The palace at night was a lie of silence.
Lanterns breathed against paper screens, each flame swaying like it had secrets to keep. Courtyards smelled of sandalwood and steel; corridors wore shadows like veils. From a distance, the great house looked serene—white walls, black eaves, silvered tiles under the moon. Up close, it was a throat clogged with whispers.
Cyan stood in the outer hall, hand resting on the hilt of his sword. His armor caught the torchlight in restless glimmers, and the callus on his palm itched as though something invisible had taken hold of it. He shifted once, twice, but the sensation remained—a pull beneath the skin.
He had learned not to question unease. Soldiers didn't ask why. They kept their posture, their silence, their blade sharp. He told himself the tension in his hand was nothing more than the aftermath of drills. Even as the thought formed, he knew it was a lie. This wasn't the ache of training. This was something stranger.
Across the courtyard, a window cracked open. A faint line of light spilled into the dark.
The princess.
He didn't move his head, but his eyes betrayed him.
Her silhouette leaned against the screen, hair loose, the line of her shoulders stubborn even at rest. She was supposed to be asleep; dawn would drag her into another day of lessons, rituals, performances. Yet here she was, awake, holding the night like it belonged to her.
Cyan looked away. He always looked away first.
But the pull in his palm tightened, as if something tied him to the girl across the courtyard.
Liora had never liked the way the palace taught her to breathe—little sips, measured and polite, as if air were a favor she must repay.
She slipped the screen open only as much as she dared. Cool night poured over her wrists. Silk whispered at her shoulders as she leaned closer to the edge, hair spilling forward, unruly as thought. The moon sat low and wide—coin-bright, promise-tarnished. She imagined taking it between her teeth and biting, just to see if it bled.
"Your Highness." A soft warning from the maid kneeling by the lacquered chest. "If anyone sees—"
"No one sees at this hour," Liora said, which was not true. The palace always watched. Doors had eyes. Floors remembered footsteps. Even the gardens kept grudges. But a lie felt like a piece of freedom, smooth in the mouth.
From the chest the maid drew a ribbon—red silk, thin, impatient. She wrapped it around Liora's wrist and tied two neat knots. "For luck," she murmured, as if luck were a thing a girl could wear.
The silk warmed against Liora's pulse. It felt like a dare.
Across the courtyard, someone stood half-swallowed by shadow. Not the clumsy weight of a bureaucrat, not the swagger of a noble who spent his days rehearsing contempt. This silhouette was stillness balanced into a shape. Soldier.
Her fingers tightened on the sill. She told herself she looked only because that was what windows were for. The truth was sharper: she looked because something in the dark had been looking back all her life and only now had decided to use eyes.
The soldier did not turn his head. His posture said obedience; his jaw said otherwise.
"Cyan," she said, testing the sound without knowing why it came to her. The name sat on her tongue like it had been waiting there.
"What did you say, Highness?" the maid asked, distracted with combs and pins.
"Nothing." Liora touched the ribbon. It hummed, or maybe that was the blood in her skin remembering a song.
A bell struck wrong. Off by a beat, a heartbeat. The night flinched and then pretended it hadn't.
Liora closed the screen halfway, leaving the thinnest seam of sight. Through it, she saw the soldier shift his weight. The movement carried no sound—the kind of grace learned by people punished for every noise.
She did not mean to smile. She did anyway.
Cyan had learned to keep his face still. Not blank—blanks drew attention. Stillness was a better mask, the kind that made other people put their stories onto you. Loyal. Useful. Safe. It had kept him alive when merit was a rumor and mercy an antique.
Tonight the mask slipped at the edges.
The itch in his palm became a pull, then a pressure running the length of his forearm. He flexed his fingers once. It did not leave. He closed his hand. It did not obey. He thought of rope-burn, of oath-scar, of the red cord the quartermaster used to measure execution heights on the yard—how it darkened with weather and picked up every sweat-salt from every throat it had ever measured.
He told himself not to think of that. He thought of it anyway. Memory is disloyal like that.
A window brightened, narrowed to a blade of light. A shape moved within it—hair loose, shoulders stubborn, a mouth he couldn't see but believed in as if he had touched it. He hadn't. He wouldn't.
He took one step back, and the air came with him. Another step, and the pull in his palm tugged in protest, a fish on a line he could not see.
"Guard." The word came like a pebble tossed into a pond; ripples of hierarchy moved out from it. A captain, voice flat with the satisfaction of giving orders. "You're reassigned at dawn. Inner residence. Princess Liora's night detail. Try not to breathe loud enough to insult anyone."
Cyan kept his eyes forward. "Yes."
His chest said something else. It said: don't.
Another soldier glanced at him. Not envy—no one envied proximity to power that could bruise without leaving marks. Curiosity, perhaps. Cyan had never given them reason to be curious. It irritated him that tonight he had.
"Finish the round," the captain added. "Then report."
Cyan bowed with the exact depth the rank demanded. No more, no less. When he straightened, the window across the courtyard had closed to a sliver. The ribbon at the girl's wrist—he hadn't seen it tied, but he knew it was there—flashed once in his mind as if lanternlight had found it. It made no sense. He believed it anyway.
He resumed his walk. The palace laid itself under his feet like a game board trying to be a map. He knew the route: colonnade, garden, the long corridor that liked to echo, the curtained gate where nobles kissed and pretended it was weather making their cheeks red.
At the corner where the fig tree threw its doorway-shaped shadow, he stopped. Not because he heard anything. Because the air felt like a question. The kind that wouldn't be answered unless someone was unwise enough to say yes.
Cyan turned his head the smallest degree a neck could move and still be called stationary.
She stepped into the shadow.
Silk made a noise like water changing its mind. The lamp behind her let go of her outline and made do with the polish of her eyes. She was shorter than the idea of her. Sharper, too—the kind of sharp that cut only what deserved it.
"Forgive me," he said, because the words came with the uniform.
"I will," she said, as if the conversation had been going on for years and she was tired of refusing him.
They were close enough to share the same temperature. Not touching. Skin knew the difference. Skin complained.
Cyan looked at her properly and felt the lie he had been telling himself—the one about stillness—go brittle. "Your Highness."
"Soldier," she replied, and the way she said it put the word on her side of the board.
Her gaze dropped to his hand. His fingers had curled like he was holding a ribbon. He wasn't. He wanted to be.
"Your rounds?" she asked. Polite tone. Not a polite question.
"Completed," he lied. Half a corridor of duty remained, and a lifetime outside that.
"Then you'll walk me back." She turned before he could decline, leaving him the choice of disobedience or following. He followed. He told himself it was tactical. The truth was softer and more dangerous. He wanted to see how her hair moved.
They went in silence along the long corridor. Lanterns bobbed, whispering moth-breath. The night pressed its face to the paper screens and watched.
At the end of the hall, she paused. The screen to her rooms stood open a hand's width; a maid slept kneeling beside the chest, head tilted, a comb caught in her fingers. The red ribbon at Liora's wrist had slipped, the knot askew, the tail hanging down like a flame that had forgotten to lie flat.
Without thinking, Cyan reached. He stopped before he touched. He was not allowed to fix anything on her body that did not belong to him, and nothing on her body would ever belong to him.
"May I?" His voice did not sound like his own. It sounded like the blade of a knife deciding to be a hand.
She lifted her arm. The silk brushed the back of his knuckles, a line of heat thin as a sin. He retied the knot—soldier's-fast, sailor's-secure. The ribbon tightened, then eased, as if satisfied with the correction.
"Luck," he said, because the maid would wake soon and explanations loved small talk. "So the story goes."
Liora's mouth curved. "I've never trusted luck." She tipped her wrist. The red gleamed. "But I do like a good story."
He let her arm go. It felt like disobedience.
"Tomorrow," she said softly, as if reciting a schedule they had agreed upon in another lifetime. "You'll be posted at my door."
He should not have answered anything but yes. He said nothing at all. The lack of refusal was its own confession.
She stepped backward into lamplight, and for a moment he saw it—the crown-shaped weight she carried, the exact geometry of her defiance, the ghost of an ending that stood up from the floor like scaffolding. He tasted iron he had not yet bled.
"Good night, Soldier."
"Your Highness."
The screen slid closed. The corridor exhaled. Cyan stood where he was until the echo of her voice no longer rang in his chest. Then he walked the final length of the round and reported to the captain with a face that had remembered how to be a wall.
He slept badly. Half-dreams came like messengers with their faces covered: a ribbon pulling his wrist toward a scaffold; a bell counting hours that did not exist; a mouth he did not touch, already tasting of goodbye.
Before dawn, he woke to the sound of a blade being drawn. It took a long heartbeat to realize it was his, and the only thing cutting was the light.
Liora did not sleep at all. She lay on the tatami, eyes open to the dark, the ribbon warm at her pulse. When she closed her eyes, she saw the soldier's hands, the way he tied the knot as if he were setting a promise he intended to keep even if no one permitted it.
By noon the palace would be a tighter fist—scribes, petitions, the noble with fox-bored eyes who called himself her future. She would smile. She had practiced the shape of that weapon.
But this hour was hers—the kind of hour that made true things possible.
She pressed her wrist to her mouth. The silk smelled faintly of sandalwood and something she refused to name. Through the thin wall the city began to wake—bakers threatening dough, fishermen arguing with morning, a temple drum deciding how serious to be today.
She caught herself grinning into the dark. Not like a princess. Like a girl who had seen a door sneaking itself into a wall.
"Cyan," she said again, just to see if the name felt better when no one was listening.
It did.
When the first servant slid the screen aside and the day, with all its teeth, came spilling in, Liora sat up with obedient grace. The ribbon trailed like a red thought. She held out her wrist without being asked.
"Highness, the schedule…" the steward began, unrolling a scroll like a threat.
Liora nodded to every cruel hour it proposed. She had been trained to. Underneath obedience something stubborn uncoiled, warm as silk.
At the door, bootsteps paused. A throat cleared. The sound was neat. Respectful. Familiar to her now in a way that should not have been possible after one stolen conversation.
"Post assigned," said the captain outside. "Night detail rotates beginning this evening."
There it was. The lie of luck. The truth of the string. The day bared its teeth. Liora bared hers back, sweetly.
"Very well," she said, and fed the morning her smile like bait.
By midday he found himself stationed not at the walls or gates but in the inner corridors where perfume clung to the air and silk whispered across polished floors. He disliked such postings—too many courtiers with sharpened tongues, too many nobles who believed a uniform an invitation to humiliate. He preferred the outer rounds, where wind and silence answered more honestly than politics.
But soldiers didn't prefer. Soldiers obeyed.
So he stood straight, sword angled just so, eyes lowered enough to show deference but never so far he couldn't see. Do not breathe loud enough to insult anyone, the captain had said.
He had no intention of breathing at all.
And yet—he knew when she entered the hall.
Not because of her footsteps. She moved like someone who had learned the palace floor plan in her bones, every step obedient to rhythm. No. He felt her because the air changed—thicker, sweeter, dangerous as a blade hidden under silk.
He kept his eyes forward until the last possible moment, then allowed himself one flicker of sight. Enough. Too much.
Princess Liora wore crimson, a robe embroidered with phoenix feathers. The silk trailed behind her like a memory. At her wrist, the ribbon remained—retied, secure, gleaming against her skin as if it enjoyed being noticed.
Her gaze slid over the assembled guards, polite, unbothered. When it landed on him, it lingered. Not long enough to scandalize. Just long enough to remind him that silk could be sharper than steel.
He looked away first. Again.
The chamberlain announced her entrance, voice booming down the hall. Courtiers bowed low, their flattery spilling like wine. Cyan did not bow; guards did not. He remained still, hands folded, sword silent at his hip. But his pulse betrayed him, each beat louder than it should have been.
That night, Cyan was posted at her door.
The assignment came with the usual warnings: Do not enter her chambers unless summoned. Do not speak unless addressed. Do not even glance beyond the threshold without cause. A guard is a shadow, not a man.
He had repeated the rules silently, like prayer beads. Yet when the screen slid open and Liora stepped into the lamplight, he forgot every syllable.
Her hair was loose again, dark against an ivory robe. At her wrist, the ribbon glowed as if fire lived in its threads. She paused, studying him as though she had expected someone else and was almost disappointed to be proven wrong.
"Soldier," she said softly.
"Your Highness." His bow was shallow, respectful. His throat felt too tight for more.
"Cyan." She spoke the name like she owned it—the way she owned the night sky, without asking permission.
He did not answer. The name sounded different when she said it, heavy with recognition that had no history to explain itself.
The ribbon trembled when she lifted her wrist, catching the lamplight. "Still tied," she murmured. "Still yours."
His breath betrayed him—one sharp exhale he tried to disguise as discipline.
"Forgive me," he said, though he wasn't sure what for. For looking too long? For tying the knot too tight? For wanting what the world would never allow?
"I already have." Her smile promised doors where there were only walls.
The hallways at night belonged to no one. Silk-draped nobles slept with their dreams of gold. Ministers whispered prayers to gods too busy to listen. Even the guards grew weary and silent. Only the lanterns remained awake, flames swaying with secrets.
Cyan stood at his post, every muscle memorizing stillness. Yet the air shifted when the screen moved again.
Liora stepped into the corridor. No attendant shadowed her. Bare feet on polished wood, robe loose at the shoulders, the ribbon a bright wound around her wrist.
"Your Highness," Cyan began, but she raised a hand.
"Not tonight." Her eyes glimmered. "Tonight, I am only Liora."
He could not answer. Even his training—shields built from silence and obedience—wavered under the weight of her voice.
She walked past him, slow, daring him to follow. She stopped beneath the fig tree, its branches clawing at the moon.
Cyan hesitated, then moved after her. Duty, he told himself. Protection. Not the truth.
"You shouldn't be out here," he said quietly.
"You shouldn't be speaking to me," she countered, the ribbon catching moonlight.
The words should have ended the moment. Instead, they deepened it. Shadows pulled close; lanterns bowed their flames.
Liora lifted her wrist, studying the silk. "You tied it too tight," she whispered.
His hand betrayed him again. He reached for hers. He touched the ribbon lightly, fingers brushing her skin. The silk had loosened in truth, but when he drew the knot snug, the thread sang against his fingertips.
Their eyes locked—too long. Too dangerous.
"Better," he said, voice lower than he meant.
"Is it?" The question wasn't about the ribbon.
He let go. He had to. The ghost of her skin burned his hand.
They stood close enough for silence to feel like confession. Liora tilted her head, studying him with a vow disguised as a smile. "I think luck has chosen me a soldier."
"You shouldn't—" He stopped. Every warning tasted like ash.
"Perhaps," she said softly, "I shouldn't."
Her gaze lingered, bold as flame. She turned back toward her chambers before he could answer, silk trailing, ribbon flashing like blood.
Cyan stayed in the courtyard. Alone, but not free. The knot in his chest matched the one on her wrist—tight, undeniable, waiting.
The bell struck the hour. Off again. A heartbeat out of time. Somewhere, hidden in the dark, fate smiled.
He resumed his post, but stillness was no longer armor. The ribbon's warmth haunted his fingers.
The screen slid open once more.
Liora stopped close—closer than propriety allowed. "Why do you always look away first?"
"It is not my place to look."
"Then perhaps it is mine to look at you."
Her hand lifted—hesitant, then certain—hovering just shy of his cheek. She did not touch him. She didn't need to. The space between touch and not-touch carried more fire than a hundred stolen kisses.
Cyan leaned the smallest measure, a soldier betraying every vow, until he could feel the warmth of her hand without it resting on his skin.
The bell tolled again—wrong, late, violent in the silence. Both of them flinched.
Liora's hand fell. Her eyes, defiant a moment before, softened into something he could not survive if he stared too long.
"Good night, Soldier," she whispered. This time it sounded like a promise.
"Good night, Your Highness," he answered, meaning stay.
She slipped behind the screen. The ribbon burned red in his memory, a flame that would not go out.
He did not know yet that he would see her again in chains. He did not know that the ribbon would follow him to the scaffold.
But the string knew. And it hummed, satisfied.