Archive of Our Own

The Knight Moralis was louder than she expected.

Luluci had spent the entire journey here building a picture of it in her head. She imagined it to be severe, cold-hearted, the kind of place that had decided long ago that silence was a form of authority and had been enforcing it ever since. She had prepared herself for that. She was good at preparing herself for things. It was, if she was being honest, what she had been doing for the better part of a year. Preparing. Bracing. Deciding in advance how she would hold herself when the next difficult thing arrived.

What she had not prepared for was the noise.

Someone was arguing at full, committed volume somewhere down the left corridor. There was a crash from above her like something heavy, dropped or thrown, she couldn't tell, followed immediately by a voice saying That's fine, that's completely fine in the tone of someone for whom it was not completely fine at all. There’s also the constant sound of boots on stone. The overlapping sound of people who had decided this building was theirs and inhabited it accordingly.

She stopped at the entrance and took a slow breath.

You passed the examination, she told herself, with the firmness of someone who had been having this conversation with herself for several weeks. The highest score in the practical, which nobody asked you to do, but it’s okay because you won anyway. Luluci, you are here because you are supposed to be here.

She believed this. Mostly. She had prepared for this, 

She looked around. Assessing the space. Checked the exits, not because she was planning to use them, it was just a habit she had acquired in the past year and had not yet decided whether to be annoyed at herself for.

The corridor to the left was long and lamplit and full of the sound of someone's argument. The corridor to the right was quieter. While ahead of her, a staircase.

And coming down that staircase, with a case folder under one arm and his dark hair half-pinned back and his uniform pressed to a standard she would later come to think of as characteristically exact, was the Knight who had once stood in front of her and her Master, who assessed the situation with flat red eyes and said, in a firm voice,  May the principles ever upheld and the pennant's justice swift upon the guilty. It was not directed at her.

She recognized him in the span of a single breath. The line of his jaw. The particular quality of his stillness was not emptiness but rather the opposite of it. Like the stillness of someone who had decided exactly where their attention was going and saw no reason to spend it on performance. She had been in the room afterward when they told her what had happened. That the member of Knight Moralis had looked at what her master had allowed to happen, at what her master had dismissed, and immediately knew which judgement to make.

She had thought about it, how she would meet him again. But she never thought it would be this fast.

Her chest did something complicated. No fear. Almost aggressively not fear, actually, which was its own strange feeling to have in the entrance hall of a strange building.

He looked up. Saw her. Stopped.

A beat passed between them. Two people recognizing each other from somewhere neither of them had planned to be reminded of today. His expression didn't change dramatically. But something in it acknowledged the beat, registered it, and then, with a deliberateness she would come to recognize as one of his most particular qualities, moved on from it. Not dismissively. Carefully. Like he was holding a door open so she could choose whether to walk through it or not.

When she did not walk away, he allowed himself to enter instead.

"You look like you're calculating escape routes," he said. His words are light and easy.

The sheer normality of it unknotted something in her chest.

"I'm orienting," she retorted, which was true.
"Mm." He looked at her and made a frank, brief assessment. "You're the new intake. Luluci."
"Yes."

"Easthies." He did not offer his hand. She noticed this the way she noticed everything, and felt the specific relief of not having to perform a handshake. "I'll show you where to go."

He walked at a deliberately slow pace without making the adjustment obvious — not obvious slow,  just considered. Like he's giving space in case she would like to walk side by side, she can do so by simply picking up the speed. She did not. This small action draws a relieved sigh from Luluci. She is tired of people expecting her to be awfully slow. As if pitying her, it feels somewhat dehumanising to be considered as such. She didn't need to be coddled, and this guy had agreed. He pointed out rooms without the particular cadence that meant this is simple, I'm being patient with you, can't you get it?

"Briefings at the sixth bell unless the board says otherwise," he said, as they passed a large room. "Check the board by the east staircase the night before. The board in this corridor is always a day behind."

"Why is the board always a day behind?"
"Nobody knows. It's been this way for several years."
"And nobody has fixed it?" Incredulous at the management of this highly regarded place.

"Nobody," he agreed, with a flatness that suggested he had some repressed opinions about this.

She almost smiled.

They passed a room where two people were now arguing about something involving documentation and the definition of the word timely, and she glanced in as they passed and then back at Easthies.

"Is it always this loud?" she asked.
"Mostly." He paused at a junction. "It's easier if you adjust to it yourself."
"Do you?"

He considered this, actually considered it, which she took note of, because most people would have said of course and kept walking. Easthies didn't, though. Instead, he replied, "To the noise, yes. To the content of the discussion, not always."

She looked at him. Luluci didn't think Easthies would be like that. Her image of him is the same as that of any other guy sitting at the table of a cafe. Not agreeing if a topic was not to his taste, but at the same time, also not rejecting it outwardly. She supposed there are things she must not presume the moment she lays eyes on anybody. Though she believes it is quite hard to adjust her view of things nowadays.

"Come on," he said. "The dining hall is below. I'll show you the armory last."

She followed him.

She did not look back at the corridor, at whatever door was somewhere in this building, the door he had stood outside of and done what nobody before him had thought to do. What she had been grateful for. She kept her eyes on the back of his half-pinned hair and let the sound of his footsteps give her something steady to walk alongside. Perhaps it was the knowledge that they had met before that gave her such calmness in her chest upon meeting him.

Luluci learned the building by following him.

It was not really a plan. He was just awfully in a convenient location each time she was uncertain of the layout, and he gave information without making her feel stupid for not remembering it yet, so she kept being near him. She would appear at doorways, and he would be somewhere in the vicinity and say things like the east archive uses a different system than the west one, which makes no sense and was apparently a decision made by someone who has never had to find anything quickly, and she absorbed it, and they parted ways. 

Luluci realised that Easthies was not performing consideration or choosing to be careful with her specifically because she was new or because he knew what she'd come from. He’s simply the same as he'd been that day. As though this was just how he was. She found it comforting, the consistency of his.

However, for the other members, she was still working out.

Six of them, all men. She had known this and prepared for it and was managing the preparation admirably, if she said so herself. Most of them were genuinely fine. A few were friendly in the way of people who had never considered how their friendliness landed, loud, assumptive, the kind of friendly that meant I've decided we're at ease, so now we are, which left her doing all the actual work of being at ease. A couple was quieter, much more professional. She likes them better. But perhaps she has to stop categorizing people so frequently.

However, she knew that none of them made her feel unsafe. She wanted to be clear about that, even in the privacy of her own thoughts. Not one of them had done anything wrong.

But she was finding, or relearning, maybe, that nobody has done anything wrong, and I feel at ease, which were not the same sentence. The first was the absence of badness. The second was the presence of goodness. She had gotten very precise about that distinction as of late.

With Easthies, she felt at ease. And she couldn't work out why.

She tried. She was a person who worked things out. She observed him across the first two weeks the way she would observe everything, carefully, from every angle, slowly building toward a conclusion, and what she found was this:

He spoke to her as though her understanding was given. Not condescended to, not explained at. Given.

He did not have opinions about her emotions. When she was frustrated, openly, visibly frustrated, because she had decided recently that she was done with the work of containing herself, he did not say Let's stay professional or make the face that meant you're a lot. He either waited, addressed the source of the frustration, or said something dry and accurate that made the frustration feel rational rather than excessive. Which it was. She had always been rational. The rooms she'd been in before had simply been called something else.

Easthies did not crowd her. This was the one she noticed most and could least explain. The way she did not need to track his position. She was always tracking the positions of men lately, a low, constant monitoring that she hated and couldn't switch off, and with Easthies, she kept finding she had already stopped, that she was simply in the room with him, that her attention was on the work and not on where he was in relation to her body.

She tried to turn this into a clear explanation and couldn't. The pieces were true, but they didn't add up to the whole.

And underneath all of it, barely a thought yet, was something else she had noticed. Something she hadn't understood yet. The way he had, on a rest day, walked past her in the corridor in loose clothes with his hair down, adorned with practical accessories, and for a moment she had thought, that's— and then lost the thought because someone called her name from the other direction.

She kept coming back to that half-thought. To the shape of what she'd almost see.

She put it away to return to later. She was developing a growing pile of things to return to later. When she found the courage to return, she realised the corner of her mind had been turned into Easthies' shrine. Filled with half-thoughts she couldn't finish.

Luluci had been a part of Knight Moralis for three weeks when Utowin appeared.

She had heard about him before she met him. His name came up in Easthies' words almost every day. Mentioned easily as if Utowin is a singular constant.  Utowin filed it two days later. Utowin has opinions about the northern case, most of which are wrong. The tone of someone referring to a fact about the world, like the position of a wall or the schedule of tides.

She had formed a picture. She had pictured someone like most of the others here. A man who had grown up assuming welcome and had never been corrected on it.

She was not entirely wrong.

He came through the door of the briefing hall mid-sentence, pointing at the person behind him in the corridor, orange-haired and green-eyed and already fully committed to whatever argument he'd been having before he entered the building. " I timed it, I literally stood there and timed it, twenty minutes is not an estimate; it is a documented fact— " And then he looked up, saw her, and stopped.

The pointing redirected toward her.

"New person?" He asked.
"I've been here three weeks," she said.

"New to me." Utowin shrugged and dropped into the nearest chair with the ease of someone who had decided this room was fine, and he would be staying in it. He had not asked. She noticed this and noted that his action did not have the aggressive quality of someone conquering a space. It was more like the weather. It simply occurred. "Utowin. You are?"

"Luluci."
"Are you the one who got the high practical score on the winter examination?"

She blinked. "How do you know about that?"

"Easthies mentioned it." He said this as though information distribution between himself and Easthies was simply a natural feature of the universe and needed no further explanation. Then he looked at the document she'd been working on and leaned forward to look at it from his side of the table. "Is that the Westhill summary? The form's wrong, they changed the standard format in autumn and sent one notice to the east hall only, so half of us are still using the old—"

"Utowin."

Easthies had appeared in the doorway. Luluci had not heard him coming. She had been focused on Utowin, which she suspected was the natural effect of Utowin. He was the kind of person who absorbed all available attention without meaning to, and things would happen around him in his blind spots.

"She's been here for three weeks," Easthies said. "Let her finish before you tell her everything that's wrong with institutional documentation."

"I'm being helpful."
"You're being ridiculous about formatting."

"It IS ridiculous, that's the point!" Utowin gestured broadly. "If she submits this with the old form, it gets kicked back, and she has to redo it, which is a waste of her time and—"

"Then tell her which form to use and stop there."

Utowin paused. Considered this as though it were a genuinely novel suggestion. Then pointed at Luluci. "It's the form with the double header at the top. They should be in the second drawer of the east cabinet. You're welcome." He picked up the cup on the table, looked into it, and made a face. "This is cold. Easthies, why is this cold—"

"Don't drink that.
"I wasn't going to drink it, I'm making a point—"
"What point?"

"That it's cold! That you left a cold cup on the table, which indicates you've been in here before, which means you knew she was working in here, which means—" He seemed to lose the thread of the point. It doesn't even make any sense. Utowin stood. "I'm getting my own. Nice to meet you, Luluci. Easthies, the north road report is on your desk, you're welcome." He headed for the door. "Also, the northern assignment went well, glad you asked, I survived everything—"

"I wasn't worried," Easthies said.

"I know you weren't, that's what I'm complaining about! That's very rude, you know?" And he was gone, his voice receding down the corridor, apparently finding a new argument with someone else before he'd even cleared the doorway.

Silence came back into the room like something exhaling.

Luluci looked at Easthies.

Easthies looked at the cold cup.

"He grows on you, perhaps he has found a liking for you," he said.

She thought about this. "Like what, specifically?"

A pause. The corner of his mouth lifted. "I'll leave that for you to determine."

She looked at the door Utowin had exited through, then back at her document, and thought, I did not feel the need to track where he was. Which surprised her. The privilege should have only been for Easthies. He's quiet, respectful. Utowin was loud and sudden and had a physical presence like an open window on a windy day, and she had been… fine. Present, aware, but not tracking.

Maybe because there had been nothing to track for. No calculation underneath the noise.

She went back to the document.

She made a note at the bottom of the page to find the form with the double header.

She warmed to Utowin slowly and then all at once, which she later learned was how most things with Utowin worked.

The slow part was simply an acclimation, getting used to the particular weather of him, learning that the loudness was not aggression, the assumptions were not malice, and the way he filled a room was not a way of leaving no room for anyone else. He was, she found, genuinely transparent. Every part of him is visible from the outside. The care he had for the people was not a performance because, truthfully, Luluci believed he didn't know how to perform. The kindness was simply there, large and uncomplicated, and extended without condition.

The all-at-once part happened over dinner, about two months in.

She had been eating with Easthies; this had become a regular arrangement without either of them deciding it was one when Utowin dropped into the seat across from her, completely uninvited, and said, "Can I ask you something?"

"You're already sitting down," she said.
"I know. Can I ask you something?"

She looked at Easthies. Easthies simply look at his food, deciding not to be involved.

"Go ahead," she said.

"You passed the winter intake exam," Utowin said. "Top score in the practical. But you also came in on the— " He stopped. Chose his words, which were unusual enough that she paid attention. "On the back of something difficult. And you've been here three months, and you're still… I don't know. Careful. In a way that seems like it… costs something?" He looked at her directly. He was not being unkind. He was being… honest, in the blunt way that was apparently the only mode available to him. "Is it getting better? You don't have to answer. I'm just asking."

She looked at him for a moment.

Perhaps her bar is on the ground, but her chest did a small leap at the simple fact of how he had asked. He did not assume it was fine, not performing sensitivity, not making her feel like she had to reassure him that she was fine so that he could feel good about having asked. He simply asked, directly, and waited.

"Yes," she said. "Slowly, but yes."

He nodded. "Good." He picked up his fork. "Easthies is good at the slow kind of better, by the way. He's very patient, and he doesn't try to rush you through it." He said this entirely conversationally, as though he were recommending a good road to take. "I'm less good at that. I tend to… try to fix things. It's a flaw."

"We noticed," Easthies interrupted, still looking at his food.
"I'm working on it—"
"You told Lord Beldaruit to exercise last week. By jogging, may I add."
"He seemed sad! Exercise can make you happy!"
"He literally cannot walk ."
"I didn't know that at the time!"

She laughed. She did not plan to laugh. It came out small and genuine and surprised her, and Utowin looked at her with the expression of someone who had just won something, and Easthies looked at nothing at all with the faintest possible suggestion of satisfaction, and she thought, oh. This. I didn't know I was going to have this.

Observation, for Luluci, was not a choice. She had been built that way before the past year, and the past year had sharpened it until it was less a skill and more a constant hum. The low, continuous work of paying attention to everything in a room and deciding what it meant.

Most of the time, it was exhausting. Occasionally, it was useful.

Where Easthies was concerned, it was both, and also something else she didn't have a word for yet.

The first thing she noticed, really noticed, beyond the general impression of safe, why, can't determine… was the hair pin.

It was a rest day, the fifth week, and she was coming back from the east archive with a folder under her arm when she passed Easthies in the corridor. He was in casual clothes, the uniform off, just a dark high-collared shirt and his hair down, which she had only seen once before, and he was wearing a small silver pin she had never seen on him. Plain, fine-edged, catching the lamplight as he walked.

She almost said something. She didn't and moved on.

She saw it again three days later, in his standard half-up arrangement. And again the week after. The pin had been incorporated, apparently, into regular rotation.

Where did that come from? ….It’s quite pretty.

The second thing happened about a month in. She had been in the reading room when a senior investigator named Barris, who was not a bad person, but had the particular quality of some men where the blunt rudeness was so built into the structure of how he operated that he'd stopped noticing it and had talked over her twice in the span of ten minutes. Not aggressively. Just… subconsciously as if it were a natural thing. The way a river would go around a stone, it did not choose to go around it, simply finding the stone insufficiently important to alter its course for.

She had made her point the third time with more volume and more precision, and he had looked at her with mild surprise, the expression of someone who had been redirected by something he hadn't expected to have opinions.

She had gotten her point across. She had been fine.

What she noticed was Easthies, across the table, who had gone very still during the first interruption and had gone quiet, an arm on the table where his chin rested upon his palm. Piercing eyes directed at Barris.

He didn't do anything about it. There was nothing to do. She had handled it herself; she didn't need handling, and he would have known that. But the stillness had been there.

He sees it… and he minds.

The third thing was in his room.

She had come to return a reference document, and coincidentally, the door was ajar. She knocked regardless, and he replied, Come in. Luluci pushed it open to find him at his desk with his hair loose and a small hand mirror propped against his inkwell, working a pin into the top sections. He looked up. There's… something in his face; she caught the tail end of it, only for a half-second. It was unguarded in a way she hadn't seen before. Then it arranged itself back into neutral, smooth, and quick as water.

"The Harrow document," she said, holding it up.

"Thank you." He took it.

She had a clear sightline to the shelf beside the window, and she looked at it. She always looked at shelves when she was in someone's room; it was the fastest way to understand a person. What she saw was a couple of books, a small case, and an inkwell. What's tucked half behind the inkwell, not hidden exactly, not put away, just placed not quite in view is a dark ribbon. A clip with a small stone in its setting. And a pressed flower, paper-dry, folded into a square of cloth.

She looked at the document in his hands.

She looked back up at him.

He was watching her with the quality of stillness that meant he knew what she had seen.

"Do you know where I can get a good conditioning oil?" she said instead. "Someone recommended one from my old chapter, but I can't find the same thing here."

A beat.

"Herbalist on Wester Lane," he said. "Green door. Ask for the long-hair formula. She doesn't put it out front, but she keeps it."

"Thank you," she said.

Luluci left soon after.

In the corridor, she thought about the ribbon behind the inkwell. About the pressed flower. About the clip with the small stone in a setting that would loosen over time if the craftsmanship wasn't careful.

She thought about the half-second expression she had caught before his face arranged itself.

She turned all of it over. Couldn't find the exact shape of it yet.

Something, she thought. There is something I'm almost seeing.

She put it in the growing pile of things she was almost seeing, where all her half-thoughts of Easthies would be, and went back to work.

On the first warm day of spring, Luluci decided she was going to the market.

She had been past it twice on rounds. She had clocked it from a distance by the colour, the organized chaos, the good noise of a place where things were being bought and sold, and people were broadly getting on with their lives. She had kept walking both times because stopping alone in a crowd still required more of her than she wanted it to. She was working on that.

But today felt like a good day. More importantly, today felt like a day she did not want to talk herself out of.

She ended up outside Easthies' door. She wasn't sure why she decided to go there; she had simply been walking and then… arrived, which, she was finding, was how she moved through the world on rest days, gravitating toward the thing that felt most like safety.

She knocked.

He opened the door. His coat was already half on, which either meant excellent timing or he'd been heading out anyway.

"The lower quarter market," she said, before he could say anything. "Come with me."

He looked at her for a moment.

"Let me get my things," he said.

They walked out into the spring morning, and she felt something in her shoulders drop that she hadn't noticed she'd been carrying.

The market was exactly what she'd hoped.

Crowded in the good way, where the crowd was just people going about the ordinary business of existing in proximity, not a thing that had any particular opinion about her. She had forgotten how much she liked markets. She had been avoiding a lot of things she liked this past year. It turned out that avoiding things you liked was not actually the same as being careful. She was working on that too.

"This way," she said, and turned left, walking in front of Easthies to lead the way.

"The overview stalls are to the right," Easthies said.
"I know, I'm not going to the overview stalls first."
"Is there a plan?"
"Yes," she said, "Come on."

The first stall that slowed her down was the hair accessories stall. She had spotted it from three rows out from the organized flash of silver and stone. She reached the front of it and started picking things up immediately.

"These are good," she said, turning a pin over. The construction was solid, and the setting was tight; the edges hadn't been rushed.

"The plain silver ones hold better," Easthies said, from beside her. "The ones with stones, the settings loosen if the work isn't careful."

She turned to look at him. "How do you know that?"

"I've had that problem."

She looked at him for a moment, this man who knew offhand about setting quality in hair accessories. Her eyes stared at Easthies’s hair, and her mouth muttered an oh. Cheeks redden. and then looked back at the stall, "This one," she awkwardly coughed, trying to lure the attention away from her. She is picking up a plain silver pin with a fine twisted edge. She turned it over, satisfied. Then, on instinct, "What about you?"

She held a slightly larger one toward him.

He went still for a fraction of a second. Small enough that she wouldn't have caught it if she hadn't been paying attention.

"I'm fine," he said.

"Your braid comes loose by the sixth bell every day," she said pleasantly. "I've been watching it happen for two months."

"That's—" He stopped. "You've been watching my braid?"

"I observe things. What about this one?" She held it up, closer.

He looked at the pin. His expression did something she almost caught. Something that flickered open briefly and then arranged itself back into neutral, the way it had in his room, the same motion with the same speed.

Then he reached past her and picked up a different pin. Not the one she was holding. Plain silver, finer-edged than the one she'd chosen. He turned it over once with the care of someone who knew what they were looking for.

"This one," he said quietly, and put it on the cloth beside hers.

She paid for both. He didn't argue. She had braced slightly for professional deflection on you don't need to do that but he simply let it happen. Put his pin in his breast pocket without comment and walked beside her toward the next row.

She was quiet for a moment, thinking about that. About the… not-arguing. About the way he'd looked at the pin before he chose it. It’s not so quick, like someone accepting an object they were indifferent to; rather, it’s more like someone who knew what they wanted and had decided, just this once, to take it.

He said he was fine… and he kept it, she thought.

She led them further into the market.

She found the accessories stall four rows in and made for it without announcing her intention.

It was excellent. She was not going to pretend otherwise. Ribbons and decorative clips and small glass beads in a dozen colours and silk cord and cloth flowers, the kind of stall that existed purely for the pleasure of things being pleasant to look at. She had gone a long time without pleasant-to-look-at things, and she was ready to bring some back to the dormitories.

She was already picking through the ribbons when she heard Easthies come to a stop behind her.

She kept her eyes on the stall.

She heard him take a step closer.

"This one," she said, picking up a dark green ribbon and holding it back toward him without turning. "For your hair. It would suit you."

Silence.

She waited.

"It's a reasonable colour," he said.
"It's beautiful," she said, "and you know it."
A pause. "It's —" Another pause. "Fine."
She smiled at the ribbons. "You can just say you like it."
"I didn't say I liked it."
"You didn't say you didn't."

He said nothing.

She heard him take the ribbon from her hand, the soft sound of him turning it over, once, twice. Unhurried. The same way he'd turned over the pin.

She picked through the rest of the stall, giving him the space of her ‘not-looking’, and bought the pale blue cord and the red ribbon and a bright yellow one she had no specific plans for. She heard him step up beside her and put the green ribbon on the cloth, and the merchant took it without comment, and that was that.

He put it in his coat pocket. With the pin.

She walked alongside him to the next row and thought: he said it was fine. He chose it carefully, and he kept it, and he said it was fine. She thought about the ribbon behind the inkwell in his room, dark burgundy, which she had not seen him bring home from anywhere but which had clearly arrived somehow. She thought about the pressed flower in the fold of a cloth.

How many things has he let himself have, as long as they were small enough to stay out of view?

The thought was not sad, exactly. It was something more than sad. Something that went sideways in her chest in a direction she couldn't name yet.

Not yours to name, she reminded herself.

"Bread," she said suddenly. "You're buying."
He looked at her. "Why am I buying?"
"I bought the pins."
"I didn't ask you to—"

"No, you didn't," she agreed, cheerfully, and walked toward the east entrance where she had spotted the bread cart on their way in. She heard the pause behind her, the moment of his face doing the thing it did when he was amused and not going to show it. She also heard his footsteps following.

They ate on a low wall near the market's edge with the morning opening up warmly around them, and it was very good bread, and she told the vendor so with the conviction of someone who took accurate feedback seriously.

"Utowin told me to get the ones with seeds," Easthies said.

She stared at him. "You consulted Utowin about bread."

"He offered information without being consulted."
"Several times?" Small laughter bubbled under her breath.
"Until it was retained." He looked at the bread. "He was right."
"I'm going to tell him you said that."
"Please don't."

She laughed fully this time, a real laugh, not the small surprised kind, an actual laugh, and he looked at nothing at all with no expression, and she laughed a little more at that, and the morning was warm, and the bread was good, and she thought, when did this happen? When did this become a thing I have?

"How long have you known him?" she asked. "Utowin."

"Since we were apprentices." He was quiet for a moment. "He sat down next to me in a field once and started making a flower crown and has more or less not stopped talking since."

She turned to look at him, surprise bleeding on her face, "He made you a flower crown?"

"He was seven."
"Did he finish it?"
A pause. "Yes."
"Did it look good?"

Another pause. Longer. "...Some of the flowers were already going limp," he said finally.

She pressed her lips together very hard.

"That's… that's very sweet," she managed.

"It was… adequate," he said, cheeks tinted in pink. Luluci’s eyes widened at that.

They sat together for a long time after the bread was finished being eaten. The market moved around them. Vendors calling, children running, the general cheerful noise of a place where people were getting things they needed.

"It gets easier," he said, eventually.

She looked at him. He was looking at the market.

"The…" He paused. "Whatever you're still carrying. It gets easier."

Not better. Not the bright, empty promise of someone reassuring themselves. Easier. The word of someone who had needed something to get easier once and had waited and found out.

"How do you know?" she said.

He was quiet for a moment.

"Because things that are very heavy are still heavy," he said, "but your arms get stronger."

She thought about that. She turned it over.

"That's either very wise or very obvious," she said.
"Probably both," he said.
"Did Utowin tell you that too?"

Easthies's lips curved to a soft smile. "No. That one's mine."

She smiled. The day had been good. She had, without planning to, given herself something she'd been needing.

"Thank you," she said. For the bread, for the walk, for all of it. For the ribbon in his pocket and the pin she'd bought him and the fact that he'd let her.

"You paid for the pins," he said.
"I know."
"So technically—"
"Easthies."
"...You're welcome," he said.

Three weeks after the market, she turned up at his door with a jar of conditioning oil from the herbalist on Wester Lane, green door, long-hair formula, and said, "I need someone to do the back sections."

He looked at the jar.

She had been working on the back sections herself for twenty minutes before accepting that her arms were not long enough to do this properly and that she needed help, and somewhere in the process of accepting that, she had found herself thinking of him. Not trying to find a reason. Just him.

"Come in," he said, and stepped back from the door.

She sat in the chair by the window and held the jar out behind her.

"Mid-lengths first," she said. "Not the root."
"I know," he said.
"Do you, though, because most people—"
"My hair," he said, "is longer than yours."

She held the jar out in silence and let him take it.

The room settled. She heard the jar open, heard him working the oil into his palms. And then his hands were in her hair, and Luluci found that her heart was at ease. It’s not beating rapidly, her throat isn’t closing up tightly, and she finds her hands steady on her laps.

His hands were careful in the specific way she had come to expect from him, the way all his attentions were. She closed her eyes briefly and let her shoulders drop.

"Your ends need trimming," he said.
"I know."
"The woman near the west gate—"
"You mentioned her. She asks how much and means it."
"Soon," he said. "Or they'll split further up the length."
"You're very bossy about this."
"I'm accurate about this."
"You do know that those aren't mutually exclusive, right?" she said.

He made a sound that was not quite a laugh. Lower than that, and shorter, happening somewhere in the chest.

She looked out the window in the evening. The city below was going golden, the sounds of it softening into the particular register of early night. She felt warm and unhurried and not required to be anything in particular.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"You can ask."

"Why is it… Easy with you?" She said it bluntly because she was a plain person when she felt safe enough. "I know it sounds strange… But I've been trying to work it out since the first day. I can list the things that are different about you. The way you talk, the way you move, the way you handle things. But the list doesn't add up to the whole of it. There's… something underneath the list."

His hands stilled. Just briefly.

Then continued.

"Maybe," he said, carefully with the particular care of someone choosing what to offer and how, "it's because I know what it costs to keep parts of yourself managed. And I have no interest in being something that makes that necessary."

She sat with that.

I know what it costs to keep parts of yourself managed.

She thought about the ribbon behind the inkwell. The pressed flower. The way he said I'm fine and then kept the things she gave him. The way he'd looked at the green ribbon when he thought she wasn't watching.

"That's a very specific thing to know," she said.

"Yes," he said.

She didn't push. She knew the door — she had been learning the shape of his doors all year, which ones had light under them and which were simply walls — and this one was open just a crack, and she was not going to force it wider. Whatever he carried, he carried in rooms she had not been invited into yet, and she was not the kind of person who forced invitations.

"Thank you," she said. For the answer. For all the things the answer was reaching toward.

"Your ends," he said. "West gate. Soon."

She laughed quietly. "Yes, fine. The west gate. Soon."

Later, when her hair was finished, and the oil was put away, she turned around on her chair and looked at him in the lamplight and said, simply, "My turn."

He looked at her.

She kept her face easy. Friendly. The offer is open, without any edges on it.

He was quiet for a moment. The room was quiet. Outside, a cart went past on the street below, and then it was quiet again.

He reached up, slowly, and began removing his pins.

He did it the way he did most things — carefully, with intention. Each one was placed on the desk beside him, not just put down. Set down. She watched his hands do this and thought about how careful he was with everything he allowed himself. Every small thing handled like it could be taken away if he wasn't attentive enough.

He turned around on his chair without a word and presented her with the long fall of his dark hair.

She picked up the oil jar.

She worked slowly because she was less practiced at this length than her own, and she didn't want to rush it. He said nothing, and she also stayed in the comfortable silence. The lamp burned low and warm. She worked a section between her fingers and found it to be well-kept, actually. Healthy at the ends, recently trimmed. She had a clear image, suddenly and completely, of him at the west gate. Sitting in that chair. Asking for just the right amount. Meaning it when he said so.

"You really take this seriously," she said softly.

"Is there a reason not to?" he said. Equally soft.

She moved to the next section.

"It's beautiful," she said, because it was, and because she had decided some time ago to say true things when she had them, and she was not going to make an exception for things that were true about him.

He was very still for a moment.

Not the careful stillness. Something else. His hands, which had been resting loosely in his lap, went completely still, and she saw, in the set of his shoulders, in the quality of it, that something had happened that she was not supposed to witness. Something that had slipped past the arrangement.

She looked back at her hands in his hair.

She did not remark on it.

She thought, There you are. Quietly. To herself, and to whatever it was she had just almost seen. There you are, for just a second. She smiles softly.

"Thank you," he said eventually. Just that. But it landed differently from politeness. It landed in the way of something that had been waiting a long time to be put somewhere.

She kept working, and the room stayed warm, and she thought, I don't know what I'm seeing. But I know what I'm seeing is something real. And it's his, and it's— she searched for the word, it's good. Whatever it is, it's good.

"I'm going to want to do this again," she said.

"All right," he said.

She smoothed the last section and sat back and looked at his hair and felt the specific satisfaction of having done something properly, and thought about how long it had been since she'd sat in a room and felt that the room was hers to be in. Welcomed without protest or tricks.

"I like this," she said. "I didn't have sisters. And most of the women I know now… We're not close like this. I'd forgotten."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Yes," he said.

She wanted to ask what he meant by that, yes, but she didn't. She was getting better at knowing which things not to ask when it comes to Easthies. There was a particular quality of his silences that meant this was real, and you've found it, please don't make me explain it.

So she didn't.

"Rest day, next week," she said instead. Upper quarter market. I want to see if the ribbons are actually better up there."

He turned around on his chair to face her, finally, and his hair was loose, and the lamplight was doing something warm to it, and he said, "They are. Third row from the south entrance."

She stared at him.

"You've been there?" she asks, amused.
"Yes."
"To the upper quarter market."
"Yes."
"For the ribbons specifically?"

He looked at her with the expression he used when he had decided to simply wait out her reaction.

"Right," she said. "Yes. Good. Third row from the south entrance." She stood up and smoothed her skirt and said, with complete seriousness: "You have to come with me, or I'll never find it."

"I just told you exactly where it is."

"Third row could mean a lot of things. You're coming."

He picked up his pins from the desk, one by one. He was not arguing. She had learned that when he stopped arguing, it meant yes.

"Upper quarter market," he said. "Rest day."

"Rest day," she confirmed, then picked up her coat and left. She had forgotten peacefulness had felt like. Surprisingly, it came in the form of Easthies. She was glad to remember.

Summer arrived, and the Knight Moralis became, against all her initial expectations, something that felt like hers.

Not in the sense of ownership. In the sense of that she knew where everything was, and the patterns of the place, and the sounds it made at different hours, and which investigators were worth arguing with and which simply needed to be waited out, and where the good lamp was in the east archive, and that the dining hall always ran out of the soup with the herbs in it by the third bell so you had to be early.

She knew these things the way you know things about somewhere you belong.

She had not expected to belong here. She had expected to be competent here, which was different. Belonging had seemed, for a while, like the kind of thing that had happened before, in a life she was still carefully dismantling herself from.

It had happened anyway. She thought that was worth noting.

She was still noticing things about Easthies.

They had accumulated through the spring and into summer through the small observations, the little almost-understandings, and they had started to arrange themselves, not into a clear picture yet, but into something. A shape with edges she could feel even if she couldn't see them whole.

It had started as he didn't quite fit. The vague texture of it, the sense of something that wasn't sitting inside its expected category, the way the others sat inside theirs. She had turned it over so many times that it had gone smooth and familiar without becoming any more specific.

And then spring had happened, and the market, and the hair, and the ribbon, and she had started to see it differently.

It was not that he didn't fit the category. It was that there was a part of him that had decided, for whatever reason, to stay out of sight. Something he had locked into a room somewhere and was very careful about. It is not shameful; she was precise about this. She knew shame when she saw it; instead, it was just private. Protected. Handled like something valuable that the world had a history of not treating as valuable.

She saw it in small things.

The way he touched his own hair sometimes, not fidgeting, not absent, something more purposeful than that. Something that looked like it was giving him something, privately, that she didn't have a name for.

The way he was on rest days. Fractionally different. He was still Easthies, still precise, still dry, still the kind of person who made her feel like the room had structure, but with something slightly more present about him. Like a window opened one more inch.

The way he'd looked at the accessories stall in the upper quarter market, which she had dragged him to on rest day as promised, third row from the south entrance, his eyes had moved across the full spread of it before he schooled his expression. She had been looking at him, not at the stall, and she had caught it. The fraction of a second before the neutral settled. The thing underneath.

She had handed him a pale ivory ribbon without commentary, and he had taken it without commentary, too. And later she had seen it with the others, in a small folded pile, on the shelf.

She thought about the shelf often now.

What are you keeping in there, she thought sometimes, not at him, at the shape of what she was almost understanding. What is it that you carry like that? So carefully. Like it might not be allowed to exist if the wrong person noticed.

She did not ask. It was not hers to ask.

But she kept the space open, like a past lover keeping a window open in case someone would come back. It's not insisting, just available. Incase.

One afternoon in late summer, an investigator she didn't know well was explaining something to the room about a case summary, and halfway through it addressed the last comment to a point somewhere above her left shoulder. Not at her. Near her. In the direction of the room that contained her, but not quite at the person she was.

She was used to this. She was not fine with it, because she had decided she was no longer going to pretend the difference between used-to and fine-with, but she was practiced at the specific arithmetic of choosing your battles.

She caught it a second later. Came back with a question, precise and unmissable, aimed directly at the information.

The investigator answered. She thanked him. The room moved on.

She had not looked at Easthies.

After the room had emptied, she started gathering her documents, and when she glanced up, he was still there, standing by the window, looking at the street below. And the quality of his stillness was the one she recognized. The contained one. The one that was different from his usual quiet.

He did not say anything about it. She did not say anything about it.

She picked up her documents. He turned from the window. They walked out together into the corridor, and Utowin was already waiting by the staircase, complaining about something, and the evening resumed.

It was late autumn.

She and Utowin were in the reading room with case documents and a lamp doing its best against the grey afternoon, and she had been at the Knight Moralis for almost a full year, and the room felt like hers the way all the rooms did now, and she had long since stopped counting the good days against the less good ones because there were enough good ones that the counting had become unnecessary.

Utowin had been quiet for almost twenty minutes, which was a phenomenal event.

"What do you think of Easthies?" Utowin asked quietly.

She looked up at him. "That's a personal question."

"Yes," he agreed, entirely comfortable with this.

She looked back at her document. Across the table, Utowin had the expression of someone who was genuinely curious and was not particularly going to pretend otherwise. He had, she'd found, almost no capacity for pretending otherwise about things.

"Why are you asking?" she stared at him.

He turned a page. "Because you know him differently than I do," he said. "And I've known him for 20 years, and I'm still… " He paused. "I still find things I didn't see before. And I'm curious what someone who knows him without thirty years of having a picture of him would say." He shrugged, like this was a perfectly normal thing to say. "What do you see?"

She thought about it.

She thought about the market, the pins, the green ribbon, it's a reasonable colour. The hair oil evenings. The way he'd gone still when she said it's beautiful. The shelf with the things he kept half out of sight. The window stillness, late summer, when someone had talked past her in a room.

She thought about all the almost-understandings, the shape she kept reaching toward.

"She's—" she started.

She stopped.

The word sat in the air.

Utowin had gone very still. He was looking at his document. His face was doing something carefully neutral, which required actual effort from Utowin, and she could see the effort.

Luluci's mind caught up to her mouth in the silence that followed, and the heat climbed her face.

"I mean—" She stopped. Tried again, deliberately. "Easthies. He—"

She stopped a third time.

Because he was sitting wrong in her mouth. Not wrong the way she had been wrong. She had come out naturally, without thought, the way words come when you're not managing them. He was the correction, and the correction felt like something slightly off-key, like a note played almost right.

She did not understand this. She looked at it from the front and the sides and could not fully understand it. And yet she had said she before she'd decided to, and now he felt like a revision of something that had been accurate.

She looked at her document.

She thought about the ribbon, turned over carefully. The half-second expression she caught, before the neutral settled back. The way he said I'm fine and then kept everything she gave him. The pressed flower in the fold of the cloth. The window stillness, minding. The specific texture of his thank you when she said it's beautiful.

The shape she had been almost-seeing for a year.

Oh, she thought.

Not fully. Not the whole of it. She did not have the whole of it, and she was not sure she was supposed to, not sure it was hers to have. But the shape had shifted, just slightly, and she could see the edge of it. The outline. Enough.

She sat with it for a moment. Privately, carefully, with the care she brought to things that were real and not hers to make into anything.

"He's precise," she said finally, quietly. "And fair. And… he understands things without needing them explained." She paused. "He makes it easier to be here. He makes a lot of things easier." She thought of the market. The warm wall, the good bread. It gets easier. Your arms get stronger. "He's the most reliable person I know."

Utowin was quiet.

He nodded once, slow, still looking at his document. He did not meet her eyes.

"Yeah," he said. "He is."

The room was quiet.

She looked at her case notes, and the words resolved back into sense, and she turned the page, and they went back to work.

But she kept it. She kept the word, the weight of it, the way it had arrived before she'd decided to arrive there herself. The way it had felt true and then she'd corrected it, and the correction had felt, just slightly, like lying.

She did not know what to do with this. She did not think there was anything to do with it. It was not her thing to do anything with. Whatever Easthies was, whatever he carried in those carefully kept rooms, it was his. It belonged to him in the way that the ribbon belonged to him: something he had been very careful about, something he held close, something that maybe deserved more room than the world had given it.

I don't know what I saw, she thought. But I know it was true.

Outside the reading room window, the first rain of autumn had begun. Soft and steady, running down the glass in thin lines.

Whatever you are, Easthies… You're allowed to be it. At least here. At least near me.

I hope you know that.

The lamp flickered once in a draft, and steadied, and the rain came on.