I need you all to know that I greatly desire to throw out everything and commit to another story where you’re Shamrock’s nursemaid/governess and he becomes obsessed with you as a mother, while simultaneously Garling is also discovering he’s attracted to you.
But you’re a casual, chill Celestial Dragon who took this job because you are not wife material, and would rather save money to travel. And every year you swear you’re going to leave the Figarlands, but the scary Holy Knight keeps raising your salary to absurd levels and you’re getting so so so rich, and really you don’t see him that much, and Shamrock is so cute and you really love him—
• Shortly after the sun had set early on Christmas Eve you were standing by the main entrance of the manor, holding a letter from your husband and waiting for his promised arrival. You had borrowed a coat from him to keep warm, but that didn’t stop the servants from worrying about you.
"Lady Figarland please, come back inside. You'll catch a cold," one of the maids pleaded with you, but you were stubborn.
"She's right, Saint Shamrock won’t be pleased if he finds you sick in bed," another servant added, they were much more comfortable speaking their mind around you when the men of the family weren’t there.
"I will stay, I want to be the first to greet him," you decided with a confident nod and leaned your shoulder against the marble pillars holding up the roof above the doors.
Hours passed, you kept slipping away into a light sleep, waking up just in time to stop yourself from falling.
Where was he? Had his promise to return by Christmas from his mission not meant anything? You couldn’t imagine attending the feast tonight on your own without a hand to hold onto and all the balls on the following days would be pointless without a dance partner.
"Lady?" Your maid asked as she put another fur coat on your shoulders.
"I know he will come back, he always does," you sobbed, it was getting harder to keep your tears at bay. The cold breeze left you shivering despite your warm clothes.
"Perhaps he's not finished with his orders yet," she tried to calm you, following your eyes as they stared into the darkness of the garden in front of the house.
[ … ]
At last, a light appeared at the gate. It swung back and forth as if a ghost was carrying it through the air - but once it came closer, you saw that the lantern hung from a saddle. A black horse galloped over the neatly trimmed law with a tall man riding on his back, his face covered by a hood.
You gasped, could it be-?
The man on the horses stopped right before you, the stallion reared and slammed its hooves into the dirt. He removed his hood and revealed his long, red hair which was soon decorated with snow flakes. His stubble was a bit longer than usual, you already pictured yourself shaving it for him.
"Shamrock! You’re back!" You squealed and he smiled down at you from his horse.
"Did you ever doubt me, my dear?" Shamrock wondered and slowly climbed down from Miach's back. The stallion shook his head, sending all the snow in his mane flying through the air.
He cupped your face between his hands, his gloves felt nice and warm, you practically melted into his touch.
"Just in time for dinner, we should hurry and get dressed," he suggested and ordered a servant to take Miach to the stables so he could rest comfortably in a pile of warm hay.
"I'm all ready to go," you noted and your husband tilted his head like a curious puppy - you loved it when he did that.
"As an apology for making you worry, I'm giving you one of your gifts early. Follow me." Shamrock bowed down and kissed the back of your hand. You felt flattered enough to allow him to walk you inside and upstairs.
In your dressing room a dark green ball gown waited for you, shimmering in the candle light with more layers of tulle than you could count. A delicate, golden tiara with a ruby in the middle sat on top of a chest right next to it.
When your gaze kept flickering back and forth between your husband and the dress, Shamrock pulled you close for a kiss and held you by your waist. He needed to bend down to reach your lips, but it didn’t bother him at all. You were perfect, he wouldn’t have married anyone else.
"Merry Christmas, darling," he purred and you thanked him with another kiss. "Hm, don’t forget, there's a lot more for you to unwrap later. What kind of husband would I be if I did not spoil my wife?"
You hugged him tight and he patted your back.
"Now let me watch you get dressed, I have missed the beauty of your body, it's been far too long."
"Pervert," you teased back and prepared to give him a little show.
The rest of the evening went wonderfully, you enjoyed a lavish dinner with your husband and sat with a few other knight families at a large banquet table. Although Shamrock preferred not to speak much and part of him still struggled to enjoy the holidays with his grumpy old man glaring over his shoulder, you knew he was trying his best to make these days special for you.
————————————————————————
[ Figarland Garling 🌙 ]
• You were busy with a few last minute preparations for the holidays, hanging up all the decorations you had bought on the tree which you also had insisted on getting, without your wish to celebrate Christmas, the Figarland manor would have been devoid of any holiday cheer.
Your husband had obliged and fulfilled your wishes, not without a condescending scoff or two, your stubbornness would always prevail in the end. Garling knew that. If he had wanted a meek servant who didn’t challenge him, he wouldn’t have brought you to Marie Geoise and put that ring on your finger at the beginning of the year.
This was your first Christmas together, it was an important time of year even for the Celestial Dragons. All connections to Nika had been erased from the traditions of course, replaced by wishes and prayers to the illusive 'Great One' the knights spoke of with a monumental weight to their words.
Saint Garling was the only one to never attend the Christmas galas, he rarely showed up for the banquet of the knights on Christmas Eve. He'd appear, fashionably late, speak a toast and leave. It was a waste of time in his eyes, especially now that he was a Gorosei and had far more important business to attend to.
You knew that was only partially true, the other Elders, from what you had been told, all celebrated with their families. Naturally you'd end up stuck with the grumpiest of all old men.
Garling was watching you from the sofa, he was reading through some paperwork while you finished up the tree. You kept glancing over your shoulder to see him with a deep frown, if only he knew how attractive he looked when he was slightly irritated.
You opened the last box and picked up a golden star, it would be the last piece to complete your decorating endeavors. Before climbing on the ladder to put it up, you held it further away from you and positioned it next to Garling.
"Hmm," you hummed and squinted your eyes at the star and the blurry silhouette of your husband. "Almost looks like you."
Garling sighed and leaned back against the pillows you had sewn for him, they weren’t perfect by any means, since you had gifted them to him on his birthday ( which he also deemed silly and unnecessary, but when has that ever stopped you? ) he refused to get comfortable without them.
"You could at least pretend you found that funny," you teased him and chuckled when he rolled his eyes.
Now it was time to finish what you started. You stepped on the ladder, it wasn’t tall enough, so you had to stand on your toes and stretch out your arms to get close enough to the tallest branch. Not paying attention for a second was enough to tip you off balance and honestly, you should have seen this coming.
A pair of strong hands saved you, Garling squeezed your waist tightly and held you up higher than the ladder ever could.
"Go on, put up your silly little star," he grunted and you happily placed the ornament on the tree. "And next time, I'd prefer it if you'd ask me for help before risking your life."
You felt embarrassed, maybe you should have asked your husband first.
"I didn’t want to get on your nerves, you don’t seem all that excited about … this anyways," you mumbled and avoided his judging glare.
Garling carried you over to the couch and made you sit in his lap. You couldn’t help yourself and stroked his beard, if he didn’t wish for you to touch it, he shouldn’t have grown it out this long.
"Listen," he ordered sharply and fixed his glasses, "I may not understand why you’re so attached to all these flashing lights and toys, but if they make you feel at home, then my house will be filled with them. You are my wife, you’re a Figarland now, false modesty doesn’t suit you."
"I will remember that," you nodded and cuddled up to him, luckily he had changed out of his suit and into his private robes, they were warm and comfortable, it was hard not to doze off like this.
"Besides, without a tree, where should I put your presents?"
You perked up at that, sitting up straight with your eyes wide open.
"Why so shocked, dearest?" He asked and stroked your neck while you were showing it off to him so willingly.
"So you do ike Christmas," you told him with a grin.
" … I never said that," Garling scoffed.
Later on that day you were trying out different settings on the tree lights when Garling entered the room again after a long meeting. He must have been quite pent up, because without uttering a single word, he grabbed you from behind and put you down on your hands and knees right under the tree.
Fortunately he allowed you to kneel on the tiger fur lying underneath you. Garling might have been much, much older than you, but his age hadn’t affected his libido.
"You know what I'd like for Christmas, little one?" He growled in your ear as he mounted you, pressing his crotch against your ass. "My child in your womb."
You instinctively spread your legs and let out a soft mewl.
"As you wish, Sir," you purred back at him.
At last even your grumpy husband found his own way to enjoy the holidays.
———————————————————————-
[ Red-Haired Shanks 🍶 ]
• Many claimed that the bounds created in found families were much stronger than those only connected by blood. During your time with the Red Hair pirates you certainly started to believe that too. You stood back and watched the crew climb up the huge tree Shanks had cut down to decorate it - all under your command, of course.
"Ah! One second, Beckman, move that over to the right-," you instructed the older man who was clinging onto the pine tree for dear life. "Juuuust a little more … more … perfect!"
You checked your concept sketch again and hummed with deep satisfaction. It had only taken an entire afternoon, but the first Christmas tree the ship had ever seen was finally finished.
The men applauded, mostly for their own patience in dealing with your conflicting orders and getting trough the process without anyone breaking their neck.
" … so does that mean we can go drink now?" Hongo asked and scratched his head.
"Yup, job's done," Benn answered before you could and the crew prepared everything for a festive drinking bout.
As expected, the captain himself showed up long after the work was done. Slightly hungover from last night and with a big, fat grin on his lips, Shanks laid his arm around your shoulder and took a good, long look at the Christmas tree.
"Look who decided to crawl out of his cave," you joked and he chuckled, it was hard to be mad at the redhead when he looked and sounded so charming.
"Good job, sweetheart. Can’t believe we didn’t do this earlier, it's pretty … gets me in the mood for another drink," he said and immediately broke out into another laughing fit when you frowned at him. "Alright, alright, just messin' with ya. I wanted to ask if you wanted to stop for some Christmas shopping at the next island?"
" … are you trying to cover up that you forgot about my gifts?" You suspected and crossed your arms with a playful pout.
Shanks pinched your cheek until you squeaked, then he let go and the sea breeze got caught in his hair and cloak at just the right moment - Screw it, you had already forgiven him.
"Not at all, doll. How could I forget? I just … think it's better you pick what you'd like and your big, strong Yonko captain buys it for you," he explained in an overdramatic tone.
"Aren’t I lucky?" You rolled your eyes and bummed your elbow against his side, which quickly turned into the two of you fighting playfully until Shanks called for a truce with a passionate kiss.
"Let's go brat, before I change my mind and drag you back into my cabin," he purred while biting your ear.
[ … ]
You were used to people swarming Shanks as soon as he sat foot on an island, everybody knew him and all those under his flag adored him. Eventually he managed to control the masses a bit and told them he wanted to spend time with his love, which saddened a few of the girls. You stuck your tongue out at them and your captain caught you by surprise with another kiss.
"Where do you want to start?" He asked, eyes flying over the many shops all throughout the town, all decorated to fit the holiday spirit.
You dragged Shanks through clothing stores, second-hand shops for antique treasures and books, bakeries and even a toy store - fortunately your husband enjoyed shopping with you, if only because he got to see you smile and hear you laughter as you showed him your strangest findings. He nodded along and bought everything that made your eyes sparkle, there was no better use for all his gold.
"Isn’t that … a bit much? I'd be happy with less, Shanks," you told him as a few members of the crew pulled the cart with all your presents back to the ship.
"I know, but I'd rather spend my wealth on you than drink myself into a coma," he chuckled dryly.
Ever since you had come into his life, his urge to drink had gotten much better, instead of the bottle he sought out comfort in you now. And to him, that was worth more than all the riches of the world.
When you returned to the ship Benn had already managed to motivate ( … force ) all of the most sober men to set up enough tables for all of you to sit at. And although most of the gifts under three were yours, it seemed a few other men were also exchanging presents.
You sat in Shanks' lap during dinner, surrounded by the family you had spent your whole life wishing for.
Shanks smiled lazily and watched you doze off after you had eaten enough for two.
"Merry Christmas, love," he whispered, caressing your neck with his lips, careful not to wake you.
————————————————————————
Thanks for reading! <3 I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas, if you celebrate ✨ Next part will include Sommers, Killingham and Gunko!
Peonies are flowers that are connected to the first love that some people have. Heather there is a small bouquet that is left next to your nightstand whilst Dragon works long nights or you see Dragon pull part of his cape aside to unveil more peonies that he hand delivers to you when he gets a break. There is a small supply run that Betty now goes on in order to gather peonies from a specific island.
You would always receive white and coral coloured peonies.
Dragon worked a lot, the man was burdened by guilt that was just reinforced with determination. Dragon constantly pushed for the freedom of others but he often stripped himself of freedom.
Dragon is a good man and a haunted one at that. You would walk over to his desk and place the white and coral peonies between you as you pulled up a chair to sit next to him. Promptly, you take half of the stack of new intelligence documents that had come through thanks to Koala and Sabo’s recent excursion in Dressrosa. You make sure to organise them by date, just to make sure that it’s easier for him to sort through.
“I know you feel bad, but you have to stop giving me white flowers, you don’t need to apologise, i knew what i was getting into when i got with you Dragon”
Dragon pauses and looks up from his work and turns his head towards you with tired eyes.
“I know, but expectations are often different from reality my love. I’m away more than even i expect-“
You cut him off quickly by moving the peonies to his hand and entwine your fingers together.
“Shut up Dragon, i love you enough no matter how often you have to leave or work, we’re revolutionaries. And at that, you need rest, you cannot keep this together if you are falling asleep at your desk, come to bed”.
“…alright”
Peonies are flowers that symbolise first love, passionate love, accomplishment, good fortune and they are flowers that are used for the celebration of achievements. White peonies are often given in apology when someone feels shame, whilst coral peonies symbolise strong relationships, happiness and success.
Snakes head fritillary (the first flower picture) and Ranunculus (the second flower picture - the light pink rose like flower).
It was an ancient ritual, one that had almost been wiped out when the snake empress and her sisters had been hunted and branded by those false, greed driven ‘gods’.
Flowers that were given to the amazonian woman’s person of interest would represent both a shard of the amazonian’s past and what the Amazonian felt that the person they were interested in represented.
As Boa was interested in you? She gad moved towards where the old trail grounds were and had picked those two sets of flowers. The Amazon Lily empress had spent hours carefully organising the flowers into an ornate bouquet for you, making sure that it was perfect. The empress herself had carefully cut off a section of the bottom of her skirt to show that a part of her was now woven with you and woven into the promise she was going to make to stay by your side.
The empresses clothes were extremely important in Amazon Lily culture, a fully preserved snake skin was very hard to find completely in tact in the forests on the island. Each part of the snake skin was woven with silk from the local silk worm minks who lived in the Alka Trees.
“Snakes head fritillary.”
Boa says as she shows the outer flowers of the bouquet.
“A flower that gives recognition to my past. They symbolise melancholy, sorrow and deep mourning. I place these in my bouquet to you in order to honour my fallen sisters and bare my soul to you, even the wounded parts”
Boa speaks as her gold snake earrings glint in the sun, jingling softly as she steps forward ad places the bouquet in your hands.
“And on the inside? Are Ranunculus. A flower that symbolises charm, attraction and radiant beauty, all things that encompass you. The lakes bloomed plenty this year and i take this as a great sign for us, my flower”
Boa smiles as the ceremony continuous around you both as you are crowned the empresses partner.
Did Buggy laugh for a good like ten minutes when he saw the name of the flower? Absolutley, of course he fucking did. He laughed until he wheezed before snatching a few of the flowers.
Originally, Buggy did have the plan of leaving the flowers that share their name with an innuendo on the corpses of rival crews that Buggy had defeated as an extra fuck you.
Until he gets with you, every now and then Buggy will blame it on Cabbaji and make you believe that the acrobat had ordered a shipment of morning glory by mistake.
Buggy will still leave them by crews he had defeated, but he had started to shove some of the flowers into your hands, you had said once that they were your favourite... and then Buggy had stuttered some excuse and left.
"Here! Their clogging up storage, do something with them!"
Buggy has never read a book about flowers or their meaning in his life, and he probably never would.
"Tch there, I saw you looking at them. As your great captain I have the generosity to bestow some upon you or whatever!"
Buggy grins, splitting off his hand from his body and using it to deliver flowers to that empty vase across the room. The same vase that you had stolen from a market to hold the first set of morning glory flowers that Buggy had gotten you.
Morning Glory serves as a reminder of the fleeting nature of life and encourages individuals to embrace love and affection in their daily lives. The flower symbolises tenderness, and tenacity, prodding individuals to pursue their dreams with endless persistence.
Shamrock didnt need to concern himself with customs that commoners took part in ehilst trying to romance others. The gifting of flowers hsd never made much sense to him. It was unnecessarily dirty, to touch the plants that existed in the tainted soil of those islands on the blue sea below Marijoa.
Why dirty your hands when someone else could pick flowers for you?
If you wanted something or someone then you either bought it or you forcefully took it yourself. That was the way of the holy knights and celestial dragons.
And yet.
Here he was in the private manicured gardens of the Figarland estate...picking fucking flowers. Shamrocks skin crawled at the soil under his nails, and whilst he felt the overwhelming need to wash this mortal filth from his hands? He keeps picking them until he gets a bundle. Tying them together with a thick red silk ribbon.
"Here, they've been growing well from the gardeners tending to them, ive saved most of the roots if you do wish to keep them in your room. Im sure I can get a maid to help make a hanging basket."
Pansies are flowers that are heavily connected to the planet Saturn. Youd think that in the Figarland estate the flowers would all be red, right?
But no.
The pansies that Shamrock had ordered to be grown were specifically blue and purple pansies. There was only one useful thing that bastard Sommers had ever said with his filthy mouth...and that was about the meaning of pansies, he had probably talked about other meanings of different flowers, but pansies had stuck with Shamrock.
Blue pansies represent loyalty, devotion and truthfulness. Purple pansies represent royalty and beauty. Overall? Pansies are strongly connected to discipline and responsibility.
Throughout Shamrocks life, he had served the Abyss order, the holy knights and Imu-sama. And now?
Now Shamrock had found himself devoted to you. Not just duty, not just following orders, no. Devotion. Pure devotion. Not just from responsibility or discipline, no, this time it was from choice.
It had been years since that day. The day that the world had changed forever, the day that power tilted in the World Governments favour and had destroyed upcoming threats against the gods of this world.
Years since Garling had started to quietly leave those flowers by your family's house in Marijoa.
Those exact flowers that had bloomed in blood of that crumbling island... Moonflowers.
Moonflowers. They emerge and glow under moonlight typically. The flowers are known to bloom under nightfall, during the time that Garlings blade carved through hunting trophies on islands.
Even the curve of the petals of the moonflower reminded you of the supreme commander of the holy knights. Garling and his stupid fucking hair that you had started to place those very same flowers in.
"Do you really get so much enjoyment out of these humiliation rituals that you decide to put me through?"
Garling would complain. You could never show affection outside of these walls, his image needed to be maintained after all and a singular breach could cost you both everything. Comrade or not, the holy knights could tarnish someone, even if it was one of their own.
Moonflowers symbolise mystery, secret love, romantic devotion that hides from the worlds prying eyes and they are flowers that provide hope during dark times.
Ironic, as Garling and the celestial dragon stronghold that you find yourself in are the cause of the darkness that plague this world.
I am once again back with my unhealthy fixation on ‘A Lineage of Red’ by the ever amazing @gav-san !
The story is really ramping up with the tension and slow sinister simmering toxic romance. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - if you haven’t read it, I cannot recommend enough to give it a try. Garling is still the absolute worst, but damn if the writing and presentation is not deliciously compelling. Absolute masterclass IMO.
Abusive relationship, but Garling deserves it anyways ♡
---
You were pissed off, having a mission from Imu go so horribly despite you doing everything you could.
You mercilessly struck Garling’s back with a kick and sent him on all fours like the dog he was, he was getting older and weaker after all, and you were as young as ever~
Sitting on your favourite couch, you let your feet rest on Garling’s back, not even giving him a chance to get up from the kick.
“Do you know what–!” He began and turned his head towards you before you shoved your right foot in his mouth, forcing a choked voice from him (which made you internally grin).
“Cerberus acts better than you! God, you’re a worthless piece of–” You took your foot out and struck his neck, his body collapsing with the force of your kick. And you weren’t even wearing your signature heels you fought in! How pathetic!
You sensed a younger thing coming around from behind you.
“Shamrock..?” You asked sweetly, turning your head to him, he couldn’t see the state his father was in due to the broad couch.
He looked sleepy and innocent, holding onto a teddy bear that you bought for him specifically, the next day right after Garling ordered he not get any more ‘childish’ gifts… Because he was a damn child!
“I heard… some stuff.”
“It’s nothing to worry about, baby.” The heel of your foot digged into Garling’s back, making him hiss in pain.
“Okay.. Can you… sing me to sleep..?”
“Of course! Give me a minute and I’ll be there.”
“You’re the best!” The boy beamed and ran back.
You stood up angrily and grabbed Garling’s hair, forcing his mouth to bite the nearest table, before pushing hard with your hand and taking a step back, only to kick his skull against the table as a warning, you could hear him choking as the porcelain dug beyond his teeth.
“You disgrace your bloodline, your son will never be the soldier you wish him to be with the way you act.” You took his hair in your hand and pulled back to slam him against the table, probably getting him a concussion. “Wild dog.” You spat on him.
“Make us hot cocoa, your son’s restless, I’m helping him sleep.”
You didn’t bother checking back on him before making your way to your son’s bedroom.
Garling Figarland x Reader, 18+ Based on this: prompt
Length 19K+
Summary: The pay was unreasonable, the child was famously difficult, and the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights was, unfortunately, exactly as advertised. You came to the Governess interview in the wrong coat, said the wrong things, and got the job anyway. You were going to do good work, save your money, and leave. The position was temporary. The child had other ideas. So, it turns out, did his father.
Previous, / Epilogue pt 1
Martha spent the better part of half an hour trying to reason with you, and you gave her the courtesy of listening to every word, even as none of them landed anywhere useful. She was thorough, you’d give her that; methodical in the way she disassembled your arguments and thoughtful in how she rebuilt them in her favor. She told you that you were making a mistake. She told you that you were the most emotionally stubborn person she had ever loved, and that those two things were probably related.
You told her, with great patience, that she was wrong.
She told you, with slightly less patience, that she was not.
You were still locked in that particular impasse when the distant sound of the piano finally ceased, replaced by the thunder of small feet in the corridor, and Shamrock reappeared in the doorway, flushed and disheveled from his lesson, bow tie askew, looking very much like a boy who had recently survived something. He took one look at Martha’s expression and your expression, and read the room with the unnerving accuracy of a child who had been raised in a household that conducted itself largely through subtext.
“Is something happening?” he asked.
“No,” you said.
“Yes,” said Martha, which earned her a look that she was entirely unbothered by. “Your governess is being a nitwit.”
She left shortly after that, not without making her feelings known one final time at the door. She paused with her hand on the frame, and you thought, briefly, that she might simply go. That she might spare you. You should have known better. Martha had never spared anyone anything in her life; she considered it a form of disrespect.
She turned.
“You know what your problem is,” she said, and her voice had dropped the breezy edge it had been carrying all afternoon. What was underneath it was quieter and considerably worse. “You have always run. The moment something gets real enough to scare you, you find the most sensible-sounding reason you can, and you use it as a door. And you walk through it, and you tell yourself you did the right thing.” She looked at you for a long moment. “And everyone on the other side of that door just has to live with it.”
“Martha.”You said, half-warning, half-placating.
“You are not leaving because you are a virtuous governess,” she said. “We both know that. And I think somewhere you know that too, which is probably why you won’t look at me.”
You were, in fact, not looking at her. You corrected this, but it cost you something.
“Abandoning someone who loves you,” she said, plainly, with no decoration at all, “is not a neutral act. No matter how many reasonable-sounding words you put on top of it. You can call it professional boundaries, you can call it appropriate distance, you can call it whatever helps you sleep. It is still abandonment. And you have done it before, and you are doing it again, and I love you too much to pretend I think you’re being brave right now.”.
Then she turned, and she was gone, and the door clicked shut behind her with a quietness that was somehow louder than a slam.
Shamrock had not moved from the spot where he’d stopped when she started talking. He was standing very still in the way children sometimes do when they are trying not to be noticed, as though their stillness might retroactively erase the fact that they were present for something they weren’t meant to hear. His bow tie was still crooked. His eyes were a little too wide, fixed on you with an expression you had not seen on his face before and did not particularly like seeing now.
He looked alarmed, in the careful, internalized way of a child who had learned that visible alarm was not always safe to show. Like he was doing rapid calculations behind his eyes and not entirely liking where they were landing.
You looked at the sky for a moment, breathing, rebuilding some form of composure. Never in your life had you been stripped down in front of a client.
Then you sat down on the nearest available surface, and you looked at Shamrock, and you patted the cushion beside you.
“Come sit with me,” you said, as evenly as you could manage. “I need to talk to you about something.”
He came. Slowly. He sat. And he watched you with those too-wide eyes, and you understood with a sinking clarity that Martha, in her caring, had done you no favors, and that whatever you were about to say, Shamrock had already begun to brace for it.
It took longer than you’d hoped and shorter than you feared, which meant it took approximately one hour, and it was one of the hardest hours you could remember spending in recent memory. You had sat through difficult conversations before. You had delivered bad news and received it, and had navigated things that required careful handling. But there was something particular about trying to be honest with a child in a way that was neither condescending nor cruel, and Shamrock was not a child who made it easy on you, because Shamrock was not a child who accepted summaries. He wanted the whole document. He wanted the footnotes.
You chose your words carefully. You started with the thing that mattered most, because you needed it in the room before you tried to build anything else on top of it.
“I want you to know,” you said, “that I’m not abandoning you.”
You watched his face as you said it, looking for the place where it landed. He didn’t look reassured, exactly. He looked like someone receiving a piece of evidence and reserving judgment on what it meant. He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he had, the kind that made you feel like every syllable was being classified and cross-referenced, weighed against prior testimony. You had always found it slightly unnerving that attention. It was too old for him.
“Okay,” he said, carefully. Not agreeing, just acknowledging that he had heard you.
“I need you to hold onto that,” you said. “While I try to explain the rest of it.”
“Alright.”
You took a breath. “I’ve come to a place, recently, where I need to begin the process of disentangling myself. From this house. From this arrangement. It’s something I have to do, and I want you to know that it has nothing to do with you.”
You believed both of those things completely, and they still felt inadequate the moment they were out of your mouth.
He did not accept them at face value. You had not expected him to.
“What does that mean?” he said. It wasn’t quite a question. “Disentangling?”
“It means,” you started, and then stopped, because the first three versions of the sentence were all wrong. He waited. He was very good at waiting, in the same way a closed door was good at waiting. Patient. Immovable. “It means I’ve let myself get too close. To this house. To this life. To you. And I need to take a step back from that.”
He considered this. “How close is too close?”
“Close enough that it isn’t good for either of us.”
“It’s good for me,” he said, with the simple, childish confidence.
“Shamrock.”
“It is,” he said, not argumentatively, just precisely. “I can tell you what isn’t good for me, if you want a comparison.”
“That’s not,” you said, and stopped, and tried again. “That’s exactly what I mean. You see? This is what I mean. The fact that you can say that to me, and I feel it the way I do, that’s the problem.”
He looked at you. “That doesn’t sound like a problem.”
“It is,” you said. “I promise you it is.“
He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Is it because you don’t care about me?”
“No,” you said, and the word came out more fiercely than you’d intended, sharper than you’d meant it to, and you saw him blink at the force of it. “That is not it. That is the opposite of it.”
He frowned. It was a careful frown, the kind that meant he was working through something rather than simply reacting. “Then why?”
You looked at your hands for a moment. The honest answer was sitting right there, patient and inconvenient, the way honest answers usually were. “Because I care too much,” you said. “And it isn’t appropriate for me to do so. Not in the way that I do. I’m not supposed to be in the place of something I’m not. Do you understand what I mean?”
He considered this with the gravity of a small magistrate weighing evidence, turning it over, examining its edges. “Not entirely,” he said at last, which was honest enough that you almost smiled.
“You have people,” you said, carefully. “People who are meant to fill certain roles in your life. A father. People whose job it is to be those things for you. And it isn’t fair, to you or to anyone, for me to blur those lines. To pretend I’m something I’m not, or to let you go on thinking I am.” You stopped, gathered yourself. “I got too comfortable here. I let myself forget what I actually am, and what I’m not. That’s my fault, not yours. But I have to correct it.”
Shamrock was quiet for a stretch of time that felt longer than it probably was. He was looking somewhere past your shoulder, with an expression you couldn’t entirely read. Then he came back to you, and his gaze was very direct.
“Is this about my father?” he asked. He said it like he was selecting exactly the right tool for a delicate job, turning it over once before he used it.
You went very still.
“Are you partial to him?” he pressed, in the matter-of-fact way he sometimes had, as though he were simply trying to establish the facts of a situation. His voice was neutral. His eyes were not.
You opened your mouth. Closed it. The right configuration of words was proving difficult to locate. You were aware, acutely, that you were sitting across from a child of nearly seven, and that the child of nearly seven was watching you with an expression that suggested he already knew the answer and was simply waiting to see whether you’d give him the honest one.
“What I feel or don’t feel,” you said finally, “isn’t really the point.”
“I think it might be,” said Shamrock.
“The point,” you continued, with some firmness, “is that I’m an adult. And part of being an adult, a responsible one, is setting a good example. About knowing what is and isn’t your place. About not crossing lines that exist for good reasons.”
“But you do,” he said. Not cruelly. Not with any satisfaction. Just observationally, like it was raining. “Feel something. For him.”
You looked at him for a long moment. He looked back. There was something in his expression that was not quite hope, or not only hope. There was something in it that was braced, too. Ready for you to deny it.
You didn’t deny it. You also didn’t confirm it. You said, instead: “I’m an employee. A governess.”
The words sat strangely in your mouth. True, and insufficient, and both of those things at once.
“My contract has specific parameters,” you said. “They exist for a reason. And those parameters matter, Shamrock. They matter more than my promises when it comes to it. They are what is real. And I need you to understand that, because I need you to know that I’m not leaving because I don’t love you. I need that to be clear. But I am leaving, and the reason is the contract, and what I may or may not feel about anything else is not something I am permitted to act on, and I’m...”
You heard yourself say it and knew it was true and knew it was also a way of not saying the truer thing underneath it, and you suspected Shamrock heard that too, because Shamrock usually did.
His expression had been moving through things for the past several minutes, cycling through iterations you didn’t quite have names for. But now it had settled into something older than his face had any right to be wearing. Something careful and heavy and contained, someone who has decided not to show you the full extent of what they’re feeling, because showing you would not help.
He was almost seven years old.
He should not look like that. He should not look so much like his father.
The silence stretched. You let it. You didn’t try to fill it because there was nothing left you could put in it that would help, and you had the sense that he needed the room to finish whatever he was working through on the other side of his eyes.
“I need to think,” he said, at last. His voice was quiet.
“Of course,” you said.
“Can I go?”
The gravity behind the decision was not missed. Tonight was the night when you and he chose a game to play, and he was willingly choosing to miss it. To miss your last night, because you had hurt him.
“Yes,” you said, and your own voice was not quite steady. “Of course you can.”
He slid off the settee with a composure that cost him something. You could see that it cost him, in the set of his shoulders, and he did not look at you as he got up. He walked to the door, and his spine was straight in a way that reminded you, with a specific and pointed painfulness, of his father. The same quality of bearing, the same refusal to let the posture slip.
He paused when he reached the frame. His hand rested on the wood. He stayed there for one moment, two, and you thought perhaps he would turn around, and you had no idea what you would do if he did.
He didn’t. He went.
The door did not slam. It closed quietly, which was somehow worse.
You sat in the garden and felt terrible with a thoroughness that left very little room for anything else.
How very thorough indeed.
Your grand resignation was delayed until approximately seven-thirty that evening, because Garling was unusually late to return home, which you chose to interpret as the universe having poor timing rather than any kind of sign.
You had requested a meeting through Hessa, who had looked at you with an expression you couldn’t quite parse and informed you, with careful neutrality, that he wasn’t in but would make time for you upon his return. You thanked her. She hesitated in the doorway for a moment in a way that suggested she wanted to say something else, and then didn’t, which you were grateful for, because you were not sure you had another conversation in you.
You went to your room. Your too-nice room, with its too-good furniture and its window that caught the evening light in a way that had, at some point without your noticing, begun to feel like yours.
You packed.
It was something to do with your hands, which needed something to do. You were efficient about it, methodical, which helped. You got Anton, the footman, to arrange for your luggage to be sent ahead to your family home, and he asked no questions, which you appreciated and also found slightly devastating, because it meant your face was doing something he felt he shouldn’t ask about.
Hessa returned once, softly, to let you know that Shamrock had asked to spend the rest of the evening alone.
“Of course,” you said. “Thank you for telling me.”
She left. You continued folding.
You sat on the edge of the bed in your too-nice room, in a house that was not yours and had never been yours, surrounded by luggage that was being sent somewhere that was, and you waited.
You had dressed for it, at least. Not formally, but deliberately, the way you dressed when you needed to feel like yourself rather than like a member of someone’s household. Your own clothes. Your own things. A small, stupid armor, but you had assembled it carefully, and you were keeping it on.
You had your resignation organized in your head the way you organized things that mattered: opening, body, close. Clear. Kind. Professional. You had rehearsed it twice, which was the right number of times; once more, and it would start to sound like a performance, and you needed it to sound like a decision you were at peace with, even if peace was not precisely the word for what you were currently feeling in the pit of your stomach.
You had a list, too. Women you knew, professionally, socially. Competent women, several of them genuinely accomplished, who could step into this role without difficulty. You had compiled it mentally over the past few hours with great care and thoroughness, and you had every intention of offering it, because it was the responsible thing to do and you were committed to being responsible about this.
You could not, at present, think of a single good thing about any of them. This was uncharitable, and you knew it. You thought it anyway.
Seven-thirty came. Somewhere in the house, a clock announced it, and you stood up, smoothed your clothes, and waited for Hessa to come and tell you he was ready.
She promptly did, with the quiet efficiency she brought to everything, and you followed her down the corridor and tried to look like someone who had not spent the last several hours dismantling their life in a guest room. You weren’t sure how convincing you were. Hessa, to her credit, said nothing, though she slowed almost imperceptibly as you reached the door, in the way of someone giving you a moment you hadn’t asked for but might need.
The door to his study was a large door. You noticed this now, in the particular way you noticed things when you were nervous, and your mind was casting around for neutral objects to fix on. Large, dark wood, with a faint gleam that came from age and care rather than newness.
He was at his desk, working late, which was expected.
To your surprise, there was another man present, working peacefully at a secondary table in the corner. You recognized him after a moment’s searching; one of the Figarland solicitors, you were fairly certain. They came occasionally, for reasons that were beyond your awareness, and had never previously had anything to do with you.
You recalibrated, briefly. It was almost a relief, strangely, to have a third person in the room. A witness. A buffer. Something to look at that wasn’t him.
It was also going to make this extraordinarily awkward, but you had years of practice navigating awkward on short notice. You were fine. You were composed. You had an opening, a body, and a close, and you had not come this far to be derailed by a solicitor.
You steeled yourself and stepped fully into the room.
“My apologies, Supreme Commander,” you said, and your voice only wavered slightly at the start, which you chose to consider a victory. “I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.”
“Yes,” he said. He gestured to the chair across from him.
The chair from the end-of-year reviews. You noticed this with a faint, irrational pang and sat down in it anyway.
He finished what he was writing, set down his pen, and looked up.
He did the thing.
The thing where the pen went down, and the full attention came up, all of it, as though the considerable machinery of him had simply and completely redirected. You had never quite gotten used to it. The quality of it, when it landed on you. The sense that you were, for the duration, the only thing in the room that existed.
You noticed, with a sinking feeling, that he looked particularly well tonight. His beard had been freshly trimmed. His hair was neater than usual, which was saying something, because it was never not neat. He looked refined in the way that he sometimes did when he had come from something formal, or was perhaps going to something formal, though it was nearly eight in the evening and you couldn’t imagine what. He looked, in short, extraordinarily handsome, and you were now in possession of the deeply inconvenient knowledge that you had feelings about that, which made looking at him a form of low-grade humiliation that you were going to have to simply endure for the next ten minutes.
“Is your sister well?” Garling asked, unprompted. “She informed me she was recently expecting.”
You blinked. “She is, yes. She said that.” You stopped. Something caught. “Pardon. She informed you?”
“Indeed.”
You stared at him.
“She writes frequently,” he said, with the same tone one might use to relay perfectly ordinary information. “I have some communication with several members of your family, but your sister is by far the most prolific correspondent.”
The resignation, which had been sitting neatly organized in the front of your mind, took several large steps back to make room for this.
“I see,” you said, which was what you said when you did not, in any sense, see. “I hope she isn’t causing you trouble. She can be a great deal, when she decides to take an interest in something.” You hesitated, a new and specific dread beginning to form. “Or my mother, if she has also—if you’ve been receiving letters from my mother, please know that I had absolutely no—”
Something moved at the corner of Garling’s mouth. The fond one. You knew it immediately, involuntarily, the way you knew all of them; you had made a complete inventory of his expressions over four years, archived them without entirely meaning to, the way you accumulated things in this house without noticing until it was too late. The fond one was the rarest.
“Your father, actually, is quite welcome to write” he said. “We share some acquaintances in business, through the Lower World. He has raised several ideas with potential. I have found him to be a man of considerable practical intelligence.”
You sat with this for a moment.
Your father. Who was, genuinely, a man of considerable practical intelligence, and who had also never once in his life failed to press an advantage when he saw one, and who had apparently been in correspondence with your employer, who was one of the most powerful men in the world, about business ventures. At the same time, you had been under this roof entirely unaware.
“Of course he has,” you said, mostly to yourself.
“You were not aware of this.”
“I was not aware of any of this,” you confirmed. “I was not aware of any of the correspondence. With any of them.” You paused. “How long?”
Garling considered this with the air of a man performing a calculation he had already done. “Some time.”
“Some time,” you repeated.
“Your sister initiated contact shortly after your second year here. Your father some months after that.” A brief pause. “Your mother has sent three letters. I have responded to one.”
You pressed your fingers to your temple. Your entire family, apparently, had been conducting an independent diplomatic relationship with Garling Figarland, and not a single one of them had thought to mention it to you, which meant every single one of them had decided, collectively and in silence, to keep it from you, which meant they had discussed keeping it from you, which meant—
Martha’s voice came back to you, unbidden and precise: you have always run.
You thought, with great feeling, several things that you were not going to say out loud in this office.
“I apologize,” you said instead, with enormous effort. “On behalf of all of them.”
“There is nothing to apologize for,” he said.
You felt this was exceedingly kind of him, and also completely incorrect. There was quite a lot to apologize for. Your family alone could account for the majority of it.
But you did not say this, because you were here for a reason, and you had already been in this office for several minutes without managing to arrive at it. The solicitor in the corner was a quiet but present reminder that you were not the only person whose time was being consumed by this conversation.
You took a breath. You reordered things. You found the opening again and dusted it off.
He was still looking at you.
He had not, you realized, stopped looking at you since you sat down. Looking not with any particular pressure to it, not in a way that demanded anything. Simply with that quality of attention that was just his, waiting for you to say what you had come to say.
You were starting to have a sneaking suspicion that Shamrock had, in fact, taken the evening alone to call and inform his father already.
“You had something you wished to discuss,” he said. It wasn’t quite a prompt. It was more like a door, held open.
“Yes,” you said. “I did. I do.” You folded your hands in your lap, which was something you did when you needed your hands to stop betraying you. You found the opening. You opened your mouth. “I want to begin by saying that working in this household has been a genuine privilege, and that my time here has been—“
You stopped.
He had tilted his head, very slightly. It was almost nothing. It was something thing you only noticed because you had been in this man’s proximity for long enough to have learned the vocabulary of his small movements. That particular one meant he had caught onto you.
You pressed on, but looked away.
“I wanted to speak to you,” you said. “About my position.”
Garling’s expression stilled.
Not cold. Not the Commander face, the one he wore for official things, for people he needed to manage. Something different. Something that was very carefully not showing you what it was, which was its own kind of information, because Garling’s face in its neutral state showed you nothing, and this was not his neutral state. This was a deliberate choice.
“Your contract,” he clarified, “Is not due for renegotiation yet.”
You could feel that your face was burning. You pressed on anyway. “It’s not time. I know. This is outside the usual review period, but I think—I think it’s the right moment to discuss a transition.”
The word landed in the room with a very specific weight.
“A transition,” he repeated.
“For Shamrock.” You were on steadier ground here, or steadier-feeling ground, which was not quite the same thing. “He’s nearly seven now and his needs are changing, and they’re going to keep changing. He’ll need educators. Specialists. He’s going to be going out more, doing more, moving in wider circles. He needs someone equipped for that next stage, someone whose skills are better suited to where he’s going rather than where he’s been.” You kept your voice even. Professional. Kind. You were very good at this. You had always been very good at this. “I have already identified several candidates. Qualified women, all of them. I can arrange a proper handover, as much time as you need, I can stay through the transition to make sure he’s settled—”
“You’re leaving,” he said.
Not a question. Not the shape of a question. Just a fact, stated with a flatness that had something compressed inside it.
You looked down at your folded hands. Then back up. “Yes. I—yes.”
“When.”
“I know it’s abrupt, but today will be my last day.” A beat. “Anton assisted with the luggage. I apologize if this is presumptuous, but it’s can’t be delayed.”
Garling said nothing.
You had learned, over four years, to sit with his silences. To let them exist without rushing to fill them, because he thought in them, and interrupting them was counterproductive. But this one had a different quality. Something compressed and burning in it, something that made the air in the room feel like it had changed pressure.
You kept going, because stopping felt worse.
“I was always going to, eventually,” you said. “You knew that from the first interview. I was very clear about it, that this was not—that I had my own life, my own plans, and this was a chapter, not a—you knew. We both knew. This isn’t—” You stopped. Restarted. “I was always going to leave.”
Garling looked at you.
“Yes,” he said, after a moment. “You were very clear.”
Something in the way he said it made it very difficult to breathe normally.
You pressed on because there was nothing else to do. “I want to begin by saying that working in this household has been a genuine privilege, and that my time here has been—”
“Wait a moment.” He raised a brow. “Is this about salary? I can—”
“It’s not about salary.” You almost laughed, which was not something you had budgeted for in the opening. “Commander. You have paid me enough money to retire. Three times over. If this were about salary, I would have stayed forever out of pure financial logic.”
“Then why now?” He demanded, with a flatness that was not coldness, simply the absence of any bullshit.
Because I finally understood something I cannot unknow. Because your son looked at me today with eyes too old for his face and asked me if I had feelings for you, and I could not lie to him, and I cannot lie to myself anymore, and I am not—I am not what you need. I am not what you should want. I am not—
“It’s the right time,” you said. “For Shamrock.”
“For Shamrock,” he repeated. He said it with a particular flatness that made it sound less like agreement and more like a thesis he was preparing to dismantle.
“I have a candidate I think is genuinely excellent.” You slid the profile across the desk, smooth and deliberate, the motion of someone who had prepared for this. “She has experience with children in his age range, she’s patient, she’s exceptionally well-credentialed, and I think the transition could be managed in a way that minimizes disruption to his routine—”
He hadn’t looked at it.
“No,” said Garling.
You startled, just slightly. “…no?”
“No.” He said, with the tone of a man who had closed a door and pocketed the key before you’d finished reaching for the handle.
You looked at the profile, sitting untouched on his desk. You looked at him. “You haven’t read it.”
“I don’t need to.”
“With respect, Commander, you cannot simply—”
“She worked for the Donquixote household.” He folded his hands on the desk. “I am familiar with the Donquixote household’s current approach to child-rearing. It is not an approach I consider a recommendation. Do I look like a man who would compromise on quality?”
“Of course not, I’d never suggest—”
“Then we are in agreement that she is not suitable.”
“There are others on the list—”
Garling looked at you.
It was a specific look. Not unkind. Not the Commander face. Something beneath that, something that had been sitting quietly beneath the surface of this entire conversation, and was now simply present, still and steady, waiting for you to stop moving long enough to see it.
You stopped moving.
“Shamrock,” he said, slowly, with the care of someone setting something fragile on a table between you, “told me you promised him you’d stay until he was a Holy Knight.”
The room was very quiet.
In the corner, the solicitor had gone entirely still. You were dimly aware of how extraordinary that was, that Garling had allowed this conversation to happen at all with another person present. He did not cross the lines of his work and his house. He had never, in four years, crossed them. The fact that he was doing it now, that he had not dismissed the man or asked you to return later, told you something you did not particularly want to know.
You opened your mouth. Nothing came out. You closed it.
You thought about Shamrock. Six years old and almost seven, sliding off the settee with his father’s spine and walking away without looking back. You thought about the weight of a promise made without entirely understanding what you were promising, in a house that had gotten under your skin so gradually you hadn’t felt it happening until it was already done.
“He told you that,” you said, finally.
Your chest ached in a way that made it difficult to sit straight.
“You matter a great deal to him.” Garling looked at his desk. Then back at you. The deliberateness of it, him chosing to return his gaze to you, felt like its own kind of statement. “He’s mine, but you’re…his guiding light. And he—” Something worked in his expression, something effortful and visible in a man whose face was seldom either of those things, the careful architecture of him coming apart one piece at a time. “He needs you. Consistent things. He has had very few consistent things, as I am not available often.”
You clenched your jaw. Garling was a strategist of the highest order, and that meant he knew precisely where to strike to dismantle a person’s reasoning at the foundation. You were not sure, in this moment, whether he was doing it deliberately.
You were not sure which possibility was worse.
“I’m aware,” you said.
“You have been—” He stopped. Something shifted, reset. “You have been the most consistent thing in our lives for four years. I want you to know that I am aware of that. That it has not been—that I do not take it for granted.”
“I know,” you said again, which was all you trusted yourself to say.
He picked up his pen. Set it back down. The gesture was so unlike him, so uncharacteristically unresolved, that it cost you something just to witness it.
“So I’m asking you.” The words came out measured, but with a quality underneath them that you had no established category for. “Not as your employer. I am asking you, as—” A pause, brief and weighted. “I am asking you to reconsider this rushed timeline. To stay, even for a month longer.”
He looked at you then directly. And there it was, the expression you had never been able to categorize, the one that had sat at the edges of your inventory for months without a name, and you had a name for it now, you had understood it this afternoon in a moment of terrible clarity, and that was precisely why you could not be in this room any longer than necessary.
In the corner, the solicitor turned a page, admirably committed to the pretense that he was not present for any of this.
The silence stretched.
You thought about Shamrock’s face. About Martha’s voice at the door. About four years of a life that had never been yours, assembled so gradually around you that you had mistaken it for something it wasn’t, and could not be, and was never going to be.
“I’m sorry,” you said quietly. Firmly. The way you said things when you needed them to stay said. “But I can’t stay.“
He frowned.
You deployed your very good blank face, the one you had spent years constructing and maintaining, warm and unreadable and present without performing presence. The one that had seen you through difficult reviews and awkward dinners and four years of proximity to a man you had apparently, without noticing, made an inventory of.
But this time, it wobbled.
You felt it wobble, felt the hairline fracture running through it, and you could not stop it because the control that had always come naturally to you was built on a foundation that no longer existed. You had always managed your emotions by not looking at them directly. By keeping them in your periphery, acknowledged but not examined. Manageable, that way. Safe.
You had looked at them today. You had been forced to look at them, and name them, and explain them to a six-year-old, and now they were not in your periphery anymore. Now they were right there, in the center of everything, and your blank face was built for the old arrangement and was failing badly at the new one.
You turned away, using every measure to not let your tears fall.
Garling straightened in his chair. Almost imperceptibly. His eyes widened, just a fraction, just enough. He had seen something he had not expected to see.
He had finally seen through you.
“Alright,” he said.
You looked up. You had prepared for more resistance. You had arguments ready, layered, in order of escalation, each one more airtight than the last. You had not, in any version of this conversation you had rehearsed, prepared for this.
“…alright?”
“If that’s your decision.” His voice strengthened, rebounded, and then firmed into the same tone he used for military dispatches and household accounts, the tone that meant a matter had been assessed and filed. “I won’t pretend I’m not—” a brief pause, the length of a single breath— “disappointed. But I understand.”
“Oh,” you said.
It was not one of your better contributions to the conversation.
“It’s the right thing,” he continued, already turning toward his desk drawer with the decisive motion of someone who had moved on, “to handle it properly. Which is why I had my solicitor prepare termination papers after Shamrock called me this afternoon.”
The said man inclined his head at his employer, with the practiced neutrality of someone who was very good at his job.
He opened the drawer.
The pen rested at the edge of the desk, precisely angled toward you.
“Take your time,” he said, in a voice that was perfectly even. “Read it thoroughly.”
He returned to his own papers as turned back to the document.
It was, upon closer inspection, a considerable stack. You lifted the edge of it slightly, gauging the weight, and felt something in your expression do something involuntary. Several pages had been tabbed for signature, small neat markers placed at intervals throughout, which at least suggested whoever drafted it had understood that you might not want to spend the rest of the evening in this particular chair.
You began to read.
Or you began to read in the way one read Celestial Dragon legal documents, which was to say you identified your name, confirmed the household name beside it, located the disbursement figures in the relevant clause—which were, as promised, generous; extraordinarily generous, almost enough to give you pause, except that he had always paid you extraordinarily and nothing in four years of this household had ever been other than exactly what it presented itself as—and then moved efficiently past several dense paragraphs of whereforeases and parties of the first part that you were reasonably confident were standard.
You were not reading it thoroughly. You both knew this.
“It’s a significant document,” Garling said, without looking up.
“I know what a severance contract looks like,” you said, and turned to the first tab, “However…”
Usually they weren’t so big. But Figarland was a man to ensure the privacy of his household, and signing a dozen non-disclosures was good practice.
You signed. Moved to the next tab. Signed again. The pages blurred slightly at the edges, all that careful formal language running together the way it always did when you had already made up your mind, and the paperwork was merely catching up. Your name, repeated. The same pen, the same cream paper, the same small definitive sound each time it touched the page.
The last tab. The last line.
You signed and put the pen down.
Garling looked at the signature.
Then he picked up the pen and signed below you, his signature looking far more refined next to yours.
“Wonderful,” he said.
It was a very quiet word. A very precise word. It landed painfully somewhere in the vicinity of your sternum and stayed there, and you chose, firmly, not to examine why he’d use that one.
“Right.” You exhaled and reached for the professional version of yourself, the one with the organized notes and the list of candidates and the clean close. “I can arrange introductions for whichever candidate you select. I’d suggest a gradual introduction, a few weeks at minimum, so that Shamrock has time to—”
“There won’t be another governess,” Garling said smartly.
You stopped. “I’m sorry?”
“He won’t have one.” Garling set the pen down. “Another governess. He won’t tolerate it, and he’s nearly old enough anyhow to shadow me.”
You opened your mouth to argue, and then closed it, because the honest truth was that this rang entirely and depressingly true. You could picture Shamrock’s upset face with complete clarity.
“I’m sorry,” you said softly. You had stopped caring, at some point in the last thirty seconds, that the solicitor was still in the room, methodically working through the countersigned pages with a stamp that made a sound like punctuation. “I genuinely am. That wasn’t—I didn’t want to leave him without—”
Garling made a sound that was not quite a sigh, but occupied the same territory. Something released in him, fractionally, the way pressure released from a thing that had been held too tightly for too long.
“Do me a favor,” he said. He said it in a register you hadn’t heard from him before, something stripped of the Commander and the employer and the careful architecture of everything he usually presented. “As someone I have invested a considerable amount of time and trust in. Allow Shamrock to visit you when he wishes to. Let that door stay open.” A pause. “And allow the Figarlands to remain on friendly terms with your family. Your father and I have business worth continuing.”
You stared at him.
You had walked into this office prepared for a clean severance—a professional conclusion. You had expected, if anything, a certain coolness, the efficient removal of a piece that no longer fit the board. Garling Figarland did not, in your experience, retain things that had served their purpose.
This was not that. This was something considerably more generous than that, and it rearranged something in your chest that you had only just finished carefully arranging.
“That’s,” you started. Stopped. “Yes. Of course. I would—Shamrock is always welcome. Wherever I am, he’s always welcome; that was never in question.”
Garling nodded, once.
“And my family,” you added, still slightly stunned, “would be—yes. They would like that.” An understatement of some magnitude, given that apparently several of them had already been corresponding with him for years without your knowledge.
The solicitor finished stamping. Set the papers into a neat stack. The sound of it was very loud in the quiet room.
You stood.
It took slightly more effort than standing usually did, but you managed it, and you smoothed your clothes.
“Goodbye, Supreme Commander,” you said. Your voice was steady. You were, again, very proud of it for being steady. “And thank you for everything. The position was—” You stopped. Started again. “It was a privilege. I mean that.”
Garling had turned toward the window. You could see his reflection in the dark glass, faintly, the halo of his hair, the glint of his glasses. He was looking out at something, or looking at nothing, in particular. Perhaps he just couldn’t decide where to put his eyes, so he looked out so as not to put them on you.
“Goodnight, my lady,” he said. A pause. The kind that had something in it. “I hope you find what it is you are so desperately looking for.” Another pause, smaller, more deliberate. “And that you remain open to the opportunities you haven’t yet thought to look for at all.”
You stood there for one moment longer than you should have, finding his words oddly sentimental.
Then you left, because there was nothing else to do, and the door closed behind you with the same quiet click as every other door in this house, and you walked down the corridor that you knew by heart, past the walls and the lights and all the accumulated geography of four years, and you did not look back.
You found Hessa right outside in the hall, which was not entirely a surprise.
“Good evening, Saintess.”
You paused.
“…Hessa.”
“Yes, my lady?”
“You called me Saintess—” You looked at her. “It’s me. It’s just me.”
“Yes, my lady.”
You stared at her. She looked back at you with an expression of perfect professional serenity, the kind that had taken years to cultivate and gave absolutely nothing away.
You supposed this was her way of bidding you farewell, back into a life of pointless privilege.
“Are you alright?” you asked, which was perhaps not the question you had meant to ask, but was the one that came out.
“Perfectly well, my lady. Will you be wanting the large carriage, or the small?”
“I always take the staff—” Something caught. “The staff carriage?”
“Unavailable this evening, I’m afraid. The master has instructed that you be taken to your family’s home in comfort.” A pause so brief it was almost not a pause at all. “Both carriages are at your disposal. Your luggage has already been sent.”
“Oh,” you said. “Alright. Thank you, Hessa.”
“No gratitude needed, my lady.”
She moved off down the corridor, leading you like you were some important guest.
The unease settled over you slowly, the way cold did, the way you sometimes became aware of a sound only after it had stopped.
You stood in the hall a moment longer.
Then you walked toward the door, because your luggage was gone and the carriage was waiting and you had signed the papers and the door behind you had clicked shut, and none of what you had noticed meant anything, and you were leaving and—
You were almost certain that was the end of it.
Returning to your family’s house to lick your wounds had always been the next phase of the plan. You had known this. You had factored it in. A brief, dignified period of recovery, a few quiet weeks of well-earned rest, and then the brochures, the charts, the open horizon of a life finally and deliberately your own.
Your parents were being sympathetic, which was its own particular horror. Your father had patted your shoulder twice. Your mother had arranged to serve your favorite meal without being asked. These were not things they did under normal circumstances, which meant they had looked at you and assessed the situation and concluded that you required handling with care. The knowledge that you were visibly in a state requiring careful handling was somehow worse than the state itself.
You had all the time in the world, now. Unlimited time. Time stretching out in every direction, unscheduled and entirely yours, which was what you had wanted, which was what you had planned for, which was why the stack of voyage brochures that had once been cheerfully deposited on your desk remained in a neat, untouched stack on your desk, exactly where you had left them.
You couldn’t open a single one.
Something you had also not factored in was the sobbing.
It started on the first night, which you were willing to forgive yourself for, because the first night was always emotional, and you had been through a great deal. It continued on the second night, which was less forgivable but still within the range of human experience.
On the second day, in a brief surge of self-determination, you put on your best going-out clothes and visited a travel agent.
It was a very good travel agent. The kind with a brass nameplate and a window display and an interior that smelled of expensive paper and possibility, an establishment that existed to make the world feel navigable and large. You had walked past it many times over the years and thought, someday. Today was some day. Today you were going to book something, anything, a route, a destination, a departure date, something concrete to put between yourself and the hollow feeling that had taken up residence in your chest since you walked out of the Figarland gates.
The man behind the desk rose when you entered. He was professional, well-dressed, the kind of person who had built a career on making people feel that their desired destination was not only possible but inevitable.
He looked at you.
Something passed across his face, very quickly, something that might have been recognition, or surprise, or a particular species of careful neutrality that people sometimes adopted when a situation required delicate handling.
"Good afternoon," he said. "How may I assist you, Saintess?"
You paused. "I'm not a—I'm just here to look at routes. Eastern passages, preferably. Something departing within the month."
"Of course, of course." He sat back down. He opened a large leather ledger with the practiced ease of a man who did this many times a day. He ran his finger down a column. Then another column. His expression did not change. He turned a page. Ran his finger down again.
The silence stretched in a specific way.
"I'm terribly sorry, my lady," he said, at last, with the professional sympathy of someone delivering news they had some prior relationship with. "It appears the eastern passages are currently unavailable."
You looked at him. "All of them?"
"At present, I'm afraid."
"That's," you said, "a great many passages to be simultaneously unavailable."
"It has been an unusual season."
"What about the western routes?"
He consulted the ledger. Another column. Another page. The same particular silence.
"Also experiencing some disruption, I'm afraid."
"The northern?"
Page. Column. Silence.
"Temporarily suspended."
You looked at him for a long moment. He looked back at you with an expression of perfect professional serenity that told you absolutely everything you needed to know and nothing you could prove.
"Is there," you said, carefully, "any route currently available? To anywhere?"
He considered this with what appeared to be genuine regret. "I can put your name on a list," he offered. "And contact you when something opens up. Where are you currently residing?"
You told him.
He wrote it down, and you were almost certain, almost entirely certain, that he wasn’t even writing it down.
"Wonderful," he said, and smiled at you, and you thought about that word, about the last time you had heard it, about a quiet office and cream paper and a stamp, and you smiled back with all the warmth you could locate, which was not very much. “Have a splendid day Lady Fi—-My lady.”
You walked home in the thin afternoon light and did not mention it to anyone, and on the third day, you went back to moping, because it was at least honest, and you had run out of alternatives.
You had always considered moping a waste of perfectly good time and energy. By the third night, you had developed a system, which was that you waited until the house was quiet. Then you cried into your pillow with the focused efficiency of someone completing an unpleasant but necessary task, and then you went to sleep. In the morning, you came down to breakfast looking perfectly fine, and your mother looked at your face and said nothing, which was how you knew it was bad.
You moped with extraordinary dedication. You moped in your room, and then you moped in the garden because the room felt too small. Then you came back inside and moped on the settee because the garden felt too large, and at some point, your mother brought you tea and sat beside you in silence for a few minutes and then left without saying anything, which was, genuinely, the kindest thing she had ever done for you.
And through all of it, with a persistence that you found frankly unreasonable, you wondered what the Figarland boys were doing.
Not constantly. Just regularly. Just every hour or so, as a baseline. Just whenever you weren’t actively preventing yourself from doing it, which it turned out required more active prevention than you had anticipated, you wondered if Shamrock had eaten properly. You wondered if he had found someone to continue his math lessons. You wondered if he was still upset, or if he had processed it in the way he processed things, calmly, thoroughly and unaided. You wondered if Garling had found someone to replace you yet, and then you felt ill, and then you felt annoyed at yourself for feeling ill, and then you went back to staring at the wall.
The world waited, supposedly full of open horizons, and you had looked at it for four days and felt nothing but tired.
Your entire life had seemed to quietly end the moment you left the Figarland gates, which was a humiliating thing to notice about yourself, and which you had been noticing, repeatedly, at approximately hourly intervals ever since. You had built something in that house without meaning to. You had built it slowly, over four years, the way you built anything you weren’t paying attention to. Now you were on the other side of the gates with your luggage and your severance and your stack of untouched brochures, and the thing you had built was still in there, and you were out here, and the distance between those two facts was roughly the size of everything.
You came downstairs for breakfast with the low, private ambitions of someone whose primary goal for the morning was tea and tears, and you stopped in the doorway of the dining room, and you stood there for a moment that lasted considerably longer than a moment.
Shamrock Figarland was sitting at your family’s table.
Sitting politely, back straight, bow tie neatly done, his mathematics book at his elbow as though he had brought it in case the conversation lagged. His plate was being filled by your mother, who looked happier than you had ever seen. Your father was saying something to him, and Shamrock was listening with that grave attention he gave everything, and nodding. Your father looked enormously pleased about this.
You held onto the doorframe.
“There she is,” your mother said, noticing you, brightly, as though this were normal. As though the Figarland child sitting at the breakfast table wasn’t your Figarland child.
Shamrock looked up.
He looked at you with the expression he’d had when he walked out of your conversation four days ago, that careful, older-than-his-face composure, and for one terrible moment, your chest did the complicated thing it had been doing for four days straight.
Then he said, with great dignity: “You forgot to say goodbye properly.”
You stared at him.
“I thought about it,” he continued, picking up his fork, “and I decided that was unacceptable. So I came.” He looked at his plate. Then back at you. “I’ve also brought my mathematics. In case you had time.”
Your mother set a cup of tea at the empty seat beside him, immediately assuring him you had time.
You crossed the room and sat down in it, because there was nothing else to do, because Shamrock Figarland had apparently decided that your resignation was not, in fact, the end of the matter, and experience had taught you that once he had decided something, it was considerably easier to work with him than against him.
“How did you get here?” you asked.
“Father’s driver,” he said, and returned to his breakfast with an air of complete elegance.
You wrapped your hands around the tea. Something in your chest, which had been doing the complicated thing for four days, did something different. Something that hurt in an entirely new direction, which was almost a relief, because at least it was a change.
“Shamrock,” you said softly.
“Yes?”
You looked at him. His bow tie. His mathematics book. The careful straightness of him, sitting at your family’s table like he had every right to be there, which he did, because he had apparently decided he did, which was really the only qualification he had ever required for anything.
“I’m glad to see you,” you said.
He nodded, as though this were the correct and expected answer, and helped himself to more toast.
Every day for the next week, Shamrock appeared at breakfast.
Not announced, not invited, simply there, at the table, bow tie done, mathematics book at his elbow, plate being filled by your mother who had, in the space of approximately forty-eight hours, developed what could only be described as a devoted attachment to him. He stayed through the morning, installed himself in your sitting room, and worked through his lessons with the focused industry of a child who had decided this was simply where lessons happened now. He easily accepted lunch, and only after the afternoon had long passed, and only then, returned home.
You were not being paid. He had not, as far as you could determine, asked anyone’s permission. But no missive arrived from the Figarland household. No instruction, no inquiry, no politely worded letter asking whether you had perhaps accidentally acquired their heir. No guards looking for their master, no master looking for his heir.
Garling knew where his son was. You were certain of this, the way you were certain of very few things. And he was saying nothing, which meant he was allowing it, which meant he was also, somewhere in his large and well-appointed study, getting the last laugh.
Free childcare. Not a penny owed. Your resignation had, in practical terms, saved him money.
You chose not to think about this too hard.
Your only problem, if it could be called a problem, which it absolutely could, was that Shamrock did not appear to consider his daily appearances a generous concession on his part. He appeared to consider them a declaration of intent. A proof of concept. A preliminary arrangement pending something more formal.
You finally understood this on the morning he arrived with a suitcase.
It was a small suitcase, neat and well-packed, carried with serene confidence. He set it down beside the door. Your mother looked at it. Your father looked at it. Neither of them said anything, which was how you knew they had already pledged their allegiance to whatever the child was doing.
You couldn’t say nothing. You had limits.
“Shamrock,” you said. “What are you doing with that?”
“I live here now,” he said, simply, taking his usual seat. “Separated parents usually divide the time evenly, but father is busy, and this arrangement seems more practical.”
You stared at him.
“You are more than welcome, you are always more than welcome, but that is not—we are not—” You carefully began, only to be stopped.
Your father passed behind you on his way to the sideboard and paused to pat your head in the manner of someone patting the head of a person who had not quite caught up yet.
“Don’t harass the boy,” he said pleasantly. “Saint Garling and I have already spoken about it.” He deposited a generous spoonful of eggs onto Shamrock’s plate with the practiced ease of a man who had always wanted a male grandchild and had decided, apparently overnight, that this was close enough. “He said he prefers Shamrock to be close to you.”
You turned to gape at your father who did not look up from serving Shamrock eggs.
“He said what?”
This required some processing. Garling Figarland, who was notoriously, almost aggressively private about his son, who had conducted the first three months of your employment as though Shamrock were a state secret. The man who had, at meeting after meeting, about who was and was not permitted proximity to his heir. Who had refused to let his close friends, his mistresses, the vast majority of Mary Geoise (even a hello)—that Garling had looked at the situation and decided that the correct solution was to let the child come and live with their former governess. Voluntarily. With apparent advance coordination with your father.
Your father, who was now cutting Shamrock’s toast into triangles without being asked, because apparently he had already learned that Shamrock preferred triangles.
“He said what?” you said again, because the first time hadn’t resolved anything. “Dad—”
“Triangles are elegant,” Shamrock confirmed to your father, with the gravity of a formal ruling.
“I think so too,” said your father, with tremendous satisfaction.
This line of inquiry was interrupted by the small sound of Shamrock setting down his glass of milk, patting his mouth with his napkin, and turning to you with the expression of a person with a perfectly reasonable request.
“Mother, could I have the jam?”
You passed him the jam.
Then your hand stopped in mid-air.
You gaped at him.
“What,” you said, “did you just call me?”
“The jam, please.” He held out his hand. “The strawberry one, if you don’t mind.”
“Shamrock.” You set the jam down on the table with a clumsiness that reflected your current internal state. “You called me—”
“Did I?” He accepted the jam with the serenity of a small monk who had taken several vows, none of which pertained to this conversation. “I apologize. Force of habit.”
“It is not a force of habit, you have never—”
“I’ve said it before.”
“When you were half asleep,” you said, lowering your voice on instinct, though everyone at the table was manifestly listening. “Sometimes, when you were tired, I know, but never—not at breakfast, not out loud, not in front of—”
“Mother,” said Shamrock, with great patience, “could you pass the butter as well?”
You passed the butter.
You did this automatically, completely, before your brain had finished catching up to your hand, and by the time it did, the butter was already on his side of the table. Shamrock was applying it to his toast with the focused contentment of someone whose morning was going exactly as planned.
Your father settled into his chair with the satisfaction of a man surveying a well-ordered kingdom, looked at you, and patted your shoulder.
"You look happier already," he said warmly. "It's always so hard to be away from one's children. Take care to value your son more."
You turned to look at him.
He looked back at you with the open, benevolent expression of someone who had said a completely normal thing.
"My," you said sharply, scathingly, because he should know better than to say such things. "son."
"Mm." He reached for his tea.
You looked at Shamrock, who was eating his triangles. You looked at your father, who was drinking his tea. You looked at your mother, who appeared from the kitchen, registered the scene, and smiled at you with the warm and knowing expression of a woman watching a situation resolve itself in a way she found personally satisfying.
You had become a single mother. No warning. No child support. Just a very lenient, inexplicably cooperative militant father somewhere in the background, apparently orchestrating this entire enterprise from a distance with the same calm efficiency he applied to naval campaigns.
Nobody in this room thought anything unusual was happening.
You had resigned your post. You had signed the papers, all seventeen pages of them, in that quiet office with the cream stock and the stamping solicitor. You had walked out of those gates and come home to lick your wounds and plan your future, your open and horizon-filled future, the one with the brochures and the sailing charts and the life that was finally, deliberately your own. And somewhere between the gates and this breakfast table, reality had made a quiet left turn without informing you, and you had apparently followed it without noticing. Now you were here, in Wonderland, passing butter and being called mother, and patting orphan boys sympathetically on the shoulder. A nearly-seven-year-old had arrived with a suitcase like a very small and very determined lodger, and your father was nodding serenely into his tea as though this was simply how Tuesdays went now.
"What," you said, to the room at large, "is happening?"
"More toast?" your mother asked Shamrock.
"Yes, please, grandmother" said Shamrock. He accepted the toast, added it to his plate, and then turned to look at you with the expression he used when he felt you were not taking adequate care of yourself, which was an expression he had developed at approximately age four and deployed with some frequency ever since.
"Mother, sit down and eat," he said. "I want to go on a stroll this morning, and your body can be terribly fragile." He pushed the jam back across the table toward you with one small, decisive hand. "You'll need your strength."
You goggled at him.
He looked back at you, serene and implacable.
"Also," he added, reaching for his tea with both hands, "father mentioned he'd like to come and visit soon."
The jam sat in front of you.
Your mother made a small sound in the kitchen that might have been a cough and was almost certainly not.
"What," you said stupidly.
"Mm." Shamrock took a sip. Set down his cup. Looked at you with those ancient, fox-clever eyes. "He asks after you so much. It's almost sad, really." A pause, brief and perfectly weighted. "I thought you should know."
He returned to his toast with the serenity of someone who had said exactly what he intended to say and had no further comments at this time.
Soon, it turned out, meant today.
This became clear at approximately five-thirty, when your mother disappeared upstairs to change into something nicer. Your father straightened his collar in the hall mirror with the particular care of a man expecting company he wished to impress. Shamrock reappeared from wherever he had been all afternoon in a fresh bow tie, which he had apparently packed specifically for this occasion.
At six o'clock sharp, Garling Figarland sat down to dinner at your family's table.
You were directly across from him. Shamrock flanked your left with the satisfied positioning of someone who had arranged the seating and found it excellent. Your parents occupied the ends of the table, your father already engaged in what appeared to be a genuinely comfortable conversation, your mother passing bread with the gracious ease of a woman entirely in her element.
No one, save yourself, looked even slightly out of place.
Garling looked exactly as he always did: Composed, filling whatever space he occupied with that quality of presence that had nothing to do with volume or effort. He was dressed with his customary precision, and he looked, if anything, well-rested, which you found deeply unfair, because you had spent days alternating between crying into a pillow and parenting Shamrcok. He appeared to have spent them sleeping perfectly.
He looked across the table at you.
"Good evening, my lady," he said.
"Good evening, Supreme Commander" you said, with a composure you did not remotely feel. You hadn’t expected to see him ever again.
Because Garling Figarland, in his fine apparel and with his perfect face, was sitting in your parents' slightly shabby dining room, in a chair that was a little uneven on one leg, beneath a chandelier that your father had been meaning to fix for approximately six years, looking as though he was very content to be precisely there. Not tolerating it. Not enduring it with polite forbearance, the way you had half-expected, the way you had braced for. Content. Settled, as if this was a weekly event he’d made time for because it was enjoyable.
It was, frankly, destabilizing.
Your mother offered him bread. He accepted it with a courtesy that was genuine rather than performed, which your mother recognized immediately, because she had excellent instincts about people and an immediate and visible approval of him that she was doing almost nothing to conceal. Your father said something about the Lower World shipping routes, and Garling responded, and your father laughed. Then Garling made a quiet sound of genuine amusement that you had heard perhaps four times in four years and which did something completely unreasonable to your capacity for rational thought.
Shamrock, beside you, cut his meat with the focused satisfaction of an architect surveying a building that had come in exactly on schedule and slightly under budget.
You reached for your wine.
You took a longer sip than was strictly necessary, and then you took another one, because the first hadn't resolved anything. Across the table, your mother was asking Garling about Mariejois in the warm and interested tone she used when she had decided she liked someone, and he was answering her. Your father was listening and nodding, and your family had simply absorbed Garling Figarland into a weeknight dinner the way they had apparently absorbed everything else about this situation, which was to say completely and without apparent difficulty.
You set down your wine. You needed to have a clear head to understand.
You were fine. You were composed. You were a person sitting at your own family's dinner table, which was a thing you had done hundreds of times. The fact that the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights was sitting four feet across from you in the chair with the uneven leg, looking perfectly at home, was simply something that was happening. You were handling it with great maturity and equanimity.
"You're not eating," Shamrock observed beside you.
"I'm eating," you said, and ate something to prove it.
Shamrock looked at your plate. Looked at you. Said nothing, in the sassy way that said everything, the way that reminded you, not for the first time, that he had been raised by a man who could communicate an entire position with a single expression and had inherited the talent in full.
Across the table, Garling glanced over.
"How are you?" he asked, quite genuinely, and then added your name the way you might add a name when you had been using it privately for some time and had simply decided, tonight, to say it out loud. Casually. Like you were old friends. Like he wasn't methodically dismantling every functioning nerve in your body by sitting in your parents' dining room and looking like that and saying your name like that. "Shamrock tells me you've been overworrying yourself."
You looked up.
"I am just—" you said, with great precision, "fine?"
The table was quiet for a fraction of a second.
"Wonderful," said your mother, in a tone that suggested she found this answer thoroughly unconvincing but was choosing her battles.
"Mm," said your father, in the tone of a man who had decided his wine was very interesting.
Shamrock said nothing at all, which was the loudest response of the three.
You set down your wine with great dignity, picked up your fork with great dignity, and looked at your food with great dignity, and in your periphery, across the table, something moved at the corner of Garling's mouth.
The fond one.
Good lord, he was handsome. This was not new information. This was information you had been in possession of for four years and had managed, for the most part, to file appropriately and not take out at inopportune moments. The inopportune moments were increasing.
But when you had resigned your drawer had exploded, and now all you were was a bunch of feelings.
You ate your carrot, face burning.
Dinner passed with suspicious smoothness, conversation flowing easily between courses in a way that you might have enjoyed under literally any other circumstances.
Your father, it turned out, had opinions about wine that Garling found genuinely worth engaging with, which meant you spent the soup course listening to them discover this about each other with the warm horror of someone watching two worlds collide and finding they fit together rather neatly.
"The eastern routes have always been the problem," your father said, gesturing with his spoon rudely. "Too much overhead at the interchange points."
"The consortium has been discussing restructuring, at the next reverie." Garling said.
Your father looked deeply pleased. "I've said so for years."
"I'll ensure that your recommendations are heard," said Garling.
Your father looked at you with an expression that said, quite clearly, ‘I like this one very much’, and you took a long sip of wine.
Your mother, for her part, had moved on to the more personal and therefore more dangerous territory of asking after Garling's general well-being, which he answered with a directness that appeared to charm her completely.
"And do you eat properly?" she asked, with the frankness of a woman who had decided the usual social parameters did not apply. "Shamrock tells me the household cook is excellent, but that you often work through meals."
"I have been told this before," Garling said.
"And?"
The corner of his mouth moved. "I remain unconvinced it requires correction."
Your mother looked at him the way she looked at people she had decided were her responsibility now. "We'll work on that. Surely something that your wife— future wife can work on."
"Mother," you hissed.
"What?"
Shamrock made a small sound beside you that was almost certainly a laugh converted at the last moment into a cough.
You drank more wine. You drank, across the course of the meal, considerably more than you would have under normal circumstances, which you felt was reasonable, because these were not normal circumstances; these were profoundly abnormal circumstances that nobody at this table seemed willing to acknowledge except you.
It was when the plates were being cleared that Garling set down his napkin and said, with the casual ease of a man making a perfectly ordinary suggestion, "I understand you have a garden."
You looked at him. "We do."
"I'd like to see it, if you wouldn't mind showing me."
You looked at Shamrock, who had developed a sudden and consuming interest in his dessert spoon, turning it over with the focused attention of someone who had never previously considered cutlery worth examining.
You looked at your mother, who had chosen this precise moment to begin collecting plates with great industry, her back mostly toward you.
"Of course, of course," said your father, from somewhere behind you, with the enthusiasm of a man who had been waiting for his cue. "Take him, dear child. Fresh air. Excellent idea. Just the thing after a meal." He was already, somehow, on the other side of the room. Doing something. You couldn't quite see what. It didn't matter.
"Shamrock," you said pleasantly. "Would you like to come?"
"No, thank you," said Shamrock, without looking up from the spoon. "I'm tired."
You looked at him. He was the least tired-looking child you had ever seen in your life. He had the bright, alert eyes of someone running an operation.
"Really?," you said.
"Goodnight, mother."
"Don't," you pleaded.
"Goodnight, father," he said to Garling, who smiled at him in approval. Shamrock then slid off his chair and removed himself from the room with suspicious efficiency, and just like that, the table was empty except for you and Garling, and the garden was waiting. You had absolutely no one left to look at.
"Right this way," you said, to the room, to the situation, to the general conspiracy that had been assembled against you over what appeared to have been several weeks of coordinated planning. Because you had been outmaneuvered at your own dinner table by a six-year-old and two people who were supposed to be on your side, and the only remaining option was to walk out into a small garden with Garling Figarland and maintain your dignity as best you could.
The garden was, to put it plainly, shabby.
You were aware of this in the ordinary way, the comfortable way of someone who had grown up in it and loved it despite its untidiness. Still, you became aware of it in an entirely new and specific way as you walked through it beside a man who lived in the kind of echelons where imperfection was simply not permitted. The uneven path. The roses that needed cutting back. The section near the wall where your father had attempted a project three summers ago and had not finished it, and had covered this fact with a pot of something that had since died.
"It's not much," you said, which was perhaps unnecessary but felt honest.
"It's a garden," Garling said, which was not quite a contradiction and not quite an agreement and somehow worse than either.
"It's a shabby place. Much like my home and family." You said, a little sharply.
"Gardens are for growing things," he said, with the equanimity of a man who had decided the point was closed. "This one has clearly grown things for a long time. Good things, of great value."
You looked at the dead thing in the pot by the wall, willing yourself to not misunderstand.
The evening was cool, properly cool, the kind of cool that arrived suddenly and reminded you that you had come outside without a wrap, which you noticed now you had already committed to the walk and couldn't reasonably go back. You crossed your arms against it, which helped marginally, and kept walking, because stopping felt worse.
Then something settled around your shoulders.
You went very still.
His cloak. Warm, heavy, carrying the faint scent of something you had no business recognizing as well as you did, something you had remembered without meaning to, the way you had remembered everything about him without meaning to. He had draped it around you as if you were lovers, like it was the logical conclusion of a situation he had observed and assessed and resolved.
You turned to look at him.
He looked back, in his shirtsleeves, entirely unbothered by the temperature, with the expression of a man who had done a perfectly reasonable thing.
"Commander—"
"You were cold."
"That's not the—" You stopped. "This is yours."
"I'm aware."
"You'll be cold."
"I won't," he said, with the serene confidence of a man who had apparently made a separate arrangement with the weather.
You looked at him for a moment. Then: "Just…What are you doing?" You said it carefully, with the precision of someone who needed the question to cover a great deal of ground. "And I mean that in the broadest possible sense. The dinner. Shamrock and his suitcase. My father, who is supposed to be a rational man—"
"I find your father very rational."
"He called you son."
"Older men often do that."
"No." You shook your head. "Not like that. He's never called anyone that in his life. Not even my brothers-in-law. He called our parish priest by his last name for thirty years, and the man buried his mother." You turned to face him more fully, which was either brave or foolish, and you had stopped being able to tell the difference. "Shamrock called me mother this morning. At breakfast. In front of everyone. Out loud."
"Did he," said Garling, in a tone that told you absolutely nothing about whether this was news to him, which meant it wasn't. "That was quick of him."
"You knew he would?"
"He mentioned it."
"And you didn't think to—" You stopped. Regrouped. "Don't you find that inappropriate? I don't even work for you anymore. I signed the papers. You watched me sign them. There was a solicitor. There was a stamp. We barely even know one another and—"
"It's natural," Garling said, with the calm of a man who had considered this thoroughly and arrived somewhere he was comfortable with, "for a boy to form a deep attachment to a mother-figure who has treasured him as her own. Shamrock is perceptive. He knows what is real."
You stared at him.
He said nothing further. He looked at the garden, at the uneven path, and the roses that needed cutting. The light from the house caught the edge of him, the line of his jaw, the gold at his temples, and you looked away, because looking directly at him for any sustained period had proven, over the course of this evening, to be genuinely hazardous to your ability to think clearly.
You were aware of the cold. And of the cloak. And of the warmth of it, which was the problem, because warmth made it very difficult to be sensible, and you had a strong suspicion that this had not been accidental.
"What are you playing at?" you said.
"You were cold."
"That is not what I asked." You stopped. Gathered what remained of yourself. "You are standing in my family's garden in your shirtsleeves. You came to dinner as if you have a standing invitation. Before that, weeks of correspondence nobody thought to mention to me." You looked at him. "It feels like you encouraged Shamrock to come seek me out, to call me what he's calling me. And you said none of this when you were asking me to stay, which I notice, I notice very clearly—"
"Would it have changed your answer?"
You opened your mouth.
You closed it.
The garden was quiet around you, properly quiet, the kind that settled in the evening when the wind dropped, and the world paused. Somewhere inside the house, your mother laughed at something, and the sound of it drifted through the window and into the cool air between you.
"That's not the point," you said. It was not an answer, and you both knew it.
Garling was quiet for a moment, looking at the overgrown roses with the expression of a man in absolutely no hurry at all.
Inside the house, your father laughed now, too. The chandelier threw its crooked, familiar light across the sitting room curtains, and the garden smelled of cool earth and things that needed tending, and Garling Figarland stood in the middle of it in his shirtsleeves and bad intentions that you didn’t understand, because the most obvious answer couldn’t be the correct one.
"I'm not playing at anything," he said.
He said it simply, like it wasn’t a debate. Just as a fact, offered plainly, take it or leave it.
You looked at him.
"Garling," you said, invoking his personal name. Not Commander. His name, which came out before you could decide whether to say it, and then it was already in the air between you, and there was nothing to do about it.
Something shifted in his expression. Fractional. His eyes softened, and his mouth turned taut.
"You left," he said, "suddenly. We were unready."
"I left," you said carefully, "because things were becoming unclear. For me." You looked down at the uneven path, at the dead thing in the pot, at anywhere that wasn't his face. "I was starting to want something that wasn't mine to want. You have to understand that. I was standing in your house, in your life, and I was—" You stopped. "It was the correct thing to do. Leaving was the correct thing."
"Yes," he said. "You're very good at that. The supposed correct thing. But was it really?"
It didn't sound like a compliment. It didn't sound like a criticism. It sounded like something he had turned over many times in private and had finally decided to say out loud. The silence stretched between you, not uncomfortable, not comfortable, something more specific than either. A silence that had gravity.
"Shamrock sees me as his mother," you said, and your voice came out quieter than you intended, and more honest. "And I—" You stopped. Pressed on. "I want to be his mother. I know that I shouldn't say that. I know what it means, and I'm saying it anyway, which is probably—that you and he coming here makes me want it more, and I've been trying not to want you both—"
You stopped yourself.
The heat that flooded your face was instantaneous. You turned sharply away from him, toward the dark end of the garden, toward the unfinished wall project, because there was nowhere else to look and no way to take back what you had just said. It was out. It was in the air. Garling Figarland now knew, with complete clarity, that it was not only about Shamrock, had never been only about Shamrock, and you had told him this yourself, in your own family's garden, voluntarily, while wearing his cloak.
There was no version of this that wasn't mortifying.
Maybe it was for the best. That thought arrived small and unconvincing and did absolutely nothing for the hot, ashamed, exposed feeling spreading through your chest.
Garling was very still.
"Did you only want to be Shamrock's mother?"
He said it carefully. Quietly. Selecting each word individually. Not unkindly. Not with any trace of satisfaction or advantage. Just the question, set down between you like something fragile, something that needed handling with care.
He didn't say the rest. He didn't need to. The rest hung in the cool evening air, legible and patient.
Or did you want me to be yours too?
You stood very still with your back half-turned and your face burning and his cloak around your shoulders. You thought about seventeen pages of cream stock paper and a stamp, and Shamrock arriving with a suitcase. Your father calling him son at the dinner table, and four years of ordinary days that had become, without your noticing, the proof of something you had no word for until now.
"That's—" you started.
You stopped.
You tried again. "That's not a fair question."
"No," he said. "But it's the important one."
The house glowed behind you, warm and slightly shabby and full of the sounds of people who had, apparently, known the answer to this question long before you did.
You turned back to face him, ruined by the question.
And he was looking at you with that expression, the one you had named too late and could not unknow, but entirely open in a way that Garling Figarland seldom was, and you understood with a sudden clarity that he had been carrying this for a long time too.
He’d known.
"No," you near whispered, less than okay. "Not only Shamrock."
Garling exhaled. Almost nothing. Just a fraction of something released. You didn't know what exactly lived in that exhale, and you weren't optimistic enough to assume.
You turned away again. Your fists curled at your sides.
"I'm very sorry," you said, and your voice had found its professional register again, the one you had spent years constructing, because it was the only shelter available to you at present. "I did my best to ensure you wouldn't be discomforted by such a development. I removed myself specifically to avoid—I wanted to divide myself properly from such aspirations before they became—" You stopped. Steadied. "Before they became your problem."
"Aspirations," he said.
"Asinine aspirations," you corrected, precisely. "Yes. I am well aware of my station, and I have never sought above it. You have been an extraordinarily generous employer. Your personal life has always been entirely separate from the rest of the household, and I want you to know that I have always respected that, that I never presumed, and that what I may or may not feel is entirely my own responsibility to manage, and not something you should feel any obligation toward, or discomfort about, and I—"
"Did you know," said Garling, cutting you off, "that you are very beautiful in the moonlight?"
You stopped, jaw falling ajar.
The word beautiful sat in the air between you, quiet and deliberate, placed there by a man who did not say things he did not mean, who had never once in your experience deployed a word without knowing exactly what he was doing with it.
You turned to look at him, brows narrowing. Was he mocking you?
He was watching you with an expression that was almost, almost something you might call fond, except that it was deeper than that, and steadier, and had none of the distance that fond implied.
"That is," you said, after a moment, “Irrelevant. To what I was saying."
"Not so," he disagreed.
"I was making an important point." You stated, trying to regain your bravado.
"You were apologizing," he said, "for wanting me. I didn't see a requirement for a response, as I didn’t see something wrong with it."
You stared at him.
"I'm not beautiful," you said, which came out more plainly than you intended, without self-pity, simply as a statement of understood fact. "You don't have to—"
"I'm aware of what you look like," Garling said, with a patience that suggested he had anticipated this particular objection and had already finished with it. "I have been aware for four years. I am not confused on the subject." He looked at you steadily. "You are beautiful in the moonlight. You are also beautiful at breakfast, and when you are cross, and when you think no one is watching you with Shamrock." A pause. "I have been paying attention. At considerable length."
The garden was very quiet.
Your face was doing something you had absolutely no control over.
"You are making it very difficult," you said, somewhat desperately, "to maintain any kind of dignity."
"I know," said Garling, the corner of his mouth moved, unmistakably, in the dark. "But I have been blind for far too long not to make it clear now.” He said it carefully, in the measured way of a man taking apart something he had built with great care, piece by piece, setting each one down where you could see it. "I am aware that my recent actions are not always legible, or would make sense according to the contracts between a master and his governess." Something worked in his expression, quiet and effortful. “But it took me some time to understand things too. But now I know, and know you want something too, I won’t be patient anymore.”
Your throat did something inconvenient.
"What do you—" Your voice wavered.
He looked at you for a long moment. The light from the house was behind him, and the garden was quiet, and he was looking at you the way he had looked at you across his desk, across four years of dinners and reviews and ordinary days, the way you had cared without meaning to and named too late and could not unknow.
"I think," he said quietly, "that you know what I'm talking about."
You did.
You had known since the morning Shamrock asked you if you were soft on his father, and you hadn't been able to lie. You had known since you signed seventeen pages of cream stock paper with a hand that wasn't quite steady and told yourself it was the right thing, and walked out of those gates, and cried into your pillow for four consecutive nights, and couldn't open a single brochure, because the horizon you had planned for had stopped looking like freedom and started looking like absence.
You knew. You had known for some time. You had simply been doing what Martha had said you always did, which was finding the most sensible-sounding door available and walking through it.
"Garling," you said, and your voice broke slightly on it, which you hadn't planned for, and which you were going to be thinking about later with considerable embarrassment. "I am not—I don't want to marry for Shamrock. I want you to know that. I would not—that is not a reason, and I won't have it be a reason, I need you to understand—"
"No," he said. "You'll marry me because I want to be married to you."
You went completely still.
The garden did not move. The air did not move. Somewhere distantly, a clock inside the house was ticking, and it sounded very loud.
"I—" you started.
Nothing followed. You had prepared for many things tonight. You had not prepared for that, stated in that tone, with that particular quality of settled certainty, as though it were simply the next logical step in a sequence he had already worked through to its conclusion.
You nearly sat down on the garden path, but remained upright through sheer stubbornness.
This couldn’t be real.
"And I am not—" You tried again. "I don't come from—I'm not what people expect. For someone like you. For your name and your position and—" You gestured at him, at all of him, the shirtsleeves and the jaw and the silver at his temples and the general unfairness of his existence. "You know what I mean."
"No," he said again, it stopped you completely. Not a dismissal. Not an agreement. Something that meant he had considered every single one of those things, had turned them over carefully, and had arrived somewhere on the other side of all of them, and had been waiting there patiently for you to catch up. "You are better than I, in every respect that matters."
You opened your mouth to argue this, because it was objectively arguable, because you had several points prepared, because you were a person who organized things that mattered, and this mattered, and you had things to say about it—
He kissed you.
It was not a lengthy kiss. It was not dramatic in the way that dramatic things announced themselves. It was quiet, and certain, and warm, and it had the same quality as everything he did, unhurried, deliberate, the complete and unthinking confidence of a man who had decided something and was no longer interested in discussing it.
He stepped back.
You stood in the garden, eyes wide.
The garden existed. You were reasonably certain of this. It had a path, and roses, and a wall, and a pot with a dead thing in it, and all of those things were still present, you were fairly sure, in the general vicinity of where they had been before. Garling Figarland was right in front of you and smelled amazing. This also seemed to be true. He was looking at you with that expression, the one, the fond one, number—you had lost the number. You had lost several things. Your train of thought had departed without you, and you were not entirely sure which station it had been headed for.
He had kissed you.
In your garden.
And then, because he seemed determined to kill you, he kissed you again.
The garden held its breath around you. The roses that needed cutting. The uneven path. All of it very still, very quiet, holding the shape of this moment with the particular care of things that understood they were present for something significant, which was more than you could say for yourself, because you were not holding anything with particular care at present, you were simply standing very still and trying to locate the thread of what you had been saying before your entire nervous system had been reorganized without your consent.
Something, you had been saying something. Something important. About—
"I don't know," you said. You had to start somewhere. "I don't—" What had you been saying? Right. Yes. "I don't know if I can do that—" You were pretty sure that if he kept kissing you, you would explode.
It came out very small. Smaller than you intended, and considerably less coherent than you had planned, stripped of everything professional and composed, just the true thing underneath all of it. The frightened and wanting and uncertain thing that had been sitting there since Shamrock asked you a question at breakfast four years ago, and you hadn't known the answer. Now you did, and it terrified you, and also, Garling had just kissed you, and your thoughts were not entirely available at present.
It was perhaps the most vulnerable thing you had ever said to another person while standing upright. It would have been more impressive if you had said it before the kiss, when your brain was still a functioning organ.
Garling pulled back, gazing at you for a long moment. His expression was serene, and you were looking back at him with what you could only assume was a very undignified expression, and the garden was very quiet. Your face was very warm, and somewhere in the house, your mother was almost certainly doing something that involved looking out the window, by arrangement.
"You kissed me," you said, because apparently that was what was available.
"Yes," he said.
"In my parents' garden."
"Yes."
"I was making a point."
“Were you?”
"I've lost it," you admitted.
The corner of his mouth moved. Just slightly. In the dark. "I know," said Garling, and he sounded, for just a moment, profoundly pleased about this in a way that was almost boyish, almost, in the way that Shamrock was sometimes almost something before the mask slipped fully back into place. "I know you're unsure. And I have not been the easiest man to know, nor any kind of obvious candidate for husbandly duty." A pause, weighted and deliberate. "But I want you to take a chance on me anyhow. Quite desperately, as it happens." His eyes held something warm and rare, something that reminded you, painfully, of Shamrock in his most open moments. "Desperately enough to do what you yourself described as asinine things to ensure it. I am not a fair man. But I am one entirely dedicated to keeping you. As Shamrock’s mother, and as my honored wife. As whatever you'll allow, because we both can’t live without you, and frankly, won’t let you go."
You were quiet for a moment, and suddenly things began align into place.
It wasn't a grand revelation, the way you might have imagined such things. It was quieter than that. It was the slow unraveling of a thread you hadn't known you were holding, each loop coming loose in sequence, and underneath it the shape of something that had been there for some time, assembled carefully, piece by piece, without your noticing.
Shamrock had anointed you as his mother. Not just experimentally, or with childish preciousness. With the serene confidence of a child stating an established fact.
Your parents, who were proper people and occasionally greedy people, had absorbed Garling Figarland into a weeknight dinner without a moment of awkwardness, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, as though they had been expecting him. Which, you were now understanding, they must have been.
Your father, who had called the parish priest by his last name for thirty years and considered this a matter of principle, had called Garling son before the soup course was finished.
The travel agent, who had addressed you only as Saintess, who had found every route simultaneously unavailable with the sympathetic efficiency of a man executing instructions, who had asked where you were currently residing in the tone of someone already in possession of the answer. You had thought it strange. You had thought it very strange, in fact, because your friend had gone the very next day and found endless routes available, an embarrassment of routes, routes in every direction, which meant the unavailability had been specific. You had been targeted.
And Hessa. Hessa, who had been standing outside the study door the moment you walked out of it, who had called you my lady without hesitation, without explanation, Perhaps because the moment you signed that last contract, you were in fact, now her lady.
Something turned over in your head, slowly, with the inevitability of something very large and very heavy finally clicking into place.
The seventeen pages. The cream stock paper. The stamp. The tabs, placed at careful intervals, anticipating that you might not want to linger. The figures in the disbursement clause, which had been extraordinarily generous, almost suspiciously so, except that he had always paid you extraordinarily and you had trusted that, had trusted it completely, because in four years this household had never been other than exactly what it presented itself as, and you loved Garling Figarland, and you trusted him, and he was a careful man who kept his household and his personal life in separate and distinct columns, and he had even brought in a solicitor to witness and sign, which was thorough, which was responsible, which was exactly the kind of thing a careful man did, when it was important—
Or when something was too important to lose.
You took a step back.
The garden was very still. No wind. Just the cool evening air and the light from the house and the sound of your own pulse doing something completely unreasonable, getting louder, which was not helpful.
You looked at Garling.
He looked back at you, and something in his expression had shifted, something that knew the calculation was almost complete, and before you could finish it, he leaned in. His mouth was very close to yours, and you were quickly discovering that whatever else could be said about Garling Figarland, he was extraordinarily effective at this particular method of disruption. It had worked twice already this evening, and the alarm bells currently ringing in the back of your skull gave you just enough purchase to take another step back before he arrived.
He straightened. His expression was composed. Entirely, infuriatingly composed.
"What," you said, very carefully, in the tone you used for things that required the most careful handling, "have you done that you would consider asinine."
He held your gaze, cryptically parsing through the variabilities of what you had just discovered.
“Garling.”
He sighed, knowing the secret was out.
"You signed a document," he said. "That my solicitor prepared. Upon Shamrock's insistence." A brief pause. "Shamrock had very clear ideas about what constituted an appropriate resolution. I found I agreed with him."
"The contract," you said. Your tone was very unsteady. "The pages I signed… just what was that contract?"
"Needed to be thoroughly reviewed, as I advised you."
"And I didn't read them thoroughly because I was distraught.."
"No," he agreed. "You did not."
The garden held its breath. The roses. The uneven path. The dead thing in the pot. All of it waiting. You shuffled through the possibilities and came upon the most likely one, and even though it was absurd and ridiculous, you took a breath and asked him.
"Garling Figarland," you said, very quietly. "Am I currently your wife?"
It was not quite a question. It had the shape of a question and none of the uncertainty, because you already knew. You had known since the travel agent. Since Hessa. Since your father said son before the soup was finished. Since Shamrock arrived with a suitcase and the serenity of a child whose affairs were in perfect order.
The corner of his mouth moved. Full and unmistakable, in the cool dark of your family's shabby garden.
"You have been," he said, "for approximately two weeks."
You stood very still.
The cloak was very warm around your shoulders. You were aware of this with the strange, floating precision of someone whose mind had detached slightly from the situation and was now observing it from a short distance. Garling's cloak. Which you were wearing. In your family's garden. At the same time, being informed that you had been his wife for a fortnight.
You were trying to remember the document.
You had signed it. You had held it in your hands, turned its pages, and you were trying now to locate the specific language of it, pulling it back from memory with the focused desperation of someone searching a dark room for something they had set down carelessly. The tabs. The dense formal language. The clauses you had skimmed because you had been in pain and in a hurry to be done with the bravest and most painful thing you had ever made yourself do.
Dissolution of your status as an employee.
Accurate, you had thought. Moving on.
Irrevocable upon signature.
Standard, you had thought. Perfectly standard.
Residential arrangements within the primary estate. Joint authority over decisions pertaining to the child, Shamrock Figarland. Mutual obligation between—
You almost choked.
It had said spouses.
You had read the word spouse and your eyes had moved on because you were not reading thoroughly, because you trusted him, because in four years this household had never been anything other than exactly what it presented itself as, and so you had trusted the structure and signed where the tabs indicated and set down the pen and felt very composed about the whole thing—
Garling had stepped closer. You became aware of this, the way you were becoming aware of everything today —gradually, through a slight and persistent fog. He was close enough now that you could see his expression clearly in the light from the house, and it was the unguarded one, the one underneath all the others.
He reached out and took your hands.
Both of them. Carefully, withcare, his thumbs settling over your knuckles with a deliberateness that suggested he had thought this gesture and meant it. You looked down at your hands in his and said nothing, because nothing was available.
He raised them and pressed his mouth to your fingers. Once. Then again, on the other hand. Taking his time, as though this were a thing he had been dying to do for a very long time.
"It was a marriage contract," you said, to the garden, to the general situation.
"Yes," he said, against your hands.
"I signed a marriage contract and didn’t realize it."
"Yes."
"I thought it was a severance package."
He chuckled. "You signed it," he said, "thinking what you needed to think, in order to sign it." Something moved in his voice that was not quite an apology, but occupied the same careful territory. "That is the part I would describe as asinine. Upon reflection."
You looked at him.
"How much of this was Shamrock?"
A beat. Smaller than it should have been.
"Shamrock knew you were going to resign. He told me." A pause. "The rest was mine."
His expression did not change. Your hands were still in his, and he was still holding them, and you were standing in your family's garden wearing his cloak, two weeks married, and the fog was thinning at the edges, and underneath it was something that was going to require some time to fully feel, and you were not ready for it yet.
"You sat across from me," you said. "You watched me pick up the pen. You said nothing."
"I advised you to read it thoroughly."
"You knew I wouldn't." You stated. Just the truth of it, set down plainly between you. "You knew exactly what state I was in, and you let me believe I was finally doing the right thing. You let me be brave about it, and now I feel stupid."
He shook his head. “Never stupid, merely preoccupied.”
"Why?" you said. Just that. The question beneath everything, stripped of all its careful management, offered without organization or structure or any of the things you usually put around things that frightened you. "Why me?"
The clock inside the house marked the painful question.
"Because you sat on the nursery floor," he said. "On your first day. In your shabby clothes, without hesitation, because that was where he needed you." His voice was even, but it was the evenness of effort, not ease. "Because my son waited at the door for you every morning and asked for you every night, and I watched you become the fixed point of our world without either of us noticing." He looked at you, and what was in his face now was unfortified and deliberate, offered without the usual architecture around it. "Because you have never bored or disappointed me. Once. In four years. And I had not understood until recently how completely that undid me." His hands tightened, fractionally, around yours. "Because you were going to leave and take all of it with you, and I found that I could not allow that, and I handled it—"
"Badly," you said.
"Yes," Garling agreed. "Badly."
You looked down at your hands in his. At the cloak around your shoulders, which was still warm, which had always been warm, which he had put there without ceremony because you were cold and that was simply what one did when a person one had apparently married two weeks ago without their knowledge was cold in a garden.
"You're not sorry," you said.
The pause was very small.
"I am sorry," he said, "that it hurt you. I am not sorry that you’re mine." He pressed his mouth to your hands again, briefly, and the gesture was so uncharacteristically tender that something in your chest did something it had no business doing in the middle of what was technically a confrontation. "I find I cannot be sorry for that. I have tried."
You stood in the quiet dark, in his cloak, with your hands in his, and you thought about a boy asleep upstairs with his mathematics book. Toward a garden and a document and a man who had read your reports twice and could not find the right way to keep you, and had therefore decided that paperwork was the answer.
"I need time," you said. "To be angry. You should know that I am going to be very angry when the shock wears off."
"Yes," he said, without hesitation, as though he had already scheduled this into his calendar and made the necessary arrangements. "Your parents and I are prepared for it."
You stared at him. "Even my parents."
"They were understanding."
"My parents knew." The fog was thinning further, and underneath it, the anger was beginning to find its shape, and it was going to be considerable. "My parents sat at that table tonight and said nothing—"
"Be gentle with Shamrock," he muttered, brushing a hair at your temple.
"I am always—" You stopped. Looked at him. "Soon. We are going to have a very long conversation. About honesty. And what marriage requires of a person. And what it requires, apparently, an entire coordinated network of conspirators, including my own parents, a travel agent, and your legal department—"
"Yes," he said. And he meant it, which was the thing about him that had always undone you, how he absorbed the full weight of your ire and simply stood in it. No deflection. No argument. Just yes, and the willingness to be held to it, because that meant you cared.
You held his gaze for a long moment in the cool dark.
"Come inside," he said, finally. "It's cold."
The corner of his mouth moved as he said it, hot in the dark. You recognized his look, and it was different from the others, fuller, the expression of a man who had arrived somewhere he had intended to arrive and found it exactly as he had hoped. He was smiling.
Then he kissed you one last time.
Kissed you with certainty of a man who understood that he was operating within a window, that the shock was thinning. The anger was assembling itself on the other side of it, and that there would be conversations and silences and a period of being looked at very coldly across rooms, and that he was prepared to endure all of it, but that right now, in this garden, in the dark, you were warm and pliant. His wife, and you would let him, and so he did.
He let you go gently, but kept hold of one hand.
You stood there for a moment, in his cloak, in your family's shabby garden, looking up at him.
"You are an extremely unreasonable person, have a huge ego, and a thoroughly unpleasant personality."
"So I have been told." He grinned, “It’s a good thing I have an exceptional son.”
Then he tucked your hand into the crook of his arm and turned toward the house, and the light from the chandelier fell across the threshold in its familiar crooked way. Somewhere inside, your mother had instructed the kettle to be put on, because she’d want Garling to stay, to talk. Shamrock would be asleep upstairs with his mathematics book and his completed plan and the unassailable serenity of someone whose affairs were entirely in order.
You let yourself be walked inside.
The anger would come. You were certain of it, and it would be thorough, and he had been warned, and your parents were apparently braced for it, which you were going to revisit at length.
But the garden was cold, and his arm was warm, and the kettle was on.
Masterlist here
FRS Masterlist
One Piece Masterlist Here
Garling Figarland x Reader,
18+++++++++++
Based on this: prompt
Length 19K+
Hey, this one is, uh, spicier than usual. Adults only plz.
Previous
Saint Halverne’s reception had been, by any reasonable measure, a social obligation, and you had attended it as such, with the dutiful resignation of a saintess who has learned that formal events are simply the tax one pays for being married to someone important. But then there had been the wine, which was very good, followed by a kiss that was considerably better than that. And then Garling, spending the better part of the evening close enough that his arm brushed yours each time he turned to speak, his voice low and private against your ear, as though the two of you were sharing something at the center of a very crowded room that was only for you.
Martha had drifted off at some point to more demanding company, leaving the two of you like an island, still and separate from the current of the party around you. You weren’t totally drunk. This was something else.
This was desire, and it had been making itself known all evening with the rhythm of a tide. If Garling had aimed to torment you, he may well have achieved it.
Every time Garling murmured something into your hair, your pulse spiked clean through your thighs. A warmth had settled into your limbs and pooled low in your belly, insistent and sluggish. When his mouth came close enough that you felt the warmth of his breath at the corner of your lips, something electric moved through you that had nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with want. You kept your expression neutral with some effort. You held your wine glass. You nodded at things.
Garling, for his part, had misread your silence entirely. You could see it happening in real time: his attention turning careful when you stopped offering commentary, the slight adjustment in his posture that meant he was preparing for consequences. He thought he had overstepped and was already building his defense.
He had no idea that you had spent the last hour like a creature gone very still in tall grass, watching, waiting, and planning to pounce.
By the time the evening ended, a warm sensation had settled over you like hot water pouring during a shower. Not dizziness, exactly. More like the tide coming in by degrees, each small wave retreating just far enough that you noticed when the next one arrived. You were aware, in a distant academic way, that the wine deserved some of the credit. You were also aware that Garling’s hand had rested at the small of your back for approximately forty minutes, and that this may have been a contributing factor.
The carriage ride home was slow and warm and slightly unbearable. You watched the city pass in the dark beyond the window and tried to remember what your reservations were. Nothing came to mind.
The carriage ride home was not helping.
Garling sat across from you, very upright, with the expression that he was fairly certain he had done something wrong and was carefully calculating the extent of it. You had seen this before, how his cool demeanor went watchful and precise when he expected consequences, like a general revising his position before the other side had even fired. Whatever he imagined he’d done at the reception, he clearly believed he was about to be punished for it in full.
You looked at him. He looked at you. You said nothing.
This seemed to deepen his concern considerably.
But that warmth that had taken root in you at the reception had not gone anywhere. It sat in your chest and your belly and the inside of your wrists, patient and unhelpful, and every sway of the carriage that shifted you fractionally closer to him did nothing to improve matters. You watched the city pass in the dark beyond the window and tried to look like a woman composing her grievances rather than a woman composing herself.
He helped you out of the carriage, through the Figarland Estate, and walked you to your door with the solicitousness of a soldier picking his way through a minefield. Like any sudden movements might detonate your fury. Once there, he gently brushed your face, but thinking you wished to continue your cold shoulder, he reached past you to turn the door handle. This bent from his considerable height, as well as allowed him to press his lips to your temple (which seemed like it was a risk worth taking, as it was tradition by this point).
That was when you felt it. The line of his bearded jaw at close range, slightly rough with the end of a long evening, tipped toward you, briefly unguarded. Underneath was his refined throat, and his masculine scent permeated your senses like a drug.
Your decision-making, by this point, had been shipwrecked.
You turned your head and caught his mouth with yours before he could straighten.
It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t natural. But it mostly worked, and the hunger that had been sitting in your chest all evening roared to life as if you had finally, after a very long search, stumbled onto the right meal.
For one suspended moment, he went very still, that single breath of recalibration, then something gave way in him.
He kissed you back with an intensity that knocked the air cleanly out of your chest, one hand finding the door frame on instinct, the other catching your waist. You felt the warmth that had been pooling in you all evening rush upward through your ribs all at once. His grip tightened when you swayed into him, your knees having quietly staged a resignation somewhere in the last ten seconds.
The hand at your waist was not on the door frame.
You noticed this distantly, in the part of your mind that was still capable of noticing things, which was not a large part. His grip had shifted without your registering when, no longer steadying but exploring, moving against the fabric of your dress with a greedy exploring that made your breath catch. Your neckline was modest by Celestial Dragon standards, but there was a sliver of chest above it, and his fingers found the edge of that territory with practiced, eager intensity.
Not that you saw any of it.
Garling’s mouth was hot and certain and tasted of the same wine you’d been sharing all evening. A heady taste, and when he tilted his head, and his jaw scraped against your skin, something sparked down through your throat and into your sternum and kept going. You had one hand twisted into his cape without any memory of putting it there, while the other had found the back of his neck, mussing his blonde hair. You did not remember doing that either, but he didn’t seem all that bothered by it.
The world had narrowed to the heat of him, the solid wall of his chest against yours, the low, unsteady pull gathering in your belly that wanted and wanted and wanted without any clear sense of what it was asking for, only that there was more. You intended to find it, your small mutters of more, more, more translating through tongue and spit.
He broke the kiss only to eagerly press his mouth to the curve of your throat, down and down, slower and slower until he was sucking red marks into the swell of your chest, tugging more skin free. Switching between nipping and biting, he worked to free a nipple, eagerly biting the freed skin into his mouth.
And such great pleasure compounded and built, rising you into utterly new depths. Garling, for his part, seemed to surrender entirely, and you followed suit, legs parting wantonly and without thought, letting him pull you onto his thigh.
The hand on your waist migrated to rest under the curve of your rear, tugging you forward and holding you up so he could simultaneously arch you over and slowly grind you over him. And while his long coat was of fine, thick material, it didn’t entirely conceal the long, hard rod between his thighs. Especially when the said jacket folded up, giving your thigh full access to measure considerable length hidden only by his pants, a touch of wetness there.
And still, that pleasure grew.
More and more and more, and you were lost in it, drowning pleasantly, the reception and the carriage ride and every careful evening at your bedroom door collapsing into this single point of warmth and want and the smell of him and the scrape of his jaw and his fingers pulling down the edge of your neckline and finish the job—
Garling tore himself back.
Not stepped. Tore.
He crossed to the far wall in two strides and put his back against it, one hand pressed flat to the plaster, legs planted apart, and he stood there and breathed. His chest rose and fell with an effort that matched yours, and his eyes, when he finally raised them to you, were dark and not entirely composed.
You became aware, slowly, of the state of yourself. Your hand rose to your throat, which was marked and warm and covered in him. The neckline of your dress had lost the argument it had been making all evening. You were gasping in a way that was not going to be easy to explain to anyone who might have ventured the halls.
You placed a hand over your mouth, touching the bruised skin, reveling in the delight still lingering.
Garling’s fingers flexed against the wall as he watched you like the apex predator he was.
You watched his jaw tighten. Watched him take one slow breath, then another, reconstructing himself from the outside in the way only Garling could, piece by deliberate piece, while his fingers pressed and curled and pressed again against the plaster like it was the only thing giving him clarity.
Then he smiled.
Slow, and wicked, and with rather too many teeth in it for a man who had just been clutching your waist like a lifeline.
“How much,” he said, “did you drink tonight, my love?”
The warmth in your chest curdled very slightly into indignation, which was at least easier to stand upright in. “I’m not drunk enough to not know what I’m doing.”
You folded your arms. This had the unintended effect of drawing his gaze somewhere it had been making inroads all evening, and he turned his eyes firmly to the ceiling with the air of a man making a significant personal sacrifice.
“You may not be entirely drunk,” he said, to the ceiling, in the voice he used for things he had already decided. “But I’m not going to bed my wife for the first time unless she is entirely cognizant. I am too prideful to accept anything less than perfect consent.”
The ceiling, to its credit, said nothing. You had plenty of words, many of them vulgar, but the most effective was the small whimper that escaped you upon the realization that you were not going to be ruined tonight.
“Garling.” You took half a step forward. He made a sound like a man in genuine pain.
“Go inside, my drunken wife.”
“I am not—”
“Go inside,” he said, with great feeling, “and lock the door. Because if you don’t, I will do something both of us will regret.” A beat. “I need a clear head for this. To be careful with you. I am not, at present, in any condition to be careful.”
The warmth in your chest dampened by several degrees, and your eyes, traitorously, filled. Not from sadness, exactly. From want, and the sudden enforced distance between you and the thing you wanted, which was close enough to the same feeling to be embarrassing.
Garling looked at your face, and something in him relented. He pushed off the wall and crossed back to you, his forehead coming down to rest against yours, one large hand curved against your jaw, and you could feel the restraint costing him in the slow, deliberate way he was breathing.
“Please—” Your hand found his lapel, fingers curling into it.
“My love.” His voice came out rougher than its usual register, stripped of something, and he closed his eyes. “Not tonight.”
You didn’t move. Your legs had not confirmed they were prepared to take instructions.
His thumb pressed once, briefly, against your jaw before his hand fell away, and the absence of it registered as an almost physical loss. He straightened, putting a careful inch of air between you, and looked at you with an expression you had never seen on him before and could not entirely name, though some part of you recognized it anyway.
“Go inside,” he said, quieter. “Shamrock is coming. I doubt you want him witnessing this.”
True to his word, footsteps sounded from somewhere down the corridor. Too dizzy and too warm and in no condition whatsoever to manage a small child, you finally went inside.
Unfortunately, tonight you remained a virgin.
The door closed behind you. You locked it, as instructed, and stood in the dark with your back against it and your heart making a considerable amount of noise, and thought that patience was a virtue neither of you was going to survive much longer.
Through the wood, you heard the low murmur of Garling’s voice, and then Shamrock’s, and Garling telling him to leave you be, that tomorrow he could have you all day.
You went to bed and collapsed into it face-first.
The next day, Garling received the cold shoulder.
It was not entirely due to anger, though you found anger the considerably easier thing to explain, including to yourself. Anger was clean and justified and required no further examination. The alternative required admitting that you had spent a portion of the night awake in a state of wanting that had no respectable outlet, and that the sight of him at the breakfast table, looking entirely composed. At the same time, you felt like a wrung-out cloth was doing nothing to improve matters. The hangover didn’t help matters.
So, anger it was.
You were perfectly civil. You passed him the salt when he needed it. You answered direct questions with complete sentences. You simply did all of this with the air of a woman who had no particular feelings about the man she was doing it for, which was so thoroughly untrue that you suspected even the housemaids could see through it.
This suspicion was not helped by the fact that you could, in your peripheral vision, observe two of them very carefully, not looking at each other.
Perhaps it was also not helped by the fruit tower. You had arrived at the table first and arranged it with some deliberation in the center, then seated yourself beside Shamrock on the far end, positioning the whole elaborate structure between yourself and your husband like a battlement. It was a very tall tower. Someone had stacked a pineapple on top, and you were not going to rule out that Hessa had done it on purpose, because when you glanced at her, she was examining a flower arrangement with the serenity of a woman thinking about absolutely nothing.
Garling had sat down across from you, taken one look at the fruit fortifications, and reached for the coffee pot without comment. This was, somehow, worse.
He hadn’t even pouted when he’d found you had woken early enough to deny him the walk from your door to breakfast. You had simply appeared at the breakfast table already dressed, already seated, already beyond reach of whatever the morning might have otherwise offered. A preemptive maneuver. He had registered it, you could tell, in the slight pause before he pulled out his chair, and had said nothing at all, which was its own kind of audacious.
You were not about to replay the previous night’s incident in the full light of day while still feeling more pent-up than a tea kettle. And if avoiding his morning greeting had also meant avoiding his mouth, well, that was his fault entirely. You were only a modest governess. A woman of simple habits and no particular passions. A woman who had identified her weaknesses and avoided them like cavities, which was the only sensible policy, and you would not be taking questions.
Shamrock, beside you, was eating his toast with the focused attention of a child who had read a room correctly and decided his continued neutrality was the wisest available position.
“Darling.”
Garling rose, having finished eating, and moved to your end of the table with unhurried confidence. The kind of ego that had simply decided the fruit tower was not a permanent obstacle. He adjusted his position until you had no choice but to look at him.
“Would you be opposed to visiting me for lunch today?” He paused, just briefly. “I find myself missing you fiercely.”
“I am opposed.” You said it so quickly that a maid nearly dropped her plate. “I’m afraid I’m otherwise occupied.”
Garling had half a second of alarm before composing himself again. “Oh?” A flash of white teeth. “And what has you occupied?”
“My sister.”
“Martha? But she isn’t—” He stopped.
“Isn’t what?”
“Nothing.” He said it easily, the way a man says nothing when he means something he has decided not to share. “I only thought she mentioned she had plans this week. I must have misremembered.”
You looked at him. He looked back at you with an expression of complete openness, which meant he was lying, or editing, or both, and you had no way to prove it without admitting you had invented Martha entirely, which you were not going to do.
“She was able to rearrange,” you said.
“Wonderful. Give her my warmest regards.”
He held your gaze for a moment, and then, with the air of a man who had won something without technically having played, he let it go.
“You look lovely this morning, incidentally.”
“I slept poorly."
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He said it with genuine feeling, which was the problem. The warmth was entirely unaffected and had no business landing the way it did. “You still look lovely. My door is open to you whenever you find yourself at liberty. Today or otherwise.”
You had braced, privately, for retaliation and for some quiet reference to the previous night, deployed with surgical precision and that particular smile. It did not come. He simply looked at you with that composed, patient attention, as though he had all the time in the world and was entirely content to spend some of it here, waiting for you to come around, which you were not going to do.
He was calm. He was mature. He was a shining example of chivalric patience, and he knew it, and he was deploying it like a weapon. There was absolutely nothing you could do about this that would not make you look like the unreasonable party. You could not be angry at a man for being kind to you. You had checked. There was no mechanism for it.
He didn’t appear to require an answer. He adjusted his cuffs, glanced at Shamrock, said something quiet and fond to him that you didn’t catch, and left.
You picked up your tea, praying the hangover away.
Behind you, Hessa had been reorganizing the sideboard for some time now, moving items in order to have something to look at that was not you. A maid to her left had developed a sudden and pressing interest in the window latch. Another had simply ceased to exist as a social presence, which was an impressive feat for someone standing four feet away.
“Not a word,” you said.
“Of course,” said Hessa, to a tureen.
You drank your tea.
Patience as a virtue, you had concluded, was a fiction invented by the elite to placate everyone else into quiet submission. The truly patient man was not virtuous. He was simply waiting you out. He had a longer horizon than you did, and he was comfortable with it, and this was arguably the most irritating thing about him, which was saying something given the competition.
When Garling had gone, Shamrock looked up from his breakfast, considered you for a moment with those unsettlingly perceptive eyes, and raised one small, brow.
“Are his kisses that bad?”
The maid by the window made a sound that she converted, with admirable speed, into a cough.
“I don’t know what you’re referring to,” you said, fingers to your forehead.
“You’re avoiding Father.”
“I am doing no such thing.”
“You got up before sunrise so you wouldn’t have to walk with him. And you told him you were visiting Auntie M, but Auntie M is enormous and in a terrible mood after balls, and she told you last week she didn’t want any visitors until after the baby comes. I was there.”
A brief pause.
“Women need support in trying times.”
Shamrock looked at you with an expression inherited wholesale from a specific parent: the raised brow, the quality of waiting. “You’re really mad at Father.”
You picked up your tea. “This is one of those personal, private things, Shamrock.”
“So the kiss was really bad.” He said it plainly, the way children say things they have simply concluded. “I thought Father would be better at it. He’s very old.”
He returned to his breakfast with the air of someone who had made his point and was content to let it settle. You watched him cut his toast into quarters, methodically, and thought that seven was frankly too young to be this perceptive, and that someone ought to have flagged it as a concern during the hiring process. You were, in fact, the someone. You had not flagged it. This was on you.
Behind you, Hessa had stopped pretending to reorganize anything. She was simply standing.
“The kiss wasn’t bad,” you said finally, with great dignity. “That’s not the issue.”
Shamrock said nothing. He had learned this from his father too: the particular weaponization of silence, the willingness to simply wait while the other person kept talking.
“It was a perfectly acceptable kiss.”
He ate his toast skeptically.
“Several acceptable kisses.” You were frowning now. You didn’t know why you were defending Garling. You hadn’t even liked him this morning. You still didn’t, technically, like him.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Shamrock said. “I already know Father did something right and then messed it up somehow. He was in a very good mood this morning. He woke me up early, and we did two hours of sword drills, and he was humming.”
The image of Garling humming at six in the morning over sword drills did something complicated to your chest that you were absolutely not going to examine at the breakfast table, or anywhere else, on this particular day.
One of the maids drifted toward the door on some urgent, invented errand. The other had developed a consuming interest in her own apron.
“It’s a shame he got it wrong,” Shamrock continued, cutting his second piece of toast with precision. “How am I supposed to get a sibling if he keeps messing up? I could talk to him. I have ideas.”
“Finish your toast,” you said. “And do not speak to your Father about our private life. Under any circumstances. That is a direct instruction.”
Shamrock finished his toast.
Then he looked up at you one more time with those steady, ancient eyes, and said, very simply, “Don’t be too upset, Mother. I need a sibling soon, or we’ll be too far apart in age to play.”
You looked at your tea, which had gone cold. You looked at the window. You performed a rapid mental survey of the building’s roof access and whether you had any prior commitments that might plausibly require your presence up there.
Hessa cleared her throat softly.
“More tea?”
“Please. And perhaps a dash of something stronger.”
Martha lived twenty minutes away and was, as Shamrock had accurately said, enormous. She also looked less than pleased to see you, so quickly after the ball. A ball she probably shouldn’t have insisted on attending in her state.
She was horizontal on a chaise with her feet elevated, a cold compress on her forehead, and the expression of a woman who had agreed to receive you only because turning you away required more energy than she currently had available. Her husband Daveed had let you in with a warm smile and the slightly shellshocked air of a man eight months into a siege he hadn’t fully anticipated.
“You look terrible,” Martha said, by way of greeting. “Hungover still?”
“And you look like—” The rudeness of it made her raise a brow. You were almost never sharp first thing in the morning. “—Sorry. Good morning.”
“It isn’t, particularly, but sit down. Daveed, she needs tea. She has the face.”
“I don’t have a face,” you said, sitting.
“You have the face you get when something has happened, and you’ve spent the night convincing yourself it happened differently than it did.” She shifted, grimaced, shifted again. “So, did Garling’s kiss at the ball upset you that much? If so, my advice is to get over it.”
“I am NOT upset over being kissed—” You stopped. Collected yourself. “That is not what this is about.”
“No?”
Martha’s expression shifted into something more interested. She reached up and removed the compress from her forehead, which meant she intended to give you her full attention, which meant she had already decided this was going to be worth it. “Did something more happen?” she said. “When you got home?”
You were quiet for a moment.
“There was. We—” You stopped.
Martha waited. She had always been better at waiting than you, which was deeply unfair given that she was two years older and had no particular claim to the moral high ground on any subject you could name.
“I kissed him,” you said. “After we got home.”
“And?”
“And then there was more kissing. And I may have.” You picked up the tea Daveed had set down beside you, needing something to do with your hands. “I may have had rather a lot of pent-up energy at the ball, and the kissing may have. Escalated.”
Martha’s eyes narrowed. Her grin widened. “Do continue.”
“I was perfectly willing,” you said, with some dignity. “I was the one who. I was very willing. Enthusiastically so, in fact, which is neither here nor there, the point is that it wasn’t—” You stopped. “He stopped it. Said he didn’t want to hurt me. That I was drunk.”
Martha stared at you for a moment. Then something shifted in her expression, softer and more surprised. “I mean. That’s actually rather lovely of him. So what’s the problem?”
You gritted your teeth.
“The problem, Martha, is that we finally got to the main event, and—” You stopped. Started again. “He saw me. And then he stopped.”
Martha blinked. “And?”
“And that’s it. That’s the problem. He saw me, and he stopped.”
A silence. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked. Outside, a cart passed over cobblestones.
“You think,” Martha said slowly, “that he stopped because he saw you and didn’t like what he saw?”
“I think it is a reasonable conclusion.”
Martha stared at you with an expression you hadn’t seen on her since you were seventeen and had announced a similarly ill-reasoned theory about why a boy at a garden party hadn’t asked you to dance. It was the expression of a woman summoning patience from a reserve she hadn’t expected to need this early in the morning.
“But that shouldn’t even be—it’s not as though the man hasn’t seen—” She stopped.
Went very still.
The compress slid slightly sideways on her forehead. She didn’t fix it.
Looked at you with new eyes.
“No,” she said.
You looked at the window. The curtains were a pale yellow. You focused on them with great attention.
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
You said nothing.
“You’re not telling me I’m wrong.”
Daveed, who had been hovering near the doorway with the tea things and the politely averted gaze of a good husband, had gone quite still. The teacup he’d been drying was no longer being dried. His eyes had cut slowly across the room to you. He was no longer looking at the wall. He was not even pretending to.
“This cannot be,” Martha said. She pressed both hands flat against her enormous stomach as though she needed something to hold onto. “You have been married for months.”
“Martha.”
“He is Garling Figarland.”
“I’m aware of who I married.”
“Are you telling me,” she said, her voice dropping to the register she reserved for matters of genuine, world-altering gravity, “that you have been living in that man’s house, in that man’s marriage, and you have not—” She stopped herself. Looked at you. Looked at Daveed. Looked back at you. The clock kept ticking. “You’re still a—”
“We have a complicated situation,” you said, with enormous dignity, and took a sip of tea that had gone lukewarm while you weren’t paying attention.
Martha made a sound that was not quite a word.
“No. You cannot possibly—are you still a virgin? You’re married to Garling Figarland, the alleged god of sexual prowess, and you are still a virgin?”
“Not that it is any of your business, but—”
“You’ve been married for months—”
“Martha—”
“Is he an actual saint? Has he been canonized? Should we be notifying someone?”
Daveed set the teapot down very carefully on the nearest surface, which happened to be a decorative side table not entirely designed for teapots. The ceramic met the wood with a soft, final clink. He did not appear to notice. He was staring at you with the expression of a man who had wandered into a conversation well above his anticipated involvement and was now rooted to the floor, eyes slightly wide, the dishcloth in his hands completely forgotten.
“The Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights,” Martha said, mostly to herself, gazing at the middle distance as though reading something written on the air. “Living like a monk in his own house. With his own wife.” She turned to Daveed. The compress slid off her forehead entirely and landed on the cushion beside her. Neither of them moved to retrieve it.
Daveed appeared to be doing rapid calculations. “Can you imagine,” he said, his voice pitched low with the reverence of a man delivering news of cosmic significance, “how absolutely furious Veria would be if she knew?” He turned away from you, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. His shoulders moved. “All those years. All that. And he married a woman who has him waiting like a—” He could not finish. He faced the wall and composed himself with visible effort.
“My dear, dear sister,” Martha said, shaking her head slowly, something warm and wondering in her voice now beneath the disbelief. “This changes everything. Do you understand that this changes everything?” She pointed at you, finger crossing the parlor with great purpose. “And then last night you finally, finally—but you were drunk—and he—” She stopped. Her expression moved rapidly through several phases, like a woman reading a letter that keeps getting more surprising. Then it settled into something certain. “Oh. Oh, he stopped because he didn’t want it to be like that.”
“Or because he saw me and didn’t—”
“If you finish that sentence,” Martha said, “I will tell Mother.”
You gasped. “That is not a proportionate—”
“Your extremely patient, generous, apparently saintly husband stopped,” Martha said, each word placed down like something heavy and deliberate, “because he cared about you. Because he wanted you present for it. Because you matter to him and he didn’t want your first time together to be while you were three glasses past sensible and he was responsible for the consequences in the morning.”
You blinked at her.
“He cared about you,” she said again, slower, in case it needed a second pass.
The clock ticked. Somewhere down the hall, a door opened and closed. The pale yellow curtains shifted slightly in a draft from the window you hadn’t noticed was cracked.
You opened your mouth.
“He is apparently,” Martha continued, before you could use it, “against all available evidence and reputation, a genuinely decent man who wanted you sober and present and actually there the first time he seduces you. And instead of recognizing this, you have come to my house before ten in the morning, still wound up like a watch spring, to complain that he doesn’t find you attractive.”
She exhaled slowly through her nose.
From the corner of the room, Daveed made a very small sound.
“Something to add?” you said, between your teeth.
“No,” he said. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” He was looking at a fixed point on the wall with the intense personal focus of a man who had decided that particular patch of plaster was the most interesting thing in the room and intended to keep believing that.
“Go ahead, Daveed,” Martha said pleasantly. “It’ll be better if she hears it from you.”
A pause. Daveed appeared to conduct a brief internal negotiation.
“I think,” he said, still to the wall, with the careful diction of a man choosing each word the way you choose footing on ice, “and I could be wrong. But I think that the man in question would be genuinely horrified to know that the wife he loves, the one he obtained through what I can only describe as an impressive campaign of dubious maneuvering because he apparently desperately wanted her, had concluded that he stopped because he didn’t find her attractive.” Another pause. “In my opinion.”
The room was very quiet.
“No one asked your opinion,” you said.
“You’re right.” He collected the teapot from the side table with the efficient relief of a man who had said his piece and located the exit simultaneously. “I’ll get more tea.”
He left. His footsteps retreated down the hall at a pace that was not quite hurrying.
Martha watched him go, then turned back to you with the expression of a woman who had made her point and was now simply waiting for it to land.
“Listen to me,” she said. “I was at that ball. I watched him kiss you in front of everyone he knows. I watched his face when he did it.” She let that sit in the air between you for a moment, where it occupied considerable space. “A man who doesn’t like what he sees does not look like that.”
You could feel your face doing something you didn’t care for. “He made me feel so ashamed.”
“I know.” Her voice lost some of its edge. “But you were nervous. He kissed you in front of half of Mary Geoise, and you didn’t know what to do with that, so you found a solution in a wine glass. And the wine gave you what the kissing had already started. And he was nervous too, because you’d been cool with him all evening, and he was drinking as well, and when it came to it, he was the more functional of the two of you.” She looked at you steadily. “That is not rejection. That is the opposite of rejection, delivered with more self-restraint than most men alive are capable of, and given the reputation, I can only imagine what it cost him.”
There was a long silence.
“I don’t know how to want him without feeling so scared,” you said.
Martha was quiet for a moment. “I know that too.”
“I was cold to him this morning.”
“I heard about the fruit tower.”
“The—who told you?”
“Shamrock. Our gossip is his primary form of entertainment.” She shifted, pressing a hand to her side with a grimace. “So. Go to the spa. Use some of that infinite money you have and get your head on straight. And then, for the love of everything, talk to the man. He was decent about this when he didn’t have to be.”
You picked up your tea. Put it down. “I want to jump off a roof.”
“You can’t use mine. Too low. You’d only twist an ankle.”
Daveed reappeared in the doorway holding a plate of biscuits, took one look at your expression, and set them down beside you without comment. He had the instincts of a man who had learned when food was the only safe offering.
“Daveed,” Martha said, without opening her eyes. “Apologize to me.”
“For what, love?”
“For not being Garling Figarland. We’ve just been told the man has waited over a year to bed his own wife. You never do such edgeplay with me.”
“That long? What are we, savages?” He winked. “How about I show you my sword later?” You made a face.
“Please do.” She waved a hand. “Compress first. I need a moment.”
“You’re my wife,” he said, with comfortable certainty. “You’re about to have my child. And Saint Figarland would drive you mad. He’s not nearly gossipy enough for you.”
“He could learn.” But she was smiling, and when he leaned down, she caught his hand, and he pressed a kiss to her knuckles with the ease of long habit before disappearing back down the hall.
You watched this and felt something very small and very inconvenient turn over in your chest.
“Go,” Martha said. “Spa. Husband. In that order. Stop making me jealous.”
Daveed kindly walked you to the door to show you out.
The spa was quiet at this hour, which was the only reason you had come. And you had used the back entrance, as Garling likes to keep his personal doings private, and paid well for it to stay that way.
The Figarlands had a standing account there, one of the many luxuries that had arrived with the marriage and which you had visited exactly once before, but as staff on an errand. The difficulty with being able to afford the best was that the spa was also full of people who could afford the best, and Celestial Dragons talked, and you were in no condition to be talked at. You had arrived early enough to avoid the bulk of them and given very clear instructions to keep it that way. The woman at the front had looked at your face and not argued.
The all-female attendants took your robe, administered the full shower and scrub with the brisk efficiency of women who had seen everything and were professionally unimpressed by all of it, and then deposited you in a warm room that smelled of eucalyptus and left you largely in peace in a giant robe. Which was the most you had asked of anyone today, and the first time you had received it.
You lay down on the heated stone and stared at the ceiling. It didn’t reveal any secrets, but it did help the throbbing behind your eyes, so you were prepared to call it useful.
You were doing this because Martha had told you to. Also, because the sort of woman Garling Figarland ought to have married went to spas and took mornings for herself and did not spend them constructing fortifications out of seasonal fruit. You were going to be that woman today. You were going to lie here in the warm, scented quiet and feel entirely at ease, and then you were going to go home composed and reasonable and not at all like someone who had spent the night wrung out over her own husband.
The stone was very warm. The ceiling was very unhelpful.
You sighed. Looked like you’d be doing this yourself.
Begrudgingly, you accepted the obvious. Martha had probably been right, though she had been very pregnant and extremely inconvenient about it.
Garling had been right not to let you seduce him drunk. You could see that now, in the eucalyptus-scented quiet,
If he had taken the easy route, something would have broken. You would have woken up and known that he had let it happen because it was available rather than because it mattered. That he had taken an easy win while you were too far gone to weigh it properly. The thought sat badly, like something swallowed wrong. It would have been the end of whatever fragile, unexamined thing had been growing in the months since the wedding, and he had apparently understood that, even drunk, even in the dark, even when you had been, by all accounts, quite enthusiastic about the alternative.
Which was, when you lay it out plainly on a warm stone in a quiet room, rather a lot to take in.
It had never been about you not having desire. That was the part you hadn’t said to Martha. You had wanted him for long enough that the wanting had become chronic, something you worked around the way you work around furniture placed in an inconvenient spot. You had simply learned the shape of the room without it.
The problem with Garling was that he was not a man you could want lightly. He was the best, and he knew it, and wanting him properly meant admitting that, which meant admitting rather a lot of other things in sequence, like a row of small doors each opening onto a larger room than the last.
Because if you let yourself have this properly, you would not be able to stop. And if you could not stop, and he left, or grew tired, or looked at you one morning with the eyes of a man regretting a decision he’d made in haste, you would be ruined by it. Not in the social sense. In the other sense. The permanent one.
You had married him under circumstances that were not, in the strictest interpretation, entirely voluntary. You had been furious about this for a reasonable period of time. But somewhere in the months since, the fury had done what fury does when it is not fed, which was to slowly and inconveniently become something else entirely. Something that sat in your chest during breakfast. Something that had made five glasses of wine feel like a reasonable solution to a problem that had been building for months.
The question was not whether you wanted him. You had been resolved on that question for some time, whether you had admitted it or not. The question was whether you were brave enough to stop building walls out of fruit and cold shoulders and let the thing happen that was, by now, fairly clearly going to happen regardless.
You pressed your face into the warm stone.
It did not offer counsel. It was, however, very soothing, and you were prepared to take what you could get.
You exhaled.
All right, you thought. All right.
You were still frightened. You expected you would continue to be frightened for some time. But you were going to go home and talk to your husband like a person, as Martha had suggested, without a fruit tower or any of the other arrangements you had been hiding behind.
You were also, you noted, still lying on a warm stone in an otherwise empty room, which was not nothing. Martha had been right about the spa, too, even if you were not going to tell her that. She had enough material already.
Garling could wait another forty minutes. He was patient. It was, at this particular moment, his most useful quality.
You had assumed, after the spa, you would meander a bit. You preferred walking alone, which drove Hessa quietly mad and the Figarland household maids somewhat less quietly so, but Mary Geoise was the safest city in the world, and you were married to the reason why. No one was going to trouble you.
The irony was that no one was particularly going to notice you either. Only lesser Dragons walked, as well as slaves and servants, and so even people who had met you formally tended to do a small double-take when they passed you on foot, as though the brain refused to process a Saintess at street level without a second attempt. You found this restful. You could think.
You had been looking forward to it. The post-spa quiet, the warm, loose feeling in your shoulders, the fresh air, an afternoon of nobody requiring anything of you before you had to go home and be brave.
As soon as you stepped out of the treatment room into the private changing area, a Figarland maid appeared in the doorway with the body language of someone who had been standing outside it for several minutes, working up to knocking. Her face had the particular quality of a person who had recently experienced something they didn’t have the vocabulary for.
“Saintess.” She dipped her head. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, I really am, but—” she cleared her throat, “There’s—”
You furrowed your brow.
“…The Master is here.”
You froze, one hand on your robe, stalling. “Pardon?”
“The… uh, Master Figarland. He’s here.”
“He’s here?”
The maid bowed low.
“Outside, ma’am. He’s…He’s in the corridor. Just outside.”
You turned around fully. “He’s in the women’s side of the spa?”
“Yes, Saintess.” She looked genuinely pained. “He arrived about twenty minutes ago. The staff didn’t feel they could ask him to leave, given who he is, but they also couldn’t very well let him through, given where he is, so he’s simply been. Standing there. In the corridor. He has been there for some time now, and several guests have walked past him, and we aren’t entirely sure what your correct protocol is because there isn’t one, as it turns out, for this specific situation.” She took a small breath. “It seems he’s taken the day off.”
You stared at her.
“He took the day off,” you said. “The Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights.”
“Yes, Saintess.”
“And came here.”
“Yes, Saintess.”
“To the spa.”
“He’s been very gracious about it,” she said, with the desperate optimism of a woman trying to locate a bright side. “He told the front desk he found himself unable to focus without the goodwill of his wife and asked if there was somewhere he could wait. They said there wasn’t, not exactly, and he said that was perfectly all right and found the corridor himself.” A pause. “Several guests have commented.”
“I’m sure they did,” you said darkly.
“The waiting room was quite full at the time, ma’am. Some of them recognized him—” She hesitated, and you gave her a look. “—All of them recognized him.”
You sat down on the dressing bench. You stood back up. You picked up your comb and put it down without using it. You looked at the door, then at the mirror, then at the door.
“Those women are going to tell everyone,” you said.
“I expect by lunch, Saintess,” she agreed, with sympathy that did not quite conceal the rest of what was written on her face, which was that she had already told two people herself and felt the information was simply too large to contain.
You pressed your fingers to your temple. The eucalyptus was doing absolutely nothing for you now.
“Tell him I’ll be out shortly.”
“Of course, Saintess.” She turned to go, then paused at the door with the reluctant air of someone delivering a final piece of news they had been saving. “He also said to let you know there’s no rush whatsoever and to take all the time you need.” Another pause. “He said it quite graciously.”
Of course, he had.
You turned back to the mirror. Your reflection looked composed. Your reflection was lying. You pressed your hands flat against the dressing table and breathed in through your nose, eucalyptus and warm cedar, the last of the morning’s careful equilibrium.
You had been going to do this on your own terms. You had a whole plan. It had involved more walking, some additional thinking, possibly a light lunch, and then, eventually, at a time of your choosing, a mature and reasonable conversation with your husband.
Garling, apparently, had different scheduling preferences.
“I will kill him.”
A perfectly corseted set of breasts was, in the right circumstances, something very close to a miracle.
Consider a man contemplating a significant life change, perhaps a man named Garling Figarland. A man who'd inadvertently fallen in love with his governess, but who also rightfully had many, many reservations about this development.
Among his many concerns was this: first, she was his son's governess. Second, he wasn’t really a man who got married, and third, the first two didn’t matter, but the last point did.
That being, perhaps the least dignified reason, but no less real: Garling didn’t know whether he was capable of leashing a libido as ferocious as his own. And whether inflicting that power upon a single soul for the remainder of his natural life was wise, fair, or even survivable for both parties involved.
And whether that libido would cooperate at all, given the woman in question.
Because the said woman dressed head to toe in modest, slightly baggy apparel. Governess apparel, taken to the extreme, which meant he must have loved you considerably, to be at this point—because he hated the clothes. They gave him nothing. Not a collarbone, not a wrist, not so much as a suggestion of a waist. The most he had ever been offered was a brief, accidental flash of ankle, and Garling was not the sort of man who could be reliably sustained by ankles.
He had considered this a safeguard. Garling was capable of loving a woman and still recognizing that no force on earth, celestial mandate included, would compel him to marry her if he felt nothing below the neck. The status quo that ensured this remained stable was kept in alignment by your frumpy uniform.
And he was glad for the arrangement. It protected everyone.
Then your mother had gotten hold of you before the ball.
Your dress itself was not extraordinary. It was perfectly ordinary, in point of fact. What was not ordinary was the amount of you it chose to display, and what that display confirmed about the silhouette that had been quietly existing beneath seasons’ worth of serviceable wool.
Garling had survived years of your modesty intact. Collected, even. Rather proud of himself, if he was honest. He respected you to the point that he hadn’t once imagined you naked.
One look.
That was it. That was all it took.
He very nearly didn’t survive the ballroom, because that quickly changed.
His first glance wasn’t even your chest. He almost didn’t recognize you at all. He’d caught movement from his vantage in the shadow of an exit, registered unfamiliar bare skin, and done a double take before his brain had fully caught up with his eyes. The back of your dress rested just below your shoulder blades, exposing the smooth line of your neck and the soft curve of your shoulders, and he stood there for a moment simply staring, which was not behavior he was accustomed to from himself.
You were lovely, though someone had taken extensive liberties with your hair and makeup.
He could tell from the stiff way you moved, and the rigid architecture of your spine, that you were deeply uncomfortable. It was that detail, oddly, that gave him enough presence of mind to shake himself loose. You were surrounded by insects who preened and leered and were making no effort to conceal their hopes to see down your dress.
You needed rescuing.
He could be useful. He had a function here.
He intervened just as one of the room’s many determined gnats grew brave enough to approach rather than simply orbit you at a respectful, longing distance.
Could he blame the men? Sincerely?
No. He could not.
Because when you turned to tolerate a fellow, Garling caught his first full view, and discovered, with something that felt uncomfortably close to religious revelation, that he was perhaps a man of faith after all.
The altar, in this metaphor, was your corseted chest, framed in rose silk.
He was going to have a very serious conversation with your mother. To thank her, or to arrange your immediate entry into a nunnery, depending entirely on how the next several minutes went.
He also couldn’t fault you for your lack of gratitude at his intervention. It was plain you had gone to some effort to placate her, endured the dress and the hair and whatever else the process had entailed, and the reward for your suffering was a ballroom full of men trying their best to undress you with their eyes.
You had looked, when he’d materialized at your elbow, like you’d see death. Not encouraging, but he supposed it wasn’t always pleasant to see one’s boss when you specifically asked for time off.
For his own part, the rest of the evening required considerable management. He saved you, let you be upset, marked his territory, got one look down your dress, and was persuaded to commit to monogamy. He was so gratified by the sight, he failed to have a lick of common sense or manners, entirely forgetting that he would have to flirt very obviously if you were to understand his intentions.
And when it concluded, he made a detour.
The personal ministrations he required, in the privacy of his own company, were somewhat embarrassingly decisive. By the end of them, he was a man entirely resolved. He was on a path, he understood, with no meaningful exit. He had made his peace with this.
But the breasts, he reflected, in the calm that followed, were genuinely exceptional. He also found, in that same calm, that he had no interest in seeing another pair. This was new information. He filed it accordingly.
It was for that exact reason he let the gossip run rampant.
By the next morning, his last mistress had graciously withdrawn before he’d had to cut the metaphorical cord. She had always been perceptive, and as it was, they hadn’t slept together in nearly a month.
He then composed a letter to your father. Measured, cordial, carefully worded. He wrote three drafts, which was three more than he had written for anything in recent memory, including military dispatches with actual stakes.
The substance of the final version was this: That he, Garling Figarland, was not only exceptionally pleased with you, their youngest daughter, as his son's governess, but that he and his son had grown very attached to you personally. To put it plainly, he found you delightful, and he wished to pursue a marriage forthwith. But so as not to overwhelm you. That said, the covenant was also to be quietly drawn up between your parents and him, because you were shy. Mostly, it would be of considerable personal assistance if the family could quietly refrain from entertaining other suitors in the meantime. He would gladly cover any costs and requested no dowry or addendums. Instead, for their trouble, he would ensure them a monthly stipend, ensure their business, and protect their family.
Your father’s reply arrived within the day.
It was not what he would call a warm correspondence. It demanded to know, in the blunt register of a man who had spent decades dealing with nonsense, who exactly was impersonating the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights, how they had obtained official stationery, and what they hoped to gain by it, because he had written to the man precisely four times in his life and both conversations had concerned tariffs.
There was a postscript. It said, ‘The nerve was impressive, he’d give them that.’
Garling arranged an in-person meeting.
Your mother, upon opening the drawing room door, went the color of old parchment and appeared to briefly lose command of her knees. She recovered with admirable speed, and by the time he had settled into a chair, she had executed a complete reversal of bearing, producing tea, a plate of biscuits, and a warmth that suggested she had just discovered an unlimited source of clout.
When she understood the precise reason for his visit, she nearly offered you up on the tea tray as well. Garling felt this was perhaps excessive, but appreciated the spirit.
The engagement was approved, the permissions signed, and the relevant documents produced with a speed that suggested your mother had been maintaining a small amount of hope for some time and had the paperwork somewhere to hand. He supposed your sister had quietly stepped in to arrange some details, and he had become friendly with her, and she proved to be an excellent tool to nudge you in the right direction. That was a limit to your obstinacy, and he had to peel it away.
All that remained was your signature.
That was resolved shortly as well, though not without cost. He regretted, in retrospect, that obtaining it had required such a disruption to your comfort in his home. A foundation had been quietly building between you, and he would have preferred to continue constructing it at his own pace, in his own house, with you inside it where he could monitor progress directly.
But there was a kind of strategy in giving ground. He let you take your space. He let you return to your family, and he let you sit alone with whatever it was you were feeling, which Shamrock reliably reported was considerable. You had left, apparently, because you felt partial to him and found the proximity compromising.
He tried very hard not to be smug about this. He mostly succeeded.
The time you spent at home, he considered the engagement period in all but your awareness of it. He sent Shamrock over like his personal sleeper agent and reaped the benefits. Shamrock, to his credit, required no instruction. He simply went, and was charming, and dismantled your professional composure one visit at a time with the focused dedication of a child who wanted something and had identified the most efficient path to getting it.
Garling might have let it continue longer, just to ensure your compliant agreement. The arrangement suited him well enough. He genuinely missed you, but found that ensuring your family’s comfort, settling certain quiet financial arrangements, and overseeing the reordering of his mansion for your eventual arrival made for a satisfying way to spend the interim. He was a man who liked a project. This was several projects at once, with a prize that would provide decades of enjoyment and pleasure.
But then you began to notice things. Small things. The kind of small things that, assembled together, formed a picture a woman of your particular intelligence was not going to be able to unsee.
At that point, he decided, it was better he take the lead. Gently. With care. He would guide you himself to the discovery that you were, in fact, already his, and had been for some time, and that the only outstanding item was your paperwork, which was already signed, so really there was nothing left to discuss.
Surely you’d agree.
And if he was enjoying himself, who could reasonably blame him?
By the time you actually knew, he’d already moved your books into his library, alphabetized them into his own collection, and had the head housekeeper begin addressing you by your future title to smooth the transition. Then he quietly arranged for your preferred meals to be stocked in the kitchens on a standing order.
He had, perhaps, been slightly overconfident about the smoothness of the transition.
Your shock departed quickly. Your anger stayed. The next month was not nearly as enjoyable as the preceding ones. The mansion felt considerably more lonely without you in it, which was an observation he kept to himself because he was not going to say that out loud to anyone. Shamrock served as his intelligence on the ground, reporting back with the solemn reliability of a very small, very invested general. It helped that the consistent intelligence he sent was that you were not impervious. You were simply furious. There was, apparently, a meaningful difference, and he was expected to appreciate it.
He conceded the point. Privately.
In the meantime, he began establishing, with increasing visibility, that he was unavailable. Mostly, this was subtle. Declined invitations to women. Brief, closed appearances at functions he could not reasonably avoid. Then an audacious widow at a diplomatic supper decided that his current domestic situation represented an opening, and made her position known with an initiative he had to admire on a purely technical level.
He left her untouched, unencouraged, and in tears, which he did not feel particularly guilty about.
But he would not have it happen again. More importantly, he would not have you hear of it through whatever channel that sort of news traveled, and draw the wrong conclusions while you were already disposed toward drawing wrong conclusions about him.
He arranged, with surgical precision, for his marriage certificate to pass through the hands of four secretaries known, collectively, to have never kept a confidence in their professional lives. It was the most efficiently he had ever deployed paperwork.
Your return home was prompt.
It was not, however, the gracious return he had been anticipating. You came back with your spine straight and your jaw set and a quality of dignity that he found, inconveniently, even more attractive than the dress. What he gained was not access to your bed but access to the next stage of a puzzle he had not fully mapped, which was beginning to be a pattern with you that he could not decide whether he found irritating or compelling.
Both, probably.
Because somewhere between your uneasy composure and a certain clause in the contract, it became apparent to him.
You were a virgin.
He had suspected it, but to have it confirmed outright was different. He sat with this information for a moment. Then he sat with it for considerably longer than he was accustomed to sitting with anything.
This changed things.
Not his intentions. His intentions were the same as they had always been and were not up for revision. He was going to have you, he was going to keep you, and the sequence of events between now and that outcome was largely a matter of logistics. That part was settled.
The complication was the nuance of logistics.
He rarely slept with virgins, but this was not squeamishness; rather, it was risk management. In his experience, which was extensive and well-documented in his own memory if nowhere else, virgins cried. Not always during, but reliably after, and sometimes before, and occasionally at intervals with no clear cause for up to a week following. They became emotional in ways that required management. They attached, swiftly and completely, to whoever had been present for the occasion, with an indiscriminate devotion that had very little to do with the actual merit of the man involved.
He had watched perfectly sensible women rearrange their entire inner lives around men who did not deserve the square footage. It was a reliable phenomenon, and a tedious one, and he had spent years observing it with the detached curiosity of a man who had never been subject to sentiment himself. When he was younger, he dabbled a few times with some of the more disposable women, but quickly he moved on.
He was not, to be clear, worried about this with you. Not because you wouldn't become attached or feel obliged. He actually wanted you to rearrange your inner life around him. Enthusiastically, and at length. He had no ambivalence on that point whatsoever.
What he did not want was for you to do it badly, or have regrets, or be unwilling. He wanted you to arrive at him clearly. Annoyed, if necessary, but with both eyes open and functioning, the way you approached everything else in your life (including him, including your own feelings, which you were currently in the process of examining with the reluctant thoroughness of someone auditing accounts they had hoped not to find).
He wanted to be wanted by you, specifically.
Which meant patience. Care. A degree of restraint he was going to find genuinely, personally inconvenient, and which he was already finding inconvenient, and you had barely agreed to be in the same room as him.
He pinched the bridge of his nose.
There was also the secondary concern, which he was less comfortable examining but examined anyway, because he was not a man who benefited from self-deception.
He was an experienced lover. This was not arrogance. It was simply a fact, the way his height was a fact, or his record in the field. He knew what he was doing. He had never had complaints. He had, on occasion, had the opposite of complaints, expressed with a sincerity that left no room for misinterpretation.
But he had never particularly cared, before, what happened in the aftermath. Whether a woman left satisfied or merely finished had been, practically speaking, her own business.
The thought of you finding it unpleasant stopped him cold.
The thought of you enduring it and deciding it was a marital duty to be discharged efficiently and then moved past. Looking past him afterward with that stone-cold composure he hated, and asking if he required anything else before retiring.
He didn’t know what he’d do with that. It was an outcome he had no prepared response for, and the lack of a prepared response was deeply uncomfortable. Because you were the prize, and it was entirely possible if he didn’t perfectly navigate this.
A silver lining, he supposed, was that he would not have to kill anyone, which simplified things considerably. He didn’t think he could let anyone who caused this much jealousy live.
But the situation called for something he had never previously been required to apply to this particular area of his life.
Patience.
He was going to take his time. He was going to be restrained. He was going to check every relevant box, in the correct order, with appropriate attention to detail. When the time finally came, you were going to be so thoroughly convinced, so completely and specifically his, that the only thing you’d be capable of afterward was lying there reconsidering every life choice that had delayed the inevitability of this, and deciding you needed him again immediately.
He found that prospect, on reflection, highly motivating. He was very much looking forward to it. He was also very glad no one could see his face as he considered it all, locked away in his office.
And so he worked. Methodically. Months of it. The careful dance between proximity and patience, of letting you come to conclusions in your own time while making absolutely certain only the right conclusions were available to you. He did not rush. He did not press. He was, by any reasonable external measure, a model of restrained and gentlemanly conduct, and he was quietly insufferable about it in the privacy of his own head.
And then, after all of it, you had looked at him with that self-righteous tilt of your chin. The one he had learned to read very well by then, the one you wore when you had lost an argument with yourself and were experiencing the loss as a personal affront. You had the presence of a woman who had arrived at a conclusion against her will and intended to make it everyone else’s problem.
Then you demanded he kiss you. Right on the lips. As though the specificity were necessary. As though he might otherwise have attempted your elbow.
But he hadn’t obliged.
Because he had come this far on patience alone, which was, he remained convinced, either a personal record or a minor miracle, and he was not going to spend that currency carelessly. If he could outlast his own libido for the better part of a year (which required divine intervention to explain and he intended to take up with the relevant parties at the earliest opportunity), then he could outlast this too.
More importantly, you had asked. You had asked, which meant you wanted, which meant you were going to have to sit with that wanting long enough to stop pretending it wasn’t there.
He needed you to come to terms with the energy between you both, without any remaining doubts, else this marriage would sink faster than a pirate ship at Sabaody.
And when you were finally, properly his, with no ambiguity left on either side, the experience was going to be genuinely extraordinary. The months of restraint were going to feel, in retrospect, entirely worth it.
He was a man of faith, it turned out. Who could have predicted it?
The altar remained the same. He was, however, now considerably more motivated to pray at it.
May the Great One bless his path. He had waited long enough. He was an impatient man by nature and by practice. But he had applied patience with what he felt was considerable grace and restraint, and he had been rewarded last night with the knowledge that his wife was, in fact, enthusiastically willing, which was all the intelligence he had required to move forward.
The only remaining obstacle between himself and pure marital bliss was his own chivalry.
He had no one to blame for this but himself. He had made the decision, and it had been the correct decision, and he stood by it fully, and it had cost him an extraordinary amount, and he was not going to think about that.
He was going to think about the next step instead.
Specifically: rearranging his schedule to take the next week largely away from Mary Geoise, somewhere quiet, somewhere his wife could not build fruit fortresses or find reasons to be busy, somewhere with a great deal of uninterrupted time and no Hessa appearing at inconvenient moments with institutional opinions.
Did the Five Elders highly look upon this? Not particularly. Supreme Commanders didn’t leave the city as a rule. They were the buffer between the Celestial Dragons and the upper brass, the fixed point around which a great deal of sensitive machinery turned.
Did he care?
He considered this for approximately one second.
No. They couldn’t replace him with Sommers. They couldn’t replace him with anyone, and they knew it, and he knew it, and the Five Elders knew it, and if they wanted to have that conversation, he was available after his honeymoon.
He adjusted his cuffs and continued to wait for his wife.
A wait rewarded shortly thereafter, as you came through the women’s section door at a pace that suggested the maid had delivered her message with the surrounding detail fully intact. You looked warm and clean and furious in the particular way you got furious when you were also embarrassed, which he had come to recognize as one of your more charming expressions. You located him in the corridor, crossed it in four steps, took his arm with both hands, and marched him toward the exit with the focused efficiency of a woman removing a hazard from a public space.
He went because he was cooperative by nature when cooperation suited him, and because your hands were on his arm.
The carriage door had barely closed behind you both before you turned on him. Hessa had redone your wardrobe with considerable taste, and he registered this fact with the calm appreciation of a man whose confidence had just received a small, entirely welcome contribution.
“What are you doing here, Garling?”
“Waiting for you,” he said, as though this were self-evident, which he felt it was.
“You were standing in the corridor of a spa.”
“There was nowhere to sit.”
“You are the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights.”
“I’m aware.”
“People saw you.”
“Several,” he agreed pleasantly. “They were very quiet about it.”
You stared at him with an expression that cycled through several things before landing on something that was trying very hard to remain outraged and was losing ground at a visible rate. “You told the front desk you couldn’t work without my goodwill.”
“It’s true.”
“Garling.”
“It was the most accurate explanation available.” He looked at you with the complete attention he always gave you, as though you were the most interesting thing in whatever room you happened to share. “I left this morning knowing you were upset with me. I found I couldn’t do a single useful thing with that knowledge. So I came to find you instead.”
The carriage moved. Outside, Mary Geoise continued its morning entirely unaware that its Supreme Commander had spent twenty minutes in a spa corridor and considered it time well spent.
You looked at him for a long moment.
“You are,” you said finally, with great feeling, “being very unreasonable.”
“Yes,” he said. “Have you eaten? The seafood at the Red Port is considerably better than its reputation suggests, provided it’s fresh.”
You should have been furious. It was outrageous, by any reasonable measure, that he had publicly cornered you outside a women’s spa to ensure you had lunch. It was audacious and excessive and entirely characteristic, and you had a great many things still to say to him, several of which were important.
“You ass.”
“If I had told you I was going to come find you,” he said, with the terrible reasonableness of a man making an airtight argument, “what would you have done?”
You opened your mouth.
You closed it.
You thought about what you would have done. The documented version of yourself, the one who had been almost somewhere for four months, who had been getting there by inches, who had a whole careful internal system for managing the getting there.
“I would have been more ready,” you said.
“Would you have?”
“Maybe.”
“Or would you have been in your head about it? Worried, and panicked, and looking for a reason to be busy?”
The carriage was very quiet.
“Perhaps,” you said, after a moment.
“Just like the kiss,” he said. “If I had told you beforehand, you would have been somewhere else entirely. Preparing yourself. Bracing.” He looked at you steadily. “Instead of actually being there.”
Instead of the overexposed whiteness and the hand in his lapel, and the room going somewhere distant and irrelevant. Instead of here.
“That’s very…something,” you started.
“Calculating?” he suggested.
“I was going to say presumptuous.”
“Am I wrong?”
“You assumed I would—”
“I assumed nothing.” He looked at you directly, without apology. “I watched you light up yesterday, and I made a decision. This morning, when I saw how hurt you were, I made another.” A pause. “I don’t debate the things that matter most to me. I act on them.”
You looked at him for a long moment.
You must have been in love, because instead of saying anything, you let him draw you onto his lap, tucked your face into his collarbone, and decided that the things you still had to say could survive another ten minutes.
For most of the ride, you both sat in companionable silence, which was rather amazing for the amount of stress you previously had about seeing him. You had not expected the silence to be comfortable. You had braced, somewhere in the back of your mind, for him to say something. He said nothing. He simply kept his arm around you and watched the city pass outside the window, and let you breathe.
It was, you thought, very like him.
Outside, the city moved past in pale morning light, the white buildings of Mary Geoise catching the sun the way they always did, indifferent and luminous. You could see the top of the Red Port beginning to appear between rooftops, the glint of water beyond.
“Garling,” you said, into his collarbone.
“Mm.” He didn’t look directly at you, which was enormously helpful.
“I—” you rallied your courage. “I owe you an apology. About this morning and last night.”
He stiffened slightly, his hand brushing through a curl of your hair. “That’s unnecessary.”
“It isn’t.” You stopped. “I was being immature and difficult.”
He was quiet for a moment. Outside, a gull crossed the window.
“You were scared,” he said, without edges. “I alarmed you. I thought giving you a kiss when you didn’t expect it would help you avoid overthinking it. I let my ego overrule your comfort and started something private that you had no ability to direct. It pushed you to drink.” A pause. “You had every right to be upset.”
You lifted your head enough to look at him, which was a tactical error, because he was looking back at you with that expression, the steady, unguarded one he didn’t seem to know he had.
“I was drinking,” you said. “But I knew what I was doing. I don’t regret it.”
His eyes crinkled, and something at the corner of his mouth moved briefly. “I’m glad to hear it.”
You put your face back into his collarbone before your own expression could do anything you’d regret.
He pressed his face to your hair and took a slow breath.
“In that case,” he said, after a moment, with the particular quality of a man raising a subject he has been patient about for some time, “I should mention that the seafood at the Red Port is, at this hour, not especially worth recommending.”
You stilled. “But—you said it was excellent.”
“I said it was tolerable when fresh.” A pause. “And that may have been generous.”
You pulled back to look at him. His arm tightened around your middle without apparent effort, keeping you precisely where you were. His expression was composed. Pleasantly so. The expression of a man who had said something mild and was waiting to see what you did with it.
“Then where are we going?” you said.
He looked out the window. “The port. Your boat was shipped out of Ennis Lobby two weeks ago. She’s just arrived.”
You stared at the side of his face. The elegant line of it. The absolute tranquility.
“My ship,” you said. “Here.”
“I had planned to surprise you in a few weeks, once the painting was finished,” he said, with the calm of a man who had been holding this card for some time and had chosen his moment with care. “But I thought you might prefer to choose her colors yourself. And her name.” He glanced down at you then with that steady, unguarded look that did things to your chest you had not permitted it to do. “And, if you’re open to it, to spend the night aboard. Together. Without the house. Without Shamrock.”
A pause, delicate as anything.
“Without interruption,” he finished.
The blood rushed to your head.
You became very aware of the arm around your waist. The warmth of him. The fact that you were on his lap in a moving carriage, being taken to a boat he had commissioned for you, and were being asked, very elegantly, with approximately three weeks of planning behind the question, whether you would like to spend the night alone with your husband.
“Garling,” you said, “was this—?”
“I planned the boat some time ago,” he said mildly. “The rest came together this morning, upon realizing that the thing I am most unable to tolerate is my wife being upset with me.” The arm around your waist was immovable, comfortable, and absolutely deliberate. “Hopefully, you’ll be somewhat less so by tonight. A week-long honeymoon is considerably more pleasant when the bed isn’t contested.”
“Honeymoon,” you said.
“Mm.”
“You’ve planned a honeymoon. On my ship.” You asked, trying to hide your delight.
“I planned several things,” he said, with the serenity of a man who had been three moves ahead since breakfast and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. “The honeymoon required the most coordination. We’ll need to leave tonight to reach the farther islands in a reasonable time, but the crew is ready.” A pause. “Hessa had your things packed before you’d reached the end of the street this morning.”
You stared at him.
“What about—”
“With your parents. He’s been given the run of the house and will be fine.” Garling said, sardonically, “Shamrock is perfectly capable of entertaining himself for a week. Thrilled, even. Now, my dear, is this enough to placate you?” He asked, mouth quirked.
The carriage rolled on. Outside, the glint of the port was closer now, the smell of salt beginning to reach you even through the window.
“You are mad,” you said, “Out of your mind, mad as a hatter.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Do you have a name in mind?“
Hessa was many things, but shy was not one of them.
She had held her position in Garling's household long enough to understand exactly what that position was worth, and she had no intention of squandering it. Garling respected her because she was correct with a frequency that made her presence feel less like service and more like infrastructure. She filled the gaps where you wavered, not out of doubt, but because a gap left open long enough became a problem, and Hessa had no patience for problems she could see coming.
That trajectory had recently expanded to include your personal life. Only slightly. A few careful touches, because Hessa was not a meddler. She simply recognized a problem the same way she recognized a drafty window, and felt an equivalent compulsion to address it.
She had benefited greatly from Garling’s newfound restraint, and she would be the first to say so. The years prior had involved a quantity of shooing she did not care to revisit. Women who lingered past their welcome, women who mistook a single evening for an arrangement, women who wept in hallways that were not theirs to weep in. It had been exhausting. Undignified, for everyone involved.
A wife was the best or the worst thing to happen to a large house. Hessa had seen it go both ways. A poor match, and the staff spent years navigating the wreckage of two people who had no business sharing a name. A good one, and the house ran itself, or near enough. Authority distributed properly, nobody overextending into territory that wasn’t theirs, the man of the house freed to be terrible at whatever he was terrible at in the world outside, because someone competent was handling everything within it.
Men like Garling wanted that. They didn’t always know they wanted it, but they did. They wanted a wife who took the house in hand and left them to their work, who was capable enough that they could defer to her without feeling diminished by it. Slightly bossy was how Hessa would have phrased it, if pressed, and then immediately declined to be pressed further.
You would be exceptional at it. She was certain of that.
The problem was that you didn’t know that. She knew that your modesty was not a calculated performance, not some long patience designed to snag a man worth snagging, though the fact that it had worked was saying something she did not intend to examine too closely. You were not being coy. You were genuinely, stubbornly, completely convinced that you were average, and had built an entire self around that conviction, the way people built houses on floodplains and then seemed surprised when it rained.
And Garling wanted to wait. To take his time, let you simmer until you broke first, convinced that patience was the same thing as strategy. To let you discover yourself and then him.
Hessa did not share the conviction.
You were not some mythical Kuja princess, crafted to specification, flawless in the way of things assembled to impress. You were a flawless emerald. Uncut. A little rough at the edges. The kind of thing someone with no eye for value walked past without stopping, and someone with a great deal of it did not. A perfect complement to Garling’s red, and the house would be better for it.
It would be a shame, she thought, to let you go on believing otherwise.
If Garling could simply get on with things, get you comfortable, confident, round with his children, and the particular ease that came from being genuinely wanted, you would take to this house as you had always belonged in it. Which, in Hessa’s estimation, you had.
But he was not moving at a pace that would resolve the situation before she lost patience entirely.
Which was why, when she conducted a thorough inventory of your wardrobe that morning, Hessa discovered, to her great professional regret, that all but the most scanty nightgowns appeared to have gone to the laundry. All of them. Simultaneously. On the same day.
She could not imagine how.
And so only the most exiguous remained to be packed. You did have the blue babydoll, at least. A pretty thing. Covered everything that strictly needed covering, and the sheer silk robe went over it nicely, and really, what more did a person need? It was, Hessa had noted with the clinical detachment of a woman doing inventory, particularly flattering through the bodice. She had observed Saint Figarland’s attention drift in that approximate direction on more than one occasion since Hessa had quietly suggested the lower necklines. She was a professional. She noticed things.
Of course, aboard your new ship, watching the crew prepare for departure, you hadn’t thought to check what had been packed.
You thought to check now.
You looked at the open trunk. You looked at its contents. You looked at the open trunk again, in case you had somehow misread it the first time.
You had not misread it.
“Hessa,” you hissed, to no one, since Hessa was twenty minutes away on dry land and therefore entirely safe, which you suspected she had also planned.
You lifted the blue babydoll by one thin strap and held it up in the lamplight of the cabin.
Outside, you could hear the small crew casting off. The ship moved, very gently, beneath your feet. You were, you realized, already at sea.
“Very daring of her, no?”
You jumped, dropping the offensive garment as Garling materialized behind you with the silence of a man who had spent decades moving without being heard and had never seen a reason to stop.
“Don’t look!” You kicked the babydoll sideways with your foot, which accomplished nothing. “It wasn’t—I didn’t pack this, I didn’t know she’d—”
He leaned over your shoulder and took a long, slow look into the open trunk.
The cabin was very quiet.
You watched his face. He had the expression of a man conducting a calm and thorough assessment, which was somehow worse than any other expression he could have produced.
“Mm,” he said.
“I’ll be speaking to Hessa when we return,” you said, head steaming with great dignity, from approximately four inches away from his chest.
“Will you,” he said, in a tone that suggested he found this unlikely.
“She has overstepped.”
“Considerably,” he agreed, and the corners of his eyes were doing the thing, the crinkle, the one that meant he was enjoying himself enormously and had decided not to hide it. He straightened, and his hand came to rest at the small of your back with the ease of a man who had been waiting for an excuse and had just been given a very good one. “Fortunately,” he said, “she has a week.“
“A week,” you repeated.
“Seven nights,” he said helpfully.
“I’m aware of how long a week is.”
“Then you’ll appreciate that there’s no particular urgency.” His hand hadn’t moved from the small of your back. “We could have dinner first. The cook is excellent. The sunset from the bow is supposed to be remarkable at this latitude.” He said it with the pleasant tone of a man describing a nature documentary. “I thought you might enjoy it.”
You looked at him. He looked back at you with that open, patient expression, the one that had been dismantling your defenses by inches for the better part of a year.
“And after dinner,” he continued, in precisely the same tone, “you could change.”
You followed his gaze to the trunk. To its contents. Back to your husband.
“It’s a warm evening,” he said. “And we’re at sea. Very private.” A pause. “Hessa has excellent taste.”
“Hessa has lost her mind.”
“Hessa,” he said, “has done us both a considerable service.” He reached past you, retrieved the blue babydoll from where it had fallen, and held it out between two fingers with the composure of a man handing over a perfectly ordinary garment. His expression was pleasant and entirely unapologetic. “What do you think? Do you still have courage? Or do you need more time?”
You stared at him. He was baiting you. He knew precisely what he was doing and was doing it anyway, which was, you had come to understand, simply how he operated when he wanted something, and you were ready enough to accept it too.
“I’ll behave,” he said. The crinkle was back at the corner of his eye. “Mostly.”
He wouldn’t.
You took the babydoll from his hand.
He said nothing. He had the expression of a man exercising tremendous restraint and finding it only slightly difficult, which was its own kind of answer.
“Out,” you said.
He went, with the grace of a man who had already won and knew it, pulling the cabin door shut behind him without being asked.
You looked at the garment in your hands. You looked at the closed door. You looked at the warm lamplight and the small porthole beyond which the open sea had spread itself wide and dark and entirely indifferent to your predicament.
Fine.
You put it on. Under your dress, because you were not, whatever Hessa seemed to believe, a woman who simply appeared at dinner in a babydoll. The silk settled against your skin, warm and slight, and you pulled your dress back over it and looked at yourself in the small cabin mirror and thought: well. All right. It was not nothing.
You were on a ship. Your ship, as it turned out, was still an extraordinary thing to have become true. You were sailing the Grand Line on a honeymoon that had been planned in secret for what appeared to be quite some time.
You were anxious. You expected you would remain anxious for some portion of the evening.
You were also, underneath the anxiety and the dress and the frankly inadequate nightwear, fairly certain you were in love with your husband, which was, you supposed, the right direction for things to be going.
You opened the cabin door and went to find him.
The rest of the evening drifted into orderly fashion.
Dinner was excellent, though notably not seafood, which you did not comment on. Garling showed you the ship with the quiet pride of a man who had commissioned something he was pleased with and wanted you to be pleased with it too, which you were, though you were careful not to be too immediately obvious about it. The cabin was beautiful. The deck was beautiful. The little galley was immaculate. The two-man crew did their jobs with the focused professionalism of people who had been very clearly instructed not to exist unless necessary, and were committed to the brief.
At some point, between dinner and the wine and the remarkable sunset he had promised you, which delivered entirely on its reputation, you forgot to be anxious.
Probably around the time you were sitting between his knees on the bow with his coat around your shoulders and his chin resting on the top of your head, watching the last of the light go out of the sky in long bands of red and gold over the water. The Grand Line stretched out ahead of you in every direction, vast and dark and quietly extraordinary, and the ship moved through it with an easy roll. Garling was warm at your back, and it occurred to you, distantly, that you had not thought about fruit towers or spa corridors or any of the morning’s considerable drama in at least two hours.
“She needs a name,” he said, into your hair.
You looked out at the water. The first stars were beginning to appear at the edge of the sky.
“I’m thinking,” you said, “perhaps the Fine Print.”
His arms tightened around you, his laughter more felt than heard, a warmth through his chest against your back.
“In dedication to a certain document?”
“I can’t have your misdeeds forgotten so easily.” You retorted. “I still get mad over it.”
“Good,” he said. “Get as mad as you like. Just don’t leave me.”
You went quiet.
It was not a dramatic thing, the way he said it. As though it were the most reasonable request in the world, and he saw no reason to dress it up.
The water moved beneath you, easy and dark.
“Careful,” you said, eventually. “I have a ship now. You’ll have to catch me if you upset me again.”
His chin dropped back to the top of your head. “I would,” he said. “I’d travel seas to find you. You know I would.”
You did know.
That was, you thought, more or less the whole problem, and also the whole solution, and you were done pretending otherwise.
“Fine Print,” he said, after a moment. “She suits it. And you.” A pause, warm. “A beautiful ship for my beautiful wife.”
You meant to say something dry about that. You had something ready. It was quite good, actually.
But you made the tactical error of looking up to deliver it, and Garling caught your face in his hand, tilting it toward his with the patience of a man who had been waiting all evening and had decided, quietly, that the evening was sufficiently advanced.
He kissed you slowly. Deliberately. With none of the urgency of the night at the ball, and all of the intention.
The stars came out, one by one, over the Grand Line.
You forgot what you’d meant to say entirely.
It was one of those kisses that rearranged the synapses in your brain. One that stole something and made the world after it different, because it made you realize you hadn’t known much about the world before it.
You had been kissed by this man before, a couple of times. One time, so good, at a ball in front of everyone he knew, and you had had five glasses of wine about it afterward, which you had at the time considered a reasonable response. You understood now that the wine had been a completely inadequate solution to a problem you hadn’t correctly identified, which was that Garling Figarland kissed you like you were something he had waited a long time for and intended to take his time with now that he had you. No quantity of wine was going to help you metabolize that.
The Grand Line spread out around you in every direction, vast and indifferent and extraordinarily dark in the night, and the Fine Print moved through it with a slow, easy roll.
Garling’s hand was warm against your face, and when he finally pulled back, it was only slightly, enough to look at you, checking, the way he always checked, quietly and without making a production of it. To see if you were all right. To see if you were still there.
You stared back at him, breathing a little unsteadily, lips swollen, the stars doing something very unhelpful in your peripheral vision.
You were still frightened. You expected you would continue to be frightened for some time. But you were also hungry, in a way that had been building for months and had no interest in being managed any further, and a kiss, even that kiss, was not going to be sufficient.
“Inside,” you said. “Please.”
Something in his expression shifted. Settled into something certain and warm and entirely without triumph, which was, you thought, exactly right. Exactly him.
“Yes,” he said.
He helped you up with one hand, steady, and then he did something that you felt in the back of your throat: he let you lead. Followed you across the deck and down to the cabin door, and when you pushed it open and stepped inside and turned back to look at him, he was standing just outside the threshold with his hand on the doorframe.
Waiting.
Giving you the door. Giving you the choice. The same way he had given you the name of the ship and the colors and every other thing he had arranged so carefully and then placed in your hands without condition.
You looked at him standing there in the dark with the Grand Line behind him and the lamplight catching the side of his face, and you thought: You absolute menace.
And it was only then, as he locked the door behind him, that Garling let himself give in. Let his hands raise to his collar and slowly undo the buttons there.
His hands rose to his collar.
One after another, each golden button was released from its prison and was freed from its place. Carefully, as he did everything, each golden button released one after another with the same calm efficiency he brought to most things, which you were finding increasingly difficult to be composed about. The cloak came away. The coat followed.
Both fit him with the precision of things made specifically for him, and when they were gone, there was no suggestion of padding or structured boning beneath. His figure was simply his figure: wide shoulders, the clean descent of them into a chest that had no business being as distracting as it was, biceps thick with the kind of muscle that came from actual use rather than ornament, all of it barely contained by a thin undershirt that was doing its job poorly.
He looked, you thought, like something carved for a temple and then implausibly animated.
Then he raised one hand to his hair, and the tall elaborate arrangement of it came loose, and gold fell down his back in a wave, and you stood in the lamplight of your cabin on your ship on the Grand Line and stared at the husband you had accidentally acquired.
He looked at you looking at him, his toothy grin showing, which was unfair given the circumstances. Then his hand slid to his belt, and with his coat and cloak already cast away, it wasn’t particularly difficult to observe the entire anatomy of him, including the more private portions.
You had been correct, you noted distantly, to be frightened.
“Have you ever seen a naked man before?”
“In books,” you squeaked.
“Books,” he repeated.
“Your books, thank you.” You were looking at the porthole. The porthole was very interesting. “And some classical sculpture. Marble. Which is.” You stopped. “A different medium.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Come here.”
“I can see perfectly well from here.”
“Some things,” he said, “are better understood up close.”
“Looking is fine. The lighting in this cabin is excellent. Whoever commissioned it has very good taste.”
“Come here.” The same tone. The same patience. His voice dropped, unhurried as everything else about him. “I have wanted you for a very long time. Let me show you how much.”
His hand moved to his belt buckle.
You turned away.
The wall was very close. You were examining it with great personal intensity. It was a well-constructed wall. Excellent joinery. Whoever had built this ship had really committed to the craft, and you were extremely grateful to them right now.
“Are you,” Garling said, from behind you, with the careful neutrality of a man trying very hard not to laugh, “looking at the wall.”
“I’m admiring the woodwork.”
“The woodwork.”
“It’s very fine.”
A pause.
Then his hands settled on your shoulders, warm and certain, and he turned you around and tipped your face up, and looked at you with that expression, the unguarded one, except that now he was also smiling, properly, in a way that was extremely difficult to focus on.
Because he was entirely naked, the long press of him against you yielded no secrets. His desire was obvious and unavoidable and warm against your clothed belly, and you became very aware all at once of the significant difference between classical marble sculpture and the living article.
“Be with me,” he said softly. “I ache for you.”
Your heart did something completely unreasonable. The rest of you was not far behind.
“I don’t deserve to be with you,” you said, burning up as his hands glided to your waist, slow and deliberate. “You’re. You’re you, and I’m just—”
“Mine,” he said. Simply. As though that settled the taxonomy entirely.
“Garling.”
“You have been mine,” he said, “since before you knew it. Since before I had any right to say so.” His eyes were warm, his voice quiet, his hands drawing you closer with the patience of a man who had waited a long time and intended to be thorough about what came next. “I think, the moment you walked through my door, something in me knew. Something that refused to be reasonable about it.” A pause. “There is no deserving between us. There is only what we both want.”
You looked at him. The lamplight. The gold of his hair lay loose around his shoulders. The expression on his face that you had been trying not to look at directly for months because of precisely what it did to you, which was this, which was standing in a cabin on the Grand Line with your composure entirely gone and nothing left to hide behind.
“I’m still frightened,” you said.
“I know.” He drew you closer, slowly. “Let me take care of that.”
The kiss continued, but different now, deeper, his hands finally beginning to work with the same deliberate patience he brought to everything except that patience, here, was its own particular torture. Once he had you pliant against him, his fingers found the ties of your dress, loosening them one by one while his mouth stayed at yours.
The dress came away. By the time it did, you weren’t thinking much about anything.
He walked you back against the wall of the cabin and set his mouth to your throat, and you stopped thinking entirely. Hot and deliberate, the press of his lips, the drag of them, working circles into your skin that drew sounds from you that you had no particular intention of making. One hand steadied you against the wall. The other finished its work. It was better than the night of the ball, considerably better, because this time the wine wasn’t thinking for you and you were entirely present for every detail of what he was doing, which was extensive.
He pulled back to look at you in the babydoll and made a sound low in his throat, something involuntary, his hands tightening at your waist.
Then his fingers found the laces.
They fell away. You grew shy at the reveal, instinctive, your chin dipping, and he caught it with one hand and tipped your face back up with the quiet insistence of a man who intended to look and was not going to be discouraged about it.
He went very still as he properly admired your chest.
His eyes moved over you in the warm lamplight with an attention that was almost unbearable in its thoroughness, like he was taking inventory of something he had been waiting a long time to properly see. Then his hand rose, deliberate and certain, and he touched you, and you made a sound you hadn’t anticipated, and he smiled, slow and satisfied.
“How perfect you are,” he said quietly. “My love.”
He was, it turned out, exactly as good at this as his reputation suggested.
Better, actually.
Which you were not going to tell him, on the grounds that he already knew and did not require the confirmation. The expression on his face as he looked at you said it plainly enough anyway, all that careful composure finally set aside, replaced by something open and certain and entirely focused on you. You had no defenses left to manage it with.
You found, to your considerable surprise, that you didn’t need any.
Even when he explored lower, using his mouth, which was beyond the scope of anything you had previously imagined on the subject, there was no more shame. He took his time, let off once in a while so you could breathe, and did not let you off until you were thoroughly, comprehensively undone.
Not until you sat flush in his lap, cheeks stinging, head tucked into the broad warmth of his bare shoulder. Loose wisps of his hair brushed your chest. One of his hands was tangled in yours, the other moving in slow circles at your back.
“You’re doing very well,” he said pleasantly. “Considerably better than the first attempt.”
“You’re bruising my cervix,” you said, into his shoulder. “You absolute brute. Could you not have a slightly smaller—”
“Is that a complaint?”
“It is absolutely not a compliment.”
You could feel his smirk against your temple.
“How inconsiderate of me. Next life I’ll arrange for a smaller coc—”
You smacked his arm. He laughed, openly and fully, in a way you had never heard from him, and the movement rolled your hips together, and you yelped, a shudder moving clean through you, the angle finding something that made your toes curl, and your breath snag entirely.
“There,” you managed, very quietly. “I think—”
He stilled. His hand tightened at your back.
“Yes,” he said, low and attentive. “I felt you.” A pause, careful and certain. “Is this all right?“
“Yes,” you breathed. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t.
He moved with the same patience he brought to everything, which in this context was its own particular form of exquisite torment, deliberate and thorough and entirely focused on you, adjusting when you made sounds that indicated adjustment was warranted, which you made freely and without the shame you might have expected, because there was no room left for shame. There was only this. The warm cabin, the slow rock of the ship beneath you, his hands sure and certain and everywhere.
“Look at me,” he said quietly.
You did.
That was, you decided afterward, what undid you entirely. Not the angle or the pace or the considerable expertise, though all of those were relevant factors. It was the look. He was watching you with that expression, open and unguarded and certain, like you were exactly where he had always intended you to be, and he intended to remember every detail of it.
You came apart rather thoroughly.
He followed shortly after, his composure finally, completely gone, his face pressed into your hair, your name in his mouth like something he had been waiting to say properly for a very long time.
You lay there until your breathing slowed and the ceiling stopped moving, which took longer than it should have. His thumb traced along your spine. The lamp guttered softly.
“Was that,” you said, carefully, “representative of the week ahead?”
His chest rose. Fell.
“More or less,” he said. “But rather, consider it a lifestyle change.
You absorbed this.
“I’ll need you to know that I am still angry about the contract. Considerably less, but still.”
He laughed, that unguarded laugh that you were rapidly concluding was one of your favorite sounds in the known world, and pulled you closer. You let him, and outside the Fine Print carried you both through the dark water of the Grand Line toward no particular destination and every possible one.
Life in the Figarland Estate was generally a peaceful one.
Seven-year-old Shamrock Figarland had ensured it would be, after all.
He was not, strictly speaking, supposed to know about the honeymoon. He had known about it anyway, because Hessa had consulted Martha, and Martha was constitutionally incapable of keeping anything interesting to herself, and Shamrock had been in the next room. He had contributed one suggestion to the laundry situation, which Hessa had implemented without acknowledging that she had implemented it, which was how they generally operated.
He felt good about his involvement.
He had wanted a sibling for as long as he could remember, with the particular want of a child who had lost one and knew the shape of the empty space it left. And then the governess had arrived, and Shamrock had watched her for approximately one week and decided: yes. Her. She was funny and warm, and she read to him without being asked, and she looked at his father sometimes when she thought no one was watching, with an expression that meant everything was going to be fine.
So he had done what needed doing. Made himself agreeable. Tugged on the right threads. Let things unfold as they were clearly going to unfold anyway, just perhaps a little faster.
He was not sorry.
His father hummed now. Not where he thought anyone could hear, but Shamrock had excellent hearing and had caught it four times since the sailing trip. He didn’t particularly care about his father’s feelings as a subject of study, but he cared very much about the results.
His mother had come back from the trip with warm color in her face and her hand in his father’s when they came through the door, which she dropped immediately upon seeing Shamrock, then picked back up when she thought he wasn’t looking. He had run at her, and she had caught him and held on for a long time, her face in his hair, and he had decided that was the best thing that had happened in his whole life.
The estate was different now in small ways that added together into one large one. His mother’s things had migrated from her quarters to his father’s. His father came to breakfast before his correspondence, always with her. There was considerably less fruit in the center of the table and considerably more conversation, and sometimes in the evenings when Shamrock was meant to be asleep, he could hear them in the sitting room, his father’s low voice and his mother’s quicker one. Occasionally, his laugh, the real one, the one that meant he had forgotten to be careful.
He found this very satisfactory.
“You look very pleased with yourself, little lord,” said Hessa, appearing behind him in the garden doorway.
“I am a Figarland,” said Shamrock. “I am always pleased with myself.”
“Your father says the same thing.”
“Father is usually right,” said Shamrock. “So am I.”
Hessa made a sound that was not quite a laugh and went back inside.
Shamrock looked out at the garden, at the warm afternoon light on the stone, and listened to his mother’s voice somewhere inside the house, asking his father something, and his father’s answer, unhurried and low.
Six months, he decided. Maybe less, if his father was as motivated as he appeared to be.
He was going to be an excellent older brother. He had already given it considerable thought.
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Garling Figarland x Reader, 18+ Based on this: prompt
Length 17K+
Summary: You married the Supreme Commander, became the Step-Mother of the year, and still haven't managed to make Garling kiss you on the lips again. Mostly because you're too shy to ask.
Previous, / Epilogue pt 2
You, as promised, did not speak to Garling for over a month.
Your anger was rare. But when it was incurred, it ran deep, and it ran without mercy, and it ran with the particular creative energy of someone who had recently discovered they had a great deal to be angry about. You could forgive Shamrock. Shamrock was seven, and had wanted a mother, and you were apparently constitutionally incapable of resisting a child who wanted a mother. But your parents, however, were adults who had made choices. You let your grudge manifest accordingly: the most sustained passive-aggressive campaign ever conducted by an unknowingly married-off daughter, which was, admittedly, a niche category, but you felt you were excelling in it.
At least now you understand why they had been so sympathetic to your situation.
For god's sake. You marrying Garling, whether you'd known about it or not, had been a massive, ridiculously easy achievement. Possibly their greatest triumph ever, much to your sister's ire. You were beginning to suspect this was how they planned to be buried: beloved parents, proud in-laws of the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights.
You had been very clear about one thing, in the midst of all this. Whatever this was. Whatever slow renegotiation was happening between you and the terms of your own life, you were not ready for it to be announced. Not to the Holy Land. Not to the full weight of Celestial Dragon society, with its opinions and its politics and its absolute, insatiable fascination with the private life of the Supreme Commander. You needed time. You needed processing. You needed, at a minimum, to have formed a coherent opinion about your own marriage before other people started having opinions about it for you.
You were very clear about this.
Garling seemed to understand that you needed a long time to process things. He was patient, in his way. He gave you space. He did not push.
He could not, however, hide a marriage forever. Particularly not when the marriage was his, and his wife and son were living in her family home. He was the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights, and absolutely nothing that man did went unnoticed for long by his fervent cult of fans.
Someone in Pangaea Castle probably had the certificate pass their desk, and then they told someone who told five other people, and that's how the Holy Land found out Garling Figarland was married, married to you.
You became aware of this when the family servant arrived with the correspondence tray, and it was, unusually, not just Garling's daily letters. It was the entire tray. A truly unreasonable quantity of correspondence, stacked with letters of every size, and color, and possibly sprayed with all the perfume in the Holy Land.
You stared at it.
"These are all addressed to me?" you asked.
"Yes, my lady."
"This one says—" you picked up the top letter, "—’Saintess Figarland.'"
"Yes, my lady."
"That's…not my name."
The servant didn't answer. The servant had, very wisely, decided to have no opinions about this whatsoever.
Hessa arrived shortly after, which meant Garling had sent her, which meant Garling had been anticipating this moment rather longer than you had and was trying to get ahead of it.
She came with a single folded paper and the expression of a woman delivering a message she personally agreed with but had not authored. The request contained, in summary, that the Master was requesting you and master Shamrock to return home, as his estate was more secure, and people were less likely to harass your family if you left.
"Honestly," you said, and gestured at the tray.
Hessa gave you a look that said, ‘I know’, and also ‘Please come home, and also ‘He’s very pretty when he mopes, but he makes the house miserable’.
Shamrock, who had followed her in and was currently working his way through the correspondence pile with the focused interest of a very small government official, held up a letter.
"This one has a wax seal," he said, impressed. "Father only gets wax seals when someone important is very angry with him." He considered this. "You must be very important."
Hessa said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
You picked up the tray and told them both to wait outside.
Your father's study was familiar territory: the smell of old paper, the particular quality of afternoon light through the shutters, the desk where you had spent a significant portion of your childhood watching him work and being told, not unkindly, that you asked too many questions. He looked at the tray when you set it down. Then at you.
"Word travels," he said.
"Did you know this would happen?"
"Obviously, my daughter." He leaned back in his chair. "Surely you understand the gravity of having an infamous husband who's the head of the Holy Knights."
"I didn't exactly consent to—" You stopped. Redirected. "Never mind. Look at this. These are invitations. This one is from Saint Ethanbrough, who has never once invited us to anything. I have seen him at sixteen separate events. He would not even look in my direction."
"You were unmarried and taking an unusual position." He looked at you steadily. "Society has opinions about that."
"I am still a nobody."
"You are not. You're certainly no longer a governess." He said it without inflection, which was somehow worse. "You're the mistress of the Figarland household, and the only woman Garling has ever married. People will know it's strange and unusual and that you're not what they expected. Things will change."
"And society has, what, reversed its opinions? And expects me to care?"
"Society," he said, with a dryness so faint you almost missed it, "goes where relevance goes. You are now relevant to the Figarland household in a different capacity. They are adjusting."
"I don't want them to adjust."
"I know."
"I don't want invitations from Saint Ethanbrough, who ignored me for ten years and is now suddenly—"
"You don't have to accept them."
"It's not about accepting them. You have power, so do what you want. Stop complaining about it and just do it." he said, clearly getting bored with your conversation.
You stopped. Looked at the tray. At the impossible stack of it. "Is this my life now?"
"You could always go to your estate.” He suggested blankly, “The Figarland staff will be considerably more selective about what reaches you. There, you can throw whatever fits you like from behind his walls. Garling, for reasons that continue to escape me personally, believes you are the finest woman he has ever encountered, and will allow it."
"You're not a very supportive father."
"I am a father who is acutely aware he has struck gold with his least reasonable daughter, and who intends to remind her of it."
"That's easy for you to say. You were born a man, you've never had to care about any of this—" You caught yourself. "Sorry. That was. I'm not angry at you about this, specifically."
He sighed.
"You're angry at me because I agreed to a marriage behind your back." He said abruptly. "That's fine. And you're angry at your husband, for good reason. He's a grown man who handled your marriage like a child, but that's not a sign he is careless with his feelings for you. It means he cared more than he'd ever cared about anything, and panicked accordingly."
Of all your father's many qualities, what you had inherited most completely was the pragmatism. It was also, therefore, the quality you found most annoying in him. You understood, intellectually, that he and Garling got along because they were built along similar lines: men who assessed situations and responded to them, unbothered by the mess of feeling underneath. You knew what he thought. You knew what he would say if you pressed him.
Garling was the best husband you could have hoped for. Better than he would have managed himself, frankly, and he was not above saying so.
It was just deeply inconvenient that he was probably right.
He looked at you.
"Your illustrious husband has made a great deal of changes for you," your father said, folding the corner of his paper down just enough to peer at you over the edge of it. "Don't you think you ought to give him a chance to court you properly? Maybe if you spent more time with him, and less time upset at what was the kindest courtship he could have managed, you'd find yourself considerably happier."
"Are you really taking his side?"
He didn't answer immediately. He lifted the paper back up instead, settling deeper into his chair as though the conversation was already beneath him.
"He's been patiently waiting," he said, annoyed, "and he hasn't taken a single other to bed since you arrived, which is more restraint than I expected of someone of his standing. Throw the man a bone before he loses his patience and finds himself three more mistresses. One of them is nearly as pretty as he is, which I imagine would irritate you far more than his company does."
You huffed, sharp and short, and turned on your heel before you said something you couldn't take back.
The walk out of his study felt longer than it had any right to. You knew, without needing to think too hard about it, that your father had no real intention of undermining Garling where you were concerned. This visit had never been an escape. It had only ever been a delay, and your father had just made it clear that he was done indulging even that. He wanted you back under your husband's roof, and he had chosen the most aggravating possible way to say so.
You didn't know why you had bothered coming at all.
You were still turning that thought over, sour and tired with it, when Shamrock fell into step beside you in the hall. He tugged at your sleeve with the particular brand of gentle persistence he had perfected over the years, and when you looked down at him, his expression was hopeful in that careful way he used when he wasn't sure of your mood.
"Could we go back?" he asked. "I do miss my toys. And the servants know how I like my tea."
You looked down at the stack of invitations you had been carrying since morning, the ones from Garling's household that had followed you here and that you had been pointedly ignoring. Parties. Dinners. An afternoon sail that would have been lovely if you weren't furious at the man extending the offer.
You stood there for a moment longer than you needed to.
Then you sighed, tucked the invitations under your arm, and told Shamrock to start packing.
-X-
The carriage ride back was short.
Short enough that there was no comfortable settling into silence, no gradual easing of tension between your shoulders. Short enough that you spent most of it very aware of the weight on your shoulders where the idea of Garling had sat for a month, and the space inside your own head where a reasonable, coherent sense of your new life was supposed to be taking shape, and stubbornly was not. You watched the streets pass and tried, as you had been trying for days, to locate the thread of the thing. The beginning of it. The point at which you were supposed to have made peace with how completely and permanently your world had rearranged itself around a man you had only just learned to look at without your jaw tightening.
You had not found it yet.
Shamrock hopped down from the step without assistance the moment the carriage stopped, landing with the neat, unbothered confidence of someone who had never once in his life doubted where he belonged. He walked through the front doors of one of the most imposing houses in the Holy Land the same way he did everything else, which was to say directly, and without ceremony, already glancing around for whichever servant he intended to charm into fetching his things first.
You followed at a considerably slower pace.
It was a beautiful house. You had always known that, in an abstract and largely irrelevant way, the way you knew the sun was bright without particularly wanting to look at it directly. Tall and white, with curated gardens that someone tended with obsessive care, and a front entrance wide enough to make most people feel pleasantly small. You had used the back door for most of your life, when you came here at all. The front was for important people, for guests who arrived with names that meant something, for the kind of woman who moved through the Holy Land and had the world arrange itself to accommodate her.
Not for you.
Until now, apparently, which meant the back door was no longer an option. You had tested this theory by asking Hessa, and the look on the head housekeeper's face had suggested she was genuinely close to fainting from the impropriety of it. You figured it was best not to test her.
She now met you just inside the entrance, composed and efficient as always, and told you without being asked that Saint Garling was not currently at home.
You thanked her. You meant it, and you also weren't sure if you did.
The house was quieter without him in it, which was strange, because he was not a loud man by any measure. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't fill rooms with noise or demand. But his absence had a particular quality to it, a kind of held breath in the walls, and you stood for a moment in the entrance hall and tried to determine whether the relief you felt was clean or complicated.
It was complicated.
The anger was still there, unresolved and circling, with no one to aim it at and nowhere to put it down. At least if he had been home, you would have had something to push against. A face to look at. A voice to respond to. Some external point of friction to justify the feeling instead of just carrying it around inside your own chest like a coal you couldn't set down and couldn't hold comfortably either.
So it was better, probably. Obviously better. You didn't have to look at him and think about the fact that you were now his wife, that word, that impossible word, and wonder what his face would do if you said something wrong, or stood in the wrong place, or simply reminded him, by existing, that there was a rather significant gap between what he was and what you were.
Worse, somehow, nonetheless.
Shamrock was settled within minutes. He had rooms, he had things, he had a small personal kingdom that received him back without question or ceremony. A maid materialized to take his coat almost before he had finished shrugging it off. Another appeared with a small tray of something he liked, presented with the quiet attentiveness of someone who had been paying careful attention to his preferences. He moved through the house the way he always did, like water finding its level, effortless and entirely untroubled, already chattering at someone about where his second-best toys had been stored.
You stood in the entrance hall and felt like a stone someone had hucked in.
A plethora of familiar servants stood at attention along the walls, people you had known in passing for most of your work, people who had never looked at you with anything in particular. They looked at you now. Not unkindly, not with the barely concealed assessment you had been bracing yourself for, but with a particular attentiveness that was somehow worse because it was genuine. Even Anton was not smiling. Anton, who smiled at everything, who had once smiled warmly at a man whose coat had caught fire. He stood straight and composed and treated you with complete and dignified seriousness.
Wonderful. You had been promoted.
"Your rooms are prepared," Hessa said, materializing at your elbow with her usual impeccable timing. "If you'd like to see them."
Meaning the rooms for the lady of the house. Meaning the rooms that had been someone else's, or no one's, and were now yours in a way that had nothing to do with wanting them or earning them or growing slowly and naturally into the kind of woman who belonged in them.
You said that you would like to see them, because there was nothing else to say.
The corridor leading to the mistress's suite had a quality of deliberate quiet to it, the particular hush of a part of the house that had been arranged to feel significant. Each step seemed to weigh more than the last. Hessa walked ahead of you with her hands clasped and her back straight, and you followed and tried very hard not to feel like you. The door opened onto high ceilings and tall windows draped in gauzy white fabric that probably cost more than your entire previous wardrobe had been worth in total. The light came through it softly, filtered and golden, the kind of light that made rooms look like paintings of themselves. There was a writing desk positioned near the window, a vanity table with a mirror framed in something that caught the glow, and a bed that looked less like a piece of furniture and more like a statement, like someone had commissioned it with the express purpose of making every other bed you had ever slept in feel like a personal apology.
You did not look at the bed.
You were aware of it, the way you were aware of a large and opinionated animal in the room, but you did not look at it directly, because looking at it meant thinking about it, and thinking about it meant following that particular thread to its logical conclusion, which was that Garling had presumably acquired a wife because he wanted something to do with one. Which meant he wanted something to do with you. In that bed. Specifically.
Which was, when you held it up to the light and examined it plainly, completely batshit crazy.
Garling, who was rich and golden-haired and had a smile that had reportedly destabilized at least two noble households. Garling, who had been surrounded by mistresses of extraordinary quality until very recently, by all available accounts. Garling, who had looked at you across a room at some point and arrived at the conclusion that you were the one he wanted to keep.
You turned and looked very deliberately at the writing desk instead.
There were flowers on the table. Fresh ones, pale and simply arranged, not showy, not the kind of thing that announced itself. Someone had put them there, which meant someone had been told to, which meant he had thought about it, or instructed someone to think about it on his behalf, and you were not entirely sure which of those possibilities you found more unsettling. Both of them required him to have pictured you here. Standing in this room. Noticing.
You stood in the middle of it and tried to take stock.
The room was beautiful. That was the problem, or at least the first layer of it, the one you kept bumping into before you could get to anything underneath. It was so thoroughly and self-evidently beautiful that it had the opposite effect of comfort. You stood inside it the way you stood inside a coat cut for someone slightly taller and more certain than you currently were, aware at every point of where you did not quite fill it out. Every careful, considered detail reminded you that someone had imagined a woman living here. A particular kind of woman. A woman who moved through rooms like this without really seeing them, who matched the furniture in some essential way, who received fresh flowers as a matter of course and accepted high ceilings and golden light and beds that made statements as simply the texture of ordinary life.
A woman who had never once, in her entire existence, used the back door.
Hessa stood just inside the entrance with her hands clasped and her expression perfectly, professionally neutral, prepared to answer questions or produce whatever else the lady of the house required.
You were not sure what you required. You were not sure you would know how to ask for it even if you did.
The room said: A woman of consequence resides here.
You thought: well, about that.
You sat on the edge of a chair, upright and careful, not quite committing to the comfort of it, and let the anxiety that had been circling you all day finally come down and settle on your shoulders where it belonged.
What were you supposed to do now?
You knew how to work. You had been doing that for years, and you had been good at it, and it had given you something to be, a shape to hold, a reason to be wherever you were at any given moment. There was a clarity to usefulness that you had never particularly appreciated until now, standing on the other side of it, in a room full of fresh flowers and expensive fabric with nothing in front of you that resembled a task.
This was something else entirely. This was not doing. This was being, being somewhere, being someone, being the particular someone that this particular room had been designed to hold. Saintess Figarland. The title sat in your mouth like a word in a language you had never studied, the syllables there but the meaning refusing to attach itself to anything you recognized as yourself. Were you supposed to attend things? Host things? Manage the household with the kind of quiet competence that people described in other women with hushed admiration? Stand beside Garling at dinners and events and very important gatherings and look, somehow, as though you had always been exactly where you were standing, as though you belonged there in the particular way that required no argument and invited no questions?
You pressed your hands flat against your knees and looked at the far wall.
And then there was the matter of Garling himself.
That was the thing you had been circling around the outside of all day without looking at directly, the way you had not looked at the bed. Because your father was not wrong, which was irritating in the specific way that your father being right always was. Garling had been patient. Garling had made changes, concrete and observable ones, the kind of changes that cost something. Garling had put fresh flowers in your room and written invitations and practically forced you to adopt his precious son.
And you had spent the better part of your marriage so far at your father's house, being pointedly unavailable.
You were angry at him. You had reasons. The reasons were real, and they were yours, and you were not prepared to simply set them down because your father thought you ought to throw the man a bone. But underneath the anger, if you were honest, if you sat very still in an unfamiliar chair in an unfamiliar room and allowed yourself to be honest, there was something else. Something smaller, less comfortable, and considerably harder to name.
Something that felt a great deal like not knowing what to do with a person who was trying.
Not knowing what to do with someone who was, and you could admit this privately, in the interior of your own head where no one could hear it, deliciously handsome. Who had been, on balance, not terrible to be in the same room with. Who you might, under the right circumstances, with sufficient time and the gradual accumulation of evidence, be somewhat okay exploring certain private and entirely new things with. Especially if he kissed you again. The way he had in the garden.
The garden. Yes. Because that was what happened when two people were temporarily out of their minds and full of feelings they hadn't finished sorting, and he had kissed you, and you had not fully recovered from it. You had spent an embarrassing portion of the carriage ride home turning it over in your mind, examining it from different angles, and arriving at no useful conclusions whatsoever. You were married now, married, in the full and legal and permanent sense of the word, which meant something. Did he expect it to mean something tonight, in the practical sense? Were you supposed to go to him? Were you supposed to simply know how these things worked, to arrive at his door with some innate understanding of the geography of it all, confident and unworried?
You stood up very quickly and walked to the window, because sitting still was not compatible with this particular direction of thought.
The view was lovely. The gardens below were immaculate, every hedge and pathway exactly where it was supposed to be, everything in its right place and behaving accordingly. None of this helped even slightly.
"May I?"
Hessa appeared in the doorway, not barging, because Hessa never barged, but carrying with her the quiet authority of someone who had decided that a gentle interference was warranted and had calculated the precise moment to offer it.
You turned from the window. "Of course."
She stepped inside and surveyed the room with the practiced eye of someone who had seen it both empty and occupied and considered the latter its natural state. Then she looked at you, and something shifted in her expression. Not unkind. Simply the particular look of a woman assessing another woman and finding the situation clarifying.
"You're worrying," she said.
"I'm thinking."
"About what's expected of you."
A pause. "Among other things."
Hessa folded her hands. She did not, as a rule, offer opinions unless specifically invited to do so. You had worked beside her long enough to know that when she offered them unprompted, it was because she had weighed the cost of silence against the cost of speaking and found silence wanting.
"Lord Figarland," she said, with the particular carefulness of someone choosing each word before setting it down, "will not ask anything of you that you are not prepared to give. I want you to understand that clearly." She paused, and something in her expression suggested that what followed was not easy to say and had been decided upon anyway. "After God Valley, one of his colleagues said something. Made a particular kind of mockery of him, regarding the company he kept. After that, he rid himself of all his female slave companions entirely and took mistresses only from his own caste to make a point. To prove that he was the one conferring distinction, not receiving it." She looked at you steadily. "This whole business, the engagement, the marriage, the manner of it, has been very unusual for him. I have been in this household a long time, and I have never seen him conduct himself this way before."
She let that sit.
Something in your chest unclenched, slightly, against your will. You did not reach for it or examine it. You simply noted it the way you noted a change in the weather, as information, and let it be.
"But," she continued, and there it was, "you are no longer simply a member of this household's staff. You are Saintess Figarland now. There are expectations attached to that name, not from him, but from the world he moves in. Your private lives are your own, and he will take the lead there, I have no doubt. But how you appear. How you present yourself in the spaces he occupies. Whether you seem—" the faintest pause, careful as everything else about her, "—as though you belong in this new capacity, it matters, and not only for your own sake. He trusts you to be willing to learn it. As it affects not only the pair of you, but also the little lord Figarland."
You looked down at yourself.
Your clothes were serviceable. They were fine, they had always been fine, they had been exactly what was appropriate for what you were and where you were going on any given day. Neat, practical, nothing that invited commentary in either direction. But she was not wrong, and you had known she was not wrong before she finished the sentence. A significant portion of how Shamrock would be received in the rooms he was going to grow up moving through would be connected, directly and visibly, to you. If you appeared uncertain, they would wonder. If you appeared out of place, they would notice. If you were found lacking in the ways that mattered to the people whose opinions shaped his world, they might conclude that the lack extended to him as well. He was a child, and children were assessed by their mothers, and you were, apparently, his mother now, or the nearest available thing to it.
The weight of that settled over your shoulders with quiet finality.
"I see," you said, which was a diplomatic compression of several things at once: yes, I understand, I was already aware of the gap, I appreciate that you declined to pretend it isn't there, and I am still, underneath all of that, entirely out of my element and not yet sure what to do about it.
Hessa allowed herself a small, private smile. The kind that suggested she had heard all of it, including the parts you hadn't said.
They arrived within the hour.
A tailor, bearing samples and measuring tape, and an expression of professional neutrality that somehow still communicated, with great clarity, that we have much to discuss and I am prepared to be diplomatic about it. Three maids who had clearly been briefed on the specific nature of the task, and perhaps trained for exactly this kind of occasion, carried themselves with the attentiveness of people who knew how to make someone presentable without making them feel catastrophically inadequate about the baseline they were starting from. And a woman who introduced herself as Mira, who was a hairdresser of some local renown, and who looked at your hair as if being presented with a restoration project she fully intended to see through.
"I invited them some time ago," Hessa said, in a tone that implied she had not, at any point, genuinely doubted what the outcome of all this was going to be. "The Master was insistent that you be allowed to remain in your family home until remaining there became…unwise."
You elected not to examine that implication too closely.
What followed was several hours of polite, expert, relentless attention.
You were measured with the brisk efficiency of someone accustomed to bodies being an entirely practical matter. Your opinions were solicited with careful courtesy, the kind that meant they would factor them in where they are feasible and set them aside where they are not, and then thank you for sharing them. Your hair was assessed, discussed in low professional tones between Mira and one of the maids, and then handled with a gentleness you had not anticipated, but seemed appropriate as you were a Saintess. Fabric was draped across your shoulders and held against your coloring and pinned into approximations of shapes that did not yet exist. Things were noted in small books. Recommendations were made with the matter-of-fact kindness of people who dealt in improvement as a professional trade and saw that you needed help, because without it, the prognosis was bleak.
You were not, you determined as you looked at yourself in the long mirror with a kind of resigned clarity, an especially promising canvas.
But the maids were professionals, and professionals did not require a promising canvas. They required a canvas, and they had one, and they worked with quiet collegial efficiency, the easy coordination of people who had done this together before and did not need to say much to understand what needed doing next. Mira performed something with your hair that you could not fully follow, her hands moving with unusual gentleness. The tailor produced several ready-altered pieces from somewhere, things that could not quite have been made to order but had clearly been prepared with a specific range of possibilities in mind, kept for exactly this sort of occasion.
You tried not to think too hard about what that implied.
That your transformation from what you were into what you were now supposed to be had been anticipated and arranged for, tidily and without fuss, the same way the fresh flowers had been arranged for, the same way all of it had been arranged for. That much of your life would be the same.
When they finished, a mirror was produced, and you looked at yourself for a long moment.
You were still there. Obviously, you weren’t under any illusions about that. The bones of the matter had not changed; you were still entirely, specifically yourself, and no amount of expert hairdressing was going to produce something that wasn’t.
But you were refined. Composed. The sort of person who might plausibly inhabit a room like this one, stand beside a man like that one, and not look as though she had wandered in through the wrong door and was too embarrassed to leave. Not a gorgeous trophy wife, not the kind of woman who stopped conversations simply by existing, but certainly a very elegant and wealthy-looking wife. The kind of woman who belonged to a name. Who wore the name, rather than being dwarfed by it.
You stood in front of the mirror for a long moment and looked at yourself with the careful neutrality of someone taking inventory.
"Well," you said to your reflection, at last. "Okay. We're done now, right?"
The reflection looked back at you with the composed expression of a woman who had just spent several hours being professionally harassed, and was now cautiously hopeful that the improving portion of the day was behind her.
Hessa did not appear to find this funny. Her expression remained exactly what it always was, which was to say thoughtful, measured, and faintly patient in the way of someone who had learned long ago that Celestial Dragons were about as useful as babies.
Anton, standing just inside the doorway with his hands clasped behind his back, did crack a smile. Small, quickly contained, but there.
"No, my lady," Hessa said carefully. "We have yet to receive the shoemaker. And the jeweler. And a few other vendors who will be arriving shortly."
Your "Oh," was considerably less composed than the rest of you currently looked. It came out small and a little deflated, the sound of a person who had believed, genuinely and perhaps naively, that the finish line was directly in front of her and had just been informed it was not.
-X-
You had not intended to fall asleep.
You had only sat down on the edge of Shamrock’s bed to read to him, because he had asked, and because saying no to him still required more energy than you currently possessed, and somewhere between the third and fourth page of whatever adventure he’d selected, the words had started blurring. Shamrock had lasted perhaps two pages longer than you before going under entirely, the book sliding sideways onto his face without waking him in the slightest.
That was where Garling found you.
You were aware of his arrival in the dim, soupy way of someone not quite asleep and not quite awake, the sound of the door, the pause, the quality of stillness that meant someone was standing in it. You tried to summon the appropriate response. The wariness, the careful composure, the general alertness you felt you owed to the situation of being alone in a room with your new husband.
Your body declined to participate.
“Come,” Garling said, very quietly, and his hand was at your elbow, steadily drawing you upright with a care that suggested he was trying not to startle you. You stood without quite deciding to. He reached past you and extracted the book from Shamrock’s face with the practiced ease of someone who had conducted this maneuver before, setting it on the nightstand without disturbing so much as the boy’s breathing.
Shamrock slept on, serene and entirely unhelpful.
Garling guided you into the corridor and drew the door mostly shut behind you. The house was quiet. The lamps had been turned low. You blinked at him in the dim light, still not entirely present, and he looked back at you with an expression you were too tired to read accurately.
He lifted your hand and pressed his lips to your knuckles.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
You looked at him. You had, at various points throughout the day, prepared several things you might say to Garling Figarland upon his return. None of them were available to you now. You were running on the absolute dregs of yourself, and the truth was that you didn’t have the energy to be properly annoyed with him, which felt like an indignity on top of everything else.
“I’m still mad at you,” was what came out, which wasn’t even one of the things you’d prepared.
“You can be,” he agreed, without defensiveness. His gaze moved over you, unhurried, taking in the results of the afternoon’s considerable effort. “But be mad in comfort.”
“Fine.” You turned and leaned on him a bit.
Something in his expression shifted, warm and appreciative in a way that made you want to look at the wall. “You’ve been outfitted.”
“Hessa arranged it.”
“Hessa continues to have excellent judgment.” He said it simply, as though it were a straightforward observation and not the sort of thing that made heat crawl up the back of your neck. “I like you in these colors. You should wear them often. You look very fetching.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” you said, which came out somewhat more like please stop looking at me like that than you’d intended, and he smiled and offered you his arm.
You took it, because you were tired and the corridor was long and you were not too proud to admit, silently, that you were grateful for something to hold onto.
It was somewhere around the halfway point that the tiredness began, very unhelpfully, to thin.
Your own rooms were at the end of this corridor. You knew that. You had stood in them for several hours this afternoon, being measured and pinned and gently improved, and you knew exactly how far they were, and you knew what was adjacent to them, and you knew what tonight was.
Your steps slowed slightly.
Garling matched your pace without comment.
The corridor was very quiet. Your heart was very loud. You thought about the room, and the bed, and the fact that you were married, legally and ceremonially and in every sense that mattered, and that standing beside you was a man who was, whatever else might be said about him, a man, with presumably ordinary expectations of the institution you had just entered into, and you had not thought about this, you had not thought –
The door to your rooms appeared at the end of the hall with the inevitability of a closing argument.
Your breathing had gone slightly strange. You were aware of it. You were also aware that you were being ridiculous, that you were a grown adult, that you had agreed to this, that there was no reason to—
Garling turned toward you at the door.
He was going to kiss you. He was leaning in, and he was going to kiss you, and that was going to lead to—
“I’m not ready,” you said.
It came out louder than you intended. You pressed on anyway, because there was no graceful recovery from it, only forward.
“I am—I want to be clear, I understand what marriage is, I’m not naive, but I’m not—the thought of—babies, I’m not ready for babies, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready for babies, and everything that leads to babies is also frankly terrifying to me, and I know that might not be what you were thinking at all and in that case I apologize for the assumption but I needed to say it before I lost my nerve and I’m sorry.”
You ran out of words and stood very still and waited.
Garling looked at you.
Then he laughed.
Not unkindly. It was a genuine laugh, startled out of him, and he pressed his fingers briefly over his mouth as it subsided, and when he looked at you again, his eyes were benevolent and creased at the corners and entirely without impatience.
“Rest,” he said.
He leaned forward and pressed his lips to your forehead, steady and unhurried. You stood very still and tried to remember how breathing worked.
“Tomorrow,” he said, straightening, “I’ve cleared my schedule. We’ll sit together, the two of us, and we’ll talk. Whatever you want to establish. Whatever you need to know. Ground rules, if you like.” A pause, the faintest lift at the corner of his mouth. “We could even draw up a contract, if that would make you feel better.”
You stared at him. Then you brought your hand up and hit his shoulder, not very hard.
He caught your hand before you could reclaim it, turned it over, and kissed your palm with the solemn deliberateness of someone certain of the effect it was having.
“Goodnight,” he said.
He released your hand and walked back down the corridor, unhurried, and did not look back, and you stood at your door holding your own hand for a moment before you remembered yourself.
Insufferable brat, you thought.
You went inside.
-X-
Breakfast was served at eight.
By eight-fifteen, Shamrock had been removed from the room twice.
He was not, Garling had explained at the outset, with the particular calm of a man who had made this decision in advance and intended to hold it, going to be part of this conversation. This was an adult conversation. It concerned adult matters. He would have plenty of time with you afterward, and he was welcome to wait in the hall if he wanted to be nearby, but he was not going to sit at this table and interject, and that was final.
Shamrock had looked at his father. Then he had looked at you, with an expression of profound and theatrical betrayal. Then he had walked out of the room with the dignity of someone being marched to the gallows, the servants closing the door behind him.
You had watched him go and felt, despite everything, slightly guilty.
“He’ll survive,” Garling said, pouring his coffee with equanimity.
“He looked at me like I’d arranged it personally.”
“He sees you as the kinder of us.”
A small sound from the corridor suggested that Shamrock had installed himself immediately outside the door and had no intention of going anywhere. Garling glanced toward it, returned his attention to his cup, and said nothing, which you took to mean he had expected this.
You wrapped your hands around your own cup and looked at the table between you.
Garling had, in fact, produced paper. And a pen. It sat to one side of his place setting with the organized air of a man who intended to take this seriously, and the sight of it made something in you loosen slightly. You were better with paper. Paper meant structure, and structure meant you could think, and thinking was something you were considerably more confident about than most of what the last two days had asked of you.
“Right,” you said. “So.”
“So,” Garling agreed, and settled back in his chair in that way he had, unhurried and entirely at ease, watching you with an attention that you were making a concerted effort not to find unnerving. “Where would you like to begin?”
“Shamrock,” you said, because Shamrock was your safest ground and you both knew it.
Something in Garling’s expression softened, almost imperceptibly. He reached for the pen.
“Shamrock,” he agreed.
What emerged over the next twenty minutes was less a negotiation than a collaborative exercise in common sense, which was, you supposed, what happened when two people who both genuinely wanted what was best for the child sat down to discuss him without theatrics. You had no intention of pretending you weren't mostly here for Shamrock, but in this new position, you were leery of overstepping in ways that might confuse him or, worse, hurt him. You had a relationship with Shamrock that had developed on its own terms, over time, and you wanted to preserve the integrity of that.
Garling listened to all of this without interruption.
When you finished, he was quiet for a moment. Then he set down his pen and looked at you with a directness that you had learned, over years of working in this house, meant he was about to say something he considered important.
“He chose you as his mother,” he said. “That matters to me. It matters considerably.” A brief pause, something shifting behind his eyes that was not quite at ease. “He doesn’t remember the other woman. Not really. You are the nearest thing to it he’s ever chosen for himself.”
You were quiet.
You thought about Shamrock. About the hours of reading together, his small weight settled against your side as though he had decided the arrangement was permanent and was simply waiting for you to catch up. The questions he asked, specific and relentless, the ones nobody else had thought to answer because nobody else had thought he was asking. The way he had looked at you in the carriage yesterday, coming home, with the particular satisfaction of a child who had gotten exactly what he engineered and was too strategically minded to let himself gloat openly about it.
His mother.
The words sat strangely. Not wrong, exactly. Just very large.
“I want to know,” you said, carefully, “about his birth mother. Who she was. What happened to her?”
Garling held your gaze for a moment.
“Very well,” he said. “But at a later date.”
It was not a deflection. It was the tone of someone filing something properly rather than discarding it, and you recognized the difference, so you nodded once and let it rest.
Garling reached for the pen and wrote something down.
You craned your neck.
He tilted the paper away with the unhurried ease of a man who had anticipated exactly that, not even looking up to do it.
You looked at the ceiling briefly and said nothing.
Dedicated time was established. Mornings, where possible, were yours and Shamrock’s. You had fallen into a rhythm of it already without realizing, and naming it simply meant protecting it. He had lessons in the afternoons; you wouldn’t interfere with those. Evenings were flexible, to be negotiated day by day depending on the household’s requirements. But the evenings were his, and Garling noted this down with the seriousness it deserved.
“The household,” Garling said, moving on with the ease of a man working through an agenda.
This was also, blessedly, navigable territory. You knew this house. You had worked in it long enough to understand its rhythms, its requirements, its particular needs. You were not starting from nothing, and that counted for something.
What had changed was your position within it. You were no longer staff. You were not going to be treated as such, and more to the point, you were not going to behave as such, because that would create a confusion of authority that would be uncomfortable for everyone and unfair to Hessa, who ran the household with a precision that deserved uncomplicated respect.
“I don’t want to be idle,” you said, because that felt important to establish early. “I’m not suited to it. If I have no purpose here, I’ll lose my mind.”
Garling looked at you steadily. “I know. What would you like to do?”
You opened your mouth and then closed it again, because no one had asked you that in quite that way, and you didn’t have an immediate answer, and the absence of one was faintly embarrassing.
“I don’t know yet,” you admitted.
“Then we’ll find out.” He said it simply, as though this were not a large thing to promise. “You’ll have the household accounts, if you want them. Hessa oversees the day-to-day, but the oversight sits with me, and I would be glad to have someone I trust taking an interest.”
You did, in fact, want the accounts. Numbers were honest. Numbers did not have subtexts.
“The household correspondence,” he continued, “will require your name now. Some of it will require your presence. I’ll walk you through the social expectations as they come, and you can tell me what you’re comfortable with and what you’re not.”
“And if I’m not comfortable with something?”
“Then we discuss it.” He paused. “I have not, I hope, given you the impression that I intend to simply direct you.”
You thought about it. Genuinely. “No,” you said, slowly. “No, you haven’t.”
Garling regarded you with that patient, particular attention of his. Not uncomfortable exactly. Simply very thorough, and you were not entirely accustomed to being the thing someone looked at with that degree of focus.
“Give this time,” he said. “You don’t have to know yet what you want from this. But I want you to know that it’s a question you’re allowed to have.”
“That’s a strange thing to have to be told.” A pause. “Is there anything else?”
You picked up your coffee cup and found it had gone cold. Garling reached over without comment, moved it toward the pot, refilled it, and set it back, and returned his attention to his paper with the ease of someone who had simply noticed a thing and addressed it. No ceremony. No expectation of gratitude.
You looked at the cup for a moment. Then you drank.
“There is one more area,” Garling said, in the same tone he had used for the household accounts. But he was looking toward the window as he said it, angled slightly away, which was so uncharacteristic that it took you a moment to register it for what it was.
You looked up.
“Our marriage,” he said, “in the more private sense of the word.”
You looked down into your coffee and found you could not quite look back up.
“I want to be clear,” he continued, his voice returned to its usual steadiness. However, he was consulting his notes with rather more attention than the notes probably warranted, “about what you are and aren’t comfortable with, and what you are and aren’t willing to consider in time. I want you to be able to say those things plainly, and I want to be equally plain in return, so that there’s no confusion between us about where we each stand.”
From the corridor came absolute silence, which meant Shamrock was either asleep or listening with his entire body pressed to the door. Neither option helped you.
Your brain had caught up with the conversation approximately one sentence in and had been trying to find a way out ever since.
“You want to talk about,” you said carefully, “the…” Your voice did something unfortunate. “The physical…”
“The physical dimensions of our marriage, yes.” He said it with perfect composure. “It matters. It’s better addressed directly than left to assumption.”
You pressed your lips together very hard.
“I am aware,” you said, in a tone that was impressively level given the circumstances, “that last night I told you, in some detail, that I was—well…”
“You did.” He interjected gracefully.
“…”
“I know what you told me under considerable distress at the door to your rooms,” he said. “That is not the same as knowing what you actually want, or what your limits are, or what timeline you might be comfortable with.” Another pause, and then, with the faintest shift in his voice that told you he was enjoying himself just slightly more than was strictly professional: “I would also like to discuss what you might, in time, like.”
You made a sound that was not quite a word.
“You don’t have to answer perfectly, or in full.”
“I wasn’t going—I was going to—” You pressed your fingers briefly to your mouth. From the hall, there was the sound of Shamrock very deliberately not listening. “Is this necessary?”
You squeaked, voice breaking completely.
He said nothing, just raised a brow. Which was, you were learning, its own kind of answer.
“Surely,” you said, and sat up very straight, and folded your hands on the table, and tried to look like someone who was perfectly capable of having an adult conversation about this in the middle of the morning over coffee and notes. “There are others who could suit you better in such discoveries than I. I mean—”
Garling’s mouth curved. He set the pen down, which suggested he was not going to be writing this part, and gave you his full attention, and said, simply, “You’re scared. Tell me what frightens you most.”
“Everything,” you said. Too quickly.
Garling tilted his head slightly. “Everything.” He considered this. “You didn’t seem that afraid in the garden during our kiss.”
Your face did something dramatic. “That was –”
“Did you dislike it?” A pause, quiet and precise. “Dislike me?”
Ha ha, if only.
“No! No, that’s not—” You pressed your fingers to your mouth, gathered yourself, tried again. “It wasn’t unpleasant. You are not… or the problem is not you, specifically.”
“Then what is the problem, specifically?”
You stared at the table. “I think,” you said, very carefully, “that you may have certain expectations of a wife that I am not adequately positioned to fulfill.”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was measured. Still, there was something underneath it, a particular evenness that suggested he had not, until this moment, fully considered that you might have reservations about his past.
“Is it fair to assume you don’t have much practical experience?” Another pause, and when it came, something careful in it. “Or did you previously attempt it, and find the experience simply unpleasant?”
He didn’t sound especially pleased at the second possibility. Which was, you thought, a remarkable thing coming from him, given the arithmetic of his own history, but you were not in a position to say so. Besides, your brain had already taken a sharp and unhelpful turn that was making it very difficult to think in straight lines.
The honest answer was that you had not. Your education on the subject extended precisely as far as the technical basics, which had always struck you as somewhat improbable and frankly unnecessary when encountered in the abstract, like instructions for a piece of equipment you had no particular plans to operate. You understood the mechanics the way you understood certain things about navigation or surgery. Theoretically. Distantly. With the mild academic distaste of someone who had never expected it to become personally relevant, it was incoming like a freight train.
And now it was very personally relevant.
Extremely personally relevant, given that Garling Figarland’s garnet eyes were on your face and your face was currently burning to a crisp and taking the rest of you with it.
You were beginning to feel the gap between you quite acutely. He had lived a life. An extensive, thoroughly inhabited life. You were not naive enough to be unaware of what that meant in practice, what it looked like, the sheer accumulated experience of a man like him set against the rather sparse and theoretical ledger of your own.
He was going to be so desperately bored.
He was going to be bored and disappointed about it in that infuriatingly handsome way of his, and eventually he was going to need someone who actually knew what they were doing. You were going to have to watch him go find them, because surely you alone could not satisfy whatever appetite lived behind that composure. He was not a mild man. He was not a man who wanted for things and accepted the wanting gracefully. He was a tiger, broadly speaking, and you were—you continued to stare at the table and tried to locate a dignified way to say any of this out loud.
You were going to need to say something before your face actually caught fire.
“It’s fine if you do—” He said, clearly attempting to cool the conflict in your head.
“I haven’t,” you said, to the table, finally just letting the humiliation pour down on you like rain. “Attempted it. At all. And I am aware that represents a considerable gap between us, in terms of—general experience—and I think it’s only sensible to acknowledge that a man of your—that is, you are not—what I mean to say is that one person is perhaps not—” You stopped. “You’re going to be dreadfully bored,” you said, which was not what you had meant to say but had the virtue of being exactly what you meant.
The silence that followed was very strange.
You looked up despite yourself.
Garling was looking at you with an expression you couldn’t immediately classify. It was not a smile, exactly, though there was something in the vicinity of it. Not offense. He seemed, if you were reading him correctly, deeply amused, and to be making a genuine effort on your behalf to keep that amusement from becoming visible, which was either kind or infuriating, and you couldn’t decide which.
“Bored,” he repeated.
“I only mean—”
“I heard what you meant.” He leaned forward slightly, just enough to close the conversational distance in a way that made you very aware of the table between you and deeply grateful for it. “Look at me.”
You did, with some effort.
"I chose you," he said. "Not due to a roster of prior accomplishments. Not a particular set of skills. Nor an appearance that sets the world aflame." A pause, and something shifted in his expression, briefly unguarded. "Up until five years ago, that wouldn't have been the case. After God Valley, I was…unsure of what I actually wanted. But since we met—"
You went still.
Garling did not speak about God Valley. That was simply a known thing, understood throughout the household and, you suspected, considerably further beyond it. The world considered it his crowning moment: the man who had stood against the Rocks Pirates and walked away the champion of the whole bloody affair. There were people who would have given anything to hear him speak of it directly. You had never been one of them—you had never especially enjoyed watching the event, for reasons you'd never fully examined, but to hear it now, from him, in this context, was very interesting.
He gave a wry smile. "—I'm not so sorry about any of it anymore."
You raised a brow.
"You nearly won the most beautiful woman in the world," you said, not particularly caring whether it landed as an insult. "I can't help but notice the differential."
Rather than take offense, he laughed, a genuinely loud laugh.
"That was rather more about asserting myself over Sommers than anything else," he said. "And when the Rocks Pirates interrupted, I found she didn't matter to me much at all." Something dry entered his tone. "She was, at best, a glorified slave with an undoubtably valuable but depreciating asset. Besides, slaves don't make enthusiastic wives or caring mothers. She would have been a misery for everyone, myself included." The wry look returned. "I couldn't let Sommers win, of course. But I wasn't entirely sorry to lose her."
You considered this. Then: "And your mistresses? The other women? Why did none of them manage to secure you, and yet you chose to marry me fraudulently?" A beat. "Without my permission."
"Without your permission," he agreed, without a trace of apology. "And it’s because you make me very happy." He said, "That is not something I'd experienced before. I recognized it when I found it, and I acted accordingly."
Your mouth opened.
"The concern I have," he continued, picking up his pen with the ease of someone deliberately returning the conversation to a manageable temperature, "is that you are frightened, and that is what I would like to address, not hypothetical women who don’t compare. The rest is not a problem."
You closed your mouth.
A moment passed.
"It rather sounds," you said, "like you're saying the rest is something you intend to take charge of."
“I’m saying,” Garling said, setting down his pen, “that it is not your responsibility to arrive perfectly knowledgeable, perfectly attractive, or perfectly intent on making me fall in love. You’ve already achieved most of that without attempting to seduce me.”
You took a breath out, and it was like something in your chest had loosened.
“It is my prerogative to ensure your comfort. And frankly, I dislike you thinking you cannot measure up to some imaginary boundary in order to satisfy me.” Now he looked up, and there was something in it that was not quite stern but carried a similar weight. “You should be demanding I satisfy your every whim. I am the one who demanded this marriage.”
A pause.
“So be selfish over me, and come as you are.” He said simply. “You are more than enough.” He held your gaze a moment longer. “So. Is there anything you would be comfortable with, or do you wish for more time?”
You looked at him for a long moment.
Then you looked at the table, because the table was easier.
Your brain was not quick. It took time, and several false starts, and at least one instance of you staring at the ceiling while you gathered the nerve to finish a sentence. By the end of your fretting, you’d not resolved anything, exactly. But you had ventured to imagine pleasant things that you’d only previously been willing to worry over in the dark.
“I like kissing,” you said, slowly, turning it over as you said it like you were testing the truth of it. “I think.”
Garling nodded, and something in his expression shifted in a way that was almost imperceptible and very much not.
“Then may I kiss you again?” He said it with the same directness he brought to everything, but there was something underneath it that was more boyish than his usual. “I’d like to kiss you daily, when I can. In the evenings, I am often late, but when I’m home I’d like to set aside time for precisely that.”
You stared at him. “A scheduled kissing appointment?”
“If you are open to it.”
“Just to kiss me?”
“Just to kiss you,” he confirmed, as though this were a perfectly ordinary thing to put in a marriage, which perhaps it was—you genuinely had no frame of reference. “I’ve become very fond of the idea. I’d like to implement the practice regularly.”
You looked at him. “You never struck me as someone particularly fond of the practice,” you said, carefully. You had, in fact, heard otherwise. It was the sort of thing that circulated quietly in a household like this one, the small accumulated knowledge of staff who were professionally unobservant. Garling Figarland did not kiss his mistresses. It was simply not something he did.
He hummed and reached for his coffee with the unhurried ease of a man entirely comfortable with what he was about to say.
“I never was, especially.” A beat, and then, with perfect composure: “But my wife’s lips are particularly pleasant.”
The heat that climbed your face was, you felt, entirely disproportionate to the statement. It was seven words. It was a simple declarative observation. It did not warrant this.
“If you must,” you said, with enormous dignity. “But for the time being, that is what I’m comfortable with. Only that.”
“Understood.”
He was already writing.
You watched him for a moment. "What are you adding?"
"An addendum." He did not stop writing. "That while I am bound entirely to respect your limits, you are not bound to respect mine. Should you become comfortable enough to push further, at any point, I would ask only that you say so plainly." He glanced up briefly. "So that I don't misread the situation and cross a line you haven't yet chosen to cross."
You processed this.
"You're writing in permissions in hopes I will seduce you—"
"If you so choose," he said, with perfect equanimity. "Which I hope you will."
You opened your mouth. He continued before you could close it again.
"If you need more structure, we can revisit the contract at any time." He set the pen down, and when he looked at you, it was with a directness that made the room feel somewhat smaller than it had a moment ago. "But it's important to me that you understand something. I intend to remain entirely chaste unless my wife invites me into her bed. I will not take mistresses. I will not seek out other women. I will not seek relief elsewhere in any form." A pause, letting that settle. "I didn't marry you on a whim. I need you to understand that clearly."
The room was very quiet.
You looked at him, this man who had upended your life with characteristic thoroughness and was now sitting across a breakfast table telling you, with the same calm he brought to military strategy and household accounts, that he intended to wait for you. However long that took, without exception and without negotiation.
"That seems," you said, carefully, "unnecessarily punishing to yourself."
"That's my concern."
"It could be a very long time."
Something moved in his expression. "I'm aware."
"I'm not—" You stopped. Started again. "I'm not being coy. I want to be honest with you. I don't know how long it will take me to feel—" You gestured at the space between you. "I don't want you to make promises that become a source of resentment."
Garling regarded you. "Do you think so little of my intentions?"
"No," you said quickly. "I don't think that at all."
"Then trust me to mean what I say." He picked up the pen. "We're agreed."
You sat back in your chair, looked at the ceiling, and thought about what it meant to be married to a man who negotiated over sex with this much precision and this much patience and was apparently entirely serious.
"So," you said. "Is that everything?"
He looked up, perfectly serene.
"Not quite. What are your feelings about children?"
Your eyes widened. Then you looked at your hands.
"I don't," you said. "Or—I don't know. Not now. Possibly not at all." You chose your next words carefully. "I wouldn't want Shamrock to think he'd been replaced. Or that he wasn't—that he didn't come first."
There was a pause.
"He is my heir," Garling said. "That isn't conditional on what happens after today."
"I know that. Logically. But children don't always think logically, and I—" You stopped. "He's worked very hard to have things the way he wants them. I wouldn't want him to feel uncertain."
Garling set down the pen. He looked at you with an attention that was difficult to hold for long.
"That you're thinking of him," he said, "should tell you something about the likelihood of that outcome."
You had nothing to say to that.
"What I want," he continued, in the same measured tone he'd used for every other clause of this arrangement, "is for you to have whatever you decide you want. If that includes children, I would welcome them very gladly. I think you may be underestimating Shamrock's desire for a sibling, if that is a genuine concern." A brief pause. "He would say so himself, I imagine, and at length."
You laughed despite yourself. "No children. Not yet, at least."
"Very well." He picked up the pen. "You should know I had a procedure, some years ago, to prevent further pregnancies. It's reversible, when and if you choose. The timeline is entirely yours."
"At my discretion," you said.
"At your discretion." He turned the document toward you. "Shall we call it a contract? I believe you were the one who wanted everything in writing."
You pushed back from the table at something approaching noon, which was when Garling stood, gathered his papers, and moved to open the corridor door with the measured timing of a man who had been listening to his son suffer outside it for an hour.
Shamrock had acquired a cushion from somewhere and was sitting against the wall with his arms folded and his expression arranged into something that communicated I am being very mature about this and did not entirely succeed.
He looked up.
"Are you done?"
"We're done," Garling confirmed.
Shamrock unfolded himself from the floor, tucked the cushion under his arm with dignity, and looked at you. "Was it productive?"
"Reasonably," you said.
He nodded, as though this met some internal standard, then looked at his father. "Did you tell her she's allowed to have more babies?"
You looked at Garling.
Garling looked at Shamrock with the expression of a man who had said things to his child he had not explicitly intended to be repeated.
"We'll cover that next time," you said, and Shamrock apparently decided that was sufficient, because he tucked himself against your side as you walked and matched his steps to yours down the corridor, and the matter was, for the moment, closed.
-X-
Life as Lady Figarland settled into shape with more speed than you had expected, and more comfort than you had any right to predict.
Garling had given evident thought to the shape of your days, which you might have found presumptuous if the result hadn’t been, grudgingly, sensible. You kept Shamrock in the mornings. That hadn’t changed, and you hadn’t wanted it to. But Garling had quietly arranged several new tutors in the interim, serious-minded people equipped to handle a child of Shamrock’s particular intellectual appetite, and with your permanent presence in the house no longer in question, Shamrock seemed comfortable, finally, letting them.
He had, it emerged, been hiding how far he’d progressed for quite some time.
“How long?” you asked him, on the morning this became apparent, watching him work through a problem with his new mathematics tutor that had absolutely no business being assigned to a child his age.
Shamrock considered this with the diplomatic caution of someone weighing confession against consequence. “A while,” he said.
“You let me keep teaching you things you already knew.”
A pause. “I liked our lessons.”
You looked at him for a long moment. He looked back with the patient certainty—the look of a too-clever child who had made a calculated decision and stood by it entirely.
You didn’t have the heart to be properly annoyed. You also made a mental note to tell Garling, who would find it either amusing or illuminating or, most likely, both.
The mornings now looked different but felt similar. You would settle with a book or the household accounts. At the same time, Shamrock worked through increasingly complex material with increasing focus, unbothered by your presence in the room and apparently content simply to have it. It was companionable in the way your lessons had always been companionable, quieter now, more parallel than interactive, but steady.
The afternoons were yours.
Garling had been clear on this point without making a production of it. You were not an accessory to Shamrock’s schedule. You were not staff. You were a person with a few hours of each day to inhabit as you chose, and he intended for you to use them.
In practice, this meant a small but deliberate curriculum. Some of it was expected: the social geography of the Holy Land, the names and allegiances and particular sensitivities of the households you would now be navigating as Saintess Figarland, the specific etiquette of events you might be expected to attend. You approached this the way you approached most things, methodically, and found it less impenetrable than you’d feared.
By far the most frustrating aspect of this new life was the kissing. Or rather, the notable absence of it, in the specific sense you had agreed upon.
The schedule was, on paper, perfectly reasonable. Once in the morning, before breakfast and before Shamrock was awake, he would meet you at your door, positioned with such casual precision that when you opened it, he was simply there, ready to take your hand and press his lips to your knuckles. Once in the evening: a slightly longer kiss to your forehead, administered after approximately an hour of sitting together in the kind of quiet that was becoming, against your better judgment, comfortable.
That was it. That was all.
The contract stated plainly that Garling had every right to more. You had watched him write it with your own eyes, and certain passages had caused you to study the ceiling for a full thirty seconds. And yet, in practice, he seemed entirely content to wait for you to come to him first. He never said so directly. He was far too deliberate for that. He had simply promised not to take what wasn't offered, and he was, apparently, a man of his word to an almost unreasonable degree.
So he gave you his hand kisses and his forehead kisses and the occasional brush of his lips against your cheek, each one unhurried and patient and impossible to reasonably object to. Whether he considered this a generous warm-up period or a calculated campaign was a question you turned over with increasing frequency.
You had your suspicions.
What you could say, with some confidence, after the first few days, was that it was working, and that this was extremely annoying.
Then the box arrived.
It appeared in your sitting room on the fourth day, handsome and unmarked except for a small card in Garling's handwriting that read simply: Private.
You opened it. You looked at the contents for a long moment.
Books. A careful, specific, deliberately assembled collection on the subject of intimacy, ranging from the clinical to the considerably less so, organized with the same orderly intention Garling brought to absolutely everything, which was somehow the detail that got you most. You picked one up. Set it back down. Picked up a different one.
You sat with it for the better part of an hour before admitting to yourself that you were not going to put it down, and that this was very probably exactly what he had intended, and that the forehead kisses were beginning to make a great deal more sense as a long-term strategy.
You were, after all, always going to be more comfortable learning from books than from anything else. He had known that.
You made Hessa and every maid in the household swear not to touch the box, then hid it under your bed like a teenager, and said nothing more about it to anyone.
Each night, after one of those too-chaste kisses, you found yourself digging one out anyway.
Eyes wide, mouth occasionally ajar, imagination thoroughly and unhelpfully illuminated, it was not, you were discovering, especially difficult to begin bridging the gap between what was and what could be. The books were well-written. Specific. Certain passages required rereading purely for comprehension purposes, you told yourself, and not because your face was hot and the house was very quiet and Garling was on the other side of a wall that was suddenly feeling rather thin.
What could be, the books suggested, was quite a lot.
What could be, more pressingly, was apparently accessible to you specifically, if you could locate sufficient courage to simply ask for it.
You closed the book. Looked at the wall.
Opened it again.
-X-
The problem with Shangra Temple was that it had very long corridors.
Garling walked through all of them like he owned the building outright, which he very nearly did. He was in his Holy Knight uniform. He had not shaved in several days. This gave you an unreasonable amount of time to notice all of that, which was a shame.
This gave you an unreasonable amount of time to notice both of those last facts, which was a shame, because under normal circumstances, you had a tremendously entertaining time at Shangra. Specifically, you had a tremendously entertaining time watching what happened to the people within when Garling entered a room. The straightening of spines. The sudden urgent interest in whatever wall was furthest from him. The way even the most decorated among them seemed to briefly forget how breathing worked. You had once watched a man of considerable rank and reputation develop an immediate and pressing need to be somewhere else entirely upon hearing Garling's footsteps in an adjacent corridor.
You found all of this genuinely delightful. You were, as far as you could tell, the only person in the entire building who did not experience Garling Figarland as a particularly compelling argument for relocating to another country, and this made Shangra a very enjoyable place to spend an afternoon.
Except today.
Today, you were having a terrible time, and it was entirely your own fault, which made it worse.
You were a reasonable person. You had been a reasonable person for the entirety of your adult life, sensible and even-tempered and not given to distraction by superficial things. And yet here you were, walking two paces behind the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights through one of the most politically significant buildings in the known world, noticing his jaw.
And his shoulders.
And the specific, unhelpful way the uniform sat across them. Whoever had tailored it had done their job extremely well, and you were prepared to resent them for it.
Several God's Knights passed in the corridor ahead. They saw Garling, and the effect was immediate: a subtle but unmistakable ripple of collective tension, eyes forward, backs straight, the practiced stillness of men who had quietly concluded that not moving was the safest available option. One of them glanced at you, registered your expression, and looked briefly confused. Whatever he had expected to see on the face of the woman walking behind the Supreme Commander, it was evidently not that.
You arranged your face into something more appropriate.
Your libido, which had apparently spent the better part of your adult life in a dormant state, was staging an inconvenient revolt. You resented it deeply and personally.
Shamrock, at least, was fine. More than fine. You had looked out over the courtyard on your way through and found him comprehensively dismantling a training partner twice his age with the focused satisfaction of a child who had been waiting for a proper challenge. He didn't need you. No one down there needed you. You had nothing to do with your attention except direct it somewhere inconvenient.
Such peace continued to elude you.
Garling glanced back, unhurried. "You're very quiet. Sommers isn't here today, so I can't attribute it to restraint." The faintest lift at the corner of his mouth. "What's on your mind, my dear?"
You did your best to be an adult.
"I'm thinking."
"About?"
"Nothing that concerns you." Damn. Your sass was a sure tell that you were annoyed.
He held a door, and you walked through it, which meant passing rather close to him, which did not help in the slightest. You caught the scent of him, clean and rich, and the several days of beard was even worse up close, and you moved through the doorway with perhaps more speed than was strictly dignified.
He fell back into step beside you, which was also gentlemanly and also unhelpful. Today, he had apparently decided to walk with you, at your shoulder, close enough that the sleeve of his uniform occasionally brushed your arm, and you were going to lose your mind in the corridor of Shangra Temple, and that was simply what was going to happen.
"You're doing it again," he said.
"Doing what?"
"Looking at the wall. Directly away from me. That usually means your either upset or embarrassed."
"I happen to find this wall interesting."
"It's the same wall it's always been."
"I'm noticing it more today."
He said nothing to this, which was somehow more aggravating than if he'd pushed further. You could feel him not smiling beside you. The not-smiling was extremely loud.
You lasted approximately another thirty seconds.
"Do you intend," you said, to the middle distance, with the crisp diction of someone raising a perfectly professional point, "to ever kiss me properly? Or is this simply not something you plan to get around to?"
Garling stopped walking.
You stopped walking because he had, and turned to look at him with the expression of someone who had asked a very reasonable administrative question and was waiting for an equally reasonable administrative answer.
He was looking at you with his head tilted very slightly, and his mouth was doing something he was making absolutely no effort to control. "I beg your pardon."
"You heard me."
"I did," he said. "I'd like to hear you say it again."
"I would prefer not to." You faced forward and resumed walking, because standing still in Shangra’s corridor, having this conversation was not something you were prepared to do. "The contract allows for it. I'm simply noting that you seem in no particular hurry, and I find that—" You searched for the word. "Neglectful."
He caught up in one stride, which was irritating given the length of his legs, and when you glanced at him, he was smiling. Properly smiling, which he did not do especially often and which was, you felt, extremely poorly timed.
"Neglectful," he said, with great enjoyment.
"Of your contractual obligations, yes."
"I see." He was still smiling. "And this is a professional concern."
"It is."
"Formally raised."
"Formally, yes."
"In the corridor."
"That's where we are," you said.
He laughed. Short and genuine, startled out of him, and he pressed his fingers briefly to his mouth the way he did when he was trying to recover himself. You kept walking and kept your chin up and kept your expression one of absolute neutral dignity, which was a remarkable achievement.
"Are you," he said, catching up again, the smile still audible in his voice, "asking me to kiss you?"
"I am raising a concern," you said. "There is a difference."
"There really isn't."
"Garling."
"Yes, my dear."
"Stop smiling."
"I'm afraid I can't do that." He clasped his hands behind his back with the air of a man settling in to enjoy himself thoroughly. "My shy wife has just ambushed me in a professional corridor to raise formal concerns about my neglecting her needs. I find that I must make her quite uneasy, for her to follow me all the way to my place of work to do it." A thoughtful pause. "A place where I cannot immediately remedy my sins. Unless, of course, you'd like me to kiss you here and risk one of my knights rounding the corner—"
You winced.
"No. Absolutely not. This was—forget it, the whole thing was absurd, just—"
Garling moved, stepping in front of you, his fingers finding your chin and tilting it up before you could retreat behind your dignity.
You looked at him.
He looked back at you, entirely collected, with just enough of a curve at the corner of his mouth to be genuinely infuriating.
"May I," he said, repulsively polite about it, "kiss your lips?"
Utterly humiliating. You wanted to say no purely out of spite, but that would only be punishing yourself at this point, and so all you managed was a very small, very wan yes, your blood-darkened face doing the majority of the speaking.
He regarded you for a moment with unhurried attention.
"Very good, my love." He released your chin and stepped back, straightening. "And I will. But at my discretion and my timing. I can't make things too easy, else you'll fret yourself into a knot waiting for it." He said this quite cheerfully, turned, and began walking again as though the whole exchange had been a pleasant administrative aside.
You stared at his back.
The upset arrived promptly and in full.
"That," you said, falling into step behind him, "is a horrid answer."
"It's a candid one."
You faced forward, chin up, expression arranged into something that was not quite a scowl, only through significant personal effort. Your face was doing something entirely unforgivable, and the corridor was very long, and Garling was walking with the relaxed satisfaction of a man who had gotten exactly what he wanted out of the last five minutes.
"Neglectful," you muttered, under your breath.
From just ahead of your left shoulder came the quiet sound of a man keeping his composure mostly internal.
Mostly.
-X-
The final cracks of your chastity developed subtly.
This was important context. It started subtly, which meant that when you eventually looked back and traced the shape of it, you would not be able to identify the exact moment Garling stopped lingering near you in doorways and became someone with a more specific agenda. It happened by increments, which was his preferred method of doing everything, and you had five years of evidence that you were catastrophically bad at noticing his increments until you were already inside them.
In your defense: you had been busy.
In his defense: he had been counting on that.
The first increment was the sitting room.
You had a habit, newly established, of reading in the sitting room after Shamrock went to bed. An hour, sometimes two, depending on the book. The sitting room had good lamps and a comfortable chair, and was the room in the house that most felt like yours rather than the household's, and you had been free to use it in the evenings for several years and had no intention of stopping.
Garling started appearing in it, earlier than the set hour you’d normally reserve.
Not always. Not with any predictable schedule you could plan around, just, increasingly, there, in the other chair with a dispatch or a report, existing in your evening the way he'd started existing in your mornings, as though the sitting room had always been something you did together and had simply not arranged the furniture for it yet.
This was fine. You had established comfort with his presence. You were mature adults.
Then one evening, he sat on the sofa instead of the chair.
The sofa was not across the room from your chair. The sofa was adjacent.
You looked at the sofa. You looked at him on it.
"Your chair is—" you started.
"The lamp is better here," he said, looking at his document.
The lamp was not better there. The lamp was the same. You looked at the lamp and formulated this objection and then looked at him, and he was reading with the complete absorption of a man who had made a very casual choice for very casual reasons, so you let it go.
The next evening, he sat there again.
You looked at your book.
You sat in your chair. Barely read four pages.
Garling read his dispatch. At some point, he set it aside and looked at his own book.
At some point, which you were not sure when exactly, he had moved to the end of the sofa closest to your chair, and the lamp was there, so fine, the lamp, whatever—
He kissed you on the temple.
Very easy. Very brief. Like something that had always happened. You looked up from your book. He was looking at his again.
"Yes, love?"
You went back to your book, face burning. What could you possibly say to that sort of name-giving? You weren’t about to again give him the satisfaction of having a fit over him not kissing you properly.
You read two more pages and absorbed zero of them, fingers brushing where he kissed, ignoring his sly grin as he edged closer along the sofa.
These new assaults weren’t just contained in the sitting room. In the study, when you came in with something for Shamrock's curriculum and stayed to discuss it. In the kitchen, unpredictably, in the middle of conversations about the household schedule. Once in the garden, in front of the roses, when you'd been explaining something about Shamrock's mathematics and had apparently reached the end of a sentence, he found particularly—
Another surprise kiss.
"What was that for?" you said, cheeks stinging at the affection from feeling such soft lips upon them.
"You look very lovely among the roses," he said. “You may continue, I was listening.”
"That's not—you can't just—"
"You get very animated," he said, "when you talk about his progress." He said it the way he said things he'd observed and found significant. "Your hands move."
You looked at your hands.
"They do not—"
"They do. You do this—" He made a small gesture that was, infuriatingly, exactly what your hands did. "When you're pleased about something."
"That's not—" You clasped your hands together. "That's irrelevant."
"It's not irrelevant to me," he said.
You turned back to the roses and said something about quadratic equations that didn't quite make grammatical sense, and he listened with his full attention, and your hands did the thing, and you were choosing not to acknowledge this.
-X-
The reception at Saint Halverne's was unavoidable, as was your eventual return to society, albeit with your shiny new title as Saintess Figarland.
You had been avoiding Halverne's receptions for years on the grounds that they were long and crowded and the food was mediocre and the conversation was worse, but you were no longer a governess who could decline on grounds of household duty and you were apparently now someone whose absence would be noted, so you went, in something nice, with Garling, and you stood at the edge of a very large room and thought about exits.
"There are four," Garling said.
You looked at him. "What?"
"Exits. You're calculating them."
"I'm not—" You were absolutely calculating them, and he looked very smug to call it. "I'm looking for Martha."
"Mm." He scanned the room with the practiced efficiency of a man who had been doing threat assessments at social functions since before you were born. "The Ethanbrough contingent is by the east wall. We'll go left, search for her there. We’ll leave if your sister doesn’t appear soon.”
"I can manage Saint Ethanbrough—"
"I know." He put his hand on your back. "We're going left anyway. He annoys me."
You went left.
The first hour was manageable. You found people you didn't mind, conversations with actual content, and the particular relief of discovering that a woman you'd been introduced to three weeks ago was genuinely funny and held similarly strong opinions about the mediocre food.
It helped, too, that most of the room had by now accepted you as the Supreme Commander's wife. The curiosity remained, but the more pointed variety had cooled considerably. Particularly after the incident with Saintess Celestina, who had made some manner of attempt and been sent sobbing out of her own drawing room in embarrassment. The specifics had traveled fast, as specifics tended to in this social climate, and the general conclusion appeared to be that whatever you had done to secure Garling Figarland, it was not worth testing.
You were in the middle of all this, relaxed in a way you'd never quite managed at these things before, when Saint Riven appeared.
Most people knew of Saint Riven the way they knew of bad weather: periodic, potentially disruptive, best observed from a distance. He was older than you, handsomer than average, and possessed the specific confidence of a man who had been told yes so consistently that no had become a theoretical concept. He moved through rooms like someone who had never once considered he might not be welcome in them.
"Saintess Figarland," he said, with the smile of a man who considered his own charm a law of nature. "I've been hoping for an introduction. You're remarkably difficult to find."
"Saint Riven." You kept your tone pleasant. "I'm afraid I prefer my own home. You'll find me there most days, which keeps me very satisfactorily occupied."
"Is that so?" He didn't seem discouraged. "I've heard rather different things about you, actually. Not least from Saint Edran, who spoke very highly of your knowledge of sailing routes."
Saint Edran ran the sailing companies that ferried Celestial Dragons across the seas for a considerable fee, and was, in your experience, a perfectly agreeable man who talked about tidal patterns for longer than was strictly necessary.
"Saint Edran is generous," you said.
"He mentioned you want to sail the Grand Line."
"I do."
"Your proposed route." He made a small appreciative sound, as though the idea were something to taste. "I'd very much love to hear about it sometime. Perhaps over—"
He stopped.
Garling had appeared.
There was no other word for it. He simply materialized at your shoulder with the quality of a man who had crossed a room like a ghoulish specter, and he looked at Saint Riven with an expression of complete and total flatness. No hostility. No performance. Simply the steady, unblinking attention of someone who had made an assessment and was content to let it sit there in the open air between them.
Saint Riven, to his credit, did not immediately flee.
"Saint Figarland," he said, with the composure of a man recalibrating quickly. "I was just speaking with your wife about a sailing trip—"
"Were you," said Garling. Not a question. "With my wife."
A pause with some weight to it.
"We were discussing sailing," you offered, into the silence, because the silence had a quality that suggested it would happily continue until something died. "The Grand Line route. Saint Edran mentioned it to him."
"Mm," said Garling.
He looked at you. Not at Riven. At you, and the expression was more ferocious than his usual, something running close to the surface that you hadn't seen since the garden, the night that had apparently established the high watermark for your cardiovascular system—
"You look like you’re enjoying the evening?"
"It's—yes, mostly, the food isn't—"
He kissed you square on the mouth.
Nothing like the morning variety. Nothing like the careful, patient, maddening restraint of the past several months. This had a different quality entirely—his hand at your jaw, the other at your waist, pulling you in with a sureness that left no interpretive room whatsoever, and he kissed you the way a man kissed someone he had been thinking about kissing for a very long time and had just been handed a reason. Thorough. The kind of kiss that made the room go distant and strange around the edges, that made friction between two hot mouths include tongue and teeth.
A kiss that made you forget for several long seconds that Saint Riven was two feet away, that Saint Ethanbrough was openly staring from across the room, that there were approximately one hundred and fifty Celestial Dragons in this building, and every single one of them had eyes.
It had been months since the garden.
You had forgotten, somewhat, what this was like.
You were remembering very quickly.
He broke it.
You opened your eyes. Your hand had found the front of his uniform at some point, fingers curled into the fabric, and you released it with what dignity you could locate, which was not very much.
Your face was the temperature of something geological.
Garling looked at you for a moment—ferocious underneath, something in his eyes that had not entirely settled—then turned to Saint Riven with an expression of absolute pleasantness that had nothing friendly in it whatsoever.
Saint Riven looked at him. Then at you. Then at him again.
"Lovely evening," he said, and excused himself with remarkable efficiency.
You were still trying to locate your lungs when Garling said, with perfect composure: "I've already bought you a ship. So I'd prefer you not let other men attempt to flatter you onto theirs."
You stared at him.
He had bought you a ship. He had apparently bought you a ship, hadn't meant to say so yet, and had been pushed into it by Saint Riven's conversation, and the fact that this was what had finally produced a real kiss after five months of forehead and hand and the occasional cheek—
You couldn't stop the smile. You tried. You genuinely tried.
"You kissed me in front of a hundred and fifty people—finally kissed me properly—because he mentioned sailing?"
Garling straightened his collar. "He was about to suggest dinner."
"You don't know that—"
"He was about to suggest dinner," he said again, with the serenity of a man who had watched this particular approach enough times to recognize a rake from the foundations. "The ship was the opening. Dinner within two exchanges. Then an attempt at considerably more."
"You could have just—stood there. That would have been sufficient."
"Yes," he agreed pleasantly.
"Then why—"
He looked at you. That look. The one that said: ‘This was the polite response’.
"Oh," you said.
"We have been married," he said, perfectly even, "for nearly five months."
"I'm aware—"
"And I have been patient."
"You just kissed me at a formal reception in front of—"
"I kiss you every morning."
"That is completely different—"
"Is it?"
You looked at him. He looked back. The reception continued chattily around you, as though one of its attendees had not just had something happen to her entire face.
"People are going to talk," you said.
"People have been talking since before the wedding."
"Now they'll talk specifically—"
"Yes," he said. Entirely unbothered. "They will."
You pressed your lips together.
"You're not embarrassed."
"No."
"At all."
"No."
"I am very embarrassed," you said.
"I know." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. He raised one hand and touched, very briefly, the side of your neck. "You go this color here first. Then your face."
"You don't need to—stop cataloging me—" You stepped back fractionally, which didn't help, because your face was doing the exact thing he had just described in the exact order he had just described it, which was deeply unfair. "Stop teasing me."
"I bought you a ship," he said. "I'll tease you as I like."
You stared at him.
"I have every intention," he continued, with the composure of a man discussing shipping logistics, "of making love to my wife on that boat at some point. She is very pretty, and the boat will be private, and I am a patient man who is nonetheless aware that patience has a horizon."
Your face was extremely hot.
"I need," you said, "to go speak to—" You gestured vaguely at the room, the exits, the general concept of anywhere else. "Someone."
"Of course."
"And you're going to stay here and—not—" You gestured at him, at the general situation he had created.
"I'll be here," he said.
You went.
Martha found you.
She took one look at your face, accepted a glass of juice from a passing tray with the ease of a woman who had been attending these functions for years, and patted your shoulder.
"He told you about the loveboat."
You turned to stare at her. "He—how do you know about—"
"He asked me for specifics." She sipped her drink. "The family's been placing bets on whether he'd actually go through with it. I had him down for waiting until you were pregnant to surprise you, so I've lost money tonight, which I'm choosing to blame on you."
"Pregnant—" The word came out at a volume unsuitable for a formal reception. You lowered it. "That's the—he's a—"
"Don't look so stricken. He's watching you right now."
"He's not—"
"He absolutely is. He lets you wander because he likes watching you have a good time. You're being shown off, darling."
"That's—" You didn't turn around. Folded your arms and considered it. Showing off was, actually, entirely within his established range of behavior. "Perhaps. Possibly. He's probably bored."
"I genuinely don't think so." Martha sounded almost admiring, which was alarming. She lowered her voice. "I don't know what sort of powers you're operating with—" You went rigid as she appeared to search for a diplomatic phrasing and declined to find one. "But the way that man looks at you. Clearly, someone is very satisfied."
You tilted your head back and addressed the ceiling.
"He's coming over," Martha said. "Oh, he has two glasses. The good ones. Where did he even find those? They were certainly not at my table—"
You turned around.
Garling was crossing the room with two glasses of something considerably better than what had been circulating at the general tables, which meant he had located the good supply specifically and done so with you in mind. You were going to need a moment with that information.
He offered you one and kissed your cheek.
"The canapés by the window are better than the others," he said, producing one as evidence. "I checked." He glanced at Martha, who was visibly delighted by this entire situation. "Good evening, Martha. I trust you're well."
"Oh, I'm having a tremendous time," she said warmly. "How very considerate of you, Saint Garling."
You looked at him. "You surveyed the canapés."
"You haven't eaten since this afternoon."
"I—"
"You forget to eat at these things when you're managing Shamrock." He said it simply, "The ones by the window are better. I'll get some."
"You really don't have to—"
He had already turned toward the window, unhurried, entirely committed to the canapé mission, leaving you standing next to your sister with a good glass of wine and no remaining argument.
Martha watched him go.
He came back with canapés.
You ate one. It was, in fact, better than the others.
"Thank you," you said, and reached up and brushed a kiss against his jaw, which was the nearest thing to reach.
"Mm," he said. "Thank you, darling."
Martha watched all of this with the expression of a woman composing an account she intended to deliver in full at a later date.
"Remarkable," she said. "Send him to train my husband."
