Salt in the Cup

At breakfast the king’s cup tasted of the open sea. He drank anyway, because a king who spits is a king who has lost the room. Sol watched the chancellor watch her.

“You met him,” the chancellor said later, in a corridor that still smelled of wet stone. “Did you give him anything?”

“Nothing that can be archived.”

“That is not the same as nothing.” He smiled again. “The court can survive a tide. It cannot survive a private language. If you are fond of him, be fond where I can see it. Fondness I can use. Silence I have to fear.”

That night Sol found salt under her fingernail, though she had not touched the water. She washed it off. In the basin, the salt arranged itself into the first word of a term she had not been allowed to hear, and then dissolved before she could decide whether reading it counted as writing it down.