The King's Flower

🌸Chapter 6:THE PULLING

Both POVs

AVA

The banquet was the largest gathering she had attended since arriving at the palace and she understood within the first ten minutes that she was not prepared for it.

Not in the way of clothes or appearance — Mira had spent an hour on that, had produced a dress the colour of deep blue water from somewhere and done something with Ava's hair that made her look, Mira informed her with satisfaction, like she belonged here. The unpreparedness was something else. Something interior. The banquet hall was enormous — chandeliers with more candles than she had seen in her entire life combined, long tables draped in white, a hundred conversations happening simultaneously in the particular overlapping way of people who were very good at talking and very good at listening to two things at once.

She found a position near the wall. Not hiding — she had promised herself she would not hide — but oriented. She needed to see the room before the room saw her.

Mira appeared at her elbow with two glasses of something pale and fizzing. "The lord at table seven has been looking at you since you walked in," she murmured, passing a glass with the smooth practiced movement of someone transferring sensitive information.

Ava did not look at table seven. "Which lord."

"Grey doublet. Silver ring. Looks like he owns things." A pause. "Most of them look like they own things. He looks like he owns things and knows you don't."

She understood then. She had met this particular variety of man before — not here, not in palaces, but the variety itself was not new. The kind who looked at powerlessness and saw opportunity rather than personhood. She had spent three years learning exactly how much space to put between herself and that look.

She put her glass down on a passing tray and moved toward the far end of the room.

He found her anyway.

She was standing near the tall windows at the room's east end, looking out at the torchlit courtyard below, doing her breathing exercise in a way she hoped looked like thoughtful contemplation, when she felt the presence arrive beside her.

"You're new," the man said.

She turned. Grey doublet. Silver ring. Smile that had calculated the distance between them before she had.

"Yes," she said. Pleasantly. Nothing in her voice. Nothing on her face.

"A guest of the crown?"

"Something like that."

He stepped slightly closer. The kind of slightly that was a question and an answer simultaneously — testing whether she would step back, establishing what kind of conversation this was going to be. She had been asked this question before, by a different man, in a different place, and she knew the answer she was supposed to give was to step back and she knew that stepping back was an answer too.

She stood still.

"You're very composed for someone so new to court," he said. His eyes were doing an inventory that she felt on her skin. "Most girls your age are overwhelmed."

"I'm not overwhelmed," she said. Truthfully.

"No." He tilted his head. "No, I can see that." And his hand moved — casual, easy, the practiced ease of someone who had done this before in rooms like this and found it uncontested — toward her arm.

She went still in the particular way that was not composure but the thing that lived underneath composure when composure was all you had left.

She didn't hear him cross the room.

Nobody did. That was the thing about Edward Quest in a room full of people — he moved through it like weather, like something the room adjusted itself around rather than something that had to navigate it. One moment she was standing at the window with the lord's hand two inches from her arm and her breathing going careful and controlled the way it did when she needed it most.

And then there was a hand at the small of her back.

Not grabbing. Not pulling. Just — placed. Warm and certain and carrying the particular weight of something that had decided.

She was standing beside Edward before she had fully processed moving. He was looking at the lord with the expression he wore when he was looking at nothing — the perfectly neutral expression that was somehow, in context, the most dangerous thing in the room.

He said nothing.

He didn't need to.

The lord's smile stayed in place for approximately three seconds — just long enough to maintain the appearance of a man who was leaving because he chose to, not because something in Edward Quest's silence had made the entire vicinity feel suddenly, specifically inhospitable. Then he inclined his head and was gone.

Edward's hand stayed at her back.

One breath. Two.

Then it was gone too.

He stepped away from her, back to the distance of a man who had simply been passing, and picked up a glass from a tray as though he had been heading for the drink the entire time and this corner of the room had simply been on his route.

He did not look at her.

EDWARD

He had not been watching her.

He had been watching the room, which was different. He watched every room he occupied — catalogued it, mapped it, tracked its movements the way he tracked troop positions on a campaign map. It was not surveillance. It was simply awareness, applied consistently and without exception to every space he entered.

The lord at the east window had been in his peripheral awareness for twenty minutes. Not because of anything specific — because of the specific way unspecific things accumulated. The angle of approach. The studied casualness of the positioning. The smile that had done its calculation before the conversation started.

He had continued his conversation with Lord Harwick about the eastern supply chain.

He had noted when the lord moved toward the windows.

He had continued the conversation.

He had noted the quality of her stillness from across the room — the difference between composed and holding. He knew the difference. Had spent years learning every texture of stillness and what lived underneath each one.

He had excused himself from Lord Harwick mid-sentence, which he had never done in his life.

He did not examine the walk across the room.

He did not examine the hand at her back — the decision of it, the certainty of it, the fact that it had not felt like a decision at all but like something that simply happened in the way that breathing happened, without deliberation, without the step between intention and action that he applied to everything else.

He stood at the window and looked out at the courtyard below and felt the place on his palm where her back had been — the warmth of it, the slight surprise in her body when he had arrived, the way she had not moved away.

He picked up his glass.

Lord Harwick appeared at his elbow, resuming the supply chain conversation with the smooth adaptability of a man who had spent decades talking to people who stopped listening without warning. Edward returned his attention to it with the practiced ease of a man who had spent the same decades doing the same.

He did not look at her again.

Across the room, he was aware — with the same peripheral, cataloguing, entirely impersonal awareness — that she had not moved from the window. That she was standing in the torchlight with her glass and her composure and the dark blue dress that Mira had produced from somewhere, looking out at the courtyard below.

He was not watching her.

He was watching the room.

The distinction remained relevant.

AVA

She did not sleep at all that night.

She lay in the dark and pressed her mother's hairpin between her palms and thought about the hand at the small of her back and the warmth of it and the certainty of it and the fact that she had not, in the moment, been afraid.

That was the part that wouldn't settle.

She was scared of men — not all of them, not always, but in the particular, bone-deep way of someone who had learned early that proximity could become danger without warning or announcement. She knew this about herself the way she knew other things that lived in the body rather than the mind — not as thought but as reflex, as the flinch before the reason for flinching had finished arriving.

His hand had arrived and she had not flinched.

She lay in the dark and turned this over carefully, the way you turned something fragile that you weren't sure how to hold.

She was not naive. She understood power. She understood that a man who removed a threat from your vicinity was not necessarily safe — that protection could be its own kind of possession, that the hand that kept danger away could become the danger. She had learned this lesson and she had not unlearned it and she did not intend to.

But.

He had placed his hand and the lord had left and then the hand had gone too and he had picked up a glass and looked at the courtyard and had not looked at her again. Had not used what he had done as currency. Had not made her feel that a debt had been created, that something was now owed, that the space between them had shifted in the particular direction she feared most.

He had simply — intervened. And then returned to being a wall.

She did not know what to do with this.

She pressed the hairpin between her palms.

She thought: be careful.

She thought: you are already not being careful.

She thought: go to sleep, Ava.

She did not go to sleep for a very long time.

EDWARD

He stood at his study window at midnight and looked at nothing and did not think about the hand at her back.

He thought about the eastern campaign. The supply restructure. The fourteen letters. The formal response to Prince Dorian of Vael's upcoming visit that Cassius had been pressing him about for two weeks.

He thought about his father, who was getting thinner and slower and was beginning to have the look of a man who had started counting something.

He thought about the court, and Seraphine, and Cassius's silence that was louder than speech, and the particular quality of the lord's smile before he left the window that Edward was going to remember and address at an appropriate moment through appropriate channels.

He did not think about warmth. He did not think about the slight surprise in a girl's body when something arrived that she had not been expecting and turned out not to be what she feared.

He went to bed.

In the morning he would have fourteen things to address before noon and a campaign to plan and an empire to run and a father who was counting something and absolutely no time or inclination for distraction of any kind.

In the morning.

End of Chapter Six