Asha did not step aside to let him in.
Not right away.
She stood in the doorway and looked at him for a moment this king in a plain grey cloak, standing on the step of her small house like it was the most normal thing in the world. Behind him, his four guards sat on their horses and tried to look like they weren't watching her very carefully. They were not very good at pretending.
The man the king waited. He didn't push forward. He didn't demand. He just waited, with the calm patience of someone who had learned that most doors eventually opened for him.
Asha stepped back.
He walked in.
The house was small and simply built. One main room, one back room, a fireplace that took up most of one wall. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling in thick bundles lavender, sage, something dark and sharp she had found growing at the edge of the forest years ago and never learned the name of. There was a wooden table, two chairs, a shelf of old books that had belonged to Maren, and a clay mug sitting alone on the table, still steaming.
She had made one cup of tea. She had known there would only be one visitor worth making tea for.
The king looked around the room slowly. Taking it in. He didn't say anything about what he saw. Most people who came here not that many did made some comment, either uncomfortable or overcurious. He didn't. He just looked, and then he sat down in the chair she pointed to, and he folded his hands on the table like a man preparing for a meeting that mattered.
Asha sat across from him. She wrapped both hands around her mug and let the warmth settle into her palms.
"Your guards," she said. "They'll want to come inside."
"They'll stay outside," he said.
"They won't like that."
"They don't have to like it."
She looked at him. He looked at her. The fire crackled between them and then went quiet, like it was listening too.
"You're the king," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"You rode two days from the capital. In plain clothes. With only four guards." She paused. "You didn't want anyone to know you came here."
Something shifted in his expression small, quick, barely there. "No."
"Which means," Asha said, "that whatever answer you're looking for, you're afraid of what happens if the wrong people find out you were looking."
The king was quiet for a moment.
"You're good at reading people," he said.
"I'm good at reading everything," she replied simply. "It's not the same as magic. It's just paying attention." She tilted her head slightly. "But you didn't come here for someone who pays attention. You came here for a seer."
"Yes."
"Why now?" she asked. "Why come to me at all? Most people in this kingdom would rather believe seers don't exist than admit they needed one."
He met her eyes. His were dark brown steady, careful, the kind of eyes that gave very little away. She noticed, again, that he was younger than she had expected. Mid-thirties, maybe. There were tired lines around his eyes that hadn't been there long. Something had been wearing at him lately. Something specific.
"I had a dream," he said.
Asha said nothing. She waited.
"The same dream. Three weeks in a row. Every time I fall asleep." He paused. His jaw tightened slightly not much, just enough to show that this was harder to say than he was letting on. "I see myself in the throne room. It's night. The torches are all lit. And then" He stopped. Started again. "And then nothing. It just ends. Darkness. Silence." He looked at the table. "I wake up and my hands are shaking."
"And your court advisors?" Asha asked. "What did they say?"
"I didn't tell them."
"Your personal physician?"
"No."
"Then you told no one."
"I told no one," he confirmed. "Until now."
Asha looked at him for a long moment.
She had met people who came to her for visions before. Mostly villagers a farmer wanting to know if the harvest would hold, a mother anxious about a sick child, occasionally a merchant from the next town over trying to get an edge on a deal. They all came the same way: nervous, half-embarrassed, already building an excuse to explain why they'd come if anyone asked.
This man was none of those things. He wasn't embarrassed. He wasn't nervous, exactly or if he was, it was buried so deep it barely showed. He was something harder to name.
He's afraid, she realized. But he's not afraid of the answer. He's afraid of not knowing.
That was different. That was the kind of fear she could respect.
"If I tell you what I see," she said slowly, "you cannot unhear it."
"I know that."
"Most people think they know that," she said. "And then I tell them, and they spend the rest of their lives wishing they'd stayed home."
"I won't."
She looked at him carefully. "You're very sure of yourself."
"In most things," he said. "In this no. I'm not sure of anything. That's why I'm here." He held her gaze. "I need the truth. Even if it's bad. Especially if it's bad."
Asha set down her mug.
She had already seen it. She had seen it the moment she opened the door. She didn't need to reach for it again it was right there, just behind her eyes, waiting. The throne room. The stillness. His open hands.
But visions were not always simple. They came in images, in feelings, in pieces. Like a painting where someone had cut out every other piece and left you to guess the rest. What she had seen was clear the ending was always clear. It was the how that was harder. The why that was harder still.
She closed her eyes.
She let herself look.
It came the way the bad ones always came too fast, and too real.
The throne room. Night. Torches burning orange along the stone walls, casting long shadows that moved like people. The king this king, sitting across from her right now standing in the center of the room. Not sitting. Standing. Like he had been called there, or had come on his own for a reason she couldn't quite see.
He wasn't alone.
There was a woman.
Asha couldn't see her face clearly. She never could, with visions the people closest to the heart of an event were always slightly blurred, like a painting not yet finished. But she could see the shape of her. The way she stood. The dress deep green, the color of something expensive. The particular way she held her hands, still and controlled, like a person who never moved without deciding to first.
Someone he trusts, Asha understood. That deep, wordless knowing again. Someone he trusts completely. That's why he doesn't see it coming.
The vision jumped they always jumped, never played out in clean order and then there was the sound she hadn't been able to name before. It was there now, just for a moment: fabric, and footsteps, and something sharp cutting through air.
And then the king fell.
And the woman in the green dress did not move. Did not reach for him. Did not call for help.
She just stood there and watched him fall with her hands very still at her sides.
The torches burned.
The throne room was silent.
Asha opened her eyes.
The king was watching her.
She didn't know how her face looked right now. She had never been able to feel her own expressions when she came back from the bad ones. She only knew she was back, and her hands were flat on the table, and the fire behind her was a little too hot against her back.
"How long?" the king asked.
His voice was very quiet.
"Six months," she said.
He didn't flinch. He didn't look away. He breathed one slow, careful breath and then he nodded, like someone confirming something they had already half-known.
"And how?"
This was the part she had been turning over since she first saw him at the door. What to say. How to say it. She was not a cruel person. She had never enjoyed delivering bad news. But she had also learned, a long time ago, that softening the truth helped no one.
"Someone kills you," she said.
"Who?"
Asha looked at him directly. "Someone close to you. Someone you would never suspect." She paused. "Someone you trust completely."
The king was still. "That could be anyone."
"No," she said. "It couldn't." She held his gaze. "Think of everyone you trust completely. Really think. How many people is that?"
Silence.
Not many, she could see him realizing. Not many at all.
"Can you tell me more?" he asked.
"A woman," Asha said. "In the throne room. At night. She wears green." She hesitated. Then: "She doesn't look surprised. She's the one who planned it."
The king went very still.
A different kind of still from before. Not the stillness of a man being careful. The stillness of a man who has just felt something land that he was not prepared for, no matter how prepared he thought he was.
He knew who she was describing. She could see it on his face the single, brief crack in his expression before he closed it back up again. A flash of something raw and real, and then nothing. Control, back in place, like a wall rebuilt in seconds.
He said nothing for a long moment.
Then: "You're certain."
"I'm never certain of the small things," Asha said honestly. "But I'm certain of this." She looked at her hands on the table. "I've had these kinds of visions before. The clear ones, the ones that feel too real to be wrong. They have never been wrong."
"Never," he repeated.
"Never," she said. "I'm sorry."
He looked at her when she said that. Like the apology surprised him a little. Like he hadn't expected it from her.
"You believe it can't be changed," he said slowly. "The future."
"I've spent twenty-three years watching futures arrive exactly as I saw them," she said. "I've tried to warn people. I've tried to push things in a different direction. It doesn't work." She picked up her mug again. The tea was almost cold now. "Fate is not interested in what any of us would prefer."
The king leaned back in his chair. He looked at the ceiling for a moment at the bundles of dried herbs hanging there and then he looked back at her.
"And yet you told me," he said.
Asha frowned slightly. "What?"
"You told me. Even though you believe it can't be changed." His voice was careful, thoughtful. "If you truly believed it was fixed and final if you truly believed nothing I could do would matter then why tell me at all? Why not just send me away?"
Asha opened her mouth.
And then closed it.
It was a good question. She hadn't expected a good question. She hadn't expected him to be this sharp, this quickly.
"Because you asked," she said finally.
"That's not a reason," he said. Not unkindly. Just clearly. "You've sent people away before who asked."
She had. She absolutely had.
She didn't answer him. Because the honest answer was one she hadn't quite sorted out herself. Something about him, standing at her door. Something about the way he had said especially if it's bad. Something about the vision that had felt slightly different from the others not in what it showed, but in the feeling it left behind. A feeling she couldn't name yet.
She didn't like things she couldn't name.
"I'll ask you the same question back," she said instead. "If you believe I'm just a witch in a forest telling lies for coin if you didn't believe there was any truth in this why come at all?"
He looked at her for a moment.
And then, unexpectedly, he smiled. Small. Brief. But real.
"Because I had no other options," he said.
Asha nodded. "Then there's your answer."
He left the decision alone after that. They both did. The fire burned lower. The morning light shifted through the one small window and moved slowly across the stone floor.
The king looked at the table between them. His hands were still folded there calm, deliberate. She noticed his right hand had a small scar along the knuckle. An old one.
"I want you to come to the palace," he said.
Asha had seen this coming too. Not in a vision just in the simple logic of the situation.
"No," she said.
"I need someone who can"
"No," she said again. Calm. Firm. Like the first time hadn't been clear enough. "I don't go to palaces. I don't go to crowded places full of people with complicated intentions. I stay here."
"You'd be safe."
She looked at him. Just looked at him. The look said: you know that's not true and so do I.
He had the decency to look slightly uncomfortable. "You'd be... protected."
"By whom? The guards who keep me safe from the woman in the green dress?" She raised an eyebrow slightly. "The same palace where someone is already planning your death in six months' time?"
"I need someone I can trust," he said, and his voice was different now quieter, less like a king giving an order and more like a person asking for something they actually needed. "Everyone in that palace has something to gain or something to lose. Everyone is playing a game. You" He looked at her. "You already know how it ends. You have no reason to lie to me."
Asha was quiet.
"Come as a servant," he said. "Nothing official. No announcements. I'll give you quarters and wages and you'll be no one of importance as far as the court is concerned. No one needs to know what you can do."
"And what do you get?" she asked.
"Eyes," he said simply. "Someone watching. Someone who can see what's coming before it arrives." He paused. "And maybe maybe someone who can help me figure out if it can be stopped."
Asha looked at him for a long moment.
She thought about what he had said earlier. You told me. Even though you believe it can't be changed.
She thought about the vision. The woman in green. The stillness of her.
She thought about twenty-three years of watching futures arrive exactly as scheduled. Of warning people who didn't listen, or people who listened and couldn't do anything, or people who did everything right and still ended up exactly where she had seen them.
She thought about Maren, who had kept a baby no one else wanted, and what that small act of stubbornness had meant to the shape of everything.
She looked at this man this king with six months left, who had ridden two days in a plain grey cloak because he had no one he trusted and no other options and she felt something she rarely let herself feel.
Curious.
Not about the palace. Not about the politics or the power or whatever game was being played in those corridors.
About whether just this once a vision could be wrong.
"Three conditions," she said.
The king's expression didn't change. But his shoulders relaxed, just slightly. "Tell me."
"First: I answer to you and no one else. I don't take orders from your court, your advisors, or anyone who outranks a servant but doesn't outrank a king."
He nodded.
"Second: If I tell you to do something anything, even something that makes no sense to you you do it without arguing. These aren't suggestions. They're what I see."
Another nod.
"Third." She paused. "When I decide it's time to leave, you let me go. No questions. No requests to stay. No changing the arrangement after the fact."
The king looked at her carefully. "What if we're in the middle of something important?"
"Then I'll tell you before I go," she said. "But the choice to leave is always mine."
He was quiet. Thinking it through. She could see him weighing it the cost against the need. King or not, he was a practical man. That much was clear.
"Agreed," he said. "All three."
Asha nodded.
She looked around the small room. The herbs. The shelf of Maren's books. The cold cup of tea. The familiar grey light through the window.
She had lived here for seven years alone. She had told herself she preferred it. The quiet. The distance. The simple honesty of a life where no one expected anything from her except to leave them alone.
She wasn't sure, now, if that was preference or just habit.
"I'll need a day," she said. "To close up the house."
"Take two," the king said. He stood, and immediately the room felt smaller he had that quality, of taking up space even when he wasn't trying to. He pulled his grey cloak straight and looked at her one last time. "I'll leave two of my guards at the road's edge. When you're ready, they'll escort you."
"I don't need an escort."
"No," he agreed. "But I'll feel better."
He moved toward the door. Stopped with his hand on the frame. His back was to her.
"The woman in green," he said. His voice was very quiet. Very controlled. "You saw her clearly? Her hands, her dress you're sure?"
"Yes," Asha said.
"But not her face."
"Not her face," she confirmed. "I never see the faces of the ones closest to the center. It's always been that way."
He was silent for a moment.
"If you had to guess," he said slowly, "based on everything you saw the throne room at night, the trust, the planning would you say it's someone from inside the palace? Someone already there?"
Asha thought about the vision. The torches. The green dress. The specific way the woman had stood like she belonged there. Like she had every right to be in that throne room at that hour.
"Yes," she said. "She's already there."
The king nodded once, very small.
He walked out the door without saying goodbye. She heard him speak briefly to his guards, too quiet for her to make out the words. Then hoofbeats, fading down the dirt road.
Asha stood in the middle of her small house for a long time after they were gone.
She looked at the shelf of Maren's old books. At the cold fireplace that would need relighting tonight. At the front door, still slightly open, letting in a thin thread of morning air.
Six months, she thought. And you're going to walk into that palace anyway.
She wasn't sure if she was thinking about the king.
She closed the front door.
She started packing.