Xara Zynthar's Arc

Chapter 4 of 16

Xara Zynthar could not sleep. The prince would question her at first bell, and she still did not know how to speak to a man she had never seen. She sat on the smooth curve of her rest pod and pressed her palms flat against the warm glowing panel. The hum ran up through her wrists. She closed her eyes and reached back the old way, toward the hearth-place her mothers had taught her to find behind her own thoughts. The stone hut fell away. She stood in a room that was not a room, before a fire crowned with shelves of books that pulsed with slow light. Her grandmothers sat around it. She did not see their faces. She felt them the way she felt sun through cloth. One of them stepped closer. Xara knew her by the weight of her presence, an ancestor from the first courts. The old woman did not speak in words. She pressed something into Xara's chest instead: a warmth, and with it a knowing. Not lines to recite. A way of listening. A way of standing so a man felt heard before he had spoken. Then the vision came. A prince in a dark room. He sat with his hands open on his knees, staring at nothing. His face was younger than Xara had expected, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Something had been taken from him, or he had lost it himself, and he had stopped looking. The court called him cold. Xara saw now that he was only empty. Grief sat where his interest used to sit. She felt sorry for him. The feeling surprised her. She had come here to use him. Now she saw a man the world had misread, and she had almost joined the world in misreading him. The warmth stayed with her when she opened her eyes. Her homeworld gown lay across the pod, green silk catching the heater's glow. She did not put it on. The gown was for a night, and this was a morning. She dressed in her plain library clothes and pulled her scarf low. At first bell the steward brought her into a side room. The prince stood at the window with his back to her. He turned. It was the face from the vision. She did not curtsy the deep way. She stood, and she waited, and she let the quiet sit between them until he looked at her properly. "You are the new one," he said. "I am," she said. "I came for the books. But I see you were expecting someone who wanted something else." His mouth moved. Not a smile. A crack in a shut door. "Sit," he said. She sat. The steward's eyes widened at the doorway. The prince asked his first question, and Xara answered without stumbling, and he asked another. When the bell rang the hour, he had not dismissed her.