Page 249 of The Crown's Awakening
"It was smart."
A pause. Then, quietly, "They have been through enough."
That is all he says. It is all that needs saying.
Rorin brings his horse alongside the transport and finds my eyes. He is thinner than the last time I saw him, the kind of thin that belongs to months rather than weeks. But his back is straight.
"Majesty."
"Rorin." I hold his eyes briefly. "Your son will be glad to see you."
Something moves through his face that he does not entirely contain. "He had better be," he says, dry enough that the man riding nearest him almost smiles.
I let the fabric fall. Behind us the formation closes in, the Veynar soldiers folding into the line with the quiet ease of men who have learned how to move without being told.
Saurin does not stir again until the path levels out completely and the cold has thinned enough that the transport no longer needs to work as hard to hold its warmth. When she does, she sits upright and holds out her arms for Kiss without a word.
I look at her.
"I am fine," she says, before I can speak.
"You are not."
"I will be." She holds my eyes with the certainty of someone who has been through worse and knows it. "Give her to me. Your arms must be exhausted."
They are. I pass Kiss across carefully and Saurin takes her with the ease of someone who has done it a thousand times.
"Stripping the glamours across that many bodies at once," I say quietly. "That is what it cost you."
She does not deny it. "Dismantling a wielder's work is not the same as fighting it," she says. "It requires finding every binding and undoing it at the same moment. If even one holds, the others can reconstruct." A pause. "There were many bindings."
I look at her for a moment. "You could have told me."
"There was no time." She looks down at Kiss, who has already found something interesting in the fabric of her collar and is pulling at it with focused determination. "And it needed to be done."
I do not argue with that. I only say, "Thank you. For all of it."
She does not answer. She only looks down at Kiss.
That is answer enough.
We smell Veynar before we see it.
I know it through the fabric walls, wood smoke and river water and something green, the particular mixture that belongs to a place lived in long enough to have its own scent worked into the ground. I know it without choosing to.
Then Colsar pulls the transport covering back himself, just enough, and holds it open. I lean forward and look out.
Veynar. It sits in the distance below us, spread across the valley in the last light of the day, its rooftops just visible, the river catching what remains of the sun in a dark ribbon that moves even in winter. From this height the palace is visible on its rise above the city, its towers small but unmistakable, its flags moving in a wind I cannot feel from here.
We are not there yet, but tomorrow we will be.
No one speaks. Even Kiss goes still. I look at Colsar. At the road on him, the travel clothes, everything the mountains have left behind. He looks at me and I know he is seeing the same thing in me.
"We need to change.”
He looks down at himself briefly. Then back at me. "Tomorrow."
"Tonight," I say. "We prepare tonight. So that tomorrow we arrive as what we are."
