Morning put the gloss back on everything. The Eastern Room shone. Lamps behaved. The bad hinge remembered itself without needing her palm.

  Tris rolled her cart with the same forgetful smile that let her stand where she liked. She set a paperweight on a folio that wanted to lift and hummed a nothing tune the House approved of.

  Tamryn arrived as if the room had thought him up: coat neat, eyes sensible red, the harmless-prince face fitted so cleanly you’d have to go looking for the seams. He didn’t go looking. He took a mid-room chair, put his ring hand flat on the table, and practiced being ordinary.

  A lady in lemon silk and ambition drifted to Tris’s path with a fan like a blade. “My dear, the Libraries do love to be seen, don’t they,” she cooed, “what with all the clever little… performances.”

  Tris forgot to notice her. “Oh dear,” she said to the cart, patting it. “You were in this room, weren’t you? Kind of you to show up. The other cart is simply useless.”

  A clerk—young, hopeful, cologne a touch too bold—stepped in with a stack. “Librarian, can I—?”

  “Thank you,” Tris said without looking up, taking the stack in a way that didn’t bruise the boy’s pride. The boy colored like a fruit and retreated, grinning at air. The lemon lady’s mouth puckered.

  From his chair, Tamryn watched the boy’s grin and swallowed something small and unhelpful. The flicker lasted only a heartbeat before he put it down where he put everything he couldn’t afford. His gaze slid back to the table like he’d never learned to look up.

  “Addendum,” Keeper Thalen said, appearing with the timing of weather. “Behave.”

  “It’s well trained,” Tris said, setting it just so in front of Queen Ilyra. The queen’s nod was the kind that meant the institution functioned. Warmth was not on the docket.

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  The lady in lemon tried again, sweeter. “Some of us work for a living, you know. Not everyone gets to push a cart and collect admirers.”

  “Oh, I don’t collect anything,” Tris said sunnily. “I misplace things. It’s a gift.”

  Someone behind a screen coughed a laugh and stopped. Tamryn’s mouth twitched; he held it steady. Harmless, harmless, harmless. He could do this in his sleep.

  He did, however, stand a moment later to carry an extra buffer of cushions to a low-backed chair by the window where drafts break manners. “Your shoulder,” he told an elderly minister, sincere. “Light’s better here.” An attendant followed with a second lamp. The effect shifted three different paths through the room—one of them the path the lemon lady had been using to loiter near Tris’s table.

  The lady tried the new route, found it unfashionable, and sailed elsewhere with a sniff.

  Tris set another paperweight, and if her knuckles brushed the table exactly on the beat his ring turned, that was between her and the wood.

  At the mid-morning lull he positioned a small screen—the kind with birds on it that says “decorative” while meaning “boundary”—to shield glare from Queen Ilyra’s left. It had the side effect of narrowing access to Tris’s desk to one clean approach: useful, polite, and absolutely deniable. Thalen gave the screen a noncommittal glance that could have meant thank you or murder. Both outcomes suited him.

  By noon the room remembered its manners. The lemon lady forgot to be interested in librarians. The hopeful clerk reshelved at the far end, humming.

  Later, in the service corridor where light turns kind, Tamryn and Tris arrived in the same space at the same time because the House enjoys patterns.

  “I was petty,” he said, low, as if reporting a minor crime.

  “You rearranged chairs,” she said. “Precision is a virtue.”

  He huffed, quiet. “The boy—”

  “Has terrible cologne,” she said, airy. “I forgave him.”

  “That seems generous.”

  “Soup makes me weak,” she said. “Don’t weaponize it.”

  “Noted.” His mouth tried to grin and learned restraint again. He brushed one knuckle near her wrist as if moving a thread; she let the thread be moved.

  “Later?” he said, not a vow, just the word in the air to see if it lived.

  She set a paperweight in his palm—brief, absurd—and took it back. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Which, by now, meant yes.

  He let harmless slot back into his bones and returned to the room that needed him to be forgettable. She rolled her cart past the bad corner. The hinge kept quiet on its own, which is all anyone can ask of a morning like this.