Gorgina had dreamed.
She knew this the way you knew things upon waking — not from the content of the dream, which was gone by the time her eyes opened, which was gone in the specific, frustrating way that the dreams you most wanted to remember always went — but from the quality of the waking. The specific, residual warmth of a mind that had been somewhere else and had returned.
She had dreamed something.
She did not know what.
She held the not-knowing for a moment in the way she sometimes held things — with the specific, attentive quality of someone trying to cup water in their hands — and the dream continued to dissolve and was gone.
She got up.
This was on the fifth day, when the fever had finally subsided with the somewhat grudging quality of a thing that had decided to concede rather than having been defeated. The physician had confirmed the subsidence with the brisk satisfaction of a man whose treatment plan had produced the expected result on the expected schedule, and had then retreated to his guest room to pack his things with the relieved efficiency of someone returning to a life that had been interrupted.
On the sixth day she went to the palace.
The stack of documents on her office table had the specific, slightly aggressive quality of work that had been waiting, knowing it would have to be addressed eventually, and had been accumulating interest in the waiting.
She sat.
She read.
She signed.
She reviewed.
She did this for one hour with the focused, methodical efficiency that was her professional default, and at the end of the hour she became aware that her head hurt in the specific, heavy way of a headache that was not arriving but had been present for some time and was only now demanding acknowledgement.
She set down her pen.
She pressed two fingers to her temple.
The room had a quality of slight instability — not dramatic, nothing that would be visible to anyone observing her, only the specific, interior quality of a body that had spent four days running a high fever and had recovered but had not yet forgotten that it had been working very hard and expected some consideration in return.
Her throat was still scratchy.
The light from the window was more present than she wanted it to be.
She did not hear the knock.
She heard the door.
She looked up.
Blonde hair in the doorway — the specific, familiar quality of a silhouette she had been recognising for seven years.
She started to rise.
Her body had a different opinion about this.
The floor came toward her with the specific, unhurried certainty of something that had been waiting for an opportunity and had found one.
She did not hit the floor.
She hit something that was not the floor — softer, warmer, with the specific quality of something that had moved to intercept the fall rather than the floor simply being there. Arms. Catching. The specific, automatic quality of a person who had been close enough to move in time.
She registered Teivel's voice saying something.
She did not register what it said.
The room went dark in the specific, gentle way that exhaustion made rooms go dark when they had the chance.
The ceiling was unfamiliarly familiar.
This was the first thing — the specific quality of a ceiling she had not looked at before, which was notable because she knew most of the ceilings in most of the rooms she occupied, and not knowing a ceiling meant she was in a room she did not usually occupy.
The ceiling was high.
The chandelier that hung from it was significant — not ostentatious, the specific kind of significant that was the result of genuine craft rather than conspicuous expenditure, the kind that had been made rather than purchased as a statement. Crystal and gold, proportioned for the room it occupied, which was a room of considerable size.
She turned her head.
The room resolved itself — large, the furnishings the specific quality of the palace's royal residential wing rather than its administrative one. Deep colours, the kind that absorbed light rather than reflecting it, that made a room feel contained rather than exposed. A dressing room door to one side. A window on the far wall through which the sky was the specific, deep blue of early evening.
She tried to sit up.
Her body filed an immediate and comprehensive objection.
She subsided back against the pillow with the specific, slightly undignified sound of someone whose ambition had exceeded their current physical capabilities.
She wanted water.
Her throat was worse than it had been — the scratchy quality of the morning had deepened during however long she had been unconscious into something denser, something that sat in her throat with the specific, obstructive weight of inflamed tissue.
She tried to call for someone.
What came out was a whisper.
Not a useful whisper — the specific, nearly-inaudible whisper of someone whose voice had decided to take the same position as their body, which was that today had been enough.
She lay there.
She tried again.
Whisper.
The dressing room door opened.
Teivel came out.
He was in a bathrobe — clearly recently bathed, his hair damp at the edges, the specific quality of a person who had taken advantage of the interval to attend to themselves. He looked at her with the expression he wore when he was assessing a situation — not the performing expression, not the socially arranged version of his face, only the actual, functional assessment of a man encountering new information.
"You're awake," he said.
She pointed at the water jug on the bedside table.
He poured a glass.
He brought it to her.
She tried to swallow.
The water encountered her throat and her throat sent back a very clear message about what was and was not currently possible, and Gorgina's body, which had been managing various forms of difficulty for four days and had arrived at the stage of simplified communication, conveyed this message through a cough that was neither small nor graceful.
She coughed.
She coughed in the way that people coughed when their throat was significantly inflamed and they had just attempted to introduce liquid to it without adequate preparation.
Teivel took the glass from her hand.
"The throat is worse," he said, which was not a question.
She looked at him.
She could not nod without discomfort so she communicated through the specific, minimum-effort expression of someone who was managing their resources.
Teivel looked at the water glass.
He looked at her.
He said, in the tone of someone who has assessed a situation and arrived at a practical conclusion:
"The physician said the issue is the throat's inability to manage swallowing. The muscles are inflamed. The angle and the pressure need to be managed."
She looked at him.
He drank the water.
He tilted her head — carefully, with the specific, clinical attention of someone executing a procedure — at the angle the physician had demonstrated, and pressed his lips to hers.
It was not a kiss.
Or it was a kiss in the technical sense of lips meeting lips, but it had the quality of a medical procedure rather than a personal communication — the specific, focused quality of someone delivering liquid by a route that bypassed the compromised mechanism.
The water moved.
Her throat, approached from this angle with this pressure, managed it.
He straightened.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
The room had the specific, charged quality of a room in which something has just happened that both people are aware of and neither person has decided yet what to do with.
"The physician explained the technique," Teivel said.
"Yes," she said, in the whisper.
"It's purely—"
"I know," she said.
The evening outside the window had the deep blue quality of the hour just before dark.
She lay in the Crown Prince's bed in the Crown Prince's room with the Crown Prince in his bathrobe beside her.
She looked at the chandelier.
She thought: I need to go home. I cannot currently go home because I cannot currently walk. This is going to be a problem.
She thought about Gerffron.
She thought: This is going to be a specific kind of problem.
She looked at the chandelier for a while longer.
She asked for more water. And the Crown Prince happily complied.