She rewrote it eleven times.
The first version was cold and formal and read like a legal document, which was perhaps honest but certainly not what she meant. The second was warmer, which alarmed her enough that she burned it immediately. The third through seventh found various registers between these poles, each failing in its own particular way. The eighth was almost right but used the word "inappropriate" four times, which she recognized as an indicator that she was still arguing with herself inside the letter rather than simply writing it.
The ninth was this:
Prince Lucian —
I have been thinking about the women on the walls. Not the ones in the poem. The real ones — the ones whose names no one wrote down because survival doesn't make for dramatic verse. They watched the war from above and survived it and woke each morning to a world that had changed without asking their permission, and they built something from what remained.
I don't know why I'm writing this to you. I told myself I was writing to say that your message was received and my position has not changed. I find I'm writing something else instead.
The position has not changed. The realities Lady Severa outlined are real. My family's situation is what it is. I understand all of this clearly.
And yet I find myself thinking — not about what cannot be, because I am very practiced at not thinking about that — but about the garden. And the library. And a conversation about border diplomacy that was, unexpectedly, the most alive I have felt in three years.
I am not asking you for anything. I am simply tired of pretending that nothing happened, because it did, and I think you know it did, and the pretending feels dishonest, and dishonesty is the one luxury I have never been able to afford.
This letter will probably alarm you.
— L. Varro
She read it over once. It alarmed her considerably. She sealed it before wisdom could intervene.
Lucian received it on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of a meeting about grain import tariffs, which the messenger interrupted with an apology and which Lucian set aside with the face of a man who had not just had his entire afternoon rearranged by a piece of papyrus.
He read it twice. Then three times. Then he excused himself from the meeting under the pretext of a sudden obligation, which made his secretary exchange a weighted look with the treasury official, and went to his private study.
He sat with the letter for a long time.
She had said she was not asking him for anything, but that wasn't quite true, he thought. She was asking him for honesty. The same currency she had offered.
He picked up a pen.
He wrote back:
L. Varro —
I have read your letter four times and I find that every time I begin composing a careful and diplomatic response, I discard it in favor of this:
You are the most interesting person I have encountered in years. Possibly longer than years. The conversations we have had — brief, impractical, surrounded by the scrutiny of all Rome — have cost me more sleep and more honestly difficult thought than anything that has crossed my desk in recent memory. And my desk contains matters of state.
This is not nothing. I do not know what it is, exactly. I know what it cannot be — you have laid that out with perfect clarity and I will not pretend the obstacles are smaller than they are. But I am thirty-one years old and have spent every year of those thirty-one doing what was required, and I find that I am not prepared to also pretend it is nothing.
The position remains what it is. The realities remain real.
And yet.
I am not asking you for anything either.
But I would like, very much, to keep talking to you. Whatever form that can take, within whatever boundaries you need to draw. I think you are worth that. I think we are worth that.
— L.
P.S. The women on the walls carried the future in silence. You are not required to be silent.
He sealed it before his own wisdom could intervene.
Their letters crossed somewhere on the Via Sacra, carried by separate messengers who did not know each other and would never know what they had passed between them on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in spring.