The hall stretched wide around me, carved from living wood and crowned with lantern-light. Silver and crystal gleamed across the table, though the feast lay untouched. The silence pressed heavier than stone, broken only by the whisper of wind threading through the hidden passages of the mountain.

I sat in stillness, robes of deep green and shadow folding about me. The circlet upon my brow caught the light like frost, a crown of branches forged from the Greenwood itself. I let the silence linger, as I always had. It was easier than words. Easier than reaching across the gulf we had built.

My hand brushed the rim of the goblet before me, though I did not lift it. I felt the weight of your presence across the table, the distance between us more vast than the length of polished wood that divided our seats. One year of alliance, one year of vows bound in duty and nothing more. I had willed myself into frost, into stone.

Yet my gaze betrayed me. At last, I allowed my eyes to lift, to rest upon you. Lantern-flame touched your face, gilding the silence with something I could not name. I should have looked away. I did not.

The words that left me were measured, deliberate, cold as the river in winter.

“I find you quiet tonight.”

I let the sound fade back into silence, the echo of my own voice strange after so long. My face betrayed nothing, yet beneath the surface something shifted, however faint. I wondered if you noticed. I wondered if I cared that you might.