The Royal Libraries pretended to be quiet. They weren’t. Quiet here was sound with its hair smoothed down: a lamp’s low whisper, the skim of vellum, the House clearing its throat when a hinge forgot itself.

  Tris rolled a cart through the Eastern Room with the expression of a woman who might at any moment forget why she’d come in. It was a good act. People stepped aside for foolish charm. They did not notice the three different lists she kept in her head, the order she laid over chaos with two fingers and a hum.

  “Librarian,” Keeper Thalen said, not looking up from a memorandum that already feared him. “Addendum on the drought years.”

  “Lovely,” she chirped, as if famine read like romance. “Shall I garnish it with graphs?”

  “Please don’t.”

  She floated. A courtier reached to stop her with a glove and a question sharpened for sport. She forgot to see him. The glove drifted back where it belonged.

  The Fourth Prince arrived the way decent weather does—seen more by absence of trouble than by thunder. Silver hair combed to a respectable rebellion; red eyes softened for public safety. He carried a folio as if it were heavy. It wasn’t. He had the forearms of a man who liked to climb where he wasn’t supposed to.

  “Librarian,” he said with the polished sincerity that made old ladies adopt him on sight. “If I were foolish enough to lose the senator who names himself like a sneeze…?”

  She didn’t look up from the cart. “Bless you. Third shelf, right bay, sneeze with an S, corruption with a C.”

  He laughed, quick and unguarded. Someone looked to see what the harmless prince found amusing. Tamryn felt the gaze and gentled himself a degree, turning the ring on his finger once before letting it rest. A man could be warm and still count doors.

  Tris set the addendum in front of Queen Ilyra with a bow that would have pleased a stricter monarch. The queen was morning-cool: eyes like weighed coin, mouth composed to neutral. She didn’t thank people when duty was the point.

  “Your Majesty,” Tris said, bell-bright and entirely ignorable.

  “Mm,” Ilyra said, which in queen meant proceed.

  A lamp fussed against a draft. At the door, the guard shifted his stance and the hinge remembered itself. The House approved. Tris wrote that down in her head under useful.

  Prince Tamryn pretended to read what Thalen was reading. He did it well. When Tris slid a paperweight precisely where the folio tried to lift, he breathed on that beat, like a man who’d learned the room’s rhythm and set himself to it.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Librarian,” he said later, softer, near a shelf that pretended to mind its own business. “If I were trying to look intelligent from a distance, which column would I frown at?”

  “The one that doesn’t matter,” she said, shelving a nothing book in a place only she could find. “Counting helps. Move your lips. People assume genius when men look busy.”

  Tamryn put on his best serious face and mouthed numbers at an index with theatrical dedication. It was idiotic. It was charming. Tris’s mouth did the inconvenient thing where it wanted to smile. She corrected it to something that could pass for fond exasperation.

  A young minister fussed with a stack of petitions. Tamryn’s hand was suddenly there, steadying the top without fanfare, letting the man keep his dignity. Not for show. No one important was looking.

  “Thank you, Your Highness,” the minister muttered, surprised.

  “Of course,” Tamryn said, easy as soup.

  Tris watched. It is not difficult to love people who are kind when it costs them nothing. The trick is to see where they aim their kindness when it might.

  “Librarian,” Thalen said, from five paces away, somehow seeing everything and nothing in the same glance. “The addendum behaves.”

  “Because I asked nicely,” she said.

  “That would be novel.”

  She rolled her cart on. She let the wheel squeak at the bad corner and kicked it just hard enough to shame it into silence. The House kept a tally of who remembered where it hurt.

  A lady with bright perfume and brighter opinion leaned near Tamryn and said, just warm enough to burn, “The librarian does enjoy being looked at.”

  Tamryn smiled in that bland, court-safe way that hid teeth. “Everyone enjoys being looked at when they’ve done good work,” he said, so sincerely it didn’t sound like defense.

  Tris didn’t turn her head. She shelved a volume that wasn’t heavy and made it look like it was. She made it look effortless when it mattered and clumsy when it didn’t, and people let her stand where she wanted to stand.

  Later, near the service stair where light turns kind, he arrived with a folio he didn’t need help carrying.

  “Thank you,” he said, and it wasn’t about the folio.

  “For what?” she asked, airy.

  “For knowing which column to frown at,” he said, matching her tone. He did not touch her. He did not ask for anything. He stood one step down so they were eye-level and let himself be ordinary in her weather for exactly three breaths.

  “Try not to trip,” she said, because it pleased her to be mean when it wasn’t cruel.

  “If I do,” he said, deadpan, “don’t catch me.”

  She snorted, unladylike. He smiled like a man who’d earned something and wasn’t sure what to do with it yet.

  The afternoon wore itself out. Lamps were lit. The House remembered to stop creaking at the wrong moments. Tris checked the bad hinge with a palm, tapped once, and felt it settle. Tamryn pretended not to see her being competent and respected the pretense.

  At closing, she pushed her empty cart back through rooms that trusted her. Tamryn stood in an archway talking to a gardener about quince with utter seriousness, as if quince were a matter of state. He didn’t look at her. She didn’t look at him. Both of them noticed anyway.

  Outside, the palace changed its clothes for evening. Somewhere else, the sort of people who liked tilting rooms toward themselves sharpened questions for sport. Inside, the Libraries stacked their weather neatly and put it on a shelf.

  Nothing happened.

  That’s the sort of day this was.

  And tomorrow there would be a ball.