Xara Zynthar had six days to make a prince fall in love with her, and she still did not know how to get past his front gate. She paced the warm inner room of her borrowed shelter, a squat stone box that looked like a tomb from the outside and a nest from within. Her green skin caught the firelight. Her tight silver dress made a soft sound with every step. Back home, her people were starving under a sky the color of rust. The council had chosen her because she could speak the prince's language and because she was, they said, pleasing to human eyes. They had given her a ship, a dress, and a deadline. They had not given her a way in. She knelt at the fireplace. The shelf above it glowed with the books her handlers had packed: courtly manners, royal genealogies, a slim volume called Secrets of the Star Prince. She had read them all twice on the crossing. She knew the prince hated loud music. She knew he kept a garden of night-blooming vines. She knew his mother had died when he was nine. She knew everything except the shape of the door she needed to walk through. Her eel drifted from the water bowl on the table, glowing pale green, and curled once around her wrist. She had raised the eel from a hatchling. It always came close when she was afraid. "I know," she said. "I'm stalling." She unrolled the parchment the council had pressed into her hand at departure. The crimson star at its center was her binding oath, signed in her own blood. Return with the prince's favor, or do not return. Her sisters had signed as witnesses. She could still see the smear of her middle sister's thumb. She set the parchment down and picked up the small vial beside it. Moonlight water. One drop pulled the truth out of any tongue it touched. The council had meant it for the prince. Xara uncorked it and let a single drop fall onto her own. The taste was cold metal. Her jaw loosened. "I don't want to seduce him," she said to the empty room. "I want to be let inside. I want someone to listen." The eel tightened on her wrist. She stared at the fire until her plan arrived, plain and small. She would not climb the wall. She would not bribe a guard. She would walk to the servants' gate at dawn and offer the one thing she had that no human girl could fake: a live, glowing eel from a dying world, and a scholar's knowledge of the prince's own private books. She would ask for work in his library. Nothing more. Yet. She corked the vial. She folded the blood-marked parchment into her sleeve. The deadline had not moved. But the door had.

Xara Zynthar left the small stone shelter before the fire had gone cold. Word had reached her at dusk: a palace steward was hiring in a tavern at the edge of the market, and the library post would be filled by nightfall. The servants' gate could wait. If someone else took the post first, her plan died on the threshold. She wrapped a scarf over her green scalp, tucked the eel's water flask against her ribs, and walked. She reached the tavern door and stopped. Her silver dress pulled tight across her shoulders. She counted three breaths, opened the door, and stepped in as if she belonged there. The hostess looked up from a ledger. "Here for the position?" Xara smiled and nodded. The woman waved her toward a curtain at the back. The back room smelled of ale and wet wood. The steward sat behind a plank table, a thin man with ink on two fingers and a permanent squint, as if the world kept showing him things he did not want to read. He did not stand. He did not smile. He looked at her scalp, then her hands, then her scalp again. "You're not from the valley," he said. "No." "Not from anywhere I know." "No." She sat without being asked. "I can read four scripts. I can catalog by author, by subject, or by the prince's own shelving order, which favors the month a book was acquired. I know the private books because I studied them on the crossing. My planet and my skin are not the job. The job is the library." He tapped his ink-stained finger on the plank. "Show me." He slid a scrap of parchment across. Six lines of court script, half of it faded. She read it aloud, then translated it, then pointed to a copyist's error in the fourth line. He listened without moving. Then he set a small locked book on the table. "Name the author." She turned it, checked the binding stitch and the mark burned into the spine. "Ovric of Hallen. The second volume. The first was lost in a fire the prince's grandfather set on purpose." The steward's squint eased by a hair. He wrote something in his ledger. He turned the ledger so she could see her own name, freshly inked, above a line that read: library, probationary, six days. "Servants' gate at first bell," he said. "Late once and you're out. Touch a book without gloves and you're out. And the prince asks about every new face inside his walls. Be ready for that." Xara walked back to the small stone shelter with her hands steady and her stomach not. She had the post. She had six days. And now the prince himself would ask who she was, and she would have to answer before she was ready.

Xara Zynthar reached the servants' gate at first bell with her scarf pulled low and her gloves already on. The steward met her without a word and walked her through a side corridor to the library. He set a stack of unshelved books on the table, told her the prince was hunting today and would question her tomorrow, and left her to work. The library was warmer than she expected. She catalogued for three hours before anyone spoke to her. A junior clerk asked her to check a Hallen text he could not read. She read it. He blinked, thanked her, and brought her two more. By midday, a older scribe walked over with a broken spine to mend and stayed to watch her hands. By late afternoon, three of them sat near her bench, asking about scripts they had shelved wrong for years. No one asked about her scalp. One woman offered her tea. Xara took it and drank slowly, so her hands would not shake. She left at last bell with her name still in the ledger and the steward's squint slightly softer than yesterday. She walked back to the small stone shelter as the sky went pink. From outside it looked like any peasant's hut, low and grey. Inside, her rest pod glowed against the far wall, its heating unit humming, its sitting curve lit soft blue. On the smooth resting bed sat a package she had not left there. It was wrapped in a cloth she recognized. The weave came from her homeworld. Her hands went cold and then hot. She untied it. Inside lay a gown of deep green silk cut in the local style, but stitched with thread that caught light the way her own skin did. A note in her own script read only: For the night he sees you. Beneath the gown, wrapped in oiled paper, sat a pale eel egg the size of her fist, glowing faintly, something curled and moving inside it. A gift, or a message, or both. She did not know who had sent it. She knew only that someone from home had reached this planet and was watching. She set the egg beside the vial of moonlight water on her shelf. Then she stripped off the silver dress and pulled the gown over her head. It fit as if measured on her while she slept. In the pod's dim mirror, she did not look like a servant, and she did not look like a thing to be gawked at. She looked like a woman a prince might listen to. She practiced her answer aloud. "I am Xara Zynthar, of the northern reaches beyond the sea. My people are scholars. I came for the library." The words fit her mouth now. Tomorrow the prince would ask, and she would not stumble. The gown had given her that. Someone from home had given her that. And she still did not know the price.

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.

The bell for the next hour came and went. The prince did not send Xara away. He sat across from her at a small table, and a servant brought a tray with two cups and a slim glass vial. The vial glowed faint silver, like a piece of the moon held in water. The prince did not touch it. He turned it once with a finger and left it between them. "You said you came for the books," he said. "Where were your books before?" Xara felt the trap without seeing its shape. He was asking about home. Any answer she rehearsed would sound like a lie in this quiet room. She thought of her grandmothers by the fire. Listen first. Let him feel heard before he speaks. "Before I answer," she said, "may I ask you something small?" He waited. "When you sit alone at night, what do you think about?" His hand stopped on the vial. His face did not change, but the room did. The servant at the door looked at the floor. Xara knew she had stepped near a wound. She did not know which wound. One wrong word and the door in his face would shut for good. She chose not to guess. She gave him her own answer instead. "I think about my home," she said. "It is dying. The water is going bad. The children cough at night. I left because I could read, and someone here would pay me for it. I saved one person. Myself. I could not carry the rest." She kept her hands flat on the table so they would not shake. "There is no one coming for them," she said. "I know that now. I sit up at night and I count who is still alive in my head, and the number gets smaller, and I am here in a warm room drinking clean water." The prince looked at her for a long moment. Then he picked up the vial and set it aside, out of reach, as if he had decided he would not need it. "I thought no one else knew that feeling," he said. "Sitting up. Counting." "I did not know you did either," she said. He nodded once. He did not tell her what he had lost. He did not have to. Something in his shoulders let go, small but real, the way a rope loosens by one turn. "Come back tomorrow," he said. "Not to the library. Here." Xara stood. At the door she remembered the eel egg in her quarters, the pale shape curled inside, waiting to become something with teeth. Someone from her world knew where she was. Someone had chosen her. She had just made the prince trust her, and she still did not know whose hand was on her back.

Xara went back to her quarters and sat on the edge of the bed. The eel egg glowed on the small table, pale and restless. Tomorrow she would meet the prince alone, and she had nothing to bring him. No book. No gift. No answer to the question he had not asked. Empty hands would waste the trust she had built. She opened her travel case. She had brought little from home. A small carved stone her grandmother used to weight prayer cloths. A pouch of dried river salt that still smelled faintly of the shore. A folded square of cloth dyed the deep blue of her homeworld's night sky. These things had no price here. To her they were the only proof her world had ever been real. She thought about the person who had left the gown and the egg. They knew her. They had chosen her. She did not know why, and she was tired of owing something to a hand she could not see. She would not go to the prince tomorrow owing another debt. She wrapped the stone, the salt, and the cloth in a scrap of paper. She wrote no name on it. She wrote only, "Thank you. These are from where I was born. I hope they give you what mine gave me." She set the package outside her door before the lamps dimmed. Whoever was watching would find it. It was small. It was hers to give. Then she turned to the egg. It had cracked in the night. A thin, sleek eel curled in the shallow bowl of water beside it, its body giving off a soft green light. It looked up at her when she came close. It did not flinch. She lowered a finger to the water and it brushed against her skin, slow and calm, as if it had been waiting for her. In the morning she carried the eel in a covered glass jar to the prince's private room. She set the jar on the table between them and took the cloth off. "This is a lumen eel," she said. "They live in the shallows where I was born. When the tide goes out at night, the whole coast glows with them. My mother used to carry me down to watch." The prince leaned forward. The light from the jar caught under his chin. "It is the only living thing I have from home," she said. "I wanted you to see it. I did not want to come here with a story I had polished." He watched the eel turn in its small water. He did not speak for a long time. Then he put one finger against the glass, and the eel drifted toward it. "Stay," he said. "Tell me the rest." She sat. She had brought him something true, and he had asked for more.

The eel turned slow circles in its jar between them. The prince had asked her to stay. Xara sat with her hands flat on her knees and knew she had run out of time to be clever. Six days had shrunk to a handful. If she waited to make him love her first, she would leave here with nothing, and her people would still be dying under a sky she could not fix from this room. "I have to tell you something," she said. "And when I am done you will want me out of this house." He set down his cup. He did not speak. He only watched her the way he had watched the eel. She reached into the pocket sewn inside her sleeve and took out a small orb. It fit in her palm. She set it beside the jar and pressed her thumb to the base. The glass warmed. Inside it, small rooms lit up one by one. A woman at a low table grinding salt. Two children asleep on a curved sleeping pod, its panels glowing pale blue. An old man watering a row of pale plants. Her mother, still alive in the picture, folding cloth by a window. "This is my home," Xara said. "Not the north. Not any place on your maps. I was not born under your sun. My skin is not this color. My face is not this face. I have been lying to you since I walked through your gate." She kept her eyes on the orb because she could not yet look at him. "My world is dying. I came here to make you love me so you would send ships, or grain, or soldiers, or anything. I chose you because you are powerful and alone. I thought I could use that." She swallowed. "Then I met you and I could not keep it clean in my head. I am telling you now because I do not have time to earn this slowly. If you throw me out, throw me out. But my people are real. Those people are real." She made herself look up. He was looking at the orb. At the child on the sleeping pod. At her mother's hands. "Show me what you look like," he said. She had not expected that sentence. She reached up and unclasped the thin chain at her throat. The glamour thinned like steam. Her true skin came through, gray-green, her eyes wider and darker, her head smooth. She waited for his face to close. He leaned forward. He studied her the way he studied the eel. Then he said, quietly, "How many ships would you need." She started to cry and could not stop. "We will talk about the lie later," he said. "Tell me the number. Tell me what your people eat. Tell me how long they have." She told him. The orb kept glowing between them. Outside, the bell for the midday change rang, and neither of them moved.

The bell had stopped ringing a long time ago. The orb still glowed between them on the table. The prince pushed his cup aside and drew a sheet of paper toward him. He wrote a number of ships. He crossed it out. He wrote a larger one. "I can promise you this on my own," he said. "I cannot send it on my own. The council holds the grain stores and the shipwrights. If I move without them, they will stall the order until your people are gone." Xara felt the room tilt. She had told the truth and he had believed her, and it still was not enough. "How long to bring them around." "Weeks. Months. I do not have a voice at that table they trust anymore." He set the pen down. "They think I have gone quiet since my sister died. They are not wrong." She reached for the small vial in her sleeve. The moonlight water inside caught the lamp and threw silver on the paper. "Then let me sit with you and drink this. Ask me anything. If they need to know I am real, let me be real in front of them tomorrow. Not a story. A woman who cannot lie." He looked at the vial a long moment. "You would drink that for a room of strangers." "I would drink it for the children in that orb." A knock came at the inner door. Not the guard's knock. Softer. Three taps, spaced wrong. The prince's hand went to his belt. Xara stood. The door opened on its own. A small figure stepped inside as if she had been invited. White hair to the waist. Dark blue robe stitched with gold at the shoulders. She looked like a child dressed for a festival, except for her eyes, which were older than the room. "Do not stand for me," the newcomer said. "I have been standing for a long while." Xara knew the face from a story her grandmothers told to frighten greedy children. Verity Shadowgift. Judge and gift-giver. The gown. The egg. The eel now curled in its jar. All of it had come from her. "You have been watching me," Xara said. "I have been deciding." Verity looked at the orb, then at the prince, then at the vial in Xara's hand. "You were going to drink that to convince his council." "Yes." "You do not need to." Verity turned to the prince. "I will speak for her at your table. They know my name where I come from. Your scholars know it too. Bring me in the morning." The prince studied her the way he had studied Xara. Then he nodded once. Verity's eyes came back to Xara. "You passed," she said. "Do not make me regret the finding." She left the way she came. The eel turned in its jar. The paper on the table waited for a larger number.

Xara did not sleep. She sat by the window with the eel's jar on the sill and watched the sky turn from black to grey. The prince's face kept coming back to her. Not his title. His face when he crossed out the small number of ships and wrote a larger one. She pressed her forehead to the cold glass and told herself the truth she had been avoiding. She wanted him. Not the ships. Him. And wanting him could kill every child in the orb on her table. A soft knock. Verity stepped in without waiting, robe brushing the floor, white hair loose down her back. She looked at Xara the way a healer looks at a wound. "You are shaking," Verity said. "I will not shake in the room." "You might." Verity sat on the edge of the bed. Her feet did not touch the floor. "You have decided something. Say it." Xara turned. "If he asks me to stay, I do not know what I will answer." "Then do not let him ask." Verity's voice did not rise. "The council will smell it on both of you. They already mistrust him. A prince in love with an offworld woman does not get his grain ships." Xara's hands closed on the sill. "What do I do." "Go to him now. Before the table. Settle it." She found the prince in the small room where he kept his sister's things. A comb. A folded shawl. The orb on a stand, showing a child asleep in a house Xara had never seen. He did not look up when she entered. "I was going to send for you," he said. "Don't." She stayed by the door. "At the council. Do not look at me the way you looked at me last night. If they see it, they will refuse you." He set the comb down. "I know." "I cannot stay. Even if you ask." "I know that too." He faced her. His eyes were red. "I am going to speak to her first. My sister. One last time, through the orb. I need to let her go before I stand at that table. If I carry her in with me, I will carry you in too, and we will lose the room." Xara's throat closed. "Then let her go." "Wait outside." She waited. She heard him speak low behind the door. She did not listen to the words. When he came out his face was empty in a new way. Clean. He nodded to her once, the way a soldier nods before a march. Verity was already in the corridor, hands folded in her sleeves. She looked at the prince, then at Xara, and something in her face eased. "Now," Verity said, "you can walk in." They walked. Xara did not look at him again. The council doors opened ahead of them.

The council doors did not open. A steward held up a hand and murmured that the lords were still gathering inside. The prince stepped aside to wait. Verity drifted down the corridor to speak with a guard, giving them space without seeming to. Xara looked at the prince and knew she had one gap left before the room swallowed them both. "Walk with me," she said. "Just to the window." He followed. The corridor ended in a tall pane. Grey light was going gold at the edges. Dawn. "I told you last night I could not stay," she said. "That was not all of it." She reached into her sleeve and drew out the folded parchment. She had carried it since her first night here. She opened it on the sill between them. The crimson sigil caught the new light. The wax edges looked black. "This is a blood pact," she said. "My council sealed it before they sent me. I was to seduce you. Secure the ships. Return. If I failed, my name would be struck from every record at home. They chose me because I was already half struck out. I think they sent me as a punishment." He did not touch the parchment. He looked at her face. "I am telling you this now because I need you to hear the other thing separately," she said. "Not tangled with it. I love you. Not the ships. You. I did not plan it. I did not want it. It happened while you were crossing out numbers on a page." His mouth opened. She kept going before he could answer. "My world is dying. Even if your ships reach it, my people will not forgive me for how I bought their passage. They will look at me and see this seal. So I have already lost them. Do you understand? I am not asking you for anything by saying this. I am not trading. I have nothing left to trade. I only wanted you to know before you walked in there. If it damns me at your table, let it." She set the small vial of moonlight water beside the seal. "Drink it if you doubt me. I will drink it too." He looked at the vial. He looked at the seal. He did not reach for either. "I believe you," he said. "Put them away." She folded the parchment. Her hands were steady now. "After the council," he said, "whatever the room decides. Come find me." "I will." Verity returned. Her eyes went to the sill, then to Xara's face, and something in her softened again. "They are ready," she said. Xara walked toward the doors. The weight in her chest had moved. It was still there, but it was hers now, not a secret between them. Whatever the lords did next, they would do it to two people who had already told each other the truth.

The council chamber was smaller than Xara expected. A long table. Seven chairs. Grey robes and older faces. Verity took a seat at the far end without being invited. No one told her to move. Xara stood where the steward pointed. The prince stood beside her, not in front. That mattered. She felt the pact seal warm against her sleeve where she had tucked it. Not hot yet. Warm. She knew what warmth meant. The magic had noticed she was here to tell the truth, and the truth would break every term her council had written. The questions began. A woman with iron-pinned hair asked why Xara had come. Xara told her. All of it. The mission. The seduction terms. The blood pact. She laid the parchment on the table so they could see the sigil for themselves. As she spoke, the warmth in her sleeve climbed. A dull ache started at her wrist and moved up the bone. She kept her face still. She would not fall down in front of these people. An older lord asked the prince if he had been deceived. The prince said yes, at first. Then he said what happened after. He said he had been a poor brother and a poor prince since his sister died. He said Xara had made him listen again. He said his sister, in her last words to him through the orb, had told him to be useful while he still could. He apologized to the table for the months he had wasted. He asked what kind of realm they wanted to be, if a dying world reached for them and they closed the door. Xara's arm was shaking now. She pressed it against her side. Verity watched her, not the council. Verity gave one small nod, as if to say hold. The lords asked to deliberate. Xara and the prince were walked to an antechamber. The moment the door shut, she sank onto the bench. She pulled back her sleeve. The skin above her wrist was black in a shape like the sigil, spreading slow. "The pact," she said. "I broke the terms out loud. It is collecting." The prince reached for her arm. Verity was already there. She placed two fingers on the mark. "It cannot take you here," she said. "Not while I stand for you. It will wait at your border." "For how long?" "Until you go home." The chamber door opened. The steward called them back. The iron-haired woman spoke for the table. Ships would sail. Grain and healers would go with them. The vote had not been clean, but it had been enough. Xara bowed her head. The ships were won. Her people would live. And the mark under her sleeve kept spreading, patient, waiting for the moment she stepped off Scytheveil soil and the pact could finish what she had started.

The council had voted. The ships would sail. Xara walked out of the chamber with the prince at her side and the mark climbing past her elbow under her sleeve. In the corridor she stopped and pressed her back to the cold wall. The ships would sail without her. That was the trap she had not seen until now. Aid needed a guide across the border. Every guide her people trusted was her. And the moment she crossed, the pact would finish its work. The prince took her good hand. "We send them with our own captains," he said. "You stay here." "Your captains don't know the reefs off my coast. They don't know which harbors are still standing. Half the fleet will run aground before the grain reaches anyone." She pulled her sleeve back. The black had crept another finger's width. "And I need to see my mother. I need to put the children on a ship myself. No one else will convince them to board a foreign hull." Verity stepped from the chamber door. She had been listening. "Then send a voice, not a body," she said. Xara looked at her. "The orb goes both ways, if someone on the other side knows how to answer it." Verity reached into her robe and drew out the vial of moonlight water Xara had offered the council. She had kept it. "Drink. Speak to your mother through the glass. Tell her what she needs to hear in a voice the pact cannot argue with. The moon compels only the drinker. It does not cross a border." Xara took the vial. Her hand shook. She thumbed the cork loose and swallowed. The cold went down her throat and settled behind her eyes. She knelt on the corridor stone and set the orb on the floor. She pressed her palm to the glass and named her mother. The scene inside cleared. Her mother sat by a low fire, thinner than before. She looked up as if she had heard a knock. "Mother," Xara said. "Ships are coming. Grey sails, three masts. The captains are honest. Take the children to the black cliff harbor. Not the north one. The north one is gone." The water pushed the next words up before she could stop them. "I am not coming home. If I cross, I die. I chose this. Do not wait for me." Her mother's mouth opened. She placed her own hand against the inside of the glass. She nodded once. Then she stood and began to call names Xara had not heard spoken in a year. Xara sat back on her heels. The prince crouched beside her. She let the orb dim. "I will not cross," she said. "I stay on your soil. My people live. I live." The mark on her arm stopped spreading. It did not fade. It waited.

Xara stayed on the corridor floor with the orb dark under her palm. Her mother had heard her. Her mother had nodded. But a nod was not a ship boarded. The grey sails would take weeks to reach the black cliff harbor. If her mother arrived early and no ship came, she would take the children back inland to wait. If she arrived late, the ships would leave without them. Xara had spoken once through the glass and burned her one clean pass. She needed a second word. She had no way to send it. The prince helped her stand. "Verity kept one vial," he said. "There may be more." "There is not. She told me the council's supply was gone after mine." Xara pulled her sleeve down over the mark. "I need to know my mother reached the harbor. I need her to know the ships left port on our end. Otherwise she waits in the wrong place and the children die on a beach." Verity was already walking toward them down the corridor, one hand inside her robe. She drew out a small glass bottle. Silver light moved in it like a slow tide. "The last of it," she said. "I lied to the council. I kept two." Xara took the vial. "One drink. One message. I already used mine to tell her to go. I can't tell her when the ships arrive and ask her to answer, both." "Then don't drink it yourself," Verity said. "Send it." Xara looked at her. "Put it on a ship. The captain drinks at the harbor mouth and speaks into the orb on his end. Your mother answers into the glass. The moon compels only the drinker. The captain crosses the border. The vial crosses with him. Your voice does not." The prince was already moving. "I'll send word to the docks tonight. The lead captain sails at dawn. He carries the vial and the orb both. He drinks when he sights the black cliff." Xara pressed the vial into his hand before she could think about the cost. "Tell him to say my mother's name first. She will not trust a stranger's face in the glass otherwise." "I'll tell him." She watched him go. Verity stayed. "Your mother will get the second word," Verity said. "You will not hear her answer with your own ears." "I know." Xara sat down on the corridor bench. The mark on her arm had not moved since she stopped speaking. The children would board. Or they would not. She had given away the last thing that could tell her which. She pressed her good hand flat against the wood and waited for the sound of horses in the yard.

Xara heard the horses in the yard before dawn. She stayed on the bench until the sound thinned into distance. The prince had gone with the captain to the docks himself. He had asked her to find him after the council meeting, whatever came of it. The council was done. The ships were sailing. She had no gift left to carry to him and no news he did not already own. Verity was still in the corridor, leaning against the stone with her arms folded inside her sleeves. "He is back within the hour," Verity said. "You should not be sitting here when he comes." "I have nothing to bring him." "Then bring nothing." "He watched me trade my home for a nod through glass. If I go to him now he will look at me the way people look at the sick." Verity was quiet. Then she said, "You are deciding what he feels before he feels it. That is a thief's work." Xara looked up. "Go to him," Verity said. "Or stay here and lose him to a story you wrote in a hallway." Xara stood. She pulled her sleeve tight over the sigil and walked. She found him in the small room off the library, still in his riding coat. The orb sat on the table between them, dark. He had set the empty place where the vial had been beside it, as if keeping the shape. He looked up when she came in. He did not stand. "The captain has it," he said. "He knows your mother's name. He will speak it first." "Thank you." She did not move from the door. He watched her not move. "You thought you would come to me with something in your hands," he said. "Yes." "I did not ask for anything in your hands." She crossed the room. She sat down opposite him. The mark on her arm itched under the cloth. She put her good hand on the table, palm up, and left it there. He took it. "I cannot go home," she said. "The pact takes me at the border. The ships go without me. If my mother reaches the harbor in time, the children live. If she does not, they don't. I will not know for weeks. I will not know for months." "No," he said. "You won't." "I did not want to bring you that." "You brought me yourself. That is what I asked for." She felt the shape of the empty space beside the orb and did not look at it. She kept her hand in his. "Stay," he said. "For how long." "For as long as you have." She said yes. The word was small and it held. Outside, the sky was beginning to grey. Somewhere past the harbor, a ship was already moving.

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.

The paper with her new title was still warm in her hand when Xara returned to her quarters. She should have felt safe. She did not. Someone on this estate had put the silk gown and the eel egg inside this room without a key, and that person had not spoken since. A title from the council would not stop a watcher from the homeworld. Until she knew who had been sending gifts, every plan she made walked out the door behind her. She set the paper on the mantel. The fireplace threw light on the shelf above it, where the glowing books leaned against each other. She had not chosen these books. They had been here when she moved in. She looked at the spines now with a different eye. Etiquette. Star-charts. A slim volume on winning a prince. Who leaves a foreign scholar a shelf like that on her first night? She pulled the thin volume down. A folded scrap fell from between the pages. Homeworld script, three lines, in a hand she did not know. "The dress fits. The eel woke. You are watched because you are worth watching." The eel in its bowl lifted its head. Behind her, the air changed. Xara turned. Verity stood by the hearth. Small, white-haired, robed in blue and gold. She had walked through no door. In the homeworld she was the story mothers told to stop children from lying — the judge who came for the false and left gifts for the true. She had already vouched for Xara once, before the prince's council. Xara had not expected to see her in a bedroom. "You," Xara said. "The gown. The egg. The books." "The gifts were mine." "Why the books on seducing a prince?" "To see which ones you opened." Xara looked at the shelf. She had not opened any of them. She had laughed at them and left them alone. "You passed," Verity said. "You've been watching me the whole time." "Yes." "For who?" "For me." Xara's shoulders dropped an inch she had not known she was holding. No handler from home. No spy waiting to report her to the council that had sent her. The watcher was the one being who had already chosen her side. She took the vial of moonlight water from the mantel and held it out. "Drink. Tell me there is no one else inside these walls sending word back." Verity took the vial. She drank. She did not blink. "No one else," she said. "You are alone in the way that matters. And not alone in the way that matters." She set the empty vial on the shelf between the books and was gone. Xara stood in the quiet. The eel turned once in its bowl. She picked up the paper with her title and walked out to find the prince. For the first time since she arrived, no one was watching her back.