The morning began, as mornings in the Wadee mansion had begun for the past three months, with the sound of the kitchen yard below the cedar bedroom window.
Gerffron had come to know the kitchen yard's morning schedule with the intimacy of a man who has had nothing but time and the sounds of a household to organize it against. The bread oven was lit at the fifth bell — you could hear it in the change of the air, the faint creak of the iron door and then, twenty minutes later, the smell that came through even the cedar bedroom's closed window, yeasty and warm and carrying the particular comfort of things that are the same every day.
The scullery maid arrived at the well at the sixth bell. She was young and had a cheerful, unself-conscious relationship with her own singing that the rest of the household apparently tolerated by virtue of the singing being genuinely good. She sang folk songs, mostly — the kind with verses that went on longer than the melody suggested they would, accumulating details about farms and rivers and people with improbable romantic problems.
Gerffron had learned, over three months of morning listening, the complete lyrics to six of them.
He got up at the sixth bell.
— — —
Selfi had been returned.
He had noticed this on a Tuesday two weeks ago — noticed it in the way you notice the return of something that was previously present and then absent: not dramatically, only with a particular quality of recognition, the household rearranging itself back into a configuration that included her.
He remembered Selfi.
She had been assigned to him in his first year as consort — a personal attendant, one of three, with the quick movements and watchful dark eyes of a girl who had come up through the household ranks with a clear sense of where she was going. She had been competent. She had been, in those first months, the most reliable source of household intelligence available to him — not because she intended to be but because she paid attention to things and had not yet learned to be careful about what she communicated through ordinary interaction.
She had been removed from his attendance before the Winter Ball.
Now she was back.
She arrived at his morning tray along with Sera — an arrangement that was clearly Gorgina's doing, the logic of which Gerffron had been turning over since its introduction. Sera's presence made sense: Sera had been his primary attendant through the illness and had claimed, through the accumulation of those months, a proprietary familiarity with his daily requirements that no one was going to efficiently replace. But Selfi's presence was a new introduction, and new introductions in the Wadee household did not happen without a purpose.
He watched her.
He was good at watching without appearing to watch — had developed this skill across two lifetimes of needing to understand environments faster than the environments wanted to be understood — and what he observed was interesting.
Selfi was not easy.
She performed her duties with precision. She spoke when spoken to, moved when movement was required, maintained all the surface properties of a competent attendant. But underneath the performance there was a specific quality of tension that had a character he recognized: not the generalized tension of someone in an uncomfortable position, but the focused tension of a person who has feelings about something and is working, with varying success, to contain them.
The feelings, he suspected, were not about him.
— — —
He went to the garden every morning.
This was the arrangement that had been in place since Gorgina's announcement three months ago — the garden accessible, the outer grounds not. He had accepted the limitation with the equanimity of a man who has learned to find the absolute maximum of a constrained space and had proceeded, over three months, to do exactly that.
The garden in summer was extraordinary.
This surprised him, although it shouldn't have — he had watched it from the window through two full years and knew its rhythms as well as he knew his own. But there was a difference between watching and being in that he had forgotten over the years of the east tower and the cedar bedroom and the glass-mediated relationship with the world outside, and the difference arrived each morning when he stepped through the garden door with something that was not quite happiness and not quite relief but contained elements of both.
The roses were at their late-summer peak.
He had begun, with the quiet permission of the head gardener — a taciturn man named Weld who had been at the estate for longer than anyone and whose relationship to the rose beds was that of a man who has long since stopped distinguishing between his professional and personal feelings about something — to work in the beds himself.
Not by instruction. By inclination. He had stood at the edge of the eastern bed one morning and looked at the way two canes were crossing each other at an angle that was going to cause problems by autumn, and had reached in and adjusted them before the thought was fully formed, and Weld had watched from the far end of the garden with an expression that had eventually resolved into a nod so small it could almost have been imagined.
After that he had come every morning with his sleeves rolled up.
The physical work did something for him that the library and the careful mental disciplines of his confinement had not. It put him in direct contact with the world at the level of soil and root and thorn — unglamorous, specific, requiring the particular attention that living things demand because they don't have the patience for inattention. It made time move differently. It made his hands useful in a way that the east tower had denied them.
And in the mornings, in the garden, he let himself think about Styrmir.
Not with the careful management he applied elsewhere. Not the deliberate not-thinking that had been his primary strategy during the worst of the house arrest. He let himself think about the boy who had crouched in this flower bed with his hands in the cold soil, taking the earth's pulse. About the young man that boy was becoming somewhere across the border, in circumstances he could only partially imagine.
He was well. Gerffron believed this.
He believed it not from evidence — he had no direct evidence — but from the particular certainty of a man who has learned to trust his understanding of a person. Styrmir was the kind of person who survived. Who found the nutrient in any ground, however poor. Who paid attention and remembered what he learned and used it.
He was becoming someone.
Gerffron tended the roses and let himself miss him and found that missing was not the thing he had been afraid of it being. Not collapse. Not uselessness. Only the specific, bearable weight of caring about something at a distance.
He could carry that.
— — —
Selfi brought the midday tray.
Alone, this time — Sera had the afternoon duties on alternating days, an arrangement that apparently meant the two women divided his daily attendance between them with the efficiency of a schedule that had been designed by someone who did not want either of them to feel that the arrangement was significant.
He was at the library window when she arrived.
"Where would you like the tray, sir?" she said. Sir — she used the word with the precision of someone who has been instructed to use a certain form of address and is performing the instruction correctly without necessarily endorsing it.
"The side table is fine," he said.
She moved to the side table. He watched her reflection in the window glass — the efficient movement, the careful placement, the small pause after she had set the tray down that was almost imperceptible and was, he had learned, her tell. The moment when whatever was underneath the performance pressed briefly against the surface before being pushed back down.
"Selfi," he said.
She turned.
"How long have you been with the household?"
A beat. The question was ordinary — the kind of ordinary that can be taken at face value or read more carefully depending on who is doing the reading.
"Eight years, sir," she said.
"You started young."
"Fourteen," she said. Something shifted in her expression — not softening exactly, more like a recognition that the conversation had not gone where she expected it to go, which required a recalibration. "My aunt was in service here. She recommended me."
He nodded.
"It must be good household to come up in," he said.
Her expression did the thing it sometimes did — a quick, internal movement, something passing through and being managed before it could make it to the surface.
"Yes," she said. "It is."
She left.
He turned back to the window.
He was not sure what he was watching for, exactly. He was not sure whether Gorgina had reintroduced Selfi into his daily arrangement as a form of observation or as a form of something else. He was not sure whether the tension he observed in the young woman was the tension of assigned proximity to a man she'd been told was a traitor, or the tension of some other feeling that he had not yet fully mapped.
He was patient.
He had all the time in the world for the kind of observation that didn't rush.
Outside, the summer garden was in its full, overripe late-season beauty, and the scullery maid had started on her seventh song, and somewhere beyond the border of this empire a young man was charting stars in a country that worked through conversation.
The day moved at its ordinary pace.
Gerffron ate his midday tray.
He read.
He was, in the specific and quietly radical way of a person who has learned to find sufficiency in the available, all right.