The crystal floor was cool against Elowen's bare shoulder, and she was in no particular hurry to move off it.
She lay half-curled on her side where she'd finally stopped moving, one arm thrown loose over her head, the other pressed flat against her stomach as though she could hold the last of the warmth in by sheer force of will. Her skirt -- pale blue silk, the kind that had been cut generously enough to move well when she danced, back when dancing had been the sort of thing court expected of her -- had ridden up and twisted until it no longer covered much of anything below her hip, and she hadn't yet worked up the energy to fix it. A thin, pale trail glistened faintly along the inside of one thigh, evidence of exactly how thoroughly her evening had gone, cooling now against her skin in the unhurried air of the crystal hall. Her whole lower body carried that particular loose, well-used heaviness that comes only from having given everything there was to give and then, somehow, having found a little more to give besides.
Her hair -- a warm chestnut brown that had been elaborately pinned that morning by hands more patient than her own -- had come apart entirely, spilling in loose, tangled waves across the floor and over her face, and every few seconds her breath stirred a few loose strands without her noticing. It still came unevenly, catching every so often the way breath does when a body hasn't quite finished deciding it's allowed to slow back down.
She was breathing like she'd run somewhere. She hadn't run anywhere. That was, she thought hazily, rather the point of the whole exercise.
She let her eyes stay closed a while longer, listening to the hall around her without bothering to look at it -- the low murmur of a dozen other conversations winding down into the same pleasant exhaustion she currently occupied, the occasional soft laugh, the particular quality of quiet that settles over a room once everyone in it has, in one way or another, gotten exactly what they came for. Somewhere further off, she could hear the faint clink of someone righting a knocked-over cup. Closer, the soft creak of a cushion taking someone else's weight. It was, she thought, a remarkably domestic sort of aftermath for an evening that had begun with quite so much shouting and laughing and at least one memorable moment involving an entire abandoned tray of fruit.
Her skin still hummed, faintly, in the specific aftershock way that took its own sweet time fading -- little pulses of warmth surfacing and subsiding at random, in her wrists, along her collarbone, low in her stomach, as though her whole body were still deciding, one small piece at a time, that the evening had actually concluded. She had learned, over the centuries she'd now spent existing in one form or another, that there was no rushing this part. You simply had to lie still and let it finish deciding on its own schedule.
"Are you dead," said a voice above her, fond and entirely unworried, "or just being dramatic."
"Both," Elowen said, without opening her eyes. "I contain multitudes."
A soft laugh, and then hands -- careful, practiced, unbothered by the state of her -- helping her sit upright, one arm braced beneath her shoulders. Elowen finally opened her eyes and found herself looking up into a familiar face: sharp-boned, freckled across the nose in a way that had never once faded no matter how many centuries passed, dark red hair cropped close and practical, the kind of haircut a person chose when they'd once needed to move fast and never quite unlearned the habit. Wren's eyes were a pale, unremarkable brown that had somehow always managed to be the most attentive pair of eyes in any room Elowen had ever stood in -- the eyes of someone who had spent a whole life watching for danger before anyone else in the room noticed it coming, and had never fully set the habit down even here, in a world where nothing dangerous was left to watch for.
She was dressed, as always, in something plain and practical -- a simple wrapped tunic the color of dark moss, sleeves pushed up past her elbows, the kind of clothing a person chose when she expected to be useful rather than admired, though admiring her had never actually required much cooperation on her part. There was a lean, coiled strength to her, visible even at rest, the specific quality of someone whose body had once been a weapon and had simply never quite stopped being one, whatever softer purposes it had since been put to. Her forearms, bare below the pushed-up sleeves, carried the faint, pale traces of old scars centuries hadn't fully erased -- a life's worth of standing between Elowen and whatever might have hurt her, written in small silver lines Elowen had long since stopped noticing except in moments exactly like this one, catching the crystal light at an angle that made them briefly visible again.
Wren herself was not, Elowen noted with the specific, unbothered clarity of the thoroughly spent, in a much more composed state. Her own clothing sat slightly askew at one shoulder, and there was a flush along her collarbone that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with anticipation, her weight shifting from foot to foot in the small, restless way Elowen had learned, over centuries of shared history, to recognize instantly. Her breathing had gone a little quick and shallow, the specific breathless quality of someone standing right at the edge of wanting something badly enough that patience had become a genuine effort rather than a natural state. Her eyes kept flicking, helplessly, toward the far side of the hall, toward the tall dark-haired woman standing near the windows, toward the man beside her -- and every time they did, Wren's whole body seemed to lean a fraction of an inch in that direction, like a compass needle that hadn't yet been given permission to finish turning.
"You're doing the leg thing," Elowen said, sitting up fully now, letting Wren's steadying hand fall away.
"I don't know what you mean."
"You do. You've been doing it since before you even got me sitting up. You're practically vibrating." Elowen looked her up, down, and up again, taking in the whole restless, coiled shape of her, and sighed -- a long, theatrical sigh that fooled absolutely no one, least of all herself. She reached out and patted Wren's knee, the exact gesture her own mother used to give her as a child when granting some especially generous permission. "Go on, then."
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Wren didn't pretend not to understand.
"You're sure," she said, already halfway to standing, which told Elowen everything she needed to know about how sure Wren actually believed the question needed to be.
"I'm sure. I'm entirely, completely done being useful to anyone for at least the next hour. Possibly the rest of the night. Possibly the rest of the week." Elowen waved a hand in the vague direction of the rest of the hall, an imperious little gesture worn smooth from centuries of practice, even now, even flat on a crystal floor with her skirt in disarray. "Go, before you injure yourself standing there vibrating."
"You could come with me," Wren offered, though even as she said it her feet were already carrying her backward, already committed to the direction her whole body had been leaning for the last several minutes.
"I could not. I have given, this evening, quite literally everything I currently possess to give. There is nothing left in me. I am an empty vessel. I am a husk." Elowen let her head fall back dramatically against the low couch behind her. "Go and be happy, and don't you dare look guilty about it, or I will actually be cross with you, rather than pretending to be."
That, finally, got a real laugh out of Wren -- quick and warm, the sound of centuries of easy familiarity behind it -- and then she was moving, quick and light-footed across the glowing floor, weaving between scattered cushions and low tables and at least one abandoned game of painted stones, toward a tall, severe-looking woman standing near one of the far windows: dark hair pulled back with unforgiving precision, a bearing that suggested command even at rest, the particular cold composure of someone who had once made entire courts fall silent by walking into them.
Eremos was with her. Elowen could see him from here, patient and unhurried the way he always was, one hand resting at the small of the tall woman's back, murmuring something too low to carry across the hall. The tall woman's shoulders, Elowen noticed, had softened slightly since Elowen had last looked over -- a small, private unclenching that spoke of whatever quiet reassurance he'd just offered her.
"Traitor," Elowen called after Wren, without any real heat in it.
Wren didn't even turn around. She simply lifted one hand over her shoulder in a lazy, cheerful wave, and kept walking, and Elowen watched her go with an expression that was trying very hard to be wounded and failing rather badly.
She stayed like that a while, propped against the couch, watching Wren's approach reach its destination -- watching the tall woman's eyes flick toward the new arrival with a flicker of surprise, then something warmer, an easy, unhurried welcome extended without any visible territorial edge to it at all, as though there were simply room enough in the moment for one more. Eremos said something that made both women laugh, and the small tight knot that had briefly formed in Elowen's chest at the sight of it loosened, slowly, into something closer to fondness than jealousy.
She let her head fall back against the low couch behind her, staring up at the crystal ceiling that dissolved somewhere far overhead into its own soft light, and allowed herself, finally, the small private luxury of admitting how badly she had misjudged all of this.
She had thought, in the very beginning -- and she could laugh at herself for it now, mostly -- that this would work the way it had always worked at home. Her father had kept concubines, the way his father had, the way that father's father had before him: a careful, ranked arrangement, favorites shifting with mood and politics and the occasional genuine affection, but always, underneath everything, a hierarchy. Someone at the top. Someone whose place was fixed, understood, deferred to by everyone beneath her. She remembered watching, as a girl, the elaborate court dance of it -- who was seated nearest her father at which feast, whose child received which honor, the whole intricate machinery of status expressed through a thousand small, deliberate gestures that everyone in that world had been fluent in since birth.
She had assumed, without ever quite examining the assumption closely enough to notice how flimsy it was, that she would simply slot into the top of a similar arrangement here. She was a princess, after all -- had been a princess, for centuries, of a continent that answered to her bloodline the way tides answered to the moon. Surely that counted for something. Surely, she had thought, with the specific unexamined certainty of someone who had never once had to fight for a place at any table in her entire life, that same weight would translate here, into this new and strange arrangement of a man and the many women who loved him.
It had taken her embarrassingly long to understand that it counted for nothing at all, in the specific, generous, maddening economy Eremos actually ran his life by. He didn't measure out his time by rank, or by history, or by whose bloodline had once commanded the loyalty of a dozen kingdoms. He gave it, she'd come to understand, the way water finds the lowest point in a room -- toward whoever needed it most, in whatever shape that need happened to take that day. Emotional. Physical. The particular ache of someone who'd gone too long feeling unseen. He didn't rank them. He simply noticed them, one at a time, as thoroughly as any single person could be noticed, and gave each of them exactly what that noticing revealed they needed.
She remembered, with a wince that hadn't entirely faded even now, the first time she'd tried to assert some version of precedence -- some offhand comment about how things were done at home, some assumption that her turn, her needs, ought naturally to come first. He hadn't argued with her. He hadn't even seemed offended. He had simply looked at her with a patience so total it had felt, in the moment, almost like a correction sharper than any argument could have been, and asked her, gently, whether she'd noticed that Vesalia had gone three days without speaking to anyone, or that one of the newer arrivals hadn't yet worked up the courage to ask for anything at all. She hadn't had an answer for that. She still didn't, not really, except that she had gone quietly and thoroughly red, and had never tried to assert precedence again.
And she -- self-satisfied, certain of her own place, entirely too used to being the center of every room she'd ever walked into -- had brought her own dearest friends here, into this exact arrangement, without once stopping to consider what that might actually mean once they, too, discovered what it felt like to be noticed that thoroughly by someone who had never once made them feel like they were competing for anything at all.
It was, she thought, watching Wren's retreating back with a complicated knot of feeling lodged somewhere beneath her ribs, entirely her own fault. And she couldn't decide, lying there on the crystal floor with her skirt still twisted and her hair a ruin around her shoulders, whether that made it better or considerably worse.