Samuel watched all of it.

They stopped at a food stall — Elara’s choice, selected on the basis of smell rather than appearance, which was usually the better method. The man running it looked at them, registered something in the guard presence without quite identifying what it meant, and asked what they wanted with the practical directness of a person with a line to move.

She bought two portions of something that turned out to be a braised meat situation in flatbread, which was exactly what the smell had promised.

She handed one to Samuel.

He looked at it.

"Have you had street food before?" she asked.

"No," he said, with the specific tone of someone stating a fact that they are only now realizing is strange.

"It’s better than palace food," she said. "Don’t tell the kitchen."

He took a careful bite. Then a less careful one.

"It is better," he said, sounding mildly betrayed by this information.

"Palace food is made to look correct," she said. "Street food is made to taste good. Different priorities."

He ate with the focused appreciation of someone encountering a new category of experience and treating it with appropriate seriousness.

They moved through the market slowly — not shopping, not purposefully, just moving through the way people moved through when the movement was the point. She watched Samuel watch everything. The rug merchant with his stacked inventory. The woman selling small glass bottles of things in colors that had no obvious practical application but were beautiful. The old man sleeping on a chair outside a tea shop with the complete commitment of someone who had made his peace with the afternoon.

"Elder sister," Samuel said.

"Mm."

"That boy has been following us for four minutes."

She did not look around immediately. "Describe him."

"About eight years old. Brown jacket, one button missing. He’s interested in something specific but I can’t tell what."

She turned, casually, in a way that included looking at where he had indicated.

The boy was exactly as described. He was also looking, with undisguised interest, at Samuel’s wheelchair — specifically at the wheels, with the intense focused attention of a child who has encountered a mechanism they don’t understand and has decided that understanding it is the current top priority.

She looked at Samuel. "You should talk to him."

Samuel looked at her. "Me?"

"He’s interested in your chair."

"I know." A pause. "People usually look and then look away when I see them looking."

"He’s eight," she said. "He hasn’t learned to look away yet. That makes him more honest than most of the adults in the palace."

Samuel looked at the boy. The boy, seeing himself seen, did not look away — he met the look with the complete equanimity of a child who does not yet understand that staring is considered rude and has not yet been sufficiently corrected on this point.

"How does it work?" the boy asked, directly, addressing the wheelchair rather than any specific person.

"The wheels turn," Samuel said, after a moment.

The boy’s expression said this was insufficient. "But how do you make them turn? There’s no horse."

"My hands," Samuel said. He demonstrated, moving the chair forward and back.

The boy watched this with the intensity of scientific inquiry. "Can I try?"

Samuel looked at Elara. She offered nothing, which was an answer.

He looked back at the boy. "Don’t go fast," he said.

The boy pushed the chair approximately three feet forward and three feet back with an expression of profound satisfaction. Then he looked at Samuel with the direct, uncomplicated reassessment of a child who has just upgraded their understanding of something. "That’s actually very good," he said, with the specific generosity of someone who had not expected to be impressed and is.

"Thank you," Samuel said, and there was something in his voice — something that had come loose, slightly, from wherever it had been held.

The boy ran off. Purpose achieved, attention complete, already somewhere else in the continuous motion of being eight.

Samuel watched him go.

"He didn’t ask what was wrong with my legs," he said.

"No," Elara said.

"People usually ask what’s wrong with my legs."

"He was interested in the mechanism," she said. "Not the reason for it."

Samuel looked at the space where the boy had been. Then he looked at his hands on the wheels of the chair, and she could not entirely read his expression, but she did not need to read it completely to understand its general direction.

"Where else?" he said.

"You choose," she said.

He looked at the market street, the branching alleyways, the various directions the city could go from here.

"That way," he said, pointing left toward where the smell of something sweet was coming from a source they hadn’t yet identified.

She followed him.

---

They came back to the palace in the late afternoon with Samuel carrying a small glass bottle — deep blue, filled with something the bottle-seller had described as suspended color, which was not a practical description but was accurate — that he had spent four minutes considering before deciding on with the specific seriousness he brought to decisions.

He had also eaten two more things from two more stalls, seen a man doing something impressive with fire that turned out on closer inspection to be controlled in a way that was less dangerous than it appeared, and had a second conversation with a stranger — an old woman who had asked him if the chair was comfortable and had received an honest answer and had given him, in return, an opinion about palace chairs that was forthright and probably not wrong.

He held the blue bottle in his lap as they came back through the east gate.

He was quiet, but it was the full quiet — the quiet of someone who has taken in a lot and is now sitting with it, not the empty quiet of absence.

At the door to his wing, he stopped.

"Elder sister."

She stopped.

He was looking at the blue bottle. "Thank you," he said. Not the careful formal thank you. The other kind.

She looked at him — at the blue bottle and the one missing button on his jacket that she had not noticed this morning and the way he was holding himself, which was slightly different from this morning in a way she could see but not precisely name.

"Tomorrow," she said, "we’ll go a different direction."

He looked up.

"There’s a section in the lower city near the river," she said, "where someone makes a kind of fried dough that is objectively the best thing sold in this city and that nobody who lives in the palace knows about because it requires a forty-minute walk through streets that don’t appear on the official maps."

He looked at her steadily. "How do you know about it?"

"I walked every street in this city before I took the throne," she said. "Including the ones that don’t appear on the maps."

He looked at her for a moment with those clear grey eyes. Something in them that was — not quite yet what she hoped it would eventually be, but moving in that direction.

"Forty minutes is a long walk," he said. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

"You have wheels," she said.

He almost smiled. Not quite. But almost.