Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Chapter 373 --373

"Yes," she said.

He sat with the knowledge of it — the map in his head connecting to the view from up here, the two perspectives finding each other. She could see the specific satisfaction of it in his stillness.

"It’s the same city," he said. "From here and from inside it. It’s the same."

"Yes," she said.

"I thought—" He paused. "I thought they might feel different. The view of a place and the inside of it. But it is the same place."

She looked at the city. "The view gives you the shape," she said. "The inside gives you the texture. They’re both true. They need each other to be the full picture."

He thought about this. "Like the mechanism," he said. "What it does and how it works."

"Yes," she said. "Exactly like that."

He held his mechanism — he had brought it, she saw, carried in his lap on the way up. He turned it in his hands, not fiddling, just the comfortable contact of someone holding something familiar. He looked at the city.

Fen was still looking at the sky. She had not resumed the professional posture and Elara did not prompt her to. The sky was the sky. The afternoon was the afternoon. The fourth district information would be what it was when it was confirmed and not before.

For a long time the three of them simply occupied the flat stone in the summer afternoon and said very little. The city below continued its continuous existence. The river glinted where Samuel had found it. A bird — not the grey cat’s bird, a different one, the city was full of birds that nobody noticed because the city was also full of everything else — flew across the space between the palace wall and the nearest building and was gone.

"Elder sister," Samuel said.

"Yes."

"What are you thinking about?"

She looked at the city. She thought about how to answer honestly without the full complicated weight of it — about the somewhere, about the category she had discovered, about Demerti’s ordinary things.

"I am thinking about the difference between what you go toward and what is just there," she said.

He thought about this. "What do you mean?"

"I have spent most of my life going toward things," she said. "Objectives. Problems to solve. Situations to improve. The direction was always — forward. Toward something."

"And?"

"And Demerti said something today," she said. "About the ordinary things. The things that are not objectives. That are just—" She paused. "Just there."

Samuel was quiet for a moment. He was looking at the river suggestion in the distance.

"The fried dough," he said.

She looked at him.

"The fried dough is not an objective," he said. "It is just there. And we go to it." He paused. "And the rope seller. And Oren." He turned the mechanism in his hands. "None of those were objectives. They were just—" He found the word. "Adjacent."

She looked at him.

"Adjacent to the direction," he said. "Not the destination. But there, beside the direction. And you went to them." He looked at the mechanism. "Maybe that is what the ordinary thing is. Not a destination. Adjacent."

She was quiet.

Fen had stopped looking at the sky and was looking at Samuel with the expression she had when someone said something that landed accurately.

Elara looked at the city — at the shape of it from up here, the accumulated evidence of many lives being lived in the adjacent space beside whatever each person was going toward. The rope seller six generations deep into his adjacent thing. Oren building patience into objects. Mira saving food for the building’s cat.

Samuel, with his mechanism and his grey eyes and his patient understanding of leverage, sitting on a rock looking at the city he had only recently been given.

"Yes," she said. "Adjacent."

He nodded, satisfied in the quiet way he was satisfied when something resolved correctly.

The afternoon continued.

Below, the city was what it always was — loud and real and full of people navigating the space between their objectives and the adjacent things, most of them not knowing that was what they were doing, all of them doing it regardless.

Above, the sky was the particular deep blue of late summer afternoon, the kind you could look into.

The three of them on the flat stone stayed until the light began its shift toward evening, and nobody said it was time to go, and at some point it simply was and they went, the three of them down the two sets of stairs and back into the palace that was Elara’s somewhere now, even if she was still learning what that meant.

The mechanism was in Samuel’s hands.

The city was in the direction they had come from.

Tomorrow was going to have things in it that needed doing.

But the sky had been very good today.

Demerti had been right about that.

.

.

.

Ken’s fish was ready.

He had said two days and it had been two days, and the announcement arrived not through any formal channel but through the smell, which reached the residential wing at approximately the fifth hour of the evening and made its own case without assistance.

Elara had been in the east corridor talking to Jesper about something that had started as a question about the palace’s original water system and had become, in the way conversations with Jesper tended to become things, a forty minute discussion about the engineering decisions of three centuries ago and the specific personalities of the people who had made them. Jesper had opinions about long-dead engineers. Strong ones. She found this consistently enjoyable.

The smell arrived and Jesper stopped mid-sentence.

"That," he said, with the reverence of a man who had been in the palace long enough to have a very complete database of its smells and was encountering something outside the database, "is not palace kitchen."

"No," she agreed.

"That is something else entirely."

"Yes."

He looked at her with the expression of a man who understood that something had changed in the palace’s kitchen situation and was rapidly updating his understanding of the implications. "The beast knight," he said. "The one who has been—"

"Ken," she said.

"Ken," Jesper repeated, as though filing the name precisely. "He has been cooking."

"For two days," she said. "This is the result."

Jesper looked in the direction of the kitchen with the expression of a man weighing his dignity against his appetite and finding the calculation more difficult than expected. "I have a great deal of remaining work this evening," he said.

"The water system records will be here tomorrow," she said.

He looked at her.

"Go eat, Jesper," she said.

He went, with the specific dignity of a man who had made a decision and was comfortable with it, in the direction of the kitchen.

---

The dining room that evening had more people in it than usual.

This had been happening incrementally — the informal dinner that had started as Elara and Samuel and whoever happened to be present had been slowly acquiring regulars, people who had figured out the rhythm of it and had decided that being present was preferable to not being present. Not because of any instruction or expectation.