Elara walked into the room on the morning of the fourth day with a folded paper in her hand.

Alistair sat at the wooden table, his cup of tea barely touched, watching the gray light leak through the window. He could tell, the moment she stepped in, that she had written the list herself. He had watched her work on it for two days now, while he had been busy correcting Silas’s footwork in the doorway practice.

Due was in the next room, his voice low over a map. Silas was asleep on the cot near the door.

Elara placed the list down between them.

"I am not coming into Verissan with you," she said, her voice steady.

Alistair did not appear surprised. "I know."

She narrowed her eyes slightly. "You knew before I told you."

"I knew last night."

"How?"

"Silas told me. He did not mean to, of course. He used a stance correction in the doorway practice that he would never have used if you had been coming with me. Following that, I figured it out."

Elara furrowed her brows and sighed quietly. "He is too sharp for a boy his age."

"He is."

She pulled out the chair across from him and sat, her hands flattening on either side of the paper.

"I am heading to the southern Oasis settlements," she said. "The exiled Caelmari nobles, the houses that lost their seats two generations ago when the current council finalized in Verissan. Several of them are still out there, and several are very old. A few have been waiting decades for someone to come and have an honest conversation about what would have to happen for them to step back into political life."

"And you are the honest conversation."

"I am the only one of us who can be."

"Why."

She did not answer at once. Alistair was honestly unsettled by how steady she seemed, because there was no flicker in her eyes, only the calm of someone who had already made a decision and was waiting for him to catch up.

"Because I am the only one of us," she said, "who has had a Caelmari council finalize against my house. I am the only one of us who knows, in the room, what that conversation will sound like. Due is brilliant, however, Due is not exiled. He has never sat at a table where the people across from him decided that his line was not going to be invited back. I have."

She paused, then continued without looking away.

"The people I am about to sit across from will hear in the first sentence whether the person speaking has been across that kind of table, or has only read about it. I have been across it, Due has not. Silas would not survive the dinner, and you, Alistair, you would lie to them, and they would know."

Alistair clicked his tongue, a small sound that filled the silence. "That is a fair assessment."

"It is the only assessment that places me in the south instead of you."

He let the line sit for a moment.

"Due is worried about it," he said.

Elara exhaled deeply. "Due is always worried about things he cannot control."

"He thinks the negotiation will compromise you."

"Due thinks that because I am the daughter of a noble house I just renounced, and he reasons like a man who has watched many people fail their own renunciations. He is not wrong to think it. Regardless, he is wrong to think it will compromise me."

"Why."

She looked across the table at him with the same expression she had worn the night she had told him her name was no longer Vance.

"Because I am the only person in this building," she said, "who can speak about that kind of compromise from the inside. The Caldren name was a name I carried for sixteen years, and I renounced it on a night I will remember for the rest of my life. Even so, I did not renounce the part of me that learned to sit at a Caldren table. That part of me is what is going south."

Her voice dropped a touch.

"That part of me will not flinch when one of the old exiled lords looks across the table at me and asks me, in a tone that is polite but is also a knife, what kind of girl renounces her father at twenty. I have an answer for him."

"What is the answer."

Her lips twitched, almost into a smile.

"The answer is none of his business."

Hearing this, Alistair nearly smiled, however, he kept it down.

He laid his hand flat on the table near hers, not touching, only resting close. He thought about long tables in long rooms, and a small woman at the head of one of them with a list of names in her coat. He also thought, in the small dark place inside himself he rarely visited, about what happens to a person who had renounced a noble house when they are sent into a room full of people waiting decades for someone like them to fall.

He said none of it aloud.

What he said was, "Be careful."

"I always am."

"I do not mean be careful with them, Elara. I mean be careful with yourself."

She remained quiet for a long moment, while the light from the window crept slowly across the wood between them.

"I know what I am going into, Alistair."

"I know you do."

"I will not come back from it as someone else."

"You will not come back from it as someone else."

"You will come back from yours as someone else, by the way."

Alistair took the line in, and he did not protest it.

"Yes."

She nodded once, then folded the list and slipped it into the inside pocket of her coat. It was the same pocket where Alistair had placed the parchment with a name the day before. Both of them, on the morning of the fourth day, were carrying the names they would be answering to in whatever room they walked into next.

’It is strange,’ Alistair thought. ’We are both pretending we will recognize each other when this is over.’

"One favor," she said as she stood.

"Ask it."

"When you come back, and you are not entirely the person who left, I will walk into the room and call you by the name you left under. I will keep doing it until you turn your head."

Alistair raised his brows slightly. "How long will that take?"

"I will know when I am doing it, and I will not stop until you turn your head."

"That is fair."

"I want you to know it before I do it, so that when you hear it, you will not think I made a mistake."

"I will not think you made a mistake."

"Good."

She walked toward the door without slowing, and the latch clicked behind her with a small, final sound.

Alistair sat for a long minute after she was gone, while the morning light on the wood stopped moving entirely. She had told him she had an answer for the third lord on the third night, and she had never told him what the answer was.

At that moment, Due’s voice came from the next room, sharp and low, calling his name in a tone that meant the timetable for Verissan had just changed.