She turned and held up a tray.
"Breakfast," she said.
"The maid brought it just now. Your father’s announcement is still being prepared so access to this wing is restricted, I took it at the door so no one would need to come in."
Alex looked at the tray.
Then he looked more carefully at the tray.
Whoever had prepared this had understood that this was not a standard morning.
The centrepiece was a serving of slow-braised venison, not dinner venison, the lighter morning preparation, the meat pulled apart and placed on a thick slice of dark honey bread that had been toasted until the butter soaked all the way through and the edges were crisp and the middle was still soft.
Beside it, a shallow bowl of roasted root vegetables that had been caramelised until they were almost sweet, finished with herbs from the palace garden that Alex had only encountered in formal dinners.
There was an omelette.
Not a simple omelette, the folded kind, filled with soft cheese that was still slightly warm and melting at the edges, flecked with fresh herbs and something dark and earthy that he identified after a moment as finely chopped forest mushroom.
The egg was cooked perfectly, the surface smooth and slightly golden, the whole thing sitting on its plate with the air of something that had been made with attention.
On a smaller plate: three pieces of dark fruit pastry, the glazed kind, the fruit inside, blackberries, he thought, or something close, reduced to something thick and sweet that had soaked into the pastry at the edges.
The glaze on top caught the morning light through the curtains.
A glass of cold fresh milk.
Beside it, a small pot of something warm, he leaned in, spiced honey tea, the kind with dried citrus in it that his mother sometimes had in the evenings.
And a tiny ceramic cup of something dark and thick: concentrated berry reduction, for dipping the pastry.
Alex sat down at the small table by the window.
Zara sat across from him and immediately took one of the pastries with the complete confidence of someone who had decided that shadow guard duties included proximity to breakfast.
He looked at her.
"What," she said, with the pastry already in hand.
"Nothing," he said.
He picked up the honey bread with the venison.
The first bite was, he took a moment with it.
The bread had done everything bread was supposed to do.
The butter had made itself completely at home.
The venison was tender in the way that things were tender when they’d been cooked for a long time by someone who had no intention of rushing, and the dark honey note at the back of it was quiet and right.
He thought, briefly, about protein bars and whatever Rin could find in the apartment at two in the morning.
’Different life,’ he thought.
Not with sadness.
Just with the specific appreciation of a person who knew the difference.
"This is good," Zara said, about the pastry, with the confidence of someone stating an objective fact.
"It is," he agreed.
"The cheese omelette —" She had already moved to it, a small piece tested.
Her eyes did something appreciative. "Yes. Whoever made that knew exactly what they were doing."
"Palace kitchen," Alex said.
"Do they always eat like this, or is this a special occasion thing?"
"I assume this is fairly standard, yes."
She looked at him with an expression that had something in it he hadn’t seen from her before, a brief, genuine kind of wonder, the kind that surfaces when someone who has not always had something good encounters it unexpectedly.
"I grew up in the branch house," she said, and her voice was matter-of-fact about it, not asking for anything.
"We ate fine, genuinely fine, I’m not complaining about it. But not—" she gestured at the table, a small motion that covered everything on it, "—this. Nothing like this."
"You’ll eat like this now," Alex said.
She looked at him.
He looked back and said nothing else because nothing else needed to be said.
She looked back at the omelette.
Took another piece.
"Okay," she said quietly. "I can work with this too."
They ate at an unhurried pace that Alex had not expected from either of them, him because he was usually running something in parallel while he did anything, her because she struck him as a person who moved with efficiency rather than leisure.
But the food was good and the morning light was coming through the curtains at a gentle angle and the bond presence at the edge of his perception was settled and warm, and neither of them, it seemed, had anything urgent enough to interrupt breakfast for.
They talked.
Not about the night before, not about aspects or bloodlines or the name that made rooms go quiet. Just about things.
Zara had opinions about food that she’d clearly been waiting for an appropriate context to express, strong and specific opinions, the kind that came from someone who had thought about it seriously and arrived at conclusions she was prepared to defend.
She had equally strong opinions about the branch house training schedule, which she described with a specificity that told Alex it had been hard and she had handled it by deciding hard things were interesting.
She had been to many of the kingdom’s cities.
She had, at fourteen, accidentally started a minor diplomatic incident by telling a visiting noble’s guard that his fighting stance had a structural flaw, demonstrating the flaw in front of several witnesses, and then declining to apologize on the grounds that she had been factually correct.
"What happened after that?" Alex asked.
"Vespera’s servant handled it, smoothed everything over, paid whatever needed to be paid to make the noble feel better about the whole thing," Zara said, serenely.
"And I got a very thorough lecture about when to say true things. Not whether to, she was very clear that the whether wasn’t the issue. Just the when."
"And did you learn from that?"
"Absolutely," she said.
"I learned to say true things faster so there’s less time for people to work themselves up about it before it’s already been said."
Alex looked at her.
"That," he said, "is genuinely the wrong lesson to have taken from that situation."
"It’s the lesson I got," she said pleasantly. "I’m not sure what you want me to do about it now."
He took a sip of the spiced honey tea.
"You’re going to be a problem," he said.
"We’ve established that," she said. "You said it yourself last night."
"I’m adding new data. The picture is becoming more detailed."
She smiled over the edge of her milk.
He looked away before the smile became something he acknowledged directly.
Fenrir’s size.
Sustainable hot water.
Zara’s breakfast opinions.
He was building a list of things that were, unexpectedly, good.
She gathered the dishes when they were done, took them to the door, exchanged three words with whoever was on the other side, and came back.
They moved to the more comfortable seating, Alex on the bed, legs folded, Zara back in the chair that had apparently decided it was hers, and resumed the conversation at the easy pace it had established over breakfast.
Nothing significant.
Nothing filed for later.
Just two people in a room finding out what the other was like when there was nothing requiring them to be anything in particular.
He was, he realised at some point, genuinely enjoying himself.
This was not a common occurrence.
He appreciated things, catalogued them, found them useful or interesting or both.
Enjoying was different.
More passive and less structured.
The experience of something being good without it needing to also be productive.
He was making a note of this when the knock came.
Three times with even spacing.
The specific knock of someone who already knew they were going to be let in and was performing the courtesy of knocking as a formality rather than a request.
Zara was at the door before Alex had moved.
Not fast, she hadn’t lunged, hadn’t alarmed, just the quiet efficiency of someone for whom being between the principal and a door was as automatic as breathing.
She opened it.
Vespera stood in the corridor.
Eclipse was behind her, already leaning sideways to see past their mother’s shoulder with the specific energy of someone who had been patient for several hours and considered that sufficient.
Vespera looked at the room.
At Alex.
At the tray that had been cleared.
At Zara positioned at the door.
Something in her expression settled, the particular quality of a mother arriving somewhere and finding things more or less in order when she’d been quietly preparing for less.
"Good morning, Alex" she said.
"Morning, mom" Alex said.
Eclipse pushed past Vespera with no ceremony whatsoever, crossed the room, sat on the bed next to Alex, and looked at him with the concentrated attention of someone who had been denied information access for several hours and intended to remedy this immediately.
"How are you," she said. "And I want an actual answer, not a summary."
"Good," he said. "Better than good, genuinely. Everything feels different this morning, settled, lighter. The Mana Heart isn’t effortful anymore, it’s just there."
"You look better than good." She studied his face with the focus of someone running a diagnostic. "You look annoyingly well rested, which is unfair because I didn’t sleep at all."
"I slept very well, yes."
"I didn’t," she said. "Not even a little. Because someone blew their doors off and the sound absolutely carried through the corridor and I lay there for three hours waiting for the next thing to explode."
"That was hours before you would have been trying to sleep, the timing doesn’t—"
"I’m aware of when it was, Alex, that’s not the point—"
"Eclipse," Vespera said, from the doorway, in a tone that was not a reprimand and was not not a reprimand.
Eclipse subsided.
Looked at Zara.
Zara looked back.
A brief, silent exchange, the specific assessment of two people who had clocked each other the previous night and were now, in daylight and without ritual context, doing a more thorough evaluation.
Eclipse nodded once.
Zara nodded back.
Something was agreed upon without words.
Alex filed this as interesting and worth revisiting later.
Vespera stepped into the room properly, let the door close behind her, and looked at her son with the expression that meant she had things to say and had organised them.
"How do you feel," she said.
"Light," Alex said honestly. "Like the body got something it needed and is now running the way it was supposed to run. It’s a significant difference from yesterday."
She nodded, unsurprised, the confirmation of an expectation rather than new information.
"I guess the Mana Heart settling. It will stabilise further over the next few days as the formation finishes integrating." She paused, and the pause had weight to it.
"There are things I need to tell you. Things I said I would tell you."
Alex looked at her.
Thought about the world briefing.
About Alessio’s specific mention of threats to the human race.
About the shape of all the things he didn’t know yet.
"I know," he said. "I’ve been waiting for it."
"Are you ready?"
He thought about it honestly, the way he’d thought about the bond the night before, not performing readiness, actually checking.
"Yes," he said.
Vespera looked at him for a moment, the look that meant she was deciding something, weighing it, finding it satisfactory.
Then she sat down.
"Then let’s begin," she said.