Relis stood at the back of the tavern in a plain hood and watched another man buy Leanna a drink. He had been an elf prince for all twenty-three years of his life, and a stranger to her for one month of it. That month was the only part he wanted to keep. She was between sets, still barefoot, gold bands on her wrists catching the lamp light. The other man wore a clean coat and spoke with his hands. She laughed once. Relis felt it land in his stomach like a coin dropped down a well. He had walked this city for weeks under a hood so no one would bow before he opened his mouth. In a crowded market he had stood beside her at a fruit stall, and she had looked at him three times pretending not to. She saw his face. She did not see the crown. Two nights ago he had left a wooden pan flute at her door with no name on it, because she had told him, without meaning to, that she taught herself every step of her fire dance alone and that she wanted the Midsummer Festival to hear her. He knew now the flute was not enough. The man at her table had brought silver bracelets and a laugh she answered. Relis crossed the room before he could talk himself out of it. He sat down across from her without asking. The other man frowned. Leanna's eyes went to the hood, then under it, and stayed. "You," she said. "Market. Pears." He nodded. The other suitor started to speak. Relis put a small carved animal on the table between them, a lizard with a cat's face, something he had bought from a child that afternoon because it made him think of the way she moved between two things at once. "I left the pipes," he said. "I wanted you to know it was me." She picked up the carving. She did not look at the other man. "Walk me out," she said to Relis. "Now." Outside the tavern she stopped him under a lamp. "The pipes were a question," she said. "I know. I came to answer it." She studied his face the way she studied fire before she touched it. "Tomorrow," she said. "River steps. Morning. Come without the hood." Relis's throat closed. He said yes. She went back inside to finish her set, and he stood in the street with the shape of tomorrow already changing under him. She had chosen him over the man with the bracelets. She had also asked for the one thing he had spent a month hiding. By sunrise she would either meet the elf who had listened to her, or the prince she had never agreed to know.

Relis did not go back to the palace. He walked the long way through the lower streets and stopped at the river steps to sit where Leanna had told him to meet her at sunrise. The stone was cold under his hands. He had hours yet. He rehearsed the sentence he owed her. My name is Relis. I am a prince. I wanted you to know me first. Each time he tried it, the words sounded like a door closing between them. He wanted to be the one to open that door, not a stranger with a message from his father. A lantern moved along the upper street before the sky changed. Relis knew the step before he saw the coat. A palace attendant, older, careful, the kind sent for errands that could not be shouted. The man was working the taverns and stalls, asking after a young elf in a plain hood. Relis heard him stop a fruit seller two corners away and describe a face. He heard his own description in another man's mouth and understood how little time he had. If the attendant reached the tavern where Leanna finished her set, someone there would point him toward the river steps. She would arrive at dawn and find a bowing stranger waiting beside the man she thought she knew. Relis stood up. He climbed the steps and cut across the lane and met the attendant under the lantern before the attendant could ask one more person one more question. He pulled his hood back. The man bowed deep. Relis told him, quietly, to return to the palace and say the prince would be home by midday and not before. The attendant hesitated. Relis said it again. The man went. Relis walked back down to the river steps with his hood in his hand. The sky was starting to gray. On the top step he set down the small wooden pan flute he had carried under his coat since the tavern, the twin of the one he had left at her door, cut from the same length of wood by the same carver. He wanted something of his hands there before he was. He sat beside it and waited. He had bought the morning. He had not bought what he would say when she came down the steps and saw his face in full light and asked, finally, the question he had been running from for a month. The answer was still his to give. That was all he had won.