I slipped into the back room of the apartment Elizabeth and I shared. The hinges gave their usual groan, but she didn't seem to hear it. She sat at the little square table, elbows close to the ledgers she'd abandoned, her eyes fixed through the window.

Outside, where the manor's training grounds used to be, late-afternoon light washed over the churned earth. The grounds had been pushed farther back when the walls expanded, leaving this patch open for the future: a neat stone foundation and a bare timber frame rising like a skeleton. One day, it would become a warm, two-story guest home—Elizabeth and I had traced out its hallways with chalk and half-serious dreams. Amos meant it for visiting nobles. At the moment, that meant us—the false noble from Hernon.

But it wouldn't be finished in time. With the new baron approaching, Amos had called the builders off. They had all marched north to start shaping what would become North Cove. So the frame outside stood untouched, lonely, its wind wove through the beams, stirring up the dust.

"Are you bored of staring at reports?" I asked, stepping up behind her.

Elizabeth jolted, her shoulders tightening as she spun around. "Cath—Lady Katrina—don't do that," she scolded, rising to her feet. A hand pressed to her chest, as if she could calm her own heartbeat.

I laughed and brushed past her to peek at the ledgers. "The hinges squeak loud enough to wake the dead. You must've been thinking very hard to miss it."

Color crept up her neck. She looked down at her hands.

"Oh, that look." I leaned against the table with a grin. "Now you have to tell me."

She let out a sigh—the tiny, defeated kind—and whispered, "Him."

Her cheeks flared from pink to a soft, glowing red.

I was grateful she kept her gaze lowered, because I didn't trust my expression not to betray me. I knew exactly who she meant. The thought of him always dropped in my chest like a stone into deep water. My cousin's smile had that effect—warm enough to melt granite, and he never even noticed what it did to any of us.

"How does he do it?" she murmured, almost reverent. "He moves through the county like a whirlwind. Everything he touches shifts, changes—comes alive. It's like… like…"

"Like the man in his story," I said quietly, finishing for her. "The one whose touch turned things to gold." Heat crawled up my neck. "Except… when he touches me, it feels like I'm catching fire."

Elizabeth let out a dreamy sigh. "I wish he would touch me."

"No, you don't," I said—too quickly, too honestly.

Her gaze lifted, startled, and for a heartbeat, we simply looked at each other. No teasing, no pretense. She knew exactly what I meant.

Being his cousin earned me—brief embraces, a warm arm slung around my shoulders when he returned from long journeys, the occasional thoughtless squeeze of affection. Harmless gestures to him. Torture to me. Every time his hands brushed my back or his cheek grazed mine, my heart kicked against my ribs like a warhorse breaking into a gallop. And each time, I had to force my arms to release him, to mask the wild heat under my skin, to pretend none of it meant a thing.

It was impossible—utterly impossible—to stand near him and not love him a little. And he moved through life oblivious, blind to the glances that followed him, blind to the hearts he stirred without effort.

Worse still… he was blind to the woman who held his heart.

I had watched it happen a thousand times—the way his face lit up the instant she stepped into a room, like someone had opened a window to let in the sun. The way his voice grew excited by instinct when he spoke to her. Every tiny sign twisted something sharp inside me.

But then I'd see Lady Paper's face when she watched him—her expression folding inward, bracing as though for a wound she expected every day yet never stopped fearing. The longing in her eyes was enough to blunt even my own jealousy. For a moment, my heart ached for her. It was never meant to be. It never could be, not in this world.

Maybe it was all in my head, maybe it was just my desire to watch a story from a bard's scroll unfold before me—tragic, beautiful, doomed. And I stood at the edges, watching the threads weave around me while my own hands remained painfully empty.

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I turned to Elizabeth and felt another quiet pang. She hid her feelings better than Lady Paper, but I knew them all the same. She had once been engaged to him, hated him and after losing him found out the truth. The man she trusted and loved had been a monster in a mask, and the monster she feared had turned out to have a magnificent soul. She ached for a future that had slipped between her fingers. A once-held promise of being his future. Losing that kind of dream leaves wounds that never truly fade. Every time she looked at him, something in her must have cracked again. And now he stood far above any of us—untouchable, unreachable.

The three of us lived in a tragedy with no exit, bound to the same man by affection we could never claim.

"What do you think he's doing right now?" Elizabeth asked softly, breaking me from my thoughts but not the melancholy of my heart. We both gazed out at the frame of the house a symbol of a future that would never be.

My shoulders slumped. A sigh slipped from me. "He ran out of here to stop the king's army from"—I imitated his voice—"'running amok through my county.'" I shook my head with a helpless laugh. "Like you said, he's a whirlwind. Never still. Never resting."

Elizabeth's lips curved into that familiar mix of awe and amusement. She ran her fingertips across the ledgers, the scent of ink faintly rising with the movement. "I don't understand him," she said. "He asked me to help Benjamin track everything—goods, production, the entire flow of silver and grain." She gestured at the mountain of papers and reed-pressed sheets. "He barely knows me, yet he trusts me with more than my father ever let his own clerks touch."

Her voice quivered as she continued. "I'm not his wife. I'm a fugitive he pays to work for him, even when his coffers are never full. Truly, never." She laughed, amazed by her own words. "My father—a simple merchant—held more coin on hand than Count Bicman ever keeps."

She shook her head slowly, reverently. "He balances on a razor's edge, yet somehow he keeps this county alive. I don't understand how he does it."

I nodded. "I think to him it is like a fast-paced dance, like the wovel or Tabasa of Blizmer. All so he can help everyone. I still can't believe we fed the entire county this winter. In most places, peasants come out of winter gaunt as ghosts. But here? Even with shorter seasons, everyone had at least one meal a day."

Elizabeth eyes fell on the ledgers. "I know."

"It's all going to change," I said. "With the new plows, Bicman will have more land planted than anyone can reasonably harvest. Especially since so many peasants begged to go with him to North Cove." I paused. "If the serfs weren't tied to the land, I think they'd go too."

"Is he bringing all the peasants?" she asked, surprised.

I shook my head. "There isn't room. And he won't risk ruining things with Baron Weston Yarbeth. Only about a quarter of them are coming—and all of them are original citizens of Bicman."

"Will the new baron be upset?"

"Probably not," I said. "The fields are already planted, and fewer peasants mean fewer mouths to feed. And with one hundred fifteen men being sent to the front in Hitub, that's even fewer still."

"That's another thing I can't believe," Elizabeth said, leaning back slightly, her hand braced on the table. "How quickly he armed all those men."

I gave a rueful laugh. "Not just the soldiers. He trained the peasants staying behind on the spear, too. Each fort is stocked with enough weapons for every peasant and even the serfs. As if he is planning for another attack."

I hesitated, pressing my palm flat on the table. "That's one thing I can't agree with him on. Giving weapons to commoners. He says there's nothing to fear if you treat your people with respect. That everyone has the right to defend themselves. That armed peasants keep nobles in check." I shook my head. "Maybe that works for him. But what happens when a group of peasants grows angry enough to want power for themselves?"

Elizabeth shivered faintly. "He really said that?"

"He did," I said. "And when he asked the people of Melnon to dismantle every tool and piece of equipment that might give the new baron an advantage… they just did it. Without shouting, without arguing. They broke everything down and prepared it to be hauled north."

She stared at me, wide-eyed. "Your cousin is amazing. Do you… Do you think it's true? What the commoners say?"

I froze. I knew exactly what she meant.

Most of the commoners whispered that he was a Chosen. The Karr murmured that he might be a Descended—some blend of man and god. I wasn't completely sure what a Descended was supposed to be, but the stories painted them like demi-gods, like the hero in the tale Amos once wrote—Hurcles, the giant who lifted mountains with one hand.

A part of me wanted to say yes—of course he was. How could he not be? Anyone who stood near him felt swept into something larger.

But heat pricked my ears, and embarrassment tugged at my throat. So instead, I said, far too softly, "I don't know."

The look Elizabeth gave me said clearly that she didn't believe a word of it. And she shouldn't have. My answer felt hollow even to my own ears. Because deep down… I did believe it. How could someone meet Amos and not question whether he was more than mortal?

He was a man like none I had ever heard of—larger than life, even in his most unassuming ways.

My eyes drifted around the room—the little markers of his presence. The dresser with its tilting bronze mirror. The boar-bristle hairbrush lying beside it, a single pale strand caught in the bristles. The desk against the wall where neat stacks of his paper sat beside a Bicman pen, the carved wood still warm from the sunlight pouring through the window.

I moved toward the desk and lifted one sheet from the stack. The paper slid between my fingers with that soft, unusual feeling and sense of wonder that it always brought at my touch. All of it from a mind that never stopped turning.

There were a thousand tiny things like that—small signs of the impossible—that made Amos… more.

More than noble. More than mortal. More than any of us could explain.

Even if none of us dared say it aloud.

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