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Rhaenyra had not expected her firstborn to be so utterly useless when speaking to women.

It seemed, frankly, unfair. His true father, Harwin Strong—though no one still living with any sense of self-preservation dared mention such things aloud—had possessed the sort of steady, open charm that made women trust him after a single conversation and fall a little in love by the second.

Laenor Velaryon, for all that their marriage had been many things before it had been romantic, could charm a court into forgiving him almost anything with a laugh, a compliment, and the careless confidence of a man who had never once overthought a conversation in his life.

And Daemon, her husband, Jace’s stepfather, and by far the longest-standing male influence in his life, was certainly no stranger to charm when he wished to wield it.

Somehow, from all this, Jacaerys had inherited none of it.

Or worse, he had inherited the desire to be charming without the slightest idea how to survive the attempt.

“He asked her whether affection was better understood as a private inclination or a civic responsibility,” Daemon said, and then, because he had apparently not exhausted his enjoyment of the matter, began laughing again.

Rhaenyra closed her eyes. “He was nervous.”

“He was terrifying.” Daemon leaned back in his chair, one boot hooked carelessly over the other, silver hair loose over one shoulder and a cup of wine untouched at his elbow. “The girl looked as if she had been summoned before the small council to defend a border dispute.”

“She did not look terrified.”

Daemon gave her a look over the rim of his cup. “My love, she curtsied to him twice in the same conversation. Once at the beginning, and once because I believe she thought it might end the encounter.”

The first proposed match had not survived the afternoon. No formal refusal had been spoken, of course; noble houses had gentler words for such things. But by supper, the girl’s mother had developed a sudden and passionate interest in returning home before the roads turned muddy.

Rhaenyra pressed her lips together.

She had not meant to smile. This was her son they were speaking of, her heir, who had grown into a man with his father’s solemn brow and her own unfortunate habit of taking duty directly to heart. Jace was clever. Brave. Responsible. Kind, when he remembered kindness did not require a strategy beforehand.

But he had also, by all accounts, attempted to begin a courtship conversation by inquiring whether his intended preferred “candour over harmony in matters of alliance.”

It made defense difficult.

“He is trying,” Rhaenyra said at last.

“That is precisely the problem.”

“Daemon.”

“Rhaenyra.” He spread one hand, entirely unrepentant. “The boy courts like he is laying siege to a castle. Respectfully, with supply lines and written terms.”

This time, the smile escaped her. Daemon saw it and looked deeply pleased with himself.

“Do not look at me like that,” she said. “He has had very little practice with this sort of thing.”

“Living?”

“Flirting.”

“Ah.” Daemon considered this. “Then perhaps he should begin by not making the girl feel she has been asked to sign a treaty with her heart as collateral.”

Rhaenyra’s amusement softened before it could become laughter. Through the open doors, the morning light fell across the painted floor in long gold bars, and for a moment she saw Jace as he had been when he was small: earnest-eyed, determined, desperate to do well even when no one had asked him to be perfect.

“He does not know how to want something without turning it into a duty,” she said quietly.

Daemon’s laughter faded at that. Not entirely—he was still Daemon—but enough that his expression gentled into something almost careful.

“Then someone should teach him,” he said.

“Gently,” Rhaenyra warned.

Daemon smiled in a way that suggested he considered gentleness a flexible concept. “Of course,” he said.

By that afternoon, Jace had received three pieces of advice: one from his mother, delivered with sympathy; one from Daemon, delivered with no sympathy at all; and one from a courtier who had clearly mistaken panic for ambition.

***

The next proposed betrothal—Lady Serena—had also been his mother’s idea, though Jace knew better than to resent her for it. The realm was quieter than it had been in his childhood, but quiet was not the same as settled, and Rhaenyra had learned long ago that peace was stitched together one alliance at a time. Serena’s house held lands, ships, and loyalties that could not be ignored; more importantly, they had remained steady when steadiness had become rare enough to count as a virtue.

Her family had arrived at court the day before in a sweep of polished armor, salt-dark cloaks, and careful smiles. Jace had met Serena in the throne room beneath too many watching eyes, where they had bowed and curtsied with all the proper grace expected of two people whose futures had become a matter of public interest before they had exchanged a single private word.

There had been time only to observe. Discreetly, of course. Jace had noticed the composed line of her shoulders, the intelligence in her eyes, the way she listened before she answered. Serena, he suspected with increasing discomfort, had noticed him standing too straight, speaking too carefully, and looking as if he had been handed a sword with no blade and told to win a duel.

They had been parted almost immediately afterward by parents, courtiers, and the usual machinery of noble arrangement. Today, their houses had agreed, with maddening cheer, that the young prince and Lady Serena should walk together in the west garden and speak for the first time without half the court pretending not to listen.

Prior to Serena’s arrival at court, Jace had read six etiquette manuals, three diplomatic histories, two collections of romantic poetry, and one very unhelpful pamphlet titled Graceful Conversation Between Houses of Consequence.

He had not slept well.

This was not unusual. Jace had survived whole weeks on less rest than any healer recommended and considered himself perfectly functional on a diet of black coffee, stubbornness, and the occasional threatening look from someone who cared enough to force bread into his hand. But this was different.

Battles made sense. Trade negotiations made sense. Even assassins, in their own unpleasant way, made sense. They had objectives. Patterns. Weak points.

Courtship, apparently, did not.

Jace stood before the tall glass in his chambers with a bouquet in one hand and a folded sheet of notes in the other. The flowers were pale blue, chosen only after he had confirmed with two gardeners and a terrifyingly opinionated lady-in-waiting that they did not represent grief, apology, illicit longing, or insult toward Serena’s grandmother’s house.

He had considered red roses for exactly four seconds before deciding they were far too presumptuous for a first visit conducted under the eye of three allied courts and at least one ambassador who looked like he collected scandals as a hobby.

Blue was safer. Respectful. Admiring, but not possessive. Pleasant, but not frivolous. Elegant, but not desperate.

He looked down at them again. They looked desperate.

“They are flowers,” he told his reflection, very quietly. “They cannot betray you.”

His reflection, which had endured a great deal from him over the years, offered no reassurance.

Jace unfolded his notes for the seventh time that morning.

Acceptable subjects of conversation: weather; gardens; recent improvements to the east road; music, provided no comparison is made between northern and southern styles; breakfast preferences, if introduced naturally; books, unless the book is political, religious, military, or likely to reveal poor taste.

Beneath that, in smaller writing, he had added: Do not ask whether they prefer honesty or diplomacy. Apparently, this is not charming.

He folded the paper sharply and tucked it inside his coat, where it sat against his ribs like armor.

When Jace arrived at the west garden, Serena was already there.

She stood beneath the arched trellis with the late morning sun catching in her hair, one hand resting lightly on the stone rail. There was nothing especially formal in the way she waited, no stiff posture or practiced courtly stillness, and somehow that made Jace feel even more as if he had arrived for examination.

Serena smiled when she saw him.

Jace immediately forgot the opening sentence he had prepared.

It had been a good sentence. Measured. Courteous. Warm without being forward. He had practiced it three times while descending the stairs and once, under his breath, while passing the portrait gallery.

Now it was gone.

For one alarming moment, Jace considered bowing again and retreating to begin his entrance a second time.

That, he decided, would not improve matters.

“Lady Serena,” he said, and bowed with what he hoped was the appropriate depth for an informal garden meeting between two people whose potential marriage had already occupied three private councils and at least one public prayer.

Serena curtsied. Once.

Jace, remembering Daemon’s laughter, chose to regard this as progress.

“My prince,” she said. Her voice was calm, but there was something at the corner of her mouth that suggested she was already fighting a smile. “I hope the morning finds you well.”

It did not, particularly. The morning had found him sleepless, over-caffeinated, and accusing a bouquet of strategic weakness.

“Very well,” Jace said. “Thank you.”

A pause followed.

Not a terrible pause, perhaps. Not yet. But the sort of pause that, if left unattended, might grow teeth.

Jace remembered the flowers.

“These are for you,” he said, offering them with both hands before realizing that both hands made the gesture look less like a gift and more like the presentation of evidence.

Serena accepted the bouquet, her fingers brushing his for no more than a second.

Jace’s mind, which had endured assassins and ambushes with admirable discipline, seemed to abandon its post entirely.

“They are blue,” he said.

Serena looked down at them. “So they are.”

“Not for grief,” Jace added quickly.

Her lashes lifted.

“That is,” he said, because apparently he had decided to continue, “I was assured they carry no funerary implication in your region. Nor apology. Nor presumption. The gardener was quite firm on that point, though Lady Bethany disagreed about the presumption until I clarified the shade.”

Serena stared at him for one breath, then another.

Then she laughed softly.

It was not the sharp laugh courtiers used when they meant to cut without appearing to draw blood. It was warm. Surprised. Almost delighted.

Some of the tension in Jace’s shoulders loosened before he could command it back into place.

“I am glad to know you did not begin our first walk by presenting me with mourning flowers,” Serena said. “That would have been a bold strategy.”

“I try to avoid bold strategies in matters of courtship.”

He heard it only after he said it.

Serena’s smile widened, but she was kind enough not to laugh again. Or perhaps not kind enough, because the effort not to laugh was somehow worse.

“Do you?” she asked.

“Whenever possible.”

Serena looked down at the flowers again, thumb brushing over one pale petal. “And yet you came armed with research.”

Jace glanced at her too quickly.

“Not armed,” he said. “Prepared.”

“There is a difference?”

“A significant one.” He offered his arm, then remembered halfway through the motion that he had practiced this. His elbow adjusted by what was probably an absurdly visible margin. “If one is armed, one expects an attack.”

Serena accepted his arm. “And if one is prepared?”

Jace looked ahead toward the path, lined with clipped hedges and late summer blooms. “Then one hopes not to make a fool of oneself before the first turn in the garden.”

Her hand rested lightly on his sleeve. It was a perfectly proper touch, sanctioned by courtship and custom and the fact that at least four distant relatives were likely watching from windows. Jace still found himself aware of it with embarrassing precision.

“For what it is worth,” Serena said, “you made it several moments past the first turn.”

Jace looked at her.

She was smiling again, but not unkindly. That, he was discovering, was the dangerous thing about Serena. She laughed as if she was inviting him to laugh with her, not at himself.

He had no idea how to answer that, so he reached for his notes.

Not literally. He was not so far gone as to draw a folded list from his coat in front of her, no matter what Daemon seemed to believe about him. But mentally, he found the first approved topic with the desperation of a drowning man seizing driftwood.

“The weather is fair,” he said.

Serena made a thoughtful sound. “A bold opening.”

“You said bold strategies were unwise.”

“I said mourning flowers would have been bold. Weather is merely safe.”

Safe. Yes. He could manage safe.

“Do you prefer it?” he asked.

“The weather?”

“Safe conversation.”

Serena did not answer immediately. They passed beneath the shade of a pear tree, its leaves shifting softly above them, the filtered light moving over her face. Jace wished, with sudden and severe irritation, that he had prepared for silence better.

“Sometimes,” she said at last. “Safe conversation has its uses. It keeps peace at dinner tables. It prevents old lords from dueling over tax grain. It allows strangers to discover whether they dislike one another without declaring it too soon.”

“And do you?” Jace asked before he could stop himself.

Serena turned her head. “Dislike you?”

It was too direct. He knew it at once. His mother would have sighed. Daemon would have laughed himself sick. The courtier who had mistaken his panic for ambition would likely have called it decisive.

But Serena did not look offended.

“No,” she said. “I do not think I do.”

Jace was so relieved he nearly thanked her, which seemed excessive even by his standards.

“That is reassuring,” he said instead.

Serena’s brows lifted. “Only reassuring?”

Jace opened his mouth, discovered three possible answers and no safe way of choosing between them, and closed it again.

Serena’s smile softened. “My prince, I am not asking you to negotiate a treaty.”

“That is fortunate,” he said. “I am usually better at those.”

This time she did laugh, bright and brief, and Jace found that he did not mind being the cause of it nearly as much as he had expected.

“May I ask you something improper?” Serena said.

Every warning he had ever received about courtly women, political snares, and questions with hidden edges presented itself for inspection.

“I would prefer you ask it plainly,” he said.

Serena glanced ahead, toward the path curving between tall hedges heavy with white blossoms. “Do you want this?”

Jace went still.

Not enough to pull away. Not enough to break the careful line of their walk. But Serena must have felt the change beneath her hand, because her fingers loosened on his sleeve.

“The alliance?” he asked.

“The courtship.”

There it was, then. The question beneath all the approved topics and acceptable flowers, beneath his mother’s careful diplomacy and Daemon’s laughter and the folded notes sitting like contraband against his ribs.

Jace could have answered as a prince. He knew how. He could have spoken of duty, stability, shared interests, mutual respect between houses. He could have made it sound polished enough that any listening courtier would nod and call him wise.

But Serena had asked plainly.

So he tried, for once, to answer the same way.

“I did not know whether I wanted it before yesterday,” he said. “I wanted to do what was required of me. I wanted my mother not to worry. I wanted your family to feel respected. I wanted not to offend you by accident, which I realize I have already come perilously close to doing several times.”

Serena said nothing, but she did not look away.

That helped more than it should have.

“But you listened yesterday,” he continued. “When Lord Morran spoke for ten minutes about harbor levies, you did not interrupt him, though I think you wanted to. When my brother made that joke about sea air and dragon tempers, you looked at him before you laughed, as if you wished to know whether he meant kindness or insult. And when my mother asked after your grandfather’s health, you answered honestly instead of prettily.”

He looked down at the pale blue flowers in her arms, because it was easier than looking at her face.

“I found that I wanted to hear what you would say next,” Jace said. “Before I remembered to want the alliance.”

The silence that followed was not the kind that grew teeth.

It was softer than that. Stranger. It settled between them like something living had been placed carefully in both their hands.

Serena was quiet long enough that Jace began to regret every word.

Not all at once. Regret arrived in stages. First, he regretted mentioning the alliance. Then he regretted mentioning her grandfather. Then he regretted the phrase before I remembered, which sounded either insulting or deranged depending on how mercifully one chose to interpret it.

He should have stopped at I do not think I dislike you either. That would have been reasonable. Mild. Nearly charming, if said by someone else.

“Prince Jacaerys,” Serena said.

His stomach sank. Use of his full name could not be promising.

“Yes?”

She stopped walking.

Jace stopped with her, because failing to do so would have resulted in either dragging her forward by the arm or wrenching himself gracelessly out of her hold, and both outcomes seemed politically poor.

Serena turned to face him, the bouquet gathered carefully against her middle. Her amusement had not disappeared, but something gentler had joined it now, something that made Jace feel both seen and entirely unprepared.

“That,” she said, “was a much better answer than the weather.”

Jace stared at her.

“I did not intend it as an answer to the weather.”

“No,” Serena said, and this time she did laugh again. “I gathered that.”

The sound of it did something unreasonable to him. It loosened the hard knot beneath his ribs and replaced it with something lighter, which was inconvenient, because Jace had no experience commanding lightness.

“Do you always notice so much?” she asked.

“When something matters,” he said.

The words came too quickly, too honestly, before he could soften them into something less exposed.

Serena’s expression changed by some small degree he could not read. Not displeasure. Not exactly surprise. Something quieter.

“Then I shall have to be careful what I say around you,” she said.

Jace frowned. “I would prefer you not be careful.”

“That is a dangerous thing to say to a woman you have known for less than a day.”

“I know,” he said. “But I have had a great deal of careful conversation, and I am beginning to think I am poor at it.”

“Only beginning?” Serena asked.

He looked at her sharply, but she was smiling into the flowers now, entirely too pleased with herself.

“You are enjoying this,” he said.

“A little,” Serena admitted. “But not unkindly.”

Jace considered that. “I am not certain there is a kind way to enjoy someone’s incompetence.”

“There is if the incompetence is harmless,” she said. “And temporary.”

“Temporary?”

“Surely.” Serena tilted her head. “You strike me as a man who improves at anything once he stops trying to win it.”

Jace had no immediate answer for that. He was accustomed to praise that came like a report: brave, capable, dutiful, promising. He was not accustomed to being understood as a flaw in progress.

“I am not trying to win you,” he said carefully.

Serena’s gaze flicked to his face.

There were several ways to clarify that badly. Jace could feel them gathering.

He chose the least disastrous one he could find.

“Not as if you are a prize,” he said. “Or a fortress. Or—”

He stopped himself before he added strategic holding, because even he knew better than that.

Serena’s mouth twitched. “I appreciate the restraint.”

“I am exercising it with great effort.”

That startled another laugh from her, and this one he had almost, impossibly, meant to earn.

Jace felt heat climb beneath his collar and pretended, poorly, to study the path ahead.

Serena resumed walking, and after one hesitant beat, he fell into step beside her again.

“What would you like to talk about, then?” she asked. “If not weather, or treaties, or the political implications of affection.”

Jace thought of his list. Weather. Gardens. Roads. Music. Breakfast, if introduced naturally.

None of them seemed equal to the strange relief of having made her laugh and survived it.

“Tell me something true,” he said.

Serena’s teasing expression faded, not into discomfort, but into thought.

For a few steps, there was only the sound of their shoes on the gravel and the distant cry of some gull wheeling above the outer walls. Jace forced himself not to fill the silence. He had asked for truth. It seemed only fair to give her room to decide whether he deserved one.

At last, Serena said, “I was relieved yesterday when you looked nervous.”

Jace turned his head. “Relieved?”

“Yes.” She glanced down at the bouquet, her fingers tightening slightly around the stems. “Everyone told me you were dutiful. Honorable. Serious. A prince who understood what was owed to his house before what was wanted for himself.”

Jace tried to decide whether any of that required apology.

Serena spared him a quick look, as if she could see the apology forming and wished to stop it before it became another formal address.

“Those are not bad things,” she said. “But they are heavy things. And I thought, perhaps, if you were everything they described, then I would spend the rest of my life married to a portrait instead of a man.”

That struck him more cleanly than he expected.

He had been called many things in his life, both kindly and cruelly, but never that. A portrait. Something arranged and admired and made to carry meaning for everyone except itself.

“And then?” he asked.

Serena’s mouth curved faintly. “And then you stood so straight I thought you might injure yourself, and bowed as if the entire peace of the realm depended upon the angle of your shoulders.”

Jace closed his eyes.

“I had hoped that was less noticeable.”

“It did not,” she said. “But it was the first moment I thought, oh. There is someone in there.”

He opened his eyes again.

Serena looked almost embarrassed by her own honesty now, which Jace found deeply unfair. She had drawn truth from him with terrifying ease and now had the audacity to look as if she regretted offering him the same.

“That is what is true,” she said. “I did not want a portrait. I was relieved to find a man who could be nervous.”

Jace had no prepared answer for that.

For once, the absence of one did not feel like failure. It felt, strangely, like relief.

He had spent so much of his life learning to become the correct shape in other people’s minds. Son. Heir. Prince. Proof. Promise. He had worn each title as carefully as armor, and like armor, they had protected him best when no one looked too closely at the body beneath.

Serena had looked too closely and had not flinched.

That seemed dangerous.

It also seemed, though he would not have known how to explain this to anyone without sounding foolish, very much like kindness.

“I do not know how to do this,” he said.

The confession left him before dignity could interfere.

Serena’s expression softened. “Court?”

“My mother attempted another match for me earlier this year,” he said.

He realized, at once, that this was a catastrophic sentence.

Serena’s brows rose.

“Not because—” Jace stopped. “That is, not because you are a second choice. You are not. I mean, technically, this is the second arranged match proposed to me, but that is not an insult. To you. Or to the first woman. Though she did not like me, so perhaps she would take it as one.”

He heard himself.

“I should stop speaking.”

Serena patted his arm, soothingly enough that it should not have undone him nearly as much as it did.

“Perhaps not yet,” she said.

“I am trying to say that I was a disaster,” Jace said. “With her. Earlier. I tried very hard to be proper, and it made me unbearable.”

“Only earlier?” Serena asked softly.

Jace looked at her in alarm, but she was smiling. Not cruelly. Never cruelly.

“I am glad she did not like you,” Serena said.

“You are?”

“Yes.” Her hand rested a little more securely on his sleeve. “Her loss may yet be my gain.”

For several long seconds, Jace forgot every rule of courtship, diplomacy, and basic speech.

He was aware, distantly, that he ought to answer. A graceful man would have answered. Harwin Strong, if all the stories whispered too softly for Jace to have heard them and yet somehow heard all the same were true, would have smiled and said something low enough to make Serena blush. Laenor would have laughed and turned the moment into ease. Daemon would have made it dangerous.

Jace managed, “Oh.”

Serena pressed her lips together, eyes bright.

“That was not the sort of answer I expected from a prince,” she said.

“I am discovering that princes are poorly educated in several essential areas.”

“Such as?”

“Responding when a lady says something kind enough to be alarming.”

Serena’s smile softened again, and Jace decided, with very little evidence, that perhaps he was not entirely beyond saving.

They began walking once more. The path curved deeper into the garden, away from the windows and the pretending-not-to-watch courtiers. Wisteria trailed over a wooden arch ahead, its purple blooms stirred by the breeze, and beyond it the bright slash of Blackwater Bay glimmered between the cypress trees.

For the first time since the betrothal had been proposed, Jace did not reach for the list in his pocket or the one in his head.

“Do you like the sea?” Serena asked.

The question was simple enough that he nearly distrusted it.

“I like looking at it,” he said. “I like knowing it is there. I like what it brings to a city, and what it keeps away.”

“That sounds like a prince’s answer.”

Jace grimaced. “It was, wasn’t it?”

“A little.”

He tried again. “I like the sound of it at night.”

Serena looked up at him.

Jace kept his eyes on the path. “When I was young, I used to think the sea sounded like a thing breathing. It made the castle feel less empty.”

Serena did not answer immediately.

Jace wondered if he had said something too strange again. It was difficult to know. With Serena, ordinary seemed less useful than honest, but honest had a troubling habit of arriving unclothed and then standing in the middle of the room expecting him to explain it.

“My father used to say the sea was the only thing at court that could not be flattered,” she said at last.

Jace glanced at her.

Serena’s smile was small, private. “You can praise it, curse it, pray to it, drown in it, build your fortune on it, or lose everything to it. It never changes its mind because you have chosen pretty words.”

“That sounds like a sailor’s answer,” Jace said.

“It is,” Serena said. “I was raised by several, against my mother’s better judgment.”

“That explains the dangerous opinions.”

“I have not yet begun to share the dangerous opinions.” She looked up at him, eyes bright with amusement. “I have been on my best behavior.”

Jace felt, absurdly, that this was excellent news.

“I would like to hear them,” he said.

Serena studied him for a moment, as if deciding whether he meant that as courtesy or challenge. Whatever she found must have satisfied her, because her expression warmed.

“Very well,” she said. “I think most lords who speak of ships have never listened to one creak in a storm. I think half the men who call themselves bold are only loud. I think court musicians are at their worst when they know the king is listening. And I think breakfast is the most revealing meal of the day.”

Jace stopped short of smiling only because he did not trust himself not to look foolish while doing it.

“Breakfast?” he asked.

“Certainly.” Serena shifted the bouquet to one arm with grave importance. “At supper, everyone is performing. At dinner, alliances are being arranged, insults are being measured, and someone is always pretending not to watch who drinks too much wine. But breakfast reveals a person. Whether they are cruel before coffee. Whether they share the honey. Whether they speak before the bread is passed.”

Jace, who had written breakfast preferences, if introduced naturally on his list that very morning, experienced the terrible sensation of fate mocking him personally.

“I had not considered breakfast a moral trial,” he said.

“Most people do not,” Serena said. “That is why it is useful.”

“Then I am in trouble,” Jace said.

“Are you?”

“I am cruel before coffee.”

Serena looked delighted. “How cruel?”

“Unfit for governance.”

“That is serious.”

“Once, my brother asked me a question before I had finished half a cup, and I told him his argument had neither structure nor strategic value.”

Serena gave him a look of grave sympathy. “Was the argument about matters of state?”

“It was about whether he could borrow my gloves.”

For a moment Serena only stared at him. Then she laughed so suddenly that one of the pale blue flowers slipped from the bouquet and tumbled onto the path.

Jace bent to retrieve it at once, grateful for the excuse to look away while his face did whatever unfortunate thing it did when she laughed like that.

When he straightened, Serena was still smiling.

“You see?” she said. “Breakfast has revealed you beautifully.”

“It has revealed me as a tyrant.”

“Only before coffee.”

He offered the fallen flower back to her. “Then I will endeavor not to make any binding decisions before my second cup.”

Serena accepted it, and for the first time her fingers lingered against his.

Not long. Not improperly. Only enough for Jace to notice that she had chosen to let the touch last a heartbeat longer than necessary.

“Perhaps,” she said, “I should see for myself someday.”

Jace went very still.

“At breakfast?” he asked, because some traitorous part of him required confirmation before it allowed hope to fully form.

“At breakfast,” Serena said. “If your mother’s councils and my family’s ships permit it.”

He should have said something polished. Something about honor, or pleasure, or the suitability of shared meals to the development of mutual understanding between allied houses.

Instead, Jace looked down at the flower between them and said, “I would like that very much.”

Rhaenyra was waiting for him in the small council chamber.

She was pretending not to be waiting, which was different only in theory. A map of the Narrow Sea had been unrolled before her, several letters lay open near her hand, and her fingers rested upon a carved marker as if she had been interrupted in the midst of some grave strategic consideration. But when Jace entered, her head lifted too quickly.

The hope in her face was carefully contained and still impossible to miss.

It made something in his chest ache. His mother wanted the alliance, of course. She wanted stability, loyalty, ships, and all the necessary pieces of a realm that would not tear itself apart the moment no one was watching. But beyond that, beneath the queen and the strategist and the woman who had learned to make peace out of impossible things, she wanted him to have done well.

She wanted him to stand before her with his shoulders a little less burdened. She wanted him to be proud of himself. She wanted him, perhaps most painfully of all, to have found some small reason to be happy in a thing arranged first for duty.

Daemon was there too, seated near the window with the expression of a man who had arrived early to a mummer’s show and expected blood, comedy, or both.

He was grinning.

Not subtly.

Jace saw, with some resignation, that Daemon had prepared himself to enjoy another account of romantic catastrophe.

Daemon opened his mouth.

Rhaenyra turned her head and gave him a look so sharp it should have drawn blood.

To Jace’s surprise, and perhaps to the realm’s continued good fortune, Daemon shut it again.

“Well?” Rhaenyra asked.

Her voice was bright. Too bright. The sort of brightness one used for young children with scraped knees, frightened horses, and sons who had recently compared affection to civic infrastructure.

“How did it go?”

Jace reached into his coat.

Daemon leaned forward immediately.

Jace withdrew the folded list of conversation topics and held it out between two fingers.

Rhaenyra’s gaze dropped to it. “Oh, Jace.”

There was so much in those two words that he nearly smiled before he had earned it: affection, concern, helpless fondness, and the quiet, terrible knowledge that she would love him even if he had somehow used every listed topic in alphabetical order.

“I did not need it,” he said.

For a moment, neither his mother nor Daemon said anything.

Then Rhaenyra’s whole face changed.

It was not relief exactly, though relief was there. It was softer and more fragile than that, the look of someone being handed good news she had been afraid to want too visibly.

“No?” she asked.

Jace shook his head. “It went quite well.”

Daemon’s grin shifted, losing a little of its sharpness.

“Quite well,” Rhaenyra repeated, as if afraid to startle the words into retreating.

Jace looked down at the list in his hand. Weather. Gardens. Roads. Music. Breakfast, if introduced naturally.

He thought of Serena’s laugh, the fallen flower, and the way she had said that another woman’s loss might yet be her gain.

He folded the list once, then again, smaller than before.

“I like her,” he said.

It was such a small sentence for the size of the thing it carried.

Rhaenyra’s hand tightened around the carved marker on the map.

“And I think,” Jace added, allowing himself the smallest, most cautious smile, “she may have liked me too.”

Rhaenyra smiled then, truly smiled, and for one unguarded moment she looked less like the queen of a realm still teaching itself how to be whole and more like a mother whose son had come home from some small, private battle victorious.

Pride softened her first. Then happiness. Then something so openly tender that Jace had to look away before it undid the careful composure he had only just recovered.

Daemon, astonishingly, said nothing.

Rhaenyra noticed this too, judging by the brief, suspicious glance she sent him, but even that could not dim her smile for long.

“Perhaps,” she said, with a brightness that was no longer quite so fragile, “Lady Serena, you, and I might take a meal together tomorrow. Somewhere less formal than the council chamber. It would be pleasant to know one another better.”

Jace looked up.

His mother was trying to sound merely cheerful, but he knew her better than that. She was already imagining it: Serena at the table, Jace not miserable, the alliance given a warmer shape than parchment and seals. Hope, arranged carefully between plates.

He nodded. “Breakfast would be best.”

Rhaenyra’s brows lifted.

Jace folded the list one final time and tucked it back into his coat, over the place where it no longer felt quite so much like armor.

“She likes breakfast,” he said.