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If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am.
–Jane Austen, Emma
These are the things you know of duty:
One: A cavalier’s responsibility is to be everything to their necromancer. Protector, defender, sounding board, whipping boy, champion, soundless servant. Whatever the House laws and conventions demand.
Two: Your duties, such as they are, comprise a much shorter and concentrated list. You are a sounding board expected to speak back. A protector responsible for disagreeing when the time is right. A champion either for or against your necromancer’s ideas, and that distinction depends on how truly awful those ideas are.
Three: Despite the cornerstone of your duty — the entire one flesh, one end bit that bookended the oath you swore at age twelve — Palamedes Sextus will never make you his whipping girl.
Not in so many words, anyway. He refuses to siphon off your soul, will not even hear of it even though it interrupts his pursuit of the ultimate goal. He has always been this way: single-minded in the pursuit of something that will inevitably lead him to a couple more subconscious conclusions while on the way.
(Case in point: He has been working on a cure for Dulcinea Seputimus’s incurable cancer since he was thirteen. You have been learning medicine alongside him for the same length of time.)
(Case in point: On your sixteenth birthday, you looked over at him and found him staring back at you, eyes and glasses glinting in the dim library.)
(Case in point: He watched you with an expression like the dawning sun: realization, delight and a little fear.)
(Case in point: “You know I love you, Cam, right?” The first and last time you can recall him ever showing a shred of boyish uncertainty.)
(Case in point: Your throat closed up. You couldn’t answer. You could only nod and turn away.)
(Case in point: You have never wondered since why you rankled at the mention of the Lady Septimus. The answer has never been more than an arms-length away.)
Four: It is your duty to not think of him this way. It is your duty to walk a step behind, though he waits for you to catch up, ever the gentleman, whose insistence you walk through doors and into rooms first comes from chivalry and not a desire for protection. It is your duty to protect the duchess, though you care nothing for the fate to which she has resigned his heart. It is certainly your duty to abide the fools of the Second and Third Houses as Palamedes does verbal battle with them over keys and power. Two things he did not want anymore. Two things he hardly needed in the first place.
Five: It is not your duty to shiver at his confidence when he gives you permission to ‘“go loud.” It is not your duty to let him fuss over the puncture through your arm. It is not your duty to clutch the sentence “Cam, I’ve never been so scared in all my life” to your chest like a child’s favorite toy.
Six: You wish it was your duty to follow him to the end. What he asked of you is a far deeper wound.
"Do you remember," he starts, perching on the edge of the dusty Caanan House bed, coughing a little when the covers puff up mites, "the time we stunned the archivists into silence?"
"Which time?" you ask, a knife balanced perfectly in your palm.
(You will later go over every detail of this moment as you lay burning with fever from an infection brought on by a wound through the shoulder courtesy of a half-mad Lyctor.)
His eyes skate over your face. You can feel the weight of that grey gaze on your eyes, your cheeks, nose, collarbone, shoulders, arms. You set the knife aside as he watches. "Which time?" you ask again.
"I should like to spend a lifetime doing that with you."
"Stunning people into silence?" Then, you did not understand the longing in his voice. Upon further review, days later, the cause is painfully obvious.
"Yes. Among other things."
You know I love you, Cam, right? It echoes in your mind. He may remember everything he has ever read, but you remember everything about him. His words hang between you.
"I love you," you say softly. His eyes glint in the light. "What?"
He sighs. "We're never going to talk about it, are we?"
You look at the Warden. The Warden looks at you. Neither of you say another word.
This is what you know of love:
One: Love is a prison, a tomb with the air sucked out. A beautiful thing left to crumble.
Two: Love is a series of steps carefully trod with only the loyal beside you.
Three: Love will eat you alive if you allow it. It will consume you and turn you inside out, then blame you when you trail blood all over the place.
Four: Love is locked hands and childish worry, fidelity and excitement.
Five: Love is steadiness, bad jokes, attempts at unification.
Six: Love is sometimes the only logical conclusion.
Seven: Love is a chain that binds you and everyone that chooses you to a bitter end.
Eight: Love questions nothing.
Nine: Love is something you cannot see in the dark unless you are prepared to squint very hard.
(This is the truth, void of solace:)
(Six: Love will turn you into a supernova in the name of buying someone a few precious moments of time. Love will twist your words in your throat. Love will blind you and bind you and weaken you.)
(Love chokes you. Love stains you. Love, at the end of all things, is all you have left.)