The room had no walls.
She sat at a table, a plain thing of dark wood, and on the table stood a bottle and two glasses, and in the chair across from her sat a man she did not know. He was tall and lean and wore a coat of deep blue over a white shirt, open at the collar. His hair was dark and his face was narrow and his hands rested on the table between them, still and easy.
The glass in front of her was half full of something amber. She did not remember picking it up or sitting down.
The space around them was wrong. There was no floor beyond the table's shadow, no ceiling overhead, only a pale and formless light that sat on the skin without warming it. The air tasted of nothing at all.
The man poured from the bottle into his own glass. The sound of the liquid was too loud, clear and precise, and it echoed once and stopped. He lifted the glass and took a sip and set it down and looked at her.
His mouth moved. He was speaking.
She heard his voice, or something near it. The words came muffled, the rhythm and the pauses where meaning should have been, and none of it meant anything she could hold.
He gestured with one hand, a slow sweep over the table. As he did, the wood changed. The grain shifted and bulged and a small figure of bone pushed up through the surface, pale and smooth. He had only moved his hand over it and the bone had come, rising from the wood.
The figure was a bird. It stood on the table with its wings half spread and its beak open, detailed down to the barbs of each feather. He picked it up between thumb and forefinger and held it to the light and turned it once, and then he set it down and slid it across the table toward her.
Her fingers closed on the cool smooth bone and the bird sat in her palm, light as air.
His mouth moved again and the muffled sound came, and she strained for the words and could not find them. He smiled then, a small and tired smile, and he leaned forward across the table and put his hand on the top of her head.
The weight of it was warm and steady, his palm on her hair and his fingers spread, and he held it there the way a father might.
She wanted to ask him who he was. She opened her mouth and no sound came out.
He drew his hand back and lifted his glass and drank the last of it and set the glass down. He said something else, softer now, and his eyes were gentle and knowing and she did not understand any of it. The bone bird sat in her hand and she held it and looked at him and wanted to cry, though she could not have said why.
The table began to fade. The bottle, the glasses, the man himself. The pale light ate at the edges of him and he went translucent and then grey and then he was gone, and the bird in her hand dissolved into dust that scattered without wind.
She stood in an open sky.
There was no ground beneath her feet, only air, and the sky went on in every direction, blue and clean and vast. The sun sat warm on her face and wind moved through her hair, and the height of it was there in her stomach without anything below to prove it.
A woman flew.
She came from above and to the left, descending in a long sweeping curve, arms outstretched, hair streaming behind her in a banner of bright gold. She wore white, a fitted costume that caught the sunlight and threw it back, and she moved through the air the way someone does when they have done it all their life. She turned her head and looked at Amelia and smiled.
The smile was wide and unguarded. There was warmth in it, and a familiarity that made Amelia's chest ache.
She did not know this woman, had never seen this face or this golden hair. She knew nothing about her at all.
And the grief came anyway.
It filled her throat and her eyes, a sorrow so deep that it could not possibly belong to a girl of three and ten from a fishing village on the bay. And it hurt in a way that healing could not touch.
The woman in white climbed higher against the blue, her golden hair trailing. She looked back once more, still smiling, and the distance between them grew.
Amelia ran through empty air with nothing under her feet and nothing to push against, and her legs pumped and her arms reached and she could not close the gap. The woman flew and Amelia could not fly, and the sky was too big and the distance grew and the golden hair became a point of light and then a speck and then nothing at all.
She stood with her chest heaving and her eyes wet and the emptiness all around her, and pressed her hands to her face and felt the tears on her palms.
A voice spoke, close and casual. A woman's voice.
"Someday, you're gonna have to find a way to forgive yourself."
She opened her mouth to answer and the sky broke apart.
Amelia's eyes came open to candlelight and warm linen and the close smell of beeswax and rose oil. The room was dark save for a single taper guttering on the stand beside the bed. The shutters were latched. Wind pressed at them once and let go.
Rhaenyra was looking at her.
The princess lay on her side with her head propped on one hand, close enough to see the pale violet of her eyes in the candlelight. Her silver-gold hair was loose and spread across the pillow in a tangle, and her shift had slipped at one shoulder, and she looked openly worried.
They were sharing a bed. Rhaenyra had insisted upon it, the way Rhaenyra insisted upon most things, with a stubbornness that made arguing pointless.
"It's warmer this way," Rhaenyra had said. "And I sleep poorly when I'm alone, and you are my friend, and friends share."
Amelia had not argued. She did not particularly want to. In fact, it would’ve taken the King’s Guard and maybe one dragon to drag her out of Rhaenyra’s bed.
"Are you all right?" Rhaenyra asked. "You were crying in your sleep. Calling out for someone."
She paused. "Someone named Victoria."
The name hit her, but she did not know it. No woman in Velton or Duskendale bore that name, nor anyone she had met on the road south.
And yet the grief was still there, a dull pull that had no cause and no cure.
She lifted her hand and found her cheek wet. She wiped the tear with her thumb.
"I feel fine, Rhaenyra," she said.
Rhaenyra watched her a moment longer, then let it go. She leaned in and kissed Amelia on the cheek, warm and quick, and pulled back and settled her head on the pillow and closed her eyes, and within a minute she was asleep.
Amelia lay still and listened to the princess breathe.
Amy, she thought.
Silence.
Amy. Are you there?
Nothing came back. No dry voice in the back of her head, no wry commentary, no whispered word in a language she didn't know. The place where Amy sat was quiet and dark.
She tried again, pushing harder, reaching for the presence that had lived behind her thoughts for months, and there was nothing to take hold of. Amy was gone, or sleeping, or somewhere Amelia could not follow.
Amelia turned onto her side and drew her knees up and pressed her face into the pillow and breathed the smell of rosewater and clean linen and the faint warm scent of Rhaenyra's hair on the silk beside her. The candle guttered and steadied. The wind pressed at the shutters and let go again.
She did not sleep for a long time. She lay and listened to the princess and the wind and the far-off sound of a guard calling the hour somewhere on the walls below.
When sleep finally took her, she did not dream.
She woke to light, thin and grey, leaking in through the gap between the shutters. The taper had burned to a stub in the night and gone out. Rhaenyra's side of the bed was empty, the silk rumpled and warm where she had been.
Amelia sat up and pushed her hair from her face and blinked at the room. The walls were hung with tapestries in red and black and the floor laid with a carpet thick enough to lose her toes in. A table near the window held a pitcher of water and a basin and a cloth, and beside it sat a tray with bread and cheese and a small pot of honey that a servant must have brought in while she slept.
She ate standing up, tearing the bread and dipping it in the honey and chewing without thinking. The honey was dark and rich and she ate more of it than she intended.
A door opened and Rhaenyra came through it with her hair still damp from washing, pulled back and tied with a cord. She wore riding leathers, dark brown and close-fitting, with boots that came to the knee and a tunic of deep red beneath the open collar. She looked awake and sharp and entirely too pleased with herself for this hour of the morning.
"You're up," Rhaenyra said. "Good. The wind is fair and the sky is clear and Syrax ate well last night, so she will be in a good mood, which matters more than you might think."
Amelia's hand stopped halfway to the bread.
Rhaenyra was watching her with bright eyes, bouncing once on the balls of her feet, and the grin on her face was the same one she'd worn at the Dragonpit.
"Amelia," Rhaenyra said. "I want you to fly with me."
The bread sat forgotten between her fingers.
"On Syrax," Rhaenyra added, as though clarification were needed. "This morning. You and I, together. I've already told the keepers to prepare her. They'll have the saddle fitted by the time we reach the pit."
Amelia stared at her. “Will it be safe?”
“Probably!”
Oh, huh. Well this is interesting.
Now you awaken? Amelia practically screamed in her mind. Where have you been?
Somewhere far away – somewhere you wouldn’t wanna follow.