The ballroom breathed perfume and candle smoke. Oris glowed at the high table, a halo of expensive friends around him. Corin watched the room like a man coaching a play. Tamryn flirted with a cousin who needed it, kissed a dowager’s knuckles, and let the harp drown the tightness under his ribs.

  Tris wasn’t meant for this room, but the Libraries demanded a body for these events. She wore her good shoes, her practical hair, and her my time is worth more than your ego smile. Requests came like insects: “the red book with the gold spine,” “the treaty with the four signatures and the storm drawing,” “the one my grandfather liked.” Tris wrote neat notes that meant nothing and scouted exits.

  She saw it in Tamryn’s face because she’d seen it on soldiers who came to the stacks after long days: too-still. A gloss on the eye. A smile with its teeth in a trap.

  She drifted into orbit.

  “Your Highness,” she said with gentle irritation, as if he’d sent an actual errand. “You sent for the charter ledger you absolutely need to sign tonight. Keeper Thalen will fillet me if I don’t get your initials.”

  Tamryn didn’t blink. “Yes,” he said. “Thalen is very particular.”

  “Terrifying.” She set her empty glass between his plate and his hand where no one could object. “Please save me.”

  Queen Ilyra glanced over. “Duty to the books,” she said, amused.

  “Duty to the books,” Tamryn echoed, and rose with a bow to the queen and a smile at the table. Oris’s aide’s mouth tightened by one grain of salt. Good. Tamryn loved when they noticed nothing at all.

  They walked at a pace that didn’t alarm anyone. Tris steered toward an open arcade. Air rolled in, cool, rinsing the sweetness. Tamryn braced his hands on stone and let his lungs decide to work again.

  “Ledger,” he said, breath even, voice steady.

  “I left it in my other dress,” Tris said, and for a heartbeat he could have kissed her for being exactly this person. “You’re going to stand here and breathe, Your Highness. Then you’ll vow water for a week to a minor god and make the wine steward cry.”

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  “Hare-god?” he asked, deadpan.

  “Any god with a sense of humor.” She watched his pupils shrink toward normal. “Can you walk without heroics?”

  “I can always walk without heroics.” He straightened and almost did something ridiculous, like touch her hair. He didn’t. “Tris.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Tamryn.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and then, before caution could get a vote, “I don’t want to sleep this off alone.”

  Her mouth did a small, wicked curve. “Blame the drug.”

  “I intend to,” he said.

  They didn’t sprint. They ghosted along the service run above the gardens to a small conference room no one used after dusk and shut the door as if they’d always meant to be in it. There were maps on the walls and a long table covered in felt and a bowl of fruit someone had forgotten in spring.

  He kissed her like he’d wanted to since the first time she’d annoyed him on a staircase. She let him. The heat came quick, clean, not desperate so much as delighted—two clever people who liked being alive finding something better to do with their mouths than talk.

  “Still full of poison?” she asked against his lip.

  “It’s not touching the important parts,” he said, and the laugh she made went straight to his hands. He turned her to the wall where the map of the northern marches made a a tidy frame around her shoulders and kissed her like a man who never forgot his pace once he found it. She matched him, then pulled, then let him win, except when she didn’t. It was the kind of kiss that wrecks a week of discipline.

  “Moderate sin,” she murmured, when his hand slid to her hip, “is a library-approved category.”

  “Is that written down?” He smiled into her mouth.

  “Everything’s written down at some point,” she said, and hooked her fingers in his vest and, in an unusually vulnerable act for a woman with a spine like a ledger, let herself enjoy him. When he laughed at exactly the wrong moment, she put her hand over his mouth and he bit the heel of it as if he’d been waiting for permission to be ridiculous. She swore in a very quiet way and kissed him again for it.

  They stopped because they had to, not because either of them wanted to. Breath is a tyrant. Duty is a bore.

  “You’re going back in,” she said, smoothing his collar. “You’ll be pious. You’ll drink water. You will not be interesting for four whole days.”

  “That sounds like work.”

  “It is.”

  He pressed his forehead to hers for a beat, which was not princely and very useful. “Tris.”

  “Tamryn.”

  “Let me see you again.”

  “Library hours are posted on the door.” She slid past him and tapped the frame twice like she always did, even on doors that didn’t listen. “Try not to be hunted on your way to the altar of water.”

  He left with a harmless smile and a pulse that wanted to be anything but. She returned to her daisies and her ledgers and tried not to look like a person who’d used someone to breathe.