She keeps her cache of food and money here, tucked safe so nobody can take it away from her again. She has been careful, careful for so many years, and since the gates closed six months ago, she has never once hoped for knights to ride in dragging salvation behind. She knows better than to depend on them. They were too late to save a single inhabitant of Carcabonne, even as they fought bitterly for the rocks that formed its walls.

Even before rations were cut, then cut again, she has not eaten her full allotment; she has hoarded and protected, and now her cache is fat and rich.

She has food for at least another month.

Which gives her one more month to save herself, so long as the castle continues to stand. So long as desperate people do not attack from within.

How changed her life has become, how different she is from the coddled, moneyed girl she was raised as. No fine slippers for her, no delicate undergarments. Her soft skin is long-since toughened, her nose grown blind to both the stench of refuse and the gentle waft of perfume.

It’s past midnight when she returns to her assigned sleeping area, if the murmurations of the nuns in the east tower are anything to go by (and they are—the nuns keep fastidious time even with their steadily dwindling supply of timekeeping candles). Though no one person enforces the division of space, nobody would think to go elsewhere. There are rules, spoken and unspoken, of how each role within Aymar relates to another.

Treila obeys them, even as she can see the fiction of them. Nothing physical makes the king more worthy of a cooler, more private sleeping space—just the loyalty of his guard, his servants, and his subjects. And that, she must concede, is power.

The castle has finally settled, all sleeping save for the night guard and two boys, playing at dice by the window. She joins them, ready to act younger than she is as she always does with them. It puts them more at ease, to think of her as a big sister and not another adult. They are freer with their chatter.

The room reeks of bodies, all of Ser Leodegardis’s household staff tucked in together to make room elsewhere for the farmers and the court. They keep their voices to whispers as they play.

“And then Ser Voyne,” breathes Simmonet, sandy-haired, son of one of the washerwomen, “came out of the keep, her armor shining, and she drew her sword.”

Treila’s shoulders tense. She catches her lip between her teeth, the better to keep herself from an angry snarl.

“No,” Edouart counters, “no, she couldn’t have. Da says nobody died, and if a knight draws her sword, she’s going to use it.”

“But I saw her.”