She did not sleep well.
This was not unusual. Veyra had never been a particularly good sleeper, her mind having the inconvenient habit of staying awake long after the rest of her had decided it was done with the day. But last night had been worse than usual, or perhaps different was the more accurate word. Not the restless turning of someone troubled. More like the particular wakefulness of someone waiting for something without knowing what.
She lay in the dark for an hour after coming home from the Callor gathering and stared at the ceiling and thought about nothing specific. About the harbor lights. About Seraphine's smile and the particular energy it cost to smile back at it correctly. About amber and gold stone and the way the temple looked at night, worn and permanent and completely unbothered by centuries of weather.
About a man on the steps who had a voice like the night air and said "more than people know" like it was the most ordinary answer in the world.
She was up before dawn.
She told herself it was because she could not sleep. She told herself she wanted the harbor at first light, which was genuinely her favorite hour in all of Selvara, the city quiet and the water silver and the sky doing the particular thing it did in the minutes before the sun arrived when everything went very still and held its breath.
She was not going to the temple.
She was absolutely going to the temple.
The streets were empty at this hour. A few dock workers moving toward the water. A baker's apprentice with flour on his sleeve. The cats that owned Selvara's nighttime hours, slipping between shadows with the authority of the unbothered. Veyra walked through all of it with her hands in the pockets of her coat and her breath misting faintly in the cool air off the harbor.
The city smelled like salt and old stone in the morning. She had grown up with that smell. It was the most home she knew.
She took the long way up to the temple. Not deliberately. She simply found herself on the longer streets, the ones that wound up through the older parts of the city where the buildings were shorter and the stone was darker and there were small shrines tucked into corners that most people walked past without noticing. She noticed them. She had always noticed them. As a child she had mapped every shrine in Selvara with the dedication of someone conducting important research, dragging Lirien behind her while their brothers complained about missing dinner.
Lirien had loved it. Their brothers had eventually stopped complaining and started pointing out ones she had missed.
That had been a good year.
The temple arrived the way it always did, more suddenly than the walk up suggested it should. One moment she was on the winding street and then she turned the last corner and it was simply there, enormous and unhurried and gold even in the grey pre-dawn light, the carved facade watching the city below it with the patience of something that intended to still be there long after everything else had changed.
She stopped at the bottom of the steps.
He was already there.
Not on the steps this time. He was standing at the far side of the temple's wide stone forecourt, looking out at the city view, his back to her. He had his hands behind him and his head slightly tilted as though he was listening to something she could not hear, and he was so still that for a moment she simply looked at him the way you looked at something that did not quite fit its surroundings. Not wrongly. Just precisely, the way an object placed with intention stood out from things placed carelessly.
She must have made a sound. Or perhaps he simply knew. He turned before she said anything, and when he saw her his expression did the same thing it had done last night, that movement at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile but was clearly related to one.
"You are out early," he said.
"You said I was out late last night."
"Both things are true."
She walked across the forecourt toward the shelf where the offerings sat. The amber she had left last night was still there, which was not surprising, the priests would not come to tend the shelf until midmorning. She looked at it for a moment and then looked at him.
"Do you live nearby?" she asked. "I only ask because you seem to be here at unusual hours."
"I am nearby," he said. Which was not precisely an answer but was delivered with such straightforward calm that it took her a moment to notice.
"I am Veyra," she said.
"I know." And then, as though he had caught something in her expression, "You introduced yourself last night. I did not forget."
She had introduced herself last night. She had done it quickly, almost as an afterthought as she was leaving, the kind of thing you did when you had been talking to someone for ten minutes and realized you had not said your name. She had not been sure he had properly heard it.
He had heard it.
"You did not tell me yours," she said.
"Sylvan."
It suited him in the way that some names suited people and others simply sat on them without sticking. Sylvan sat on him and stuck. She did not know why. It was not a common name in Selvara. She was not sure it was common anywhere.
"Are you from Selvara, Sylvan?"
"No."
"Where are you from?"
He looked at her with those steady eyes and she had the sudden sensation she sometimes got from old books, from texts in the mythology section of the bookshop on Harren Street, the feeling of something deep underneath ordinary surface. Like reading a word you recognized and understanding for the first time how old it actually was.
"The north," he said.
She nodded slowly. The north. She did not push further and was not entirely sure why. It was not her nature to leave questions alone. Senna frequently described her curiosity as a public hazard.
But something about the way he said it made the question feel like a door that was not hers to open. Not yet.
They stood in the forecourt of Aeldrath's temple in the grey pre-dawn quiet and looked at the city below together. Selvara spread down toward the harbor in tiers of gold stone and dark water, the first fishing boats already moving out past the harbor mouth, small and deliberate against the silver sea. The sky above the eastern hills was beginning to change color at its lowest edge, the deep grey softening toward something warmer.
"You come here in the dark," he said. Not accusatory. Simply observing.
"The temple is different at this hour," she said. "In the day there are priests and petitioners and people performing their devotion for an audience. I do not find that interesting." She paused. "At this hour it is just the building. And whatever the building is for."
"And what is it for?"
She glanced at him. He was looking at the temple facade, at the worn relief above the entrance, the faceless carved suggestion of something vast. His expression was neutral in a way that was somehow different from blankness. Like someone listening very carefully.
"Honestly?" she said.
"Preferably."
"I think it is for the things you cannot say to anyone else." She looked back at the temple. "The impossible things. The things that are too large or too private or too unreasonable to put in front of another person." She could feel him listening. It made her more honest than she usually was with strangers, which she noted and filed away to think about later. "People come here and they pray for practical things. For good harvests and safe voyages and profitable trades. But I think what they actually come for is permission to believe that someone is listening."
The sky was turning gold at its edges now. The first real light of morning moving across the city below, touching the harbor water, climbing the stone streets.
"And do you believe that?" he asked. "That someone is listening?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"I have always believed it," she said. "Everyone in my life has found that either charming or embarrassing depending on their mood." She smiled without particular bitterness. It was just true. "But yes. I believe it. I have never been able to stop."
He was quiet for a long moment. The sun arrived at the edge of the hills and the gold stone of the temple caught it the way it always did, suddenly and completely, blazing from grey to brilliant in the space of a breath. The forecourt filled with warm light. The city below glittered.
She turned to say something and found him watching her instead of the sunrise.
Not intrusively. Not in the way that required a response or a step backward. Simply watching her with those steady eyes and an expression she could not name and did not try to, because some expressions were not meant to be named immediately. They were meant to be noticed and held and thought about later in the quiet of your own room.
She thought she would be thinking about this one for a while.
"I should go," she said. "My household wakes early."
He nodded. Made no move to stop her, said nothing to extend the moment. Just stood in the golden morning light of his own temple and watched her go with the expression she could not name.
She was at the top of the steps leading back down to the city when she stopped. She did not plan to stop. Her feet simply did it.
She turned back.
"Do you believe it?" she asked. "That someone is listening?"
He looked at her across the forecourt. Something moved in his expression. Something that was there and then carefully was not.
"Yes," he said quietly. "I do."
She nodded once and went down the steps into the morning city, her coat around her and the harbor smell in the air and the warm certainty of the sun on the back of her neck.
She did not look back again.
She wanted to.