Promised to His Shadow

Chapter Four

The Room That Was Never Mine

Elianne’s POV

She moved into the palace three days after the announcement, and I spent the entire morning not looking out the window.

I was aware of her arrival anyway. The east wing was two corridors from mine, and I had, in a deeply unreasonable way I refused to examine, already catalogued the sound of her footsteps on stone floors. Lighter than most. Deliberate. The walk of someone who had decided that how they moved through a room communicated something, and intended to control what it communicated.

I went back to my reports. I had a garrison to manage and a treaty to stabilize and a dead brother to mourn with appropriate dignity. I did not have time to be aware of footsteps.

I was aware of them anyway.

* * *

Lady Camille de Rohane found me in the long gallery before lunch, which was not an accident. Camille did not do accidental.

She was wearing pale green and the smile she reserved for rooms where she was performing rather than simply existing in. I’d known her for six years. I knew the difference.

"Your Highness." She fell into step beside me. "I wanted to offer my condolences properly. Adrien was a fine man."

"He was."

"And the new arrangement." The words came in so smoothly they almost sounded like the same sentence. "I imagine it must have been a difficult decision."

I stopped walking. Looked at her. "Was there something specific you wanted, Camille?"

Her smile stayed in place. She had extraordinary composure. I’d always found it admirable and slightly exhausting in equal measure. "Only to say that I think very highly of the match. Lady Elianne seems exceptionally capable. I’m sure she’ll make a fine addition to the court."

Fine. The word landed with the precise weight she’d given it. Not terrible. Not wonderful. Fine. Like a piece of furniture you tolerate because it serves a purpose.

I thought about Elianne in the dead garden, standing up off the bench because she’d refused to have that conversation looking up at me. I thought about her saying I don’t want to marry you in a voice that was honest rather than cruel, which was somehow considerably harder to hear than cruelty would have been.

"She’s rather more than fine," I said.

Something flickered behind Camille’s eyes. Brief, controlled, gone. "Of course," she said warmly. "Forgive me, I only meant —"

"Thank you for the condolences." I kept my voice even. "If you’ll excuse me."

I walked away and didn’t look back, and I was aware, with a clarity that was new and slightly uncomfortable, that I had just defended a woman I was barely betrothed to from a remark that was technically a compliment. And that it had not felt optional.

* * *

I found Elianne in the library that afternoon.

She was at the far table with a stack of papers that I recognized, after a moment, as the grain records from the eastern corridor trade agreements. The ones I’d been meaning to review for two weeks. She had a quill in her hand and she was making notes in the margins in handwriting that was considerably smaller and neater than mine, and she did not look up when I came in, which meant she had excellent peripheral awareness and had simply decided not to acknowledge me yet.

I sat down across from her.

She let me wait exactly long enough to be pointed about it, then looked up. "You could have announced yourself."

"I could have. You knew I was there."

The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but something adjacent. "What are you doing in the library, Gabriel?"

My name in her mouth, without a title. She’d been using it since the garden. I wasn’t sure she’d noticed she was doing it. I had definitely noticed.

"Same thing you are, apparently." I nodded at the records. "Those are three months old. The most recent copies are in the second cabinet."

A pause. "Are they?"

"The agreements were revised in October. Trade window extended by two weeks, compensation structure amended."

She looked at me with an expression that suggested she was revising something. "You know these records."

"I sat in every negotiation that produced them. Adrien let me observe, even when he handled the formal sessions himself." That last part came out flatter than I’d intended. I moved past it. "What are you looking for?"

Another pause. Longer. The kind where a person is deciding how much to trust you.

"Verannes has been quietly buying grain rights along the eastern corridor for nearly a year," she said finally. "Small purchases, spread across different buyers, but consistent in direction. I noticed it in Adrien’s correspondence before he died. I didn’t think much of it at the time."

"And now?"

"Now I think a kingdom that wanted leverage over Valmonde might have started building it very quietly, before they had any obvious reason to need it." She set the quill down and looked at me directly. "I don’t know if it connects to what happened to Adrien. I don’t know anything yet. But I’d rather be looking at the wrong thing than at nothing."

I looked at her. The records she’d pulled before I’d even thought to look at them. The notes already in the margins. The fact that while the rest of the court was deciding what to think of her, she’d been in the library since before I’d gotten out of bed, pulling at threads.

Something in my chest did something I was not going to look at too closely.

"We’ll look at it together," I said. "You’re missing the October amendments, and there are three other purchase patterns you haven’t flagged yet that I think matter."

Something in her expression relaxed, just slightly. It was the smallest shift — the kind you’d miss if you weren’t watching. "I was hoping you’d say that."

"Were you?"

"You came to the garden yourself," she said. "When a letter would have been easier. I had a feeling you were the kind of man who showed up."

She turned back to the records. I found myself, despite everything, wanting very badly to be that man.

* * *

We worked until the candles burned low, and I went back to my chambers with ink on my fingers and a clearer picture of what Verannes might be building along our eastern flank, and the odd, specific feeling of having spent two hours in a room with Elianne de Castelane and forgotten, for long stretches of them, to feel guilty about wanting to be there.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and had a very direct conversation with myself about what that meant.

It meant nothing. She was my brother’s betrothed, now my own, and she was brilliant and careful and she’d noticed my tell in a dead garden at dusk and she believed, as I was beginning to believe, that Adrien had not simply fallen from a horse, and none of that changed the fact that wanting her was an indulgence I had given up the right to when I’d looked across a betrothal dinner two years ago and laughed at something she’d said before I’d had the sense to stop myself.

I had given that up. I had been giving it up every day since.

It was getting considerably harder to put down.

* * *

In the morning, before breakfast, I sent a message to the garrison commander asking for the updated patrol reports along the eastern border. Standard request. Nothing unusual.

Except it wasn’t standard. It was the third time I’d requested those reports in two weeks, and this time I was requesting them because Elianne had pointed at a pattern in a grain record and something in my chest had said yes, that matters, pay attention.

I was letting her change how I looked at things. I wasn’t sure when that had started. I wasn’t sure I minded.

That was the part I needed to be careful about.

Wanting to be useful to her was manageable. Wanting to be in the room with her, specifically, in the particular way I’d wanted things before I’d learned how to want them quietly — that was something else. That was the thing I’d talked myself out of for two years, and the thing I was going to have to keep talking myself out of, because she was going to be my wife and not my —

I stopped that thought before it finished forming and went to meet my steward instead.

Whatever Elianne was, she was also, increasingly, the most capable person I had in this palace for what we were trying to do. And right now, that mattered more than the rest of it. I was going to keep telling myself that until it was more true than it currently felt.