Crow raised a brow when Penelope explained that she had taken a nap before supper in preparation for a guard shift that night. He supposed he shouldn’t have been so surprised though. It made sense that the royal guards would want to put her to work right away since she was going to be around for a while. Offhandedly, he wondered if their already limited time together was going to be cut even shorter now that she was working again. The though made him feel a pang of disappointment, but he tried not to dwell on it. After all, even if they were going to be strained to visit with each other in the future, they still had right now. He didn’t want to ruin the moment by moping.

“It’s not very different from what I was expecting,” Crow answered her question with a shrug. He was about to go on, but then paused as he caught sight of Preston walking over to the table with a plate of food for him. The attendant set his supper down on the table, and the viceroy restrained himself from commenting as the boy proceeded to do a quick taste test. Upon deciding the food was safe, he bowed and walked off, leaving them alone again.

“I’ll never get used to that,” Crow muttered with a shake of his head and then turned back to Penelope. “But to answer your question: No, I didn’t have time for a nap. I had to spend the whole day being tutored by one of the dullest men I’ve ever met.” He wrinkled his nose distastefully. “I thought he was going to educate me on writing or math or something useful, but instead, he had me memorizing upper-class [i]etiquette[/i]. It was awful.”

He gave an exaggerated shudder and popped a bite of food into his mouth with one hand, blatantly disregarding the way Udolf had taught him to eat his meal. “I hope he was just getting the boring part out of the way first, because if every lesson is like this one, I swear I’m going to start daydreaming about the gallows.” He met her gaze once more and smiled. “But enough about me. How have you been? I haven’t been able to see very much of you lately. Are you settling back in comfortably?”