She was making the fried dough.

The process was visible and, Elara had always found, genuinely satisfying to watch — the dough produced from a large covered bowl, shaped quickly with practiced hands, the oil in the wide flat pan behaving exactly as oil in a very experienced cook’s pan behaves, the whole thing moving with the specific rhythm of someone who had done this so many times that it had become a form of fluency.

The smell was extraordinary.

Samuel stopped his chair and looked at the stall and said nothing, but his expression said quite a lot.

"Two," Elara said, to the woman.

The woman looked at her, then at Samuel, then produced two portions with the efficiency of someone who did not consider customer contemplation to be a necessary part of the transaction. She wrapped them in paper. Elara paid. The woman was already making the next one before they had moved away.

The fried dough was hot and slightly sweet and had a specific texture — crisp on the outside in a way that gave way to something that was almost the opposite of crisp on the inside — that Elara had not found replicated anywhere else in the city despite having looked, which suggested that the recipe was either proprietary or the result of some specific combination of variables that only obtained at that particular stall.

Samuel ate it with the same focused seriousness he had brought to the flatbread yesterday.

Then he ate the rest of it faster.

"You were right," he said, when it was done.

"I’m usually right about food," she said, "for the same reason I’m usually right about cats. I pay attention to the things that matter."

He looked at the empty paper in his hands. "Can we come back?"

"We can come back," she said.

He looked satisfied in the way that people are satisfied when something they hoped would be true has turned out to be true.

They stayed at the river for a while. There was a section of the bank where the water steps extended down to a small flat area just above the waterline, accessible from the street, and they occupied it — Elara sitting on the steps, Samuel alongside in his chair, the river in front of them doing what rivers did, and the market behind them doing what markets did, and the morning continuing around them with complete indifference to their presence, which was, she found, pleasant.

"Tell me something you want to know," she said.

He looked at her sideways.

"Not for the curriculum," she said. "Not useful. Something you actually want to know."

He looked at the river. "What’s on the other side?"

She looked at the opposite bank, which was visible — buildings, a different district, the city continuing in its various ways. "You can see the other side."

"I mean further," he said. "Past the city. What’s actually out there."

She looked at the far bank. "Past the city on that side is the Meridian farmland — flat, mostly grain, a few large estates. Past that is the border territory, which is technically empire but practically a different world, the kind of place that knows the empire exists as an abstraction but doesn’t feel it in the daily way the capital does." She paused. "Past that is another empire entirely. Veth. They are — complicated neighbors. Not currently hostile but not comfortable."

"Have you been there?"

"To the border territory, yes. Not across it."

"Do you want to?"

She considered this honestly. "Yes," she said. "There are things I want to understand about Veth that I can’t understand from reports. The texture of a place is different from its description."

He nodded. He was looking at the water. "I want to go everywhere," he said, quietly. Not with complaint. Simply with the directness of someone stating a true thing. "I’ve been in one building for ten years. I want to see everything."

"You will," she said.

He looked at her.

"Not immediately," she said. "Not this year, probably. But the fact of the chair doesn’t prevent travel — it changes the logistics of it. Different roads, different modes, more planning. Not impossible. Different."

He looked at his wheels. "Everything is different," he said. "Not impossible."

"Yes."

He seemed to file this — the way he filed most things, into a place where it would be accessible later and would mean something when it connected to something else.

---

On the way back, they went a different route.

Not planned — she had not planned it, it had simply happened the way navigation sometimes happened when you were not rigidly committed to the original path and the city offered something that seemed worth following. There was a street she had noticed from the corner, a narrower one, that had the quality she had learned to recognize as interesting without being able to specify why immediately.

She turned into it.

Samuel followed without asking where they were going, which she noted.

The street was a craftsman’s row — small workshops opening directly onto the pavement, the work visible from outside, the makers present and doing the work in the particular absorbed way of people for whom the making was the whole point. A glass-blower whose furnace sent heat waves shimmering into the street. A woman doing something intricate with metal that Elara couldn’t immediately identify. A man making shoes with the focused patience of someone who understood that the work required the time it required and not less.

Samuel stopped in front of a workshop that had no obvious product visible.

She stopped beside him.

Inside the workshop, a man was working with wood. Not furniture — smaller than furniture. He was carving, or not quite carving — it was more precise than carving, the tools finer, the scale of the work requiring him to hold what he was working on very close to his face. On the shelf behind him, the finished examples of whatever he made were arranged in a line.

Mechanisms.

Small ones — wooden constructions with moving parts, the specific category of things that were not toys exactly but were not purely decorative either. She could see, from the street, that the moving parts actually moved, that the mechanisms did something when they were engaged, though what they did was not visible from this distance.

Samuel was looking at them with an expression she had not seen on him before.

She looked at the man inside the workshop, who had not noticed them, who was entirely occupied with what was in his hands.

"Go in," she said.

Samuel looked at her. "We can just look—"

"You want to see them properly," she said. "Go in."

He went in.

She stayed at the doorway — not following, giving him the space of it. She watched the craftsman look up, register the wheelchair and Samuel’s face, and go through the same rapid recalculation that everyone went through when they saw Samuel, which resolved — faster than most people’s did — into simple interest in the visitor.

"Looking at the mechanisms?" the man said.

"Yes," Samuel said.

"Come closer if you want."

Samuel came closer.

The craftsman — his name was something she didn’t catch, she was watching from too far away — held out one of the mechanisms for Samuel to take. Samuel took it with the care of someone who understood they were being trusted with something. He looked at it. He turned it. He found the part that moved and moved it, and the mechanism responded, and his face did something that she saw from the doorway.