Victor came to me on a night when there was no reason for him to come.
No crisis. The fortress was quiet, and the hour was past dinner, and there was nothing in the day's shape that required the Alpha King to be in the Aerie tower.
He knocked.
I opened the door, and there he was—not in his working configuration, not in his official one. In the configuration, I’d started thinking of it as the third one, the one that had been emerging over the weeks since the bond stopped being a dam and started being a river. He wore no rank insignia. His shirt was untucked on one side in the specific way of someone who had been sitting and reading for a long time and had not noticed. His hair was slightly unkempt from the same.
He looked, I thought, like a person.
“I was passing,” he said.
I al
