Word spread through the palace.
She walked up to him after seeing him fly.
And asked about his scales.
The court decided she was either brilliant or mad.
She was neither.
She was just Nora.
Word spread through the palace that she had gone to the garden after watching him fly.
She didn't know how. But by the following morning, the way people looked at her in the corridors had changed.
Not the wariness or assessment she had been receiving since arrival. Something with a different quality. Something closer to genuine confusion.
They don't have a category for me either, she noted. At least I'm consistent.
Lady Mira found her in the library.
She sat down and said directly: "Did you really just walk up to him in the garden after seeing him in dragon form and ask about his scales?"
"I asked about the colour," Nora said, without looking up. "Structural coloration. The answer was interesting."
Mira looked at her with the expression of someone encountering a foreign language they're determined to learn. "He showed you. Voluntarily."
"He was flying over the north tower. I happened to be in the library."
"He never flies over the palace," Mira said. "He hasn't in years. The last time he did, three of the kitchen staff quit." She paused. "Two guards needed a week before they could speak in full sentences."
He flew because I was here, Nora thought, setting her book down slowly. He did something he hadn't done in years because something changed.
I don't know what to do with that yet.
"He's not frightening when you don't expect him to be," she said. "He's large. And extraordinary. But frightening is something you decide about a thing, and I hadn't decided that."
"You hadn't decided to be afraid of the Dragon King in his dragon form," Mira repeated slowly.
"I hadn't decided to be afraid of him in any form," Nora said. "I don't really work that way."
Mira looked at her for a long moment. "The court doesn't know what to make of you," she said.
"I know," Nora said.
"Lady Cassian thinks you're playing a very long game. That your whole unbothered manner is calculated."
"What do you think?" Nora asked.
Mira considered this honestly. "I think you're exactly what you look like," she said. "And that's somehow the most frightening version."
"Why frightening?" Nora asked.
"Because calculated things can be predicted," Mira said. "Real things can't."
She's sharp, Nora thought. Sharper than she lets on in groups. Good.
That afternoon, Malik came to the library.
He sat across from her and said, without preamble: "I've been thinking about what you said. In the garden."
"Which part?" she asked.
"About being something you don't have the right category for." He looked at the table. "I've been running through my categories. Advisors, enemies, allies, people who served, people who tried to take things from me. I have a category for all of them." He looked up. "You don't fit any of them."
"What's the closest one?" she asked.
He thought about it.
"Friend," he said slowly. As though trying the word out in a new context. "But that's not right either. I've never had anyone who simply wanted to know who I actually was. Without an agenda attached to the knowing."
He said the word friend like it was a language he learned from books, she thought. Not from experience.
"I have an agenda," she said honestly. "I'm curious. I want to understand things. That's not directed at you specifically — it's just how I am in general."
"I know," he said. "That's what makes it different."
She thought about what she wanted to say. She chose it carefully.
"You told me in the garden that I was the first person you couldn't fully hold in your mind," she said. "I want to tell you something equally honest."
He was very still. Waiting.
"You are more than the thing you've been turned into," she said. "I can see the parts underneath. I've been seeing them since the marketplace. And they are not what I expected from anything I'd heard." She paused. "I think you are, underneath everything, a person who wants very much to be known accurately. And I think almost no one has ever given you that."
The silence that followed was long enough that she wondered if she had gone too far.
Then he said, very quietly: "No. They haven't."
"Then I will," she said simply. "That's what I'll give you. Accurate knowing. No performance."
He looked at her across the library table in the afternoon light with an expression that had no armour in it whatsoever.
"That is worth more," he said, "than anything else I have been offered in seventeen years of being a king."
I know, she thought. That's what makes it worth giving.