Lady Cassian came alone.
She sat down.
She said: you have become a target.
Then she said: I am tired of watching things that matter get broken by things that don't.
Nora believed her on both counts.
Lady Cassian came to her rooms on the seventeenth day.
She came alone. Without the other ladies, without the choreography of the court. Alone, she was different. Taller somehow. More present.
This is who she actually is, Nora noted. The version with the other ladies is the performance. This is the person.
Nora opened the door and stepped back to let her in.
Whatever this was, a doorway conversation was not it.
Cassian entered and looked around the room — the books on the desk, the fire, the open window despite the cold. She looked at Nora.
"May I sit?"
"Yes," Nora said.
They sat across from each other.
"I want to speak plainly," Cassian said.
"Good," said Nora. "That's the only way I know."
Something shifted in Cassian's expression — the beginning of respect, carefully controlled.
"I have been in this palace for fourteen years," she said. "I've watched three significant changes of political climate, two nearly-successful coups, and the management of a kingdom by a man who is unlike anything the history books prepare you for." She paused. "I know this palace the way you know your marketplace. Every current and undercurrent."
"I believe you," Nora said.
I do, she thought. Fourteen years. She came here alone, without an audience, to tell me something she didn't have to tell me. That means she's being honest.
"What you are doing — what is happening between you and the king — is without precedent in this court," Cassian said. "He has not been engaged, in this way, with anyone since he took the throne. Nothing like this."
She looked at Nora steadily. "That means no one knows what the rules are."
"I'm not aware of having broken any," Nora said.
"That's not what I'm saying." Cassian leaned forward slightly. "I'm saying that when a king becomes attached to something, that something becomes a target. Every ambition in this court that previously had no leverage over him now has potential leverage. Every faction that wants something from him is looking at you and calculating."
I know, Nora thought. I've been watching them do it.
"Who, specifically?" she asked.
"Lord Vaeren," Cassian said. "He has wanted northern trade rights for eleven years and been refused seven times. He is very wealthy and very patient and very unscrupulous." She paused. "And there are others."
"Thank you," Nora said. She meant it genuinely.
Cassian looked at her. "You're not frightened."
"I'm taking it seriously," Nora said. "That's different from frightened."
Cassian was quiet for a moment.
Then she said something Nora had not expected.
"He was different as a young man. Before his father — before all of it. There were people in this palace who remembered the boy he was and grieved the distance between that and what he became." She looked at the fire. "In the past three weeks I have seen something in him I had not expected to see. Small things. But present."
Small things, Nora thought. She's been watching for small things for fourteen years. She knows what they mean.
She looked back at Nora.
"I don't know what you are to him. But whatever it is, be careful with it. Not because it's dangerous to you — though it is. But because it matters. In ways I don't think either of you has fully understood yet."
She stood. "That is what I came to say."
"Lady Cassian," Nora said, as she moved toward the door. "Why are you telling me this? You could have left me to navigate it without the warning."
Cassian paused at the door.
"Because I have been in this palace for fourteen years," she said, "and I am tired of watching things that matter get broken by things that don't."
She left.
Nora sat by the fire and thought about what had been said and what had been underneath it.
She is telling me to protect it, she thought. Whatever this is. Because she has watched him for fourteen years and she knows what it cost him to become this. And she sees something returning.
And she doesn't want to watch it get broken again.
Neither, Nora found, did she.