Filar House
COLSAR
The servant who received him at the door was new, young, the particular nervousness of someone who had been told exactly how to behave and was concentrating very hard on it. Colsar gave him nothing to work with and followed him through the familiar corridors without comment.
The air feels wrong as they move deeper into the house, the sensation quiet but persistent, the same underlying distortion he had felt in the mountains when the dead began to move beneath them.
It lingers at the edges of his awareness, threaded through the corridors and into the walls themselves, something that does not belong to Rathmor and never has.
She was in the smaller dining room. The table set for two, candles already burning at their midpoints, a meal laid out with the particular precision that meant it had been arranged well in advance.
The doors to the veranda stood open, vines thick along the pillars outside, the lower gardens visible in the last of the evening light.
The room is as it has always been, unchanged in every visible way, and yet the feeling follows him here, faint but insistent.
She stood when he entered.
"Colsar." Her voice carried the warmth of someone who had practiced it. "Come, sit." Her eyes moved over him. "You look different. But well."
He took the chair across from hers without ceremony.
"Is fatherhood treating you well?" she asked.
"Yes." He reached for his glass and left it where it was. "You have two grandchildren, as you know. Perhaps you will deign to meet them when you are not busy doing things of more…” He pauses. "Importance."
She smiled. "Of course."
A servant filled his glass, the pour steady, precise. For a moment the light catches at his fingertips, the color there faintly gray before he withdraws. Colsar left it untouched.
The Queen Dowager leaned back into her chair with the unhurried ease of a woman who had never once needed to fill a silence she did not intend to fill.
She looked well. She always looked well.
Dark hair pinned high, silver threading through it now more than before, the particular composure of someone who has long since decided that aging is a matter of posture.
The pin at her temple draws his attention then, the stone set within it wrong in a way that is not easily missed, shifting beneath the surface in a way he has seen before and has not forgotten from Alarna.
“Yorali,” he says.
Her hand lifts lightly, brushing the pin as though it means very little. “You always did have a good eye.”
“You must have done something unforgettable,” he adds, his tone even, “to be gifted something so rare.”
Her smile deepens. “Perhaps I did.”
He holds her eyes a moment longer than the exchange requires.
"Your wife," she said pleasantly, "caused quite a stir."
"I am aware."
"The Avanki. The children." She lifted her glass. "The firebirds flying ahead. It was quite something." A pause. "She has grown into the role."
"She was always suited to it."
His mother regarded him with mild interest, the way she always did, as though he were a problem she had already solved and was revisiting for confirmation. "You are proud of her."
It was not a question. He did not answer it.
"How lovely," she said.
Servants brought the first course. She ate with a practiced ease, each movement considered, nothing wasted. Colsar ate because not eating would give her something to notice.
"You did not ask me here for the pleasure of my company," he said.
"I never do." She dabbed at her mouth with the linen. "And you never came for mine. We have always understood each other in that regard."
"Then say what you came to say."
She set the linen down. Folded it once. Placed it beside her plate.
"There is something you should know," she said.
He waited.
"Your wife's blood," she began, with the same pleasantness she brought to every topic that had teeth in it, "carries a particular susceptibility to feeder compelling.
It is in her lineage. It does not require force.
It does not require the feeder to intend it.
" She lifted her glass. "Proximity alone is enough.
A feeder of sufficient power near her, over time, will compel without trying.
And she will have no way of knowing it is happening. "
The room was very quiet.
"I need more information," Colsar said. "Details."
"I do not have any for you." She held his eyes without apology. "I thought you would like to know."
A long pause.
"What are you up to?” he said.
She looked at him with something that passed for warmth. "Nothing, my son."
He held her eyes for a moment longer. She held his in return with the particular ease of someone who has nothing left to prove and knows it.
Then it hit him, Teorin’s voice cutting through the memory exactly as it had then, she is in danger, real danger, the words returning with a clarity he had not given them at the time, dismissed too easily for what they were.
This had to be what he meant. It had to be. Anything else would require a kind of failure Colsar was not willing to name, not now, not when Asharin was already somewhere within reach of it.
Asharin. Alone in the palace. Sevrin somewhere in those same corridors, in those same rooms, with his particular patience and his particular hunger, months of yearning and separation already behind him. And now this. Proximity alone is enough.
His eyes move to the clock on the mantel.
Six twenty-two. Fuck.
He pushed his chair back.
"Can you not stay for dessert?" she said. "The palace is a ten minute walk."
He moved toward the door. "Goodbye, Mother."
"Colsar."
He stopped. Did not turn.
"Give my love to your wife," she said. "She defended you at lunch once, do you remember? I found it rather charming."
He left without answering. The road back to Veynar was faster in the dark than it had any right to be.