When your mind is full of thoughts you would rather not have, the most effective remedy — if not the wisest one — is to keep yourself so thoroughly occupied that those thoughts never quite find the space to settle. It is not a solution. It is, however, an exceptionally efficient way to run from one.
Aiona was no longer there to offer her opinion on my choices. For the first time, there was no quiet voice rising from somewhere inside me with commentary I hadn't asked for and usually needed. The silence where she had been was its own particular ache, one I was still learning the dimensions of. But it did mean that no one was telling me I was wrong.
So I ran.
I kept myself busy to the point of neglect — barely eating, barely sleeping, filling every hour before exhaustion claimed it with something that demanded my full attention. I spent long stretches in the imperial library, working through books with the focused, slightly desperate energy of someone using knowledge as a barrier between themselves and their own interior. I hired tutors for subjects I had always been curious about and never had the time to pursue properly. I read until my eyes ached and kept reading anyway.
I also threw myself into the preparations for the Fair — the gathering for noble women that I had set in motion before Fonta, before everything. The noble ladies of Arpa were genuinely excited about it; apparently such an event had not been hosted by an empress in a considerable time, and the anticipation in certain circles was palpable. Rewathi, Gayathri, and Sangya had taken on most of the substantive organisational work, which left me with the task of sending formal invitations to noble ladies across the city, summoning them to the castle in seven days' time.
It was not intellectually demanding work. That was rather the point.
I went out to the makeshift warehouse — an empty bureau building that had been repurposed to receive the incoming wares — to inspect what had arrived. Gayathri accompanied me. Four guards were assigned for the outing.
I looked at them and exhaled through my nose.
Arvid's doing, of course. Two weeks since Fonta, and I had not seen him — not properly, not the way that would require me to sit across from him and maintain a face over the duration of an entire meal. He had sent invitations. To dinner, to breakfast, to simply come and sleep in the east wing rather than the separate quarters I had effectively retreated to. I had declined each one with the same polite excuse: I was busy. It was even true, technically. I *was* busy. That was the entire point of being busy.
I knew I couldn't run forever. Some part of me understood that the longer the distance stretched, the harder the return would become. But even thinking about him made something in my chest contract with a pain I hadn't found a way to metabolise yet. I needed more time. More time to sit with it, to absorb it, to reach some version of acceptance that would allow me to look at him without my face becoming a confession.
I was working on it.
The warehouse smelled of new fabric and sawdust. Cases had already been stacked along the walls and arranged across the floor in orderly rows, and I was making my way between them with a clipboard and a distracted mind when Gayathri took my hand in both of hers.
I stopped.
"What is troubling your Majesty?" she asked. Her voice was quiet and without performance — genuine concern, simply stated.
I looked down at where her hands held mine, then up to meet her eyes. She was watching me with the particular attentiveness of someone who is actually seeing you and not simply looking in your direction.
"Nothing of the sort," I said. I freed my hand gently and turned my attention back to the nearest stack of cases.
Not because I disliked the gesture. Because if I had let it go on any longer I would have started crying, and crying in a warehouse full of imported textiles with four guards stationed at the entrance was not something I was prepared to do.
Gayathri sighed — a soft, accepting sound, the sigh of someone who has decided not to push.
"As your Majesty wishes," she said. "But if your Majesty ever wishes to share what is weighing on her — I'll be here. That won't change."
She smiled, briefly and genuinely, and then turned her attention to the nearest case.
We began working through the inventory in relative silence. The imported fabrics from the east were extraordinary — Chang'an silk among them, the kind that shifted colour under different angles of light, catching the warm glow from the warehouse windows and giving it back in iridescent ripples of blue and green and gold. I ran my fingers across a folded length of it and tried to simply be present in the texture and the colour and nothing else.
After a while, I spoke.
"What gave it away?"
Gayathri didn't hesitate, which told me she had been expecting the question.
"I've had a sensitivity to other people's emotions since I was a child, your Majesty," she said, examining the edge of a silk panel with careful fingers. "I notice things before people intend to show them. But honestly, even without that — the signs were not subtle. Your Majesty has been sighing frequently, going still and distant in the middle of conversations, looking at things without really seeing them. It was apparent that something was weighing on you."
"I see," I said.
That was all I gave her. It wasn't that I didn't appreciate the care she was offering — I did, genuinely. But I had trusted my understanding of a person and been profoundly wrong, and the instinct to share something private with someone I had known for a relatively short time was not an instinct I currently trusted. People contained things you couldn't see from the outside. I had learned that more thoroughly than I had wanted to.
I did not want to think about it. I turned my attention firmly back to the fabric.
"Ah!" Gayathri's exclamation cut through the quiet of the warehouse — bright, sudden, entirely unself-conscious. "It's here! Your Majesty, it's finally here!" She was already moving toward the entrance before she finished the sentence, drawn forward by whatever she had spotted being brought through the doors.
I followed her gaze.
Several large carriages had drawn up in the courtyard, their sides marked with a merchant flag I didn't recognise — not any Selonian house, not any eastern trade guild I could place. The men unloading them were evidently foreign. Their colouring was noticeably different from anyone I was accustomed to seeing in Arpa — pale skin, light hair, eyes in shades of grey and blue and pale green. Western merchants, if my rough knowledge of the continent's geography was serving me correctly.
Gayathri was following the cases being carried inside with barely-contained enthusiasm, leaning to examine a particularly well-made specimen as one of the workers set it down. It was locked — a serious, well-engineered lock, the kind used when the contents are worth protecting. Whatever was inside, it had been packaged with care.
"Please fetch the head merchant," Gayathri told the nearest worker, with the decisive energy of someone accustomed to getting answers quickly. "I'd like to see what's in these."
The man nodded and withdrew. I tracked him through the warehouse windows as he crossed the courtyard to one of the carriages and knocked — then, receiving no response, knocked again more firmly, and apparently woke someone.
A young man emerged with a yawn and the expression of someone interrupted mid-sleep who has not yet decided whether to be civil about it. He straightened and the irritation rearranged itself into something more presentable.
I noticed, with the detached objectivity of someone simply cataloguing information, that he was unusually tall — a full head above most of his own men. His hair was the colour that exists at the boundary between blond and silver, and his eyes, even at this distance, were clearly a pale blue. He pushed the hair back from his face with a single practiced motion, said something sharp to the men nearest him, and turned toward the warehouse entrance with the unhurried stride of someone who has decided to cooperate without being particularly pleased about it.
I pulled my attention back to the fabric in front of me and kept it there, examining a fold I had already examined twice.
He was good-looking, in the straightforward, uncomplicated way of someone who has never had to work at it. Not in the way Arvid was — nothing like Arvid, the comparison arrived unbidden and I set it aside immediately — but objectively, undeniably, he was a handsome man.
A flash of something I didn't immediately identify moved through me. Guilt, I recognised after a beat. Absurd, given the circumstances. Guilt nonetheless.
"How may I help you, my ladies?"
The voice was unexpectedly melodic for someone who had been asleep thirty seconds ago — deep and unhurried, carrying the particular cadence of a language that was not his first.
We turned toward him. Gayathri with the genuine surprise of someone encountering him for the first time. Me with the practiced composure of someone pretending the same.
I felt the guilt again, small and irrational, sitting in my chest.
I looked at him and said nothing, and waited to see what he had brought us.