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Rhodin walked up behind the boy trying to balance a bucket on top of the partially open front door to Cliopher’s small apartment.
He watched the boy for a long moment, considering the situation. The boy’s skin was a near black and his clothes were quite fine, if rather dingy and wrinkled, but his hair had grown long enough to be a tangled mess.
“What do you have there?” Rhodin asked.
Rhodin easily caught the boy when he yelped and fell backwards off the pile of crates he had stacked to climb and reach the top of Cliopher’s door. Rhodin skipped them both back out of the way as the crates, not balanced the most precisely before the boy tumbled off them, wobbled and clattered to the ground, the bucket tipping to spill over the crates and clatter to the ground with them as the falling crates knocked the door open. A few of the crates had broken open on impact, and showed their splintery guts to the sky.
“Hey!” the boy protested, wiggling in Rhodin’s grasp. “Let me go! You ruined it! Now I have to try something different!”
“What were you even trying to do?” Rhodin asked, eyeing the pile of wet wood - and more importantly, the open door. Rhodin knew how difficult it was to get into Cliopher’s rooms without authorization.
“It’s his fault that they’re messing with my room! They could have just left it alone!”
“And what does that have to do with the bucket?” Rhodin asked, hefting the boy up so he could hold him more firmly.
The boy seemed to have given up on wiggling free, and was instead clutching at Rhodin’s tunic, scowling up at him.
“Why do you care?”
“Wel, I’m going to have to clean this up, so I want to know why I will need to be doing so, and what exactly I’ll be cleaning up,” Rhodin said.
The boy wrinkled his nose and sniffed, looking only a little mollified. “Well. If I can just get rid of him, they’ll stop messing with my room, won’t they? And I heard someone say that he’s filth, and Nanny always said that the first thing to do when you need to get rid of filth is to soak it with soapy water.”
Rhodin nodded along solemnly as he followed the boy’s logic. He was a little surprised that what he had said had actually worked to get him answers - the boy must have some great respect for his Nanny to have listened so closely to her speaking of a task he would never be expected to do.
“So then, the bucket just had soap and water?” Rhodin checked.
“Yes,” the boy said. He wiggled again in Rhodin’s grip, the huffed. “When are you going to let me go? I told you what you need to know to clean up!”
“Well, I can’t just clean up now can I? I need to make sure you don’t make the mess again, or I’ll need to do this all over again.”
“I won’t do the same thing again! Mama said that doing the same thing over and over is stupid , and I’m not stupid!”
“And where are your mama and your nanny?” Rhodin asked, turning away from the open door to Cliopher’s apartment and making his way to the main hallway where he would see if he could find a page to send for the guard. “Cliopher’s people shouldn’t be disturbing any inhabited rooms, and you should be with your mama and your nanny.”
“I don’t need my mama or my nanny anymore! I’m grown up! I’m nine years old already!” the boy protested, attempting to wiggle out of Rhodin’s grip again.
Rhodin was fairly certain that the boy was not, in fact, nine years old yet. He was probably not even seven.
“I’ll have you know that my mama didn’t like me, but I still had to stay with her until I was nearly twenty,” Rhodin said.
“Until you were twenty? That’s forever!”
“That’s eleven more years, which is longer than you’ve been alive, yes,” Rhodin said. “So, if I had to stay with my mama that long, you should really still be with your mama or your nanny, don’t you think?”
The boy looked away now, his fists tightening on Rhodin’s tunic as Rhodin waved down a page. The boy was quiet as Rhodin spoke with the page, arranging for some of the on duty palace guards to come clean up the mess at Cliopher’s front door, and to guard it until Cliopher was abe to confirm that his belongings - and any classified documents he might have had in his rooms - hadn’t been touched.
“I didn’t mess with his things,” the boy said as the page hurried away.
“I believe you,” Rhodin said as he moved down the hall, heading for the small sitting area he’d spent time in occasionally when he wanted to be near Cliopher, but he didn’t want Cliopher to know and worry. “But my friend Cliopher knows a lot of secrets, and his door was open.”
“I opened the door,” the boy said. “If he knows a lot of secrets, his door shouldn’t be so easy to open.”
Rhodin paused. “ You opened his door? How?”
“There’s the key ring in the Master of Offices’s office,” the boy said. “You can go anywhere if you have that.”
“Hmmm.” That was good leverage against the Master of Offices. Perhaps Rhodin would finally be able to urge his Radiancy to replace him with someone who was not the Ouranatha’s creature. Rhodin resumed walking. “And what about your mama and your nanny? Don’t think I didn’t notice that you haven’t said what happened to them.”
The boy frowned at Rhodin, then his eyes slid away. “I haven’t seen mama or papa since the Fall. They were at the big party down in the city.”
“And your nanny?”
“I don’t know. One day she left, and she didn’t come back.”
“Well,” said Rhodin as he turned into the sitting area, “even if your mama and your papa and your nanny are gone, you shouldn’t be all alone.”
“I don’t have anyone else,” the boy said sulkily.
“Then we’ll find someone to take care of you,” Rhodin said. “What’s your name?”
The boy straightened as best he could in Rhodin’s grasp and stuck his nose haughtily into the air. “I’m the Most Honorable Tryphon Lord Yra.”
“Oh?” Rhodin said, hoping he sounded less worried than he actually was.
As far as he had been aware, the only surviving member of the line of Yra was the far away Princess Anastasiya.
“And who are your parents?”
“My mama’s Chryse Marchioness Yra, and my papa is Euthymius Lord Argyris.”
“Well,” Rhodin said. Rapid fire calculations spun in the back of his mind, but none of them were about who should take in the boy. There were only three other members of the Imperial Family known to be alive, and his lord could not afford to allow his sister or his great aunt to raise the boy. “I know exactly who should be taking care of you then.”
This was going to be a political nightmare.