"Nothing is not an answer, Serelyn," Kassias said. "Nothing is the absence of an answer. Those are not the same thing."
Serelyn kept her eyes on the far wall.
"I'm aware of that," she said.
"Then say something. Describe something. Give me a point of reference I can work with."
"I did."
"You said nothing."
"I did. Maybe it bears repeating."
He began to make a sound, then stopped. What came out wasn't quite a word but a choke? A gasp?
Maybe now he will stay quiet.
The anteroom held a quiet that institutions built deliberately. Echoing in the vastness of itself. Two chairs upholstered in deep green beside a narrow side table. A clerk at a desk near the inner door who had acknowledged their arrival once and not looked in their direction again. A small silver bell hung from a fixture on his desk. The walls carried the seals of the military commission in carved relief, evenly spaced, positioned at a height that required looking up slightly to read them. Someone had decided that was intentional.
Serelyn had been in rooms like this before. Valemere had its own versions. Different seals, same silence, same clerk with the same quality of professional unawareness that was not unawareness at all.
She knew what the room was for. It was for making people understand how small they were before they went any further.
She understood where she was.
She was in a chair that cost more than most people in the lower quarter earned in a month, arguing about the definition of nothing with a man who would not stop until he had extracted something he could classify acutely.
"You felt something," Kassias said. "You have told me you felt something. The word nothing is therefore imprecise to the point of being incorrect."
It seems I was mistaken.
She took a long breath in before continuing slowly. Deliberately.
"The word nothing is the most precise word I have. I cannot give you more because nothing was all that there was for me to interpret.”
"That's not possible."
"Kassias." She exhaled, pulling her hands to her eyes, rubbing away the exhaustion of the conversation.
"Sensation requires a stimulus. A stimulus is by definition something. What you experienced had a cause and the cause had properties and—"
"Were absent," she said in a whispered voice that seemed to keep rising. "That is what I am trying to tell you. The properties were absent. He was standing in front of me and the field around him had no — it didn't—"
She stopped.
This was the wall she kept finding. The place where language ran out and left her at the edge of something she had actually felt, holding words built for different experiences.
The clerk's quill paused.
Neither of them acknowledged it. Serelyn lowered her voice by half. Kassias lowered his by somewhat less.
"It was like standing next to a held breath," she said. "Except the breath was the field. And it wasn't held. It was just not there."
"That's something," Kassias said.
"It's nothing dressed in more words."
"It is categorically not nothing. A held breath is a specific—"
The clerk cleared his throat.
A small, deliberate sound, deployed only after the raised eyebrow and the conspicuously paused quill had both failed him. It was not yet a reprimand, though one sensed he was rapidly exhausting the gentler tools of his profession.
Serelyn folded her hands in her lap. Kassias straightened, which was nearly impossible given he had been sitting at full extension since they arrived. Three seconds of appropriate anteroom silence.
"He had no signature," Serelyn resumed, quieter now. The voice she used when she wanted him to hear something instead of process it. "I have stood in rooms with magi drawing on the field at full capacity. I have stood in the reliquary during the full ceremony of the Ever Tow when
the ceremonial relics are active and the air is thick enough to feel against your skin. I have never in any of those rooms felt what I felt standing in front of that man."
Kassias was quiet.
"Which was," he said. Carefully.
"A hole," she said. "In the shape of a person."
The clerk's quill resumed.
Kassias sat with that for a moment. Then he leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees, voice dropping to something that had nothing to do with the clerk.
"Serelyn. We are about to stand in front of two of the most powerful men in the Union. In all of Aethra, if we are being precise about it. I understand what you are trying to explain. But that will not suffice. In there. In that room." He pointed. "We need something that answers the only question that matters."
She looked at him.
He was right. She had known he was right since they sat down. The argument had never been about whether he was right.
"Yes," she said. "I understand the weight of the room we are walking into." She kept her voice even. "The best I can give them is an absence. Where there should have been something, there was not. Rowland will understand that. He can carry it further than I can with Holst present."
She paused.
"You are asking me to describe something I have never encountered. I cannot give you perfection on this. What I can give you is what I experienced, relayed as accurately as I am able. Whether it was the man himself or something he carried — those are the questions for a more experienced mind than mine. My function in that room is to put the experience in front of them clearly enough that they can ask the right questions."
Kassias was quiet for a moment.
Then he looked away. His eyes moved to the carved seals on the wall, tracking them without reading them, as if consulted only when motion had already begun.
"You're right," he said. "I pushed too hard. If there was more to give, you would not hold it back. That much I know." A beat. "Forgive my overbearance."
Serelyn said nothing.
Not because she had nothing to say. Because some things Kassias said were better received in silence, and an apology from him was one of them. She had learned that early in their tutelage.
He continued looking at the fixtures.
She continued looking at the far wall.
A breeze entered the room and traveled past Serelyn until it reached the clerk's desk. The silver bell let out a small ringing sound that filled the vastness of the anteroom.
The clerk set his quill down.
This time, he glared at the two of them.
His face remained composed. His eyes held nothing but vitriol.
“High Marshal Holst will see you now.”
There was no mistaking the disdain in his voice. Whatever reserve of professional courtesy had been afforded them was apparently spent.
They stood at the same moment without discussing it.
Serelyn smoothed her coat and glanced at Kassias. His collar had turned in on itself at some point during the argument, sitting slightly wrong against his jaw. She reached across and set it right without comment. He accepted this with a brief nod that served as both acknowledgment and thanks, which was as close to gracious as Kassias got about anything he hadn't noticed himself.
They looked at one another.
A shared breath. The particular composure of two people who had been arguing about nothing for the better part of an hour preparing to walk into a room where that argument would need to sound like scholarship.
Serelyn turned toward the inner door first.
The clerk did not rise from his desk.
He extended two fingers from where he sat, a gesture so small it barely qualified as one, and the doors opened ahead of them on a current of air that moved with too much intention to be a draft. Clean. Precise. The aether shaped and released in a single motion that had been performed so many times it had worn itself down to something almost invisible.
Almost.
Serelyn felt it pass her as she crossed the threshold and filed it away with everything else the anteroom had told her about this building and the people who moved through it.
Her eyes found him before she had finished crossing the threshold.
She had expected authority. Valemere had taught her what authority looked like. The careful construction of it. Men who assembled themselves inside formal rooms to communicate power before a spoken word. She had seen Grand Council members receive foreign delegations. She had watched her own father occupy space in a room of rivals.
This was none of that.
Holst stood at the table, his attention on the document spread across it, and he was simply present.
Unyielding.
It was the first word that entered her mind when she laid eyes upon him.
Grey had come for most of High Marshal Holst’s hair, and he had apparently declined to negotiate with it, the remainder still pulled back without ornament, suggesting the habit predated any concern for appearance. His shoulders carried the kind of breadth that comes not from effort but from decades of being the thing other things lean against. His jaw was set as though it had been done once, a long time ago, and had simply stayed that way. Firm.
He did not look up when they entered.
He did not need to.
The room had already told her everything it knew about him. The campaign chest against the far wall. The window positioned east for morning light, not view. The document before him received the same scrutiny she suspected he gave everything. Not because the page before him demanded it, but because that was simply how he moved through the world.
She felt the weight of obligation settle in her chest. Not his obligation to her, nor hers to him. Something larger.
For reasons she could not immediately name, she thought of the seawall at Khartha.
The old white stone stood against the sea while the city carried on behind it, taking every tide, every storm, every season of salt and wind. Weathered, certainly. There were places where the years had carved themselves plainly into its face. But it had never cracked. Never yielded.
And standing there before High Marshal Holst, Serelyn had the strange impression that the wall did not protect Khartha from the sea.
It protected the world behind it from ever having to think about the sea at all.
She had only felt that once before, standing within the House of the Ten, the great library of Valemere. Deep beneath its central vault, she had become suddenly aware of how much weight rested on so little that could be seen.
She had not expected to feel it looking at a man.
Rowland sat in a chair beside the table. He sprawled in it like a man of leisure, one leg hanging over the side, the other keeping the chair tilted a degree farther back than its maker had likely intended. The chair had probably been placed there for a specific purpose that had nothing to do with how Rowland was currently using it.
His fingers worked idly at the cuff of one sleeve, turning it back, smoothing the fold, then letting it fall loose before beginning again.
He looked up when they entered.
His eyes moved to Serelyn first. Then Kassias. A brief assessment that gave nothing back.
"Close the door," he said.
Kassias closed it.
Holst still did not look up.
Kassias had drifted toward the table.
She noticed because Kassias never quite chose such movements. His attention usually found purchase first, the rest of him following after, as if consulted only when motion had already begun. His eyes had settled on the document spread across the surface, moving over it with the concentration he reserved for things willing to reward him.
She should have said something.
She almost did.
"These positions here," Kassias said, his voice settling into the register he used when he was thinking out loud and had forgotten he had an audience. He leaned forward slightly over the table. "The heavy concentration on the left — that's your anchor. You're not expecting pressure there, you want them to feel it as immovable so the right reads as the softer approach."
Holst's quill stopped.
Kassias continued, his confidence growing.
"The gap here between the center and the right flank — that's not a weakness, that's invitation. You want movement through there. Something fast. Cavalry, given the spacing I assume."
Kassias leaned in to better study the document before him.
Rowland's hand stilled on his cuff.
"And this clustering at the rear—" He pointed at the black Xs at the bottom of the paper. "That's not support, that's reserve held deliberately back from the main engagement. Infantry by the density of it. You're planning a second push after the first contact breaks the line." He straightened slightly, eyes still on the document. "The terrain must be relatively flat for you to commit this heavily to a forward position without — where is this? I don't recognize the approach from the ward markings."
Silence.
He looked up.
Holst was standing at his full height looking at him with an expression that had not yet decided what it was.
Then Holst looked at Rowland.
Rowland was looking at the ceiling with the very careful expression of a man who suddenly felt it was the most important thing in the room.
Holst looked back at Kassias. Then at Serelyn. Then to Kassias.
"My boy," he said, with the measured delivery of a man who had spent the last forty years choosing his words carefully and was choosing these ones with the most particular care, "those are the seating arrangements for Lord Commander Varro's elevation ceremony."
Serelyn brought her hand to her mouth.
"Oh no," she muttered. "Kassias."
The sound that came from Rowland's direction was not quite a laugh. It was the sound that happened when a laugh had been suppressed past its structural limit and was now escaping through whatever gaps it could find.
Kassias looked back down at the document.
He looked at it for a moment with the expression of a man slightly confused and reviewing his reasoning for errors.
He found none that he was prepared to acknowledge.
He straightened.
"The spacing is very deliberate for a ceremonial arrangement," he said.
"It is," Holst said, and something that was almost a smile moved through the lower half of his face and was gone. "I find that precision in these matters tends to prevent the kind of disorder that reflects poorly on the institution."
"That's — yes," Kassias said. "That's reasonable."
Rowland had recovered enough to be looking at his sleeve again. His shoulders, however, had not fully committed to the recovery.
The room settled.
Holst returned to his full height, the last trace of the moment still present in something around his eyes that hadn't quite finished being amused. He looked at Rowland.
"Why have you brought children before me today, Rowland."
Not a question exactly. The kind of statement that felt more like an accusation.
"They're no younger than you or I were on our first campaign together," Rowland said.
"That is exactly why I said children." Holst's voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "We just had swords."
A smile began there, something borrowed from another time. It never quite reached the present.
He didn't answer.
Serelyn watched the exchange pass between the two men and understood, without being told anything further, that this was old ground. Worn smooth by use. The kind of thing said between people who had stood somewhere together that neither of them discussed in rooms with witnesses present.
"You know why they are here, friends. Let's not prattle," Rowland said with some sincerity returning to his voice.
Holst's eyes moved to Kassias. Then to Serelyn.
"Ah yes then. Sit," he said. Not unkindly. "Both of you."
Two chairs waited in front of Holst's desk, angled slightly toward one another. Serelyn lowered herself into hers and felt, immediately, that it was built for someone larger.
Rowland straightened in his chair, drawing his leg back from the arm and settling into it properly, as though he had suddenly remembered it deserved the courtesy. Holst settled behind the desk and folded his hands.
"Begin wherever makes sense to you," he said. "I'll ask what I need to."
Serelyn glanced at Kassias. He gave the smallest nod of encouragement.
Thank you for that.
Taking a breath, she began.
"We were near the Gallowmoth district," she said. "A bar called the Drowned Anchor. Following a lead Master Valemont gave us — a contact who claimed to know something about the man who reached the relic shop first. Before High Magus Rowland arrived."
"The contact was nothing," Kassias said. "Worthless. Although it did give us a name to follow up with."
Holst looked at Rowland briefly. Then back to her.
"While we were there and these two questioned the barkeep inside, a man came through the side entrance from the patio. I was standing near the door." Her hands had somehow found each other in her lap without her deciding to put them there. "He seemed in a hurry and he bumped into me. Our eyes made contact. Only briefly."
"Describe him," Holst said.
"His eyes — they seemed to have held the weight of the world, yet there was something else in them —"
She caught herself drifting and picked back up where she left off.
"He was wearing a dark cloak. Nothing distinct about the cut. A dark shirt and fighter's leathers." She motioned to her wrist with her open hand.
She glanced at Kassias. "He had a sword about him, resting against his chair when he'd been sitting — and a bedroll on the seat beside him. Kassias saw that from inside."
"Yes, that's right. I saw a fractal blade resting openly at his table. He had the feel of a mercenary," Kassias said. "The bedroll sat too heavy. I thought it held supplies. Or weapons."
"It wasn't either."
Holst's eyes moved to her and stayed there.
"What was it?"
She opened her mouth.
Nothing came.
The silence stretched. Neither man offered to fill it. Somewhere beyond the window a bell was being struck, the sound carrying into the room and sitting there with everything else.
They need an answer. Now.
She could feel her pulse in her hands.
"I don't—" She stopped. Started again. "I'm trying to find the right—"
Still nothing from either man. Just the weight of being watched, patiently, by two people whose patience seemed to wane the longer the silence grew.
A bead of sweat ran cold down the back of her neck and she hated that it had happened where neither of them could see it. She hated the weight of their judging eyes more.
"She felt something was wrong with him," Kassias said, too fast, the words crowding out before he'd finished deciding to say them. "An absence. A field disruption. Something near the man wasn't registering correctly, the aetheric signature was—"
"I asked her," Holst said sharply.
His words cut through Kassias's attempted explanation like a headsman's axe.
The room went quiet in a different register.
Kassias's jaw worked once.
"That's twice you've offered an opinion unasked, boy." Holst's voice hadn't risen. It hadn't needed to.
Rowland turned his head toward Kassias.
"Your help here is not needed until it is specifically requested," he said. Low. Final. "Remember your place as an acolyte."
Kassias went still suddenly, eyes locked in indignation.
Serelyn watched it happen to him. Shoulders pulling back fractionally, eyes dropping. The entire shape of him folding inward by some small measure. He wanted to argue. She could see the argument sitting right behind his teeth, fully formed, ready. He didn't say it.
She felt a rush of gratitude she had no room to express right now, and beneath it something more complicated. She had wanted to find the words herself. Some part of her had wanted to prove she could stand in this exact silence and not break, and he had taken that from her even while trying to help.
She was grateful anyway.
"Dear," Holst said. Not unkind. Patient, in a register that asked nothing and demanded everything. "Please. What was it?"
She made herself breathe.
"Sir. I've stood near magi drawing on the field hard enough to make the air taste like metal. I have felt an aetheric pulse strong enough to break a Wardline charge. Ceremonies with aetheric pressure enough to feel it against your bones. This was not that. There was nothing to taste. Nothing to feel. I was standing close enough to touch him and it was like reaching toward a fire and finding the air cold instead. Wrong in a direction I didn't have a word for until just now."
Her voice shook slightly on the last few words. She let it. There was no use pretending otherwise in this room.
"It felt empty. Hollow. Absent," she said. “And somehow that nothingness carried weight. It pressed back.”
She breathed, catching it properly for what felt like the first time since they'd sat down.
"It didn't last," she added. "By the time he'd passed me it was gone. I don't know if that's normal. I don't know if I caught something that isn't supposed to show itself at all."
Holst's gaze held on her a moment longer. Then he looked at Rowland.
It was brief. Less than a second. But Serelyn caught it. Two men arriving at the same understanding in the same instant and choosing, deliberately, to say nothing about it in this room.
"His bearing," Holst said, returning to Kassias, voice even, the reprimand already filed and finished with. "Beyond the cloak and the sword. How did he hold himself?"
Kassias answered carefully this time. Measured.
"Like a man who'd been carrying something heavy for a long time," he said, "and had stopped noticing the weight of it."
Holst sat back satisfied. His attention returned to Rowland.
"Master Valemont. The shop."
Rowland came off the table's edge.
"A fake," he said. "Good enough to fool anyone without the training to look closer. Someone salted it — left it behind to slow down whoever may come looking."
Serelyn glanced at Kassias. He too looked relieved to be out from under the weight of Holst's gaze.
"You believe the genuine piece was already gone," Holst said.
"Its signature was well masked. What I've been turning over is something else entirely." Rowland looked at the room. "What man goes through the effort of replacing a relic with a convincing fake rather than simply buying it outright?"
Nobody answered it. Nobody was expected to.
"The buyer," Holst said.
"Reports disagree on most of it. Well-dressed. Old money, or close enough to pass. Merchant by some accounts, scholar by others. Two to four armed men with him — never obvious about it. The kind of escort trained to look incidental."
"A name."
"Ophis. Given to the shop owner. I don't believe its authenticity. Haven't been able to confirm it either way."
Holst was quiet, turning something over behind his eyes.
"Two men," he said finally. "Two relics. Moving through my city at the same time and neither one announcing himself."
"It would appear so."
"I don't trust that as coincidence."
"Neither do I."
The knock came again before anyone moved to answer it.
Not impatient. Just certain.
Holst looked up from the document he had returned to. Rowland hadn't moved from his chair. Neither had Serelyn or Kassias, who had both, somewhere in the last few minutes, developed the resilient stillness of people who understood their function in this room was to be present and nothing more.
"Enter," Holst said.
The doors opened before he finished the word.
Both doors pushed wide enough that the clerk, who had clearly attempted to place himself between the disturbance and the office beyond, was left holding the handle with the expression of a man who had followed every proper procedure and had been defeated.
"Sir," the clerk said, to the back of the man already past him, "if you'd allow me to announce—"
"Announce me then," the new man said, without stopping. "Catch up or be left behind. I care not which."
He was broad through the chest, a man built by work rather than vanity who had simply never stopped working. Dark hair shot through with grey at the temples, cropped close on the sides, his jaw carrying several days of growth that suggested he had been at sea long enough to stop caring. His coat was travel-worn but the bearing underneath it wasn't. He moved through Holst's office like it was expecting him and had arranged itself accordingly.
His eyes found Rowland.
The grin arrived before anything else.
"Row, you old bastard."
Rowland was already standing. Something in him had loosened the moment the door opened. The tension from the earlier conversation evaporated from him entirely.
"Callum," he said.
Varro crossed the room in four strides and caught him in an embrace. Rowland returned it. The embrace of a man who did not do this often and was doing it now without reservation.
"Too long. It's been too bloody long, my friend."
"Too long indeed." Rowland stepped back and looked at him. "You've lost some of your hair, I see, and what's left seems to have turned to the grey."
"You've lost all of yours." He raised an eyebrow.
Rowland's hands came to his heart. "You wound me, my good sir. I was simply making an observation."
"As was I, my friend."
Rowland smiled. Not the half-controlled expression he used for rooms and situations. The real one, smaller and quieter, that Serelyn had not seen before.
"You've gotten fat," Rowland said.
Varro looked down at himself. Then back up.
"I most certainly have not."
"You look healthy then. It concerns me."
Holst made a sound from behind his desk, beginning in reprimand and ending somewhere closer to resignation.
"Callum," he said.
Varro turned. Whatever remained of the grin didn't leave his face exactly. It simply reorganized itself into something more appropriate for the room.
"Sir." He crossed to the desk and clasped Holst's hand across it. "You look exactly the same. Like shit."
Holst's eyes widened at Varro's sudden brashness.
"How very astute of you, Varro. It seems the voyage has freed your hair and your tongue. However, I am exactly the same. Worn down, tired, and waiting for reports that should have arrived a week prior."
"That's either very reassuring or very troubling, but allow me to explain the delay, sir." He pulled himself together before answering. "The women of Trivain would not permit me to leave their beds." He gave a little flourish of his hand and a bow. "I am simply too humble a man to decline their demands. Surely you remember the days we spent in Trivainian brothels."
“I recall dragging you from them,” Holst said. For the briefest moment, amusement disturbed the severity of his face.
The clerk was still in the doorway.
"Sir," he tried again, from roughly the same position he had been in since the door opened, "I did attempt to — the gentleman didn't—"
"Thank you, Aldous," Holst said. "That will be all."
The clerk pulled the doors shut with the controlled precision of a man choosing dignity over expression. The click of the latch was very final.
A second figure had entered with Varro and now stood just inside the closed doors.
He had not announced himself. Had not needed to. He simply occupied the space near the door with the stillness of someone who understood that his function in a room was often to wait and had made his peace with that a long time ago.
Serelyn noticed him with the uneasy certainty of realizing something had been in the room longer than she had known.
Blond hair pulled back and secured at the crown, a few loose strands framing a face that was, she decided, genuinely handsome. Pleasant features, open and settled, the face of someone
people lean toward before he has spoken. Serious without severity. He held himself with the controlled economy of someone trained past the point where bearing required thought.
His eyes are wrong. She noted.
Not unkindly. Just — one of them was amber, warm and present, tracking the room with quiet attention. The other was pale. Whitish-grey bordering white, the iris washed of color in a way that read as old damage rather than birth. A thin scar traced back from the outer corner of that eye, straight along the temple, disappearing where the hairline met the top of his ear.
He had not looked at her.
He was looking at Rowland.
Serelyn looked away.
"How long has it been," Rowland was saying. "Since all three of us were in the same room."
"Fourteen years," Holst said, without hesitation.
"You didn't even think about that."
"I didn't need to."
"That's unsettling."
"Fourteen years, three months, and some days if you want the full accounting," Holst said. "I don't recommend it."
Varro laughed. It was a large laugh. The room absorbed it without comment.
Kassias had not moved beside her. She knew his silences by now. This one meant he was building something, some order she wouldn't see until he decided to show her.
She wondered if he had noticed the man at the door.
She suspected he had.
"How was Trivain?" Holst said, the question genuine, the shift in register slight but present. Moving them somewhere.
"Trivain was Trivain," Varro said, settling into a chair that had not been offered to him. "Loud. Commercial. Entirely convinced of its own importance and not entirely wrong about it." He reached inside his coat. "Though I didn't make it through the western approach without being handed this."
He set a sealed document on the desk.
Holst looked at the seal. Something in his face settled into a register Serelyn had not seen before. Not quite alarm. The expression of a man receiving news he had expected, and had hoped with equal certainty to be wrong about.
He broke the seal and began to read.
Nobody spoke.
Varro watched him, searching his eyes for answers as he did.
"The Iron Barb's been engaged in open water," Varro said, quietly now. "Three separate incidents on our approach. His ships are handling it but the density near the Karvene coast—" He paused. "It's not what any of us have seen before. The elementals aren't drifting. They're concentrating, as is the aether."
"Trade routes," Holst said, still reading.
"Closed to civilian traffic as of ten days ago. His recommendation. Council in Trivain has concerns but they're not arguing." Varro's voice had shed the last of the warmth from the reunion. "When Trivain stops arguing about commercial restriction, you know the water's gone wrong."
Holst set the document down.
He looked at Rowland. Not Varro. Not the document.
Rowland met his eyes with the expression of a man who had been carrying a thought for some time and had just watched the room arrive at it.
Something passed between them that Serelyn could not read, and did not try to.
Holst folded his hands on the desk.
"Master Valemont," he said. "Perhaps our young friends have given us everything they have for today."
Rowland nodded. He turned to Serelyn and Kassias.
"Certainly, sir." Then, quieter: "Come."
They stood. Kassias smoothed his coat once. The automatic gesture of a man gathering himself back together and moving toward the door. Serelyn followed.
At the door Kassias stopped.
Turned.
"Master Rowland."
Rowland looked at him.
"You know of my family's connections in the merchant quarter. Houses that deal in trade that draw men like the one we're looking for. If there's intelligence to be had on a name — a real one — I can make that inquiry without bringing attention to it."
Serelyn flashed a glance at Kassias.
Now that was interesting.
The offer had come too quickly to be vanity.
He is reclaiming his position.
That much was plain. But there was something underneath the offer she couldn't place yet. Something in the set of his jaw that suggested this offer came at a cost.
She filed it.
Rowland studied him for a moment.
"Lightly," he said. "Nothing that suggests we're looking."
"Understood."
"We'll speak more on it." Rowland turned back toward the room. "Go."
They went.
The corridor was quiet after the office door closed behind them. The same stone, the same sealed air, the sounds of the building around them restored to their ordinary register.
Only then did Serelyn realize how tightly she had held herself for the better part of an hour. The tension was beginning to leave, slowly enough that she felt each part of it go.
They walked toward the anteroom.
She glanced back once.
The man with the pale eye was still visible through the narrowing gap of the closing door, standing where he had stood since he entered, watching nothing in particular and everything at once.
Then the door closed.
And he was gone.