Work Text:
Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
— Maya Angelou
Despite his bristling at Teleus’s solicitude, Relius didn’t drop Kamet’s arm as they walked together through the palace, nor try to speed up the slow pace that he set. By unspoken agreement, they made a course not for the queen’s garden or the public gardens, but the courtyard that Relius’s windows looked out into, just two floors down. This was more like the gardens Kamet had known in the Mede Empire, but more beautiful; hanging baskets surrounded it, with deep pink flowers spilling out of them, and large ferns separated its borders from the covered walkway that ran along the outside. Honeysuckle trees sat in each corner, and there was a wide bird bath and two benches, one on the east side and one on the west. It was not an especially large garden, compared to others in the palace, but large enough that a couple could sit on one bench and converse, without fear of being overheard by anyone sitting on the far side. On this particular evening, they had no such concern—except for a small party of birds meeting at the bath, they were alone.
“Let’s sit,” Relius said. “And don’t think I’m about to keel over just because I made the suggestion.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, uncle,” Kamet said solemnly, and Relius rolled his eyes. They sat, and Kamet crossed his legs and laced his fingers around his knee. “So. That was very elegantly done, getting me out of the room without Costis.”
“Thank you, I thought it was.”
“Was it for our benefit, or theirs?”
“A little bit of both,” Relius admitted, and then he was silent, peering at the bird bath. Night had fallen, but the moon was full, and when Kamet followed his gaze, he could just make ought the smudge of movement. He could hear them better, conversing among themselves in low, whooping twitters. “I think it is a distinction without a difference, which is very odd.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. We are working in tandem to a degree that is very unusual.” Kamet sensed that Relius was in a philosophical state of mind, rather than his typical brusqueness, and he waited quietly until the older man had put his thoughts in order. “For as long as we have known each other, we have worked together in the queen’s interests, but our lives beyond that were as independent as they could be. The first—” He had been staring at nothing; now his eyes darted to Kamet’s face, and he frowned. “Kamet—you’re not shy?”
It took Kamet a moment to understand him, and then he laughed. He had lived in close quarters with others all his life, until his last visit to Attolia when he had first been given his own bedroom, and in the Mede Empire “personal privacy” did not mean privacy from slaves. Sometimes he was self-conscious about his own person and his own history—but no, he was not shy.
“I thought not. Well, the first time we tumbled into bed together, I thought it was a chance occurrence. We both did. Then it happened again, and again, and again, and finally we thought we might as well make a proper attempt at a love affair. It was very pleasant for… oh, six months. If that. Looking back I could tell you exactly what went wrong, but I won’t—”
“Tell me,” Kamet interrupted. Relius’s eyebrow lifted.
“You don’t think we have more important matters to discuss?” He asked pointedly, and Kamet wondered where he meant to begin—the education of the next Baron Erondites, the possibly malevolent incompetence of the current secretary of the archives, or the specter of Relius’s permanent departure from the palace. Yes, they certainly had other things to discuss. But—
“No,” he said firmly. “I don’t think we do.”
If Kamet thought about it too much, he began to miss Roa with a ferocity that pained him. Life had been slower, there. Quieter. Now, with distance, he was beginning to forget the underlying tension that came from waiting for and waiting out a war, and remember instead only the good things. Like being with Costis, being alone with Costis, learning day by day how to build a life. How to be in love.
It had not always been easy, or pleasant, but it had been fulfilling, and he had been wary of relearning the lessons in the Attolian capital. Of course he had come, because Costis had wanted to go home, and because Pheris had needed him. But there were times in the past few months when he had found himself wishing for Relius’s advice (unsurprisingly, he had never worked up either the courage or the callousness to ask Teleus).
Relius looked at him appraisingly for a moment, and Kamet tried to keep his expression politely interested despite the warmth he could feel rising in his cheeks. He wasn’t sure if he succeeded, but Relius simple lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug, and kept talking.
“Very well. Essentially, we were both very rigid and utterly convinced our work was more important than anyone else’s. We demanded complete devotion from each other without sacrificing our own devotion to our respective duties. And when that didn’t work— we broke completely.” He was contemplative for a moment, and then he sighed. “And then we drifted together again. Thankfully. We were—are—still devoted to each other, I think, but a different kind of devotion. The greatest part of my life has been my work, but Teleus has fit himself in the spaces in between, and I have done the same for him. Dropping in occasionally for a glass of wine if we couldn’t dine together properly, and never mind if someone has to be doing paperwork at the same time. A night, here or there, and satisfaction from others if taste or schedules didn’t match—on my side, at least. Actually I don’t know if Teleus has taken another lover in all this time, and I think I would know if he had. People tend to tell me these things,” he added, the most outrageous understatement Kamet had heard anyone give with a straight face.
“I wonder why.”
“I used to wish he would,” he said ruefully. “Especially those first few years. I felt as though it put a lot of pressure on me, being the only one.”
“Costis—” Kamet began without thinking, and then he paused. He wasn’t sure how candid he was allowed to be on Costis’s behalf—they had never discussed it. But, he decided, what Costis didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. He would be circumspect, anyway. “He asked me once if it bothered me, that he had more… experience… and I had practically none at all, and it doesn’t. I am very content with what we have—and frankly, I don’t think I would enjoy sharing that kind of vulnerability with other people I didn’t trust implicity. I certainly wouldn’t put myself through it just to match him. And I don’t mind that there were others, knowing that he chooses me above them—although there were a few flirts in Roa I always wanted to speak very sharply to.”
Relius snorted.
“Over time, I have moved away from very tall men and military men, with one prominent exception,” he said dryly. “But for the most part, Teleus doesn’t mind. He thinks I have horrible taste in bedfellows, and that is a great comfort to him on lonely nights. Except when I was arrested the first time—I think. I hope.”
“So, so, so,” Kamet smiled. “What’s changed?”
“Hm? Oh. Now… We are not quite adjusting ourselves to fit in each other’s spaces. We are… adjusting the spaces. It is a process that began, I think, when I was in prison, the first time. I thought he had been executed. Six months ago, he thought I had been killed. We have grieved each other, and been given another chance. That is no small thing.”
Kamet shivered, despite the late summer heat.
“No,” he said in a quiet voice. “It’s not.”
“And this has not been an easy time, and I… I want another life. A place in the country—not far—with goats and a library and a view of the stars. I want a life with Teleus, and he wants a life with me. Intertwined, rather than intersecting. It may not happen immediately, or even soon, but there was once a time when I expected to die chained to a wall and he with a sword in his hand, and now our expectations are different.”
There was a lump in Kamet’s throat. He looked down at his hands, and found his fingers twisting, his knuckles pale. He forced his grip to ease and leaned back on the bench. The smooth stone had absorbed the heat of the day, and was slow to release it.
“For my sake, I hope leaving proves difficult,” he admitted. “But I have recently had a chance to appreciate the joys of goats and a sky view—and of course I have always loved a library—and I would be a very poor friend indeed if I begrudged you them.”
Relius patted his knee.
“You are not that. But don’t worry—there are many difficulties already.”
“Such as?”
“Such as captaincy of the King’s Guard. Does Costis want it?”
There was brusque Relius back, and Kamet’s eyebrows rose.
“Yes,” he said simply. “But I would be surprised to hear he had ever admitted that, even privately in his own heart.”
“That’s what I thought. And he is very young, and admittedly lacking in experience. Lieutenant Enkelis has seniority—the queen made him captain when Teleus was arrested. But Teleus doesn’t like him, and neither do the men. He won’t leave the Guard in the hands of someone he doesn’t trust absolutely.”
“Of course.”
“And then there is our young Baron Erondites,” he sighed. “I must speak with the king and queen—when they first devised this inheritance scheme, I can’t imagine they expected him to ascend to the barony so quickly. It will take some delicacy.”
“I don’t think we have been doing too badly,” Kamet frowned.
“No, no, not at all. But I took responsibility for the boy, and I don’t want to shirk it. Besides, the queen has told me how much you’ve taken on in the last few months. You’ve used your convenient lack of a proper role to steal the duties of at least three or four—don’t deny it.”
Kamet could not, in fact, deny it. Roa, delightful as it had been, had also been very quiet, and the opportunities to use some of his skills far and in between. He thought for a moment about some of the other difficulties of court, and spoke suddenly in a low murmur. They were alone in the courtyard, and between the chirping of the birds and the thickness of the leafy barrier, he did not think they would be overheard—but he was still very aware of the open walkway, the windows in the rooms above.
“Speaking of the baron… did you tell him where you were going, when you left?”
“No,” Relius replied in kind. “I didn’t tell anyone except you.”
Kamet nodded—and then he froze.
“And Yorn Fordad.”
Relius looked at him with an odd expression.
“I didn’t tell Yorn Fordad where I was going. Why would I?”
“But—the king said…”
“I visited the queen’s apartments to ask Her Majesty and the king if I could leave the court. That was not so unusual—I had done the same on other occasions. I was in a hurry, because Costis had just left and I wanted to depart within a day, and I interrupted a meeting they were having with Fordad. We walked out together and he asked where I was going, but I didn’t think a foreign ambassador had any need for the truth, so I made something up on the spot. I think I told him I needed to speak to someone at the penal colony in Thracia.”
Kamet’s heart was pounding in his ears.
“The entire reason you were presumed dead is that you were gone for so long, and an ambassador from the Continent knew where you were going—but he did not know where you were going. I was the only one who knew—”
“Presuming the message I gave Costis arrived unread.”
“It did. It was pristine when he arrived, and he never so much as shared a fire with anyone on the trip. But the route to Thracia doesn’t overlap with the route to the Erondites holdings at any point—so how were you found?”
“I don’t know. I was not quite as careful as Costis; I stayed at inns both nights. The morning of the third day, I turned the first bend in the road and found a Pentish nobleman waiting with a dozen soldiers. Erondites’s men—I recognized several of them, and one in particular had been an informant of mine. He looked deeply uncomfortable with the situation, but would not disobey the Pent.”
“Uncomfortable enough to have told someone that he had arrested an Attolian intimate of the queen’s, at the behest of his baron and a foreign national?”
“Perhaps.”
“Then it would be very strange, would it not, that the king and queen were never informed?”
“Yes,” Relius said significantly. “Very strange. But under certain circumstances, not so strange at all.”
They were both quiet for a moment. Kamet’s heart was still racing, but at the same time everything felt very distant. It was odd, being so blisteringly angry on such a lovely summer evening, following a pleasant dinner, in good company.
The birds had finished their bathing ritual. One flew from the bath to the tree. Most of the others followed, except for one; then the flock lifted out of the tree, spiraling up through the palace towards the open sky, and only then did their lazy fellow notice and join them. The bird flew past the window to Relius’s office, and Kamet noticed that the lamp inside had dimmed considerably. Before he could comment, Relius stood.
“Your arm?” he said, and Kamet hastily stood and obliged. “Not because I am frail,” he teased. “Because I like you, Kamet, and I like walking with you.”
“The feeling is mutual,” Kamet said, ducking his head. He was a little embarrassed, actually, and was grateful Relius wouldn’t be able to discern the warmth in his cheeks. He was getting used to having friends, but slowly—Costis didn’t count, and most of his other companions were not so blunt. It probably wasn’t good, he thought, that he was more comfortable discussing treason than accepting such a compliment, but that was what it was. “We can discuss the—other matter—some other time.”
“Can we?” Relius asked. His voice was unusually quiet and serious, even given everything, and Kamet peered up at him and thought of an earlier question, and the unspoken question that naturally ought to have followed.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Whenever you like.”
“Good.” Relius put his other hand on top of Kamet’s forearm and squeezed. “Thank you, Kamet.”
“Thank you, uncle.”