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Chapter Text

Part I: A Brief (Ha!) History of the Nijani Police Force

Aioru asked to speak with Cliopher sixteen hours before he and Rhodin were due to set out for Alinor.

“Yes, of course, send him in,” Cliopher told Franzel, standing from where he’d been looking through his bag. He was already packed, and had been for a few days, but he found himself prone to an uncharacteristic fretting about its contents. He knew how to pack for the trip to find Basil. He knew, even, how to pack for adventures, for difficult journeys to unexpected places. He still found himself worrying about his other objective; he wasn’t sure where they would even begin to look for his Radiancy.

Cliopher had a vain hope that it might be a perfectly benign visit, one to see him off, perhaps. One look at Aioru’s face when he came in dashed those hopes. “What happened?” Cliopher said.

“The Duke of Nijan is dead,” Aioru said.

“How did it happen?”

“Best as we can tell? Stabbed. It’s not clear yet whether it’s murder or an assassination.”

Cliopher absorbed this blow. “Remind me, is the police force —”

“On strike again? Oh yes. There’s rioting in the streets. The other Jilkano princes are sending forces in —”

“Which is liable to set the whole city off,” Cliopher finished. He was mentally running through the list of staff in the Private Offices in his head, trying to come up with another name who had spent as much time in Nijan as he had, another person who could speak to both the citizens of Nijan and the Council of Princes, somebody else.

It was useless. He knew it was useless.

“I’m sorry to have to ask,” Aioru said.

Cliopher exhaled. He kept his face under control with an effort. “No, I know,” he said. “I know there’s no one else. Let me…”

His gaze skimmed over the packed bag resting on the table in the sitting room. One room over, in his private study, the desk was swept clear, matters put away.

He opened his traveling bag and retrieved his writing case. “Let me send a page for my secretaries,” he said finally. “And one to Rhodin, to let him know we won’t be able to leave tomorrow morning, after all.”

Ludvic took Cliopher and Rhodin down to his bar three days later, once the dust had settled enough for Cliopher to have the time and for it to have become obvious that Cliopher would be going nowhere anytime soon, unless it was to Nijan to listen to people shouting.

“Rós or beer, Cliopher?” Ludvic asked.

Cliopher considered rós’s reputation for ferocious strength, the fact that he had to be in the Offices of State by the first bell of the morning tomorrow, and the infrequency with which he typically drank. He also considered the absolute disaster of a Council of Princes meeting that he’d had to preside over today, the likely equally monstrous meetings and correspondence he’d be embroiled in all day tomorrow, and the fact that he’d asked Franzel to finish unpacking his things before Ludvic had arrived to spirit him away. “Rós.”

Ludvic clapped him on the shoulder and went to relay their orders to Giya.

“It won’t be that bad, Cliopher,” Rhodin said.

Cliopher stared at him.

“Yes, all right, it probably will be exactly that bad,” Rhodin admitted. “I won’t pretend I know the politics of it as well as you do, but gods know I’ve heard you and his Radiancy talk about Nijan enough to know that much.”

Cliopher could be grateful, he supposed, that his Radiancy didn’t have to be embroiled in this particular mess. Few dilemmas had exasperated him quite as much as the Nijani political system had. Cliopher could deal with this for him, and be — and be glad for him, that he was off having his grand adventure. Free of it all.

He could. He could.

Ludvic came back with a trio of shot glasses for the table.

Rhodin lifted his. “I would make a toast, but all my ideas are too grim,” he declared. “Cheers.” He took his shot in one go.

Cliopher considered his, shrugged, and tipped the whole drink into his mouth. He managed not to spit it out, but it was a near thing.

Ludvic was laughing at him with his eyes.

“I know,” Cliopher said, and tried to smile at him.

Ludvic said, more seriously, “I’m sorry, Cliopher.”

Cliopher didn’t want to talk about it. “I know why I’m morose,” he said, “but Rhodin, I didn’t realize you were looking forward to the trip so. You could still go, to Alinor or — was it Voonra, where your correspondent lives?”

“It is Voonra,” Rhodin admitted. “I can’t say I like the idea of ambling off on a trip of my own while the two of you weather such a crisis.”

“It won’t put the government in any better position for you to resume your position and then retire shortly anyway,” Cliopher pointed out. “I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t the Nijan expert in the Offices of State.” He rolled his shot glass around in one hand. The problem with drinking it all in one go was that now there wasn’t any more. “No reason for all of us to be stuck here. Sorry, Ludvic,” he added belatedly.

He thought that Ludvic had to be feeling a little bit of that same call to adventure too, surely — Masseo Umrit was out there, already traveling with his Radiancy — but Ludvic just shrugged. “I’m used to it. One of Rhodin or I would always have had to stay through the first couple months of the new Lady Magus’s tenure, just to have a firm hand on the reigns through the transfer of power. You know Himself would blame himself if anything went wrong.”

Cliopher did know. “Still.”

“It won’t be so long now regardless,” Ludvic said. “Six more months until the Jubilee; another two for the transfer of power after that.”

He was right, it wouldn’t be so long. Cliopher could be patient for another six months.

He had vowed, to his Radiancy and to every province, to keep the world safe for him until he came home. Cliopher could hold the world for him for six more months.

Cliopher resigned himself to it, or at least stayed busy enough that he was able to stop thinking about it, which was almost the same thing. So he thought, at least, until the next batch of letters came, the day before Rhodin was to head out to look for his penpal alone.

This time, Cliopher had four. One from his Radiancy; three with handwriting he didn’t recognize. He opened his Radiancy’s first.

It read,

My dear Kip,

Important news first: Basil, Sara, and Clio are alive. Their letters should have come through with mine; go read those first, I know you’ll want to. I assure you mine can wait.

Cliopher sank blindly into the chair in his study and fumbled his letter opener twice before he could get the other three letters open. His hands were shaking. Had he truly forgotten what Basil’s handwriting looked like? Had it been that long?

It had. He knew it had.

The longest letter was signed Basil. The shortest letter was addressed to Uncle Kip.

Cliopher had to stop, then, until he could compose himself. Weeping and reading were activities that did not particularly mix.

He did put aside his Radiancy’s letter for the moment in favor of Basil’s, which read,

Dear Kip,

Three hundred and twenty-seven letters. We got them all in one go, you know, around four months ago. And you must have sent far more than that, with how bad the post’s been on this side; those are only the ones that got through. Oh, Kip, I am sorry I didn’t have your faith. I thought you were dead until the spring. Someone last winter was going to Zunidh, and I thought about writing home, but I didn’t know what to say, not after so long, not if you wouldn’t be there to read it. I didn’t know how to go home if you wouldn’t be there to meet me.

I will come home now; we all will, Sara and Clio and I. The border to Zunidh opens every six months on this side, you may remember, and it will open in about three weeks for us. Your lord (more on him in a moment) and I tried to estimate what that would amount to on your side, but in his words it is ‘one part magic, one part math, and one part chance, and I’ve never been particularly good at math,’ so who knows. Expect us hopefully soon. Our plan is to come to Solaara and stay with you either until you get sick of us, the family elders shout loudly enough that we have to divert to the Vangavaye-ve for a time, or the Jubilee happens.

Now, as promised, your lord. He is here at the Bee, as you have likely gathered, along with — oh, I had better start at the beginning, I think. Since we last spoke, I have not reformed any governments nor accomplished any great tasks besides being able to make very good mead, but I have made one rather excellent friend. When I first discovered Jullanar of the Sea lived in Ragnor Bella, and indeed at many moments since then, I have thought both that you would be delighted and that I wished I could introduce the two of you. I look forward to actually being able to do so now, the two of you will get along splendidly, I think. But I am getting distracted. All this to say that Jullanar recently divorced her husband and vanished to places unknown on an adventure, so it was, despite our years of close friendship, a little surprising when she showed up on my door with half the Red Company in tow, including Fitzroy Angursell. More surprising still, when he came straight up to me and said, “You’re Kip’s Cousin Basil! He’s told me so much about you!”

I stared at him. “Somehow he’s never mentioned to me that he knows Fitzroy Angursell.”

“Ah,” Fitzroy said, “well.” He sounded a little sheepish. “He knows me by another name. Artorin Damara?”

I must admit I laughed my head off. Only you, Kip. “In that case,” I said, once I could talk again, “I have heard a great deal about you. You’d better come inside.”

I do hope this is not how you’re finding out about all this. Fitzroy seemed vaguely optimistic that perhaps you already knew, but I have to say, if you found out your beloved lord was Fitzroy Angursell and then never managed to hint at it once in three hundred letters then I will be shocked at your skills at dissembling. Although you have been circumspect about other things in your letters: I have noticed that, despite a good three hundred letters extolling your lord to the skies, there’s a word you never call him. Why is that?

Well, I won’t tease you, at least not now; it’s less fun in letter form when I can’t see your face anyhow. I like him very much, Kip. I thought I would from the way you talk about him, but it is one thing to read about him and another entirely to see exactly how long he can talk about how amazing you are and how impressive all of your many accomplishments are. (Twenty-seven minutes, in case you were wondering, I lost a bet to Jullanar about it. I actually think he could have talked for longer but Pali wandered in at that point and muttered something about ‘this again’ and he cut it short.) I wish you were here with us; he played with the village musicians the night he arrived and all I could think about was how much you would have enjoyed playing with them too, getting to flex your repertoire of Fitzroy Angursell songs for the man himself. I’m sure you have half of them memorized still, even if the ban against playing them is probably more strictly enforced in Zunidh than it is here.

Somehow it is easier to talk about current events than to try and sum up the last fifteen years of my life. Where to even start? And having been working my way through your letters it somehow feels like I could just start talking about the last few weeks, as if we have been talking together all this time, or as if I could simply pick up exactly where we left off and go from there.

But I think you will want to know about more than just the last fortnight. Clio…

Cliopher had to put the letter down, then, and breathe through the hot flood of feeling that was creeping through him, so that he would be able to do the rest of the letter justice. It had been a week and a half ago, his and Rhodin’s original departure date, and two days to the Alinor Border. He could have been there by now, to hear these words in Basil’s own voice. He could have clasped Basil’s forearms and pressed their foreheads together and breathed the same breath. He could have embraced Sara and gotten to see Clio — Clio, a teenager! Cliopher only remembered his namesake nephew as a baby, the fierce clutch of his small hand at Cliopher’s pinky finger, the way he’d wailed when anyone but Sara or her mother tried to hold him.

He could have been there when his Radiancy arrived, to share the joy of it with him, to play with him with the village musicians.

Cliopher wiped at his face. This was the dissolution of one of the great sorrows of his life, an ember of hope that he had tended for a thousand years only to see it grow into a grand bonfire. Why couldn’t Cliopher just let himself ride the tide of joy? He had gone a thousand years without Basil, only to find that he lived. Surely that could be enough for him, for however long it took for Basil, Sara, and Clio to get here? For six more months? Why couldn’t he be uncomplicatedly glad?

Cliopher let that hot fierce feeling burn itself down slowly to embers, but the fire of it didn’t go out, merely settled into a quiet smolder, ready to be stirred to wakefulness once again.

Then Tully came to knock on his door to tell him he was about to be late for a meeting with Ludvic and Aioru, and he had to get up and wash his face and put his court mask back on.

His court face was not good enough, today, to fool Ludvic, whose eyebrows went up the moment he saw Cliopher. Cliopher shook his head slightly at Ludvic, meaning ‘later’, and Ludvic subsided.

“Thank you for coming, sir,” Aioru said, glancing up briefly before immersing himself back into reports, parceling out a few to pass over the table to Cliopher. They were in a small meeting room near Aioru’s office, which had once been Cliopher’s. The privacy spells on the walls and windows muffled the sounds of the Private Office outside, but Cliopher could still faintly hear the steady bustle, the ebb and flow of people at work.

“How was Nijan?” Cliopher asked, sitting at the third seat at the table. He and Aioru had sent messages back and forth through the Lights as fast as they would go, several times a day for the entirety of Aioru’s trip, and he’d read Aioru’s preliminary report, of course, but he wanted his unofficial opinion as well.

Aioru shrugged. “About as bad as you’d expect. The rioting’s calmed, and it didn’t seem like it was going to start up again the second I left. They missed you, though, sir.” He gave a rueful smile. “Especially the duke’s daughter.”

“Of course she did,” Cliopher said with a sigh. “How many times did she demand to schedule her investiture?”

“Only about seven times,” Aioru said. “And I only had, oh, about eight people corner me to talk about democratic elections, and three people who threatened revolution if they couldn’t have them.”

Cliopher pinched the bridge of his nose. Up to this point, Cliopher and the rest of the mundial government had always been able to help the various Nijani factions stabilize, which had usually looked like the duke remaining nominally in power, even as their fledgling new form of government slowly sapped away the power from him. Although that somewhat undersold the volatility of the whole process; responsibilities shifted back and forth with every strike, every protest, every reformed faction and broken alliance. No faction had yet tried to break away from the mundial government with any real effort. The duke’s daughter was more popular than her father had been, with her own faction, but Cliopher did not think she was popular enough to be able to overcome the determination for self-governance that had been brewing in Nijan for the last two decades.

And Cliopher did not want her to be able to. He wanted to see Nijan stabilize into a more fair, more equitable, form of government. But such a thing was easier said than done.

“Meanwhile, here, all four of the Jilkanese princes implied to me that they would take control of Nijan by force sooner than see us take power away from the duke’s daughter or use this as an opportunity to make Nijan its own administrative district,” Cliopher said wearily. Their division of labor, Aioru to Nijan and Cliopher to remain in Solaara, had been in part so that the Nijani factions could start to get used to Aioru, and Aioru could get more hands-on familiarity with the Nijani factions, but also so that Cliopher could do his best to keep the princes contained, who had all been in Solaara for a Council of Princes meeting regardless. “Their excuse is that the assassination might have been done by radicals, and giving them what they want would only incentivize more political violence.”

“Not untrue,” Aioru muttered, scrubbing at his face. “Commander Odo, any information yet on who might have been behind it?”

“Not yet,” Ludvic said. “Rhodin’s network is investigating. So is the Nijani police department, but.” He shrugged. Unspoken was that they were all wary of blindly trusting the results of the Nijani investigation, given the stakes and the incentives for the department to return with specific types of findings.

“Right,” Cliopher muttered. Then a thought occurred to him, and he grimaced. “Please tell me I don’t have to tell Rhodin to come back from his retirement too. We just convinced him he could still travel.”

Ludvic shook his head. “No, his successor is managing the network fine. There’s nothing Rhodin could do differently.”

“Well, that’s something,” Cliopher said, leaning back in his seat. “Can we keep the situation stable until we can figure out who was responsible?” If they could prove it wasn’t politically motivated, they would defang at least one argument from the princes against letting Nijan elect their next ruler themselves.

“The duke’s daughter won’t stand for putting off her investiture for that long,” Aioru pointed out.

Cliopher considered this. “Isn’t she a suspect too?” he inquired. “She does, after all, stand to inherit the duchy of Nijan from her father’s death.”

Aioru considered it. “That could work.”

“I’m doubling your guard until this is all over,” Ludvic informed him.

There was more to hash out, of course, but by the end of it they had a number of strategies to deploy with both the princes and on the ground in Nijan to attempt to stabilize the situation (though Cliopher had to admit, in the privacy of his own head, that he felt optimistic about none of them). “And perhaps let me talk to the Jilkanese princes now that I’m back?” Aioru suggested to him. “They do need to see me as an authority, and the sooner the better.”

“Of course,” Cliopher said. “And I…” He could not and should not try and take on more responsibilities, new responsibilities, not with his retirement only deferred for the bare minimum of time. On the other hand, he could not leave himself, retire in truth, not with the situation wavering on the brink of outright warfare.

Aioru’s smile was sympathetic. “Take some time for yourself?” he suggested.

If Cliopher had to sit around twiddling his thumbs he would lose his mind. “I’m going to legalize the rest of Fitzroy Angursell’s poetry,” he said, without entirely meaning to. To Aioru’s widened eyes and Ludvic’s raised eyebrows, he said, “I need a project, it’s non-essential to government functioning, and he’s Zunidh’s poet laureate now. Having half of his works be illegal for sedition is absurd.”

“I don’t believe anybody actually expects us to enforce those laws at this point,” Aioru said.

“Then nobody will care that I’m changing the laws to match the expectations,” Cliopher retorted.

Aioru shrugged and smiled. “Well, I won’t complain.” He stood and stretched. “I’d better get back to it before more urgent dispatches from the Lights arrive.”

Cliopher stood as well, but as the door clicked shut behind Aioru, Ludvic looked up at him and said, “What happened?”

Cliopher had actually, for half of that meeting, forgotten. He could hear his own voice wavering with the sudden rush of startled joy as he said, “Basil’s alive. He’s alive, Ludvic.”

Ludvic stood so he could grip his shoulder wordlessly. “I’m glad,” he said quietly.

“He’s going to come visit me,” Cliopher added, smiling suddenly down at the table. Oh, he would be glad of the free time, wouldn’t he? Once he had visitors again? “He and Sara and Clio. Once the Border opens on their side.”

He could keep himself busy until then. And if his Radiancy wouldn’t come with them, if that reunion would have to be deferred — well, Cliopher could make things easier for him when he did come back, make it as easy as possible for him to return to Zunidh wearing Fitzroy Angursell’s mantle. That, at least, was work Cliopher could do with his whole heart.

It was easier, after that, to bring himself back to the letters. To let himself savor Basil’s words, Sara’s, Clio’s, the visions of what their lives had been like, and imagine them showing up on his door. Probably not showing up as petitioners, the way Ghilly, Toucan, and Bertie had, but perhaps he would be working in his study and Franzel would come to tell him he had visitors; perhaps he would walk out of a Council of Princes meeting and Gaudy would be there to greet him, alert and excited about the arrival of their family…

He had already begun the process to reverse any remaining bans on Fitzroy Angursell’s poetry and, along with it, to repeal and amend the last of the sedition laws still in existence since the Fall, before he came back to his Radiancy’s letter. The sting of guilt he felt at that, though, was eased by the fact that the very next line of it was, You’ve read Basil, Sara, and Clio’s letters? Caught up appropriately? Good.

It was a cheerful, meandering letter, especially in contrast to that heartbreaking uncertainty in the last one. There were a solid four pages of description of Basil and Sara and Clio, the Bee at the Border, their lives there, the town, as if his Radiancy knew (and he probably did) how badly Cliopher would want to be there with them, and wanted to illustrate the scene vividly enough that Cliopher could close his eyes and breathe in the smell of honey.

His Radiancy only spoke about himself near the end of the letter:

Things have been easier, since my last letter. Not easy, precisely, but easier. Domina Black and I had a chance to speak; she apologized to me for an argument that we had. And I have found another friend, one who recognized me in the official portraits; it did soothe something in me, to know that I was not completely unrecognizable, all this time. If there are still — oh, but I would rather not get into it right now. I am tired of the glumbles, Kip, tired of the inside of my own head sometimes, and I am enjoying the way my time at the Bee has been a reprieve from it, even if I suspect it won’t last. Basil and Sara in many ways have both a better grasp on what I have been up to for the past thousand years and fewer preconceptions of who I ought to be than my friends do, and I am enjoying spending time with them, even if Basil’s resemblance to you is strong enough that I walk away from half our conversations wishing I could speak with you instead.

Cliopher found himself rereading that passage, along with the cheerful descriptions, again and again over the days following, sometimes with a bittersweet sting, and others as a fortification of sorts against the endless meetings with the princes.

Convincing the princes to agree to overturning the sedition laws was straightforward, at least once Cliopher had politely reminded them of some of the insults many of them had called him to his face, and inquired whether their ideas had therefore been less valid to consider. The only one to provide any real resistance after that had been the Princess of Xiputl. (Prince Rufus had complained that most near-retirees just took up fishing, but Cliopher did not count that under legitimate complaints.) This had confused Cliopher until he remembered the princess’s bitter comments to his Radiancy about the Red Company, at which point he had smiled his mildest smile at her while the vote passed despite her objections.

The Nijan issue, predictably, continued to be nightmarish to deal with. The Council of Princes had gone from a body that met every six weeks to one that met either officially or unofficially roughly every other day, with endless maneuvering and countless attempts to break the stalemate of the future of the Nijani government, all unsuccessful thus far. At one point, Cliopher suggested to the Jilkanese princes that Nijan could remain part of its existing Jilkanese administrative district, the duke’s daughter could inherit the title of duchess, but the actual ruling power of the duchy could be split into a separate, elected position.

“Which of course the duchess would be eligible to run for,” Cliopher told them. “Surely if she is, as you say, the best candidate for the position, she would have no trouble being elected to the position?”

The Prince of Haion City banged his fist on the table. “You just intend to reduce the strength of our voting bloc!”

“I just said that the Princess Jilkano-Ngurai would continue to serve as ruling Princess,” Cliopher pointed out, thinking as he did that the Prince of Haion City had perhaps never forgiven him for the time that Cliopher had suggested that Haion City be merged into one of the other Jilkanese provinces.

“But of course I could not in good conscience disenfranchise our good Duchess without good reason,” the Princess Jilkano-Ngurai said, watching Cliopher intently.

Never mind that the only way the new Duchess could hope to actually keep her ruling authority without immediate deposition was to earn the consent of the governed, Cliopher thought grimly, while he hunted for more politic words to say exactly that.

So it went.

Cliopher reread his Radiancy’s letter again that night, though it ached more than it soothed to read about those cheerful little adventures wandering around Basil’s village. Over time, however, he found his gaze returning repeatedly to one little aside, early in the letter:

You ought to have told me that Basil was at the Bee on the Border, I should have stopped by when I first came to Alinor to look for him! Well, no matter, it worked out serendipitously enough in the end.

That casual assertion that of course his Radiancy would have gone looking for Basil, those lovingly detailed passages of Basil and Sara and Clio’s lives, tangled up in Cliopher’s chest. He had nothing to offer that could possibly be equal to this gift, given so casually. He could not find the Red Company where the Astandalan government had long tried and long failed.

He could, perhaps, make it a little bit easier for the members of the Red Company to find one another. So when Cliopher officially stamped the overturning of the sedition laws and the legalization of the entirety of Fitzroy Angursell’s repertoire, the official communications to the provincial governments included a note that every member of the Red Company had been officially pardoned by the mundial government. After some thought, Cliopher also arranged for similar messages to be sent out to Alinor, Ysthar, Voonra, and Colhélhé. He had no authority to encourage any of them to do the same, but he could at least make clear that Zunidh would not prosecute any of the Red Company, and remove one excuse any other world might have to arrest any of them.

It was all Cliopher could think to do, and so he had to be content with it. And he was, more or less, until the first letter from Rhodin arrived.

It began,

Dear Cliopher,

You will not believe my fortune! The Merrions must have smiled on myself and my beloved Sardeet, not an imposter as it turns out after all, for I had barely stepped foot over the border into Colhélhé when who should I run into but her and several of her comrades, including one Fitzroy Angursell, who as it turns out is none other than…

Cliopher put the letter down very slowly. To his empty study, he said blankly, “You have got to be kidding me.”

Chapter Text

Kiri’s eyebrows raised the moment she laid eyes on him. “Everything all right, sir?”

“Fine,” Cliopher bit out, striding into the Offices of State at a crisp pace and immediately having to check his speed so that he would not collide with a desk. The secretary whose desk he avoided collision with bent her head to her desk assiduously. “What’s the situation?”

“You’re not going to like it,” Kiri said.

Late last night, the duke’s daughter had attempted to requisition a sky ship to come to Solaara, presumably to demand her investiture. Some of the citizens had gotten wind of it and come out in force, starting protests that had shut down the docks and the Lights. The forces that the Jilkanese princes had sent had waded in to ‘restore order,’ as they put it; the Nijani police department had taken offense to the violent dispersal of peaceful protesters.

“Fortunately, Commander Omo had already ensured members of the army would be close at hand if the mundial government was required to keep the peace, and they were able to step in and stabilize the situation,” Kiri finished. “So far we have thirty-one injuries, one death.” Horribly, Cliopher knew it could have been far worse. “But the situation’s not tenable. The army’s established a curfew and sent the citizens home and shut down the port for the rest of the night, but that can’t last more than a day or two, if longer than tonight. The princes want to talk to you.”

“Oh, I’m sure they do,” Cliopher said grimly.

All of the Jilkanese princes started talking at once the moment Cliopher strode into the council room. He caught “— dared to threaten our forces,” “threat to industry and productivity,” and “the nerve of those commoners” before his temper snapped.

“Enough!” Cliopher shouted. His voice rang through the suddenly silent hall. “Perhaps if your forces had not threatened violence to peaceful protesters, the situation would not have escalated! Perhaps if you had ever listened to me the last, oh, thousand times I told you that the situation in Nijan was unstable and required further adjustments, the duke of Nijan would still be alive! You may complain to me as you like, I am certainly unlikely to be able to stop you, but you had better be ready to propose some new, dare I say productive, suggestions about what to do here, because none of us are leaving this room until we have an action plan!”

It took thirteen hours and Cliopher had a raging headache by the end of it. Ludvic, waiting for him outside the hall, took one look at him and said, “You need painkillers and to lie down. You’re still in recovery for a concussion, Cliopher.”

“That was over a month ago,” Cliopher said. He managed to keep his voice mostly even, but it was hard to keep control over his face.

“Concussion symptoms can last for weeks, if not months.”

“I need to —”

“Whatever needs to be done, I can do,” Aioru interjected, coming up behind him. “You browbeat them sufficiently, sir, I can handle the details.”

“I,” Cliopher began, and then lost the rest of his train of thought.

Ludvic took his arm. “Come on, Kip.”

Cliopher was distinctly aware of people around them, his secretaries clustered around him, staff members of the princes. He ripped his arm free. “I’m not a child,” he bit out.

Ludvic stepped back half a step, raising his hands.

Cliopher inhaled. Exhaled. He needed to — The situation couldn’t keep deteriorating further. They might have stabilized it for now, but Cliopher should never have let it get this bad. It was his job. It was literally the entire fucking reason he was here.

If he hadn’t been so eager to leave, would he have caught signs of this coming earlier?

“I want to write some letters to Nijani officials before I sleep,” he said. “See if I can do anything else to smooth the situation.”

“It’s smoothed enough for now,” Aioru said.

He couldn’t know that. They had thought that yesterday, and someone had died today. Cliopher had to do better than this. He had to —

“His Radiancy would be upset if you put your health at risk for this,” Ludvic said quietly.

“Then he should be here to tell me that himself,” Cliopher hissed before he could stop himself.

Ludvic’s gaze was very knowing.

Cliopher exhaled. He was still aware of people, coming and going, watching out of the corner of their eyes. He was the highest authority in Zunidh at the moment. He had to be seen to be untouchable, calm. His Radiancy had excelled at that despite the cost to himself. Cliopher had to keep control of himself.

“You’re right,” he said, no longer certain whether Ludvic was or not, only that his head was pounding and his heart hurt and he wanted to escape that gaze. “I’ll — rest.”

“We’ll handle any fires,” Aioru assured him. “And send someone for you if we absolutely need you — so if we don’t, assume you’re not.”

Cliopher slept for a good eleven hours straight and woke bleary and cross. When he tried to go down to the Offices of State, Tully, Gaudy, and Zaoul informed him in no uncertain terms that Kiri had told them that Cliopher should take the day off, and that if he tried to show up before tomorrow that she and Aioru would eject him.

“I am, technically, their boss,” Cliopher pointed out. In a better situation he thought that he might find this funny.

“I believe Commander Omo told them to call him if they required assistance physically removing you from the offices, with the rationale that his Radiancy specifically ordered him to do his best to keep you from overworking yourself into a health crisis,” Tully, the bravest of his secretaries, offered.

Cliopher managed not to growl at that. His secretaries didn’t deserve Cliopher taking out his foul mood on them. Neither did Ludvic, for that matter. For a brief, longing minute Cliopher considered just going back to bed for the day. But there was work to be done, and so instead Cliopher reached for his court face and did his best to set aside his emotions. “Are there any requests for meetings or audiences today that I should know about?”

“The Princess of Jilkano-Ngurai,” Tully said instantly. She was the Jilkanese princess into whose district Nijan fell. “Not urgent enough to wake you for, but ‘at your earliest convenience,’ she said.

Cliopher considered that. “Will you schedule her for a couple hours from now?” The sooner the better, only if he didn’t have a chance to acquire caffeine before then he would be entirely useless for dealing with any kind of subtleties.

There were a few other requests, most of which could be put off, but Tully finished with, “And a pair of representatives from Bear Publishing House, who wanted to speak with you about a book of Fitzroy Angursell poetry they’re publishing now that the bans have been overturned.”

“Oh,” Cliopher said. He hesitated. “Yes, I’ll speak with them.”

The meeting with the Princess of Jilkano-Ngurai was short but confusing. “You are willing to support control passing to an elected official, but only if Nijan becomes its own administrative district?” Cliopher said slowly. “My apologies, Princess, but I will admit to some confusion, as I thought you and your colleagues objected strenuously to Nijan becoming its own district.” They had found some small points of common ground in their negotiation earlier, determining that the mundial army would keep the peace for the moment and that the Jilkanese princes would withdraw their forces, but that was a long way from this.

“You are correct that the situation has become untenable,” the Princess said quietly. “I wish to resolve it. I would, of course, require a new position to grant to my kinswoman, the Duchess, and there is the matter of tariffs for trade between the City of Emeralds and Voonra…”

“I’ll need to speak with the Lord Chancellor on that matter, of course,” Cliopher said.

“Of course,” the Princess said.

Cliopher stared at the door for a blank thirty seconds after she left.

“Isn’t that good, sir?” Zaoul hazarded. Then his gaze sharpened. “Or is it that it’s too good?”

“It’s very good for my eventual goal of making Nijan its own administrative district, and much less good for finding a middle ground that all parties will accept right now,” Cliopher said frankly. “We may be able to make something work with it; without her opposition we can swing a number of the princes who have been opposing out of principle that the mundial government shouldn’t interfere in a principality’s territory like this. Of course, the ones who won’t want a more progressive new seat at the council won’t be budged, and neither will the ones who don’t want a new Jilkanese seat… still, perhaps… but I wish I knew why she was willing to give ground, and why now. And whether the other Jilkanese princes are on board.”

The negotiations from that kept Cliopher busy enough, official day off or no, that he didn’t have time to think overmuch about anything else until his audience with the publishing representatives.

“You want me to write an introduction for your book of Fitzroy Angursell poetry?” Cliopher repeated.

Both representatives bowed to him. “We read your essay making him poet laureate, of course, your excellency,” the one on the right said, an older man with a salt and pepper mustache named Hans. “You are clearly a great expert on both the man himself and his work.”

Where did that fall on the groveling sycophancy scale? Three or four, perhaps. He was no expert, to have never have recognized the man himself in front of him. “What works are you including in your collection?”

“Anything we can get our hands on,” said the other, a younger woman named Marz. “We have full copies of Aurora and Kissing the Moon, but we’re still trying to see if we can unearth Donkey Ears and the alternate version.”

Hans shifted, shooting an unsettled look at Marz, who shrugged back at him with an expression Cliopher suspected translated to, Listen, he just repealed the sedition laws, didn’t he?

Cliopher smiled. “Give me one moment.”

It only took Marz and Hans a few moments with The Secret Collection to understood what they held. “Oh, this has everything,” Marz breathed. “How did you get this?” She had, Cliopher suspected, briefly forgotten who she was speaking with.

Cliopher knew better than to admit to theft of government property, at least to uncertain company in the Palace of Stars. He really ought to have pretended to get it from elsewhere rather than fishing it out of his writing case in front of them. “It’s a long story.”

“I can only imagine,” Marz said. “May we borrow this?”

It took them some time to negotiate the terms of the loan. Cliopher was, he could admit, loathe to let go of it, for all that he had long since memorized the contents. But to allow it to reach proper distribution channels and be spread widely, the way it had always deserved — yes.

He said yes to writing the introduction as well, of course. The urge was nearly irresistible. And it gave him something to do, that evening, when the backdoor negotiations with the princes settled somewhat, and Cliopher needed a distraction from the letters still sitting on the desk of his private study, the one from Rhodin still mostly unread, the one from his Radiancy unopened.

He would read them soon. Just not quite yet. Once he had time to do them justice. Once he was less grumpy about this situation in Nijan and could be properly happy for Rhodin the way his friend deserved, that Rhodin had found his great friend.

The introduction proved unexpectedly challenging. The poet laureate essay had taken him a bit of time, to be sure, but the time had been in ordering his thoughts, in drawing out the correct way to make an argument he had made in his head many times before. This time…

It was not as if he did not have anything more to say about Fitzroy Angursell. But he was not sure where to start or what to focus on.

He wrote a tentative three sentences about reading Aurora as a teenager, then put that paper aside. He wrote a more academic paragraph about the reforms he had done based on Aurora and why he had wanted to repeal the sedition laws, then put his pen down.

His headache was beginning to ramp back up. He remembered, again, Ludvic telling him that his Radiancy would not have wanted him to put his own health at risk.

Cliopher went to take his medication and get ready for bed. He tried not to feel as though the remaining blank spaces on the page were mocking him.

Cliopher reflected, the next morning, that he had enjoyed the entire four days when he had not had a constant headache.

Domina Audry just happened to drop by and check in on him that morning (Cliopher suspected conspiracy) and, upon hearing Cliopher’s reluctantly honest admission of how he was feeling, informed him that he needed rest, not more excitement, so his ban on setting foot in the Offices of State was extended for another day. Aioru and Kiri were insistent that they could handle negotiations with the princes and to leave it all to them, which did not actually prevent any of the princes from reaching out to Cliopher directly, but stemmed the number of pages and audiences flowing through Cliopher’s rooms by perhaps half.

Cliopher hated it. It was just enough activity that he couldn’t rest without hearing whispered debates in the hallway about whether his household should wake him up for a note that had just arrived from the Prince of Dair, but not enough for him to stay continually busy. He kept having free half-hours here and there, during which he kept finding himself sitting in his study, his gaze tracking from his letters to the mostly-blank page for his introduction, which was most definitely taunting him.

If he had to read his Radiancy’s letter about all the adventures he was going on and fun he was having with Rhodin, Cliopher would throw something, and that would be unkind to his staff. So he did not even bother, and instead kept returning to the introduction, that boring bureaucratic opening in Cliopher’s perfect type-set handwriting, professional and precise and perfect to be cooped up in the Palace of Stars writing reports.

Cliopher crumpled the page up and threw it away, unable to look at it any longer. He sat there staring down at the blank page for one minute, two, and then put his pen to paper and wrote, I first encountered The Secret Collection in the office of the Imperial Censors in Astandalas the Golden.

He wrote the whole story: stealing it from the censors, hiding it in their office, recovering it at last when he was Hands and keeping it. Aware, all the time, that his phrasing was dry and uninteresting, that his storytelling left something to be desired. But this was who he was.

It remains the only thing I have ever stolen from the Palace, Cliopher finished, and sat there, looking down at his little essay, his tale, barely a page and a half long, in his precise handwriting, feeling — what? Something hot and tight swelling in his throat.

Cliopher picked his pen back up again and dipped it into ink. In exactly as smooth letting as he had written any other part of it, he added, Well. Except for the government, of course.

And then, riding on that wave of heat still, not knowing where it carried him, only that this was not where he stopped, he read over his little essay once, twice, and then sealed it and handed it off to Gaudy to deliver to Hans and Marz.

Ludvic showed up around lunchtime, when Cliopher was dealing with three separate notes from three separate shadow negotiations with the Jilkanese princes. “This,” he observed, watching Cliopher write while consulting his notes on trade for the City of Emeralds, “does not look like the rest the doctor ordered.”

“Don’t you start,” Cliopher said wearily. “You may raise the matters with the princes, not to mention the Nijani police force, if you wish.” He sealed the last note. “There. I’m done for the moment, if it helps.” He rolled out his shoulders. “Have you eaten yet?”

They had lunch. Ludvic wordlessly handed him another dose of his medication once Cliopher had something in his stomach, and the combination of the care, cessation of pain, and guilt made Cliopher say, “Thank you. I’m sorry I snapped at you the other day, Ludvic.”

“It’s all right,” Ludvic said easily. “I know it’s been a difficult week for you.” He swallowed a spoonful of soup and then said, “Was Himself badly upset in his letter? I did tell him not to worry.”

Cliopher stared at him, his own soup congealing into a heavy mass in his stomach. “Why would he be upset?” At Ludvic’s look of astonishment, Cliopher could feel himself flush. “I haven’t — had a chance, yet, to —”

“You haven’t read his letter yet?”

“As you said, it’s been a difficult week,” Cliopher managed. “I — he’s upset?” He could hear that his own voice had gotten smaller.

“Read your letter, Cliopher,” Ludvic advised.

Cliopher was a poor conversationalist for the rest of lunch. He went straight for his desk afterwards, managing with an effort to actually hunt for his letter opener rather than just ripping it open.

He could tell the moment he looked at the letter that his Radiancy had been upset, writing it, or at the very least agitated. The ink was uneven in places, and there were more inkblots and scrawled out phrases than his last letter.

Kip —, the letter began, with a great blot of ink on the dash, as if his Radiancy had written the address and then stopped and thought about how to go on.

Rhodin told me about the landslide. He assures me that you are well besides lingering aftereffects from the concussion, that Domina Audry expects you to make a full recovery, and here there was a blotted-out section before his Radiancy went on, so long as you take the rest and time you need to finish healing. As I am not there to forcibly give you a day off by way of audits, I can only entreat you, as your friend: Kip, please take care of yourself. Please. For me. To hell with Nijan.

At this point Cliopher’s vision was blurring enough that he had to put the letter down and cover his face.

By the time he felt able to able to approach the rest of it, his petty jealousy felt very small indeed, and it vanished entirely at the letter’s final two paragraphs, which read,

I expect to spend at least a few days at the following address, and though I would not entrust anything particularly sensitive to it, you can reach me there if you need anything. (A more permanent solution is on its way to you, but as it is a package of both larger size and somewhat magically sensitive it cannot go through the Lights and so I expect it will lag behind this.) Or if you feel otherwise inclined to, I hope you know that you would always be very welcome, though of course I know (I, of all people, know) that you have more than enough on your plate to be getting on with to begin with.

If the Council of Princes hassles you too badly, please remind them of that time that I turned Earl Baljan into a table and inform them that I would be most happy to temporarily return from my quest to repeat the phenomenon should they insist on pestering you incessantly while you are in recovery from a head injury.

He had had trouble with the valediction again. There were several crossed out versions, too thickly done for Cliopher to discern any of them, and in the end he had simply not signed it at all.

Cliopher reread those last few paragraphs again. Oh, but it cut deep, that careful, courteous maneuvering, the way he had so deliberately not asked Will you write to me? He had not wanted Cliopher to feel obligated, clearly, and yet he had wanted it enough to be willing ask circuitously — and Cliopher, because he had not read the letter until now, had not responded for three days.

He could respond immediately now that he had read it, at the very least. He pulled over a fresh sheet of paper at once and wrote, My lord, out of habit, and then stopped, staring at it.

Cliopher crumpled up the sheet of paper and began fresh. This time he addressed it to Fitzroy.

It was not the most elegant letter he had ever composed. He did succeed, he thought, at hitting the important points. He made it clear that he had not read Fitzroy’s letter until just now, because he did not think he could apologize for not writing back sooner without making Fitzroy fear that he had felt obligated. He did his best to reassure about his health and workload, noting that they had split up the workloads of the Lord Magus and Lord Chancellor substantially between a variety of other roles. He expressed that he had been happy to receive Fitzroy’s other letters and that he was glad to have a return address for him, however temporary.

It was not until he was actually writing said address onto the envelope that he properly absorbed where it was. Cliopher stared at the letter for a moment. Then he went and retrieved the envelope it had come in so he could check the return address. It was the same as the one his Radiancy had given him.

He sent his letter off first, because that was the priority, but after that he went down to Ludvic’s office and rapped on the door.

“You read it, I take it?” Ludvic asked.

Cliopher said, “What on earth is he doing in Nijan?”

Chapter Text

The answer, it rapidly became very obvious, was engaging community stakeholders. Only as Fitzroy Angursell, not Artorin Damara. He had inserted himself into the middle of factional politics, asking everybody questions about their goals, providing advice on what he thought they ought to do next, telling them what he actually thought of them and their plans…

The Council of Princes, predictably, was livid.

“That traitor should have been arrested immediately!” The Prince of Haion City thundered. “What is the police force doing?”

“He received a full pardon from the Glorious One before he left, so they have no grounds to arrest him,” Cliopher said placidly.

“No grounds!” the Princess of Jilkano-Lomoi cried. “What do you call encouraging anarchists and protesters to flout local rule?”

Personally Cliopher considered the reportedly three hours his Radiancy, Fitzroy, had spent debating the benefits and limits of anarchy with a group of protesters to be more effective political outreach than the Princess of Jilkano-Lomoi had probably done in her entire career. “It isn’t illegal to discuss different political philosophies,” Cliopher pointed out.

“Not now that you’ve repealed the sedition laws, it isn’t,” Prince Rufus said, with narrowed eyes.

The Prince of Jilkano-Lozoi glowered at Cliopher. “Surely your excellency could not possibly stoop to such depths as conspiring with a noted outlaw to further your dastardly plans for Nijan!”

Dastardly was a new one, Cliopher noted. “Me?” he inquired. “A career bureaucrat, conspire with an infamous outlaw and anarchist?”

The princes seemed skeptical about this argument for some reason.

It was amazing how much more bearable the Council of Princes was when the meeting was a mere hour and a half long (in deference to Fitzroy’s plea to take more care with his health, as wildly indulgent as it felt). That said meeting had consisted nearly entirely of complaints about all the ways that Fitzroy was rapidly inserting himself into a position of influence with half the factions rather than an imminent crisis might, admittedly, be helping even more. Cliopher still had no idea why he was in Nijan, but what he was doing there seemed clear enough: by the end of the week, and with access to Rhodin’s network, Fitzroy would probably know the moment a major faction head sneezed, let alone made a significant move in the struggle for control of Nijan.

Not to mention, of course, the pettier pleasures of it.

“Did he really tell the duke’s daughter that her sense of entitlement was so large it was impeding the development of any kind of common sense?” he asked Aioru after the meeting, picturing it a little dreamily. "Or that she really ought to be the duchess of Penache where she could do less harm?” He had had many (many, many) conversations with her over the years and he could just imagine her trying to unsuccessfully use the trick of looking down her nose on his Radiancy (who was several inches taller than her).

“As best we can tell, yes,” Aioru said. He cocked his head to one side, studying Cliopher. “Sir, is there anything I should know about this situation? You seem less surprised than I would have expected.”

Alas, this was the problem with appointing clever people as your successors, Cliopher reflected. “Nothing I am at liberty to discuss at the moment, Aioru,” he said.

Aioru nodded. “I understand.”

What Aioru thought he understood Cliopher didn’t know. That freeing Fitzroy Angursell had come up with his Radiancy before he left, maybe? But Cliopher let it be. He had no better answer to give Aioru, not yet. Not until he had a chance to speak with his Radiancy, at least.

Which reminded him. Cliopher cleared his throat. “Perhaps I could reassure the princes by going to Nijan myself to speak with the duke’s daughter? They have been complaining that I have not been taking her seriously.”

“Sir, I think if you gave any sign of actually planning to grant the duke’s daughter the title, there would be riots in the streets,” Aioru said frankly. “Plus the Jilkanese princes would follow you, which would also mean —”

“Riots in the streets,” Cliopher finished, sighing. “No, of course you’re right.”

He did have the consolation of a response from his Radiancy waiting for him on his desk.

My dear Kip —

I am glad to hear you have managed to divest yourself of some of the burdens I left upon your shoulders (even if five new positions sounds, I must say, like an undercount). I only wish — well. Perhaps we may resolve this situation in Nijan (I say as if any situation in Nijan has ever been prone to easy resolution) and lift a few more. I cannot say that I ever imagined Nijani politics featuring on my quest, though admittedly I have been finding the involved parties as interesting as they are infuriating now that I may interact with them directly. Still, only for you, Kip.

Speaking of Nijani politics, if you will recall some prior discussions we have had on the matter, would you find flexibility on tithes or shared laws more useful given the current circumstances? I am finding more room to maneuver on both than we had originally imagined.

Have to run — the army forces keep hovering, uneasy about Fitzroy Angursell running loose for some reason, and I’ve been trying to avoid letting any of them get a good look at my face. I don’t suppose you could facilitate an excuse for them to go elsewhere for a time? No, I suppose it’s either them or the Jilkanese military and that comes out worse on average.

How long have you known?

— Fitzroy

Cliopher reread it a few times. If it was brisker than his last letter, without the vulnerability of the one before that, well, it was good to see at least that he was not upset any longer.

That comment, only for you, Kip, surely did not mean… but Cliopher could not see any other interpretation. He wrestled for a minute with the idea of his Radiancy, of Fitzroy Angursell, taking a detour from his quest to wrangle the Nijani police force, which had given the both of them more headaches than Cliopher could count, simply to make Cliopher’s life easier.

It did not get any less overwhelming upon further consideration.

He distracted himself from the matter by composing the response:

Dear Fitzroy,

While I wish you had been able to avoid Nijani politics entirely, I can’t pretend it hasn’t made my interactions with the Council of Princes significantly more bearable already. By the time today’s meeting ended (which I called as soon as my headache started deteriorating, so you needn’t worry about that) one of the princes had accused me outright of being an accomplice of Fitzroy Angursell and demanded to know how long I had been in his employ. I did not tell him nine hundred years, but I was sorely tempted.

Tithes would be very helpful if you can swing it, though I’d be delighted with either. It is going better than chess with you usually does for me but I cannot pretend by all that much. Though maybe draughts is the better metaphor, especially if you recall the game we played after the Lights opened in Amboloyo.

I figured it out about two months ago, though with the benefit of hindsight I find myself thinking that I truly ought to have seen it far sooner. I wish I could have done more for you earlier.

I proposed coming out myself to Nijan to see if I could assist with local tensions myself and was informed in no uncertain terms that I would be tempting riots if I did. At least the post is fast.

— Kip

Cliopher considered the draft, frowning at it. It felt… incomplete, somehow. Not quite correct. He wasn’t concerned about the elliptical status update to his Radiancy; just as his Radiancy had known Cliopher would remember the discussion they’d had — what had it been, two years ago, maybe, about what they imagined the future state of Nijan could be, what the most realistic and stable setup might look like, and why nobody would ever agree to it — Cliopher felt certain that his Radiancy would understand that he was struggling to emerge from a stalemate. (The other Jilkanese princes continued to object most strenuously to a new administrative district, so while Cliopher still thought the Princess of Jilkano-Ngurai’s change of heart was promising, he had not yet managed to get the votes to actually act on it in any meaningful way.)

No, it wasn’t that. But Cliopher wasn’t sure what it was.

He sat frowning at the note for another five minutes, but with ten minutes left until his strategy meeting with Aioru, he had to either send it now or leave it for later, so he opted to send it now.

He went to put his Radiancy’s — Fitzroy’s — note into his writing kit with the others. It was only when he had his the secret compartment in his writing kit open to reveal Fitzroy’s last letter that he noticed something he had not noticed when he first received it.

He had put the letter in his writing kit handwriting-side-down for some reason, mostly likely by accident. (He had, perhaps, still been more than a bit emotional when he had finally gone to put it away.) He hadn’t noticed there was anything on the back.

Some ink-blots; something that was scratched with enough aggression that it could not be truly called a doodle; and a single measure of music, a staff with five notes scratched onto it. Cliopher hummed them to himself quietly.

He didn’t recognize the song that they came from. Was Fitzroy writing something new?

Then Tully knocked on his door to ask if he was coming, and Cliopher had to put it aside for the moment.

Negotiations continued, and so did the stalemate, though the shape of it changed from day to day. That was often, in Cliopher’s experience, the way politics went: an inciting incident, a flurry of activity, and then extended, excruciating negotiations. The flood of letters to and fro from Nijan made it bearable, even fun at times — the moment Aioru had come to him to tell him about the agreement the duke’s daughters’ faction, the police force, and the dockworker's union had come to about tithes Cliopher had had to fight from crowing aloud with delight — and Cliopher thought, a little ruefully, that this reminder of what it could be like would only make it worse, when his Radiancy — when Fitzroy left again. Maybe by then —

But right now, Cliopher had a job to do. The tithes, combined with a concession on tariffs that Cliopher and Aioru had worked up, was enough of a concession for the Princess of Jilkano-Ngurai to openly back making Nijan its own administrative district, which had allowed a number of shadow negotiations to come out into the open and proceed more directly. They did not have a majority vote yet, but for the first time Cliopher felt that there was one almost within sight, if he could just figure out the right way to put his finger on the scale.

The strategy, when it came, came unexpectedly in Conju’s wake as he swept back in from his trip. “You, Cliopher, look more pallid than you did when I left. You need a vacation,” he informed Cliopher as he swept down from the sky ship.

Cliopher shrugged, holding a hand above his eyes to shield his face from the sun. He hadn’t been going outside enough, it was true. “If Nijan could sort itself out for longer than a week at a time then I would be most delighted to take one.”

“Is the situation truly so dire that his Radiancy needed to involve himself?”

“No, he’s just cross about Cliopher having to sit through endless Council of Princes meetings with a head injury,” Ludvic said easily before Cliopher could respond. “Here.” He took Conju’s bags.

Cliopher frowned at Conju. “Did Ludvic tell you about that, or did his Radiancy write to you himself?”

Conju let out a sigh that implied the strong desire to roll his eyes. “Nobody needs to tell me anything when he’s writing poetry about it, Cliopher.”

“I’m sorry, he’s what?” Cliopher said blankly.

“You haven’t seen it yet? It was all the rage in the City of Emeralds when the sky ship stopped there.” He sniffed. “Not his best work, it’s a bit arcane and tricky to follow, but it is clever — well, all of his work is, I suppose.”

Cliopher stared at him. “Conju. This is a very important question. Do you have a copy of it.”

He did.

They retreated to Conju’s rooms to read it, so that Conju could freshen up and pour them all wine. Cliopher gave into temptation, told Tully to cancel all his meetings for the afternoon, and then seized the little pamphlet Conju held out the moment it emerged from his luggage.

Cliopher couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows at the title. “‘A Brief (Ha!) History of the Nijani Police Force’?”

“Don’t ask me why the ‘ha!’ merits an inclusion in the title,” Conju said waspishly.

Cliopher made it a whole three stanzas into the actual poem before he could feel a ridiculous smile start to steal across his face. If he hadn’t already figured out that his Radiancy was Fitzroy Angursell, he would have realized it instantly from the contents of this poem. The poem started with the first Nijani political crisis, or at least the first Cliopher had dealt with, and he remembered discussing this with his Radiancy, he remembered this exact train of thought from him, even if it had been so much more subtly and mildly remarked, back then, when his Radiancy, when Fitzroy had been trapped behind the serene facade of the Emperor and not able to frankly speak his mind.

Then he reached a stanza that made all the thoughts fly out of his head. “I’m in this?” He? Cliopher Mdang? In a Fitzroy Angursell poem?

“Oh,” Conju said, “keep reading, Cliopher.”

“Read it out loud,” Ludvic requested, taking a sip of his wine, his own eyes alive with interest. Ludvic, of course, was a poet too.

Cliopher made it through those first few stanzas, describing that first letter to the Emperor that had come from Nijan, the solution Cliopher and his Radiancy had settled on after discussing the matter, Cliopher bringing it to the Council of Princes as Hands of the Emperor and the princes shooting the matter down instantly. He made it through the next few stanzas, the next crisis, Cliopher bringing a proposal to the Council of Princes —

Cliopher had to set the pamphlet down. “Is that the chorus?” He re-read the music, focusing on the actual notes this time. “That’s the chorus.”

His Radiancy, who was Fitzroy Angursell, had written a song about their trials and tribulations with the Nijani police force, and the chorus, the punchline of the song, was the way they, the way Cliopher, took sensible suggestions to the Council of Princes time after time after time and they refused to implement them nine times out of ten.

At this point Ludvic took the pamphlet away from him because Cliopher was laughing too hard to read aloud.

He had to chew on his knuckle for half of Ludvic’s recitation, to keep his gleeful mirth cooped up internally so that he could listen. Oh, but it was a delight, to hear Fitzroy’s sense of humor slip the leash fully at last and run free, with his skewering of petty drama between the Nijani factions, his sardonic asides about each prince, his dry commentary about each setback. It was rougher than some of his most popular works, less edited, Cliopher was almost certain, as he could not have been working on it for long, but Cliopher adored it all the more fiercely for that, for showing the edges where Fitzroy was picking his craft back up, for having so much heart. Because it did have heart, even through that sharp, skewering recitation of all their failures and struggles and false starts. There was rueful amusement that shone through each time the dust settled with less progress than anyone would like that said, to Cliopher: well, it’s not much progress, but it’s some, and what else can you do but take it and go forward with it? And Cliopher knew that philosophy: that was the philosophy that had carried him through a career in government, in unpicking the hardest problems, or trying to, over years and decades and centuries, that insistence that it was not worthless, that it did have value, even the failures, even the most incremental of improvements.

Ludvic gave the pamphlet back to him after he finished his recitation so Cliopher could page through it and hum the melody to himself softly. The little five-note refrain scrawled on the back of his letter, he noticed, didn’t appear; he thought it might be in a different key entirely.

“I have no idea what he was thinking,” Conju said acerbically. “His older work had popular appeal, at least. This one is so… obscure.”

Cliopher did not throttle Conju. He reminded himself that he himself had thought the poem was a little rough. He reminded himself that Conju had different taste than he did, and that was fine.

“Careful,” Ludvic said, with an impish smile, looking over at Cliopher.

“I’m not afraid of Cliopher, he’s a pacifist,” Conju declared. “Who is even the target audience for this?”

“Who indeed,” Ludvic said blandly.

Conju stared at him. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“It’s to browbeat the Council of Princes with,” Cliopher said absently, turning it over in his head. Seeing for the first time the path to victory, well-paved and clear. Then he blinked, because Conju was glaring at him and Ludvic looked long-suffering. “What?”

“Again,” Cliopher said, “political satire is not illegal.”

The Council of Princes, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not like Fitzroy Angursell’s new poem nearly so much as Cliopher did.

“He makes us sound like fools!” the Prince of Haion City bellowed.

The shouting went on for some time after that; Cliopher let them yell, waiting, judging their tempers, their frustrations. These meetings were increasing in animosity, he thought, every time. The Council of Princes were as annoyed as Cliopher was at having to meet on a frequency of roughly every other day, as trapped in Solaara as he was, as irritated at this whole situation as he was.

Cliopher had spent long centuries honing his ability to persuade, to negotiate, to talk people around. He listened to the room, and he waited, and he felt the moment the lull came, the shouting subsiding to grumbles.

He stepped forward and spread his hands. “My lords, I understand your dismay. To face ridicule for being obstructionist when, of course, you all merely want to do what is best for your province and for Zunidh…” He shook his head. “Of course it is frustrating, to know that this poem, like all of Fitzroy Angursell’s work, will be read across the whole of Zunidh, and that criticism and judgment will be laid at all of our doors from citizens who do not and cannot understand the full complexity of the issue. But neither may we suppress this poem, for the flipside of the power that you each wield, as a prince — or paramount chief,” he amended, looking at Jiano, “is responsibility to your citizens, your province, and to the whole of Zunidh, that they may judge the work you do on their behalf.”

He paused for a moment to let that sink in. “Our citizens have the right to lay criticism at our feet for being unable, year after year, to find a solution to this issue that will allow Nijan to flourish without political unrest. They have the right to consider us fools. And if you are, as I am, tired of going in circles on this matter, tired of Nijan surfacing as a topic year after year in this meeting, tired of the same arguments — then perhaps it is time to try something new.

“The Princess of Jilkano-Ngurai, into whose province Nijan falls, has expressed a willingness to explore a novel approach and create a new administrative district for Nijan where they might have more autonomy over their own governance. Many of you have expressed a variety of reservations about this — that this would adjust the balance of power at this table, by creating a new Jilkanese prince of an unknown political persuasion, being only one.” He saw the Jilkanese princes shift at the reminder that this prince would, too, be Jilkanese, and therefore could be expected to share interests with them, even if this prince or representative might have radical politics. “I cannot pretend to be uninterested in this proposal. As you know, as many in the government know, as all our citizens who have read this new poem now know, I have long argued for Nijan to sit as its own administrative district.”

Cliopher met the gaze of the Princess of Jilkano-Ngurai. He had realized, reading Fitzroy’s poem, listening to the words in Ludvic’s calm, steady voice, why it was that she was only interested in elections in Nijan if it became its own administrative district. “If you are tired of the criticism, tired of the circular discussions, tired of demands for actions from your citizens,” Cliopher said, “then I suggest, my lords, that we try something new — and let the judgment of history rest on my shoulders for it, rather than yours.”

It took, of course, another four hours or so for the princes to talk themselves around. When the motion passed, it passed with only a two-vote majority — but it did pass.

Cliopher looked down at the paper in his hand declaring Nijan its own administrative district and empowering the citizens to determine the mechanism for choosing a prince or otherwise named representative, the culmination of decades of work on his part.

“I hope you know, sir,” Aioru said, coming up behind his shoulder to stare at the motion with about as much bewildered awe as Cliopher felt, “that now you can’t retire until there’s been at least a couple of months without a major political incident in Nijan.”

“I do know,” Cliopher said ruefully. He was too much the architect of this approach, had accepted too many of the responsibilities for it. He would probably regret that, in a week or a month, but he hadn’t seen another tactic that would work. And right now, today, it felt worth it.

It took more time than that to formalize it, of course. The chief of the Nijani police force and several union heads and the duke’s daughter all came out on a sky ship to Solaara to see the ratification; Cliopher invested the duke’s daughter with a new position elsewhere in Jilkano and carefully ignored the poisonous looks she sent him. (Making her Duchess of Penache had, admittedly, been an indulgence on his part, but the idea of making his Radiancy, Fitzroy, laugh with it had been irresistible.)

The most interesting of the conversations surrounding the ratification came from the head of the dockworker’s union, Fatimah, who he’d spoken to before on prior trips to Nijan. She was in her late forties, had the callouses of somebody who worked hard, and was, as far as Nijani partisans went, someone Cliopher actually respected.

She came up beside him halfway through the inevitable, interminable court function to mark the resolution, while he’d been out on a balcony taking in fresh air. Fatimah leaned against the balcony railing next to him, looked down at the ocean trailing away towards the horizon, and said, “Had some discussions with Fitzroy Angursell during all this. Interesting man. Not who I would have expected.”

Cliopher made his favorite noncommittal humming noise.

“Lucky for him that you’d just repealed those sedition laws,” she said, almost but not quite offhandedly. “He walked right up to the line on all of them, right up until some of the anarchists let him know he didn’t have to.” She snorted abruptly, rubbing at her face to hide a grin. “Then he really started to have fun with it.”

Cliopher couldn’t help the fierce rush of pride he felt at that, though he did his best to keep it off his face. He’d been thinking of Fitzroy’s older songs, but Fitzroy’s new songs should have the freedom to be as spirited, as irreverent, as funny and correct. Fitzroy should have that freedom.

He should have had it all along.

“It’s funny, though,” Fatimah said, not quite casually. “I’d heard the rumors that Angursell might have Imperial blood in him somewhere and never placed any stock in it, but he really does look quite a bit like the Emperor.”

Cliopher carefully did not tense up. “Does he?” he inquired.

“Mm. Sharp mind for politics, too. Knew a lot about our history with the duke. The Council of Princes, too.”

“Well,” Cliopher said, “political satire has always been his genre.”

Fatimah turned to look at Cliopher head on. “I was glad to have his insights and his assistance,” she said, “so I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. But some people have more curiosity than gratitude, if you know what I mean.”

Cliopher did. Before he could settle on something appropriately non-committal to say, Fatimah nodded to him and vanished back into the crowd without a word, apparently uninterested in making Cliopher come up with an excuse or explanation.

He watched her go. This was a matter he had not considered yet, the matter of other people on Zunidh finding out that Fitzroy Angursell and Artorin Damara were one and the same. And yet they almost certainly would, eventually, at least if Fitzroy spent any kind of prolonged time in Zunidh as himself, either before or after the Jubilee.

If he did, for any reason, decide to live more permanently in Zunidh, for instance.

After this newest poem, the Council of Princes would likely have some things to say about the matter, and they would not be pleasant.

Perhaps it was not the worst thing in the world that Cliopher would have to delay his retirement for another couple of months. It would give him time to think about what, if anything, needed to be done — what the protocols should be — what he, Cliopher, could do to ensure that his Radiancy, that Fitzroy, could wander Zunidh as himself, as either of his selves, without setting off inter-provincial political crises.

But that was for another day. For the moment, Cliopher could bask in the satisfaction of a real resolution (or so he hoped, at least) on the Nijan issue at last. Fitzroy clearly agreed with him. The note from him arrived the day after the Council of Princes passed the resolution and it was only four words long:

Brava, my lord Mdang.

Cliopher rode the high of it for three straight days.

Chapter Text

Part II: The Long Way Home

Cliopher’s sense of triumph didn’t last long. He received one more letter from Fitzroy after the official ratification, which read, Now that you’ve achieved the impossible once more I’m off, so best not to write to this address again — I can’t think what happened to your package, besides getting caught up in Nijani strikes, so I am hoping it will arrive within the next week or two. If it does not you may need to audit the post office again, which I suggest only because I suspect you’ll be looking for something to do by then anyway.

Fitzroy had him dead to rights on that front, Cliopher thought ruefully, though if anything his estimate of it taking Cliopher a week or two to get restless was overly optimistic; within a few hours of the note arriving, Cliopher started to feel itchy.

He spent that day determinedly parsing through reports from Nijan, taking his time to ensure that the election plans were being drawn up properly, that the police force showed no inclination to strike, that the Jilkanese princes weren’t planning any kind of interference. He knew better than to expect smooth sailing for long, but for now at least the arrangement was holding. The day after he spent a significant amount of time writing letters to various Nijani leaders and consulting with Aioru and Kiri in the afternoon in an attempt to keep it that way.

On the third day he ran out of tasks to assign himself. He spent two hours working out protocols for the Nijani elections before he gave up and went to hunt down every critical review of Fitzroy’s new poem that he could find. He had to parse through absolute reams of articles that were frothing at the mouth about the unexpected return of Fitzroy Angursell, and where had he been for the last thirty years, and so on and so forth. There were a number of wild theories — Cliopher had to pause midway through to shudder at the thought of Louya writing him about Fitzroy-based conspiracy theories — but nothing that came close to the truth. That didn’t mean the truth wouldn’t come out eventually, but it did, hopefully, mean they had time before it did.

Cliopher made a mental note to check with Fitzroy if he could talk to Aioru about his identity. Whenever he was next able to communicate with Fitzroy, at least.

The actual reviews were generally positive, which pleased Cliopher, though there were a few that made him roll his eyes and one that made him remind himself at least three times that he was the Viceroy of Zunidh and he was meant to be above letters to newspapers complaining about their editorials.

One of them in the Haion City Times that he had otherwise been enjoying made him pause halfway through.

Most satisfying is seeing Angursell’s sparkling wit applied to the politics and bureaucracy of current-day politics. Lord Mdang is an excellent target for Angursell’s wit, embodying the ineffectual boredom of bureaucracy that Angursell has always scorned…

Cliopher shook his head ruefully after a moment. He had told the Council of Princes, hadn’t he, that they all had to be accountable to their citizens for the situation in Nijan? This had been written, he saw when he checked the date, the day before he had gotten the Council of Princes to pass the motion for the new administrative district, so he had at least disputed the accusation of being ineffectual.

Cliopher was a bureaucrat, and he could hardly pretend to be so interesting as the kind of people Fitzroy Angursell ordinarily wrote poems about, so he couldn’t dispute that part of the review.

At the point where he found himself actually starting to compose an anonymous letter to the Csiven Flyer, Cliopher made himself put the newspapers aside and return to hunting for actual work to do. If he kept thinking about Fitzroy’s new poem while he dragged out all his volumes of the Law-Code of Astandalas, about the melodies and harmonies and how it would sound on the oboe — well, it was legal to play. Cliopher could do that later if he wanted to, and he did want to.

He only became aware that Ludvic had dropped by to see him when Ludvic started chuckling in the doorway.

Cliopher gave him a bemused smile. “What? Do I have something on my face?”

“You really don’t know you do that, do you,” Ludvic observed, still grinning.

“Do what?”

“Nothing. Have you already found more work to do? You know most near-retirees take up hobbies, Cliopher?”

“Do you know, Prince Rufus said something very similar to me recently,” Cliopher said absently, looking down at the Law-Code. “No, it’s not a new project, or not yet at least. I was just thinking. Ludvic, do you think…”

“Do I think?” Ludvic prompted after a moment.

“The lèse-majesté laws,” Cliopher said.

Ludvic’s mouth tightened.

The lèse-majesté laws were the laws for defamation against the Emperor. The laws that made it illegal to say no to him or to disrespect him; the laws that Cliopher had memorized word-for-word nine centuries of Solaaran time ago; the laws that, for a good portion of his life, Cliopher had expected would be the death of him, quite literally.

“What about them?” Ludvic said guardedly.

“Well,” Cliopher said, looking down at the text in front of him, which it turned out he did not need; he still remembered them word perfectly, “he hates them, doesn’t he.”

Because Cliopher was intimately familiar with Fitzroy Angursell’s body of work, and he knew Fitzroy Angursell had always hated them, had spoken always with the utmost contempt of men who thought their blood set them far enough above other men to be like gods, that they could make no mistakes, could tolerate no criticism. Because his Radiancy had always thought these things about Nijani politics, but Fitzroy Angursell could offer the honest critique of a man where Artorin Damara was constrained to the condemnation of a living god. Because Cliopher had spent centuries at his Radiancy’s side and seen the way that high and lonely pedestal the world had put him on had worked.

Because it had been treason to invite him on vacation.

“I expect he does, yes,” Ludvic said. “Please tell me you’re not making them your next project.”

“Why not?” Cliopher said, he thought reasonably. “I do need one.”

“Hobbies,” Ludvic repeated. “You know he isn’t coming back to Solaara for longer than the few weeks that the Jubilee will take.”

“Then I can make the Jubilee easier for him,” Cliopher said stubbornly.

“You know what won’t make life easier for Himself?” Ludvic said. “When the Ouranatha try to assassinate you. I am certain that he would hate that far more than having to put up with the bowing and scraping for one more month — which you know people will do whether you repeal the laws or not.”

“Well, yes,” Cliopher said, but he still could not entirely agree that it would be a waste of time. Even if Fitzroy was the last Emperor; even if he was about to retire; even if the Empire was long dead.

These laws had been part of Fitzroy’s oubliette, and so Cliopher wanted to eradicate them off the face of the earth, regardless of how sensible it was.

“Fortunately,” Ludvic said, “regardless of whether you do pick up a hobby, you should have company to keep you busy soon. That’s why I dropped by, actually — I just got word the border from Alinor opened earlier today. You should see a message from your cousin tonight or tomorrow, assuming he and his family came through as planned.”

“Oh!” Cliopher’s mood did lighten at that. “I had been wondering. Time must be running quite a bit slower on Alinor than here. I should —” He stood and then remembered, with no small chagrin, that if he went to make immediate arrangements with his staff that it would effectively shoo Ludvic off.

Ludvic was smiling, though. “Go make the arrangements, Cliopher, I can see you want to,” he said easily. “I’ll talk to you later.”

There was not so much preparation to do, Cliopher’s staff being well-prepared to host any dozen of guests on the drop of a hat, but Cliopher found himself lying awake that night fighting the itching sensation of something left undone all the same. Not for Basil, Sara, and Clio’s arrival; something else. The lèse-majesté laws, maybe, for all Cliopher knew intellectually that Ludvic was right and they weren’t worth the battle they would spark.

Cliopher couldn’t retroactively repeal them. He could not turn back the time. He could not undo the years he had spent so cautiously sidling up to the line of treason, trying to figure out where it lay for his Radiancy, what honesty was too honest, where it was that he must stop. Not that Cliopher had ever been good at stopping; but neither had he gone quickly, stepped boldly, spoken freely.

There were so many years that they might have been better friends.

After the clock tolled one in the morning, Cliopher gave up on sleep and got up. Habit carried him to his study, to his writing kit, to the paper he used for his personal correspondence. He wrote, My dear Basil, before he stopped himself.

It was foolish, surely, to write a letter to Basil when Cliopher would see him in person in only a few days. (His letter had come as Ludvic had predicted, earlier in the evening, to confirm their imminent arrival.) Not that he thought Basil would mind having a letter waiting for him when he arrived, it was only…

The ink dried on his pen while Cliopher was trying to put words to what it only was. While Cliopher cleaned the nib, he finally admitted to himself that in some ways it had been — simpler, to write to Basil, when he had no longer expected any response. Now Basil’s reaction to the, gods, hundreds of letters Cliopher had sent him over the years was an unknown, but no longer unknowable, quantity.

And Cliopher no longer wanted to have one-way conversations with Basil, trace out his thoughts in ink and imagine Basil’s responses. He wanted to be able to speak with him, to hear Basil’s voice and words and thoughts. He would speak with him, too, so soon.

If that left him without a correspondent, someone who Cliopher could imagine listening patiently to his halting attempts to work through his own feelings through the medium of paper and ink —

An idea occurred to Cliopher. He turned it over in his mind, considering it in its angles.

He had never written his Radiancy, written Fitzroy, a personal letter before, but that did not mean he could or should not. If anything, the opposite. Fitzroy had written him that single letter full of aches and hurts, and Cliopher had not answered it properly when he had written to him while he was in Nijan, had he? He had written quick letters, not impersonal but not… not personal in the way that one letter had been, either.

Cliopher could do better than that. He wanted —

He put aside the piece of paper with the address to Basil on it and pulled out a fresh one, and on that one he wrote, My dear Fitzroy.

If he had had expectations about what it would be like, to write a personal letter to his Radiancy, he would have expected it to be… not difficult, exactly, but a little awkward, at least. So it was a surprise to discover instead how easy it was, to set pen to paper and see the words flood out, as if by their own volition. Perhaps it was the time, the place, the long habit of writing to Basil late at night, of letting his mind wander and his words flow freely. Perhaps it was that he could not yet send this, and so until such a time as he could, it could as easily be remarks only to himself.

Perhaps it was simply that Cliopher had long wanted to be able to simply talk to his Radiancy, about anything and everything, without the pressure of the work and the formalities and their roles, and now he could.

…it’s frustrating, being stuck in an in-between state. I have never liked idleness; I have always wanted to just get on with it, whatever ‘it’ is. (I’m sure this is entirely new information about me.) Ludvic suggested that I should stop making up projects for myself, and of course he’s right, I am only… I don’t know. Struggling to find an alternative that will actually quiet the restlessness, I suppose.

Context is a strange thing. This shouldn’t be any different from riding the sea train, back when I took it between the Vangavaye-ve and Solaara, which was also a prolonged in-between time. (Maybe time has merely worn away the edges of how restless I got then in my memory.) But I like to travel, and even if the sea train is less satisfying than sailing or the like is, where I am progressing through the application of my skills and knowledge, at least I am still making progress towards my ultimate destination all the time. I don’t mind slow progress so long as there is progress.

I don’t mean to complain. Things are well here, soon to be quite a bit better than well, because Basil, Sara, and Clio should be arriving in a few days. Ironically I think I am barely less nervous than I would be if I had gone to find them after all, because instead of wondering whether or not they are actually alive at the end of the journey I am wondering what they, what Basil, will think of the person I am today. Whether it will be difficult to pick up again where we were after so long apart. Whether…

But I know you know what that’s like.

Cliopher rested his hands on the railing and tried not to let them clench into fists as he watched the twin lights of the sky ship approach. “What if —” he began.

Conju did not let him even voice it. “They are on the ship,” he said tartly. “They will recognize you. They will not laugh at your outfit. It’s not even a nice one.”

It was, in fact, the most casual outfit Cliopher had been able to convince Féonie to let him out of his apartments in. “I know,” Cliopher said weakly, “but —”

“No buts.” The sharpness in Conju’s tone would have been more convincing if Conju had not invited himself over to Cliopher’s apartments this morning claiming boredom and then spent a good three hours distracting him, so much as Cliopher could be distracted.

“It’s just — been a long time,” Cliopher said. “I don’t know if…”

“I know.” There was an edge in Conju’s voice that puzzled Cliopher for a moment.

Then he flushed at the belated remembrance. “Any word from Terec and Nerisse?”

Conju sniffed. “Not yet.” Above them, the tower for the Lights gleamed in the light from the headlamps on the sky ship, as the dock swung out into operation, ropes swinging and the shout and cries of people and gulls spilling into the air. “I imagine they’ll show up with little notice; he gave them a button of all things to lead them to me, you know, can you imagine? But truthfully, having seen your dithering about this, I can’t say I mind — though I am likely to be quite rude to Terec without the ability to prepare myself.”

Cliopher bit back a smile and, carefully, bumped their elbows together. “That seems like a reasonable reaction to having been left behind.” It was only in saying those last two words, left behind, that Cliopher heard — but of course it was different — Cliopher had chosen this, had volunteered for this, and if he wanted —

“Quite,” Conju said primly.

The question hovered on the tip of Cliopher’s tongue: do you wish you’d gone with him? But he was not sure if he should say it, if he could say it, if —

Conju went on before he could decide. “But I will be pleased to see Nerisse. As pleased as you are about to be, I imagine. That’s them, isn’t it?”

Cliopher looked.

Oh. Oh, it was them.

The boy hanging out over the railing, gaze searching, caught Cliopher’s eyes first and his profile leapt out suddenly into sharp familiarity. Behind him was a woman it took Cliopher a moment to recognize as Sara, looking worn and frail but still with that tawny hair, and behind her —

Cliopher met Basil’s gaze and all of his doubts and fears evaporated like fog.

Cliopher didn’t know how he got to Basil or whether Basil came down to him. All he knew was the moment that Basil stepped close to him, gripping his shoulders and pressing his forehead to Cliopher’s in the old Islander greeting.

“Basil,” Cliopher said, voice wavering.

Basil’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. “Kip.”

“The rooms are ridiculous, I know,” Cliopher said after Franzel’s departure having brought in the tea tray. Sara and Clio had vanished as well, supposedly to rest and recover after their journey, but Cliopher suspected it an excuse to give him and Basil time to talk alone.

Basil laughed. His smile was so familiar, almost shockingly so. “They are. No wonder you were so flummoxed when you first moved in! They’re rooms for a Big Man, as Buru Tovo would put it, not a tanà — though I suppose you really qualify as both by now, don’t you? Viceroy of Zunidh?”

That easy acceptance, that knowledge — Cliopher had forgotten that he’d even written to Basil about the rooms. “Much to my dismay,” Cliopher admitted. “If I’d managed to accumulate less responsibilities, maybe I would actually be able to retire, instead of getting eternally roped into dealing with the next crisis.”

Basil was watching him with crinkled, amused eyes, slouched a little in his chair, cradling his cup of tea with both hands. “Be honest with me, Kip: how much are you getting roped into the crises and how much are you roping yourself in?”

“I am not —” Cliopher began, before he remembered Aioru asking him if he knew this meant he couldn’t retire quite yet. Cliopher scrubbed at his face. “Half and half,” he admitted. “But what am I supposed to do, not say anything when I can help resolve a situation more favorably? No, don’t say anything, I can see it on your face.” Basil was grinning. Cliopher said sourly, “I know. It really is the worst of both worlds; I’m too much of a busybody to take any excuse to leave the way I want to, but not so much of one that I can avoid the resentment when I have to stay.”

Basil’s smile gentled into something softer. “Missing your Aurelius Magnus, Kip?”

Cliopher couldn’t even deny it. “Yes,” he admitted. The thought he’d begun to have earlier came back to him, now fully formed. “I wish I’d gone with him.” He wished Fitzroy had asked him to come with him.

Foolish thoughts, really. They could not have swung this transition any other way.

Probably Fitzroy would not have wanted his company, anyway, for his grand journey of self-discovery. He was surely focused on his reunions with the Red Company right now.

“You and him both, from the way he talked about you,” Basil said. There was still amusement in his voice, but it was a warm amusement. “I think he was half-hoping to find you camped out in my office, balancing my ledgers. Who knows, maybe he’ll show up in Solaara one of these days with approximately half an hour’s notice.”

Cliopher did his best to smile. “I doubt it. He doesn’t like it here much, I don’t think. He doesn’t like…” He gestured around at the ornamentation of the room, the formality of his ridiculous apartments, that Cliopher was, most days, used to, because he couldn’t explain that Fitzroy had once said he was trapped in an oubliette, not right now, not even to Basil. “He needs to be free. Free of… all this.”

Basil had always seen straight through him. “Not free of you, Kip.”

Cliopher looked down. “You can’t know that.”

“I might only have spent a few days with him,” Basil said, leaning back in his chair, “but that was enough to be sure of that much.”

…political violence in Nijan four days ago; a group of armed criminals intercepted two of the ballot boxes from the first round of elections for their Prince. (I suspect they’ll end up settling on a different title, only they are, predictably, still arguing over what it should be.) Nobody was hurt, but they’ll have to redo the votes from those neighborhoods, and there are already claims that the election’s being tampered with. Someone in the Offices of State, I suspect Kiri or Tully, put up a note on the wall yesterday that lists off the number of days since the last Nijani incident. There’s a betting pool already on how long it will take for it to surpass fourteen days.

We’re handling it, Ludvic and Aioru more than me really, but that doesn’t mean I am not cross about it. I’ve been sleeping poorly the last few nights, dreaming about the Southern Grey Mountains and poison dart frogs and similarly unpleasant topics. I keep waking up and, when I tire of staring at the ceiling above my bed, going to my study, to go through some of the reports and coming up with a preventative strategy, a plan, something… That’s what I would have done once, at least. Instead I keep just sitting in my chair and staring off into the distance while my ink runs dry.

Basil caught me at it last night. Once he got the whole story out of me — I don’t know if it’s more irritating to me that my subconscious is so transparent or that I didn’t see the relevance until he talked me through it — he asked me what I usually do when faced with some emotion I’m struggling to deal with. Conju and Rhodin aren’t much for talking about feelings, both by culture and personality; Ludvic and I could have talked about this kind of thing had we been closer earlier, but we weren’t. (I could talk to him about it now, I suppose, only my megrims at the moment are not particularly solvable with knowing smiles from him, and I don’t want to snap at him more than I already have.) I had to admit to Basil that my primary strategies are distracting myself with work, talking to you, or writing to him. Or talking to him, now, as he firmly made clear to me was an option that I could and should avail myself of. He promised me that it will be worth it, to learn, to re-learn, how to actually keep in touch with my own emotions. I promised him that I would try. It will be hard, I think. Especially here.

I keep thinking that I’ve fully reckoned with what assimilation cost me and I keep being wrong. That’s another thing that’s hard to look at, I suppose. I used to be so proud of my dreams, so certain of them, of myself. Not that I am not often certain of myself now — not that I am not willing to talk freely of what I think other people should do! It’s easy to have dreams for the world, to want to fight for the good of all. Harder to do these things for myself.

I am rambling abominably. I hope that you understand what I mean, all the same. I know it cut you deeper and cost you more, that process of making yourself into what the court expected. Shamefully I don’t think I could even conceive of how much it hurt you until I realized who you were, the kind of freedom and life you had once had; I doubt I have yet grasped the extent of it. It is not, I know, the same thing, but — of course I could never think less of you, for finding it difficult to integrate back into the rest of the world. It is difficult for me, too.

I would like to think that I could say all this to you without the distance of pen and paper, without letting my mind and my hand follow those well-worn paths of processing my feelings by writing them out to Basil late at night, but truthfully I’m not sure. Basil is right, I do have to learn, I want to learn to be better at this. I want to be able to sit and talk with you about these things directly, face to face, someday.

Cliopher had finished four letters by the time Fitzroy’s package finally escaped the vagaries of the Nijani post office and found its way to his desk.

Inside it was a neat little letter tray, very nearly of the kind that Cliopher had on the desk in his study, and with it a note explaining that any communications placed in the letter tray would vanish and appear in one that Fitzroy had.

Cliopher looked down at his little stack of letters and then looked back at the letter tray. He placed a blank sheet of paper in first, in an experimental vein, and it vanished the moment it touched the base of the tray.

“Well,” Cliopher said thoughtfully, to his empty sitting room, “that is convenient.”

He hesitated for a moment, looking at his letters. It had been not quite two weeks, since Fitzroy had left Nijan. He knew four letters was… a lot.

Too much, maybe.

He stood there for three or four minutes, battling with himself, but in the end what decided him was the memory of that letter from Fitzroy after he had found out about the landslide, the way he had not been able to ask Cliopher to write him. As if he had feared that that was a step too far to ask.

Cliopher placed his stack of letters into the letter tray, where they vanished, on their way to Fitzroy. Then he opened up his writing kit, rearranging the compartment in the back until he could slide the letter tray inside, where it nestled snugly into place like it had always belonged there.

Any lingering anxieties he had about his four letters were quieted when, not an hour after he had sent his letters through, a return letter had come back from Fitzroy, as clearly written in advance and awaiting the opportunity to send as Cliopher’s had been, and then less than a day after that a second letter, responding to Cliopher’s stack of four.

And then, as simply as that, he and Fitzroy were penpals.

Chapter Text

My dear Cliopher —

Well, so ends my brief return to public service, at least for the time being. It’s a curious thing, participating in politics as Fitzroy Angursell rather than Artorin Damara — at least so far as such a distinction can actually be drawn. I don’t know if my friends in the Red Company were more perplexed by my new patience for political minutiae or Rhodin more horrified by my willingness to stick my nose directly into any manner of incendiary situations without backup. (Rhodin, to be fair, was much less obvious about it, but I have spent too long with him at this point to be fooled by his courtier’s face, at least when he’s this dismayed.) Well, I enjoyed myself in spite of the bewildered faces. I saw that you were able to dismiss the Council of Princes, so I hope that your headaches are at least less bad…

My dear Kip —

I really ought to have figured out a method of magically exchanging letters earlier. If I’d realized that I would unlock the power of Kip Mdang, dedicated correspondent, I should have been substantially more motivated to do it earlier. I was delighted to receive your letters, if significantly less so to realize how many sleepless nights seem to have preceded the writing of them. But it isn’t a surprise to me that the restlessness is as bad for you, if not worse, as the actual work was. You always feel like you ought to be doing more, don’t you? I wish I could be there to audit your work and tell you to take a proper day off. Ah, but that’s not quite right, is it? What I actually wish is that I could stroll into your office and convince you to skive off for the day with me, and go down to Solaara with you so you could show me all your favorite bookstores and all the best walking paths and the like until you stop thinking about all the unfinished tasks in the world.

I am sorry that I could not find a way to go without leaving you with such a burden to carry. I wish

Well, I am glad that you have Basil there with you now to talk to, at least. (And Sara and Clio as well, of course!) And I hope you know, my dear Kip, that I would always like to hear about your troubles and glumbles, especially if it would help you to share them. I hadn’t realized that I was the only one in the palace you spoke with about these things, that you, too, found it difficult to share in that environment. What a pair we make. Will you tell me about whatever’s making you so gloomy? Ludvic mentioned you’d been a bit down but I think he undersold it somewhat. (Don’t be cross with him for telling me about it, I’m the one who asked.)

For my part things are… oh, I don’t know. It varies from day to day, I suppose. We are on our way to Daun in search of Damian and Pharia, and for some reason I have been thinking often of my first visit there, shortly after I left my tower. I stepped into a magical portal with no idea where it came out and landed directly into a boat occupied by Damian and Jullanar, which in retrospect is probably partially responsible for why half of my friends seem to have a theory that I am secretly Aurelius Magnus or a trickster god or some such thing. (I will admit to you that I find these speculations particularly irritating. I have had more than enough of being trammeled into godhood for one lifetime, thank you.) But, oh, it was a strange and wonderful time for me, and I am finding revisiting it now to be both nostalgic and complicated, I suppose. I had never been in a place larger than the Red House, never met more than five or six people, never had a friend. I must have seemed like a particularly clumsy newborn calf to my friends: astonished by my own shadow, asking Jullanar if the small village we were in was a city, intimidated by a rooster. I thought to wonder the other day if Jullanar and Damian laughed at my oddities, then, if my naiveté was a great joke. It’s foolish to be stung by the idea, but oh, I was so busy falling in love with the whole world, and it does hurt, somehow, to imagine them laughing at it. Maybe it’s a product of the fact that I am altogether finding myself more sensitive to teasing than I once was. Either way it feels impossible to ask Jullanar about; how does one bring up a perceived potential slight that happened more than forty years ago (or over a thousand, in my case)?

Somehow I cannot seem to get away from escaping from towers. Sometimes I wonder if I ever truly will.

Jullanar just asked me if I was working on a new poem. They are all so excited about the return of my poetry, which admittedly I am also ecstatic about, at least in between bursts of anxiety that it was a fluke and I won’t be able to do it again. Truthfully, Jullanar is the only reason I could do it at all; by the third time I had to explain the intricacies of Nijani politics to one of my old friends, she caught on that I was repeating certain phrases and rhythms and started taking notes for me. Once she gave them to me I could see the skeleton of a poem in it, already half-written, and managed to trick myself into fleshing it out properly by telling myself that I was only finishing up the jokes and making it readable enough that I could send it to perhaps you and our other friends and inject a bit of levity into this latest round of Nijani frustrations. It was only after I finished the words that I realized what I had and how useful it could be, which was fortunate because the nerves made the music nightmarish to compose. I’m a little afraid to go back and listen to it now, I composed most of it drunk at about three in the morning (Gadarved’s idea and I am still horrified that it worked).

Now that I am sober and reckoning with the impact of Fitzroy Angursell releasing new poetry after decades of silence, it is much more difficult to shut off the noise and the pressure of the outside world. Jullanar threatened to revoke my access to any kind of newspaper entirely after I complained to her for a solid eight minutes about a review in the Haion City Times and only relented when I told her it was giving me an idea for a new poem. Then, of course, she nearly strangled me when I refused to tell her any details about what it was. Explanations that I need to sneak up on the poem and that if I let myself actually think about what I’m writing, much less talk about it, then I’m likely to get mired in writer’s block were not well received.

I am looking forward to spending time in places the empire never touched; we should arrive in Daun tomorrow and…

My dear Fitzroy,

There are a few bookstores in Solaara that I regularly frequent; there’s one quite near the palace that is open during ordinary working hours. It is excellent, with high ceilings and tall shelves and nooks by the windows where you can sit and peruse your takings before purchasing them, but it’s also the haunt of a specific type of court academic who has more leisure time than work, so it would be the place to go if we wanted to stir up rumors of our skiving off. But unless you were in a particularly mischievous mood, I think I would take you to the other bookstore I regularly frequent instead; it’s further from the Palace, further into Solaara, and open later into the night, so I go in the evenings sometimes. The place is poorly lit and crammed full of books that do not seem to be sorted in any particular order, with nooks and crannies everywhere, so it is almost impossible to find anything specific that you are looking for but a delightful place to get lost for a while. I would trail along in your wake, see what treasures you unearthed, and see if we could while the time away thoroughly enough that the manager would have to track us down and kick us out at closing time.

I am sorry if I worried you. I’m all right, really, my restlessness and glumbles aside. (Is that actually a word?) If I am to be entirely honest, my gloomy mood mostly boils down to missing you, so your letters are already a great help.

I think childhood dreams and precious things can be particularly vulnerable to laughter, even gentle laughter. Oddly enough I had a discussion about something similar with Toucan, before he left. (Did Rhodin tell you my friends from the Vangavaye-ve came to visit me at last?) I sang a passage from the Lays for them, and it reminded me of a time when I was young, after my voice changed and while I was still searching for my vocation. I knew I didn’t have it in me to follow in my Buru Tovo’s steps as a pearl diver, but I thought I might apprentice to my uncle, who’s a great singer. My uncle and the director of the opera choir listened to me sing, and the director said I might be able to sing in fifty years, and my uncle laughed. The memory of it still cuts deeper than it feels like it ought to, all these years later. I hope Jullanar and Damian understand, now if not then, how important that first taste of freedom was to you.

Family can be such a curious thing, can’t it? Basil and I have been reminiscing about ours, and he and Sara and Clio have been fending off a small flood of letters demanding updates on his life and to know when he’s coming home. (I suspect they’ll go, shortly, if only for a short time, before the letters increase in number to be an avalanche.) Toucan said that my family has a reputation for cutting the tall poppies down to size. I would like to hope the Red Company was a more comfortable place to feel different than my family sometimes was, but I know it’s not always easy even when everybody means well and only wants the best for you.

How have things been with your friends, besides enthusiasm for your poetry? How recently did you find Gadarved? On the topic of poetry I will say that I adore your new poem and think everything about it is delightful including the music, so in my opinion you have nothing to fear in a re-listen. (In fact Ludvic had to read most of it out loud because I was laughing too much to be a passable narrator.) Admittedly I am not an unbiased party, but I’ve already memorized half of it, so I’m afraid it’s too late to change the music now unless you want me to flub the notes for the rest of time.

I have been playing more in generally recently, not only your songs, Basil having brought his mandatory Mdang musical instrument (the cello, for him) with him. We have been…

My dear Fitzroy,

How on earth did you take an accidental detour to Fairyland? Somehow I had imagined that your astonishing feat of crossing half the world in three days when you left on your quest was an anomaly, and not how you ordinarily travel, but clearly I was mistaken. Well, Fairyland may have an insufficient supply of salt for your purposes, but Solaara does not, so we shall see if it can travel through the letter tray as easily as letters do. I will not tell you to try not to start an inter-mundial incident with Fairyland, but I will say that if you do, advance notice would be helpful so that I may prepare an official document of diplomatic immunity for you and your friends in advance…

…Clio has been asking me a great many questions about the Lays and about our culture, and I have been very much enjoying answering them. Basil’s done well with him, but he never trained as a lore keeper, so Clio’s knowledge is a bit patchy at best, but he’s so enthusiastic! Eventually I’ll be able to take him to Loaloa, I’m looking forward to it a great deal. Maybe in a few weeks. Not that the teaching is always easy, of course; Clio asked me today why I don’t wear my efela openly, and I realized, a little to my own surprise, that I wasn’t certain of the answer. My instinct was to tell him that it’s private for me, at least here, but I am not actually certain whether I want privacy or merely for the court not to gawk and stare. I don’t think Franzel or Féonie would flinch at it, but I am well aware that it is not elegant enough for the Viceroy of Zunidh, even if I am prouder of it than half of my nicer ones and obviously not about to take it off…

…No diplomatic immunity necessary, my dear Kip, who do you take me for? We have escaped only a little bit wanted by one not very important noble, and also Faleron fell from out of nowhere to land on top of Rhodin during our escape, so all’s well that ends well. We are in Daun and back on track now. Thank you very much for the salt, it came in handy…

…I don’t believe there’s a right or wrong answer to your concerns around your efela. You owe the court nothing, as far as I am concerned: neither access to your culture nor any care for their sensibilities. That said, if I may hazard a suggestion: if you would like to wear your efela more openly without drawing particularly biting comments about your efela ko, I think if you paired it with the efela nai you would find nobody gave it a second look. (If you do go this route, I will also humbly request a detailed description of the expression on the Council of Princes’ faces when they first see you.)

Is Nijan unstable enough that you can’t leave Solaara for even two weeks? I’d hoped things were calming down.

My dear Kip,

The enclosed is for you; Jullanar dragged me to a bookstore and it made me think of you. I expect few of the texts published in Daun over the last couple decades will have made it to Zunidh, so hopefully it will be new to you, though I would have traded the novelty of the texts to be able to putter around in your maze of a bookstore with you in a heartbeat. I wish I was there with you now. I

I’m sorry. I’m rather I expect I’ll be a poor correspondent tonight. We found Damian and Pharia, you see, only they don’t want to come with us. They have family matters to deal with. Things more important than Red Company business.

I ought to have seen this coming. I ought to have been prepared for this. I had trouble talking Gadarved around, too. (After we left the Bee at the Border, we went to Colhélhé, and found him shortly before Rhodin found us.) He was settled, comfortable, uncertain if he wanted to shake up his life like that… but he decided he did want to, that he wanted the adventure, and he’s been enjoying himself so I thought, stupidly, that we might see more in that vein. Nothing like this.

I fought with Damian yesterday. We’ve argued before, but not like this. He blames me for

It’s not like I don’t understand that we have all changed, that we all have priorities outside of our group now. (Certainly I have endured enough teasing from the rest of the group for my own to attest to that much.) But I could not turn away from my old friends any more than I could my new. I don’t understand how they can.

That’s too harsh, perhaps. Damian’s anger at me aside, they do care for us, still, clearly. Pharia hugged me. Jullanar and Damian both cried when they reunited. We are simply less important than their actual family.

Masseo reminded me, a few nights after I reunited with him, of the end of our time together, the way we’d been teetering on the verge of dissolution even without the intervention of the Empire’s magic. I had forgotten it, or made myself forget. We were entering our thirties; Pharia and Damian wanted to settle down, they had their children, Pharia was pregnant at the time. I fought them on it so fiercely. They had lives they could go back to, they had homes that would take them back in. I only had them. I had only ever had them. I knew who to be by what made them smile, Kip, I

I have to go. Pali’s at the door, she has some sort of quest for us. Like you she does better with a task, although her tasks usually fall more in the category of stabbing things than reforming the government.

— Fitzroy

Chapter Text

Cliopher had trouble falling asleep, the night he received that awful, heartbreaking letter from Fitzroy. He got up twice to work on his response to it, inasmuch as he could respond, could provide the kind of comfort he wanted to from a distance.

But eventually he did sleep, and when he slept, he dreamed.

It was an odd dream. It felt unusually crisp and vivid, the heat of desert air settling around him, the faint shrieks of hawks in the air above, the currents of the air that tugged on and played with Cliopher’s hair. And he knew he was asleep, which ordinarily he would not have realized until he woke.

He stood in a small valley, a diamond-shaped space that lay between four mountains, sheer cliff faces surrounding him on all sides. The valley was littered with objects, books and furniture and swatches of fabrics, gems and finery and paintings, as if a second-hand shop had vomited its contents out into the sand.

And in the middle of all this, hopping from object to object in a quizzical manner, was a crow.

Cliopher picked his way carefully towards the crow. It was slow going; the spaces between the objects were often crow-foot-sized, not human-foot-sized, but Cliopher made it to the crow in the end. It was hopping from foot to foot, craning its head back and forth to study the book on the ground in front of it.

“Hello, Sayu Crow,” Cliopher said politely. (Was there a way to tell a crow’s gender?) “Are you looking for something?”

The crow had no human mouth to speak with, but speak it did all the same. Oh, hello, the crow said. I’m looking for myself.

Cliopher would know that voice anywhere, even in a dream, even worlds away. “My lord?” he said, and then, “Fitzroy?”

The crow cocked his head at Cliopher. Is that my name?

Cliopher could not respond to that. This was a dream. A nightmare, surely.

I made a deal with a god, you see, the crow said, blithely enough, as if he could not see — the sheer unfeeling cliffs around them, feel the desolate heat around them, understand the horror that was — I wanted to know who I was. He said that if I could find all the pieces of myself in this valley, and carry out only what belonged to me and leave the detritus belonging to others behind, then I would know myself truly and never lose myself again.

The sensation of the dream pressed down on Cliopher like a blanket, smothering and smooth and featureless, keeping his voice calm and unemotional. That this experience felt vivid and strange did not necessarily mean — That Cliopher spoke to a wild mage, a great mage, whose power worked in ways he did not fully understand, did not make this — “Did he tell you what would happen if you can’t find all the parts of yourself? Or if you try to keep things that don’t belong to you?”

Oh, yes, the crow said. I asked. I can’t leave with anything that belongs to someone else or without any piece of me. He sounded supremely unconcerned by this.

Cliopher was aware, distantly, that he wanted to shout, that he wanted to argue, that he wanted to cry out that surely self-knowledge could not possibly be worth that risk. He did none of those things. His foolish, traitorous tongue, which never knew when not to speak, said, “Do you know who I am?”

He knew the answer already. It didn’t matter. The crow flapped his wings, fluttered to perch on the back of a chair to peer at Cliopher’s face, and then said, No, should I?

Cliopher inhaled, exhaled. Thought of his Radiancy breathing like that to —

Cliopher was distantly aware that if he had a physical body right now that he might want to throw up. He did not have one. What he did have was a mind that he had trained to focus on the task in front of it.

He looked around at the objects surrounding them, aware for the first time of the width and breadth of the valley. It looked small with the pressure of those cliff faces leaning in around it, but Cliopher could not think to count how many objects were here. Easily thousands.

Perhaps this was merely a dream. But Cliopher found himself unable to believe that.

He said, “Would you like some help sorting through this all?”

Yes, please, the crow said, sounding relieved. I’ll admit I haven’t been quite sure where to start. Or what is mine and isn’t mine. He hopped to another object, a tall harp, and sidled back and forth along the top of it. This one is mine, I know that much, and as he said it the harp glowed golden and then vanished, evaporating back inside of him, sending him flapping to keep himself from falling, but some of these others…

Cliopher said, “We’ll take them one at a time.”

They settled on three piles, ‘yes’, ‘no,’ and ‘maybe.’ (Well. Technically it was two piles, as any object belonging to the ‘yes’ pile was absorbed back into the crow instantly.) The ‘maybe’ pile was much, much larger than the ‘no’ pile.

Oddly enough, Cliopher found quickly that in some cases he himself was much more certain of when an object belonged to his — to the crow than the crow himself was. When he picked up a pair of gemstones that were efevoa-golden, exactly the color of the lion eyes, and the crow said, I don’t know about those, Cliopher could not help but blink up at him and say, “Don’t you?”

Should I? The crow sounded dubious.

Cliopher looked from the beady black eyes of the crow, down to that perfect match to his Radiancy’s eyes. Well. He supposed people did not often meet their own eyes. Maybe it was not so strange, that Cliopher would recognize them more easily than the crow would. He said slowly, “We can put these in the maybe pile if you would like, but… I do think these are yours.”

Do you? The crow sounded intrigued. He hopped onto Cliopher’s hand, claws pricking carefully against Cliopher’s fingers, and lifted one of the gemstones with one foot. Oh, you’re right. They glowed a fiercer gold, and vanished, and when the crow cocked his head and looked up at Cliopher this time his eyes were golden. I do know you!

Somewhere back in his body, Cliopher felt certain his heart had skipped a beat. “You remember?” he asked.

Not everything, the crow said, sounding faintly disappointed by that. I don’t know your name, though I think I should. But these eyes remember looking at you.

Oh, was it foolish, to believe that Cliopher himself was an important enough part of Fitzroy’s life to be represented here, with things so central as his music and his sight? He swallowed. “Maybe we’ll find my name somewhere else here. But let’s focus on finding yours, for the time being.”

What they found first, instead, was Aurora.

Cliopher didn’t even think about it, when he picked up the book, when he saw that familiar cover, that swooping golden lettering, exactly the way it had been on that single copy that made it all the way out to the Vangavaye-ve to fall into Cliopher’s hands: he held it out to the crow.

The crow took a large hopping step back. That was mine once, he said, but I’m not certain it is any longer.

Cliopher let the book in his hands lower slowly until it rested on where his crossed legs sat on top of each other. “No?” he asked. “Why not?”

I’m not that person anymore. I only pretend to be him.

Cliopher didn’t feel entirely qualified to work through that. But there was nobody else, and Fitzroy could not leave here without all the parts of himself, so he would have to try. “Because you’re older now?”

Because I’m so different.

Cliopher considered that. He offered, “When I was twelve, I got sent off to stay with my great-uncle because I kept committing petty larceny and fistfighting my classmates.”

The crow peered up at Kip with those efevoa eyes. You don’t commit petty larceny now?

That was —

Cliopher had forgotten. For a moment. That the crow did not — know him.

“Now I’m the head of the mundial government,” Cliopher said, the only answer he could give. He did not commit larceny unless it was of Fitzroy Angursell poetry, and his theft of The Secret Collection could hardly be considered petty.

What does mundial mean?

Cliopher did not know how to — “Maybe we should make another pile,” he said, “for things that once were yours, but might not be anymore, and come back to them.” It felt like a failure, but Cliopher did not know what else to do. He couldn’t —

He couldn’t.

Aurora stayed in its own little pile, a pile of one, while they worked through several more objects, most of which went into the ‘maybe’ category. They did not find another item where Cliopher felt confident he knew which pile it belonged to until he reached around him and came up with a small globe of Zunidh.

Not just an ordinary globe of Zunidh, like the ones in Cliopher’s schoolrooms, imperfect replicas distilling key features of geographical and cultural importance. This one was infinitely precise, with its mountain ranges sticking up off the globe to menace Cliopher’s fingers, its plastic water shifting slowly nonetheless with the movement of the waves and the tides, the intricate dense sprawl of Csiven and the other largest cities of Zunidh captured with miniature buildings and tangles of roads, with the forests prickling against Cliopher’s palms like a toothbrush. It was hard to know how to hold it properly.

Cliopher held it out to the crow for evaluation wordlessly. He did not want to inject his own opinion about this one.

The crow studied it for a long time. This was mine, he said finally, but I didn’t want it. It was too heavy to carry.

“I know,” Cliopher said quietly.

The crow took one step back and then three steps forward, circling the globe slowly. Cliopher turned it for him. The broad seas, once filled with typhoons, and marshy fens, now bound. All those cities. All those lives, too small to be captured at this scale, but Cliopher could feel their presence all the same.

The crow hesitated. I still don’t want to carry it. But I don’t want to drop it, either.

“You don’t have to carry it,” Cliopher said instantly. “I’m carrying it for you, until you can find somebody to give it to.”

What would I be taking back that’s mine, then?

Cliopher considered it. “I’m not sure,” he had to admit. “The memory of carrying it, maybe.” And then, because he owed it to the crow — to his Radiancy — to be honest about this, he said, “Or the responsibilities that still remain to you.”

The crow cocked his head to one side. The small golden eyes remained fixed on the globe.

Cliopher held it steady and waited.

The crow hopped forwards once, twice, and then he came to perch on top of the globe. The globe dissolved into a shower of golden light that sank back into the crow. With the absence of the globe, the crow flapped his wings sharply twice and came to perch on Cliopher’s hand instead, little claws digging into the meat of his palm. He said, You were helping me carry it before, too.

Cliopher tried to keep his voice steady and calm. “Yes.” He waited, wondering if — trying not to hope that —

What’s next? asked the crow.

The crow recognized a few unfamiliar items that Cliopher did not ask about before they came to another that Cliopher knew.

Cliopher looked down at the brazier and ewer of the ritual purifications and had to swallow hard before he could hold them up for the crow’s inspection.

No, the crow said. No, that’s not mine. I don’t want it. I never wanted it. I tried to run from it. I tried to say no. They made me.

The whistle of the wind was thin and mournful. “I know,” Cliopher whispered.

It’s not mine, the crow insisted. Put it away.

Cliopher went to and then hesitated, his hands floating above the three piles, the two bigger ones and the third with its one lone book.

One beat, three, and then the crow snorted, abruptly back into lighter humors. You’re going to put it in the correct pile even if I tell you not to, aren’t you?

Cliopher thought again of the constraints of this exercise: that Fitzroy could not leave until he had reclaimed all that was his. He wished for Fitzroy’s sake that he could believe that the things that had been done to him, the long imprisonment, the cruelties of the taboos, could be left behind entirely to be forgotten. But he did not think that was the case. “Yes,” he admitted, and put it in on top of Aurora.

Fine, the crow said, faintly sulkily.

The increased emotiveness, Cliopher thought, had to be a good sign, surely? The crow had absorbed a good many things, even if his name was not one of them, even if he had been able to accept neither Aurora nor the ewer and brazier, even if he still did not remember — It was progress, all the same. Slow progress was still progress.

You’re humming, the crow observed a minute or two later, hopping to Cliopher’s shoulder as Cliopher sorted a set of rubies into the ‘definitely not’ category.

Cliopher found himself abruptly trying not to smile. “I’ve been told I do that regularly.”

It’s not the thing you usually hum.

“And what do I usually hum?” Cliopher inquired.

I don’t know. The crow sounded suspicious. Are you baiting me? It feels like you’re baiting me.

Cliopher kept his face straight with effort. “Why would I do that?” he asked. “And what about these?”

‘These’ were a ring of fist-sized pearls, irregular and flickering with a curious reflected light. The one that Cliopher held up to for the crow’s inspection was warm to the touch.

Cliopher wasn’t at all certain what they were, so it was a minor surprise when the crow’s response was immediate and vehement. Yes, that’s mine. I want that. He hopped off Cliopher’s shoulder to perch on the pearls before Cliopher could ask what they were, and they glowed golden and then vanished as surely as everything else that was the crow’s had, returning back inside of him.

The crow yelped and nearly fell, though it was only an inch or two to the ground, flapping in a great alarmed splutter of wings to keep upright. Kip!

The awful knot of tension that Cliopher had been holding in his breastbone loosened. “Oh, thank goodness,” he said.

Kip, Fitzroy repeated, sounding dismayed, even distressed. I — I didn’t recognize you at first. Terribly, the distress was a relief, too. Crow-Fitzroy hopped onto Cliopher’s knee, and Cliopher found his own hand rose without entirely consulting his conscious brain to settle on the crow’s back. How did you get here?

“I have no idea,” Cliopher admitted frankly. “I think I’m asleep.” Fitzroy’s feathers were warm and soft under his fingers. Cliopher pet at them carefully with his thumb and then stopped, flushing, when he realized what he was doing. “I’d assumed it was your doing somehow.”

I — maybe. It hurt, to hear him sound so uncertain. My magic is — around here somewhere, we haven’t found it yet, but it can react without my conscious intent, if the situation is dire enough. It — might have reached out to you for help, when I — I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you involved in this.

“Don’t be sorry!” Cliopher couldn’t entirely keep how emphatic he felt about this out of his voice. “If you’re in trouble, I want to be here.”

As if you haven’t already done more for me than I could ever repay.

Cliopher wasn’t sure how to read the tone in Fitzroy’s voice. All he could do was repeat, with all the insistence he had, “I want to be here. I want to help.”

And so you are. Fitzroy laughed, abruptly, something in his voice loosening. Imposing all this order on my chaotic valley.

“Well,” Cliopher said, smiling too hard to carry off the lofty tone, “as you may know, I like to organize things.”

Really, what would I do without you, Fitzroy said lightly.

Cliopher said, equally lightly, “Oh, I’m sure you’d manage well enough. You’re doing very well on your quest, aren’t you?” He suppressed a silent pang.

You say that as if I have not been cursed into the form of a crow and trapped here in this valley until I achieve a unified sense of selfhood.

“I have been meaning to ask,” Cliopher said. “Why a crow?”

That tale carried them through the discovery of the Diamond of Gaesion, a nest of fabrics from Fitzroy’s private study, and his new poem about Nijan, which, Cliopher was relieved to see, Fitzroy took as his own without a moment’s hesitation. (Not that he had truly expected otherwise, but he was still unnerved by Fitzroy’s earlier unease with Aurora.) While he absorbed the poem, Cliopher gathered up another small cluster of items, scanning through it for anything familiar or that looked particularly Fitzroy-esque.

Then Fitzroy said, Oh, in a hushed tone that captured all of Cliopher’s attention immediately.

Cliopher looked up at him. “What?” he asked. He wished that they had found more representations of Fitzroy’s body somewhere. It was tricky to read the body language of a crow.

His voice, magical and detached from his ordinary body as it was, was still easier. Fitzroy said, I didn’t realize you were… all this time, you were humming my new song? He sounded so shyly pleased. It made Cliopher feel almost ferociously protective of him. You really like it that much, Kip?

“I love it,” Cliopher whispered. “It’s so… it’s so funny, and clever, and… and it’s good company for tasks like this, isn’t it? When you’re making progress, but it’s slow going, and there’s nothing to be done for it beyond getting on with it?”

Of course you would like that aspect of it. Fitzroy’s voice was soft and warm.

Cliopher could feel himself flushing. He ducked his head, attending to his task, but couldn’t help but add, “And I’m in it, of course, which has only been a private aspiration of mine for, oh, half my life? More?”

Has it, now. Fitzroy’s voice was curiously speculative.

Cliopher suspected his face was hot enough to light a fire off of. “Yes,” he confessed, and then, in a hasty rush, said, “How about any of these?” and thrust forward his most likely pile.

Fitzroy accepted the change of topic with good grace, absorbing one of the five items as his and consigning two others to the ‘maybe’ pile, before he went on, I still can’t recall the one you usually hum, though, and it’s driving me up the wall.

Cliopher considered him, a small black form hopping between riotous colors and objects. They were making headway, slowly, patches of desert beginning to emerge beneath the slew of items as they imposed order on them, as Fitzroy reclaimed what was his. “Do you want to?” He extricated Aurora from where it lay under the ewer and brazier and held it out to him.

Oh, Fitzroy said. He came closer slowly, hopping up onto Cliopher’s knee so he could inspect the book but not touch it.

Cliopher let him do it. He thought: look first, listen first. He kept quiet, and looked, and listened.

At last Fitzroy said, I always did love listening to you hum it. It made me feel like — like a person. Or even just like I had once been a person. I had once been real.

Cliopher couldn’t help but stir at that, had to bite his tongue on the urge to say —

No, I know. Fitzroy sounded amused, at least, even if only for a moment until it faded. You’re going to say I was always a person, and I was always real. I… It didn’t feel that way. Not for a long time. Even the feeling that I had once been real was better than what I had before it, before you came and capped my joke and looked at me. I felt lost. I felt absent from my own body. I felt dead.

Cliopher’s throat felt full and tight, swelled like a balloon. He didn’t think he could speak, but he couldn’t bear to do nothing, provide no response, to that, so he brought up one hand to touch the top of Fitzroy’s crow head.

Fitzroy bumped his head against Cliopher’s palm.

Cliopher stroked the top of Fitzroy’s head as carefully as he could, and Fitzroy did not pull away.

Eventually Fitzroy said, Sometimes I think that I will never write anything as good again. That I will never find my way back to the person that I was. I don’t know how to… Kip, I don’t know how.

Cliopher turned that over in his head as he pet Fitzroy’s head. He said finally, “I don’t know that any of us can ever go back to the people we once were, not really. I know that’s not… that’s not what you want, but… I can’t go back to being the boy who was so ready to tell everybody what he thought they should do, who was so open about his dreams, either.”

As if you don’t still tell everybody what you think they should do.

Cliopher huffed out a half-laugh at that. “Well, yes, but I still carry him with me, don’t I? I can’t not have been that boy any more than I could be him again now. He’s part of me, but I’m bigger than him now. Literally as well as metaphorically,” he added, looking down at his adult body, his crossed legs and his hands, one holding Aurora and one touching Fitzroy, before he paused, completely derailed. “Hmm. Fitzroy?”

His hand on Aurora was transparent and fading away.

Fitzroy cocked his head to one side, hopping forward on Cliopher’s leg. Oh dear. Put it down for a moment?

Cliopher did. It did not seem to help, nor arrest the progress at which Cliopher’s forearm was becoming translucent.

You remember how you said you thought you were asleep? Fitzroy said. I think you’re waking up.

Now that Fitzroy had said it, Cliopher could feel it, could feel his own physical real body again, the heavy haziness of sleep, the darkness of his room superimposed over the harsh desert light.

Kip. There was a tone in Fitzroy’s voice that Cliopher didn’t like. If I can’t — you remember the protocol for if I don’t come back for the Jubilee, don’t you? Of course you do. You remember all the protocols.

Cliopher didn’t understand until he saw that Fitzroy was looking at the brazier and ewer. Then he understood too well. “No,” he said.

No, you don’t recall the protocols? Unlike you, my dear Kip. Fitzroy was trying to keep his voice airy, but Cliopher knew him, knew all the little variations in his voice, had spent too long attuned to the slightest hints of his mood to be fooled.

He had been trying, so hard, to prepare himself to lose his Radiancy. Ever since he had found out that his Radiancy was Fitzroy Angursell, Cliopher had known that he could not compare to Fitzroy’s great friends out of legends, with the call of freedom and the wild and adventures. He had thought he was making his peace with that. He still could, and perhaps he would still have to, because Cliopher could not, would never, try to hold Fitzroy anywhere that he did not want to be.

But Cliopher could not accept this.

A hot, tight heat was rising up through his lungs, coming to press against the roof of his mouth. Let Fitzroy go to be trapped here, in this isolated desert, trying to work through the legacy of all that had been done to him, all the ways he had been forced to change to survive, alone? No. No.

Cliopher said, “Where are you? Daun, I know, but where in Daun?” He was mentally riffling through his knowledge of Fitzroy’s repertoire to see if there were hints to where Damian or Pharia were from, for all that he knew Fitzroy was too canny to put explicit references in there, anything the empire could use to hunt them down.

Kip, Fitzroy said. Kip, you can’t — you can’t mean to — you don’t need to do this. Any — duty you feel towards my wellbeing you’ve more than discharged years ago. And the government —

Cliopher said, “To hell with the government.”

Kip! There was shock in his voice, and maybe an undertone of delight. Cliopher wished he could see his proper face. Even seeing his small crow’s body was difficult now; the closer the edge of sleep became, the less distant that drowsy sense of his real body became, the more the weight of the darkness of night and the heaviness of his blankets pressed down on him, with the sunlight of Daun peeping through the darkness in hesitant fits and glimmers, now. It was unfair, deeply unfair, that Cliopher’s anger and fear were pushing him further towards awakening and further away from —

The pressure of that hot feeling against his vocal cords and the knowledge that his time here was about to end were too strong to keep silent. “Duty, you said. Is that what you think this is?” Cliopher could not possibly control his voice, could not keep the rawness out of it, and he heard Fitzroy’s sharp inhale. “I’m tired of being places where you’re not. I’m tired, and I hate it, and I miss you.” He squeezed his eyes shut to block out the dizzying array of light and shadow, the wavering shapes of the crow and the objects, all that detritus of a life. “I can manage it, I can, but only if you’re coming back at the end of it. You have to come back. You have to come back to me.” He swallowed. “And if you can’t, then I’ll come find you.”

Cliopher hung there, suspended in the darkness. Somewhere the Palace bells were tolling. There was a flutter of wings, the clink of metal touching, a soft thump.

And then hands, human hands, were gripping his forearms, and warm soft skin was pressing against Cliopher’s forehead, and Fitzroy’s breath was mingling with Cliopher’s. His voice was rough in his throat when he said, “Outside of Ixsaa, two days to the north-east. Ask at the Rose and Phoenix Inn about it and they can show you the way. But give me a week before you come out as the cavalry, will you? I can — I think I can do this.”

“Three days,” was Cliopher’s counter-offer.

“Five.”

“Fine.” It wasn’t Cliopher’s most graceful concession.

“I will come home to you,” Fitzroy whispered. “I want to. I will. I promise. I only — I can’t handle Solaara yet, Kip, I can’t. Can I be terribly selfish and ask you to wait a little while longer?”

That promise echoed in Cliopher’s ears and mind and heart. “I can wait as long as you need so long as you do come home,” Cliopher croaked.

“I will,” Fitzroy said, with as much solemnity as he had ever used for any of his proclamations, as serious as Cliopher had heard him be about anything. “I will, Kip, I —”

Cliopher opened his eyes. He was in his bed, in his nightgown. The morning bells were tolling their last chimes.

Cliopher closed his eyes again and let out a long, shuddering breath.

The letter from Fitzroy came four and a half days into Cliopher’s promised five day wait. All it said was, All’s well, no need for the cavalry, more details on what happened shortly. Cliopher sank into his desk chair and let himself study it, the easy, comfortable swirls of Fitzroy’s handwriting, the relaxed looseness of it, and breathed through the wave of relief that Fitzroy did, in fact, seem to be well; that he’d made it out of that dry, desert valley all right; that he had, presumably, rescued and reunited with all the pieces of himself. Cliopher would, admittedly, have preferred to be able to — to be able to verify that piece himself.

He sat there, studying the curl of Fitzroy’s y’s, the little flourishes on Fitzroy’s h’s, the best cues that he had, right now, to actually evaluate Fitzroy’s mood besides his words. Of course Fitzroy had, very kindly, wanted to let Cliopher know immediately that he was well, and of course Cliopher was glad to know that, and of course Fitzroy had also likely gotten swept up in questions and tales and the demands of his friends, the Red Company, and Rhodin too, of course. Perhaps they had found Fitzroy after Cliopher had gotten pulled away and helped him with the rest. He had not explained, after all, where they had been in all this. And surely even Damian and Pharia, for all that it sounded like matters were fraught there, would not stand by while their old friend was in trouble.

It was good, that Fitzroy had people there to support him, even while he, Cliopher, was so far away.

Cliopher filed the little note carefully away with Fitzroy’s other letters and went to unpack his bags once again.

Chapter Text

“What is it?” Aioru said absently to Cliopher’s knock on the door to his office. “Oh, sir, come in! Is this about the latest news from Nijan?” He paused, studying Cliopher’s face. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine, I’m just a bit tired this morning,” Cliopher said. “No coffee yet. And yes, I wanted to check in.” He shrugged. “I know you have the matter under control, but the Prince of Haion City likes to grill me on any Nijani news incident more prominent than a mugging to ensure that I’m taking proper responsibility. Something along those lines, at least.”

They had not said so much aloud, but both Cliopher and Aioru understood, by now, that it would probably take multiple successful elections, over the course of years, for Nijan to reach even the relative level of stability that it had been at before the duke’s assassination. The birthing of a new form of government, as his Radiancy had said once, was an exceedingly messy affair.

Aioru flashed him a sympathetic smile. “Of course he does. Here, I’ll take you through it.”

Aioru and the Offices of State had the matter fully under control, of course.

As he stood to leave, Cliopher said, “I’d also wanted to run a potential project by you,” and slid the folder across the table to him.

Aioru opened it to skim the précis. “Taking aim at the lèse-majesté laws now? Bored again, sir?”

Cliopher shrugged. “You know how I get without something to do.”

My dear Fitzroy —

I am glad to hear the fully story of your exploit and safe return, even if I am still sorry that I had to leave in the middle of it myself. Is it helping, to have gone through it all and … I don’t wish to say reconciled with it, exactly. Is it helping to have gone through it all? I can’t say I think well of this Crow for proposing it in the first place, godfather or no (and that is a story I should like to hear more about when you have a moment), but I can’t deny you do sound lighter in your last letter.

I am not surprised that Pharia and Damian came to help rescue you, but I am pleased to hear it. I know I have never met them, but it always seemed so clear in your songs about them how much you all cared about one another. And I am glad for your sake that Damian is talking at least to Jullanar, even if I can’t say I understand why he can’t talk to you as well. But it sounds like an old wound that did not heal right, as surely as this situation with Raphael does. Will you go look for him, do you think? I agree that if he hasn’t returned to Daun despite it being what sounds like years in the local times of both Ysthar and Daun then he seems unlikely to come back on his own, but as someone with, I daresay, more than my fair share of stubborn family members (and yes, before you say it, I do include myself in that) I can understand how possible it is for a family of stubborn people to gridlock into an arrangement that is undesirable for all parties.

It is mostly business as usual here in Solaara. The primary piece of news is that Terec and Nerisse have arrived at last. Conju and Nerisse have been ensconced away doing small family activities for the most part, so I have not gotten to know her well, but I have liked what I’ve seen of her and Conju seems deeply happy to have reunited with her. Terec is another matter; he and Conju have had at least six screaming matches so far, and the one time I attempted to ask Conju about it I was told in no uncertain terms to stay out of it, so I am accepting that edict and leaving it alone for the time being. (Ludvic gave me a very unflattering look of surprise when I told him as much. I’m not normally that bad, am I? No, don’t answer that.) I did take him out for lunch and to people watch the other day and he was particularly scathing about everyone who passed, so I presume the end result is that it’s going somewhat messily.

How are things with your other friends? You mentioned Gadarved was reluctant to come adventuring at first; has he been adjusting all right to the reality of it? Have things been all right with Pali since your détente? Has Rhodin convinced her to spar with him yet?

— Kip

“You can still go if you want, you know,” Cliopher said. “You don’t have to stay on my account.” He smiled to soften the sting of it. Basil, Sara, and Clio had planned to finally heed their family’s pleas and go home to the Vangavaye-ve if Cliopher had indeed left for Daun. But that he was not going did not mean that they also must stay. Cliopher went on, “We’ve already exhausted the tourist spots I know in Solaara, after all.” Not the Liauu, but nobody wanted Cliopher to go back there, not even Cliopher.

This being the third time Cliopher and Basil were having this discussion, Clio ignored them both entirely in favor of rummaging around in his still mostly-packed bag to hunt for his book. Cliopher wished that he would unpack it properly; ever time Cliopher had to watch him search through it, he felt some kind of emotion that he was doing his best not to look directly at. (Cliopher’s own bags, of course, had been unpacked fully the day he’d gotten the letter.)

“We’ll stick around as long as you do,” Basil said, the same as he’d said the last two times.

“Going to get buried in an avalanche of letters asking you to come home first?” Cliopher said lightly.

Basil said easily, “I don’t think they could outdo your avalanche unless they got a thousand years to write them all, too. Even if there are a lot more Mdangs making up the difference.”

Basil’s mild face wasn’t as good as Cliopher’s. But then Cliopher had had a long time to work on his.

My dear Kip,

Don’t think it escaped my notice that your last letter was entirely about other people without a word about yourself. Is everything all right? I know I have been somewhat preoccupied with the aftermath of my quest in the mountains (for which I remain deeply grateful for your assistance, if I haven’t said that yet; I suspect I would still be trapped there without you), but that does not mean that I don’t wish to hear about you. Very much the opposite, in fact. Did something happen?

Yours,

Fitzroy

“The lèse-majesté laws, Cliopher, really?” Ludvic said in the doorway.

Cliopher had a headache. Getting shouted at by the priest-wizards for three straight hours did typically have that effect. “Hi, Ludvic,” he said.

“When I said it was a bad idea to pick this particular fight with the Ouranatha,” Ludvic said, “and you did not pursue the project at that time, I thought it was because you agreed with me, not because you were biding your time.”

“No, you were right,” Cliopher said. He stared blindly down at his notes. He had been doing — something with them. He was finding it difficult to focus. “It’s a bad idea.”

Ludvic paused in the way he did when he was reevaluating with new information. “Why do it, then?”

Why did Cliopher do anything? “It’s something to do,” he said. “Work usually helps.”

“May I recommend something less likely to inspire murderous rage from your political opponents?”

Cliopher smiled sardonically. “Certainly. Did you have something in mind?” He had tried to find something better. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know that the damage had long been done. Solaara for Fitzroy would always be his prison, his cage; it was centuries too late for Cliopher peeling away a few of the bars to do any good. He had tried to come up with other ideas, and then when his mind had felt only sluggish and empty, he had brought out old notebooks with potential projects. But he had looked at the ideas spilling off the page and felt nothing about any of them. He had handed those fires on; he didn’t want to tend them any longer.

He did care about the lèse-majesté laws. That would have to be enough.

Ludvic didn’t ask if Cliopher was all right, which Cliopher at least had an answer to hand for. Instead he said, “Do you need to go, Cliopher? We can make it work. We would have, if he’d needed you. We still can if you need —”

“I don’t need — it’s fine,” Cliopher said sharply. “I’m fine.” Fitzroy had asked — and Cliopher had said — and so Cliopher was fine, had to be fine. “I just need something to do until the Jubilee.” Two months and five days, now. “My only tasks are make-work and being shouted at by the Council of Princes. At least this is being shouted at by new people.”

My dear Fitzroy,

I’m sorry I worried you. I have mostly been very tired these last few days, and feeling more boring than usual. I’m afraid I’m not up to my usual standards of correspondence.

The problem, Cliopher reflected, studying his letter to Fitzroy, was that he did not want to lie to Fitzroy or to worry him. He could possibly have dissembled well enough to fool Fitzroy in his last letter if he had put in more effort, and in retrospect perhaps should have. It had only seemed like a great deal of work, and he was so tired.

There was a quiet rap on the doorframe of Cliopher’s study, and he looked up to see Basil there. “You’ve been avoiding me,” Basil observed.

Cliopher had been. He’d made it two and a half days without being alone with Basil, he suspected only because Basil had, at least at first, let him get away with it.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, you can tell me that, Kip.”

Cliopher said, “There just doesn’t seem to be much point in talking about it when I can’t change it.”

Basil made a neutral noise that Cliopher knew better to think was agreement. He drew up a chair to Cliopher’s desk and poured each of them a small cup of —

“This isn’t your mead,” Cliopher observed, lifting his glass and sniffing it.

“No, I couldn’t fit much in our bags. Conju had some recommendations for — Kip. You’re dissembling.”

“A little bit, yes,” Cliopher said, and sipped the wine. It was a sweet white, quite excellent. Well, anything that Conju recommended would be.

He expected Basil to ask, but Basil did not. Basil sat next to him quietly, letting the silence build.

Cliopher could have gone back to his letter; he could have yawned and excused himself to sleep.

He said, “He asked me if I could wait a little while longer for him to come back, and I told him that I could wait as long as he needed.”

“Oh, Kip,” Basil said.

Cliopher tried not to let the gentleness in Basil’s voice put his hackles up. It wasn’t — it hadn’t been — “I meant it.” It had felt so — not easy, exactly, but natural and obvious, true, so why —

“I know you did,” Basil said. “Kip, I think everybody’s made a promise that they meant in the moment that they weren’t sure they could keep afterwards.”

Cliopher’s shoulders straightened and stiffened. He said sharply, “I’ve never broken a promise to him, and I don’t intend to start now.”

Basil blew out a breath. “That’s not what I meant. Did you ask him about going to find him?”

Cliopher said, “He asked me to wait five days, and I did, and then he told me he didn’t need me.”

“I don’t think he meant it like that,” Basil said quietly. “Did you ask him about going to find him because you want to, not because he needs you?”

Cliopher’s temper snapped. “What am I supposed to say?” he demanded. “Oh, you did too well at saving yourself from being disassembled into your component parts, I was hoping for an excuse to skip out on all my sworn responsibilities so I could gallivant around Daun with you instead? Don’t worry too much about political instability in Nijan, it’s not so much more unstable than it always was! It’s been a whole eight days since the last time political violence broke out, after all! It’s two months until the Jubilee.” Fitzroy had served as Lord Magus for a thousand years. He had hated every one of them, Cliopher was almost certain, exactly this badly.

“How about, ‘I miss you, and I’d like to come see you’?” Basil said.

But Cliopher had told Fitzroy that he missed him. He had.

And Fitzroy had said — Fitzroy had promised — Fitzroy had pressed his forehead against Cliopher’s and promised to come home to him. Cliopher could wait for that — for him — he could. He wanted —

Please don’t apologize. My dear, you are not and have never been boring, and I could happily listen to you talk about problems with anything from your family to the Nijani elections for ages. Ludvic tells me that you’ve been picking fights with the Ouranatha; are they causing problems for you, or you for them? I shan’t say anything about the advisability of starting fights with the Ouranatha, because gods knows I started more than a few of my own over the years. (Though to be entirely honest, I am never entirely certain if I picked too few or too many.) I did have the thought that if you’ve been finding yourself restless, perhaps you might like something more pleasant than battles with the priest-wizards to think about? I’ve been having a bit of trouble with the harmonies on this one. Maybe we could play it together once it’s done.

The sheet music attached to the letter did spark Cliopher’s curiosity enough to penetrate at least a little bit through the depth of his hollow exhaustion. It was most definitely a work in progress, he could see immediately as he flipped through it, with scribbled notes in the margins and little music staves floating across the page at odd angles, not linking up into a full song. Curiously, there were no lyrics; either this work was entirely instrumental, or Fitzroy hadn’t included them yet. Cliopher hummed a few of the notes and then blinked, frowning, and went to hunt through his writing case.

Yes, he’d been right, he could see when he had this sheet music lined up with that letter Fitzroy had written him after the landslide; this was the song that that little cluster of notes belonged to.

Cliopher hummed a bit more of the music — frowned, hummed a little more — and then he went to get his oboe.

Cliopher made it about five measures in on his oboe before he started to have trouble with it. Oh, but it was a startlingly melancholy song, quiet and delicate, soft, almost intricate. It was — wistful, and plaintive, and — more than anything it felt like Fitzroy had come quietly into the room and looked into Cliopher’s eyes and taken the awful grinding hurt and transposed it into something —

Cliopher started to cry. He put his oboe aside and covered his face.

Cliopher missed him, helplessly, desperately, beyond all reason or logic. He had let him go once, and then he had let go of the chance of leaving to go look for him, and now he had had to let go of that chance again, and instead of being easier every time it got harder and harder. It should not be this hard — it should not be this difficult, these last few months — with the end in sight. But, oh, it was. It was.

The tears subsided slowly, little bursts of them fighting their way up from time to time in small refrains. When they went, finally, Cliopher felt… not hollow, exactly, the way he had earlier, but washed clean, an ocean beach after a storm, the waves settling again.

Cliopher picked up his oboe, but instead of raising it to his lips he set it on his lap, fiddling with the keys as he thought.

He could — Basil wasn’t wrong, that he could simply write Fitzroy and say — what? The situation in Nijan has stabilized as much as it is likely to, so I thought I might come traveling with you. Cliopher could write that.

But if Fitzroy said — not even no, but not yet — or some little practical objection, like his protests in the dream that Cliopher didn’t need to bother…

If Fitzroy wrote back and said, Oh, of course, Kip, we’ll be looking for Raphael shortly, we’ll swing by Solaara after we find him and pick you up…

Cliopher couldn’t. He couldn’t. It would be worse than the waiting. To hope, and wait for news, and then realize that there was more waiting still — still! — on the other side. He couldn’t do it again.

And Fitzroy had promised that he would come back. He had promised that he would come home.

That he would come home to Cliopher.

Cliopher let himself imagine, for a single guilty moment, Fitzroy coming into the room, and taking his hands, and saying, It’s all right, Kip, you’ve done enough; you’ve waited long enough; you can stop, now, I won’t leave you again.

Then he had to wipe his face again.

It did help, working on the song with Fitzroy. They ended up with a rapid-fire correspondence about it almost the way they had done it for Nijan, tossing ideas back and forth, hashing out a harmony, fleshing out the melody. It was a nice distraction. Cliopher hoped that he could make it last for the full two months.

Chapter Text

Part III: Seven Things Cliopher Mdang Stole from Astandalas

“What do you think, sir,” Aioru said, as they waited for the sky ship to finish undocking, “are we actually going to get a Nijani prince out of this visit, or will we be back here again before the Jubilee?”

“I will believe Nijan has successfully elected a representative for the Council of Princes when that representative is sitting in the council room in front of me, and even then I’ll be waiting for the rest of the joke,” Cliopher retorted.

They had come out to Nijan after the third interference attempt in the Nijani elections to, as Cliopher had put it in his letter to Fitzroy about it, look intimidating and official and stand imposingly at various functions. He did not write about Ludvic’s exhaustive plan for providing mundial security at the different polling stations, or the extensive debates Cliopher, Aioru, and several of the union heads had had about how to ensure this level of security didn’t deter potential voters, or that Cliopher’s headaches had been getting worse.

It was tricky, sometimes, figuring out how to walk that line of telling Fitzroy about his troubles without worrying him too much or making him feel guilty for leaving, but Cliopher thought he was getting better at it. Fitzroy just seemed to be in such an ebullient mood, his muse having come rushing back properly in the aftermath of his crow transformation, and Cliopher didn’t want to spoil that.

If Cliopher sometimes had to rewrite the letters he wrote in the latest hours of the night, the ones where the subtext of come home, I miss you, please come get me was so obvious that even Cliopher could see it clearly, well — he had the time. Even with Basil, Sara, and Clio still staying with him; even with Nijan being Nijan; even with the composing; even with the endless back-and-forth with the Ouranatha, who had given ground on a couple of the lèse-majesté laws but were proving more tenacious about others than even Cliopher had expected.

It was just too much, to leave the letters as they were. Too much in the same way that it would have been too much to turn around, not a week after Fitzroy had made him that promise, and ask —

Well, the Jubilee wasn’t so far away now.

The lurch of the sky ship beneath his feet drew Cliopher back to himself.

“I can’t say I’m sorry to leave Nijan behind me, at least for a little while,” Aioru said, gazing out on the window looking down.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Cliopher said, his own gaze skimming over the ocean, the seagulls gliding, the city sprawled beneath them, “at least it’s a break from Solaara.”

Gaudy and Zaoul had come to Nijan with him, while Tully dealt with people seeking audiences with him back in Solaara. She met their group at the Lights and fell into step besides Cliopher — or rather, did her level best to stay right besides Cliopher — as they made their way back to the Palace of Stars. “Sir,” she said, “do you want the most important news first, or the news you’re actually going to care about most?”

Repentantly, Cliopher slowed his pace enough that she could keep up without struggling. “I’ll admit I’m curious what you would define as the news I’ll care about most.”

Tully gave him a sidelong, slanting grin. “There was a problem with your preorder.”

Cliopher managed to not swear out loud in front of his secretaries, but it took effort. “What kind of problem?”

Fitzroy was publishing a small pamphlet of his new poetry, and Cliopher was ferociously proud of him for it. He had no idea whether Fitzroy had been particularly prolific since his time as a crow or if the time differential in Daun (and Eahh for a while, after an attempted trip to Ysthar had gone impressively off the rails) had just been strongly in his favor, but either way the results had been impressive. He was up to four short poems, plus the one about Nijan, which was apparently enough to actually put them all into print together. (Not including the one Cliopher was helping him with, which wasn’t done yet. Probably because he seemed to be exclusively working on it with Cliopher at this point, and the speed of letter writing was a limiting factor.) Cliopher had read all the poems in the pamphlet already, so it wasn’t really an issue if he couldn’t get his copy right away, but he did very much want it all the same.

“Something about a group of university students making off with several of the boxes of shipment, but the details weren’t all that clear,” Tully admitted. “The note was very frazzled. I could ask for more information if you like, sir.”

“Or I could go down and ask in person,” Gaudy offered. Cliopher suspected this was not an entirely self-interested offer, and that Gaudy perhaps had a preorder of his own that was at risk.

“No, that’s all right,” Cliopher said with a sigh. “What’s the most important news, Tully?”

“The Lord of Ysthar is here, and he wants to speak with you.”

Cliopher stared at her. “The Lord of Ysthar?”

“He arrived yesterday. Saya Kalikiri spoke with him, of course, but he said he wanted to speak with you as well.”

Cliopher had no idea what to make of that, but unexpected visits from Lords Magi seemed unlikely to bode well. “What time did you give him?”

“In an hour and a half,” Tully said promptly, “time enough for you to wash up and have coffee.”

“You’re a lifesaver,” Cliopher informed her, and went to do exactly that.

The Lord of Ysthar showed up at Cliopher’s door thirty seconds before the beginning of their scheduled meeting, wearing half court costume, with his phoenix perched on one shoulder and some kind of case for what Cliopher suspected was a musical instrument slung over the other. “Good afternoon, Lord Mdang,” he said politely. “Thank you for speaking with me on such short notice.”

“I am only sorry I could not be here when you arrived yesterday, my lord,” Cliopher said. “Come in — would you like tea? Coffee?”

The Lord of Ysthar considered him for a long moment, his fair brows furrowed slightly. He looked younger than Cliopher by a couple decades or so, though from the way the time differentials ran on Ysthar Cliopher suspected he was actually quite a bit older. Cliopher waited patiently. Eventually the man made an abrupt little dismissive hand gesture, not one of the formal ones with inscribed meanings that his Radiancy used, and said, “James. Please. This isn’t official business, anyways, more of a — personal matter.”

Cliopher nodded in private relief. He was unaccustomed, in all honesty, to calling other people ‘my lord.’ It had migrated into rather more of a term of affection for him longer ago than Cliopher would willingly admit to aloud. “Then you must call me Cliopher.” Then James’s comment about it being a personal matter registered properly, and Cliopher could not help the sharp flare of curiosity. The Lord of Ysthar was notorious for being a deeply private man, and Cliopher had no idea what could have brought him to Cliopher’s door.

James was still standing in the doorway, in that half court costume that was simultaneously exquisitely correct and also looked like nothing Cliopher had even seen him wear on Ysthar. Cliopher came to a decision. “Would you like to go for a walk? Perhaps in the gardens?”

James nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

It took James a few minutes of wandering through the lush greenery, the fragrant florals, the mossy pathways, to speak. Cliopher let him start the conversation. He had not spent so much time with the man during his embassy to Ysthar, but it had been enough to determine that Buru Tovo’s old admonishment to look first, listen first, was often the way forward with him.

Eventually James quoted, as they reached a terrace with ivy climbing up the side of it, “‘Where stood at the window, white stone and ivy; the silent watcher in her high tower.’”

Cliopher smiled. He knew the reference, of course; it was to one of Fitzroy’s works. He finished the quote: “‘As we rode the high way, to the golden city, down the white way, to the city of roses.’ Hopefully the Jubilee will be less eventful than That Party was.”

James smiled faintly. “Somehow I doubt it. I wanted to speak with you about him. Fitzroy Angursell, I mean.” He did not use the same gesture for it that Fitzroy did, or any gesture at all that Cliopher could see, but Cliopher was familiar enough by now with the sensation of a Wall of Silence rising to register it coming into being. “I would like to speak with him, and I believe you may be able to help me find him.”

The hairs on the back of Cliopher’s neck prickled. He was grateful, in this moment, for his court face, smooth and unruffled as any courtier’s. “Why do you say that?”

“Well,” the Lord of Ysthar said, his blue eyes sharp and impenetrable on Cliopher’s face, “he did make you his Viceroy, didn’t he?”

For a single, frozen moment, they stared at each other, each, Cliopher thought, trying to crack the blank expression on the other’s face. Cliopher said, “That’s an interesting theory. Fitzroy Angursell, Emperor of Astandalas?” and raised an eyebrow in a deliberate imitation of his Radiancy. (Of Fitzroy. It felt a little dangerous even to think of him that way, in this moment.)

Cliopher had asked Fitzroy, whether he could tell Aioru, what he ought to do if people did begin to guess. Fitzroy’s response in its entirety had been I defer to your judgment on the matter, my dear Kip, which Cliopher had tried not to find exasperating and mostly not succeeded at. He had settled, eventually, in his own mind on a strategy much like the one Fitzroy had always used: to divert attention, neither confirm nor deny, try to dodge around the matter.

Whether he could succeed in such a strategy as effectively as Fitzroy had always seemed to was another question entirely.

They walked quietly another five steps before James answered. “I read the proclamation you sent out, and the pardons.” It took Cliopher a moment to even remember that message he had sent out, to all the former worlds of the empire, to tell them that the government of Zunidh had pardoned the Red Company. “I have an — interest in the Red Company. I thought the timing was curious. But nothing came of it for some time.” Another pause, only punctuated by the quiet rasp of their sandals against stone. “There’s not much inter-mundial trade in Ysthar, and much of it goes through me, obliquely or no. When his publishers reached out about distributing his new book in Ysthar — well. I am a musician myself. I was curious. I acquired an early copy. It was… illuminating.”

Mentally Cliopher was flipping urgently through the poems in the pamphlet. The Nijan poem was in many ways the most telling, but that had come out long enough ago by now that Cliopher had thought it would not be enough for most people to connect the dots. Perhaps in combination with one of his newer works? But those were mostly disconnected from his time as Emperor or Lord Magus, at least thus far. (There was one about transforming into a crow where Cliopher was, he had to admit, looking forward to critical analyses about the choice of a crow specifically as an object of metamorphosis.)

“Besides his intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Zunidh government and his obvious familiarity with you specifically —” What? “— there is — well. My mother told me he was the spitting image of an Imperial scion.”

Even Cliopher’s somewhat bewildered mental perusal of A Brief (Ha!) History of the Nijani Police Force could not stop him from focusing on the important part of that sentence. “Your mother?”

James hesitated for a beat, a second, and then he said, “Pharia Cloudbringer.”

Cliopher stared at him.

James’s mouth twisted. It was possibly the most honest expression Cliopher had ever seen on his face. “I know. I’m not much in the model of my parents. Too much m-music and magic.”

Several things clicked into place all at once. Cliopher smiled at him and said, “Do you prefer James, or is Raphael better?”

“I suppose you may as well call me Raphael,” Fitzroy’s more-or-less nephew said.

“Fitzroy is in Daun,” Cliopher began — James, or rather Raphael, made a face that looked a bit like he had bit into a lemon — “but I can pass along a letter for you if you like; I am certain he would be delighted to hear from you. If you’d like to stay for a few more days, I expect he’ll get back to you quite quickly.”

Cliopher left Raphael to compose his letter, with promises to pass it along as soon as he finished it, and returned to his own rooms marveling at it. Fitzroy’s nephew! (Even if Damian and Pharia did not think of Fitzroy that way, if Raphael was more interested in connecting with Fitzroy than he was in speaking with his own parents then Cliopher felt perfectly willing to provisionally consider Raphael Fitzroy’s family.) Oh, but he would be pleased. Cliopher wished — he only wished he could tell Fitzroy himself, in person, where he could see his face.

He had a letter of his own waiting for him to distract him from that thought, from Vinyë. It read,

Kip,

Have you read it yet? The new book of Fitzroy Angursell poetry, of course, although knowing you, you knew exactly what I meant without needing the specification. I ought not to have read it yet, of course, it doesn’t come out properly until tomorrow, only you know Farlo’s bookstore? He was going through the shipment of the copies, and he took a quick sneak peak at the table of contents. Kip, you never told us that you knew Fitzroy Angursell! You never let on a single hint…

The letter went on, but Cliopher’s mind was whirling too much to focus on it, and he lowered it slowly. Raphael had said his obvious familiarity with you. Vinyë, now too — but Fitzroy had said —

Had Fitzroy said that only those five poems that Cliopher had already read were in this pamphlet? Or had he said the names of those poems, and simply not mentioned that there might be… more. Did Cliopher even dare to imagine that —

But it was, he had to admit, the kind of little mischief that Fitzroy would think was very funny.

Cliopher put the letter down and went to knock on Basil’s door. “Hello,” he said, “I’m going to go fight some university students over Fitzroy’s poetry, do you want to come with?”

Three hours later, Basil observed, “You know, Kip, I don’t think we’re going to manage it this way.”

Cliopher observed the near riot thronging the bookstore in front of them grimly. “No, unfortunately not. Ludvic, do we need to do something about this?”

Ludvic studied it for a moment and then shrugged. “City Watch is on it. Our job is to guard you.” ‘Our’ in this case being himself and Ato.

Ludvic had not originally been on guard duty when they had originally set out on this expedition, but had promptly assigned himself to it, either because he wanted his own copy of Fitzroy’s new book or because he thought the situation would be funny, or both. At his suggestion, they had invited Conju to come along as well, but he had declined the invitation by sniffing and saying, “Why do I need to bother going to great effort to find a copy when Cliopher’s going to find one as soon as one can be found, read it immediately, and then describe it to me in exhaustive detail for a good week straight?”

As soon as one can be found did, unfortunately, look increasingly less likely to be today as the minutes passed. Cliopher watched someone attempt to climb the drainpipe to enter the bookstore through the second-story window and said gloomily, “I’m the Viceroy of Zunidh. It seems like that should at least come with the privilege of getting a copy of my friend’s book at release.”

“Do you know, I think that’s the most tyrannical I’ve ever heard you be,” Ludvic remarked. “I’m going to tell Himself you said that, he’ll like it. What I’m really amazed by is the fact that he didn’t just send you a copy directly.”

Cliopher opened his mouth and then closed it again, frowning.

Basil, looking at his expression, said, “Kip, please tell me you at least checked.” Then he started to laugh as Cliopher scowled at him.

“Right,” Ludvic said, “back to the Palace, then?”

Conju, for all his purported disinterest, was having a glass of wine in Cliopher’s sitting room when they returned. “I was just curious, that’s all,” he said. “Did you manage to acquire a copy?”

Cliopher heard Ludvic say, “That remains to be seen,” behind him as he went on a beeline for his writing case. He opened up the back compartment, reaching for the letter box, and —

And there was, in fact, a small brown book inside of it. It was thicker than Cliopher had expected it to be, by a fairly significant margin, and it had a note tucked inside the front cover.

The note was one word long and read only, Surprise.

Cliopher flipped to the table of contents and then stopped, staring down at it.

After a couple of minutes, Ludvic came in to see what was taking him so long and said, “I take it he did send it to you after all. Are you reading it without us?”

Cliopher handed it over to him wordlessly.

It was still open to the table of contents, where the first entry was, Seven Things Cliopher Mdang Stole from Astandalas. From the page count, it was longer than any other poem in the book.

“So I take it he liked the introduction you wrote for the reprint of his work,” Ludvic said. “Although I’ve no idea how he got to seven from your stated one. Two, I suppose, including the government.”

“He read that?” Cliopher said blankly. “You read that?”

Ludvic looked at his face and then started to laugh. “Cliopher, it’s the first reprint of His poetry in decades. Everyone has read your introduction. I know for a fact Saya Kalikiri has a copy of it hanging up in the Offices of State.”

“Oh,” Cliopher said weakly.

“The uptick in threats to your person that I’ve had to brief you on over it wasn’t a clue?”

“I thought those were because of the lèse-majesté laws,” Cliopher said, frowning.

“Only the Ouranatha care about those. Nor the Princess of Xiputl or Prince of Western Dair growing more oppositional in the Council of Princes? Sayu Aioru thought the timing was suspicious.”

“That wasn’t because of Nijan?” Though the Prince of Western Dair had been scrupulously neutral on the matter until after the new administrative district had been ratified. Cliopher had assumed at the time that that had been disapproval over how it had only partially stabilized the region.

“Do you know,” Ludvic observed, “I knew you were going to be more difficult to guard than Himself, but somehow I didn’t anticipate how much more difficult. I really should have. Come on, do you want to read your poem out loud, or should I?”

Cliopher, obviously, wanted to read his poem. (His poem. A poem that Fitzroy had written about him.) He reclaimed the book and took it out to his sitting room, where they had somehow also acquired a Clio and Sara, and Franzel was bringing out snacks and drinks.

They got settled and then Cliopher flipped the page. “It opens with a dedication… ‘It is a delightful irony that…’” and then his eyes skipped ahead of his voice and the rest of the words died in his throat.

Conju made an exasperated noise after a moment and said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Cliopher, let one of us do it.” He took the book out of Cliopher’s hands, his own eyes skimming over the dedication, and then he said, “Ah.”

Cliopher could still see the words on the page in his mind’s eye, was imagining them said in Fitzroy’s warm baritone:

It is a delightful irony that the greatest heist I have ever participated in is one that was both fully legal and where I was an accomplice at best. For Kip, my partner-in-crime and the one with the vision.

Conju cleared his throat and read it aloud.

“Right,” Ludvic said after a moment, “you clearly are not going to be in a state to read this aloud, Cliopher. Let me do it.”

Cliopher kept it together, listening, for — for a while. Through the beginning of the poem, which was about Cliopher’s early years in Astandalas, his original theft of The Secret Collection, the details not always accurate but more than Cliopher would have expected Fitzroy to be able to make them, without having asked Cliopher himself for the story. (Had he — could he have researched it? Cliopher had spoken with him enough about his writing process by now to know that Fitzroy valued accuracy, he cared about precision.) Cliopher started to tear up for the first time when the poem started to tell the story of Cliopher lighting the first fire in the Palace after the Fall, but he still was able to keep his face calm, keep an appropriate listening face on.

Then Ludvic reached the first, what Cliopher would later discover was the only, stanza that used first-person pronouns. Oh, the Emperor of Astandalas was in the poem, all of his titles sprinkled in with whimsical abandon, speaking with Cliopher and passing proclamations. But there was only one stanza that Fitzroy was in, and that one read:

He came down too to the oubliette they kept me in / cracked open the entrance and stole away / the shroud of gold they’d used to bury me alive / and let the air in so I could breathe again / and kept the fire burning.

Cliopher cried through the entire rest of the poem.

Everything was in there. Cliopher’s reforms, his long fight to raise the world up so that Fitzroy could step off of that high throne, the annual stipend. The fire dance, in such proud and loving detail that Cliopher almost couldn’t parse it. The reenactment of the Singing of the Waters at the Viceroyship ceremonies in the Vangavaye-ve. All of it — and all of it in Fitzroy’s voice, Fitzroy’s words, transforming it from the — the slow boring bureaucratic slog that Cliopher had always thought of it as into something — into something —

Ludvic and Conju slipped away almost immediately after Ludvic finished reading, Sara and Clio following, Cliopher knew to give him privacy. Cliopher could not bring himself to regret his total loss of composure all the same. This was his family; and they knew, he knew that they knew, what this meant to him.

Basil sat quietly next to him on the couch, and rubbed his back while Cliopher cried, and then when the flood of tears had finally dried and Cliopher had gotten ahold of himself again, said, “Was it everything you always dreamed of, Kip?”

Cliopher took a sip of chocolate to try to steady his emotions, his trembling hands. “Better,” he confessed in a whisper. If he had never entirely been able to let go of his childhood dreams of entering the Lays, well, his dreams of belonging in Fitzroy Angursell’s poetry had been ones he’d successfully laid to rest long ago. To the degree that he’d ever let himself daydream about it, he’d imagined — oh, rescuing the Red Company from some great danger, being a person Fitzroy Angursell could admire and respect for his cleverness and bravery and stubborn determination to do the right thing, a person Fitzroy Angursell liked enough to immortalize in a song once their paths had diverged and Fitzroy had gone on his way once again.

This was not that kind of poem. Fitzroy had written a few of those, and Cliopher had read them all, and he knew how they went. This was not that.

This was the kind of poem that Fitzroy had written about other members of the Red Company, the titans who had seized the imaginations and the hearts of the world, the friends that Fitzroy loved with his whole heart.

Cliopher’s voice was tiny when he said, “He makes me sound — he makes me sound like a hero. Like I’m — extraordinary. Like the things I’ve done are — are worthy of legend. Like he —”

Basil waited a minute for Cliopher to go on, and when he couldn’t, Basil squeezed him on the shoulder and stood. “I think that’s probably because that is, in fact, how he sees you, Kip.”

Then he slipped out and left Cliopher there, holding that impossibly precious book of poetry between his hands.

As it turned out, his friends hadn’t left; Conju and Ludvic and Basil and the others were sitting in one of Cliopher’s other, slightly less casual sitting rooms. His eyes were still red, he knew, but he was able to smile at them freely without tears.

Conju took one look at him and sighed. “You’re going to be insufferable about this for months, aren’t you.”

Basil started to laugh. “Only months?”

“Conju,” Cliopher said seriously, “my favorite poet, who I have admired for decades, and who I have also recently discovered is my favorite person in the world, wrote an epic poem. About me. And my life’s deeds. I am going to be insufferable about this for quite literally the rest of my life.”

Cliopher’s first letter to Fitzroy after receiving this was a half-coherent burst of feelings that was all Cliopher could do to convey how much he loved it — how much it meant to him — and that he knew barely scratched the surface.

He sat down to write the second letter, the next day, and hesitated with his pen hovering over the paper.

He had been in the middle of composing a letter to Fitzroy when he had gotten back from Nijan, a cheerful, meandering missive about getting to walk by the ocean, filled with funny anecdotes about Nijan politics. A letter that said nothing at all about the way that Ludvic had tried to convince him to go home to the Vangavaye-ve for a few days while he was close by, and how Cliopher had refused, because his hurts felt too close to the surface, too easily prodded, and he hadn’t been at all sure that his family wouldn’t accidentally rip off the protective covering of Cliopher’s carefully practiced distance, because they wouldn’t know how to step around the wounds the way Cliopher’s friends and family at the Palace would.

Cliopher looked at that letter, and he thought about Fitzroy’s poetry. About the one Fitzroy had written for him, of course, but also the ones Fitzroy had written about his other friends, the Red Company, about the great deeds they had accomplished but also the ways they had rescued each other from great danger. Which was hardly the same thing, of course, but — but Fitzroy had never made it sound like he thought any less of any of his friends for needing rescue, for needing help, only like it was part of the package of friendship, to go to their aid, even if it involved breaking into the Imperial dungeons or stealing away from the meadows of the Sun.

Cliopher wasn’t in any such danger. But then he also didn’t need any rescue of that intensity. He needed —

What did he need? More help with Nijan? He wasn’t certain Fitzroy could stabilize the situation there further any more than Cliopher could. Not for Fitzroy to come back to Solaara to step back into the cage, never that; nothing could possibly be worth that. And if Cliopher might not be able to leave and Fitzroy could not come to stay, wasn’t it unfair to burden him with —

But Fitzroy had asked, hadn’t he? He’d asked what was wrong. He’d asked it more than once, Fitzroy had, his Radiancy had, who was so careful about asking for things — obliquely, the second time, but he had asked a second time. Cliopher wanted — Cliopher wanted to tell him. He wanted — help, to not feel so — so alone in the awful wait, and if he didn’t know what kind of help, if he didn’t know what to ask for, then — maybe he didn’t have to. He would not have thought for Fitzroy to go to Nijan. He would not have thought to ask for that. Fitzroy would have different ideas than Cliopher, would bring a fresh eye to it.

He flipped open the book of poetry and reread the dedication again. He reread a few sections, here and there, of his poem. Everything he’d heard in it was still there. Respect; admiration; pride. And saturating every word, peeking out through every stanza, shining through too brightly to deny: love, and love, and love.

It wasn’t too much to ask. He wasn’t too much. He wouldn’t be. Not for Fitzroy.

Cliopher put aside his half-written letter. He pulled down a blank page and sat considering it, for a moment, to decide where to start.

Chapter Text

I’d hoped, stupidly, when this all went down with Nijan, that perhaps it would be a month or two for them to elect a representative, for them to get settled with the Council of Princes, and that then I could leave, the way I’d originally planned to after the landslide. I was going to go looking for you after I found Basil, did you know that? I have no idea if Rhodin told you that. I kept telling myself, maybe this round of the polls will go smoothly, maybe this intervention from Aioru will do it… if I can just give a little more, work up some energy from somewhere, surely there’ll be a workable solution… but there isn’t, or at least not one I can find. By this point the most positive outcome for Nijan I can actually envision is handing it off to the new Lady Magus with my sincerest apologies at the Jubilee and then enduring a four-hour shouting session with the Council of Princes while they tell me I’m abandoning my responsibilities, because I’m not staying past the Jubilee even if Nijan secedes from the mundial government or kicks off an inter-provincial war, I don’t care any longer. What an awful thing to say about something that I’ve worked on for at least a decade, isn’t it? Fitzroy, I don’t understand how you did it, sometimes, how you did this for a thousand years. It has been, what, a little over a year for me? And already I am so, so tired sometimes. It was never like this when I was Hands or Lord Chancellor, when you were here. The work was hard, and it wore me down, but I always wanted to do it, I always wanted to keep going. I don’t want to any longer. I can; I will for as long as I must; but I don’t want to. I want to stop.

Raphael left the next day, an hour after Cliopher gave him Fitzroy’s return letter. He left without telling Cliopher, or indeed anyone, where he was going. Cliopher hoped it was to Daun, hoped that he would go see Fitzroy, and wished that Raphael had told him that he was leaving, so that Cliopher could have perhaps gone with him if they were indeed both bound for the same destination.

Cliopher himself spoke with Ludvic, the day after Fitzroy’s book arrived, about his own delayed retirement. The problem, as always, was Nijan. Cliopher told Ludvic that, after the investiture of the Nijani representative in five days, Cliopher would speak with Aioru about leaving himself.

Ludvic fixed him with a wordless stare of judgment.

“I know,” Cliopher told him. “I do know.”

Ludvic said, “There won’t be a good time to go. Too much change in the air. If you want to go, then go. Don’t wait.”

“Ludvic, I promised him I would look after the world for him while he was gone.” He had sworn an oath — he had sworn it seventeen times, once for every province. It had been different, when the situation had been stable, when Cliopher’s early departure wouldn’t risk the reversal of everything they’d worked for in Nijan. No matter how badly Cliopher wanted to go, he had sworn an oath, and the only person who could release him from it, before the Jubilee, was Fitzroy.

But then, that was what the letter was for.

Cliopher couldn’t write it all in one go. It took too much out of him, dredging down in the parts of his heart that he ordinarily tried not to look at. Fortunately he had, for once, plenty to do, mostly in the form of a small swarm of letters from family, friends, and acquaintances exclaiming about Fitzroy’s new poem, about how marvelous it made Cliopher’s work sound, and Kip, was that really how it happened? And so on and so forth.

Some people had put it together, that Fitzroy Angursell was Cliopher’s lord. Aya — well, she had guessed long ago. Bertie had known, but Ghilly and Toucan did too now, he could tell from their letters. And some others sidled up to the question who Cliopher did not think were in Bertie or Aya’s confidences: Zemius; Galen; Cousin Haro, oddly enough. At least among Cliopher’s friends and loved ones, the people who had read his letters talking about his lord for all those years, it seemed inevitable that the news, if not quite out yet, would be soon enough.

Cliopher shook his head, smiling a little, at the letter from Dora that asked him if he was dating Fitzroy Angursell and not Lord Artorin after all, with a distinctly judgmental air. He shouldn’t be surprised, he supposed. People always acted like a romance was the most significant relationship that anyone could have. He’d long since given up trying to argue any competing viewpoint, at least with his family.

When we went to the Vangavaye-ve for the last stage of the Viceroyship ceremonies, I bought a house.

By the sixth letter that inquired whether he and Fitzroy were lovers, Cliopher felt significantly less sanguine about the question.

“— something in the poem, or are people reading too much into it? I didn’t think, listening to it, that there was anything of that nature, but you know that I’m not particularly good at noticing these things, and now I’m —”

“Remember to breathe, Kip,” Basil advised.

Cliopher closed his mouth and took a deep breath.

“What I think,” Basil said, “is that the poem makes it very obvious that he loves you, but I also think that’s been obvious for a long time. If you want to know what that love means to him, you’d have to ask him, not me. You’ve never thought about it before?”

“No,” Cliopher said plaintively. “I didn’t think we had that kind of relationship.” He was thinking about it now. He had to, because for all that it was true that people were very quick to read any kind of close relationship that way, he also knew that he, Cliopher, had missed signals in the past — was awful, as a general rule, at noticing when people were flirting with him — and so now he had to wonder —

“Do you want that kind of relationship?”

Cliopher had never been interested in men, had never been interested in any specific man, had hardly ever been interested in anyone. He had never loved anyone as he loved Fitzroy, but that had never been about sex for him. He had never thought before that that might matter. It had never seemed to, in all those long years — at arms-length, when Fitzroy could not reach out, constrained by the awful weight of all his powers and the terrible threat of the taboos.

And now, now that he could reach out? If he did want that?

I will come home to you, Fitzroy had told him, I will, I want to, I promise, but what if he’d wanted — what if he’d thought — what if without that —

“Kip.”

Basil had asked him a question. Cliopher was still thinking about the answer. About the slowly awakening flame of desire he had felt for his occasional lovers. About Fitzroy’s long fingers and his beautiful hands. He wanted to be close to Fitzroy. He wanted Fitzroy to have the things he wanted.

“I could — be that for him, maybe,” Cliopher said finally. “If that was what he wanted.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Basil’s eyes were steady, and kind, and very difficult for Cliopher to look directly at right now. “I like Fitzroy, but he’s not my cousin, my brother. His heart isn’t my primary concern. What do you want? Do you want that? For yourself, and not for him?”

What did it matter what Cliopher wanted for himself? Cliopher had always wanted the wrong things. He couldn’t say that to Basil. Cliopher was certain, from the way that Basil said it, that he already knew the answer, and that he was going to make Cliopher say it anyway. “No,” Cliopher said, and he could hear the weight of all the weariness that had piled up on him these last few months in the word. “Not particularly. But people don’t usually want what I want to give.” And above all, Cliopher did not want to have to watch Fitzroy walk away from him. Not again.

“Have you asked him for what you want, Kip?”

A week ago, if Basil had asked him this question, Cliopher might have told him that what Cliopher wanted had to be equal to be true. Today he found, a little to his own surprise, that the words felt — not quite right on his tongue. He had re-read his poem some four times already, and the dedication at least a dozen. Fitzroy Angursell thought that Cliopher’s theft of the government was the greatest heist he had ever participated in. Fitzroy did not think Cliopher’s great deeds had been less impressive than any of his because they had been subtler. Fitzroy thought they were equals already, that was clear enough. Did Cliopher believe that? Could he? Could he do anything less than believe it, after that poem?

Cliopher scrubbed a hand over his face. He had barged into Basil’s room to brandish the letters and book of poetry at him. Basil was sitting on the bed, still, and Cliopher standing in the doorway. He wanted to go sit on the bed with Basil and let Basil wrap an arm around his shoulders. He wanted to slink away back to his own private rooms and lick the wounds from this conversation in peace. He wanted to hide away from the knowing expression on Basil’s face. “Because asking is so easy to do from worlds away.”

“Write him a letter,” Basil said ruthlessly. “I happen to know you’re very good at that.” Cliopher couldn’t help the low, frustrated noise he made in the back of his throat at that. Basil’s voice was softer, for all Cliopher still couldn’t bear to take his hand off of his face and look at him, when he said, “I know it’s difficult to talk about these things — in general, and especially not in person. But it won’t help to let it fester, either.”

Cliopher wasn’t going to, he didn’t want to, but after hours that night spent tossing and turning he had to grimly admit that Basil was right, and that now that he had looked at the possibility he was going to fret at it until he’d figured out what to do about it. He dragged himself out of bed, and went to his study, where the letter he’d started — the letter where he’d promised himself that he would be honest with Fitzroy about what he felt, about what he wanted — waited.

It took a long time to figure out how to start, but once he found them the words came quickly.

Some of my cousins were teasing me today in their letters about romance. It’s not something that’s ever come very intuitively to me. I don’t think about it — sex, kissing — not without prompting, not usually. That’s not to say that I don’t like either of them, I do, but desire is slow, for me, and rare, and temperamental, and sex is fun enough but it doesn’t make me feel closer to other people the way I know it does for most people.

There. That was — that was factual information that Fitzroy should have, things that he should know about Cliopher, and part of Cliopher wanted to stop there, but his pen, conditioned by late nights writing long, too-honest letters to Fitzroy, next-day edits be damned, kept going.

Sometimes it feels like my earliest days in Astandalas. Is that a strange metaphor? But I got there and there were all these rules, all these social scripts, and they seemed to come so easily for everyone else, and I was always half a beat behind, trying to remember my lines, trying to fumble through a script that I had memorized by rote that looked so easy and so natural on everybody else. It never made sense to me, it’s not (if you’ll pardon another awful metaphor) how I would write the protocol for it, but sometimes it feels like the whole world says that that’s the only way to be close to somebody. The only way to be intimate with somebody, the only way to love somebody like that, with your whole heart, like the sea loves the land, only that’s not true, or at least not true for me, I suppose I can’t speak for anybody else. But I do want to be close like that, I do want intimacy, I do love you that deeply, I only — there’s an Islander concept called fanoa that

Cliopher’s nerve dried up and died all at once. He already felt like he had poured out most of the guts and inner compartments of his own heart onto the page to give over to Fitzroy to see whether he would want it. He could not, in that moment, put that last secret dream on the page for Fitzroy to read and interpret and dissect worlds away where Cliopher could only imagine his reaction, the expression on his face.

He could not send the letter like this, mid-sentence. He did not know if he could bear to send it at all. He wrote, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m having a very strange night, a useless explanation but all that would come to hand, and then he folded the letter and sealed it and opened up the back compartment of his writing case.

He did not know, in that moment, with the letter in his hand, if he was going to put it into the letter tray or simply file it with all the other letters and books and papers, all of the remnants of a life dedicated to a devotion, a love, he had never dared to name. But his eyes caught, as he was reaching in, on that little brown book, that pamphlet of Fitzroy’s poems, which Fitzroy had dedicated to him and which contained his poem, and his hand finished the by-now habitual motion and dropped the letter in the tray.

The magic spirited it away instantly. It was gone, and Cliopher could no longer take it back, no matter if he wished to or not. He had no idea if he did wish to or not.

Cliopher stood there staring at the letter tray, letting his breathing calm down and settle, and eventually, for lack of anything better to do, went to try and go back to bed.

He gave up at four in the morning after an hour of punching his pillow into shape. Cursing Basil’s name silently as he went back to his study to retrieve the little brown book, he thought to himself that letter writing was, if not the worst, certainly the most excruciating way to try to have a conversation of this nature, and that he had no idea how he was meant to bear the waiting.

Fitzroy’s poem kept him company until morning, kept the worst of the anxiety at bay with the promise, the reminder, that —

Still, truthfully, shamefully, when he received an urgent runner from the Offices of State at breakfast to inform him that the Princess of Xiputl had committed treason, he was relieved to have something significantly more urgent to focus on.

Chapter Text

While Cliopher had been fixated on his own problems, he had somehow managed to overlook the fact that the evidence tying Fitzroy Angursell and Artorin Damara together was now significant enough that Raphael had been able to connect the dots, and that other people might be able to too.

Including, apparently, Princess Anastasiya. That was, at least, the only explanation Cliopher could think of as to why Fitzroy’s great-aunt, relentlessly and notoriously dedicated to her duty, had arrested Ayasha e'Oroto-o and planned to execute her tomorrow afternoon.

Aioru clearly couldn’t think of one either. “I can’t imagine what’s gotten into her,” he said, staring down at the report from Xiputl affirming that yes, according to all their informants, it did in fact seem like Princess Anastasiya had a woman who at least matched a rough description of Fitzroy’s friend and noted Red Company member Ayasha in her custody, and that she did in fact seem to plan to completely ignore the Imperial pardon and orders from the Offices of State and Viceroy of Zunidh to release her. “Does she have a strong grudge against the Red Company? Strong enough for this?”

Cliopher cleared his throat. “I think it may not be the Red Company — or not only the Red Company — that she has a grudge against.”

Aioru gave him a politely blank look.

I defer to your judgement, Fitzroy had said.

Cliopher couldn’t see a way around it. He looked at Ludvic, also here as the head of the most relevant pillar of government to the situation. “Is this room secure enough to discuss… sensitive information?” They were in the conference room they often used for these councils of war (and oh, Cliopher hoped fervently that that would continue to be a humorous exaggeration of what they did here and not the reality) in the Offices of State.

Ludvic nodded once. “Yes. You think…”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Cliopher said. “Aioru, you should know that his Radiancy is Fitzroy Angursell, and I suspect that Princess Anastasiya just realized this fact.”

Zaoul, seated off to the side, inhaled, a quick intake of breath that was hastily stifled. Aioru opened his mouth, closed it again, and then burst out with, “But that makes it so much worse! Why would she dare go against the Imperial Proclamation if she knew —”

Cliopher said slowly, “After his Radiancy’s heart attack, I was in the room when his great-aunt visited him, and happened to hear…” And then he told them, because he had to, some of the things Princess Anastasiya had said: her resentment that his Radiancy had inherited instead of Shallyr, her dislike of his changes to the culture and laws, her assertion that it was no surprise that Astandalas fell under him — her wish that the Red Company had stolen him away. “I cannot pretend that I know her well, or truly at all, but it is the only thought that comes to my mind of a grudge that could be strong enough to overcome her commitment to her duty.” He was amazed that anything was strong enough to overcome that, truthfully, after so many long years attending to it so assiduously.

But then all things had their breaking point, did they not? Even duty carefully attended on for years upon years.

It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

Aioru scrubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Do we think the woman she’s arrested is actually e’Oroto-o? It seems like an unlikely coincidence of timing.”

“It could be her,” Ludvic observed, “if she seeks to reunite with her friends.” He shot Cliopher a look that was nearly apologetic, which Cliopher only understood when he continued: “She might hope Cliopher could put her in contact with Himself.” Cliopher had told him about Raphael. “Or it could be a coincidence, or a lie to bait Him out.”

“He’s —” in Daun, Cliopher almost said, but details about Fitzroy’s location were need-to-know only, as far as Cliopher was concerned. “— not in Zunidh right now. Even if he found out, he couldn’t return in time to do anything.”

“We should consider the possibility that it’s a lie to bait you out,” Ludvic said. “Tomorrow afternoon is only just enough time to get to Xiputl from Solaara if we leave as soon as possible. If she wants a way to lash out at Himself…” Cliopher had no idea what expression his face was making, only that his stomach felt like a tangled knot of thread at the idea that — “I don’t think it’s likely,” Ludvic said, “not when that pushes her far out of the realm of plausible deniability that she could have not received the orders to release Ayasha. She may be relying on that defense, and her position, to avoid a treason charge.”

“I have to go regardless,” Cliopher said, though he knew from Ludvic’s expression that Ludvic knew this already.

“Sir…” Aioru said.

Cliopher said, “She has to have received the pardons. I ensured that all the provinces received copies of them months ago, even if you allow for the possibility of the message our office has just sent getting misdelivered somehow. But you’re right that that is the defense that she must give. If she has dared so far, can we assume that she will not dare the rest, and execute e’Oroto-o and claim innocence after?” Cliopher was not certain if it would be possible to try a princess of the realm for treason and not shatter the world’s peace, and yet — “Am I to allow her to flagrantly ignore his Radiancy’s pardon? Defy the rule of law? The surest way to prevent her following through on this threat is to ensure that she cannot claim innocence of what she does. She cannot be allowed the defense that she did not know.”

Aioru was a clever man. Cliopher wouldn’t have appointed him his successor were he not. He could see Aioru putting together the worst-case scenarios that faced them. His face was pale and grim when he said, “I understand, sir,” and Cliopher knew that he did.

Cliopher stood. “I’ve sent word to the Lights for a sky ship to prepare for our departure.” Gaudy was on it; he would have one ready within an hour or two, which should give them just enough time. “I need to speak with any of the members of the Council of Princes who are in Solaara, if they are available this morning. Zaoul, I’ll need you to send a message to them asking them to attend me in the council room at their earliest convenience. Mark it as highly urgent, please.”

Ludvic stood as well. He said, “Lord Mdang,” and saluted, something he had never done for Cliopher before. He had never needed to.

From that alone, Cliopher knew the question Ludvic was about to ask. He knew that Ludvic understood as well as he what needed to be done here, what path they would have to walk.

Of course Ludvic did. He loved Fitzroy, too.

“Commander Omo,” Cliopher said, “would you accompany me to the Council of Princes meeting? I believe the question you intend to ask me will be more appropriately asked and answered there — though you should make whatever arrangements you must unofficially beforehand.”

Ludvic smiled grimly. “A good instinct for theater, sir.”

Cliopher’s answering smile was equally grim, though the humor was real as well. “You know I learned from the best.”

Cliopher gave the princes twenty minutes, as long as he could spare. It took time, sending pages across the Palace of Stars, time for the princes to make their way to the council room, even if they actually moved with all haste.

The wait — Cliopher endured it. He had gotten passable at that. He kept his hands clasped carefully on his desk. He did not open the back compartment of his writing case to see if there was a return letter waiting for him in the letter tray. He could not. He had to stay focused. He had to shut off his emotions, remain attentive to the situation at hand.

Four princes came, out of the seven currently in the Palace of Stars. Prince Rufus, the Grand Duchess of Damara, the Prince of Southern Dair, and the Prince of Kavanduru. It was a better mix than Cliopher had dared hope for, more than acceptable for Cliopher’s purposes. Melissa, the Grand Duchess, was Fitzroy’s sister and Anastasiya’s great-niece; the Prince of Southern Dair thought of himself as a peacekeeper; the Prince of Kavanduru hated Cliopher. Prince Rufus had long had expasionary visions for his territory that the Princess of Xiputl stood to thwart. Yes, they would serve nicely as a microcosm for the broader council, for a testing ground.

It was, Cliopher thought, with a little flash of amusement despite the direness of the situation, possibly the only time he had ever felt grateful for Prince Rufus’s presence at a Council of Princes session.

When the four of them were seated, Cliopher stood, spreading his hands open in welcome. “My lords and ladies, thank you all for coming,” he said. “I wanted to inform you all that the Princess of Xiputl has arrested a woman she claims is Ayasha e'Oroto-o of the Red Company, and that she plans to execute this woman for treason tomorrow afternoon, in violation of the Imperial pardon granted to each member of the Red Company in his Radiancy’s own hand.” He gave the council three beats to absorb that, and then went on, “I wanted to inform you all of this at the first available moment. I am certain this matter is merely a grave misunderstanding on Princess Anastasiya’s part, and I intend to fly out to Xiputl myself today to clear up any confusion on her part as to the validity of said pardon. But for a princess of this realm to threaten treason, even accidentally, is of course a matter of the highest gravity.”

The word treason fell into the center of the room less like a brick thrown into a frozen duck pond and more like the word ‘fire!’ shouted at a crowded theater. As Cliopher had intended it to.

The Prince of Kavanduru said, “Have you lost your mind?”

Cliopher had mentally alloted five minutes for the initial round of shouting, accusations, and castigations. The Grand Duchess lost patience before he did, interrupting after three and a half minutes to say, “Surely my great-aunt has misplaced the pardon, or forgotten its issuance, and will remedy the matter as soon as she is reminded? She has always been one to do her duty.” Her expression, as always, was very difficult to read.

“Of course, I too am certain that is the case,” Cliopher told her. “I have sent a message ahead to remind her of the pardon. I wish to go myself only to make quite certain of the message’s safe receipt and to ensure Saya e’Oroto-o’s safe release. It would be a pity for an honest mistake to lead to such dire consequences. Once Saya e’Oroto-o is released, and this misunderstanding is cleared up, I will be most happy to forget this mistake as a mere accident of circumstance, as does happen from time to time.”

The princes parsed the important part of that polite, euphemistic reply out instantly.

Prince Rufus slammed a palm against the table. “Your excellency, you forget yourself!” he thundered. “You would support a pack of traitors and fools over the Glorious One’s great-aunt? She has given a lifetime of devoted service to this realm! You would dare?”

“Surely the Princess Anastasiya only has the most reasonable of concerns about a known outlaw traveling through her province,” the Prince of Southern Dair said.

“Not even you could possibly risk the stability of our world for a Terror of Astandalas!” the Prince of Kavanduru cried out.

The Grand Duchess said nothing. She merely studied Cliopher’s face with that serene expression. There was a very faint purse to her lips that looked so like the expression his Radiancy wore when he was puzzled by something and trying not to show it that it sank hooks into his heart and twisted.

Cliopher had had an argument planned out, walking into this room, a very rational and reasoned argument about the rights of all Zuni citizens to the protection of a pardon and the importance of a trial under the law, and it was not going to work. He could see that now. Despite everything, despite all his reforms and all his long work, Princess Anastasiya’s rank and status mattered too much. Perhaps his Radiancy could threaten to hold her to account on principles alone without losing the support of the princes; he, Cliopher Mdang, commoner by birth, could not. It was good to discover this here, in this trial run, and not in front of Princess Anastasiya, when every word would hold lives in the balance.

He could not give less than the full truth, his full truth, to this fight. Not and be persuasive.

Well. At least it could not be harder than the letter.

Cliopher cleared his throat. “My lords,” he said, in a voice designed to carry, “have rumors come to your ears yet that his Radiancy is in fact Fitzroy Angursell?”

The entire chamber fell into a dead silence.

“I cannot, of course,” Cliopher said, into that silence, “confirm or deny officially at this time, without approval from his Radiancy. But let us suppose for this moment that it is true. This chamber has accused me many times, over the years, of being his Radiancy’s lapdog, his sycophant, his tool. I should not phrase it in such a way, but I do believe from these statements that this chamber would agree with the general assertion that I have dedicated the better part of my life to his service. You may understand, then, that I have a vested interest in ensuring that his Radiancy’s long overdue retirement goes off without a hitch, and that he is after that point left unbothered by the government and able to live the rest of his life freely and without fear.

“Now, suppose that Princess Anastasiya executes Ayasha e’Oroto-o, despite an Imperial pardon, for no reason other than the fact that she was once a member of the Red Company, and escapes penalty. Should any other member of that group spend any time on Zunidh, then, without fear of persecution? Even he who is, I think no member of this group could deny, more deserving of that freedom from fear than anyone for his thousand years of service given to this world?”

Cliopher stepped around the podium where he stood, set apart, where his Radiancy, where Fitzroy had presided over these meetings for all these years. He stepped into the center of the space, the midpoint where all the princes’ eyes drew naturally, and turned a slow circle, meeting eyes with each prince in turn. “Tell me,” he said quietly, “in service of that goal — is there anything you truly believe I would not dare?”

Silence hung for a long, tense moment.

Behind him, with a rustle of papers and a click of heels, the Grand Duchess stood. “Lord Mdang,” she said, as Cliopher turned to look at her, “I believe none of us here could question your devotion to my brother. He is, I have long thought, very lucky to have you. If you don’t object, I would like to accompany you to Xiputl to speak with my great-aunt. My family is not so large that I can so easily lose any member of it to the executioner’s block over what is, one must hope, a simple misunderstanding that can be cleared up by speaking with her directly.”

Cliopher bowed deeply to her. “I would be most grateful,” he said, entirely truthfully.

There was a quiet thump as Ludvic, standing silently back by the door, brought his heels together and snapped into a salute. “Your Excellency,” he said.

Cliopher met his gaze. “Yes, Commander Omo?”

“Permission to mobilize the guard for an investigation into a treason charge against the Princess of Xiputl, Anastasiya Princess Yra?”

“Granted,” Cliopher said quietly. Every person in the room heard it all the same; a pin dropping would be perfectly audible in this silence. “Zaoul, write up an official warrant to that effect and I will authorize it. My lords, you are dismissed.”

He, the Grand Duchess, Ludvic, and Zaoul made it halfway down the corridor before a clomping footstep alerted them to someone else’s presence. Cliopher turned to look behind him.

It was Prince Rufus. “I’d better come along too,” he announced. “Not that Princess Anastasiya is stupid enough to stand against you in this kind of mood, but in case she is feeling more suicidal than I’ve ever known her to, I may as well get her thinking about Xiputl annexed into Amboloyo. She’ll stay alive out of sheer spite to avoid that.”

Cliopher entirely agreed with him. Oh, it was not an entirely altruistic offer on Rufus’s part; if Princess Anastasiya did feel committed to destroying anything of Fitzroy’s that she could, even at the cost of her own life and her life’s work, then Cliopher would have a hard time denying Rufus the annexation in the aftermath after this.

It was a risk he felt comfortable taking. “Your company would be most appreciated, Prince Rufus,” he said, somewhat more ironically than he had said it to the Grand Duchess.

Xiputl came into sight at dawn the next day. Cliopher was awake to see it, standing by the windows of the sky ship to watch the sun rise.

He felt, for once, no restlessness, no itch, to urge to claw his way out of his own skin. He had looked at the empty letter tray when he woke and felt — not nothing, but like a muffling blanket had been spread over the nauseating anxiety. It had not been a perfect letter, but it was the best that Cliopher could do right now, in these conditions and with Fitzroy so far away, not here to talk through it with him.

He had his ke’e, he had his ke’ea. He could navigate his way through this crisis with the Princess of Xiputl or he could not. Fitzroy’s answer to his letter would come when it would come and no sooner. Either way, he had done all he could. Time would tell, now, what the fruits of his labors would be.

 Ludvic, after a while, came to join him. He stood silently next to Cliopher for a long time before he spoke. “There’s something I’ve been wondering about, but I don’t know whether this is the right time to ask about it.”

Cliopher glanced over at him and raised his eyebrows inquisitively.

“Conju called you a pacifist, the other month.”

Ah. Yes. Cliopher could understand why Ludvic would wonder about that right now. “That is what I would consider my philosophy on violence, yes.”

The sunlight shone off the water of the ocean below, casting great sheets of light that rippled and trembled with the morning breeze and the waves.

“You don’t know how to fight, and you don’t wish to learn,” Ludvic observed.

“I don’t know how to fight with swords,” Cliopher corrected, with a rueful smile, remembering the many fist-fights he’d gotten into after his father’s death. “It’s not a distaste for the physical acts of violence, it’s… my lifelong dream, my life’s work, has been for a world without war. I’ve long felt that… that the way to get there cannot be through violence. When violence is an acceptable answer to a problem, there will always be a point where you reach for it, because the cost of it is less than the alternative. No, I know, this still doesn’t resolve the contradiction.”

Ludvic listened patiently. Waiting.

“When I went home after the Fall, I talked my way there… I was held prisoner in the Grey Mountains, I had to bargain and negotiate for food, I feared starving… I came back to the Palace and still I did not want to learn, still I did not want to know how to fight. I wanted to bring peace. But I am a pragmatist as much as I am an idealist. I work with the world that is, not the world that I want to see. And it does feel different to me when death is legally prescribed rather than extrajudicially applied. Perhaps that’s a cop-out. I think Aioru would probably say that it is.” Aioru was here on the sky ship, elsewhere, in his own room perhaps, asleep or watching the sun rise himself.

Ludvic said, “You don’t mind that violence is a part of my skillset. Or Rhodin’s.”

“No,” Cliopher agreed. “It’s a tool to an end. Not a tool that I choose to use myself, but one that has uses nonetheless. And I am not here on my own behalf, and it’s not my life that’s on the line. I know how to do what needs to be done in service of something more important than myself. Is this a terrible muddle? It feels like a terrible muddle. Maybe I’m just a hypocrite.”

Ludvic cocked his head to one side. “It makes sense to me.” He smiled suddenly. “But I have known you for a long time now.”

They stood by the window in silence for a while longer, watching Xiputl grow closer and closer.

Eventually the Grand Duchess joined them, and after a minute or two Ludvic excused himself and left.

Cliopher kept his eyes fixed on the landscape below them, even as he kept his body angled slightly towards the Grand Duchess, projecting openness without pressure as best he could.

The sky ship was low enough now that Cliopher could see Xiputl’s shoreline, see the waves lapping against the beach, that dance where the waves met the shore. He wanted to go home, but he did not only want to go home: he wanted to take Fitzroy home, to take his hand and walk with him along a beach like this and tell him the stories of Ani and Vou’a, the ones that he had not been brave enough to say on their vacation.

The Grand Duchess said, “I saw him at That Party. Fitzroy Angursell, I mean. I noticed the resemblance — who wouldn’t? — but I thought… perhaps he was the child of my uncle who left court. Such a child, I thought, would have learned his anger at the empire, at the Emperor, at his father’s knee. I never thought… even knowing, at that point, that I had a brother, I never imagined…”

She did not go on. Cliopher watched her expression in the reflection in the glass. He offered, “I did not know myself until very recently, after he had already left on his quest.”

Her head inclined slightly towards him.

She did not speak again, but Cliopher thought, all the same, that he could guess at what she had come here for. “I do have a way to contact him,” he said, “and could pass along a letter for you, if you would like.”

Fitzroy’s sister considered this for a long moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “I would like that. Thank you.”

Princess Anastasiya awaited their arrival in her throne room, her thin face drawn tight and sharp with bitterness. She went through the courtesies welcoming the Viceroy of Zunidh and two leaders of other provinces to her realm; Cliopher and the others went through the return courtesies with equal care. He had to try hard to not to burst into deeply inappropriate laughter by the end of it.

That done, they looked at each other, Princess Anastasiya and Cliopher. She said, “It is true, then.”

For the briefest of moments, Cliopher considered denying it. Then he gave it up as useless. He had told the four princes present at the meeting; the others would know within the week, if they did not already.

And he had confirmed it to her already, by coming here himself. (Not that Cliopher would not have gone to a great deal of effort to save any member of the Red Company from the headman’s axe, even before he had known. But Cliopher’s long admiration for the Red Company was not something Anastasiya of Yra knew about; his long years of devotion to his lord was.)

That, perhaps, was why she had scheduled the execution exactly far enough out so that he could make it in person if he exerted all possible effort, but only then. To see if this mattered enough to him to come himself to stop it.

“Yes,” Cliopher said.

Princess Anastasiya let loose with a torrent of imprecations of Fitzroy’s character, his weaknesses, the faults and flaws in his upbringing. Cliopher was better prepared for it now and kept his face mild throughout, the patient listening face of the Viceroy of Zunidh, of the rising tanà. He let her spill her vitriol out onto the floor, purge the festering rot of the years of accumulated bitterness, and waited for his opening.

Eventually she took a deep, shuddering breath and hissed, “Why did he even accept the office, if he scorned it so?”

There it was. The most honest answer was, Cliopher knew, ‘because he had no choice,’ but the second-most honest answer was more useful. “Because it was his duty.”

Her face curdled. “What does he know about duty?”

“As much as you, madam,” Cliopher said. “Do you think Fitzroy Angursell, a man who loves freedom and hates empire, sought the throne or wanted it? Do you think it was a reward for him and not a prison?”

“It should have been Shallyr,” the Princess Anastasiya hissed. (The Grand Duchess, behind him, made a small noise, a small movement.) “It should have been —”

“But it was not,” Cliopher said. He held her gaze. “And it was not you. It went to him, and he did his duty, the same as you did.”

“What could you know about it?” she hissed.

That was a dig, probably, at his commoner blood, his barbarian ancestry. “About what it means to rule? A little, now. About duty and how bitter it can taste? Plenty. I have always greatly respected your commitment to yours.” Until now. He did not say the words, but he thought them, and he could see from the expression on her face that she heard them.

“And now you have come to see if I will do mine once again,” she said.

“Yes.” He considered her, the spite in her expression, the long accumulated years of anger and hate, and decided she needed more of a push. “Of course,” he said diffidently, “if you’ve decided to throw yours aside, to destroy your legacy in an act of treason that would demand the executioner’s axe, I would — not be pleased to do so, but would nonetheless oblige you. If you are willing to see history note his unfailing commitment to his duty where yours faltered at the end of your life. If you have given up on your desire to outlive his Radiancy.”

“You dare?” she hissed.

For Fitzroy? “Yes,” he said. He held her gaze. “Is this where you stop?”

The Grand Duchess spoke for a bit, behind him, and Prince Rufus too. Cliopher listened with half an ear, but most of his attention was attuned to the princess’s face, the flickers of her expression. He had said his piece. He waited, listening to the wind and the tides of this negotiation, to see where she would go, how she would move.

They fell silent after a time, and their whole party waited for her response. Princess Anastasiya’s eyes moved from the Grand Duchess’s, to Prince Rufus’s, and finally settled on Cliopher’s with an expression that suggested that if she were any other kind of person, she would spit on his face.

“And you expect me to attend the Jubilee in a month and celebrate his reign, that has left Astandalas a wreckage behind him and destroyed a hundred generations’ work?” she said.

Cliopher kept his rising triumph off his face. “No,” Cliopher said. “I expect you to attend the Jubilee for exactly long enough to make your vows to the new Lady Magus of Zunidh. Should you prefer to skip the remainder of the ceremonies and never speak with his Radiancy again, I believe that can be arranged.”

“Good,” she said. She made a dismissive gesture at one of the guards at the far end of the room. “Release our prisoner.” To Cliopher, she said, “I assume you’ll want to see her freed and gone from my realm.”

“Please,” he said politely. “And Commander Omo will accompany your man to release her, if you don’t mind.” Not that he really expected her to have given the guards orders to kill Ayasha even if given a verbal order to release her, but it was the principle of the thing.

Ludvic followed her guards out, Ato falling into step behind him as a silent shadow. Cliopher’s own guards stayed with him. Princess Anastasiya, apparently done with him, went through the forms and courtesies once again before she spun on her heel and strode out of the throne room, dismissing him and his entourage completely.

“Well,” Cliopher said, turning back to the Grand Duchess and Prince Rufus, “that went better than I hoped. I must thank the both of you for —”

And then the floor split open with a crack. A flare of blinding light and a wave of overwhelming darkness rolled over Cliopher, and he fell.

Chapter Text

The first thing Ludvic said when he found Cliopher was, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Cliopher said. He had been caught by some kind of magic and deposited, feather-light, on the ground completely unharmed. He stared around at the scene surrounding them. “Albeit rather confused.”

Ludvic contemplated it as well. It was quite a sight: they were in the servants’ corridors beneath the throne room, only instead of being populated by servants, it contained the two of them, the Grand Duchess (unharmed by virtue of having landed on her bodyguard and inspecting the surroundings with curiosity), Prince Rufus (hobbling around with a limp, shouting), fourteen guards in the Imperial panopoly (bristling with weapons and the obvious desire to use them on people), piles of rubble from where the ceiling had collapsed, and seven statues.

Seven human, incredibly detailed, incredibly lifelike statues.

“I think this is one of the head priests of the Ouranatha,” the Grand Duchess said, peering at the statue closest to her.

“I have always wondered what Himself’s protections on you would do if they ever needed to activate,” Ludvic said after a moment. “Cliopher, do you recall when I told you to stop picking fights with the Ouranatha, because they were going to try to assassinate you?”

“I do recall that, yes,” Cliopher said. “Clearly I should have listened to you. You may say that you told me so as often and for as long as you like.” He looked around him and added, doing his best to not sound too bewildered by it, “You think Fitzroy’s magic did this?”

Ludvic was stepping between each statue, inspecting each one carefully, in all their vivid precision. One of them had a pinky finger in his ear; another a dagger held between two fingers. “Unless you have some other kind of magical protections on you designed to respond with extreme prejudice against people who attempt to harm you.”

“Well,” Cliopher said, “when you put it like that.”

“Rhodin did describe them to me as both very thorough and very nasty,” Ludvic said. Cliopher had to take a moment to consider what Rhodin, second-in-command of the Imperial Guard, an organization which thought a planetary mage required a pair of heavily armed guards in his presence at all times, would consider ‘very thorough and very nasty.’ “He owes me money,” Ludvic went on. “I told him somebody would be stupid enough to set them off eventually, no matter how blatant He made them.”

“Fitzroy did this?” the woman behind Ludvic asked, dark bushy eyebrows furrowed and arms crossed. “Sounds about right. You’d be his friend, then, your excellency?”

“Cliopher, please,” Cliopher said. It had been altogether too long a day for a Terror of Astandalas to be calling him honorifics. “And you must be Ayasha e'Oroto-o.”

It was, of course, a little difficult to confirm her identity, since all they had to go on was decades-old descriptions of her in Fitzroy’s poetry, but Cliopher was inclined to believe it was her from her sheer unruffled attitude to having been arrested, threatened with execution, released at the last hour by personal order of the Viceroy of Zunidh, and then been tertiarily involved in an assassination attempt foiled by turning the perpetrators into statues. That she wandered off after three minutes to stick her nose into the fight Prince Rufus was busy picking with Princess Anastasiya’s steward only clinched matters.

Increasing volumes of people kept descending on the scene: Aioru, even more guardsmen (where had Ludvic stashed them all?), Princess Anastasiya’s guards… Cliopher told himself that he would get up and involve himself in the mess in just a moment. He just needed a minute to rally himself first.

Then Princess Anastasiya herself showed up on the scene, and Prince Rufus started bellowing accusations that she must have been involved in this, and Cliopher heaved a sigh and pushed himself to his feet, time up. He started that old familiar process of putting on his court face, pushing the steel into his spine, readying himself for —

“I seem to be a little late to the party here.” The voice was so familiar and so beloved and so completely unexpected that what felt like every muscle in Cliopher’s body locked up all at once. Silence began to spill out from the end of the hallway where the voice came from as people turned to see and then, in a frantic scramble, stopped what they were doing and dropped into obeisance. “Would someone care to explain to me the sequence of events that led to a murder attempt on my Viceroy?”

Cliopher did not fall into that obeisance along with everybody else. It was all he could to turn around and look at the other end of the hall.

And there he was at last: the sun of Cliopher’s life, his lord, his friend, Fitzroy Angursell. His posture and his raised eyebrow were both recognizably his Radiancy, but more relaxed than Cliopher had ever seen him; his hands were in the pockets of his legendary scarlet mantle, and he had a full head of riotous curls bundled in a violet scarf. The lion eyes were alive with magic and vitality.

He looked like — he looked like himself, like all of himself, both halves brought into focus and harmony together at the same time. And he was looking at Cliopher.

“All right, Kip?” Fitzroy asked, quiet enough that few people outside of the nearest would hear it, a question only for Cliopher.

Cliopher nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure he could speak right now. Fitzroy’s gaze was intent, with a power and a pressure behind it that was as heavy and as obscurely comforting as a weighted blanket.

Some of the weight, that sensation of banked power, eased after a moment, but perhaps that had not been the source of Cliopher’s speechlessness, because he still found himself lost for words.

The whole hall was silent now and prone, with the exception (of course) of Princess Anastasiya, who rose from her obeisance without prompting to launch into welcoming courtesies that somehow managed to sound, tonally, exactly like an elder cursing at a rowdy teen to get off their lawn.

Fitzroy let her get a sentence and a half in before he raised a finger and she fell silent. “Let me rephrase,” he amended. “I would like to borrow Lord Mdang —” His gaze scanned the hall. “—Commander Omo, and Chancellor Aioru to discuss the events that led up to this incident. The rest of you may resume your activities.” He gestured a dismissal at them and then spun on his heel, with a quick flick of a glance to confirm that Cliopher was following him.

Cliopher was, of course, and he let himself fall into Fitzroy’s wake and follow him away from the crowd and out of the palace altogether.

“What happened?” Fitzroy demanded as soon as they were out of earshot of potential eavesdroppers, in a voice that was so carefully even that Cliopher immediately knew he was exerting tight control on himself.

“The Ouranatha, my lord,” Ludvic said, “or so it would seem. As all the perpetrators seem to have been turned into statues in the first fifteen seconds of the attack and before any of them could come within more than ten feet of Cliopher, I cannot pretend to more information than that. The ceiling collapse was the worst of it, and I checked Cliopher for injuries from that.”

“Oh,” Fitzroy said. “Well. Good.” He showed no sign of stopping his swift strides away from the collapsed throne room, steering them outside of the palace entirely and out into the fresh air.

Ludvic went on, “I have to say, my lord, I was not expecting you to be able to get here so quickly. Were you not in Daun?”

“No, I was about half a day outside of Solaara when I felt the protections on Kip trigger.” Oh, but it was so good to hear his voice. Cliopher didn’t know how to do anything other than drink in his presence. “I had a pre-existing miniature teleportation spell of a sorts to send letters back and forth to him, and I managed to hook into it to make it… somewhat less miniature.”

“I’m amazed you’re upright and not flat on your back after that kind of magic,” Ludvic said.

“Raphael probably is, as he’s the one who powered it for me. I didn’t want to burn all my reserves on the trip here when I thought they might be needed. Not that they seem to be,” Fitzroy added, sounding faintly chagrined by this. “You all seem to have the matter well in hand, with no need for my presence at all.”

“I don’t know if I’d say that,” Ludvic murmured.

At that Fitzroy’s head turned, not towards Ludvic but towards Cliopher. He had been walking a few steps away and behind Fitzroy, his habitual position, but Fitzroy slowed until they were walking side by side, close enough that their arms were nearly brushing, close enough that Cliopher could, if he dared, reach out and take Fitzroy’s hand.

Aioru’s voice, and the reminder of his presence, kept Cliopher from doing it. “Did you come for Saya e'Oroto-o, my lord? She’s all right, we can assure you.”

“Always reassuring when people feel the need to open with that,” Fitzroy observed. There was still a slight edge to his voice. “I did not. Is Ayasha here? Finding Raphael for me not enough for you, Kip?”

Cliopher cleared his throat. Speaking should not be this difficult. “Technically I believe they both found me. But yes, she’s here.”

“There you are,” Fitzroy murmured under his breath, gaze sharp on Cliopher’s face. Then, louder, “Is she why you’re here?” His face clouded over. “Weathering assassination attempts?”

“She ran into a bit of trouble with Princess Anastasiya,” Cliopher hedged, “but it’s resolved now, everything’s fine.”

Ludvic spoiled this effort by saying, “And what he means by that is that Princess Anastasiya threatened to execute Saya e'Oroto-o for treason in violation of your pardon, so we flew out here to rescue her. Whether the Ouranatha’s attempted assassination of Cliopher shortly afterwards was in concert with Princess Anastasiya or independently remains to be seen.”

Fitzroy stopped dead and turned to stare at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, damn it,” Cliopher realized, “this is going to be absolute hell to untangle with the Council of Princes.”

“Cliopher,” Ludvic said, “nobody cares about the Council of Princes right now.”

“I, for one, certainly do not,” Fitzroy said.

“Because I promised them I wouldn’t press charges against Princess Anastasiya so long as she released Ayasha,” Cliopher went on, “not that I should have had to, but I just couldn’t see a way around it, and now she has, so if I have to charge her for treason again after all —”

“Sir,” Aioru said, “I don’t think —”

Cliopher’s mind was busy following the train of thought to its logical, grim conclusion. “They’re probably going to accuse me of orchestrating it myself and blaming the princess,” he said. “The Prince of Haion City would take any opportunity to accuse me of bad faith behavior right now, what with Nijan.”

“Kip,” Fitzroy said.

That hot and awful thing was bubbling up in Cliopher’s chest again, because he wouldn’t even be able to go with Fitzroy, would he? One more thing to do, there was always one more thing to do, and things were much more unstable than they had been when Fitzroy had left — some custodian of the world Cliopher had turned out to be — and after all this time, once again, “We’ll have to postpone the fucking Nijani investiture, because the Council of Princes will want to hash this out first, and —”

An elegant, long-fingered hand covered Cliopher’s mouth. “Kip,” Fitzroy said, not unkindly, “hush a moment.”

Cliopher hushed.

“I have gotten distracted,” Fitzroy said pensively.  The palm of his hand was hot against the skin of Cliopher’s cheek and his mouth. The angle of his wrist looked mildly uncomfortable. “I have a great many opinions on people trying to kill both Kip and Ayasha but I think, Ludvic, that you know those opinions well? Yes? Good. I’m leaving that matter in your hands, then. If it helps, I may assure you my great-aunt cannot have been a conspirator in the plot against Kip, as she is walking and speaking and not a piece of living statuary.”

Ludvic nodded gravely at this information. Cliopher had to bite back a half-hysterical giggle.

“Now,” Fitzroy went on, “what I actually came here to do, before all the attempted murders, was to see if I could borrow my Viceroy here for — well, for the foreseeable future, actually. I have been told by a number of reliable sources that his retirement has been repeatedly delayed already in the interest of preserving the world’s peace. Will the situation down there, or indeed the rest of the world, actively dissolve into chaos and anarchy if Cliopher vanishes until the Jubilee, or may he embark on his long-overdue retirement now?”

Ludvic and Aioru looked at each other. Cliopher considered opening his mouth to speak and decided that the continued presence of Fitzroy’s hand against his mouth meant that Fitzroy did not yet want Cliopher’s input on the matter, and so stayed silent.

Aioru inhaled, straightening his shoulders. “My lord,” he said, “if I may speak quite freely?”

“Certainly,” Fitzroy said.

Cliopher braced himself for it, whatever it was. For whatever task urgently required his specific attention, for whatever work still could not be left undone —

“It would be a great help if the both of you could leave Solaara, and in fact ideally Zunidh entirely, and not come back until the Jubilee.”

What? Cliopher said, “The Council of Princes —” into Fitzroy’s hand.

Despite the muffled quality of it, Aioru clearly understood exactly what Cliopher said, because he said, “Sir, you’re right that the Council of Princes would have kicked up a fuss — until yesterday, when you heavily implied to four of the princes that you would execute Princess Anastasiya for treason if she refused to release Ayasha e'Oroto-o, and you weren’t even bluffing.”

Fitzroy’s hand had slipped away from Cliopher’s face at some time during this statement, so Cliopher was able to say clearly, “Of course I wasn’t bluffing. She tried to kill Fitzroy’s friend!”

“The Prince of Kavanduru and the Prince of Southern Dair both mentioned your retirement in a wistful manner to me before we even left Zunidh,” Aioru went on. “If anyone else makes any noises of complaint, I will simply mention to them that with the two of you gone, nobody will be trying to make any new administrative districts, since we hadn’t even fully finished sorting out the Mae Irionese before this business with Nijan happened. Or picking fights with the Ouranatha, since with you gone we have a good pretext to drop the remaining proposed changes to the lèse-majesté laws.”

“I feel as if we ought to be able to leverage the fact that they just tried to kill me to at least get the one about obeying the emperor’s every whim repealed,” Cliopher couldn’t help but interject.

Fitzroy, next to him, made a slightly strangled noise. The expression on his face was an odd one.

Aioru sighed.

“No more repealing sedition laws or legalizing treasonous poetry without you, either,” Ludvic observed.

“I’d finished with the sedition laws already,” Cliopher pointed out.

Fitzroy’s expression cracked abruptly into helpless, silent laughter. He covered his mouth, shoulders shaking.

“Besides, if we publicize your retirement and departure from Solaara, Lords Magi and other Red Company affiliates will stop visiting in search of you. You’ve already sent the Red Company’s pardons to the other worlds of the Empire and publicized their freedom, what more work could there be to do on that front?” Ludvic added. His abrupt smile was impish. “That’s not even considering whatever monstrous project you’d cook up if anyone tried to make you stay in Solaara after all this. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t be so cross that you’d be more than willing to pick a fight with the first pillar of the government to step a single toe out of line.”

Fitzroy’s laughter was significantly less silent at this point.

Cliopher said, with as much dignity as he could manage, “I don’t do well without something to do.”

“We know,” Aioru told him. “Sir, the entire world knows that at this point. Please take that skill and apply it somewhere that is not Solaara, so that we can actually prepare for the Jubilee before it happens in, gods, six weeks.”

“Right,” Fitzroy managed, voice still trembling with laughter, “this is much less browbeating than I thought this would take. We’ll just go, then, shall we, and leave that mess down there to the two of you?”

Aioru nodded. “We can handle it from here.”

Ludvic smiled at the two of them. “Have fun.”

And then the two of them were gone, making their way back towards the palace, leaving Cliopher and Fitzroy up on the grassy field together in the sunlight.

Fitzroy started talking more or less as soon as Ludvic and Aioru were out of earshot. “Was that all right? I assumed that you wouldn’t want to deal with either Prince Rufus or my great-aunt, given the choice, because really who would —”

Cliopher felt a little dizzy with how fast events had unfolded, with the realization that he was — he was done. Just like that. He was done.

“— but I should have asked, only I also didn’t want you to involve yourself out of a sense of duty when there’s really no need to — oh,” Fitzroy said, cutting himself off abruptly as Cliopher turned and hugged him.

Cliopher couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop himself, didn’t even try. He’d missed him so terribly — he wanted so badly to be closer — and then Fitzroy’s arms came around him, clutching him tight. Cliopher pressed his face into the crook of Fitzroy’s neck and clung to him.

“Oh,” Fitzroy whispered again. One of his arms had wrapped around Cliopher’s waist; his other hand had settled on the back of Cliopher’s neck. “Hi.”

“Hi, Fitzroy,” Cliopher managed, before adding, stupidly, “You’re here.”

“That I am,” Fitzroy murmured. His breath tickled the hair on Cliopher’s temple. Cliopher could feel his breath in his lungs, too, the movement as he inhaled and exhaled, the beautifully human rhythm of it. “I’m sorry it took so long.” His voice was barely audible when he said, “I should have come a long time ago.”

Cliopher didn’t care, he didn’t, only that Fitzroy was here now, but all the same he could feel something in him ease at the words, some small knot of hurt unraveling and smoothing out. Fitzroy was squeezing him tight against his chest, and yet strangely Cliopher felt like he could take a true deep breath for the first time in a long while.

Fitzroy’s grip loosened into something more relaxed, after a time, though he didn’t let go, kept Cliopher’s head tucked half under his chin with the hand on the back of his neck. Still, some part of Cliopher thought that he ought to pull away soon, maybe, not be so — so — but then Fitzroy started to play idly with Cliopher’s hair.

Cliopher made a low noise in the back of his throat at that, and Fitzroy’s hand paused immediately. “Sorry,” he murmured, “should I not —”

“No,” Cliopher managed, “no, you’re fine, it — it feels nice.” An understatement.

Fitzroy’s breath caught. After a moment, his hand resumed its motion, playing with the little wisps of hair that had grown out a bit longer than Cliopher usually let them, scratching lightly at the base of Cliopher’s scalp.

Cliopher felt like he was melting, like he was slowly liquefying against Fitzroy. Like all the burdens that he’d taken on over the course of the last year — of the last seven — of the last decades were falling away from him slowly, one by one, set free by the gentle, careful touches.

The spell was broken, after some interminable length of time, when Cliopher was more a puddle than anything, by a slight tremor in Fitzroy’s frame that heralded him laughing quietly. “You, my dear Kip, are an absolute menace. How many laws did you repeal, exactly? Or try to?”

Cliopher had to think about that for a moment. “Ten? No, eleven. It would have been fifteen if the Ouranatha had been less obstinate.” At least he’d been able to repeal the one prohibiting saying no to the emperor. It was a little irritating that the one declaring the emperor a living god would probably survive intact, though.

“Of course they were the only obstinate party in this negotiation.” Fitzroy’s voice was full of — laughter, yes, but less than Cliopher would have thought, instead so brimming with an affection that was deep and rich and thick that Cliopher had to draw back then to see the expression that matched the tone.

The way he was looking at Cliopher — the fact that he’d dropped everything and come to get Cliopher, even after that letter, especially after that letter — the fact that he’d come home the way he promised — all of it made it easy for Cliopher to confess, “It’s possible I was more obstinate than usual. I missed you and it made me grumpy.”

“And to think I just wrote a lot of poetry about missing you,” Fitzroy murmured.

“Probably a better outlet than mine,” Cliopher admitted. “I only made myself and everyone else cross, but the poetry made me very happy.” He couldn’t entirely keep from ducking his head at that, his voice going soft.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. When I stepped foot in Nijan and saw a copy of Aurora in a place of pride in the display case in the first bookstore I passed, I…” There was a waver in Fitzroy’s voice that pulled Cliopher’s eyes back up to his face.

For a long moment they just looked at each other.

“You look good,” Cliopher said shyly. “More… comfortable in yourself.”

“I am, I think,” Fitzroy said. He was studying Cliopher’s face so carefully. “You, on the other hand, look very worn.” There was a quiet hurt in his voice at that. He brought a hand up and brushed a thumb against Cliopher’s cheekbone, his finger trembling very slightly. “I really ought to have stayed longer in Nijan. Or made it clearer to the Council of Princes that they weren’t to hassle my dear Kip so.”

Cliopher snorted. “Some things are beyond our power.”

Fitzroy was still following his train of thought. “Or came to see if I could steal you away ages ago the way I wanted to.” His eyes were bright and intent on Cliopher’s face. “I told myself I was being very responsible, resisting the urge for so long, the more fool I. I used to imagine you lecturing me about the importance of orderly transfers of powers on days I particularly missed you. I find policy discussions endearing now, it’s really very appalling.”

That startled a proper laugh out of Cliopher. The motion of it shook off Fitzroy’s hand and he tilted back towards it again, wanting — Fitzroy’s fingers bumped against his cheek. Fitzroy’s breath caught, and then his palm flattened out to cup Cliopher’s cheek properly. Cliopher leaned into the touch and just looked at him, too full of feeling to have room for words inside of him.

Fitzroy said, in an abrupt rush of words, “I wrote you a letter. Another one, I mean, a response to the last one you sent me, and I thought I ought to send it on ahead so that you wouldn’t fret, only then I thought that it’s awful to know you’re upset and not be there in person to be able to talk with you about it and what if I mucked up the words, I already felt like I’d made a hash of things, so then I thought I’d just give it to you in person, and then later I thought maybe I ought to have written ahead to tell you I was coming, only by then I was almost there and —”

It was much harder for the awful knotting fear at the thought of Fitzroy’s response to his letter to get a grip on Cliopher’s heart when Fitzroy was rambling anxiously and touching his cheek and watching him with those huge eyes, full with an uncertain tenderness. Cliopher pressed a kiss to the meat of Fitzroy’s palm and Fitzroy fell abruptly silent. Cliopher said, “That was probably a good idea. I want to read it.”

“Now?”

“Not right this moment. This doesn’t seem like the best place for it, for one.”

“No,” Fitzroy agreed, looking around them. It was quiet here now, with only the sunlight and the whisper of the wind in the leaves to keep them company, but the reminder of the rest of the world brought the faint sound of clamor and hubbub that still burst free of the palace from time to time back to the forefront of Cliopher’s attention. “In fact, we should probably make our escape before anyone comes looking for us.” He let his hand drop from Cliopher’s cheek and took Cliopher’s hand instead, leading him away from the palace.

Cliopher laced their fingers together. “What about Ayasha?”

“I expect Ludvic will send her out after us soon enough. I certainly have no desire to brave that mess.”

“No,” Cliopher agreed. “I’ll have to get my bags from the sky ship, but if we’re quick about it maybe we can still leave before they sort things out down there.”

Fitzroy shot him a crooked, sidelong smile. “Running away, my lord Mdang?”

“You started it,” Cliopher retorted. “And I‘ve only spent the last five months trying to detangle myself from all this, I refuse to get dragged back in at the last moment. In fact I think we should avoid Solaara altogether until the Jubilee.”

“Too risky,” Fitzroy agreed gravely, eyes dancing. “You don’t need anything from there?”

“I think I’ve got everything I — oh, damn, my oboe.”

“Rhodin and Raphael and the others are still on a sky ship to Solaara right now, I’m sure we can deputize one of them to pick it up for you.” There was a speculative glint in his eye when Fitzroy said, “Can I convince you to sing with me in the meantime? Your comment about wanting to study as a singer when you were younger has me curious about your voice now.”

Cliopher flushed. “The context of being told I wasn’t very good at it didn’t deter you?” Their shoulders bumped together. Fitzroy’s hand was warm in his, a little bit sweaty, gloriously real.

Fitzroy laughed. “Not in the slightest! I have listened to you understate your own abilities for far too long to actually take such an assertion at face value. Besides, I’ll enjoy it regardless of how tuneful you are.”

Cliopher’s blush was only deepening at this point. “I still want my oboe. For your unnamed song, the one that I’ve been helping you with.” There weren’t any words to that one.

“Our song,” Fitzroy corrected him. “Don’t think you’re getting away without co-authorship on that one, Kip, you’ve written or rewritten half the song at this point. But you’re right, I would like to play that one with you.”

“Does it have a name yet, or must I continue calling it the unnamed song?”

“I thought we’d just established that it’s our song, and therefore I believe you get equal stake in any name-giving.”

“I’m not particularly original with names,” Cliopher said, “and besides, you already have one in mind, don’t you?”

Fitzroy shot a narrow-eyed look at him. “What makes you say that?”

Cliopher shrugged and smiled at him. “Just a hunch. Am I wrong?”

“It’s possible that I have an idea for it,” Fitzroy allowed.

The Csiven Flyer

New Releases

1. Fitzroy Angursell and Cliopher Mdang, ‘The Long Way Home.’