He closed his eyes and reached for the fern’s rhythm again, and it was easier to find the second time, the shape of it already familiar. He was three breaths into holding it steady when he became aware, gradually and then all at once, that she’d wheeled herself closer while his eyes were shut. She was close enough that he could smell something faintly floral in her hair, some soap or oil. Beneath it something warmer, just her, close enough that it pulled his attention clean off the fern without his permission.
The fern’s rhythm slipped away entirely. He didn’t chase it. He was too busy noticing the particular way her mouth had set into a thin, focused line while she watched him work. It was not quite a frown, something more deliberate than that.
"You’ve lost it," she said, not a question.
"Working on getting it back." Which was, strictly speaking, not a lie, if he counted his own scattered focus as something he was actively working on.
"You went somewhere else just now." Her eyes narrowed slightly, reading him the way she seemed to read everything, and he felt suddenly and thoroughly caught. "What distracted you?"
"Nothing." It came out faster than he meant it to, which was its own kind of confession, but he pushed forward before she could press on it. "Sorry. Let me try again."
She didn’t look entirely convinced, but she let it go, and he closed his eyes and made himself find the fern’s slow, patient rhythm one more time, and did not, this time, let himself notice anything else in the room.
By the time the light through the study window had shifted from morning gold to the flatter, warmer angle of early afternoon, he still hadn’t managed to turn that same attention inward toward his own core. Every attempt slid sideways at the last moment, his focus reaching for something that felt, frustratingly, like it kept moving just out of reach the instant he got close.
What he had noticed, with mounting insistence over the last hour, was that he was hungry.
"I think I need to eat something," he admitted, opening his eyes to find Isolde watching him with the patient, faintly amused look of someone who’d been expecting this development for a while.
"Good. You should." She said it simply, without any of the reluctant concession he might have expected. "Mana sensing draws more out of you than people realize, especially this early. Your body’s spending real energy learning to notice something it was never built to notice before. It’s not so different from muscle strain — you just can’t see the exhaustion from the outside."
"You could have told me that an hour ago."
"I could have. You needed to learn to recognize it yourself." The faint almost-smile again, there and gone. "What would you like to eat?"
He considered the very short list of things he actually knew how to prepare without incident. "Toast," he said. "And eggs, if we still have any that survived the move."
"An ambitious menu."
"I contain multitudes."
That earned him something closer to an actual smile than anything had yet, small and quickly reined back in, but real. He pushed himself up off the cushion, joints stiff from sitting still for the better part of a morning, and went to go see what he could manage not to burn.
***
The afternoon came and went aa he tried to make something that would be edible. It was by dinner before he would manage something that was not crisp or burning the whole kitchen. It was quieter than usual that night, though quiet had become something of a baseline between them by now. It was a comfortable kind more often than not, plates passed without much need for words, the two of them settling into a rhythm neither had planned for but both seemed willing enough to keep.
Emeric had managed something slightly better than toast this time, a simple stew he’d gotten mostly right after burning the first attempt, and Isolde ate it without complaint, which he’d learned by now counted as genuine approval rather than politeness. She wasn’t a woman who spent words on things that didn’t need them.
Tonight, though, the quiet sat differently. She’d gone still in the particular way he was starting to recognize — not simply eating in silence, but somewhere else entirely behind her eyes, spoon moving slower than the meal warranted.
His own mind hadn’t settled either. It kept circling back to the window only he could see, the one that had hung in the air over her that first night after the rift. It had listed her condition as nearly hopeless.
Projected life expectancy if untreated: two years.
He’d sat with that number for days now, turning it over at odd moments, and it hadn’t gotten any easier to hold.
Did the Rowans know. Had anyone told them their daughter had no more than two years, maybe less, before whatever was wrong with her simply won. Had his own father known, when he’d signed off on a marriage he clearly saw as the disposal of an inconvenient asset. Had he known he was handing his least useful son a wife with an expiration date, and decided that made the arrangement more convenient rather than less.
He didn’t ask her any of it. He wasn’t sure he had the right to, not yet, not with a truth he’d learned by looking at something she couldn’t see and hadn’t given him permission to know.
She spoke first, setting her spoon down with more care than the motion required.
"I owe you an apology," she said. "For the other night. The way I spoke to you, about the rift."
"You don’t—"
"I do." She said flatly in a certain, the way she said most things that mattered to her. "I wasn’t wrong about the danger. I stand by every word of it. But I said it like I was angry at you, and that isn’t what it was."