Aldric explained what being consort meant in practice.
Nora listened to all of it.
Asked two questions.
Neither of them was what Aldric expected.
Aldric came to her rooms on the third morning with a document.
She heard the knock, said come in, and he entered with the particular bearing he always carried — upright, unhurried, occupying exactly the amount of space he required and not one inch more. He was carrying several pages of closely written paper, which he held with the careful two-handed grip of a man transporting something that had taken considerable effort to produce and deserved to arrive undamaged.
He handed it to her without preamble, which she appreciated. Aldric did not perform handovers. He simply gave you the thing and waited for you to engage with it.
It was detailed — several pages of small, careful writing, the kind that suggested the writer had thought about every word before committing it to paper and saw no reason to use two sentences where one would serve. It outlined the formal duties, protocols, and expectations attached to the position of royal consort. Receiving obligations. Attendance requirements. Ceremonial roles. Wardrobe allocations. Correspondence protocols. The chain of staff now formally assigned to her household and the structure of their reporting. A section on diplomatic functions and the consort's role within them. A section on the king's formal calendar and how it intersected with hers. A section titled Precedence and Placement that was more involved than she had anticipated.
She read the entire thing before saying anything.
This was not a performance of thoroughness — she genuinely needed to read all of it before she could know which parts required questions and which parts she could simply absorb and act upon. She had found, over the years, that people who asked questions partway through documents often asked the wrong questions, because they hadn't yet seen what came later and changed the context of what came before. She read to the end first. She always read to the end first.
Aldric stood and waited. He was very good at waiting — not the restless waiting of someone who wished they were elsewhere, but the settled waiting of a man who had learned, over thirty years of palace service, that the people worth waiting for were worth waiting for properly.
She reached the final page. She read it. She set the document down on the desk in front of her and looked at it for a moment, organizing what she wanted to say.
"Two questions," she said.
"Of course," he said.
"The formal receiving duties." She found the relevant section and pointed to it — not to show him, he had clearly written it himself and knew it thoroughly, but to establish precisely which passage she was addressing. She had found that specificity at the outset saved considerable time later. "The consort is listed as attending all formal state receptions and standing in the receiving line."
"Yes," Aldric said.
"Is there a protocol for when the consort disagrees with the diplomatic position being presented at the reception?"
Aldric paused. It was a short pause, but it was genuine — the pause of a man who had not been asked this question before and was not going to pretend otherwise by answering too quickly. "In the traditional sense," he said, carefully, "the consort does not have a diplomatic position. She is present as — a representative of the household. A formal embodiment of the king's domestic establishment. Her role in the receiving line is presence, not participation."
"So if a trade envoy presents an argument I know to be factually incorrect," Nora said, "the protocol is for me to stand beside the king and say nothing."
"Traditionally," Aldric said, with the specific careful emphasis of a man putting all possible weight on a single word, "yes."
She looked at him steadily. "I have spent the last several weeks working through trade documentation that most of the court has never read. I know the figures. I know where the numbers have been misrepresented, where the historical precedents have been selectively cited, where the argument being made depends on an audience that hasn't checked the sources." She paused. "You're telling me that the formal protocol, as written, requires me to stand in that line and hold my tongue while someone presents inaccurate information to the king."
"As written," Aldric said, "yes."
"That will need to be revisited," she said, without heat, without drama. Simply as a statement of fact, the way one might observe that a window latch was broken and would need fixing. It was not a negotiation and it was not a complaint. It was a notation.
Aldric made a small, nearly imperceptible movement that she had come to recognize as his version of agreement expressed through the body rather than the voice.
"The second question," she said. She found the relevant section. "The wardrobe allocation. The palace will provide formal dress for official functions."
"Yes," Aldric said. "The palace maintains arrangements with several tailors and dressmakers who supply formal court attire. The consort's wardrobe would be—"
"I'd like to continue providing my own clothing," she said. "I'll meet the formality requirements — I understand there are standards for state functions and I have no objection to meeting them. But I'll dress myself. I'll make my own selections."
Aldric looked at her for a moment. Not with disapproval — disapproval was too personal an expression for Aldric — but with the particular quality of attention he directed at things that required him to assess whether they were possible before he could assess whether they were advisable.
"That is somewhat irregular," he said.
"Most things about this are somewhat irregular," she said. "I came from outside the court. I have no family title, no existing position, no established history within the palace structures. The king announced my appointment at a dinner rather than through the council. I don't believe irregularity is something this particular arrangement has been shy about so far." She looked at him evenly. "I don't see why my wardrobe should be the exception."
He considered this with genuine seriousness, which she appreciated — he never dismissed her points by processing them too quickly. "I'll note it," he said. "It will require a conversation with the household coordinator, and likely with the king, but I see no structural reason it cannot be accommodated if the formality standards are maintained."
"They will be," she said.
"Then I'll note it," he said again, which was his way of saying: considered, accepted in principle, will be executed.
"Thank you," she said. She folded the document and set it squarely on the desk. "I'll read the rest more carefully this afternoon. The precedence section in particular. If I have further questions I'll find you."
"Of course," Aldric said.
He turned to go with the efficiency of a man who had delivered what he came to deliver and had other things to attend to.
"Aldric," she said.
He stopped. Turned, unhurried.
"The receiving line protocol," she said. "Has anyone ever actually asked whether it could be changed?"
He thought about it. Not reflexively — actually thought, the way he thought about things that deserved real consideration rather than a ready answer. "No," he said, after a moment. "No one has ever asked."
"Then it hasn't been changed because no one asked," she said. "Not because it can't be."
Aldric looked at her. It was the expression he produced occasionally — not often, but occasionally — when she said something that landed in a particular way. Not surprise exactly. More the expression of a man recognizing, from the outside, a thought he had held privately for a long time without ever quite voicing it, and finding it strange and slightly satisfying to hear it said plainly by someone else.
"That is," he said, "a reasonable interpretation."
"Good," she said. "I'll bring it up with Malik this evening."
"I'll let him know to expect that," Aldric said, with the faint and characteristic understatement of a man who had been managing Malik's expectations for thirty years and considered it one of the more reliable parts of his work.
"You do that," she said, and opened her book.
She heard him leave. The door closed with the soft, precise click that Aldric always produced, as though even the mechanical operation of a door handle was something he did with intention.
She looked at the folded document on the desk for a moment before returning to her page.
No one ever asked, she thought. Thirty years of protocol. Dozens of formal receptions. And no one ever asked.
She filed this, too, under things worth knowing, and read.