Xara Zynthar's Arc

Chapter 15 of 16

The prince left for the morning session before the sun cleared the wall. Xara stayed in the small room off the library with his coat still on the chair. The orb sat dark on the table. Her hand kept going to the sigil under her sleeve. She had said yes to staying, but staying was not a post. By noon the steward would want her cot cleared. The library job had been six days. The six days were gone. She walked back to her quarters and closed the door. The room was small and warm. The heating unit hummed under the window. The lumen eel drifted in its bowl and turned its head to follow her. She sat on the bed and made herself think. The court would move on her before the prince did. She had heard it in the corridor on the way up — two clerks going quiet as she passed. A foreign woman with a cursed arm and no title was a problem the council would want gone by week's end. If she waited for the prince to invent a place for her, the place would look like charity and the court would eat it. She needed a role they could not argue with. Something the estate lacked. Something only she could do. She looked at the shelf built into the wall above the hearth. The books on it glowed faintly through their spines — courtly manuals the previous occupant had left, etiquette, star-charts, a thin volume on how to please a prince. She had laughed at them her first night. She pulled one down now and set it on her knee. The estate had no one who could read her homeworld's scripts. No one who could speak to the captains coming back with reports in a language none of the scribes knew. No one who could translate what the healers sent home from her world when the ships returned. The aid the council had voted would fail without a hand between the two tongues. She wrote it out on a scrap. Envoy of the Aid Mission. Answerable to the council, paid from the treasury, seated in the library. Not the prince's guest. The council's clerk. She went to the steward first, not the prince. She knew that mattered. She showed him the draft and named the ships still at sea and the reports that would come in a script only she could read. The steward read it twice. He asked two questions. Then he signed his name under hers and said he would bring it to the council at the afternoon session. She walked back through the corridor with the paper in her hand. The two clerks were there again. This time she did not lower her eyes. She had work. She had a desk. She had a reason to be inside these walls that did not depend on a man's affection. The prince would find her in the library when he came looking.