A/N: tammydrabbles prompt 13: "the morning after the night before"

Disclaimer: Tamora Pierce's characters and plot.

The morning after/The night before

He woke alone in his bed, disoriented by her lingering scent—alien, exotic, yet so familiar once.

"Surprised to see me?" she says coquettishly, and he is surprised: she never used to be coquettish. Or perhaps this is the tone he used to think of as seductive.

Had he really done that? Gone to bed with her, again, after all these years? Well, yes, he had; stupid to attempt denial. And why? Well, she was beautiful, of course. She always had been, and that had been reason enough, many times. And she was eager, and he was—best to face the facts—lonely and afraid.

"Are you sure it's appropriate for you to be here?" he asks, half stalling, half genuinely concerned; she has a reputation to uphold, now, and she is under the Imperial eye. She laughs at him. "I've missed you," she says. "But I see you still take things much too seriously."

What did it mean that she had gone before he woke? That (like him) she wished to avoid complications? That she had had second thoughts, had regretted coming to him in the first place? Or simply that it would not do for her to be found in this part of the palace in the morning? He felt a little ashamed at the magnitude of his relief that she had, at any rate, gone.

"Ugh, I wish I could rid the palace of all these dead things," she says in disgust. She tosses her delicate monogrammed handkerchief over the stuffed vulture's head, and he has to admit that things are easier without those glassy eyes seeming to watch them.

He dragged himself to breakfast, feeling abused, only to find someone missing who should have been there. No one else had seen her; scrying failed to reveal her whereabouts, and searching only led him into what he would later realize was a dangerously stupid display of attachment. And there she was, after all, perfectly unharmed, though she seemed as ill at ease as he.

She has learned new things since the last time—as who should not, in eight years? No doubt he has learned a great many new things as well, in this arena as in so many others. He isn't sure how he feels about this, about her insistence that she loves him still, has been waiting for him all this time, given the evidence to the contrary. Still, he can't deny that it is … pleasant. That in bed, at least, they do very well together. Bed, of course, was never the problem.

"You asked to speak to me," he said. "Let's go to my room." But of course they couldn't go alone, not the way Carthakis think; they needed a chaperone, and so there were three of them when he opened the door to his bedchamber and, too late, remembered the handkerchief, and the scent. "Did Varice have a chaperone?" he heard her murmur to their companion. For no reason that he could articulate, he felt acutely embarrassed.

"You've never married, either." It is a statement rather than a question. "No," he agrees, and there is no more to say. She would like him to tell her that she is the reason for this, but of course he can't, or not in the way she hopes.

Her news was bizarre, possibly dangerous, certainly astounding. This new and inexplicable power could not have been more ill timed. And, worse, on the way out, she murmured to him, "You shouldn't have tried to hit him. I don't think he liked it."

"I would have come with you," she says. He knows what she wants him to say, and how much she wants it; but there are lies, and lies. "I'm sorry," he says instead.

Only now did he realize how thunderously stupid he had been, how perfectly he had played into his enemy's hands. He wished there was some way to take back those words, those actions, to protect her from the looming danger. "I'm sorry," he said instead. But she was already too far away to hear.