Page 218 of The Crown’s Temptation

"Everyone I've met until this evening."

The haze shifts between them, red and slow. Someone behind her finishes and someone else starts, and neither of them turns to look.

"You haven't fed."

"No."

"There's a room of it."

"There is."

"And you're standing here."

"Yes."

She has met men who were dull and men who were evasive, and she has a reliable sense for which is which. This is a third thing. He answers everything she asks and gives her nothing, and she can't tell whether that's discipline or amusement.

She's still deciding when he says, "You were slow with her."

"With the girl?"

"You could have taken it in half the time. You didn't."

"Would that have been better?"

"I didn't say better."

She takes the pipe from the table beside him without asking. Draws on it. Blows the smoke somewhere in the vicinity of his face.

"You'll want to tell me your name eventually."

"Will I?"

"Everyone does. It's the vanity. It gets them all in the end."

"Sevrin."

She takes another draw and doesn't hurry it.

So that's the man. She'd assumed she'd meet him on her own schedule, walk into Rathmor Palace announced as a Yorali princess, which she is, and take the measure of him across a table with both of them lying politely. That was a plan for a woman who was ready. It was going to happen in a year, possibly two, after she'd stopped being something Morrath was still teaching.

Instead he's here, and she has blood on her chin, and she's four days from losing whatever she decides to say to him.

"Something," Sevrin says.

"What?"

"Your face did something."

"My face does a great many things. Most of them are lies."

"That one wasn't."

"No." She hands him back the pipe. "It wasn't."

He leans in.

Nox catches his lower lip in her teeth and bites until she tastes him, holds it after he goes rigid, and keeps holding it.