No. No, he may not. But she can’t refuse a king, and she’s never been skilled at polite dances. So she grimaces and backs up a few steps, finally straightening, hands tugging at the roughspun fabric of her robes. She looks for all the world like a nun, except that where a nun keeps her skull fastidiously close-shaven, her head now shows nearly a year’s worth of shaggy, dark growth, untended and unminded. Her clothing has been leeched of color in several places by experiments gone wrong. She is far thinner than even the privations of the siege demand.

He follows her in with a wave of his hand. His escort remains outside and closes the door after him.

Phosyne has never been alone with a king before. She can’t tell if she’s suffocating under the weight of his presence, or if she’s shocked that he is, in fact, still just a man.

A very tired man, who goes to the stool by one of her workbenches and sits down heavily. He’s picked the more familiar array of her tools to look at, vessels grudgingly loaned to her by the Priory mixed in with her own more-chipped and haphazard implements. He must notice the mess of it all, even in the gloom, but he seems to look right through it. His gaze doesn’t stop on the half-sketched frescoes on her walls, attempts at understanding pigment and form. He does not speak.

Phosyne flinches anyway.

“No progress,” she mutters, eyes averted. “I thought I had something, but—but not yet.”

He sighs. “The quartermaster tells me—”

“Fifteen days,” she accedes. “I know.”

“You have done the impossible for me once,” he says. “Surely it cannot be so hard to do it again?”

Unfortunately, she is fairly sure her first miracle was pure luck. She still doesn’t know where the process came to her from. A dream? A half-remembered theorem from her days at the Priory? But if so, the Priory itself would have solved the problem long ago.

Though—

“Has Prioress Jacynde had any luck?” she asks. “Any progress at all? If I knew where their work stood, I might be able to build on it.” And though the prioress would sneer with disgust if Phosyne came to her directly, even in this time of greatest need, she would not do the same to a king.

“No,” the king says, dashing her hopes. “None at all. They claim it cannot be done. That matter cannot be transformed, that something cannot be brought forth from nothing.”

Phosyne chews her chapped lip to keep herself from arguing. Or, worse yet, agreeing.

She’s still not sure where she stands on the concept.

They are silent for several moments, long enough that Phosyne spies a shifting shadow beneath her other desk—Pneio nosing out from his hiding place. She moves, half a step, to shuffle him back out of sight.