Aldric told her about the laughing.
How it had existed once.
How it had been trained out of him.
How it had come back in the marketplace.
In five minutes.
Because of her.
She learned about the laughing from Aldric.
She had not asked him directly. She had asked about the palace's history, which had led — with the careful navigation of a man who knew what could and couldn't be said — to a description of what the palace had been like before Malik took the throne.
"The previous king," Aldric said, with perfect neutrality, "was not a man who valued levity."
"He punished it?" Nora asked.
"Punished is a strong word. He disapproved. Strongly. And when the king disapproves of something strongly, it tends to disappear from the spaces around him." He paused. "The young prince learned early to be economical with certain expressions."
"He laughed as a child?" Nora asked.
Something brief and complicated moved across Aldric's face.
He's remembering something specific, she noted. And it matters to him.
"Very much so," he said. "Before his mother died, before his father's full attention turned to him — he was a child who found a great deal of things funny. Who said what he thought. Who asked more questions than any tutor could keep up with." He set the tea tray down carefully. "Afterward, those things became less frequent. By the time he took the throne, they had stopped entirely."
"Until the marketplace," she said.
Aldric looked at her directly. For the first time without the professional buffer.
"Yes," he said simply. "Until the marketplace."
After he left she sat for a long time with her tea going cold in her hands.
He laughed because I surprised him, she thought. And I surprised him because nobody surprises him. Because everybody manages themselves around him so carefully that nothing real ever happens.
And then I happened.
She held the thought quietly and found that it mattered to her.
That evening she went looking for him.
She found him in the west study, still working at nearly the evening hour, papers spread across the desk in an arrangement only he understood. Pushing past the point of genuine productivity out of habit.
He stays at the work past the point where the work is useful because the work is what there is, she thought. If he stops, there's just the room.
She knocked on the open door.
He looked up. The slight shift of his expression — the fractional easing of focus, the specific quality of seeing her rather than whoever he had expected.
"Come in," he said.
She came in and sat across from the desk. "What is all of this?"
"Northern trade agreements," he said. "Three of them are in conflict with each other. Someone should have caught it six months ago and didn't. I have to resolve the conflict before the winter session of the council."
"Can I see?" she asked.
He turned three of the documents to face her.
She read carefully and thoroughly. She asked questions. They worked through it together for two hours — her questions forcing him to articulate things he had been assuming, his expertise providing the context her questions needed.
At the end of two hours the conflict was resolved.
It took two people, she thought. He had been trying to solve it alone for two weeks.
"You should have been an advisor," he said.
"I'm a fabric merchant's daughter," she said.
"Those things are not mutually exclusive," he said.
She smiled at the corner — just briefly. He noticed again.
He always notices, she thought. He catalogs every small thing. I wonder if he knows how much that shows.
"Aldric told me," she said, "that you laughed a great deal as a child."
He went very still.
"Before things changed," she said. "He said you were curious and said what you thought and made the tutors struggle to keep up." She looked at him steadily. "I think you still are all of those things. I think you just forgot you were allowed to be."
The silence that followed was long.
He looked at her across the desk, in the candlelight, with the papers between them holding the solution to a problem that had taken two people rather than one.
"You," he said quietly, "are the most dangerous thing I have ever encountered."
"More dangerous than a war?" she asked.
"Wars," he said, "I know how to fight."
Yes, she thought. I imagine you do.
But you don't know what to do with someone who simply tells you the truth.
Neither do I, entirely. But I'm willing to find out.