Chapter 368 --368
He had been eating his meals in his room until approximately four days ago, when he had begun appearing for the informal evening meal that Elara had established as the palace’s actual dinner, as opposed to the formal state dinner that happened on occasion and that she had reduced in frequency to the bare minimum that protocol required. The informal meal was small — herself, Samuel, whoever happened to be present in the relevant wing at the relevant hour, which recently had included Fen and occasionally Demerti and twice had included an elderly noble named Lord Faras who had been visiting on administrative business and had been too hungry to maintain the fiction that he did not want to eat.
Tonight it included Mahir.
He had appeared at the doorway of the dining room at approximately the time that the food smell had become impossible to be within range of without responding to, which was not a coincidence. He had looked at the table and at the people at it and had done the brief calculation that produced his expression of asking-without-asking.
Elara had said, "Sit down," and then turned back to her conversation with Samuel, who was telling her what Jesper had told him about the older sections of the palace and had clearly been filing it systematically because he was delivering it with footnotes.
Mahir had sat down.
He and Ken exchanged a look across the table that contained, as most of their exchanges did, a full conversation. Then Ken had turned to Samuel and asked him something about the mechanism from the craftsman’s workshop, which Samuel had brought to the table because he had been fiddling with it while he waited for dinner and had not put it down, and a conversation had started that moved from the mechanism to the way mechanisms generally worked to a question about water wheels that Elara knew the answer to and let Samuel answer instead, which he did correctly.
It was a dinner.
Not a strategic dinner, not a political dinner, not a dinner with an agenda. A dinner where people ate extraordinary food and talked about mechanisms and architecture and the grey cat that had been seen again in the east garden and whether it was the same one or a different one with a similar ear situation.
"It’s the same one," Fen said. She had arrived approximately seven minutes into the meal with the expression of someone who had been doing something elsewhere and had followed the smell. "I’ve seen it three times. The ear is distinctive."
"It won the territory," Samuel said. "Elder sister said it would."