He does not know if she is healed. He has not asked recently and does not remember the last time he did. She had been cut open, split apart to bring his children into the world, and he had watched her move carefully through her recovery and had not once thought to ask what she needed to move through it faster.
Of course she had wanted the healing pools. Of course she had gone every morning because her body required it, and he had forbidden it and given her no reason beyond his own discomfort, and she had gone anyway because she always found another way when he left her to find one. He had known the pools would help her heal. He had always known that.
He thinks of the countryside house, the private pools there, the one she had used after the Thren attack day after day in the early mornings when the light was still low and the water could do slowly what rest alone could not manage. He had been there with her then, close and present and watching over her in a way that had required no particular decision on his part because there had simply been nowhere else he needed to be. She had not needed to ask him then. He had just been there, and it had been enough, and she had healed, and he had not understood until right now standing in this corridor that she had not been asking for the pools at all.
She had been asking for him. He remembers the evenings at the countryside house, the particular quality of the quiet in them, the way she had spoken with a hesitation that did not come naturally to her, choosing each word carefully before she set it down. She had said she wanted a family, the kind that ate dinner together and knew how the other had spent their day, something small enough to fit inside an ordinary evening and solid enough to return to.
He has all of it now. The title, the children, the table set every night with two places. Yet he has not sat down to a single meal with her since the children were born. Not one, and when he turns that fact over looking for a reason that holds he cannot find one, only the accumulated weight of choices made one at a time without any thought for what they were adding up to.
He reaches inward then, toward the part of himself he has kept carefully closed these past weeks. The siakar, the thing that runs beneath everything else, older than reason and considerably older than restraint. It answers immediately, a pull that has no patience left in it, the way it has been since the night the childrenwere born, waiting without any particular grace for him to stop pretending he cannot feel it.
Every time he had stepped into their chamber and found her lying there with Ari and Kiss asleep against her, something in him had reacted in a way he did not have clean words for. It was not simple want and it was not even love as he had understood love before her. It was something that lived beneath both of those things, something that drew him toward her with a force that required active effort to hold back, and he had held it back every time, turned away every time, told himself the distance was necessary and found his way back to his work before it could reach him fully.
She would never know what those moments cost him.
He remembers the first night in the hidden kingdom, the bath and the careful work of helping her out of the water and dry and into bed, and then his hands had begun to shake for no reason he could name and he had stood there in the quiet of the room not understanding what was happening to him. Later he had gone to his study and by the time he reached it the distance between them had become something physical, a pressure that bent him forward over the desk until he forced himself back upright through sheer will. He had gone to the Sovereign the following morning and asked, because he did not know who else to ask and he was not accustomed to not knowing.
"It is common," the Sovereign had said, unhurried, as though Colsar had come to him with something entirely unremarkable. "After the first child is born. The siakar does not take well to separation from its partner.”
Colsar had said nothing.
"Most manage it by remaining close to the woman constantly in those first weeks. Then there is another phase that follows, a mating period, and they do not emerge from it for days. Sometimes longer. It is why siakar siblings tend to arrive so close together."
A quiet sound, almost amused, and then the tone shifted into something harder. "But you do not have that luxury right now."
A pause, and then the instruction, delivered with the particular finality his father often used. "If her proximity makes restraint difficult, then distance yourself until the pull eases. It will pass."
Colsar exhales slowly, standing in the corridor above the empty courtyard, the afternoon light stretching long and gold below him.
He had listened. He had done exactly what his father told him, kept his distance, buried himself in the demands of the kingdom, and in doing so, he had left her alone in every way that mattered.
The truth had been there all along, in the mornings when she woke and he was already gone, in the evenings when the table was set and he did not come, in the quiet hours she had asked him to share.
He had filled them with work instead, and told himself it was for her as much as for him. Her voice comes back to him, clear and precise in the way it always is when she has chosen what she wants to say.I am sorry I still need you to be present when the kingdom is not burning.
He exhales and the words stay with him.
It is the quiet that loses you.
He looks down at the courtyard. The family is gone. He stands there a moment with the full weight of everything he has not done, not turning from any of it. He has been here every day, beside her, holding their children, moving through the same hours, and still he has not been with her in any way that matters.
Kentan. The name comes back and he lets himself feel what he feels about it plainly. He does not like that she has spent her mornings with someone else nearby. He does not like that he did not know, that she stopped coming to him.
He knows why she stopped. He gave her no reason to keep trying, and eventually she believed him. Colsar straightens. She had only ever asked for him, and he had made her find something else to fill what he kept leaving behind.
The rest falls away. He still does not know where she is.
This time, he does not hesitate.
CHAPTER 60
Urvinar
We leave before the light fully breaks across the mountains, following a path that narrows as it climbs until soil gives way to rock and the trees thin enough for the sky to open around us. Kentan walks ahead with the ease of someone who has made this journey many times and no longer needs to think about where the ground drops or rises. Enovar keeps pace beside him. Wyn remains close enough behind me that I can feel her presence without turning to check for it.
Urvinar. I do not ask for details beyond the name because it does not seem important. For the first time in longer than I care to measure I am somewhere that does not require me to explain myself before I have even arrived.
When we crest the ridge, Urvinar appears below us as though it had been carved out of the mountain rather than built upon it, its houses and terraces drawn directly from the rock in warm layers that spill downward into a network of narrow streets. Smoke rises from low chimneys and drifts into the cool morning air. The village simply exists, simple and entirely itself.
