He was quiet for a mont, in the comfortable way. Derti had always had comfortable silences — it was one of the things she had valued about him from early on, the absence of the anxious-filling-silence quality that most people had in her presence. He did not need to fill the silence. He was simply in it.
"Is sothing wrong?" he asked, after a while. Not urgently. Gently.
"Nothing is wrong," she said.
"But sothing is—"
"Sothing is unclear," she said. "That is different from wrong."
He looked at the sky. "What is unclear?"
She thought about how to say it to Derti specifically — not in the way she would have written it in a docunt or analyzed it for herself, but in the way you said things to a person who had been genuinely present for a significant portion of your life and who you did not need to perform for.
"I do not know what I am doing," she said. "Not the daily things. The larger thing."
He was quiet for a mont.
"I rember the staff’s faces," she said, "when I said vacation. The happiness. And I did not understand it at first. Now I think I understand it better but the understanding does not tell how to—" She paused. "I have always been going toward sothing. Before, it was survival. Then it was the throne. Then it was fixing the most broken things. But those are not — they are not what made their faces do that."
Derti looked at the sky for a long mont.
"May I say sothing that is perhaps not my place to say?" he said.
"When have you ever not," she said.
He almost smiled. "True." He folded his hands in his lap. "I have worked for you for — it has been several years now, Your Majesty. Since before all of this. Since you were still — negotiating your position." He paused. "I was a laundry worker before you put in the administration. Which you know."
"I know," she said.
"What you do not know," he said, "is that I decided to follow you because I saw you beat a servant."
She turned to look at him.
He held up a hand. "I know how that sounds."
"It sounds insane," she said.
"Yes," he agreed. "But let finish." He looked at the sky. "The servant had done sothing that, in that palace, at that ti, was genuinely harmful to soone who could not defend themselves. Everyone knew it. No one did anything, because the servant was connected to a minor noble and the calculus of that situation ant doing sothing was expensive." He paused. "You beat the servant. Not in a rage — not in the way that powerful people beat people to demonstrate power. You beat him specifically and proportionally and then you walked away and went back to your day as though it was a thing that needed doing and you had done it."
She rembered. She had not given it much thought at the ti.
"I thought," Derti said, "this is a person who does things because they need doing. Not for the appearance. Not for the politics. Because they need doing." He looked at her. "I have been right about that assessnt for several years. I continue to be right."
She looked at the sky.
"You asked what made the staff’s faces do that," he said. "The vacation happiness." He paused. "They were going ho to ordinary things. Not extraordinary things — ordinary ones. A family dinner that is slightly too loud. A child who needs sothing. A person who asks how the day was and actually wants to know." He thought about it. "The extraordinary is not what makes the face do that. The ordinary is."
She absorbed this.
"You have spent your entire ti here," he said, carefully, "doing things that needed to be done. You have not — with respect, Your Majesty — you have not spent much ti doing things that did not need to be done."
"The river," she said.
"The river," he agreed. "The fried dough. The rope seller. The craftsman’s workshop." He paused. "Samuel."
She looked at him. "You know about all of that."
"I am your administrator," he said. "Knowing things is my function." A pause. "Also Fen talks to . Not reports. Talks." He said this with the slight warmth of soone who values a conversation.
She looked at the sky.
"The thing you are looking for," Derti said, "is not a large thing. It is not an achievent or a resolved problem or a completed reform. I believe it is — smaller. It is the thing that is just there. Not worked for. Just—" He thought. "The sky being good today. Too bad it is sumr."
She looked at him.
He looked back at her with the expression she had seen on him many tis — the expression of a man who had decided a long ti ago to be honest with her and had been consistently paying that commitnt’s cost and had found the cost worth it.
"You said sothing interesting," she said. "When you ca. About your life before."
"The laundry," he said.
"You said it was hard, but nice."
He considered this. "Yes," he said. "It was physically difficult work. Long hours. Not prestigious. But there was — a satisfaction in it that I did not appreciate until it was gone. Sothing done that was visibly done. Clean where it had been dirty. Complete in a way that administrative work is rarely complete."
"Do you miss it?"
"No," he said. "I miss the quality of it, not the thing itself. The quality of seeing the result clearly." He paused. "Although there are days when reviewing tax restructuring docunts when the laundry seems — philosophically appealing."
She almost did the thing she had removed from Samuel’s scene. She did not. But the edge of it was there — sothing that would have been a laugh if she had been built differently.
"You have a sweet mouth," she said. "When you want sothing, it usually arrives wrapped in this kind of conversation."
He looked at her with the expression of a man who has been known well enough to be caught and who has made his peace with that. "There is nothing I want today," he said. "Today I saw my Empress sitting on a rock looking at the sky and I thought she might want the company."
She looked at the sky.
"Being the ruler is tiring," she said, eventually. She said it the way she had not said it before — not analyzing it, not qualifying it, just stating it as the plain true thing it was. "It was not what I planned. I do not think I actually planned anything after a certain point. I was just—" She paused. "Going."
"Yes," he said.
"My father was not—" She stopped. Thought about how to be honest without being dramatic about it. "This royal family had a disease in it. Not one person’s fault. A structural disease, the kind that goes back so far that the people in it do not know they are sick. My father, his children, all of it — the disease produced the behavior." She looked at her hands. "I do not excuse any of them. The behavior was the behavior. But the disease is the thing that actually needed addressing."
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