Dinner that evening restored some order to the household — Lord Alaric home at last from the capital, warm and travel-worn, his hand heavy and reassuring on Elias's head.
"Educational, Father," Elias reported when asked how his day had been.
"Big Sister is... thorough."
He glanced at Aina, who remained perfectly impassive, though Elias thought he caught the faintest twitch of her left ear.
Talk turned, inevitably and a little wearily, to Ortis.
"He barely stayed a week," Lady Elara sighed, swirling her wine.
"Missed Elias's whole first three years, and then simply vanishes again after leaving Aina here on a whim. He didn't even wait to see you, Alaric."
Alaric took a slow, careful sip of his own wine, and Elias could have sworn he heard the words good riddance muttered somewhere into the glass.
"Your brother carries burdens few people in this world could manage," he said instead, diplomatically, though his relief at not having crossed paths with his brother-in-law was fairly transparent to anyone paying attention.
'Burdens,' Elias thought, deeply skeptical. 'From the man who lost half an estate gambling and spent six months chasing a rock?'
There had to be a story there. Filed carefully away, for later.
"Still," Elara said, "he could at least be more present. It's the head of House Mellou behaving like an errant teenager."
"Elias," Aina said, before the conversation could go any further, "two-hour lesson after dinner. Prepare yourself."
Elias groaned into his napkin. This was going to be a very long life indeed.
Later that night, alone in her own room, Aina pressed her face into a pillow and let herself imagine — just for a moment, just where absolutely no one could see her do it — not a student, but a little brother. Not lessons, but games in the garden. Praise instead of correction, freely given instead of measured out like rationed water. She had three older sisters, all effortless paragons in their own right, and had spent her entire life being the one who followed a step behind. She had never once had anyone to lead.
Elias, prickly and clever and hiding something enormous behind eyes far too old for his face, had become that person without either of them quite agreeing to it out loud.
She wiped a single spot of blood from her nose with a handkerchief afterward — the small, physical toll of feelings disciplined too hard for too long — and allowed herself the smallest, most private smile of the entire day.
'My little brother,' she thought, and meant it completely, without a trace of the icy formality she wore like armor every other hour of daylight.
Across the manor, Elias slept fitfully, chased by the vague, uncomfortable sense of being planned for by something warm and entirely too invested — entirely unaware of the small, fierce shadow that had already, quietly, claimed him as her own.