Chapter 5: Two Rooms, One Bath, a Locked Tower

They ran. Through the alcove's hidden door, down a spiral stair that smelled of damp and rosemary, along a corridor of cracked tiles that Elowen had last walked as a girl of nineteen, carrying her first satchel of royal herbs. The gold thread hummed between their wrists the whole way, and every time one of them stumbled, the other felt it in their own bones.

The tower was the old apothecary wing, abandoned since her dismissal. The envoy broke the lock with a charm and a sharp word, and they tumbled through the door into a round stone room hung with dust and cobwebs and the ghosts of drying lavender. Two chambers opened off it, each with a narrow bed, and between them a tiled alcove holding a copper tub, an iron stove, and a rusted pump that coughed, then, miraculously, ran.

"Bathe first," the envoy said, with the stiff courtesy of a man trying very hard not to look at anything. "You are shivering. There is wood for the stove. I will keep watch on the stair." He turned his back with a deliberate, almost comic dignity. The thread between them went slack for a moment, then tightened again, and Elowen understood that he was only a few steps away and that he was standing very, very still.

She heated the water herself. It took an hour, and a good deal of swearing, and by the end she was glad of the steam and the silence. Through the half-open door she could hear him pacing, and once she heard him laugh, a short surprised sound, as if something in the old shelves had amused him. The thread carried that laughter into her chest like a spark into dry kindling.

When she emerged, wrapped in a blanket from the cupboard and smelling of old lavender, he was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, the mask finally set beside him. He did not turn his head. "I will not look," he said. "I would like you to know that I want to, and that I will not." The honesty of it undid her more thoroughly than any boldness could have. She sat down on the far side of the stove, close enough that the thread lay between them like a loose string on a harp.

They talked until the stove burned low: of her dismissal, of his country, of the long grief that had made him a messenger rather than a man. And near dawn, when he finally slept, she crept to the window and saw torches gathering in the courtyard below, forming a ring around the foot of the tower. Behind her, the door they had come through swung shut with no hand upon it, and every lock along its edge turned, one by one, from the outside.

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