Chapter 369 --369
Nature had a specific quality when you stopped moving long enough to notice it.
Elara had not stopped moving in a long time. She was not certain she remembered how. But she was stopped now — sitting on the flat stone at the edge of the palace’s upper garden, the one that nobody came to because it required climbing two sets of stairs and offered nothing practical, just a view of the sky and the distant suggestion of the city below — and the sky was doing what skies did when you gave them your full attention.
It was extraordinary.
Not dramatically — not the painted-ceiling kind of extraordinary that people described in poetry. Just the honest kind, the kind that came from actually looking at something enormous that you had been too busy to look at. The blue of it was very specific right now, the summer blue that had depth to it, the kind of blue you could look into rather than simply at. There were clouds — the high, thin kind that moved slowly enough to be almost still but were never actually still, always shifting, the shape that existed ten seconds ago already gone and replaced by something almost identical.
She had been sitting here for — she did not know how long.
That was unusual. She always knew how long. Time was one of the things she tracked automatically, the way she tracked people’s expressions and document organization and the quality of information in reports. But right now she had no idea if she had been here for thirty minutes or two hours, and she found that she did not particularly want to look at the sun’s position to find out.
She was thinking about nothing.
That was also unusual. Her mind was not empty — it was never empty, there was always a layer of running calculation, the continuous background process of everything she was tracking. But the foreground was clear. She was looking at the sky and she was present in the looking and nothing else was demanding the front of her attention.
She thought about her staff — Demerti’s face when she had declared the brief vacation period. The specific expression of relief that had moved across the administrative office like a wave, people looking at each other with the cautious happiness of people who had been told something good and were waiting for the correction that would make it not good.
She remembered that expression.