Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Chapter 366 --366

Samuel was looking at the arch with the expression she recognized — the flood-report expression, the mechanism expression, the quality of attention he gave to things that had connected to something in his internal structure.

"What was the earlier structure?" Samuel asked.

"Nobody is entirely certain," Jesper said, with the slightly pleased expression of a man delivering interesting uncertainty. "The architectural records from that period are incomplete. But the arch type is characteristic of a construction style associated with the pre-dynasty settlement. Which would make it—" He did a mental calculation. "Possibly four hundred years older than the rest of this corridor."

Samuel looked at the arch. "So every time someone walks through this corridor they walk under something four hundred years older than they think they’re walking under."

Jesper looked at him. "I had not thought of it in quite that way," he said. "But yes."

Samuel looked at the arch for another moment. Then he said, with the directness that was becoming his default register: "What else in the palace is older than it looks?"

Jesper appeared to consider this question as the gift it was.

Elara withdrew before either of them noticed her. She walked back toward the east garden, past the courtyard where she had spoken to Mahir earlier, through the smaller corridor that connected the residential wing to the garden passage.

She was thinking about the city. About the river section from this morning, about the specific quality of Samuel’s face when they had been at the water steps. About the rope seller, whose existence she had filed and was now retrieving because Fen had said something about it that had stayed with her — the idea that the palace was the constructed version of the city, that the city was the actual thing.

She had known this. She had known it before Fen had said it. But knowing something and having someone articulate it back to you were different experiences, and the articulation had done something, had made the knowledge more active.

She sat in the garden.

The afternoon was long and the light was the good late-afternoon kind, the kind that made shadows horizontal and gold. The garden held the day’s warmth the way enclosed spaces did, the stone releasing what it had absorbed. She stretched her legs out in front of her, which was not a posture associated with empress-hood in any text she had encountered, and looked at the far wall where the climbing plant she could never remember the name of was doing its late-summer best.

She had, she realized, been sitting down voluntarily in outdoor spaces twice in one day. This was unprecedented in the recent record of her behavior.

She sat with that.

She was trying to understand something that had been at the edge of her thinking for several days, something that she had not yet brought into focus because it kept shifting when she tried to look at it directly. Something about the distance between who she was in the administrative documents — the empress, the work, the system — and who she was in the east garden in a non-empress posture looking at a climbing plant.

The second one felt more real.

That was the thing at the edge. The second one felt more real, and she was not certain what to do with that fact.

She had spent so long — not just since the throne, but before, the years of preparation, the years of watching and reading and positioning — being primarily the strategic version of herself that the other version had become a thing she encountered only occasionally and briefly. The girl who had wanted to know why the rope seller only sold rope. The person who had felt something when Samuel said he had never had a somewhere else before.

She was not sentimental about this. She was not going to become sentimental about it. Sentiment was not the point.

The point was more practical — that the version of herself that existed only in documents and decisions was not, on its own, adequate. That the work required a person doing it, not just a function. That she had been operating recently in a way that was eating into the person in order to sustain the function, and that this was, at a basic level, not sustainable arithmetic.

She had known this too.

But it was different to sit in a garden in the late afternoon and know it through your bones rather than your head.

She heard footsteps that she identified before the person came around the garden path corner — Mahir’s footsteps, which she had catalogued, which she could distinguish now from most of the people who moved regularly through the palace’s inhabited spaces.

He stopped when he saw her.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

There was a moment of mutual assessment of the situation, which was: she was sitting in a garden in an unguarded posture in the late afternoon with her legs extended and the climbing plant doing its thing on the far wall, and he had clearly been intending to walk through the garden for his own reasons and had not expected to find her here, and they were both now deciding what to do about it.

"Sit down," she said.

He sat down on the bench at the edge of the path, which was not the closest bench. That was, she thought, the right choice — close enough for conversation, distant enough to acknowledge the current geometry of their situation.

"The kitchen," he said.

"I know," she said.

"The young staff members are following Ken around," he said. "He has not encouraged this but he has not discouraged it either, which is functionally the same as encouraging it."

"I know," she said again.

"Barro is—"

"Barro will adjust," she said. "He’s a professional. He will not like it and he will adjust and eventually he will understand that Ken being in his kitchen improves his kitchen, and that understanding will be uncomfortable but it will be real."

Mahir was quiet for a moment. "You’re not worried about it."

"I’m not worried about it."

He looked at the garden. She watched him look at it — the specific quality of a person who has been inside for a long time encountering an outside and not yet having the language for what the encounter feels like.

"The bird came back," he said. "After you left. Different bird but same wall."

"Fen says I’m surrounded by people who know who I am," she said. "That it changes the quality of the information I receive."

He considered this. "She’s right."

"I know she’s right."

"But you’re aware of it, which is different from not being aware of it."

"It’s different," she agreed. "Though awareness is not the same as solution."

He looked at her sideways. "What’s the solution?"

"I went to see the city this morning," she said. "A rope seller."

He looked at her.

"Near the river market," she said. "He sells exclusively rope. No other goods. Just rope, in various thicknesses and lengths. And I have been curious about why since I first walked past him approximately three years ago, and I have never stopped to ask because there was always something else."