Chapter Text
Retirement. How wonderful.
Emilia saya Mapa propped herself up against her pillows and pulled over the notebook and calendar from her bedside table. The sun was clear of the horizon and the room was full of clean early light; as clean as it got since her little cottage was swallowed by the outskirts of what she still thought of as the new city of Solaara.
As a girl Emilia had woken every morning in the poky little attic bedroom now directly above her head, listening to birdsong and the rustle of the leaves. These days it was her son Gus - nearly thirty, if he was a day, and still no closer to moving out - who folded himself in under those sheltering eaves. She could hear him now, stomping about above her with what he probably thought was a gentle tread, clumping down the stairs as considerately as he could. He was woken every day by the traffic outside - bicycle bells, shouts, a few early advertising cries from the stands at the corner of the road.
Emilia noted this thought in her book, which functioned as a sort of diary and also as a place to shake out loose odds and ends so she could keep her head clear for scheduling. For most of the past sixty years she had carried the complex and shifting rota of pages in the Palace of Stars in her head at all times. Now… she was retired. It was time to relax. She no longer had to be out of bed two hours before sunrise, nor commute up to spend her days in the huge, shadowy, and shabby Pages’ Hall at the centre of the Palace. She could lie in. She could accept the lukewarm and weak cup of coffee that Gus brought gingerly up the stairs, and not wince when he spilled it on her bed linen, and wish him a good day up at the Nec.
At least Gus had a steady job, now, and was keeping regular hours, she thought as he left, then remembered again that he had been working at the Necropolis for nearly a decade. Possibly longer, possibly even much longer. The years since he left school - since she went back to full time work at the Palace - were something of a blur for everybody involved, and not just because of the nature of her job. Gus had been between twenty and thirty - Emilia somewhere just over fifty - for what sometimes felt like it could have been half a century at least.
She sipped the coffee dutifully, because her son had brought it for her, and looked over her calendar. The neighbourhood committee was meeting that evening, and she was host, so she would make a point of baking something tasty this afternoon. She had a list of projects as long as her arm that they would be tackling together this month; the allotment allocation needed revisiting since that nice family moved in round the corner, and there were a series of complaints about the playground that Mira would insist on sending over, so those would have to be discussed, if only so that she could try once again to convince the older woman that occasional small puddles were more a pleasure than a slip hazard to a toddler.
It was at least an hour after dawn and there was really nothing more to plan for the day. Emilia snapped her notebook closed, finished her coffee, and, for want of something better to do, got up.
Gus had refused to join the committee, pleading a longstanding commitment to spending most of his evenings out drinking with his friends from work. Emilia was glad that he had his own friends, and relieved that he would not be in the house while she was organising hers. Gus had Hari’s trick of easy companionship, which she had always rather envied.
She broke her fast slowly. The kitchen was the real glory of this cottage: large, stone-flagged, the enormous old wooden table bashed and battered with years of family meals, friendly dinners, and minor local events. It was cool and comfortable even as the day warmed up, and stayed that way when she opened the back door to let the fragrance of the garden flood the space, a fresh floral counterpoint to the warmth of buttered toast and the sharpness of her second, properly made cup of coffee.
She was, Emilia realised, waiting for her husband to come in. Hari had spent his third night in a row away from home, and she was bracing for a crash. He meant well, and he was so charming, and undeniably good in bed, but he was also extremely bad at ending his intense temporary flings. She had, at one time, rather resented having to help him extricate himself from his distress when his affairs came apart, in the same way that she had struggled to understand why such a clever and articulate man found it so difficult to stay at the same job for more than a month or two. It had stretched her, making peace with the person Hari was, accepting that the price to pay for his steady companionship, those clever hands and that sparkling wit was dealing with his ups and downs and drama. She was glad they had found their way through to a balance with each other. And, after all, he had learned to put up with her organising ways, eternal mothering of everybody, and her devotion to her job.
Sitting around feeling maudlin and listening out for her sweet scoundrel of a husband was no way to be retired, Emilia reminded herself, or at least not to have the sort of retirement she had set her heart on.
She cleared away the breakfast things, cleaned and put away the few dirty cups, and then abruptly had had enough of being indoors by herself. She took her papers and the last of her coffee out to the front garden, where the flagstones were still cool underfoot but at least the air was warm and moving and the bustle of the street was only half-hidden by the soft curtain of vines climbing up the tall iron railings.
The plans and minutes for the committee were, alas, already in sparkling order, and there was nothing else new to add to her schedule or her diary. Emilia turned a few papers over and pulled out the next task, a long proposed script for an amateur theatrical production one of the volunteer groups wanted to put on in the park, and settled herself to trying to understand what the stage directions would require in terms of construction, possible damage to grass and trees, and the permissions and paperwork the troupe needed.
The front gate creaked in a friendly fashion and scraped across the stones as someone came in. Emilia held up a hand while she finished making a list of materials, then looked up.
It could have been Hari, or his latest lover, or both, in any kind of state. Several of her dearest friends over the years had come into her life through Hari, one way or another. Or it could have been someone from a project - the amateur theatricals, the allotments, the neighbourhood committee - also in any kind of state. Emilia unknotted things for people, which meant she got to meet them at their most stressed.
It was neither. To Emilia’s surprise and delight it was her sometime colleague and friend, Viorin saya Hassia, whom she hadn’t seen for months. She hopped up to fetch another drink, a cushion for a second chair, a plate of cut fruit. Viorin was short where Emilia was tall, compact where she was broad, and perhaps twenty years younger, and she leaned against the door watching Emilia fuss with a fond smile, unruffled by Emilia’s need to get everything just so, and then accepted the drink and the fruit and the seat with unfeigned pleasure.
“What brings you here?” said Emilia, once they were settled. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
Viorin grinned at her. “I resigned,” she said, “again!”
Emilia blinked. “Isn’t that getting to be a habit?” she asked. “I thought you said you liked it, at that trading house?”
They had been colleagues, back when Saya Mapa headed up the Pages’ Hall and Saya Hassia effectively ran the Administrative Office for the Imperial Service. Emilia had cheered when she heard that Viorin had resigned from the Palace, some time after she herself had retired. The Pages’ Hall had been bad enough, but her friend had been stuck working directly for and succeeding in spite of the famously corrupt and slimy Lord Meriloe, Master of Offices.
“I did - well, I do! - but I resigned months ago,” said Viorin. Her cheeks flushed, “I was - well, sought out by a competitor. And then I spoke with some of my contacts in the other warehouses and they offered me a higher price again, and… I realised that I didn’t have to work for any of them, if I worked for all of them, on a project basis. Self-employed. They all pay me by the day, now. On my terms.”
Emilia applauded. She couldn’t help it. Viorin flushed even deeper.
“Thank you,” she said, “anyway, it means I get to decide what I want to do, and today I wanted to come and catch up with you. Have you heard the latest, from the Palace?”
“No?” said Emilia, cupping her chin on her hand and leaning forward. After her retirement she had deliberately kept away from the Sun-in-Glory and the other watering holes clustered up near the centre of Solaara, where her former colleagues drank. At first she had wanted a clean break, a chance to rest and recover, and then when she started to get more curious she had found herself feeling a little shy. The world inside the Palace walls was so different from the world outside, its concerns and preoccupations so distinct from what she was increasingly come to think of as real life. Emilia had not had to remember the correct degree of obeisance for a lesser prince from a distant world in nearly two years, nor yet dodge a fusillade of what was euphemistically known as frank and free discussion between members of the Upper Secretariat, nor navigate any of the treacherous undercurrents that swirled around whatever nonsense the priest-wizards had dreamed up next. She was glad that she was retired.
“Well,” said Viorin, “you heard about the latest Imperial Secretary, right?”
Emilia groaned “What happened to this one?” The short and calamitous careers of the various unfortunate souls sent up to trial as secretaries to the Glorious One was a running - and not at all funny - joke across the Palace.
Viorin grinned at her. “You are out of the loop! This one’s made it stick, somehow,” she said, “he’s been there for months now, and he’s working with the Dragon on a total reform of all the Ministries, with the Emperor’s support, and word has it that the Ouranatha are out on their ears, and General Ravillon’s retiring, and they ordered Merry’s arrest.”
“They what?”
“The toad got away, of course, which is how I heard about all this - one of the trade factors knew I’d worked with him, came to ask what I thought happened. Which is how I know that the Palace is heaving like an anthill someone stepped on, and the Upper Secretariat are quailing in their boots.” Viorin delivered this with a certain cheerful satisfaction.
It was incredible. Mind whirling, Emilia snagged on a strand of passing thought almost at random. “Wait, doesn’t Lord Meriloe handle the secretarial appointments for the Emperor in the first place?” she asked.
Viorin actually laughed. “He did, yes. He set his own robes on fire with this one. I’m longing to hear how it happened. He was working through the most useless of the minor nobles, you know, and never let the rest of us close to the list. I suppose every set can have an outlier, one way or another, and eventually Merry must have stumbled on a second son who wasn't a complete waste of space. Can you imagine his face, when he realised what he’d done?”
Emilia reflected that her friend deserved a bit of schadenfreude, after the shit she had put up with from Merry over the years, which made her wonder… “how is Sayo Mdang taking all this? He must be delighted!”
“I have no idea,” said Viorin, with a lightness that did not fool Emilia for a second. Things had clearly not worked out between them, then, which seemed like a shame. Viorin had been very taken with their former colleague, and Sayo Mdang had certainly never seemed interested in anybody else. Possibly he was just not interested, full stop. She remembered how often he missed their lunches, and how animated he grew when he was talking about his work (and, mostly, what was wrong with his latest assignment). Perhaps if Viorin had found some way to dress up as a piece of misfiled paperwork... Emilia lifted her drink to hide her amusement at the thought.
“Kiri’s doing well, though,” Viorin added. “I wrote to her, when I got the news - she’s been promoted right up into the new Private Office.”
Emilia knew Viorin well enough to read the pain under this apparent lightness, too. Kiri saya Kalikiri was a local Solaaran girl, like the pair of them, but the similarities started and ended there. Kiri was impossible to dislike, with her charm and intelligence and sunny nature, but it was equally impossible not to be aware of the advantages that had helped her career to flourish. She was younger than both of them, and had been self-evidently on the fast track to the Upper Secretariat from the moment they met. She had the right accent, and the right parents, and the right connections in the Palace.
Emilia had never had much ambition for herself, but she had been glad enough to get the recognition and the salary that Sayo Mdang had insisted on when they first met. She had also been de facto coordinating all the Palace pages for decades without that recognition, and managing a boss who spent much of her time dosed up on various substances and only occasionally and explosively interested in the work. Viorin, who was ambitious, had had Merry actively sabotaging her on a daily basis, and had never been promoted or rewarded for her efforts at holding things together.
It was good, all told, for both of them to be sitting here in this shady garden, well away from the snakepit. Emilia wondered whether to ask further after Sayo Mdang, whom she remembered fondly as a whirlwind of outraged organisational efficiency punctuated by odd deep, quiet moments of thought. He had been endearingly earnest, and dead set against Lord Meriloe. If he had survived the turmoil this long he was certainly up there with Kiri organising the Private Offices too; Emilia doubted that even Princess Indrogan at her fiercest could keep him out of a real chance to, as he always put it, fix the government.
She glanced across at Viorin, who was looking thoughtfully at the dregs of her coffee, and decided not to bring the man up again. There was always a chance that he had finally managed to piss someone off enough to wind up on the sharp end of one of the endless Palace plots, and Emilia would on the whole prefer not to know about that.
“Kiri tells me they’re hiring,” said Viorin, suddenly. She looked up. “More than that, she says they’re disbanding the Administrative Office altogether, and she’s looking for help setting up a replacement.”
“So of course she wants you,” said Emilia, fighting down a twinge of envy. She was making retirement work, dammit. “Will you go for it?”
“I’m not sure,” Viorin admitted. “I - well, I swore I’d never go near the Palace again, after how they treated me - I earn nearly twice as much, these days, and my clients listen to me. But…”
“But you’d like the chance to dance on Merry’s grave?”
“Oh, yes, that too! But, well, you know how Sayo Mdang always went on about fixing things? Well, I’d been thinking - I had ideas - I know how to restructure an office now. It’s one of the projects I like best, to be honest - and I doubt Kiri’s going to find anyone else who understands how the Administrative Office was supposed to work. So… I’ve been thinking about asking if they’d commission me on a temporary contract, like the trading houses. I like being my own boss, I don’t want to give that up but - well, I miss being part of the government, too. It was all so much bigger - and they say it’s getting better.”
“And you believe that?” Emilia couldn’t quite hide her scepticism.
“We-ell, all the big suppliers say the Palace is cracking down on bribery and corruption like never before, and - this whole restructure shows they’re thinking big again, you know? And if the Emperor’s showing an interest… I’m curious, I suppose. And it’s not as though I’d be trapped there, not on a short term contract. I’d like to work with Kiri.”
Emilia nodded. She didn’t need to be a mind reader to see what Viorin had already decided. “I can see that,” she said, once more squashing a pang of envy.
Viorin looked up at her, bit her lip, looked away, and said, “But then I thought - well, if I know the Administrative Office inside out, surely you know the pages just as well? And… I’d like the company. Someone to keep me balanced, you know?”
Emilia stared at her. Surely she couldn’t mean…?
“I was wondering if you wanted to come too?” asked Viorin. Mumbled, really, at the table, not meeting Emilia’s eyes. “I know you’re retired, but it could be part time? Just for a month or two?”
She did mean. She lifted her face at last and it was shining with abashed sincerity.
Emilia was astonished at the strength and confusion of her own emotions in response. To go back up to the Palace - to perhaps be listened to - or perhaps not.
Yes. No. Yes.
“I need to think about it,” she said, though she knew her answer. She snorted. “Sayo Dirzha must be having fun, he always loved the drama. I hope he’s looking after my boys and girls. Hmm.”
“I’ve said I’ll go and meet Kiri tomorrow morning,” said Viorin, “is that enough time? She writes like she’s in a hurry.”
“These Private Office types are always in a rush,” said Emilia, “I don’t have to tell you that. I’ll come and meet her, of course..”
Viorin beamed her thanks. Emilia felt her own heart thudding in anticipation. Sod being retired, this would be fun.
“I’m not saying I’ll stay, mind,” she temporised, with her friend and herself. “But it’ll be nice to see Kiri again.”