The night before Elias departed, neither of them slept.
He knew she wasn't sleeping because he could hear her, through the wall between their adjacent rooms — not moving, not speaking, just the specific quality of a room occupied by someone who is awake and deciding not to be visibly awake. He had known this quality of her wakefulness since the river barge, when she had slept against his shoulder and he had been the one watching the canvas shift. These nights they were both on the same side of the distinction.
He dressed before dawn and went to the library, which was where he went when the dark was too full for sleep and the rooms too small for thought. He took the lamp and set it on the small table by the window and looked at the estate's garden in the pre-dawn, the shapes of the garden's structures barely visible in the darkness, and thought about what he was leaving and what he was going toward and whether the distance between them was what he had been building for or something else entirely.
He had been building for it. He was certain of this. He was ready in all the ways that Mira and Aldric had prepared him for, ready in all the tactical and technical and operational senses. The readiness was real.
What the readiness did not fully address was the ten years he was leaving. The garden, this view in this light, the kitchen where Bess left the warm cup, the library where Harlan had built something in him alongside everything else — the cultivation of a mind that could also think, not just act, because acting without thinking was what Draven did and he intended to be different. He was leaving all of it.
He was also leaving Lira.
She appeared in the library doorway at the fourth hour, which meant she had been awake for as long as he had and had decided, at some point, that the distance between the rooms was unnecessary. She sat in her chair — the one she always used, the one to the left of the window — with her journal in her lap and did not say anything.
They sat in the library until the grey of dawn came through the window, and then the gold, and then Bess was moving in the kitchen and the household was coming to life.
At breakfast, their last breakfast at the same table, Harlan made more food than anyone needed. This was a thing he did when he was managing difficulty through action, which was not his usual mode but was available to him when the usual mode — thought, language — was insufficient. He put plates in front of both of them and sat down himself and said: "Eat."
They ate.
"The contacts in the capital," Harlan said, in the voice of a man giving a briefing because giving a briefing was what he could usefully do. "Pen's safe house locations are in the documentation I've given you. The approach protocol for Sable's man in the merchant district —"
"I have it," Elias said. "I have all of it."
Harlan stopped. He looked at his plate. "Yes," he said. "You do."
After breakfast, in the courtyard, Elias gave Lira the copy of their mother's letter. He had made it two weeks ago, in the careful hand he used for things he wanted to get exactly right, from the original that he kept in the cover of the geography book and would continue to keep there.
She took it without asking why. She looked at the copy in her hands, at the handwriting — his replication of their mother's particular H, the slope of the letters — and held it.
"I kept it for you to find when you were ready," he said. "Now I think you should have it. You're more ready than I was when I found mine."
She folded it and put it in her inside pocket, where his had lived for years.
They embraced in the courtyard at dawn. No speeches — neither of them was built for speeches, and the things that needed saying had already been said in the library, in the way things said without words are said. He held her and she held him and the embrace had the quality of something that has been very long in the making and is now, in its ending, as complete as it was always going to be.
He stepped back. He looked at her face, which was composed with the specific composure she had developed into the finest instrument of her capabilities, and underneath the composure, very clearly, herself.
"Three years," he said.
"Three years," she said.
He mounted and rode out with the small merchant party toward the southern road, and she stood in the courtyard and watched him go until the road bent and the gate was just the gate again and the morning was just the morning.
She stood in the courtyard for a moment longer than necessary. Then she went inside. She went to the library. She sat at the table and opened her journal to a new page.
She wrote at the top: Day 1.
Below it she began writing the plans for the three years she had been given. Not as grief. Not as waiting. As work.