The silence that followed us from the Great Hall was a different creature from the one that had preceded the feast. This was a respectful, watchful quiet, heavy with the weight of reassessment. Lords who had watched me with suspicion hours before now offered curt, acknowledging nods as we passed. I had passed their test. Not with charm, but with teeth. I had proven I could not only survive in their world but bite back.
Lysander's arm beneath my hand was a solid, unyielding line of warmth. He did not speak as he led me not toward the East Wing, but deeper into the private heart of the keep, toward the West Wing. My pulse, which had just begun to settle, kicked back into a frantic rhythm. The memory of the scream, the black veins, the silver eyes—it all rushed back.
He felt my slight hesitation, the faint tremor in my fingers. He did not look at me, but his voice was low, for my ears only. "The performance is over. What you see now is not for an audience."
We stopped not at the cursed chamber, but before a different door, sturdy and unadorned. He released my arm to produce a heavy iron key from his belt, unlocking it with a definitive click.
The room within was a stark contrast to the library's scholarly chaos. This was the brain of the beast. A massive table dominated the space, its surface a meticulously organized landscape of crisis. A large map of the duchy was weighted down at the corners, covered in painted wooden blocks representing troops, and marked with worrying clusters of red wax near the northern passes. Neat stacks of ledgers—one for the mines, another for the granaries, a third for the timber yields—sat beside an abacus and a pot of ink.
This was the reality behind the title. Not just balls and feasts, but the relentless, grinding arithmetic of survival. The weight of it pressed down on the room, a tangible force.
Lysander closed the door behind us, shutting out the world. He leaned back against the heavy wood, crossing his arms, his gaze sweeping over the table before settling on me.
"You spoke of efficiency in the Silverpine Valley," he said, his tone flat, analytical. "The ledger you skimmed is outdated. The last factor's reports were… optimistic. The new one is either incompetent or a thief. The yield has dropped by fifteen percent in the last quarter alone."
He was not asking for comfort. He was presenting a problem. A co-conspirator, indeed.
I approached the table, my eyes scanning the columns of figures in the open ledger. The script was neat, the numbers precise, but the totals were troubling. "Have you audited the weighing systems at the mill?" I asked, my mind slipping into the familiar, comforting patterns of data analysis from my old life. "It's a common point of leakage. Or perhaps a skimming operation during transport? A fifteen percent loss is too consistent for simple incompetence. It's systemic."
He was silent for a moment. I looked up from the ledger to find him watching me, a strange, intense expression on his face.
"You see the pattern quickly," he observed, his voice devoid of its usual chill.
"In my world, information was currency. We learned to spot fraud in a heartbeat." I traced a finger down a column. "You need to send someone you trust. Not a soldier. Someone who looks like a low-level clerk. Have them watch the process from felling to shipment. The truth will reveal itself."
"And if it is the factor?"
"Then you make an example of him," I said, meeting his gaze. The words should have felt harsh, but here, in this room of cold hard facts, they felt only logical. "Publicly. The North values loyalty. Betrayal cannot be tolerated. It's a cancer."
A slow nod. "Agreed."
He pushed off from the door and came to stand beside me at the table, his shoulder brushing mine. The contact was electric, a jolt of pure awareness in the midst of clinical discussion. He pointed to a cluster of red wax on the map. "The worg packs. They're growing bolder. Captain Killian's request for reinforcements was valid, but pulling men from the southern pass opens us to bandit incursions. A calculated risk."
I studied the map, the geography I'd read about springing to life. "You can't defend every inch of border at once."
"No," he agreed, a hint of frustration—a rare, human crack in his armor—edging into his voice. "I cannot."
An idea, born of a thousand history documentaries and strategy games, flickered in my mind. "Then don't defend the border. Defend the people."
His brow furrowed. "Explain."
"Pull the guards back from the most remote outposts. Consolidate them here, and here," I pointed to two central villages near the trouble spots. "Fortify these towns as strongpoints. Encourage the outlying homesteads to retreat behind these walls at the first sign of trouble. The worgs will find the pickings slim in the wilds and be forced to attack a fortified position. Your men will be concentrated, not spread thin. You fight on your terms, not theirs."
He was utterly still, his entire focus on the map, on my words. I could almost see the strategy unfolding behind his eyes, assessing, calculating. The silence stretched, thick with potential.
"It is… unorthodox," he said finally. "The Northern way is to meet the threat head-on, to hold every inch of ground."
"The Northern way is getting your men killed for the sake of prideful real estate," I said softly, but without malice. "This is not about ceding land. It's about choosing the battlefield."
He turned his head to look at me. The storm in his eyes had quieted, replaced by a deep, swirling intensity I couldn't name. The air between us hummed, the professional distance evaporating under the heat of shared purpose.
"You see the board differently," he murmured, his voice a low rasp that seemed to stroke along my nerve endings.
"I see the pieces for what they are," I whispered. "Not just tokens on a map. They are your people. Your duty. The thing you fight the curse for every night."
The mention of his secret hung in the air, a dangerous, intimate truth. His gaze dropped to my lips. The space between us diminished without either of us moving a muscle. The scent of him—sandalwood, frost, and the faint, clean smell of ink—wrapped around me.
I could see the conflict in him, the war between the solitary Duke who trusted no one and the man who had just found an unexpected, and terrifyingly capable, ally.
A sharp rap at the door shattered the moment.
We sprang apart as if scalded. The Duke's mask of icy control slammed back into place so completely it was dizzying.
"Enter," he barked, his voice once again the whip-crack of command.
Steward Valerius entered, his face as impassive as ever. "Your Grace, the emissary, Lord Tavish, wishes to take his leave. He requests a final word."
"See him out. I have nothing more to say to him." Lysander's tone was dismissive, but his eyes flickered to me for a fraction of a second, a silent communication. This isn't over.
Valerius bowed and retreated.
The door closed, leaving us in the charged silence once more. The spell was broken, but the resonance remained, vibrating in the air between us.
Lysander turned back to the map, his finger tapping thoughtfully on one of the villages I'd indicated. "Consolidate the forces," he said, as if to himself. He then looked at me, and for the first time, it felt like he was truly seeing me, Elara, not the asset or the complication. "I will consider your strategy."
It was not thanks. It was not praise. It was something better. It was trust. A tiny, fragile sliver of it, offered from a man who had none to spare.
"See that you do," I said, echoing his own dry tone from earlier.
A ghost of a smile, there and gone. He gestured to the door. "You should retire. The… nights… are long here."
The warning was back, but it was different now. It was not a threat from a jailer to a prisoner. It was a warning from one soldier to another about the nature of the battlefield we shared.
I left the strategy room, my mind racing, my skin still tingling from his nearness. The hierarchy of the North was not just about titles and land. It was about trust earned in council, respect won in battle—both of the sword and the word. And I had just taken a significant step up that ladder.
And the romance? It was no longer a flicker. It was a low, steady burn in the hearth of that frozen strategy room, fed by the oxygen of shared intellect and the dry tinder of a mutual, desperate need. He was a locked fortress, but I had just been given a key. Not to his heart, not yet. But to his mind. And for a man like Lysander Blackwood, that was the most intimate door of all.