Five days later
~ KAEL ~
The decision about who came had taken most of the morning after the letter, and the answer had been, in the end, both simpler and more surprising than Kael had expected.
Aldric came. He'd said, when Kael had looked at him across the table, "You'll need someone who understands theology. And someone who's good at talking to clergy. And someone who's known you long enough to tell you when you're wrong." He'd paused. "I'm all three."
Awen came. Not because anyone asked her to — she'd simply said, the next morning, that the Harvest Mother's temple had interests in Orrenth too, and that she'd rather learn the rest of this story in person than read about it in a report six weeks later.
Biscuit, emphatically, did not come. He'd been deposited with Bertha, who had accepted this responsibility with the air of someone who'd been expecting it, and had already reorganized a shelf for him.
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
The night before the ship, Kael sat in the courtyard behind the Cracked Lantern — the same courtyard where he'd burned roses, where Biscuit had colonized sea-boots, where the coalition had gathered more times than either of them had counted — and was quiet in the particular way of someone who had something to say and hadn't found the shape of it yet.
Nyxara waited. She'd learned, over the past months, that Kael's silences were different from other people's silences — not empty, not avoidant, just… in progress.
"I've never left," he said finally. "Since I arrived in this world. This city is… it's the only place I've been. Everything that's happened has been here. The alley. The harbour. Pale's study. This courtyard."
"And now you're leaving," Nyxara said.
"And now I'm leaving," he agreed. He turned his pen over, the old habit. "Is that… strange for you? The anchor — I've always assumed it was tied to here, to this place. The alley specifically. The undercroft. The spots where things happened."
"I wondered that too," Nyxara said honestly. "For a while. But I don't think the anchor is a place, Kael. I think… I think it's you. It moves when you move. It's always moved when you moved — from the alley to the harbour, from the harbour to Pale's study, from Pale's study to the Exchange. I was always there. I think I'll be there on the ship too."
"You've never been on a ship," Kael said.
"I've been in the ocean," Nyxara said. "For seventeen thousand years. I think I can manage a ship."
Kael laughed — quietly, the way he always laughed at her when she said something that was both completely true and somehow funnier for being so. "Fair point."
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
The goodbyes were not dramatic, which felt right. The people who'd built something together in this city didn't need drama to mark what they'd done — the work was already there, in the queue, in the voided contracts, in Thorne's newly steady hand, in Senna's flowers in a window and Druven's lighter step.
Pale shook his hand with both of hers, which was, for Pale, the equivalent of someone else weeping openly. "Don't get killed," she said. "The queue will miss you."
Mott said: "I'm sending a letter ahead to the Orrenth harbour commission. Trade contacts. They'll know you're coming."
Druven said: "Bring back something interesting," and then, quieter: "Thank you. For… you know."
"You would have gotten there eventually," Kael said.
"I wouldn't have," Druven said, with the particular honesty of a man who had stopped pretending. "But that's alright. That's what you're for."
Renn walked him to the dock, and stood there for a moment, in the early morning light, looking faintly lost in the way of someone who had built a competence around a specific person and was now going to have to see if it held up independently.
"You'll be fine," Kael said. "You've been running the commission for three months. You just didn't notice because I was standing in the same room."
Renn looked at the ship. "What if something comes up? Something complicated?"
"Read everything," Kael said. "All of it. Even the parts that look unimportant. Especially those."
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
The ship moved away from the dock as the sun came fully up, and Nyxara felt it — the city, behind them, becoming smaller and then distant and then simply… there, the way things were there when you couldn't see them anymore but knew they hadn't gone.
She felt the undercroft, still warm. The queue, already forming, Bertha's boy arriving with the tea. Thorne's office, opening for the day. Corwin at her windowsill, the cedar box beside her, beginning the morning's work.
She felt all of it, and found, with some surprise, that she could. The anchor hadn't frayed. Hadn't stretched thin or gone uncertain. It was simply… longer, now, reaching back over water, the way it had once reached down an alley, the way it had reached through a Conclave hall, the way it had reached across a city that had learned, incrementally and imperfectly, to ask better questions.
"Kael," she said.
He was standing at the ship's rail, watching the city go, in the particular way of someone making sure they'd looked at it properly before it was too small to see. "Yes?"
"I can still feel all of it. The city. Everyone. It didn't… the anchor didn't change."
He turned from the rail — and she felt the warmth of it, the small, honest, unperformed relief of a man who had been quietly worried about the same thing and hadn't wanted to say so.
"Good," he said simply.
"I told you," Nyxara said. "It's you. Not the place."
Aldric appeared beside him at the rail, squinting at the horizon with the expression of a man who had spent his entire life in a landlocked temple district and had just remembered, too late, that ships moved. "How long to Orrenth?"
"Six weeks," Kael said.
"Six weeks," Aldric repeated, in the tone of someone revising several assumptions. "And there's… nothing to do for six weeks. On a ship. On the water."
"There are the contracts," Kael said. "I brought copies."
Aldric looked at him. "Of course you did."
Awen, on Kael's other side, was already writing in her notebook, looking at the open water with the expression of someone who had been sent to find the whole story and was only now beginning to understand how much of it was still ahead.
The city shrank behind them. The water widened. Somewhere in Orrenth, forty days from now, a magistrate named Sera Odon was preparing a hearing that was going to need the weight of someone who had done this before.
Kael pressed two fingers to his wrist — the old habit, the first one — and felt warmth, steady and certain, crossing water as easily as it had ever crossed an alley.
He reached for his pen.
There were contracts to read.
End of Volume 2