Chapter 135 — What the City Held

Chapter 135: Chapter 135 — What the City Held

Orientation didn’t begin for another two days, Talia had told him, giving Arlen a stretch of unclaimed time he hadn’t properly had since Marrowgate. He woke to it the way he’d learned to wake to any gift he hadn’t expected — grateful, and determined not to waste it.

He left the Foxglove after a modest breakfast Pella pressed on him before he could properly decline it, and let the city simply carry him wherever it wanted to for a while, the same unhurried wandering that had served him well in every settlement since Thistledown.

The market nearest the guild district sprawled across three connected squares, considerably larger than anything Marrowgate had offered, and Arlen found himself moving through it with the same careful, cataloguing attention he brought to every new region — a spice stall doing brisk business with something that smelled of scorched sugar and pepper both at once; a baker working dough with four hands rather than two, the extra pair emerging from a second set of shoulders beneath the first, calling out prices in a rolling, musical accent; a fishmonger arguing amiably over the price of something silver-scaled and still faintly twitching, her customer a broad-shouldered woman whose skin held the faint, mottled pattern of stone rather than ordinary flesh.

Nobody around him seemed to find any of it remarkable. That, more than any single sight, was what struck Arlen most — a city large enough that difference itself had stopped being the point of anyone’s attention, simply one more ordinary texture among a hundred others.

He bought a skewer of something grilled and unfamiliar from a vendor whose accent he couldn’t place at all, paid the two copper without haggling, and found the flavor sharp and smoky in a way that reminded him faintly of Ashford’s Crossing’s river spices, though considerably bolder.

"First time trying vashroot?" the vendor asked, catching his expression.

"First time trying most of what I’ve eaten today," Arlen admitted.

"You’ll run out of days before you run out of new things to try, in this city." The vendor said it plainly, without any particular pride, the way a person might mention the weather.

He wandered north from the market eventually, drawn by nothing more purposeful than curiosity about where the streets led, and found the ground rising gradually beneath his feet until he reached a wide, paved overlook where a scattering of other people had stopped to do exactly what he found himself doing — simply look.

The city spread out from here in a way the guild district’s own considerable scale hadn’t quite prepared him for. Rooftops layered outward in every direction, threaded through with the silver ribbons of canals, and far across the sprawl, rising above everything else the way the guild hall had risen above its own plaza, stood a cluster of pale towers behind a high, unbroken wall of their own — spires catching the morning light, banners he couldn’t make out from this distance flying above them in colors he didn’t recognize.

"Palace district," said an older man nearby, noting the direction of Arlen’s attention without seeming to mind the company. "Crown keeps its own walls inside the city walls, same as the guild does, near enough. Noble quarter wraps around the base of it — you’d need a proper reason and considerably finer clothes than either of us to get past the outer gates, though the streets right up to them are open enough."

"Have you ever been?"

"Near it. Never past the gates themselves." The man shrugged, unbothered. "Most people who live here never do. It’s not really built to be visited, that part of the city. It’s built to be seen from exactly where we’re standing, and left at that."

Arlen studied the distant towers a while longer, filing the shape of them away alongside everything else — a whole separate layer of the capital he understood, immediately, he wasn’t likely to properly explore anytime soon, existing instead as a fixed point on the horizon the same way the Verdant Crown’s canopy once had, back before he’d known what waited beneath it.

He continued his wandering through the afternoon, following streets without much plan beyond his own curiosity, and found himself, gradually, in a quieter district considerably less crowded than the market squares — workshops rather than stalls, the sound of hammers and looms and the occasional muttered incantation drifting from open doorways. A dyer’s apprentice hauling bolts of cloth nearly tripped over her own too-long sleeves, her laugh carrying a musical lilt that marked her as something other than simply human, though Arlen couldn’t have said what. Further along, a pair of children chased each other around a well, one darting low and quick on four legs before scrambling back upright, the other simply faster than any child had any right to be, both of them laughing too hard to notice him watching.

He found a modest teahouse near the district’s edge as the afternoon wore toward evening, drawn in mostly by the smell, and settled at a small outdoor table while a broad-shouldered proprietor — skin a deep, weathered green, tusks visible when he smiled — set a steaming cup in front of him without being asked.

"You’ve got the look of someone who’s walked the whole city today," the man said. "Sit as long as you like. Tea’s included in the seat."

Arlen thanked him, and drank slowly, watching the district settle into its evening rhythm around him — workshops closing, lanterns kindling one by one, a mixed crowd of faces and forms drifting past that he’d stopped trying to properly count somewhere around midday.

He thought, sitting there, of the palace towers still visible above the rooftops in the distance, and of how little the city beneath them seemed to concern itself with what happened behind those walls — an entire world going about its ordinary, layered business, trading and building and raising children, while somewhere above it all a crown he knew almost nothing about simply continued to exist, distant and largely irrelevant to the life actually being lived in its shadow.

Strange, he thought, finishing his tea, how a city this size can hold a king and never once make you feel him.

He made his way back toward the Foxglove as full evening settled over Aurenholt, exhausted in the good, accumulated way that came from a day spent properly seeing something rather than merely passing through it, and found himself already looking forward, despite the lingering unease of an orientation he still didn’t fully understand the shape of, to however many more days like this one the capital still had waiting for him.