Free Web NovelChapter 42: Chapter 42: Riven
Elian woke up to an arm across his chest.
He lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling, cataloguing.
Warm. Heavy. Definitely a person. Definitely Caelian, based on the specific quality of the weight and the fact that nobody else would have walked into his room uninvited.
What, Elian thought, is this man doing here.
He tried to move.
The arm tightened.
Not consciously — Caelian was still asleep, face relaxed, doing the deep breathing of someone genuinely resting. But his arm had apparently developed opinions about Elian leaving and was acting on them independently.
Elian tried again.
The arm did not cooperate.
You are not my problem, Elian thought at the sleeping man beside him. I have decided you are not my problem. I will help you because I have no choice and because whatever is trying to kill you is also a threat to this entire world and not because of anything else. But I am not going to be your personal — whatever this is.
He managed to extract himself after several undignified minutes and sat on the edge of the bed.
Behind him, Caelian woke up.
Elian heard it — the shift in breathing, the small sound of someone surfacing.
He didn’t turn around.
"You don’t like the Duke’s daughter," Caelian said.
Not a question. Point blank. The way he said things when he’d been thinking about them for a while.
"That has nothing to do with me," Elian said. "She’s your concern. Your council’s concern."
"You left the greenhouse."
"I had ledgers." freeweɓnovel.cøm
"Elian."
He turned around.
Caelian was sitting up. Looking at him with the violet eyes, morning-tired, the severity softened by sleep into something more honest.
"If I had a choice," Elian said, "of leaving this situation and going back to my own life — I would take it. Without hesitation." He said it clearly. Not cruelly. Just plainly. "That’s still true. It will probably always be true."
The room was quiet.
Caelian looked at him.
Something moved through his face that Elian didn’t let himself examine too closely.
"You don’t want to stay," Caelian said.
"I never wanted to be here in the first place," Elian said. "You know that."
A pause.
"Yes," Caelian said. "I know that."
He looked at his hands. At the bracelet on his wrist.
"I understand," he said.
He got up. Found his coat from where he’d left it. Put it on with the careful movements of a man doing something ordinary while something else was happening underneath.
"Thank you for—" He stopped. Started again differently. "I slept well."
He left.
Elian sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the door for a while.
That was the correct thing to say, he told himself. That was honest. That was appropriate.
He got up and went to find Sable.
* * *
Rowan found Caelian in the east corridor.
He’d been looking for him — Edmund had said he’d left the consort’s wing, which was its own piece of information, and Rowan had been putting things together since the greenhouse in ways he hadn’t voiced yet.
"You look better than yesterday," Rowan said.
"I slept," Caelian said.
They walked. The corridor, the turn toward the outer garden. The comfortable silence of people who had grown up with each other’s quiet.
"Am I," Caelian said, "such a bad prospect that nobody wants to be married to me."
Rowan looked at him.
"You have a consort," he said carefully. "You’re meeting candidates for a second. I don’t think you’re struggling."
"He looked at me this morning and said if he had a choice he’d leave." Caelian said it without inflection. "He meant it."
Rowan was quiet.
"He’s been doing things," Caelian said. "In the palace. I don’t know exactly what. But something changed when he arrived and something changes when he’s — present. And now he isn’t, and—" He stopped. "He meant every word."
They stood at the garden entrance.
Isolde appeared beside Rowan, having caught them up. She looked at Caelian.
"Your Highness," she said. "I don’t think he meant it the way you heard it. People say things when they’re frustrated. It doesn’t mean—"
"He meant it," Caelian said simply. "I know what it sounds like when someone means something."
He went inside.
Rowan and Isolde stood at the garden entrance.
Rowan looked at the door.
Isolde looked at Rowan.
Neither of them said anything.
* * *
The temple was busy in the mornings.
Elian had gotten used to the rhythm of it — the early prayers, the specific sequence of the opening ritual, the particular quality of the light through the stone windows at this hour. He and Sable had taken to sitting in the back, watching, taking notes when they could without being obvious about it.
He was watching the head priest lead the morning sequence when he felt it.
A gaze.
Not the diffuse awareness of a crowd. Specific. Directed.
He turned.
A man was sitting three rows back and to the left, watching him with the relaxed attention of someone who had been watching for a while and wasn’t bothered about being caught.
He looked — Elian’s brain reached for the word — like someone who didn’t belong to any particular place. The clothes were layered, mismatched in a way that suggested long travel rather than poverty. Dark eyes. The kind of face that had been weathered by a lot of different weathers. A collection of things around his neck and wrists that Elian recognized, some of them, as tools of the trade.
Practitioner, Elian thought.
The man smiled.
"You," he said, just loud enough to carry, "are something I have never seen before."
Sable went still beside Elian.
Elian looked at him.
"That’s an interesting opening," Elian said.
"I find interesting openings get interesting responses." He tilted his head. "You’re not from here. Not this country, not this — context. And you’re working something that nobody in this kingdom has the tradition for." He looked genuinely curious. "How."
"Carefully," Elian said.
The man laughed. Short, genuine. "Fair." He looked between Elian and Sable. "I know a great many rituals. Some of them are not the kind that get discussed in polite temples." He glanced at the altar, the head priest, the morning faithful. "Dark workings, light workings, and everything in between."
"A dark sorcerer," Elian said.
The man looked at him with something that might have been amusement.
"I wouldn’t say purely dark," he said. "I wouldn’t say purely good either." He leaned back slightly. "Think of me as someone who works with what’s needed."
"Morally grey," Elian said.
"If you like." He extended a hand, unhurried. "Riven."
Elian looked at him.
Looked at the things around his neck. At the specific combination of them — some protective, some he couldn’t categorize, one that he was fairly certain was for something his master would have called deeply inadvisable.
He shook the hand.
"Elian," he said.
Riven smiled.
"I know," he said. "I’ve been hearing about you for two weeks. You’ve been making noise in places that don’t usually have noise." He tilted his head. "You need something you don’t know how to get. I might know how to get it."
"Or," Elian said, "you might want something from me in return that I’m not going to like."
Riven looked delighted.
"Now," he said, "we’re having an interesting conversation."
* * *
Riven introduced himself to the kitchen staff as a household consultant brought in to review the palace’s supply chains.
It was, technically, not untrue.
He spent two hours in the kitchen. Helping with prep work, asking questions, laughing at the right moments, remembering names. By the end of it three different staff members had volunteered information he hadn’t asked for.
That was the art of it. You didn’t ask. You just made yourself pleasant and let people fill the silence.
The tea came up naturally. He didn’t push. Just listened.
Always been here, they said. Gets refilled. Don’t remember who by.
He went to the outpost after. Checked every record.
Nothing.
He came back to the sitting room and sat across from Elian and told him what he’d found.
Which was that someone had been maintaining a specific addition to the tea supply for years without leaving any record of it.
"Clean," Riven said. "Very clean. Whoever is doing this knows exactly how to move through a palace without leaving traces."
Elian looked at the table.
"Someone embedded," he said.
"Someone who has been here long enough that their presence in the kitchen, in the supply rooms, in any part of this palace — is invisible," Riven said. "Not because they hide. Because they belong."
Elian was very still.
"Yes," he said. "That’s right."
He looked at the wall.
The thread was right there again.
He didn’t pull it.
Not yet.
He went to the shrine before bed.
Stood outside it in the dark.
The divine being’s presence was there — warm, steady. It had gotten stronger over the months. The maids’ offerings, the genuine faith building up.
Are you strong enough yet, Elian thought at it. For what’s coming.
A warmth. Not quite an answer.
Keep growing, he thought. We’re going to need you.
He went inside.
