He left with a step that was almost light.
I turned the page. Read the next dispatch. The fog hummed, warm and approving, and the runes beneath my collar settled into their familiar low burn.
* * *
The afternoon continued.
Reports from the border. A dispute between two council members over jurisdiction in the lower markets. A request from the Academy's teaching body for additional funding that I denied without consideration. The work was a river, and I moved through it with the current, neither swimming nor drowning but simply being carried, my hands making the correct motions at the correct times in the correct order.
At the fourth bell, Milan returned.
He appeared in the doorway without knocking — a liberty he'd always taken, since the days when he'd stood in this same study with Gün Ata and Elif and the rest of them, back when the world was configured differently and the word friend still meant something my mind could process.
"Sarp sent word from Ceren's estate," he said. He settled into the chair across from my desk and made himself comfortable with the speed of someone who'd never once doubted his right to be comfortable anywhere. "Ada's gone."
I continued reading.
“Ceren told Sarp she left three days ago. Alone. Bound the fox with a command spell to keep her from following." He leaned forward. "Hakan. She came back. She came back here."
"I'm aware."
"You're — " Milan's expression shifted. The performance of concern deepened into something that, on a less practiced face, might have resembled genuine alarm. "You've seen her?"
"Eren informed me she was at the gate. I declined the audience."
Milan stared at me for a long moment. "She's standing in the rain."
"So I've been told."
"Hakan. She has more right to walk these halls than anyone in this building, including you. She was Gün Ata's heir. She was supposed to rule here. You stepped in because she was drowning in grief and someone had to hold the court together — that was the understanding. And now you've sent a clerk to turn her away in the rain like she's a stranger petitioning for market rights." He paused. "She was your everything. You loved her. Whatever happened between you, whatever reasons you had for what you did that night, she deserves — "
"She deserves nothing from me," I said. The words came out flat, unweighted, carrying no more emotional charge than the dispatches I'd been reading. "She has no position in this court. No standing. No claim on my time. If she chooses to stand in the rain, that's her decision."
Milan fell silent. His eyes moved to my collar — to the angular script creeping above the fabric, visible now where it hadn't been a month ago. He studied the runes with an expression I couldn't read and didn't try to.
"You're changing," he said quietly.
"I'm governing."
"That's not what I mean."
I set down my pen and met his gaze. "If you have intelligence to report, report it. If you're here to discuss my personal affairs, you can leave."
Something moved behind his eyes — quick, calculating, there and gone. He nodded slowly, and whatever expression he'd been wearing rearranged itself into acceptance.
"She's grieving," he said, rising. "Barely functioning. And she came back anyway. That should tell you something."
"It tells me she's irrational."
Milan left. The door closed behind him with the soft click of someone who had learned when a conversation was over.
I didn't mean to look.
The window behind my desk faced the street that ran along the eastern approach to the Academy — a wide avenue lined with lamp-posts that cast circles of amber light in the gathering dusk. The rain had intensified since morning, falling in dense, silver sheets that turned the cobblestones to mirrors and emptied the streets of everyone with the sense to seek shelter.
I was reaching for a fresh sheet of parchment when my gaze drifted — not deliberately, not with intent, just the unconscious movement of eyes that had been focused on close work for hours and sought distance to rest. The way you look out a window without looking at anything. A reflex. Nothing more.
She was standing on the far side of the street.