"Two months," she said. "The logistics assignment runs two months. After that, I’ll have a clearer picture of the full situation and we’ll have a different conversation."

He looked at her. His tail moved once — that slow, considered movement. "Two months," he said.

"Yes."

He stood. "I’ll leave you to your garden." He paused. "You should sit in the sun more often. You look like someone who has been inside for a very long time."

She looked up at him. "Mahir."

He stopped. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"Don’t find me again unless I’ve called for you," she said. It was not unkind. It was simply the boundary of where they were right now, stated clearly, which was more respectful than leaving it unstated.

He received it. "Yes, Your Majesty."

He left.

She turned back to the garden. The sun was very warm. The bird in the hedgerow was still doing whatever it was doing.

She sat in it for another twenty minutes — not reading, not reviewing, not planning. Just sitting in the sun in the too-warm section of the east garden that nobody else used at noon.

Then she went back inside.

The Keth River commission report was waiting.

She picked it up and began to read.

.

.

.

Samuel had never seen a cat fight before.

Not a real one — not the kind that happened between two palace cats who had decided, in the way that cats decided things, that the particular patch of sunlight on the east garden wall belonged to one of them and not the other and that this was worth resolving at volume and with claws.

He had heard them from his window and had wheeled himself to look, and now he was watching with the focused attention he brought to most things, his chin in his hand, his papers completely forgotten.

The larger cat — orange, with the specific confidence of an animal who had never once doubted its own importance — was making a sound that was technically a hiss but had the quality of a very serious speech. The smaller cat — grey, scrappy, with one ear that had clearly lost an argument with something at some previous point in its life — was not backing down.

"The grey one is going to win," Elara said.

Samuel startled. He had not heard her come in, which happened sometimes — she moved quietly without meaning to, a habit built over years in places where being heard first was a disadvantage.

"How do you know?" he asked.

She came to the window and looked. "The orange one is loud," she said. "Loud usually means less certain. The grey one hasn’t made a sound."

They watched.

The orange cat made three more sounds of escalating indignation. The grey cat sat down, which was somehow more threatening than anything the orange one had done. The orange cat looked at the grey cat sitting down and seemed to undergo a rapid internal recalculation. Then it turned, with great dignity, and walked away in a direction that had nothing to do with retreat.

The grey cat waited until it was gone. Then it lay down in the sunlight.

"You were right," Samuel said.

"I usually am about cats," Elara said. "Less reliable about people."

He looked at her sideways — that careful, assessing look. "You seem reliable about people."

"I’m better at reading them than predicting them," she said. "Reading is observation. Predicting requires understanding what they’ll choose, which is harder because people surprise themselves."

He thought about this. "Have you been surprised recently?"

She looked at the grey cat, now fully stretched in its acquired sunlight with the complete satisfaction of a creature that had gotten exactly what it wanted. "Yes," she said.

"By what?"

She glanced at him. "You," she said simply. "The flood report. I didn’t expect that."

He looked at his papers, then back at the window, and she saw the thing she had seen before — the small complicated process of a person receiving something that landed in a place that had not received much and therefore did not quite know what to do with it.

"What should we do today?" she asked.

He looked at her. The question clearly surprised him — not because it was strange, but because the we was not a word he had significant experience receiving.

"I don’t know what the options are," he said, carefully.

"That’s a good starting position," she said. "What do you want to do? Not what’s useful or appropriate. What do you actually want."

The question sat between them.

He was quiet for long enough that she thought he might not answer — that the question had gone too deep, into territory that hadn’t been accessed in a while and needed more time to surface. Then he said, quietly: "I want to see the city."

She looked at him.

"I’ve never seen it," he said. "I’ve seen the palace. I’ve seen the courtyard from the window. I’ve seen—" He stopped. "I’ve been in this building my entire life."

Ten years old. Ten years in the same building. She thought about her own years before she had found ways out — about the specific quality of a world that was only as large as the structure containing you.

"Then let’s go see the city," she said.

---

The preparation for this was more complicated than going to see the city should have been.

There were guards to configure — she kept the complement small, deliberately, because a large formal guard presence transformed the experience of moving through a place into the experience of being processed through it. She changed out of formal dress. She thought briefly about whether Samuel’s wheelchair would be a problem on the city streets, assessed her memory of the capital’s surface geography, and sent Fen ahead to map a route that would be navigable.

Fen returned the assessment in twenty minutes with three route options and her recommendation, which was the second one, which Elara agreed with.

They went out through the east gate, which was the quieter gate, the one that opened onto the older part of the capital rather than the ceremonial boulevard.

The city received them.

Samuel was quiet for the first several minutes — not withdrawn, not retreating into the contained stillness he used for uncomfortable situations, but the different kind of quiet that comes from taking in too much at once. His eyes were moving constantly, which she recognized as his version of the flood report — the same quality of attention, the same systematic processing of information, applied to an environment rather than a document.

"It’s louder than I expected," he said eventually.

"Does that bother you?"

He considered. "No. It’s — it’s good loud. It’s people loud."

She looked at him.

"The palace is quiet in a way that doesn’t feel like quiet," he said, finding the words carefully. "It feels like people choosing not to make noise. This is different."

It was different. The market street they had turned onto was loud in the specific way of a place that had no investment in impression management — the sellers calling out, the buyers negotiating, children running between adult legs with the complete indifference to consequence that children in motion always had, the sound of someone hammering something nearby, a woman laughing two stalls over at something someone else had said, the whole layered texture of people going about their lives without performing the going.