Before dawn the air in the suite always felt cooler than the corridor: the stone floor kept the night, embers winked in the hearth, and the parchment corners on the map frame between the windows faintly rustled in the draft. Darius didn’t ask me to wait outside; he beckoned me in with one gesture, and when I shut the door, silence settled on us like a well-fitted coat.
“Sit,” he said, pointing not to the armchair but to the low couch in the anteroom. “We speak alone; what I’ll say concerns no one else. We leave for two weeks. Half of it is travel; the other half is a test—yours and mine.”
His voice was dry, factual, yet I felt the dense attention that doesn’t let answers go. I sat. The cold iron ring at my wrist touched the linen, a reminder of where I’d started.
“I know the guard and C
