🌸 Chapter 5: Your Coldess
1437 Words
Ava's POV
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She found Lady Voss on her third attempt.
The first attempt she went to the wrong window. The second attempt she found the right window but the wrong elderly woman in grey, who looked at her with the expression of someone who had not asked to be approached and did not intend to pretend otherwise. The third attempt she found the right window, the right grey, and a pair of sharp dark eyes that had been watching her navigate the room for the past ten minutes with something that was almost amusement.
"Sit down, child," Lady Voss said, before Ava had opened her mouth. "You look like you're about to apologize for existing and I find that exhausting to watch."
Ava sat down.
"You're the diplomat's girl," Lady Voss said. Not unkindly. Simply accurately, the way of someone who dispensed with performance as a general policy. "The collected debt."
"Yes," Ava said, because there was no point in being anything other than honest with someone who already knew.
"And someone told you to find me."
It wasn't a question. Ava hesitated anyway. "Yes."
Lady Voss made a sound that might have been approval. "Someone with sense, then. There's very little of it in this room." She looked out at the court — the clusters of silk and calculation, the conversations that were never only conversations — with the serene detachment of someone who had seen every version of this for fifty years and found it consistently predictable. "What do you want to know?"
Ava looked at her. "Everything," she said honestly.
Lady Voss almost smiled. "Good answer. We'll start with the dangerous ones."
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She learned more in forty minutes with Lady Voss than she had in four days of navigating the palace alone.
Not names and faces — she was building those already, slowly, the way she built everything, carefully and without rushing. What Lady Voss gave her was architecture. The invisible structure beneath the visible one. Who held actual power versus who performed it. Which alliances were solid and which were maintained purely by mutual fear. Which of the court ladies were coordinated and which were simply individually unpleasant.
"Seraphine coordinates," Lady Voss said, with the tone of someone reporting weather. "The others follow because following her is safer than not. It is not personal to you specifically. You are simply the current available target. This will change when something more interesting arrives."
"That's — not comforting," Ava said carefully.
"It wasn't meant to be comforting. It was meant to be accurate." Lady Voss looked at her. "Comfort is what people give you when they want you to stop asking questions. I find accuracy more useful. You appear to as well."
Ava thought about this. "Yes," she said. "I do."
"Then you'll manage," Lady Voss said simply. And turned back to the court as though the matter were settled.
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She was thinking about this — about managing, about what that meant in a palace this size with these people — when she turned the corner near the library and walked directly into Edward.
Not literally. She stopped two feet short of him, which given her record with palace architecture felt like an achievement worth noting.
He was reading something — a document, dense with figures, held in one hand while he walked, which seemed like exactly the kind of thing he would do. He looked up when she appeared. His expression did not change.
"You found Voss," he said.
It wasn't a question either. She was beginning to understand that he didn't ask questions so much as make statements and wait to see what happened to them.
"I did," she said. "Thank you. For telling me."
He looked at her for a moment with those dark eyes that processed everything and revealed nothing. Then he looked back at his document.
"You're blocking the corridor," he said.
She stepped to the side. He walked past her. And then — she didn't plan it, it simply occurred, the way some things occur when your mouth moves slightly ahead of your better judgment —
"You're very cold, aren't you."
He stopped.
The words hung in the air between them. She heard them properly for the first time approximately half a second after she said them and the part of her brain responsible for self-preservation made a sound like a door slamming shut.
He turned around slowly. The kind of slowly that had its own specific quality — not threatening, not angry, just the particular deliberateness of someone who had all the time in the world and intended to use it.
She stood very still.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I meant — Your Coldness. Your Highness." She stopped. Closed her eyes for exactly one second. "I meant Your Highness."
The silence lasted long enough that she considered whether the floor might open and resolve the situation.
Then something happened to his face.
It was small. Almost nothing. The very faintest movement at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, not even adjacent to one, more like the ghost of the idea that a smile was theoretically possible somewhere in the universe.
It was gone before she could be certain it had been there at all.
"Go eat something," he said. And walked away.
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She stood in the corridor for a long moment afterward.
She was waiting for the fear to arrive — the specific, familiar fear of having said the wrong thing to the wrong person, of having made herself visible in the way that invited consequences. She knew this fear well. Had spent years learning exactly which words opened which doors to which versions of it.
It didn't come.
What came instead was something smaller and stranger. A sort of — lightness. The particular lightness of having said a true thing out loud and survived it.
She had called the Crown Prince of the Questian Empire Your Coldness to his face and he had told her to go eat something and walked away and that was — that was all. That was the whole of it.
She walked back toward the east wing with the feeling sitting in her chest like something that hadn't decided what it was yet.
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The food was already there when she got to her room.
A covered tray on the small table near the window — warm, she discovered when she lifted the cover, still steaming. Bread and soup and something soft and sweet at the side that she didn't have a name for but that tasted the way she imagined comfort was supposed to taste.
No note.
She sat at the table and ate every bite and looked out the window at the garden going dark in the early evening and thought about a man who told her to go eat something in a corridor and did not appear to notice that the food had somehow arrived before she did.
She thought about the ghost of something at the corner of his mouth that may or may not have been there.
She thought about the fact that she had survived four days in this palace and had Lady Voss and Mira and a street child named Pip who saved her bread crusts and a corridor she could now navigate correctly on the first try.
It was not much.
It was, she decided, looking at the empty tray and the darkening garden and the small silver hairpin on the table beside her embroidery —
It was something.
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She did not sleep well that night — she rarely did, not yet, not here — but when she lay awake in the dark it was not with fear exactly. It was with the particular restless alertness of someone whose mind was working on a problem it hadn't fully named yet.
She was trying to understand him.
Not because she needed to. Not because it was useful or safe or sensible. But because there was something there that didn't match — a coldness that sent warm food to her door, a wall with something moving very quietly behind it, a man who told a stone statue that it didn't mind being apologized to and then walked away like he hadn't said anything kind at all.
She pressed her mother's hairpin between her palms in the dark.
She thought: he is not what he appears to be.
Then she thought: be careful with that thought.
Then she went to sleep.
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End of Chapter Five
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