The King's Flower

🌸CHAPTER9:STONE CROWN

Ava's POV

It happened because she was tired.

That was the only explanation she could construct afterward that made any sense — that the particular filter between thought and speech, the one she had spent years reinforcing until it was essentially structural, had developed a c***k somewhere around day sixteen of the palace and the c***k had chosen this specific corridor, this specific morning, to become a gap.

She had been up since before dawn.

Not by choice. By the particular cruelty of a mind that would not stop working even when the body was finished — she had lain in the dark for three hours turning over the previous evening's dinner, cataloguing every small moment of it, the redistribution of the court ladies, the cold shoulder from the woman in green she hadn't even done anything to yet, the way Seraphine had smiled at something across the room and the smile had landed in Ava's direction like a stone dropped from a height.

By the time she gave up on sleep the palace was grey and silent and she had been running on four hours and a chamber tray breakfast that had gone cold.

So when she turned the corner near the east corridor and found Edward coming the other direction with two guards flanking him and a document in his hand and that expression that meant he was solving something in his head that had nothing to do with the physical space he was moving through —

The thought simply arrived. Fully formed. Without consulting her.

There goes Stone Crown.

And then her mouth said it.

Quietly. She would tell herself it was quietly, after. More of a murmur. The kind of thing that might, conceivably, have been aimed at herself rather than the general atmosphere of the corridor.

The guards found the ceiling very interesting.

Both of them. Simultaneously. With the practiced, total commitment of men who had developed a refined ability to become architecturally interested in their surroundings at moments of professional necessity.

Edward stopped walking.

Not gradually. Just — stopped. The document remained in his hand. His expression did not change in any way she could specifically identify and yet it changed completely. The quality of his stillness shifted into something that had a different texture from his ordinary stillness — more deliberate, more present, turned toward her like something that had decided to pay full attention.

The corridor was very quiet.

"I —" she started.

He looked at her.

She closed her mouth.

He looked at her for three more seconds — the measuring seconds, the deciding seconds — and then he said, with the same tone he used for everything, which was to say no tone at all:

"Come."

And walked.

She composed the apology on the way to his study.

It went through several drafts.

The first draft involved a great deal of explanation about the lack of sleep and the extenuating circumstances of being awake since before dawn and the way the thought had arrived without warning or invitation.

She discarded this on the grounds that it was both too much information and demonstrably the kind of thing that made you look more guilty rather than less.

The second draft was simpler. Direct. I apologise for the disrespect, Your Highness. It won't happen again. Clean. Sufficient. She rehearsed it twice.

The third draft, which arrived as she was rounding the last corner before his study, was: I meant it affectionately.

She absolutely discarded that one.

She arrived at his study door with the second draft ready and her breathing counted smooth and her face arranged into the composed architecture she was getting better at constructing on short notice.

He was already inside. Already seated. Already looking at something on his desk.

"Sit," he said, without looking up.

She sat.

She waited.

He finished whatever he was reading. Set it aside. Did not look at her. Reached for a second document.

She waited.

He read the second document. Made a note in the margin. Set it aside.

She waited.

The apology was ready. She had it right there. The second draft, clean and direct, waiting for the moment he looked at her and gave her the opening to deploy it.

He didn't look at her.

He reached for the third document.

She waited.

After approximately fifteen minutes of this — of him reading, of her sitting, of the apology growing heavier and heavier in her chest like something that had been packed for a journey that kept not departing — he set down the third document and looked sideways at the small table near the window where a tea service had been placed at some point without her noticing.

"Tea," he said. Not offering. Stating.

She blinked. "I'm sorry?"

He nodded at the tea service.

She stood and poured — not because she particularly wanted tea, but because the instruction was clear and she was not in a position to argue about tea and also because it gave her hands something to do, which she needed.

She poured two cups. Set one on his desk. Held the other.

He picked up his cup. Looked at it.

"The east garden," he said.

She blinked again. "I'm sorry?"

"You go there every morning. Before the court gatherings."

"Yes," she said carefully.

"The roses are — " he paused, with the quality of a man who had arrived somewhere he hadn't planned to be. "Flowering early this year. The head gardener mentioned it."

She stared at him.

He looked at his document.

She sat back down, slowly, with her tea, and looked at the side of his face — the sharp jaw, the dark hair, the expression that was not quite nothing but was very close to it — and tried to understand what was happening.

He was not going to mention it.

That was what was happening. He had brought her here and made her compose an apology for the entire length of a corridor and sit for fifteen minutes and pour tea and he was going to talk about the roses and he was never going to mention Stone Crown at all.

She did not know whether to feel relieved or cheated.

She drank her tea.

He read his document.

The study was quiet in the particular way of a room that two people were occupying without performing the occupying — no conversation sustained for its own sake, no filling of silence because silence was uncomfortable. Just two people in a room with their respective tea and documents and thoughts, existing in the same space without requiring anything from each other.

She became aware, at some point, that she had stopped counting her breathing.

Twenty minutes later he set down his pen and said, without any particular inflection: "You may go."

She stood. Gathered herself. Moved toward the door.

She was reaching for the handle when she heard her own voice — quietly, aimed at no one in particular, aimed at the door handle, aimed at the general principle of the thing —

"Thank you. For the tea. The Oldie."

She was through the door before the last word had fully left her mouth.

She did not look back.

She walked down the corridor with her hands clasped in front of her and her face doing something she was not entirely in control of — something at the corners of her mouth that kept trying to happen despite her best efforts at structural maintenance — and she did not look back.

She was entirely certain he had heard it.

She was entirely certain about this because she had heard, in the precise moment between the word leaving her mouth and the door clicking shut behind her, the sound of a man who had been completely silent for the past twenty minutes making a sound that was — small, quickly contained, immediately suppressed —

Not quite a laugh.

The ghost of one. The idea of one. The shape of something that lived in the same neighbourhood as amusement and had briefly considered showing itself before remembering that it didn't do that.

She made it to the east corridor before she let the thing at the corners of her mouth become what it had been trying to become for the past thirty minutes.

She smiled. Fully. Quickly. Alone in the corridor with no witnesses except the stone bust of his great-grandfather, who had heard stranger things.

Then she composed herself and went to the garden.

The roses were, she noticed for the first time, flowering early.

She sat on the stone bench with her embroidery and looked at them — deep red, fully open, extraordinarily early for the season, filling the east garden with a colour that had no business being this vivid in weather this cold.

She thought about a man reading documents for twenty minutes and saying not a single word about the thing she had said and then mentioning, apparently at random, that the roses were flowering early this year.

She thought about the ghost of something that lived in the same neighbourhood as amusement.

She thought: he is not what he appears to be.

She thought: I know I keep saying that.

She thought: I'm starting to believe it.

She threaded her needle and began to embroider and let the garden be quiet around her and did not examine, too carefully, the feeling that had settled somewhere in her chest — small, warm, not quite named.

Not yet.

EDWARD

He heard it.

He sat at his desk for a long moment after the door closed and looked at the document in front of him and heard the word in the particular way of something that had arrived unexpectedly and made itself at home before he could assess whether it was welcome.

The Oldie.

He put his pen down.

Picked it up.

Something in his chest — the same inconvenient region that had been behaving strangely for the past week and a half — did the thing it had been doing. Small. Quickly suppressed. The kind of thing that happened before you could apply the correct response to it.

He returned to his document.

He read the same sentence four times.

He put the pen down again and looked at the middle distance for a moment with the expression of a man conducting a brief, private, entirely internal conversation with himself about the current state of his composure, the outcome of which was that his composure was fine, completely fine, everything was fine.

He picked the pen back up.

He did not smile.

He returned to his document and his campaigns and his fourteen things and the empire that required running and the father who was counting something and the Vaelian negotiations and the eastern flank.

He returned to all of it.

But for the rest of the morning — in the war room, in the council chamber, in the corridor outside the library where he passed a stone bust of his great-grandfather and felt, inexplicably, that something had happened in that corridor recently that the bust was aware of —

For the rest of the morning, something in the neighbourhood of amusement lived very quietly in the back of his chest and refused, despite all reasonable expectation, to leave.

End of Chapter Nine