By evening, Lord Baek had moved.
I learned this not from Lord Baek himself but from the particular silence that had fallen over Kaien's residence — the attentive, loaded silence of a household that knows something is happening and is holding very still so as not to disturb it.
Kaien was at the window when I returned from the Emperor. He looked at me the moment I walked through the door, and the quality of his looking — the way the tension in his shoulders released by exactly one increment — told me he had been standing there for forty-three minutes and knew it.
"You're here," he said.
"I said an hour," I said. "It was less than an hour."
"I know." He didn't move away from the window. "How was he?"
"Careful," I said. "He let me go. He said he needs to think."
"Men who say they need to think are men who are already thinking very fast in a direction you haven't identified yet."
"I know," I said. "Which is why we can't wait for him to finish thinking."
We sent word to Lord Baek.
