They both had somewhere to be.
Neither of them got there.
They walked for two hours in a corridor.
Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Because it was.
It was late evening when she passed him in the east corridor.
She was heading to the kitchen — she had forgotten to eat dinner, which happened sometimes when she was reading something particularly interesting. He was heading somewhere with the purposeful stride of a man with an actual destination.
They both stopped.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"Kitchen," she said. "I missed dinner."
"You missed dinner," he repeated, with the particular flatness of someone filing information under: this is a habit I am going to have opinions about.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
He paused. "The west study."
"What's in the west study at this hour?"
"Work," he said. "The kind that waits until everyone else has gone to bed so it can be done without interruption."
He works when the palace is quiet, she noted. Because during the day there are always people. Requests. Performances. At midnight the palace is just a building and he can just be a person doing work.
"Come to the kitchen first," she said. "You haven't eaten either."
"How do you know I haven't eaten?"
"Because Aldric would have mentioned it with the same tone he uses when he's quietly concerned about something and trying not to show it," she said. "He had that tone at dinner."
A pause.
"You read Aldric's tones," he said.
"I read most things," she said.
He fell into step beside her.
They didn't go to the kitchen immediately. They turned left instead of right and ended up in the long gallery corridor — the one with the dragon reliefs — and somehow the kitchen stopped being the destination and the walking became the thing itself.
They talked.
About the kingdom's history. About the dragon flight paths in winter. About whether the east wing heating problem was structural or just poor insulation — he said insulation, she said structural, neither of them conceded.
Two hours passed like twenty minutes.
They ended up at the kitchen eventually, ate cold bread and leftover roasted vegetables standing at the kitchen table, and went back to their respective rooms at midnight.
I walked a corridor for two hours tonight, she thought, lying in bed. I don't do things without purpose.
She thought about it.
That was the purpose, she concluded. The walking was the purpose.
She went to sleep.