By the time the last finishing touches were done, the evening had arrived properly — the light outside the tent warm and low, the fair grounds quieter than they had been all day as the other guilds wrapped up their own preparations.
I had caught glimpses of my ladies-in-waiting several times throughout the afternoon, moving between the stalls at a pace that suggested they were operating on pure momentum and determination. Rewathi with her arms full of papers. Gayathri directing someone while simultaneously reviewing something in her other hand. Sangya, characteristically focused, moving from one point to the next with the efficiency of someone who has made a list and is going to complete it.
*Tomorrow the fair opens.* I watched them go and felt a genuine wave of gratitude. Without my asking, without fully knowing what they were doing it for, they had given this event everything they had. I had stumbled into exactly the right people.
Which was when the practical problem surfaced.
As the empress of Selon, I was expected to open the fair tomorrow morning. Which meant that Henry Delgon could not be present for the opening of the fair tomorrow morning. The two identities had coexisted without difficulty for two days, but tomorrow they would be in direct conflict for several hours.
I hadn't found the right moment to mention this, and the afternoon's steady pace of work had given me very few opportunities. The carriage ride back to the Silver Coin provided the first reasonable one.
Gratina had said her farewell — rising from the tent's peak in one clean, powerful motion and disappearing south in the direction she'd come from. The four of us settled into the carriage in the collective silence of people who have worked hard and have very little left to spend on conversation. Even Benedict, whose natural state was somewhere between loud and louder, kept himself to himself, his head tipped back against the cushion.
I was the one who broke it.
"Mister Reichert." My voice came out more tentative than I intended. Both of them turned to look at me, which did not help. I continued anyway. "I won't be able to come tomorrow morning for the opening."
A beat.
"What?" Benedict sat up. "You're abandoning us the moment we need you most?"
Reichert said nothing. He looked at me, and the frown that had settled on his forehead carried no particular heat — more the expression of someone reassessing a calculation they thought they had completed.
"I'm truly sorry," I said, keeping my voice even. "I made a prior commitment to accompany someone tomorrow morning — it wasn't something I could anticipate conflicting with this. I can be here in the afternoon."
Benedict drew breath to argue. Reichert raised one hand, a small motion, and Benedict stopped.
"You can go," Reichert said. His voice had taken on the particular quality of mountain-top air — clean, cold, entirely without warmth. He turned back to the window. "Don't come back. Collect your wages from the counter at the inn."
"You cannot be serious!" Benedict turned on him with the full force of his considerable personality. "We need people, Reichert! Let the boy take the morning and come back in the afternoon — it makes no sense to lose him entirely over half a day!" He threw up his hands. "What is wrong with you?"
Reichert didn't engage with the question.
I sat with the decision for a moment and was surprised to find that my immediate response was relief rather than disappointment. I had come here with a specific purpose: to observe someone I believed might be a threat to Selon, to gather information, and to make a judgment. I had gathered the information. And the judgment, if I was being honest with myself, was that whatever Reichert's secrets were — the dual name, the western royal blood, the collection of extraordinary beings around him — he had done nothing, across two full days of close proximity, that indicated any intention to harm anyone.
He was suspicious. He was mysterious. He was many things I didn't yet have words for.
But suspicious and harmful were not the same thing, and I had begun to conflate them somewhere along the way.
Beyond that, there was the other consideration — the one I had been carefully not looking at directly. The mustard seed's worth of attraction I had acknowledged to myself in the carriage yesterday, and which had not diminished with proximity the way I had hoped it might. That was reason enough to close this chapter cleanly rather than let it continue to accumulate.
This was where it ended.
I had a life to return to. An empire. A husband. The full weight of what I actually was and what was actually required of me.
"Tell him, lad!" Benedict said, close to my ear. "Tell him you're not quitting!"
I looked at him and felt a genuine warmth toward this man — this loud, honest, straightforward person I had known for two days and would probably remember for considerably longer. There was something uncomplicated about Benedict Ferenriarth that felt valuable in a life that was almost entirely complicated.
Then I looked at Reichert, still watching the street through the window, presenting me with the studied indifference of someone who has made a decision and is waiting for the world to arrange itself accordingly.
"Thank you for the opportunity, Mister Reichert," I said. "Genuinely. I've learned things here I didn't expect to, and I'm glad I met the people I met. It was a good experience." I paused. "Thank you."
He turned from the window.
There was something in his expression that hadn't been there a moment ago — not quite a surprise, but something adjacent to it, and beneath it something else that moved too quickly across his face for me to name before it was gone. He seemed to consider a response, then think better of it.
"Whatever suits you," he said, and returned his gaze to the window.
The rest of the ride passed in silence. Benedict made one further attempt to change my mind, sustained it for approximately thirty seconds, and then looked at my face and let it go.
---
At the Silver Coin, Benedict went directly to the bar with the focused purposefulness of a man who has earned a drink. Reichert crossed to the counter, said something brief and quiet to Olga, and went upstairs without looking back.
Olga watched him go, then turned to me and beckoned.
I approached. She looked more tired than usual this evening — the ledger still open in front of her, the coins still in their careful rows, but the energy behind the familiar composure slightly diminished.
"So you're leaving then," she said. Not quite a question. Her voice was neutral in the way of someone who has seen many things come and go and has stopped assigning strong feelings to departures.
She placed a pouch on the counter. Coins shifted inside it with a satisfying weight.
"Whatever." She said it almost to herself. "It's a shame. Good ones are hard to come by." She pushed the pouch toward me and returned her attention to the ledger.
I picked it up. There was something strange about holding coins I had earned through my own labour — the Empress of Selon, the wealthiest woman in the empire by most reasonable calculations, standing at an inn counter and accepting two days' wages as a construction hand. But Henry Delgon was none of those things, and he needed coins for a trip home, and so I took them.
"Thank you, Ma'am."
She didn't look up.
---
Outside, the evening air hit me clean and cool.
I walked a few paces from the inn's entrance and stopped, and stood there for a moment, and exhaled — a long, slow breath that had apparently been waiting for somewhere to go. The weight that was lifted with it was difficult to quantify. Two days of holding a persona in place, of managing what I let show and what I kept back, of watching someone I found interesting and inexplicable and faintly alarming — it had cost something, and the sudden absence of that cost was immediately, physically noticeable.
A vendor nearby was selling chilled milk with diced fruit in a clay cup, moving between the evening pedestrians with the unhurried confidence of someone whose product sells itself. I bought one with a coin from wages — my own coin, earned by my own hands — and drank it standing on the pavement.
It was extraordinary. Cold and faintly sweet, the fruit bright against the milk, simple in a way that very good things often are.
I looked up at the Silver Coin Inn while I drank.
My eyes found the third-floor windows without quite intending to.
And stopped.
Someone was standing at the window of the last room on the left. I couldn't make out details — the light was wrong, the distance was enough to obscure — but a figure was there, looking down, and for the fraction of a second before they moved back into the room, their gaze and mine were directly aligned.
I stood very still.
They did not return. I finished my drink watching the window, and the figure did not reappear.
I walked away.
The feeling that followed me was not comfortable. Not anxiety, exactly, and not the ordinary social discomfort of having been observed without knowing it. Something older than that — a primal, instinctive register of something that my body understood and my mind was still catching up with. The particular alertness of an encounter with something at least as powerful as you, something that knows what you are at a level that bypasses ordinary recognition.
I had felt this sensation before. I was almost certain of it.
But the memory of where wouldn't come.
I walked back toward the palace and told myself it was nothing — a coincidence of timing, a trick of the light and distance. Someone standing at a window. Nothing more than that.
I almost believed it.