The meeting room was on the fourth level of the east wing, past two checkpoints and a corridor that turned three times before arriving anywhere useful. Lira counted the turns on the way in and filed them in the part of her memory she used for routes and exits, a habit so long-standing it had become reflexive. She had been mapping exits since before she had the vocabulary for what she was doing. Her father had called it being aware of the room, and she had called it that too for a long time before she understood it was a specific response to a specific kind of life, the kind that required knowing, at any given moment, how to leave.\n\nShe had been escorted from the workshop by a household official who had introduced himself as Senior Coordinator Ren and who had the manner of a man whose job involved managing the logistics of important people and who had therefore long since ceased to be impressed by any of it. He had given her a brief and accurate description of where they were going, the route they would take, and approximately how long the meeting would last. She had listened carefully and asked two clarifying questions, and he had answered them and asked nothing in return, which she appreciated.\n\nShe arrived at the door two minutes before the appointed time. She had been aiming for three, but the third corridor was longer than she had estimated. She stood outside and did not fidget. She had a rule about not fidgeting in corridors before important meetings, a rule she had developed through practice and now maintained through habit. It was a small rule but it had served her consistently, and she did not discard things that served her consistently.\n\nThe room inside was smaller than she had expected, given what she knew about the way formal spaces were proportioned in buildings like this one. Most rooms in the palace district that were used for official meetings were sized for impression, for the particular discomfort of smallness that a person felt standing in a room built for people who were larger than them in the ways that counted. This room was none of that. A single long table. Six chairs. A window. A tea service that had not been touched. The proportions were working proportions, and she noted this and found it informative in the same way that his voice in the stairwell had been informative: it told her something about how he chose to use the spaces available to him, and that was something worth knowing.\n\nShe sat down and placed her hands on the table and then placed them in her lap and then settled on folded in front of her on the table, because she was not going to spend energy managing her hands during a meeting that required her attention for other things. She reviewed the questions she had prepared and went through them once more in order of priority, in case the meeting moved faster than anticipated and she needed to know which ones she was not willing to skip.\n\nThe door opened and he walked in.\n\nShe had been in his physical presence exactly once before, under conditions that were not favorable for careful observation. She had been behind a shelving unit in a restricted room, working by feel and sound rather than sight, and her observation of him at the moment of discovery had been limited by the circumstances of the discovery. She had managed an impression: younger than the voice, still and measured, the quality of someone who assessed before reacting.\n\nNow she had the opportunity to look properly. She did, with the same quality of attention she gave to things she needed to understand.\n\nHe was in his formal daytime dress. Not the ceremonial robes of public events, which she had seen twice at a distance, but working formal clothes, composed and exact and clearly expensive in the way that things were expensive when the expense was not the point and was therefore invisible. He moved the way people moved when they had inhabited a bearing since childhood and the bearing had long since stopped being separate from them, when the posture was not performance but structure. He was, she thought, not particularly aware of how he moved, because he had never had reason to become aware of it. This told her something about his life that she had already guessed and now had evidence for.\n\nHe stopped when he saw her, for the precise duration required to register that she was there and process that information. Then he walked to the chair across from her and sat down. He arranged the documents he was carrying with the practiced efficiency of someone for whom this was a motion performed dozens of times a day, without particular thought. He did not look at her while he arranged them.\n\nShe waited. She was good at waiting.\n\nHe opened the topmost document. \"The arrangement has been confirmed by both parties,\" he said. His voice in this context was slightly different from the voice she had heard in the storage room. Fuller, more deliberate, calibrated for official purpose. It had the quality of a professional register, a voice that had been shaped for this kind of use. She heard, underneath it, the same thing she had heard before, and she filed this without examining it. \"I will review the public-facing terms, and you may raise questions before we proceed.\"\n\n\"All right,\" she said.\n\nHe reviewed them. He was precise and unhurried and used exactly the language the document used, which she found useful because it confirmed the document as the primary source rather than his interpretation of it. She followed along easily, noting the places where the language was slightly looser than she would have preferred and the places where it was specific in the ways that mattered. When he had covered the key elements, she let a beat of silence pass.\n\n\"You're not going to mention the other night,\" she said.\n\nShe had prepared many opening approaches and had spent several minutes this morning deciding not to use any of them, because none of them accomplished what she actually needed, which was to establish, as quickly as possible, whether the thing that sat between them was going to be acknowledged or managed. The direct approach was not always the elegant one. It was usually the one that gave her the clearest information.\n\nHe had been looking at the document. He looked up, not sharply, not slowly, with the same measured pace he applied to everything. His expression gave her very little. She was already learning to pay attention to the specific quality of the little it gave her.\n\n\"No,\" he said.\n\nOne word. Not hostile. Not apologetic. Not layered with any of the things that one-word answers often tried to contain. Just the word, with the weight of a decision behind it: that subject is closed, I closed it, I am not re-opening it, and I am not going to explain the decision because it is not a decision I owe an explanation for.\n\nShe considered it. She found it, somewhat to her surprise, sufficient. She had closed doors before for reasons she had not explained, and she understood the practice, and she respected it in him in the same way she respected her own version of it.\n\n\"Understood,\" she said.\n\nHe returned to the documents. He covered the public announcement timeline, the narrative that would be presented to the court, the specific language that would be used in formal communications. He was thorough without being excessive. She listened and noted.\n\n\"What does the court need to see?\" she asked, when he had finished the announcement section. \"In specific terms.\"\n\nHe looked up. She had noticed, even in the short duration of this meeting, that he looked up from documents when a question required actual consideration rather than a formulaic response. This one did.\n\n\"Consistent and believable presence,\" he said. \"Twice-weekly public appearances, conducted with the appropriate degree of visible mutual regard.\"\n\n\"Define appropriate degree,\" she said.\n\nHe held her gaze for a moment. \"Sufficient warmth to be credible,\" he said. \"Sufficient restraint to be dignified.\"\n\n\"That is two adjectives without a definition between them.\"\n\nAnother pause. She waited through it. She had the sense that he was not accustomed to being asked to be more specific, not because he disliked specificity, but because most people did not ask. They took the adjectives and filled in the meaning themselves.\n\n\"Proximity,\" he said. \"Consistent attention. The appearance of preference. At a minimum.\" A pause that felt considered. \"At a minimum, because the precise requirements will depend on the context of each event.\"\n\n\"Better,\" she said. \"Thank you.\"\n\nHe looked at her for a moment with an expression in the vicinity of recalibration, and she noted this without interpreting it yet, because she did not have enough data.\n\nThe protocol briefings, he said, he would conduct personally. She asked why, genuinely. He said no in a way that meant: I have a reason, and the reason is sufficient, and the reason is not something I am sharing. She filed this too.\n\nShe asked her final question of the formal review. He answered it. When she had nothing left to ask, she said: \"I have a condition of my own.\"\n\nHe waited. She noted that he waited without visible impatience, without any of the small signals people gave when they expected a condition to be manageable and were already preparing to agree to it. He simply waited.\n\n\"When I do something that causes a problem,\" she said, \"I want to hear it from you, directly. Not softened, not managed through an intermediary. I want to know what the problem is and why it is a problem, stated plainly.\" She kept her voice even and her hands still. \"I work better with accurate information than with the consideration people apply when they think accuracy might be uncomfortable.\"\n\nHe looked at her across the table, and for a moment she had the experience she had not had yet in this meeting, the experience of being seen rather than assessed, of someone looking at the actual content of what she had said rather than at the category it belonged to.\n\n\"Agreed,\" he said.\n\nThey signed the remaining confirmation documents. She asked two more small questions. He answered them in full, without surplus. They stood. She picked up her bag.\n\nHe was at the door when he stopped. She had been preparing to follow him out, and then she was not. He was looking at the door, or at the wall adjacent to the door, at the specific point that people looked at when they were deciding whether to say something they had been holding in a different part of the conversation.\n\n\"You said,\" he began. She stilled herself. \"That night. That I sounded like someone who had given up asking.\" He paused. \"What did you mean by that.\"\n\nShe thought about her answer for a full three seconds. Not because she did not know it, but because she wanted to give it in the form that was most accurate.\n\n\"I meant,\" she said, \"that there is a difference between knowing what is expected of you and accepting that it is enough. And you said the words the way someone says something they have stopped being sure of, but have not stopped saying because the alternative is to stop and look at what is actually there.\" She paused. \"I meant that you sounded like someone who had not looked in a long time.\"\n\nHe said nothing. He did not move for a moment. Then he opened the door and left.\n\nShe stood in the meeting room in the silence after the door closed, and she looked at the window, where the inner courtyard was doing its quiet afternoon things, pear tree and stone wall and pale light.\n\nShe thought: he asked.\n\nShe thought: he had already decided not to acknowledge it, and then he asked.\n\nShe picked up her bag and found her way back through the three-cornered corridor, counting turns, filing the route. She had a policy about exits. She always committed them to memory before she needed them, because you never knew exactly when you would.\n\nShe walked back through the supply district in the afternoon air and thought about what she had agreed to, and what she had said, and what he had not said in response, and whether the not-saying was the same thing as the not-saying in the storage room or whether it was a different kind.\n\nShe thought: I have one hundred days to understand the difference.\n\nShe thought: that is either exactly enough time or exactly not enough, and I will not know which until I am on the other side of it.\n\nShe bought bread from the bakery at the corner of her street and went home and ate it without tasting it and went to bed early and did not sleep for a long time.\n\n\nThe night after signing the confirmation documents, she lay in her narrow bed and ran through the terms one more time from memory. She had a habit of doing this with agreements: committing them fully, checking her recall against itself, catching the places where her memory had softened something the document had said precisely. It was a form of accountability she applied to herself, the same kind she would have applied to a supplier who had told her one price and invoiced another. She held herself to the same standard.\n\nThe terms held up. The contract was what it had been described as. The exit was clean. The compensation was fixed. The duration was one hundred days.\n\nShe thought about the line that kept returning to her: both parties agree not to develop personal attachments that complicate the contracted exit. She had read it four times in the room and filed it and now it was back, asking to be examined.\n\nShe examined it. Both parties was the phrase that carried the weight. It was not one party, the commoner who had no business in a palace, who might be expected to develop inconvenient feelings in an inconvenient direction. It was both, symmetric, written as if the risk ran both ways with equal probability.\n\nShe thought: someone wrote that sentence because they thought both parties needed it.\n\nShe thought: I am probably the person who needs it.\n\nShe thought: I do not develop attachments. I have structured my entire life around not developing attachments, because attachments require permanence, and permanence is a thing she had never been able to assume. She had learned to care about people without depending on them, to enjoy a place without belonging to it, to be fully present in a thing without requiring it to last.\n\nShe was very good at this. She had been practicing it for twenty-two years.\n\nShe thought: one hundred days.\n\nShe thought: that is a very specific number of days. Specific enough to count. Specific enough to track.\n\nShe closed her eyes and did not sleep for a long time, and in the dark her mind kept returning to a question she had not yet decided how to ask herself, a question about the difference between not developing attachments and not allowing oneself to notice things. She had always assumed those were the same category. She was beginning to suspect, with the low-level discomfort of someone encountering information that does not fit their existing framework, that they were not.\n\nShe fell asleep eventually and dreamed about nothing she could remember, and in the morning she went to the workshop and did her work and did not think about the meeting room or the words that had been said in it.\n\nShe managed this successfully for most of the morning, which she counted as reasonable under the circumstances.\n\nThe announcement went out at the end of the week, exactly as Caius had said it would. Lira learned of its contents from Nari, who mentioned it with the careful neutrality of a woman who had not yet decided what to make of the situation and was therefore making nothing of it, which was very like Nari. The announcement described a personal selection by the Crown Prince, framed in the language of mutual acquaintance and chosen interest, and said nothing that was technically false about the origin of it. She had expected this. It did not make reading it less strange.\n\nShe went to her room that evening and stood at the window and looked at the street below. Haesol was doing what it always did in the late autumn evenings: shutting up shops, moving toward warmth, the street-sellers calling their last rounds in voices that carried the specific hoarseness of a full day of use. She had been watching this street for two years. She knew the rhythms of it.\n\nShe thought: in one hundred days, I will still be watching this street. I will be back in this room. The house will not yet be bought, but it will be closer than it has ever been, and I will know how to count the distance to it in a way that has weight.\n\nShe thought: that is a good reason. That is a sufficient reason.\n\nShe did not think about the meeting room or about what she had said at the door, which was becoming increasingly difficult, because the thing she had said at the door kept finding its way into the edges of other thoughts and sitting there with the particular patience of a thing that has decided it will wait to be examined on its own terms rather than someone else's schedule.\n\nShe had one day before the household would send for her to begin. She used it to finish the commission she had been working on, to settle her accounts with the workshop for the period of her absence, and to write a short letter to Seline, who was in the southern port city and would hear the announcement within a week and would have questions. She wrote the letter with the same care she wrote everything important: accurately, without surplus, giving the true information in the form that served it best.\n\nShe did not write: I am not sure what I have agreed to. She did not write: there is a line in the contract about attachments and I keep thinking about it.\n\nShe wrote what was necessary and sealed the letter and left it with the post, and the next morning the household came for her and the hundred days began.