The summons came at dusk, on heavy cream paper folded in thirds and sealed with black wax — a tower with a single window stamped into it. Four lines, in a hand I would learn to know anywhere.

Miss Marsh. I would speak with you at half past nine, in my study, third floor, east wing. The door will be open. You may bring your attendant as far as the threshold. — C.V.

Mira read it over my shoulder and was quiet a long moment.

"The door will be open," I said. "Meaning what?"

"Meaning he won't sit behind it pretending not to hear you knock. Meaning he won't make you wait in the corridor. He's being courteous, in his way. And the threshold means I can't follow you in. You'll be alone with him." She paused. "But the door stays open the whole time. He's never closed one on a guest mid-conversation in his life. I'm telling you that because you're about to be very alone in a room with him, and the open door is not casual."

"What do I wear?"

She was already at the wardrobe. "The grey wool. The cuffs are like mine. He'll like them. He won't say so." She rebraided my hair tighter than I'd done it, reset the crescent pin at the line of my jaw, smoothed my shoulders with both palms in a way that was practical and somehow maternal, and stepped back. "Don't ask to sit. He won't sit, and the chairs face the window, so the visitor ends up squinting into the lamp behind his head. He doesn't do it on purpose. He's never noticed he does it. But it gives him the room, and tonight the room should be yours."

She walked me to the eastern stair.

The third floor was not like the others. No portraits, no art at all — only wide white walls, cold globe-light, and small ironwood doors set at intervals, all shut. Sound died in it. My own steps made no echo, and by the third door my breathing had slowed without my permission. The door stood open a hand's width, warm yellow light spilling through.

I pushed it wide and stepped in. I didn't knock. Mira hadn't told me to.

He was at the window, his back to me, and he hadn't turned. His hair was loose down his back — I'd only ever seen it bound, a shape suggested at the Council — and the lamp behind him caught the dark length of it. He wore black. He wasn't breathing. Vampires breathe only when they're performing for someone, and he wasn't performing for me.

"Miss Marsh."

"Lord Cassian."

"Lydia, in this room, is acceptable."

He turned — slowly, with the control of a man who has had two centuries to practise never moving fast near someone smaller. The study was careful and spare: full bookcases on three walls, a cold hearth, two armchairs, a chessboard mid-game with white to move. And on the near chair, face-down on its open pages, a slim cloth-bound book.

A Decade in the Marble House.

Aldric had handed me my copy that afternoon. His was open on his chair. He watched me see it and didn't move to cover it.

"I've asked you here to give you the terms of your residency," he said. "You've had the rules from Mira. Terms are a different thing."

"Then give me the terms."

"You're under my House from now until the Bonding Moon, in February. Room, board, your classes, a small allowance paid in cash into your own keeping, and the protection of my name. You are not to be touched. By anyone — and I'll be plain, that includes my own House. It isn't a courtesy. It's treaty law, and it's unconditional. If anyone lays a hand on you, you tell Mira, Mira tells Aldric, Aldric tells me, and it's resolved by morning."

"And in February?"

"In February you'll be present for the ritual, in the chamber below. You'll be prepared for it across the months between. Your part —" the smallest hesitation, the first flaw in the surface — "is a part you don't yet have language for. The class is the language. By the Moon you'll have it."

"You're not going to tell me what it is."

"Not tonight. You're not ready to carry it, and I won't hand a thing to someone who can't yet hold it."

"People keep saying that to me," I said. "Mira. Aldric. Now you. Not yet. After the first week. By the Moon. Everyone on this island has decided in advance exactly how much of my own life I'm allowed to know, and when."

"Yes," he said, without apology. "And one of them is wrong to. I have not yet decided which."

I let that sit. He hadn't looked away from me since he turned — not once — and the steadiness of it was its own pressure, like standing too near an open flame and feeling the skin warn you before the heat does.

"You have a question," he said.

"What happens if I refuse?"

He absorbed it without a flicker, the way he'd absorbed Aldric's voice through the wall that first morning — logging it, filing it for later. "You will not refuse."

There was no threat under it. No or else. Only the calm of a man stating a fact about weather. The tide comes in. The fog lifts by ten. You will not refuse.

"You don't know me," I said.

And he looked at me.

It was the first time. In three rooms I had stood with this man and in not one had I been seen — in the Council he'd spoken to the air, in the gallery he'd held my eyes for two counted seconds and let go. Now he looked, and the looking had weight. His eyes were the colour of the bottom of a deep glass of water, grey with a silt of green-brown underneath that was neither. They moved once — a half-second flick to the crescent pin at my collar, and back to my face — and something crossed him that I knew, because I had seen it once, on my father's face the morning he told me my mother was dead. A held thing that almost let go, and caught. The catching was the part I could see.

It was gone in the same breath.

"No," he said. "I do not know you." A pause. "I would like to. Very much."

He took a step. Not fast. The room was not large and the step closed half of what was between us, and the air seemed to thin where it crossed. He raised one hand — slowly, telegraphing it, the way you'd move toward a thing you didn't want to startle — and did not touch me. He stopped with his fingers a breath from the pin at my jaw, close enough that I felt the cool of him against my throat without contact, close enough that my pulse came up to meet a hand that wasn't there. I did not step back. My pride held me where I stood; everything under it leaned the wrong way, toward the cold, toward him.

This near, I could see the discipline of it — how still he kept the hand, how a thing in him had to be told, continuously, not to close the last half-inch. It was the most restrained I had ever seen a person be, and it was the least restful thing I had ever stood inside. My mother's line went through me like a draught under a door. Do not give them your hands. I had both of mine fisted at my sides. He had not asked for them. He had stopped exactly where asking would begin, and somehow the stopping said more than any reaching could have.

"That pin," he said quietly, "is older than the House. I wondered who would wear it next." His eyes came up from the crescent to my mouth, briefly, the way you glance at a thing you've decided not to want, and then back, and the brief glance cost me more than the long look had. "You hold your breath when you're being studied," he observed, not unkindly. "You shouldn't, with me. I will always know."

"Then I'll learn to like being known," I said, "or I'll learn to stop breathing. We'll see which comes first."

Something moved at the edge of his composure — not a smile, but the place a smile would have stood if he'd let it. His hand lowered without ever landing. He stepped back, and the room widened, and I could breathe again, and hated a little that I'd noticed I couldn't, and hated more that some part of me had counted the half-inch he hadn't crossed and wanted it back.

"I won't refuse what I don't yet understand I'm refusing," I said, because it was the only thing I'd brought.

"That's fair."

"And I won't promise."

"Also fair." The corner of his mouth did something that wasn't a smile and wished it were. "You may go."

Not withdraw — go. The difference was deliberate and I took it. I turned and walked out without breaking stride, didn't say goodnight, didn't look back, and behind me the door stayed open.

Mira was at the head of the stair, exactly where I'd left her, and from the set of her shoulders she had not moved an inch the whole time. She read my face and didn't ask.

"He looked at me," I said.

She nodded slowly. "I thought he might." Then, after a moment, lower, as we started down: "What did he do with his hands?"

The question stopped me on the step. "Nothing. He kept them to himself."

"Good." She didn't explain it, and the not-explaining sat on me the whole way down. Good was not the word for a man who had done nothing. Good was the word for a man who had wanted to do something and chosen not to, and Mira — who had read my thin file and braided my hair and warned me about gifts that were really contracts — had known, before I did, which kind of nothing I had just been handed.

In my chamber, with the lock driven home from the outside — comforting now, in a way that frightened me — I sat on the bed and took up Catherine Lyle's memoir. I turned to page eleven, the second paragraph: Lord Cassian is a man for whom the inside of a sentence is more habitable than the outside. He prefers grammar to anatomy. This will work in your favour, if you let it. I didn't understand it. I understood that I would.

Then I turned the book sideways to find page forty-one — the page his copy had been open to on the armchair.

I didn't have to flip for it. The pages parted on their own. Something between them held it open.

I lifted the book carefully. Pressed flat between page forty and forty-one, dry and fragile as old paper, was a single white flower the size of my thumbnail.

Lunar jasmine. Do not pick.

I didn't know yet what jasmine meant on Aeloria. I didn't know I'd been keeping a flower he'd pressed.

I knew only this: that the slim book lying open on Cassian Venantius's armchair tonight, while he stood alone at his window with his hair down and the lamp lit and the door waiting open for a girl he claimed not to know — had been open to the very same page.