The gate

Lysa finds me before I find Riven.

She comes from the east wing direction in pale green with her hair pinned up, and she closes the distance between us quickly and takes my hands in hers before I can do anything with my own face. Her grip is warm and tight and exactly the grip I have known since we were girls. It is so familiar that it makes my chest hurt.

"Aelara." My name in her voice, soft and concerned. "Are you alright? That must have been terrifying."

"I am fine," I say.

Her eyes stay on mine. Reading. Lysa has always been good at reading people. It is one of the things I spent years calling intuition when it was something else entirely.

"I was so surprised," she says. "Everyone was. I just want to hear it from you. That you are happy. That is what you truly want."

She means: tell me something I can use. Tell me whether the plan is broken or just delayed.

I know that now. I did not know it when she was doing this to me every other day of my life, but I know it standing here holding her hands while she holds mine, and the worst part is that I can still feel how much I want to believe she means exactly what she is saying. How much easier everything would be if she did.

"I am very happy," I say. "Truly."

Her smile goes a fraction wider. Her grip on my hands stays exactly the same when it should loosen, and that is what gives her away. Good news makes people's hands go soft. Hers stay tight.

"Good," she says. "That is genuinely all I wanted to hear."

She lets go and walks back toward the east wing.

I watch her go for three seconds. Then I turn and walk toward the stables.

* * *

Riven is near the eastern gate watching two horses being walked by a groom, and he looks like a man who found the most sensible thing to do with an unsettled afternoon and is doing it without apology.

He hears me coming and turns. He does not look surprised to see me, which is its own small piece of information.

I stop a few feet away and I say it directly, because this is not a moment for easing in.

"What I said today. I meant it. It was not an impulse and I am not going to take it back."

He looks at me. "Why me," he says. Not a question with an upward note. A flat, honest ask.

"Because you have always shown up," I say. "Not when it looked good, not when anyone was watching, not when there was anything in it for you. Every time something was hard, you were there. You pulled me out of the river when I was twelve and never told a soul. You stood between those boys and me from the court when I was fifteen and walked away like it was already forgotten. You sat outside my door all night the morning my mother died and you never knocked once, because you understood that what I needed was to know someone was there, not to have someone come in." I stop and hold his eyes. "Nine years of that. And I never once asked myself what it was. I am asking now. I know what it is now."

He is quiet. The horses reach the far end of the path and turn. The groom says something soft to them. The afternoon just keeps going around us.

"You were in love with Dray yesterday," Riven says. Flat. Not cruel. Just honest, placing it down where we can both see it.

"Yesterday I thought I was," I say. "I understand now that those are very different things."

He is quiet for a long moment. His jaw shifts slightly. He turns to the horses, then back to me.

"What changed between yesterday and today?"

My father asked me this. Caelan asked me this. And now Riven, and he is the one I least want to answer with something less than the full truth.

"I understood something," I say. "About what I had been choosing and what I had been missing. I know forty minutes does not sound like enough time. It was enough for me."

He is quiet again. Not uncomfortable quiet. Riven's quiet has never been uncomfortable. It is just him actually thinking, and I have learned today not to rush it.

"I am not going to pretend I understand this," he says finally. "I am also not going to pretend I have no interest in finding out. Both of those things would be dishonest, and I do not do dishonest."

"I know," I say. In nine years that is maybe the clearest thing I have ever known about him.

"Give me time."

"As much as you need."

He nods once. "I will come to the wedding. Not as a decision. As a starting place."

That is more than I came here expecting and I do not reach for anything beyond it.

I turn to go. Then I stop.

"You never told anyone," I say. "About the river. When we were twelve."

A pause. He looks at me. "You asked me not to."

"I was embarrassed."

"I know," he says. "You were also twelve and you had just swallowed half a river. It was not worth making worse." He pauses. "I remembered it, though. I kept it."

I look at him standing there with the horses moving slowly at the far end of the path and the afternoon light coming down through the gate, and I think: nine years. Nine years of this man and I spent every one of them looking in the wrong direction.

I leave him at the gate.

I am halfway back across the courtyard when I hear the running footsteps.

I turn.

One of my father's attendants, breathing hard, his face holding the news before his mouth does.

"My lady. The king. The physician has been called."

The courtyard drops out from under me.

"How urgent," I say.

His face holds the news before his mouth does. It is the face people make when theye Theres no gentle version.

"Now, my lady," he says.