Elan's knock was distinctive from any other knock in the palace, which Naia had concluded was a function of personality rather than physics. Other knocks announced themselves. Elan's knock arrived with a particular quality of energy that was the knock equivalent of someone already mid-sentence.

Naia opened the door of the studio room to find Elan holding a sketchbook, which was hers, and a small bag, which contained what turned out to be two pastries from the kitchen that she had clearly acquired through the kind of casual authority that came from being someone the kitchen staff had known since childhood.

"Good morning," Elan said. "Can I work in here?"

"Yes," Naia said.

This was how their working sessions usually began. Elan had no formal schedule with Naia, which meant her appearances were governed entirely by her own interest and availability, which in practice meant she arrived approximately three mornings a week with work in various stages of completion and sat in Naia's studio room and drew while Naia worked on her own projects and they talked intermittently about drawing and other things.

Naia had found, over the weeks, that she looked forward to these sessions more than she had expected to look forward to anything inside the palace. Elan was good company in the particular way of people who were genuinely interested in the things they were interested in and did not perform interest they did not have.

This morning, Elan settled in the chair across the room and opened her sketchbook to a page she had been working on, a botanical study of one of the plants in the south garden, rendered with the improving accuracy of someone who was developing her eye faster than her hand could keep up. Naia looked at it across the room.

"You're getting the structure better," she said. "The branching."

"It still looks wrong in the middle section," Elan said, frowning at it.

"Because you're drawing what you think the branch looks like rather than what it actually looks like. Look at it for another minute before you add the line."

Elan looked. Drew. Looked again. The middle section improved.

They worked in the companionable quiet that had developed between them over the weeks, the kind of silence that did not need filling. Naia was working on a concept spread for the second book, a page that had been giving her trouble for several days, the composition not quite arriving at what she needed it to be. She was trying something with the negative space, the areas of the image that were not drawn, which she had been thinking about since Kael's comment about the empty chairs.

She was considering a particular line when Elan looked up from her botanical study and said: "Can I ask you something?"

"Yes," Naia said.

"Do you actually like him?"

Naia looked up.

Elan was looking at her directly, with the frank attentiveness she brought to things she was genuinely curious about. She had set down her pencil. This was, apparently, the real purpose of the morning visit, or at least one of its purposes.

"I like him," Naia said, which was accurate.

"That's not what I asked." Elan's tone was entirely without judgment, the way her questions generally were. She asked the way she looked at things: to understand, not to assess. "I asked if you actually like him. Not whether you find him acceptable. Not whether the arrangement is working. Whether you, specifically, as a person, have feelings for him that are not professional."

Naia set down her pencil.

She thought about the answer that was true and the answer that was accurate and whether they were the same answer. She thought about the catalogue, the four pages of things that were not in any briefing, the sketchbook full of drawings she kept turning pages on before she had looked at them long enough.

She gave the answer she had: careful, honest about the facts, constructed to answer without quite answering the question behind the question. She talked about the arrangement, about the genuine respect she had developed for him, about the complexity of working in such close proximity for an extended period and the blurring that could occur.

Elan listened to all of it.

Then she said: "That's a very good answer. It doesn't answer my question."

Naia looked at her.

"You didn't say no," Elan said. "When you're deciding what to say, you're not looking for the accurate description of what you feel. You're looking for the phrasing that doesn't commit you to anything." She said this with the matter-of-factness of someone reporting an observation rather than making a criticism. "That's a different thing."

Naia did not respond.

Elan picked up her pencil again, as if the conversation had reached a natural pause, and looked at her botanical study. After a moment she said, without looking up: "He's different since you've been here."

"Different how?"

"Small things." Elan added a careful line to the middle section of her drawing. "He comes to dinner without being reminded lately. He looked at a news piece about a music festival last week and mentioned it in conversation like it was something he was interested in, which is, for Ren, very significant evidence of something." She paused. "He pauses now. In conversations. Like he's actually thinking about what to say before he says it, rather than just producing the answer he knows is correct."

Naia sat with this.

"He was always thoughtful," she said.

"He was always correct," Elan said. "That's different. Correct means you've decided in advance what the right answer is and you give it. Thoughtful means you're actually engaging with the question in real time."

She said it without emphasis, as if it were a simple distinction she was reporting rather than a significant one, and Naia found that the simplicity of the delivery made it land more precisely than it might have if it had been delivered with weight.

She thought about conversations where he had paused. She had a catalogue of those too. The pause before he said things she had not expected him to say. The pause that she had been learning, slowly, was not uncertainty but something else: the quality of someone who took language seriously enough to use it only when he knew what he meant.

"He smiled," Elan said, still looking at her drawing. "Last Tuesday. In a meeting about infrastructure funding, which is objectively one of the least smile-producing environments possible. Someone made a very small joke and he smiled. Not the formal one. The real one." She looked up. "I have seen that smile approximately twelve times in the last five years. Last Tuesday was one of them."

Naia looked at the concept spread on her desk, at the negative space she had been trying to get right.

She thought about what it meant to draw the empty chairs before the prince. About where the weight was.

"Elan," she said.

"Yes."

"Why are you telling me this?"

Elan considered the question with apparent seriousness. Then she said: "Because you're going to leave in thirty-something days, and I don't think you know yet what you're leaving. And I think you should know."

She went back to her drawing.

Naia looked at the negative space in her concept sketch. She thought about what it would look like filled in and what it would look like remaining empty and which version of it was the drawing she was actually trying to make.

She picked up her pencil.

She did not draw what she had been planning to draw.

She drew, instead, a figure standing at the edge of a frame, looking in. Not from outside, not from inside. The threshold. The specific quality of someone who is deciding whether to cross.

She looked at it.

She thought it was the most accurate drawing she had made in several weeks, which was either good or alarming, and she did not have the distance yet to tell which.

"Elan," she said.

"Yes?"

"Your middle section is better."

Elan looked at her drawing. "It is, actually," she said, with genuine satisfaction, and they went back to work in the comfortable quiet, and Naia did not turn the page on the drawing for the rest of the morning.

After Elan left, Naia sat in the studio room for a long time.

She sat with the concept sketches and the sketchbook and the drawing she had made, the figure at the threshold, and she thought about what Elan had said: that she was going to leave in thirty-something days, and that she did not know what she was leaving.

She thought about what she was leaving.

She was leaving the palace and its corridors and its light at different hours and its garden and the specific bench in the northeast corner. She was leaving Elan, who knocked with her own particular energy and sat in the studio room and drew botanical studies with increasing accuracy and said things that were directly true in a way that few people were capable of being directly true.

She was leaving the version of herself she had been in these rooms.

She thought about that. About the version of herself that had been in these rooms for sixty-something days, the version that got up in the early morning and worked at a drafting table in south-facing light and spent evenings in a garden looking at the same sky as someone else. The version that had filled a sketchbook with the accumulated record of what she had been paying attention to.

She thought about whether that version of herself existed only inside the arrangement or whether it was a version she had always been, that the arrangement had made visible.

She thought about the drawings. She thought about the first book, which she had made before the arrangement, and whether the prince at the window had been drawing toward something he could see or something he could not. She thought about what Kael had said: you drew this before you met me.

She had.

She had drawn, for years, the specific shape of something she had not yet encountered. She had drawn loneliness and distance and the quality of being present in a room in a way that was not quite arrival. She had drawn it because it was what she understood and because understanding through drawing was the way she processed things she could not address directly.

And then she had drawn a person who recognized the drawing.

She thought about recognition. About what it meant to make something from the inside of yourself and have someone else see it and say: yes. That. I know that. Not as a response to the craft or the composition or the narrative, but as a response to the specific thing underneath all of those, the thing the drawing was actually about.

She thought about how rare that was.

She thought about what she had been trying to protect herself from and whether the protection was working.

She thought about Elan's words: you're going to leave in thirty-something days, and I don't think you know what you're leaving.

She thought: I am beginning to know.

She picked up the drawing she had made, the figure at the threshold, and looked at it.

She thought about thresholds. She had been drawing thresholds for days, ever since the conversation about page thirty-one, ever since she had understood that the second book was about the act of choosing rather than the result of choosing. She had been drawing the moment before the step, not the step itself.

She thought about why she kept drawing the moment before.

She thought she knew.

She was afraid of the step.

Not because she did not want to take it. Because she wanted to take it and could not be certain of the ground on the other side, and the uncertainty was the wound, the thing she had been carrying since she was nineteen, the thing that made her leave first and draw lonely princes from the inside of a studio and maintain distances that felt like independence.

She was afraid of the ground on the other side.

She sat with this.

She thought: I am allowed to be afraid and still take the step.

She thought: these are not the same thing.

She looked at the figure at the threshold.

She thought: I have been drawing this figure for a long time and I have never drawn what happens next.

She picked up her pencil.

She began to draw what happened next.

That afternoon she went to find Kael.

She did not have a specific reason. She had not planned the finding. She was walking through the palace in the way she walked through it when she was thinking, using the corridors as a kind of external surface for the internal work, and she found herself near his office and she knocked.

He was there. He said come in.

She came in and stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at the room, which was a working room rather than a formal one, with the quality of a space that was used by someone who worked in it rather than someone who received people in it. There were papers on the desk and a laptop open and something that looked like a policy document with notes in the margin in the small even handwriting she had seen on the sticky notes in her book.

"I'm interrupting," she said.

"No," he said. It was the simple negative, without elaboration, which she had come to understand meant: no, and also I am telling you the true thing rather than the polite thing.

She came the rest of the way in and sat in the chair that was not behind his desk, the chair that was there for visitors or for the version of him that was working through something rather than working at the desk.

They sat for a moment.

She said: "Elan told me you've been going for walks."

He looked at her. "She shouldn't have told you that."

"She told me because she thought it was relevant."

"It's not."

"She thought it was."

He was quiet. Then: "She is difficult to argue with."

"I know," Naia said. "She told me that my answer didn't answer her question."

He looked at her with the specific quality of attention he paid to things he was trying to understand. "What was the question?"

She thought about the answer.

She thought about the courage Elan had told her she might need. She thought about the figure at the threshold she had been drawing for days. She thought about what it meant to step across.

She said: "She asked if I actually liked you."

He was very still.

"And I gave the answer that was technically accurate," she said. "And she told me it sounded like an answer." She looked at him. "She was right."

He said nothing.

She looked at the window behind him, the east-facing window, the different angle of light. She thought about south-facing windows and what it meant to have your preferences remembered.

"I am trying to be more honest," she said. "Than I have been."

She stood. She looked at him for a moment, the specific attentive quality of someone who was paying the kind of attention that had been going both directions for seventy days.

"That's all," she said. "I just wanted to say that."

She left.

In the corridor, she walked back toward the studio room and thought about what she had said and about his stillness and about the specific courage it had taken to say even that much, which was not the full thing but was more than she had said before, and which meant she was moving in the right direction even if she had not yet arrived.

She thought: I am moving in the right direction.

She thought: that is enough for today.

After the conversation with Kael in his office, Naia walked back to the studio room and sat at the drafting table and thought about what she had said.

She had said: I am trying to be more honest than I have been.

This was, she understood, the beginning of something rather than the end of it. She had said the approach without saying the content. She had said she was moving toward something without saying what the something was. She had given him the direction without giving him the destination.

She thought about that distinction.

She thought about why she had given him the direction and stopped before the destination. She thought about the specific quality of honesty that was incremental rather than all at once, whether that was a real thing or whether it was the same management she had been doing for weeks dressed up in different language.

She sat with that for a while.

She thought: I am being honest at the pace of my courage. This is different from not being honest.

She thought: the pace of my courage is increasing.

She thought about the increment: she had gone to his office without a specific plan, which was itself new. She had said I am trying to be more honest without managing the sentence into something less revealing, which was also new. She had looked at him when she said it and registered that he understood what she meant, which was the third new thing.

She thought about what the fourth new thing would be.

She thought about the fourth new thing for a long time.

She was not going to do it today. But she was going to do it.

She thought about the drawing she had made earlier, the figure at the threshold, stepping across. She thought about what stepping across actually looked like, the physical reality of it: one foot moving forward, the weight shifting, the balance adjusting to the new position.

She had moved one foot.

The weight was beginning to shift.

She picked up the pencil and drew the second position: both feet across, in the room, the threshold behind her. She drew herself standing in the room fully. She drew the room around her.

She looked at the drawing.

She thought: this is where I am going.

She thought: I know how to get there.

She thought: I am getting there.

She went back to the second book, which was waiting, and worked until the light changed, and the work was the best it had been in weeks.