It was a messenger. The boy was young, a new recruit, gangly and awkward, likely to never see war. He bowed respectfully to the King's Witch and waited until she looked ready to receive his message. He would then say,

"The king requests your audience. He awaits your company in his dining hall." He relayed, and would scurry off if she let him.

Indeed, Cassian was seated at a long table in a lonely room, only a single servant standing just by a door, ready to fetch whatever the king should ask for. He didn't ask for anything, of course. He never did. He picked at his food, eyes and mind elsewhere.

Alys stood before the boy would deliver the message, Atlas and Adda standing with her as she nodded her understanding of the message. They'd walk together back into the castle after collecting the training weapons and her directing them to put them away before they headed to their room to wash up.

Butterflies occupied her stomach as she approached the door, though her face didn't show it. Even if she had found her footing in one aspect, it didn't mean she was confident where she stood with him. He had always been so hard to read.

She didn't knock, didn't lift her hood. He had called on her and she knew he'd be expecting her, so instead she slipped inside. Unable to help herself, her eyes scanned the room as she shut the door behind her before she settled on him. Something about the emptiness of the room told her to go closer, even if not yet invited to do so, and she did just that. Stopping only when she was just in front of him to his right, her fingers brushing the top of the table to keep from reaching for him.

"You called for me." It wasn't a question, but more of her way to break the silence.

Cassian didn’t look up when she entered. He didn’t need to look to know who it was. Alys had had a presence with him from the time she was a simple soldier he was passing in the garden. It was his attention to her that had catapulted her through the ranks, setting her at the very side of the king, a position young commoner girls only ever dreamed of. There she was, set at the top of the tower, cared for by the king, and it still hadn’t been enough. Cassian had come to terms with their reality: he would never be enough. So rather than toiling pointlessly like a man unhinged, he had taken care of his issue.

When Alys’ hand touched the table Cassian’s gaze peeled up. Where once they might have shared an unspoken understanding, now there lay only darkness and mystery in his gaze.

“Where have you been spending your time outside the castle?” It didn’t carry the tone of threat or jealousy, but instead simple curiosity.

If only she knew how he felt. If only he knew how she saw it…

Her first instinct was to ask why. Why did it matter suddenly? She had stumbled after her injuries, had lost herself. But she was finding balance now. She was finding a piece of the old Alys. She didn’t ask anything. Instead she answered truthfully, “Sometimes it’s to my family’s place in Skia,” her commoner family, not the Delaney’s.

“Sometimes to the Captain Commander’s estate.” If he wanted to have her followed, she hadn’t tried to hide where she had been going. “I haven’t been back inside my estate since—,” her words died off. She couldn’t remember the last time she had said his name out loud.

She was oversharing, she knew it, and yet she couldn’t stop. Not as her throat tightened, not as her eyes burned suddenly as she finally, held his gaze like she had been able to before life altering events hit her wave after wave.

“I’ve felt lost this last year.” Since she had returned from Dresmond and found Regan standing where she once had. “I felt replaced… brushed aside and forgotten. Less than.” Her fingers curled into her palm. “I’m trying to not hide in my workroom.” Trying to be the strength alongside his military as she had been before. Even if everyone seemed to want answers on what they had seen or heard about from the ball. “I am trying to do better for you… for Nevermere.”

They were missing each other, just as they had been for years now. Ever since the pregnancy. Ever since Alys had opted out of standing beside Cassian in the way he had wanted. The only way he’d been able to offer her. Her response made it clear. A question from him that he’d intended to use to bridge their gap was translated as an interrogation, and her response showed her defensiveness. It seemed everything they had once had was broken. Or maybe it had never been whole to begin with.

Cassian wasn’t going to argue with her, nor would he give her false reassurance.

“Have you?” Still just a question. Even one with a hint of hope in it. “Have you done as I’ve asked?” Because he always did what was best for Nevermere.

Whatever she was hoping for didn’t come. She opened herself a bit, a vulnerability she didn’t show just anyone… and it was how her head fell forward that contained every bit of her that clung to what she felt for him... what she hoped might have been said and wasn’t.

A deep breath, and her head lifted, her emotions now held behind a mask as she forced herself to focus. “I’ve grown, I’ve not told anyone more than they already knew.” Rumors she couldn't control. She didn’t play into them, didn’t entertain the questions.

She straightened, her hand leaving the table and coming to clasp behind her back. A solider. “Cassian?” Her dark eyes lingered on him. “How can I fix this?” Because despite them missing each other constantly now, Alys felt that desperate pull to him. The one she always had.

Cassian nodded, believing her. She hadn’t yet given him a reason not to. Funny, how she stood so close yet seemed so far. At this point, however, there was nothing he could do to help them.

When she straightened up and clasped her hands begins her back he assumed she was creating the professional distance he observed with everyone at certain moments. Then she called him Cassian. It was not the first time that Cassian wondered if even Alys knew exactly where she stood.

With the ambiguous question there was only ambiguity to be had in the answer.

“Not everything can be fixed.” Were they Even talking about the same thing? “Some things, through breaking, simply change.”

Her eyes searched him silently, even once he answered her. As if she’d find something there. Something that’d answer more than what he just had. Whether she found it or not, was something for her to know and not be shown on her face. Things just simply… changed.

“May I sit?” She asked, not pointing to any chair in particular, and watching with what he might say. But as always, she didn’t just… leave. Couldn’t. Something tied her right here with him.

Alys’ silence was not unusual. Though something changed for her, nothing changed for Cassian. Things has been different for a time. He looked into those familiar brown eyes and saw a stranger. Where before they could communicate without speaking, now they were speaking but communicating different things. Life was funny like that. He never could have predicted this course for them.

Cassian opened his hand towards the chair on the other side of his desk. He’d watch her move, watch her sit, waiting. She might have something to say or she might not. Either way, a silence filled the space between them unless she chose to break it.

She moved to sit at the seat beside him at his private dining table. Not too close, but not far. She wanted to keep talking, a small part of her growing louder with the things she wanted to say. But as he remained silent, she realized she was the problem.

“I’m sorry,” her words soft. “I always tried to treat you as a man, but failed to remember you aren’t just any man.” That was part of her problem. “I know you are my King, it never slipped my mind. But I assumed,” he wanted to forget that. But that was wrong. Cassian was a King. Always. From the moment his eyes opened in the morning and even through the sleep. And she assumed he had picked her, a commoner, to feel normal.

Her thoughts were all wrong. “I have some witches who have been under my watch. I’d like to look at setting up some cursed wards at the southern border between us and Dresmond.” Her eyes moved to his. “It’d take a group of us… but cursing the area if anything was to pass through of gifted blood… we’d know.” What she needed… was a gifted.

Cassian’s face betrayed nothing. It was his mask behind which his thoughts and feelings resided, safely guarded. When she spoke nothing changed, not outwardly.

He supposed she had found the issue but didn’t know what to do with it and thus abandoned it: Cassian was both. It wasn’t something everyone could compute. In fact, to this day he could only think of one individual who had been able to truly grasp that reality and make their exchanges work.

She moved from talking about them to talking about a plan.

“Write a proposal, detailing the good of this and what exactly the curse will do—“ because all curses doled punishment, “and submit it for review.” It was an underwhelming response, but it was the last thing he said so he assumed it was of utmost importance.

That seemed to be that. His gaze made her want to keep going, but what else could she say? She was no longer his second in anything, his right hand. Her cheeks burned suddenly but she cast her gaze to the table before she laid down her thoughts.

Once she collected enough, her eyes rose to him. “I will,” as much as she hated her handwriting, it had at least improved enough that she knew he would be able to read it unlike when she had first became his witch. “By the end of the week.” She slowly stood from her seat.

“I’ll see you full moon?” She loathed the feeling that twisted her stomach at seeing Regan. Her whole world felt upside down.

Cassian gave a nod. Full moon. That was that, then. All that they had once had, all that they had once been, so easily eclipsed by a focus on the border. A focus he wasn’t even sure why she held. Of course, she didn’t know that Regan was taking a trip into the heart of Dresmond very soon. Cassian didn’t tell her things anymore, not since she had become so unreliable. So unstable. She wasn’t the same woman she had been before her loss. Cassian had hoped she would spread new wings, but it seemed her power had been in her husband. He had been under the wrong impression that it had been in him, her king and alpha.

With their business finished, Cassian returned his attention to his plate and the food on it. He could not have said why his eyes burned, as he wasn’t currently reflecting on himself; it took everything in him to keep from watching her leave, which is what he assumed she would do.