Kaelis came to her after morning court.
She heard him before she saw him — the specific quality of his footsteps in the corridor outside their chambers, the rhythm of them, the pace that was different from his war room pace and his public pace and his I am about to say something difficult pace. This was the unhurried one. The one that had developed gradually over the months of everything and that she had learned to recognize the way she had learned to recognize most things about him — not by deciding to learn it but by paying attention long enough that the learning happened on its own.
He pushed the door open.
He looked at her across the room.
She was at the window seat with a book she had not been reading, which he would know immediately because he always knew, because the specific quality of her not-reading was apparently legible to him in ways she had not consented to being legible.
"You are not reading," he said.
