The arrival was scheduled for the third hour after midday.
Isadora knew this because her mother had told her at breakfast, in the same tone she used to announce the weather or the day’s schedule of appointments, measured, informational, completely unbothered by the fact that she was describing the arrival of the man Isadora was expected to marry as though it were a linen delivery.
“They will be shown to the east wing guest quarters,” Sarafinn had said, buttering her bread with the focused attention of a woman for whom no task was beneath her full consideration.
“You will meet them at dinner. Formally. The introductions will be made properly.”
“Of course,” Isadora had said.
“You will be civil.”
“I am always civil.”
Her mother had looked at her over the bread.
“You will be civil in a way that does not make the young man feel like he is being assessed for deficiencies.”
“I would never….”
“Isadora.”
She had picked up her tea.
“I will be civil,” she had said, in the tone that meant the conversation was finished.
That had been this morning.
It was now the second hour after midday and she was standing at the window of the upper corridor that looked out over the palace’s eastern approach, which gave a clear view of the gate and the road beyond it, and she was absolutely not watching for a carriage.
She was simply standing at this window.
For unrelated reasons.
Esther appeared at her shoulder with the silent approach she had perfected over four years of living with a woman who noticed everything.
She looked out the window.
She looked at Isadora.
She said nothing, which was one of the things Isadora valued most about her.
They stood at the window together for reasons that were entirely unrelated to the road.
✦ ✦ ✦
The carriage appeared at the gate at the third hour, almost exactly as scheduled.
It was not a palace carriage.
Of course it was not, he did not have a palace carriage, he had whatever could be hired from the village for the journey, and what had apparently been hired was a working carriage of the kind used for market runs, broad and practical and entirely indifferent to the impression it made pulling up to a royal palace.
It stopped at the gate.
The guard checked the correspondence.
The gate opened.
Isadora watched from the window with her hands clasped behind her back and her expression arranged into something that could not be described as watching.
The carriage door opened.
A small woman came out first, older, grey haired, looking at the palace with the wide open expression of someone encountering something so far outside their frame of reference that their face had simply given up trying to manage it.
Behind her a large man, broad shouldered, steady on his feet, who looked at the palace with the measuring gaze of someone assessing how much it would cost to maintain.
Then a young woman, dark haired, sharp featured, who stepped out and looked at the palace with an expression of deliberate composure that Isadora recognised immediately as the expression of someone who had decided in advance how they were going to feel about this and was committed to it.
And then him.
He came out last.
He unfolded from the carriage door with the unhurried movement of someone who was not performing anything for anyone, straightened to his full height, and looked at the palace.
From this distance she could not see his eyes.
She could see the grey hair, silver pale in the afternoon light, the kind of colour that should have looked strange and somehow did not, somehow looked exactly right in a way she could not account for.
She could see the set of his shoulders, the quality of his stillness.
He was not looking at the palace the way the older woman was looking at it, with overwhelmed wonder.
He was not looking at it the way the broad man was, with practical assessment.
He was looking at it the way you looked at something you had been thinking about for a long time and had finally decided to look at directly.
Something moved in Isadora’s chest.
She took a step back from the window.
“Your Highness,” Esther said.
“I see them,” Isadora said.
“Thank you.”
She turned from the window and walked back down the corridor toward her rooms with her spine straight and her hands still and the particular quality of composure that she had been perfecting since she was old enough to understand that composure was a skill and not a feeling.
Behind her she heard Esther following, silent as always.
“He is taller than I expected,” Esther offered, after a moment.
“I did not have expectations regarding his height.”
“Of course not.”
Isadora did not dignify that with a response.
✦ ✦ ✦
She did not see him again until dinner.
The hours between the arrival and the meal she spent on correspondence and on the careful work of not thinking about things she had decided not to think about, which was a task she was normally very good at and was finding, today, somewhat less reliable than usual.
She looked at herself in the mirror and saw her mother’s face looking back and thought, not for the first time, that she had inherited all of Sarafinn’s external architecture and was doing considerably messier things inside it.
“You look beautiful,” Esther said, with the sincerity of someone who was also saying something else entirely.
“I look like a woman going to a dinner she did not request,” Isadora said.
“You look like both,” Esther agreed, and handed her the pearl earrings.
✦ ✦ ✦
The formal dining room was the smaller of the two, her mother’s choice, deliberate as always.
Intimate enough that distance was not available as a strategy.
The table seated twelve and tonight there were seven of them, which left enough empty chairs to feel the shape of the occasion without being swallowed by it.
Her father was already there when she arrived, standing near the fireplace with a glass of wine and the expression of a man who was paying careful attention to everything in the room while appearing to pay attention only to the fire.
He caught her eye when she entered and gave her the small nod that meant I see you and you are going to be fine which she appreciated even when she did not entirely believe it.
Her mother was at the head of the table, speaking to the palace steward about something logistical, her attention divided with the ease of someone who had been dividing their attention for decades.
The family from the village was already seated.
She saw them before they saw her, the small grey haired woman sitting very straight with her hands folded and her eyes moving around the room with undisguised wonder that she was making no effort to conceal, which Isadora found immediately and unexpectedly charming.
The broad man beside her, steady and quiet.
The young woman with the sharp features sitting across from them, who noticed Isadora the moment she entered and held her gaze with a directness that was not rude but was absolutely an assessment.
Isadora met it evenly.
The young woman’s expression shifted slightly, something that might have been approval, or might have been the beginning of a more complicated opinion.
And at the far end of the table, with his back to the door, the one who had not yet seen her come in.
She had approximately four steps before he would hear her and turn.
She used them to compose herself, which she did not need to do, and to observe what she could from behind him, which was: broad shoulders in a dark coat that fit well and was not palace quality but was well made.
Grey hair that caught the candlelight.
The particular quality of stillness she had noticed at the window and was noticing again now, not the stillness of someone trying to be still but of someone who simply was, who did not fill spaces with unnecessary movement.
He turned.
✦ ✦ ✦
His eyes were exactly as she remembered them.
That was her first thought, which she immediately classified as irrelevant information and filed accordingly.
Ice blue, extraordinary, the kind of eyes that a person noticed and then continued to notice against their better judgment.
They found her face with the directness of someone who had decided in advance not to be intimidated and was honouring that decision.
She crossed the remaining distance to her place at the table with the unhurried grace of twenty-one years of practice and sat down and looked at him across the table and said, in her most civil voice, civil in a way that did not make him feel assessed for deficiencies, as her mother had specified, “Good evening.”
“Good evening,” he said.
His voice was lower than she had expected, which she had not been expecting anything about, and even across the formal table she caught the edge of his scent beneath the candle smoke and the dinner preparations, something that her senses had apparently decided to catalogue with extreme thoroughness despite not being consulted on the matter.
She reached for her water glass.
The small grey haired woman, his mother, she understood, or the woman who had raised him, she had read the correspondence, leaned forward slightly.
“Your Highness,” she said, with the earnest formality of someone who had been practising this.
“It is a very great honour. I am Grace. This is my husband Gibson, and our daughter Vivian, and our….” A brief pause, the smallest hesitation.
“Aldric.”
Our Aldric.
The pause had been a grammatical one, Isadora noted.
The working out of how to name the relationship in formal company.
Our son would have been simpler and was clearly what she meant, and the fact that she had hesitated was not a coldness but a care, a woman making sure she said the right thing in the right place.
Isadora felt something shift in her chest that she did not examine.
“Grace,” she said.
“It is a pleasure to have you here. All of you.” She meant it, which surprised her slightly.
She looked at the broad man.
“Gibson.” He nodded once, with the comfortable economy of a man for whom words were tools used when necessary and set down when not.
She looked at the young woman with the sharp features and the direct gaze.
“Vivian.”
“Your Highness,” Vivian said.
With perfect politeness and eyes that were still doing their assessment.
Isadora looked at him last.
“Aldric,” she said.
“Your Highness,” he said.
The name in his mouth, applied to her, had a quality she could not immediately categorise.
Not deferential, it was the right word in the right context, she could find no fault with it technically.
Not hostility, exactly.
Something more complicated than hostility.
Something that knew what the title meant and what it had cost, and was saying it anyway because he had decided to be here and he was going to do it correctly.
She understood that, actually.
The decision to be somewhere difficult and to do it correctly anyway.
She understood it rather well.
Dinner was served.
✦ ✦ ✦
The meal was, by any objective measure, a success.
Grace talked, warmly, openly, with the natural ease of a woman who liked people and found them interesting and had no particular investment in performing sophistication she did not have.
She asked Isadora’s father about the gardens, which she had glimpsed from the window, and Sebastian answered with genuine enthusiasm because the gardens were one of the things he loved about the palace and he never needed much encouragement to discuss them.
Within ten minutes they were deep in a conversation about the relative merits of different varieties of kitchen herbs that Isadora was fairly certain no formal palace dinner had ever featured before.
Gibson said perhaps twelve words over the entire course of the meal, every one of them precise and considered, and Isadora found herself revising her assessment of him upward with each one.
Vivian was sharp and funny and watching everything with the attentiveness of someone filing it all away for later use.
She asked Isadora two questions that were technically polite and actually quite pointed, and Isadora answered them both honestly, which seemed to recalibrate something in Vivian’s expression toward something warmer.
Her mother managed the table with the invisible skill of a woman who had been doing this for thirty years, drawing people out and steering conversations and making the whole thing feel effortless in the way that only enormous effort could produce.
And Aldric sat across from Isadora and ate his dinner and spoke when spoken to and did not perform anything for anyone.
She watched him, in the way she watched everything, not obviously, not constantly, but with the peripheral thoroughness of someone trained to gather information without appearing to gather it.
He was uncomfortable in the formal setting, she thought.
Not visibly, he held himself well, ate correctly, said the right things in the right moments.
But there was a quality of contained effort to it, a man doing something that required attention rather than something that came naturally.
And yet.
There were moments, when Gibson said something dry and quiet and Aldric’s mouth moved in what was almost a smile, when Grace said something earnest and Vivian rolled her eyes with the affectionate exasperation of a sister and Aldric caught it and looked briefly at the ceiling, when the effort dropped entirely and something else appeared.
Something unguarded and real and completely different from the contained, watchful man who had been sitting there a moment before.
She thought about the balcony.
She thought about the quality of the silence he had made, uncrowded, unhurried, two people sharing a space without either of them needing to make it more than that.
She reached for her wine glass.
Across the table his eyes moved to her and found hers with the same directness they had found her face when she walked in, and for a moment, just a moment, neither of them looked away.
She looked away first.
She took a sip of wine and returned to her conversation with Vivian, who was saying something about the village that Isadora made herself pay attention to, and did not look across the table again for the remainder of the meal.
Not more than twice, anyway.
✦ ✦ ✦
Afterward, when the family had been shown to their quarters and her parents had retired and the palace had settled into its night breathing, Isadora sat on the edge of her bed and looked at the drawer of her nightstand.
Esther was moving quietly around the room, putting things away, her back diplomatically turned.
“He looked at you,” Esther said, to the wardrobe.
“Many people look at me. I am the princess. It is a common occurrence.”
“He looked at you differently.”
“Esther.”
“I am simply noting…”
“You are simply noting yourself directly into a conversation I did not open.”
Esther turned from the wardrobe with the expression of a woman who had survived four years of this and had developed a complete immunity to it.
“He has very unusual eyes,” she said pleasantly.
“That is all I was going to say.”
“That is not all you were going to say.”
“It is all I am going to say now.” She picked up Isadora’s discarded earrings from the dressing table.
“Goodnight, Your Highness.”
“Goodnight, Esther.”
The door closed softly.
Isadora looked at the drawer for a moment longer.
Then she lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling instead, which was more appropriate and equally informative.
Across the palace, in the east wing, a village alpha with grey hair and ice blue eyes was sleeping in a room that probably felt nothing like the narrow house on Cotter’s Lane.
She wondered if he was sleeping at all.
She wondered, with the particular irritating specificity of a thought that had decided to be thorough, whether he had his pipe with him.
She closed her eyes.
“This,” she informed the ceiling, in the same dry tone she had used in this room once before, “is still a problem.”
The ceiling, like the room before it, offered nothing useful.
She went to sleep anyway.