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Gaudy supposed he was ranked highly enough now in truth to request a skyship for his own occasional use, but it was still disconcerting to have such a valuable craft diverted for him alone—not that it wouldn't have come here in any case, with dispatches and the post and all the rest. He patted down his robes as the ship docked, so smoothly he hardly noticed, except that the distant sound and smell of Gorjo City grew unaccountably clearer as the air settled around him.
They were waiting to greet him in the tower, his mother and grandmother and Leona, and even Uncle Kip—he was Uncle Kip here, undoubtedly, dressed in shabby linen tunic and sarong and looking thoroughly Islander, thoroughly relaxed. Gaudy felt a strange sense of vertigo, looking at him, with the layers of court robes heavy on his own shoulders and a sailor shouting in a Solaaran accent behind him. Then the moment stretched and snapped, and a wave of rightness washed over him. Home again.
Saya Kalikiri had had an odd twinkle in her eye when she granted him this sudden holiday, unasked for, and handed him a stack of dispatch cases taller than he was to work through on the trip out. He was to have a week's holiday in the Vangavaye-ve, and no work to do on the journey back, so he certainly couldn't complain. He saw that same twinkle now in the eyes of his family as they greeted him, and was confirmed in his suspicions that the trip was for more than a job well done.
No one brought it up as they walked through the streets of Gorjo City, though that may have been because they rarely went farther than half a block without being accosted by a relative shouting greetings and the occasional crack or two about his court robes. Uncle Kip seemed to fade into the background of these exchanges, looking thoroughly amused.
No one explained anything, either, when they arrived at the house that still felt like home, and Gaudy duly hugged and kissed and accepted food from two dozen assorted relations.
At last Uncle Kip led him back out of the house and along the shore of the lagoon. They walked in silence for a time—interrupted less now that Gaudy had changed out of his court robes—until Uncle Kip said, "You've probably guessed this isn't an ordinary holiday." Then, "I'm getting married."
Gaudy took two more steps turning the words over in his mind before they sank in. "Married?" He turned and grasped Uncle Kip by the arms, caught in the sudden joy of it. "I thought it must be something like that, but I didn't think it would be you—ah, no offense."
Uncle Kip waved this aside with all sincerity.
"Congratulations! But Uncle Kip— who?"
Uncle Kip's face took on a softer, nervous smile, and he nodded down the quay. A figure was waiting for them on a bench, and rose as they approached.
Gaudy nearly dropped into the formal obeisances, and stopped himself just in time. Uncle Kip caught the Emperor's hand, and they gazed at each other with such unabashed tenderness that you might have thought they'd been separated for months rather than hours. Gaudy even had time to marshal himself and shut his gaping jaw before they stopped making eyes at each other and turned back to him.
Gaudy had never, in all his life, seen the Sun-on-Earth look nervous. Serene, mostly, irritable or mischievous, on occasion, but never nervous . But here he was, holding Gaudy's uncle's hand and looking—well, like a man desperate to make a good first impression on his in-laws.
Gaudy cast about for something to say, and landed on, "What should I call you, then?" At a raised eyebrow, he went on, suddenly flustered, "Lord of Rising Stars, Your Serene and Glorious Highness, please pass the salt?" (The part of Gaudy’s brain that ran his court manners was screaming louder with every word that came out of his mouth. The part of him that wanted to see his uncle happy was crushing that other part, resolutely, because otherwise he was going to be walking around cross-eyed for the rest of his life trying to remember who he was talking to.)
"That would be rather a mouthful for the every day," the Lord of Rising Stars, His Serene and Glorious Highness said gravely. Then, the uncertainty bleeding through again, "Leona and I had settled on Uncle Fitzroy. But if you would prefer—"
"No," Gaudy said, and tried not to think about how he had just interrupted the Emperor—but if he’d only interrupted his uncle-to-be, that was all right. A little frowned-upon, maybe, but not treasonous. "Uncle Fitzroy is just fine."
The smile that broke out on the Glorious One’s—on Uncle Fitzroy’s—face was nothing like the serene and benevolent smile that the Sun-on-Earth bestowed upon his underlings. This smile was broad and toothy and tinged with relief.
The Lord of Ten Thousand Titles, now (Gaudy told himself firmly) known as Uncle Fitzroy, wandered off on some pretense or another, leaving Gaudy and Uncle Kip to walk slowly, at an ambling Islander pace, along the shore. Gaudy had always thought better while walking, and he thought now, though he tried not to wonder too much about how long it had all been going on. He wondered—
"Wait," he said, and stopped. "We talked to half of Gorjo City on the way from the Spire earlier, and no one said anything. There were two dozen people at the house, and no one said anything." He looked accusingly at Uncle Kip. "You haven't told anyone yet, have you?"
Gaudy's uncle, former Viceroy of Zunidh, shifted guiltily from foot to foot. "We've told my mother and yours, and Leona. The wedding is in three days. We'll tell some people tonight and let the rumor mill do its work." He scratched his neck. Gaudy had never seen his uncle look so much like a shamefaced teenager. "We didn't want anyone to have time to get too many ideas about the ceremony."
"I suppose that’s understandable," Gaudy said, thinking about the lumbering circus that had been the procession for the Viceroyship ceremonies.
Uncle Kip cleared his throat. "I was hoping you might stand for me. If you're willing."
Gaudy blinked. "Not Bertie?"
Uncle Kip opened his hand in a shrugging gesture. "I thought you, more than anyone else here, would understand trying to make two separate halves of yourself fit together."
Gaudy found himself, suddenly, blinking back tears. "I— yes," he said, and cleared his throat and said more clearly, "I'd be honored, Uncle Kip."
The next few days were a flurry of preparations and to-do lists, as Gaudy’s grandmother and the former Groom of the Emperor’s Chambers marshaled their formidable wills to pull a full-scale wedding together out of nothing in seventy-two hours. One might have thought, with the number of Mdangs around to command, Gaudy would not have been sent scrambling back and forth across the city on quite so many errands, but in truth there had been quieter weeks working for the Offices of State. The subjects of the whole damned hullabaloo, he thought dourly more than once, at least had their own house to retreat to, away from the dreaded words: “Oh, and one more thing…”
In all, he hardly saw either of them for longer than five minutes at a stretch until the evening before the ceremony, when he met Uncle Kip at the docks. It was an older tradition, though hardly a forgotten one, for an Islander to spend the night before their wedding holding vigil on the Bay of the Waters. In the strictest tradition, each of the spouses-to-be would row out alone, and speak to no one from sunset to dawn. These days it was more common to go out with friends and make a party of it. Uncle Kip had asked Gaudy to find them a boat for the evening, and Gaudy rather thought it was going to be closer to the former than the latter.
"We won't stay out all night," Uncle Kip had assured him. "Bertie made me promise I'd let him take me out for a drink afterwards." Then he’d been pulled away to answer some question Great-Aunt Oura had about the food, and Gaudy had been sent out to fetch some oddment or another, and that had been that.
Now, Gaudy steered them out in a borrowed vaha, a little clumsy at the tiller until he'd gotten them clear of the marina’s crowded rows. The sun had just set, and the wide arc of the sky was tinged orange and pink to the west, with the first glimmer of stars to the east.
They sailed in silence out to the open bay as the stars twinkled into view one by one overhead. Uncle Kip watched them wordlessly, and Gaudy left him to it.
Gaudy hadn't been sure what Uncle Kip intended from the evening, so he'd packed a range of drinks, from Great Uncle Lazo's non-alcoholic fruit punch to Cousin Clia's decidedly alcoholic moonshine. Uncle Kip raised his eyebrows at the selection and, to Gaudy's secret relief, chose something from the middle of the pack, which would get them pleasantly tipsy and wouldn't require anyone to scrape them off the bottom of the canoe when they made it back to shore.
For a time they talked of inconsequential things, or nothing. More out of stubbornness than patience, Gaudy waited.
“Gaudy,” Uncle Kip said at last, watching the wake of his trailing fingers in the black water. “When I say home—your home—where do you think of?”
“Here,” Gaudy said without hesitation. “The Tahivoa house.”
“Mm,” Uncle Kip said, and seemed to drift back inside his own thoughts for a moment. “I wish I could be glad. It would be easier for you if you could answer Solaara.”
“Easier for me, maybe. Not for anyone else.” Gaudy gestured with his drink in the vague direction of Gorjo City, of Tahivoa lagoon and his grandmother’s house.
“Still. I don’t like to think— It only got harder as I got older, you know.”
Gaudy sat up and refilled his glass, thinking. It was difficult, in Solaara, knowing what he was missing—and worse, not knowing what he was missing, every time he came home and found a child grown taller, a cousin married, a new inside joke between his old school friends. And it was difficult in Gorjo City too, to hold on to the belief that missing all those things meant something even when his family didn’t really understand. Most of his family. He smiled at Uncle Kip, not sure if it was visible in the dark. “If you’re trying to scare me off of the Service, it’s a little late for that. I made my choices, and so did you.”
Uncle Kip huffed out something approaching a laugh. “So you did. So I did. I wouldn’t take it back for anything, you know. Even if I would have done a few things differently.”
“You do seem to have landed on your feet.”
Real laughter this time, a startled burst of it. “I have, haven’t I?”
Gaudy smiled, glad to have shaken his uncle out of whatever odd melancholy had gripped him tonight. “Most people would say so. Marrying the Emperor, and all.”
Uncle Kip snorted. “No, the ceremonies for that would be atrocious. I’m marrying Fitzroy Angursell, which may be a dream belonging to rather more people.”
“You might think that,” Gaudy murmured into his drink. Uncle Kip, who had just taken a long draught, half-choked on it.
“Oh, no,” he sputtered, once he’d caught his breath again. “What has your mother told you about that?”
“Not nearly as much as you just did,” Gaudy said, grinning.
They left the conversation there, drifting back into a companionable silence. Gaudy thought about the Palace and the people he loved there, Eldo and Tully and Zaoul, Iri and Iro, the sharp, cheery, clever chatter in the Offices of State. He wondered, if he asked, where each of them would call home . He had been carrying along in the comfortable assumption that everyone who came to the Palace from far away went about their business with a knot of homesickness in their chest. Certainly that had been true in the pages, but Gaudy supposed some people must grow out of it. It had never even occurred to him as possible.
What would it be like, if he could shed that homesickness and learn to call Solaara home? To never again step foot in the Ring as anything but a visitor? Gaudy couldn’t imagine.
And for Uncle Kip, who had sat at the feet of the tana-tai? Who had held Aōteketētana and the government of the world both?
Gaudy said, very softly in the drifting silence, “You used to say you wouldn’t retire before your lord did. Would you have stayed?”
Uncle Kip did not answer for so long that Gaudy thought he might not, but at last he said, with great effort, “That was something I did not allow myself to think about. One of many things, I have come to realize. But when I did think about the future… I never thought I could have both.” Gaudy translated this, without effort, to mean both home and his lord. "I thought no matter what happened, one way or another I would have to hurt someone. To— carve out some vital part of me and leave it behind. I don’t think I understood until tonight that that isn't true any longer. That I will be whole, and here, and home, for the rest of my life." He blew out a breath. "It's a daunting thought."
"But a good one?"
"Oh, yes," Uncle Kip breathed, like it was the most wonderful thing in nine worlds.
The moon was a narrow sliver, wavering on the calm waters of the bay, and had nearly set by the time they tied the vaha back up at the dock. Gaudy was sure he could feel Uncle Kip’s eyes on him as he fumbled with the rope—he got the knot right on the second try—but when he turned around, his uncle was gazing quietly off into the city, eyes half-lidded. He disembarked with the kind of slow, careful movement that made Gaudy suspect he was drunker than he wanted to seem. Gaudy himself felt nicely mellow, carried along in a gentle warmth.
Gaudy left his uncle in Bertie's capable hands and walked towards home along quiet streets, marveling at the gentle sway under his feet and the vast blanket of stars still visible over the city lights. He’d grown used to the solidity of the ground in Solaara, the bells marking the passage of time, the bustle and the lights, often, at any time of day, because there was always a crisis to tackle or a deadline to be met. He liked that, the work and the rigidly compartmentalized days, but he liked this too. He’d never spent much time walking around Gorjo City after dark, even in university; it felt rather as he imagined crossing into the Borderwoods might feel, as though he was somewhere out of the world, where he might walk forever and never meet another living soul.
Maybe he was more than tipsy, then.
He realized suddenly that he was crossing the square where Uncle Kip lived these days. The waterlilies in the pond gleamed white against the dark water. There were no lights on in any of the houses lining the square, but he could see by the light of the lamppost that there was a dark lumpy shape stretched out on the rock at the center of the pool, and atop that, nearly invisible in the dark, a crow.
As Gaudy squinted at it—yes, it was definitely a crow—it fluttered to a bench at the edge of the pond and turned into a man.
“Good evening,” Uncle Fitzroy said. “I take it Kip has been safely delivered into the hands of the carousers?”
“Safe and sound, except for the inevitable hangover,” Gaudy confirmed. “I think Bertie had a map.” His eyes flickered to Uncle Kip’s house, which was nothing but a squat shadow looming against the sky. “The others have already gone to bed?”
“Ludvic and Rhodin keep disgustingly healthy sleep hours,” Uncle Fitzroy agreed, lounging back against the arm of the bench. The dark lump crawled out of the water and into his lap, revealing itself to be a startlingly large iguana. “I believe Conju may still be up at the Mdang house with your grandmother, going over last-minute preparations.”
Gaudy realized suddenly that he didn't know which wedding traditions, if any, Uncle Fiztroy might follow—Damaran or Astandalan or something entirely of his own choosing. "Are you keeping vigil, then?"
Uncle Fitzroy laughed. "Oh, hardly. If there is any night in which one can indulge in a fit of melodrama, it is the night before one's wedding, don't you think?"
Before Gaudy could let his brain catch up with his mouth, he said, "I hadn't realized you limited yourself to just one night," and then hummed a few bars from a particularly showy moment of That Party. Uncle Fitzroy laughed delightedly.
"I don't, at that. But I never pass up a good excuse." The iguana opened one beady eye and shoved its head into his hand, and he began to scratch under its chin.
“Is that Saya Dorn’s familiar?” Gaudy said, nodding at it. “Leona said it was a menace.”
“My Lord is perfectly polite to those who treat him with the proper respect,” Uncle Fitzroy said primly, and Gaudy had to take a moment to sort this out.
“You call the iguana your lord?”
“His name is My Lord. Capital M, capital L. We’re trying to train my new housemates out of old habits.”
“Huh.” Gaudy squinted at the creature, who squinted right back. “Is it working?”
“Somewhat. They are very old habits.” The iguana nudged at Uncle Fitzroy’s hand again, and Gaudy almost thought he could hear purring. Surely iguanas didn’t purr. “There’s quite a lot of, ‘My lord, will you please pass me that dishtowel?’ —I’ve gotten them to ask me for things, we’ve made it that far at least— and then I say, ‘No, he can’t, he has little iguana hands.’” Gaudy snorted. Uncle Fitzroy, seeming bolstered, went on, “And then they have to say it again properly this time. I may write a song about it. Teaching Your Old Iguanas New Tricks.”
Gaudy grinned, imagining Uncle Kip’s face. “Not the Red Company’s typical adventure.”
“You underestimate my ability to embellish," Uncle Fitzroy sniffed. "A dragon here, a few swords there, a dash of magecraft for flavor. Or who knows? Maybe Fitzroy Angursell’s new works will take a new direction.” His gaze flickered towards the house, a very different kind of smile drifting across his face seemingly without his notice. A quieter smile, hopeful and private. Gaudy dropped his eyes hastily to the iguana, who seemed offended that the chin scratching had stopped. Or possibly that was just its face.
Uncle Fitzroy cleared his throat. "In any case, I did have a question for you."
"Oh?" Gaudy tried to keep his apprehension from showing. Not another errand, I hope.
As if he knew what Gaudy was thinking, Uncle Fitzroy smiled, a twinkle in his eye, and said, "Who did Lady Aurelia end up choosing for her secretary, in the end?"
Gaudy was so surprised by the sudden change in topic that he answered automatically, “Zaoul and Iri, my lord. Oh, damn.”
Uncle Fitzroy held the iguana up gravely. It glared at Gaudy, as if it knew this sudden elevation was his fault.
Gaudy sighed. “I'm dreading the day when I call Uncle Kip your excellency in front of Leona. I'll never hear the end of it.”
“Perhaps you can pretend it’s the name of a nearby cockatoo and save face,” Uncle Fitzroy suggested, as the iguana squirmed out of his grip to drape itself over his shoulder. It did not, by any stretch of the imagination, fit there, but nevertheless there it sat.
Gaudy grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind. In any case, Lady Aurelia has settled in well since you left, but I do think the structure of the civil service confuses her. She wants us all to have academic research interests on the side, ‘to ensure we get tenure’. We can’t tell whether or not she’s joking.”
Uncle Fitzroy snickered. “One of the few perks of being in charge. Good for her. What is your new area of academic study, then?”
“I’m writing a paper comparing the immediate post-Fall and current bureaucratic structures of the Vangavaye-ve,” Gaudy said, faintly embarrassed. “Don’t tell Uncle Kip, please—it’s meant to be a surprise.”
“Oh?” Uncle Fitzroy looked delighted. “I shall do my best not to spoil it.”
The iguana, by some mysterious impetus, chose that moment to place a great clawed hand gently across Uncle Fitzroy's entire face.
"Message received," he said, slightly muffled, and carefully disentangled the creature from his head and set it on the ground. "My Lord is informing me that I should go to bed," he said, rising. "I am to present myself for primping and preening an hour after noon." He sighed, but there was a giddy edge to it.
Gaudy thought of the glittering, opulent costumes of the Lord of Rising Stars, then tried and failed to imagine what Fitzroy Angursell might wear to a wedding, no less his own. He was sure it would be something spectacular, regardless. “Four hours to dress?”
Uncle Fitzroy shrugged fluidly. “So Conju insisted.”
Gaudy realized, suddenly, what had been bothering him about the darkened house. “Do you have no one else to stand on your side of the fire?” he blurted. “Just Lord Conju and Commander Omo and Ser Rhodin?” The Vawens were a small family, but not that small. He couldn’t imagine a Vangavayeven wedding with one side of the fire so sparsely populated. With the great mass of Mdangs on the other side—
Uncle Fitzroy’s expression shuttered closed so suddenly and thoroughly that Gaudy nearly dropped to his knees in hasty apology. “I didn’t mean— I am very sorry.” Gaudy held his hands out helplessly. “I may be drunker than I’d thought.”
Face still carefully blank— serene, even—Uncle Fitzroy said, “No, you are right, of course. I’m afraid it will make a rather dismal spectacle. I had been hoping some other friends of mine might make it, but—” He gestured at the darkened courtyard. “As you see.”
It took Gaudy, still reeling from his misstep, a few moments to translate other friends into the Red Company. Ah.
"Well," he said, "if certain songs are anything to go by, I'm sure they'll turn up five minutes before the ceremony tomorrow and send all of my grandmother's careful plans straight to the sea floor."
The mask cracked into a crooked smile. "I have no doubt."
Gaudy eyed him speculatively. “Ordinarily, I would have taken my mother’s name and dances. But my father was the last of his maternal line, so Leona and I have his instead.” Realizing that this was something of a non-sequitur, Gaudy stopped. Uncle Fitzroy tilted his head to one side in an inquisitive go on gesture, so Gaudy continued, “You do have friends here in your own right, and not every Mdang has to stand on Uncle Kip’s side of the fire. I’m sure Dora would be delighted.”
Uncle Fitzroy paused, his face softening as he thought. “I hadn’t considered that. Perhaps Zemius, and Enya as well. She’s always said I’m one of her favorite diners.”
Gaudy nodded encouragingly. “And besides—the ceremony ends with the two sides joining. That’s the whole point. In the end, it won’t matter which side anyone started on, because it’s all the same side.”
“All one family.” Uncle Fitzroy looked back up at the darkened house across the square. “I think I like the sound of that.”