Lain woke with the specific clarity of someone whose brain had decided, somewhere in the night, that sleep was finished and there was no appealing the decision.
He stared at the ceiling.
Right, he thought.
He was in the palace. His old rooms. The same ceiling he'd stared at for the first seventeen years of his life, familiar enough that he'd stopped seeing it long before he left.
He was seeing it now.
Every detail of it — the particular way morning light fell across the carved cornice near the window, the faint water stain near the left corner that had been there since he was eight and had never fully been explained.
He was home.
He was home, and his cousin was his master, and yesterday he had called her ugly to her face and then fainted into a flower bed in front of the Emperor.
He lay very still for a moment, absorbing this.
Today, he thought, with the deliberate focus of a man building a plan from whatever materials remained available after catastrophe.
Today is different.
I am family now — properly, officially, in a way that actually matters. That changes things. She can't dismiss family the way she dismisses everyone else.
And I have something none of the others have. I know this capital. I know these corridors, these ministers, these politics. I know which names matter and which ones only think they matter. I know where the power actually sits and where it only appears to.
She needs that. Whether she's said so or not.
I just have to show her.
A knock at the door.
"Come in," he said, sitting up.
They came in.
Not one. Four — moving with the quiet, practiced efficiency of people who had done this exact thing many times before and had every intention of doing it correctly now.
One carrying a basin of warm water.
One with pressed clothes draped carefully over both arms.
One whose specific purpose was not immediately clear but who moved with enough certainty that Lain decided not to question it.
One who simply held the door and then closed it again, which was, apparently, a full-time role.
"Good morning, Your Highness," the first one said.
Lain blinked.
Your Highness.
He hadn't heard that in three years.
It landed differently than he remembered — heavier, somehow. More real. Or perhaps just real in a different way than it had felt at seventeen, when it had simply been the air he breathed without noticing he was breathing it.
Three years of roads and markets and being nobody in particular, and now four people had walked into his room at dawn and addressed him like he'd never left.
Like the three years were simply a gap in a record, waiting to be filled in.
"Good morning," he said, because it seemed required.
They moved around him with the smooth coordination of a system that had been running long before he arrived and would keep running long after he left.
The basin was placed.
The clothes were laid out.
Someone handed him something warm to drink without being asked and retreated to a respectful distance before he'd even registered reaching for it.
He let it happen.
It felt, he noticed distantly, like putting on a coat he'd left hanging for three years — familiar in the shape of it, slightly strange in the wearing, the weight distributed differently than he remembered.
He dressed carefully, methodically, the way he'd been taught.
The clothes were right — precisely right, down to the specific cut of the collar — and by the time the last detail was settled he looked, he supposed, exactly like what he technically was.
The Grand Duke's son.
A prince of the eastern provinces.
Home.
"Her Highness," one of the attendants mentioned quietly, setting a tray of breakfast on the small table near the window, "has been in the Lady Amber's study since before dawn."
Lain paused halfway through picking up his fork.
The Lady Amber's study.
His aunt's rooms.
He hadn't been inside them since he was a child — it had always felt like entering somewhere that belonged to someone else entirely, even when she was still here. Private in the specific way certain people made spaces private simply by occupying them enough.
Her Highness, the attendant had said.
Not the princess.
Her Highness.
The same title they'd use for him, if he were a different kind of royal entirely.
Both of them carried it in this palace — his master and his cousin and the same woman, all at once — and the staff moved around her the way they moved around everything important.
Carefully.
Efficiently.
Without comment.
He ate.
He thought.
She's been up since before dawn, he thought.
And I'm sitting here eating breakfast.
Useful, he reminded himself. Today I prove it.
He set the fork down, stood, adjusted his collar — considerably easier now, with a proper pressed coat rather than anything he'd worn on the road — and stepped out into the corridor.
He found her almost immediately.
Or rather, she was simply there — crossing the corridor ahead of him, unhurried, already moving somewhere with the specific purposeful calm of someone who had decided where they were going and had no interest in being redirected.
No veil.
He was still adjusting to that.
Still taking an extra half-second each time to reconcile what his eyes were presenting him with.
"Mas—" he started.
Stopped.
Master had nearly come out entirely on its own.
Three years of habit, apparently, did not simply dissolve overnight because of a flower bed and a crown.
He caught it just in time.
Alright, he thought. Assess.
She was his cousin. Established, confirmed, unavoidable. She was also his master — had been for three years, would presumably continue to be regardless of what he called her. She was the crown princess of the empire, which technically outranked both of those things and added a third title to the pile he was now apparently carrying alongside his own.
Your Highness felt wrong between cousins.
Master felt wrong in a palace corridor while he was wearing a pressed coat and four attendants had spent twenty minutes calling him Your Highness without blinking.
Cousin she would say no to. He was fairly certain of that before he'd even tried.
Sister was what Aleric used — which was either evidence that it worked or evidence that Aleric had simply decided it worked and nobody had stopped him yet. Those were not the same thing.
But her name—
He'd used it once.
A long time ago, when he was small enough that nobody had yet explained to him that certain names required permission and certain distances were meant to be maintained even between family. He'd called her Blaze the way you called anyone anything at that age — simply, directly, without considering whether it was allowed.
She hadn't corrected him then.
He couldn't remember now if that meant it had been permitted or if she'd simply decided he was too small to be worth correcting.
They were one year apart.
Barely.
In any ordinary family that would simply be normal. You called your cousin by their name. That was what names were for. It wasn't presumptuous, it wasn't overstepping, it wasn't a wind gust waiting to happen.
It was just a name.
Blaze, he thought, testing it carefully inside his own head first.
It sat differently than master did. Smaller, somehow. More direct. Less like addressing a force of nature and more like addressing a person — which she technically was, even if the force of nature aspect had never once gone away.
He used to call her that.
Before he understood what she was.
Before the square, before the lightning, before three years of roads and manuals and a shadow wearing his own face in the dark.
Before all of that, he'd simply called her Blaze, and the world hadn't ended.
It worked then, he thought.
It can work now.
Blaze had stopped walking.
She was looking at him — not quite at him, slightly past him, in the way she had of looking at things that were technically in her field of vision but not necessarily occupying her full attention.
"What," she said.
He straightened.
"I used to call you by your name," he said. "When we were children. You never told me to stop."
Blaze looked at him.
One long, unhurried moment.
"I prefer my royal title," she said.
She turned to keep walking.
"We're one year apart," Lain said, immediately, before she'd taken two steps.
Apparently this was a hill he'd decided to die on this morning.
"I called you Blaze when I was seven. You didn't correct me then. That has to count for something."
"No," Blaze said, without turning around.
"You were right there. You heard me say it. Multiple times, probably. You never once said—"
"No."
"—don't call me that, which any reasonable person would interpret as implicit—"
"No."
He exhaled through his nose.
She was eight, he thought. She probably just didn't consider me worth the effort of correcting.
That thought was not as comforting as he'd hoped.
He tried a different angle.
"Have you seen my father this morning?"
Blaze stopped walking.
Her hand moved.
Small.
Unhurried.
The gust of wind arrived without warning — not violent, precisely, but entirely without negotiation — and caught Lain squarely in the chest, lifting him backward and sideways simultaneously, depositing him with remarkable efficiency through a set of tall doors that had been in exactly the right position at exactly the right moment.
He landed outside.
Flat on his face.
On the courtyard stones.
Directly in front of his father, who was in the process of mounting his horse and had, by the look of it, been entirely unprepared for a son to arrive at his feet from the direction of the palace doors at that particular velocity.
Kaedrin looked down at him.
Lain looked up at him.
"Good morning," Lain said, from the ground.
Kaedrin looked at the palace doors, already swung shut behind him.
Looked back at his son.
Reached down and offered his hand.
"Rebel," he said, pulling him upright, entirely straight-faced.
"You're going to have to stop landing like that eventually."
Aleric woke up wrong.
Not badly — just wrong, in the specific disorienting way of waking up somewhere that wasn't where he'd fallen asleep enough times that his body had stopped expecting consistency, except this time the wrongness was considerably more elaborate than usual.
The ceiling was very high.
He stared at it.
It had detailed plasterwork along the edges. Little carved flowers, repeated at intervals, running all the way around the room in a ring he could follow with his eyes from one corner to the next without moving his head at all.
He'd never woken up under a ceiling with carved flowers before.
He sat up.
The bed moved with him in the specific way very good mattresses moved — accommodating, unhurried, as if it had all the time in the world and he was welcome to take as much of it as he needed.
He looked around the room.
Big. Very big. The kind of big that felt slightly excessive even by palace standards, though he was admittedly working with limited data on what palace standards were supposed to feel like. A wardrobe that probably had opinions. A writing desk near the window with a lamp already lit on it, which meant someone had come in and lit it while he was asleep, which was — that was a thought he was going to set aside for now.
A small vase of fresh flowers sat on the table beside the bed.
He looked at them for a long moment.
Someone put those there, he thought.
While I was sleeping.
For me.
He was still looking at them when the knock came.
"Come in," he said, mostly because it seemed like the right response and he hadn't yet formed a better one.
Three people walked in.
He'd seen attendants in the corridors since arriving — had watched them move around Lain with the smooth, practiced efficiency of people who had been doing this exact thing for a long time — but that had been at a distance, and from a distance it had looked entirely normal.
Up close it was different.
They moved around him like he was something that needed to be handled carefully and they had been specifically assigned to do the handling, which was — it was a lot, first thing in the morning.
"Good morning, Young Master," the first one said.
Aleric opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Young Master.
He looked behind him, briefly, on instinct.
Nobody there.
"Good morning," he said. "I'm not — I mean, I don't think I'm actually a—"
"Of course, Young Master."
He looked at her.
She looked back at him with the warm, patient expression of someone who had heard that sentence begin many times before and had a reliable method for waiting until it finished.
Alright, he thought. Young Master. Okay.
A basin of warm water appeared from somewhere. Fresh clothes were laid out on the bed beside him — not his road clothes, something new, pressed and clean and considerably finer than anything he currently owned.
He tried again.
"These aren't mine," he said, gesturing at the clothes.
"They were prepared for you, Young Master."
"Right, but when did — I only arrived yesterday, how did anyone have time to—"
"Will Young Master be requiring anything else this morning?"
He looked at her.
She looked back pleasantly.
Short sentences, he thought. Everything I ask gets a short sentence back.
One of the other attendants reached for his hair.
Aleric went very still.
"I can do that myself," he said.
"Of course, Young Master."
The hand continued moving toward his hair.
Of course, Young Master apparently did not mean what he thought it meant.
He submitted to it.
It was strange in a way he didn't have good language for — not bad, just entirely outside anything he'd previously experienced. Being handled carefully, deliberately, by people whose whole purpose this morning was to handle him carefully and deliberately.
He didn't know what to do with his hands.
He folded them in his lap.
"What are your names?" he asked, mostly because sitting in silence while someone else dealt with his hair felt stranger than talking.
A brief pause — the specific pause of people who had not been expecting that particular question.
"Min," said the first one.
"Sera," said the second.
"Dov, Young Master," said the third, with a small smile.
"Min, Sera, Dov," Aleric said.
They looked at him with mild surprise.
"Were you the one who put the flowers there?" he asked Min.
"The household, Young Master."
The household, he thought. Short sentence. We're back.
He looked at the flowers while Dov finished with his hair.
Someone told someone to put flowers next to my bed, he thought. That's not something you do automatically. Someone decided to do that specifically.
He thought about the kitchen yesterday. About Alden at the stove, entirely unbothered, doing a double reduction at whatever hour of the morning he'd started. About the way he'd looked up when Aleric walked in — not surprised, exactly. More like — expecting.
Oh, Aleric thought.
It was him.
The Emperor had talked to whoever managed these things and told them — specifically, deliberately — to take good care of a boy who'd arrived from the road with a basket of cooking supplies and a notebook.
Had probably done it last night.
After the thyme argument.
After wasted on throne.
Aleric looked at the flowers.
Something warm settled in his chest — quiet, unhurried, the specific feeling of being seen by someone who hadn't needed to look and had looked anyway and then done something about it without saying a word.
He didn't know what to do with that either.
He sat with it the way he sat with most things that were too large to hold too tightly, and then he stood up, because sitting still was starting to feel like something he'd have to actively choose to keep doing.
"Thank you," he said, to Min and Sera and Dov, and meant it.
"Of course, Young Master," Min said.
They filed out.
The door closed.
Aleric stood alone in the big room with the carved ceiling and the fresh flowers and the breakfast tray with its three carefully arranged dishes, wearing clothes that weren't his that fit him exactly.
He picked up a piece of bread.
Took a bite.
Stood there eating it for a moment, looking at the flowers.
Then he picked up his notebook, tucked it under his arm, and went to find the kitchen.
He smelled it before he found it.
The specific, unmistakable smell of stock being built properly — something long and patient already underway, and underneath it the warm suggestion of something baked recently, and underneath that something else he couldn't name yet but that made his feet move faster without consulting him about it first.
He pushed the kitchen door open.
Alden was at the stove.
The kitchen staff were also there — three of them, arranged along the near counter with the specific careful energy of people who were present but had been recently, firmly, and very clearly told they were not needed, and had not yet fully processed what to do with themselves in the aftermath of being told that.
One of them was holding a ladle.
Just — holding it.
Not using it.
Simply standing there with it, like they'd picked it up in preparation for something and then been pre-emptively dismissed before the something could happen.
Alden had his back to all of them and appeared to be pretending they didn't exist.
"Your Majesty," one of the staff said, carefully, as Alden reached for something on the upper shelf, "perhaps we could assist with—"
"No," Alden said.
"Of course, Your Majesty, only if you'd like us to take over the stock we're very happy to—"
"I said no."
"Naturally, naturally, only the bread will need turning in a few minutes and it's no trouble at all for us to—"
"If one more person offers to touch my bread," Alden said, to the upper shelf, in the tone of a man who had been having this exact conversation since before dawn and had reached the end of his patience with it somewhere around the second hour, "I will reassign all three of you to the grain inventory."
Silence.
The staff member with the ladle set it down very quietly on the counter.
Alden looked up when Aleric pushed the door open.
"Aleric," he said, pleased, the way he said most things — openly, without reservation, like being pleased was simply a fact about the situation that he saw no reason not to announce. "Good timing."
Aleric came forward, already looking at what was on the stove, already reading the state of it the way he always read kitchens — what was underway, how far along, what decisions had already been made and what was still open.
The stock was good.
Better than good, actually. Longer than yesterday's, slower, built with the specific patience of someone who hadn't been in a hurry this morning and had let the time do what time did when you gave it enough of it.
"You started early," Aleric said.
"Before dawn," Alden said, with the mild satisfaction of someone confessing to something they weren't particularly ashamed of. "I couldn't sleep. The kitchen seemed like the right place to be."
Aleric looked at the pot.
At the rack of bread cooling nearby.
At the vegetables waiting on the counter, already washed, already waiting for someone to decide what came next.
"Young Master." One of the kitchen staff materialized at his elbow with the smooth immediacy of someone who had been watching the door and had decided this was their second chance. "Please, allow us to assist. If you'd like to taste the stock we can prepare—"
"I've got it," Aleric said.
"Of course, but perhaps if Young Master would prefer to be seated we could bring—"
"I cook," Aleric said.
Gently.
Clearly.
The kitchen staff looked at him.
He looked back, without impatience, because they were being genuinely kind and that deserved something other than impatience in return.
"I appreciate it," he said. "Really. But this is what I do. It's not a hardship — it's just what I do."
"Young Master is a guest of the palace," the staff member said, with the patient persistence of someone who had a responsibility and intended to discharge it regardless of what the guest thought about it. "It wouldn't be appropriate for us to simply—"
"He said he's got it," Alden said, from the stove, without turning around.
The staff member stopped.
"Your Majesty—"
"All three of you," Alden said pleasantly, "out. Come back at midday. If we need anything before then we'll send for you."
A pause.
The specific weighted pause of three people deciding whether this was a battle worth having, reaching the same conclusion simultaneously, and arriving at acceptance with the coordinated resignation of people who had learned, over time, that the Emperor's kitchen moods were not negotiable.
They filed out.
The door closed.
The kitchen went quiet.
Alden looked over his shoulder at Aleric, expression easy, entirely unbothered.
"They mean well," he said.
"I know," Aleric said, already reaching for the spoon.
He tasted the stock.
Thought about it seriously — not performing the consideration, just actually doing it, turning the flavor over, tracing it back to the decisions that had produced it.
"You added something this morning," he said. "Something you didn't add yesterday."
Alden looked at him.
"What do you think it was," he said.
Aleric tasted it again.
"Dried mushroom," he said. "Early. Before the first reduction."
Alden was quiet for a moment.
"Most people don't catch that," he said.
"Most people aren't paying attention to the right things," Aleric said, without any particular edge to it — just a fact, stated plainly, the way facts were.
He set the spoon down and looked at the vegetables on the counter.
At the bread.
At the general shape of what Alden was building and felt, the way he always felt when a kitchen had been started well, the specific pull of wanting to continue it.
"Can I work alongside you," he said.
Not can I help. He'd learned yesterday that the Emperor had quiet but definite opinions about that particular phrasing.
Alden smiled.
"Do your work," he said. "I'll do mine."
Aleric pulled an apron from the hook by the counter.
They worked.
It settled quickly — the rhythm of it, the way the kitchen reorganized itself around two people who both knew what they were doing and had, without discussing it, arrived at an understanding about how to share the space. Aleric took the vegetables. Alden stayed with the stock. Neither of them got in the other's way.
It was, Aleric thought, a lot like cooking with Maze — except Maze's version of helping involved warmth that came from somewhere older than fire, and Alden's version involved narrating his own decisions out loud to no one in particular, which was different but not unwelcome.
"The carrots want to go in last," Alden said, to the pot, apparently. "Not first. People always put them in first."
"Because they take longer," Aleric said.
"They don't, actually, if you cut them correctly."
Aleric looked at the carrots.
At the way Alden had cut them.
"...That's a very thin cut," he said.
"Exactly."
"You've thought about this a lot."
"I have had," Alden said, with great dignity, "considerable time to think about carrots."
Aleric laughed.
It came out before he could decide whether to, which was, he'd found, usually how the best ones did.
Alden looked pleased in a way that had nothing to do with the carrots.
They kept working.
The kitchen filled slowly with the smell of things coming together — stock and bread and the specific warmth of a room that had been used well, treated as a place where real things happened rather than just a place where food appeared from.
At some point Aleric stopped tracking the separate threads of what each of them was doing and simply — worked. The way he worked when something had settled around him properly, when the space felt right and the rhythm was right and there was nothing requiring active management, just presence and attention and the quiet satisfaction of something being built correctly.
He wasn't sure when he'd started thinking of this as that kind of space.
He looked up at Alden, who was tasting something from the pot with the focused, unselfconscious expression of someone entirely absorbed in what they were doing, entirely unbothered by anything outside the immediate radius of this kitchen and this morning and this stock that had been started before dawn because the kitchen had seemed like the right place to be.
He comes here when things are heavy, Aleric thought, simply.
That's what this is. This is where he goes.
He looked back at the vegetables.
And he let me in, he thought.
Not with fanfare. Not with explanation. Just — looked up when the door opened and said good timing like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like Aleric had always been one of the people who belonged in this particular kitchen on this particular kind of morning.
Something warm settled in his chest.
Quiet.
Unhurried.
The specific warmth of something that didn't need a name to be real.
He added the thyme.
Early.
"I saw that," Alden said, without looking up.
"I know," Aleric said.
A pause.
"It was the right call," Alden said.
Aleric looked at him.
Alden was still looking at the pot, still entirely focused, still giving no indication that he considered this any kind of concession at all.
"Thank you," Aleric said.
"Don't get used to it," Alden said mildly. "I'm not always wrong about the thyme."
"You were yesterday."
"Yesterday was an anomaly."
"Convenient," Aleric said.
Alden laughed — the real one, the warm unguarded one that Aleric had heard at dinner and had decided, privately, was one of his favorite sounds in the palace so far.
They kept working.
The kitchen filled further.
At some point the bread needed turning and Aleric did it without asking and Alden said nothing, which was his version of thank you, which Aleric had already figured out.
At some point Alden started humming something under his breath — quietly, without apparently noticing he was doing it — and Aleric didn't comment, because it seemed like the kind of thing that would stop if it was noticed.
He just listened.
And stirred.
And felt, somewhere underneath the warmth that had settled in his chest earlier, something else — something quieter, something he didn't fully have language for yet.
This is what it's supposed to feel like, he thought, not quite knowing what this referred to.
Just — this.
The kitchen.
The morning.
The smell of stock built right.
Someone humming beside him who had started the fire before dawn because the kitchen seemed like the right place to be, and who had looked up when the door opened and made room without being asked.
He kept stirring.
Said nothing.
Didn't need to.
Blaze found the kitchen by smell.
Not that she'd needed to follow it — she knew where the kitchen was, had known since childhood, the palace layout sitting in her memory with the same permanent clarity as everything else she'd decided to keep. But the smell reached her first anyway, drifting down the corridor with the specific unhurried confidence of something that had been building for a long time and had nowhere else to be.
Stock. Bread. Something underneath both of those that hadn't finished yet.
She stopped in the doorway.
Neither of them noticed her.
Alden was at the stove, stirring something with the focused absorption of a man entirely in his element, narrating something under his breath about carrots that nobody was listening to. Aleric was beside him — not hovering, not watching, just working, moving through the kitchen with the easy economy of someone for whom the decisions happened before they were decisions.
She watched them.
They move alike, she thought.
Not identically. Nothing that could be pointed to directly. But the way they both reached for things — unhurried, certain, knowing exactly where everything was without checking. The way they both tasted things with the same quiet focus, turning the flavor over privately before saying anything about it. The way neither of them needed the other to say much for the conversation to keep going.
Alike, she thought again.
Something sat underneath that observation that she didn't immediately examine.
She looked at her father instead.
At the easy way he was standing. At the way the line of his shoulders had lost the specific tension he carried everywhere else in the palace, in every corridor and throne room and meeting she'd watched him move through in the last several days.
He's happy, she thought, simply.
The old man has found someone else to interrogate about thyme.
Which means he's occupied.
Which means he's not going to spend the morning following me down corridors asking questions.
Something shifted in her expression.
Not quite amusement.
Not quite something else.
Good, she thought.
She stepped inside.
Aleric turned first.
He always turned first. Not because she made sound, not because anyone announced her — simply because he always seemed to know, in the way he knew most things, slightly before his brain had finished telling him.
"Sis!"
He crossed the kitchen in four steps and grabbed her hand.
Same grip as always. Same warmth. Same complete, total absence of hesitation — as if the distance between them was simply an inconvenience he was correcting rather than a social boundary he was crossing.
"I haven't seen you since yesterday," he said, looking up at her with the open, uncomplicated relief of someone reunited with something they'd been quietly worrying about.
"I was working," Blaze said.
"Are you alright?"
"Yes."
"Okay," he said immediately, and meant it, and didn't push further.
He didn't let go of her hand.
She didn't move to make him.
Alden had turned from the stove.
Oh, he thought. That's new.
Just — that. Simple. The quiet surprise of a man noticing something he hadn't been expecting to notice this morning.
She doesn't let anyone touch her, he thought.
I hug her sometimes, the way fathers do, and she goes still inside it.
Not pulling away, she never pulls away, she simply becomes very completely herself and waits for it to be over.
She doesn't let anyone.
And she is standing there.
Not moving.
Not even thinking about moving.
He looked at their joined hands.
At her face — composed, unbothered, giving nothing away as always.
At the boy looking up at her like she was simply the most natural thing in the world to be standing next to.
That's new, he thought again, quietly, and turned back to the stove.
"You should eat something," he said.
"Father."
"Hm."
"Stop."
"I'm cooking," Alden said pleasantly. "This is what cooking looks like."
Blaze looked at the back of his head.
At the shoulders — slightly too carefully relaxed.
She looked at Aleric.
Aleric was looking very intently at his notebook.
Blaze sat in the chair nearest the counter.
Not a gold chair. Just the kitchen chair, plain and wooden, the kind that had always been there. She sat in it like she sat in everything — with the unbothered ease of someone for whom furniture was simply furniture and existed to be used.
"What's for breakfast," she said.
Aleric was already moving.
Not rushing — just the smooth, immediate efficiency of someone who had been waiting for exactly this question and had the answer ready before it finished being asked. A bowl appeared. Something warm, something that had clearly been keeping gently at the back of the stove for a while, waiting.
He set it in front of her.
Stepped back.
Watched her the way he always watched people eat his food — not hovering, not anxious, just present, just interested in the specific honest way of someone for whom the tasting was the only review that mattered.
Blaze looked at the bowl.
Picked up the spoon.
Ate.
Once.
Twice.
Good, she thought, turning it over with the focused attention she gave things worth giving attention to. The balance is right. The temperature is right. The seasoning sits exactly where it should — present without announcing itself.
Perfect, she thought. Precise fit to what I was testing for.
She took another bite.
Looked up.
Aleric was staring at her.
Not rudely. Not obviously. Just — watching her face with the open, unguarded attention of someone trying to read something they genuinely wanted to know the answer to.
That stare, she thought.
That specific stare.
Should I gauge his eyes out.
She considered this briefly and with complete seriousness.
"Is it good?"
Alden had appeared beside her, hands wrapped around his own cup, looking at her with the hopeful expression of a man trying to appear like he wasn't hoping for anything.
Blaze looked at the bowl.
"Barely edible," she said.
Aleric and Alden looked at each other.
The look of two people who had arrived, independently and simultaneously, at the same conclusion.
"Right," Aleric said, already turning back to the stove.
"Obviously," Alden agreed, nodding seriously.
Blaze looked at the pots.
At the stock still going. At the bread. At the things underway that would become other things before the morning was finished.
"I hate people who waste food," she said, to no one in particular.
Alden looked at Aleric.
Aleric looked at Alden.
"She's asking us to join her," Alden said, as though translating something from a language Aleric was still learning.
"I got that," Aleric said.
They got their bowls.
Pulled chairs up — Alden on one side, Aleric on the other, the table suddenly considerably less empty than it had been a moment ago.
They ate.
The kitchen held them quietly — the smell of stock and bread and morning, the specific warm weight of a room being used the way it was meant to be used, by people who had somewhere to be and had, for the moment, decided this was it.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Nobody needed to.
Blaze ate her barely edible breakfast.
Aleric refilled her bowl without being asked.
She didn't tell him to stop.