Chapter 9: What Guardianship Has Cost Aeron, Counted Honestly

The Royal Mile at three in the morning is not empty so much as emptied — the distinction matters, to something old enough to remember what fills it by day. The ghost-tour crowds gone, the last pub stragglers absorbed into closes and stairwells, the cobblestones shining with a wet, impersonal beauty that they never quite manage in daylight when there are people to perform it for. Aeron walked slowly, without destination, which was the most honest he had been about his condition in several days.

He had told Seris he needed air. She had looked at him over the dark green notebook with the expression she deployed when she was declining to say that air was a gaseous mixture rather than a requirement for beings of his particular constitution, and said, with the exact amount of precision it required: "I'll continue the analysis." Which was her way of saying: go. Which was also her way of saying: I noticed you needed to. He was discovering that Seris communicated a great deal in what she chose not to quantify.

The Castle sat above the city the way it always sat — with the particular assurance of something that has outlasted its reasons. Aeron had seen it twice before, at different points in its construction, when it was rawer and more obviously desperate in its aspiration. He had a habit of doing that — arriving, observing, leaving before anything became a claim on his attention. It had seemed, for most of those arrivals, like the right kind of discipline.