Kira reached Caedrin-by-the-Lake on a wet evening, eleven days after she had ridden out. She had ridden the salt road back without a guide. She had not, on the return, been walked. She had not, on the return, been registered. The horse had been waiting at the leaning stones the way a horse waited when it had been told to wait; she had not, in two days of return-riding, asked herself how he had been told.
She did not stop to bathe. She did not, before going to the prince, change the travelling coat. She walked into Tovalen's small audience-room at the back of the palace with the leather case in one hand and the road on her boots, and Tovalen, who had been at his lake-window, turned and saw her and did not, at first, speak.
He sat down. He gestured to the chair across the table.
She sat.
She set the case on the table between them. She opened it. She took out the figure. She set the figure on the wood.
Tovalen looked at it.
He looked at it for what Kira, much later, would describe as the longest single hour of his rule.
He did not pick it up immediately. He did not reach for it at all in the first quarter-hour. He sat with his hands flat on the table on either side of the figure, the way a man sits with his hands on the table on either side of a letter that has informed him of a death in his family. Kira had seen Tovalen receive bad news many times. He received it the same way each time — quiet, fully present, taking the shape of the news into him before allowing himself to respond. She did not, in the quarter-hour, speak. She had been a spymaster long enough to know the value of being available to a prince who was reading.
After the quarter-hour he reached out with one hand. He did not lift the figure. He set his hand against it — palm flat against the small wooden back, as if he were taking the figure's pulse. He held it there. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he said the only thing he would say in the audience.
"Two years."
"Two years, my prince."
He took his hand off the figure. He sat back. He did not, for a long count, speak again.
He had stopped believing in things — in a serious, completed way — perhaps eight years ago. The Schism his mother had carried out had been, by his own private reading, the last era in which Caedrin had taken its old liturgies as anything more than the small comforting habits of an aging country. He had been, in his court, the prince who had stopped requiring belief in practice. He had thought, in stopping the requirement, that he was sparing his people the small daily violence of having to perform a faith they did not feel. He had also thought, in a private place he did not often visit, that the celestials whose names his mother had defended at the Schism had, by their long centuries of silence, deserved the indifference his generation had grown into.
He had been a man who did not believe, in the careful adult way of men who had decided to mean it.
He had now, in his hand, a piece of carved wood.
The wood had been carved by an old woman in a desert he had never seen, in a kingdom he had never visited, two years before he had asked her to carve it. The wood was correct. The wood was correct in a way that no kingdom of his had been correct about anything in his lifetime. The wood was correct because an older country than his had taken the trouble to count, and the counting had been a kind of attention his own court had not, in his rule, practiced.
He held the figure against his chest for a moment. Kira, watching, did not name what she was watching.
He set the figure back on the table.
"Kira."
"My prince."
"She named him to you."
"She named him, my prince. The man at the working table. They have called him so for two years."
"And she did not warn us."
"She did not."
"Did you ask her why."
"I asked, my prince."
"And."
"She said it was not Vornholt's role to warn outsiders. She said the seeing was older than our kingdoms. She said her office was the seeing, not the carrying of it."
He took that in. He did not, at first, answer.
"Send the figure to Aelinna of Krypton tonight. Send a copy of the witch-mother's words. Send the letter through your usual channels. Mark it for the princess only."
"It will be in her hands within ten days."
"Good."
He stood. He went to the lake-window. He stood for some time at the glass, watching the rain on the lake. The rain had been, by the small unreliable measurement of a foreign prince, falling for the entirety of the day. The lake had been, in the witch-mother's reading, off — by a small fraction — for a good deal longer than the day.
He did not, at the window, speak again.
When Kira had quietly closed the door behind her, the prince who had stopped believing in things stood in his small private audience-room with a piece of carved wood on the table behind him, and the small carved figure waited, on the table, for the prince to come back to it; and the prince, after a while, did. He returned to the table. He sat. He picked up the figure. He held it again. He held it for the rest of the evening.
Belief, the chronicler will record, is sometimes carved.