Page 205 of The Crown's Awakening
"You are not going back tonight," he says, not looking at me as he holds one out.
It is not a question. I take the cup. "No," I say, and the word feels simple and right.
Later, when the fire has burned to embers and the sky has darkened fully above us, I lie back against the cool ground the sound of the water filling everything. Enovar is still talking, something about the Avanki and the way they have taken over part of the upper grounds, his voice easy and unguarded in a way I have not heard from him before.
I only half listen.
My thoughts drift to Colsar. To the way he had looked at me. To the rawness in his voice when he said he was trying. I close my eyes and let myself feel the pull of him, the familiarity of him, the particular grief of loving someone this much and still not being able to close the distance between you.
The twins surface next, and with them a brief twinge of guilt. But I think of what Saurin would say. That the children will not be happy if I am not. That they are safe. That it is better to return to them calmer. The thought holds.
I wake before dawn. The air is cooler now, the fire gone entirely, the sky just beginning to lighten at the edges. Enovar is already awake.
"Are you ready?" he asks.
I push myself up and brush the last of sleep from my eyes. “For what?”
A second voice answers before he can. “For something better than this.”
I turn. Kentan stands just beyond the edge of the clearing, hands clasped loosely behind his back, entirely at ease in a place I had assumed belonged only to us.
“He has been training with us,” Wyn says, stepping out of the brush.
Enovar shrugs. “He is fun, and quite easy on the eyes,” he adds with a wink.
“You are insufferable,” I say, and then, “What plans?”
Kentan glances toward the rising light beyond the trees, then back to me. “Today,” he says, “we are going to Urvinar.”
The Distance
COLSAR
The door closes behind her and the silence that follows is wrong in a way he cannot immediately place. It does not feel like the quiet after something ends. It feels like something left open, unfinished in a way that should not have been allowed, and he stands where she left him for a moment longer than he intends to, looking at where she had been as though the answer might still be there if he waits long enough.
It is not. He exhales once and turns, and the word that comes out of him is quiet and without inflection.
"Clear it."
The servants return immediately, cloth and water and careful hands moving across the marble until the last trace of ash is lifted and taken away. What had been scattered across the floor disappears piece by piece until the room looks as though nothing happened in it at all. Colsar watches briefly and then loses interest in watching. It is finished. That is what he had said, and that is what he had meant, and he leaves before they are done.
The corridors move around him in their usual rhythm, servants passing, guards shifting at their posts, voices carrying from distant rooms he does not need to enter. Everything continues exactly as it should, and yet something sits slightly wrong beneath all of it, the way a stone sits wrong inside a boot, present with every step, impossible to ignore entirely and not really worth stopping for.
He ignores it anyway. There is work to do. There is always work to do, and he has never had difficulty finding his way back to it.
The council chamber is already prepared when he enters, maps spread across the table, markers placed and in some cases moved, small adjustments made in his absence that he notices the moment he crosses the threshold.
"Who moved the eastern line?"
A man straightens. "Majesty, the latest reports?—"
"I did not ask for the reports."
Silence falls over the room and stays there while Colsar steps forward and presses his hand flat to the table, studying the map carefully. The high provinces stretch across it in ink and faded color, the borderlands marked with symbols that have crept further than they should have been allowed to creep, further than he had left them. Too much red. He moves one marker back to where it had been.
"Put it back."
"Majesty, the ground there is no longer holding. We thought it best to?—"
