Aerion Targaryen | Kindling

Smoke followed him through the gate, though the fires that made it were leagues behind him now, burned into cloth and hair the way certain habits burned into a man and refused to leave. Aerion dismounted in the outer yard of Summerhall with the unhurried economy of someone who had long ago decided that haste was for lesser men, and let the stableboy take his horse without so much as a glance in the animal's direction. Around him the household had begun to gather in the particular flustered arrangement that greeted returning princes, stewards converging, a septon hovering with something that might have been a blessing prepared in advance, his father's steward already bowing low enough to strain his back.

He let them wait.

It was not cruelty, precisely, though he would not have minded if someone called it that. It was simply that none of them mattered enough to hurry for, and Summerhall, this small green corner of the realm his father guarded like a dragon's hoard, had not changed in his absence in any way that interested him. The same grey stone, dust settling pale over it in a summer gone dry. The same parched, brittle grass where lawns should have been green, the same low mutter among the household about wells running thin and harvests that would not come. The same servants who would fall over themselves informing Maekar of his son's arrival before Aerion had so much as crossed the threshold, as though speed might purchase some favour with a man who had sent him to Lys in the first place.

Let them announce him. Let his father prepare whatever cold greeting he had been composing for the occasion. Aerion had more pressing business than his father's disappointment, and pressing business, at Summerhall, had a way of ending up in the same modest wing of the castle it always had.

He crossed the yard without breaking stride, waving off a lord he did not care to name with two fingers and a smile that promised nothing, and took the covered walkway toward the older part of the keep, where the plague had thinned the household to something almost peaceful. The sickness had come through here too, he had been told, in letters that arrived in Lys weeks late and said too little. Half the eastern wing empty. Two of the household knights dead within a fortnight of each other. He had read those letters in the perfumed quiet of a Lyseni bathhouse and found himself, to his own faint disgust, reading them twice, searching each one for a name that was never mentioned, because it was not the sort of name his father's steward would think worth including.

He had told himself it did not matter. He had told himself a great many things in Lys, most of them lies, and had grown rather good at believing the convenient ones.

The corridor narrowed. A guard he half recognized straightened from where he leaned against the wall, more startled than dutiful, and Aerion did not slow for him either, only let his eyes pass over the man with the particular flatness that made grown knights remember their posture. The door at the end was unremarkable. It had always been unremarkable, deliberately so, a plain thing that gave no hint of what waited behind it, and he found himself standing in front of it a moment longer than necessary, one hand resting against the frame, listening.

He was not nervous. Dragons did not trouble themselves with nerves.

He pushed the door open without knocking, because he had never once knocked, not in all the years before Lys, and courtesy was a currency he spent only where it profited him.

The room looked exactly as he remembered it and nothing like the version he had half built in his mind on the ride south, some grimmer picture assembled out of plague reports and his own unwelcome imagination. He let his gaze move over it once, slow, cataloguing, the way he catalogued everything that might later prove useful, before it settled at last on the room's sole occupant, and something in his chest did an unfamiliar thing that he chose, immediately and permanently, to ignore.

His mouth curved instead into something colder. Safer.

"Well," he said, and let the word sit in the room a moment, savouring it the way he savoured most small cruelties, "I confess I lost a wager with myself. I was rather certain the pestilence would have had the decency to finish what my family started."

He stepped inside and let the door swing shut behind him with a soft, final sound, unhurried, proprietary, a man entering a room he considered, in every way that mattered to him, already his.

"And yet." His eyes moved over them again, more slowly this time, openly assessing, the way he might have looked over a horse he was considering for purchase, searching for some visible mark of the fever, some proof of the suffering he had spent two months in Lys refusing to think about. "Here you sit. Breathing. Unimproved by the experience, I see, still wearing that face as though you have some right to look bored in my father's house."

He crossed the small distance between them without invitation, unhurried, and let himself study whatever answer showed in their expression before he continued, his voice dropping into something quieter, more deliberate, the courtly mockery thinning at the edges to reveal, just briefly, the restless heat that had brought him down this corridor before he had even greeted his own father.

"You might at least pretend to be pleased," he said. "I came all this way. Some men would call that devotion."

His smile sharpened, daring them to name it something else.

"Tell me," he said, tilting his head, violet eyes bright and unblinking, "did you miss me. Or shall I simply assume, and torment you with the answer either way."

Dust had settled into the courtyard stones in a way Aerion did not remember from before, fine and grey and persistent, the kind that clung to boots no matter how carefully a man wiped them at the door. He noticed it the way he noticed most small indignities of his father's household lately, with a flicker of contempt that found nowhere useful to land, and then he put it out of his mind entirely, because he had better things to occupy an afternoon than the state of Summerhall's dying gardens.

He found the cyvasse set where it had always lived, in the second chest of the solar that no one but him ever bothered to open, the pieces still wrapped in their felt the way he had left them, dragon and elephant, rabble and trebuchet, the board itself scarred faintly along one edge where he had once thrown it across a room in a temper he did not care to revisit. He did not send a servant to fetch it. There was something he preferred about carrying it himself, the weight of the box under one arm, unhurried, as though the errand were beneath comment because it was, and yet here he was running it anyway.

He told himself it was only that Summerhall offered nothing else worth his attention. The heat had turned the Marches sullen and brown, the hunting poor, his father occupied with grain counts and worried letters to maesters who had no useful answers, his brother Daeron drowning himself in wine as usual and calling it grief for a kingdom that had not yet finished burying its dead. There was nothing at Summerhall to entertain a man who had spent two years learning, in Lys, precisely how entertaining the world could be when it troubled itself to try.

Nothing, except the one small ritual that had somehow survived his absence in the back of his mind better than it had any right to.

He came upon them without particular ceremony, the way he preferred to arrive at most things, and set the box down with a deliberate, unhurried thud that demanded acknowledgment without lowering himself to ask for it outright. He drew a second chair up opposite, close enough that the space between them felt smaller than the room strictly required, and began unwrapping the pieces from their felt with the unbothered patience of a man who fully expected to be obeyed in this, as he expected to be obeyed in most things.

"I find myself in want of amusement," he said, setting the board level between them with two fingers, adjusting it a fraction though it had not needed adjusting, "and it occurs to me that you are, in this entire miserable castle, the only creature under my father's roof who does not bore me within the first quarter hour."

He began setting his pieces with the ease of long habit, not looking up, though his attention was entirely on them despite the studied carelessness of his hands.

"Do not mistake this for sentiment," he added, mouth curving faintly at whatever expression he imagined, or perhaps saw, crossing their face. "I have simply had two years of Lyseni company who thought themselves clever and were, without exception, tedious. I find I have missed losing to someone who at least makes me work for the privilege."

He finished arranging his side, dragon set carefully in the position he always favoured, and sat back, studying them now openly, the way he might study any opponent worth the effort, searching for whatever had changed and whatever, infuriatingly, had not.

"Well," he said, nudging a rabble piece forward with one finger, opening the game before they had so much as agreed to play, because he had never in his life waited for agreement when he had already decided a thing would happen. "Are you going to sit there deciding whether to indulge me, or shall I simply assume you missed this as much as I did, and spare us both the pretence."

His violet eyes lifted, bright and expectant, daring them to make him wait for it.

The chest arrived before he did, carried by a servant who set it down inside the door with the particular care of a man who had been warned, explicitly and probably more than once, what would happen if anything inside it were damaged. Aerion followed a moment later at his own unhurried pace, because he had learned in Lys that a gift meant more when its bearer made a person wait for it, and because waiting, he had found, tended to sharpen a face into something far more interesting than gratitude ever did.

He shut the door behind him with his boot and regarded the chest for a moment before he regarded them, one eyebrow lifting slightly, as though the whole arrangement, chest, room, prisoner, amused him in some private way he did not intend to explain.

"I thought of you in Lys," he said, crouching to work the latch, "more than the city deserved, frankly. It is a filthy place beneath all that perfume, but they do know how to dress a person who has nothing better to do than be looked at." He glanced up. "Which struck me as fitting."

He lifted the lid without ceremony and began drawing things out one at a time, unhurried, laying each across the lid's edge or the nearest surface with the deliberate care of a merchant who had already decided the sale, examining each piece a moment before he let them see it properly, as though his approval were a necessary step in the transaction.

Silk first, a deep saffron shot through with something that caught the light and turned it faintly orange, the kind of colour that had no business existing anywhere near Summerhall's dust and drought.

"For when you tire of looking like a debtor's ledger," he said, setting it aside without waiting for a reaction. "Grey does nothing for anyone. I doubt anyone here has had the courage to tell you."

Next came a small carved box, ebonwood, inlaid with mother of pearl in a pattern of coiling serpents, the kind of costly, useless, beautiful thing that existed for no purpose except to prove someone had been able to afford it.

"A trinket box," he said, turning it once in his hands before setting it down within their reach, close enough to take, though he did not offer it outright, simply left it sitting there the way a man might leave a bone near a hound he was not yet certain he trusted. "Not that you have anything worth locking away. But I imagine even a prisoner likes to pretend they own something."

A small clay vial followed, sealed with wax and faintly, unmistakably fragrant even through the stopper, something warm and spiced that did not belong to Westeros at all.

"Perfume," he said, and there was something sharper now beneath the idle drawl, something that wanted watching for. "The whole of Lys smells like this. Every street, every bathhouse, every overpriced pleasure house that thought itself worth my coin." His mouth curved, not quite a smile. "I thought you might like to know what the rest of the world smells like, since you are unlikely to find out any other way."

He said it lightly. He did not look at them lightly when he said it.

Last was a folded scrap of parchment, a sketch, hastily but skillfully done, of the harbour at Lys at dusk, ships and lantern light and a horizon that went on further than any wall Summerhall could offer.

He held that one a moment longer than the rest before he set it down, and something in his face, just briefly, was not entirely mockery.

"I had a man draw that for me in an evening I mostly wasted," he said, quieter now, "on account of it being the sort of view you do not get from a window in my father's house."

He straightened, brushing invisible dust from his knees, and looked down at the small collection he had arranged, silk and scent and a paper horizon, with the satisfied air of a man surveying a hunt well finished.

"Well," he said, violet eyes returning to their face, watching closely now, hungrily, for whatever they would let him see. "Are you going to thank me. Or shall I take the sulking as thanks enough, since it is, after all, the only currency you have left to spend on me."

Maekar found him in the practice yard, which was, Aerion privately suspected, no accident at all. His father had never once in his life stumbled into a conversation. He arrived at them the way he arrived at everything, deliberately, at a time of his own choosing, when the ground already favoured him.

Aerion finished the drill he was running through before he acknowledged him, because making his father wait a moment longer than strictly necessary remained one of the few small pleasures Summerhall still afforded, and only then did he lower the blunted blade and turn, breathing a touch harder than he would have liked to show.

"Father." He reached for a cloth to wipe his hands, unhurried. "Come to admire my form, or is there something you actually want."

Maekar did not rise to it. He rarely did, which was its own kind of irritation, a wall Aerion had spent twenty years learning he could not charm or provoke his way through. His father simply stood there in the flat, dust hazed light of the yard, broad and grey and immovable as the stone behind him, and studied his son for a long moment before he spoke.

"Walk with me."

It was not a request. Aerion tossed the cloth aside, waved off the squire who came forward to take his practice sword, and fell into step beside his father with the particular loose, insolent grace he reserved for exactly one man in the world, because it was the only defiance his father had never quite managed to beat or lecture out of him.

They walked the outer wall in silence at first, past the parched kitchen gardens, past the well that had dropped another hand's width this month according to the steward's worried muttering, and Aerion waited, because he had learned that his father's silences were not empty, only loaded, and it never profited a man to fire the first shot into one.

"There is word out of the Free Cities," Maekar said at last. "More than word. Movement. Bittersteel has not been idle, and there are men in this realm, some of them closer than you would like to think, who remember the black dragon fondly enough to wish they had bet differently the first time." He did not look at Aerion as he spoke, his gaze fixed somewhere out past the wall, toward the brown hills shimmering faintly in the heat. "The realm is weak. Plague thinned it. Empty granaries will thin it further before the year is out. It is exactly the sort of weakness men like that wait for."

"And you want to know what I intend to do about it," Aerion said, mouth curving, "seeing as I am, by your own repeated estimation, the family's greatest liability."

"I want," Maekar said, with the flat, grinding patience of a man who had said versions of this sentence to his son a hundred times before and expected to say it a hundred more, "to cut the thing off before it becomes a war. A marriage does that. It always has. It says to every quiet Blackfyre sympathiser in this realm that the matter is settled, that old loyalties have been folded back into the house that always should have held them, that there is no cause left worth dying for." He stopped walking. "I intend to marry our ward to you."

Whatever Aerion had expected from this walk, it had not been that, and for one unguarded instant something flickered behind his eyes before he mastered it, smoothing his expression back into something closer to amusement, though his pulse had not yet caught up with the performance.

"Ours," he repeated slowly, testing the word, tasting something underneath it he had no intention of naming aloud. "How generous of the crown. I confess I did not expect to be made a peace offering."

"You are not being made anything," Maekar said. "You are being given a duty, and I would remind you that a great many men in this realm have gone their whole lives without one half so favourable." His pale eyes found Aerion's at last, and whatever softness might have existed in his father's face at some earlier point in his life had long since been worn away into something harder, more exacting. "Which is why I am telling you this myself, rather than trusting you to hear it and behave as you please."

"I always behave," Aerion said. "You simply dislike how."

"I know precisely how you would treat this if left to your own instincts." Maekar's voice did not rise. It rarely needed to. "You would use it. You would turn a peace into a leash and call it justice for old grievances, and you would tell yourself you had earned the right, and within a year you would have undone every purpose this marriage was meant to serve, because you cannot help yourself when you are given something to break." He let that sit a moment, hard and flat between them, before he continued. "This is not a toy, Aerion. This is not some captive delivered to your rooms for your amusement. This is a person this house is asking to walk willingly back into the fire that already scarred them once, for the sake of a peace they had no part in breaking. You will treat it, and them, accordingly."

"You think me incapable of civility."

"I think you civil exactly as long as it serves you," Maekar said, "and not one moment longer, and I have buried enough of what that costs other people to know better than to hope marriage alone will teach you otherwise." He held his son's gaze, unblinking, immovable, a king's disapproval condensed into one man's stare. "Hear me clearly. Whatever satisfaction you imagine in this, whatever old scores you think a marriage entitles you to settle, you will set aside. You will not use this house's peace as cover for private cruelty. You will not break what I am asking you to hold together. If I learn that you have, I will not need Bittersteel's help to make you regret it."

Aerion said nothing for a long moment, the dust and heat and his father's unrelenting stare pressing in around him, weighing something he did not care to examine too closely in front of the one man whose judgment he had never quite learned to shrug off.

It was over his father's shoulder that he saw them.

Across the yard, near enough to the kitchen stores to have a reason for standing there, far enough that it might have been mistaken for coincidence by anyone less practiced than Aerion at reading exactly how long a person lingered when they had already finished whatever errand supposedly brought them outside. He went very still, the way he did when a plan he had not yet built began assembling itself somewhere behind his eyes, and something in his expression sharpened into an attention his father knew far too well to mistake for anything good.

"Do they know," he said, and his voice had dropped, quieter now, almost idle, though nothing about him was idle in that moment. He did not look away from the far side of the yard. "Or am I to understand you mean to have some septon inform them, the way you'd inform a man his crops have failed."

"They will be told," Maekar said, "properly, and soon."

"Let me."

It was not quite a request, though he had pitched it to sound like one, the way he pitched most demands when it suited him to appear reasonable in front of his father. His gaze finally came back to Maekar, and there was something almost boyish beneath the calculation, something that might, on a kinder man, have passed for eagerness.

"I would rather they hear it from me," he said, "than from some maester reading it off a page like a sentence. I can be civil, Father. You have my word." His mouth curved, faint and private, already half turned toward the yard, toward that familiar figure and whatever excuse he intended to invent for crossing the distance between them. "Let me be the one to tell them."

The household knight went down for the third time that morning, and Aerion did not offer him a hand up.

He stood over him instead, chest rising and falling with the easy, controlled effort of a man who had not yet begun to tire, the blunted practice blade hanging loose at his side, and studied the knight sprawled in the dust the way he might study something he had stepped in. The man was older than him by a decade at least, one of his father's household knights, solid and competent and entirely unremarkable, and he had lasted longer than the last two, which Aerion supposed was the only reason he had not yet grown bored of him.

"Get up," he said, not unkindly, which was somehow worse than if he had been unkind about it. "I have not finished."

The knight rose, slower this time, one hand pressed briefly to his ribs before he thought better of showing it, and reset his stance with the grim, dutiful patience of a man who understood exactly whose son he was facing and exactly how little choice he had in the matter. Around the edges of the yard a handful of others had gathered to watch, squires mostly, a groom who had found some excuse to linger by the fence, all of them careful to look occupied whenever Aerion's gaze happened to sweep past them, because interest, he had found, made a man a target as surely as insolence did.

He came in fast, no warning in it, because warnings were a courtesy and he had never seen the use in extending courtesy to a man he was being paid, in effect, to beat. The knight got his guard up in time, barely, and Aerion drove him back three steps with the sheer weight of the exchange, blade ringing dull and flat against blade, before he found the gap he had been hunting for since the bout began and put the flat of his sword hard against the man's ribs. The knight staggered. Did not fall this time, which earned him nothing but a faint, considering look, as though Aerion were recalculating how many more bouts the morning might reasonably contain.

It was in resetting his own stance, unhurried, rolling one shoulder to loosen it, that he caught the shape of someone else at the yard's edge, apart from the squires, apart from the usual dull scattering of household eyes that never held his attention for more than a moment.

He did not turn immediately. He finished the exchange first, put the knight down a fourth time with a strike to the back of the knee that dropped him hard into the dust, and only once the man was down, and staying down, wisely, did Aerion straighten fully and let his eyes settle on the yard's edge with open, unhurried interest.

"Well," he said, loud enough to carry, sword resting easy across one shoulder now, violet eyes bright with the particular pleasure of an audience he had not had to summon. "This is a novelty."

He crossed the yard toward them without hurry, boots kicking up small clouds of the dry, powdery dust that coated everything at Summerhall this season, and stopped close enough that the watching squires found other places to look.

"Come to admire the form," he said, "or merely to remind yourself what a man looks like when he is good at something."

His gaze dropped, briefly, deliberately, to the practice weapons racked along the fence, then back to their face, assessing, testing, the way he tested most things he had not yet decided how to use.

"There is a blunted blade there with your name on it, if you have the nerve for it." His mouth curved, sharp and inviting in equal measure. "I promise to go gently. Or don't, and stand there being decorative instead, though I warn you I find staring a poor substitute for participation."

He tilted his head, considering them a moment longer, something restless and hungry moving behind the practiced idleness of his expression.

"Which will it be. The sword, or the excuse."

He saw it from the far end of the gallery, the kind of small domestic scene that would have meant nothing to anyone who had not spent the better part of two decades learning to read a room the way other men read a ledger. A servant, one of the younger ones, new enough that Aerion did not yet have her name fixed in memory, standing a shade too close, voice pitched a shade too low, something passed from hand to hand too quickly for the exchange to be about linens or supper.

He stopped walking.

It was likely nothing. He told himself that first, out of habit rather than conviction, because his father's household screened every letter that came within these walls, every merchant's manifest and every septon's correspondence and certainly every scrap of parchment addressed to a Blackfyre prisoner of rank, and Maekar was not a man who left such things to chance. And yet knowing a door was locked had never once stopped Aerion from testing the handle, because locks, in his experience, meant only that someone had thought the thing behind them worth locking, which was reason enough to look.

The servant saw him first. He watched the colour leave her face in the particular satisfying way it always did, watched her drop whatever remained of the exchange into a fold of her apron and find, with sudden and violent urgency, somewhere else in the castle she needed to be. She did not run. She was not foolish enough to run. But she left at a pace just short of it, and did not look back, and Aerion let her go, because she had never been the point.

He came the rest of the way unhurried, the way he preferred to arrive at most confrontations, giving them the full length of his approach to consider exactly how much of it he had seen.

"How industrious," he said, stopping close enough that the space between them felt smaller than the gallery strictly required. "Summerhall's household staff developing such a keen interest in your correspondence. One might almost call it devotion."

His eyes dropped, briefly, to their hands, their sleeves, wherever a folded scrap of parchment might have vanished to, before returning, unhurried, to their face.

"Show me."

It was not phrased as a request, and he did not intend to let it become one through repetition. When they did not immediately produce whatever the servant had passed them, he tilted his head, mouth curving into something that had stopped, several words ago, resembling patience.

"I am told everything that reaches you passes through a maester's hands first," he said. "Every letter read, copied, approved before some kindly steward decides you are permitted to have it. My father is thorough that way. It is one of his few genuinely admirable qualities." He let that sit a moment, savouring it. "Which means either my father's diligence has grown careless in his old age, or you have found some servant biddable enough, or frightened enough, or paid enough, to bring you things that never troubled a maester's desk at all."

He stepped closer still, close enough now that he could watch every small betrayal a face made under pressure, the things a mouth did when it was deciding whether to lie.

"I find myself curious which it is." His voice had dropped, quieter, colder, the courtly drawl thinning at the edges the way it always did when something underneath it wanted out. "Who are you talking to. Not the servant, I care nothing for her, she will be dealt with regardless of what you tell me. Who is she talking to on your behalf. What name is worth risking a flogging for. What word from across the water is worth the wait."

His hand came up, not quite touching, hovering near their jaw the way a man might hover near a flame to test how much heat it still held.

"You will tell me," he said, softer now, almost gentle, which had never once meant gentleness where he was concerned, "or I will find out regardless, and I promise you, I am considerably less pleasant to deal with when I am made to work for my answers."

The chamber smelled of warmed oil and beeswax long before he lit the second candle. He had dismissed the servants himself, locked the door with a quiet turn of the key, and set the small iron brazier on the low table so the flame would stay contained and obedient. Red wax and black, the colours of his house, not theirs. He had chosen them with care.

Aerion poured the oil first, slow and measured, letting it pool in his palm before he drew both hands along their skin. The scent was rich, spiced, the same costly Lyseni blend he had brought back with him. It clung. He worked it in with the flat of his fingers, lingering where the flesh was softest, where the heat would later bite deepest. He did not speak while he did it. Speech would have made the moment smaller than it was.

Only when the oil had settled, gleaming faintly in the candlelight, did he lift the first taper.

Black wax. He held it at an angle, watching the flame eat the tip until a dark bead formed and trembled. Then he tipped it.

The drop struck just below the hollow of their throat. A sharp, bright sting that bloomed into heat and stayed there, hardening almost at once into a small black seal. He watched it set. Watched the way the body beneath it tensed and then tried not to.

“There,” he said, voice low, almost conversational. “A better mark than any banner you ever carried.”

He moved lower. Another drop, slower this time, letting it trail a thin black line before it cooled. Then another. He worked in silence for a while, building a careful pattern of dark stains across skin that had once answered to a different dragon. The oil made the heat linger longer than it should have. He knew that. He had tested it on himself in Lys, more than once, until he understood exactly how far the pain could be drawn out before it tipped into something less useful.

When the black was finished he set the spent taper aside and took up the red.

This one he held closer. The flame licked higher. The first red drop fell hotter, sharper, and he did not look away from their face when it landed. He wanted whatever crossed it. He wanted the small, involuntary sound. He wanted the proof that the body still answered him even when the mind tried to refuse.

“You wore black for years,” he murmured, tipping the candle again, letting a thin stream of scarlet run along the line of a rib. “I am simply correcting the colour.”

The wax cooled in raised ridges. He traced one of them with a fingertip, pressing lightly until the hardened edge bit back. Then he dripped more, overlapping the black in places so the two colours bled together into something darker, richer, unmistakably his. Red over black. House over pretender. He worked with the same unhurried precision he brought to a cyvasse board, each placement considered, each pause deliberate.

At one point he set the candle down and simply looked. The chamber was quiet except for the soft pop of the brazier and the sound of their breathing. Oil and wax and the faint metallic tang of heat on skin. He had imagined this more times than he cared to admit, in Lys and after, and the reality was better. Cleaner. They were here, marked, and the door was locked, and no one in Summerhall would open it without his leave.

He picked the red candle up again. Held it higher this time, so the drop had farther to fall and struck harder. Another. Then another, slower, until a small constellation of crimson seals covered the places he had chosen. He leaned in close enough that his breath stirred the cooling wax.

“These will bruise if I peel them too soon,” he said, almost gently. “I have not decided yet whether I will. I rather like the look of them on you.”

His free hand settled at the side of their throat, not squeezing, only resting there, the weight of it a reminder of how easily the pressure could change. The other hand tilted the candle once more. A final drop, careful, precise, landing where it would be felt most.

Aerion watched it harden. Watched the faint tremor that followed. Then he set the candle aside, sat back on his heels, and regarded the whole of what he had made with quiet, satisfied attention.

“You will tell me,” he said, violet eyes steady on theirs, “whether that was enough. Or whether you need more.”

.