The commission granted a one-day recess, a mercy for which Seraphina was profoundly grateful. The mental fatigue was a different beast than physical exhaustion; it sat behind her eyes, a low, constant pressure. Seeking a silence that wasn't administrative, she found herself, as evening fell, climbing the spiral stairs of Freya's observatory.
She found her not at the great telescope, but on the balcony, wrapped in a thick shawl, a steaming cup in her hands. The Sultan was notably absent.
"May I join you?" Seraphina asked.
Freya glanced over, her expression unreadable in the twilight. "It's your palace."
"It's your sanctuary," Seraphina corrected softly, coming to lean on the balustrade beside her. The city lights below were a terrestrial mirror to the stars beginning to prick the violet sky above.
"Sanctuary," Freya repeated, the word a dry leaf on her tongue. "Yes. It is that." She sipped her drink. "He built it well, your husband. It is a perfect instrument. A perfect, lonely instrument."
"Where is Argenthelm?" Seraphina asked, the question blunt out of sheer weariness.
"At a trade symposium. He is a man of passions, but they are… diurnal. Earthbound. The stars hold less allure when one's arms are full of silk and spice." She said it without bitterness, a simple statement of fact. "He is a pleasant distraction. But distractions, by nature, are temporary."
The honesty was breathtaking. "And Rian?" Seraphina dared to ask.
Freya's laugh was a short, soft exhalation. "Rian is where he has always been. Being indispensable. Mediating a dispute between your father's wine steward and the head gardener, last I heard. He is the glue that holds the polite world together. It is his calling. It is also his prison." She turned her sharp, astronomer's gaze on Seraphina. "You left that prison. I saw it the moment you returned. You stopped being a part of the display."
Seraphina felt laid bare. "It wasn't a prison Rian built."
"No.But he was a fellow inmate who made the captivity bearable with conversation. I understand." Freya looked back at the stars. "I have my own conversations. They are quieter. They require no words at all. And they will outlast every desert king and diplomatic prince."
They stood in silence for a while, two women who had loved and been failed by the same man in different ways, each finding their own separate peace.
"I ended it," Seraphina said finally, the confession offered to the cool night air. "The understanding. With Rian."
"I know."
"Does it…change things? For you?"
Freya considered."It changes the geometry. The emotional triangulation is simplified. Less acute anguish, perhaps. A more stable, obtuse loneliness." She offered a wry smile. "I am glad for you, Seraphina. And for Hadrian. To find a path out of the void… it is a rare thing. Do not look back."
"I'm trying not to."
"Good."Freya pointed a slender finger to a bright point of light near the horizon. "See that? That's not a star. It's the orbital research station. They're monitoring atmospheric decay. Even up there, they're watching things fall apart." She lowered her hand. "We all find our vantage point from which to observe the endings. You've chosen to stand in the tide, it seems. It's a messier view."
"It is," Seraphina agreed. But she didn't say that recently, standing in the tide, she had sometimes found her hand held. That the mess was preferable to the sterile, perfect distance.
They were joined, unexpectedly, by Hadrian. He carried a tray with three more cups. "I thought you might be here," he said, his voice gentle. "The cook made spiced wine. She said it's for 'stargazing bones.'"
Freya accepted a cup with a gracious nod. Hadrian handed one to Seraphina, his fingers brushing hers, a touch that now held a universe of shared drafts and coastal winds and quiet understandings.
The three of them stood on the balcony, a silent, unlikely constellation: the astronomer with her distant love, the architect with his newfound defiance, and the marine biologist standing between the sea and the stars, holding a warm cup, feeling the solid rail beneath her hands and the faint, persistent warmth where her husband's hand had briefly touched hers.
The romantic void was still there, above them in the infinite dark. But down here, on this stone balcony built by a man trying to reach his wife, there was warmth, and spice, and a fragile, shared silence that was no longer about what was missing, but about what, against all odds, remained.