˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
The Queen walked quickly when she had somewhere to be, and those who followed her learned to match her pace or fall behind and miss things.
Eurydice Hughes had never fallen behind in her life.
They moved through the upper corridor of the palace together, the three of them: Queen Lexi ahead, Alexis Asterios a precise half step behind her right shoulder, and Eurydice behind Alexis, as protocol placed her. The cloudstone walls on either side were hung with tapestries depicting the great moments of Nephorian history rendered in thread of gold and silver and deep violet: Brontes calling down the first storm, the founding of the kingdom on its bed of high cumulus, the repelling of the Outcast invasion four centuries past. Eurydice had walked this corridor ten thousand times. She had long since stopped seeing the tapestries. She saw them now.
Her father's voice was still in her head.
Four hundred years. They have left us in peace.
She pushed it aside. She was good at pushing things aside. It was, she had come to understand, one of the more essential skills a princess could develop.
The Queen stopped before the doors of her private receiving room, turned, and looked at them both with the particular attention she reserved for moments she considered important. In the council chamber, her mother's gaze swept a room. Here, in the narrower space of the corridor, it settled. There was a difference.
"The matter of the Outcasts is not finished," Queen Lexi said. Her voice had lost the measured formality of the council chamber. What remained was quieter and, somehow, more serious. "Kostas will depart within the fortnight. Before he does, I want full intelligence briefs prepared: everything we know of Outcast settlement patterns, power distributions, known lineage lines. Alexis, you will coordinate with the archive division."
"Yes, Your Majesty," Alexis said.
"Eurydice." Her mother's eyes moved to her. "You will review the military contingency documents from the last campaign. Not to act on them. To understand them. A princess who cannot read a campaign plan is a princess who can be surprised, and I will not have you surprised."
"I understand," Eurydice said.
Her mother held her gaze for a moment longer, as though measuring something she did not name. Then she turned, pushed open the doors to her receiving room, and was gone.
The doors closed. The corridor was quiet.
Eurydice stood still for a moment. Beside her, Alexis Asterios did not move either, and there was something in her stillness that was different from her usual composed quiet. Alexis was always still. This stillness had a quality to it, a texture, the way water is still differently just before it moves.
Eurydice looked at her.
Alexis was looking at the closed doors.
"Alexis," Eurydice said.
"Your Highness."
"That is not what I meant."
A beat of silence. In all the years Eurydice had known Alexis Asterios, appointed to her position before either of them had quite finished growing up, she had learned to read her the way one learns to read weather: not by what was said, but by the small signs, the particular arrangements of what was held back. Alexis touched the aquamarine pendant at her throat now, a brief and automatic gesture, the way a person checks that something important is still where they left it.
Eurydice waited.
"The intelligence briefs," Alexis said at last, carefully, "will require significant archival research. The most complete records of Outcast settlement patterns date to the founding era." She paused. "The archive division has not conducted a thorough review of the founding era materials in quite some time."
It was said with perfect neutrality. It contained, Eurydice thought, at least three things that were not being said.
"How long?" Eurydice asked.
"The review?" Alexis considered this with the gravity she applied to everything. "Several weeks, I would imagine. The founding era materials are not the most accessible part of the archive. Some sections have not been formally catalogued in living memory."
"I see," Eurydice said. She did not entirely see. But she had the feeling, precise and inexplicable, that she was being told something she would need later, delivered in the only way Alexis Asterios ever delivered anything she was not certain was safe to say plainly.
She filed it away. She was good at filing things away.
They began walking in the direction of their respective quarters, the corridor opening into a wider gallery that looked out over the inner courtyard of the palace. Below, the cloudstone gardens were arranged in the formal geometric patterns that Nephorian architecture favoured: symmetrical, deliberate, every element in its proper place. Eurydice had played in those gardens as a child. She remembered thinking then that the rigid, sculpted hedgerows were very beautiful, and wondering distantly why anyone would choose to shape a living thing into a form it had not chosen for itself.
She had not wondered that in years.
"May I ask you something?" she said.
"Always, Your Highness."
"When the report was read. The spy's report, about the sighting in Thessaloniki." She kept her voice even. "You were very quiet."
Alexis said nothing for a moment. They walked together, their footsteps steady on the pale cloudstone floor.
"I am often quiet in council meetings," Alexis said. "It is my role to observe and advise. The council chamber is not the appropriate place for my personal thoughts on a matter."
"And what is the appropriate place?"
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Here, perhaps," Alexis said quietly. "If you are asking."
Eurydice looked at her. Alexis was looking ahead, her profile composed and still, the aquamarine pendant catching the afternoon light from the gallery windows.
"I am asking," Eurydice said.
Alexis exhaled, very softly. It was, from her, the equivalent of a great unburdening.
"The Outcasts have not made any aggressive movement in four centuries," she said. "No raids, no incursions, no communications of any hostile nature. The spy report confirms their existence and their location. It does not confirm intent." She paused. "Her Majesty speaks of eradication as though intent has already been established. I find myself wondering on what evidence that conclusion rests."
Eurydice was quiet.
"My father said something similar," she said at last.
"His Majesty often speaks sense," Alexis said, and then added, with the precision of someone choosing their words with great care: "in private."
The implication sat between them, gentle and sharp at once. Eurydice understood it. Her father spoke sense in private because in public his sense was overridden, dismissed, absorbed into the greater machinery of her mother's will. He had been speaking sense in private for years. Nothing had changed.
They had reached the junction in the corridor where their paths divided, Alexis toward the advisor's offices, Eurydice toward the royal wing. They stopped. Outside the tall windows at the junction's end, the sky above Nephoria had deepened into the rich amber and rose of late afternoon, the clouds below the kingdom's edge burning gold where the light struck them.
It was beautiful. Nephoria was almost always beautiful. Eurydice had grown up understanding that beauty and safety were the same thing, that the magnificent ordered perfection of the kingdom was evidence of its rightness, its strength, its worthiness to endure. She still believed that.
She looked at Alexis.
"If the archival review turns up something unexpected," she said, "in the founding era materials. You will tell me."
Alexis met her eyes. There was something in them, clear and steady and just barely something else, the way deep water looks clear until you understand how deep it actually goes.
"Of course, Your Highness," she said. "That would be my duty."
She gave a small, precise bow, turned, and walked in the direction of the offices. Her footsteps were quiet and even on the cloudstone, and she did not look back.
Eurydice stood at the junction of the corridor for a moment longer. She looked at the golden clouds beyond the window. She thought about founding era materials that had not been catalogued in living memory. She thought about her father's voice and her mother's certainty and the word eradication and the way Alexis had touched her pendant.
She thought about the space between what people said and what they meant, and how long she had lived inside that space without quite naming it.
Then she straightened her shoulders and walked in the direction of the royal wing, and the afternoon light fell long and golden through the windows behind her, and the clouds of Nephoria burned beneath her feet like something that did not yet know it was about to change.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧‧₊