Styrmir was grinning.
He was standing in the palace's main entrance hall at the seventh bell of the morning, in the formal attire of the delegation's daily schedule, with the winter-pale eyes and the dark gold hair pushed back from his face, and he was grinning at Gerffron with the specific, wide, unmanaged quality of a man who is very pleased with the current state of the world.
Gerffron looked at him.
He thought: this is going to be a long day.
"Good morning," Styrmir said.
"Good morning," Gerffron said, in the tone of someone returning a greeting with the minimum necessary investment.
"You look well."
"Thank you. The delegation is assembled?"
"Almost. The princess is — yes. There she is."
Princess Caelith appeared from the guest corridor with two of the other delegates and the expression of a woman who had slept adequately and was ready for whatever the day intended to produce. She greeted Gerffron with the warmth of someone who had been watching him manage a difficult situation with competence and was prepared to extend the professional regard that competence merited.
The other delegates filled in.
The administrative staff. The judicial correspondence officers. The senior advisory members.
Gerffron counted heads.
Everyone was present.
He smoothed his expression into the composure appropriate for today — the palace tour was a formal occasion, part of the delegation's official programme, designed to provide context and to begin the process of establishing the informal relationships that formal diplomatic sessions required as foundation.
He had prepared for the tour.
He had walked the route three times.
He began.
He was, if he was being honest about it, a good guide.
Not in the way of someone performing the function — not the cheerful, slightly mechanical quality of an official palace guide delivering the same information in the same order to the same pattern of attentive nods. He was good at it in the specific way of someone who had spent two and a half years reading the history of everything around him and who had arrived at the tour with genuine knowledge of what he was pointing at rather than merely a description of it.
He knew why the western wing was built at an angle.
He knew the specific, practical reason that the main corridor's ceiling was three feet higher than the rest of the palace's comparable spaces, and the reason was interesting rather than merely architectural.
He knew the history of the formal gardens and the specific decisions that had produced their current configuration, including the one that had been made by a king three hundred years ago who had been trying to impress a visiting dignitary and had overestimated the available budget and had therefore produced, through the specific alchemy of ambition exceeding resources, something that was better than the intended design.
He talked about all of this.
He talked about it with the engagement of someone who found it genuinely interesting and whose genuine interest communicated itself to the people listening in the way that genuine interest always communicated itself, which was as something qualitatively different from performed enthusiasm.
The delegates listened.
Styrmir listened.
He listened with the full, complete attention that he brought to things he found worth attending to, which was the way he had been listening to Gerffron since the carriage, which was the way he had been listening to Gerffron since he was eight years old and Gerffron had sat on a garden bench and opened a book and said nothing and it had been the least lonely hour of Styrmir's life to that point.
He listened, and he watched, and he filed everything.
And somewhere between the eastern wing's history and the formal gardens' introduction, when Gerffron was in the specific, absorbed quality of someone who has found the rhythm of what they're doing and is inside it rather than observing it from the outside—
Caelith caught Styrmir's eye.
She tilted her head toward the delegation's left flank.
Styrmir tilted his head very slightly in acknowledgement.
Over the next eight minutes, with the smooth, organic, completely deniable efficiency of a woman who had been managing things her entire life and had gotten very good at it, Princess Caelith of Veldrath redirected the delegation.
Not all at once.
Gradually — one conversation here, a slight change of pace there, a direction-adjacent suggestion that was so gentle it barely registered as a suggestion. The administrative staff followed the princess because the princess was the highest-ranking member and because following the highest-ranking member was the default behavior of administrative staff. The judicial officers followed the administrative staff because that was what judicial officers did in informal settings. The senior advisory members followed everyone else because that was what happened when everyone else moved.
The delegation moved.
Gerffron was explaining the specific history of the formal gardens' eastern hedge and did not notice.
He noticed at the third explanation.
He had been in the middle of a point about the hedge's original planting date when some peripheral instinct — the specific, trained awareness of a person who had spent years in situations that required him to track his environment — registered the quality of the listening around him.
He turned.
The delegation was not there.
He looked to his left.
He looked to his right.
He looked behind him.
Styrmir was standing approximately six feet away with the expression of a man who is entirely comfortable with the current situation and does not feel any particular urgency about changing it.
"Where," Gerffron said, "is everyone from the delegation?"
"I'm not certain," Styrmir said.
"What do you mean you're not certain—"
"I was listening to you," Styrmir said, in the specific, pleasant tone of someone explaining rather than an excuse. "You were talking about the hedge. It was interesting. I was absorbed."
Gerffron looked at the empty garden path.
He looked at Styrmir.
He looked at the empty garden path again.
"You," he said, "are a junior court astronomer and diplomatic advisory consultant. Your entire professional value proposition is attention to detail. Are you telling me—"
"Your voice is very engaging," Styrmir said.
"Do not—"
"When you talk about architecture and history, there's a quality—"
"Do not!" Gerffron said.
He turned.
He began walking back the way they had come.
Styrmir fell into step beside him.
They walked.
The formal gardens had several sections and Gerffron had been in the third one, which required passing back through the second one and the first one and the connecting passage to reach the main palace entrance from which the tour had departed.
He walked with the focused speed of a man who had lost his entire delegation and was acutely aware of every professional implication of having done so.
They passed a junction.
He took the left path.
He walked.
He walked for three minutes.
He stopped.
He looked at the hedges.
He looked at the path.
He looked at the hedges again.
"We're lost," he said.
Styrmir looked around at the formal garden's maze-like third section with the expression of someone taking in information.
"We are," he agreed.
"The formal gardens have a maze section," Gerffron said, in the specific, flat tone of a man informing himself of a fact he already knew and was only now finding relevantly inconvenient. "I walked the route three times. I walked the route three times and somehow the maze section—"
"You went left at the junction," Styrmir said.
"I—"
"The correct turn for the exit is right. You went left."
Gerffron looked at the hedge.
He looked at the junction behind them.
He looked at Styrmir.
"You knew that," he said.
"I've been looking at the garden layout since we entered," Styrmir said, with the pleasant ease of someone confirming a fact.
"And you did not say anything."
"You seemed confident about the direction."
"I was wrong about the direction."
"Yes."
"You knew I was wrong about the direction and you didn't—"
"Consort Wadee," Styrmir said, and the smile was the slow one, the settled one, "what do you plan to do now that we are lost?"
Gerffron looked at him.
He looked at the hedges.
He muttered something.
It was too quiet for Styrmir to catch fully — only the tone of it, which was the tone of someone expressing a very specific frustration about the absence of a very specific kind of technology in the current era.
"What was that?" Styrmir said.
"Nothing," Gerffron said.
"It sounded like—"
"It was nothing." Gerffron straightened. He looked at the maze. "We retrace our steps to the junction and take the correct turn. It is straightforward."
"Of course," Styrmir said.
They turned.
The problem was that the formal gardens' maze section was not straightforward.
This was the point of it — it had been designed three hundred years ago as an entertainment, which in the context of three hundred years ago meant a space designed to disorient in a pleasurable way, and which in the context of right now meant a space that was disorienting in a way that had no qualifier.
They had been walking for ten minutes.
They had passed the same junction twice.
The specific, thin quality of perspiration that came from the combination of physical movement and mounting professional anxiety had found its way to Gerffron's temples and hairline with the thorough efficiency of stress.
He was aware of this.
He was aware of it in the way he was aware of several things he would have preferred not to be aware of while navigating a garden maze with the most distracting person he had been in close proximity to in several years.
He pushed his hair back from his forehead.
Styrmir watched this.
He watched Gerffron move through the maze with the focused, slightly tense quality of someone who was managing a problem and managing the awareness of being watched simultaneously, and he found both of these things — the problem management and the awareness of the watching — considerably more interesting than any garden maze had a right to be.
Gerffron's coat was the formal liaison's attire — the navy-and-gold, which sat on him with the specific quality of clothes that had been made well for a person rather than made to a conventional standard and adjusted. The cut followed the line of his shoulders and the narrow, specific quality of his waist with the accuracy of something that had been measured rather than approximated.
He moved with the economical, contained quality he always had — the movement of someone who had learned, over years of various confinements and various restrictions, to inhabit space with precision rather than sprawl.
His waist, when he turned at the junction for the third time with the slight, frustrated tension of someone who has not found the exit yet, had the specific quality that certain kinds of looking noticed and catalogued with the automatic, involuntary thoroughness of a person who was paying attention.
A bead of sweat moved from his temple to his jaw.
His hair had gone from the crisp morning arrangement to the slightly damp version that happened when a person had been doing something physically active in a coat that was not entirely designed for exertion.
He bit his lip.
He bit it in the specific, unconscious way that people bit things when they were thinking hard — not an affected gesture but the genuine, unconsidered response of a mind using the body's available resources.
Styrmir watched all of this.
He was finding the formal gardens significantly more interesting than he had anticipated.
"Left here," Styrmir said.
"You said left here last time," Gerffron said.
"I said right last time."
"You said—"
"I said the exit was right. I did not say turn right at this junction." Styrmir looked at the hedge. "This junction is left."
"How can you tell?"
"The shadow on the hedge. The sun is there—" he pointed "—which means that hedge is facing west, which means this path runs north, which means the exit from the maze is—"
"You're an astronomer," Gerffron said.
"Navigation is a related field."
"You knew where the exit was this entire time."
"I had a general idea."
"Styrmir."
"I wanted to see what you'd do."
Gerffron stopped walking.
He turned.
He turned with the specific, compressed energy of a man who has been managing his patience and has arrived at the outer boundary of the available supply.
He turned directly into Styrmir's chest.
The collision was, if anything, slightly worse than the palace entrance one, because this time Gerffron had momentum and the momentum delivered him to Styrmir's collarbone with the specific, solid commitment of a person walking at purpose.
He stepped back.
His hand went to his nose.
Styrmir looked at him with the expression of a man containing a great deal of something.
"That," Styrmir said, "is the second time."
"I know, I apolo-" Gerffron said, through his fingers.
"In two days."
"-gi-nevermind. I am aware of the frequency."
"Do you like it?" Styrmir said, and his voice had the warmth that appeared in it when he was genuinely amused rather than performing amusement. "My chest. You keep returning to it."
Gerffron lowered his hand.
He looked at Styrmir.
"You do not have," he said, "a lady's chest. I am not embarrassed. We are both men. This is a collision, not a social event."
Styrmir looked at him.
The smile arrived — not the slow, settled smile, something slightly different, something that had more in it than the pleasant surface.
"Then you clearly," Styrmir said, in a voice that had dropped a register and which was doing something that Gerffron was absolutely not going to acknowledge, "have no sense of danger."
The garden was very quiet.
The hedges were the hedges.
Gerffron and Styrmir stood in the formal garden maze in the specific, charged quiet of two people who are in close proximity and who are both entirely aware of the proximity and who are each, in their own way, managing the awareness.
"I am a married man," Gerffron said.
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true."
"It's not a force field," Styrmir said.
"It is a relevant fact."
"It is a fact. I agree with you that it is a fact." Styrmir looked at him. "What it is not is an answer to the question."
"What question?"
"The question of whether you have any sense of danger."
"I am in a garden," Gerffron said. "In broad daylight. In a palace. Surrounded by—" he looked at the hedges "—hedges. The danger level is—"
"I am not talking about the hedges," Styrmir said.
Gerffron looked at him.
He looked at him for a moment with the full, direct attention that was his most honest register.
He thought: I know what you're talking about.
He thought: I am not going to give you the satisfaction of acknowledging that I know what you're talking about.
He said: "I want to find the exit."
"Left," Styrmir said.
"You are absolutely certain?"
"I am absolutely certain."
"And if you are wrong again, I am going to make an official report to the delegation coordinator about the navigational incompetence of the Veldrathi court's advisory staff."
"That is a very specific threat," Styrmir said.
"I am a very specific person."
"Yes," Styrmir said, and the warmth in his voice had arrived at the place it had been heading since the beginning of the conversation, which was not the playful register and not the charming register but the actual one, the real one, the one that had been underneath everything else since the dock. "You are."
From somewhere beyond the hedges, voices.
Male voices, carrying the specific quality of people who have been searching for something and have been doing so for long enough that the searching had taken on the urgency of the search becoming official.
"Consort Wadee!"
"Consort Wadee, are you—"
Gerffron exhaled.
He looked at the hedge.
He looked at Styrmir.
He said, with the dignity of a man who was not going to let any of this afternoon's events define him:
"Not a word."
"Of course not," Styrmir said.
"About any of it."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
"The nose, the maze, none of it."
"Completely between us," Styrmir said, and the smile was the warmest it had been and the most genuine it had been, and Gerffron looked at it briefly and then looked at the hedge.
"Left," Gerffron said.
He went left.
The exit was there.
The guards were extremely relieved.
Gerffron was extremely professional about the rest of the afternoon.
Styrmir was extremely helpful.
Neither of them mentioned the hedges.