I haven't moved. I notice this about myself without particular judgment — it's simply information, the way most things are simply information. What's harder to catalogue is the specific quality of relief I feel when her eyes open, something unclenching in my chest.
Mireya opens her eyes and they find me immediately, like she knew exactly where I'd be, and something moves across her face that I can't entirely read. Not surprise. Something more complicated than surprise.
"You stayed," she says. Her voice is rough from the antidote.
"Yes."
"The server."
"Handled."
"And the house behind it."
"Publicly cornered during the banquet itself," I say. "The confirmation came from Draevik around the second hour. The evidence will be in crown hands by morning."
She absorbs that. Looks at the ceiling. I watch her work through it — the political implications, the follow-on moves required, the secondary houses that will recalibrate. Even half-conscious with an antidote hangover she is cataloguing. I find this, against all reasonable expectation, enormously comforting.
She looks back at me, with eyes that always seem to be doing two things at once — processing what's in front of her and cross-referencing it against everything she already knows. "You carried me out," she says.
"You couldn't walk."
"That's not what I mean."
I know it isn't. I meet her gaze and I don't look away and I don't explain myself, because the explanation would require me to examine things I have been deliberately not examining, and this is not the moment.
"Sleep," I say. "We'll deal with the political fallout when you can stand without holding the wall."
She stares at me with an expression I won't name. Then she closes her eyes.
I stay until she's asleep again. Then I stay a little longer than that.
9
MIREYA
The political fallout from the banquet hits while I'm still in bed, which feels appropriate.
By the time I'm upright and functional — two days after, because whatever was in that wine was not subtle and the antidote is half the problem — House Corvel has officially distanced itself from the servant's employer, three minor allied houses have sent groveling correspondence to Sevareth's administrative office, and the noble family behind the poisoning attempt has lost two trade licenses and gained what Draevik describes, without inflection, as "a productive conversation with House Vhol'ir's enforcement division."
I decide not to ask what that means. Some information is more useful as an outline than a detail.
What I do notice, while I'm still horizontal and piecing the night back together in fragments, is that there's a chair pulled close to the left side of the bed that wasn't there before. The cushion is slightly compressed and says someone sat in it long enough for it to hold the shape.
I think about what it means that he stayed, and what it means that I noticed the chair before I noticed anything elsein the room. Then I decide neither of those things needs to be examined right now, and I get up.
What I do ask about is the guard rotation outside my door, which has tripled, and the new policy that apparently nobody is permitted within ten feet of my food without being personally cleared by Draevik first. I ask about it because I find Sevareth in the study on the third morning and I want to address it calmly, like a reasonable adult, which I manage for approximately thirty seconds before my reasonable adult facade runs directly into his immovable-object face.
"The vetting protocol is excessive," I tell him.
He doesn't look up from his correspondence. "It's effective."
"There are six people outside my door."
"Eight. Two are on the roof access."
He continues reading his letter with the focused serenity of a man who does not consider this a conversation with two sides. "Sevareth. I can't function with eight guards trailing me through a building I'm supposed to be running political strategy from. I need to move freely to be useful, and useful is literally the reason I'm here."
He looks up at that. Sets the letter down. There's something in his expression that is trying very hard to be reasonable and is only partially succeeding. "Someone tried to kill you four days ago."
