"It's only that Dravok's been asking when you mean to come and see him." Rhosyn stepped past him into the hall as he made room. "It's time, Trafalgar. Past time, if he's the one doing the asking."
"I know, I know." He fell in beside her, steering them both toward the sitting room at an unhurried pace. "We'll meet them soon. The sooner we start, the sooner I'm worth anything, and the sooner we start finding whoever's left of our people."
"You say it like it's a short road." Rhosyn's mouth curved, dry. "It won't be as quick as you've got it in your head. To reach the ones still out there, you'll have to climb higher than you can picture from where you're standing."
"It'll get done." He glanced sideways at her, something almost boyish surfacing under the dry front. "Or won't it? Go on. Tell me you don't feel something different about me."
Rhosyn stopped, looked him over properly for the first time since she'd come in, and let out a short breath that was nearly a laugh.
"Hm. You've climbed a core." She started walking again. "That's what you dragged me in here to flaunt? Fine. Yes. You're moving fast, faster than you've any right to, though I'd wager every soul in this house has told you the same." A pause, and something more thoughtful ran through it. "Look at Valttair. The age he is, and the height he's reached. I couldn't tell you what Dravok will want out of you before he's satisfied. That's a thing we'll have to learn the hard way."
"And Dravok himself," Trafalgar said. "What am I walking into?"
Something complicated moved through her face. "Dravok doesn't teach the way you're used to being taught. He'll take you apart first, and see what's worth keeping out of the pieces. Go in expecting that much, and it'll hurt a little less."
"Comforting." He let a breath out. "And his end of it. It's all finished?"
"Ready and waiting, whenever you are." Her black eyes moved to him. "Anything left to deal with here first?"
"Something's come up, as it happens." He kept his voice level. "One of my sisters has been busy, and now there are answers I have to go and dig out. Nothing worth losing sleep over, though. Not yet, at least. Valttair's home, and he won't let anything come apart while he's the one holding it together."
"That's worth hearing." Rhosyn nodded slowly. "The more time you've got before we leave, the better it sits with me." Then the dryness went out of her, and what took its place was older and far heavier. "The barrier's wearing thin. We'll see how long it lasts, but taking the grim view of it, it holds another eight years at the least. Whatever we do, it has to be done before it doesn't."
"I know." He said it low this time, the last of the humor gone out of him. "I know."
For a few steps neither of them spoke, and Trafalgar let the weight of it press down on him. Eight years. A barrier wearing thinner by the day.
They reached the sitting room a moment later.
The warmth of it met them at the door, the tea and the low talk and the four faces turning toward the new arrival. Rhosyn took the room in with a small tip of her head, unhurried, and greeted each of them in turn. If she was surprised to find Bartholomew folded into a chair among them, she gave it away only in the brief pause of her gaze coming to rest on him.
"Bartholomew." A flicker of something close to amusement crossed her. "They've got you cornered too, I see."
Barth, who had been quietly praying the attention of the room might move to anyone else at all, took the reprieve with both hands. "Lady Rhosyn. It's good to see you."
The rest of it passed easily. Rhosyn stayed a while, and for a woman with the ruin of an entire people behind her, she folded into the warmth of the room better than anyone would have guessed. Mayla drew her into the talk without appearing to try, the way she drew everyone in. Cynthia decided the strange woman in black could be trusted on the grounds that she ate what was set in front of her. And if any of them found it odd to be passing bread to a Primordial, not one of them let it show. The afternoon wound down into evening the way the good ones tend to.
By the next morning the house had already shifted its rhythm around what was coming. There were things to see to before Trafalgar left, and one of them lived somewhere the rest of the household had never once been told about.
He went with Caelum.
The place lay far beneath the mansion, past doors that answered to no one else, down a long stair cut into cold stone that swallowed the light off the lamp Caelum carried. Their footsteps were the only sound. The air turned older and colder the deeper they went, pressing in close on either side.
Two years the man had been down here. Two years asleep, held under by whatever it was Caelum did to keep him that way, a card Trafalgar had picked up out of the ruin of Aurevane and never yet found the right moment to play. He hadn't come to play it now, either. But everything above ground had begun to move at once, the mine and Rivena and a homunculus passing for a girl at the Academy, and before he disappeared into Dravok's training for however long it took, he wanted his own eyes on the one piece no one else knew he held. He wanted to be sure the man was exactly where he had left him.
Trafalgar spoke without slowing, his voice low in the dark.
"So how's he keeping, after all this time?"
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