She went home for a day.
Her father told her the king had come to the stall.
Twice.
Blue wool the first night.
Green linen the second.
She went back to the palace the next morning.
Not because of the agreement.
Because she chose to.
On the eighteenth day, she went home.
Not permanently.
She went home because certain things needed to be thought through in familiar spaces. The palace, however comfortable it had become in three weeks, was not yet a familiar space in the necessary way.
She needed the kitchen table. The sound of her father's pen on the ledger. The smell of their house — wool and wood smoke and something that had no name but meant home.
I need to think about this from the outside, she told herself, walking through the palace gates into the morning city. I've been inside it for three weeks. I need to see it from outside.
She helped her father with the inventory. She sat at the kitchen table with tea and watched him work across from her and felt the particular comfort of a thing known completely.
Her father finally spoke.
"You're going back," he said. Not a question.
"Yes," she said.
He was quiet, adding a column with the careful focus of someone concentrating on numbers to avoid examining the thing next to the numbers.
"Is it good for you?" he asked. "Being there?"
She thought about the library and the garden. The late evenings in the west study working through problems together. The private dining room with the tall window. The morning she had watched him fly and gone to find him in the garden and he had looked at her with an expression that had no armour in it.
She thought about the book on her desk. Two hundred pages of the inside of a person she was beginning to understand.
Is it good for me? she thought. That's the question. Not is it safe. Not is it wise. Is it good.
"Yes," she said. "I think it might be."
He nodded. He went back to the ledger.
Then, without looking up: "He came here, you know. While you were at the palace."
She looked up sharply. "He came to the stall?"
"In the evening, after we'd closed. Just him and one guard, plain clothes. He bought fabric." Her father's mouth did something brief and controlled. "A bolt of blue wool. The same blue you were wearing when you first talked to him, I think. He paid twice the asking price. I tried to correct it and he said — and I'm quoting exactly — 'The price is what I say it is, Master Atwood. Good evening.'"
Blue wool, she thought. The same blue.
He remembered what I was wearing. He went to the stall and he bought the colour I was wearing the day I didn't kneel.
She sat very still.
"Did he say anything else?"
"He asked how you were." Her father looked up, and his eyes were warm with something he was choosing not to put into words. "I told him you were fine. He nodded and left." A pause. "He came back the next day and bought another bolt. Green, this time."
Green, she thought. My second best dress is green. He came back the next day and bought the other colour.
He went twice. He came back.
She went back to the palace the following morning.
She walked through the gates at the second hour. Aldric met her. She walked through the familiar corridors — already familiar, already hers in some way she hadn't planned for — and down to the library and put her coat over the chair and opened her book.
She had been reading twenty minutes when she heard the footstep pattern she had, without meaning to, completely memorized.
His walk, she noted. I know his walk. I know the rhythm and weight of it. When did that happen?
He appeared in the doorway.
They looked at each other.
"You came back," he said.
"I said I would," she said.
"You said you'd think about it."
"I thought about it," she said. "I came back."
He came in and sat in his chair. The library was morning-quiet around them.
"My father told me you bought fabric," she said.
He looked at the shelf of books across from him. "The stall needed patronage."
"You bought blue wool and green linen on consecutive evenings," she said. "He described the specific colours."
A pause. "The blue is a good quality," he said, with the dignity of someone maintaining a position they know has been seen through.
She looked at him. He continued to look at the shelf of books. The corner of his mouth was doing the thing.
He's not going to say it, she thought. He bought two bolts of fabric in my colours on consecutive evenings and he is going to call it patronage until he dies rather than say what it was.
I'm going to let him.
For now.
"Malik," she said.
He looked at her.
"I'm staying," she said.
Not as a negotiated condition. Not with qualifications. As a statement of something she had decided in her kitchen at home with her father and his ledger and the sound of rain on a familiar roof.
"Not because of the agreement," she said. "Because I choose to."
He was very still.
"Because of what you wrote," she continued. "About being two things at once in the moment before resolving. I think that's what I've been watching you do since the marketplace. Being two things at once — the thing you were made into and the thing underneath." She paused. "And I want to see what happens when you resolve."
He looked at her for a long time.
The morning light was pale and clean across the library floor.
He's taking it in, she thought. Not deflecting. Not managing it. Taking it in.
"That might take a while," he said.
"I'm not in a hurry," she said, and opened her book.
He stayed.
He pulled a book from the shelf and opened it.
They read in the morning quiet of the palace library. Outside, the fountain continued its silver arc. The city went about its life beyond the walls.
Nora Atwood had chosen something she hadn't yet found a name for.
I'll find the name eventually, she thought, turning a page. I'm not in a hurry for that either.
And found that not having the name for it didn't bother her at all.