The Distance
COLSAR
The door closes behind her and the silence that follows is wrong in a way he cannot immediately place.
It does not feel like the quiet after something ends.
It feels like something left open, unfinished in a way that should not have been allowed, and he stands where she left him for a moment longer than he intends to, looking at where she had been as though the answer might still be there if he waits long enough.
It is not. He exhales once and turns, and the word that comes out of him is quiet and without inflection.
"Clear it."
The servants return immediately, cloth and water and careful hands moving across the marble until the last trace of ash is lifted and taken away.
What had been scattered across the floor disappears piece by piece until the room looks as though nothing happened in it at all.
Colsar watches briefly and then loses interest in watching.
It is finished. That is what he had said, and that is what he had meant, and he leaves before they are done.
The corridors move around him in their usual rhythm, servants passing, guards shifting at their posts, voices carrying from distant rooms he does not need to enter.
Everything continues exactly as it should, and yet something sits slightly wrong beneath all of it, the way a stone sits wrong inside a boot, present with every step, impossible to ignore entirely and not really worth stopping for.
He ignores it anyway. There is work to do. There is always work to do, and he has never had difficulty finding his way back to it.
The council chamber is already prepared when he enters, maps spread across the table, markers placed and in some cases moved, small adjustments made in his absence that he notices the moment he crosses the threshold.
"Who moved the eastern line?"
A man straightens. "Majesty, the latest reports—"
"I did not ask for the reports."
Silence falls over the room and stays there while Colsar steps forward and presses his hand flat to the table, studying the map carefully.
The high provinces stretch across it in ink and faded color, the borderlands marked with symbols that have crept further than they should have been allowed to creep, further than he had left them.
Too much red. He moves one marker back to where it had been.
"Put it back."
"Majesty, the ground there is no longer holding. We thought it best to—"
"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."
Colsar studies him for a moment. "This morning when?"
"She came through the courtyard. She trained. She left."
Something in that stops him entirely, and he turns it over before he speaks again. "She trained?"
"Yes, Majesty."
He does not respond immediately because he is not sure what to do with it.
The last time he had paid close enough attention to notice, she had still been moving carefully, still favouring one side when she thought no one was watching, still catching her breath at the wrong moments in a way that told him her body was not finished with what it had been through.
He had assumed, without asking, that she was nowhere near ready for the training grounds, that she was resting somewhere inside the palace while he managed everything outside it.
He had been so certain of it that he had not thought to question it until this moment, standing here in the empty courtyard with Trophi watching him carefully.
Apparently she had not waited for his assumption to catch up with her.
Colsar nods once and turns away before whatever is moving through him has the chance to reach his face.
He moves through the palace after that with the particular focus of someone who does not yet want to name what they are feeling.
The gallery, the outer courtyard, the long corridors she has always favored with their tall windows that hold the last of the afternoon light.
He walks all of them and finds nothing, each empty room pressing a little harder than the one before it, building toward something at the edges of his awareness that he does not reach for yet.
By the time he reaches the lower wing his pace has changed without his having decided to change it.
The pools are quiet, steam drifting faintly over the surface, attendants moving in their slow rhythm along the edge until he enters and everything slows with him.
"Majesty."
"Where is she?"
A brief pause, careful in a way that he notices immediately. "The Queen is not here," the nearest attendant says. "She usually comes in the mornings. Not at this hour."
Something in him goes very still. "She comes here?"
"Yes, Majesty."
"How often?"
Another pause, shorter than the first. "Every day, Majesty."
He absorbs that without speaking, turning it over in his mind. Every day.
"She comes alone?"
"Yes, Majesty, though Lord Kentan tends to be here at the same hour. They keep each other company while they are both here."
Kentan.
He had told her not to come here. From the beginning he had been clear about it, clear enough that there should have been no room left for interpretation, and she had come anyway, every morning, and found her own rhythm in it, and built something small and ordinary out of the hours he had not been present for, and he had not known any of it.
Not the mornings. Not Kentan. Not any of the quiet architecture of her days that had begun to exist without him.
He turns and leaves without another word.
He moves faster now, corridors passing without detail, faces blurring at the edges of his awareness, voices starting and fading before they reach him fully. A guard steps forward with something urgent in his posture. "Majesty, there is an update from the eastern—"
"Not now."
"Majesty, it concerns the missing unit. There may have been—"
"I said not now."
The guard stops and Colsar keeps moving, and the corridor closes behind him.
He reaches the passage overlooking the inner court and stops without meaning to.
Below, a family crosses the path, a man and a woman with a small child walking between them, her hand in each of theirs.
The girl stumbles and laughs, the sound bright and entirely unguarded.
The man bends and says something low that makes the woman laugh too, and then all three of them are caught up in it together, held inside something small and ordinary and whole, a moment that requires nothing from any of them except to be there.
Colsar watches them from above and the sound carries faintly upward and he cannot remember the last time he laughed with Asharin. He stands there and he tries, reaching back through the weeks, and he cannot find it anywhere.