“Sabine—”
“You ask for delay because delay does not spend you.”
He flinched as if she had slapped him, though her voice had remained level.
“That is not fair.”
“It is exact.”
“I am trying to save you.”
“You are trying to save me from being useful.”
Mirelle rose. “Enough.”
The word landed like the placement of a knife on a table.
Cassian stopped moving. Mirelle did not lift her voice again, which made the next sentence worse.
“You may speak of estates, loans, and legal rights if you must,” she said to Sabine. “You may even speak of marriage as though it were livestock trade, if coarseness relieves you. Butyou will not stand in this room and call your own destruction usefulness.”
Sabine held her mother’s eyes.
“Then what would you prefer I call it.”
Mirelle’s mouth tightened. “I would prefer you remembered that you are my daughter before you attempt to make yourself a strategy.”
There it was again. Not plea. Not comfort. Identity used as restraint. Sabine knew the shape of it too well. A daughter should be protected. A daughter should be refined. A daughter should not assist in pricing her own transfer.
Cassian seized on the pause. “We still have time. Registration is not this morning. We can send inquiries first. We can wait to see whether the king is answered with outrage or eagerness. If the district refuses numbers, if the larger houses balk, the whole thing may turn awkward enough to slow.”
Sabine almost smiled.
Cassian still believed history could be inconvenienced into mercy.
“The larger houses will send daughters,” she said. “The ambitious ones at once. The frightened ones more quietly. The desperate ones fastest of all.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know the kingdom we live in.”
A knock came at the door.
Junor entered carrying a leather portfolio bound with faded straps. He bowed first to Mirelle, then to Sabine, then to Cassian. He looked older in the morning. The hollows at his temples had deepened. One cuff had been darned with thread very close in color and not quite close enough.
“My lady,” he said, “you asked for the full debt papers, the title encumbrances, and the marriage settlements held inthe lower archive. I have brought what I could retrieve before breakfast.”
Mirelle closed her eyes for one brief second.
“Set them there,” she said.
Junor placed the portfolio on the writing table by the window.
Sabine rose before anyone else moved. She opened the straps and drew out the first packet. Loan schedule. Estate map with shaded parcels. Notices of arrears. A copy of the crown’s standing right to protective administration under prolonged insolvency. The pages smelled of dust, leather, and old starch paste.
Cassian stayed where he was. “This is unnecessary.”
“No,” Sabine said. “This is the part where we stop using softer nouns.”
