He didn't sleep.
After Ardith left he sat in the chair for a long time, watching the candle shorten. When it got low enough that the light started doing strange things on the walls he moved to the floor beside the curtain, back against the wall, knees up, and listened to his mother breathe. Not because it helped anything. Just because the alternative was lying in the dark with his thoughts, and his thoughts had not been reasonable company since the road.
He turned over everything he had just learned, methodically, piece by piece, laying each part flat before moving to the next.
Then his train of thoughts was broken by a sound. His mother coughed once in her sleep and he went still until it passed.
His train of thought was all over the place. He and his family would have greatly better lives if he accepted. However just how much could he trust the words and faith of a man he knew for less that a day? For all he knows he could just be walking through deaths door. But is staying here any better? Especially now that his whereabouts are known to those opposing him. If he refuses what's stopping them from killing him in his sleep. His mother is also getting worse and worse by the day.
These were the thoughts which plagued Riel's mind. He though of every possible outcome, every scenario, every future and came to one conclusion.
He looked at the curtain in the dark.
By the time the sky started to go gray he had finished arriving at the decision. He'd understood, somewhere around the third hour, that it had never really been a decision. The moment he'd seen the Court Seal he had known. He'd just needed the night to let his mind catch up.
He was still sitting on the floor when the knock came.
Ardith. First light, as he'd said. He stood at the door looking like a man who had slept only slightly better than Riel had, and who had spent whatever time he'd had going over contingencies. Ardith was now wearing clothes that drew less attention since he was staying in the village inn for the night. While he still looked like a man of quality taste he was less eye-catching now . He looked at Riel with eyes full of expectations that betrayed his calm persona.
"Fine," Riel said, before Ardith could open his mouth. "I'll go."
Ardith's expression shifted, just briefly. Something that was relief before it became professionalism again. He straightened. "I'll begin arrangements. The nearest city with access to a Domain Warp Gate is seven days by road."
"That's pretty far.."
"Yes."
"Then I need three days before we leave."
Ardith nodded without arguing. He had the manner of a man who had prepared for negotiation and was quietly relieved when it didn't materialize. He reached into his coat and set something on the table near the door — a small dark leather pouch, finely stitched, the drawstring capped with silver. He placed it there without a word and disappeared before Riel could realize.
Riel looked at the door. Then at the pouch.
He picked it up. Loosened the drawstring and looked inside. For a moment Riel's face made an expression he didn't know it was capable of making. He quickly closed the pouch and sat down in the chair.
"I guess people like him really are different," he said to himself as a bead of sweat crept down his cheek.
He needed to think about how to say what he had to say to Cilia and his mother.
Cilia arrived home midmorning, basket swinging, cheeks pink from the cold, with the particular energy of someone who had sold well and had not yet found somewhere to put the feeling.
"You won't believe my luck today," she started, pushing the door open with her shoulder, "Mrs. Haren bought four bundles today, four, because she said the color reminded her of her cat who died, which I think—"
She stopped.
She stood in the doorway and looked at the room the way she looked at problems , which was a different quality of attention than most her age had developed and which Riel had learned to never mistake for anything less than what it was.
Her eyes went to him. To the table. To the pouch she hadn't looked directly at yet but had clearly registered then she looked back at him.
"Was someone here?" she said.
"Yes."
She stepped inside and closed the door. "Who?"
"Someone pretty important."
She narrowed her eyes. She had a gift for that particular expression, the one that communicated she was not ruling anything out. "Are you in some kind of trouble?"
"Not exactly."
"That doesn't sound like a no."
"Sit down, Cilia."
She sat down across from him and folded her hands on the table.
He told her most of it.
He left out the parts that weren't hers to carry yet. Nothing about the factions who had kept him unfound, because that was a thing that would make her too worried, and he didn't want to give her that weight tonight. But he told her the basic outline of his situation.
Cilia was attentive. She was collecting each piece of information with the careful attention of someone who understood that this was the kind of thing you only got told once and needed to hear properly.
When he finished, the kitchen was quiet for a moment.
"So mom can get better now?" she asked.
"It's not a given but most likely."
She absorbed this. Something moved through her face that she didn't try to control, brief and unguarded, the kind of thing that only appeared when she stopped managing herself. Then it was gone, and she was looking at him with those innocent guarded eyes again.
"And we go with you."
"Yes."
"Ok then," she said plainly.
Riel looked at her with a strange expression which she seemed to have noticed because she responded to his confused expression with an almost playful indifference.
"Stop looking at me like that, were you expecting me to be shocked or something?"
"Well, yes." Riel responded.
Cilia grew a slight smile on her face.
"Well think again, I'm basically a princess now aren't I?" Her smug smile widened, "What princess would be shocked at the news of her being a princess."
Riel sighed.
That was just like her. She always found a way to make light of any situation. It was to the point where Riel wondered if it was the effect of her attribute. He decided that he will find out once they complete the journey.
"Anyways," Cilia looked at her hands. Then, with the practiced casualness of someone who had absolutely been thinking about it the entire time, she looked at the pouch on the table. "What's in that?"
"I haven't told you yet."
"Well I'm asking."
"Sit still."
She was already reaching for it. He didn't stop her. She loosened the drawstring and tilted it to look inside and then made a sound that wasn't quite any sound he had heard from her before — short and involuntary and immediately suppressed, like her body had needed to acknowledge something too large and had done so before she could stop it.
She tipped the pouch gently against her palm.
Gold caught the light.
Riel had counted them while she was out. One hundred and twelve. He'd sat with that number for a long time before it had become anything other than a number. Even then it had only become real in the way that very large things sometimes did, intellectually but not yet in the stomach.
Cilia stared at the coins in her palm.
"Is that real?" she asked shakily..
"That's real."
Cilia stayed quiet.
"What's wrong, isn't a princess not supposed to be easily shocked?" Riel sneered.
She was quiet for a moment longer, her face doing something complicated and private. Then she looked up at him and the solemnity cracked just slightly at one corner.
"Do you know how much jerky that is."
Riel stared at her with his most deadpan expression.
"There is no version of this where you spend any of that on—"
She reached for the pouch.
He pulled it back.
"Give it, I'll be responsible—"
"Stop being unreasonable."
"I have a plan—"
"A plan that came from your stomach."
She lunged across the table for it with the full commitment of someone who had decided to win, and he stood up fast enough that the chair scraped back, and then they were on opposite sides of the table with the pouch between them and both of them were slightly out of breath and pretending this was a dignified situation.
"Half," she said.
"None."
"Thirty percent."
"None of it, Cilia."
"That's not even most of it! Thirty percent is a reasonable—"
"You don't have a plan, you have a craving, and I'm not giving you access to a hundred and twelve gold coins because you want jerky—"
"It's not just for jerky, I have several ideas—"
"Name one that isn't jerky."
She opened her mouth. Then closed it.
"The jerky is the main one," she admitted.
"I know."
"But I have others."
"I'll believe it when I hear them."
She made a sound of pure principle and sat back down, and he set the pouch back on the table between them and sat down too, and for a moment they just looked at each other across it.
"Three days," he said. "That's what I asked for. I need to sort some things out before we go."
She nodded slowly, turning this over. "What things?"
"I need to speak to that man."
The air in the room changed.
Cilia looked at the table. Her expression went to the flat, careful place it went when the subject of their father came up, the same place Riel's went, the one that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite grief and had no clean name because it was both of those things compressed into something quieter and more permanent.
"He hasn't been home in a few weeks," she said.
"I know."
"I don't want him to come."
"I know that too."
She didn't say anything else about it. She picked at the edge of the cloth on the table for a moment, a habit she had when she was thinking. Then she looked up. "And mom?"
"I'll tell her tonight. After I've worked out how."
Cilia nodded. She seemed to accept this, the way she accepted things she couldn't change. She looked back at the pouch.
"Can I at least hold it?"
"No."
"Just to see what it feels like."
"I know what you're like."
She sat back with an expression of immense dignity. "I'm offended."
"You were about to put it in your pocket."
"I was about to feel how heavy it was."
"With your pocket."
She didn't answer this. He took that as confirmation.
He leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling. The crack he'd been meaning to fix for two years had gotten a little longer. He noticed that the way you noticed small things when your mind was trying to avoid the larger ones.
Three days.
He thought about the house. About the bowl under the leak and the warped floorboard and the window latch that stuck and everything else he'd been meaning to get to and never quite had. He thought about what it would mean to leave it. Whether leaving it felt like anything, and if it did, what kind of thing that was.
He hadn't worked that out yet.
From the other room, a sound. Not a cough. A shift, slow and deliberate, the sound of someone who had been awake for a while and had decided to stop pretending otherwise.
Riel and Cilia looked at the curtain at the same time.
Then he got up and went through.
His mother was on her side, eyes open, watching the gap in the curtain where the light came through.
"I heard," she said. Her voice was rough.
He came and sat on the edge of the cot. "How much?"
"Enough." She looked at him. "Most of it, I think."
He nodded slowly. He had wondered. The curtain wasn't much of a barrier.
"Riel."
"I know."
"Let me say it."
He was quiet.
She reached out and put her hand over his where it rested on his knee. Her hand was thin and the trembling was there underneath the warmth of it, but the warmth was there too.
"You don't have to do this for me," she said.
He looked at her.
"I mean it," she said. "Don't go for me. If you go, go because you've decided. Not because—" She stopped. Pressed her mouth together for a moment. "I don't want to be the reason you become a part of something like this."
He thought about saying something careful. Something measured, the kind of thing that would move the conversation forward without landing anywhere painful.
Then he thought about the nights he'd sat against the wall listening to her breathe and done the math of how much worse it had been getting, and how much further it had to go, and what the end of that road looked like.
"You're not the only reason," he said. "But you're one of them, and I'm not going to pretend you aren't."
She looked at him for a long time.
Then she closed her fingers around his hand, just for a moment, and let go.
From the other room, the sound of Cilia very carefully and very quietly pulling the drawstring of the pouch loose.
"Cilia," Riel said, without raising his voice or moving from where he sat.
A pause.
"I was just looking," Cilia said.
"Put it back."
The sound of coins settling. The sound of a drawstring pulled shut with great and unconvincing innocence.
His mother made a sound he hadn't heard from her in a long time. Small and tired and completely real.
She was laughing.
He sat with her for a while after that, not talking much, just sitting, which was sometimes more than talking. When he came back through the curtain Cilia was sitting with her hands folded on the table in the picture of someone who had not been doing anything.
The pouch was exactly where he'd left it.
He sat down across from her.
He still hadn't worked out whether it felt like a loss. He was beginning to think it was going to feel like both, the leaving and the staying, simultaneously, and that he was going to have to carry both of them at once.
That was fine.
He was used to carrying things.