Breakfast was, against all reasonable expectations, normal.
Or as normal as breakfast could be when one side of the table had spent the previous twelve hours doing what they had spent the previous twelve hours doing and the other side of the table was Grace, who noticed everything, and Vivian, who noticed more than that.
Isadora arrived at the table dressed and composed and with her hair done properly and sat in her chair and accepted her tea, and looked at no one in particular for the first thirty seconds while she established that she was a normal person having a normal breakfast.
Aldric arrived two minutes after her.
He sat across from her.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
Something passed between them that had no name and required no words and lasted approximately one second before both of them looked at other things.
Grace said good morning to everyone with the warmth of a woman who loved mornings and loved people and found the combination of the two deeply satisfying.
Gibson helped himself to bread.
Vivian poured her tea and said nothing and watched everything with her sharp dark eyes and Isadora could feel the weight of that watching and chose not to address it.
Her father arrived and sat beside her and said she looked well.
“You always say that,” she said.
“You always look well,” he said, and reached for the teapot.
Her mother arrived last and sat at the head of the table and looked at the assembled group with the expression of a woman who had orchestrated something and was quietly satisfied with how it was proceeding.
Isadora drank her tea and did not look at Aldric more than twice.
He did not look at her more than twice either.
It was the most disciplined breakfast she had ever attended.
✦ ✦ ✦
The formal arrangements meeting was at the second hour.
Her mother’s study again.
This time, all of them: Sarafinn at the desk, Sebastian to her left, Isadora in the chair she had claimed at the first meeting, Aldric beside her.
The palace steward with his documents.
The formal business of two people being officially matched, the paperwork of it, the legal language of it, all of it laid out on the desk in careful order.
Sarafinn went through it with her usual thoroughness.
The terms of the match.
The title, Aldric would be formally recognised as Crown Prince consort upon marriage, with the full rights and responsibilities of that position.
The date, three weeks from today, allowing time for preparation and for the formal announcements to reach every corner of the kingdom.
Three weeks.
Isadora sat with her hands folded and listened and noted that three weeks was both a very short time and a very long one depending on what you were measuring it against.
Aldric sat beside her and listened with the focused attention he gave to everything important.
He asked two questions, both specific, both about the practical responsibilities of his position rather than the ceremonial ones.
Sarafinn answered them.
He nodded.
At one point his arm shifted on the armrest between their chairs and his hand was close to hers, not touching, just close, the way things were close when two people were sitting in adjacent chairs and not thinking about the distance between them.
She was thinking about the distance between them.
She looked at the steward’s documents.
“Three weeks,” Aldric said, when the meeting had concluded and the steward had gathered his papers and Sarafinn had stepped out to speak with someone at the door.
“Three weeks,” she agreed.
He was quiet for a moment.
“That is not very long.”
“No,” she said.
“It is not.”
They sat in the study with the afternoon light coming through the windows and the distant sound of the palace going about its business around them and neither of them said what they were both thinking, which was that three weeks was also not very long compared to the rest of a life.
Sebastian, still in his chair, looked between them with the quiet perceptiveness of a man who saw a great deal and commented on very little of it.
“Come on,” he said to Aldric.
“I’ll show you something.”
Aldric looked at him.
Looked at Isadora.
Stood and followed Sebastian out.
She sat in the study alone for a moment.
✦ ✦ ✦
She found her in the east garden.
Vivian was sitting on the bench, Isadora’s bench, the one by the fountain, with her legs crossed and a piece of embroidery in her lap that she was not working on.
She was looking at the garden with the expression of someone thinking hard about something and not particularly enjoying the thinking.
She looked up when Isadora approached.
They regarded each other for a moment.
“May I sit?” Isadora said.
Vivian moved her embroidery.
“It is your bench,” she said.
“It is a palace bench. Technically everyone’s.” Isadora sat.
Looked at the fountain.
“You have been waiting to talk to me alone.”
“Yes,” Vivian said, without pretending otherwise.
“Then talk.”
Vivian looked at her.
Direct, assessing, the look she had been giving Isadora since the first dinner, not hostile, just thorough.
Taking a full accounting.
“My brother,” she said, “has spent his entire life not belonging anywhere. Not because he is difficult or because there is anything wrong with him. Because the world decided what he was before he had any say in it and arranged itself accordingly.” She paused.
“He does not show that easily. But I know him. I have known him his whole life and I know what it cost him to come here and I know what it will cost him if this, if you, turn out to be one more thing that does not have a place for him.”
The garden was quiet.
Isadora looked at the fountain.
At the still water and the two reflections in it, side by side.
“I know,” she said.
“Do you?…”
“I know what it is to have the world decide what you are,” she said.
“Not in the same way he does. My cage is made of different materials. But I know what it is to perform something you are not because the alternative is worse.” She paused.
“I am not going to be one more thing that does not have a place for him. I am going to be honest with him. I am going to be, I do not know yet exactly what I am going to be. But I am going to be honest. That is what I can promise.”
Vivian looked at her for a long moment.
“He likes you,” she said.
As though this was information she was releasing under mild protest.
“More than he has said. More than he probably knows yet.”
Something moved in Isadora’s chest.
“I know,” she said.
“Do you like him?”
Isadora looked at the fountain.
She thought about a garden at five in the morning and a man who did not fill silences he did not need to fill.
She thought about his voice saying her name, just her name, not her title.
She thought about breakfast this morning and the one second of eye contact that had said everything neither of them had said out loud.
“Yes,” she said.
Simply.
Without qualification.
Vivian nodded slowly.
Something in her face settled, not into warmth exactly, not yet, but into something that was the beginning of warmth.
The decision to let it develop.
“Good,” she said.
She picked up her embroidery.
“He deserves someone who actually likes him.”
“So does everyone,” Isadora said.
Vivian looked at her sideways.
“Yes,” she said. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“But I am only concerned with him.”
Isadora looked at her, the sharp features, the direct eyes, the fierce uncomplicated love for her brother that lived in every word she said about him.
“You are going to be formidable,” Isadora said.
Vivian raised an eyebrow.
“I already am,” she said.
Isadora looked at the fountain and felt, unexpectedly and entirely without planning for it, the particular warmth of liking someone new.
“Yes,” she said.
“You are.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Aldric’s family was leaving in the morning.
Not permanently, they would return for the wedding in three weeks, Grace had established this with the firm certainty of a woman who was not going to miss her son’s wedding and was not entertaining alternative suggestions.
But the palace had been arranged for the initial visit and the initial visit was concluding and it was time for them to go home to Cotter’s Lane and their ordinary life while Aldric stayed.
Stayed.
He was staying.
Isadora stood in the corridor outside the east wing guest rooms that evening and thought about that , about a narrow house on a modest street that was going to have one fewer person in it starting tomorrow.
About Grace and Gibson going back to the patched roof and the kitchen table and the smell of bread, without him.
She knocked.
Grace opened the door.
She looked at Isadora with the open warm expression she brought to everything and stepped back to let her in without hesitation, which was very Grace, Isadora was learning.
Grace did not hesitate about people.
She made room for them.
The room was in the midst of the organized chaos of packing.
Vivian folding things with characteristic efficiency, Gibson stacking the small bag with the careful precision of a man who packed the same way he did everything else.
Aldric was sitting in the chair by the window watching his family pack with an expression she recognized, the one he wore when he was feeling something he was not going to talk about.
He looked up when she came in.
She crossed to where Grace was standing and said, “I wanted to come before morning. To say thank you. For coming here. For….” She stopped.
Found the right words.
“For him. For the people who made him who he is.”
Grace looked at her for a moment.
Then she stepped forward and took both of Isadora’s hands in hers — the warm capable hands of a woman who had worked hard her whole life and had loved hard her whole life and did not see a distinction between the two, and said, “You take care of him.”
It was not a request.
“Yes,” Isadora said.
“I will.”
Grace squeezed her hands once and let go and went back to her packing and Isadora stood in the middle of the room and looked at Aldric in the chair by the window and he looked back at her and neither of them said anything and it was enough.
Gibson looked up from the bag.
Looked at Aldric.
Looked at Isadora.
Looked back at Aldric.
“Good,” he said.
Two words.
Carrying everything.
Vivian caught Isadora’s eye across the room and gave her a look that was approximately forty percent approval and sixty percent warning and was, Isadora thought, probably the warmest thing Vivian was going to offer for a while and should be accepted accordingly.
She accepted it accordingly.
She said goodnight.
She left.
In the corridor she stopped and leaned against the wall for a moment and looked at the ceiling and thought about three weeks and a wedding and a life she had not planned for that was, against her better judgment and all available evidence to the contrary, beginning to feel like something she might actually want.
She pushed off the wall and went back to her room.