By evening, Lord Baek had moved.
I learned this not from Lord Baek himself but from the particular silence that had fallen over Kaien's residence — the attentive, loaded silence of a household that knows something is happening and is holding very still so as not to disturb it. The servants moved differently. Quieter. More deliberate. The kind of careful that people who are paid to not notice things deploy when they are noticing everything.
Kaien was at the window when I returned from the Emperor. He looked at me the moment I walked through the door, and the quality of his looking — the way the tension in his shoulders released by exactly one increment, no more, controlled even in the relief — told me he had been standing there for forty-three minutes and knew it.
"You're here," he said.
"I said an hour," I said. "It was less than an hour."
"I know." He didn't move away from the window. "How was he?"
"Careful," I said. "He let me go. He said he needs to think."
