The Meridian was not the kind of establishment that required reservations, but Caelum had a standing arrangement with the owner that functioned like one — a corner table near the fire that was understood to be available to him on the evenings he came alone, which were the evenings he came to think rather than to be sociable. The owner, a former cavalry soldier who had transitioned from service to hospitality with the same practical competence he'd applied to both, understood the difference and accommodated it without commentary.

Valerius found him there at the seventh hour.

This was, in itself, information. Valerius Vance had not sought him out in the evenings since Seraphine died — had not, in fact, come to the Meridian since the weeks immediately after the funeral, when they had all three sat here with untouched drinks and no one had found anything adequate to say. Caelum watched him come through the door and noted the way he moved, which was different from the way he had moved for four months: not light, not easy, but purposeful in a way that the shuffle of a man moving through grief and the shuffle of a man moving toward something he does not yet know he wants are distinct, and Caelum had spent twenty-one years learning the difference.

He flagged the owner for a second glass before Valerius reached the table.

"I wasn't sure you'd be here," Valerius said, which was his version of: I looked for you here specifically.

"I'm often here on Thursdays." Caelum pushed the glass toward him. "Sit down."

Valerius sat. He looked at the fire for a moment, then at the table, then at Caelum with the particular directness of someone who has decided to be more direct than they are comfortable with. "You know her."

"I've met her."

"She approached you."

"She did."

"Before she approached me."

Caelum arranged his expression into the neutral attentiveness of a man at a formal inquiry — not deceptive, not forthcoming, simply present. "Yes."

Valerius processed this. He picked up his glass and did not drink from it, which was one of his tells — holding something without using it indicated he was occupied with something he had not resolved. "She told me she's pursuing you," he said, at last, with a careful evenness.

"She told me that as well."

A pause. "Is it true?"

Caelum had known this question was coming and had prepared for it with the care of someone who has agreed to maintain a fiction while also agreeing not to lie directly. He turned his glass slowly on the table. "She is a remarkable person," he said. Which was true. "She has very clear priorities and acts on them with a focus I find impressive." Also true. "I've agreed to spend time with her in the lead-up to the Festival." True, though incomplete.

Valerius looked at him. The fire moved in the hearth, making his face harder to read than usual — the deep-water eyes with their suggestion of contained force watching Caelum with the quality of attention he reserved for things he was trying to understand accurately.

"She wants me to play for her," Valerius said.

"I know."

"You didn't mention she'd approached you when you were at the house yesterday."

"You didn't ask."

"I'm asking now."

Caelum met his eyes. The firelight was not ideal for this kind of conversation — too warm, too much movement in it. He preferred having difficult conversations in good light, where the work of reading expressions was not complicated by interference. "She asked me if I was willing to be part of what she's building. I said yes. I thought it was worth supporting."

"Why?"

This was the question he'd been waiting for and had prepared an honest answer to. He set his glass down. "Because in four months, nobody — not me, not Elowen, not the Academy, not any of the resources or the care we've applied to this — nobody has made your hands move the way they apparently moved last night." He looked at Valerius steadily. "She has. In three nights. I don't know how she did it and I don't need to understand how she did it. I know what the outcome looks like, and the outcome looks like you going out at night and coming back with something different in your face, and I'm going to support whatever causes that."

The silence that followed was long. The fire settled. Someone at the bar ordered something and the owner poured it. Outside, the canal moved past in the particular way Oakhaven canals moved in winter — slower, under the weight of cold.

"She's pursuing you," Valerius said, again, with a very careful neutrality.

"She said so."

"And you—"

"I like her," Caelum said, which was true and which was not, he had decided, the same as claiming reciprocal romantic interest. "She's interesting and she's direct and she doesn't manage me, which is a quality I value." He paused. "Why do you ask?"

Valerius looked at his glass. "I'm establishing the terms," he said, with the precision of someone filing information in its correct category. "If you have an interest, I'm a third party to the arrangement. I need to know the parameters."

Caleum looked at him for a moment — at the careful phrasing, at the studied neutrality, at the hands that were moving slightly against the table in the familiar pattern of a musician thinking about something else. He said: "What are the parameters you're most concerned about?"

Valerius was quiet for long enough that the answer became available without being stated.

"Val," Caelum said, gently, because there were moments when the full name was required. "Have you eaten today?"

"That's not related to what we're discussing."

"Everything is related to everything. Have you eaten?"

A pause. "At noon."

"It's the seventh hour."

"I'm not hungry."

Caleum flagged the owner for the winter soup, which was what the Meridian served when the temperature dropped below a certain point and which was, in his experience, one of the most reliable interventions available to him when Valerius decided that physical maintenance was optional.

They sat with the fire and the wine and the approaching soup, and Caelum watched his friend look at the middle distance with the expression of someone trying to sort something into the wrong category because the right one was uncomfortable.

"The selection announcement is up," Caelum said, because the conversation needed a different direction. "Have you looked at the requirements?"

"I saw the notice."

"The requirements this year are technical. The resonance scoring is weighted at forty percent of the total. You would score in the upper tier without effort."

"I'm not entering the selection."

"The act you're building with Aurelia—"

"I'm not entering the selection," Valerius said, with the finality of someone establishing a boundary rather than expressing a preference. "We're rehearsing. That's separate from any intention to perform publicly."

Caelum let this stand. The soup arrived. Valerius ate it without being asked twice, which was, under the current conditions, a minor victory.

"She told me the dance she's building is old," Valerius said, after a while. "That it comes from her tradition. She was—" He paused, with the careful quality he had when filtering information for relevance. "There were things she didn't say about it."

"There usually are," Caelum said.

"That doesn't bother you?"

"I'm a cavalry captain. I've worked with people who carried significant information under the surface my entire career. I've learned that the things people don't say immediately aren't always things they're keeping from you. Sometimes they're things they're not ready to say yet." He looked at Valerius. "I extend that courtesy unless I have reason not to."

Valerius considered this. "And you don't have reason not to."

"Not so far."

The soup was finished. The fire had settled lower. Outside, the canal boats were done for the evening, the waterway quiet and dark under the crystal lanterns.

"I'm going to practice on Monday," Valerius said. "At the cathedral. Early."

"I know."

"You don't need to arrange anything."

"I know that too."

Valerius stood, and gathered himself, and looked at Caelum with the expression that was reserved for moments when he wanted to say something and had not yet found the right form for it. Caelum waited.

"The last time I played anything," Valerius said, at last, "was the night before she died. I was at the Academy. I was working on the autumn concert programme. I was there until midnight. If I had come home—"

"Val."

"I'm not asking for reassurance. I'm telling you that when I played last night, that was the thought I was expecting to arrive. And it didn't." He stopped. "It just — didn't come. The music was there, and the thought wasn't. I don't know what that means."

Caleum looked at him for a long time. Then he said: "I think it means you're still here."

Valerius nodded once, as if this had been a piece of information rather than a comfort, and turned and walked out of the Meridian without saying goodbye, which was normal and had always been normal and required no accommodation.

Caleum sat with the fire and the empty glasses and thought about the girl who had sat on the Promenade bench with her quiet, careful assessment and her incomplete information, and the boy who had just discovered that the silence between notes could be empty rather than full of the wrong things, and the particular shape of an arrangement that he suspected was going to cost everyone involved more than they had currently factored for.

He called for another drink. He sat with it and did not drink it immediately, which was his own version of holding something while he thought.

In the morning, he would go back to his patrol. In the morning, Valerius would go to the cathedral at an early hour and the girl with the amber eyes would be there, and something would continue that had already started in ways neither of them fully understood.

In the morning, he told himself, he would revisit his conditions.

For tonight, the fire was warm and the city was quiet, and somewhere across Oakhaven a violinist was probably standing in a practice room with a bow in his hand, doing the thing he had come to believe he could not do anymore, and this was, Caelum decided, sufficient grounds for optimism.