*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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When she next sees Hiran, he's wearing a traveling cloak.
She's spent the morning trying on attire for the coronation, preparing for the crowning tomorrow. Travel clothes are unexpected.
"What's going on?" she asks, watching as he closes the door and locks it.
"Allayria sent a message," Hiran responds. "It's time to go to Solveig."
"Now?" Tara huffs, turning around, shuffling the stack of papers on the writing table by the fire.
Well, not stack, more like pile. Or mess. Organization has never been her strong suit.
"We can't go now, I have to be crowned. She ordered me to take the bloody throne, I have to actually take it before we can leave."
She's needling the fire now, stoking it so the embers dance up into the stone chimney and it glows hungrily, grasping at any newly exposed wood. In the days since the funerals she has felt better, recovered even from Freija's poison, though in some moments, when the evenings draw near, she feels an increasingly familiar fatigue.
"Tar—"
"And why now?" Tara continues, setting the poker down and pacing in front of the hearth. It's good to be upright, to be moving. "What's the rush? Old Feuilles isn't going anywhere, certainly not now. Why do we have to go treat with him now?"
"Tara," Hiran interrupts, "she didn't ask for you."
Tara halts, and it's a simple thing, an easily understandable thing, just like addition, subtraction, and any other form of basic math, but for some reason, the implications of that, of Hiran in his traveling cloak, of Allayria not asking for her, won't seem to register in her brain.
"What?" she says, but she knows even as she asks; it breaks in her voice, the understanding of what comes next.
"I have to go," Hiran says.
Silence falls between them but for the crackling of the logs behind her, and she takes this long moment to sit in the chair by the writing table, to pause to think. The moment at the funeral, when she asked him about Ruben, has remained crystallized in her thoughts these past few days, like a new ornament hung above a hearth.
"Why?" she demands now.
"The Paragon commanded—"
"No," Tara interrupts this time. "Why, Hiran: Why did she ask for you? Why are you going to Feuilles? What is going on?"
She can see by the way his face tightens, freezes, that he understands what she asks; what she's driving at, beneath all the words. Because if Hiran Baulieu is to leave her now, he is going to tell her about the thing that has been lingering in the air, the thing she has not been told about.
His mouth twists, his cheek twists, a flinching, shoo-ing thing.
"Tar," he tries again, and his voice shakes. "Don't—"
