I had resigned myself to four hours of uncomfortable silence and the prospect of arriving at the first wall sometime in the small hours of the morning. As it turned out, I was wrong on both counts.
At some point during the ride, the sweet smell that had been emanating steadily from the man across from me simply stopped. Not gradually — it ceased, as though a source had been switched off. And almost simultaneously, the carriage came to a halt.
Zaren stirred, opened his eyes, and pushed his side of the carriage door open with the unhurried ease of someone who had been expecting this particular stop. He stepped out without a word or a glance in my direction and walked away.
I sat where I was, momentarily confused.
The carriage driver resolved my confusion by pulling open my door with the energy of someone who had somewhere else to be.
"Are you getting out?" Not a warm invitation.
"I apologise — I had assumed you were going as far as the first wall, and I didn't want to—"
"We're inside the first wall," he said, and closed the door behind me the moment I had cleared it.
I stood on the street and looked around.
He was right. The architecture was unmistakable — the dense, well-maintained streetscape of the merchant district, and specifically Inn Street, where establishments catered to travelling merchants and visitors with comfortable rooms, food, and drink at every other doorway. I knew this street. I had walked it before.
But that was impossible.
At the pace the carriage had been travelling, reaching the first wall from where we had picked me up should have taken at minimum four hours. We had been inside for less than one, possibly considerably less. The arithmetic simply did not work.
Unless something had been applied to make it work.
The carriage was already moving again, pulling away down the street. On the opposite pavement, Zaren was walking toward one of the larger inns, one hand raised to press against his temple with the slow, careful pressure of someone managing a considerable headache.
"Mister Zaren—" I caught up to him in a few quick steps, aware that he showed no signs of stopping. "I wanted to thank you properly. You were very generous this evening."
He didn't stop. Didn't turn. His hand raised briefly in a dismissive wave — not unkind exactly, more the gesture of someone who has run out of energy for social niceties — and then he pushed through the inn door and let it close behind him.
I stopped on the pavement and looked up at the sign above the entrance.
*The Silver Coin Inn.*
I stood there for a moment, committing it to memory. Then I turned and began the walk back toward the palace.
---
The walk gave me time to think, and thinking produced a revision.
My earlier assessment of Zaren had been incomplete. I had concluded he was probably someone with an affinity for engraving magic — capable of imbuing objects with spells, but not of working magic directly. That conclusion needed to be set aside.
The carriage had covered four hours of road in under one hour. That was not the passive work of an enchanted object operating on stored magic. That was active, sustained magical output — someone continuously working throughout the journey, bending the relationship between distance and time for as long as it was needed, and then stopping the moment it was no longer required. The cessation of the sweet smell had coincided exactly with the carriage stopping. And the headache — that careful, deliberate pressure of fingers against temples — was consistent with the particular exhaustion that came from sustained magical output that had cost something to maintain.
Engraving magic couldn't do that. Engraving magic worked through stored spells in objects; it didn't require continuous effort from its user. What I had observed required someone actively converting and directing magical energy throughout the duration of the journey.
Which meant Zaren was either a mage or a sorcerer. Both were extraordinarily rare in this era, for reasons that were now entirely personal to me.
When dragons had lived and moved through the world, ambient magic had been a constant — spilling from them in those drifting particles of light, absorbed by nature, cycling through the world in an unbroken current. That ambient magic was what mages worked with, the way a miller works with water: channeling and directing a force that existed independently of them. But when the dragons had gone, the ambient magic had gone with them. Mages, deprived of their source material, had become increasingly rare over the generations, until they were now something closer to historical curiosity than practical reality.
Sorcerers were different — and rarer still. Where mages drew on external ambient magic, sorcerers generated their own, converting natural energy directly into magical output through some internal mechanism that no one had ever fully explained. They were not dependent on a dragon-sustained supply. They were, in a sense, their own source. The limitation was capacity: they could only produce small amounts, just enough for immediate use, and the effort cost them.
The headache. The pained groan in the carriage. The deliberate, managed cessation of output the moment it was no longer needed.
Sorcerer. And one with sufficient skill in engraving magic to have produced the enchantments in the pink diamond necklace.
That was not a simple person. That was not a merchant who had happened into the jewellery trade and done well for himself.
I turned that understanding over as the palace walls came into view, and felt the unease he had always produced in me settle into something more specific. More nameable. Not fear, exactly. Wariness — the particular quality of wariness that comes from recognising a thing as genuinely unknown and therefore genuinely unpredictable.
What was he doing in Selon? Why was he operating under an assumed name? What had taken him beyond the second wall tonight, after dark, on a farm road with no obvious commercial purpose?
I needed someone on him. Discreetly and immediately.
I let my appearance reassemble itself into my own face as I approached the palace gates, the conjured young man dissolving back into what I actually was. The guards admitted me without incident.
The corridors inside were quiet. The hour was late and the palace had settled into its night rhythms — the particular hush of a large building occupied by sleeping people, punctuated only by the measured footsteps of the night watch.
I reached my chamber door.
*I really don't want to go in,* I thought, with complete honesty.
Then I dissolved and reappeared inside.
---
"Where were you?"
The voice came from the chair beside the bed. Dark in the room, only a faint thread of light from the window's edge, but enough to see him — sitting very still, watching me with an expression that had none of its usual management. Disappointment, anger, something quieter underneath both of them. He was not performing anything. For once he was simply showing me what was there.
"I went out," I said. My voice came out smaller than I intended. "To walk. I needed to clear my head."
He looked at me for a long moment without speaking.
Then he exhaled — a slow, considered sound — and rose from the chair.
"You don't have to force yourself." He crossed the room toward me, and his voice had settled into something even and deliberate, the way his voice got when he was saying something he had decided on rather than something he was still working out. "I'm going to give you time. I'll wait for you to find your own way through this. But when you're ready — when we're both ready — we'll address what's between us properly. And when that's done, when it's right, we'll think about a child."
The words moved through me and left something in their wake that I had not expected.
Relief. Profound, involuntary, washing through me from somewhere below the level of thought.
He stopped in front of me and pressed his lips to my temple — a single, brief touch, careful and without demand.
"Sleep well, Rhia," he said.
Then he walked to the door and closed it quietly behind him.
I stood in the centre of my chamber in the dark and simply breathed for a moment, feeling the shape of the evening — all of it, from the library to the alleyway to the carriage to this — settled around me into something that was not resolution, but was perhaps the first preliminary shape of one.
I reached up and touched the rose pendant at my throat.
Then I took it off, set it on the table beside where I could see it, and went to bed.