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

Chapter 371 --371

Demerti was quiet.

"I do not understand families," she said. "People who went home happy. The kind that produces faces like that. I have never had — I have many people who would follow me. That is not nothing. But it is not that."

He looked at the sky for a long time.

"Samuel," he said, eventually.

She looked at him.

"He calls you elder sister," Demerti said. "You know this. You knew when he said it the first time that it was — something. And you have been—" He chose his words. "You have been going to the city with him. The mechanisms. The fried dough. The river." He paused. "He looks at you the way — if you will permit me to say this — the way that children look at the person who is their somewhere."

She was quiet.

"You said he told you he had never had a somewhere else," Demerti said. "But I think he has a somewhere now. I think it is wherever you are." He looked at her. "And I think perhaps the same is becoming true in the other direction."

The sky was the same sky. The clouds had moved — the shape from ten minutes ago was completely gone, replaced by a different one, and in another ten minutes this one would be gone too.

She sat with what Demerti had said.

She did not confirm it. She did not deny it. She was not certain she had the vocabulary for it yet, or that the vocabulary was necessary. Some things were true before they were named. The petrichor had a name, Fen had said, because it was worth naming. But it had been real long before anyone named it.

"You never wanted to become an administrator," she said, after a while.

"Never," he said.

"Are you glad you did?"

He looked at the sky. "Yes," he said. "Although the hours are extremely unreasonable."

"You chose it."

"I chose it," he agreed. "Several times, actually. Once when I saw you beat the servant. Once when you pulled me from the laundry and put me in the records office. Once when I saw what you were actually trying to do." He paused. "I choose it regularly, in small ways. Every day is a choice."

She looked at him. "And if you had not?"

"Then I would be very good at laundry," he said, "and I would not be here watching the sky with my Empress on a summer afternoon, which would be a smaller life." He said it simply, without performance. "Not a bad life. Smaller."

She looked at the city in the distance — the suggestion of it, the accumulated presence of it beneath the sky that was the same sky it had always been.

She thought about the thing Demerti had said. The ordinary things. Slightly too loud family dinners. Someone asking how the day was.

She thought about Samuel with fried dough in both hands and his feet over the edge of the water steps, telling her he had never had a somewhere else.

She thought about what a somewhere was.

"Demerti," she said.

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"The hours are going to continue to be unreasonable," she said.

He sighed — a long, theatrical, completely genuine sigh. "Yes," he said. "I assumed."

"And I am going to continue to be difficult to work for."

"You have always been difficult to work for," he said. "It has never been boring."

She looked at the sky.

"Thank you," she said. Simply. Directly.

He received it without making it larger than it was, which was the right way to receive it.

They sat on the stone in the summer afternoon, the sky above them doing its continuous slow remarkable thing, the city below existing in its loud and real and ordinary way, and the palace behind them containing all the complicated machinery of an empire that needed attention and would get it tomorrow.

Today the weather was good.

Even if it was summer.

.

.

.

The sky was still good when Demerti left.

He had stood up eventually — not abruptly, not with the anxious energy of someone who had somewhere more important to be, but with the natural unhurrying of a person who had given the moment its full time and was now completing it. He had bowed, which he always did, and walked back down the two sets of stairs, and she had heard his footsteps fade into the palace sounds below.

She stayed.

The sun had moved — it was later than she had thought, or earlier, she still was not tracking it and was still not going to start. The quality of the light had shifted toward the afternoon version of itself, the shadows longer, the blue of the sky slightly deeper and less sharp than the midday blue.

She was thinking about what Demerti had said.

Not analyzing it — she had learned, over the past weeks, that some things lost their quality if you applied the analytical process to them too quickly, the same way you could not look directly at certain kinds of light without the looking destroying the thing you were trying to see. She was simply sitting with it the way the stone was sitting with the sun’s warmth — absorbing it, letting it settle into the temperature of things.

The somewhere.

She had not had a somewhere in either life, she thought. In her previous life she had had a company and a function and the cold satisfaction of a machine running at high capacity. People had respected her, feared her, relied on her. Nobody had waited for her. Nobody had wondered where she was with the specific warmth of someone whose day was better when she was in it.

She had not missed it then. She had not known what it was to miss.

She was not certain she was missing it now, exactly. It was more like — discovering that a category existed that she had not previously known was a category. The way Samuel had felt about the city. He had known intellectually that it was there. He had not known it in the body.

She knew now, in the body, that the category existed.

What she did not know was what to do with that knowledge.

She heard footsteps again.

Different ones this time. She identified them before the person appeared — lighter than Demerti, more even, the footsteps of someone who moved with the physical assurance of someone whose body had been trained and trusted.

Fen appeared at the top of the stairs.

She looked at Elara on the stone.

Then she looked at the view — the sky, the distant city suggestion, the afternoon light — with the specific look of someone who had not been up here before and was doing the automatic spatial assessment but was also, underneath it, simply seeing.

"The fourth district," Elara said. "You found something."

Fen came and sat on the stone nearby — not where Demerti had been, slightly further, the configuration of someone who occupied space efficiently rather than socially. "I said end of the week," she said.

"I know," Elara said. "You’re here anyway."

Fen looked at the city. "The supply cart we saw," she said. "At the corner of the eastern loading area."

"Yes."