He did not remember the journey home.
He had a theoretical understanding that it had occurred — that he had left the southern wing, that he had navigated the palace's corridors and the palace's main entrance, that he had found his way to a carriage and the carriage had taken him to the estate — but the specific content of these things was not available to him.
What was available was the balcony of the cedar bedroom.
He had gone there, apparently, and had stood there for a period of time sufficient for the city to complete its transition from evening to night to the specific, pale quality of early morning, and had then continued standing there while the early morning completed its transition to the specific, clear quality of a spring dawn over the capital.
He was watching the dawn when the household began.
The kitchen yard below — the bread oven, the fifth bell, the cheerful singing of the scullery maid who had been singing her way through the estate's morning for as long as he had been there.
He went inside.
He washed.
He dressed.
He went to breakfast.
Lady Elowen arrived at the breakfast table at the seventh bell, which was her usual time, with her correspondence and her correct posture.
She looked at the table.
She looked at the empty chair across from Gerffron's.
She set down her correspondence.
She looked at the empty chair.
She looked at the maids.
"Where is my daughter?" she said.
The maid nearest the sideboard — a junior one, with the expression of a person about to deliver information to a powerful person and aware of the delivery's potential consequences — said:
"The Duke didn't return last night, my Lady."
Lady Elowen's expression moved.
It moved toward a specific register — the register of a woman who has been worried about her daughter for six days and has just been given information that compounds the worry, and whose worry expressed itself as directed fury because directed fury was the form her feelings took when they needed somewhere to go.
She looked at Gerffron.
She opened her mouth.
"She informed me," Gerffron said.
Lady Elowen looked at him.
"She was reviewing the backlogged documents," he said. "The four days of reports that accumulated during her illness. She felt it was more efficient to remain at the palace and attend to them rather than make two journeys." He picked up his fork. "She said she might be home today."
He said all of this with the specific, neutral quality of a man stating facts he had been given, in the tone of someone sharing information rather than fabricating it.
He did not look up from his plate.
Lady Elowen looked at him.
She looked at the empty chair.
She said, "She is working herself to death even after a significant illness."
"Yes," Gerffron said.
"She always has."
"Yes."
"She was like this ever since she became a duke. I could not get her to rest." Lady Elowen picked up her correspondence with the fond exasperation of a woman who has been managing a particular quality of stubbornness for thirty years and has made her peace with it. "She doesn't know when to stop."
"No," Gerffron agreed.
Lady Elowen began reading her correspondence.
Then she looked at Gerffron over the top of the letter.
"At least one of you," she said, with the specific, elegant derogation of a woman who had decided to deliver a point through the minimum available words, "is capable of managing a household responsibility appropriately. The other one apparently requires the empire's foreign policy to have anything to do."
Gerffron looked at his eggs.
"The delegations come whether I arrange them or not," he said pleasantly.
"And you have attached yourself to this one like a — what is the expression — like a limpet."
"I was appointed to it by the court."
"Mm." She returned to her correspondence. "A consort. A very glamorous consort, entertaining foreign dignitaries. While his wife does the actual work."
"Mm," Gerffron said.
He ate his breakfast.
He ate it with the focused, present attention of a man who has decided that the most useful thing he can do with the next twenty minutes is eat breakfast properly, because the next twenty minutes after that were going to require things of him that breakfast could help with.
He was twenty-six years old.
He had seen his wife in another man's room last night.
He was eating breakfast.
The royal palace's breakfast room had a different quality from the Wadee estate's dining table — the formal, slightly elevated quality of a space that was still a room where people ate but which had never entirely given up the register of occasion.
The king was there.
Teivel was there.
Princess Caelith was there.
Two of the delegation's senior advisory members were there.
Styrmir was there.
The queen was not there, which Gerffron noted with the automatic, involuntary attention he gave to the composition of rooms — noted it and filed it without pursuing it, because the queen's absence had its own architecture that he was not going to attempt to understand over breakfast.
He arrived at the seventh bell.
He bowed.
He greeted the room with the correct, professional register.
"Your Majesty, I have some documents from yesterday's session that require your review when convenient. I thought I would leave them with your secretary, but if—"
"Sit down, Consort Wadee," the king said, with the specific, mild authority of someone who had decided how the morning was going to proceed. "Have breakfast. The documents will keep twenty minutes."
Gerffron looked at the table.
He looked at the available seats.
He looked at Styrmir.
Styrmir looked back at him with the expression of someone who is very pleased with the current arrangement of circumstances.
He sat.
He sat at the available seat, which was — with the specific, inexorable geometry of available seats at a table with limited options — adjacent to Styrmir.
"Consort Wadee," Teivel said.
His voice had the specific, calibrated quality of someone who has decided on a register for a conversation and is opening it.
"Your Highness," Gerffron said.
"You look tired."
"I had an early morning."
"A consort's work is never done, I suppose," Teivel said, with the pleasant tone that had edges. "Hosting. Accompanying. Managing the various social requirements of an international delegation. It must be — exhausting."
"Enormously," Gerffron agreed. "Though I find the delegation itself a reward for the exhaustion. The Veldrathi court has assembled some remarkably capable people." He reached for the bread. "I've been particularly impressed by the level of preparation — the advisory staff, especially, has clearly done extensive background work on Zenos court dynamics. Much more thorough than I would have expected from a delegation this size."
He said this to the table in general.
He did not look at Styrmir.
"Advisory consultant Voss," Teivel said, turning to Styrmir with the specific, assessing quality of someone who has decided to be direct. "You've been in evidence at each of the formal sessions. More than I would expect from an advisory role. How long have you been at the Veldrathi court?"
Styrmir looked at him.
He looked at him with the winter-pale eyes and the specific, composed expression of someone who has been waiting for a version of this question and is prepared for it.
"Three years," Styrmir said. "I came to the court from a private study appointment. Astronomy primarily, with some secondary work in cartographic methodology and the historical land records of the border territories." He tilted his head slightly. "The overlap between astronomical navigation and geographic boundary disputes is more significant than most people realise. The same precision that maps stars maps territory. I found the court's interest in both a natural fit."
"Your origin?" Teivel said.
"The northern Zenos territories originally," Styrmir said, without a pause. "I've been in Veldrath for three years. Citizenship follows residence, at the Veldrathi court."
"Interesting," Teivel said, and the word contained the specific, compressed quality of a person who has more questions than they are going to ask at a breakfast table.
"Most things are, once you look at them properly," Styrmir said pleasantly.
Caelith, across the table, applied herself to her tea with the expression of a woman who is watching a performance she finds satisfying and does not want to accidentally disrupt through visible enjoyment.
Teivel looked at Gerffron.
"And the Duke," he said. "Not at breakfast this morning?"
Something in the phrasing of it — the specific, weighted quality of the question, the slight emphasis that lived in not at breakfast — was the thing that the rest of the table noticed without reacting to, with the experienced social awareness of people who understood that some things were being said through the gap between the words.
Gerffron's hand, under the table, had gone still.
"She's attending to the backlog from her illness," Gerffron said.
His voice was completely even.
His hand, under the table, was not moving.
Teivel smiled.
It was the smile of a man who has said something and is watching the person he said it to manage the receiving of it.
"Of course," Teivel said. "Dedicated as always."
The breakfast table was quiet for a moment.
Something warm covered Gerffron's still hand.
He looked down.
Styrmir's hand was on his.
Not dramatically — not a performance, not a statement for the room. The specific, deliberate warmth of someone who had noticed the stillness and had made a decision about it with the quiet efficiency that characterized everything he did.
Gerffron looked at the hand.
He looked at Styrmir.
Styrmir was looking at Teivel.
"Your Highness," Styrmir said, in the pleasant, conversational register that was his most dangerous register, "I understand Lady Mallory's family has been very active in the capital recently. The betrothal arrangements moving forward, I imagine? I had the pleasure of meeting her at the palace. A very thoughtful woman." A pause. "She seems like someone who pays close attention to the people around her."
Teivel looked at him.
"She does," he said.
"That's a quality I find very admirable," Styrmir said, returning to his breakfast. "In anyone."
The table continued.
Gerffron's hand, under the table, stopped being still.