My first few weeks consist mostly of just getting into the rhythm of my new schedule.

I don't expect to be called back to breakfast after the first time, since Khysmet had said he usually eats alone. However, I only eat breakfast in my room with Vizsla once before being called back the next morning, and every subsequent morning thereafter.

It's unfortunate, because I'm hardly at my best behavior first thing in the morning. But I start to get the sense that the more I lower my filter, the less effort Khysmet puts into being irritating. When I make that connection, I drop my filter so hard it bounces. Instead of trying to hold my thoughts in and not being able to control when they explode out, I just tell him when I think he's being a dick, and he seems to appreciate my candidness.

A little too much, if I'm being honest. He seems more pleased when I tell him what I really think of him than when I attempt to tolerate his antics. Every unkind word earns me a very genuine, if self-satisfied smile. Whenever he moves to pat me on the head again, he’s ecstatic when I try in vain to slap his hand away. And he absolutely revels in my sarcasm. It’s a bit mystifying, but there’s a level of comfort in the feeling that I don’t have to hold anything back.

The flirting confuses and flusters me, moreso at first. It isn’t very frequent, just every once in a while, right when I start to get comfortable. He never makes any sort of move and hardly ever even touches me; he’ll just say something suggestive that makes my skin prickle, wait a second to gauge my reaction, then move on like nothing happened. I’ve become convinced that he only does it to watch me squirm. I’d love to stop giving him the satisfaction, but not squirming under his penetrating gaze proves difficult. It’s the only aspect of his teasing I can’t really get used to.

The times he asks me to accompany him in the afternoon are not as horrendous as I'd thought they'd be, especially as his presence becomes more tolerable. Often, he wants to go to the library, where there's a beautiful grand piano for me to play. The windows there, which span multiple floors full of bookshelves, provide a breathtaking view straight over the cliff the castle sits on. I can just noodle around on the piano and stare off into the distance while he reads and occasionally talks to me about the novel he’s picked that day.

A couple times he has me bring my lute and accompany him on walks through the expansive royal gardens. They’re breathtakingly beautiful, but man, am I miserable under the heat of the sun here. The clothes I have been given are almost invariably made of a nice, cool cotton, but breathable fabric only takes you so far. I mention my discomfort to him once, and the next day for breakfast, I get led into the garden for a picnic under the much cooler morning sun. It’s a little too intimate, which has me on edge the whole time, but it is fun.

Sometimes he even has other plans – either administrative matters that require more attention, his wanting to practice his swordsmanship with members of the castle guard, or whatever else might strike his fancy – and he doesn't need my services at all. On those days, I get to wander the castle and work on my efforts to make as many friends as possible. I'm filling my notebook of people's names up at a steady clip, and I spend about half an hour before bed each night studying it.

Most of the attending servants are very receptive to my friendly advances. Many of them are quite young, and they are invariably kind and curious – curious about me, and also about everything going on in the castle. There's no shortage of thirst for salacious rumors among them, but I don't find the same sinister overtones in their questions as what I overhear from the court nobles in the great hall every morning. For many of them it takes only a little persuading to get them to call me Cat, and they talk to me happily whenever they see me in the halls.

The stable hands are exceedingly friendly – too much so. They're loud and boisterous, and quite funny, but they flirt with me incessantly. The guard Khysmet assigned to me is on edge every second I spend in their company. For his sake more than anything else, I don't make a habit of visiting the stables often. I don't think he's been instructed to stop me from going anywhere, but I have a feeling Khysmet might not be happy with him "letting" me hang out there.

Most of the guards don’t talk to me very much. They are extremely tight-lipped when they’re on duty. I can only imagine that they speak more amongst themselves in their barracks and other places in the castle that they use for breaks, but I have a distinct sense that I’m not welcome in those areas, so I avoid them. I still try to learn their names, though, and I ask how they’re doing even though I don’t typically get much more than a word or two in response.

The kitchen is where I feel I am truly among my people. The energy there makes me feel like I'm back with the Warblers. They're chatty while they work, and I bear witness to many little good-natured squabbles between them that are quite entertaining to listen to. The head chef is a stern but fair woman named Lorna who doesn't take anyone's shit, and I love her from the moment she hands me a freshly baked pastry and tells me to piss off and stop bothering her staff.

I even manage to start a conversation with two of the court chemists when I happen to encounter them on their way into a room I didn't know was their lab. They're reticent at first, but once I express interest in what they're working on, they open up quick. I'm excited to have a chance to get to know some of the smartest scientists in the country. I can't tell if they like me yet, but both of them are positively jazzed to have someone asking questions about their work.

No one of noble blood has said a word to me yet. I find it hard to be disappointed by that.

I’m also trying to befriend the guard appointed to watch over me. He’s rather young – I'd guess about twenty, give or take a few years. His name is Rhys, and he obstinately refuses to call me Cat. Nothing I say will sway him.

He seems rather skittish in general, and it's odd to me that Khysmet would have picked such a nervous person to watch over me. Somehow I get the sense that it's not because Khysmet lacks confidence in his abilities, though. Whenever I move too close, he flinches and scurries away with surprising alacrity. It almost seems like he's scared of me, but I can't fathom why.

Not until I mention it to Khysmet one morning, anyway.

"Oh, he's not scared of you," he says, waving my concern away with a dismissive hand. "If anything, he's scared of me. I told him if he touched you, I'd have the tips of his fingers removed."

"You… you what?" I splutter, physically recoiling in shock and disbelief. "You can't- I mean- You wouldn't really do that, would you? Is that something you've done to people?"

He chuckles at my energetic response. "No, it isn't," he admits. "I can't say I've ever given an order to maim someone who works under me."

"Well, does Rhys know that?" I demand loudly, not finding the situation very funny at all. When he doesn't answer, I rip a piece off of my toast and throw it at him, but that only serves to turn his subdued chuckle into a full laugh.

"Okay, look," he says with a placating gesture, "not only does Rhys know that I'm not going to hurt him, that's also not what I actually said to him."

I ready another piece of toast, and it's satisfying when he flinches and holds his hands up to deflect the projectile before I've even thrown it, though his laughter doesn't stop in the slightest.

"I did order him not to touch you," he concedes, "but I didn't threaten him. I promise you."

I reluctantly stand down and lower my throwing arm.

"Well, you better hope you didn't."

After that I don't try so hard to befriend Rhys, since the last thing I want to do is get him in trouble. I make sure to telegraph more clearly when I'm moving in his direction so he can back off more discreetly, and it's not long before he's much less nervous in my presence.

My mornings in the great hall are still fairly disheartening. After around a month and a half, the jabs at me have died down somewhat, but I still hear them every day. I will say though, that other topics of conversation do start to take precedence.

Stolen novel; please report.

I overhear so much from my spot beside the west wall. For one, I get to witness all the interactions that Khysmet has with the members of the public that come to see him.

He is shockingly kind to his people. When he speaks to those who come representing their towns to plead for his assistance, he never mocks or belittles them, never rejects them out of hand without first listening to their full stories. More often than not, he agrees to help quite readily, though he is pragmatic about the amount of aid the kingdom is able to provide. Not once do I even hear him say an unkind word about them after they leave, not even about the truly odd ones, like those who come to read aloud the dreadful poetry they have written in his honor. His advisors mock them regularly, but Khysmet unflaggingly shuts that down.

When it comes to the members of his court, however, he is not always so kind. I don't yet have the context for much of the political talk that passes between him and his ministers, advisors, lords, et cetera, but Khysmet is quick to tell them when he disagrees with or is displeased by them. And there's a lot of conversations that seem innocuous to me at first, but then Khysmet shuts them down hard, and I wonder each time if there was some sort of underhanded double-speak happening that I just didn't recognize as such. I hope that given time, I'll be more attuned to what's really being said. Khysmet seems to navigate these conversations with ease, or at the very least with confidence, and I find I'm impressed despite myself.

Watching these interactions only convinces me more that he gets off on telling people what to do, though.

I do notice a marked difference between the way he interacts with other people and the way he talks to me. His public face is very calm, very above-it-all. Very kingly, I suppose you could say. His general demeanor holds a lot of authority in and of itself, and he is treated with a great deal of respect by just about everybody. I don't see many people directly contradict him – even when his advisors express differing opinions, they sort of talk around it so it doesn't seem like they're saying "no" in as many words.

With me on the other hand, he's much more animated. I don't think I even once see him have more than a reserved two-second chuckle in front of his advisors, but I personally witness him full-on cackle on multiple occasions. His movements are looser, his face more expressive – even the way he talks is more relaxed. He affects what I would call a sort of boyish charm, if he was directing it at someone else. As it is, I would call it an obnoxious series of tribulations inflicted upon me with an irritating level of enthusiasm. But he does seem genuinely happy.

I wonder if there’s anyone else that he lowers his guard around, someone I just haven’t met yet. It really doesn’t seem like it though. Given all the time I spend with Khysmet each day, I think I’d at least have run into them incidentally at some point.

I wonder if he was lonely before he brought me here.

The hardest part for me to get used to might be the lack of agency I have over my choices. With the Warblers, it’s not like I was making all the decisions or anything. I was told what to do pretty frequently, in fact, and I didn’t mind it whatsoever. Maybe the reason I didn’t mind was because the things I was told to do were generally perfectly reasonable. Also, I almost always had the ability to say no, even though I didn’t exercise it very frequently.

Here, when I’m told what to do, there’s not often a rhyme or reason to what I have to do and why I have to do it. When I ask, Khysmet often gives the maddeningly opaque reasoning of “Just Because”. The most egregious example of this happens at breakfast one day, the first time I tell him I want to go out into the city for a day with a couple people from the kitchens.

“No.”

“No?” I ask, taken aback. “What do you mean no?”

“I mean no, you can’t go,” Khysmet says simply, as though stating an obvious fact rather than saying something ridiculous.

“Well why the hell not?” I demand.

He shrugs. “It’s dangerous.”

“The fuck do you mean ‘It’s dangerous’, we’ll be in broad daylight the whole time!”

He cocks his head like he’s carefully considering the logic of my argument, and not just thinking of more ways to torture me like I know he is.

“Okay,” he says, “But I’m coming with you.”

I scoff. Is he serious?

“No way,” I say. “You’d make my friends nervous hovering around the whole time, and they wouldn’t have any fun. It defeats the whole purpose if you come.”

He shrugs. “Then I guess you can’t go.”

I slam my hands down on the table and stand out of my chair.

“This is ridiculous!” I snap at him. “I’m not asking for permission, I’m informing you of what I’m doing regardless of what you want.”

He smirks and leans back in his chair, steepling his hands. He looks at me with heavy-lidded eyes, exuding smugness from every pore.

“I think we both know that’s not true.”

I blink.

I’m going to kill him.

He watches with apparent glee, flicking his tongue as I stand there, hands on the table, murder in my eyes, shaking with anger and the exertion of holding myself back from picking up a plate and breaking it over his head. And then I realize that this is exactly what he wants.

Well I’m not going to give it to him anymore. I close my eyes and take deep breaths. I sit down. I put my hands in my lap. Then I go back to eating and don’t even look in his direction.

“How badly do you want to go?” he asks, trying to reel me back in.

“No.”

“No? No what?”

“I’m not going to beg to go outside like a four-year-old,” I say. “I refuse.”

He hums thoughtfully and leans forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.

“I suppose I’ll let you go…” he says, “if you tell me exactly where you’re going and promise to be back at least an hour before dark. And you have to take Rhys with you.”

I close my eyes. My left eyebrow twitches. I suck my lips in between my teeth and bite. I tap my fingers on the table, slow at first but building to a frantic speed. I take in a deep breath through my nose. And I tell him.

“Good girl,” he praises. “Now was that so hard?”

“Someday I am going to smash a plate over your head,” I inform him.

“I look forward to the day that you try.”

Upon later reflection, it’s clear to me that he was going to let me go anyway. If he really didn’t want me going, there’s no way he would have lost so much ground, going from a full “no” all the way down to “just tell me where you’re going”. He just wanted to see how much he could get away with telling me what to do.

This is a common theme with Khysmet. Because he gets off on it. I can’t figure out why no one seems to see that but me.

It’s a common trend among the whole castle staff. No one will say a single thing against Khysmet. They have a lot to say about just about every other member of the court, but never him. Whenever I kvetch about the trials and tribulations he puts me through every day, I am always, without exception, gently but firmly corrected. It’s maddening. I become generally popular with most of the staff, but I think complaining about him sets me back with a few people.

I actually come to gain a sort of significant status amongst the staff, filling a crucial role that earns me points with pretty much everyone in every section of the whole castle. I become an information broker.

Listening to people in the great hall every morning has put me in a unique position wherein I hear a positively insane amount of gossip. The things that people will talk about in a crowded room amaze me to no end. What's more, they will often come stand next to me and speak very low when they want not to be overheard. I suppose they figure the sound of the harp will drown them out to everyone else in the room. Unfortunately for them, I have an uncommonly good ear.

I bear witness to so many personal arguments, private confessions, and other secret exchanges on a daily basis that I start to have a near encyclopedic knowledge of everything that's going on within castle walls. And I am very generous with distributing this information. Members of the castle staff start coming to me just to ask what's new, and to check things they've heard against my knowledge base. When it comes to salacious rumors, I am the last word on truth and integrity in this place. I don't ever make shit up. I don't have to; the royal court is chock full of drama, and it's all spoon-fed to me every single day.

I take my role very seriously. I keep my ears open constantly and try to tune in to as many conversations as I can, casting a wide net as it were, so I stand the best chance of hearing something new and otherwise unknown. I can't hear everything, but I don't miss much.

This is how, one day, sitting as usual at my harp along the west wall, I end up hearing something exceptionally strange, far beyond the typical run-of-the-mill gossip. Something that I immediately know I can't tell anyone.