#uvek

She pressed the latch and pushed through and let the gate swing shut behind her with the sound of old iron settling back into place. The latch clicked. The sound carried briefly and then the wind off Leona Lake took it, and there was nothing after it but birdsong and the distant water and the smell of pine coming off the Spine hills, green and cold and clean in a way that the city never quite managed.

No one for miles. This was the thing she thought every time she passed through that gate, the thought that arrived before any other and sat with her for a moment while she adjusted to the particular quality of the silence. In Ilirea there was always something. Voices in the corridor, the city beyond the windows, the soft constant presence of people whose lives ran adjacent to hers and whose needs accumulated around her like water finding level. Even in the deep hours of the night when the palace went quiet there was the awareness of it, the weight of the inhabited world pressing gently against every wall. She had been leading people since she was eighteen and she had never resented it, would not resent it, but she had learned in the last year what it felt like to be genuinely alone in a way she had not been since childhood, and the knowledge had become something she needed with a regularity that surprised her.

Here there was nothing. Hills and water and dark stone and the sound of the wind in the Spine pines and, somewhere behind the castle, Thorn.

She followed the path through the overgrown hedgerows and let the gate out of her mind.

She had arrived the previous evening as the sun was going down behind the hills, the sky over the Spine going that particular dark gold and rose that happened this time of year when the angle was right. She had ridden in with her black traveling cape pulled close against the lake wind, the hem of it dark with the dust of the road, and Murtagh had been at the top of the outer steps when she came through the gate, which he would never have been if he had known she was watching, because it would have looked like waiting and he had very specific feelings about being caught waiting. She had said nothing about it. She had tied her horse and unclasped the cape and gone up the steps and he had held the door and that had been the whole of the greeting and it had been entirely sufficient.

The evening had been what evenings here were, which was quiet in a way that required nothing of her. They had eaten at the long table in the hall with the dark red curtains pulled against the chill coming off the lake, the candles burning low in their brackets, and the conversation had been the particular kind that happened in that room, slow and unguarded, the kind she did not have anywhere else. The meats had been set over the fire when she arrived, sizzling in the pan with herbs from the kitchen garden and fat rendering down into the iron, the smell of it filling the whole lower floor, warm and good, the kind of smell that went straight past the mind into something older and more immediate. Later the fire had burned down and they had sat with the last of the wine and not spoken at all for a long time, and that had also been sufficient.

She had woken in the grey before dawn with the window open and the air from the Spine cool on her bare skin.

The sheets were heavy linen, old and soft with use, and Murtagh was warm against her back with his arm across her waist, and for a moment she did not move or think anything at all. She only lay in the particular darkness of the room, the sky through the open window going from black to the first uncertain grey, the curtains moving in the draft, the smell of pine and lake water and woodsmoke still faint in the stone from the night before, and the specific warmth of the body behind her. She was not wearing anything and neither was he and there was no one for miles and this was the thought she held, letting it settle through her like the warmth of the bed.

The hills of the Spine came in slowly out of the dark, the tree line becoming visible first and then the contours of the hills themselves, and the sky above them went grey and then the faint rose of early morning and then, by increments, pale gold. Two birds started up somewhere in the grounds. The curtains lifted and fell. She lay and watched the light come and did not move and felt, with a thoroughness that was almost physical, the complete absence of anything she was required to do.

She had not always known how to do this. The first time she stayed the night here she had been awake before the sky had begun to lighten, already sorting through the dispatches in her mind, already constructing the morning. She had dressed quietly and left before he woke because the alternative, lying still while the morning came, had felt like something she did not know the grammar of. She had ridden back to Ilirea with the sky barely light and sat in her study and worked and told herself that this was what she needed, that she did not require whatever it was she had left behind in that bed.

She had been wrong about this.

By the third visit she had learned to stay still. By the fifth she had learned to stop sorting dispatches before she opened her eyes. Now she lay with the window open and watched the hills and let the morning do what it did, and Murtagh slept or did not sleep beside her with the specific careful stillness that she had learned to read, and neither of them felt the need to fill it.

At some point he had gotten up quietly and come back with food, and before he returned she had heard the sound of the pan going back over the fire, the sizzle of it resuming, and the smell had reached her before he did, meat and herbs and warm bread, and she had pulled herself up against the headboard with the sheets pooled at her waist and her hair loose and unbound around her shoulders, the full coiling weight of it, and felt like herself in the specific way she only felt here.

They had eaten in bed with the window open and the Spine laid out before them like a painting too large for any single frame. The meats were thick-sliced and good, the fat crisped at the edges, the cheese the aged variety from the Surdan border that she had noted he favored and had been sending without comment, the bread dense and dark and still slightly warm, the fruit the last of the autumn pressing, small and sweet. He ate with the quiet attention of someone who had stopped taking food for granted, which was something she understood and did not remark on. She had peeled an orange and given him half and he had taken it and eaten it watching the hills, and they had been still together in the morning light with their bare shoulders touching and the empty cloth between them and the fire reduced to coals in the grate, and the smell of the food and the pine air and the faint sweetness of her perfume all mixed together into something that had no name except this place, this room, this particular morning.

She thought about this now, crossing the terrace with her basket and her gloves.

The garden was ahead of her, the iron gate standing open the way she always left it, and the roses were visible from here, the deep red heads of them catching the early light against the old pale stone of the south wall. The fountain was running, which meant he had opened the channel before she came down, which meant he had been awake and had thought to do it without being asked, which she added to the internal record she kept of the small things he did without ever indicating that he was doing them.

She went through the gate and pulled on her leather gloves and picked up her shears and went to the roses.

The work was quiet and particular and required enough attention to clear everything else, which was another reason she had taken to it. She moved along the south wall cutting stems and laying them in the basket, noting which plants needed the dead growth taken back, which ones were pushing new runners that wanted training up the stone. The soil here was good, dark and rich and responsive, better than she had any reason to expect from a long-neglected garden, and she had come to believe that the old wards Morzan had set into the ground were doing something to it, some spillover of old protective magic encouraging whatever grew here to grow well. She found she did not mind the source.

She was humming without meaning to, something low and half-formed with no name, not any song she could have identified, just the sound of a person occupied and unhurried and entirely present in her own body. She only noticed she was doing it when she paused to move the basket and heard the quiet the absence of it made. She kept humming.

It occurred to her, not for the first time, that Brom had done this. Had stood in this same garden, or what it had been then, turning soil and trimming back the growth and existing quietly in the grounds of this castle. A leader of the Varden disguised as a gardener in the Forsworn's household, tending something that grew. She had been doing the same thing, more or less, for four months, visiting under the cover of hunting trips, putting her hands in the earth of Morzan's estate. She found this privately very funny. It seemed to be a particular affliction of people who led the Varden, this compulsion to come to this castle and grow something in it. She wondered if she would tell Eragon someday and decided probably not, because it would require explaining several other things first.

The roses smelled extraordinary this close, that particular deep red-rose smell that was richer and darker than the decorative varieties the palace gardeners cultivated, almost too much in the direct warmth of the midmorning sun, and it mixed with her own perfume, the amber and oud she had worn since she was a girl, and the green smell of turned earth and the pine coming down off the Spine, and the whole garden had a smell she could not have described to anyone who had not stood in it.

Thorn was in the large pond.

She could hear him from the garden, the low resonant sound he made when he was content, something between a rumble and something else entirely that had no human name, and it came up through the soles of her feet as much as through the air. She had grown used to this. She had grown used to a great many things in the past four months that she could not have predicted, the stone dragon on the fountain and the ducks in the reeds and the particular weight of a sleeping arm across her waist at four in the morning and the way the whole castle felt different than it had the first time she came, when it had been dark and cold and barely inhabited.

She had done that, mostly. The curtains and the candles and the replanted orchards and the garden itself and the fountain she had ordered commissioned in Ilirea and sent ahead without telling him what was on top. He had walked in the morning after the stonemasons left and stopped when he saw the stone dragon with its wings spread over the falling water, and he had stood looking at it for a long time. When he turned around she had been watching his face and he had known it and had not looked away.

She did not need him to say anything. She knew what it meant that the fountain was running when she came down this morning.

She heard the door above open and then his step on the terrace stone.

She did not look up. She heard him come down the slope, unhurried, the sound of the grass changing under his feet as he came, and she kept her hands in the roses and let him come to his own stopping point. He stopped at the gate. She could feel the quality of his attention from here, that particular directedness that had nothing performed in it, and she worked through it for a moment before she let herself look up.

He was shirtless from training, his dark hair loose, the old scar white in the morning light across his shoulder and down toward his spine. He was leaning against the gate with his arms folded, watching her, and in one hand he held a cup of tea.

He came through the gate and set it on the low wall beside her without a word, without breaking stride, and went to the bench and sat down. She picked it up. It was the way she took it, sweet enough to be almost too sweet, two sugars, the way she had mentioned once in passing months ago and apparently not needed to mention again.

She held the warm cup in her soil-dark gloves and felt something she had no particular interest in examining too closely.

Behind him the castle rose dark and quiet against the pale sky. Behind her the fountain ran. The roses moved slightly in the wind off the lake.

"Thorn's on his back again," he said.

"He does that every morning."

"He's going to roll over and lose the ducks their peace and quiet, the big oaf."

"There was a crash of water from the pond direction, significant enough to send a ripple across the garden flagstones, and a distant indignant waterfowl sound, and Murtagh exhaled through his nose in a way that was not quite a laugh and was better than a laugh.

She set down the shears and looked at him across the garden.

He came in and sat on the low stone bench beside the fountain and leaned his forearms on his knees and she went back to the roses. The morning went on in the way of mornings here, slow and unhurried, the light moving across the stone walls and the fountain catching it on the water and the Spine enormous and green and permanent on the horizon. She was aware of him watching her and she did not perform for it and he did not expect her to, and this was the thing she valued most in this place, the absolute freedom from presentation, the room to simply be in her own body without the weight of what that body was required to represent.

She had worn her hair down, the full coiling weight of it loose around her shoulders, the way she kept it only here where there was no one to see. She was in the white dress, the sheer one, the one entirely wrong for gardening, and she had put it on because she wanted to and because there was no one here to tell her what a queen ought to wear in her own garden.

After a while she brought the basket to the bench and sat beside him and he shifted to make room without looking at it. The fountain ran between the sound of birdsong and the sound of the lake and the enormous distant sound of a dragon settling back into contentment.

She picked up one of the cut roses and turned it in her fingers. The petals were very dark at the center, almost black, opening to deep red at the edges. The same color as the curtains in the hall. She had not planned that parallel when she ordered the curtains, or perhaps she had and had not admitted it to herself. It was sometimes difficult to tell with the things she did here that had no practical justification.

"Uvek is coming this afternoon," he said.

"I know. I'll leave before midday."

He was quiet for a moment. "You don't have to."

She turned the rose in her fingers. "He knows I come here?"

"Uvek knows most things I try to keep to myself."

"Is that inconvenient."

"Usually." He looked at the roses rather than at her. "Not in this case."

She let that sit in the warm morning air between them and did not poke at it, and he let it sit too, and the fountain kept its sound, and the rose in her hands was very dark and very alive, and the hills of the Spine watched all of it with the enormous indifference of old things.

She set the rose in the basket.

"I'm going to plant the east wall before I go," she said.

He looked at the garden, at the walls, at the roses already filling the south side. "You're going to run out of wall."

"Then I'll start on the beds."

She felt him almost smile and did not look at it directly, which was how she had learned to let the rare ones happen without startling them into disappearing.

She stayed until the light began its shift toward midday, the shadows shortening and the garden warming into the full smell of itself, the roses and the earth and the water from the fountain and her own perfume all of it braided together in the still air between the walls.

When she finally rose and brushed the soil from her dress Murtagh was still on the bench, watching her, and she came and stood before him and he looked at her in the white dress with her coiling hair loose and dark and the roses behind her and said nothing at all, and she let him look.

He walked her out through the castle when the time came, through the rooms that were becoming something other than what they had been, the dark curtains and the candles burned to varying heights and the smell of the garden coming through the windows she had begun leaving open, and the quiet of it, the particular quality of quiet that accumulated in a place where two people had learned not to fill silence for its own sake.

At the front steps Thorn was waiting in the wide court, having come around from the pond with his scales still dark-wet and gleaming, which meant he had been told, or had simply decided, in the way he sometimes did. He lowered his head to her, which she had come to understand as the specific greeting he reserved for her alone, and she put her hand briefly against the warm red scales of his jaw.

Murtagh helped her up without ceremony and she settled between the neck ridges and Thorn lifted from the court in a single movement, the ground dropping away, the castle becoming small below them and then the hills and then the full spread of Leona Lake going silver in the midday light. The Spine rose enormous to the west, the pine forests dark and dense across the upper slopes, and the wind was cold at this height and smelled of nothing but cloud and distance.

She looked down once at the castle, the dark stone of it against the green of the foothills, and in the wide court below Murtagh was a small figure watching her go.

She did not tell anyone where she had been.