Tobiah came to him.
Elham had been heading to Tobiah's workshop, and had been strategizing on what to say on the way over. However, when he was halfway through, he turned a corner and Tobiah was already there, coming from the other direction.
Tobiah stopped. Looked at him and waited.
"You know, I was coming to find you," Elham said.
"I figured," Tobiah said. "I'd save you the walk."
They stood in the street. Around them the city moved through its morning.
"Han told a lot of people something yesterday," Tobiah said.
"Go on."
"He said you'd been building something with me. Using me to advance a position, I want to know if he was right."
Elham looked at him. At the carpenter's hands and the measuring expression that had been there since the first day and the three weeks of early mornings between them and the wood shavings and the city's history told plainly without agenda. He had genuinely liked this man. He still did. The liking had not been false. It had just been running alongside something else that he had not looked at directly until Abidan named it from a sickbed yesterday afternoon.
"He was partly right," Elham said.
Something in Tobiah's face settled. Not surprise, he had known the answer before he asked the question, had come this morning already carrying the knowing. The asking was not for information. It was for the honesty of hearing it said plainly.
"Tell me the part he was right about," Tobiah said.
Elham took a breath. "I came into this city and felt that you were the right person to lead it through what's coming. But then I started getting to know you with that conclusion in mind, so everything we talked about, everything you told me in the workshop, I was fitting into a structure I had already decided on." He paused. "The conclusion wasn't wrong. You are the right person. But I was working toward you rather than with you. And there's a version of that which is just using someone, even if what you're using them for is genuinely good."
Tobiah was quiet for a long time. A woman passed them with a basket. Two boys from the southern quarter running toward the harbor. The city going about its morning around two men standing in a side street having a conversation that neither of them had planned to have today.
"You know what the worst part is," Tobiah said eventually.
"What."
"I knew. Not from Han, I knew before Han said anything. I could feel the structure of it in how you talked to me. Every conversation had a direction. Every morning had a purpose underneath the purpose." He looked at Elham. "I kept allowing it because the conversations were real even if the direction behind them wasn't. Nobody else in this city talks to me the way you do, like they're genuinely interested in what I think rather than what I'll do with it. I thought of you as a friend." He paused. "Which made it worse when Han said it out loud. Because then I had to decide whether I'd been naive or whether I'd just been willing to overlook something I should have pushed back on earlier and let you use me."
"Stop, you weren't naive," Elham said. "The conversations were real and I genuinely tried to get to know you."
"Here's what I need you to understand," Tobiah said. His voice had shifted slightly, less flat, more careful, the tone of someone saying something they have been working toward for a while and are now saying correctly. "I have spent years being the quieter one. The one who sees things clearly and says them to the right people and then watches someone else stand up and be the person who acts on it. My whole life people have told me I should be doing more and then positioned themselves to benefit from whatever I did." He looked at Elham. "You're not the first person to attempt this. But know that every single time it has cost me something, because being seen as useful to someone else's plan is not the same as being chosen."
Elham held that. The wound of a man who had been taken advantage of so many times that being seen had become something to be suspicious of rather than something to receive.
"You're right," Elham said. "I'm sorry, and I'm not going to try to fix that right now because there isn't a version of me explaining myself that doesn't make it worse." He looked at Tobiah. "So, what now?"
Tobiah looked at him for a moment. The question had landed differently from what he expected, he had come prepared for the explanation, for the defense, for Elham to make the case for why his intentions had been good and his conclusion had been correct and therefore the method was forgivable. The question instead of the defense was something he had to recalibrate for.
"I need you to stop," Tobiah said. "Whatever you've been building, stop building it. Stop coming to the workshop with a direction underneath the conversation. Stop positioning me relative to Han and Ruel and Jered like I'm a piece you're moving." He paused. "I'm done."
"All right," Elham said.
"That's it? All right?"
"What else would you like me to say."
Tobiah studied him. Looking for the angle in it, the way a man who had been seen clearly and used correctly looked for the angle in everything now. He didn't find one.
"All right," Tobiah said at last.
He walked away. Not angry. Just done with the conversation, the way Tobiah was done with things, completely, without residue.
Elham stood in the street and watched him go.
The warmth in his chest was steady. He pressed his hand to it out of habit and felt it there, warm and present, saying nothing specific, not confirming what had just happened and not warning against it. Just there. The way it had been there for weeks, patient, waiting for him to stop moving long enough to read it correctly.
But he hadn't stopped moving.
He had been told to stop by Tobiah in a side street and agreed and he knew he meant it. But he couldn't help his thoughts, he was still standing in the street with the plan he had been building still half assembled in his head, the conversation he'd been rehearsing on the way over, the structure he'd been working toward, and all of it was still there, still running, because understanding that something was wrong was not the same as the something stopping.
Asher was behind him. Had been there the whole conversation, close enough to hear, far enough to be discreet.
"Say it," Elham said without turning around.
"You're still still planning it in your head," Asher said.
"I know."
"While he was talking you were building it."
"I know."
A pause. "That's the problem," Asher said. "Not what you did. What you can't stop doing."
Elham turned around. Asher was leaning against the wall of the building behind them, arms crossed, the sword at his hip with its faint constant glow. He looked the same as he always looked collected, present, not performing anything. But there was something in his expression that had not been there in Dothan. Not warmth exactly. Something more precise than warmth. The specific expression of someone who had been watching carefully for a long time and had arrived at something they needed to say and were saying it because the moment required it not because they had been waiting for permission.
"You've been different," Asher said.
Elham looked at him.
"Since we arrived. You haven't been yourself." He said it simply. Not accusation. Observation.
Elham thought about it. About the mornings since they'd arrived, each one moving immediately, workshop or harbor or market or Abidan's house, the days full from early to late with things that needed doing and people that needed seeing and a city that needed understanding.
"The city will be the city whether you move through it today or not," Asher said. "It has been the city for forty years without you in it. It can manage a morning."
Elham looked at him.
Asher looked back. Waiting. Not pressing. The specific quality of patience that had been there since the grain cart in Aram, the patience of someone who had calculated the situation and was waiting for the other variable to arrive at the same conclusion.
"All right," he said.
· · ·
He went back to the inn.
He sat on the edge of the bed in the room with the one window facing the street. His staff against the wall. The city outside with voices, cart wheels, the distant sound of the harbor. All of it continuing without him.
He sat with his hands on his knees and did nothing.
The warmth was in his chest, steady as it had been for weeks. He didn't try to read it. He didn't press his hand to it and wait for direction. He just sat with the fact that it was there and that he had been treating it like a compass he checked occasionally rather than the thing he was supposed to be following, and that somewhere in the distance between those two things the last three weeks had happened.
He sat for a long time.