Niccola had no idea how long they stayed like that. Isaiah's energy eventually gave out, but he didn't move until Niccola rubbed his back to break the stillness between them.
"Bedtime?" she murmured.
He nodded. Niccola helped him to his feet, then found and dug his nightclothes from the rumpled covers of the bed so he wouldn't have to search for them. He murmured thanks. Niccola retreated to the opposite side of the room and turned her back so they could both change. Well, not really "change" on her part. She'd brought no other clothing with her. She kicked off her shoes with little ceremony, and stripped down to the soft undershirt and pants she wore beneath her dress. She and Phoebe had always donned layers, particularly when climbing trees or rookery ladders, or running wild in the streets. Many women in Varna wore pants alone, but Niccola had always preferred the best of both worlds.
Isaiah didn't seem any more bothered by changing or sleeping in the same room than she did, unless that was an apathy born of sheer exhaustion. The changing part at least made sense. He couldn't see her, and even if he could, she suspected he would be no more drawn to look indecently than she was.
"I'm done," said Isaiah behind her.
Niccola turned with a frown. "How—"
"You kicked your shoes against the wall." He smiled, weak but genuine. "Also, we've established that we are the same person on this."
So he'd have turned his back, too. The mutual respect of privacy went a long way to lifting the strangeness of the next discussion they had to have.
Isaiah made little ceremony of it, glancing down at the bed he was sitting on. "Which side do you want?"
"Do you have a preference?"
"Usually the back."
Unsurprising, given who may arrive to wake him on any given morning. The Calisian palace had serving staff, but a personal servant for the prince was conspicuously not among them.
"I should be ready to hide again if I have to anyway," said Niccola.
Isaiah said nothing. He snapped his fingers for Pekea, then rolled to the back of the bed and burrowed about as far under the covers as he could get without suffocating. Niccola moved about the room in a nighttime pattern somehow both familiar and foreign. The lamp, washstand, and washbasin were all far more like hers from back home than in the Bel Ilan manor, yet the fact that they were not hers somehow emphasized their foreignness. It was just as well that she couldn't see much as she finally blew out the lamp, padded to the bed, and slipped under the bedcovers. She nearly groaned at the comfort of them. She'd forgotten what a proper mattress and duvet felt like.
Isaiah was still shivering. Chilled, or in shock, or both. And the blankets weren't warm yet.
They weren't this close yet. Were they?
It would be inappropriate. She could find another blanket instead, though she had no idea where they were stored, or if Isaiah even had spares. In a room with only one chair by his parents' mandate, that seemed unlikely. She would also have to leave the warmth of the covers in her now-bare feet, and she'd tossed her socks off somewhere in the darkness, and they would take time and effort to find.
And hadn't she been hugging Isaiah a moment ago? She'd offered, and he'd taken it, and stayed much longer than he strictly needed to. Leaned into it like he was starved for touch. That was as good an indication as any that she could offer it again, unless sharing a bed was already too much of an intrusion, in which case she didn't want to risk pushing boundaries. Bad enough that they were locked in here together. That she would have to escape come morning.
Though that did mean nobody could walk in on them.
Isaiah stirred, curling up tighter. Pekea gave an anxious churr.
That would do for permission.
Niccola reached out to locate one of Isaiah's hands, only to find them both tucked up tight across his chest. She tugged one lightly. "I don't mind sleeping closer if you want to."
He hesitated, and Niccola nearly second-guessed everything she'd just decided. Then Isaiah shifted to make space for her as if there wasn't plenty enough already. Niccola joined him on the far side of the bed. He lifted a hand by habit to find where and how she lay, but stopped short before it made contact. Unwilling to touch wrong by accident. Niccola took it and guided it to her shoulder. Isaiah found the nook there and dropped into it immediately.
Niccola slipped her arm around him. That was all it took for him to melt against her side, where the shivering began to lessen almost immediately. There was nothing for it now; this was as close as they were going to get. Isaiah still didn't know what to do with his other hand, so Niccola interlaced their fingers, giving his arm a place to rest across her chest. He squeezed her hand in thanks. Niccola smiled as Pekea crept up and installed herself between their legs.
Only when both prince and dragon were asleep did the silence of the room set in. Niccola lay awake, listening to the whisper of the wind outside and the creak of stones settling in the walls as they cooled from the daytime sunshine. She was certain she would get no sleep tonight. Even after Isaiah's breathing became routine, every sound that could be a footstep set Niccola's senses afire, ready to leap out of bed to hide, or come up swinging if Meribah returned. She wanted so dearly to return the slap whose bruise already radiated heat from Isaiah's cheekbone. When Meribah set the guards on her, she would reveal her true identity. The Calisian royals would not dare kill fellow royalty lest that news reach their ally-enemies in Drevo and Madeira, even if it was a Varnic royal they killed.
Oh, how Meribah's face would twist when she realized the partner her son had chosen was not a crow-keep commoner at all, but a ruler from a lineage that made crow-keeping their national economy. Isaiah had standards. He deserved to maintain them, too. Just the thought of him being forced to write the letter Meribah had ordered made Niccola's stomach twist like she'd eaten something off for dinner. When she pictured Isaiah in the future, stepping up to rule after she helped him depose his parents, it was not an unfamiliar face beside him.
The fantasy cracked as the implications of what she was imagining came home to roost. She was not Isaiah's partner... yet his words to his mother came back, rebounding like an echo inside her mind.
You wish for me to take over the throne when you wish to retire from it? Then that is who I want to do it beside.
Niccola pulled her arm tighter around him. It was selfish of her, when there was still so much she hadn't told him after all his vulnerability. Selfish to imagine herself on a Calisian throne, or he on a Varnic one—or maybe they could finally ally the realms, even unite them under a single banner. With only a day's journey between the two, neither she nor Isaiah would ever be far from home. It would be the strategic alliance Isaiah had mentioned, standing toe to toe with Madeira, fighting for their own...
The iridescent image of the future slipped away like a soap sheen on washing-water. She did not even know if she would be here in two moons' time. It was nothing more than selfish to give Isaiah that happiness, only to tear it away again.
Moonlight had reached the bedspread. Niccola stretched out her free hand. When the thin, silver shard touched it, she could see through her fingers to the window beyond. She clenched her fist, opened it, turned her hand in a vain attempt to shake what she wished was an illusion. It had progressed since the last Crow Moon. She didn't have much more time.
Yet her resolve to carry through on her own plan, once tenacious and unbeatable, now stood on shaky ground. In all the friendships she'd had, partners she'd courted simply for the experience of it, and relationships she'd forged, none had ever felt as real or safe or right as this moment right here, locked in a dark, quiet room with a barricaded door, a soft bed, and the prince of Calis asleep against her shoulder. Never had a person she got along with so well also been one she would let rest their head so near her chest without a second thought. They saw each other the same way. Niccola had never thought to ask the world for that, but she'd been given it anyway. And now she didn't want to let it go.
Tears pricked her eyes unexpectedly. It was probably tiredness: too many emotions and not enough sleep for a single day. Niccola wiped them away, but more took their place. She wanted to tell Isaiah the whole truth. To ask his help to find a way out of the situation she had gotten herself into because she'd been too slow to stop her sister from running away, too arrogant not to fight with her in the first place. Niccola didn't even remember what they'd been fighting over. Something far too trivial to matter, clearly, when its cost had been a princess who had run into the forest and never returned. Opting into the family magic line had proven an indispensable choice for Niccola's search thus far, but had the cost been too high? She didn't know anymore.
She had to find Dinah. The reassurance of Isaiah at her side lasted up to that point, after which the road forward stretched onward into a frightening unknown. She would walk that path alone. Asking Isaiah to throw himself into danger with her would only endanger him and prolong her own penance, her own mission, her own need to prove... something to the world. That she was who they thought she was? The spare child of a barrower family, never fit to hold a throne? Isaiah didn't think so. And somehow that mattered more right now than all the voices in her head and outside it that had ever told her otherwise.
You wish for me to take over the throne when you wish to retire from it? Then that is who I want to do it beside.
The loop played on, tempting, taunting, and tormenting her in endless succession, until Niccola was sure her head would burst from the pressure of her own renegade thoughts. They only settled when the first chirp of birdsong sounded outside. Niccola froze. Had a whole night passed already? When predawn arrived, she would have to sneak out of the room somehow... how? She would have to climb through the window and find a way to the ground from there, soon enough to meet the guard at the kitchen gate to be let out of the palace.
And then what?
The question stuck. She had found the person in the sketch, little sense as that revelation made. Her reason for coming to Calis and going undercover in the Bel Ilan household was complete; what was left now was to solve the puzzle of Dinah's continued existence itself, and stop the necromantic of the Catastrophe from wreaking another on all realms on this side of the Ring of Thirty. Staying as a serving-woman would only hinder her now.
She had to get out of here and return to the manor, pack her things, and quit her job. Or simply leave; quitting formally could take time she didn't have. From there, she would need a new base from which to launch her search, putting her and Isaiah's minds and resources together to solve the puzzle of how a woman who had lapsed two generations before could return in human form, having scarcely aged, bent on repeating the Catastrophe. They had to solve what Phoebe meant in all of this, and whether she was still alive.
They—she—had to stop Dinah, a feat that the whole Calisian military had failed at once before. Niccola's only reassurance was how many interim steps they faced before she had to carry on into that final task, alone.
Her eyes fell on Isaiah again. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest against the her own, slow now that he'd slept most of the night while she lay awake torturing herself. Another bird chirped outside. Predawn was soon. Isaiah stirred as Niccola slipped her arm out from under him. Pekea whipped her head up with a chirp of surprise. Niccola extracted her feet from under the dragon, then sat up properly and shook Isaiah's shoulder.
His eyes startled open on the second shake. Fear flashed across them for all of a moment before Niccola remembered he would not recognize her, and whispered, "Shh. It's me."
He pushed himself up. "Are you leaving?"
"No. We both are. Pack up anything you don't want to leave behind."
He blinked in surprise or incomprehension. Niccola slid off the bed, hissing as her feet met the cold stone floor. She gathered her socks and dress from the day before and pulled them on again. They were the only things she'd brought with her.
"I can't come," said Isaiah.
Niccola stopped halfway through probing his closet for a bag. "Why not?"
"The portrait—"
"I know who it is. I'll tell you when we're out of here and somewhere safe."
"What if you need information from the palace again?"
"Then I'll sneak in. The guards are on our side." Niccola found a thick cloth pack and tossed it to him. Isaiah's hands gripped it, but he set it down in his lap.
"I can't," he said again.
Niccola stopped in front of him and crossed her arms. "And I cannot, in good conscience, let you stay here and deal with that abuse even one more time."
Isaiah kept his head down, attention fixed on the bag. "Is it abuse if she's right?"
Niccola lost her words before they left her. She stood with her mouth open, muted as the reality of what he'd just said sank in.
"I don't want Calis to crumble because of me." Isaiah clenched the bag tighter. "I don't want to make the wrong decision just because I believe it and nobody stops me. My parents don't know much about the regular Calisian people, but the people don't know much about politics, either... I don't want to be the one to send Calis back into collapse because I didn't listen to my parents when they warned me. I don't know if I'm right. And I don't want to drag you into something that—"
"Isaiah—"
"—that gets you hurt, or killed, or taken away." His voice was falling apart. "I don't want people to die because of me. You know what you're doing. I'll help you escape—"
"Isaiah."
He broke off in something close to a sob. His head had dropped completely now, hiding his face in shadow. Niccola crossed the space to the bed and sat beside him, catching one of his hands. It went limp in her own. Only when she laced their fingers together and squeezed tightly did his grip return.
"You are right," said Niccola. "Far more right than your parents. You know what you're doing, because you listen to your people, and you also know the politics. You saw what an attitude like your parents' did to my realm." Her hand clenched tighter. "Whatever your mother tells you is a lie. And yes. It's still abuse even if she is right. But she's not. She just wants control over you to maintain her own image." She drew a breath that shook from her own emotions. "That's it. That's all she has over you."
"She's going to come after me," he whispered.
"She can try."
They sat in silence, both gripping each other's hands now, like they would fly apart if even one of them let go. At last, Niccola tugged Isaiah's gently. "Come. Please. I can't solve this alone, and I can't leave you here and let your mother—" Should she say it? But it was leaving her anyway, and she'd said it once already, albeit at a time when she wasn't sure he'd hear her. "And let your mother make you write that letter. I know you don't believe it, but you deserve so much better. You deserve to choose who you want to marry. Please. Just get out with me. Get somewhere safer. We can figure out the rest from there."
She knew she couldn't force him, but Niccola poured all her silent willpower through their linked hands, begging him to say yes. His other hand loosened on the bag. Without letting go of hers, he pulled open the drawer beside his bedside table and scooped out the needle-felting materials inside. Niccola let out a breath of relief deep enough to shake her.
"What can I get?" she said. "I can help you pack."