Are You Like Him

The scarf went on before anything else did.

She tied it the way she always did, snug at the temples, knot resting just behind her left ear where her fingers could check it without thinking, and settled the cap over it after, the weight of it familiar against her skull. Not armor. Habit. There was a difference, though most people at court had stopped noticing which one it was a long time ago.

By the time she reached the east corridor, three separate voices had already greeted her by name. A steward. A visiting lady's attendant. One of the younger guards, who always slowed his pace to match hers without being asked, though she'd never requested it and never needed to. She knew this corridor by its echoes the way other people knew it by its tapestries.

Respect, she had learned early, could sound very different depending on who was offering it. Some gave it like a gift. Some gave it like a debt they weren't sure they owed. She could hear the difference in the pause before someone said her name, whether it came easy, or whether it came measured.

She was three minutes late to the dining hall. She knew this before anyone told her, from the particular quality of impatience already thickening the air near the long table.

"You're late."

Devon's voice. Cool, flat, entirely uninterested in being agreed with.

"Three minutes," she said, moving toward her place at the table with the same unhurried certainty she moved through everything. "The kitchens ran behind. Not mine to control."

"Everything in this palace is yours to control, apparently." A pause, footsteps, closer now than she expected. "That's the whole point of you."

She didn't flinch when his hand came up, two fingers and a thumb, closing gently but without permission around her chin, tilting her face up toward his the way one might inspect livestock, or art. She held still. Stillness had always served her better than resistance.

"Let's see if you're as good as everyone insists," he said, and something was pressed to her lips before she could ask what: a spoon, something warm, something faintly, wrongly sweet beneath a taste that curled sharp and metallic at the back of her tongue half a second later.

She spat it onto the floor between them without hesitation, already stepping back out of his hold, her pulse ticking upward but her voice perfectly even. "Aconite. Poorly masked. You'll want a better cook if you intend to actually kill someone with it."

For a moment he said nothing. She couldn't see his expression, but she didn't need to; she could hear the shift in his breathing, something almost like surprise, quickly swallowed back down into whatever colder thing he preferred people to find there instead.

"DEVON."

The second voice arrived like a door slamming. Josh, unmistakable in his fury, crossing the room fast enough that she heard the hem of his coat cut the air. He didn't stop until he was between them, close enough that she caught the warmth radiating off him, a solid presence at her front like a wall raised in her defense.

"Was that necessary?" he demanded. "Grabbing her, feeding her something unknown, without warning, like she's some animal you're testing..."

"She is exactly what I'm testing." Devon's voice hadn't risen at all. If anything, it had gone quieter, which she was beginning to understand was worse. "Careful, brother. Anyone would think you actually cared how she's handled."

"Someone should."

"How touching."

She heard him step forward, one step, unhurried, and then the small, sharp sound of a hand meeting a chest, shoving Josh back half a pace. Not hard enough to be violence. Hard enough to be a warning.

Then he was close to her again. Close enough that when he spoke, it wasn't for the room. It was only for her.

"Are you like him." Not quite a question. "Is that it. Is that why I don't trust you."

She didn't answer. She wasn't entirely sure, yet, what answer he was looking for, or whether he wanted one at all.

He was already walking away by the time she opened her mouth to try.