But because how you presented yourself when you were afraid was the only thing you could fully control, and I had learned that lesson early and kept it like a shield.

The north wing study was at the opposite end of his bedroom corridor, which meant walking the full length of the passage I had sat in last night.

By daylight it looked different - less threatening.

The closed doors. The low torches. The temperature. All of it chosen. A man who controlled his environment with the same ferocity he applied to everything else.

I knocked.

"Come in."

The study was large, ordered and surprisingly full of light - one entire wall was windows overlooking the winter garden below.

Books lined every other surface, not decoratively but functionally, their spines annotated in the margins where they stood.

Maps. Territorial charts covered in notations.

The organized mind of a man who had not stopped working despite everything trying to destroy him.

He was standing at the window with his back to me.

The curse markings were worse in daylight.

I could see them clearly now - both hands

entirely consumed, climbing past his elbows, disappearing under the dark fabric of his

shirt.

Where they reached his jaw the skin was cracked and faintly luminous, like cooling volcanic rock.

He did not turn around.

"You were outside my door last night," he said.

"Yes," I replied.

"Why." Not a question. A demand.

"You were in pain," I said.

He turned then. And for the first time in daylight with nothing between us, no curtain,

no corridor, no door. I saw his face completely.

He was younger than I had imagined.

The stories made him sound ancient, worn down to something elemental by the curse and the violence and the years. But he was perhaps twenty-eight, twenty-nine, and under the markings and the exhaustion was a face that had been severe and striking before the curse started eating it.

His gold eyes were cold in daylight too.

But closer they were also tired in a way that went beyond sleep.

He looked at me the way he had on the road. Like I was a variable he kept failing to

categorize.

"The last woman they sent me couldn't stand to be in the same room as me," he said. "The

curse; the presence of it - causes pain in most people. Pressure. Disorientation. She

lasted forty minutes in this study before her nose bled."

I said nothing.

"You're not in pain," he glanced.

"No," I replied.

"Why not."

"I don't know," I said honestly.

He moved toward me. Slowly with that same deliberate careful quality he had shown

on the road, a man who had learned to warn things before he reached them.

He stopped two feet away and raised his marked hand and held it near my face, not touching, the same way he had done in the library.

The curse markings pulsed.

And then - I watched it happen.

The black cracked lines on his hand, faintly glowing at the edges, eased. Not disappeared. Just stilled. The way a river stills in one spot when something interrupts the current.

"What are you?" he asked.

Low. Almost to himself.

"Nobody," I said. "According to everyone who has ever met me."

He lowered his hand. Stepped back. Turned back to the window.

"You will have your meals in the hall with the others starting tonight," he said. "Heda will remove you from the household duties list."

I absorbed that.

"That's all," he added. You're dismissed.

I walked to the door. Stopped with my hand on it. "It eases when I'm near you too," I said. "The burning. On my neck. It calms down."

*Silence behind me.*

I left without looking back. But I heard it - the sharp exhale of a man who had been holding his breath, releasing it slowly into an empty room.

He was as undone by this as I was.

He was just better at hiding it.

Chapter 6 The Summon

You might like