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They left on a Tenthday morning, an hour after the first bell, with a four-rider escort and the green-backed Battle Cat, the size of a draught horse.
The escort was Teela's choice. She had argued the Queen Marlena down from twelve to four over the course of three increasingly polite conversations, and had won the argument by the simple expedient of pointing out that the four she had selected would, in any encounter she could realistically imagine, perform better than the twelve she had been offered.
The Queen had accepted this with the small, wry smile she wore when she had been outmaneuvered by someone she had wanted to be outmaneuvered by.
Cringer, the big cat, had not been consulted. The cat had simply arrived in the courtyard at the appointed hour and sat down beside the escorts with the air of a thing that did not need to be issued orders to know its place in a formation.
Adam was on the steps of the palace, finishing something with Duncan that involved a great deal of pointing and the occasional small, frustrated gesture toward a map. Teela stood by her horse and watched the two of them and let herself, for thirty unguarded seconds, think about the four weeks ahead.
It was a circuit of the eastern half of the kingdom. Six villages, two garrisons, one provincial seat, then the long road home through the Whitehorn Pass. The mission was diplomatic on paper and complicated in practice: damage assessment, grievance hearings, and the reaffirmation of loyalties that had stretched and in some cases torn during the fifteen years. Adam had asked to lead it personally. The Queen had said only, "He needs to see them, and they need to see him," and had returned to her tea.
Teela had been Captain of the Royal Guard for nine years. She had ridden circuits before, with three different lords lieutenant and one regent. She knew the shape of them. She knew the slow grinding tedium of damaged places that wanted to be heard and the brittle pride of garrisons that wanted to be respected and the careful, vinegared courtesy of nobles whose loyalty had been negotiable. She had her notebook. She had her sword. She had her plan.
What she had not factored, because she had been deliberate about not factoring it, was the shape of four weeks on the road with Adam.
Eight months. She had been calling him her good friend for eight months. She had said the phrase, in those words, to her own reflection in the polished side of a bucket no fewer than six times during the second month, in the manner of a woman who had identified a problem and had decided to manage it by repetition. Good friend. It was a perfectly good phrase. It had behaved itself, mostly. It had got her through the coronation and the Queen's first audience and the rebuild of the south wall and the long autumn of meetings in which Adam had sat across from her at the council table and had not, by any reasonable measure, done anything to her face.
It would get her through four weeks. She had decided.
He looked up from the map. He saw her watching. He lifted a hand in the small half-wave that meant one more minute, and Teela lifted her own in the small half-wave that meant take three, and he grinned and went back to Duncan, and she turned her face into the cold morning and breathed once, slowly, with great competence.
Battle Cat looked at her.
"Don't," she said.
The cat said nothing. The cat had not, in eight months of acquaintance, ever said a thing that needed saying.
She mounted up.
Week One: Holdfast
Holdfast was a frontier village in the easternmost tongue of the Inland Reach. It had a population of two hundred and twelve before the war and a population of one hundred and forty-eight now, and the gap between those figures was the entire reason they had come.
They arrived at midday on the fifth day of riding. The village reeve met them at the edge of the road. He was a stout man of about sixty with hands that had not stopped working in his entire life and a face that had decided, somewhere around year three of the occupation, to stop showing anything to outsiders. He bowed correctly to Adam. He extended hospitality correctly. He housed them correctly, in the council house, on bedrolls laid out in the council hall itself, because the inn had not been rebuilt and the reeve's own home was small.
At supper, the food was correct. At supper, an old woman served them and said nothing. At supper, a man at the long table said, into his bowl, "We did not see the crown for fifteen years," and the reeve's hand twitched on his own spoon, and no one looked up, and Teela watched Adam set his bowl down very carefully and rest his hands on the table.
He did not bristle. He did not begin the speech she had been half-expecting. He said, "I would like to see where the dead are buried."
The room went still.
"My lord."
"I would like to see where the dead are buried. If one of you would be kind enough to show me. I will not need an escort. I will leave my guard at the door."
The reeve's mouth worked.
"My lord, it is dusk."
"There will be light enough."
He was not asking. He was also, somehow, not commanding. He had found a register Teela had not heard him use before, in which the request was a request and the answer was nevertheless not in question. The old woman set down the jug she had been holding. She wiped her hands on her apron. She said, "I will take you."
He nodded to her. He rose. He looked, briefly, at Teela.
"Captain. With me."
She went with him.
The burial ground was a quarter-mile from the village proper, on a low rise under a stand of trees. There was no wall. There were no stones; the village could not afford stones. The graves were marked with carved wooden posts, with names burned into them, and the names had not yet faded because they were new.
The old woman walked them slowly along the front row. She told him who was buried there.
She did not editorialize. She said, "Pieter Holm. Eighth month of the occupation. Fever, they would not let the physician in for." She said, "Anna Holm, his sister. Two days after." She said, "Tomas of the Mill. Hanged at the crossroads for not pointing the way to the granary." She said this last one, looking straight at Adam, and Adam looked back at her, and neither of them moved their faces.
He listened to all of it. He listened to her name forty-one names. He did not interrupt. He did not promise. He did not say I will see justice done or they will be honoured or any of the small, useful sentences a prince was supposed to know. He said only, at the end, "Thank you for telling me." Then he said, "Will you walk me back?"
She walked him back.
In the council hall that night, Adam sat by the fire with his bowl in his lap and ate the cold remainder of the meal he had set aside earlier. The man who had spoken at supper sat across from him. The man did not look at him. Adam did not press. Adam ate his soup.
After a long time, the man said, "Why did you come here?"
Adam thought about it.
"Because I was ten when I left," he said. "And I have been trying to learn the country since I came back. I could read the reports in the city. I have read the reports. The reports are not from the country. I came here because I wanted to know where the country was. I have been learning it village by village. Holdfast was the third village. There are nineteen more on the circuit."
The man looked at him then. Properly.
"Nineteen."
"Nineteen. Then I go home, and I sit with my mother, and we decide what to do with what I have learned. Then I come back. Not all the way out here, every time. But some of you. Or some of me. I do not yet know which. I have been doing this for eight months. I will be doing it, I think, for the rest of my life."
The man was quiet.
"You will not fix it," he said. "You cannot."
"I know."
"My boy is in the ground out there. You cannot give him back."
"I know."
The man's mouth worked. Teela, on a bench against the wall with her sword across her knees, kept her face composed and her hands still.
"My boy was twelve," the man said.
"What was his name?"
"Henrik. Henrik of the East Furrow."
"Henrik of the East Furrow," Adam repeated. He said it carefully. He said it the way one said a thing one intended to remember.
The man wept, then, without sound, with his bowl in his hands and his face down. Adam did not move toward him. Adam did not offer comfort. Adam simply ate the rest of his soup at the same pace beside him and let the man weep in the company of a person eating soup, which, Teela understood with a kind of slow internal shift in her own chest, was exactly the company the man had needed.
She watched him.
She had been calling him her good friend for eight months.
The phrase, for the first time since she had started using it, felt wrong.
Week Two: Westmark Hold
Westmark Hold was a stone garrison fort at the inland edge of the Marrowback Range. Its commander was a woman named Sergeant Major Kell, who had held the fort with eighty-three soldiers and an evolving cast of refugees for the entire fifteen years of the occupation. Skeletor had besieged Westmark twice and had not taken it. Kell had received the news of Skeletor's death with a brief nod and had then gone back to inventorying her stores.
She received Adam in the small inner courtyard with the same brief nod.
"My lord prince."
"Sergeant Major."
"Welcome to Westmark. I have prepared the audit you requested. We have lost twenty-one in fifteen years. We have killed four hundred and ninety of theirs. We are owed eleven months of stipends, three deliveries of grain, and a roofing party for the south barracks. The roofing is the one I would like first."
"You will have it."
"By when, my lord?"
"By the first week of autumn. I will send the Royal Man-At-Arms personally. He has been asking for an excuse to come."
She permitted herself the smallest twitch at the corner of her mouth, which on Sergeant Major Kell was the equivalent of a small private celebration.
"My lord is gracious."
"My lord has been told what your roofing situation is. My lord agrees with you about the roofing."
She showed him the fort. She showed him the audit, in detail, in the smallest of the watch towers, with the records laid out on a trestle table that had been used during the siege for both planning and surgery. Adam went through it line by line.
He asked questions that Teela, standing two paces back with her hand on the pommel of her sword, recognized as the questions of a man who had spent eight months learning how to ask them. He did not waste Kell's time. He did not perform. He noted three errors in the columns and accepted Kell's quiet corrections without comment.
They were halfway through the second hour of the audit when the wallbell rang.
Kell was on her feet in a single motion. Adam was on his feet half a beat behind her. Teela had her sword half-drawn before she had finished registering the sound.
"East road," Kell said. "Mounted runners. That is not the alarm for a person. That is the alarm for a thing."
They went up onto the wall.
The thing on the east road was a Stalker.
Teela had seen one Stalker in her life before, in a cage, dead, dragged in from the northern wilderness by a hunting party seven years ago. They were the bred-things, the kind of beast Skeletor had cultivated in the deep places: long-bodied, six-limbed, the color of wet bark, with a head that ended in a mouth too wide to look at directly. The one on the east road was eating a horse. The horse had belonged to a young soldier of Kell's, who was now running for the gate of the fort with the long, limping gait of a person who had been thrown and had hurt his hip.
The Stalker raised its head from the horse. It saw the running boy. It began, with a terrible unhurried efficiency, to follow him.
"Open the gate," Kell said. "Get him in. Close it behind him. Archers on the wall. Loose at my mark."
"Belay that," Adam said.
She turned.
"My lord."
"Open the gate. Get him in. Do not close it." Adam was already moving. "I will be at the gate before the Stalker is. Loose at the captain's mark, not yours. The captain has the cleaner sight line."
He was down the stairs before Kell had finished her objection, which she did not finish, because Kell was an officer of fifteen years' experience and could recognize an order. She turned to Teela. Teela was already where she needed to be. The longbow had been hers since she was sixteen. She had her arrow nocked before her boot found the platform.
Adam went out the gate at a flat run.
He did not transform.
Teela noticed this with the cold, focused part of her brain that did not have time, in the moment, to feel anything. He was running across the open ground with the Power Sword in his hand and his ordinary body inside his ordinary armor, and he was getting between the running soldier and the Stalker without any of the protections that were available to him. She drew her rifle-staff. She held it. She waited for her mark.
He reached the boy. He pushed the boy past him toward the gate. He turned to face the Stalker. The Stalker, fifteen yards out and closing, lowered its head into its charge.
Adam took his first lunge on the flat of the sword, was knocked back ten feet by the weight of it, came up to one knee, and got the point of the sword into the soft place at the base of the Stalker's foreleg as it tried to reach him with its mouth. The Stalker screamed. The Stalker reared. Adam rolled clear, came up, and only then, with the boy through the gate and the Stalker injured and the ground clear, lifted the sword and said the words.
The light hit the wall like a struck bell.
He-Man came up out of the light with the sword over his head and met the Stalker as it landed.
The fight after that was the fight Teela had seen He-Man have a dozen times before, the bright, lethal economy of it, the way he moved as if the world had been built around the geometry of his strikes. But she did not watch the fight. She watched the moment before the light.
She watched, in her memory, the moment Adam had taken the lunge on the flat of his sword without the strength of He-Man behind it. She watched the way he had gotten himself between the soldier and the Stalker before he had given himself permission to be more than a man.
He had only transformed when the boy was safe.
He had wanted to be sure the fight was his to take, not someone else's to pay for.
The Stalker died on the open ground. He-Man dragged the carcass clear of the road and went back to the gate, the sword over his shoulder, the cape catching the wind, and as he passed through the gate, the light came around him in the reverse direction, and Adam stepped out the other side of it, in the same armor, with the same nicked knuckles, slightly more out of breath.
He went straight to the soldier the Stalker had been chasing. The soldier was sitting on a step in the inner courtyard, being shouted at by a healer. Adam knelt down at eye level with him. He asked the boy his name.
The boy told him, between gasps. Adam said, "Bryn, you ran very well. The hip will be fine. Sergeant Major will tell me if it is not, and I will send a physician from the city. Drink the water the healer is telling you to drink."
He stood. He looked at Kell.
"You should write up the boy for the citation," he said. "He kept his head."
"He did."
"You should also write up the citation for me to sign, since I will be on the road."
"My lord."
He nodded to her. He went, with the bone-deep tiredness of a man who had just done two fights in one body, to the trough at the inner wall, and he washed his face, and Teela found, on the wall above him, that she was just standing there with her rifle-staff still cocked and her eyes on the back of his head.
She did not look away.
She thought, quite clearly, with all the small honesty of someone who had been to a great many funerals: I want him to look up.
He looked up.
He saw her on the wall. He raised his hand. The wave was small. It was the half-wave from the courtyard, the morning they had left. One more minute.
She lifted her own hand back. The wave was small. It was the half-wave she had given him at the gate. Take three.
She de-cocked and made safe the rifle-staff.
She did not, that night, say the word crush to herself even in the privacy of her own head, because she was an officer, and officers did not have crushes on their commanders. But she allowed, lying on her bedroll in the small room Kell had given her in the south barracks under the roof that needed mending, that the word good friend was no longer doing the work she had been asking of it.
She slept poorly, but she slept smiling.
Week Three: The Sapphire Coast
The Sapphire Coast was a long shallow curve of bright sea and white-sanded cove and old money, and Lord Marrish of Marrish Keep was the oldest of the old money, and Lord Marrish of Marrish Keep was the man Adam was going to disappoint at the third feast of the third week.
They had been at Marrish Keep for five days by then.
The first three days had been hospitality of a kind Teela had been raised to be suspicious of: too much food, too many servants, the wrong kind of attentiveness. Lord Marrish was a slender, exquisitely mannered man in his late sixties who had been the regional administrator under three different rulers, two of them Skeletor's. He had survived by being useful. He had been so useful for so long that he had begun to confuse usefulness with virtue, and he had been delighted, on the prince's arrival, to find an opportunity to demonstrate the virtue.
The opportunity was his daughter.
Her name was Marisel. She was twenty-two and entirely lovely and entirely uninterested in the proceedings, in the careful, tired way of a young woman who had been being presented to people for several years and had developed, as a defense, a small private kingdom inside her own head into which she retreated for the duration. Teela had clocked the kingdom on day one.
She had warmed to Marisel. They had had a cordial conversation about hawking on the second afternoon and had silently agreed, by the end of it, that they would have liked each other under other circumstances.
The other circumstance was Lord Marrish's plan for Marisel.
Adam handled the first three days with the patient civility of a man who had been brought up at court and then had it deepened by fifteen years away from one. He was charming to Marisel without being charming to her.
He thanked Lord Marrish for the hospitality without committing to anything beyond the hospitality. He listened, on the second night's banquet, to Lord Marrish's careful self-curating account of the fifteen years, in which Lord Marrish had been a quiet light of resistance behind a facade of compliance, and Adam had said only, "It is a complicated history, my lord. I will read the records."
This had been the moment, Teela suspected, at which Lord Marrish had decided to escalate.
The third feast was held in the keep's great hall on a Sevenday evening. The hall had been decorated in the deep coastal blue that Lord Marrish had selected, twenty years previously, as the marker of his house, and his house's many silvered candelabra had been arranged in a way that made the prince of Eternos look, from the dais, as if he had been set down inside a jewel. Lord Marrish stood and made a long, graceful toast.
The toast was, in essence, a proposal: of a coastal estate to be granted in trust to the crown prince upon a certain understanding; of a marriage alliance to be considered at the prince's discretion; of certain regional records that Lord Marrish had felt, on reflection, were no longer necessary to preserve and which he would, with the prince's blessing, have respectfully retired from the archive.
He smiled. He sat. He lifted his cup. The hall waited.
Adam set his cup down.
He looked at it for a moment, as if studying the cup, and Teela, in her place at the corner of the dais with her hand on the pommel of her sword and her face composed into the polite blank of a senior officer at a state function, watched the small shift in his shoulders that meant he had decided what he was going to do.
He stood.
"My lord Marrish."
"My prince."
"Thank you for the hospitality. It has been generous. The food has been excellent. Your daughter is a credit to your house and to herself, and I am sorry that this evening has put her in the position of having to listen to her father offer her to a guest at the table. Marisel, I apologize."
A small ripple ran the length of the hall. Marisel, at her father's left, looked down at her plate and bit, very carefully, the inside of her own cheek to keep her face still. Teela, who was looking at no one in particular, allowed herself a single small inward salute.
"My lord Marrish," Adam continued. "I will not accept the estate. I will not accept the marriage. I will not allow the records to be retired. I will read them in their entirety when I return to the city. If they exonerate you, I will say so publicly. If they do not, you will be invited to the capital to answer for them. The invitation will be polite. I expect you to accept it. I am telling you now, in front of your household, so that there is no part of this you can later claim to have misunderstood."
Lord Marrish had gone the color of the keep's stone.
"My prince. I must say. I am surprised. We have all of us lived through difficult times, and I had hoped."
"You had hoped that I had been gone long enough to be grateful."
A silence.
"It is not what I meant."
"No," Adam said, gently. "But it is what I heard." He picked up his cup. "I will sleep one more night under your roof, my lord, because it would be rude to leave before morning. We will ride at first bell. You have my thanks for the hospitality. You will have my letter from the city by the end of next month."
He drank. He sat. The hall remembered, slowly, how to be a hall.
Marisel did not look up for the rest of the meal. But as she rose to leave, at the end of the evening, she paused at Adam's chair and said, quietly, "Thank you, my prince," and Adam said, "Thank you, my lady," and that was all that was said, but Teela watched it happen, and she felt something hot and complicated and not at all officer-like rise in her throat and lodge there.
Later, on the long covered terrace that ran the seaward side of the keep, with the cat asleep at the foot of the steps and the moon a thin polite slice over the water, she stood beside Adam at the rail. He had not spoken for a quarter of an hour. He had simply been looking at the sea.
"Was that all right?" he said eventually.
"It was all right."
"I worried I was too direct."
"You were exactly direct enough. He cannot now pretend not to have understood."
"That is the part I planned. I am still worried about the daughter."
"She heard you say it."
"Yes. But she will be in this house for another six months while I am reading those records. He will be unkind to her."
"Then write to her from the capital. Send her a letter. Invite her to the autumn audience. Give her a place to come to."
He turned his head to look at her. The moonlight did a thing to his face that she did not have a category for.
"That is a very good idea."
"It is not a very good idea. It is the obvious next move. You have just not thought of it because you are tired."
"I am tired."
"Yes."
He looked back at the sea.
"I am glad you are here," he said.
He did not look at her when he said it. He said it to the sea. It was the kind of sentence one said to the sea, because the sea would not respond, and that nonresponse was what allowed the sentence to be said.
Teela replied to the sea, "I am glad I am here."
It was as much as either of them could manage that night.
She allowed herself, going back along the terrace toward the room she had been assigned in the east wing, to think the word love for one half-second only, between the second column and the third, and then she put it away. The half-second was enough. The half-second was a great deal. She had not allowed it before. She had now.
She lay awake. She heard, through the wall, Battle Cat sigh in his sleep at the foot of the door, on guard, as he had been every night since they left the city.
She had been the Captain of the Royal Guard for nine years. She was about to lose a great deal of sleep.
Week Four: The Whitehorn Pass
The Whitehorn Pass took four days. They could have done it in three, but they slowed the pace on the second day because the escort's mounts were tired, and again on the third because Adam asked. Adam had not asked about the schedule for the entire circuit. Teela noted this, gave it to him, and did not ask why.
She found out on the fourth night.
They were camped at a spring on the south side of the pass, two days from the city. The escort was around the fire on the lower terrace. Adam had taken the upper terrace, a flat stone shelf the size of a small parlor, with a clear view of the long valley below them and the road they had come in on.
He had built a small separate fire there, of his own kindling, in the small, considered way of a man who had been spending the evening alone for most of his life and had developed an aesthetic about it.
Teela climbed up to him with two tin cups of the bad wine the escort had been carrying.
"Permission to sit, my lord."
"Granted, Captain."
She sat. She gave him a cup. He took it. They drank in silence for a while.
"You have been quiet today," she said eventually.
"Have I."
"You have. You asked us to slow the pace yesterday, and you have not spoken since the noon halt. The escort thinks you have a head cold. I have told them you do not. I would like to know if I have told them correctly."
He laughed. The laugh was small.
"You have told them correctly."
"All right."
She waited. She was good at waiting. She had been an officer for long enough.
"I had a dream," he said eventually, "two nights ago. About Earth."
"Tell me."
"It was a small dream. It was about my old office. The coffee machine made a noise at ten past nine every morning, and I have not heard it in eight months, but in the dream I heard it. That was the end of the dream. I woke up, knew the sound, and missed it for about thirty seconds, which I was not expecting, because I do not miss the office. I miss the coffee machine."
He drank.
"The dream got under my collar. I have been carrying it for two days. It is not a sad dream. It is the kind of dream that asks you a question you would prefer not to have been asked. The question is something like, did you make the right trade? Not the kingdom for Earth. I would not unmake the kingdom. The trade I am asking about is smaller. It is the trade between the man and the role. Between the ordinary morning and the morning when you are going to be needed by twelve different people before lunch. Between the small good life I had on Earth, with the coffee machine and the manager named Greg and a flat with a window that looked out on a brick wall, and the very large life I have now, which I would not trade, but which sometimes I do not know how to be inside of."
He stopped.
"I do not say this to anyone," he said. "I am not asking you to fix it. I am telling you because I have been carrying it for two days, and you noticed and I would rather not lie to you about it."
Teela drank her wine. The wine was bad. The night was cold. She let the silence settle.
"I nearly left Eternos," she said, after a while.
He turned his head.
"When."
"The year after my father decided to become a full-time drunk. I had a commission offered to me, off-world. The Avian Reaches. It was a good commission. I would have taken it. I had the letter on my desk for four months. I read it every morning. I wrote three different replies. I had a friend in the postal corps who would have taken the reply off planet for me without going through the steward. I had it set up."
"Why did you not?"
"I do not know."
"Yes, you do."
She laughed. He had said it gently, without prosecution, with the small specific certainty of a man who had been on the road with her for four weeks and could now tell, without effort, when she was being polite to herself.
"I do know," she said. "I stayed because if I had gone, I would have spent the rest of my life knowing that I had left at the lowest moment of the country I had been brought up to defend. And I could not have lived inside that knowing. I would have made a competent officer for the Avian Reaches and a very unhappy person. So I stayed. I stayed every morning for a year. I had to choose it every morning. By the second year, I did not have to choose it as often. By the third, I had mostly forgotten the letter. But the year I am telling you about was a year of choosing. It was not a year of certainty. The certainty came later. The certainty was the result, not the cause."
She turned her cup in her hands.
"The trade you are asking about," she said. "Between the man and the role. I do not think it is a trade you make once. I think it is a trade you make every morning. Some mornings you wake up, and you would give the role back for a coffee machine. That is not a betrayal. That is the morning telling you that you are tired. The next morning, you wake up, and you would not give it back for the world. That is also not the truth of the matter. The truth is that the trade is daily, and the daily is what makes it true. If you only made it once, it would be a vow, and a vow without renewal is a lie people tell themselves. The trade is the renewal."
She drank.
"I learned that from a year of choosing to stay," she said. "I give it to you now, in case it is useful."
He did not speak for a long time.
The fire ate its small meal. The valley below them held its breath, the way valleys do at that hour. Down on the lower terrace, one of the escorts laughed at something, and the laugh traveled up the rock and arrived at the upper terrace softened, as a sentence said in a dream.
"Thank you," he said.
"You are welcome."
"Teela."
"Yes."
He did not say anything. He looked at her. He looked at her for the length of time it took her, in the privacy of her own chest, to decide that whatever she was going to say to him at the gate of the city tomorrow was going to have to be said well, because he was looking at her like that, and she was not going to be able to take the look back from her own memory once it had been given.
"Sleep well, my lord."
"Sleep well, Captain."
She climbed back down to her bedroll. She lay awake. She listened to Battle Cat, two paces from her bedroll, breathing in the slow, patient rhythm of a creature on watch.
She thought: tomorrow.
She slept.
The Return
They came in through the East Gate at the eighth bell, on a Firstday, with the city's banners hanging full from the wind off the river and the heralds running ahead because someone had been watching for them on the south road since dawn.
The court turned out. Teela had expected this and had warned the escort. They rode in past the assembled lords and the Queen's standard and the steward's small wave from the inner gate, and they dismounted in the great courtyard, and the Queen Marlena embraced his son, and the cat sat down on the flagstones and accepted his ear-scratch from the Queen with the dignity of a creature receiving long-owed tribute.
Teela stood at parade rest beside her horse and made her report to the steward in the brisk, competent voice of a captain who had brought her charge home in one piece. The steward took the report. The steward thanked her. The escort dispersed to their barracks. The Queen took Adam by the elbow and steered him toward the council hall, because there were three pieces of business that could not, evidently, wait another hour, and Adam went, with the small backward half-look at Teela that meant give me until evening.
She gave him a small half-nod in return.
Then she went to her own quarters, and she changed out of four weeks of road dust, and she sat on the edge of her bed for fifteen minutes, and she did not cry. She was very competent about not crying. She had a great deal of practice.
She had been the Captain of the Royal Guard for nine years. She knew how to wait until evening.
She did not wait until evening.
She intercepted him in the south corridor at the fourth bell of the afternoon, between the second piece of business and the third, when the Queen had released him for ten minutes to drink something, and Adam had been walking toward the small antechamber where the steward kept the water.
"My lord."
"Captain."
"A moment, if I may."
"You may." He stopped. He had been polite about stopping. He had stopped fully, the way one did when a person one had been on the road with for four weeks asked for a moment in a corridor. "Here. Or somewhere."
"Here is fine. I will be brief. I have rehearsed."
He looked at her.
"All right."
She breathed in once. The breath was steady. She had decided, on the long ride down through the Whitehorn at dawn, that she was going to do this the way an officer did things. Not because it was the kind of moment that demanded officer behavior. Because she was an officer, and the officer was the part of her that knew how to walk into a room without flinching, and she was going to use it tonight because she did not have anything else as well-trained.
"My lord. Eight months ago, at the rebuild of the south wall, I told the steward that you were a good friend of mine. I told him because I had decided that good friend was the word I was going to use for you, both to him and to myself, until I was sure of something else. I have been using it since. It has been a serviceable word. I am telling you because I want you to know that the word was deliberate."
"All right."
"On the road, I stopped being able to use it. I want you to know that as well. I am not going to tell you which day. I will not tell you which week. I will tell you, in case it matters to either of us, that there were four moments in four weeks that I will not be forgetting, and after the fourth, I knew I would have to come and tell you this when we got home. I have come to tell you this. We are home."
She had thought, in her rehearsal, that she would lose her nerve at this point. She had not. She had the rest of it ready.
"I am in love with you, my lord. I would like, if it is at all welcome to you, to be courted by you. Properly, with the formalities. Slowly. Openly. I do not require an answer in this corridor. I require only that you know that this is what I have come to say, and that I have said it as well as I could find a way to say it. That is all."
She stood still.
He had not moved. He had been watching her face the entire time. His own face had done a thing during her second sentence that she had not been able to read at the time, and she was unable to read now, because the readings she had available all meant different things, and only one of them was bearable.
He said, "Teela."
"My lord."
"Take a step closer."
She took a step closer.
"Closer."
She took another step.
"All right." He let out a breath. The breath was the breath of a man who had been holding it, by her count, since approximately the second sentence of her rehearsal. "Teela, I have been writing a letter to you in my head every night for the last three weeks. The letter has been getting longer. I was going to give you a folded copy of it when we reached the city. I had decided to do it tomorrow morning in the courtyard, because if I did it tonight, I would not sleep, and I have been needing sleep. You have ruined the plan. I am grateful."
"Adam."
"I am in love with you. I have been for some time. I do not know how long. I think I was already in love with you when I came back from Earth, saw you standing on the council steps, and did not know how to greet you without making you uncomfortable. The not knowing how to greet you has been the shape of the eight months. I have been calling you my good friend as well. I have been calling you that to my mother. My mother has been laughing at me about it for six months. She will be unbearable tonight."
Teela laughed. The laugh was small. It cracked a little at the edges.
"Yes to the courting," he said. "Yes to the slowly. Yes to the openly. Yes to all of it. May I kiss you in this corridor, or shall we be more decorous about it?"
"You may kiss me in this corridor."
He kissed her in the corridor.
It was a quiet kiss, by any reasonable measure. He was dust-streaked still in the places his collar had not reached, and she could smell on him the four weeks they had been carrying, and his hand came up to the back of her neck with the small, considered care of a man who had been carrying that gesture in his head, also, for some time. The kiss was not long.
It did not need to be. It was the punctuation at the end of a sentence that had been about to run on for the rest of their lives, and she was grateful, in the small, careful way one was grateful for punctuation, for the period.
He drew back. He rested his forehead on hers. He breathed.
"I am due in council in three minutes."
"I am aware."
"I will be terrible in council. I will say yes to everything. They will get away with murder."
"I will sit in on the council. I will say no on your behalf."
"That is a very good plan."
"It is the obvious next move. You have not thought of it because you are happy."
He laughed. He kissed her once more, briefly, the kind of kiss that was a promise rather than a sentence. He went to the council. She walked, with the long, careful step of a captain who was not going to allow her step to broadcast anything to the corridor, back to her quarters to change into something not road-stained, because she was, by the Queen’s standing order, entitled to be present at any council the prince attended, and she was going to attend.
In the courtyard, the Queen, who had been told the news by a passing kitchen maid who had been told the news by a passing under-steward who had seen the corridor from the south gallery and had run, paid Duncan twenty crowns, and did not bother to hide the fact that she had been delighted to lose the bet.