Senna had a theory about men who appeared from nowhere.
She had delivered it over tea that morning at the small table by Veyra's bedroom window, her cup held in both hands, her expression carrying the particular gravity she reserved for things she had decided were important. The theory was detailed and thoroughly reasoned and could be summarized in one sentence which was that men who appeared from nowhere were either running from something or hiding something and frequently both and that Veyra should under no circumstances find this interesting.
Veyra had listened attentively and said absolutely nothing about the temple.
"You are not listening," Senna said.
"I am listening. Men from nowhere. Running or hiding. Frequently both."
"And?"
"And you are probably right." She sipped her tea. "About most things."
Senna looked at her with the expression she had been perfecting since they were twelve, the one that meant she knew something was being withheld and was choosing her moment. Then she topped up her tea and changed the subject to the Callor gathering and Seraphine's comment and whether it was possible to legally acquire a gathering invitation and simply not give it to certain people.
Veyra laughed and agreed that it should be possible and did not think about a man called Sylvan saying "yes" to her question about listening with an expression that had lived in the back of her mind all morning like a song she could not finish.
She thought about it constantly.
The market on Brennan Street ran every third day and Veyra went to it the way she went to most things she genuinely enjoyed, without announcing the fact to anyone who would turn it into an obligation. Her mother knew. Lirien sometimes came. Her brothers treated her market habit with the same baffled tolerance they applied to most of her preferences, which was to say they did not understand it and had stopped trying to.
She went alone that afternoon.
Brennan Street in market hours was the best version of Selvara. Loud and colorful and completely indifferent to social architecture. Merchant families and dock workers and sailors from Thalindor with their complicated knotwork jewelry all occupying the same narrow street with the democratic equality of people who wanted things and were prepared to negotiate for them. The stalls ran the length of the block and beyond it. Spices from the eastern trade routes. Cloth from Vorrakan in the deep reds and blacks they favored there. Books, which Veyra always stopped for. Small carved things whose origins she could never precisely identify but which felt old in the way certain objects did, like they remembered something.
She was examining a small figurine at the third stall from the corner, a carved thing in pale stone that might have been a bird or might have been something else entirely, when she became aware of someone standing nearby.
She looked up.
Sylvan stood two stalls away looking at a display of old maps with the focused attention of someone who found them genuinely interesting. He had not seen her. Or if he had he gave no indication of it, his eyes moving across the maps with calm unhurried interest, one hand resting on the stall's edge.
She looked at him for a moment.
He was dressed simply. Dark clothes, nothing that announced wealth or its absence. He stood the way he always seemed to stand, with that particular stillness that was not stiffness, the quality of something that did not need to shift its weight or check its surroundings because it was entirely comfortable in whatever space it occupied.
The market moved around him and he stood in it like a stone in a current.
She put the figurine down and walked over.
"You are following me," she said.
He looked up from the maps. That almost-smile arrived immediately, which she was beginning to think was simply what his face did when he saw her, and the thought sat warmly in her chest before she could do anything sensible about it.
"You were at the temple," he said. "Now you are at the market. I was at the temple and now I am at the market. The sequence does not necessarily imply intent."
"That is an extremely reasonable defense."
"I thought so."
She looked at the maps spread across the stall. They were old, genuinely old, the kind of old where the edges had gone soft and the ink had faded to brown and the coastlines were slightly wrong in the way of maps made before better instruments. She loved them. She had three at home, framed, on the wall of the room her father called her study and she called her space for things he did not understand.
"Do you collect maps?" she asked.
"I find them interesting," he said. "The way they show what people knew at the time. What they thought the edges of the world looked like."
"And what do you think they actually look like?"
He considered this with the seriousness he seemed to apply to most things she said, which was something she had noticed and which she was trying not to find as affecting as she did.
"Larger than most maps suggest," he said. "And stranger."
She looked at him.
He looked back.
"There is a bookshop," she said before she had finished deciding to say it. "On Harren Street. They have a mythology section that is genuinely extraordinary. Old texts, some of them. The kind you do not find in the larger shops." She paused. "They also have maps. If you are interested in that sort of thing."
"I might be interested in that sort of thing," he said.
"It is two streets north of the harbor." She picked up one of the old maps from the stall, a rendering of the three continents in which Thalindor had been given a slightly fantastical coastline and Vorrakan looked more mountainous than it actually was. "Tomorrow morning. If you are nearby."
She put the map down and kept walking.
She did not invite him precisely. She simply mentioned a place and a time and left the rest of it up to the universe, which she had always found to be a more reliable mechanism than direct asking. Direct asking gave people the opportunity to decline formally. This way the universe could simply arrange things.
The universe had never let her down on the small things.
She told Senna about it over dinner at the Vayne family table, which was perhaps a tactical error because the Vayne family table contained not only Senna but also her mother, her brothers Corren and Thane, and Lirien, who was sitting at the end of the table feeding small pieces of bread to something Veyra was fairly certain was not there.
"Who is he?" Corren asked immediately.
"A person I have spoken to twice."
"Where is he from?"
"The north."
Corren and Thane exchanged the look that brothers exchanged when they had decided something required investigation and were distributing the investigative responsibilities silently between them.
"The north is large," Thane said.
"Most places are large," Veyra said. "That is what places are."
"Veyra." Her mother's voice from the other end of the table. Maren Vayne had the specific skill of saying her daughter's name in a way that contained an entire conversation. This particular version contained warmth and curiosity and the careful neutrality of someone withholding an opinion until they had more information.
"His name is Sylvan," Veyra said. "He is new to Selvara. He is quiet and he listens properly which is rarer than it should be and I have spoken to him twice and told him about the bookshop on Harren Street." She looked around the table. "That is the complete information available."
"You told him about Harren Street?" Senna said.
"The mythology section specifically."
Senna put her fork down with the deliberateness of someone setting something down in order to have their hands free for expressing an opinion. "Veyra. You do not tell people about Harren Street."
"I tell people about Harren Street."
"You have told four people about Harren Street in the fourteen years I have known you and I was one of them and it took three years." Senna looked at her with the expression she had. "You told this man after two conversations."
The table was quiet in the particular way of people listening very carefully while pretending to eat.
"He is interested in maps," Veyra said. Which was not really an answer and she knew it and so did everyone at the table.
Lirien looked up from her end with the expression of someone surfacing from a private world. She looked at Veyra with those wide careful eyes and said with the complete seriousness of a twelve year old who had decided something was true and saw no reason to be uncertain about it.
"Is he the one you have been leaving amber for?"
The table went quiet in a different way.
"I leave amber for Aeldrath," Veyra said carefully.
"I know," Lirien said. And went back to her bread.
Veyra looked at her sister for a moment. Then she picked up her fork and returned to her dinner and did not think about the way Sylvan had said "yes" when she asked him if he believed someone was listening.
She thought about it all evening.
That night she went to her window. The harbor glittered below the city in the dark, the lights of the ships small and distant and peaceful. She stood there for a while the way she sometimes did, not praying exactly, just present. Just herself in the dark with the city below and the sky above and the particular quality of nighttime quiet that she had never found anywhere but here.
She reached into the small dish on her windowsill where she kept things. Found a piece of amber, smooth and warm in her palm.
She set it on the sill.
Not for Aeldrath this time. She was not entirely sure who it was for. Just a small sincere thing placed in the dark the way you placed small sincere things when you did not have words for what you meant.
The harbor lights glittered below.
She went to bed.
She slept well for the first time in weeks.