Page 154 of The Crown’s Temptation

He dismissed Ivernet and sat with the quiet for a while.

After, he went below to the library himself, moving through the shelves with the attention Aviaryn had shown him, looking for the ones with illustrations. In the evenings he would meet her in the sitting area in the east wing that had two comfortable chairs and a warm fire. He had not ever remembered using it, but he had remembered it recently and thought it a good place for the reading to take place. Aviaryn met him there each evening with whatever she had found in the library that day and he would show her what he had found and they would decide which story she would read to him. She would sit in the chair beside the fire with the book held at an angle that suggested she was still learning how to hold one properly. Her reading was careful and precise and she did not look up when she turned pages.

One evening she set the book down and said, "There is a story I have heard about. Someone told me of it." A pause. "A friend, I think is the correct word."

"What is it called?"

She told him.

He said he would look into it.

His strength was still not what it needed to be. What little he had he spent carefully.

Admittedly, calling for his Morraks spent a great deal of strength in his current condition. Yet he did it, as they had an important assignment. He called them quietly, the way he called all things quietly now. "Find it. Check them all."

It took three days.

When the book arrived he felt a strange satisfaction he could not entirely account for. He looked at it, as well as for the newer books he had requested without knowing their names, only that the ones in Kelsey castle had faded illustrations and appeared old, and he suspected Aviaryn would enjoy new ones. He brought them to the east wing that evening. She looked at the stack. Then at him.

"Is it for me to keep?" Her mouth opened slightly.

"Yes," he said. "And the others. You said that one was for a friend, so I found you a few of your own."

He felt strange giving them to her. Almost shy, which was not a word he had ever applied to himself and did not intend to start now. He did not know much about children. He did not know why he wished to please her at all. He only knew that he had and that the wanting had arrived without his permission.

She looked at the books. Her expression did not change. She took the one for her friend first, then looked at the others.

He had gotten it wrong.

Then she looked up at him and did something he had never seen her do before.

She smiled. A full, unguarded smile, and when she did he saw the gap where an upper tooth had recently been. Small and ordinary and entirely human. The kind of thing that happened to children her age everywhere in the world and nowhere in Morrath.

It pleased him more than he knew what to do with.

She looked at the remaining pile and carefully selected three more books, setting them apart from the others.

He frowned. “Are you not interested in the other three?"

She looked at them. Then at him. "I believe," she said, "that friends sometimes read together." A pause. "I would like to read those with you."

Sevrin looked at her for a moment.

He could not help it. He smiled.

"I would like that," he said.

As he walked back to his room, he thought of Asharin. She would like Aviaryn, he decided. He would find her interesting the way that she did. And endearing. And in need of something that she had given him, and that he was giving her, and that was so foreign to him that the exchange of it sometimes made everything in his chest go warm.

Reciprocity.

The Argument

SEVRIN

The argument at dinner that evening began the way it always did.

He was beginning to find a strange sort of comfort in it. The way it escalated and then plateaued and then escalated again without ever quite resolving. It was, he had come to realize, the most honest thing that happened in this castle on any given day.