He asked if she would eat with him.
Just him. Small room. No ceremony.
She said yes.
He looked at her like she had given him something.
On the fifth day, he asked her to have dinner with him.
He actually asked — with the particular careful quality of someone trying out an unfamiliar action.
He appeared in the library doorway in the late afternoon with his hands behind his back and said: "Will you eat with me this evening?"
She looked at him over the top of her book. "Is this a formal dinner?"
"No. The private dining room. Just us."
Just us, she noted. Not the court. Not Aldric hovering. Just us.
She said yes.
The private dining room was small. A table for two. A single tall window. A fire already burning. Candles on the table.
Whoever set this up, she thought, understood what this meal was supposed to be. Not a state dinner. Something smaller and more real.
They ate. The silence between them was not uncomfortable — not the silence of two people with nothing to say, but the silence of two people comfortable enough that words were optional.
"Tell me about your mother," he said, partway through.
He was looking at his plate, not at her.
He's asking because of the earrings, she thought. He files things away and then comes back to them. That's what he does.
"She was a weaver originally," Nora said. "Before she married my father she had her own workshop. She made tapestries. Some are still in the cathedral. She was small, dark-haired, very direct. She said what she thought and didn't apologize for it." She paused. "I'm told I'm like her. Offered as both a compliment and a warning."
"It is both," Malik said. "Both at once."
He didn't say that to be kind, she thought. He said it because it's true and he recognized it immediately.
"Your mother," she said. "What was she like?"
He was quiet for a moment — not reluctant, but choosing accuracy over speed.
"Gentle," he said. "She noticed small things — if a servant seemed unhappy, if the courtyard flowers needed water, if a piece of music was slightly off tempo. She paid attention to things that didn't require her attention and she did it because she cared." He looked at his wine glass. "She was the only person in this palace who made it feel like a home rather than a mechanism."
"And after her?" Nora asked.
"It became a mechanism," he said simply.
He said it like a weather report, she thought. He didn't make peace with it. He just stopped looking at it.
"It doesn't have to stay one," she said.
He looked at her. The candlelight warm on his face.
"No," he said, after a long moment. "I suppose it doesn't."
They finished dinner. He walked her back to her rooms — not formally, just walking beside her the way people walk when they're not ready for the conversation to end.
Outside her door he stopped.
"Thank you," he said.
"For dinner?" she asked.
"For everything since the marketplace," he said.
Oh, she thought. He meant that.
Something in his face was briefly exposed — not vulnerability exactly. But something adjacent. Something he generally kept carefully out of sight.
"Good night, Malik," she said.
He said good night. She went inside.
She stood in the sitting room looking at the fire, thinking about a man who had forgotten what it was like to be spoken to as a person.
And finding that she minded considerably less about being here than she had expected to.