SN Chapter 23

The escort knights looked back and forth—once at Rosaline, seated on the branch overhead, once at the assassin currently constituting a vivid mess on the floor below. Their expressions bore a remarkable resemblance to Rikardis's.

"Thank you for your service," Rosaline said, saluting them both.

Her complete equanimity unsettled the senior knights considerably. 'Absurdly capable... but... hm... well... it'll be fine...' Having arrived at this conclusion, they rationalized the peculiar situation to their collective satisfaction and filed out. The brief commotion faded; silence settled back over the room.

Rikardis started to close the balcony door and go inside, then turned back. Rosaline sat motionless on the branch, keeping the quiet with her. Something about the sight nagged at him. Perhaps some old memory, surfacing without invitation.

"Dame Rosaline."

She nodded.

He had not meant nod—he had meant come here. Rikardis frowned faintly and gestured her in. She descended the tree with practiced ease, traversed the wall in a handful of movements—

Stood before him. It was instantaneous.

He supposed she'd traded whatever social awareness she'd once possessed for the considerably more useful kind.

Without a word, he went inside and settled on the sofa. Rosaline followed, covering the distance in long, unhurried strides. Dead of night, entering a man's private chambers—not a flicker of hesitation. The old Rosaline would never have considered it; she'd have worried what rumors might reach her lord. In some ways she seemed genuinely amnesiac. In others—the particular way she continued to orbit him—nothing had changed at all.

He studied her where she stood by the table, then held out a glass.

"Will you drink?"

"I'm all right."

"Drink."

"Yes."

She accepted the glass from his hand. The knuckle of her finger grazed softly over the back of his hand as she took it. Rikardis's eyebrow twitched. Rosaline remained entirely undisturbed. He pressed his lips together, fetched a second glass, and filled them both himself.

She watched him pour with the focused intensity of someone reading a very important document.

He was aware of it without meeting her eyes—the gaze fixed, steady, intense enough to register from across the room. She waited with her glass already in hand, and the moment his own glass filled, she moved.

Like wind.

Clink.

A clear bright ring as quality crystal met quality crystal. Rikardis stared at her.

So that was why she'd been watching his glass fill with such ferocious attention.

Are you—did you just toast with me? My own guard knight? She appeared to have no comprehension of his incredulity. In fact, she looked rather pleased with herself.

'When glasses are shared, you lightly tap them together to make a sound.'

She had remembered what Kallix taught her and executed it without delay. How brilliant. Magnificent, Sister. She could almost hear the sound of his applause. That was where the satisfied expression had come from—Kallix's approval, lodged in her chest like a verified fact.

That Kallix would have been profoundly distressed to know about this situation was something Rosaline did not know.

Rikardis drew his thumb across the corner of his mouth. He had been catching himself off-balance rather frequently lately. Memory loss truly could transform a person—for better or worse, the verdict remained pending. He made a low, considering sound and let her transgression pass without remark. She looked so thoroughly pleased with herself that scolding her would have felt like delivering a serious reprimand to a small child. Her unexpected behavior had, in any case, made him briefly forget: he'd brought her inside intending to ask a few things.

Her way of thinking had shifted considerably, but what Rosaline was made of at her core didn't seem to have changed much. Most notably: she was risking her life to remain at his side without being asked. He'd doubted the amnesia report more than once—it so precisely replicated her old behavior. And yet watching her shed every piece of ordinary common sense she'd once possessed, he couldn't dismiss the amnesia claim entirely either.

So. Why did she continue to orbit him?

She would earn no glory here. No honor. He hadn't offered any before and had no intention of offering any now. So long as the Redwheel name preceded hers, she could take nothing from him.

He had said as much to her directly, once. At a time when she'd looked at him with eyes full of guilt—those eyes he'd found unbearable, the sight of them making his skin crawl—and he'd tried to drive her away completely.

His silver hair, usually kept, hung in disorder. Something raw had climbed into his expression and settled there. His clothes appeared to be either half-donned or half-removed, caught between.

Rikardis had screamed like a man coming apart.

'Leave! Get out of my sight! I am sick to death of you—disappear! Why exactly are you at my side!'

He had been younger then, and less practiced at concealing what moved inside him. The particular circumstances of that night had stripped what practice he'd had. His only younger sister had just died.

Rosaline was kneeling in the middle of the room—objects broken all around her, furnishings reduced to pieces on the floor—with tears running freely down her face. Words forced their way through her trembling lips.

'I will protect you, Your Highness. I will surely protect you. Only you—I will—even at the cost of my life—'

He seized his own hair and screamed. Something close to self-destruction in the gesture. Rosaline rose and moved toward him to stop it; he refused her absolutely.

'Who do you think you are to protect me. What are you, that you could protect me—what?'

That room. That was where all of it had happened.

He had never imagined Rosaline setting foot in it again. The original Rosaline would have known the same. And yet—him, watching her from across a table, quietly, without any of the old charge running through everything—it felt wrong in a way that resisted naming. Genuinely surreal. Even before all of it, they had never been on terms that warranted sharing a glass of wine.

Rosaline made a face—the wine, likely too dry for her palate. A sharp, involuntary huff of a laugh escaped Rikardis before he could suppress it.

They drank without much conversation. Every time he refilled her glass, she clinked hers against his without fail, which made him flinch each time. She was never scolded for it. Wine going down, crystal ringing, the soft shift of fabric—intermittent sounds in the quiet between them. Rikardis had been exhausted all day; Rosaline still found human language a labyrinth. For both of them, as arrangements went, this one was acceptable.

The first bottle emptied quickly. He brought another—a wild strawberry wine, sweet, popular with women. It suited her; she drank more readily than before. Then another bottle. Then, several hours later, another. His guard knight showed no signs of becoming intoxicated, and this stirred something unreasonably competitive in him. By the time dawn began to lighten the windows, Rikardis was thoroughly, completely drunk. Rosaline lifted him without ceremony and carried him to bed, precisely as she had once carried Nestor.

He made a low sound and settled his head into the pillow. She folded the blanket over him carefully, smoothed it down, and turned to go. A rough voice surfaced from beneath the covers.

"Why exactly—"

Why exactly are you at my side. A strange question with no clean answer. Rosaline had not thought about it very deeply. Because she'd simply been doing it? Because it was her occupation? Because she'd made a promise to someone? She couldn't say. But it sat lodged in her chest, firm: protect the master of the White Night. She must protect him. She leaned close and whispered to Rikardis—his face flushed, blinking slowly up at her.

"I will surely protect you."

Something that might have been profanity came from him. But the words dissolved with his next breath. Beneath the blanket, his chest rose and fell with even regularity. Rosaline smoothed the hair fallen across his face and went out through the window.

A quiet dawn. The morning sun rising.

"Haqaev, you son of a bitch!"

The tidy table was in disarray in an instant. Dozens of retainers watching—he made no attempt to conceal the violence of his mood. Elpydion snarled and hurled a vase at the wall. Clang! Shards scattered in all directions.

Despite the deep hour of night, the Quartz Castle of First Prince Elpydion had drawn a considerable crowd. All of it at his summons. Second Prince Rikardis had learned the nature of the new poison through the witch Ketrin. By now it had reached several key high nobles and the Emperor's ear as well.

"What? Magic? They mixed magic into the poison?"

Elpydion's aide did not dare meet his eyes. When his lord was in this state, a hundred cautions were barely enough. True to the aide's prediction, he appeared to have no intention of letting this pass quietly. Elpydion struck the aide over the head with his open palm. Once, twice.

"Hey. What the hell are you? What are you even good for? Isn't that why I have you in that position—to find out things like this first? When did I ever tell you to trail after Rikardis picking up secondhand intelligence?!"

"I apologize. Prince Haqaev's side gave no indication—"

"That filthy Baltan son of a bitch! Not a single useful one in the lot! How did everyone manage to sit on their hands while things got this bad? How did none of you identify that the poison contained magic?!"

Elpydion swept the room with a furious gaze. Heads of houses renowned within the empire and beyond—every one of them, collectively, having failed to identify a single substance. There was no comedy quite like this one. He paced, fuming.