The Palace library at the ninth hour of night was the kind of quiet that had weight to it.
It was not silence — silence would have been easier. It was the low, settled hush of a vast room with one lamp burning, the occasional creak of old shelving adjusting to the cold, and, twice an hour or so, the muffled passage of guards in the corridor outside, their voices dropping to the particular murmur men use when they are bored and trying not to be heard being bored.
At a long table near the lamp, surrounded by paper, Flaure worked.
The stack to her left was the surplus budget — the leftover allocations from three districts that had not spent their full quarter, which now had to be folded back into the central treasury without making any of the three district directors feel either robbed or rewarded. The stack to her right was worse: the draft of next month's Palace proclamation, which someone in the clerks' office had written in language so stiff it read like a threat, and which Flaure was quietly rewriting line by line into something a frightened citizen could actually hear without flinching.
She was good at that part. The words.
She turned a phrase over — the Crown requires became the Crown asks — and felt the sentence settle into a better shape, and moved on.
The lamp burned. The shelves creaked. Somewhere far down the corridor, a guard laughed at something and was shushed by another.
---
The library door opened, softly, and an old woman came in.
"Lady Flaure. You haven't gone home?"
Flaure looked up. "Oh — Eva."
"Still here at this hour?" Eva came a few steps closer, peering at the stacks. "Paperwork like that is exactly what clerks such as myself are for, Your Majesty. A goddess shouldn't be buried under little tasks like these."
"No, no." Flaure shook her head. "If anything, being a goddess means I should carry more of them than anyone, not fewer." She set down her pen. "I'm not — I'm not as remarkable as the gods of the previous generation were.."
"But I would at least like to do as much as I'm able."
Something in Eva's face went gentle.
"Lady Flaure..."
"What brings you back so late?"
"Ah — my department went out for a meal, and I left something behind at my desk like a fool. So I came back for it." She gave a small creaky laugh. "I've grown old and forgetful, Lady Flaure."
"That's nothing to be ashamed of. And — Eva. You can just call me Flaure."
"I've watched you since the day you were placed in this Palace, you know." Eva's gaze drifted, briefly, somewhere that was not the room. "Time did fly."
"...it did."
"Might I sit with you a while?"
"Of course you may, Eva."
"What an honor," the old woman said, and she said it like she meant it, and lowered herself into the chair across the table.
---
By the eleventh hour the budget stack had been reviewed, summarized, and folded into its file. Flaure pressed the cover flat with both hands and let out a slow breath.
"Eva. Staying up this late really isn't good for you."
"It's no trouble at all." Eva had not moved from her chair, and did not move now. "To sit with you, Lady Flaure — even for a short while — is honor enough. You are a benefactor of mine, after all."
The room felt a little warmer than it had an hour ago.
"Do you remember when I was twenty-six," Eva said, "I was seeing a woman."
Flaure looked up.
"It has not been against the law in Orenthel since start of your reign — you know that better than anyone. But the law and a family are different things. Mine did not approve. They made that very clear, and they made it clear often." Eva's hands rested folded on the table. "My life in those years was not a good one. The people I worked beside looked at me as though I were something scraped off a boot."
She paused.
"And then there was you, Lady Flaure. You saw a plain clerk with a sad face at her desk, and you worried about her. An ordinary commoner. You actually worried."
"I remember being — quite embarrassed, at the time. That a goddess would trouble herself."
"Ah — you were genuinely in a difficult place then. That was all." Flaure's voice was warm and certain in the way it almost never was about herself. "Love should never be something a person is shut out of."
"You were right about that. But, Lady Flaure — you went further than that. You traveled to my parents' house. Personally. To speak with them yourself."
Eva laughed, soft and low.
"I was so anxious. I kept thinking — a goddess, about to see the inside of a commoner's home."
"Nonsense." Flaure waved a hand. "I have never thought less of anyone for that, Eva. The way I see it — if a thing causes no one any harm, then it is not a wrong. A person with an illness of the body, a person who loves differently from others, a person with their own small strange hobbies — every one of them is simply a person. The same as anyone."
A pause.
"And how is Kate?"
"You even remembered her name." Eva's voice caught very slightly on the surprise of it. "She's retired now. Living quietly."
"Mm." Flaure's eyes lowered to the folded file. "Time really does move quickly, doesn't it."
"It does." Eva pushed herself up from the chair with the slow care of someone whose joints had opinions about late nights. "Well. I should let you be, Lady Flaure."
"Rest well, Eva."
"And you, Lady Flaure. And you."
---
Flaure gathered the files into her arms — the budget, the proclamation, the rest — and set off for her chambers.
She had crossed half the corridor when the window beside her shattered.
Tink.
The sound came a half-second before her mind caught up to it. She turned, files still in her arms, eyes going wide —
"To be taken alive, then," a voice said softly.
A pair of dark eyes had fixed on her from the broken frame of the window. The figure was already moving — already coming through, already reaching, the unmistakable low committed motion of someone intending to scoop her up and carry her away.
"Wh — what are you—"
A pane of broken glass skittered across the floor and caught the side of her hand as she flinched back; a thin line of red opened across her skin. She pressed it to her chest, files and all, and stumbled a step backward, and the word she wanted would not come fast enough —
A blade arrived before it.
It came singing out of the dark of the corridor and met the intruder's reach with a clean ringing crash, and the figure was forced to twist away from her, fast, to keep his own arm.
"Breaking into a royal hall at this hour," Claude said, stepping between Flaure and the window, "and setting your sights on a beautiful woman, no less."
His sword moved.
It moved fast — faster than the intruder's, though only just, the two of them trading strikes down the length of the corridor in a blur that threw sparks against the stone. The intruder was good. He was very good. But Claude was a half-step ahead of him on every exchange, and the half-step was the difference between a duel and an execution.
This is past anything a catalyst does.
That speed is not — that is not a human speed, Flaure thought.
Pressed back against the far wall, the cut on her hand forgotten.
The intruder pressed harder, teeth bared, trying to force the half-step closed.
Claude smiled — the small insolent smile that the entire Black Vanguard had learned to dread — and stamped his foot down against the stone.
The floor did not crack. The air did.
A sudden hard column of displaced wind erupted upward from the point of impact like something detonating, slamming into the intruder's chest mid-lunge. His balance broke instantly. His blade jumped half out of his grip; he staggered, twisted, scrambled —
"Got you—!"
— and did not, quite. The intruder wrenched his body around, planted his heel, clawed his sword back into his hand, and threw himself backward out of the broken window in one motion, vanishing into the dark beyond the frame.
"...tch," Claude said.
Boots hammered down the corridor. Vanguard officers — four of them, then six — came pouring around the far corner, weapons drawn.
Flaure was already scrubbing the blood from her hand against her sleeve, fast, the way a person hides a thing before it can be fussed over.
"Claude — what in the world is happening—"
"Thalassia, most likely," Claude said. He had not stopped watching the window.
"Thalassia. I see."
"Captain Claude!" One of the Vanguard officers skidded to a halt, breathless. "We couldn't hold all of them — one got through, did you see him—"
"He just left. Through there."
Claude's hand closed slowly into a fist.
"He was fast."
The officers exchanged a look. One of them ventured, carefully, "If the Captain says a man was good, then we should probably—"
"But nowhere near as good as me. Or the rest of you." Claude turned, and the dread smile was back. "Because I am the Captain of the Black Vanguard — the spear of Lady Flaure herself. The rest of you only have to be the shield. That's plenty."
"Captaaain."
A younger officer's voice wavered.
"C-could we maybe get more Vanguard sent to reinforce? It's just — I really can't fight properly when I've been pulled out of bed, you know—"
He shrank.
"I — it's fine if not—"
"Of course we can—" Flaure began.
"I'll handle it myself, Your Majesty," Claude cut in smoothly. "The rest of you — go home. It is far too late, and working a double shift dulls a man. Off with you."
"Booo."
"Is that acceptable, Lady Flaure?"
"...it's fine," Flaure said.
The Vanguard officers filed off down the corridor, grumbling in the comfortable way of people who were not actually unhappy.
"Our Captain is start dreaming of a throne."
"I CAN HEAR YOU!"
In contrast.
"Please everyone, take care of your health," Flaure called after them, and they were gone.
---
The corridor that led up toward the residential floor was long, and lamplit, and now very empty.
"Claude."
"Yes, Your Majesty?"
"I could — withdraw the order. If you wished."
She said it lightly. She kept it light on purpose. There was nothing in her voice a person could point at.
"There's no need at all, Lady Flaure." Claude did not slow his pace. "I'll be the one to protect you."
He was walking close. Closer than the corridor required. He was a tall man, and he let the height of himself fall across the space beside her in a way that was not quite anything she could name and not quite nothing either.
"And the other day, in the council chamber," he went on, warm, "when you sent that sheet of paper past that commander's ear — that was magnificent, Your Majesty. Truly. There is no one like you."
"Ah — mm. Is that so. I suppose it was."
Flaure did not entirely care what he was talking about. She let the current of it carry her anyway.
"Is something the matter, Lady Flaure?"
"Nothing."
She edged, very slightly, sideways. A handspan of corridor opened between them.
"Shall I guard you from inside the room itself tonight?" Claude's voice did not change. "You've seemed a little strange ever since the attack, you know~"
Flaure's eyes moved — to the corridor ahead, to the door, to the corridor again.
"That won't be necessary."
She reached her chambers — the duplex at the top of the Palace, the highest and most private rooms in the building.
"Thank you."
She stepped through and began to close the door.
A gloved hand caught the edge of it.
"...is something wrong?"
"Sleep well, Your Majesty." A wink. "Pleasant dreams."
"Mm."
Flaure closed the door the rest of the way and turned the lock fast — faster than was graceful, the bolt going home with a small hard click.
For a moment she simply stood there.
Then her back found the door, and she slid down it, slowly, until she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest. She pressed her face down against them. Her arms wrapped around her shins. It was the shape a person folds into when the day has finally finished with them and there is no one left to perform for.
She bit at the edge of a fingernail.
If he had—
She did not finish the thought.
She sat with it instead, small and folded, in the dark of her own locked room.
Then — after a while — she lifted her head.
She looked across the room at the tall mirror on the far wall.
I'll have to trouble her again, won't I.
---
In the Palace records room, the lamps had been left burning.
Among the long shelves, between rows of boxed and bound documents, a figure moved without urgency through the oldest section — the shelves marked with dates that ran back into the eleven-hundreds.
Across the floor between the shelves lay the guards. Several of them. They were not moving. They were, on closer look, still breathing — but they were not moving, and would not, for some time.
"How convenient," the figure murmured, "that he opened the way in. The ones posted here were only RMO hangers-on, in the end."
A gloved hand drew a brittle, yellowed folio from the eleven-hundreds shelf and turned it toward the lamplight.
"But these — the old records, all the way back to the eleven-hundreds. It's just bad old policy mostly, the thing we can use to blackmail are so few," the figure said softly, "would that be the thing worth—"
Trust me. This is what will help carry us to the world as it ought to be.
The voice arrived from nowhere and everywhere, and the figure's eyes went briefly unfocused, the way a person's eyes unfocus when something steps quietly into the front of their mind and makes itself at home.
"Hey — what's wrong with you?!"
The shout came from the corridor outside — a guard, alive and upright, who had just looked through a doorway and seen the floor.
---
The next morning, the public notice boards of the central district carried the usual things.
But the item drawing a small uneasy knot of readers was not from any of the great papers. It was from the Welling Post — a small press, four pages, the kind of paper that the great papers did not consider a competitor so much as a weather condition.
An older woman near the front of the knot read it twice, all the way through.
"Utter nonsense," she said.