BETROTHED TO THE DEVIL

ARRIVAL

The village at the foot of the castle came first.

It was not a small village. It stretched along both sides of the road for almost a quarter mile, stone buildings packed close together, the gaps between them narrow and dark. Smoke from chimneys. The smell of animals and bread and something like pine resin burning. Signs above doors written in the northern script she was only beginning to read.

The people stopped what they were doing when the carriage came through.

Not the way people stopped in the south, which was with noise cheering or calling out or pressing forward to get a better look. They stopped quietly. They watched. Women with market baskets. Men outside a smithy. A group of children at the edge of the road who stood perfectly still as the carriage passed, their breath visible in the cold air, their eyes tracking the procession with the patient attention of people who had learned that most things coming down this road had something to do with their lives.

Seraphine watched them through the window.

She did not wave. She had the feeling that waving would be the wrong thing here, would read as performance, would confirm her as something southern and strange and not serious. So she sat straight and looked out, and where her eyes met theirs she held the look for a moment and then moved on. Acknowledgment without theater.

She thought of what Polla had said. They don't stare the way southern people stare. They just watch, like they're waiting to decide.

She understood now.

The castle gate was iron, dark and heavy, and it opened before the carriage reached it. That meant someone had been watching the road for a long time. The attention it implied was not comfortable. She was used to being watched but not like this, not as a variable to be assessed and prepared for. In Aldenmere the watching had been social, curious, sometimes envious, often indifferent. This was something more deliberate.

The courtyard inside the gate was large and paved with flat dark stone. Soldiers stood at intervals, not stiff, not performing, just present. A man in a grey coat stood at the base of the main steps. He was not a young man. His hair was white at the temples and he had the posture of someone who had been managing things for a long time.

The carriage stopped.

Seraphine waited. A footman opened the door and placed the step and she descended into cold air that hit her face like water. She had thought she was prepared for the cold. She was not prepared for the cold. It was immediate and total, a different quality of cold than anything she had felt before, not just temperature but atmosphere, as if the air here were made of something slightly different than the air in the south.

She did not shiver. She breathed through it and stood straight.

The man in the grey coat came forward. "Lady Seraphine. I am Corvan, the castle steward. His Majesty sends his regrets that he cannot meet you personally. He is occupied with matters that require immediate attention."

He had been occupied with matters when she arrived.

She filed that away.

"Thank you, Corvan," she said. Her voice came out steady, which she was grateful for. "I look forward to meeting him when he is available."

Corvan looked at her for exactly half a second longer than he needed to, the way people looked at you when you had said something other than what they expected. Then he inclined his head and gestured toward the steps. "I'll show you to your rooms. Dinner is at the seventh hour. His Majesty dines with the household on Tuesdays and Fridays. Today is a Tuesday."

So she would see him tonight.

Her rooms were in the east wing, two floors up, connected to a sitting room and a small library. She walked through them with Corvan while he listed the functions of each room in the precise way of someone reciting information he considered complete. She listened and noted things he did not say. The rooms were clean. The beds were made with care. Someone had put a vase of white winter flowers on the table by the window.

Someone had considered what a vase of flowers would mean to a person arriving in an unfamiliar place.

She did not know who. She thought about it.

When Corvan left, her two ladies Essa and Nola, who had made the journey with her began unpacking. She stood at the window and looked at the courtyard below, and beyond it the wall, and beyond the wall the dark shapes of trees at the edge of the forest.

The view was nothing like her view at home.

She looked at it for a long time.

"The flowers are nice," Essa said carefully, from behind her.

"Yes." Seraphine turned from the window. "Put the books on the shelves first. And my journal on the desk."

She spent the two hours before dinner walking the rooms. Not restlessly. Methodically. She was learning the space the way she learned everything, systematically, so that she would not be surprised by it. The stone held the cold differently than she expected, not damp but dry, so that the rooms were chilly but not miserable. The fireplace in the main room was large and already lit and threw good heat. The small library held perhaps thirty books, all in northern script.

She picked one up. Set it down.

She changed into the dress she had chosen for this evening, which was dark blue and not elaborate, because the cook's comment about the northern dignitary who complimented nothing had stayed with her. She did not want to be a person who required complimenting.

She went down to dinner.

The hall was long, the table dark wood, the candles set in iron holders rather than the elaborate silver stands she was used to. Men and women of the household were already seated, perhaps thirty of them. They watched her walk to her seat at the head table the way the children in the village had watched the carriage. That careful northern watching that held its conclusions back.

She sat. She looked at the empty chair beside her.

The room went quieter in a specific way, like a sound dropping below the range you can hear but still sense.

She heard him before she saw him. Not his footsteps, the floors here were stone and absorbed sound. She felt the change in the room, the thing Polla's soldier had tried to describe, the quality that preceded him like a drop in temperature before a storm.

She looked up.

He came in through the side door and she had one second of seeing him before he saw her, and what she saw was not what she had prepared for. She had prepared for cold. She had prepared for severity. She had prepared for the presence that made rooms smaller.

She had not prepared for how young he looked.

Not young in a soft way. Young in the way that age had happened to him faster than it was supposed to and left something visible behind it, the way a healed wound was still a wound.

He was tall. He was dark haired. He moved like someone who had never once in his life thought about how he moved.

He saw her.

His expression did not change.

He walked to the chair beside her and sat down without a word.

The room exhaled.

Seraphine looked at her plate. Then she picked up her fork.

She was going to eat the dinner whether it went cold or not.