Chapter 370 --370
He was quiet for a moment, in the comfortable way. Demerti had always had comfortable silences — it was one of the things she had valued about him from early on, the absence of the anxious-filling-silence quality that most people had in her presence. He did not need to fill the silence. He was simply in it.
"Is something wrong?" he asked, after a while. Not urgently. Gently.
"Nothing is wrong," she said.
"But something is—"
"Something is unclear," she said. "That is different from wrong."
He looked at the sky. "What is unclear?"
She thought about how to say it to Demerti specifically — not in the way she would have written it in a document or analyzed it for herself, but in the way you said things to a person who had been genuinely present for a significant portion of your life and who you did not need to perform for.
"I do not know what I am doing," she said. "Not the daily things. The larger thing."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I remember the staff’s faces," she said, "when I said vacation. The happiness. And I did not understand it at first. Now I think I understand it better but the understanding does not tell me how to—" She paused. "I have always been going toward something. Before, it was survival. Then it was the throne. Then it was fixing the most broken things. But those are not — they are not what made their faces do that."
Demerti looked at the sky for a long moment.
"May I say something that is perhaps not my place to say?" he said.