried while he waited for an answer.

Hearing Jeffery ask after Anna, Addie felt the caution in her chest ease. If it was this man, she decided, there was nothing to guard against—even though she didn't know him at all, even though there was no logical reason to trust him, save for the way she remembered him running—that barely-controlled panic in his face—when he had climbed the tower to reach Anna.

"She's in a much better mood today," Addie said, her voice soft with a fondness that carried a thread of long-held worry beneath it. "She hadn't said a word for days." She paused, and something small and bright entered her expression. "But today she asked me to go out and buy her pastries. Of all things. She really is better—she even smiled a little."

Jeffery didn't speak right away after she finished.

He stood there, letting those words settle in his chest. Hadn't said a word for days. He turned the sentence over once, then again, then pressed it down into the place he didn't let others see. His expression didn't shift much, but the line near the outer corner of his eye tightened faintly—the way a sheet of paper tightens when someone pinches a corner, then slowly releases.

Days.

Alone in that stone palace, she had been silent for days.

He lowered his eyes to the coin in his fingers, held it in silence for two counts, then put it away and reached for something else—another coin, though he didn't extend it yet, only held it, as though making up his mind.

"Pastries," he repeated, his voice level, but the faintest curve appeared at the corner of his mouth, so faint it was almost not there. "She sent you out for pastries."

He looked back up at Addie. Something in his amber eyes was heavy, yet it landed on the words at least she smiled a little lightly, warmly—the way a person who has walked a long time in the dark might feel upon glimpsing a distant light, still too far to reach, and yet already exhaling.

He turned the coin once between his fingers, then asked directly:

"Which shop are you going to?"

Before Addie could answer, he added one more line, his tone carrying something he hadn't bothered to conceal this time—more straightforward than anything he had said so far:

"I'll walk with you."

As he said it, his profile turned toward the light falling through the lane's entrance, a few strands of dark hair drifting loose in the morning breeze, the small old scar on his left brow appearing and disappearing in the shifting light. He didn't look at Addie's expression—he simply stepped forward half a pace and angled himself so that the direction was hers: you go first, I'll follow.

He turned the reasoning over in his mind and found no objection to it.

She wanted pastries. She had asked someone to go buy them—which meant she wanted them, which meant today she had felt like wanting something. A person who had been standing at the edge of a tower roof only days ago, today wanted pastries. That fact, by itself, mattered more than any words could.

He had no intention of disturbing her. He only thought: if those pastries could be a little better, just a little—

Then they were worth the trouble, if they made her smile a little more.