Oren

Oren repaired roofs with his uncle, argued with his uncle, and dealt the first hand of cards Zarina ever played.

He was at the table the night she arrived, sorting a deck, and he asked whether she played and she said no and he said he would show her. He explained the rules once. She understood perhaps half of them and did not say so. She lost the first round, and the second, and the third, and by the fourth had worked out what she had been doing wrong, and nobody at the table treated any of it as remarkable. When she asked what he did, he told her about a roof he had nearly fallen through the previous week, at length, and never came back to the fact that her own answer had been evasive.

He is not a subtle man and he is not a curious one, and both turned out to be gifts. He complains that he is not paid enough, which is usually true. He arrives after midnight and objects that everybody started without him, when nobody has started anything. He heard from his uncle, who has never met her, that the Supreme Ruler’s daughter is quiet, and said so in front of the Supreme Ruler’s daughter, who was sitting across the table drinking something with fruit in it. He was hauling boards at the harvest festival on the day Zarina watched him from the royal platform in ceremonial gold, and his eyes went straight across the royal household without stopping, and he disappeared back into the crowd.

He hurt his hand at work and could not climb for several weeks and was insufferable about it, because he hated being idle. Nobody asked Sera to fix it. That was the whole of what she had in that room: a friend with an injured hand, and no expectation that she would do anything about it beyond asking after it.

He once fell asleep with his head on her shoulder and woke apologising, because he had drooled slightly on her cloak. At court, nobody had touched her in twenty years without a protocol officer’s permission.