The map occupied the full length of the table, its edges weighted down at each corner. The crew had gathered around it in their usual loose arrangement — Benedict to one side, Phoenix leaning with characteristic ease against the far edge, Sheriya occupying the smallest possible amount of space near the door, Ivanna present but characteristically attentive to something other than the room. At the head of the table, Reichert sat in a silence that no one moved to interrupt.
It was Benedict who finally spoke, with the air of a man who has been patient for as long as he is naturally capable of being.
"Are we stopping at Gaia Island or not?" He directed this at Reichert without particular expectation of a prompt reply, which was wise.
Reichert's attention was elsewhere. Not absent — he was aware of the room, of the map, of the question — but the weight of his focus had shifted, temporarily, to things that could not be charted.
Her preferences. Her moods. The particular angle of her expression when she was genuinely entertained by something and trying not to show it. The way she swam — not as a human would, not even quite as a dragon would, but as something that belonged to the water in a way that was specific to her.
He knew, already, what his answer to Benedict's question would be. He had known before the question was asked.
"We'll stop at Gaia Island," he said. "The Heilan flowers should be in bloom. The island will be covered in them this time of year."
A beat of silence.
"Since when do you care about flowers?" Benedict asked, then appeared to think better of pressing further, exhaled heavily, and looked away.
Reichert didn't answer. The answer was not one he was going to give to anyone in this room.
'Since I finally have her close to me.' That was the honest answer. Not in his arms — not yet, she had made certain of that — but close. Closer than he had any right to expect, given where they had started. She was allowing the distance between them to close, degree by cautious degree, and he was intelligent enough to understand that this was a thing that required patience and no sudden movements.
Patience was something he had rather a lot of, given the circumstances.
---
Reichert, to the deepest core of what he was, was not a good person. He had made his peace with that assessment long ago. What he was — what he had always been, in this life and in every one of the thirteen that had preceded it — was something that the ordinary categories of good and not-good could not entirely contain. Not quite human, though he had spent more time wearing human form than not. Not quite anything with a settled name.
An abomination was the word his father had used, once, without malice — a creature that should not be, born of circumstances that had no precedent in the order of things.
His mother had loved her creator. That was the beginning of it — the root cause of everything that came after. A love that should have been impossible by definition, the way a river flowing uphill should be impossible, and yet had happened with complete sincerity. His father had not been unmoved by it. His father was not, in fact, unmovable. And from that impossible love had come Reichert — one final remnant of a woman who had eventually ceased to exist for the most extraordinary reason being loving someone she should not have, and giving birth to his offspring.
Who was he to judge the nature of love, given that origin?
He had fallen in love with his father's creation. His godmother, in the sense that applied to beings like them — ancient, made rather than born, existing at the intersection of several things that were not supposed to intersect. She was not an abomination. She was beloved. She was, by every measure that mattered, the finest thing his father had made.
He had loved her with the particular totality of someone who does not know how to do anything by halves.
She had killed him for it.
He had not expected, after his father pieced him back together — a long, painstaking reconstruction, the way you might reconstruct a shattered object of great value, fragment by careful fragment — to feel what he felt. Grief, perhaps. Rage, even. The burning of having been killed by the one he loved, which seemed like the kind of experience that ought to produce at minimum a fundamental revision of feeling.
What he had felt was longing.
Worse than before, if anything. The longing of someone who had been close to the thing they needed most and had then been removed from it, which produces a specific quality of ache that simple distance does not.
His first words, reconstructed and newly functional, had been a series of questions directed at his father: 'What did I do wrong? Why was she angry? How do I win her love?'
His father had looked at him with the expression of a being who has seen a great many things and still occasionally finds himself without words.
"You want to thank me for bringing you back together," his father had said eventually, "and instead you ask me that."
But his father had been merciful. His father had, across every version of events, been merciful.
The terms: enter the cycle of reincarnation as something close to human. Live thirteen lives. Learn what humans are, how they work, what they need and fear and love and become. Prove, life by life, that the understanding had been genuinely acquired. In exchange, at the end of each successful life, a portion of his sealed power returned. Accumulate. Learn. Wait.
Wait for her.
He had agreed without deliberation. A thousand years of waiting and relearning seemed a reasonable price for the thing he was waiting to reach. And the thirteen lives had been, in their way, instructive. He understood humans now with the particular intimacy of someone who had been one, repeatedly, under varied circumstances. He understood human error, human love, human stubbornness, and human grief. He understood the gap between what people wanted and what they were willing to show that they wanted.
He understood patience.
He had almost lost it, in the warehouse. That first glimpse of her, after a thousand years — the accumulated weight of all that waiting had nearly broken through his composure entirely, rising up with the force of something that had been held back for far too long. He had managed it, barely, by the only method immediately available: he had made her dislike him. A provocation carefully calibrated. The cold merchant persona assembled and deployed in real time, purchased at the cost of her first impression of him.
It had worked. And it had given him something to measure himself against — a reminder of what patience had earned and what impatience could cost.
---
The snowstorm had surprised him, though he had known it was coming in the general sense. He had planted the seeds years ago, carefully and without hurry, ensuring that the man Arvid's ambition would eventually outpace his judgment. That the foolish, undeserving creature who had been granted the title of her mate — granted it by the cosmic law, without any apparent consideration of merit — would eventually do something irrevocable.
He had.
The diamond palace had frozen solid. Not metaphorically — literally, structurally, the stone and mortar and wood replaced with ice that was luminous in the dark, the entire structure transformed into something that would have been extraordinarily beautiful if it were not also the physical manifestation of a shattered heart. And at the centre of it, frozen in the same way, was her.
The mate in question had fled. The minister, the servants — everyone had scattered ahead of the cold. He had left her there, surrounded by ice of her own making.
Reichert had requested an audience with the emperor on the third day, when it had become clear that the livestock were gone and the humans would be next.
Arvid had looked haggard. The particular exhaustion of someone who had done something he had not fully thought through, and was now living inside the consequences.
Good. He had earned that exhaustion.
Reichert had presented himself simply: a sorcerer, with knowledge of engraving magic and a solution to the problem at hand. He had laid it out with the clean, merchant efficiency of someone who has prepared his presentation and is not going to waste time.
Arvid had listened, and then asked the question Reichert had expected.
"The bracelet will take her pain away — suppress the memories, calm the magic, end this?"
"Yes, your Majesty. However — if she were to remove it, even accidentally, everything would return at once. The pain, the memories, all of it, and with greater intensity for having been compressed." Reichert held the man's gaze. "Which is why I recommend a voyage. At least a year at sea, long enough for her to accumulate new memories — experiences that are genuinely good, genuinely hers. If the bracelet comes off after enough of those have been laid down, she has to pass through them to reach the painful ones. It becomes manageable rather than catastrophic. And in the meantime, I can develop a more permanent solution."
He waited.
Arvid was quiet for a moment.
"Why?" he said finally. The word came out careful, considering. Those silver-grey eyes moved over Reichert with the particular quality of someone who is excellent at reading people and knows it. "What do you gain from this? Why go to this length for someone you don't know?"
Reichert looked at him.
'You have no idea,' he thought. 'You have no idea how long I have waited for this moment, or what I am standing to gain. You are asking me what I get from this as though the answer could be measured in trade concessions. The answer is the only thing I have ever wanted. The only thing, across a thousand years and thirteen lives, that has remained constant.'
'You are not capable of understanding what that means.'
He assembled the most gracious merchant smile available to him.
"What else would a humble merchant require, your Majesty?" he said pleasantly. "Only the exclusive rights to jewellery distribution across the Selon empire. Nothing more than that."
The man before him was not a fool. Reichert had been wrong, briefly, to think of him that way. He was calculating and dangerous and, in certain respects, formidable.
But he was not a match for someone who had lived thirteen human lives and waited a thousand years to reach this precise conversation.
Arvid had agreed.