What did Laya have to offer? His breath hitched in his throat as he studied her features. A pretty face, although an accurate observation, was not what she wanted to hear. So he told her, “A sharp mind. A quick tongue. I’ve watched you outwit nobles twice your age. Their admiration for you grows year after year.”

Laya blinked. His choice of words surprised her. “Noticed all of that, did you?” she asked, her voice uncharacteristically tight.

“I notice everything that happens at court,” he replied.

Everything about you.

They stood there for a long, pregnant moment. Laya gazed at him, not with lust, but with what appeared to be genuine gratitude. “Dear Luntok. If I kiss you now, I fear I may never make it back to my chambers,” she murmured as she stepped into the shadows. “But know that it brings me great comfort, having you around.”

Not once did she mention the word love, but Luntok could taste it in the muggy night air that hung between them. A lump rose in the back of his throat as he watched her go. In another life, he’d follow her up to her bedroom, make love to her, and then fall asleep at her side. According to some, Luntok had no right to that future. All because ancient rules governed their lives and forced him to relinquish Laya. It tore him in half every time.

Not for long. Luntok spat again at the foreign district for good measure. Maynara was changing, becoming a place where even ancient rules could be snapped in half like brittle reeds. Luntok and Laya were proof of this. Fortune would favor them if they were brave enough to carve their own path. And they belonged together. Anyone with eyes could see it. Why shouldn’t they have the future they both desperately craved?

Often, when Luntok worked himself up with feverish fantasies, his mother’s voice burst through his bluster to soothe him: Soon, my boy, soon. This once, Luntok leaned into the imagined comfort. He knew he needed only bide his time and Laya would be his, as she always should have been. Never again would he watch her spin out beyond his reach.

He squinted up at the nearest consulate, a miserable, gray block of a building. Once, it had housed the delegation of some western power⁠—Luntok had never learned much about the Sunset States, that faraway continent, their countries a messy patchwork of strange tongues and stupid names. Those consulates had no place in Maynara; they were a scar upon the Gatdula legacy. Hara Duja’s mother, the late queen, should have demolished them when she’d expelled their emissaries several decades before.