He showed her where his mother's hedges were.
He didn't tell her they were his mother's.
She already knew.
He showed her the palace gardens on a morning of pale gold light and dry winter cold.
She dressed correctly for it — heavy wool coat, good boots, her hair down because the wind was less vicious than it looked from the window.
He met her in the courtyard in a dark coat, no golden cloak, and for a moment he looked almost ordinary.
Not ordinary, she corrected herself. Nothing about him is ordinary. But less armored. More like a person and less like an office.
They walked the gardens. He named things — plants, their origins, what they were used for. She listened and asked questions that made him think rather than simply recite.
He likes this, she noticed. The questions. He comes alive slightly when the question is one he has to actually think through. He's been surrounded by people who accept the first answer for seventeen years.
"This section," he said, stopping near a hedge-lined path in the east corner, "was added three years ago. I extended the garden boundary in this direction."
"Why this direction?" she asked.
The east corner faced the city. From its edge you could see, over the palace wall, the rooftops of the merchant quarter.
He's deciding whether to give me the surface answer or the real one, she thought. He's been giving me the real ones. He's starting to default to it.
"I wanted to be able to see the city from the garden," he said. "I spend a great deal of time in this palace and I sometimes lose the sense of what's outside it."
"Do you go into the city often?" she asked.
"Rarely. Usually with full escort."
"That's not the same as going," she said.
"What's your favorite part of it?" she asked. "The city."
He's surprised by this question, she observed. He's been asked about the city as a political entity, a strategic resource. He's never been asked what his favorite part of it is.
"There is a street near the old market district," he said slowly. "The one that runs alongside the river. In the summer it smells of the bakeries there — they open before dawn." He paused. "I went there once when I was eight, with one of my father's guards. We bought bread and ate it by the river and he told me stories about the kingdom."
"Do you still know his name?"
"Aldric," he said.
She blinked. "Your steward."
"Yes." The corner of his mouth. "He was a junior guard then, young enough to still have ideas about things. Now he manages my household and has traded ideas for competence, which is probably a net gain."
Nora smiled.
He saw it.
"You're smiling," he said.
"You made a joke," she said.
"I make jokes," he said, with the dignity of someone stating a fact that has been unfairly doubted.
They reached the fountain at the garden's center. She stopped and looked at it.
His mother designed these gardens, she thought. And he extended the garden three years ago in the direction of the city. In the direction of the ordinary world she came from.
"Can I ask you something that might be uncomfortable?" she said.
"Yes."
"The dragon form," she said. "Do you choose it? Or does it happen to you?"
"Both," he said. "Like breathing — I can control it consciously but it also happens on its own if I don't. Strong emotion accelerates it." He paused. "Most people either pretend it doesn't exist or they're too afraid of the answer."
"I'm curious," she said. "About what you actually are. Not what people think you are."
He looked at her with those red eyes in the pale winter light. "What do you think I am?" he asked.
He asked, she noted. Actually wanting the answer.
She thought about it honestly.
"A person who has been made into something very large and very frightening by circumstances that started before he was old enough to choose," she said. "And who has been so long in that shape that he's not entirely sure what's underneath it."
He was very still.
"That," he said quietly, "is the most accurate thing anyone has ever said to me."