Chapter 311 --311
But the specific closeness she had built with the knights — the working distance that had over months become something shorter than working distance — began, gently, to expand.
Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone could point at and name.
But not so quietly that they couldn’t feel it.
She knew they felt it. She was not trying to prevent that. She was trying to give herself enough space to think clearly about what she now knew before the thinking got interrupted by the people the thinking was most about.
This was the correct logic.
She was also, she was honest enough to know, afraid.
She filed this and kept working.
***
The Liang Meridian ship was due the following morning.
She went to the shore in the late afternoon to check the arrival point — normal, practical, the kind of thing that Lian Mei of Liang Meridian did routinely. Verify the docking position. Confirm the manifest timing. The customs documentation had been filed but filing and confirming were different actions and she preferred confirming.
The waterfront was settling toward evening. The light came in long and low across the water, the activity thinning, the smell of salt and rope and the specific industry of a port city winding down. She stood at the edge of the dock with the documents in her hand.
She was not reading them.