Page 207 of The Crown's Awakening
Colsar studies him for a moment. "This morning when?"
"She came through the courtyard. She trained. She left."
Something in that stops him entirely, and he turns it over before he speaks again. "She trained?"
"Yes, Majesty."
He does not respond immediately because he is not sure what to do with it. The last time he had paid close enough attention to notice, she had still been moving carefully, still favouring one side when she thought no one was watching, still catching her breath at the wrong moments in a way that told him her body was not finished with what it had been through. He had assumed, without asking, that she was nowhere near ready for the training grounds, that she was resting somewhere inside the palace while he managed everything outside it. He had been so certain of it that he had not thought to question it until this moment, standing here in the empty courtyard with Trophi watching him carefully.
Apparently she had not waited for his assumption to catch up with her. Colsar nods once and turns away before whatever is moving through him has the chance to reach his face. He moves through the palace after that with the particular focus of someone who does not yet want to name what they are feeling. The gallery, the outer courtyard, the long corridors she has always favored with their tall windows that hold the last of the afternoon light. He walks all of them and finds nothing, each empty room pressing a little harder than the one before it, building toward something at the edges of his awareness that he does not reach for yet. By the time he reaches the lower wing his pace has changed without his having decided to change it.
The pools are quiet, steam drifting faintly over the surface, attendants moving in their slow rhythm along the edge until he enters and everything slows with him.
"Majesty."
"Where is she?"
A brief pause, careful in a way that he notices immediately. "The Queen is not here," the nearest attendant says. "She usually comes in the mornings. Not at this hour."
Something in him goes very still. "She comes here?"
"Yes, Majesty."
"How often?"
Another pause, shorter than the first. "Every day, Majesty."
He absorbs that without speaking, turning it over in his mind.Every day.
"She comes alone?"
"Yes, Majesty, though Lord Kentan tends to be here at the same hour. They keep each other company while they are both here."
Kentan.
He had told her not to come here. From the beginning he had been clear about it, clear enough that there should have been no room left for interpretation, and she had come anyway, every morning, and found her own rhythm in it, and built something small and ordinary out of the hours he had not been present for, and he had not known any of it. Not the mornings. Not Kentan. Not any of the quiet architecture of her days that had begun to exist without him.
He turns and leaves without another word.
He moves faster now, corridors passing without detail, faces blurring at the edges of his awareness, voices starting and fading before they reach him fully. A guard steps forward with something urgent in his posture. "Majesty, there is an update from the eastern?—"
"Not now."
"Majesty, it concerns the missing unit. There may have been?—"
"I said not now."
The guard stops and Colsar keeps moving, and the corridor closes behind him.
He reaches the passage overlooking the inner court and stops without meaning to. Below, a family crosses the path, a man and a woman with a small child walking between them, her hand in each of theirs. The girl stumbles and laughs, the sound bright and entirely unguarded. The man bends and says something low that makes the woman laugh too, and then all three of them are caught up in it together, held inside something small and ordinary and whole, a moment that requires nothing from any of them except to be there.
Colsar watches them from above and the sound carries faintly upward and he cannot remember the last time he laughed with Asharin. He stands there and he tries, reaching back through the weeks, and he cannot find it anywhere.
She visits the pools every morning. Every day. And Kentan is there, and they talk, and it has become the kind of small reliable thing that a person builds when the larger things have not been given to them.
She had asked him to go with her once, quietly, in that way she had when she already knew the answer and was asking anyway because the asking itself meant something to her. He had dismissed it without much thought. He did not have time to sit in the water while people were dying, while the borders slipped and the high provinces bled and every hour carried its own weight. The idea had irritated him more than it deserved, and beyond that the pools were not private, and he had not wanted anyone looking at her, had told himself that was reason enough and moved on.
That particular reasoning sits differently now.
