Gayathri, to her credit, read the atmosphere between us with considerable speed and moved immediately to defuse it — pivoting to introductions with the smooth redirectional instinct of someone who has spent a great deal of time managing uncomfortable social situations.
"I should have introduced you both before, your Majesty, but I'm afraid their goods rather overtook my better manners." She smiled, entirely unabashed about this. "This is Reichert Dorken, leader of the Silver Eagle merchant guild — a highly regarded name in the west, particularly for their jewellery. Exceptional quality across the board." She turned to the man in question with the same warm efficiency. "And Mister Reichert — this is Her Majesty Rhiaenne Sarenna Draga, Empress of Selon and Queen of Draga."
There was a note of pride in her voice as she said it. Whether she was proud on my behalf or simply proud of herself for being on intimate terms with the person she had just introduced, I genuinely couldn't determine.
Reichert's mouth opened. Then closed. He winced, almost imperceptibly, in the manner of a man running rapid calculations about the nature of his recent remarks and arriving at conclusions he did not enjoy. He appeared to be assembling something to say.
I didn't wait for him to assemble it.
I handed the clipboard to Gayathri, gave her a brief set of instructions about what remained to be checked and noted, and walked out.
To be fair to him — and I found, despite everything, that I was inclined to be fair — it was not an unreasonable failure of recognition. No one would reasonably expect the Empress of Selon to spend her afternoon doing inventory administration in a converted warehouse. That was work that any capable clerk could manage. I had simply needed something to do with my hands and my hours, something that required enough attention to keep the other thoughts from getting too loud.
In doing so, I had apparently found a new category of unpleasant experience to add to the week's collection.
I stopped walking.
The small entourage that had accompanied me stopped a beat later, nearly running into each other in the process.
I stood in the middle of the street and looked at nothing in particular and thought about the pattern I had settled into — the busyness, the avoidance, the endless motion that was really just standing still in disguise.
'I'm tired of running.' The thought arrived with a weariness that surprised me with its depth. Not the tiredness of insufficient sleep, though there had been plenty of that too. A deeper exhaustion — the kind that comes from working very hard at something that isn't actually working.
Nothing excites me anymore. Everything that had felt vivid and real two weeks ago had taken on a muffled quality, as though experienced from behind glass. I had died, in a sense — or something in me had. No, not in a sense. I had died properly, in the most literal meaning available: I was no longer human, the person I had been for the entirety of my previous existence was gone, shed in a tower on a hill outside a livestock village, and what had come after was still learning what it was.
Perhaps that was where the hollowness was coming from. Perhaps it was simpler than betrayal.
I started walking again.
---
By the time I reached the Rose Palace, it had been long enough since I last properly occupied it that returning felt faintly strange — the way a familiar room feels after you have been away from it for just slightly too long.
But the strangeness of homecoming was immediately secondary to something else: there were too many people outside. The Emperor's personal guard, stationed at intervals that suggested they had been there for some time. Servants I recognised as belonging specifically to Arvid's household, not mine. An entire quiet infrastructure of attendance, present and waiting.
He was here.
Why was he here? He could have sent a message asking me to come to him — that would have been the simpler course, and Arvid did not typically complicate things without reason. So why come here himself, without warning, without a word?
The head servant — the one appointed to Arvid after Vicram's removal — came forward to receive me. His expression had the particular quality of a man who has spent several hours in a situation he didn't choose and wasn't sure how to explain.
"How long?" I asked, because I needed the shape of it before I went inside.
The question appeared to cause him some physical distress. A visible bead of sweat traced its way down his forehead.
"Since last night, your Majesty," he said carefully.
Since last night. I turned that over.
"Has he eaten? Did he attend morning court?"
"His Majesty returned every meal that was brought to him — said he had no appetite. And the morning court session was —" He paused with the air of someone delivering news they would rather not deliver. "His Majesty did not attend. We considered sending word to your Majesty, but his Majesty specifically asked us not to. He said he would wait until your Majesty returned on your own."
I looked at the man for a moment without speaking.
Arvid had not missed a morning court session since taking the throne. Whatever else I could say about him — whatever I was still in the process of deciding about him — he was not a man who abandoned his duties without cause. The court was not optional. It was the mechanism by which the empire actually functioned, and he understood that better than anyone.
So what was this?
'Do I know him at all?' The question had become a recurring one, and it still had no satisfying answer. But this — the missing meals, the missed court, the waiting — this didn't fit the architecture of deception. It didn't fit any version of him I had been constructing, either the one I'd believed in before or the one I was trying to revise toward now.
I exhaled slowly.
Then I went inside.
My feet felt heavier with each stair. First floor to second, second to third — I found myself having the kind of internal negotiation that should not be necessary for walking through a building one owns, repeating small firm instructions to myself in the way you repeat them when you don't entirely trust yourself to comply.
'I have to do this.'
'I can do this.'
'One more step.'
And then I was in the doorway of the room, and the negotiation became irrelevant, because there he was.
He was lying on my bed. Not his — mine. His face was turned into the pillow on my side, the one I used, and both arms were wrapped around it with the complete, uncomplicated commitment of someone deeply and genuinely asleep. He looked, in that moment, nothing like an emperor. He looked like a very tired person who had found the nearest thing that carried a familiar scent and held onto it.
He didn't stir as I crossed the room. His breathing was even, slow and deep — the breathing of someone who had finally gone under after holding on too long.
The longing that moved through me was so sudden and so complete that it was briefly difficult to breathe around.
'I want to touch him.' The thought was simple and immediate, with none of the complicated architecture I had been building around everything that concerned him lately. 'I want to hold him. I want to tell him that I love him, even now, even knowing what I know, even not knowing what I don't.'
I watched my own hand reach toward his hair — those golden locks slightly disordered from sleep, softer-looking than they had any right to be — and stopped it with my other hand before it arrived.
No. Let him sleep. And beyond that: I didn't know, not really, what he wanted. What he would want, waking to find me there. There were things I had believed I knew about him and had been wrong about. I would not assume the small things while I was still uncertain about the large ones.
I went around to the other side of the bed instead. Conjured something comfortable to sleep in — one of the quiet conveniences of being what I now was — and eased myself onto the mattress with the extreme care of someone trying to disturb absolutely nothing. The bed barely registered my presence.
I settled on my pillow and looked at him.
He didn't wake. He breathed in and then out, slow and regular, entirely untroubled in sleep in the way that people sometimes are when they have finally reached the place they were trying to reach and can let the effort of getting there go.
He was, as he had always been, exactly as beautiful as the first time I had seen him. The man who held my heart without knowing — or perhaps knowing — how completely. The man I had missed, against all better judgment, every single day of the past two weeks. There had been moments when the urge to abandon the whole careful architecture of distance and simply go to him had been very nearly physical.
'Just one glance,' I had told myself on those nights. 'Just let me see him for a moment.'
Now he was right in front of me, and my fingers wanted to reach out, and I told them not to, and looked at him anyway from a safe distance like the absolute fool I had apparently always been, my dragon heart refusing every reasonable argument I tried to make.
'Greedy,' I told myself. 'Always wanting more than you should.'
I watched him breathe until the watching became its own kind of peace, and somewhere in that quiet, between one breath and the next, sleep finally found me too.