Chapter 347 --347
She brought work.
Of course she brought work. She had a document case with a week’s worth of reading material that she had been meaning to get to and a set of blank pages for notes and correspondence, and she spent the first four hours of the journey working through it steadily, the carriage’s motion a background condition that she incorporated into her rhythm the way she incorporated most background conditions — by ignoring it until it became relevant.
It became relevant at approximately the fifth hour.
The road through the Verdan corridor was old — one of the empire’s original transit routes, built before the capital had been where the capital was now, which meant it had been built for a different destination and had been repurposed several times since without ever being properly rebuilt for its current purpose. She had noted this in the road infrastructure reports. She had flagged it for the construction commission. She was now experiencing it personally, which was clarifying in the way that personal experience of a reported problem always was.
She set down her pen and looked out the window.
Forest on both sides. Old forest — the kind with trees large enough that the road felt like a passage through something, a cutting made in a living thing that had not particularly welcomed the cutting and had been slowly, patiently regrowing around the edges of it for centuries. The light came through in pieces, green-filtered, moving. She watched it.
She was, she recognized, tired. Not the acute exhaustion of the dungeon corridor, when her legs had simply stopped. The chronic kind, the kind that a week’s worth of normal sleep would not entirely resolve — the accumulated tiredness of a person who had been operating at a sustained deficit for long enough that the deficit had become the baseline.
She would sleep in the carriage tonight if necessary. She would—
The carriage stopped.
Not gradually. It lurched to a stop, a sudden pull of the horses being reined in hard, and she was already reaching for the door handle before the coachman’s voice came.