No. It couldn’t have, because there were the flagons, there were the tables, there were the open mouths wailing to the ceiling with jubilation. But Scratch couldn’t hear a damned thing, save for a distant ringing and something that thrummed like a heartbeat, but too quick. Maybe a hummingbird’s heart, tiny and faint and too fast, too fast.

She regretted that one bite of ham. It was now charting a speedy course back up her throat—with ice picks, by the feel of it. Her palms sweat and her cheeks burned and the pants, the fucking pants, gripped her so tightly she thought her eyes might pop out of her head.

“I have to get out of here.”

James clamped his hand over hers, green eyes dark. “I know. I know, I’m sorry. But you can’t leave so soon. People will know.”

“I’m gonna—”

She was ready to say “be sick” but that wasn’t it. It was terribly, horrifically worse.

She was going to cry.

She felt eyes on her like finger pads, peeling back her clothes to peek at the skin underneath. Everyone was looking, or else her imagination had run wild and nobody was looking and, gods, which was worse?

“Just a minute, Scratch,” James murmured. He was so rarely gentle, but when he turned it on, the man could be a blanket. Somehow, that made it worse. “Just a few moments. It’s all right. Just plaster on a happy face. You’re fine. You’re fine.”

She wasn’t fine, but that was hardly the point. The point was getting through the rest of this meal without bursting into flames. The point was her ten years of service, of good service, without a damned scrap of respect. The point was becoming a godsdamned knight.

“I’m leaving.”

“Scratch, where are you—?”

But she wasn’t listening anymore. She was barely seeing. She moved as if in a trance, boots slapping against stone floor as she burst from the hall and into the moonlit night. It was gentle weather, chilly and starlit late springtime, but it slapped her in the face like winter winds. She gasped, choking down the freshness, wishing away the soupy rage that clotted her throat.

She kept moving. She wasn’t entirely aware of where her body was taking her, but when she finally arrived, she wasn’t surprised. There was a corner of the palace grounds, a strip of garden between two hedges, that housed only a stone bench and a patch of weedy grass. A place the gardeners forgot, where a soldier could breathe, unnoticed and unbothered, for hours at a time. Few people knew of it—at least she assumed so because nobody ever bothered her here. Not in this little spot outside of time.