In the morning, Orin reached for his spoon and promptly dropped it. He stared overly long at the offending object. The rest of them did not stare at his trembling hands.

Not an hour later, his presence was requested for an urgent meeting. Everyone—Rose and Lochlann and Jeshinkra and Aaron himself—looked at the man, and he looked at them. As Aaron knew where all the king’s clothes were kept, he went to select an outfit. Between him and Lochlann, they got the man dressed. But it was left to His Majesty to walk the distance to where the Lord Protector and his people gathered.

Aaron remembered, once, watching Orin’s father walk, and hoping the man would not fall. Orin himself managed it with equal dignity. And equal speed.

There were dragons on the road north again. Not in numbers they could not handle, but—

“I am failing to see how my presence was required,” Orin stated, with exactly the degree of patience to which he was entitled.

The problem was, they were trying to be helpful. They were alerting the watch houses to incoming attacks; some were aiding in those attacks. On the human’s side.

“We believe they’re militia who were doppeled,” one lord said, as everyone tried to pretend they were looking at Orin as their king, not as the man they were poisoning for this same crime.

The helpful dragons were, unsurprisingly, not staying to chat after their good deeds were done. Also: they were making a sizeable impact on the sheep flocks farther south. Or so complained the most recent news from Salt’s Mane, whose duchess suggested joint action to hunt the beasties, as they were suspected to be roosting on the cliffs between there and Helland. There were more caves than had been claimed by humanity’s architects in that stretch.

“They should have turned themselves in,” another noble said. That she seemed to sincerely believed it—that in their position, she might even do so herself—did not improve the advice.

These dragons were marked not only by their helpfulness, but at their relatively abysmal dragon-ness. They were poor fliers: one had already been found crippled, dashed against a rock face after particularly strong winds. Others had been struck from the sky by their fellow dragons as the militia’s spotters watched. They were just as unskilled at camouflaging, and tended towards displaying the solid colors that were a dragon’s true skin rather than the background-matching of their peers.

It was a steep learning curve, becoming a dragon.

Best to hunt them out while they were newborn to the role.

“They are helping our militia?” Orin asked, in clarification no one needed. “Then perhaps it would be wise to leave the dealing with them until season’s end. They’ve their death sentences already; let them serve.”

His Majesty was not invited to future meetings. Out of respect for his failing constitution, of course.

* * *

The Lady found Aaron in the alcove outside of His Majesty’s rooms. Because Orin did not wish company, and Aaron did not wish to be out of sight of at least two people at any given time, particularly where the Lady was concerned. Jeshinkra and the other guard on Orin’s door neatly filled the role of witnesses, if ones too far away to hear.

“Pastry?” she offered, with pleasant smile and outstretched hand.

“No thank you,” he said, even though the fresh-baked sweet looked good. Mockingly good.

The Lady gave a little shrug, and took a bite of the thing. She joined him in his window seat, and chewed, and watched through the arrow slit as griffins flew past in the far distance.

When the last bite had been savored, she put a foot up on the cushioned seat, and nodded to his reading material. “Have you found your ghost stories, yet?”

“A hint would be nice,” he said.

“The book is the hint,” she said, exactly as helpful as ever.

“What are ghosts?”

“Ghosts,” she said, “are best left forgot.”

“But are they actually bad?” he asked. “If the old castle is haunted, but things got worse after it was sealed—”

“Pastry?” she interrupted him, pulling a new one from the same sort of place he would have. It was just as squished as one of his would have been, as well.

Aaron glared pointedly at her. She smiled back. And did not eat this second one, he noted. Which—was there something actually wrong with it? Or did she only want him to think there was? Or…?

“Why do you keep dodging the subject?” Aaron asked. “I know better than to speak of the unwanted dead, but this isn’t a person’s name—this is just… ghosts. In general. As a species, if they can even be called that. Can they?”

She placed the pastry on the arrow slit’s ledge, and rested an arm across her raised knee. “There are other stories than those written down,” she said. “About a Sweet Child on the continent, who has no business knowing the things she does. Things said in locked rooms with none to overhear; things spoken with only humans around, but more than humans soon know. If my predecessors knew how the trick was done, it wasn’t a thing they were given the opportunity to pass down. But it is fact that the continent still listens for us, and they do not like ghost stories. Not the true ones.”

She tapped the page of his book, twice. Then she left him—and her little pastry, still on its window ledge—behind.

And her Death, who’d sat on the ground throughout the conversation, watching indulgently as a little mouse down the hall raced from hiding spot to hiding spot ahead of the calico cat’s stalking. Whether it was the mouse or the cat she smiled at, he couldn’t say. Its Death flickered just ahead of it, cheering on each success, no matter how temporary.

“Is she actually meant to die soon,” he said, voice low enough to be speaking to himself, “or are you just hanging about?”

She laughed a light little laugh, all together quite like the Lady’s, when the woman was feeling playful.

“Meant to? Oh yes. But will she? I am in such suspense.”

The calico pounced. The little mouse shrieked; twisted, and bit, and ran again. Aaron pulled his feet up by reflex as it raced into a chink in the rockwork under his feet. The cat pulled short, looking up at him balefully.

“That was hardly my fault,” Aaron told her.

Mrmph, said the cat.

“It most certainly was,” said the mouse’s Death, with distinct satisfaction.

Which. Was certainly a thing that had just happened.

“Am I supposed to be keeping it a secret that I can see your sort, or aren’t I?” Aaron asked, because he hadn’t intentionally tipped his hand to the Lady’s Death, much less a mouse’s, but it seemed they’d had him made from the start.

“It’s certainly a choice, who you trust,” the Lady’s Death said, and the little mouse’s Death tittered.

Jeshinkra was looking his way, now. Aaron ceased to scowl at thin air, and took up his reading again. Perhaps he’d finish sometime this decade.

…The continent knew things they shouldn’t. Things said in locked rooms, with no one else present. No one they could see.

No one humans could see.

The cat had shifted its glare to the Deaths. Its tail lashed behind it. Then it left, too dignified for all this.

The little mouse emerged a few minutes later, whiskers quivering. It retreated, just as quickly, as Aaron’s hand came down.

He set the pastry outside its hidey-hole, and kept reading.

That night, he collected the fifth letter to Connor.