The guest chamber's single lamp had burned low enough that Kael had let himself stop pretending he intended to put it out and sleep properly, and he lay instead with his boots off and his shirt half unlaced, listening to a palace settle into its own nighttime rhythm around him: a distant clatter of kitchen crockery being scrubbed for tomorrow's feast, a patrol's unhurried boots on stone somewhere below the window, the specific, layered quiet of a building large enough to hold a hundred separate lives without any of them quite touching. His whole body still carried the day's cost in it, the healing chant's drain sitting behind his ribs the way it always did after real use, an honest debt paid in full and not yet fully collected on, and he found himself turning over Elandrie's odd, unguarded relief on the staircase with the same patient attention he'd give an unfamiliar verb ending, certain it meant something and equally certain he didn't yet have enough of the surrounding grammar to translate it safely.
Elandrie did not knock so much as announce her arrival through the door itself, three short raps delivered with the unhurried confidence of a woman who had never once in her life needed to consider whether she was welcome somewhere before entering it, and Kael, still half dressed in the borrowed shirt a steward had left folded at the foot of his bed, had barely called out before the latch gave and she stepped through it anyway.
"You said you wanted to know," she said, closing the door behind her with a care that told him she'd thought about the closing more than the opening, "which of my reasons was the true one. I've decided I'd rather show you than make you sit through another version of me being clever about it."
"It's the middle of the night," Kael said, which was true, and also not remotely an objection, and he heard how little conviction the words carried even as he said them.
"It is," Elandrie agreed, crossing to the room's single chair and settling into it with the unbothered ease of someone who had clearly decided the conversation was happening whether the hour approved of it or not. The lamp on the table between them threw long, restless shadows up the wall behind her, catching gold in hair she'd let down out of its earlier court arrangement, and her face, stripped of the playful performance she'd worn on the staircase that afternoon, looked considerably younger and considerably more tired than the princess he'd met a few hours earlier. "I find that most true things arrive at inconvenient hours. I've stopped waiting for the convenient ones. They don't come."
Kael sat on the edge of the bed, keeping a careful, deliberate distance between them that had less to do with propriety than with the specific wariness of a man who had spent three months learning exactly how much a room's apparent safety could lie to him. "Then tell me your reason."
"I know you're lying," Elandrie said, no preamble at all, watching his face with the same quick, assessing attention she'd turned on him at the base of the staircase. "About who you are. Not the healing. I don't doubt the healing, I watched what it did to my brother's arm with my own eyes and no illusion built by any mage I've ever met could counterfeit that kind of joy on his face afterward. I mean the name. The face. Something underneath both of them that doesn't match what you're currently showing the rest of this palace."
He kept his own expression carefully still, the discipline three months at Blackmere had built into him arriving without needing to be summoned, and felt, even as he did it, the specific exhaustion of a man who had genuinely hoped, for one evening, to be done lying to someone. "That's a serious accusation to bring into a stranger's room at this hour."
"It isn't an accusation," she said. "I don't actually care what you're hiding, or why, not tonight, not in the way that word usually implies caring. I have a secret of my own considerably larger than whatever you're carrying, and I've found, over the years, that the people worth trusting with a large secret are almost never the ones who don't have any of their own." She studied him a long moment, something behind her eyes weighing a decision she'd clearly already half made before she ever crossed the corridor to find him. "I have the power of necromancy, Kael. I can speak to the dead. I have been able to since I was a child, and it is the reason I don't have many friends in this palace, and the reason most of the ones I do have keep a careful, polite distance from me that they'd never admit to keeping on purpose."
The lamp's flame guttered once in a draft neither of them had caused, and Kael found himself, for a long moment, simply looking at her, turning the sentence over with the same instinct he gave any piece of language he hadn't fully translated yet, testing it for the seams a lie usually left behind and finding, to his mild surprise, none at all. "You're not joking," he said finally.
"I have never once joked about this," Elandrie said, something raw moving under the words despite how evenly she kept her voice. "It isn't the sort of thing a person jokes about, once they understand what it actually costs to carry. I don't choose who answers when I reach for them. I don't choose what they tell me, or when they decide to stop talking, or whether what they say is even true once I've heard it. I only know that the dead do not lie the way the living do, because they've generally run out of anything left to gain by it." She reached up and touched the small locket she wore at her throat, a habitual gesture that looked, to Kael's practiced eye, considerably older than the necklace itself. "My real mother speaks to me. Has, since I was small enough that I thought every child heard a voice like hers and simply didn't mention it. Queen Solara isn't my mother. She married my father after my true mother died, and she has never once let me forget the difference, not out of cruelty exactly, only out of a coldness that never warmed regardless of how many years passed."