Isadora woke at five in the morning because she always woke at five in the morning.
This was not a choice.
It was a body that had been trained by four years of pre-dawn exits through palace windows and had decided, somewhere along the way, that sleeping past five was not something it was going to do regardless of whether there was anywhere to be.
She had tried, on multiple occasions, to renegotiate this arrangement.
Her body had declined every time.
She lay in the dark for exactly three minutes, which was how long it took her to accept that sleep was finished, and then she got up.
Esther was not awake yet.
This was one of the small mercies of five in the morning, no one was awake yet, no one needed anything from her, the palace was just a building full of sleeping people and she could move through it without being Her Highness for a little while.
She pulled on a plain dress, something simple, nothing that required assistance with the buttons, and left her room.
She went to the garden.
The east garden specifically, the one with the old oak and the stone bench beside the fountain that her father had put there twenty years ago because he liked to sit outside in the mornings and her mother had specified that if he was going to do that he was at least going to have somewhere comfortable to do it.
The fountain was not running at this hour.
The garden was grey and quiet and smelled of damp earth and the last of the autumn roses on the far wall.
She sat on the bench and pulled her knees up and looked at nothing in particular and let her mind do what it did at this hour, which was, essentially, run through everything without the social performance layer, honest and unsupervised.
She had a week, approximately, before the formal arrangements would be finalised.
A week of dinners and meetings and her mother steering everything with invisible precision toward the outcome she had already decided on.
A week of being civil in a way that did not make him feel assessed for deficiencies, which was going to require ongoing effort because assessment was simply how she processed the world and she could not turn it off, she could only manage where it showed.
He was going to be her husband.
She said it plainly in her head because she had been avoiding saying it plainly and avoidance was not a strategy, it was just a delay with extra steps.
Aldric of Cotter’s Lane, Millhaven Village, no family name, age twenty-seven, was going to be her husband.
A man she had met twice — once on a balcony in the dark where neither of them knew who the other was, and once across a dinner table where both of them did.
A man whose eyes she could not look at for more than a moment without her brain doing something she had not authorised it to do.
A man who was, apparently, already in her garden.
She saw him at the same moment he saw her.
✦ ✦ ✦
He was standing at the far end of the garden near the rose wall, pipe in hand, a thin curl of smoke rising into the grey morning air.
He had clearly come out here for the same reason she had, to be somewhere quiet before the day started, and had clearly not expected to find anyone else with the same idea.
They looked at each other across the garden.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Then he said, “I didn’t know anyone would be out here.”
“Neither did I,” she said.
Another pause.
He looked at the pipe in his hand, then at her, with the expression of a man doing a quick calculation about whether he should put it out.
She shook her head slightly.
He didn’t.
He stayed where he was.
She stayed where she was.
The fountain sat between them, not running, full of still dark water and two reflections.
It should have been awkward.
It was, technically, awkward, a princess on a bench in a plain dress at five in the morning and the village alpha she was supposed to marry standing at the rose wall with his pipe, neither of them dressed for company or prepared for conversation.
It was less awkward than it should have been, which was its own kind of problem.
“You wake up early,” she said.
“Always have.” He took a slow draw on the pipe.
“You?”
“The same.”
He nodded.
He looked at the garden rather than at her, which she appreciated because it made it easier to look at him.
He was more ordinary in daylight than he had seemed at the ball, less striking, she told herself, until the morning light caught his hair and made a liar out of her immediately.
The grey was almost silver out here.
His eyes, when they moved briefly to her face and away again, were the same impossible blue they had been across the dinner table.
Ordinary was not the right word.
She filed it away and did not replace it with anything.
“Did you sleep?” she asked.
“Some.” He glanced at her.
“You?”
“Some,” she said.
A bird started somewhere in the hedges.
The grey of the sky was beginning to lighten at the edges, the earliest suggestion of morning moving in from the east.
“The room is fine,” he said, unprompted.
“The bed is larger than I know what to do with. But it’s fine.”
She looked at him.
“Larger than you know what to do with.”
“I’m used to a narrower one.”
“Most beds in the palace are designed for people who have never considered the concept of excess,” she said.
“My mother finds it practical. I find it like sleeping in a field.”
He looked at her then.
Fully.
And the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, not quite not one.
“A well furnished field,” he said.
“Very well furnished,” she agreed.
“It does not help.”
The almost-smile stayed for a moment and then went away, and he looked back at the garden.
But something had shifted, the specific tension of two people who did not know how to be near each other had loosened, just slightly, into something more like two people who were simply near each other.
She did not ruin it by talking too much.
She had learned that about herself, she had a tendency, when she was nervous, to fill silences with words, and she was not nervous now but she was something adjacent to it, and the silence was fine, the silence was doing good work, and she left it alone.
After a while he said, without looking at her, “I want to say something.”
“Then say it.”
He was quiet for a moment, choosing.
She waited.
“I didn’t want to come here,” he said.
“Not to the ball. Not to the palace. None of it.” He said it without apology, the way he seemed to say most things, plainly, as a fact.
“I want you to know that. Not because I think it changes anything. Just because I don’t want to be here pretending otherwise and have you think I’m something I’m not.”
She looked at him.
He was still looking at the garden.
“I didn’t want any of this either,” she said.
He glanced at her.
“My mother gave me a choice between this and consequences I was not willing to accept,” she said.
“I chose this. That is not the same as wanting it.” She paused.
“So we are in agreement on that point.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“That’s honest.”
“I find it saves time.”
He looked at her properly then.
The full weight of those eyes, which was considerable, and which she met without looking away this time because she had decided she was going to stop doing that.
“All right,” he said.
“Honest, then.” He took one last draw on the pipe and tapped it out on the stone wall beside him, careful as always.
“I have a problem with the crown. With the royal house. With what it represents and what it’s done to people like me.” He said it evenly, not as an attack but as information.
“That doesn’t go away because I’m standing in the garden.”
“I know,” she said.
He blinked.
Just slightly.
“You know.”
“You think I haven’t seen it? The way alphas are treated in this kingdom?” She looked at the fountain.
“My father is an alpha. I have watched my entire life at what it costs a man to exist in a world that has decided what he is before he opens his mouth.” She paused.
“I am not against my mother’s policies. I am not the crown’s decision. I am a person sitting on a bench at five in the morning who also did not want to be here.”
He said nothing for a long moment.
Then: “Your father seems like a good man.”
“He is the best man I know,” she said.
Simply.
Without qualification.
Something shifted in his face at that.
Brief, gone before she could name it, but she had seen it.
She did not push on it.
She left it where it was.
The light was coming up properly now, the grey giving way to pale gold at the horizon.
From inside the palace there was the distant sound of the kitchens beginning to wake, the first clattering of an early morning, the day starting up its machinery.
She put her feet back on the ground and straightened.
“My mother will expect everyone to be present.”
“Right,” he said.
She stood.
Smoothed her skirt out of habit.
Looked at him one more time in the early morning light, the grey hair, the blue eyes, the pipe tucked back into his coat pocket, standing at her rose wall like he had always been there and had simply been waiting to be noticed.
She turned to go.
“Isadora,” he said.
She stopped.
Turned back.
He had used her name, not her title.
Just her name, plain and direct, the way he did everything.
He held up his hand.
In it was a folded cloth, plain, worn at the edges.
The one she had taken from him on the balcony.
She had left it on the garden bench when she stood up.
She crossed back and took it from his hand.
Their fingers did not touch.
There was no reason for them to touch.
There was approximately half an inch between his fingers and hers and she was aware of every millimetre of it.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You keep leaving it,” he said.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
The almost-smile was back, brief and dry, and she felt something in her chest that she was not going to name at five in the morning in a garden with insufficient witnesses.
“I am keeping it,” she said.
“I am simply bad at keeping track of things before six in the morning.”
“Noted,” he said.
She walked back to the palace.
She did not look back.
She was smiling before she reached the door, which she stopped immediately and replaced with a more appropriate expression before she went inside.
It was a near thing.
✦ ✦ ✦
Esther was awake when she returned to her rooms.
She took one look at Isadora’s face and said nothing for three full seconds, which for Esther was remarkable restraint.
“I went to the garden,” Isadora said, before Esther could say anything.
“I can see that.”
“It was uneventful.”
“Of course.”
“He was there. We talked briefly. It was civil and unremarkable and completely uneventful.”
Esther handed her the hairbrush.
“Completely uneventful,” she repeated, in the tone of someone writing something down internally.
“Yes.”
“You have mud on your left shoe.”
Isadora looked down.
She did not have mud on her left shoe.
She looked back up.
Esther was already moving toward the wardrobe, her expression perfectly neutral, her shoulders doing the thing they did when she was working very hard not to smile.
“Esther.”
“Your Highness.”
“If you say anything…..”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Good.”
“I was simply going to help you dress for breakfast.” She produced a gown from the wardrobe, deep blue, which she had not chosen by accident, Isadora was fairly certain.
“Unless you would prefer something else.”
Isadora looked at the deep blue gown.
She thought about midnight blue gowns and masquerade balls and a man at a rose wall with silver hair catching the morning light.
“That one is fine,” she said.
Esther said nothing.
She was absolutely smiling.