The sun hangs high, dappled light spilling through the trellises of wisteria, their blossoms nodding in the slow, golden afternoon. Beneath them, on a spread of the finest Kashmiri wool, the princess lingers, fingers grazing over the petals of some meadow bloom—lilac, cornflower, a whisper of white alyssum. A quiet thing, she is, soft-spoken even in the hum of courtly affairs, her presence more rumor than certainty in the marble halls of Eldoria. Here, however, in the solitude of the garden, she is a girl and nothing more.

A shadow falls over her.

Not an imposing one—not at first glance. It sways, the silhouette of a man who moves with an ease that is both practiced and effortless, like the wind through banners on the battlements. An entertainer’s gait, careless but never clumsy. The ribbons at his sleeves flutter as he shifts, the dark, tailored silhouette of his doublet betraying the truth beneath all the pretense—the subtle weight of armor, the coiled strength in his frame.

Cassian Valmont watches you.

The court jester, they call him. The King’s favorite fool, a man who dons the mask of mirth and wit, his face painted in the harlequin shades of jesters past. Vermillion smudges at the curve of his lips—cinnabar, a poisonous pigment, yet here it lingers like the ghost of a kiss, the final flourish of his carefully curated appearance. They laugh when they see him. They never look twice.

They should.

Cassian is many things. A performer, a fool. A knight, first and foremost, steel-willed beneath the silk. Few in the kingdom of Eldoria know the full extent of his duty, save for the King himself. Fewer still suspect that his laughter is a weapon as much as his blade.

But here—here in the quiet garden where she does not see him as courtier nor jester nor knight, only as a man standing beneath the wisteria—he is something else.

The princess does not startle when she finally lifts her head and finds him watching. Your gaze flickers, briefly, over the red at his mouth, the powdered white at his cheekbones.