KAELRITH
Thalric had given me a role and a room and food on a corridor floor and his name said in the dark at Ashfen's boundary and three years of exile reconsidered in the light of a fabricated evidence trail. I had given him the proposal from his desk. We had not yet given each other the thing that the giving of everything else had been building toward, the conversation neither of us had found the right moment for, and that was going to require finding the moment deliberately because the right moment was not going to arrive on its own.
I went to find him. He was in the administrative room where he had been working through the governance correspondence that had accumulated during the crisis, the specific, ordinary work of a man who ran a territory and did not stop running it because lar
