"Put it back."
The man obeys, and another voice tries from across the table, quieter than the first. "There is word from the outer watch. Movement near the lower passes. We believe it may be connected to the?—"
"Later."
Colsar reaches for a report, scans it, sets it aside, reaches for another. The same pattern running through all of them, positions and losses and gaps where there should be answers and are not. One page holds his attention a fraction longer than the rest. No confirmation. No recovery. No signal. He sets it down.
"Send two units through the northern pass. Stagger them."
A pause. "Majesty, we have already lost?—"
"Stagger them."
"Yes, Majesty."
"And increase scouts along the eastern ridge."
"That will leave the inner line exposed."
"I know what it leaves."
No one speaks again after that, and Colsar straightens and looks across the table at all of them. "Continue."
The rest of it passes in fragments, voices and requests and decisions that require his presence without requiring much of him beyond it. He answers without thinking. He has learned, over a very long time, how to do exactly this, how to be present in a room without being anywhere at all.
By the time the chamber empties the light has shifted and the afternoon has gone somewhere without his noticing. A servant appears quietly at the door and bows.
"Majesty. Dinner is prepared."
Colsar looks up from the last report and the word sits in the air between them for a moment before he does anything with it. Dinner. He should have returned sooner, had meant to return sooner, had told himself he would and then let the hours move the way they always did when there was enough work to fill them with.
"She will be there," he says, and does not examine why he says it the way he does, as though it requires saying at all, as though saying it makes it more likely to be true.
The dining chamber is set when he arrives, candles lit, table prepared, everything arranged in its proper place with the kind of quiet care that does not get noticed until something is missing from it.
Asharin is not there.
Colsar pauses just inside the doorway and takes in the empty chair across the table, the untouched place setting, the candles burning for no one, and something tightens in him that he does not immediately name.
"Where is she?"
A servant lowers her head. "We have not seen the Queen since earlier, Majesty."
"Earlier when?"
"After she left the throne room."
He turns immediately.
Their chambers are empty, the children sleeping under careful watch exactly as they should be, their faces slack and unbothered by whatever moves through the palace around them. Colsar stands in the doorway longer than he needs to, looking at them as though something there might tell him where she went, some detail he has overlooked that would make the answer obvious. It does not. He asks anyway, and the answer is no, she has not been here, and he leaves.
The training grounds are quiet when he arrives. Trophi looks up as Colsar approaches and straightens, reading something in his face before he has said a word.
"Majesty."
"Where is she?"
"I have not seen her since this morning."
