It was a very good thing that her dress was a dark blue, because the kohl lining her eyes was soon running down her cheeks in streaks, and would have ruined a white gown. He just let her cry; she had obviously been having a bad couple of days. And after a while, he began to enjoy holding her, in spite of her obvious distress. It made him feel unexpectedly strong and protective and capable. It made him feel—expectedly—very angry at whoever had frightened her so. And there were some rather new and entirely pleasant sensations stirring that he couldn’t quite put a name to—

Finally, it was she who reluctantly disengaged herself from his arms and scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand (making the damage to her makeup much worse). She looked down at the mess on her hand and winced.

“Marit-ka is going to kill me,” she said forlornly. “After all that work—”

“Marit-ka is just going to have to do it over,” he replied, and steered her over to the chair she had been sitting on when he came in. He sat her down on it, looked about for a bit of cloth, spotted a towel beside an empty basin on a little table nearby, and took it out to hold it in the rain pouring down into the courtyard. When it was soaked, he brought it in and, with the expertise of someone who had been caring for the soft and tender skin of a dragonet for a year, scrubbed all of the streaked and ruined makeup from her face, taking care to get all of the malachite and kohl from around her red-rimmed, swollen eyes. He went out again for more of the cold rain, rinsing the towel as best as he could, and bathed her eyes again. She let him, holding still beneath his hands, her own clasped in her lap, her back rigid.

“There,” he said at last, looking at his handiwork. “I’ve at least left Marit-ka with a clean surface to repaint. Now, why don’t you tell me what has been happening to make you turn into Great Mother River in flood?”

She giggled weakly at that, which he took as a good sign. “It isn’t so much that anything happened,” she said at last. “It’s that—Father had visitors, nasty and important visitors asking after me, and afterward he was frightened. I’ve never seen Father frightened before. That was the first time they came, and it was right after you brought me home, as if they knew where I had gone.”