The noblewomen's fair was two days away, and I had decided to make one final inspection of the site — partly out of genuine necessity, partly because movement helped me think, and I had a great deal still to think about.
The past few days had been, by recent standards, peaceful. Arvid's decision to give me time had lifted something from my shoulders that I hadn't fully realised I had been carrying, and I had allowed myself to accept the respite without immediately filling it with the next anxiety. I was trying, in other words, to simply breathe.
I had not entirely succeeded. The sorcerer-merchant had taken up residence in the back of my mind with an enthusiasm I found profoundly inconvenient, appearing without invitation at irregular intervals and staying as long as he pleased. He had done nothing visibly wrong. He had given me a ride when I needed one and retired to an inn with a headache. And yet the unease that had followed me since our first meeting in the warehouse had not diminished — if anything, it had acquired more texture now that I understood what he was.
I had considered telling Arvid about him. I knew now, with considerably more clarity than I had possessed a week ago, that Arvid was more than capable of handling a single sorcerer. But every time I approached the decision, something stopped me. Perhaps it was that Zaren hadn't actually done anything wrong yet. Perhaps it was something less rational than that — the particular reluctance of someone who is still, quietly and against her better judgment, deciding how far her trust extends.
I had settled on watching. I would assign someone to observe him discreetly during the fair. After the fair, he would board a ship and return to wherever he had come from, and there would be nothing left to worry about.
That was what I told myself.
I stepped down from the carriage and found Gayathri already waiting to receive me, a pleasant smile in place and a small, practiced curtsy accompanying it.
"A pleasure to see you, your Majesty."
I returned the greeting and then paused, because Gayathri was not where I had expected her to be. She and Sangya had been managing the imports; Rewathi had been overseeing the construction site. The three of them had been in those positions for days without any indication of change.
Gayathri appeared to read the question directly off my face.
"Your Majesty must be wondering why I'm here rather than at the imports," she said, falling into step beside me as I started toward the bureau building. "I took the liberty of reassigning myself. I sent Rewathi to the imports and took over the construction oversight. With your Majesty's permission, I'll explain."
"Please do."
"Rewathi was becoming a distraction to herself," she said, with the fond exasperation of someone managing a situation they have managed many times before in slightly different forms. "She has always had a weakness for handsome faces — foreign ones especially. She had rather a substantial crush on his Majesty when she was younger. Then there was Niwara's third brother, whom she confessed her feelings to, only to be told very kindly that he considered her a sister. And now—" A significant pause accompanied by a small, expressive exhale. "Now she has gone and fallen for a full foreigner. Not even mixed heritage — completely foreign."
We passed through the entrance and into the main space, where the stalls were in their final stages. Most of the structural work was finished; what remained was decoration and finishing touches, the kind of work that transforms something functional into something inviting.
"We've been meeting every evening at Niwara's to share progress reports," Gayathri continued. "She has more organisational sense than all of us combined, so we use her home as something of a command centre. In the last several days, Rewathi's contribution to those meetings has consisted almost entirely of reports about one specific man rather than anything related to the construction. I gave her several chances to refocus herself." She paused again. "She did not take them. So I reassigned her, and she threw a considerable fit about it, which I absorbed with patience, because we have known each other since we were seven years old and I have considerable experience absorbing her fits." A wry smile. "Construction is the most important element right now. Presentation shapes the entire impression of the event. I couldn't allow it to suffer on account of Rewathi's romantic preoccupations."
"You did the right thing," I told her. "There's nothing to forgive — on the contrary, I'm grateful. And the fact that you've all been meeting in the evenings to work through problems and find solutions says a great deal about how seriously you've taken this. I mean that genuinely."
Gayathri accepted this with a quiet, unhurried dignity.
"It's what the work requires, your Majesty. The four of us don't do things by halves. Either something receives our full effort or we don't involve ourselves with it at all."
We walked between the stalls, and I ran my eyes across the work — the proportions, the spacing, the quality of the materials used in the finishing. It was good. Better than good, actually. They had made something here that would serve its purpose beautifully.
"I am curious about one thing," I said, after a moment.
"Yes, your Majesty?"
"Who is the man who has derailed Rewathi so thoroughly?"
Gayathri produced a small, delighted laugh — the laugh of someone who has been waiting for exactly this question.
"I can show you, your Majesty." She kept her eyes directed forward, her voice taking on the unhurried tone of someone discussing the stall framework, as though we were doing nothing more remarkable than commenting on the construction. "Without looking too quickly — to your right. Silver hair. Blue eyes. He's been helping with the finishing work on his guild's stalls."
I turned my head slowly, the way you do when you are pretending to survey a space rather than look at a specific thing within it.
And then I stopped.
The small sound that escaped me was not dignified, and I was grateful that Gayathri was looking forward.
He was there, working alongside the construction crew with the focused, unhurried physicality of someone who does not consider manual work beneath them. It was a hot day, and he had taken his upper garments off. The silver-blond hair clung to the back of his neck, damp. His skin caught the sun with the particular luminosity of someone naturally fair.
None of that was what made me stop.
What made me stop was his back.
Spanning the width of it, worked in ink with the kind of detail that does not come from an ordinary hand, was a tattoo of extraordinary scale. At the centre: a human heart, rendered with anatomical precision, depicted mid-beat, vivid and alive. And wrapped around it, coiled from one side of his back to the other, a serpent — enormous, scaled, with its head raised near one shoulder blade, red eyes open and burning, fangs fully extended in the posture of something prepared to strike anyone who approached too closely.
I had never seen a tattoo of that scale before. I had never seen imagery quite like it — the combination of the living, beating heart and the predatory coil of the snake around it, protective and threatening simultaneously.
Something about it disturbed me. Not in the way of ugliness — it was not ugly. In the way of things that mean something specific and carry that meaning in every line.
Arvid had mentioned once, in passing, that he had a tattoo. I had never seen it, despite having seen him in various states of undress. I had not pressed him about it, mostly because the absence of ink on his skin as I knew it suited him, and I had preferred not to examine why I found that absence so satisfying.
The man in front of me looked like what sin would look like if it decided to wear a human shape. That was the most honest description I could find, and it was not a comfortable one, and I could not entirely account for why.
A moment passed.
Then, as though he had felt the specific weight of a particular gaze rather than simply the general awareness of being observed, he stopped what he was doing and turned around.
His eyes found mine immediately. Not the searching sweep of someone trying to locate the source — directly, without hesitation, as though he had known precisely where to look.
Those pale blue eyes, fierce and sharp and carrying the same quality I had noticed in the carriage in the dark, met mine across the noise and movement of the construction site.
Neither of us looked away first.