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"Tell me what you like."

"You won't like the answer."

"I doubt I'll care."

So he tells her.

Nox considers it. Not what she expected, and not what she'd have chosen, which is the first time anything in Morrath has managed either.

"Fine," she says.

Afterward he's quiet a long while.

Then: "You hadn't done that before."

"Is that a complaint?"

"It's a question."

"No. I hadn't."

He sits up. In the red he looks younger than he did across the room, and his face has gone formal, like a door opening onto a corridor he was raised in.

"Then when we leave here, you'll marry me."

Nox laughs before she can stop it. "You don't know my name."

"I know you're Yorali, and a princess, and that your father is a monster, because you told me all three in the last four hours. I'm not a man who takes a thing like that and disappears.”

"You won't remember taking it."

"I'll remember that I owe something. I always do."

She sits with that. It's the most useful thing anyone has said to her in two years, it's worth nothing, and she's going to have to spend it anyway.

"What if you've gotten pregnant?" he says.

"I'm a feeder. The odds are small."

"Small."

"Small."

He lets it go, which she doesn't expect, and which she understands much later to be the first thing he ever gives her.

"I can't marry you," she says. "And you need to hear the rest while I can still say it out loud."

"Say it."

"There's a girl at Baron Dyvarin's manor. She's veiled. She's my sister, though she doesn't know it and no one in that house knows it, and she's being used badly." Her voice holds. She makes it hold. "When you find her, you're going to want her. I don't know how I know. I know it the way I know my own hands."

"Then I'll have her."

"You can't marry her." She takes his wrist. "My father doesn't count girls in manors. He counts queens. Crown her and he'll know exactly what she's worth, and he'll come, and everything I was made for happens on schedule."

"What were you made for?"

She tells him that too. She's said it out loud once before, to Axar, and promised herself she'd never say it to anyone who would keep it.