Ivel reached his hand down to her.
She looked at it for a moment, then took it, and he pulled her to her feet.
"Well," he said, "I suppose you're not just a princess."
Verna raised an eyebrow.
"Oh, you think I'm a princess. How nice of you."
"It wasn't meant as a compliment."
"I know." She brushed herself off. "Though I'll take it anyway. You were genuinely difficult to read, for what it's worth."
"You were harder," he said, and meant it. "I couldn't find a pattern to work with. Took me longer than I'd like to admit."
She pointed at him.
"Switching styles mid-fight." A slight pout crossed her face. "That isn't fair, you know."
He laughed.
"At least you noticed."
She laughed too, and the formality of the spar dissolved entirely between them.
Verna sat down on the ground and then lay back, folding her hands across her stomach and tilting her face toward the sky. After a moment she turned her head and looked at Ivel, still standing.
"Are you going to stand there all night?"
He said nothing.
"You wouldn't leave a princess alone, would you," she added, the corner of her mouth lifting.
"Yea, yea."
He lay down beside her — not close, just parallel — and looked up.
The sky above the capital was vast and unhurried, stars spread across it in their slow and indifferent arrangements, the kind of sight that made the events of the day feel small in a way that wasn't unpleasant.
"I always like coming out here at night," Verna said. "It's peaceful."
"What about it is peaceful to you?"
She considered him for a moment, as though deciding whether the question was genuine.
"Have you never felt it — that feeling when you look at something and know, without being able to explain it, that it deserves to be looked at? That it's asking to be admired, and quietly, and by yourself?"
Ivel was quiet for a moment.
"Back home," he said, "there's a cliff above the shore. I sit there sometimes. The wind comes in off the water and it smells of salt and it's cold in the way that actually wakes you up properly." He paused. "And the ocean just — sits there. Being itself. And it looks strange and beautiful at the same time, the way things do when they're too large to fully take in." He turned the words over. "And sometimes I feel something when I'm sitting there. Like the water is calling to me. Like there's somewhere out there I'm supposed to be going."
He glanced sideways at her.
"It's a strange thing to try to explain."
"No," she said simply. "I understand exactly what you mean. Sometimes I feel the same way about the stars. Like I don't just want to look at them." She paused. "Like I want to be part of them."
Ivel let that sit for a moment.
"Part of the stars," he repeated.
"Yes." She smiled at the sky. "Part of the stars."
A quiet settled between them, comfortable and unhurried. Then Verna tilted her head toward him.
"If I did become a star," she said, "do you think you'd know which one I was?"
Ivel laughed — a genuine one, surprised out of him.
"What kind of question is that? How would I possibly be able to tell?"
She smiled and looked back up.
"I'm sure time will tell."
Ivel followed her gaze back to the sky.
"Maybe it will."
They stayed like that for a while — side by side on the ground, looking up at the slow and distant expanse of it all, the half-lit moon casting its pale light across the training ground and the manor walls and the dark shape of the capital beyond.
Neither of them spoke.
Neither of them needed to.
From somewhere at the edge of the courtyard, in the shadow that the moon threw longest, a figure stood with a wine bottle hanging loosely from one hand. Vas looked at the two of them lying there beneath the stars — the boy who trained when he should have been resting and the girl who had come to find him anyway — and something moved across his face that had no name but was not complicated.
He smiled.
Then he turned and walked back into the dark, the night's breeze carrying him away as quietly as it always did.
"Ah," he said softly, to no one in particular.
"To be young again."
And then he was gone.