Chapter 110 Aria and Aldric — Honest

Chapter 110 Aria and Aldric — Honest
Aria drove to the eastern house on a Saturday with nothing in the car except herself and the specific intention of arriving without an agenda, which was harder than it sounded for someone who had been running on agenda for the better part of two years.

No documentation. No list of twelve things.

No governance updates or constitutional implementation questions or anything that needed to be discussed before it could be filed and acted on. Just the eastern road and the six hours of it and the garden she could see from the gate when she arrived, the northern wall section fully established now, green and growing in the ground that had been cleared and replanted.

Aldric answered the door before she finished knocking.

He looked better than the last visit, which she noted without saying anything about it because saying something about it would have made it a medical conversation and she had not driven six hours for a medical conversation. He looked like a man who had been sleeping more than he had been sleeping three months ago and whose physician had apparently found an approach that was costing less than the previous one, which Sera had told her in the careful language Sera used when conveying information about Aldric's health without making it feel like a report.

"No folder," he said, looking at her hands.

"No folder," she said.

He stepped back from the door and she came in and the eastern house received her the way it had been receiving her for months, warmly and without ceremony, the specific comfort of a place she had been visiting long enough that it had stopped being new.

He made the tea himself.

She sat at the table and looked out the eastern windows at the garden and thought about nothing specific for a few minutes, which was a skill she had been developing slowly and imperfectly over the last year and which still required conscious effort but was becoming slightly less effortful each time she practiced it.

He brought the tea and sat across from her and they drank it in the comfortable silence that had developed between them through six months of correspondence and visits, the silence that didn't need filling because everything important had been said in one form or another and what remained was simply being in the same space.

She had been sitting with a question for three weeks.

Not a governance question and not a constitutional question and not anything on any list she had ever made. A question that had arrived one evening when she was reading the fourth batch of historical documentation materials and had found a section she had not been prepared for despite having been prepared for most of it, a section that documented the specific decision-making process behind the Settlement Seven authorization in more detail than the northern elder records had provided, and she had read it and sat with it and the question had arrived and she had been carrying it since.

She set her cup down.

"Do you regret it?" she said. "Marcus."

The garden was quiet outside. The afternoon light was coming through the eastern windows at the angle it came through at this hour, warm and unhurried, the kind of light that made rooms feel like rooms rather than places where difficult things happened.

Aldric looked at his cup.

He looked at it for long enough that she understood he was not avoiding the question but arriving at the honest answer, which required the specific kind of consideration that separated the honest answer from the reflexive one, and she waited because waiting was what the question deserved.

"I regret the method," he said. "Not the outcome." He looked at her directly. "You know that's the honest answer."

She looked at him for a long time.

She thought about a twenty-two year old on a road three miles north of a settlement that had burned, and about a year of building everything that had come after, and about the specific thing it meant to be sitting in a garden house with the man who had ordered it and understand that the honest answer to the question she had asked was the answer he had just given and that the honest answer was complicated in a way that did not resolve into something simpler no matter how long she sat with it.

She had known the answer before she asked the question.

That was why she had been carrying it for three weeks without asking it.

"I know," she said. "That's why I still come."

He held her gaze and she held his and neither of them pretended that what she had just said was not complicated because it was and they had both long since stopped pretending things were simpler than they were.

She came because the correspondence was real and the visits were real and what had developed between them through six months of garden updates and history books and surprise questions was real, and all of that was true at the same time as Marcus being on a list and the road and the settlement that burned and the grave she had dug with her hands.

Both things. At the same time. Without one cancelling the other.

She had been living in the space between things that were simultaneously true since the night she crossed the border and she had not found a way out of that space and had stopped looking for one because the space was not a problem to be solved. It was simply where the truth lived when the truth was large enough to contain more than one thing.

"The documentation team finished the Settlement Seven section," she said after a while.

"I read it," he said.

"Cael did the compilation," she said. "He handled it well."

"Yes," Aldric said. "He did."

They sat with that.

Outside the garden was doing what gardens did in the late afternoon, settling into the specific quiet of growing things at rest, and the light was changing along the northern wall where the replanted section had fully taken hold and was producing exactly what it was supposed to produce in the ground that had been cleared for it.

She picked up her cup.

"Tell me about the groundskeeper," she said.

Aldric's expression shifted into the dryness she had come to recognise from six months of letters.

"He has opinions about the eastern bed," Aldric said.

"He always has opinions about the eastern bed," she said.

"This week's opinions are worse than last week's," he said.

She looked at him and he looked at her and the afternoon sat around them and she felt the full weight of the complicated thing they were to each other sitting in the room with them and she let it sit and she let it be complicated and she did not try to resolve it into anything else.

Some things were not meant to be resolved.

They were meant to be lived inside, carefully, with full awareness of what they were.

She was learning to do that.

She thought she was getting better at it.