e spent less than ten minutes at the Crocus. He’d told ada’na he was working late, and he’d asked to have kofi sent up; it had been a quiet request, underneath the burble of the Hesseans still drinking and doing business at the bar.
He burned his tongue on the first sip. He drank two cups anyway, feeling wakefulness tingle through him. His hip hurt, his muscles were sore, but it was a manageable sort of pain now, dull and thrumming and grounding. He had spirit in him yet.
He stole sips as he went through his drawers. It was with the taste of kofi clinging to his mouth too that he knelt down and took the case out from under the hotel mattress. He opened it with steady hands, flicking tired eyes over the hard-angled tension wrenches, the picks with their short, delicate hooks. His lip twitched.
It wasn’t necessary. None of it was, but this especially: he doubted he’d have need of them, and he wasn’t sure why he’d had them made in the first place. It had been a whim late summer of last year – on the pretense of teaching Silk, though they’d both known it wasn’t about that – a gentleman’s eccentric hobby, he supposed, now.
He folded it up and tucked it into his bag anyway, because he didn’t think this was about necessities, not for either of them.
The face in the mirror was gaunt and grey. He didn’t stop to look at the eyes, or ask himself what or who was in them; there wasn’t any point.
There was still a faint lingering taste on his lips, it seemed to him, a faint warmth in his skin still, a faint secret familiar scent in the folds of his clothes that he was loath to part with. But a word – a word he still didn’t know the meaning of – whispered in his ears still, stronger than any of it.
It was a simple dark tunic and trousers he’d found, one he’d had made shortly before he’d gotten back to Thul Ka. He wrapped himself in it before he went, throwing his deep orange amel’iwe around his shoulders to be tucked away when the time came. It might’ve stood out for an arata, not a whit of white on him, but he’d already seen Anaxi make worse fashion mistakes; if he stood out anywhere along the way, it would be as a clumsy foreigner.
The one thing they always had on their side, he thought wistfully: unlikelihood.
He tucked himself out the back way anyway. The way from Cinnamon Hill to to the platform was gold and then soft blue; it smelled of expensive tobacco, sounded like distant echoes of well-to-do parties, and then deep-fried batter and cablecar rattling.
He passed the way as if in a dream. If a couple of arati lasses on the platform snickered at him, they were gone by the time Ese reached campus, replaced by other faces; a tired-looking man was sleeping at the back of the car.
The platform was empty.
The quiet corner of campus they’d passed through earlier that day was unrecognizable to him now; instead of setting-sun gold, soft blue and red caught the rustling edges of the trees, the twisting branches. The night bugs were loud, loud as they’d been on the first night here. But they were familiar now, and so was the humid breeze tugging at his clothes.
He didn’t see him at first. He was conscious – as ever – of his field; cheerful noise clattered out under the burbling of the fountain as he rounded the bend, and he tucked himself into the shadow of a tree, listening to it get closer. It was the flash of white fabric that made him ease further away, careful not to caprise. The students were loose-limbed, laughing silhouettes, the lamplight catching on bright fabric.
They went, and he shifted back onto the path, coming out around the fountain.
He didn’t see Aremu at first; he didn’t see him at all. If he felt a twinge of anxiety, he tamped it down with trust.
But his eyes weren’t any good for seeing in the dark. Carefully, he took a step into the edge of the light; he wound his way round it, passing under the branches of the trees where the shadows met it. He didn’t speak, but he looked into the dark, and a faint smile tugged at his face, even though he could make nothing out.