The King's Flower

🌸CHAPTER8:LITTLE DEBT

Edward's POV

He found out on a Tuesday.

Not because he was paying attention. Because Sera filed a guard report — routine, weekly, the kind he received from every assigned guard and read in the same way he read everything, quickly and completely and without missing anything — and in the section marked subject welfare and daily activity there was a line that said: subject has not attended the evening meal in three consecutive days. Reason unknown. Subject appears to be eating minimally from chamber trays only.

He read it twice.

Set the report down.

Picked it up and read it again.

Then he set it down and returned to the campaign map he had been working on and did not think about it for the better part of an hour, during which time he moved three supply markers, revised the eastern flank approach, and read and responded to four of the fourteen letters that perpetually required his attention.

Then he put down his pen.

He didn't go to her chambers.

He sent word — brief, formal, through the correct channels, the way things were done — that the girl from the east wing was to present herself to his study at the second evening bell. No explanation given. None was his habit.

He returned to his maps.

She arrived four minutes early, which surprised him — most people arrived to summons late, from nerves or from the particular court habit of performing indifference to being called. She knocked twice, quiet but definite, and when he said come in she opened the door and stood in the frame with the expression she wore when she was preparing for something unpleasant.

He recognised it. Had been cataloguing her expressions without intending to for the past week and a half. This one was the composed one — the careful architecture of a face that had decided in advance how it was going to look regardless of what happened to it.

"Sit down," he said, without looking up from the document in his hand.

She sat.

He finished the paragraph he was reading. Set the document aside. Looked at her.

She looked back. Not at the floor, not at the wall — at him. With those warm brown eyes that did not look away when they should and did not show what was behind them when they shouldn't. She had the particular stillness of someone waiting for something they have already decided they can survive.

"You haven't been eating," he said.

A pause. Brief. She had not been expecting this particular opening. "I have been eating," she said carefully. "From the chamber trays."

"That is not eating. That is subsisting."

"I wasn't aware there was a distinction required."

"There is a distinction," he said, "between a person who is functioning and a person who is declining, and I have a vested interest in you remaining in the former category."

She looked at him with an expression he couldn't fully read — something between surprised and careful and something else underneath both. "A vested interest," she repeated.

"You are a debt this palace has accepted responsibility for. Your condition reflects on that arrangement."

"My condition," she said. Very quietly. Very evenly.

"Your health. Your welfare. The basic standard of care that was implicit in the arrangement your father made with the crown." He held her gaze. "You will attend the evening meal."

"I —" She stopped. Started again. "The evening meal is difficult."

"Many things are difficult."

"The court ladies —"

"Are a fixture of this palace and will remain so regardless of whether you are present or absent." He picked up his pen. "Absence does not resolve the problem. It simply removes you from the room and gives them a victory they have not earned."

She was quiet for a moment. He returned to his document — not because he was finished with the conversation but because he had said what needed to be said and he did not believe in filling silence for the sake of filling it.

"Is that all?" she asked finally.

"You will eat dinner tonight. In the dining room. With the court."

"And if I don't want to."

He looked up then. Slowly. "That sentence suggests a negotiation is occurring. It is not."

She held his gaze for three full seconds — which was, he had noted, her particular tell. When she was deciding something. When she was taking the measure of something and deciding whether she could afford to push it.

She could not afford to push this.

She appeared to reach this conclusion independently.

"Fine," she said. With a quality to it that was not quite agreement and not quite defiance and lived in the precise territory between the two. "Your Highness."

"You're dismissed," he said.

She stood. Moved toward the door. And then — in the doorway, her hand on the frame, not looking at him — she said, very quietly:

"You know, for someone who calls me a debt, you spend a significant amount of time checking on the account."

The door closed.

He sat with that for a moment.

Then he went back to his document.

He told himself, for the rest of the evening, that what had happened in his study was simple administrative management. A transaction required maintenance. Maintenance required oversight. Oversight occasionally required direct communication when indirect channels — guard reports, chamber staff, the ordinary machinery of palace management — proved insufficient.

This was all it was.

He attended a war council at the fourth bell. Reviewed the northern supply chain revision with his generals. Received and dismissed a report from Cassius about the upcoming Vaelian negotiations that he read with the particular attention he gave everything Cassius said, which was complete attention with a portion reserved for what was not being said.

At the sixth bell he dismissed his generals and sat alone at the war room table and looked at the campaign maps.

He thought about the eastern flank.

He thought about the Vaelian situation and what Dorian's visit was going to cost him politically and whether the cost was manageable.

He thought about his father, who had looked at him across the dinner table last night with an expression Edward had not been able to categorise and had not liked not being able to categorise.

He did not think about a girl in his study doorway saying for someone who calls me a debt, you spend a significant amount of time checking on the account.

He did not think about the fact that she was right.

He sent the instruction to the kitchen at the seventh bell.

Specific. Detailed. The kind of instruction that left no room for interpretation — what was to be prepared, how it was to be presented, which chamber it was to be delivered to, and that no note was to accompany it. He signed it with his seal and sent it through the correct channels and returned to his documents.

It was not a gift. It was maintenance. The adequate provisioning of a debt the palace had accepted was a logistical matter and he was addressing it logistically and this was the full extent of what was occurring.

He returned to his documents.

He did not find out until two days later — from another of Sera's weekly reports, filed with the same precise efficiency — that she had come to the dining room that night. Had sat at the table. Had eaten. Had maintained the kind of pleasant, careful composure that apparently required her to count her breathing all the way down the corridor but produced no visible evidence of the counting once she arrived.

Had done it again the following night.

And the night after that.

He read this portion of the report three times.

Then he set it down and went back to his maps.

He noted, briefly and without interest, that something in his chest had done something inconvenient.

He did not note it again.

He passed her in the corridor two mornings later.

She was walking with purpose — the correct corridor, the right direction, moving through the palace with the particular quality of someone who had stopped being lost and started being somewhere. She had the embroidery bag over her arm and her hair done and the composed face and she was going, he estimated, to the east garden.

She saw him.

"Your Highness," she said. With a quality to it — not quite warm, not quite cool, something balanced carefully in between, the voice of a person who had decided exactly how much to give and was giving precisely that.

"You attended dinner," he said.

A pause. "You told me to."

"I'm aware of what I told you."

"Then why —"

"I'm noting that you did it." He looked at her. "That's all."

She looked back at him with those eyes that held things carefully. "Did you expect that I wouldn't?"

He considered this. "I expected that you might not."

"I considered it," she said honestly. Then, after a beat: "The food in the dining room is better than the chamber trays."

Something happened at the corner of his mouth. He was aware of it and did not investigate it. "Go to your garden," he said.

She went.

He stood in the corridor for a moment longer than he needed to.

Then he went to the war room, where he had fourteen things to attend to and not a single one of them was a girl in a gold dress sitting at a table she hadn't wanted to sit at and doing it anyway because someone had told her to and because she had decided, in her quiet, stubborn, entirely private way, that she could.

Not a single one.

That evening, for the third time, warm food arrived at her chamber with no note.

He signed the instruction with the same seal. Sent it through the same channels.

Maintenance. Logistics. The adequate provisioning of an arrangement the palace had accepted responsibility for.

He went back to his maps.

End of Chapter Eight