The First Lesson

The velvet box was small, deep blue, almost black.

“I had these made for you,” Evander said.

He had come to her chambers unannounced, his dark coat brushed free of the morning’s frost. The impropriety of it should have alarmed her, but he stood at a careful distance, the door left open behind him, and there was nothing in his manner that suggested anything untoward. Only this: the box in his hands, offered like a secret.

Ilyra set down her book. A treatise on grain distribution she had been pretending to read for the last hour. The words had blurred together, her mind elsewhere, circling back to their conversation in the library, the gallery, the strange exhilaration of being seen.

“For me?”

“Open it.”

She took the box. The velvet was soft under her fingers, warmer than she expected. Inside, nestled against cream silk, lay a pair of gloves.

They were beautiful. Supple leather dyed the deep gold of autumn leaves, lined with pale silk that caught the morning light. The cuffs were edged with delicate golden thread, an embroidered pattern of vines so fine it might have been drawn with a single hair.

“They are lovely,” she said, and meant it. “But why…”

“Court is full of people who might reach for you.” His voice was mild, conversational. “Touch creates connection. Obligation. A squeezed hand here, a familiar gesture there. Everyone wants something from a princess, even if only proximity.”

She looked up at him. His gaze held hers, unwavering.

“These will remind you to be selective about who touches your skin.”

It should have felt strange. A man she had known barely a fortnight, gifting her something so intimate. But his reasoning made sense. She thought of the jostling in the amber salon, the hands that reached for her without asking, the way nobles touched her arm or shoulder as if she were furniture to be adjusted.

“May I?”

She nodded.

He watched as she drew the left glove over her fingers, then the right. The leather fit as if it had been made from a mould of her hands. The silk lining was cool against her skin, then warm, then neither, becoming part of her.

“They fit perfectly,” she said, surprised.

Satisfaction flickered across his face. The quiet pleasure of a craftsman viewing finished work.

“I hoped they would.”

The words settled strangely. He had been watching her hands. She understood this suddenly, clearly. Not a glance across a crowded room. Not a passing observation. He had studied them. Measured them with his eyes. Memorised the length of her fingers, the width of her palm, the particular shape of her.

Something fluttered low in her stomach.

It was too intimate. The kind of attention a man should not pay to a woman he had known barely a fortnight. She should be unsettled. She should return the gloves, politely, with some excuse about propriety.

Instead, she found herself flexing her fingers inside the soft leather, watching the way it moved with her. Wondering what else he had noticed. What else he had memorised.

She looked away first. Her pulse had gone unsteady.

This is inappropriate, she told herself. He is a foreign dignitary. You are a princess. This is nothing.

But she did not remove the gloves.

Behind her, a quiet knock. Mira entered with the tea tray, her movements the practiced silence of long service. She hesitated at the threshold, her gaze moving from Evander to Ilyra, lingering on the open door, the careful distance between them.

Then she saw the gloves.

Mira’s step faltered. Her expression did not change, not quite, but something passed behind her eyes. Recognition, perhaps. Or warning. She set down the tray, poured tea with hands that were not entirely steady, and when she handed Ilyra her cup, her fingers brushed the golden leather.

The touch was deliberate. Ilyra was certain of it.

“Your tea, my Lady.” A pause, longer than it should have been. “The gloves are very fine.”

“Yes,” Ilyra said. “They are.”

Mira did not linger. Usually she would ask if there was anything else, if the tea was prepared correctly, if her mistress needed her. Today she simply gathered the empty tray and withdrew, her back straight, her eyes fixed somewhere past Ilyra’s shoulder.

The door closed behind her. In the silence that followed, Ilyra found herself looking at her gloved hands, wondering what Mira had seen that she herself could not.

Evander smiled. “Shall we walk? I have something to show you.”

The gallery overlooked the inner courtyard, a long corridor lined with windows on one side and portraits of her ancestors on the other. The Aurelian dynasty watched from gilded frames, their painted eyes following her with silent judgement.

Evander stopped at the central window. Below, the courtyard bustled with the morning’s activity. Servants crossed with baskets and bundles. Two footmen carried a rolled carpet between them. A gardener knelt beside the frost-bitten roses, cutting dead branches with careful precision.

“Tell me what you see.”

Ilyra looked. The courtyard. People going about their business. The ordinary machinery of palace life.

“Servants,” she said. “The household staff. Some gardeners.”

“What else?”

She looked again, more carefully. “The footmen are taking the carpet toward the east wing. For cleaning, perhaps. Or storage.”

“Perhaps. Look at the gardener.”

She did. An old man, weathered face, hands steady despite the cold. He worked methodically, each cut considered.

“He’s pruning the roses.”

“In winter?”

She frowned. “It is the proper time. Dead growth must be removed before spring, or it chokes the new.”

“Excellent.” His voice carried a teacher’s satisfaction. “You know horticulture.”

“I read about it. Once.”

“Reading is the foundation. Observation builds the house.” He leaned against the window frame, arms crossed, watching the courtyard with the casual attention of a man who had all the time in the world. “There is a difference between looking and watching. Looking is passive. Watching is active. When you look at the gardener, you see an old man cutting roses. When you watch, you see the head gardener, a man who has served the palace for forty years and knows every servant’s name and every noble’s schedule. You see the person who decides which flowers grace which rooms, and therefore knows which rooms are being prepared for use. You see someone who arrives at dawn and leaves at dusk, who notices everything and is noticed by no one.”

Ilyra looked at the gardener again. The same old man. But now she saw the way his eyes swept the courtyard between cuts, taking in the servants, the footmen, the pattern of movement.

“He is watching too,” she said.

“Everyone watches. Few understand what they see.” Evander pushed away from the window. “Walk with me.”

They moved through the gallery, past the portraits. He pointed out the patterns she had never noticed. The servants’ paths through the corridors, worn slightly paler than the rest of the marble. The way certain doorways were busier at certain hours. The rhythm of the palace, invisible until someone taught you to see it.

“Your brother, His Imperial Highness Crown Prince Alistair, takes this corridor every morning at the ninth bell,” Evander said, pausing at a junction. “He visits the garrison, inspects the guard, then returns by the eastern stair. Your sister, Her Imperial Highness Princess Seraine, uses the chapel passages, avoiding the main halls. Their Imperial Highnesses Princes Dorian and Cassian prefer the western wing, where fewer courtiers linger.”

“How do you know this?” She had lived here her entire life and had never mapped her siblings’ movements.

“I watch.” He smiled, a slight curve of his lips. “A ruler who does not understand her own house cannot hope to change it.”

Her spirits lifted. Not at the wisdom of his words, though she would remember them. At the way he said “ruler” as if it were already true. As if she were already something more than the forgotten fifth.

They continued walking. He showed her how to read the servants’ expressions, the subtle signals that indicated which nobles were in favour and which were not. He explained the language of flowers left in certain vases, the meaning of particular livery worn on particular days. The court was a text she had never learned to read, and he was teaching her the alphabet.

By the time they reached the end of the gallery, the palace had become a different place. The same corridors, the same marble, but now layered with meaning she had never seen.

They paused at the window that overlooked the gardens. The winter light was pale gold, and for a moment neither spoke. The lesson felt complete, but he made no move to leave.

“Tell me something,” he said. His voice was different now. Softer. Less like a teacher. “What do you do when you are not reading treatises on grain distribution?”

She blinked. “I… I read other things.”

“Such as?”

“History. Philosophy. Sometimes poetry, though I would never admit that to my tutors.” She felt foolish. Why was she telling him this? “Cassian is the artistic one. I am supposed to be practical.”

“Practical.” He tilted his head. “And yet you read poetry.”

“In secret. It feels…” She hesitated. “Indulgent.”

“What is your favourite?”

No one had ever asked her this. Not once in her entire life. She opened her mouth to deflect, to say something diplomatic, and instead heard herself answer honestly.

“There is a verse from the Third Age. About a woman who watches the sea, waiting for ships that will never return. It is melancholy and probably overwrought.” She looked away. “I have read it perhaps a hundred times.”

He was quiet for a moment. When she glanced back, he was watching her with an expression she could not read.

“You are full of surprises,” he said. Not mocking. Wondering.

Her chest tightened. She did not know what to do with the way he looked at her. As if she were a puzzle he wanted to solve. As if every answer she gave him made him want to ask another question.

This is inappropriate, she thought again. But the thought was losing its edges.

“You noticed something earlier,” he said, his voice shifting back to the teacher’s tone. “When we passed the third portrait.”

She had. The frame had been recently cleaned, the gilt brighter than those surrounding it.

“The painting of Empress Valeria. Someone has been tending it.”

“And what does that tell you?”

She considered. “That someone in the palace still honours her memory. Or wants to appear as if they do.”

His eyes lingered on her. “You have good instincts. They only need sharpening.”

She looked down at her hands, folded before her. The golden thread on the gloves caught the light, delicate and fine. She had not thought to remove them. She didn’t want to.

Before dinner, the private salon glowed with firelight and the orange glow of the winter sun approaching horizon. From here, she could see the rooftops stretching as far as she could see, the smoke rising from a thousand chimneys, the distant gleam of the river.

Mira sat in the corner by the embroidery frame, her needle moving in small, precise stitches. A proper chaperone, silent and unobtrusive, her presence rendering the private audience acceptable. She did not look up when Evander entered, but her needle slowed.

Evander poured wine for them both. The same golden vintage they had served at his reception, fragrant with summer orchards. She accepted the glass, a small smile of polite gratitude playing on her lips.

“Tell me about your siblings.”

The question came easily, casually, as if he were asking about the weather. She should have been wary. Should have remembered that this man was a stranger, a foreigner, someone whose motives she could not fully know.

But he had spent the day teaching her. He had looked at her as if she mattered. And the wine was warm in her throat, and the firelight softened everything.

She found herself watching the way the flames painted shadows across his face. The line of his jaw. The curve of his mouth when he almost smiled. She looked away before he could catch her.

Stop it, she told herself. Focus.

“What would you like to know?”

“Whatever you think is interesting.” He leaned back in his chair, wine glass balanced loosely in his fingers. Unhurried. Attentive. As if he had nowhere else to be, nothing else he would rather do than sit in this room and listen to her speak. “I find that what a person considers interesting tells you more about them than any direct question.”

She found herself speaking of Alistair first. The eldest. The soldier. His rigid honour, his distrust of cleverness, the way he looked at everyone as if assessing their combat readiness. Then Seraine, wrapped in her certainties, convinced that the Light spoke through her, that righteousness was a blade she alone could wield.

When she reached the twins, she hesitated.

“Cassian and Dorian,” she said. “They are… complicated.”

“All the interesting ones are.” The firelight caught his smile. “I have found that the uncomplicated people are rarely worth the effort of understanding.”

“And which am I?”

The question escaped before she could stop it. Too forward. Too hungry. She felt heat rise to her face.

But he did not look away. “You,” he said, “are the most interesting person in this palace. That just might be why I am still here.”

Her lungs forgot their purpose. He does not mean it the way it sounds, she told herself firmly. He means strategically. Intellectually. Not…

But her pulse would not steady.

“Cassian is an artist,” she said, too quickly. “A patron. He supports the theatre, the opera, the poets who write verses no one else will publish. He pretends to be frivolous, but he is not.”

“And Dorian?”

She took a sip of wine. “Dorian is exactly what he appears to be.”

“Which is?”

The words came easier than they should have. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was the intimacy of the firelight, the way Evander listened with his whole attention, leaning forward slightly, his gaze never leaving her face. As if nothing in the world mattered more than what she said. As if, for this hour, she was the only person who existed.

“He gambles. Every night, in gaming houses in the lower city. He loses more often than he wins, but he always finds more coin. He borrows from everyone, pays back slowly if at all.” She set down her glass. “He sold seized grain last autumn. Quietly. I found the records in the archive.”

Evander’s expression did not change. Interested, but not surprised. As if he already knew, or had suspected, and was pleased to have it confirmed.

“Which gaming houses?”

“The Gilded Serpent, mostly. Sometimes the Silver Wheel.” She paused, but he waited, and the silence drew more from her. “He prefers places where no one asks questions about a prince losing his inheritance.”

Evander’s fingers traced the rim of his wine glass. Unhurried. Waiting.

“Which merchants did he sell to?”

She named them. Three, that she knew of. Men whose ledgers did not quite balance, whose warehouses seemed fuller than their declared imports would allow. With each name, a small betrayal she chose to ignore.

“What hours does he keep?”

“Late. He leaves after the tenth bell, returns before dawn.” She heard herself continuing, the words coming easier now, as if speaking them aloud made them less like secrets and more like facts. “The servants know not to disturb him before midday.”

Each answer felt like a small betrayal. But Dorian had sold grain meant for starving people. Dorian had laughed at her across the breakfast table while children died in the bread district. What loyalty did she owe a brother who had never once looked at her as if she were real?

Evander nodded slowly. “You have been watching him. For how long?”

She opened her mouth to deny it, then stopped. He was right. She had been observing Dorian for weeks, perhaps months, compiling his failures without ever acknowledging what she was doing.

“I did not realise,” she said quietly. “I thought I was just… noticing.”

“There is no difference.” His voice was gentle. “Observation is instinct. You have good instincts. You simply needed permission to use them.”

The word “permission” struck something in her. She had never had permission for anything. Not to speak in council. Not to challenge her mother. Not to be anything more than the forgotten daughter reading books in a dusty library.

“Why do you care?” she asked. The question came out smaller than she intended. “About my instincts. About any of this.”

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was low, and the timbre of it made her chest ache.

“Because I have waited a very long time to find someone worth teaching.”

A very long time. The words hung in the air. She heard them one way, and then another: a mentor seeking a worthy student. Or something else. Something more.

He gave her permission. He saw her, valued her, trusted her with his attention. Her shoulders loosened. Her spine straightened. She had not realised how tightly she had been holding herself until that moment.

The balcony overlooked the gaming district.

He had led her through passages she had never noticed, up stairs that wound through the palace’s old bones. Mira followed three paces behind, her shawl pulled tight against the evening chill, saying nothing. A chaperone’s duty was presence, not conversation.

Now they stood on a rooftop perch that looked down upon a street of lanterns and laughter and the particular desperation of men who believed luck would save them. Mira waited by the door, close enough to observe, far enough to grant the illusion of privacy.

The cold bit at her face, but her hands were warm in the golden gloves.

“There,” Evander said softly. “The door with the serpent.”

The Gilded Serpent. Dorian’s preferred establishment. She could see the sign swinging gently in the wind, a gilded snake coiled around a dice cup.

A carriage drew up. The door opened.

Dorian.

He stepped out laughing, his arm around a man she did not recognise. Tall, thin-faced, wearing clothes too fine for honest trade. They spoke, too distant to hear, but the ease of their manner was unmistakable. Old friends. Or at least, familiar associates.

“Do you recognise his companion?” Evander asked.

“No.”

“Aldric Venn. A merchant with interests in the eastern provinces. Some of his cargo never appears on any manifest. He has connections to men who have connections to foreign agents.”

She watched as Dorian and the merchant disappeared through the serpent door. The lanterns swayed. The street continued its evening noise.

“What are you telling me?”

“That your brother keeps dangerous company. That his debts are held by men who would profit from his vulnerability. That if someone wished to exploit those connections…” The sentence hung between them, unfinished.

Ilyra looked down at the street. At the gaming house. At the door her brother had walked through, laughing, oblivious.

He could fall so easily.

The thought arrived unbidden. Clear and cold as winter glass. She saw it suddenly: how small he looked from above. How fragile. A prince who believed himself untouchable, walking into a den of vipers with a smile on his face.

All it would take is a push.

Something cold moved through her. He was her brother. He was still blood.

But she did not look away.

Evander’s hand found hers.

The touch cut through everything else. His fingers curving around her hand, warm through the leather. An anchor when she might otherwise have floated away on the strangeness of what she was feeling.

She should pull away. She knew she should pull away.

She did not pull away.

“You are thinking like a ruler now.”

She did not answer. Could not answer. Her throat was tight, and not only because of Dorian, not only because of the terrible clarity of what she had just thought. His thumb brushed across her knuckles, once, and her breath stuttered.

The gloves, she told herself. He is only touching the gloves. There is a barrier between his skin and yours. It means nothing.

But she could feel him through the silk lining. Could feel the shape of his fingers against hers. And her treacherous pulse would not slow.

He squeezed her hand once, gently, then released it. “Take a moment. I will wait for you inside.”

His footsteps retreated. A door opened and closed.

She stayed on the balcony, the cold wind sharp against her cheeks, and watched her brother’s gambling house spill light and laughter into the dark. Behind her, Mira’s shawl rustled in the wind. But for all the difference it made, Ilyra might as well have been alone.

Her study was warm after the cold of the rooftop. The fire had been built up in her absence, the candles lit, everything arranged just so.

Mira moved to her corner without being asked, taking up her mending basket. The same quiet presence, the same careful distance. Her needle caught the firelight as she worked, and if her stitches were slower than usual, if her eyes lingered too long on the archduke, Ilyra did not notice.

Evander sat in the chair by the hearth, waiting. He occupied the space as if he had always belonged here, amid her books and papers, in this room she had thought was hers alone.

“You compiled a dossier,” he said. “In your head. Everything you know about Dorian.”

She had not realised she was doing it. But he was right. In the hours since the balcony, the scattered observations had arranged themselves into something sharper. Not just facts, but a shape. A pattern of vulnerabilities.

“I… yes.”

Silence settled between them.

The fire crackled. Outside, the distant bells marked the rapidly approaching dinner hour she had lost track of.

“And if his debts were held by those who wished him harm?” Evander asked softly.

She understood immediately what he was suggesting. The shape of it, clear and complete. Buy the debts. Control the creditors. Apply pressure until the structure collapsed.

Her first instinct: “We could not. He is my brother.”

The fire crackled. Evander said nothing.

Her second instinct, harder to speak: “But if someone else were to…”

She did not finish the sentence. Did not need to.

Evander waited. Still as stone. His eyes caught the firelight and gave nothing back.

She thought of Dorian laughing at her across the breakfast table. Dorian calling her “the mouse.” Dorian selling grain while children starved in the bread district, while Mira’s brother burned.

She thought of herself on the throne. The changes she could make. The suffering she could end. The empire she could build, if only the obstacles were removed.

“How would it begin?” she heard herself ask.

Evander smiled. The expression reached his eyes for the first time since she had known him. Warmth. Approval. Something that looked almost like affection.

“With pleasure.”

And he did.

The candles burned lower. The fire settled into embers. Outside, the city prepared for the night, and Ilyra listened as a foreign archduke taught her how to destroy her brother.

For the empire, she told herself. For the people who had starved while Dorian gambled their grain. For justice.

She almost believed it.

When the bells struck the late hour, Evander rose to leave. He bowed, courteous, correct, and paused at the door.

“You did well today,” he said. “Better than you know.”

Then he was gone. Mira saw him out, and Ilyra was alone with the dying fire.

She should be thinking about Dorian. About the plan they had laid, the pieces they would move, the careful destruction of her brother’s reputation. That was what mattered. That was why they had spent the evening together.

Instead, she found herself staring at the chair where he had sat. The slight depression in the cushion. The glass he had left on the side table, a ghost of wine still clinging to the rim.

You are the most complicated person in this palace.

Her fingers flexed around eachother. She pressed her hands together, remembering his fingers touching hers. The closeness she had felt through the silk.

Stop, she told herself. This is not what this is.

But when she finally climbed into bed, hours later, it was not Dorian’s fall she was imagining. It was the way Evander’s voice had softened when he spoke to her. The way his eyes had held hers across the firelight. The terrible, wonderful feeling of being seen.

This is inappropriate, she thought, one last time.

But the thought no longer had any force behind it.