A Marrow cousin attempted to sell a rumor that Brynna intended to flee to Solenne lands with alliance jewels. Lucen answered not with rage but with the decision log and three witnesses who had eaten supper with them the night of the alleged flight. The rumor died of paper poisoning. Brynna thanked Lucen without softening the earlier inventory of his faults. He accepted thanks without trying to cash it in as absolution. This, too, was practice.
Near the end of the fifth week, rain returned, colder. In the chamber the channels ran again. Vorath watched the water and said, "Your sister's escorts have been reduced to one on garden days. Grell is adjusting to observers. Adjustments are not kindness. Do not thank them. Use the wider sky she has and keep pressing."
Brynna's eyes shone, not with triumph—with the particular pain of hope that must stay disciplined. "We use it," she said.
Lucen added the note to the log before he could be tempted to turn it into a speech.
On the forty-first night—counted because counting was how they refused myth—Lucen descended and found Vorath already speaking quietly with Brynna about the difference between binding and belonging. Lucen waited at the threshold until invited by a flick of a horn tip, then entered.
"You are late," Vorath said.
"I was rewriting a provisional inheritance clause that tried to become absolute while I slept," Lucen said.
"Good reason," Vorath said. "Sit. Belonging, if it comes, will come from time and terms. Binding is what was done to me. Do not confuse your marriage with my compact. Parallel burdens are not identical chains."
Brynna glanced at Lucen. "We are learning the difference."
"Slowly," Lucen said.
"Slow is honest," Vorath said. "Fast is how flails arrive."
They sat with that until the watch turned, then climbed together toward a sleep that would not fix anything and would at least not ask them to pretend.
They still argued. Argument had become a hygiene.
They argued about whether to allow a pilgrim chronicler into the outer corridor (no). They argued about whether Lucen should train with the sword daily again (yes, but not as penance theater). They argued about Brynna riding to a border moot alone (no, then yes with Talren company, then a compromise involving miserable weather and three horses). After each argument they wrote the decision down because Vorath had begun asking to see the decision log, and a dragon who read your minutes was a strong cure for romantic amnesia.
One late afternoon, when the torches in the corridor burned low and the floor slabs held the day's chill, Lucen descended for his watch and found Brynna already there, seated against the wall near the open doors, crimson dress dark in shadow, strawberry-blonde hair braided for once against the work of the day. She was repairing, with clumsy determined stitches, the cloak Morthen's flail had torn. The mend would never be invisible. She did not try to make it so.