POV: Aphrodite
Some lines are not crossed.
The morning after the almost-bond has a different quality than the mornings before it. The court feels it — or the court's magic feels it, which amounts to the same thing in a place where the magic and the space are so thoroughly merged that they respond to the same inputs. The bound nobles move differently in the corridors, slightly more alert, the compulsion-operated circuits of their daily movement interrupted by some signal the court is running through its infrastructure. The King's chains have been glowing at a low continuous level since last night rather than the intermittent pulses I was tracking before.
And the King himself has been in the same corridor as us three times this morning, each time with the particular quality of someone who is not seeking proximity and not avoiding it, just moving through his court in the patterns his court requires and finding us in the same spaces because the court is finite and we are both in it.
