Night lay like a velvet cloak over the palace gardens. The smell of wet jasmine rose from bowed bushes; distant sentries paced in measured steps. In the hidden terrace behind the healer's wing, two figures had become an island of warmth amid a kingdom of suspicion and flame. Their quarrels of the day—treason, poison, blades and burned banners—had been folded away for the moment, like a map slid into a drawer to be re-opened later. Here, beneath the soft lantern glow and the hush of the jasmine, there was only the slow language of two bodies learning each other again.