Rain taught the streets to whisper. The umbrella took the drumbeat and softened it to a hush, a small room moving through a larger one. Asha walked beneath it with the Regent a half step behind, guards arranging their silence into something like safety. The city made its wet-metal smell; lamplight licked the edges of puddles and turned them to coins.
Her father's building waited in the Old Quarter where signs were hand-lettered and glass was a luxury repaired slowly. The staircase remembered every footstep. On the second landing, Asha paused and touched the banister the way she used to as a girl—two taps for luck, one for stubbornness. The Regent noticed and said nothing; the not-saying felt like respect rather than ignorance.
Her father opened the door with a cough he tried to swallow. He had a blanket around his shoulders and a stubbornly neat beard, the kind a careful man trims by habit even when the world is not careful with him. The small room smelled of camphor and tea and a rain-wet coat hung too near the stove.
"Asha?" He took in the soldiers over her shoulder, then the man behind her. His hand found the doorframe and held.
"It's all right," she said. "We won't stay long."
The Regent inclined his head. It wasn't a bow, not exactly, but it was as far as a man like him could bend without cracking something true. He removed his right glove, one finger at a time, as if visiting the sick demanded bare hands no matter who you were. The scar across his palm sat white as chalk.
"What do you want with my daughter?" her father asked, voice rough as fabric drawn across wood.
"To keep her safe," the Regent said, plain as a ledger, and her father's eyes flickered with the brief, helpless anger of a man who has lost too much to sentences like that.
Asha crossed to the stove and poured tea. She took her time; tea demands it. When she handed her father the cup, her fingers brushed his knuckles and he steadied.
"There's an offer," she said. "A bargain, really."
"A cage?" He coughed into his sleeve. He loved her by asking the worst version first.
"A marriage," she answered, because truth told straight goes down cleaner than the sweetened kind. "Quietly. In exchange, your debt disappears. And I—" She exhaled. "—I build a clock he needs."
Her father's mouth tightened around a remembered argument. He looked past her to the Regent. The Regent met the gaze and did not look away.
"How many men stand outside?" her father asked.
"Enough," Kairon said.
"And if I refuse? If I tell you to take your soldiers and your bargains and step off my stair?"
"Then the debt-holder will make his lesson public," the Regent said softly. "I am here to prevent that lesson. I won't force your daughter. But I will not lie about what happens if she refuses."
Asha watched the choice rise and fall in her father's chest. He lifted the cup and didn't drink. The steam found his eyes and made them shine; he pretended it was only the tea.
"I have a condition," he said finally, looking at Asha, not the man who ran a kingdom. "That he treats you as if you were the only remaining hour he has. Not a tool. Not a symbol."
A muscle in the Regent's jaw moved once, then was still. "I can sign that," he said.
"Then do it," her father whispered, voice cracking on tiredness and pride. "And forgive your old man for not being the one who could keep you."
Asha knelt, put her forehead to his, and breathed him in: tea and oil and camphor, the smell of her childhood's clockwork cathedrals. "You kept me by teaching me to keep myself," she murmured. "The rest is just… different kinds of time."
They left promises and steam behind and descended into the rain.
The palace took them like a throat swallowing. Corridors learned their names with the quick greed of places that watch for stories. In a narrow chamber off the main hall, a scribe waited with a stack of paper thick enough to be a winter blanket. Ink stood ready, black as the inside of a lock.
Asha read. She mouthed clauses the way she mouthed gear ratios to make them behave. The Regent stood at the window, rain pinning light to the glass, hands behind his back like he had tied them there on purpose.
"No balcony after dusk," she said, not quite smiling. "You've written your rules into the shape of law."
"Some rules keep men from falling," he said without turning.
"And women?"
He did turn then. "Especially women."
She read on. "No visits to the east corridor," she said. "Why?"
A fraction too long of a pause. A blink he managed not to make. "That wing is unstable," he said. "In more ways than one."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the answer I can give without undoing the purpose of this bargain." His voice had roughness at the edges now, not from anger—fatigue, perhaps, or the grind of holding positions for too long. "If you go there, I can't protect you."
"You can't protect anyone everywhere," she said. The quill in her fingers felt like a small, fragile sword. "But I'll keep to it. For now."
She added her clauses. Ownership of the key. Access to her workshop. Formal protection for her father, written in a way that could be enforced by the lowest guard with the highest courage. The right to refuse any alteration of the device that turned it into a weapon against minds without consent.
The Regent came to the table. Close like a man would stand if he trusted the person next to him not to mistake his nearness for permission. He read her additions without comment, then nodded once and lifted the quill.
"Wait," Asha said, and the word made more sound than she expected. She took a small file from her pocket and smoothed a burr on the quill's metal tip. "It will catch."
He watched her hands the way a soldier watches wind—quietly, learning how to move with or against it. "Thank you."
She tipped the ink. The quill's point flashed and she reached, too fast, and nicked the soft triangle of skin between thumb and forefinger. The pain was small but immediate. Instinct brought his hand up, gloved, catching her wrist before she could drip on the contract. The leather was warm; his grip careful enough to be a compliment. He held her there for the time it takes rain to travel the height of a window.
"Don't bleed on our future," he said, and tried to make it a joke. The corner of his mouth obeyed a little.
She held still, the shape of his fingers fitting her bones too well for strangers. When he released her, she wiped the blood and set the quill down as if it were now a promise made of feather and iron.
They signed.
Ink darkened and sank. The page grew heavier, exactly as he had promised; she could feel the weight in her palms. The scribe sprinkled sand and blew, the exhale of a man who knew how history begins.
"Rooms have been prepared," the Regent said. "You can move at your own pace."
"My pace is fast," she said.
"I noticed."
A maid with neat hands led Asha through the palace. Servants looked up and then away with the choreography of people taught never to make a scene. The air changed from boiled linen to beeswax to the green note of plants that had never seen real rain. The corridor floor whispered underfoot. Portraits watched without blinking.
Her rooms were clean, the bed a quiet cloud, the windows taller than anything in the Quarter. Someone had set a small tray of tools on the desk—serviceable, not the kind she loved, but chosen by someone who wanted to be kind and was not yet good at it. On the mantel, against custom, a single desert marigold in a glass. Asha touched its stem with one finger and wondered who had told the palace she liked stubborn flowers that bloom where they shouldn't.
Later, a knock. The Regent stood at a distance polite enough to be an apology. He had traded the wet coat for a dark waistcoat; the candlelight made him less winter and more dusk.
"Your father's warrant was rescinded an hour ago," he said. "An officer delivered the notice and waited to see him read it."
She let herself breathe the way a person breathes when the rope goes slack and you remember your throat. "Thank you."
He nodded, as if receiving gratitude required balance. "There will be a small ceremony. Tomorrow. No court." He hesitated—a man unused to asking permission to speak plainly. "I thought you might like to choose the hour."
"Dawn," she said, surprising both of them. "When the city is ugly and honest."
"Dawn," he agreed. His gaze flicked to her hands, to the mark the ring had pressed into her palm. The glance carried more than it should have. "Rest," he said, and then, softer, "please."
He turned to go and she said, "Kairon?"
The name made him still as struck glass. He looked back over his shoulder, careful to keep his body facing the door, an instinct that says: leave yourself the retreat.
"When were you last… happy?" she asked, because some questions behave like keys; turned carefully, they open more than they should.
His throat moved. He searched for the safe version of a dangerous answer. For a second the search failed and something unarmored looked out. "A workshop," he said, almost to himself. "Different light. Same smell of lemon oil."
He left before either of them had to decide what to do with that.
Night found the palace and dressed it in listening. Asha lay awake and watched the ceiling learn her breathing. She took the ring from her pocket and wore it on the middle finger of her left hand, where it didn't fit and therefore couldn't be mistaken for anything but a process underway. The marigold closed its petals as if keeping counsel.
She rose before the sun, opened the window to the rain-clean air, and let the cold make her honest. Below, the courtyard stones held small moons in their puddles. Somewhere in the east wing, a clock chimed a note she did not recognize. She heard it with the part of her mind that hears more than sound and decided she would map every bell in this place until it could no longer surprise her.
_The clocks are still ticking in the shadows. Step closer and hear them first on patreon **@rosavyn**._