"You'll cut yourself."
"So?" She held out her hand for the knife. "I don't care."
She did cut herself. Twice. Bled on the white silk and didn't even flinch. By the time the handmaiden found her — an hour later, hysterical, threatening to resign — Ada had produced something she swore up and down was a fox but which looked even less like a fox than my sword had looked like a sword.
She held it up proudly. "Look."
"That's not a fox."
"It is. That's its tail. And that's its face."
"That's a lump."
"It's a fox and I'm keeping it." She clutched it to her ruined dress like it was made of gold. "I'm coming back tomorrow."
Not asking. Telling.
"You can't just —"
"Tomorrow," she said, already being dragged toward the tree line by the handmaiden. "Same time. And don't finish your sword without me."
She came back the next day. And the next. And the next.
For three summers, the fort in the Boundary Quarter forest was ours. Sarp found us in the second year — wandered in looking for a place to eat stolen pastries in peace and never left. The three of us built that fort into something real, adding walls, a roof of woven branches, a lookout post where you could see the Academy spires if you climbed high enough. Ada brought food from the palace kitchens — ridiculous things, honey cakes wrapped in golden cloth, fruits I'd never tasted, more than the three of us could eat in a week. Sarp brought jokes and an endless supply of stolen sweets. I brought the forest — every path, every hiding place, every secret the woods had shown me in my years of solitary exploration.
We were children. Just children. Ada didn't care that I owned two shirts. Sarp didn't care that my mother flinched at her own reflection. And I didn't dream of shadows yet, didn't feel the cold thing sleeping under my ribs. I was just a boy in a forest with a girl who climbed trees in silk dresses and a friend who made everything lighter, and the world was small enough to fit inside a fort made of sticks.
That was the version of me Ada had fallen in love with. The boy in the forest. The one who'd stepped aside and let her in.
The memory settled over me like a hand on the back of my neck — Milan's gesture, brief and firm and steadying.
Three weeks of her hands and her mouth and her light, of stolen hours in the music room and whispered conversations in servants' corridors. Three weeks of learning how to be something other than a weapon.
Today I was taking her to meet my mother. Properly.
Not because I deserved it. Not because I'd earned it. But because a girl in a ruined silk dress had once sat in my fort and smiled at me like I was enough, and some stubborn, reckless part of me still believed her.
I finished my cold tea. Straightened my coat. Checked my gloves — still in place, still hiding the darkness underneath.
And went to find her.
CHAPTER 10
THE BORDER
Ada
Getting out of the palace required lying to everyone I'd ever trusted.
I told my handmaidens I was feeling unwell — monthly troubles, which made them retreat so fast you'd think I'd announced a plague. I asked not to be disturbed. Then I waited until I heard them settle into the outer chamber before slipping into the servant's passage behind my wardrobe.
The passages ran through the palace like veins, connecting every wing, every floor, every hidden corner the nobles preferred to pretend didn't exist. I'd memorized them over the past weeks — partly for my meetings with Hakan, partly from some instinct I couldn't name. A need to know escape routes, even in my own home.
I changed into the servant's clothes I'd taken from the laundry — rough gray fabric, patched at the elbows. Rubbed ash into my cheekbones to dull the golden glow that marked me as pure-blooded. Pulled a deep hood over my hair.
In the polished brass of a wall sconce, I barely recognized myself.
Good. That was the point.
