Aria lets the silence hold for exactly as long as it takes Galahad's boots to stop echoing, and then she turns her back on the tiers, tips her chin up toward the cold lights, and pitches her voice for forty benches. "So does the Order feed its guests, or do we go find a pub in Tintagel? I'd love a meal that isn't a front for somebody's test." Her voice carries flat and easy across the stone, no tremble in it, and somewhere on the middle tiers a chair creaks as somebody sits back down instead of filing out. Sera's hand lands flat between Aria's shoulder blades — not a nudge, a claim — and she says, "She's right," in a tone that files no appeal. Dani's grin comes slow and sharp as a broken bottle. "I could eat a horse. I'd settle for whatever's in that cellar — for me and my favorite melodramatic elf princess."

On the lowest bench, the woman in gray wool closes her notebook, stands, and tucks it under her arm like a woman who has just been given the rest of her day back. Gareth's iron key rattles once against its ring; he shifts his weight, and the whole hall holds its breath, forty-odd people waiting to see whether hospitality is just one more ward to pass. Aethelred is the one who breaks it — he comes down two tiers with his old man's careful balance, stops a step above Aria, and says, "The kitchen has been keeping something warm since the demonstration. Nobody wanted to be the one to offer it first." He looks at the garnet on its chain against her collarbone, then at her face. "Follow me, and I'll show you where the plates are."

"Thank you, Aethelred," Aria says, and the voice that comes out is soft and high, the one she uses at her own kitchen table and not the one that cracked the chamber walls. "I would appreciate it." She lets him take the first step down, because he's earned that, and falls in a half pace behind his shoulder. The garnet swings against her collarbone with the movement, warm from her skin. Behind her she hears Sera's boots, then Dani's, then Mike's heavier tread, and then — a scrape, a shuffle, a chair pushed back — the hall itself moving, forty-odd people rising off their benches to follow, the whole tide of them funneling toward the door she came in through an hour ago.

Aethelred walks slow and doesn't apologize for it. "The kitchen's under the west wing," he says, guiding her through a low arch and into a corridor where the torches are actual torches, smoking and guttering, and the walls sweat cold. "It was built for the garrison. It's never been built for guests." He glances sideways at her, at the ears, at the ring. "You'll be the first elf it's served. I'd tell you to lower your expectations, but this last day I have watched you heal a wall without touching it and shatter a thousand years of our supposed mystery, so I suspect you'll lower them yourself."

The corridor opens into a stone room that smells of barley and woodsmoke and something roasting, and the kitchen is exactly what he promised: long trestle tables, iron pots on a banked hearth, a woman in an apron who takes one look at Aria and drops her ladle into the pot. Aethelred pulls out a bench and stands beside it, waiting, and behind them the crowd keeps coming, boots and whispers, filling the benches one by one. "Sit," he says. "You've given this hall more than it's given you so far, and the gap is not small.”

Aria sits. The bench is worn smooth by centuries of elbows, and it takes her weight like it's been waiting. The woman in the apron has abandoned the ladle entirely and is now wrestling a second pot off the hook with both hands, muttering something in a dialect Aria's ears can't quite parse. Aethelred settles across from her, not beside her, which she notes and files.

Sera doesn't sit across from her. Sera comes around the end of the trestle, drops onto the bench at Aria's right elbow where the wood is still cold from the draft, and hooks her ankle around Aria's under the table — a small, private claim in a room of forty strangers. She doesn't say anything. She just reaches over, tucks a strand of silver-blond hair back behind Aria's ear where it's fallen forward, and leaves her hand there for a second longer than the gesture needs. "You did good," she says, low enough that only Aria hears it, and then louder, to the apron woman: "Whatever's in the pot, we'll take four bowls. Five. Mike eats like a horse."

Mike, sliding onto the bench on Aria's other side, doesn't dignify that with a response beyond taking the ladle the apron woman thrusts at him and serving himself first, which gets a laugh out of the nearest tier of Order members that surprises everyone, including them. Dani lands across from Sera and immediately starts negotiating with the woman in the apron about whether there's anything that isn't barley. Somewhere behind them, benches scrape as the hall keeps filling, and Aria realizes the room has stopped being a test and started being a meal. She reaches for the garnet at her collarbone — warm, still, a vote she didn't ask for — and finds Aethelred watching her hand do it. He doesn't look away. He just says, quietly, "Eat first. We can discuss the catacombs after, they have waited nine hundred and sixty years. They can wait until you've had soup."

Aria leans back against the trestle's edge, one shoulder settling into Sera's warmth, and turns the full weight of her attention on the old man across from her — not the hall, not the forty benches filling behind her, just him. "Thank you," she says, and means it, and lets the violet of her eyes hold his for a beat longer than is polite. "And pardon my asking, but you do seem to be the resident expert on soup. What kind might this be? I love a good recipe." The question lands in the stone room like a dropped spoon, and the nearest benches go quiet, because nobody in fifteen hundred years has asked Aethelred of Wessex for a recipe. The apron woman pauses with the second pot half off its hook, staring, and somewhere down the table a man with a white beard actually snorts into his cup.

Aethelred doesn't laugh. He looks at her the way a man looks at a card he didn't know was in the deck, and then — slowly, deliberately — he picks up the ladle himself, dips it into the pot, and pours a stream of it into a wooden bowl he sets in front of her with both hands. "Barley, mutton, and the last of the winter parsnips," he says. "There's a bay leaf in it that's older than my son was. We keep the pot going. It hasn't gone cold since before the Normans came, and I will not pretend to you that I know how the kitchen does that." He sits back. "The recipe is: you don't let it stop. That's the whole of it. Everything else is what you have on hand." The bowl steams between them, and Aria wraps her fingers around it and feels the heat go up her wrists, and for one unguarded second she is not a miracle or a threat or a vote — she is a woman holding soup in a cold room, and Aethelred is watching her face do it.

She tastes it. The bay leaf comes through last, a green note under the barley, and she makes a small sound she didn't authorize — surprise, mostly, that a pot older than the Plantagenets tastes like something her mother would have made on a Tuesday. "That's good," she says, and then, because she's still Jason enough to mean it: "That's really good. You've been eating this for nine hundred years and nobody's written it down?"

"The recipe is the pot," Aethelred says. "The pot is the recipe." He breaks a heel of dark bread and hands her half without being asked. "The woman who started it was named Aelfwyn. She was my aunt. She fed the garrison the winter the Danes burned the coast, and when she died, the next cook kept the flame going because it was the only thing that hadn't been taken from us. A thousand years later, it's a superstition nobody can explain and everybody obeys." He turns the bread in his fingers. "You asked for a recipe. That's the one I have. It's a story about not letting the fire go out, and it tastes like parsnips."

Aria laughs — a real one, low and startled — and the sound moves down the trestle like weather. Sera's ankle tightens around hers under the table. Mike is on his second bowl. Dani has talked the apron woman into a plate of something that is emphatically not barley, and the woman is now sitting on the bench beside her, wiping her hands on her apron and answering questions about the hearth with the specific pride of a person who has never once been asked. Down the long table, the white-bearded man who snorted is leaning toward the man beside him, and Aria catches the shape of it — she asked him for a recipe — passed hand to hand, a small heresy rippling the benches.

Aethelred watches the room do it and then looks back at her, and something in his face has gone quieter than it was. "You've been here two days," he says. "You've broken our ward, mended our ceiling, and asked the oldest man in the hall for his soup. I sat through the chamber and watched it beg you to stop, and I have not yet decided what you are." He sets his bread down. "But I have already decided what you are not, and that is that you are not the thing the hall was afraid of. So, as you have offered on the condition that I ask, I will ask you plainly, and you can tell me no: will you help me find the son I lost once more, if you can?”

Aria doesn't answer with words first. She sets the bowl down on the worn trestle, wraps both hands around it to feel the last of the heat, and lets her mouth do the thing it does when she means something — the slow, lopsided smile that starts at one corner and takes its time getting to the other, the one that has talked Mike out of three bad breakups and Sera out of her clothes. "Of course," she says, and her voice is the soft one again, the kitchen-table one. "I can't promise you anything, Aethelred. I won't lie to you about that — the body's been in the ground nine hundred and sixty years, and I've never done one that old. When I use the magic, it looks for the bones and body that were the person's, and if that room has been sealed as long as I understand it has been, we won't really know the shape of things until we enter. Hopefully the chamber hasn't been damaged or disturbed since then." She lifts the bowl, takes a sip, sets it down. "But the odds are good enough that we should be ready for the chance. If it works, he's going to wake up cold, confused, and hungry, and he's going to want a familiar face and a warm bowl of whatever's in that pot. So — a room with a door that closes, a blanket that isn't wool, and somebody who can stay with him for the first hour. That's the bare minimum preparation, though I'm sure you have more in mind than that if things work out.” She then pauses, her lips pursed, “There is a third possibility that I have encountered. That he may actually be at peace and not wish to return. If that's the case though, it'll be his choice, and you'll know that he's content.”

She smiles at him — the warm one, the one that starts in the eyes before it finds the mouth — and she means it down to the marrow, because this old man has spent nine hundred and sixty years keeping a pot on a fire and a hope in a box, and she has just handed him back the second one. "Then we'll be ready," she says.

Aethelred reaches across the trestle and takes her hands in both of his, and his palms are dry and warm and older than the wood under her bowl, and he holds on longer than a handshake, longer than thanks, long enough that the bench nearest them goes quiet and watches. "Thank you, Mistress Mithlass," he says, and his voice has gone thin at the edges, the way an old rope goes thin just before it holds. "You have given me back a dream I thought dead — the dream of watching him grow. Even if the dream proves fleeting and you cannot bring him back, the dream will have been worth having had." He lets go, sits back, and picks up his bread like a man who has just set something heavy down and is testing whether his hands still work. "Eat your soup before it goes cold."

She lifts the bowl and drinks it down the way her mother used to drink coffee at the end of a double shift — both hands, eyes closed, no apology — and when she sets it back down the white-bearded man has slid two benches closer, cup in hand, watching her like she's a page he can't stop rereading. Aria meets his eyes over the rim and gives him the grin, the crooked one. "You're the one who improved the soup story," she says. "Cynric. The bay tree and the Saxon king's ransom. Aethelred corrected you and you laughed at being caught." The old man's eyebrows go up and stay there. "You were listening," he says, and Aria says, "I was raised on people who tell stories with their hands. You tell one like you're still deciding how it ends." Cynric barks a laugh into his cup, delighted, and the bench nearest him turns to see what the noise was.

Down the trestle, Mike has fallen into something with Galahad that Aria doesn't like the shape of at first — the swordsman's voice low and steady, Mike's head tipped, both of them working a piece of bread into smaller and smaller pieces. Then Mike lifts his hand and does the thing, the Champion thing, and Galahad does it back, and the two of them are suddenly comparing the exact angle of a parry over mutton, and Aria exhales through her nose and lets it go. Dani has the apron woman laughing now, actually laughing, both hands on the table, and when Dani catches Aria's eye across the room she lifts her chin — *I'm fine, you're fine, eat* — the same face she makes at the house when Aria's been quiet too long. Sera's ankle stays hooked around hers under the bench, warm and constant, and Sera has been eating one-handed so she doesn't have to move the hand she's got resting on Aria's knee.

Cynric settles onto the bench beside her like a man who's decided the seat is his now, cup cradled in both hands, and Aria lets him. "I tell it like I'm still deciding," he repeats, tasting the words. "Nobody's said that to me in six hundred years. Most of them just tell me to get to the point." He tips his cup at Aethelred, who has gone back to his bread with the studied calm of a man pretending not to listen. "He's the worst of them. Nine hundred years of 'Cynric, the point.'"

"The point is the bay tree," Aethelred says, without looking up. "The point is always the bay tree."

Aria laughs into her bowl and the sound gets picked up two benches down, where a woman with cropped gray hair and a leather apron is watching Cynric with the particular fondness of someone who has heard the bay tree story four hundred times and will hear it again. She catches Aria's eye, raises her cup an inch — a salute, or a warning, or both — and Aria raises her own back. The room has gone loose around her, benches full, cups moving hand to hand, the low hum of forty people eating the same soup their great-great-greats ate. Nobody is watching her ears anymore. She checks, once, the way she still checks — a flick of the eyes down the trestle — and finds a table of four bent toward each other over something Dani's saying, and a knot of younger members by the hearth where Mike has wandered with his second bowl, and Gareth alone at the far end with his key and his silence, eating like a man who doesn't quite believe he's been invited. She lets him be.

Aria turns the empty bowl in her hands, watching the firelight move across the glaze, and asks it quietly, like a thing she's been carrying since the ward went silent. "What's it like? Living that long. In a world that keeps changing the furniture on you." Cynric sets his cup down slow, the way a man does when he's about to say something true, and Aethelred stops pretending to eat his bread. "You mean does it hurt," Cynric says. "Most people ask about the wars. Nobody asks about the mornings."

"The mornings are the whole of it," Aethelred says, and he turns his cup a quarter turn on the wood, a small, exact gesture, the kind a man makes when he's counting something he can't say out loud. "The world doesn't change all at once, Mistress Mithlass. It changes by forgetting. The smith's son takes over the forge and the nails come out a little different, and then his son's nails are different again, and one day you walk down to the market and the whole street smells wrong and you can't name the year it happened." He looks at the trestle, at the forty people eating. "I watched the language do it. I still dream in a tongue nobody in this room could answer in. That is not a wound. It is a house with a room in it that only I can open."

Cynric snorts softly into his cup and doesn't drink. "He's being poetical. Here's the plain version. You get good at funerals. That's the trick nobody tells you. You learn to carry them without setting them down, and after a while the carrying is just how you stand." He tips his head at Aethelred. "He keeps a pot on because it's the one thing that hasn't been taken. I keep telling the same story because every time I tell it, the people who heard it last time are still here in the room, even the dead ones. That's not sentiment. That's arithmetic. You keep the count or the count keeps you." He looks at her then, and his eyes are old and dry and entirely without pity. "You've got the other problem. You're going to watch all of us go, and you won't even get to say it was a long life, because for you it won't be."

Aria sets the bowl down and looks at him — really looks, the way she looks at a body she's about to heal, reading the whole of it. "That's the part I wanted to ask about. Not the dying. I've buried three people in my yard and I know what that costs. It's the other thing." She taps the trestle with two fingers, once. "You said the world changes by forgetting. But you don't. So what do you do with it — the remembering? Where does it go? You've got nine hundred and sixty years of Tuesdays in there and they don't fit in a cup."

Cynric laughs, short and dry, and it's the first time she's heard him laugh without the story underneath it. "You want the honest answer or the one I give at feasts?"

"The feast one has a bay tree in it. Give me the other."

He turns the cup in his hands, mirroring Aethelred without meaning to, and Aria catches that too — the way two men who have eaten at the same trestle for six centuries have started moving like each other, the way Sera's got a habit of tucking her hair behind her ear that used to be Jason's. "The honest one is you get bored of yourself," Cynric says. "You run out of things to be sorry about and you run out of things to be proud of, and then it's just the work. You get up. You do the morning. You learn a new word for bread because the old one's gone. And every so often somebody dies who you actually liked, and you notice you've stopped counting them as people and started counting them as weather." He sets the cup down flat. "That's the ugly part. The part I don't tell at feasts."

Cynric doesn't answer right away. He turns his cup a quarter turn, the way Aethelred did, and the two old men sit there moving their hands the same and not noticing. "Then why keep going into the chamber every fifty years?" Aria asks, and the question lands flat and plain in the middle of the trestle, and Cynric's hand stops on the cup like she'd put a blade through the wood. "You said it's not a wound. You said it's a house with a room only you can open. Fine. Then what's the room for? Why walk back in there and come out twenty-five and pick up a sword again, if the cost is just — the mornings?"

Cynric looks at Aethelred, and Aethelred looks at his bread, and for a second the two of them are having a conversation Aria isn't invited to. Then Cynric snorts. "Because it works," he says. "You walk in old and you walk out young, all the way back, twenty-five and stupid and hungry and your knees don't hurt. No price on the ticket. Merlin built it and nobody's ever found the bill." He tips his cup toward the hall, toward Gareth eating alone at the far end with his key. "That's the whole trick, girl. It's not a curse. It's a faucet. You turn it on, you drink. And that's exactly why half this room is afraid of you — because you're the first person in fifteen hundred years who might be able to shut it off." He sets the cup down. "So. You wanted the honest answer. There it is. We don't go in because we're brave. We go in because it's free."

Aria turns that over the way she turns a spell in her head before she casts it — looking for the seam. "Free," she says, and it isn't a question, and it isn't agreement. She lifts the bowl, finds it empty, sets it down. "Nothing's free. You just haven't found the bill yet." Across the trestle Aethelred's fingers stop on the bread, and he doesn't look up, which is its own kind of answer. "But I'll take your word for it," she goes on, softer, "because you've been drinking from it for six hundred years and you're still in here telling me the ugly part, so whatever the price is, it hasn't taken the part of you that tells the truth. That counts for something."

Cynric studies her over the rim of his cup, and there's something new in the old face — not warmth exactly, but the absence of the thing that had been there before. "You keep saying things like that," he says. "Like you're already doing the arithmetic on a life you haven't lived yet." He sets the cup down. "Fair warning, girl. The hall's going to want you to be its answer, and the hall's going to want you to be its problem, and it's going to want both on the same day. Pick which one you are before somebody picks it for you."

Down the trestle, Mike has abandoned the parry lesson and is laughing at something Galahad said — actually laughing, the loose one he only does when he's forgotten to be careful. Sera's ankle is still hooked around Aria's under the bench, warm and constant, and Dani has the apron woman doing something with her hands that looks like it might be a card trick. The room has gone on being a meal while Aria sat inside it and got handed a warning disguised as soup. She reaches for the garnet at her collarbone — warm, still, a vote she didn't ask for — and finds Aethelred watching her hand do it, the way he has been all afternoon.

Sera leans forward across the trestle, both elbows planted on wood worn smooth by six hundred years of somebody else's suppers, and fixes Cynric with the flat green stare she saves for people who are being clever instead of honest. "Cynric. New question. Different question." She hooks a heel on the bench rung and tilts her head. "I buy that you go in because it feels good to be twenty-five with working knees again. Fine. But if the faucet dried up tomorrow — if somebody walked down that stair and put a stone in the pipe, and you knew, standing there, that this was the last go-round on the ride — would you honestly be sad? Forget the Cabal. Forget whatever the hall needs the youth for. Forget the twelve hundred years of paperwork. Just you. Would you be sad, or would you be relieved?"

Cynric goes still in the way that old men go still, which is not stillness at all but a man checking his own hands to see what they're doing. He turns the cup a quarter turn on the trestle, then turns it back. "That's a sharper question than the one she asked," he says, tipping his chin at Aria without looking at her. "She wanted to know what it costs. You want to know if I'd miss it." He drinks, sets the cup down, and stares at the fire for long enough that the room's hum fills the gap — Mike's laugh down the trestle, the apron woman telling Dani something with both hands, benches shifting as the hall decides the meal is just a meal. "The honest answer is I don't know. And I don't know because I've never once been asked to imagine the morning after the last one." He looks at Sera then, and his eyes are dry and tired and entirely without performance. "Ask me again in a hundred years, if the faucet's still running and we're both still here. I'll have an answer by then. Right now all I've got is that I've never had to find out, and I've arranged my whole long life so that I never would."

Sera holds Cynric's gaze a beat longer — lets him see she heard the answer and is choosing not to press it — then gives him a small nod, the kind you give a man who told the truth when he didn't have to. She turns back to her bowl. And then her voice arrives inside Aria's skull, dry and close, the way it always is: *Gareth.* A pause, while Sera's spoon scrapes the bottom of the bowl like she isn't saying anything at all. *He said he'd do right by us unless we threatened the Order. He lied about what that meant. But maybe there's something underneath it worth hearing.* Another scrape. *Also, he looks really sad.* A beat. *Go check on him. Don't be too nice.* Half a second. *Don't be too mean either.*

Aria follows the thought down the trestle without moving her head. Gareth sits alone at the far end, back to the hearth, a half-empty bowl going cold in front of him and his hands folded on the wood like a man waiting to be dismissed. He's been eating the same way since the chamber — mechanically, without tasting — and every few minutes his eyes come up and track the room and go back down, cataloguing instead of joining. He's not sulking. That's the thing that catches her. He's standing watch at a table where nobody's asked him to. She sets her bowl down, slides her leg out from Sera's ankle with a small press of the calf that means *I'll be back*, and crosses the trestle with her cup in hand — not toward the head of the table, where Aethelred is, but toward the cold end, where the firelight doesn't quite reach. She doesn't sit across from him. She sits on the bench beside him, at the angle, close enough that her shoulder is in his peripheral vision and her cup is on the wood between them, and she says nothing for a moment, because the first thing you do with a man on watch is let him decide whether you're a threat. He doesn't look up. "Mistress Mithlass." Flat. "If you've come to finish the conversation from the antechamber, the hall is watching and I'd rather you didn't."

"I didn't come to finish anything." Aria turns her cup a quarter turn on the wood, watching the firelight slide across the glaze instead of him. "I came because you're the only man in this room eating like he's on shift. Forty people at a table and you're the one who keeps checking the doors." She lets that sit. Down the trestle Mike's laugh goes up and falls, and the apron woman is showing Dani something with her hands, and none of it reaches this end. "Here's what I actually want to know. In the antechamber you told me the ward was built to test whether a thing can be unmade. Fine. That's the job. But you knew what it would do to them before you put them in the room, and you did it anyway, and you're still sitting here — so either the Order is worth more to you than five strangers, or there's something you were told that made it worth the risk." She finally looks at him. "Which one is it, Gareth. I can understand the first one, I know there are people willing to trade a life for a belief. Maybe that's you. I need to know though, if that's what it is, or if there's something I still don't know and should."

Gareth doesn't answer for a while. He pushes the cold bowl an inch away from himself with the flat of two fingers, the way a man clears a desk before he has to say something he's been carrying, and when he finally looks at her the flatness is gone out of his face and what's left underneath is tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. "I wasn't lying to you in Indiana," he says. "The Cabal needs you. That part was true the day I said it and it's true now. Their magic runs in the blood — in the lineage — and it's been thinning for four hundred years. Every generation down a little weaker than the last, and they know it, and they're frightened of it in a way that makes them do things like send six of themselves to a house in Indiana in the middle of the night." He turns his cup a quarter turn, catches himself doing it, and stops. "But I didn't tell you what the Order believes some of them can already do. There's a working — a chamber, or a thing like one — that certain factions of the Cabal are said to have. It doesn't strip magic the way ours does. It takes the magic it's turned against and *bends* it. Dominates it. Makes it answer to whoever holds the leash. Our ward eats what was made. Theirs makes what was made theirs."

He lets that sit, and Aria doesn't fill it, and the fire pops somewhere behind them and neither of them turns. "So when I came to your driveway," Gareth says, "I already knew what the ward would do. I'd read the accounts. A thing that strips what was made from the outside — a polymorph, a glamour, a borrowed face — that was the theory, and the theory was wrong, apparently. Maybe the mistake was that we had never once fed it a person who had been remade from the inside out, and that perhaps was the difference. I don't know." He looks at her then, and there's no apology in it, just the flat accounting of a man who has already stood trial in his own head and lost. "If it stripped you, the Cabal had nothing to take. If it stripped them and left you, we'd know your party was vulnerable, and we'd have the answer before the Cabal did. Either way the hall learned something. That was the trade I made with five bodies that weren't mine to spend."

Aria doesn't reach for the garnet this time. She keeps both hands flat on the wood, because she can feel the bolt sitting in her palm like a held breath, and she is not going to be the woman who lights a man on fire at a supper table. "You could have asked," she says, and it comes out quieter than she meant, which is worse. "You could have walked up the drive and told me what the Order believed and what it was afraid of, and asked me to walk into that room with my eyes open. I would have said yes. I might even have said yes faster than you did."

Gareth's mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "You would have said yes," he repeats, and the firelight catches the flat of his face.

Gareth says it without heat, the way a man reports weather. "And if you hadn't said yes, we would have forced you. Not out of cruelty — out of arithmetic. The risk of leaving you be, if you weren't strong enough to resist either our chamber or whatever it is the Cabal keeps, was too great. A thing that can be twisted and warped into a tool — a weapon we have no counter for — is worse than an enemy we can name. So the hall would have taken you anyway, and called it protection, and slept fine." He turns his cup a quarter turn, catches himself, and flattens his hand over it instead. "I'd do it all the same way again with the same information. Being proven wrong doesn't change what I knew when I chose."

Aria doesn't answer for a beat. She looks down the trestle — Mike mid-laugh with Galahad, Dani's hands still working the apron woman's card trick, Sera's green stare cutting over here and back — and then she looks back at the flat, tired, unrepentant man beside her. "Then I'll take the honest version over the apology," she says. "You forced my family into a room to see if it would eat them, and you'd do it again, and you're sitting here telling me to my face instead of dressing it up. I can work with a man who does that, but I can't work with a liar." She picks up her cup, drinks the last of it cold, and sets it down between them. "So here's my arithmetic. You don't get to gamble my people again — not the ward, not the hall, not the Order. Ask me first, every time, or I'll hear about it after and I promise you'll like that less. But you're still the man who came to my driveway and told me the truth about the Cabal before anyone else did, and I don't believe in throwing people away." She stands, cup in hand, and looks down at him. "Eat your soup, Gareth. It's going cold, and you're no good to anyone on an empty stomach." She smiles slyly, “I learned that from Aethelred.”

Gareth doesn't answer with words. He picks up the spoon the apron woman left beside his bowl, holds Aria's eyes the whole way, and lifts a mouthful to his lips without looking down at it — the kind of man who has spent six hundred years eating in halls where a dropped guard was a dropped throat. The spoon goes in crooked. Broth breaks over the rim and runs down the heel of his hand and off his wrist onto the trestle, a thin brown line that neither of them acknowledges, and he chews and swallows and sets the spoon down flat, still holding her gaze, still saying nothing, like the bite itself was the sentence.

The giggle gets out of Aria before she can catch it — small and honest and entirely at his expense — and she slaps two fingers over her mouth to bury it, which only makes the sound escape through her nose instead. Gareth's eyebrow moves a quarter inch. "Something funny, Mistress Mithlass." Not a question. "You've got soup on your wrist," she says, and the second laugh comes out of her sideways, and she reaches across the bench without asking, hooks his sleeve, and drags the wet line off his skin with her thumb. She wipes the thumb on her own knee. "You also haven't looked at that bowl once. Which means you're either showing off, or you're the kind of man who'd rather watch the room than his food — and I already know which one it is, so stop performing." Gareth looks down at the bowl finally, at the smear on the wood, at his own clean wrist where her thumb just was, and something at the corner of his mouth almost commits to being a smile and then doesn't. "Eat it properly," Aria says, and turns back to her own empty bowl with the crooked grin still sitting on her face, "or I'll tell the hall you spilled it on purpose."

Aria reaches for her empty cup and fills it with a flicker of violet light, takes a sip, and catches Gareth staring.

“Prestidigitation,” she says, “Smallest thing I can do.” Gareth looks at the cup, then at her, and Aria smiles, “Eat your soup.”