Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Chapter 367 --367

He was quiet for a moment. "And you want to know why."

"I want to know why," she said. "It’s probably not interesting. He probably inherited the stall and the stall has always sold rope and there is no particular reason, just continuity. But it might be interesting. And I have spent three years not finding out because I had something else to do."

"You’re going to find out," he said.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Or the day after. When we go back for the fried dough."

He absorbed this. "You took Samuel."

"Yes."

"He’s different," Mahir said. "From this week to last week. Something has opened."

She looked at the climbing plant. "He told me he’d never had a somewhere else before."

The garden was quiet around that for a moment.

"He’s a good child," Mahir said. It was said simply, without agenda, the way true things are said when there is no need to justify them.

"Yes," she said.

They sat in the garden for a while, not talking, the afternoon continuing in its long golden way around them. This was, she noted, unusual — sitting in a garden with Mahir and not talking and not finding the not-talking uncomfortable. She filed this. She filed most things.

"What were you like before all of this?" she asked eventually.

He looked at her. The question had surprised him — she could see it, the brief unmanaged surprise before the consideration arrived.

"Which before?" he said.

"Any before. Pick one."

He thought about it. "Impatient," he said, after a moment. "More than now. I didn’t wait well. I made decisions faster than I should have sometimes because waiting for the full picture was — I didn’t like it. The incompleteness of partial information bothered me in a way I hadn’t learned to manage yet."

"What changed?"

He paused. "Being patient," he said, "because I had no other option. The collar removed the option of impatience. And in removing it, I found—" He thought about how to say it. "I found that the things I had been making decisions about quickly had fuller answers if I waited. That the impatience had been costing me accuracy."

She looked at him. "The collar taught you patience."

"The collar forced it," he said. "The teaching was a different thing. The teaching was noticing, once I had been forced to wait, what the waiting produced." He paused. "I’m aware that is a very complicated thing to say about a system that should not exist."

"It’s an honest thing," she said.

"Honest and complicated are not mutually exclusive."

"No," she said. "They’re usually the same thing."

He looked at the garden wall. His tail moved once, slow. "What were you like before?" he said.

"Angrier," she said, immediately and without thought, which surprised her slightly.

He looked at her.

"I had—" She thought about how to be accurate. "I had a very clear picture of what was wrong. Early. Before I had the ability to do anything about it. And the gap between seeing something clearly and being able to address it is—" She paused. "It produces anger. Not loud anger. The other kind. The cold kind that stays functional but is always there."

"And now?"

She considered. "The gap is smaller," she said. "Not closed. But I’m doing something. Which changes the quality of the feeling." She paused. "Also I’m tired enough most of the time that maintaining the cold anger requires energy I don’t have."

He made a sound that was quiet and surprised and was, she realized, a laugh. A real one — brief, genuine, the kind that happens when something lands true before the filter can catch it.

She looked at him.

He looked back, slightly surprised at himself.

"I didn’t know you did that," she said.

"I don’t, usually," he said.

"Clearly."

He looked away, and there was something in the set of his face that she did not have a full category for yet — something that was not quite any of the expressions she had catalogued, that was in the gap between the warmth he showed her and the control he generally maintained. She filed it as a new category and did not push on it.

"Dinner will be interesting," she said, standing. "Whatever Ken has made."

"I heard the staff singing," Mahir said.

She looked at him. "Singing."

"In the kitchen. About forty minutes ago. I assume it was a positive development."

She looked at the kitchen wing, which was not visible from the garden but was in that direction. "I have a feeling Barro is going to ask me for a formal staff reorganization proposal within the week," she said.

"What will you tell him?"

"That Ken is not his staff," she said. "Ken is— " She considered. "Ken is a guest who cooks."

"Ken will not be satisfied with that," Mahir said.

"I know," she said. "I’ll deal with it when he says so."

She walked toward the garden door.

"Your Majesty," Mahir said.

She stopped.

"Thank you," he said. "For the garden. For the sitting in it."

She looked at him over her shoulder. "You found me here."

"I know," he said. "But you said sit down."

She looked at him for a moment. He was sitting on the bench in the late afternoon light with his tail still and his face open in the specific way it was only open when he had stopped deciding how to be.

"Tomorrow," she said, "if you want, come with us to the river."

She left before he could respond.

---

Dinner that night was the best meal the palace had produced in living memory.

This was not hyperbole — this was the informed assessment of Jesper, who had been in the palace for long enough that his living memory constituted a significant comparative database, and who delivered this verdict with the specific solemnity of a man who takes his assessments seriously.

Ken had made four things.

The first was something with the fish from the river market that Elara hadn’t known about until Fen mentioned that Ken had sent one of the kitchen staff to the market specifically for it at the fourth hour, which explained the earlier confusion about a kitchen staff member leaving the palace during working hours that had briefly generated a minor administrative query she had been about to ignore and now understood.

The second was a bread — not the standard palace bread, which was adequate and consistent and had been produced from the same recipe for so long that adequacy and consistency had become its entire identity. This was different, with a crust that did something specific when you broke it and an interior that suggested someone had thought carefully about the relationship between time and temperature and had made decisions rather than followed instructions.

The third was a preparation of vegetables that should not have been extraordinary — the vegetables were the standard palace kitchen inventory, nothing unusual — but that had been treated in a way that made them taste like the best version of what they were rather than simply the present version.

The fourth was a dessert that Elara ate half of before she realized she had been eating with genuine attention rather than the background automatic fueling she usually performed at meals.

Samuel was at dinner.