Chapter Text
It was galling to realise that you, the Last Emperor of Astandalas, had become the kind of person who had a favourite briefing meeting every week, but in your defence very little else brings new information into your environment, and I liked Ser Rhodin an Gaiange, the man whose combination of squirrelly instincts and demure presentation had landed him with the responsibility of reporting on the findings of my network of spies and informers.
Having a secret service should not be boring, I felt, and (mercifully enough) Ser Rhodin appeared to agree. My previous briefing agent, the Marchioness du Nuale, had not shared his sensibility. Her reports had been regrettably dry and to the point; Ser Rhodin recognised that what he had to offer was the juiciest of gossip dressed up in the driest of officialdom and he relished it, and that let me relish it too.
Ser Rhodin’s official post was as a junior guard, and his purported cover for the report was a routine session to update you on the weekly postings and shifts. Only your carefully vetted inner guard were aware of his identity, as they were perforce in the room throughout the briefing. The system had been established in the years after the negotiation of the Littleridge Treaty, when it became clear that the Lord of Zunidh would keep the peace only through fancy footwork and hard graft and always being two or three steps ahead of the princes who ruled each of the provinces of the world.
It had become routine, but Ser Rhodin regularly introduced ripples of variation by passing on spicier details, or showing you some of the work of his spy craft, or, on rare and precious occasions, revealing some of his complex and bizarre personal theories about the workings of the world. Apparently, he had noticed that I was bored, and had decided to do something about it, which by itself elevated him above nearly the entire rest of the Palace for observation and response.
Today my polished spy was gleaming with subtle anticipation; another gift, as outside the briefing room he never let me or anybody else see any but the glossiest and most superficial emotions. He ran efficiently through the usual update: malcontents identified, plots foiled, plots suspected, a scattering of rumours and character notes that fleshed out my understanding of your court.
Then, with a flourishing bow, Ser Rhodin asked me to raise the Wall of Silence. You did so, intrigued. This was unusual, though not unheard of. He did, sometimes, have updates that could not be shared even with your inner guard.
His manner relaxed infinitesimally, once we had aural privacy. He withdrew a couple of somewhat crumpled sheets of paper from the pouch at his belt and placed them on my desk. “My lord, I regret to report that your Hands is engaged in a clandestine correspondence.”
What?
I drew my Imperial mask over my confusion and let you reply. “Sayo Thistlethwaite, Ser Rhodin?”
Ser Rhodin nodded and gestured to the papers. You picked them up. They were indeed a letter, addressed to ‘My darling wife’. I dropped them as though they singed my fingers.
I knew that Cliopher Thistlethwaite, Hands of the Emperor, my peerless secretary, and the effective head of my government, had a wife. I had not known he wrote to her.
I had been struck by many things about Cliopher, when he first strolled into my study. His unprecedented competence at all secretarial tasks. The way he observed the courtly graces as though they were foreign, and slightly ridiculous, impositions. His nonchalant courage in stating his own views before me, even in correcting me when necessary. His willingness to joke, and laugh, and look me in the eyes. And, most of all, his name.
He was, my magic asserted, a native citizen of Zunidh, hailing from the Vangavaye-ve. A Wide Seas Islander, with his decidedly non-aristocratic pale golden-brown skin, his light and warm brown eyes, his hair black and smooth and thick, for all that it was kept resolutely cropped in the short cut of the Imperial Bureaucratic Service. His name, however, was as Alinorel as they came, both unexpected and so familiar that it had shocked me to the core.
I had, at the time, been sinking away beneath the terrible weight of the glory that my priest-wizards claimed as my due, been entirely unmoored from my government, been lulled and bullied and starved of human contact, been half way to becoming in truth the detached golden god the Ouranatha wanted as a figurehead. You had become more and more of my being, your cold voice and your frozen face my only protection against the bewildering whirl of court and ritual and disaster. Hearing Sayo Thistlethwaite’s name, a name he shared with one of my oldest friends, had brought me abruptly, painfully, back to myself.
Resurrection may not be comfortable but it is infinitely better than apotheosis. I owed Cliopher more than I could say, for being there, for treating me like a person, as much as for the victories his statecraft had won for you down all these centuries.
“We had understood,” you said to Ser Rhodin, your voice harsher than usual, “that Sayo Thistlethwaite's wife was lost in the Fall.”
It had taken me months to find this out. You could not be seen asking the question, showing too pointed an interest in your secretary, showing a direct awareness of the significance of the name. Your friend had, after all, been denounced as a Terror of Astandalas.
It was true that, thanks to careful wording, first in my verse and then in your decree, she had been condemned under an epithet rather than her familial name. It was still dangerous to draw even a hint of that connection to the minds of those around you.
I had led my chief attendant, Conju, through careful steps into sharing a great deal of gossip about the members of my household. This turned out to be an excellent plan on merits; both of us, it transpired, derived delicious pleasure from discussing the foibles and follies of those around us. The effect was something like turning over an apparently featureless tablet and finding the other side entirely close-written with intricate text. There were so many people in my Tower, in my Court, in my Palace, and every single one of them had a story. As Conju talked, his glances sly, his chosen words superficially proper, his silences eloquent, I began to see them come to life around me. I began to revive as a human being, with a human interest in the beings I met, for all that Imperial protocol rendered them stunned and featureless in our direct interactions.
Amongst the subjects of our gossip, of course, was Cliopher. “Sayo Thistlethwaite has not seen his wife since the Fall,” Conju informed me. “She was Alinorel; his culture is matrilineal; so he took her name. I understand that she was on Alinor, and there has been no word... Some real affection there, I believe. He does not talk about her.”
The passages to Alinor had been badly damaged in the Fall of Astandalas. That half-conquered world had experienced severe magical convulsions, and contact had not been restored for several centuries in subjective Solaaran time. Even now, the messages that passed through came in slow and disorderly. I had hoped, even so, to hear soon of Sayo Thistlethwaite’s wife. For his sake, I told myself, firmly, not for mine. It was ridiculous, of course, to bear even the tiniest spark of anticipation. My friend was older than Cliopher; how would they even have met one another? It would not be her. It could not be her. But… she had had sisters…
Ser Rhodin had the grace to at least feign some awkwardness as he said, “He writes to her regularly, under the cover of letters that he sends to his cousin, Basil White, who is also lost on Alinor. He has never received any response.”
I could feel your brows drawing together into the sternest expression of disapproval that you dare. “We have no prurient interest in Our Hands' rituals of mourning,” you intoned, with reverent hypocrisy, because you were also reading the letter.
It was innocuous, if heart-wrenching. Short, and sweet, and most definitely the letter of a man who does not know whether its recipient has survived but hopes against hope to see her again. Cliopher was, he wrote, determined to begin every letter by asking how you are, so that the first thing you see in my hand is an enquiry after your wellbeing. He skimmed entirely over the greatest part of our work and spoke instead of - of me.
I knew I was breaking his trust and still I could not help reading, feeling my tears prick the back of your eyes, my indrawn breath stifled by your serenity. A loving description of our games of chess. There is nothing I like better, he wrote, than being at ease in my lord’s company. It was entirely in character, and simultaneously blessedly unexpected, for Cliopher to openly refer to me in such casual terms in a private letter. I felt a familiar pang of concern over his safety. His enemies would love to get hold of this. And then… Cliopher wrote of me as a man, a well-read man with quite a fondness for epic verse. That gave me pause; I could not recall a conversation that would have revealed... I treasured every casual moment with my Hands, I had many of our interactions near-memorised as support through your endless ceremonies and rituals, and I would certainly have known if we had ever discussed stories of adventure and derring-do. Ser Rhodin raised his eyebrows at my swift glance, but said nothing, and so I continued reading.
The next sentence took me out at the knees. I have no doubt you would find him an eager customer were he ever to visit Elderflower Books.
Elderflower Books. Even your iron grip on my nerves was not enough to prevent the smallest external twitch; inwardly I shook and gasped for air.
Ser Rhodin, not seeing the shaft that struck home, took your raised head as an indication that you had finished reading the letter. “There is a ciphered message concealed in the letter, my lord,” he said.
Alarm pinched the back of my neck and tingled down my arms. “Indeed?” You held your calm, barely, against the welter of fear and hope and desire and anguish rising in my breast.
For the first time in our acquaintance, Ser Rhodin looked me in the eyes. He was part-Voonran by descent, I noted, and his mien was handsome in the sharp Voonran style. His eyes were darker than Cliopher’s and Ludvic’s, and pleasingly shaped, and vividly alive with intrigue and a sparkling thrill. “My lord, in his ciphered message Cliopher implies that he has discovered some important adventurer known to his correspondent concealed within the Palace. Hidden in plain sight is the term he uses, and he refers to the personage in question as your wayward Olor.”
You stared at him, your face constricted with the effort of containing my shock. “And what do you take that to mean, Ser Rhodin?” you asked, your words slipping out without my conscious thought, testing, shaping the moment. I was reeling, and had no coherent addition to make.
Ser Rhodin said, with an air of breezy confidence that was surely as false, or at least as incomplete, as every other emotion that he had displayed today, “I believe that Cliopher may have come to the same conclusion as myself, my lord. That Artorin Damara perished in the Fall, and that you are in fact Fitzroy Angursell, hiding in plain sight as the Lord Magus of Zunidh.”
His audacity would have astounded me, had I any capacity left for amazement. On top of the roil of my emotions, however, the only response I had left was incredulity. Your mask shattered as I laughed, wildly, without control. The situation was so absurd, the counterpoint with my secret hopes and fears so delicious. Ser Rhodin raised his eyebrows in what I took to be the first honest expression of emotion he had ever shown me: pure shock. His baffled elegance only made me laugh harder.
“We are Artorin Damara of Zunidh,” you responded, firmly, once you had your breath back.
“Yes, my lord,” said Ser Rhodin, “and yet I have discovered… discrepancies.” He began to outline these: changes in your manner and personality since the Fall, the sudden flowering of a substantial gift for wild magic, the evident satisfaction you felt when my secretary hummed Fitzroy Angursell’s forbidden verse; you, who as Artorin Damara had upheld the ban on his poetry, had declared Angursell and his Red Company to be defeated Terrors of Astandalas, had had their names inscribed on the dais beneath your feet.
(I had, so desperately, hoped that one of them would take this as a challenge, would burst or slink or stroll into your throne room and see you, face and name together, labelled for their convenience, so damaged, so alone…)
There were a scant few minutes left for this meeting. You would have to take down the Wall of Silence and both go about your day. For all of our sakes, I knew you must come to some form of accommodation with Ser Rhodin first.
“We… see,” you said, when he finished his remarkably concise presentation of the evidence. “What a delightful conjecture. Have you shared these suspicions with anyone else, Ser Rhodin?”
“I have not,” he said, in the same cheerful tones, “This is the first matter I have investigated entirely by myself. I have, however, left my speculations where they will be found in case of my disappearance, my lord.”
“The melodrama will not be necessary,” you told him, and I scrabbled for the right reassurances. What sort of person was Ser Rhodin? I marvelled at both his courage and his courtesy. If I had taken advantage of Artorin Damara’s death to replace him in secret, then Ser Rhodin’s loyalty was not, properly, owed to me. His report would serve me as a warning, giving the notorious outlaw time to flee or protect himself.
How fortunate I was that such a wily man was willing to collude with me rather than alert his seniors. How rare and unexpected, to find someone indubitably loyal to me personally rather than to you, the Emperor. Another treasure beyond price, another person I could rely on in this poisonous swamp. Cliopher Thistlethwaite, Ludvic Omo, Conju an Vilius, and now Rhodin an Gaiange.
Denials would not shift him, but I suspected that truth would.
“We are Artorin Damara. The eldest son of the Imperial Princess Lamissa of the house of Yr and Grand Duke Mantorin Damara. Descended in the right line through ninety-eight Emperors of Astandalas, springing from the Son of the Sun, Harbut Zalarin himself. While we must congratulate you on your powers of observation, Ser Rhodin, your conclusion is, alas, incorrect. We can assure you that we did not perish in the Fall.” I let a little of my magic seep into my words, just enough for Ser Rhodin’s own small gift to taste and test, bearing the truth of the statement in the barest shape of my soul.
He blinked, looked disconcerted for the first time in the hundred and more years of our acquaintance, and was only prevented from falling into full prostration by my swift gesture. “I am sorry, my lord!” he blurted, the contrast from his usual assured style so absurd that I could not help but laugh again.
“Please do not on any account apologise for your trust in me,” I told him, and saw his eyes widen at the informality of my address. “I am honoured that you felt able to share your conclusions. My wild magic was a state secret of Astandalas, and I did not display it before the Fall. You saw what few others have seen, and your investigation has been remarkably subtle and thorough. Thank you.”
“Thank you, my lord,” he said, with the court gestures of abject gratitude, and I noticed, too late, the pallor of his face, the slight trembling of his hands, the lurid gleam of exhilaration in his eyes, and remembered that Ser Rhodin was not Cliopher, and was born and bred to the peculiar habits of the Astandalan aristocracy. He knew exactly how far he had overstepped, for all that it had been deliberate. I flinched back into your mask as I realised the level of stress my odd reactions were inflicting.
A trustworthy spy was a gift from the gods. You needed Ser Rhodin. All the more, if the suspicion currently churning my insides to butter were correct. He would make an excellent spymaster, as soon as I could arrange it.
“In confidence, Ser Rhodin, We share your interest in the fates of the notorious Red Company,” I told him, “the more so since rumour evidently connects Our name with theirs. Should you find any further information on the location of any former member, We would be most interested to view it.”
“Yes, my lord,” he said, his manner easing in a way that told me (again, too late) that this command was reassurance that he would not be executed. You straightened your spine, hardened your expression, and took a series of slow breaths. Control.
“And Our secretary’s letter?” you asked, balance regained.
“A mystery, my lord,” said Rhodin, “Cliopher certainly appears to believe that he has identified some great adventurer in the Palace.”
“He may be mistaken,” I pointed out, letting the ‘as you were’ fall silently after my words.
“Mistaken or not, his phrasing suggests he is writing to a contact who knows this adventurer personally.”
“Are you suggesting that Cliopher Thistlethwaite is somehow in - in cahoots with the Red Company?” I asked, doing my best to pitch the question without overdoing the incredulity. I had, at one time, been famed for my performances but not, alas, for my acting ability. Since then, however, hard necessity had forced me to master the subtler skills.
“It is the natural conclusion,” said Ser Rhodin, slowly. “Unless another conspirator thought to disguise their message in his hand in the form of a postal delivery schedule.”
I could have groaned aloud. Only Cliopher.
“Or the message could be about something else entirely,” I ventured.
“I suppose that’s possible, my lord,” said Rhodin. He did not look satisfied, and my heart sank as I realised that he would not be able to leave his concerns aside. I thought, I hoped, that he was more concerned for Cliopher's safety than for any danger that he might pose to me.
“We will speak with Cliopher,” you said, in your most Imperious tone. “We do not believe that he means any harm, but his activity may be… unwise. For his sake, we ask for your discretion until that conversation has taken place.”
“Of course, my lord,” said Rhodin, far more readily. “I’m sure Cliopher has your best interests at heart,” he added, “and, if he’s made the same mistake as me, he'll prefer to hear it from you. I’ll leave you my notes.”
“Thank you once again, Ser Rhodin,” I said, and made it a dismissal by dropping the Wall of Silence. He made his obeisances, and left.
The paper that he handed me was brief, shorter than Cliopher’s letter, which I doubted I could bring myself to relinquish even if it were safe to do so. My eyes skipped over his commentary to the encrypted message itself, and the deciphered text in full.
brace yourself have found your wayward Olor hidden in plain sight trapped bad bad bad danger will do what I can come at once
There was nothing in the words to identify the recipient, but… Thistlethwaite. Elderflower Books. Olor, the hero of old whose story had entranced me since before I named myself. The hero who escaped from a tower. The hero whose exploits I had delighted in extolling to my dear friends.
I placed my hands flat on the table on either side of the letter, for balance, and shakily let myself articulate the obvious conclusion: Cliopher. My secretary. The head of the Imperial Bureaucratic Service. The man I had named Hands of the Emperor. Was married to Jullanar of the Sea, my first and dearest friend.
More than that. Cliopher knew who I was. He was sending for help.
The Red Company had come for me.
I could not react. The guards were in the room. I stood, shaky, sweeping the letter up as nonchalantly as possible, feeling the stiffness of the Imperial mask as tightly wound about my turbulent emotions as it had ever been. I clung to the Emperor, to your serenity, and lengthened my strides to reach the door of my personal study before that grip loosened.
Inside my one and only private space, as the door shut behind me, I collapsed against it. My heart was thudding dangerously in my chest, the blood pounding in my ears. Trapped. Bad bad bad. Danger.
I had not realised until that moment how accustomed I had become to the chains that bound me. The metaphysical weight of the magics that anchored the Empire were a hobble and a torment and somehow I had stopped noticing. Had found a perilous point of balance where I could ignore the open sores in my arcane self, the blasted and bitter landscape of my inner being. I - I - Fitzroy Angursell, the defiant rebel, the brilliant rogue - had been bound so long that I had made accommodation with my captivity, had made myself over into Artorin Damara, had cultivated you, the Emperor, had never expected, never hoped, to ever again be anybody or anything else, anything more…
I felt myself, I knew myself, to be a cipher. An institution, not a person. Serene, responsible, authoritative, dull. And yet… Cliopher, my competent, intrepid, unrefined, funny secretary, who looked into my eyes, who was married to Jullanar, had seen past you. Had seen me.
At first all I could do was sit there slumped against the door, weak in body, my mind whirling, my grief and fear and joy and shame flooding me so intermingled that I could not tell where one reaction ended and the next began. Cliopher. Jullanar. Cliopher. bad bad bad. All at once I felt trapped, felt every loop of the chains of magic holding me apart from the world, felt every guard and every attendant and every stone of the Palace as a barrier to my freedom.
It is a fortunate fact of life that any overwhelming tide of emotion will ebb, given time, and allow mundane concerns and sensations through. The twinge in my knees informed me that sitting in a miserable huddle on the floor was not a standard position for the Sun on Earth, Lord of Rising Stars, Heart of the Empire, and so on and so forth unto ludicrosity.
As I hauled myself up I recalled, regretfully, that my attendants had not dressed me for a fit of physical weakness brought on by an earth-shattering revelation today, and that my astonishing samite and topaz robes were going to be somewhat the worse for the experience. I brushed myself down as best I could, then sat gingerly on the edge of my couch, laid my hands carefully on my knees, and forced myself to count my breaths and examine my situation.
I had, in truth, stopped letting myself think of myself as Fitzroy Angursell, some centuries ago. It was difficult to believe, even for me, that those joyous and freewheeling years had been anything more than a dream. It had become… easier, not to remember.
This letter was no dream. Cliopher was no illusion. I could not have invented him; I did not have it in me to create a character so gloriously full of hidden depths and contradictions. Those sly eyes, that bland face, the way that he leavened all of our interactions with his direct, treasonous gaze, with his mischievous asides, and yet was also, through and through, the great bureaucrat, the visionary who had done more to change the world with his deft negotiations and nine hundred page reports than I had ever managed with my dashing escapades and scurrilous verse.
I was delighted for Jullanar that she had found and married such a man. I was desolate, that they had lost one another in the Fall. I was, at once, in sympathy with Cliopher, with Kip, as he signed himself, in the desperate assumption that she was alive until proven otherwise. I was very firmly not going to consider any of the smörgåsbord of private fantasies that I had been slowly constructing around the person of Cliopher Thistlethwaite in my most leisured moments, and whether any of them would be applicable to consoling him for his separation from such a remarkable woman.
Jullanar was alive. She had to be. Any other conclusion was unacceptable.
The message had been intercepted; she would not receive this letter (I would not let it leave my private study, as incriminating as it was). I wondered if it was the first that Cliopher had sent. I wondered if she had already received one or more of his messages, if she was already on her way, if she had found, was bringing, any of our other friends…
When I was first taken by the Empire I had longed for my rescue like a traveller chasing the illusion of water across a desert land. The shimmer of it was always before me, hovering over mundane interactions, lurid with my fear, tinged slowly but surely with my disappointment, and then my despair. I had imagined that it might be as we had planned, if any of us were taken up as prisoners: a coordinated jailbreak, making full use of the remarkable skills and ingenuity we could collectively bring to bear. I looked out for a familiar face in a Palace uniform, or a familiar voice behind a stranger’s face, or even familiar body language (if face and voice alike were disguised). I tracked and memorised every slight sound I heard, even the tiniest discrepancy in my surroundings, in the smooth and featureless life of the Emperor, in the hopes that one day I would guess how they were communicating with one another.
I had, long since, given up.
I sucked in a long, shaky breath. It was painful, to have hope again.
I was utterly terrified for Cliopher. I wondered what had possessed him to use her surname openly in the Palace of Stars. He was neither stupid nor suicidal, so there must be a story to that. Very few people outside the Red Company, it is true, had ever explicitly connected Jullanar Thistlethwaite with Jullanar of the Sea, but it was still an act of breathtaking insolence to walk coolly into the Imperial Apartments, under the glare of scrutiny, and knowingly display that connection. To come back, day after day, year after year, putting that name on all of his reports, ye gods, on all of our decrees.
Cliopher had come very, very close to disaster today. He had taken precautions: the message was in a cipher that would have been unbreakable if Ser Rhodin had not had all his cunning and his slight gift of magic to bring to bear. Cliopher had sent his letter under another cover, had signed it with his nickname, but... it had not been enough. if Ser Rhodin had reported his findings up his usual chain of command, instead of taking the initiative to speak directly to me, first, about my identity…
What could I do, what would I not do, to keep my people safe? I could, in the first instance, conceal Cliopher’s letter. I would have to ask Ser Rhodin to intercept his future messages, too, to ensure that no-one else did, even if that prevented Jullanar from learning where I was. I would have to promote Ser Rhodin, as soon as possible, to give him more freedom to act on my behalf. A spymaster entirely loyal to me…
I was shying away from the greatest dilemma, which was whether and how and when to acknowledge my identity to Cliopher. The idea was too big, too incredible, blazed too brightly for me to think about it directly. I wanted to summon him at once. I wanted to draw him into this small, cluttered room, and seize him and bless him and thank him for saving me - for seeing me - for seeing my chains, for recognising my torment, for telling me that it was bad, bad, bad, and that I urgently needed help, needed a rescue.
I had no idea what Cliopher had in mind for a rescue mission but I had no doubt that he had one planned. I took brief joy in imagining the expression on his face when he presented me with the relevant report, however many hundreds of pages of close-written text, analysis and stakeholder voices and projected costs and benefits and all.
I could see no way to speak with him without the guards being present in the room, which precluded sobbing and throwing myself into his arms. Discretion would take some time to arrange, too. There would have to be some other reason for him to require a confidential conversation, so that I could raise the Wall of Silence without inviting gossip and re-igniting the suspicions I had so far been able to dismiss from Rhodin’s mind.
It was imperative, until then, that he did nothing further to draw attention to himself or to his correspondence. I had to get word to him, to warn him, to thank him.
I could hand him a paper, or at least tuck it into a report that I was returning to him, in person, in my study. I could seal and address it with magic, and ensure that it was invisible to all other eyes. At least, I thought I could.
When a frantic rummage around the desk failed to turn up any paper I made a silent apology to my long lost tutor and tore a blank sheet out of the front of the legal tome that was balanced precariously at the top of the pile. There was, to my relief, a pen tucked behind the books that spilled over the edge of my couch.
Writing materials thus obtained I sat for half a bell, staring blankly at the door of my oubliette, racking my brain for the best way to begin, for the words that would show Cliopher, show Kip, as he was to Jullanar, that he was right, that he must be careful, that I -
The final quarter bell startled me out of my tizzy with the reminder that time was passing, and would keep passing, however inconvenient that might be to conspirators the world over.
I scribbled frantically. I signed myself ‘Olor’. I enchanted the paper to burst into flames if anybody but myself or Cliopher attempted to read it.
I tried and failed to keep the mess of ink and tears from your ahalo silk robes.