She did not go in.

This was not for her. This was for him — this specific moment, in this specific workshop, with this specific mechanism in his hands and whatever was happening in his face that she could see the edge of but did not need to see the full extent of.

Fen appeared silently beside her at the doorway.

"He’s good," Fen said quietly, watching Samuel and the craftsman, who had apparently found a language in common and were now engaged in what appeared to be a genuine conversation about how one of the mechanisms worked.

"Yes," Elara said.

"The craftsman doesn’t know who he is."

"No."

"That’s good," Fen said. "Probably."

"Definitely," Elara said. "He spends too much time with people who know who he is."

Fen considered this. "So do you."

Elara looked at her.

Fen looked back with the expression of someone who had said a true thing and was prepared to stand behind it. "You’re surrounded by people who know who you are and behave accordingly," she said. "It changes the quality of the information you receive."

"I know," Elara said.

"I’m saying it because I think you forget sometimes," Fen said. "That the city out here is the actual thing and the palace is the constructed version of it. Not a criticism. Just—" She paused. "The man selling rope near the fried dough stall. You looked at him like you wanted to know why someone sold exclusively rope."

"I do want to know why someone sells exclusively rope."

"That’s what I mean," Fen said.

Elara looked at the rope thought for a moment. Then she looked back at Samuel in the workshop, who was now watching the craftsman demonstrate something, his whole body oriented forward with the specific quality of attention that had no performance in it whatsoever.

"Tomorrow I want to know about the rope," she said.

Fen almost smiled.

---

They came back to the palace at midday.

Samuel had acquired, in addition to the blue bottle from yesterday, a small mechanism that the craftsman had sold him for a price that Elara suspected was significantly below what it was worth, either because the craftsman was generous or because there was something about Samuel’s quality of attention that he had found worth rewarding. She did not comment on the price. She filed the craftsman’s name, which she had gotten on the way out — Oren, workshop on the Via Stretta — for no reason she could articulate beyond the general principle that knowing where good things were was useful.

At the palace gate, Samuel stopped.

She stopped beside him.

He was looking at the gate — the specific way you look at something when you have just gone outside and come back and the return has changed your understanding of the departure. She watched him look at it.

"It’s different coming back," he said.

"Yes."

"Going out is—" He thought. "It feels like going toward something. Coming back feels like going toward something different. Not worse. Just—" He paused. "I didn’t have a somewhere else before. Now I do."

She looked at the gate. "That changes things."

"Yes," he said. He sounded like he was still working out exactly how.

They went through.

---

In the early afternoon, she found Mahir and Ken in the north courtyard.

This was unexpected — not their presence in the courtyard, which was within the areas they were permitted to access, but what they were doing in the courtyard, which was apparently nothing. Specifically nothing, in the specific way of two people who had spent a long time being very purposeful and were now experimenting, somewhat uncertainly, with the absence of purpose.

Ken was sitting on the stone bench with his face turned up toward the sun, which was something she had not seen him do before.

Mahir was watching a bird.

She stopped at the edge of the courtyard.

Mahir heard her. He always heard her — she had stopped being surprised by this. He turned, and the warmth that arrived in his expression when he saw her was immediate and not performed, which was one of the things about Mahir that she found she had stopped trying to categorize as strategy or sincerity, because it was probably both and the distinction had stopped mattering.

"The logistics reports," he said, by way of greeting.

"Are presumably fine," she said. "I didn’t come about the logistics reports."

He looked at her for a moment. "Then why?"

She sat down on the opposite bench. Ken had opened his eyes and was watching her with the calm, unhurried quality he brought to most things.

"I want to know something," she said. "Not official. Not for any file."

"Ask," Mahir said.

"What do you actually want?" she said. "Not from me, not from the empire. What do you want. Both of you."

The question landed in the courtyard and the courtyard was quiet around it.

Ken looked at the sky. "That’s a question we haven’t been asked in a long time," he said.

"I know," she said. "That’s why I’m asking it."

Mahir looked at the space where the bird had been — it had left while she was coming through the gate, startled by her guards’ footsteps. "I want—" He stopped. Started differently. "When we were in full operation. Before — before all of this. The work was meaningful. Not because of who we were serving. Because of what it was. The actual mechanics of it, the problem-solving, the — there’s a quality to doing something genuinely difficult well that is—" He paused. "I miss that quality."

"Not the power," she said. "The difficulty."

"The difficulty," he confirmed. "Power is a circumstance. The difficulty is the thing itself."

She looked at Ken.

"Same," Ken said, without looking away from the sky. "Also—" A pause. "I want to cook something that isn’t produced in a dungeon kitchen with limited spice access."

The last part landed with a dryness that surprised a short exhale out of her that was not quite a laugh but was closer to one than most things she produced.

Ken looked at her. His expression was, for Ken, remarkably satisfied.

"The kitchen here has full spice access," she said.

"I’m aware," he said. "I walked past it yesterday. It was — it took considerable restraint to keep walking."

"Then stop walking past it," she said.

He looked at her steadily. "That’s not a formal authorization."

"Consider it one," she said.

Ken sat up from his sun-tilted position and looked at her with the specific expression of a man who has been given something he wanted and is deciding whether it comes with conditions he hasn’t yet identified.

"No conditions," she said. "Cook something. I’ll eat it. Samuel will eat it. If it’s as good as I expect it to be based on the dungeon evidence, the kitchen staff will be significantly less pleased about your presence than you are about theirs, which will be their problem."

Ken looked at Mahir.

Mahir was looking at her with that full-attention expression again. "You’re doing this on purpose," he said.

"What?"

"Giving us small things," he said. "Not the large thing, not yet, not the — the return to meaningful work that we’re both waiting for. Small things. The courtyard. The kitchen." He paused. "It’s deliberate."

"Yes," she said simply.

"Why tell me?"

"Because you already knew," she said. "And I would rather you know that I know you know than have us both pretend the mechanism isn’t visible." She looked at him steadily. "The small things are real. They’re not manipulation. But they’re also part of a process that I’m being honest with you about."

He held her gaze. His tail moved — that slow, considered movement she had catalogued by now into its own category, distinct from the reflex warmth of seeing her and distinct from the performed ease he sometimes wore. This one meant something closer to respect, she thought. Or the beginning of it.

"Honest," he said.

"I find it more efficient," she said.

"Than?"

"Than the alternative," she said. "Which requires more maintenance."

Ken made a sound that was, unmistakably, a short laugh. She looked at him. He looked back at her with the expression of a man who laughs rarely and is slightly surprised to find himself doing it.

"I’m going to the kitchen," he said, standing. "Before the authorization expires."

"It doesn’t expire," she said.

"I know," he said. "But momentum." He walked off toward the kitchen wing with the specific quality of a person who has remembered what it feels like to want something and go toward it.

She and Mahir sat in the courtyard.

The sun was warm. The bird had not come back but a different one had arrived on the opposite wall and was regarding them with the specific sideways suspicion of birds.

"The difficult work," she said, after a while.

"Yes," he said.

"It’s coming," she said. "Not the logistics reports. The actual difficult kind."

He looked at her.

"I don’t know the shape of it yet," she said. "But the empire is not stable enough, not fixed enough, for there to not be a difficult problem that requires capabilities I don’t currently have fully available." She paused. "When I know the shape, you’ll know."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Two months," he said.

"Two months," she said.

The bird on the wall decided they were not interesting and left.

The courtyard was warm and quiet, and somewhere in the palace kitchen Ken was having a conversation with the head cook that was going to go one of two ways, and Samuel was in his room with a mechanism in his hands and a blue bottle on his desk, and Fen was in the outer city tracing the beginning of a network that would take months to build correctly.

Elara sat in the sun.

She was not thinking about anything she needed to do.

She was thinking about the rope seller.

And the river.

And the fried dough, which she was already looking forward to next time.