˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
Nobody made a ceremony of it.
That was the thing Eurydice Hughes noticed first, standing at the high window of the eastern gallery in the grey hour before the rest of the palace had properly woken. No formal send-off in the main courtyard. No council assembled in their ceremonial robes to mark the departure of one of their own. No blessing spoken over the journey, no record entered into the official palace log, no acknowledgment of any kind that a man was leaving Nephoria today on a mission that could determine the fate of the kingdom.
Kostas Emilios walked out through the service entrance of the palace at dawn, accompanied by two of the Queen's personal spies whose faces Eurydice did not recognise, carrying a single travel pack over one shoulder, and disappeared into the cloud roads that wound down from the kingdom's edge toward the mortal world below.
She watched until she could no longer see him. Then she watched the empty space where he had been for a moment longer.
"You are up early."
She did not startle. She had heard Samu Ó Cuirc's footsteps from the far end of the gallery, that characteristic heaviness that was not carelessness but simply the natural consequence of a person who took up the space they were given without apology.
"I could not sleep," she said.
Samu came to stand beside her at the window. He was not in his council attire this morning. He wore the simpler clothes of his off-duty hours, a plain tunic, his dark hair unstyled, the scar that cut through his right eyebrow catching the early light. He looked younger like this. He looked more like the boy she had grown up alongside and less like the council member she had watched choose his words carefully in a room full of people who were also choosing their words carefully.
He looked out the window at the place where the cloud roads descended.
"He is gone already?" Samu said.
"A few minutes ago."
A silence settled between them, comfortable in the way that silences between people who have known each other a long time can be comfortable. Below the window, the inner courtyard of the palace was still and golden in the early light, the cloudstone gardens casting long soft shadows across the geometric paths. Beyond the palace walls, Nephoria was beginning its morning, the distant sounds of the market district drifting upward, thin and musical with distance.
"Do you think he will be alright?" Eurydice asked.
She had not meant to ask it. It was not the kind of question a princess asked about a council member undertaking a mission at the Queen's instruction. It acknowledged too much: the danger of the mission, the uncertainty of the outcome, the fact that Kostas Emilios, for all his theatre and his smirks and his talent for making everything look effortless, was a person who could be harmed.
Samu was quiet for a moment.
"Kostas has been to more kingdoms and stranger places than either of us have read about," he said at last. "If anyone can move through unfamiliar territory without being seen for what he is, it is him."
"That is not quite what I asked."
"No," Samu agreed. "It is not."
He looked out at the cloud roads. His jaw was set in that way he had when he was turning something over, weighing it, deciding how much of what he was thinking he was willing to put into words.
"I grew up hearing about the Outcasts the same way you did," he said. "Astrapi the traitor. His lineage hiding in the mortal world, nursing old hatred, waiting. It was in every history lesson. Every cautionary tale the palace tutors told when they wanted to explain why Nephoria's borders needed to be strong."
Eurydice said nothing. She was listening.
"I believed it," Samu said. "I still believe most of it, I think. The history is the history." He paused. "But my father commanded soldiers in the last border engagement, forty years before either of us was born. A small skirmish, nothing like the great invasion of four centuries ago. Just a handful of Outcast scouts who strayed too close to the kingdom's edge and were turned back." Another pause, longer this time. "He told me once that the scouts had not been armed."
The morning light lay quiet and gold across the palace gardens below them.
"He said he had always wondered," Samu continued, "whether they were scouting an attack or simply looking upward. The way anyone might look at the place they came from, if they had never been allowed to return to it."
Eurydice turned that over in her mind. She looked at the cloud roads where Kostas had disappeared, the pale winding paths that descended from the kingdom's edge into the open sky and the mortal world below.
"You never told me that before," she said.
"You never asked me about the Outcasts before," Samu said. "Not directly."
This was true. Eurydice had grown up with the certainty that the Outcasts were an enemy. You did not ask questions about enemies. You understood the threat they posed and you prepared accordingly. Asking questions was something her father did, in his quiet careful way, and she had always read that as weakness.
She was less certain now that she had read it correctly.
"My mother is not wrong that they represent a risk," she said, and heard in her own voice the slight quality of someone constructing an argument rather than expressing a belief.
Samu heard it too, she thought. He was tactful enough not to say so.
"No," he said simply. "She may not be wrong about that."
"But?"
He was quiet for a moment. The courtyard below was beginning to stir, a gardener appearing at the far end of the geometric paths with tools over one shoulder, moving with the unhurried purpose of someone who had tended the same garden for many years and trusted it to be the same garden tomorrow.
"There is no but," Samu said carefully. "There is only the question of what we do with the risk. Whether we move toward it or wait for it to move toward us. Whether the people we send into that risk come back the same as they left."
He looked out at the empty cloud roads.
"I hope he comes back the same person," he said quietly.
Eurydice looked at him. The morning light was fully arrived now, the gold deepening to something warmer, the clouds below the kingdom's edge lit from within by the rising sun in the way that happened only at this hour, this particular quality of light that Nephoria held for perhaps twenty minutes each morning before the day became simply the day.
She thought about Kostas walking out through the service entrance with his single travel pack. She thought about the mock reverence of his bow, and the smirk that never quite reached his eyes, and the thing she had seen pass between him and her father in the council chamber that nobody else seemed to have noticed.
She thought about Samu's father's soldiers. The scouts who had not been armed.
"Samu," she said.
"Yes."
"If you learned something. Something that changed the shape of what you understood about all of this." She chose her words with care, the way she had watched Alexis Asterios choose words yesterday in a palace corridor. "What would you do with it?"
Samu looked at her. His hazel brown eyes were steady and serious in the morning light, the scar through his brow giving his face a gravity that his natural warmth usually softened. Right now the warmth was present but the gravity was present too, and Eurydice saw in him, for a moment, not the boy who had waved at her across a council table but the man his father's blood and his own hard work had made him.
"I would want to know first that it was true," he said. "Completely true. Not partially true, not convincingly true. True."
"And if it was?"
"Then I would not be able to pretend I had not learned it," he said. "That is not the kind of person I am."
Eurydice held that. Outside, the perfect twenty minutes of morning light were ending, the gold deepening into the ordinary brightness of full day, the clouds below settling back into their familiar white. The gardener had reached the centre of the geometric paths and was kneeling over something with careful attention.
"No," she said at last. "It is not."
They stood together at the window for a little while longer, not speaking, watching the morning arrive fully over the kingdom of Nephoria. Then Samu said he had training to oversee, and Eurydice said she had documents to review, and they parted at the end of the gallery with the easy familiarity of people who had been parting at the ends of corridors their whole lives.
But as she walked back toward the royal wing, Eurydice found that Samu's words had settled somewhere deeper than she intended to let them.
I would not be able to pretend I had not learned it.
She pressed the thought down. She had documents to review. Her mother had asked her to understand the campaign plans, and she would understand them, and she would be the princess she had always been and the future queen this kingdom needed her to become.
She pressed the thought down and it stayed down.
For now.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚