The supply tent is a disaster. Not dramatic—no collapsed shelves, no rats—just the slow kind of disorder that happens when good people hold a system together with loyalty instead of logic.
Herb stores alphabetized by common name rather than use frequency, which means the three most-needed remedies live on the top shelf behind a crate of dried nettle nobody has touched in months. My fingers start reorganizing before my brain formally authorizes the operation.
"Nobody asked you to do this." Ulric fills the tent entrance with crossed arms and a face caught between offense and curiosity. "That's my supply system you're dismantling."
"This is not a system. This is an accumulation." I pull down the nettle crate and set it on the ground where it can contemplate its failures.
"Your food rotation has a three-day gap between the river provisions and the dried stores." I line the jars by use frequency, fingers moving faster than my explanation. "You're burning through smoked fish to fill it when staggering the drying schedule eliminates the gap entirely."
"You've been here two days." He says it slowly, testing whether the words become less insane on repetition. They do not.
"And yet the gap was visible from the main path." I stack the fever-reduction herbs at eye level where they belong. "Your yarrow is also low—harvest before the next frost or you're rationing poultices by midwinter."
He opens his mouth, closes it, makes a sound like a man swallowing an argument he knows he'd lose. "I'm going to get Jericho," he says finally, and walks out with the careful stride of someone who has encountered a problem above his rank.
By midday I have restructured the herb stores and identified a bottleneck in the grain distribution costing an extra day of labor per week. The camp watches me the way you watch weather—not sure yet whether to be grateful or take cover.
When Jericho finds me that evening, I am elbow-deep in a provision ledger maintained by someone with a creative relationship to arithmetic. He leans against the tent pole, and the last of the daylight catches the line of his jaw in a way my eyes have no authorization to track.
"You have been here two days," he says, arms crossed, one shoulder against the canvas, "and my beta already wants to keep you."
"Your beta's supply chain was held together by hope and habit." I keep my gaze on the ledger because looking at him has become an unsound activity. "Broken systems make my hands itch—I cannot help it."
He laughs. The sound lands somewhere behind my sternum—warm, low, startled out of him like something locked in a room for years that just found the door open.
I have never heard him laugh—not in the cells where he knelt in chains, not in the herb garden where the world tilted, not in the great hall where my name became a weapon. This is the first time, and my ribs do something entirely inadvisable with it.
"Your face." He shakes his head, still half-laughing. "You're genuinely furious at a ledger."
"This ledger deserves fury. Whoever maintained it treated subtraction as a philosophical suggestion." I close it harder than necessary and finally look at him, which is a mistake, because his eyes are still creased and the version of Jericho who laughs is someone my defenses cannot account for.
“I’ll make sure to make a public notice. Now, come on. Let’s eat.” He gestures his hand to usher me to the fire pit.
The camp settles into quiet around us—low voices, wood popping, a song I almost recognize—and Jericho sits close enough that his warmth bleeds through my sleeve in a continuous line from shoulder to hip.
This is different from anything I have known—not the careful performance I maintained with Vesper where every gesture was negotiated, not the exhausting solitude of being Luna. Just two people by a fire, and the simplicity of it sits in my chest like something breakable.
"Can I ask you something?" His voice drops below the reach of nearby ears, and the intimacy of the register makes my pulse do something unhelpful.
"You've been asking me things since I arrived. The lack of permission hasn't slowed you down."
"What do you want?" His mouth twitches, then steadies, and the question hangs between us like something with weight.
"Politically?" I deflect on instinct, the way I always do. "Because I have a list, and the supply chain alone—"
"Not politically." The firelight carves shadows beneath his cheekbones. "Not for the prophecy, not for anyone else—for yourself, Agatha."
The question lands like a hand pressed flat to the center of my chest. I open my mouth and nothing comes, which is new—I have always had an answer, a plan, a sharp remark to cover the gap where a real one should be.
Nobody has ever asked me that. Twenty-four years of being hidden, mated, rejected, imprisoned, named, and claimed, and every question has always been about what I could carry for someone else.
"I don't know." The words come out raw, and I press my thumbnail into the side of my finger because the honesty scrapes against something I keep locked. "I genuinely don't have an answer."
"That might be the most honest thing anyone has ever said to me." His voice is quiet, stripped to its foundations, and the weight of his attention makes my skin prickle.
The fire burns low. The camp empties in the gradual way of people who have noticed two wolves sitting too close and have chosen the mercy of silence. His warmth runs the full length of my left side—shoulder, arm, hip, thigh—a geography I have been mapping against my will for an hour.
He turns. The look on his face is the one I know—the herb garden, the cells, the firelight on my name last night. Like I am the only fixed point in a room that will not stop spinning.
He leans in, slow and deliberate, giving me every possible second to pull back. I close the distance instead.
His mouth finds mine and the contact moves through me like a fist unclenching— proximity without permission, cataloging the angles of his face while my self-preservation screamed from the back row.
His hand slides to the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair, and my spine curves into the touch like something finally giving way. The kiss is slow and thorough, and I pour every unsaid thing into it—the cells, the garden, the name he spoke against my hair.
We break apart. My forehead presses to his, and I breathe, and his breath comes ragged against my mouth, and his hand stays warm and steady on the back of my neck.
"Well." My voice is wrecked, scraped hollow, and my hand is shaking where it grips his collar. "That was probably inadvisable."
His thumb traces along my jaw, and the tenderness of it cracks something I didn't know was still load-bearing. "Probably," he says, and his voice isn't much better than mine, and neither of us moves back.
The fire is embers now. I sit pressed against a man whose laugh I heard for the first time today, whose mouth I can still taste, and the certainty drops into my bones with the weight of something that cannot be undone.
I am in serious, irreversible, catastrophic trouble—and my mouth is still tingling, and I do not pull away.