🌸 Chapter 4: THE FLOWER IN THE WRONG GARDEN
1460 Words
Edward's POV
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He first noticed her in the corridor outside the library.
She was walking with purpose — or attempting to. The east wing had seventeen corridors and four of them looked identical and he had watched three separate new staff members spend their first week taking wrong turns before the geography settled into their bones. She was on her fifth wrong turn of the morning and she had started narrating them quietly to herself under her breath, which he discovered when he rounded the corner and nearly walked into her.
She didn't see him.
She was looking at the wall.
Specifically, she was looking at the stone bust of his great-grandfather on the carved pedestal at the corridor's end, which she had apparently walked into, and she was saying — quietly, very seriously, with the gravity of someone who meant it — "I'm so sorry. I wasn't looking where I was going."
To the statue.
She was apologizing to the statue.
Edward stopped walking.
She patted the base of the pedestal once, in a manner that suggested she felt the apology required a physical component to be complete, and then turned around and saw him standing four feet away and went the colour of something that had lost all its blood very quickly.
The silence lasted approximately four seconds.
"He's been there for sixty years," Edward said. "He doesn't mind."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at the statue. Looked back at him. "I wasn't —" She stopped. Started again. "Good morning, Your Highness."
"You're on the wrong corridor," he said.
"I'm aware."
"The east corridor is left at the arch."
"I know that now."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he walked past her without another word, took the correct corridor, and did not look back.
He found himself mildly annoyed for the rest of the morning without being able to identify a satisfactory reason why.
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He saw her again at noon.
She was in the garden — the east-facing garden that nobody important used before noon, which apparently she had discovered, which meant someone had told her, which meant Mira, because Mira told people things without apparent concern for whether those things were meant to be said. Ava was sitting on the stone bench near the roses with her embroidery in her lap and she was not doing the embroidery.
She was feeding bread through the gap in the garden gate to the street child who had apparently taken up residence in the approximate vicinity of the palace and who Edward's guards had been attempting to remove from the premises for the better part of two weeks without success. The child had so far evaded every effort with the cheerful determination of someone who considered this a game rather than a threat.
He was currently eating the bread and talking at considerable speed about something that required extensive hand gestures.
Ava was listening with the complete, unhurried attention of someone who had nowhere more important to be, and she was smiling — not politely, not carefully, but actually, the kind of smile that changes the whole shape of a face.
Edward stood at the upper window for a moment.
Then he went back to his maps.
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He saw her a third time in the afternoon, which was two times more than he had seen anyone outside of official business in recent memory and significantly more than he considered convenient.
She was in the corridor outside the receiving room — the formal one, the one that had hosted Lady Seraphine's little performance two days ago — and she was standing very still with her back to the wall and her eyes closed and her lips moving in what appeared to be a count. He had seen this before. Had recognized it the first time and had not examined the recognition too closely.
A breathing exercise. The kind you learned when you needed to be able to walk into rooms without your body announcing exactly how frightened you were.
He stopped.
She opened her eyes and saw him and the breath she'd been counting caught in her throat.
"Your Highness," she said. Quickly. Straightening. "I was just —"
"Which room?" he said.
She blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Which room is giving you trouble."
It was not a question and they both understood this. She looked at the door to the receiving room and back at him with the expression of someone making a rapid series of calculations.
"All of them," she said finally. Quietly. Honest in the way of someone who has run out of energy for anything else. "I don't —" She stopped. "The court is very large."
"It is."
"And everyone already knows each other."
"They do."
"And nobody particularly wants another person to know."
He looked at her. She was stating facts, not requesting comfort — he appreciated the distinction even as he noted it. She stood against the wall with her hands folded and her breathing steady again and she did not look like she expected anything from him, which was, he realised, unusual. Most people in her position would be asking for something by now — reassurance, protection, a promise of some kind. She wasn't asking for anything.
She was just telling him the truth because he had asked and she had answered.
"Voss," he said.
She blinked again. "I'm sorry?"
"Lady Voss. The elderly Countess in grey. She sits near the east window at every formal gathering. She has been in this court for fifty years and she is politically neutral and she does not participate in campaigns against people who have not earned it." He paused. "She is also the only person in that room who will talk to you without wanting something in return."
Ava stared at him.
"That's the receiving room," he said, nodding at the door. "You're on the right corridor this time."
And then he walked away, because he had said what needed to be said and there was nothing further to add and he had maps to return to and a supply chain restructure that required his attention and approximately fourteen other things that were more relevant to his day than standing in corridors talking to girls who apologized to statues.
He was halfway to the war room before he acknowledged, briefly and without pleasure, that he had just given her something useful.
He did not examine why.
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He examined it at eleven o'clock that night, in the particular way he examined things he had decided not to examine — which was to say, against his will, while pretending to read a campaign report.
She was a transaction. He had received her as one. She was housed and fed and provided with appropriate quarters and a maid and a guard and she required nothing further from him and he required nothing further from her and this was a simple, clean arrangement that did not need complication.
He had told her about Lady Voss.
He had told her which way the east corridor went.
He had told a statue it didn't mind being apologized to by a girl who was clearly lost and clearly frightened and clearly refusing to show either of those things to anyone who might use them against her.
He set down the campaign report.
Picked it up again.
The court was full of people who would see her softness as a target. He knew this because he knew the court — knew every current and undercurrent of it, every alliance and every grudge, every smile that meant nothing and every silence that meant everything. Seraphine had already moved. Cassius had already noted her. The ladies who collected small cruelties like currency had already begun their work.
She had nobody except a seventeen-year-old maid who dropped things and a guard who reported to him and a street child who ate her bread.
This was, practically speaking, a problem. A transaction that was damaged or destroyed reflected poorly on the arrangement. It was in the interest of the crown — his interest, the empire's interest — that she remained functional and unharmed. This was simple logic. It had nothing to do with anything else.
He returned to his campaign report.
Across the palace, in the east wing chamber with the window that faced the garden, a girl was pressing her mother's silver hairpin between her palms and building a map of a world she hadn't chosen and surviving it, quietly, without asking anyone for help.
He didn't know this.
He had his maps. She had hers.
For now, that was enough.
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End of Chapter Four
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🌸🌸wow this was intense
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