Caelum's dining room was not large enough for four people to avoid being in each other's presence, which was, Valerius suspected, entirely intentional.

The table seated six but Caelum had arranged it for four — the chairs pulled to one end, the candles clustered there, the effect being a space that required proximity rather than merely permitting it. Valerius recognized this as one of Caelum's particular forms of social engineering: the deliberate construction of environments that made the things he wanted to happen more likely to happen, deployed so naturally that the people inside the environment rarely noticed they were inside it.

Elowen had arrived before them. She was in the kitchen when Valerius and Lysandra came in, doing something practical with the herbs that Caelum kept but never used, and she looked up when they entered with the expression she wore when she had been expecting them and was not going to say so.

The introduction between Elowen and Lysandra was the first one that had happened under conditions that permitted actual observation. Previous encounters had been brief, peripheral, background to other things. Tonight there was no performance to prepare for, no schedule to maintain. They looked at each other across the kitchen with the assessing quality of two people who are gathering information about a mutual significant other without having agreed on the terms of that category.

Elowen extended her hand. "Elowen Reed. I've heard you're remarkable."

Lysandra took it. Her grip was the specific kind that communicates equal footing — not aggressive, not deferential, present. "Aurelia Thorne. I've heard you're the reason he takes his tinctures."

Elowen looked at Valerius, briefly, with the expression that meant she was filing something. "Only some of them."

Valerius moved past this exchange to the table, where there was wine and an excuse to be occupied with something.

The dinner was the most socially functional hour he had spent in recent memory, which was simultaneously gratifying and disorienting. Caelum told the story about the canal bridge incident — the one with the horse that had taken three Knights and a significant amount of rope to resolve — with the timing of someone who has told a story enough times to have refined it to its essential elements. Elowen asked precise questions about the rehearsal process in the way she asked questions about anything: with genuine interest and the capacity to take technical information and hold it without oversimplifying. Lysandra answered her with more detail than she usually provided on the subject, which Valerius noticed and filed without yet knowing what to do with the filing.

What he noticed, across the dinner, was how she moved through a room.

Not as a performer — as a person. The social register she deployed was different from the cathedral register, from the backstage register, from the quiet register of late evenings under the moon-laurel tree. Here she was bright in a way that was genuine rather than constructed: quick to laugh, attentive to whoever was speaking, possessed of the particular social gift of making people feel that their sentences are more interesting than they had expected them to be. The table was warmer for her being at it. He had known this about her in the abstract, from watching her in rehearsal spaces and performance contexts. In a dining room, at close range, with nowhere else to look, the observation became something he could not comfortably maintain in the analytical category.

After the meal, while Elowen was asking Caelum something in the kitchen about the canal system — a follow-up to something from dinner that had apparently produced genuine curiosity — Caelum moved to the far side of the room where a small table held a decanter. Lysandra went with him. They stood together with the ease of people who have developed a working relationship, talking in low voices about something she could not hear from the table.

Then she laughed.

Not the social laugh — the real one. He had learned to distinguish them over six weeks of paying the kind of attention that produces such distinctions. The real laugh was shorter, less controlled, arrived before she had decided to let it, and changed her face completely: the careful brightness became something unguarded, the amber eyes narrowing with genuine amusement, her head tilting back slightly in the way of a person who has lost the thread of composure for a moment and has not yet found it again.

Two seconds. Perhaps three.

In the middle of a sentence he was finishing for Elowen's benefit, Valerius stopped.

The stop was brief — a half-beat, less than a breath, not long enough to be noticed by anyone not paying close attention. Elowen was paying close attention.

He continued the sentence. He finished it correctly. Elowen received it and added something of her own.

His hand on the table had stopped its usual movements and was very still.

"She's extraordinary," Elowen said, after a moment, with the quietness of someone making a statement and leaving room for response.

"She's the most skilled Weave-Dancer I've encountered," he said. Which was true. Which was also a specific selection from among the true things available, and he was aware of the selection as he made it.

Elowen looked at him with the expression that meant she had received both the thing he said and the thing around it. She did not comment on either. She turned to look at where Lysandra and Caelum were standing, and her expression while she looked was not the expression of someone watching a romantic rival — it was more complicated than that, more layered, the expression of a person who has been carrying something for a long time and is considering setting it down.

"She makes you play differently," Elowen said.

"We've been rehearsing intensively. The work improves with time."

"Yes," she said, in the way she had of agreeing with a sentence while meaning more than the sentence contained.

The evening wound down with the gradual drift of people who have been in a good room and are not yet ready to leave it. Caelum moved plates. Elowen helped. Valerius stood at the window with his wine and watched the canal, which was dark and blue and moving slowly under the crystal lanterns.

At the door, the dispersal of the evening produced its natural logistics: Elowen lived north, Caelum was home already, Valerius lived east. Lysandra lived on Willowgate, which was south-adjacent to the cathedral district, and Caelum mentioned something about needing to confirm a detail about the final week's schedule, and they ended up at the door together, leaving at the same time, saying their goodnights to Valerius and Elowen from the threshold.

Valerius stood at the open door after they had gone and looked at the empty street where they had been.

Thirty seconds. Possibly more.

"Cậu ổn không?" Elowen said, behind him.

"I'm fine."

"You've been standing at the door for half a minute."

He turned. She was standing in the hallway with her coat over her arm, looking at him with the specific expression she reserved for moments she had decided to be honest about. Not pitying — honest.

"That's better," she said, quietly. "Standing at the door. Than what you were doing before."

He looked at her.

"Four months ago you would have been in the gray house not opening the case," she said. "Tonight you're standing at a door watching someone leave because you don't want them to have left." She tilted her head slightly. "Those are not the same situation."

He was quiet for a moment. "Elowen."

"I'm not saying anything else about it," she said, and smiled at him — the small, real smile that she kept for moments she had decided were worth a real smile. "Good night, Val."

She left.

He closed the door and stood in Caelum's empty hallway and thought about standing at the door.

He walked home through the city at the late hour when most of the lanterns have shifted to their night frequency, the amber going slightly blue, the canals quiet. In the practice room he sat with the Aetheris across his knees and played the phrase — the twenty-three-bar piece that had been writing itself in the months since.

In the middle of the second section, a new melody appeared beneath the main phrase. Darker, with a questioning quality, circling the primary line without resolving against it. He played it through twice before he understood what it was doing: it was the sound of wanting something and being uncertain whether the wanting was a safe thing to be.

He played them together — the portrait phrase and the darker questioning line beneath it — and the Aetheris carried both with the particular warmth of an instrument that knows the emotion and is not surprised by it.

He set the bow down.

He sat in the practice room for a long time, looking at his hands, which had been moving in two different musical conversations simultaneously without his permission.

The canal was blue. The city was quiet. Somewhere on Willowgate Street, in a room above a candle-maker's shop, the person he had been writing music about was probably awake and probably not thinking about the same things he was thinking about.

Probably.