The dinner continued with lighter conversation for a while — he asked how I had spent the past two weeks, what had kept me occupied, whether I had been sleeping and eating adequately. I answered each question with the careful truthfulness of someone selecting which truths to offer. Then the conversation drifted toward more uncertain ground.
"Are you alright, though?" The words came out with a slight effort, as though he had been holding them for some time and had finally decided to set them down. He looked at me as he said it, and then, almost immediately, looked away.
I blinked.
"I mean—" He continued, directed at some point past my shoulder, his voice carrying the particular quality of someone pushing through self-consciousness to say something that matters to them. "You haven't been quite yourself since we returned from Fonta. I noticed. If there's something troubling you, I'd like to—"
"There's nothing of the sort," I said, before he could finish the sentence. "I'm adjusting. My understanding of myself, of what I am, of where I stand as a creature in the world — all of it has changed considerably in a very short time. I'm finding my footing. That's all." I offered him a composed, apologetic tilt of my head. "I'm sorry if I worried you."
'I'll ask about the tomb after the fair.' The decision settled quietly in the back of my mind. 'It can wait a few more days.'
I knew it was avoidance. I was under no illusions about that. But I could live with avoidance for a short while longer. The fair gave me something to point to, a reason that was also real, and I was not above using it.
"Of course I worry about you." His voice had lost the earlier awkwardness entirely. It was very direct now, and very certain. "I love you. Worrying is not something you need to apologise for — it's my right, freely given."
The words landed on my chest with more weight than I was prepared for.
It was not the first time he had said it. He had said it before, in various forms, and each time I had received it as something I could simply carry forward. But now the words arrived differently — complicated by everything I had turned over in the underground chamber of a two-thousand-year-old tomb, by the empty platform and what should have been resting on it, by all the questions that still had no answers.
What did love mean to him? Did he mean it in the way I meant it? Could a person love someone and still engineer the circumstances of their near-death in pursuit of something larger? What were the limits of his love — where did it stop and something else begin? Could he kill for it? Could he, if it came to that, kill the person he loved for the sake of what he loved more?
Perhaps I was simply not his greatest love. Perhaps the Selon Empire occupied that position, and I was something adjacent — significant, genuine even, but categorically secondary. It was not an impossible thing. People could love more than one thing and have a clear ordering between them.
For me, he was the greatest love. Without contest, without qualification. I was aware of this with the same certainty I was aware of my own heartbeat — both of them now, each one steady and immovable. For him, I thought, without particularly wanting to think about it, I could set everything else aside. The empire, my dignity, the careful sense of self I had spent years constructing. All of it.
If I placed both our loves on a scale — his and mine — I was fairly certain which side would strike the surface.
But love was not measurable. It had never been, and the attempt to measure it was its own kind of loss. I knew that.
I let out a quiet, steadying breath and raised my eyes to meet him.
"I know," I said.
A pause, in which I felt the full weight of what I was about to say and said it anyway, because it was true regardless of everything else.
"I love you too."
The words came from somewhere below deliberation. They were simply what was there.
---
The next morning I walked the site earmarked for the noblewomen's fair, moving through the early stages of construction with Rewathi at my side.
It had only begun today, and there was not much to see yet — the stalls still in their skeletal phase, wooden frameworks going up across the courtyard with the focused industry of a crew that knew what it was building and didn't require supervision to do it. Lumber was still arriving at the far end, each delivery handled with brisk efficiency. The workers moved quickly and with the kind of practised ease that comes from doing physical work well over a long time.
The site itself was well chosen — a large courtyard adjacent to one of the older palace buildings, positioned near both the noble houses district and the bureau offices. Convenient for logistics, convenient for the guests. It would serve.
Six days remaining.
"The stalls should be fully framed in three days," Rewathi said, watching the lumber with the assessing eye of someone who has been managing timelines. "Possibly less, given the pace they're setting today."
"And the goods?"
"Gayathri sent word this morning — the last of the shipments arrives tomorrow. She and Sangya are both buried in the current imports." A small, fond laugh. "Completely consumed by them. I'm not sure either of them have come up for air since yesterday afternoon."
"Should we find them more help?" I asked, scanning the courtyard ahead — and catching, at the periphery of my vision, a flash of silver-blond hair near the far corner.
I looked away.
"Were you about to make a recommendation?" I asked Rewathi, turning toward her and away from the peripheral distraction.
"Actually, yes — I was." She brightened in the way she did when a topic genuinely interested her. "There's a friend of mine who has been helping us behind the scenes since the early planning stages. She has been invaluable, honestly — excellent with books, meticulous with accounts, a natural organiser. The only difficulty is that she is rather shy. It takes her a considerable time to feel comfortable with new people, and the idea of formally meeting your Majesty has apparently given her a great deal of anxiety. She hasn't been willing to come forward." Rewathi paused with the expression of someone who finds this situation both endearing and maddening. "But she has so much potential. It would be a shame to waste it."
"What is her name?"
"Niwara, from the house of Gorawa. Their youngest daughter."
I leaned forward to examine a length of roofing fabric that a worker had unrolled nearby — thick, tightly woven, the kind of material that would hold against a heavy southern downpour and deflect the violent afternoon sun equally well. Good choice.
"An imperial summons would resolve the hesitation, I imagine," I said.
Rewathi turned to me with the immediate, full-beam enthusiasm of someone who has just heard the answer to a problem they have been nursing for some time.
"Your Majesty, please." She pressed her hands together. "I have tried everything short of physically carrying her out of that house. Nothing has worked. An imperial decree would do it — nothing else will. Please, your Majesty. If something doesn't change soon, my poor friend is going to live and die in that house without ever meeting anyone."
I considered asking what exactly the connection was between working at a noblewomen's fair and avoiding an unmarried death, but Rewathi looked so earnest about the whole thing that I decided against it.
"I'll send the summons this afternoon," I said.
She beamed.
I turned back to the courtyard, and the silver-blond hair was no longer at the periphery. It was approaching directly, its owner navigating the construction site with the unhurried confidence of someone who has decided on a destination and sees no particular obstacle between himself and it. Blue eyes, tall frame, the expression of a man who had apparently decided that yesterday's interaction was simply a starting point rather than a conclusion.
I increased my pace.
Rewathi stumbled slightly to keep up, casting me a puzzled sideways look.
I knew, on some level, that avoidance was irrational. Our last encounter had not ended well, and I had found him genuinely unpleasant despite the undeniable fact that he was a handsome man — the two things not being mutually exclusive, as I had ample evidence to confirm. But the instinct to simply not deal with him this particular morning was strong, and I was inclined to respect it.
He, however, appeared to have no corresponding instinct whatsoever. He moved with the single-minded directness of someone who has identified something and intends to address it, and he was faster than a dignified increase in walking pace could account for.
He came to a stop directly in our path, neat and unhurried, and bowed — a proper bow, deep and precise, the kind that communicated that its maker knows exactly how to do this and has chosen to do it correctly.
"Good morning, your Majesty." He straightened, and the smile that accompanied the words was entirely too comfortable for someone who had, less than twenty-four hours ago, suggested I might be a thieving northerner with a stone for a heart.
The courtyard offered me no useful avenues of escape. I stopped.
"It is indeed a fine morning," I said, with the smooth pleasantness of someone who has had considerable practice producing expressions they do not feel. "Please, at ease, Mister Reichert."