Friday Keeps Coming Next - rattyjol - Nine Worlds Series (2024)

Chapter 1 Chapter Text

Day 1

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn. He couldn’t think what had woken him, until with a nervous twist in his gut he recalled that today was the day he began his new position as the Emperor’s personal secretary.

He was not due to report to the study (the study of the Sun-on-Earth!) in the Imperial Apartments until the third hour after dawn, but there was no getting back to sleep now. He rose and dressed in his best set of Fifth Degree secretary’s robes, which he had cleaned and pressed and hung carefully on the back of his door the previous evening.

To calm his nerves, he set about the soothing routine of making himself a cup of coffee. He had brought a small bag of Vangavayen beans back to Solaara with him from his last visit home, and had been carefully rationing it out over the intervening time. He thought there was just enough left for one generous cup. If there were any day he wanted to begin with the bolstering memory of home on his tongue, he decided, it was today, and made the lot.

It was probably only due to sheer bad luck, and not nerves, that he splashed a measure of the coffee down the front of his good robes. He sighed and changed into his second-best robes—not as carefully pressed as the first, but they would do—and hoped it wouldn’t presage his first meeting with the Emperor (the Emperor!).

After a leisurely span sipping his coffee and watching the moon set as the sky slowly lightened outside his little window, Cliopher turned his thoughts to the day ahead—which, it was true, he had never entirely stopped thinking about. He decided he would allow himself a generous hour and a half to be sure of finding his way across the maze-like corridors of the Palace to the Imperial Apartments in good time, and enough extra to duck into the common refectory for breakfast on the way, though his stomach turned queasily at the thought. That left him over an hour to fill, which he spent puttering about his chambers finding small tasks to complete and reviewing the documents he had prepared for the morning’s work, though he had left them in good order the night before.

He had a small stack of letters, in their envelopes but not yet sealed, which he had not had the time to post the day before. He thought of adding a postscript about his new position, but his own roiling feelings were too new and raw to put into words just yet. And besides, it was only a probationary appointment—he might not even get past his obeisances.

At last he gave up on the pretense of productivity, straightened his robes, tucked his writing kit under his arm, and set out.

Not two hallways away, Cliopher found himself hailed by a secretary named Tabor, who was just exiting his own rooms. Perhaps the only one of Cliopher’s fellow secretaries he might tentatively call a friend, Tabor did not come from nearly so distant a hinterland as Cliopher, but he was from somewhere remote enough to be sniffed at nevertheless, and had fought and scraped for his position nearly as much as Cliopher had. Here was one person, he hoped, who would react with genuine well-wishes for his new appointment.

“Good morning, Tabor,” Cliopher said, greeting the man with as much cheer as he could muster through the nerves. “You’re back from Ysthar at last, are you? You’ll have to tell me how the embassy went at supper.”

“Forget Ysthar, Cliopher!” said Tabor, waving it aside with an airy gesture. “What about you—no one has spoken of anything else since we arrived last night, so I suppose the rumors must be true?”

“I would not recommend taking the volume of gossip as proof of its veracity,” Cliopher said dryly, “but yes. I am on my way to the Imperial Apartments now, in fact.”

“Well, gold and glory, Cliopher, don’t let me delay you,” Tabor exclaimed, hastening out of Cliopher’s path. “We’ll talk at supper, if you haven’t taken on too many airs by then, eh?” Grinning, he waved Cliopher onward.

Cliopher's morning with the Sun-on-Earth was everything he could have dreamed of, until it wasn’t.

Cliopher fled the Imperial Apartments in a blind panic, not knowing if it was tears or magic that made his eyes burn so. He could still see, floating before him like sunspots, the laughter in those golden eyes giving way to horror, and the thought that he himself had been the cause was almost more than Cliopher could bear.

By the time he’d reached his own chambers, the panic had subsided, to be replaced with ruthless practicality. If he was to be dismissed from the Palace and sent home, it would be best if his things were packed. If not— Well, best not to think about that. His things would have to be packed up regardless.

He gathered his efela, his oboe, his books, the few pieces of clothing he owned here which were not uniforms. Letters from his family which he particularly treasured, a scattering of other personal papers. He had left his writing kit behind when he fled the Emperor’s study. (He was not likely to need it again, in any case.) That was all, the sum total of his life here in the Palace. It made a meager pile.

His eyes fell on the tidy stack of letters, ready to post, which he had not had time to send out yesterday. The thought of trying to explain his uncertain situation to his mother and sister was unbearable. If he was sent home, he’d write to them on the way. If not… In that case, the letter would not be his to write. Cowardice, perhaps? Still.

Cliopher scrounged up some paper and pens and inks that had not been in his writing kit, and settled at the little table where he had sat—only this morning?—to watch the sun rise. He would write a letter to Basil, he decided. This did not seem like such an insurmountable obstacle as writing to his mother, somehow, perhaps because he didn't know if Basil would ever read it. Even so, he could not bring himself to put words to the second option, to what would happen if he was not sent home.

(It would be worth it, though. If he was sent home, or if he was—not. It would be worth it for those hours when he had been in his Radiancy’s presence, written down his words, made him laugh. To know that all those years of drudgery, failure, loneliness, disappointment, had been each of them one step closer to that room, to that man, to the future he had glimpsed like a far-off island when he picked up the portrait in Saya Dorn’s shrine.

Perhaps this was why he was unable to write to his mother: because he could not bring himself to regret it at all.)

When he was finished, he sat and sang snatches of the Lays to himself as they came to him; he prayed to gods who he knew were far away; he thought of golden eyes shining with laughter for one brief, heartstopping moment. And he waited.

Day 2

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn. He must have fallen asleep, though he couldn’t imagine how. No one had told him to leave the Palace, and no guards had come to arrest him, either. He rose and dressed in the dark, then sat and waited some more, as the bells rang out dawn, first hour, second hour. Perhaps he was not to be dismissed after all?

He gathered himself and went to the Master of Offices, from whom he had received his assignment, only two days ago. The man was harried and in a fine temper, and at Cliopher’s query snapped, “Yes, you’re to be in the Imperial Apartments at the third hour,” and turned away to berate a subordinate about a missing report. Cliopher took the hint, and showed himself out.

Just as before, the guards pounded their spearbutts on the floor as they announced him. He was not late, though he had been close; the bells rang the third hour overhead as he sank into the deepest obeisance, eyes fixed firmly on the floor. At length his Radiancy said, "We are pleased to see you well. Rise, Sayo Mdang."

Cliopher settled himself at his desk and faltered for a moment as he opened his writing case and found the previous day's work was not present, even those documents he was sure he filed away neatly long before he fled the Imperial chambers. (For that matter, who had returned the case to him? It had been in his rooms when he woke this morning.) But there was no time to dwell on it, for his Radiancy was already speaking dictation, and Cliopher had to fumble for his pens.

This morning was much more subdued. Cliopher kept his eyes firmly on his papers, and made no jokes at all.

Day 3

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn. He was accustomed to waking at the first hour of the morning, but it seemed that he was beginning to make a habit of rising early. Rather than spend the morning puttering or fretting again, perhaps he would get an early start on his day. There were always reports to write outside of the hours he spent in his Radiancy’s study, and he could work on them just as well before that time as after.

As he rose to dress he was surprised to find his best robes hanging clean and pressed on his door. There was no sign of the coffee stain, which he had done his best with but surely not removed entirely. And he had left it draped over the back of a chair to dry, hadn’t he? He tried to remember if he had seen it yesterday, and could not. If the position of the Emperor’s personal secretary came with laundry service, no one had thought to mention it to him.

Come to think of it, he could not recall unpacking, either, after that agonizing afternoon and evening of waiting for an unknown fate. But all of his things, his books and oboe and yes, even his efela, were back in their accustomed places as if he had never moved them. How curious.

He took breakfast from the refectory before the morning rush, and spent a productive few hours at his desk until the office began to gradually fill with the buzz and bustle of the ordinary workday.

On his way out the door he was waylaid by Aanala, one of the clerks, waving a report he had just filed.

"Cliopher, you've got the wrong date here,” she said, thrusting it at him. “It's the fifteenth."

"Is it?" Cliopher looked down at his report, which he had indeed dated as the seventeenth. "My apologies, I must have lost track of the days."

"Nervous, eh?" She gave him a broad grin which he did not entirely understand. "Even you must make a mistake sometimes, I suppose."

He made appropriate noises of agreement, corrected the report, and made his escape, or thought he had, until he ran into Tabor just coming in the door.

"Cliopher!" Tabor exclaimed. "The whole Palace is abuzz with rumor about you— is it true you've been appointed the Emperor’s personal secretary?"

Cliopher stared at the man, taken aback. "Yes, it is. We had this conversation two days ago, Tabor, though I do apologize for missing you at supper."

"What?” Tabor chuckled bemusedly. “Two days ago I was still ears-deep in trade agreements on Ysthar. Don't tell me you're so nervous you've lost your wits!" Recovering his good humor, he stepped aside and waved Cliopher through the door. "Don't let me delay you, Cliopher. We'll talk at supper, if you haven't taken on too many airs by then, eh?"

Before Cliopher could untangle the muddle of this, the bells rang the third quarter-hour. Cliopher bit out a minced oath and ran.

As it turned out, he missed supper with Tabor again that evening. Cliopher had, somehow, mislaid all the previous days’ work, and he was forced to work late into the night to try to recreate it from memory. He didn’t make it back to his rooms until shortly before midnight, and he was asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.

Day 4

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn.

Something was tugging insistently at the back of his mind. He lay there a while as the room slowly lightened around him, thinking. When the bells rang a quarter-hour past dawn, he rose to dress, and found his best set of robes—which he knew for a fact he had left folded on a chest the previous evening—clean and pressed and hanging on the back of the door. Struck with a sudden, horrible suspicion, he opened the tin that held his small personal stash of coffee beans and—yes, indeed, there was the small paper packet with one generous serving of good Vangavayen coffee.

“Ah,” he said aloud. Then, “Oh,” and sat down at his little table to think.

The robes and the coffee. The dates on Aanala’s report. Tabor… Yes, that was it. Tabor lived in quarters not a five minute walk from Cliopher’s. Cliopher threw on his robes and hastened out, still doing up the fastenings.

He had to knock on Tabor’s door three times before the man came to open it, bleary and half dressed.

“Gold and glory, do you know what time it is? We had a horror of a time getting through the portal from Ysthar, and we didn’t get in till well past midnight—”

“Tabor,” Cliopher interrupted his tirade, “what day is it?”

Tabor puffed out his chest. “You woke me up at the crack of dawn to ask me the date ?”

“Please, Tabor.”

“The fifteenth.”

Cliopher’s heart sank. Tabor peered at him, suddenly concerned.

“Here now, Cliopher, there were all sorts of rumors flying about you last night—you’re not really being tried as the Emperor’s personal secretary, are you?”

Cliopher smiled weakly. “I rather think I am. I’m sorry for waking you up—perhaps I’ll see you at supper?”

“Of course. If you haven’t taken on too many airs by then, eh?” Tabor winked and shut the door.

Cliopher stumbled back to his own chambers in a daze, and fixed himself that last serving of Vangavayen coffee to give his hands a familiar task as he thought. He was caught in some tangle of magic, surely. As for when it started, what had caused it—that was easy enough. He saw again the golden eyes, shining one moment and shuttered the next.

So, then. He had broken a taboo, and thus damaged the flow of magic and time in the Palace, still so fragile since the Fall. He would go to the Ouranatha and explain, and they would put it right.

He wondered if he might be permitted to spend one more morning in his Radiancy’s presence. Surely it would cause no further harm if he waited until the afternoon? But no. He'd caused quite enough damage already; best not to give himself the chance to lose his nerve.

The wizards were not cruel or cold, but merely presented the facts in a clear and straightforward manner he could appreciate, if distantly. They explained that in breaking the taboos, he had damaged something that must be repaired, at any cost. In this case, they continued, the cost was relatively light.

Relatively.

He had known this, of course. It was why he had come to the Ouranatha in the first place. Still, to hear it laid out plainly before him was—difficult. He gripped the fabric of his robes tightly to hide the trembling in his hands.

So, then. He had died the moment he met those lion’s eyes after all, and the extra days had been a gift, of a sort. Did he wish he had known, that he might have spent them better? No, he decided. The only thing he might have wished to do was go home.

Writing the letters was easier this time. He wrote two, nearly identical, one for his mother and sister and another for Basil. Clear and emotionless, for he thought anything more would be too much for him to bear. He sent his love to the rest of the family at home, and to Sara and Clio on Alinor, and sealed and addressed the envelopes. Handing them off to a page to be posted was more difficult even than the writing had been.

Cliopher had only a passing familiarity with Schooled magic as practiced by the Ouranatha, and none at all with the deeper rites surrounding the person of the Emperor. He asked, not certain he wanted to know the answer, what would be expected of him. They told him he need not be conscious during the rite, that it would be easier, in fact, if he were not.

The drink they gave him was bitter, but not overly unpleasant. And then—

Day 5

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn.

He drew first one breath, then another, certain he could still taste the bitter drug on his tongue. He rose and turned on all the lights, then lit the fire in his little stove, hoping the light and heat would chase away the shadows that left him shivering. Mechanically, mindlessly, he dressed himself in the freshly laundered robes hanging on the back of the door, and made himself the last of the Vangavayen coffee to rinse the bitter taste from his mouth.

When he had accomplished all those things, and his trembling had subsided, Cliopher did the only thing he could think of, and went to work.

His Radiancy's voice was cold and steady, carrying only a distant rumble of thunder. "Sayo Mdang, we expect our secretary to be present every work day. Explain your absence yesterday morning."

"My lord?" Not yet released from his obeisances, caught off guard, Cliopher scrambled for an answer. "It was only yesterday afternoon that the Master of Offices assigned me to your Radiancy's direct service—"

"Don't be absurd," his Radiancy snapped. "You have been in our service these past five days."

The room went still.

Cliopher's fingers pressed into the cool stone floor. He was trembling; he had been so certain— had the Ouranatha’s rite worked after all? But no, the robes, the coffee, he could still taste the bitter drug, he could not be mistaken— could he, dare he, suggest then that it was the Sun-on-Earth who might be mistaken?

After a very long silence, his Radiancy said, "Ludvic, the date."

Behind Cliopher and to his left, one of the guards spoke. "The fifteenth day of the fifth month, my lord."

Cliopher realized with a sudden clarity that he had overlooked something. Every day since he entered his Radiancy’s service had started the same, with his robes hung on the door, his last serving of Vangavayen coffee unground, Tabor’s lines about rumors and putting on airs. But his Radiancy had never dictated the same letter twice.

Cliopher forgot himself. His eyes snapped up to meet that golden gaze, searching for the knowledge that he knew was there. Like the first time, he was not struck blind on the spot. Unlike the first time, he did not run.

“My lord,” he said, still on his knees, still holding his Radiancy’s gaze, “I have broken time.”

Chapter 2 Chapter Text

Day 5 (cont.)

“You believe this began when you met my eyes the first day of your position as my secretary?”

“That is my best guess, my lord.”

They were sitting one on each side of his Radiancy’s enormous sandalwood desk, which Cliopher had never before seen his lord use. The great span of it, stretched out between them, felt insubstantial in the face of the magic sparking in the lion eyes. Cliopher held his hands clasped tightly in his lap and fixed his gaze on his Radiancy’s left ear.

“Five days.” His Radiancy shook his head.

“I only became certain yesterday, my lord.”

“But you did notice things were not as they should be. Whereas I have been very foolish, and very blind. Inattentive. Not complacent but— acquiescent.” This last word, his Radiancy bit out like the fiercest insult. This quiet vehemence was very different from the cold affront he had greeted Cliopher with not a quarter-hour past. It was deeper, and older, and seemed to come from a side of his Radiancy Cliopher had not yet seen. (Had seen, perhaps, once, in laughter transmuted to horror.)

“If you did not notice,” Cliopher said slowly, “then I rather think it is the fault of your environment more than of yourself.”

“Yes,” his Radiancy said bitterly, “perhaps I should ask to be woken by hordes of singing courtiers each morning as I was before the Fall. At least the rituals varied from day to day.” He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and seemed to pull the imperial serenity back over himself like a shroud. “That is neither here nor there. My magic can be a trifle unpredictable at times, and it appears to have caught you up. Tell me what you have observed.”

“I have no magic to speak of, my lord, and I’m afraid my knowledge of it is very limited. I began to notice things returning each morning to the same state they had been the day before. And people repeating conversations, forgetting things we had talked about. Yesterday—yesterday for me, and I expect also for you—I realized I had been entangled in some magic relating to the taboos, and went to the Ouranatha for,” he faltered, “advice.”

His Radiancy’s lips thinned, just slightly. “We are familiar with the Ouranatha’s usual form of advice in matters such as these.”

Cliopher bowed his head, still clasping his own hands tightly in his lap. “Yes, my lord. But I woke up this morning alive and well.”

“That is most fortunate,” his Radiancy said, his voice edged. “In the future, Sayo Mdang, if you find yourself caught in a magical web beyond your understanding, I would appreciate it if you came to me before the Ouranatha, if at all possible.”

Cliopher blinked, startled by the tightly furled anger behind the words, and certain it was not directed at him. “Yes, my lord.”

“That said,” his Radiancy went on, “I’m afraid the Ouranatha are a resource we may be forced to lean on, in this case. Though I assure you that I will not permit their methods to run amok again.”

“I— thank you, my lord.”

His Radiancy waved this away. “They are an ancient and powerful body which hold a tremendous amount of knowledge. They are, concurrently, a group of overeducated fools who believe magic follows a single, unchanging course, with no tributaries or flood plains or—” He paused, searching for a word.

“Avulsion, my lord?” Cliopher suggested, and then flinched at his own breach of etiquette.

“Just so,” his Radiancy agreed. “Their practices are based on the form that Schooled magic took before the Fall, which, to extend the metaphor, was always more of a canal than a river. Its course was carefully shaped over the millennia to suit the purposes of this or that emperor or head priest-wizard.” Here he stood and began to pace, up and down the length of the study along his accustomed path. “Before the Fall, if the mere act of meeting my eyes had not struck you dead where you stood, the Ouranatha likely would have been correct that your death was a necessity to maintain the shape of Astandalan magic. But that shape was chosen and rigorously maintained. Since the Fall, the priest-wizards continue to maintain the walls of their canal, though the magic is no longer contained strictly or even primarily within it. Some power still continues to flow along the old lines simply out of habit, but I believe the Ouranatha take great pains to conceal just how little that is.”

“My execution was meant to shore up the walls of the canal,” Cliopher ventured, watching the embroidered hems of his Radiancy’s impossibly fine robes snap and flare superbly as he paced. “But as the broken magic is no longer contained within the canal, repairing a breach in the wall was a useless action.”

“More than useless. Wasteful. In any case, I believe the Ouranatha will be able to see the damage more clearly than I can, if they are stopped from following their accustomed methods before investigating further. Will you allow them to examine you?"

"My lord," said Cliopher, baffled, "you hardly need my permission."

His Radiancy stopped, on the other side of the room beside the golden mechanical nightingale in its cage, and looked at Cliopher’s face. Cliopher hastily dropped his gaze. "Need, no. But I will not ask you to submit to them against your wishes. I have not forgotten that yesterday you had the experience of dying at their hands, even if it failed to take." Safely hidden in his lap, Cliopher’s hands tightened spasmodically. His Radiancy went on, "They can examine me alone, if you prefer."

Cliopher breathed carefully, in and out twice before answering. "I think it would be best if they had the fullest picture possible, my lord."

The remainder of the morning, and much of the afternoon, Cliopher spent under the prodding hands and cold masked faces of the Ouranatha. He was chanted over, made dizzy with incense, daubed with powders, instructed to carry out bizarre and precise motions according to some arcane clock he could not fathom.

Most of these rituals he underwent together in the study with his Radiancy, though on one occasion the priest-wizards led the Emperor away deeper into the Apartments for some semblance of privacy. Before he left, his Radiancy discreetly but unambiguously summoned two of the outer guard to stand in the study with Cliopher and the remaining wizards. They flanked the door as impassive and easy to overlook as statues, but Cliopher found their presence more reassuring than he could say, even as the rites grew more difficult and less dignified. Cliopher was absurdly, pathetically grateful not to be alone under the cold glint of the wizards' masks; ashamed that his Radiancy had seen his fear so easily; honored beyond words that the Sun-on-Earth had spared even that one thought, that one flick of the hand, for Cliopher's comfort. There could be no way to express this using the proper forms, of course. The Glorious One might grant boons and bestow gifts, but he did not, according to the great rulebook of the Astandalan court, offer tiny, unimportant kindnesses, unasked for and unacknowledged.

When his Radiancy swept back into the study, guards and wizards at his heels, Cliopher caught his eye for a brief moment, and thought he saw a faint, infinitesimal tilt of the head in return.

At last the wizards pronounced their work done, and Cliopher was permitted to slump into his chair in exhausted relief. He felt as wrung out as a dishtowel, and he thought it would take at least three washes to get the lingering smell of incense out of his robes. (If they aren’t hanging pristine and pressed on the door tomorrow, his mind murmured, but he pushed that thought aside.)

As the junior priest-wizards packed away their supplies, the two senior wizards attended on his Radiancy, discussing the results of their rituals in low tones. Able to hear little of the conversation and understanding even less, Cliopher didn’t bother to strain his ears. After a short time, his Radiancy’s voice rose sharply, cutting across the room.

"We are aware of what the taboos demand. You have tried it. It is unacceptable. Find another option."

After this, the conversation subsided again to murmurs, and eventually ended as the wizards made their obeisances and were dismissed. When they had gone, his Radiancy sat down heavily behind the carved sandalwood desk, the first outward sign of exhaustion Cliopher had yet seen.

“Well,” his Radiancy sighed. “That was not entirely unhelpful.” He seemed to be thinking. Cliopher, not certain if the words had been addressed to him or to the room at large, erred on the side of waiting.

The quarter-bell had rung three times before his Radiancy seemed to come back to himself. “Oh, Cliopher. I am keeping you from your supper.” He briefly ran a hand over his face, a startlingly ordinary gesture. “I think… that I need to think. If you will come back tomorrow morning at the usual time—or today, I suppose I mean—I may have a few ideas.” He made a gesture of dismissal. Cliopher performed his obeisances and left.

Unable to face the thought of a crowded dinner in the refectory, which was sure to be full of questions about his supposed first day, Cliopher instead fetched one of the boxed meals set aside for those working late, dodged a conversation with Tabor and a few of the nosier secretaries from his old office, and walked home through the gardens, as he often liked to do when the weather was fine.

It was only just sunset, earlier than the usual end of his workday, and the rippled stratus clouds lit up the whole arc of visible sky in glorious pinks and oranges. He ate as he walked, admiring the way the colors shifted to cool twilight and the magical lights lining the walkways twinkled on one by one. The lights illuminated paths curving this way and that across the span of the gardens, nestled between two wings of the Palace. Cliopher found himself imagining the magic running along those paths, following the banks of their rivers and swirling out into tributaries where the paths forked, dancing, shimmering, bursting free of their banks—then he shook his head and returned his attention to the physical world of the gardens. Better to leave the magical metaphors to the magicians.

It happened very quickly. One moment Cliopher was strolling along in the twilight, savoring the sounds and smells and fresh air. The next: his face driven ruthlessly into the soft earth, his wrists caught in an iron grip behind his back, a weight between his shoulder blades that stopped his breath. Something—a rock, perhaps—had cut his cheek. He could smell only the coppery tang of blood and, absurd in this moment of confusion and pain, he found that the loss of the delicate floral scents of the garden upset him more than all the rest.

“We are sorry for our methods, Sayo Mdang,” said a voice above him, calm and level. “It is necessary for the balance of the world. It will be painless.”

And it was.

Chapter 3 Chapter Text

Day 6

"I think,” said his Radiancy, “we had best not ask for the Ouranatha's assistance again." His expression was as serene as ever, his tone dangerously flat. He had released Cliopher from his obeisance almost before it was finished and then resumed his interrupted pacing, his sandals striking the stone floor in a sharp, syncopated rhythm as he spoke. “I should have them exiled from the Palace. But of course, the Bavezh and Lezomê of today would never dream of outright defying me, and have done no such thing.” He gestured dismissively as he passed Cliopher's desk and started back up the room. “And I would only have to fire them again tomorrow.”

“Did you get the information you needed from them, then, my lord?” Cliopher had settled at his desk and set up his papers and inks as if it were an ordinary day, and now sat with his pen poised over a fresh sheet, ready to take notes.

“Enough to be getting on with for the moment. I believe—” His Radiancy's pacing turned him back towards the bottom of the room where Cliopher sat and he paused, appearing faintly puzzled. “There is hardly any need to take dictation,” he said. “It will all be gone at midnight tonight. Midnight appears to be the time when the changeover occurs,” he added. "I was awake when the bells began to toll, and a moment later it was morning."

“I will better remember what we discussed tomorrow if I write it down,” Cliopher explained. It was true, and that he could not allow his hands to shake as he wrote was only a side benefit. “I will stop if you wish, of course, my lord.”

“No need for that,” his Radiancy said, gesturing brusquely. “Write or not, as you prefer.” He returned to his pacing. “Now, what was I— yes.” He summarized the Ouranatha’s findings, of which Cliopher understood little, but copied down dutifully nonetheless. It was easier, much easier, to focus on transcribing the words into shorthand than on the smell of blood and incense, the phantom bruise he half expected to feel on his back every time he moved. His walk to work that morning had taken longer than usual, as he found himself detouring to avoid empty corridors, though of course it was entirely irrational. But here in the impossible splendor of the Imperial Apartments, where he should have felt as out of place as an oboe in a string quartet—here, under his Radiancy’s golden eyes, he felt safe.

“To continue our extended metaphor from yesterday,” his Radiancy was saying, “it seems as if the breaking of the taboo took the water from the canal—the water, of course, being magic, or time, or perhaps both—and set it to run through a fountain instead. Rather than progressing along its course, it falls into the basin, where it is pumped back up the column and allowed to fall again. One day repeating ad infinitum, you see? I imagine the reason you and I are able to remember is due to our involvement in the inciting incident.” With a puzzle to solve, his Radiancy had become more animated in his movements and expressions; the gulf between this and the caged, restless pacing of the first few days was astonishing. “My own natural wild magic is still difficult to access. I am interested to see this tangle from a deep trance; however…” He paused midway down the room, an odd look on his face as if he were trying to see the back of his own skull.

“Deep trance, my lord?” Cliopher prompted.

“The state in which I am most connected to my own magic, and that of Zunidh. I’m afraid that the condition of Zunidh’s magic since the Fall makes it rather precarious, at present. It will not be a last resort, but I do not think it will be our first one, either. Luckily—” and here a slight change of tone, posture, expression, a glimpse at that elusive man behind the personage of his Radiancy so quick and startling that Cliopher almost missed it “—luckily, I am a very accomplished mage.”

They began with a few books which an attendant retrieved from the small private library off one end of the study, and a similar number of volumes which a page was sent down to the Imperial Archives to fetch. His Radiancy had rattled off the titles he wanted from memory with impressive speed. Cliopher, who had still been taking dictation mainly out of sheer habit, copied the list out again longhand for the poor page, who looked as if he had already forgotten every word.

The books were mostly dry, dusty tomes of the sort that Cliopher would have easily absorbed if they had contained trade treaties or income tax schedules, but with no background in magical theory or symbology he found them baffling and incomprehensible by turns. His Radiancy, Cliopher noted, flicked through them with long familiarity. Well, he was the Lord Magus of Zunidh, and center of the Empire’s magic before that.

In the meantime, Cliopher busied himself in committing his notes from the morning to memory. It was not a skill he called on often at the Palace—he had a talent for relaying a short message word-perfect, but most things at court were simply written down—and he found himself dusting off the memorization techniques he had used to learn the Lays, long ago in his boyhood on Loaloa. He quickly discovered that the stress and syllable patterns of Shaian did not fit well into the meter of the Lays, and picked another song somewhat at random. It was not until he was running through the whole thing silently to check his recall that he noticed that the tune he had chosen was Aurora.

Oh, well. He could use something less treasonous tomorrow.

At last his Radiancy stood, closing one of the heftier tomes with a satisfying thud, and began to pace again. It was not the caged pacing of the first few days or the animated, problem-solving pacing of earlier that morning; Cliopher had never yet seen his Radiancy sit for so long at a stretch, and thought he might simply be restless.

“Well,” his Radiancy said, surreptitiously rolling his shoulders at the top of the room. “The Ouranatha’s secondary recommendation—which we would have discussed further had they not jumped to hasty action on their first—was for you to undergo the purification rites, which are ordinarily used before an object or person comes into contact with the person of the Emperor, not after. However, it seems that in certain cases, the magical consequences of a broken taboo can be mitigated by performing the rites post hoc.” He reached his sandalwood desk and paused briefly to gesture at one of the books. “Fortunately, as the broken taboo was relatively minor, you will not have to go through the full purification rites, which take some six months. The abbreviated three-day ceremony should be sufficient. Unfortunately, it does seem that even three days may be difficult to come by."

"Do you think the purification might hold across days, my lord?" Cliopher asked.

"I haven't the faintest idea," answered his Radiancy, seeming pleased to say so. "We shall have to find out. The more immediate problem, however, is that the ceremony must begin at dawn."

"Ah." Cliopher considered this. "It may be possible. On an ordinary day I wouldn’t wake until the first hour, but the day I entered your service, I woke a short time before the half-bell in the hour before dawn. My rooms are at the far end of the Alinorel wing, about forty-five minutes at my usual pace. I could, with need, possibly arrive here by sunrise.”

"And of course, there would be no purpose in putting you up temporarily in closer rooms," his Radiancy mused. "My attendants wake me only a quarter-bell before dawn, so I will not be able to send assistance. It will be all I can do to convince them to forgo most of the morning routine, I imagine."

Day 7

Cliopher skidded to a stop outside the great outer doors to the Imperial Apartments less than five minutes before the dawn bell. The flanking guards stared at him impassively, unmoved. "Cliopher Mdang, secretary," Cliopher gasped. His Radiancy must have told them to expect him early, for the guards pounded their spearbutts on the floor without challenge, and the doors swung open. The guards at each set of doors announced him to the next, so by the time he reached the seventh antechamber he had almost gotten his breath back, though he wished the doors did not swing open so impressively, damnably slowly. In each chamber he felt guards' and pages' eyes on him, perhaps curious, perhaps scornful that anyone would come so close to being late to an appointment with the Sun-on-Earth.

The Sun-on-Earth in question was waiting in the study, with implements and ingredients much like the Ouranatha's laid out neatly on the sandalwood desk. He looked, somehow, not the slightest bit disheveled, though Cliopher knew he must have woken not a quarter-hour before.

"Good, good," his Radiancy said impatiently, gesturing him forward. "Come, stand here—"

The rites were similar to some of those that the Ouranatha had performed, but the experience was entirely different. Cliopher knew, of course, that there had not been time to send for a more lowly wizard to carry out the rites; Cliopher knew also that his Radiancy was a learned and accomplished mage, and perfectly capable of performing them. That knowledge did nothing to stem the awe Cliopher felt as he stood in the Imperial Apartments in the Palace of Stars under the personal ministrations of the Last Emperor of Astandalas himself.

It was very different, also, to undertake the ritual under the golden eyes of his Radiancy, and not the cold metal masks of the priest-wizards; to follow instructions given in a warm baritone with an undercurrent of humor, and not the indifferent voice of a stranger; to smell the incense wafting from a brazier which had been lit with a spark of his Radiancy’s own magic.

Still, the rite took nearly an hour of careful concentration. By the end of it, Cliopher was acutely aware that he had not had breakfast or even coffee, that he had crossed half the Palace at a dead sprint, and that it was not yet even the first hour of the morning. Even on his long, long journey to the Wide Seas and then across it, when he had walked for months and sailed for much longer—even then, when he had not been living a secretary’s life, he had not had much occasion to run.

His Radiancy, too, seemed drained by the time they had finished. It was not until he stepped back that Cliopher became aware of how close he had been, only just out of arm’s reach; Cliopher was glad now that he had been too focused on following the requirements of the ritual to notice. The scent of his Radiancy’s perfume, roses and lemons and something else Cliopher could not name, still lingered in the air beneath the smell of the incense.

His Radiancy sank into a chair, and waved Cliopher to his own desk. Taking this as signal that the ritual was complete, a swarm of attendants descended to whisk away the ritual instruments and replace them with trays of coffee and tea and pastries. With a flick of his hand his Radiancy indicated that Cliopher, too, should be fed, for which Cliopher was tremendously grateful. They ate and drank in exhausted silence.

“That was the first of nine,” said his Radiancy at length, when the empty plates had been removed, and Cliopher felt that a cup and a half of truly excellent coffee had begun to make inroads in scrubbing away the fog in his head. “Dawn, noon, and sunset, for three consecutive days. We are exceedingly lucky that there is no required ritual at midnight, I suppose.”

“Will you be able to tell tomorrow, my lord, if today’s ceremonies have persisted?”

“I’m not certain.” His Radiancy took another contemplative sip of tea. “I will think on it today. Certainly I think we would both prefer not to have to perform the dawn ceremony more times than necessary.”

“My lord,” Cliopher agreed fervently.

His Radiancy sent down to the Imperial Archives for yesterday’s books and a smattering of others, and aside from the interruption of the noon ritual, they spent the day much as they had the previous one. Every now and then his Radiancy would rise from his sandalwood desk and think aloud—pacing, of course—while Cliopher carefully noted his ideas, which he would then commit to memory when his Radiancy had returned to reading.

As new as it was, it was familiar, pleasant, even homey.

(Surely it was some sort of breach of etiquette to feel comfortable around the Sun-on-Earth?)

“I have been thinking on how best to determine if the purification will persist across days,” his Radiancy said, after they had completed the final chant of the sunset rite. The brazier still balanced in one hand, his Radiancy reached for Cliopher’s writing kit, then paused. "If I may?"

"Of course, my lord."

His Radiancy picked up one of Cliopher’s calligraphy brushes and wet it on the inkstone. "Your left hand, please." Obedient and bemused, Cliopher held out his arm and watched as with a delicate, practiced flick his Radiancy painted a thick black streak across the back of his hand. The brush was fine and soft, the ink curiously warm, and there was a little frisson of magic in it, which even Cliopher could sense. The shimmering feeling faded and settled as his Radiancy set down the brazier, bringing the ritual to a close.

"There," his Radiancy said, admiring his work with some satisfaction. "Let that dry, and be careful not to let it wash off before you sleep. I’ve bound it up in the purification rite, so it will last if the magic does." He gestured for the hovering attendant to gather up the ritual instruments, and drew back to his accustomed distance. “If it’s still there when you wake up, make certain you are here for the second day’s dawn rites. If not, there will be no need to rush; come to the study at the third bell as usual and we will find another method.”

Cliopher had never been so aware of his own hands as he was when he left the Imperial Apartments that day. The ink burned on the backs of his knuckles like a brand: a mark from his Radiancy's own hand, however fleeting.

He was not two hallways away from the Apartments when he was pulled out of his reverie by a polite, “Sayo Mdang?”

Cliopher tamped down his little jolt of reflexive fear—irrational on half a dozen levels, absurd that it should set his heart racing so—and turned. The tall man who had spoken proved to be wearing neither the silvery-gray robes of the Ouranatha nor, though he looked vaguely familiar, the various sandy shades of a secretary, but only a simple sleeveless tunic and trousers, with no livery or uniform markings Cliopher could see.

“My name is Ludvic Omo,” the man said, seeming to catch Cliopher’s brief hesitation. “I’m a member of the Imperial Guard.”

Cliopher blinked in surprise and mentally transposed over the man the fantastical panoply of ostrich feathers and leopard skins; yes, indeed, this was one of the honour guards who stood at the door to his Radiancy’s study each morning.

“Of course,” Cliopher said, wishing he remembered how one was expected to politely address a guard—was it Guard Omo? Sayo Omo? If he had a rank or title he wished Cliopher to use, surely he would have introduced himself with it—and decided to skip the problem altogether. “How can I help you?”

Omo seemed to consider his words for a moment. “I can’t say I entirely followed your conversations with Himself this morning, but I understood enough to know that I won’t remember it tomorrow. With your permission, I would like to give you a passphrase. If you should need my assistance to assure the Glorious One’s safety or your own, or to fix the magic that’s gone wrong, repeat it back to me, and I think I will believe you.”

Cliopher faltered, stunned. “That is… exceedingly kind of you.”

Omo didn’t smile, but his eyes were warm. “Say practical, rather. May I?”

Cliopher inclined his head, bewildered by the ease with which this near-stranger placed his trust in Cliopher’s hands.

The passphrase, of all things, was poetry—a quatrain from what seemed to be a romantic epic of the type Cliopher liked best. From Omo’s manner as he recited it, Cliopher was reasonably certain it was the guard’s own poetry, perhaps never before shared. He had Cliopher repeat it back until he was satisfied.

“Thank you,” said Cliopher, touched. “I'm honored by your trust in me.”

Omo bowed, not quite in the court style, and excused himself.

Day 8

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn. He fumbled immediately for the small light he kept at hand for late-night reading and examined the back of his hand, which he found unmarked by ink. So, then. He was relieved, at least, not to have to leap immediately out of bed and run across half the Palace, and then felt faintly guilty at being relieved.

His attention was caught then by the light in his hand, a small enchanted stone which, he knew vaguely, was linked somehow to all the other magical lights, a web of tendrils lain across the whole of the palace, and at the center of it all the Sun-on-Earth. He had never paid much attention to the magical lights and how they worked, only that they did. He wondered now what powered them, if they still followed the old canals of the Schooled system out of habit, and if that magic might slowly drain away over time. Or perhaps such frequent use carved their paths so deeply that they would never shift, a river at the bottom of an ancient gorge.

How was he to know? Magic was not something Cliopher had ever studied. He had always taken it for granted, all those small conveniences of light and heat and cleanliness in his mother’s house before the Fall. He had not needed to understand how it worked in order to use it, as he did not need to understand how cloth was woven in order to wear clothes. And, he considered, as he had not needed to understand the complicated patterns of wind and current in order to ride as a passenger on Buru Tovo’s vaha, that first trip to Loaloa. But he had learned those well enough in the end.

Over breakfast in the refectory, Cliopher fished a scrap of paper out of his writing kit and wrote out the titles of the books his Radiancy had used the day before. Paper in hand, he went next to the Imperial Archives. There was only one attendant on duty at this time of morning, huddled grimly over her coffee and looking like she wished she were anywhere else. The brass nameplate on her desk identified her as T. Saya Ardeni.

“Will you have these sent up to the Imperial Apartments, please?” he asked, sliding the list across. She nearly choked on her coffee, and would have spilled it all across her desk and the list as well, except that her mug seemed to be enchanted to prevent such accidents. She set the cup down gingerly, clearing her throat.

“The Imperial Apartments?”

Cliopher smiled sympathetically. “The only ones I know of. For the third hour of the morning.”

“Oh, good,” Saya Ardeni said faintly, pulling the page towards herself.

“And is there an introductory text on magical theory you would recommend? The absolute basics.”

She flicked her eyes up from the list. “Schooled, wild, or divine magic?”

“Ah— Schooled and wild, I suppose, or general theory.”

“Hmm.” She pursed her lips in thought. “We should have a copy of Beeching’s Magic and Magecraft. Will you wait here a moment?” Without waiting for an answer, she vanished into the closed stacks, leaving her coffee behind.

She was gone closer to a quarter of an hour than to a moment, in the end, returning at last with an intimidatingly large tome clutched in her arms. Her mood was entirely transformed, from dour to smug.

“My apologies for the wait,” she said, sounding more triumphant than apologetic. “The accursed thing was shoved up with the cookbooks, somehow; I’ll have to give the aides a talking-to— In any case, here you are.” She pushed the volume across the counter to him and, noticing his hesitation as he eyed the size of it, added, “Or shall I have it sent up with the others?”

“Yes, please,” Cliopher said gratefully. He had not relished the thought of carrying it up all those stairs. “Thank you for finding it.”

“No, thank you,” said Saya Ardeni, eyes gleaming. “Nothing more satisfying than finding a lost book on a slow morning.”

The books arrived in the study not ten minutes after Cliopher did, trundled in on a little cart whose wheels had evidently been oiled to within an inch of their lives. His Radiancy’s brows rose. "Goodness, is that Beeching's?"

"Yes, my lord,” said Cliopher. “Do you know it?"

"Know it? When I was a boy my tutor had me memorize it. 'It's vital to have a firm grasp of the foundations, savelin.' Huh."

Cliopher felt a jolt of surprise at the idea that his Radiancy had once been in need of tutoring; had once been a child; had ever been, in fact, anything other than the tall, brilliant figure standing before him.

“It was ancient even then,” his Radiancy went on, “but then I suppose everything seems ancient when one is a child. And as they say, the basics never do go out of style.” He eyed the books, now stacked neatly on his sandalwood desk. “Now, I had thought I was on the right track yesterday with the generic flow patterns... It really is too bad your notes don’t last.”

“A moment, my lord.” Cliopher hastily put down the last few lines of his memorized notes, fanned a hand over the paper to dry the ink, and gave the sheets to an attendant to carry across in a silver tray.

His Radiancy picked up the notes and raised his eyebrows as he skimmed the first page. “Goodness, Cliopher. You really are far and away the most competent secretary they’ve ever sent me.”

Cliopher could feel the tips of his ears burning, and ducked his head to hide the smile tugging irresistibly at the corners of his mouth. “It is only a small bit of memorization, my lord. I’ve had little else to do, as my knowledge of magical theory is rather nonexistent.”

“Hence Beeching’s,” said his Radiancy with approval. He tugged the large green book out of its stack and paged through it, apparently at random.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Well, far be it from me to stop a man from educating himself. Do let me know if you have questions; I have often thought Beeching took malicious delight in tormenting Shaian grammar to its utmost limits. But his glossary of notations is the best-organized I’ve come across.” As he spoke, he had been walking with the book open in his hands, and arrived at Cliopher’s desk before he seemed to recall himself. He hesitated for such a brief instant Cliopher might not have noticed if the lion eyes had not flickered in the direction of the attendant who should, according to strict propriety, have been tasked with conveying the book from Emperor to subject. Then, as if he had not paused at all, he closed the book and set it on the edge of Cliopher’s desk.

"I have been finding the affectation of ceremony ever more pointlessly tedious," said his Radiancy quietly. His Radiancy, who was the source and center of all ceremony, who lived it in his every action.

Struck suddenly by impulse, Cliopher admitted, "I failed the etiquette portion of the civil service exam four times, my lord.”

"Did you?” Humor flashed in those golden eyes. “I would never have guessed."

Very early in his time in the Service, Cliopher had made the mistake of admitting those failures to someone he thought was a friend; the consequent jokes had followed him through the Lower Secretariat and still popped up from time to time even now. This did not feel like that sort of joke. There was a warmth behind it that none of his fellow secretaries had ever shown.

Cliopher wished, suddenly, treasonously, to know the man who stood at the center of all ceremony and thought it tedious.

Chapter 4 Chapter Text

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn.

"Gold and glory, Cliopher—!" exclaimed Tabor.

"The Imperial Apartments?" said Saya Ardeni.

"Perhaps we might try..." mused his Radiancy.

"I would like to give you a passphrase," said Ludvic Omo.

So it went.

Day 42

His Radiancy sat straight in a high-backed wooden chair, his hands flat on his thighs, his eyes closed, the only movement an occasional twitch or sigh. Cliopher had not yet become accustomed to the stillness of the deep trance, even after three days of increasingly lengthy attempts. His Radiancy’s great energy and vitality and quick, sharp movements were gone from him, and though Cliopher had sometimes seen him be still, he had never before seen him empty.

If it was disconcerting to watch as his Radiancy sunk into himself, however, it was perhaps more so to witness the reverse. His Radiancy came back to himself slowly, by degrees, like water slowly working its way up from the hem of a cloak. Worse, he did not have his usual fine control over his expressions, and the discomfort of the process was evident: tension bleeding into the beautiful hands once relaxed, shoulders pressing into the carved filigree of the chair back, ramrod-posture twisting into something almost pained. Cliopher was never sure whether to avert his eyes for an illusion of privacy, or to bear witness so that his Radiancy was not quite so alone.

But the return to consciousness was quicker every time, and it wasn’t long before his Radiancy had regained control of himself, wiping away all traces of discomfort as if they had never been. One attendant stood at a distance to dab the perspiration beaded on the Imperial brow; another held a tray of refreshments. His Radiancy took water and waved the rest away.

Fresh paper at the ready, Cliopher dipped his pen. “Anything new, my lord?”

“Only the same bloody awful tangle.” His Radiancy set the glass down, only a faint tremor in his hands betraying his exhaustion. “I could perhaps unpick it, if I had a thousand years and a talent for fine control. Alas, as Lord Magus my magical fingers are far too large and clumsy for the detail required. Feh!” This interjection was so unexpected that Cliopher had to pretend to itch his nose in order to cover a smile. “Or I could take a sword—metaphorical, of course, though in that state everything is—and slice through the lot, but I daren’t think what it would do to the rest of the world.”

“It’s a question of scale, then?”

“Scale, precisely—” His Radiancy made a gesture of agreement and, so doing, collided with the glass of water. It spun away, spilling water in a wide arc across the sandalwood desk. One attendant with lightning-quick reflexes stepped forward and caught the glass before it could roll off the edge of the desk and shatter, and two more with towels appeared from seemingly nowhere. There was little they could do without drawing too near his Radiancy, who sat unmoving and staring at the spreading puddle in utter bafflement, as if he could not fathom how the glass and the water could have dared to become separate objects.

For several breaths, all was motionless and silent, save for the plink, plink, plink of droplets hitting the stone floor. Then his Radiancy shook himself back to the present, stood, and backed away from the desk to allow the towel-wielding attendants access, though he waved away any attention for his own person.

Though his face had returned to its usual neutrality, Cliopher noted how he stood at an even further remove from his attendants than usual, his arms held closely to his sides, hands tucked away in his wide sleeves. The puddle vanished rapidly under the towels; the towels and their accompanying attendants vanished just as thoroughly, and his Radiancy settled again into the high-backed chair, his every movement just a touch too slow and measured. If he had been any other man, Cliopher might have called him shaken.

“Now then,” he said, as if nothing had happened. “What was it we were discussing?”

Cliopher frowned, but forced himself back to the work at hand. “Scale, my lord.”

“Scale, yes. An individual mage may perform magic at the level of individuals, but a Lord Magus’s power is too closely tied to the magic of their world to function with such precision. I work on a cartographic scale: continents, regions—you know of the Solamen fens?—but no smaller.” He spoke smoothly, apparently unruffled. “To disentangle us from the time loops is like trying to mark the two of us on a map of Zunidh. Certainly two dots could be placed and labeled, but they would not be terribly accurate, and something else may be blotted out in the process.”

“Could an ordinary mage accomplish it, then?”

His Radiancy seemed to consider this for a moment. “It’s possible, I suppose. The limiting factors are time, power, and ability. First, of course, the mage would need to be found and informed, and complete the working, in a single day between morning and midnight. When I was—in my prime—I could perhaps have done such a working in that time, but only just. Second, the mage must have a certain amount of magical strength. I believe this particular working would require a mage of uncommon power—not vanishingly rare, but certainly in the upper echelons. And finally, our hypothetical mage must have knowledge not only of Schooled practices but also wild magic, and the talent and ability to wield both in tandem. Altogether, this makes for a rather small pool of candidates.”

He delivered this in the same even tones as he usually did his impromptu lectures—it was never entirely clear if they were for Cliopher’s benefit, or simply a way of gathering his thoughts—but his eyes flicked and followed the movements of various attendants, usually faded so thoroughly into the background as to be invisible. Cliopher noted again how still he held himself, without pacing, without even a hand gesture to express or illustrate a point.

“I will investigate the mages currently residing in the Palace and see if any meet these criteria,” Cliopher said, and then before he could allow himself to think better of it, went on, “Perhaps in the meantime you should take a day off, my lord.”

“A day off?” His Radiancy sounded as though he had never before heard those words in that order. “To do what?”

Day 44

Cliopher entered the Imperial Apartments two mornings later, readying his (disquietingly short) list of potential mage candidates in his mind, only to find the study a flurry of activity, grooms swarming about his Radiancy and half a dozen more guards than usual lining the walls.

"Ah, Cliopher!" his Radiancy said warmly, waving Cliopher out of his obeisance. "Good. I have decided to take your advice and play truant today. Come, let us walk in the Gardens."

“Of course, my lord.” Cliopher carefully schooled the surprise from his face as he stepped back to let a groom hurry past on some task or another. He had hoped that his Radiancy would grant himself a break, yes, but Cliopher had hardly expected to be invited along—!

After a few more minutes of general fuss, revolving around the still figure of his Radiancy at the center, the whole cavalcade sailed out through the great black and white doors. Caught in their wake, Cliopher followed.

Even the most seasoned denizens of the Palace fell back in surprise as the party swept through the corridors and staircases and great gilded atria. Straggling in the back, Cliopher was far enough away from his Radiancy to catch glimpses of shock, disbelief, stunned awe as faces rose from their hasty obeisances, turned inexorably after the Imperial presence like flowers seeking the sun. It was some relief to pass out of the crowded corridors and step out into the fine morning air.

His Radiancy wasted no time in organizing his party as he liked, brusquely directing all but two guards and the whole gaggle of grooms and attendants, even the two with parasols, to walk some distance ahead or behind. Cliopher, placed nearly at his Radiancy's side, was perhaps the only member of the party with a view of his lord’s expression as they stepped from the shade of the Palace walls and into direct sunlight. For a few brief moments, his eyes fluttered closed and his face tipped up towards the warmth. Then one of the parasol-laden attendants hurried forward, and the expression vanished back into the smooth surface of his Radiancy as if it had never been.

Though his Radiancy seemed content merely to stroll according to his whims, it was only a very short time before the party was hurriedly approached by a woman in reasonably fine clothes with mud caking the hems. A brief conversation with one of the outer guards saw her permitted through and announced as the curator in chief of the Imperial Gardens. Her face was flushed with exertion and her obeisance unpracticed; Cliopher imagined she had been hastily summoned from her usual tasks to attend on his Radiancy.

They processed through the Gardens at a sedate and dignified pace. The curator pointed out certain plants which his Serene Holiness might find of interest, and his Radiancy plied her with questions which, to Cliopher, betrayed a surprising quantity of botanical knowledge. He had not known his Radiancy had an interest in plants; but then, there were none in the crystallized splendor of the Imperial Apartments. Beneath the calm and scholarly questions, Cliopher thought, lay an appetite long suppressed.

Cliopher considered how the grooms earlier that morning had flocked about like headless chickens; he glanced out of the corner of his eye at their anxious milling some ten or fifteen meters away, with parasols and hats and creams. How often, he wondered, was the Lord Emperor of Zunidh permitted to step foot in his own demesne?

He was doing more than stepping foot in it now. To the plain horror of the grooms, and even an audible inward breath from the normally-imperturbable guards, the Lord of Rising Stars sank into a crouch on the path and dug his impeccably manicured hands into the soft earth. He turned his fingers through the dirt in evident joy, and Cliopher felt something in his own chest ease.

With priceless robes dragging through gravel, his Radiancy leaned across to the little cluster of scarlet blooms which had caught his attention. “Look, Cliopher,” he said, shaking dirt from his fingers as he pointed. “Do you see how the petals form a spiral?”

“The Fibonacci sequence, my lord,” Cliopher agreed, smiling.

“Even in nature it seems there is no escape from mathematics,” his Radiancy said dryly, turning his head up towards where Cliopher stood. His eyes were alive with mirth, and Cliopher’s breath caught. Then his Radiancy turned back to the flowers to deeply inhale their scent, and— sneezed.

Cliopher had never yet seen his Radiancy do anything so plebeian, so utterly and undeniably human, as to sneeze. It was a deep, resonant sound, and for all that, a startlingly ordinary one. Within a breath his Radiancy was swarmed by attendants wielding handkerchiefs, and Cliopher was forced to step back to make room.

But still he thought of his Radiancy’s face turned up toward his, open with joy. How was it that something so ordinary as a flower could do—that? (And what, he wondered, could he do to make it happen again?)

Later, the curator pointed out a rare orchid on the cusp of blossoming which, she said, would be a truly spectacular sight, if the Glorious One might have the time and the condescension to visit the Gardens again tomorrow. His Radiancy made all the polite murmurs about schedules and possibilities, but Cliopher lingered a moment as the party continued onwards, faintly sick to his stomach as he looked at a flower that might never bloom.

Day 47

When his Radiancy released Cliopher from his obeisances, Cliopher did not go immediately to his desk, but hesitated where he stood.

Now faced with the reality of it, Cliopher was starting to regret the reckless impulse that had seized him as he left his rooms that morning. Still, he asked, "My lord, may I be permitted to ask a question concerning the taboos?"

Curiosity tugged at one corner of his Radiancy’s mouth. “You may.”

“I am given to understand there are restrictions on what your Radiancy is permitted to eat and drink. But I know I have seen your lordship drink coffee.” Over the recent weeks Cliopher had fallen out of the habit of the most formal patterns of courtly speech as the ruse of it seemed to wear thinner and thinner, but he retreated back to it now, his heart in his throat.

The other corner of his Radiancy’s mouth twitched up. “That isn’t a question, Cliopher.”

“Is any type of coffee acceptable?”

An eyebrow lifted. “So long as it is heated, and so long as it is prepared and served in a purified vessel.”

Cliopher swallowed and rested a hand on his writing kit. “I had thought— that is, I mean to say, I dared to presume—” He opened the leather case and withdrew the paper packet of Vangavayen coffee; the feel of it in his hand brought him some sort of inner strength, and he took a breath to try again. “On my last trip home to the Vangavaye-ve,” he said, rather incongruously, “I brought home a bag of Vangavayen coffee. I find it far superior to any kind sold here in Solaara, or even in Astandalas-that-was. On the morning when”—Cliopher waved a hand vaguely—“all this began, I had only a little remaining. And I thought, perhaps, if it pleased your Radiancy— you might wish to try it.”

His Radiancy’s smile had dropped away at these last words, and he stared at the paper packet laid on the table between them with something like wonder. “You wish me to have the last of your coffee from home?” (Was that moisture misting those golden eyes? Surely not.)

“Only if your Radiancy wishes,” Cliopher said hastily. “And— there will be more of it tomorrow. It is no great gift.”

“It is,” his Radiancy pronounced, solemn as any court judgment, and waved over an attendant. “Please prepare this coffee for two,” he said, indicating the packet.

“It will make a meager quantity to share,” Cliopher protested.

“For two,” his Radiancy repeated firmly.

Cliopher had indulged himself with this coffee nearly every day since he realized it would replenish itself overnight, and had almost begun to take it for granted. But sipping it now, watching his Radiancy over the lip of a flawless white porcelain cup worth more than his mother's house and everything in it, he tasted it as if it were the first time in years: rich and smooth and bitter, with an elusive touch of citrus. His nose filled abruptly with the green salt scent of home, and he missed his family so fiercely and suddenly that he had to put the cup down, clinking the fine saucer as his hands trembled just slightly.

“This is an excellent coffee,” his Radiancy said, smiling at him. “You are correct as always, Cliopher. Do you happen to know where in the Vangavaye-ve it is grown?” Still with that careful, correct pronunciation, which had not wavered since that first day Cliopher had corrected him.

“A cousin of mine has a plantation in the Epalos—a cluster of islands in the near part of the Eastern Ring—and my family often buys from her. I imagine these are hers, though I admit I’m not certain. There are a number of other places in the Vangavaye-ve where coffee is grown, mainly in the Eastern and Outer Ring, though I believe there are one or two islands closer to Gorjo City to which the industry has recently expanded, in order to meet the growing demand in a more convenient location…”

This segued, almost without Cliopher’s notice, into describing the Ring, Gorjo City, his family—in fits and starts at first, faltering around hurts that were still fresh. He told his Radiancy all about home-that-was, the home he had crossed the Wide Seas for, and not quite found. If his Radiancy noticed the missing pieces, he did not comment on them.

"It sounds beautiful," his Radiancy said. "I would dearly love to visit it one day. And to meet your family."

"They would like you very much, I think," Cliopher murmured.

His Radiancy regarded him with something like surprise. "You truly mean that, don't you? You're not just being polite."

"Of course," said Cliopher, faintly puzzled.

"Of course," his Radiancy echoed, just on the edge of smiling. "You have never seen any reason to present me with anything but the plain truth, Cliopher."

"I would not lie to you, my lord," Cliopher said firmly.

"I know." He sounded… awed. Cliopher thought of the flattery and games and vicious backstabbing he had seen in his years at court, thought of how it seemed to grow pettier and more cruel the higher in the ranks the players advanced. If that held true even to the highest levels, perhaps his Radiancy was right to be awed by clear, undecorated truth.

Later, when the coffee things had been cleared away and books delivered from the Archives for the day’s work, his Radiancy observed, "You say many of your family are musicians. Do you play or sing?"

Cliopher had already turned his attention to the task of setting up his writing things, and looked up in surprise. "I dabble with the oboe, my lord."

“Only dabble?”

“I played more before I left home. I never had much time to spare for practice here in the Palace, and—I confess I’ve always found playing alone a trifle lonely.” He snuck a sideways glance at his Radiancy, whose face was a study in… in not wanting, Cliopher recognized. His heart gave a peculiar thump and he said, before his brain could catch up with his tongue, “Perhaps my lord would like me to play for him?”

His Radiancy drew in a measured breath. “I would like that very much.”

Cliopher added hastily, by way of disclaimer, “I'm afraid I am a poor musician when compared to much of my family." When compared to the best artists of five worlds, who had once traveled to Astandalas to win the Emperor's favor, how much more so? But he could not regret the offer, not in the face of that terrible not wanting he had seen on his Radiancy’s face, which echoed painfully in his own heart.

His Radiancy’s eyes were smiling now. "As much of your family seems to be supremely skilled in that area, I will not hold it against you."

Cliopher inclined his head. "I will have to fetch my oboe, my lord."

His Radiancy flicked his fingers dismissively. "No need. We shall have someone bring it, and you can play after lunch."

Cliopher had never ventured deeper into the Imperial Apartments than the outer study and attached library. His oboe case was a similar size to his writing kit, and he tucked it into the crook of his arm in the familiar fashion as his Radiancy led him through the doors separating the public space—insofar as any part of the Imperial Apartments was public—from the private.

His Radiancy’s sitting room was, to no surprise, exquisitely and expensively appointed, minimalist in its unapologetic apogee of taste. The same hand which had decorated the outer study seemed to be at work here as well; Cliopher could not say for sure whether that hand was his Radiancy’s, but he thought not.

He could not help but compare it to his mother’s sitting room in Gorjo City which, while decorated with her impeccable eye, nevertheless had the look of being lived-in. This was a room designed for beauty, not comfort. But his Radiancy waved Cliopher to a seat, and took a second chair for himself. Cliopher sat gingerly on the upholstery—hand-embroidered with delicate golden buds in stitches so small and fine they appeared part of the woven cloth—and laid his oboe case across his knees.

A tray of refreshments had already been set out: tea in a delicate, hand-painted service—gold-rimmed for his Radiancy, silver for Cliopher—laid beside two plates of Alinorel biscuits that smelled of ginger and cloves. Cliopher’s stomach growled audibly; he had been too nervous to do more than pick at his lunch. But his Radiancy only smiled, overriding Cliopher’s embarrassment.

“Please eat,” he said, encompassing the tray in one expansive gesture. “Will you have honey in your tea?” And then, astonishingly, unthinkably, the Last Emperor of Astandalas poured Cliopher a cup of tea with his own hands.

Cliopher studied his Radiancy over the rim of his cup, just as he had that morning over the Vangavayen coffee. He had seen, in glimpses like the flash of a jeweled sandal beneath a whirling hem, the man who stood at the center of all ceremony, who delighted in burying his hands in the earth, who found awe in something so small as an unembellished truth. That man sat now in such perfect stillness, who could have summoned a dozen of the finest oboists at an hour’s notice, but who had invited Cliopher here, had offered him refreshments, not as a performer but as a— a— friend.

Cliopher was not a skilled enough musician to play for the Glorious One, the Sun-on-Earth, the Last Emperor of Astandalas. But undoubtedly he could play privately for a friend.

So he ate a biscuit, because his mother had raised him to eat what was offered, and besides he was hungry. It was exquisite, as every food served to the Lord Emperor of course must be, but he told his Radiancy so anyway, and was rewarded with an easing of that stillness he was coming to realize concealed emotions his Radiancy dared not show.

Then he rinsed the crumbs from his mouth with water from a carafe which had been set thoughtfully beside the tray, and assembled his oboe with practiced hands that did not tremble in the slightest. He played a few simple etudes to warm up, still not as good as he would have liked to be, but he'd had ample time to practice recently, and was pleased not to embarrass himself.

"Do you have any requests?" he asked at last.

His Radiancy regarded him thoughtfully. "Will you play that song you're always humming?"

"Which song is that?"

His Radiancy’s lips twitched up at the corners. "Oh, you know, the one that goes—" and then horrifyingly, mortifyingly, hummed a few bars from the denouement of Aurora.

Cliopher coughed. “I— had not realized I was humming that, my lord.”

“I did suspect that may be the case.” Still that hint of a smile, humor sparking in the lion eyes, no sign that he was aware that Cliopher had, all unknowing, been committing near-treason—how often?

Surely he knew what he was asking. Surely!

Well—Cliopher had asked for requests.

He steadied his breathing and there, in the heart of the Palace of Stars—in the sitting room of a friend—he raised his oboe to his lips and played Aurora.

Day 53

Saya Ardeni the Archives attendant was in her usual glum mood. Cliopher waited until she had finished taking a sip of coffee and set her mug down before he said, “Will you please have these books sent up to the Imperial Apartments for the third hour?”

She startled. “The Imperial Apartments?”

“The only ones I know of.”

“The third hour, you said?” She drew the list towards herself.

His next line, according to the usual progression, was, I believe Beeching’s may have been mis-shelved with the cookbooks. But he recalled suddenly the triumph with which she had found it that first day he asked. She wouldn’t remember the satisfaction tomorrow, of course, but— couldn’t he make today a good day for her anyway?

He smiled and thanked her, and left her to her search.

A page in Imperial livery found him just as he was exiting the Archives. He gestured for them to take a moment to catch their breath—he remembered his own time scurrying up and down stairs looking for an elusive personage all too well—and found himself hardly surprised at all when they at last managed, "The Glorious One wishes you to attend upon him in the Imperial Treasury this morning."

“Did he say why?”

“N— no, sayo,” they replied, seeming shocked by the idea of his Radiancy offering a reason for anything at all. “That’s the entire message.”

“Thank you.” He waved them off back to their duties and turned towards the stairs.

Though the Treasury was a veritable maze, Cliopher had no trouble at all finding his Radiancy. A pair of guards at the outer door pointed him in the right direction, and the occasional encounter with a flustered Treasury clerk or another set of guards reassured him that he had not lost his way. When at last he located the correct chamber, he found his Radiancy, in a gilded chair that had clearly been hastily brought in from another room, surrounded by dozens of stringed instruments of every shape, size, and style.

“Good morning, Cliopher,” his Radiancy said cheerily. He strummed the zither laid across his lap, which made a tinkle of noise like a gentle waterfall. The room practically vibrated in response, as the hundreds of strings surrounding them picked up the echo. “Would you like to help me pick out an instrument or two?”

“I had no idea you played, my lord.” Cliopher stepped across to admire a standing harp even taller than he was. The front column was carved into a merman suspended in mid-leap, every line of his body radiating freedom and joy. It was so intricately lifelike that Cliopher almost thought he could feel the spray on his face.

“Not since I became Emperor.” His Radiancy picked at the zither again, not quite in tune, and set it aside to stand and join Cliopher at the harp. “This one has a wonderful sound,” he said, plucking a few honeyed notes from the strings, “but it may be too cumbersome to have carried up all those stairs every day. I’ve always preferred something I could play while walking, in any case.” A little wistfully, he traced the curl of a wooden wave with his fingertip before turning away. He gestured next towards a much smaller harp with a long neck, so heavily encrusted in pearl and amethyst Cliopher wasn’t certain it was even made of wood. “Try that one. It is more the size, but…”

He raised his eyebrows and waited as Cliopher gingerly picked up the instrument and gave it an experimental strum. The notes emerged flat and dull, and Cliopher did not think it was due to his own lack of skill. He grimaced and returned it to its stand.

“Just so,” his Radiancy agreed. “Now, this one…” He led Cliopher on a rapid tour of the instruments he had already tried, and it was abundantly clear from his commentary that his knowledge of music and lutherie ran both deep and wide. They worked their way through that room and four others before his Radiancy at last settled on a beautiful rosewood harp in what he said was a style from southern Voonra.

“It’s not a variant I’ve ever had an opportunity to play before,” he said, belying his words by plucking out a jaunty tune as he spoke. “But I’m sure I shall pick it up.”

Chapter 5 Chapter Text

Interlude

My dear Basil—

In the ordinary course of life in the Palace, much of my free time was devoted to catching up on my correspondence. I have recently found myself with an abundance of time on my hands, for reasons which I will explain shortly, and I find I miss the routine (and you, and the rest of the family at home). So I thought I would try to write, although the letters will likely never even leave the Palace, let alone reach their destinations.

As to the abundance of time I find myself with, you will be pleased to hear that I have at last found a subject with which I have no affinity whatsoever: magical theory. I have been working through the basics, with generous assistance from my lord, but we find both our temperaments can only take a few hours of this a day. I continue to serve as his secretary for his own, more in-depth magical research about our predicament, and the rest of my time is largely my own.

I plan to begin to sample some of the entertainments that Solaara has to offer. Though of course not up to the standards of Astandalas the Golden, the city has grown considerably since the establishment of the capital here, and I think I will find sufficient amusem*nts to keep me busy for a time. There are also some old projects of my own which have begun to stir in the back of my mind, but I will have to consider the best way to make progress in the current situation. And much of the remainder of my time is spent with my lord, not as his secretary but as his friend. He is quite a remarkable harpist and singer; clever-minded and well-read and funny to boot, and we get along splendidly. He defeats me at chess nine out of ten games, which I’m sure gives you great satisfaction.

But of course I never had the chance to write to you about my new appointment, and I have not yet explained our predicament, so I will begin from the beginning.

Basil, you of all people will understand what it means to me when I tell you that I am now the private secretary to the Lord Emperor himself…

Buru Tovo—

Tē ke’e’vina-tē zēnava parahë’ala!

I celebrated the Singing of the Waters this past week. The timing should be about right, by my reckoning, though of course I have no way to know how time may or may not be progressing outside Solaara.

It is not the same to celebrate alone, of course, but no one else here in the Palace speaks language. When I came home after so long away, I was worried that I might have forgotten it, but the moment I saw you the words came easily to my tongue, called out of their long hiding. An unseen ember coaxed back to life.

I don’t know how long it will be before I see you again, Buru.

When I mentioned this to my lord, he suggested I begin to teach him to speak language, ensuring I will not forget and giving myself a practice partner all in one. He speaks a dozen tongues fluently, and bits and pieces of any number of others, and he is learning astonishingly quickly. He is accustomed to learning language through written grammars and dictionaries, which of course we don’t have—I wonder if anyone at the University has written one? I think they must have—but I would hardly know where to begin with a grammar of the old language, in any event.

It’s a learning experience for both of us, I think. It is very strange to look at the old tongue from his perspective, like looking at the surface from underwater, the familiar turned distorted and strange. He will ask me why a sentence is formed the way it is, and I have to stop and think, and try to come up with more examples and counterexamples until we are both satisfied. It’s an odd sort of puzzle, but an enjoyable one.

But don’t think grammar is our only occupation. Of late, we’ve begun to work our way through the Palace, speaking with each person, asking them about themselves and their families and where they come from and what they do. It almost reminds me of sailing the Ring with you when I was young, tending the fire. Though certainly no one ever reacted to our arrival on their island as the people here do to my lord’s! There is one man in the kitchen who faints every time my lord tries to speak to him, no matter how we approach—it seemed cruel to keep scaring the poor fellow every day, so we’ve let him be for now, but I may go back and talk to him on my own, if only for completion's sake. Most people we speak to seem to calm down a little once they realize that my lord’s questions are not a slight on their work, but genuine interest—he is endearingly curious, and his ignorance in most practical matters makes mine look like a pebble on the beach.

It is fascinating to meet all the many and varied people who make the great machinery of the Palace turn—you would enjoy it, I think, once you had stopped scoffing at anyone needing more than a stone knife to meet their needs. Pages and cooks and footmen and quartermasters, secretaries and maids and launderers and guards, artisans and scholars and yes, even ministers and great lords, each with their own skills, their own methods, passed from senior to junior. It isn't the same, but it's not so very different, either.

There are so many problems here, Buru, just as there are anywhere, big and small, and some so simple to fix, if only they would stay that way. Yesterday I mediated an argument between two young pages who had been good friends until they had a falling out. They ended the day as friends, and woke this morning at odds again. Of course, problems don’t always stay fixed from day to day even in the usual course of time. But still, it’s disheartening. You told me once that there are no new patterns, that the steps to every dance are somewhere in the Lays. I haven’t found this one yet. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, I don’t know.

And there are other problems, of course, that are not so simple to fix, loops or no loops. Astandalas was never good to its people, and the Fall has caused so much suffering, here and across Zunidh. I joined the Service because I thought I could change things for the better. I know it was arrogant of me, I could hardly fail to be aware of it, everyone always told me so, but—

Everywhere I look I see a fire that needs lighting or tending, and I know that I could make even a small difference, if I only had the chance.

I hope you are well, wherever you are.

—Kip

Dear Vinyë—

I have at last been to see the Solaaran Imperial Symphony Orchestra. They played Edeline’s Ninth, which is not one of my personal favorites, but it was, of course, excellently done. (Though I did think the first chair cellist was not quite up to par.)

I have been practicing my oboe nearly every day, and to my utter shock, my playing has improved immensely. This is a great trick which I know the entire musical profession will be ecstatic to learn, and which surely no well-meaning elder sisters have ever advised! My lord plays with me often, even though he is unable to build up harp calluses and ends every session with blisters. On occasion he chooses only to listen or sing, but I think he enjoys feeling the consequences of having made something only for himself, like sore muscles after a hard day’s labor.

And here is where I would ask you about your life, if there was any chance you could ever answer. What your symphony is playing next, whether you think you’ll make second chair soon, what you thought of the latest Detective Pehaki novel, whether you are seeing anyone new (did you ever get the chance to ask that Erwin fellow to coffee? I liked what you told me of him.)

I do wonder if perhaps it is only us here in Solaara who are trapped. Are you in the Vangavaye-ve, passing through one day after another, wondering why the letters have stopped coming? Or are you living the same day time and again, unknowing, like the people here? My heart aches to think of you all living like puppets on string. I hope it was a good day, at least.

Or perhaps you've all just stopped. Frozen in time, waiting for it to start again. Maybe someday… But oh, Vinyë, I am starting to wonder.

All my love,

Kip

Chapter 6 Chapter Text

Day 922

Leaving the refectory after lunch, Cliopher stepped back from the door to let Tabor through. Tabor was in the midst of explaining something to the junior secretaries at his back, his head turned away over his shoulder, and he gesticulated widely as he spoke, nearly braining Cliopher on the backswing. Cliopher, expecting the motion, prudently ducked.

“My apologies,” Tabor began, turning in surprise, and then, “Ah—Cliopher! Gold and glory, that was some dodge!”

Cliopher, who had taken the blow three times before he managed to get the timing right, inclined his head in wry acknowledgement.

“But here now, Cliopher, I’ve hardly heard a word about anything else since we got in from Ysthar last night—have you truly been sent to trial as the Glorious One’s personal secretary?” Behind him, the junior secretaries goggled.

“I have.”

Tabor paused expectantly, and when no more was forthcoming, prompted, “And? Glory and gooseberries, man, how did it go?”

Cliopher smiled. “Well, he hasn’t dismissed me yet.” He tilted his head towards the door. “I believe we are blocking the doorway, Tabor.”

Tabor obediently shuffled aside, his gaggle of secretaries following. “Yes, of course, and I’m sure you’re marvelously busy. We mustn’t keep the Sun-on-Earth’s own secretary from his duties, after all!” He winked at Cliopher. “Perhaps you can tell me about it at supper, if you haven’t put on too many airs by then, eh?”

“If I’ve the time,” Cliopher agreed amiably, and made his escape.

Some many dozens of loops ago, Cliopher had come across a private little nook in a low-traffic corridor, which received a splendid sunbeam at just this time of day. He frequently spent the latter portion of his lunch hour there, condensing the morning’s notes and committing them to memory, or sometimes just enjoying the sun, though the window itself was set so high in the wall that the only view to speak of was the occasional cloud drifting past against the vividly blue sky. There was one shaped a bit like an albatross that he was particularly fond of.

“Sayo Mdang?”

Cliopher smiled into his notebook. It was always a better day when Ludvic Omo found him.

He did not seek out Cliopher every day, nor even most days, but often enough. Cliopher had discovered, through unintentional trial and error, that Omo was much more likely to trace him to his nook when Cliopher stopped in the refectory to talk to Tabor. Whether that said something about causality, or merely the guard’s tracking skills, Cliopher had no idea.

“My name is Ludvic Omo,” said Omo, as he had many times before. “I’m a member of the Imperial Guard.”

“Yes, of course,” said Cliopher, following his script. “How can I help you?”

The usual pause to consider his words. “I can’t say I entirely followed your conversations with Himself this morning, but I understood enough to know that I won’t remember it tomorrow. With your permission, I would like to give you a passphrase. If you should need my assistance to assure the Glorious One’s safety or your own, or to fix the magic that’s gone wrong, repeat it back to me, and I think I will believe you.”

He recited a few lines. It was not the most common quatrain for Omo to choose, but it was one of Cliopher’s favorites.

Omo, shrewd as always, caught the ease with which Cliopher repeated the lines back to him, "I've offered this to you before."

Cliopher smiled. "Dozens of times. I don't mind."

“I suppose it was arrogant of me to assume that I would be the first version of myself to think of this.” He bowed, again that not-quite-court gesture that he always used, with his fists held away from his body and stacked vertically one atop the other. “You know where to find me.”

“I do. Thank you.” Cliopher, as always, meant it.

Even the Imperial paperweights were exquisite.

This was no surprise, of course. Cliopher knew that every one of the objects he walked past in these rooms each day was the pinnacle of the life’s work of one of the finest artisans on five worlds. Still, it was easy to let them fade into the background, and for a time he could almost forget where he was, who he spoke to, until a new piece of art he’d never seen was brought out to stun him with its craftsmanship all over again.

The paperweights were solid gold, formless and abstract at first glance, and resolving into tigers, birds, even whales on the second. The animals were only lightly suggested, with a curve here or a shallow indentation there, yet leapt to the eye with motion and life.

“Would you like to hold one?” his Radiancy said, amusem*nt crinkling his eyes at the corners.

“May I?” Cliopher said, already reaching for the whale, and then stopped in bemusem*nt, realizing that his Radiancy had spoken, and Cliopher unthinkingly answered, in the Islander tongue. “Well done, my lord,” he said, the Shaian honorific clumsy in the midst of Islander words. “That’s a tricky construction.”

“It has some similarities to the Renvoonran interrogative.” This last word was in Shaian, though the rest was flawless Islander. He really did have a superb ear for languages.

At a wave from his Radiancy, Cliopher resumed his aborted motion to pick up the whale. It was smooth and solid under his hands, and he turned it this way and that, watching the sleek form disappear and reappear as his point of view shifted.

“It is a remarkable illusion,” he murmured, tracing the faint indent of an eye with his thumb. “Is there magic in it?”

“None,” his Radiancy said tolerantly. “Mere mundane skill. Not that there is anything mere or mundane about such ability.”

Cliopher smiled at him, pleased—he had been about to say nearly the same thing—and gently placed the whale back on the desk with its fellows.

“What did you have in mind for the afternoon, my lord?” The paperweights certainly had not been present that morning.

“I recall you said, when you began tutoring me in language, that there were only a handful of Islander texts in the Archives. I thought we might work through them together, if you are willing.” He gestured to indicate a small pyramid of archival boxes on a trolley at the end of his desk, the kind of container used to protect fragile scrolls. Cliopher, now that his attention had been drawn away from the little golden whale, recognized them immediately.

He blinked hard and cleared his throat. “Of course, my lord.” Then, recalling the strict instructions he had received each time he had pored over these texts under a protective archivist’s eye, his hand flew out to touch the whale’s head. “You mustn’t— er, perhaps should not use these to hold the scrolls open, my lord, they’re too heavy and the parchment too fragile. The archivist should have sent up—ah.” He ducked down to retrieve a handful of soft weights from the bottom level of the trolley. “These are safer.”

His Radiancy flashed him a dazzling smile. “Practical as always.”

The scrolls, as Cliopher had correctly recognized, were the transcriptions taken by the scribe who had accompanied Aurelius Magnus to his first, momentous meeting with Elonoa’a. The meeting itself had been recorded in Shaian, but the scrolls his Radiancy had pulled from the Archives were transcriptions of conversation and story in Islander, much of it spoken by the Paramount Chief himself.

The transliteration was difficult to decipher, being both an old dialect of the Islander tongue and prior to Zangora VI’s Shaian spelling reforms. But Cliopher had spent many hours working out the conversions, and was familiar with the texts besides.

“‘The Wide Seas were wider then,’” his Radiancy read slowly, “‘for there was no—dance?’”

“Land,” Cliopher corrected. “They come from the same root word.”

“Ah, yes, I see. ‘For there was no land, and—’ Is this a name? It’s a pity the cartouche had fallen out of fashion by Aurelius’s day. Let me see. V… ow? And a glottal stop, and an ah. Vow’a?”

“In my part of the Ring we pronounce it Vou’a now. He’s an Islander god—he has many domains, of course, but he is mainly known as the god of mystery.”

“Ah, a god after my own heart. ‘And Vou’a sailed the Seas from one end of the world to the other, seeking… questions?’”

“Questions, answers, mystery. It has many shades of meaning.”

“Mystery, then, as it is most poetic. ‘—seeking mystery, but the only mystery to be found was under the prow of his own canoe.’”

They continued in this manner through the first portion of the scroll, with frequent pauses for questions, explanations, clarifications. Cliopher found himself dredging up more old lore than he’d thought about in years, the Lays humming in the back of his mind. This particular story wasn’t from the Lays, though he knew a few fragments of those songs had been recorded elsewhere in the scrolls. This was an old folktale, the kind used as a cautionary story meant to keep children out of trouble but more likely to inspire them to create more. Cliopher’s family had told a similar story, and he couldn’t help but point out the differences.

“The way my mother told it was set much later in the history of the world, and Vou’a was accompanied some of the time by Ani, the Mother of Islands. Her main role was to make acerbic comments, and to return the coconut shell he dropped earlier in the story just in time at the end, in place of the friendly shark.”

“The shark did seem to come out of nowhere,” his Radiancy agreed, listening to Cliopher’s explanations with a flattering intensity. “I wondered if it was a staple in other tales.”

“Maybe in some other part of the Ring,” Cliopher ventured. “But not in any stories I’ve heard.”

“And Ani? I imagine there are many stories about her.”

Cliopher smiled. “An understatement.”

Day 986

“I’ve never thought much about the bells,” Cliopher said, hoping the raggedness of his breath was not too audible. He thought of himself as reasonably in shape, but the steps up to the top of the bell tower were narrow and steep, and seemed to be going on much longer than the physical height of the tower would indicate.

“Oh?” said his Radiancy, glancing back over his shoulder. His breathing, too, was slightly heavier than normal. “And you so punctual?”

“The physical bells, I mean, my lord,” Cliopher clarified.

As he spoke, the quarter-bell chimed. Though thankfully no louder here than anywhere else in the Palace, it hung in the narrow space, precluding conversation until the echoes died away.

The spiral stair wound tight and close around its central column of white stone, faintly warm under Cliopher’s hand. Windowless as it was, the air should have been stuffy and stale, but some magic kept it fresh and smelling vaguely of lilacs. The steps were reassuringly solid, carved from the same white stone—no rickety wood slats could be permitted to grace the Palace of Stars, even in this half-secret stair where few of its denizens ever tread.

A few steps behind Cliopher was Ludvic Omo, in his full panoply, seeming entirely unaffected by the steep climb. Half a turn ahead was his Radiancy, white robes almost glowing in the dimness. Ahead of his Radiancy, out of sight behind the central column, was Omo’s partner Sergei, and ahead of him was Sayu Zai, the bell-keeper.

“I myself have never seen the bells in person,” his Radiancy admitted. “The magic on them is old and largely quiescent; they have not come to my attention before this.”

“Only two more levels, Glorious One,” Sayu Zai’s voice floated back, only the faintest quiver betraying their nervousness. They had reacted to his Radiancy’s unexpected arrival with impressive equanimity—both times, in fact, for they had been one of the earliest Palace residents Cliopher and his Radiancy had approached in their efforts to speak to every person in the Palace at least once. Neither had not ventured up into the tower then, only asked the bell-keeper about their duties. Sayu Zai, of course, did not remember that conversation.

Cliopher did not know what Sayu Zai meant by levels, for there were no landings or windows, nor any other break to the monotonous staircase that Cliopher could see, but it was not an interminable time later when the staircase at last ended in a blank wall, a door in the ceiling, and a short but sturdy ladder. Sayu Zai and Sergei had already ascended by the time Cliopher had come around the last bend; his Radiancy was eyeing the ladder with great concentration. Sergei hovered over the opening, looking as if he would have liked very much to give his lord a hand up, but he only stood back at his Radiancy’s wave and watched with well-suppressed anxiety and horror as the Sun-on-Earth awkwardly hitched up the skirts of his robes and made a go at the ladder.

Thankfully, the ceiling was low and the ladder was short. Cliopher winced as his Radiancy slithered through the trapdoor in a thoroughly undignified manner, and heard him remark generally, “I really must make an effort to have a more practical outfit prepared for such occasions.”

By the time Cliopher made it over the top of the ladder, his Radiancy had dusted himself off and stood looking cheerfully rumpled, gazing around with visible interest.

Cliopher had always been given to understand belfries as airy, open places, with broad windows to let the sound travel. This one was as close and windowless as the staircase had been, five-walled and some twenty feet high. The four great bells of dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight hung immobile from the thick central beam, each one bracketed with two hammers which would, Cliopher presumed, strike the bells to produce their sound. They were etched with scenes of conquest in an old Astandalan style, gleaming bronze in the low light. Between the great bells hung three smaller ones, the quarter-bells, much more plainly carved, suspended from ropes leading to an intimidatingly opaque mechanism in the center of the room. Bracketing the row were the two hour bells, of middling size and decoration, similarly yoked.

“The bells are rung at the correct times by a clockwork mechanism, Glorious One,” Sayu Zai was saying, their hands fluttering in quick, illustrative gestures. “The sound is captured by the runes on the walls and re-emitted evenly throughout the Palace, that it need not be unpleasantly loud in the center in order to be heard at the far ends.”

It was true that the bells sounded as strongly in Cliopher’s remote rooms as they did in the Imperial Apartments, but he had always assumed it was a trick of acoustics.

His Radiancy turned to the wall, motioning Sayu Zai to bring over their hand-held magelight to better illuminate the runes. He quirked an inviting eyebrow at Cliopher, who joined them.

“You’ve spent enough time with Beeching’s glossary by now, Cliopher,” he said. “What do you make of it?”

Cliopher squared his shoulders and frowned at the carvings, which seemed to shift and dance in the flickering magelight. “It’s a passive spell,” he said after a moment. “Powered by the sound waves themselves—which I imagine is why it was only a short time after the Fall before they began to function again?”

“That’s right, Sayo,” said Sayu Zai, bobbing their head. “My predecessor had to do some repairs on the clockwork mechanisms, she said, but the runes only needed a few minor tweaks to function on Zunidh.”

“That would be this element here,” Cliopher mused, motioning to one of the symbols which seemed to have been carved more recently and less neatly than the rest. “And so this must be the core statement… Spatial indicators here and here, and the power recursion here.” He dropped his hand. “The rest is beyond me, I’m afraid.”

“Some of these are very obscure acoustical sigils,” his Radiancy agreed. “And the choice of linkages is unusual. Do you see here, Sayu Zai’s predecessor used a latch rune in place of the more common lashing.”

Cliopher leaned in to examine the section he had indicated. “Perhaps she wasn’t certain the Palace would remain on Zunidh, and wanted to ensure her changes could be undone without unraveling the whole mechanism.”

“Very likely.” His Radiancy studied the runes for another moment, then shook his head. “Nothing in this assemblage has the strength to affect time on this scale, even if it were part of the larger stream, which it is not.”

“And the bells?”

His Radiancy turned away from the wall, tilting his head back to examine the row of bells gleaming in the low light. “There is some powerful magic in them,” he said, frowning slightly. “It has… a familiar sort of flavor, though I can’t quite place it.” He considered the bells for a moment longer, then turned to the bell-keeper once more.

“Sayu Zai,” he said. “How does one reach the bells?”

Ten minutes of astoundingly undignified rope-climbing found his Radiancy securely straddled across the central rafter beam, his robes bunched up around him. His breathing was ragged with the effort, but his eyes blazed. Cliopher snuck a glance at the guards, who were standing beneath the beam, looking very stoic indeed. What they would do if his Radiancy fell, Cliopher was not sure if even they knew.

His Radiancy inched past the hour bell, careful not to jostle it, and leaned low to examine the midnight bell. Lit from below by Sayu Zai’s mage-lantern, his jeweled sandals caught the light in dizzying flashes, his hands limned with reflected bronze.

“Ah!” he said at last, in tones of enlightenment. “Not the bells at all.”

Cliopher looked up at him in puzzlement. “Not the bells, my lord?”

“No, the magic I was sensing comes from the hammers.” He reached out precariously far—Sergei made an abortive motion in his direction—to grasp one of the strikers. “How very interesting. Sayu Zai, are these original to the bell tower?”

Sayu Zai spread their hands in bewilderment. “As far back as I have seen in the records, Glorious One. I recall a mention of them during the reign of Zangora IX, some thousand years ago. Of course I can consult the records if the Glorious One so wishes.”

“No, that’s quite sufficient.” His Radiancy pushed himself upright. “These hammers are buried deep in the magic of Zunidh. So deep, in fact, that I’m impressed even the might of Astandalas was enough to keep them in place on Ysthar for so long.”

Cliopher considered this. “Are you suggesting that they are the reason the Palace came to Zunidh during the Fall?”

“I am indeed,” agreed his Radiancy. “One mystery solved—but not, alas, ours. The hammers’ magic has no temporal nature at all, and I don’t believe they’ve been activated in some time.” He frowned briefly at the hammers. “Not as long as I would expect, but certainly more than half a day, or— what are we at now, Cliopher?”

“Nine hundred and eighty-six days, my lord.”

“Indeed. Longer than that. No, the bells are not connected to our little problem.”

“Still,” mused Cliopher, “it could be worth the attempt.”

“It could, at that.” His Radiancy drew himself to his full imperial dignity, an impressive feat while awkwardly straddling a beam suspended twenty feet in the air. “Sayu Zai, we require you to stop the midnight bell from ringing tonight.”

Sayu Zai gaped fishily. “That is most— er, of course I am pleased to do the Glorious One’s will— I will have to consult— yes, certainly, but— does your lordship require the bell to be back in place tomorrow?”

His Radiancy regarded the bell-keeper, expression wry. “I imagine that it will make very little difference either way.”

Day 987

“Well, Cliopher,” said his Radiancy the next morning, cheerfully enough. “What bright idea shall we try today?”

Chapter 7 Chapter Text

Day 1239

“This name, Enyë Walea,” his Radiancy said, pausing over his translation. “I’ve seen it before, in one of the earlier scrolls. But that was an old woman in a story from Elonoa’a’s childhood, and this Enyë is the daughter of one of his crew. Is it a very common name?”

“Not uncommon, certainly,” Cliopher said, considering. “Enyë is a name straight from a very early section of the Lays, almost as traditional as they come—my cousin Enya has a variant of the same name—and there are a fair few Waleas scattered about, though perhaps they were more numerous then. Likely the two Enyës were related.” At an inquiring look from his Radiancy, Cliopher went on, “Islander names are often passed down through families, though rarely in an unbroken line as some other cultures do. It’s uncommon, though I wouldn’t say rare, for a parent to name a child after themselves; more often the child is named to honor a beloved relative. It can bestow a kind of”—Cliopher gestured for the Shaian word—“godparent status on the namesake, though not in any sort of defined manner.”

“To encourage a busy grandparent to dote on that child in particular?” his Radiancy observed, the corner of his lips twitching upwards.

Cliopher smiled in return. “Sometimes. Though if that was my mother’s intent, I’m afraid it didn’t work—there were five of us in my generation named after my Uncle Cliopher, so any favoritism he might have shown was thoroughly diluted.”

His Radiancy raised both eyebrows. “Five Cliophers in one generation? Just how large is your family, Cliopher? No, more importantly—how did you ever know when someone was addressing you?”

Cliopher laughed. “There are fifty-nine first cousins in my generation.” His Radiancy mouthed the words fifty-nine with utter astonishment. “My grandmother had sixteen children, so you see we’ve rather expanded to cover most of Gorjo City by now.”

“Indeed.” His Radiancy’s eyes glittered. “And the names?”

“Nicknames. Uncle Cliopher has the full name to himself, as the eldest; the others are Whitey, Clia, Ferry, and Pico. I’m not certain anyone had ever called me Cliopher in earnest before I came to Astandalas; it took some getting used to.”

“That’s only four,” his Radiancy observed. “Were you Clio, then?”

Had Cliopher truly never told his Radiancy the name his family called him? “No, that was Clia’s name when we were youths. And it belongs now to my infant nephew on Alinor.” (Surely no longer an infant, if he lived. Cliopher wondered how old he was now—five? Twenty-five? Eighty-five?) “As for mine…”

He paused. His Radiancy was watching him keen-eyed across the carefully preserved accounts of the first meeting of Aurelius Magnus and Elonoa’a, in which neither of them had known the right questions to ask. And he found himself saying, “Guess.”

His Radiancy’s face transformed into a picture of such delighted glee that Cliopher could not help but grin back at him, dazzled. Cliopher had discovered a fair few smiles which his Radiancy possessed, over the course of their unusual acquaintance, but this one was entirely new. (He wanted very badly to learn how to cause it again.)

“Let’s see now,” his Radiancy said, leaning forward. His eyes, nearly sparking, had not left Cliopher’s face. “Clio and Ferry are the most obvious shortenings. Whitey I imagine comes from a physical feature—a shock of white hair? Or vitiligo, perhaps?”

“The hair,” Cliopher confirmed cheerily.

“You have no distinguishing features which lend themselves to an obvious nickname—unless perhaps you have a large birthmark shaped like the Yenga on your upper back? No?—so I believe we can rule that method out. What was the last? Pico, yes. There are two options for Pico, I imagine: either there is a charming story behind it, or someone jumbled around letters from Cliopher until they landed on something they liked.”

Cliopher gave an encouraging hum.

“I don’t expect I can pull your charming story out of the ether—though I could certainly make one up—so I will proceed on the assumption that it is a derivation of Cliopher.” The air between them crackled with energy; his Radiancy had entirely abandoned his usual dignified demeanor in favor of the puzzle before him. "Clee is too close to Clio, I suspect, and it doesn't suit you besides. Gopher?"

"Isn't that some sort of burrowing weasel?"

His Radiancy waved a dismissive hand. "A rodent, I believe. No, certainly not. Perhaps an Islander variant—Kifo?"

"No, but you're surprisingly close."

"Am I? Oh, please tell me it isn't Keith."

“No, it isn’t Keith,” Cliopher laughed, the kind of dizzy, full-body laugh he associated mainly with late-night conversations with Basil, or Bertie, or Ghilly.

“Well, there’s a relief. I’m sure I could learn to like the name, attached to the right person, but I do prefer not to have to.” His Radiancy’s eyes were intent, glowing, radiant; he began to throw off names rapid-fire. “Kivo? Kimo? Kibosh? Calypso?”

“You’re getting colder.”

“Am I? Drat.” Cliopher could not recall ever seeing his Radiancy’s smile look so at home in his face. “Well, don’t tell me. I’ll think on it.”

Cliopher inclined his head in agreement. Relaxed, his tongue loose with easy laughter, he asked, “And you? Did you have a nickname when you were a boy?"

The joy in the lion eyes snuffed out like a candle, and Cliopher’s chest clenched. Wrong question.

"I did not have a name when I was a boy," said his Radiancy flatly—neither bitter nor sharp, only a simple statement of fact.

Feeling like a man who had just passed unexpectedly from the warm waters of the shallows to the cold over the deeps, newly aware of the unknown abyss yawning just below his feet, Cliopher tried to think what he knew about his Radiancy’s childhood. Practically nothing, save that there had been a tutor who had had him learn dead languages and memorize tomes.

“Surely your parents must have called you something?” Cliopher ventured.

His Radiancy’s gaze was like a palpable thing, heavy and golden. Cliopher breathed carefully and did not look away. At last his Radiancy said evenly, "Am I correct in assuming you have not heard of the Imperial position known as the Marwn?"

“No. Or rather, that’s correct.” Cliopher bit off the my lord he had nearly appended to the end of his sentence. Though his Radiancy had lost all his relaxed good humor, Cliopher thought that he would not, just now, appreciate the honorific.

"I thought not. Even you can hardly be expected to know everything, particularly when the subject in particular is one of the most closely held secrets of the old Empire.” He settled himself in a sort of recitation pose, chin up, shoulders back, and very still as he began, “You know, for we have spoken of it before, that the most fundamental power of Schooled magic is derived from balanced and opposite pairs…"

The tale he unfolded, in a hard voice so unlike his earlier bright curiosity, made Cliopher’s heart ache for the little boy in a house of strangers, for the youth in a forgotten tower, for the man swathed in ahalo cloth and taboos here before him.

Cliopher thought of his own childhood, overstuffed with relatives as it was; thought of how his Radiancy had drunk in all his stories like a man dying of thirst caught in a sudden rainstorm. Thought of how his Radiancy had never, not once, offered one of his own. Cliopher had known, but not known; had seen, but not understood: his Radiancy was lonely. Had been lonely, it seemed, all his long life.

Cliopher breathed in, out, considered his words carefully. “Is there a nickname you would have liked?”

His Radiancy’s gaze fell sharply on Cliopher, taken aback but not, Cliopher thought, displeased.

“In my exile,” he said slowly, drawing the words forth with a noticeable effort, “when I realized for the first time that I possessed no name, I chose one for myself. What you name yourself you are, Harbut Zalarin wrote, and I, being nothing, chose to be something instead. Chose to be someone. I wanted—” He broke off, visibly pained—at least in the recesses of his eyes, where only Cliopher ever dared to look. Seeming to draw strength from Cliopher’s unbroken gaze, he went on, “I have held that name in my heart for a very long time, and silence is a difficult habit to break. You understand this, I think.”

Cliopher thought of uncountable beaches stretching from Nijan to the Vangavaye-ve, scattered with ash. He nodded.

“Someday you will know that name,” his Radiancy said, and then hesitantly, like an uncertain offering, added, “I have long thought Tor would be a fine nickname, if ever there were anyone in a position to call me by it.”

It was not—quite—an invitation. “A fine nickname indeed.”

Day 1245

Entering the Imperial Apartments one morning at his usual time, Cliopher was ambushed almost the moment he came through the door by a gaggle of clothiers and tailors, brandishing fabric and pins and measuring cords like weapons. Pulled into the center of the room and divested of his outer robe almost before he knew what was happening, he cast a beseeching glance across the room. His Radiancy watched the proceedings without apparent reaction, though Cliopher knew him well enough to spot amusem*nt sparking just below the surface.

“My lord,” Cliopher said, craning his neck above the shoulder of one of the clothiers, who lifted his arm with a long golden wand, measured from wrist to shoulder, and unceremoniously dropped it again, “may I be so bold as to ask what is happening?”

“I do believe they’re measuring you for a new suit of clothes,” his Radiancy said serenely. “Tailors do that, in my experience. Mm, not that one,” he added, to the address of the woman who had just held a length of silk up against Cliopher’s face. “Olive is not his tone, I think.”

“My lord, what—” he broke off as the wand pressed his chin gently upwards and his throat was measured from jaw to collarbone “—what is the new suit of clothes for?”

“For evening court,” his Radiancy answered, with no further elaboration. He was enjoying this.

Cliopher did not recall, in all the time they had lived this day, a single evening when his Radiancy had not canceled court. It was clear his Radiancy was planning something, and it was equally clear that Cliopher was not likely to get a straight answer as to what.

“I take it, then, that I am expected to attend?”

“Indeed.” Seeing the look on Cliopher’s face, he added, “Not to worry, my costumiers will have the full outfit ready in ample time for tonight, and I am assured it will be splendid.”

“I wasn’t worried about the clothes,” Cliopher murmured, but one of the tailors had—with nothing more than the golden wands—turned him firmly around, and he subsided.

The clothes were, Cliopher had to admit, very fine, though they made him feel a bit like a child swaddled in too many layers of blankets.

Court was the dazzling, glimmering, dizzying hullabaloo he had always imagined it to be. Cliopher had only been inside the throne room once before, when a few hundred frightened people had gathered to find out whether the world had ended, and even one of the most beautiful rooms ever built could not capture anyone’s attention. The crowd now was similar in size, but seemed a dozen times larger, filling the space with glinting jewelry and tinkling laughs and cloying clouds of perfume.

The sweeping lines of the room were by some trick of architecture even more evident despite, or perhaps because of, the throng. Inexorably, his eye was drawn past the (admittedly, currently reduced) riches and splendor of the highest aristocrats, drawn past jeweled floors and soaring arches, drawn past everyone and everything to rest on the dais with the golden throne. The man upon it was distant and motionless, unreadable even as Cliopher took his honored place near the base of the dais. The music was exquisite, the dancers whirled in great glittering formations, and Cliopher wondered again just what his Radiancy had planned.

At some unseen signal, the music ended with a flourish, and did not begin again. The dancers stepped back from their places, heads turning without prompting towards the throne.

High up on the dais, his Radiancy stood, and the hush that fell across the room was so immediate that Cliopher’s ears rang. At a gesture, two guards stepped forward from where they had been shadowed behind the splendor of the throne, carefully carrying between them the large standing harp his Radiancy had once admired in the Treasury. From this distance, Cliopher could just make out the merman relief on the front column, though the intricate detail of the ocean spray was lost.

Without any preamble, his Radiancy stepped up to the harp and began to play.

The acoustics of the throne room would carry even the merest murmur from the dais clear across the room. It was not necessary. The harp’s size and cool clean sound left every note echoing in Cliopher’s ears, reverberating in his bones. His Radiancy had played for Cliopher as a friend, but this, here, was a performance.

His Radiancy first repeated the same song that the court musicians had just finished, putting even their superb skills to shame. The next piece he played was one which Cliopher recognized as having won the Emperor’s composition contest shortly before the Fall, a sharp and rapid melody that somehow conveyed the exact feeling of being caught up in a market-day crowd on the streets of Astandalas the Golden, breathless and exhilarating and just a heartbeat beyond control. He did not stop when it was done, but flowed smoothly from one song to another to another, each more exquisitely played than the last. Cliopher did not know how long it had been when the last echoes of the harp strings faded between the great columns, and the whole room let out a breath like a sigh.

His Radiancy stepped out from behind the harp, his soft sandaled footfalls the only sound in the whole great room. He said, clearly and with full Imperial serenity, “Any requests?”

This, even more than the harp, than his Radiancy's undeniable skill, floored every person in the room. The silence, if possible, grew even more profound, broken only by one muffled cough from elsewhere in the crowd. It was only then that Cliopher understood what was about to happen, and he pressed his lips together to keep his expression under control.

His Radiancy waited patiently on the dais until at last he said, “In that case, I will play a song I picked up somewhere, though I’m afraid I didn’t catch the title.” He stepped back behind the harp, raised his hands, and in the midst of the entire court, there in what had once been the heart of the Astandalan Empire, he played Fitzroy Angursell’s Aurora, or the Peaco*ck, from beginning to end.

Chapter 8 Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn.

“Gold and glory, Cliopher—!” exclaimed Tabor.

“The Imperial Apartments?” asked Saya Ardeni.

“Sayo Mdang?” said Ludvic Omo.

“Here now, Cliopher, I’ve been hearing all sorts of rumors about you—”

“The Imperial Apartments?”

“I would like to offer you a passphrase—”

“—if you haven’t put on airs by then, eh?” winked Tabor.

Cliopher startled awake—

So it went.

Day 1427

His Radiancy closed the book he had been referencing and slid it onto the pile with the others. While his back was turned, Cliopher took the opportunity to set down his pen and stretch his fingers, which had been cramping with the effort of keeping up with his Radiancy’s rather nonlinear stream of thought.

His Radiancy having finished arranging the books to his slightly-misaligned satisfaction, he turned again to face Cliopher, regarding him seriously. “Clay,” he said. “Crab. Cabochon.”

“None of the above,” Cliopher said, hiding a smile as he shuffled his pages of notes into some semblance of order. “You shall have to guess again tomorrow, my lord.”

“Bah.” His Radiancy’s eyes glimmered with suppressed laughter as he waved a hand at Cliopher’s papers. “Go spin those into gold, Rumpelstiltskin, and I shall see you after lunch.”

As the day passed again and again, they had fallen into an easy routine, and lunch, in Cliopher’s opinion, was the low point of it.

Mornings were hard work, it was true, delving into ever-deeper and more obscure layers of magic and historical records. His own grounding in the subject was sufficient these days to allow him to make notes and offer the occasional suggestion, little more. It was tiring and occasionally tedious, but well worth the effort, to watch his Radiancy’s firespark mind at work.

Afternoons were better still, spent in the study of language and magic, music and poetry, politics and history, philosophy and art; or working on their own projects in company.

Dinner they ate together frequently, in the intimacy of his Radiancy’s smallest dining room (which, it was true, could seat at least two dozen before even adding the table leaves), and evenings were more often spent in company than not.

But outside the cocoon of the Imperial Apartments, where his Radiancy spun up light and life and laughter, Cliopher was finding the Palace increasingly difficult to stomach. The refectory nearest the center of the Palace was, necessarily, the place most of Cliopher’s colleagues (former colleagues?) also ate, and each and every day he answered the same questions—yes, he had been appointed the Lord Emperor’s new secretary; yes, of course it was quite splendid; no, the Sun-on-Earth had not dismissed him during his obeisances, or indeed at all—and answered them, and answered them, and answered them again. It reminded him, rather dizzyingly, of being near the center of a particularly juicy piece of gossip in Gorjo City, with every third person stopping him on the street to ask if it was true his Aunt Oura had really done such-and-such a thing, but here the wheel of rumor never turned itself away.

Once in Astandalas Cliopher had seen a woman displaying an extraordinary clockwork peaco*ck, which walked and moved just like the creature it was meant to mimic, if a little stiffly. It was only after he had watched it for some time that he noticed it performed the same sequence of actions over and over, in precisely the same manner each time. He was starting to feel as if the people he saw in the refectory each day were merely automatons, clockwork beings wearing the faces and names of people he'd once known.

Lunch was fried plantains and meat on skewers, with fragrant gravy as a dipping sauce. He’d been fond of it, once, but as it had now been the only meal on offer for over fourteen hundred days, he was growing rather tired of it.

At the door he met Tabor, just entering, his head turned over his shoulder as he gesticulated something to the posse of junior secretaries trailing behind him. Cliopher wearily sidestepped his arm, nodded politely to the group, and ruthlessly cut off Tabor’s exclaimed “Gold and glory, Cliopher—!” with a firm “Yes, the rumors are true, and I’m afraid I must dash, very busy, perhaps I’ll catch up with you at supper,” and fled.

That was the worst of it over with, at least. The rest of his allotted ninety minutes he could spend in his sunny nook, where no one he knew ever wandered by after the quarter-bell. No one, that was, except for—

“Sayo Mdang?”

Ludvic Omo, just on schedule. He had never felt so much like an automaton as Cliopher’s fellow secretaries, perhaps because Cliopher had not known him before, but Cliopher was finding it difficult to dredge up enthusiasm even for a tidbit of Omo’s poetry, just now.

Seized with a sudden savage desire to put a wrench in the clockwork gears, Cliopher turned to face him and said, without preamble, “Edriana took up her staff and raised it to the sentinel stars.”

In the arrested silence that followed, Cliopher completed the quatrain, and then for good measure rattled off all the fragments Omo had ever taught him, one after another. (He did not feel any better when he had finished.)

Omo, to his credit, showed his shock only a little, through a sudden tensing of his posture, a startled jerk of the chin. “Of course,” he said when Cliopher at last ran out of poetry. “I suppose it was arrogant of me to assume that I would be the first version of myself to think of this.” He inclined his head, as if awarding Cliopher a point. “What can I do to help?”

Now well outside the usual conversational script, Cliopher found himself more honest than he had intended. “Nothing, I suppose. I only wanted to change the conversation.”

Omo’s eyes were shrewd. “I see. How many times have you lived this day?”

“One thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven,” said Cliopher, disliking the edge of bitterness that had crept into his voice, and unable to restrain it.

“And Himself?”

“Yes. Both of us together.”

“That’s something, at least.” Omo glanced down the corridor in the direction of the Imperial Apartments, though they were some fifteen minutes away at a brisk walk. “I am sorry for your troubles, but— I have guarded him since he woke from his long sleep, and I have never seen him truly smile before today. I can’t help but be glad that he isn’t alone any longer.”

The world seemed to tilt under Cliopher’s feet. He thought of hands turning through dirt, golden eyes flashing laughter, Aurora soaring from one end of the throne room to the other. He thought of the fluidity of the Islander tongue in his Radiancy's fine baritone, jeweled sandals glinting under an embroidered hem, a child alone in a house full of strangers. Not alone any longer.

All he could find in himself to say was, “I, too.”

Day 1454

The crowd jostled and shoved, a river of people each with their own lives, each taking their own tiny actions which even Cliopher had not yet learned. He did not know their names, or which plays they were going to see, or whether they were about to dart left unexpectedly and stumble into his path.

The street, known to its denizens and visitors alike as Tany’s Alley, was a ramshackle row of rundown playhouses just on the western fringe of the theater district. Cliopher had begun on the northern edge of the district, inching one evening at a time through the sort of respectable, middle-class establishments he had occasionally visited with colleagues in the past. At one show a week, he had worked his way around the outer edges of the district, skirting for now the glittering center where court nobles entertained visiting dignitaries. (He wasn’t even sure if he would be permitted in the door of such places, but that was a puzzle that would come when it came.) In all, the shabbier playhouses had provided better entertainment than the respectable ones, though he had yet to come across any illicit performances of Fitzroy Angursell’s work. Perhaps one had to be invited to that sort of thing.

The previous week he had attended an astoundingly raunchy performance of an old Amboloyan play about a shepherdess and a potter. His face had flamed through all three acts, and then again the next evening when he dutifully recounted it to a delighted audience of one. Either his Radiancy had an uncanny ability to predict the next bawdy joke, Cliopher reflected, or he was familiar with the work. Perhaps the tower of his youth had included a vast library of dirty plays.

Cliopher passed the playhouse in question—the first act had already begun, to judge by the sheep bleats floating from the upper window—and turned into the next without sparing a glance for the colorful posters plastered across the facade. It was more enjoyable, he had discovered, if he went in with no prior expectations.

So he was caught entirely by surprise when the curtains opened on a dark-skinned man in yellow robes, who declared that he, the Emperor Aurelius, would sail the Wide Seas in search of an ally.

Aurelius Magnus and the Seafarer King was not widely considered among the best plays in the Astandalan theatrical canon, nor the most popular, but firmly entrenched in that canon it certainly was, an undisputed classic of the genre. Early in his time in Astandalas, Cliopher had found that among his Shaian-educated colleagues at court, the name of the Vangavaye-ve would receive, at best, a puzzled stare, but a mention of the Wide Seas of Zunidh could reliably prompt a curious, “Oh, like the Seafarer King?” (Cliopher had rapidly stopped attempting to explain the difference between a king and a Paramount Chief; there had been bigger seas to sail in those days.)

He had read the text of the play in his youth, and seen it staged once, when the year above him at school chose it for their class performance. Steeped as he had been in the Lays, he had at the time fixated on its inaccuracies against the story he knew. Now, he found himself better able to step back and appreciate it as a piece of historical embellishment like any other. The story followed the patterns of an Astandalan drama instead of a tale out of the Lays, and Elonoa’a on his claw-sailed boat declaimed his soliloquies in perfect courtly Shaian, but the pearl at the heart of it—two men each finding in the other something longed for: an ally, a trading partner, a dear friend—shone true.

The production itself, with the constraints of budget and space, relied on imagery more stylized than ornate. The boats were flat painted wood, carried by the actors. The Seafarers wore slashed green sarongs to simulate grass skirts, and Elonoa’a was demarcated from his crew by a crown of cassowary feathers. The flames, when it came time for the fire dance in the third act, were formed of flickering red and orange ribbons, lit from below by glimmering magelight. More than his own dances, it reminded Cliopher of the greater dance of the Kindraa lorekeepers, who outlined the steps of their dance partner the wind through the snap and sway of brightly-colored ribbons.

This was appropriate, for the fire dance scene was also the source of the playwright’s most egregious inaccuracy: having Elonoa’a dance the fire. (Cliopher’s schoolmates had identified one of the anonymous Seafarers as Tupaia and given him the fire dance instead, though it had, admittedly, bled some of the emotional tension out of the surrounding scene.)

The actor playing Elonoa’a moved more like an Alinorel step dancer than any Islander Cliopher had ever seen. The drumbeat was too fast, the green sarong did not look anything like a grass skirt in motion, and the glowing ribbons, while beautiful, were a poor imitation of true fire, and nothing at all like the coals they should have been. And yet…

And yet Cliopher felt as if this flimsy masquerade had torn open something in him, laying bare the loss and the longing for home that he had hidden away, and hidden away, and hidden away. Tears burned behind his eyes, but he found he could not weep.

He thought of the grass skirt, tattered by travel and typhoon and time, which had hung for years at the back of his wardrobe where it was safely hidden behind the robes and trappings of his life at court. He had woven it himself on some lost and lonely island, he had worn and mended it and worn it again across the whole of the Wide Seas, and then he had carefully packed it up and brought it back to Solaara with him when he left, because—why? Because he could not bear to abandon that last piece of his long journey, perhaps; or because he had not intended to leave any fragment of that travel-worn, typhoon-worn, time-worn Cliopher behind in the Vangavaye-ve, where he had not been wanted.

He had not touched the skirt since he returned to the Palace, except to unfold it from its wrappings and brush it out carefully and hide it away even from his own sight.

The play went on, of course. Cliopher let himself be swept up in it away from his own roiling thoughts, let the rhythms of the narrative wash over him, so different from the one he knew and yet at its heart the same story, the same friendship, that had guided his steps his whole life long.

Cliopher felt the wrenching grief as Aurelius was stolen by the Sun, felt the tempestuous anger of Elonoa’a as he rallied his crew to sail after him. Felt the tension and the terror and the unyielding love when Elonoa’a stood at the center of the stage and seemed to gaze straight into Cliopher’s soul as he said: “I will not let him linger long alone.”

Ludvic Omo’s words seemed to echo there, hanging in the empty space above the audience: “I can’t help but be glad that he isn’t alone any longer.”

And Cliopher had said, “I, too.”

A child in a house full of strangers; a youth in a tower full of magic; a man guarded at every moment, never and always alone. But Cliopher was there with him. Cliopher had followed him into this realm, this place of stasis and magic, and so Cliopher’s Emperor, Cliopher’s Aurelius, no longer lingered there alone.

On the stage, Elonoa’a and his crew took their crab-clawed boat and sailed away into the sky. The curtains, heavy blue drapes like the ocean at twilight, fell closed with a finality that shook Cliopher’s heart.

That had always been the end of the story, after all. Elonoa'a had gone to Sky Ocean in pursuit of his beloved Aurelius, but neither had ever come home.

Day 1455

“Your mind is elsewhere this morning, I think.”

Cliopher started and came back to himself, realizing that the end of his pen had been hovering above the page so long that it was dry. “I apologize, my lord,” he said, hastily dipping his pen. “Would you like me to take a dictation?”

His Radiancy waved a dismissive hand. “No, we’ve done enough for the day.” Seated behind his vast sandalwood desk, he rested his elbow on the table and his chin on his palm in a most un-Imperial gesture, studying Cliopher from across the room. “Is there something wrong?”

“No, my lord,” Cliopher said automatically, busying himself with tidying away his inks and papers. Then, before he could stop himself: “I have been thinking.”

“A common occupation of yours, I have observed,” his Radiancy remarked lightly. Cliopher was able to work up only the weakest of smiles in response. His tongue was thick in his mouth, all his faculty with words fled from him.

He was aware, had been aware all morning, of Ludvic Omo’s presence at the door, ordinarily blended smoothly into the background. Just another piece of decor—superlative, as everything in the Imperial Apartments of course must be; easy to forget nevertheless. But Omo saw and heard, even if he did not remember. And he had known his Radiancy longer than Cliopher, in a sense, and more intimately, in another. And if he thought that his Radiancy was better off—

No. Cliopher did not need Ludvic Omo to tell him what he could see with his own two eyes.

Cliopher swallowed and looked up. His Radiancy had dropped the hand from his chin, palms laid across the surface of his desk, and his expression was one of concern. Cliopher shook his head and tried again.

“We have been studying our magical problem for one thousand, four hundred and fifty-five days. We have made, in essence, no progress. And I am not certain, at this point, why— why we are still trying at all.” There. He had said it, what he had needed to say. His pulse was thundering in his ears.

His Radiancy did not answer right away. Cliopher glanced across at him and saw to his horror that the concern was gone, all emotion, in fact, wiped away. His face was as motionless as carved obsidian, and as sharp.

“Of course,” his Radiancy said, in tones cool and distant and so, so carefully neutral, “if you no longer wish to spend your days with us, you are a free man. We release you from this obligation.”

Cliopher nearly snapped the pen he was holding. “No, my lord!" He took several breaths, forcing his wild vehemence back down, and struggled again for words. “That isn’t what I meant in the slightest.”

“Pray enlighten us, then.” Even his eyes, where Cliopher could often see a glimpse of his true feelings, were shuttered; he did not meet Cliopher’s gaze.

“I— I wished to—” Why was this so difficult? “I am thinking of your happiness, my lord.”

“My happiness?” The utter bafflement, at least, had cracked his Radiancy’s blank smooth surface.

“In the loop, you can do what you wish.” Cliopher waved a hand helplessly. “Play the harp, cancel court, walk in the gardens, visit the kitchens—” Did he dare? Yes, he dared. “—spend time with a friend. I did not know you before, my lord, but I know you did not do these things. And I see they make you happy. I have no wish to take them away from you.”

His Radiancy had not lost his absolute stillness, but the sharp edge was gone. “You are suggesting we simply— stop?”

His Radiancy could not possibly know how that hit Cliopher like a blow to the heart. “Not stop, precisely… Only let rest.”

“Let rest.” His Radiancy closed his eyes briefly, looking for just a moment as utterly exhausted as everyone in the Palace had looked those first few awful weeks-months-years after the Fall. Then he opened his eyes and met Cliopher’s gaze at last. “I am not the only one affected.”

Cliopher could not find within himself an answer to that.

“Your family, Cliopher,” his Radiancy prompted gently. “Your home. You would give them up, perhaps forever, for my happiness?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? They did not need him; he was no use to anyone there. But here, this fire, half-smothered until it had been unexpectedly coaxed back to life; here was a fire he could tend.

“For your happiness. For you, my l—. For you. Tor.”

His Radiancy rocked back as if struck. They stared at each other for a long, long moment, from across two desks and half the room. Cliopher felt as though the world were balanced on the prow of a canoe, and the slightest jostle might knock it either into the belly of the boat, or into the endless depths of the sea.

Then his Radiancy stood, bracing himself on his desk, and said in a voice like stone against stone, “I do not accept.” He turned to the guards, bringing them crashing suddenly back into Cliopher’s awareness. "Have someone prepare a barge down the Dwahaii at once, and a ship to take us around Southern Dair when we reach the port. We will leave the moment the barge is made ready."

Cliopher did not know what Omo and his guard partner Sergei might have made of their conversation, but their training held. Sergei said, "Yes, my lord," and turned to summon a page without protest.

Cliopher, floundering, discovered all he could find to say was, "My lord!"

"Pack your things, Cliopher," his Radiancy said decisively, and dismissed him with a flick of his hand. “You’re going home.”

The barge, hurriedly commandeered for his Radiancy’s use, made good time down the river and arrived at the port in mid-afternoon. There they changed to a narrow, three-masted clipper which sat light in the water, its cargo piled hastily on the dock.

“South and around the cape,” his Radiancy said brusquely to the captain, who had flung herself violently into her obeisance and now stood on the dock looking poleaxed. “As far from the port as you can get us before midnight.” Cliopher tried to give her a look of silent thanks and apology as he progressed up the gangplank in his Radiancy’s wake, but he was feeling rather flummoxed himself, just at the moment.

His Radiancy had dismissed the idea that distance from Solaara might set the magic right very early on, as, he said, the effects clung to the people, not the place. What his Radiancy had in mind Cliopher did not know and had not had a chance to ask, as his Radiancy had become quite seasick almost the moment the river barge pushed off from its dock in Solaara. And though he had already been ill for hours when they arrived in Ithazhi, he had marched off the barge and straight over to the clipper without a moment’s hesitation. For Cliopher’s sake.

As shouted orders and the sounds of canvas and rope filled the air, Cliopher went to join his Radiancy at the rail. The Glorious One looked rather more queasy than glorious, his hands locked around the rail like a lifeline.

“Do you truly think putting enough distance between us and Solaara will set it right?” Cliopher asked.

His Radiancy smiled with some difficulty. “It is a possibility.”

“A very slim one, you said.”

“Quoting my own words back at me, as usual. I don’t know why I ever asked for a competent secretary.” The lion eyes flashed with humor. “A slim chance is still a chance. And if it fails, there is no great cost.” The deck lurched suddenly. Cliopher’s sea legs still held him solid even after all this time, and he reached without thinking to steady his Radiancy, only snatching his hand back at the last second. His Radiancy, hunched over the rail and looking as if he might start retching again, did not appear to notice. No great cost, Cliopher considered, was not quite accurate.

“The wind is out of the east,” he observed, once the ship had calmed and his Radiancy seemed to be briefly recovered. “I don’t expect we’ll make very good time this evening, if it holds.”

His Radiancy turned his gaze upwards, considering. “I wonder…” He raised his hand, and the wind, without fanfare, turned almost due south. Above them, the sails belled out, driving the ship forward with another lurch. “Well!” His Radiancy lowered his hand and examined it with some satisfaction. “And I feel much better, too.” He tapped the rail thoughtfully. “Clipper?” At Cliopher’s bewildered blink, he clarified, “To match your cousin Ferry.”

“Oh! No, not Clipper, but you’re not far off.”

“Not far off Clipper, and close to Kifo.” His Radiancy hummed in contemplation. “Clifo? Kipper?”

“Getting warmer.”

“Which one?”

Cliopher smiled, the knot of tension in his chest loosening just a little. “That would be telling.”

“You’re going to make me work for every inch, I see,” said his Radiancy, eyes twinkling.

A sudden noise made them both jump. It took Cliopher several moments—and his Radiancy looking down in surprise—to realize that it had been the growl of the Sun-on-Earth’s very earthly stomach.

“Well!” his Radiancy said, laughing. “If I’d known a little wind magic was such an effective cure for seasickness I’d have bottled it up and sold it years ago. Shall we go below and see what food the grooms were able to scrounge up?”

There was a small wall clock in the dining cabin on the clipper, and they sat together listening to it count off the quarter hours as the ship hurtled southward down the coast. The night outside was dark and silent, save for the creaking of ropes and sails.

“You are wrong, you know,” his Radiancy said idly, as if continuing a conversation. He fiddled with the cover of the book open on his lap, the pages of which he had not turned in quite some time.

Cliopher turned his head away from the narrow window, where the coast of Dair flickered by, near-invisible. The low clouds had not broken since sunset, so he had not even been able to use the stars to gauge their speed and heading; still, he watched. “Wrong about what? My lord,” he added uncertainly.

“You say that it was the loops that gave me the freedom to be happy. To walk in the gardens, to play the harp.” He smiled at Cliopher. The cabin was lit by magelights that swayed in the gentle rocking of the ship, casting moving light and shadows across the familiar planes of his face. “To sit with a friend.”

“Is that not so?”

“Not entirely.” His Radiancy’s long fingers drummed on the page of his book, the noise loud in the night stillness. “It is true that I am able to do things I could not before. Though perhaps could is not the right word. If there is one thing our predicament has made abundantly clear, it is that I can do all those things whenever I wish. It is only that each and every action I take, as Emperor or former Emperor, has outsized consequences, only some of which I can predict. I have told you about the cherry blossoms?”

Cliopher inclined his head.

“And that was merely an absurd waste. Of time, of resources, of money. But only those. In the first six months of my reign, four people took their own lives before I learned how to hold my tongue.” His face was a mask, but his fingers had not stilled, drumming out a staccato beat. “I had known, of course, that lives hinged on my words. I had not yet realized that they hinged on every word, no matter how ill-considered, how hasty, whether said in anger or exhaustion or jest. So you see it was not the walls which confined me, but myself. My own unwillingness to bear responsibilities for the consequences, which I could neither control nor predict. For a mere few moments of fresh air?” His lips twisted in scorn, directed inward. “The loops freed me from the consequences, it’s true. But I would still have been trapped in my old habits, living the same life. Do you understand?”

“I— I think so. Some.” How could he? But then—watching his Radiancy drum his fingers where once he had been still, digging up long-buried anguish and presenting it to Cliopher, unpolished, unasked—how could he not?

His Radiancy leaned forward intently, his golden eyes flashing in the low light. "It was the loops that opened the door. It was you, Cliopher, that showed me it was possible to walk through it."

Something within Cliopher seemed to tilt and settle into place, as if it had always been crooked without his knowledge, and only now was it right. He held his Radiancy’s eyes for a moment that seemed to stretch all the way to the Vangavaye-ve. Cliopher longed to give his Radiancy something equal in return—there was a story in his chest that ached to be told—but he could not, could not, open himself up and lay bare that long-buried anguish at the heart of him, not here, tonight, unable to let himself hope that such an impossible journey could be repeated.

“Kip,” he said at last, his throat dry. “Everyone at home calls me Kip.”

“Kip,” his Radiancy repeated, seeming to test the word on his tongue. “I was close, then. It suits you.” He smiled almost shyly, and Cliopher felt an answering smile on his own face, dredged up from somewhere very deep indeed. “Is there a story behind your nickname, Kip?”

“There is.” Cliopher found he couldn’t help but respond to the name, his posture loosening, his accent slipping, more even than during their discussions of Islander history. “My mother always said they’d meant to call me Clip, as a more direct shortening of Cliopher. My sister Vinyë, who was about two at the time, could only pronounce it as Kip, and it stuck.”

“So a jumbling of sounds and a charming story, all in one. Ever the overachiever.” His Radiancy’s fingers strummed the air absently. “Your sister Vinyë—the cellist, yes? Ah, and the Vangavaye-ve is called the home of music, isn’t it? I should have packed my harp.”

“I didn’t bring my oboe, either.” Cliopher felt unaccountably dismayed at the thought. He had not had it with him the last time he was home, either, and see how that had turned out. “The harp isn’t a common instrument in the Ring, but I’m sure we could find you something. If we arrive.” He dared not hope.

“The oboe seems an unusual choice,” his Radiancy said unpressingly. “I don’t believe you’ve ever mentioned how you came to it.”

That was a rather long and meandering story to tell, and by the time it was done it led smoothly into another, and another.

Cliopher had spoken of his home many times before, but never with the possibility of reaching it so tantalizingly close, never with the scent of the sea drifting through the window, waves rolling under his feet. It poured out of him in a torrent, as if he might burst if he failed to release it, and every word tightened the knot of homesickness in his chest. He could almost feel the rough ropes of the Tui-tanata under his palms, could almost see the tempests clear and the horizon open before him, revealing a smudge of green in the distance, the end at last to that endless journey. He spoke, and his Radiancy asked all the right questions, and the words came easily to Cliopher’s lips, and he wanted so badly to stand with his Radiancy under that sun—

—and the clock struck midnight.

One chime, two chimes, three, and Cliopher dared almost, almost to hope, that it had truly been so simple after all. Six chimes, seven—

Day 1456

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn. He put his hands over his face and wept, and did not go to see his Radiancy that day.

Day 1457

Or the next.

Day 1458

Or the next.

Day 1459

It was shortly after the fourth hour of the morning when there was a sharp rap on the door to Cliopher’s chambers.

Startled, he wiped his face and stood, making a rapid check of himself and his rooms out of long habit. At least he was dressed presentably today, in the robes which had been hung on the back of the door with such care by a version of himself he could hardly remember being. He had come close to getting himself out the door at the proper time that morning, but in the end he had not gone.

(He missed his Radiancy sharply, and still he had not gone.)

There was another knock, louder this time. It would be a page, he thought, come to summon him to the Imperial Apartments. Three days had been more than generous. He opened the door, opened his mouth, and flung himself to the floor in hasty obeisance, speechless.

"None of that," his Radiancy said, and shut the door in the faces of his surprised guard. He stepped carefully around and crouched—crouched!—beside Cliopher on the floor. The sight of the Lord of Rising Stars squatting like a fishmonger amidst yards and yards of the very finest ahalo cloth was so incongruous that Cliopher couldn't hold in a startled, barking laugh, which turned, mortifyingly, into something like a sob.

"Dear Kip," his Radiancy said, so gently that Cliopher nearly dissolved into tears right there. "I am sorry. Perhaps I should not have suggested it."

"No," Cliopher said, pushing determinedly to his feet and turning his face away from his Radiancy, just for a moment. He pulled one of his two narrow wooden chairs away from the table and offered it, uncertainly, to the Sun-on-Earth. "It was—very kind."

“Kindness does not mean it did not hurt you.” His Radiancy used the chair to lever himself to his feet, awkward and unbalanced in his voluminous robes, and settled himself on the wooden seat, like a storybook tale come to life in Cliopher’s own cluttered room.

Cliopher took the second chair, any words he might have wished to say sticking in his throat. He had not realized just how little hope had been left to him until it had suddenly surged within him, those last few terrible, wonderful moments on the ship, and then been snatched away again. He did not know how to say so, in a way that did not imply that he did not value—that he did not treasure—the time his Radiancy chose to spend with him, every day. In a way that did not remind his Radiancy that he, unlike Cliopher, had no home to miss.

“It was not you that hurt me,” Cliopher said at last, drawing on every last reserve of his court etiquette to keep his voice steady, his face still. “Only my own foolish hopes. I am sorry that I— that I led you to believe so. You gave me a great gift, only in the trying.”

“Cliopher,” said his Radiancy, then, “Kip,” and the nickname plucked at Cliopher’s heartstrings so that he had to hold back tears again. “We will not stop trying.” The words held the force of a vow, quivering in the air about them full of magic that even Cliopher could sense.

Cliopher wanted to say I know; wanted, even more, to say thank you, but could not force the words out past the lump in his throat. Instead he sprang to his feet, aware even as the lingering magic faded of his unfulfilled duties as a host. “Would you like something to drink, my lord? I have coffee, or water.” A meager set of choices to one such as his Radiancy, but so it was.

His Radiancy looked as if no one had ever offered him such a thing before. Cliopher realized belatedly, painfully, that very likely no one ever had.

“I— oh, Cliopher, I can’t drink anything from an unpurified vessel. But I wish I could express to you how deeply grateful I am for the offer.” His voice was so sincere that Cliopher felt only the faintest clenches of mortification at his error.

“Yes, of course, my lord. I— forgot.” Cliopher’s hands flexed briefly in frustration, in the need to do something.

“And that is a great gift,” his Radiancy said softly. “Only in the trying.” He met Cliopher’s eyes across the table, and for half a breath Cliopher thought he might drown in the depths of feeling he saw there. Then his Radiancy blinked, and one corner of his mouth quirked up. “Of course, you should not let me stop you from drinking something if you wish. I would not consider it rude in the slightest.”

Cliopher nodded and stepped over to his little kitchenette, grateful for the time to compose himself.

The packet of Vangavayen coffee sat at the top of the tin, of course. Even the sight of it had him fighting down another wave of homesickness, and he set it carefully aside and chose another coffee at random. As he measured out a serving into the grinder, he heard his Radiancy rise from the table and cross the room, perhaps deliberately scuffing his sandals on the floor to advertise his movements. Deliberate or not, Cliopher was keenly aware of his Radiancy’s location, behind his left shoulder and a safe distance back, watching without comment as Cliopher turned the crank on the grinder and then transferred the ground beans to the percolator, filled the base with water, lit the stove, all the soothing little rituals that Cliopher’s hands followed without thought.

More than once, on that long, long journey home, he had washed up on some lonely isle, boat wrecked, heart wrecked, his ke'e lost again, and when the voice at the core of him asked Is this where you stop?— well, he had not always had the strength to say no.

(But he had never said yes, either. What sort of person would he have to have been, in order to go so far and no further?)

Each time, when he could not bring himself to stand and start again, he had wondered if he had come to the end of himself, if that island was where he would live out his days, on coconuts and fish and the labor of his hands. And then, each time, after days or weeks or longer, perhaps—each time, eventually, he stood up. He rebuilt his boat, he gathered supplies, he danced the fire, and he found the next star in his ke’ea.

But he had always, always, done it alone.

When the coffee was brewing and everything had been tidied away, he took a measured breath and turned. His Radiancy stood a little distance back, far enough away to preclude accidental mishaps, and was studying the percolator with keen eyes. Cliopher had seen that look before, on the days when they wandered the Palace only to learn things and speak to people, and his Radiancy encountered some little detail of practicality in the kitchens or laundry which caught his attention.

“Would you like me to explain how it works, my lord?” Cliopher asked, with a surge of fondness that dragged up what felt like—probably was—his first smile in days.

His Radiancy’s gaze broke from the percolator and darted to Cliopher, an answering smile hovering a little sheepishly on his lips. “I would.”

Cliopher described the mechanism, to the extent that he understood it: the heated water vapor was drawn up the central pipe into the upper chamber which held the coffee grounds, where it filtered back down into the water chamber to be heated and drawn up again.

When the coffee had finished brewing, he poured it into a mug and set it aside, then—his Radiancy having cooled the contraption with a wave of his hand—disassembled the percolator and carefully stepped back so that his Radiancy could look more closely.

“A better metaphor than our fountain, perhaps,” his Radiancy mused, turning one of the pieces over in his hands. “We are filtered through this day again and again, a little changed each time.”

“I suppose so,” Cliopher said, considering. “Though if I recall correctly, the water in the fountain was time, not us.”

“Perhaps. Well, I reserve the right to alter my metaphors at will. The prerogative of a poet, you know.” His Radiancy paused, his face briefly resorting to that disguising serenity, the motion of his hands stilling. “I can’t recall the last time I called myself a poet. How… liberating.”

“I didn’t know you wrote poetry. One of your guard does too—Ludvic Omo.”

“Does he?” His Radiancy smiled crookedly. “I knew there was a reason I liked him.”

“On occasion, when he hears us talking about the loop in the mornings, he’ll stop me in the afternoons and give me a passphrase to gain his trust on future iterations, if I should need it rapidly to ensure your safety. The passphrase is nearly always his own poetry.”

“Does he? How splendidly sensible of him. He’s never given any such passphrase to me, but then I suppose he doesn’t think I’d need it.” His Radiancy nodded towards the door, on the other side of which, Cliopher presumed, Omo and Sergei stood guard. “This is the first time I’ve been alone in a room with any one person since I became Emperor, you know.”

Cliopher, who had just picked up his abandoned coffee to take a sip, sputtered. “I— did not.”

“Well, and so. Hardly a word of protest from either of them. It was the same with the barge. They’ll do whatever I say, simply because I say it, as long, I imagine, as it does not endanger me, or perhaps more importantly the taboos.” He set down the percolator tube and picked up the basket of used coffee grounds to take a curious sniff. “This isn’t your usual. Where is it from, do you recall?”

"Haion City in Jilkano." Cliopher fingered the discarded paper wrapping, which was unmarked. "My ship stopped there on the journey to Solaara. There was a man at the docks looking for news from further west, so I told him what I knew, and he insisted on giving something in trade. It has a different flavor profile than anything grown in the Ring, but it’s quite good as a change of pace.”

“To Solaara—after the Fall? I had not quite realized you had traveled so far.”

Cliopher felt as if he had just turned a corner on a familiar path and found suddenly a precipice gaping at his feet. “Yes. There had been no news from the Vangavaye-ve since the Fall, and with the typhoons, no ship would take a letter so far west for any price.” He took a long draught of his coffee, lukewarm now. “So I quit the Service and went myself.”

His Radiancy set down the coffee grounds and turned to face Cliopher fully. His sharp ears, as always, had picked up the lacunae. “But no ship would go.”

Cliopher swallowed. “No.”

"That must have been a difficult journey."

Cliopher could say "It was," and leave it at that. He could. His Radiancy, he knew, had not asked him directly, had left him this choice, this way out, deliberately. He could take the easier path, and the conversation would turn some other direction, and all would be well. He could.

Instead he set down the coffee and went to his wardrobe, where he pushed aside the rank of sandy robes and over-robes, and from the back drew out the grass skirt he had worn across the whole of the Wide Seas.

It was not quite so tattered as he remembered. In need of some care, yes, but he thought he could wear it in front of his Buru Tovo and not feel ashamed.

He laid the skirt on the table in front of his Radiancy, who watched him with all the gravity and patience of the Emperor, all the warmth of the inner man. It felt like laying himself bare.

Then he took a breath, centered himself as he would before the fire dance in those last lingering moments before the sun touched the horizon, and began, "It is a long story of the sea to tell it."

Notes:

Credit for the Rumpelstiltskin joke goes to mage-pie!

Chapter 9 Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Day 2481

“Good afternoon, Cliopher.” His Radiancy gestured him out of his obeisance practically before he’d made it. “Did you have a nice morning? I confess I am curious, but I won’t ask unless you want me to.”

“No need to ask.” Cliopher smiled and gave a roll of papers to the attendant, who carried it across to his Radiancy on a tray. “I’ve been working on this for a while, but I needed the morning to put it to paper.”

His Radiancy raised a curious brow, taking the documents. “So this is why you’ve been so squirrely of late. Architectural plans?”

Cliopher swallowed, quashing the sudden feeling that he should have spent an extra week on the plans, or a month, or not shown them to his Radiancy at all. “For a terrace off the Imperial Apartments.”

His Radiancy paused, the large-scale plan half unrolled in his hands, and looked across at Cliopher. “These would take weeks to build. Months.”

“They would.” Cliopher took a breath. “I thought… afterward.”

“Ah,” his Radiancy breathed. He spread the plans out across his sandalwood desk, weighting the corners with three books and an inkwell, and took them in with a keen eye. “This is beautiful. And structurally sound, I presume?”

“Of course,” Cliopher said with a prickle of pride.

His Radiancy smiled, the twinkle in his eye showing no offense meant. “Of course. I had no idea you had studied architecture.”

“I hadn’t, before now.” Cliopher shrugged. “It’s not the form of applied mathematics I’m accustomed to, but not so different in the end. The Archives had some good foundational texts, and it’s easier than magical theory, certainly.”

“For some, perhaps.” His Radiancy returned his attention to the plans, tracing a finger almost reverently across the line of the facade. “I could not have imagined such a thing, when I was Emperor. Nor afterwards.”

“Perhaps eventually.”

“Perhaps.” He looked up from the plans, catching Cliopher by surprise. Cliopher had not realized he’d been staring, but his Radiancy only smiled. “Another door I did not know was there until you showed it to me. Thank you, Cliopher. Kip.”

“You’re very welcome.” Cliopher felt a flush of triumph at having pleased his Radiancy, judged him correctly. “I will have to draw them up again when all this is over, of course.”

“Indeed.” His Radiancy touched the plans one more time, with a hint of longing, then sighed and rolled them up again with care. “Shall we return once more to our labor and toil?”

Cliopher ducked his head to hide a smile and reached for his writing kit. “Yes, my lord.”

“Oh, and Cliopher?” His Radiancy raised a sardonic brow. “Foundational texts?”

Seeing his own laughter reflected in the lion eyes, Cliopher felt a wave of enormous fondness. “I had hoped you would catch that.”

The thought of afterward tugged at him, even as things went on much as before. He had already once let himself lose his grasp on it, dropped his eyes from that ke’ea that would bring them out of this someday. And he had liked having a project, teaching himself architecture day by day, the progress intangible but real.

He had made notes, hadn’t he? All those years ago, shivering in his rooms in Astandalas, warmed by that fierce, fiery hope he had tended through drudgery and disappointments and failures. He could dig out those notes, dig up that hope; he had his ideas and his principles, Aurora and the Lays. If he could hold onto that idea of afterward, could he not imagine an afterward better than what had come before?

Day 3905

"Are you secretly a merman, cursed into human form?"

Cliopher had intended the question to be in jest, but even as he spoke he thought of his Radiancy’s finger wistfully tracing the furl of a wooden wave, and of Fitzroy Angursell’s Aurora soaring merrily through the throne room.

His Radiancy, startled, nearly choked on his wine, and laughed sputteringly until the guards flanking the door began to look concerned.

"Fine, fine," he wheezed, waving them off. "No, Cliopher, I am not a merman, cursed or otherwise."

Cliopher nodded gravely. "Thank you for your honesty, my lord."

“That is the game, I understand.” Recovering his composure, his Radiancy regarded Cliopher with dignity, though his lips still seemed to twitch at the corners. “Did you see many mer-creatures on your long journey home?”

“None, alas,” Cliopher replied, “only the usual mundane fish and crustaceans.”

“Perhaps they all quite sensibly fled for calmer waters.” His Radiancy leaned back against the arm of his couch. With his knees drawn up, his feet bare of sandals and tucked under a mere two layers of silk, his wine glass held at a comfortable angle—though not, thankfully, a steep one—he could have been any man at home in his own sitting room, albeit a very fine one. “Your question, Kip.”

“Oh, is it? I wasn’t certain the follow-up counted.”

“Yes, it is,” said his Radiancy smoothly. “My turn.”

Cliopher snorted. “Hah! Very well, ask away.”

“What is it that draws you to mathematics? I confess I myself have never seen the appeal.”

“Ah, no easy answers for me, I see.” Cliopher leaned forward to refill his glass and found the bottle nearly empty. When had that happened? “I suppose when I was younger it was merely something I was good at. When I started thinking about what I might do after university, accounting seemed like a good way to put those skills to use. My Buru Tovo never had much patience for skills with no practical application, and I wanted so badly to do something. To be useful. And, too, numbers are undeniable. If they don’t line up, the problem lies in the source.” He smiled, sheepishly, in self-reproach and nostalgia. “I was so certain I was right about everything, all the time, and if I only made clear what was wrong, it would all fall into place. My family and friends, alas, were not nearly as cooperative as equations.”

“Practicality and debate. An unerringly Cliopher answer.”

“What is that supposed to—no, no, that isn’t my question.” He held up a hand palm out, chuckling. “You won’t get me a second time. Hmm… yes, that’s the one. What is magic to you?”

His Radiancy raised a curious brow. “Point of clarification: are you asking how I experience it, or how I feel about it?”

“The latter.”

“A hard question for a hard question. It’s only fair.” Sitting up, his Radiancy eyed the last sip of wine in his glass speculatively, polished it off, and began to fiddle with the empty vessel, twirling the delicate stem between his fingers. “When I was a child, it was a game. When I was a young man, it was freedom. When I was Emperor, it was a cage.”

“My question was in present tense,” Cliopher said mildly, daring to push.

“So it was.” His Radiancy sighed. “The past informs the present. A game it certainly isn’t; I daresay I have outgrown that phase entirely. We are both of us caged by magic, in a way. And in that same way, it has given me freedom I dared not dream of.” He tilted his empty glass to encompass the room, and then again towards Cliopher himself. “And I think most of all… magic is poetry. Gods but I miss poetry!” He flung himself back down on the couch, wine glass and all, in a move which, coming from any of his younger cousins, Cliopher would not have hesitated to term an adolescent flounce.

As they had, only three days before, spent several hours happily picking apart a collection of Collian villanelles, Cliopher did not think it was poems that his Radiancy missed. He bit his lip. “I wonder if there is anything that would… unblock the dam, so to speak. Perhaps if you talk about what inspired you to write in the past.”

His Radiancy, still in his flounce, motioned helplessly. “Oh—I don’t know. The things I saw, the things I did. Action, vibrancy, life.”

Balancing his writing kit on his knee, Cliopher said, “Go on.”

His Radiancy's laugh was startled and merry. "Do you keep that with you all the time? No, of course you do." He sat up and swung his bare feet to the white-carpeted floor, like shadows on sand. “People,” he said. “My best work was always about people.”

Cliopher jotted this down and made an encouraging noise.

“Books were all well and good, to start, but of course no one really acts the way they do in tales, not every moment of every day. I had to start from the real thing and strip it down to the bare essentials. It couldn’t go the other way.”

“So what did you do?” Alone in his tower, with nothing but books and all the time in the world—what had he done?

His Radiancy considered him for a long moment. The lion’s gaze pierced into the very marrow of Cliopher’s soul, crying out for—what? At last his Radiancy straightened his spine, drew back his shoulders, and recited in a clear, fine voice:

And Olor of might and renown
Took the clothes from his back and ripped them long
And with the craft the Lady of Mists had taught him
Wove them into one braid as long as the tower was high
Tied them to the bar in the window
And in the dark of the night made his escape.

Cliopher blinked. “I don’t believe I know that one.”

“It’s from the Gesta Oloris. It was one of my childhood favorites; I’m sure there must be a copy in the Archives. Perhaps we can read it together.”

“I would like that.” An understatement; Cliopher felt unaccountably touched by the thought of his Radiancy sharing something he had loved as a child. Perhaps it was all the wine. “Very much.” Then the actual meaning of the passage filtered through, and he sat back in surprise. “You escaped your tower of exile?”

His Radiancy relaxed from his recitation posture, favoring Cliopher with a sardonic smile. “That’s two questions in a row. Three, in fact, since I rescinded mine.”

Cliopher waved a hand. “Oh, very well. Your question.”

“Cliopher,” said his Radiancy, leaning forward. “Kip. How would you feel about doing something rather foolhardy?”

Day 3906

The morning dawned clear and beautiful.

The morning always dawned clear and beautiful, of course, but Cliopher found himself especially appreciative today.

He made his way, not by his usual route through the gardens to the center of the Palace, but around to the switchback road that zagged back and forth down the hill to Solaara. They had chosen their time carefully: the Palace employees who lived out and worked overnight had already left, those working the standard day shift had already arrived, and it was not yet time for lunch, so the path held only a bare trickle of merchants and petitioners and sundry others with business up at the Palace or down in the city.

Cliopher’s eye almost slid over the small party waiting at the top of the hill. It seemed his Radiancy had managed to wrangle himself down to a mere four guards—dressed not in full or even lesser panoply, but in the white kilts of the ordinary guard, and looking very stoic—and no grooms or other attendants at all. His Radiancy himself was dressed not in his accustomed black or white or Imperial yellow, but in the silvery hooded mantle of a priest-wizard. Under the shadow of the hood, his eyes gleamed, keenly devouring his surroundings.

Cliopher made only an ordinary court bow, albeit a deep one, as he approached, forgoing the full prostration. His Radiancy crooked a hand to summon him inside the circle of guards, and Cliopher looked up into Ludvic Omo’s face as he passed.

“Edriana took up her staff and raised it to the sentinel stars,” he said, watching surprise flicker across the guard’s phlegmatic features. “All will be well.”

Omo inclined his head in acknowledgement. He made no other move, but Cliopher thought he seemed fractionally more at ease.

“Well,” said his Radiancy, as they started down the dusty path. “I have to say this is much easier than a rope of rags out the window.”

Cliopher laughed in surprise. “Did you really?”

His Radiancy waved a dismissive hand. “Not all the way to the ground. There was a gargoyle, just about a body’s length beneath the window—looking back on it now it really was one of the most foolish things I’ve ever attempted, but I didn’t plummet into the Abyss to fall for all eternity, so I’ve always considered it a success.”

“I think I’m going to need a little more detail than that,” said Cliopher, agog.

His Radiancy indicated the long, winding road before them, and the city spread out at the bottom of the hill like a great tapestry. “We have time.”

They reached the outskirts of the city in good time. The walk down had been hot and dusty, even shaded as it was by trees, and at last his Radiancy shed his silver mantle, revealing plain but superlative garments in a lovely peaco*ck blue. He frowned slightly at the discarded mantle in his hands, as if surprised it had not been instantly whisked out of existence.

“Here, my lord.” Omo took the mantle carefully and traded it for a waterskin, which he had produced from a bag strapped to his waist. “Lord Conju thought to provide me with a purified vessel for you.”

“Oh!” His Radiancy brightened noticeably. “What a good idea.”

Cliopher winced; such a thing hadn’t occurred to him, either.

Omo rolled the mantle tightly and tucked it into his bag, along with the waterskin when his Radiancy had finished with it. Cliopher wondered what other clever supplies the guard had equipped himself with.

They kept to wide, uncrowded streets as much as possible, with the guards firmly bracketing them at four corners, maintaining a careful bubble of space against accidental touch. They attracted attention, to be sure—four uniformed Imperial Guards, carrying the spears that indicated they were on duty, would draw anyone’s eye—but no one dropped into the full prostration, or fainted dead away, or cried, “By all the gods, that’s the Glorious One himself!” It seemed that his Radiancy, though clearly an aristocrat of significant status, was astonishingly anonymous.

“It’s the clothes,” his Radiancy confided, nodding at an older woman who gave him the merest bob of a bow before hurrying off on her errands. “And the context. No one would ever expect the Lord of Five Thousand Lands to be caught dead wearing blue, let alone walking cobbled streets on his own two feet.” He flashed a grin at Cliopher and wiggled a foot in demonstration; his sandals today were finely-tooled leather, but looked sturdy and practical.

“Where did you get the clothes on such short notice?” Cliopher wondered. Surely they didn’t keep a rainbow of unused garments sitting in the back of the Imperial wardrobe somewhere, just in case the Lord Emperor ever had to go incognito?

“Borrowed, and hastily re-tailored,” his Radiancy said, with thinly-disguised glee. “It caused my grooms and costumiers no end of consternation, let me tell you.”

They stopped first at a street food stall which Cliopher had enjoyed in the past. The stall’s specialty was spiced meat wrapped in a soft, floury dough and eaten by hand, no purified utensils required. Better still, the proprietor prepared each meal in full view of her customers. This seemed to satisfy the guards, who watched her with sharp eyes, but more importantly it delighted his Radiancy to witness his meal come together. He quizzed the stall owner mercilessly on her every action, and his genuine interest was so keenly evident that she couldn’t help but respond in kind. He came away from the stall with his beautiful peaco*ck robes dusted in flour, and his eyes alight not with magic but with exhilaration.

Only a few streets away, they happened upon a park with public game boards scattered about. His Radiancy insinuated himself effortlessly with the elders who held court there. They reminded Cliopher of nothing so much as his Buru Tovo and the other elders who frequented the tables outside the barbershop, and he wished he had ever felt half so comfortable sitting with them by invitation as his Radiancy seemed to be as a total stranger. It took less than half a chess game—with the whole gaggle of elders clustered around shouting advice to both sides—before a sly pun from his Radiancy sent the group into paroxysms of laughter. Cliopher thought even Omo, standing unobtrusively to one side, might have cracked a smile, but it may only have been a trick of the light.

By the time they left the park, it was approaching midday, and the streets had become so thick with people that his Radiancy could no longer walk safely apart. They found a cafe with an upper floor, where Cliopher purchased a cup of coffee to secure them a table on the shaded balcony—his Radiancy, of course, could not use the cafe's cups, though someone had refilled his waterskin—and waited out the busy hour. The balcony looked out over a public square, thronging with people from all walks of life, from merchants to beggars to aristocrats to a cluster of pages in Palace livery. Boisterous groups of students, couples intent only on one another, families with young children, serious people conducting serious business. Cliopher sat and sipped his coffee and watched his Radiancy watch the people below. There was a hunger in him, Cliopher thought, which could not be satisfied by watching alone.

The afternoon was the hottest part of the day, and the streets emptied to a trickle again as people returned to the coolness of their homes and shops. Their party took refuge from the heat in a bookshop Cliopher had visited before, tucked away out of sight down an alley and up a rickety outdoor set of stairs. The aisles were narrow and twisting, the shelves laden two books deep and often with more shoved haphazardly on top. It was not a place where you went to find anything in particular.

His Radiancy lit up immediately upon seeing the interior, and disappeared at once into the maze-like corridors, his guards following closely. Cliopher meandered in the same general direction, stopping every few paces to pull a book off the shelf that had caught his eye. He was deeply engrossed in a lyrical essay about the ecology of the Solamen Fens when his Radiancy found him again, arms laden with books and eyes aglow over top of them. One of the guards kept sneaking disapproving little glances, not at his Radiancy, of course, but at the books themselves, evidently displeased that his charge might be burdened with carrying anything at all.

Well, it was rather precarious. Cliopher caught two books as they slid off the top of the stack.

“Ah,” said his Radiancy breathlessly. “Thank you.”

“What have you found?” Cliopher examined the books he had caught, finding them to be a treatise on pre-Imperial Alinorel scholarship and a splendid illustrated volume titled The Deeds of Olor.

“That’s the Gesta Oloris which I mentioned yesterday,” said his Radiancy, pointing his chin in the direction of the latter. “Taabana isn’t my favorite translation, but the woodcuts are marvelous.”

“Oh!” Cliopher paged through the book with increased interest. “Which translation was the passage you recited?”

His Radiancy smiled a little crookedly at him. “Mine,” he said, and swept away towards the front of the shop.

Luckily, the ever-prescient Lord Conju had also thought to provide Omo with currency; Cliopher had a small amount but not nearly sufficient for their purchases, and his Radiancy, of course, carried none. In the end—persuaded by Cliopher that he would hardly have time to read all of them by midnight, and that it was unfair to the guards to burden them with two dozen books he would never read—his Radiancy winnowed his catch down to a mere six, including The Deeds of Olor. As his Radiancy floundered through the transaction with the proprietor with considerable flair, Cliopher leafed through the illustrated volume, admiring the brightly-colored scenes of daring adventure that had so caught his Radiancy’s fancy, once upon a time. He could easily see what had attracted someone whose life was so very constrained to these tales of romantic heroism; he felt the stirrings of recognition from his own younger self, who had been similarly entranced by tales of the Red Company. He wondered if, when he read Olor, he would find any tidbits of action he recognized, for surely Fitzroy Angursell had been well-read, and the poet was not above a little shameless cribbing now and again.

“And a wonderful evening to you as well, Sayu,” his Radiancy said to the proprietor, effecting a flourishing bow that somehow managed elegance despite being comprised mainly of elbows. Cliopher could not help but smile in the face of his Radiancy’s slightly madcap grin as they left the shop.

His Radiancy was more vibrant, Cliopher decided, here out in the open, than he had ever been even in his least constrained moments in the Palace. The cook at the food stand, the elders in the park, now the proprietor of the bookshop—the interactions with them seemed to light up a piece of his Radiancy’s soul which Cliopher had not even known had existed. Cliopher’s fire to tend, and there were whole swathes of it which were yet undiscovered.

“Well,” said his Radiancy at the bottom of the stairs. “Where to next? Have you any more hidden gems of Solaara to recommend, Kip?”

Omo cleared his throat, a soft noise which made even his fellow guards raise eyebrows at him in astonishment. “If I may, my lord,” he said diffidently, and when his Radiancy had gestured him on, continued, “There is a drinking establishment which is known to me where the patrons gather to play music most evenings. I believe there is even a small selection of instruments available to rent, if such a thing might please your lordship.”

His Radiancy turned on him a grin of such dazzling brilliance that Cliopher was astonished Omo was able to stand so stolid in the face of it. “It would, Ludvic,” his Radiancy said. “It most assuredly would.”

Day 4092

“I’ve been working on something,” Cliopher said as he rose from his obeisances. “I didn’t have time to write it all out—this is only the precis.” He set the sheaf of papers on the sandalwood desk, gently, feeling like he had just offered his Radiancy a piece of his soul.

“Only the precis?” His Radiancy flicked a sardonic brow, weighing the papers in his hands. “This is, what, fifty pages?”

“Fifty-four.” Oh, he was nervous, nervous as he hadn’t been since, perhaps, he had knelt for the first time in this very room—on this very day—knowing he was at last in the presence of the Emperor he had crossed worlds for. (The man he had crossed worlds for had still been hidden then, unknown. But he had been there too.)

“Perhaps you’d best start with a precis of the precis.” His Radiancy’s tone was light, unpressing; he knew Cliopher was on edge—Cliopher never had quite gotten the trick of courtly indifference—but he did not know why.

Cliopher took a breath. “It’s a plan for reforming the government.”

His Radiancy looked down at the papers he was holding much as divers in the Outer Ring regarded the venomous trident snails, which were valued as much for the danger of collecting them as for the beauty of their shells. He said, very neutrally, “Go on.”

“First, to re-form the government. Bring the warring factions of Zunidh together under your aegis as Lord Emperor.” He held up his hands, knowing that his Radiancy’s stillness hid displeasure, perhaps anger. “Once they’ve agreed that their power stems from you, emphasize your role as Lord Magus of Zunidh. The magic of the world is broken. You’ve spent enough time in the deep trance to know if you possess the power to fix it. Do you?” He knew the answer, but he asked anyway, letting his own certainty show in the steadiness with which he met his Radiancy’s gaze.

“Perhaps,” his Radiancy said carefully. His mask was still firmly in place, but Cliopher thought there was interest beneath it. “What then?”

“While you put the magic to rights, I—with your backing—do the same for the government. Root out corruption, rebalance the budget—do you know the Upper Secretariat has three times the number of postings as it had before the Fall, and that with only one world to govern? Create a government that does not rely on fear or force, that stewards the resources of all for the benefit of all. A government that draws on the talents of the whole world, that allows anyone to be anything, that does not tamp people down merely because they happened to be born in the wrong place, or to the wrong people, or with the wrong name.” His passion had risen with a force that surprised even him, and he paused for breath, holding his Radiancy’s golden gaze as he laid down his final point like an offering: “A government that does not rest upon a single man alone.” He let his words sit for a moment, his Radiancy as motionless as that merman frozen in wood. “We’ll find a way to disentangle you from the taboos. And then, when the Lord Magus is merely the Lord Magus, another mage can be found to take his place.”

His Radiancy said, with such precision it hurt to watch, “Do you think such a thing is possible?”

Cliopher said calmly, levelly, “I have compiled the statistics on Lords Magi whose fates are recorded in the Archives; you will find them in Appendix B. Sixty-eight percent of Lords Magi of Zunidh have passed their roles to their successors while still living. Seventy-two percent across the five worlds of the Empire.”

“And how many of those were previously the Emperor of Astandalas? How many presided over a fallen Empire that apotheosized them as a living god?” His Radiancy’s voice fell like a whip. His hands had tightened around the sheaf of papers, so that Cliopher wondered if he might crumple them up and fling them away. But he didn’t, only stood with his face turned away, his sole outward sign of emotion in the rise and fall of his chest and that tightening of his hands.

“It’s only a plan,” Cliopher said gently.

His Radiancy spun on his heel and fled—there was no other word for it, though in any other man it would be little more than a long stride, he fled—across the room to his private study. The door closed behind him with a soft, final thud, echoed by the spearbutts of the guards taking up their positions on either side.

But he had taken the precis with him.

If there was one thing Cliopher knew how to do, it was wait.

He sat at his desk and unpacked his writing kit, slowly, meticulously, taking his time to ensure each bottle of ink was unsmudged, each pen properly sharpened, his inkstones and brushes clean, all lined up in neat rows before him. He was able to stretch this activity to cover one quarter bell by taking the time to sort his spare nibs by size.

After that he sat, thinking of Aurora, thinking of the Lays, thinking of his plans so carefully laid out and the man at this very moment, he hoped, reading them behind that door. Only a few strides (and two spear points) away. Even after all this time, Cliopher had never seen the private study; his Radiancy had never invited him there.

He registered the demarcation of time absently as he waited. Quarter-bells, half-bells, hour bells. When two full hours had passed, Cliopher rose and approached the door—slowly, noting the slight tension of the guards’ postures that signaled a shift to readiness. He stopped a good distance away and met Ludvic Omo’s eyes.

“May I knock?”

After a long moment, Omo nodded. Cliopher stepped forward and rapped softly twice. Only silence answered him, those few moments longer than the two hours that had come before—but at last the door cracked open, revealing a sliver of the room beyond. Cliopher held his breath and stepped through.

It was the least imperial room Cliopher had ever seen in the Imperial Apartments, perhaps in the entire Palace. His first thought was of a dragon’s hoard, not of gold but of things. Books and trinkets and toys overflowed from shelves, chased one another across the desk and floor; bolts and swathes of fabric were flung haphazard across every surface. The whole room was a riot of color and texture and vibrancy as existed nowhere else in the Presence, a vivid and unmistakable rejection of the clean lines and balanced palettes in which his Radiancy spent his days.

What little Cliopher could glimpse of the furniture, beneath its draperies and clutter, was outmoded and shabby, as if it had been salvaged from a secondhand shop, if a very fine one. There was just enough space cleared on the desk for a few pages and a bottle of ink, untouched. There was a single window, set high and deep in the wall so that only a narrow rectangle of sunlight shone on the ceiling. And there was his Radiancy.

His Radiancy stood in the space behind the door, so that Cliopher was able to take in the whole room before turning at last to him. He was crying.

Cliopher had seen his Radiancy’s golden eyes shine misty with unshed tears. He had seen, once, on a particularly bad day, a single droplet escape his Radiancy’s iron will to run a shimmering track down his cheek.

His Radiancy was crying now, silently, his face a river, his robes blotched at his collar and sleeves. Cliopher took a step towards him, unthinking, conscious only of the urge, the need, to hold him and wipe his tears. The man who could never forget he was the Sun-on-Earth flinched back into the wall like a frightened animal, and Cliopher froze where he was, his hands outstretched, his heart like it had been impaled on one of those spear points just on the other side of the door.

“Oh,” he breathed. He took a step back, but his Radiancy stayed where he was, pressed against the wall. “Oh, Tor, Tor, I’m sorry.”

His Radiancy smiled weakly, though the tears still flowed. “A great gift,” he whispered, his voice raw. “Only in the trying.”

A long time later—the bells were muffled here, and even Cliopher’s subconscious had not been counting—they sat side by side on the overstuffed sofa, now cleared of detritus, with a long length of crimson velvet wrapped around his Radiancy, draped over his head, clenched around his hands. His Radiancy had calmed, and wept, and calmed again, and Cliopher rubbed soothing circles across his back through the velvet, as he had done for his sisters and cousins countless times, half a world away.

“Embarrassing,” his Radiancy said, self-deprecating mockery, his voice a rasp. “It has been a long time since I lost control so thoroughly.”

“Not embarrassing,” Cliopher said firmly. “Necessary.” He tilted his head back to consider his Radiancy, whose face sat shadowed to unreadability under its velvet hood. “Consider it a balancing of the scales, if it makes you feel better.”

“Those scales are infinitely balanced, I think. Or infinitely unbalanced, I’ve never been quite sure.” His Radiancy’s tone was stronger now, back to its habitual poise. “I feel remarkably refreshed. As though my skin has been painfully rubbed raw, revealing the fresh new skin underneath. Is it always like this after crying so?”

Cliopher felt a pang at the implications of the question. “Often, yes.”

“Remarkable. I had forgotten.” His Radiancy rose from the couch in one fluid motion, the red velvet sweeping behind him like a great cloak. Cliopher dropped his hand, which had been still resting on his Radiancy’s back; the warmth and the heavy velvet seemed to linger on his palm and on the pads of his fingers, and he closed his hand surreptitiously on his lap, as though to trap the sensation there.

His Radiancy retrieved the precis from atop a towering stack of books, but he did not return to the sofa, instead making a few aborted attempts to pace—even without the clutter, it would have been difficult to walk more than a few paces in a straight line—before clearing off the desk chair and perching upon it. He had pulled the velvet down, baring his head, but kept it wrapped around his shoulders, and Cliopher watched his hand stroke it absently, rubbing the thick cloth between his fingers. The contrast of the crimson against his dark skin was striking; Cliopher thought it a shame that the great art of the Emperor’s costumes so rarely ventured past their restrictive palettes.

He could not bear to watch his Radiancy read his plans. He picked up a book at random off the floor and opened it, and absorbed so little in his distraction that if pressed afterwards he could not even have recalled the subject.

After a time, the rustling of pages stopped. Cliopher looked up to see his Radiancy, head tipped back towards the high window like a sunflower turning its face to the light.

"Kip," he said, his voice very small. "I don't know if I can step back through that door."

His anguish was so clear that Cliopher’s heart nearly broke against the urge to cross the room and kneel at his Radiancy's side and take his hands in his own. He closed one fist over the other, holding to the memory of velvet under his palm.

"The door will still be there," he said past the lump in his throat. "And I will be there to hold it open for you." He did not see how such a promise could possibly be sufficient, but his Radiancy nodded, his eyes closing briefly as he drew his composure back to himself in a slow, careful breath.

“It will work,” Cliopher said, half to himself. “I can make it work. I can."

His Radiancy met his gaze and said, with a wrenching simplicity, "I believe you."

Had anyone ever said such a thing to Cliopher before? Not with a chuckle, not with an indulgent smile, but plain and simple and true: I believe you.

Cliopher blinked hard, and turned his attention forcibly back to the matter at hand. “In any case,” he said, “we’re no closer to breaking the loops than we were to start. We could find a way out tomorrow, or it could be another hundred years. In the meantime, we have an unprecedented opportunity: a practically unlimited quantity of time to research and plan. Of course, the plans will need to be flexible once circ*mstances begin to change again, but—” He stopped. His Radiancy was watching him, his smile like the first wavery rays of sunlight after a typhoon. Cliopher couldn’t help but smile back. “What?”

“I am only marveling,” his Radiancy murmured, “that the Master of Offices did, in the end, manage to find me a competent secretary.”

Warmth bloomed in Cliopher’s chest. “Only by sheer dumb luck, I believe.”

“Yes,” his Radiancy agreed. “Mine.” His voice was weighted with feeling, his eyes blazing with the certainty of it. Cliopher felt his own chin rise to meet the strength of that gaze, and thought that his Radiancy was not the only one who had been singularly, undeniably lucky.

Notes:

The poetry his Radiancy recites in this chapter is directly from The Tower at the Edge of the World.

Chapter 10 Chapter Text

Cliopher startled awake in the silent darkness of his chambers before dawn.

“Gold and glory, that was some dodge!” laughed Tabor.

Ludvic Omo’s little gifts of poetry, of trust.

“Nothing like finding a lost book on a slow morning,” said Saya Ardeni, triumphant.

His Radiancy, head thrown back, belting out a filthy tavern song at the bar of the most musical pub Cliopher had ever encountered outside of Gorjo City.

So it went.

Day 7968

Cliopher stood in front of the run-down old playhouse which now knew was called the Ivy, watching the theatergoers hurrying up and down the street. Sheep bleats drifted over from the playhouse next door, which he knew meant the Ivy’s curtain would be lifting shortly. In fact, most shows on this street had already begun; the flow of people had slowed to a trickle, and he looked up the street impatiently, to no avail.

He had learned, somewhat to his surprise, that the Ivy actually predated the Fall, a stately building that had been one of the only theaters in Solaara, back in the days before Solaara was much more than a stopover for tourists and pilgrims. It was named not for the plant, of which it had none, but for one of the first plays performed on its stage, an ancient Alinorel drama called Ivy in the Green. The building had once been painted a fine dark shade of emerald to match its name, now much faded and peeling off in great curling strips, though the original color could still be seen in the odd crevice or shaded patch. Cliopher had known none of this before today. It had all been eagerly relayed to him by the Ivy’s manager, who had given him an unasked-for tour and impromptu history lesson earlier that afternoon, when Cliopher had stopped by to inquire about the possibility of reserving a private box.

The reason for the box was hurrying up the road now, in his lovely peaco*ck robes, flanked by the usual six guards he was induced to take with him in the evenings. When he left for the city in the morning, he could often get away with only four. Cliopher found himself musing on what factors might be the cause—was it the encroaching dark, or simply that a different set of guards were on shift when his Radiancy made his request?—so that he did not have to think about the brightly colored posters plastered on the wall behind him. About what it meant that of all the shows and entertainments in Solaara, this was the one Cliopher had chosen.

“My apologies for our tardiness,” his Radiancy said breathlessly. “The crowds on our intended route were too thick to pass through safely due to an accident a few streets over, and we were forced to find a less hazardous path.”

“Oh, yes, the overturned cart. I should have warned you about that.” Cliopher had grown so used to avoiding the area in the evenings that he had forgotten. He beckoned his Radiancy, and perforce the guards, inside the front hall, where the last few straggling audience members were hurrying to find their places. “The play starts a few minutes late, but we’re cutting it fine.” As he led them through the halls and up the stairs, he relayed a few of the more interesting pieces of the Ivy’s history, which he knew his Radiancy would appreciate.

The box had been sumptuous once, furnished for low nobles and wealthy merchants, but it seemed as sadly diminished as the rest of the theater, with the green carpet curling up in the corners and just a touch of tarnish on the fine-filigreed railing. The velvet upholstery on the chairs, the same deep blue as the heavy stage curtains, was visibly worn.

The guards arranged themselves with two outside the box and four inside, which left the space a touch crowded, but not uncomfortably so. No sooner had they all settled than the heavy blue curtains twitched and drew themselves aside, revealing a yellow-robed man alone in the vast space of an empty stage. His Radiancy caught his breath.

Cliopher had always set his steps after Elonoa’a, following that ancient pattern laid out before him. He had wondered, but never brought himself to ask, if his Radiancy felt the same way towards his own illustrious ancestor. Now, watching his Radiancy mouth the words of Aurelius’s opening soliloquy, Cliopher at last knew the answer.

His Radiancy watched the play with rapt attention. Cliopher watched his Radiancy. He did not realize that his Radiancy was watching him, too, until during the fire dance his Radiancy leaned across to Cliopher and murmured in Islander, “This scene bothers you, I think. Why?”

“The Kindraas hold the wind, not the fire. It was a tanà of the Mdangs who performed this dance.”

“Ah!” said his Radiancy in a tone of enlightenment. He sat back in his chair and returned his attention to the stage.

Then the fourth act. Aurelius and Elonoa’a, declaring their partnership, their friendship, clasping hands over a fire: this, oh, this was what Cliopher had dared to want all those years ago in Saya Dorn’s house, dared to want all those cold, lonely days in Astandalas, dared to want—now. He knew his Radiancy was watching his reactions, but Cliopher could not bring himself to look back at him. He pressed his hand against the velvet of his chair, remembering a different velvet, softer and less worn, beneath his palm. Cliopher said nothing, and his Radiancy said nothing, and the play went on.

It was not until the final act, after Aurelius had been stolen away, that his Radiancy stood and stepped to the front of the box, his hands gripping the railing as though it were the only thing preventing him from launching himself down onto the stage, down into the very story.

Below, Elonoa’a raised his chin and said, with that same conviction that had driven him to reaches of the Wide Seas no one of his people had ever seen, "I will not let him linger long alone."

At his words, his Radiancy turned away from the stage to let his gaze fall on Cliopher, golden eyes brilliant not with magic but with tears.

"And you didn't," he whispered, as behind him Elonoa’a and his boat rose into the sky. "You never did."

After the closeness of the theater, the night air was pleasantly cool. His Radiancy lit their path back up the hill with cheerfully bobbing magelights, and they walked in companionable silence. Cliopher could not help but think about hands clasped over a fire, about the pattern he had set his steps to so long ago. After a time, Cliopher became aware that his Radiancy was humming.

It was not a song he recognized, though it tugged at the edges of his memory. His Radiancy paused, then hummed the same line over slightly altered, and Cliopher realized that it was—not the Lays, not exactly, but had the echo of it, running through the whole melody like the guiding line at its core.

“Is that,” he began, and at his Radiancy’s expression—shy , almost, as Cliopher had never once known his Radiancy to be—began again, “Did you write that?”

“Writing,” his Radiancy admitted, his smile quick and nervous. “It’s just an idea—but I might like you to tell me again about Aurelius and Elonoa’a from the Islander account. As entertaining as it was, I certainly would not like to rely on the play for historicity.”

“Certainly not,” Cliopher agreed fervently. “And I would be delighted.” An understatement if ever there was one; he was surprised at the strength of the pleasure burbling up within him at the idea.

“Oh, good. You are pleased, then, it isn’t—presumptuous in some way?”

“Pleased? Tor, I’m thrilled.” That he had found his poetry again, that this was the story he had chosen—Cliopher did not think he could have stopped grinning had the sky fallen down around their feet. “And the tale is as much a part of the history of your people as it is of mine.”

“I suppose it is, at that.” His Radiancy eyed him speculatively, his own smile less elated, but no less warm. In the pause, Cliopher’s stomach rumbled audibly. His Radiancy cast him a sardonic sideways glance. “Did you eat supper, or were you too busy arranging our seats?”

Cliopher scratched his nose. “The theater manager was very eager to give me a thorough tour. I believe he guessed that I was acting on behalf of someone high in the court, though of course he had no idea who.”

“I will interpret that as a no,” said his Radiancy smoothly. “My kitchen, much like the proverbial bullfrog, never sleeps. Will you come up for a nightcap?”

Cliopher did not want the evening to end, did not want to leave this bubble of light and warmth to go back to his lonely room at the far end of the Alinorel wing and wait for midnight. And besides, he was hungry. He smiled. “Certainly.”

His Radiancy’s sitting room had not been designed for comfort, but they found it there anyway: sandals and outer robes discarded; Cliopher curled snugly in an armchair; his Radiancy stretched out on the divan in a most unimperial manner, all long limbs and jutting angles even through his many-layered robes.

This was a luxury Cliopher could hardly have imagined in the barren loneliness of his old life in the Palace: to sit with a friend, no demands on their time, a small fire more for ambiance than for warmth. Food and drink, company, laughter. With the guards set on the outside of the door, the only occasional interruption—so smooth it hardly deserved the name—was an attendant slipping in and out to refresh refreshments.

It was nearing midnight when they switched from a very good wine to a similarly exceptional tea, after the attendant pointedly failed to replace the empty bottle. Cliopher had long since ceased to be surprised by his Radiancy serving him with his own hands; he watched now, muzzily content, as the fine golden liquid ran from spout to cup in a shining stream. Wine and the lateness of the hour having loosened his Radiancy’s usual precision, he kept pouring just a touch too long, and a small quantity of tea overflowed the porcelain rim to splash into the saucer. Something in Cliopher’s brain sparked, like a tovo striking against a tanaea, and he sat up so quickly he jostled the table, drowsiness forgotten.

“Tor,” said Cliopher, breathless with the idea, desperate to put it into words before it wisped away like smoke, “you once described the repeating day as a fountain, trapping the broken magic within its basin and drawing it back up to fall again.”

“I did,” agreed his Radiancy, intrigued, caught in Cliopher’s eagerness.

“What if—I’m not even certain this makes sense, but what if we overflow the fountain? Pour in so much magic that it spills over the walls keeping it in place?”

Golden eyes flashed, his Radiancy’s face alight with possibility. “It could work,” he said wonderingly. Cliopher half expected him to spring to his feet and begin to pace, but he did not. “It all began with a broken taboo,” his Radiancy said, meeting Cliopher’s eyes, and Cliopher realized with a jolt that they had leaned towards each other, that the lion eyes, glowing like sun-shot amber, were not so very far away at all. “Perhaps a second…” His Radiancy raised a hand, palm up, and left it hovering there between them. Cliopher found he had forgotten how to breathe.

“It may make things worse,” his Radiancy warned. His hand, outstretched, seemed to blot out the whole of the world.

“It may.” Cliopher reached out his own hand and left it there, palm down above the other, close enough that he could feel the heat of his Radiancy’s skin. The air between their palms seemed to crackle, whether with magic or meaning, Cliopher did not know. “It may… not.”

“Only one way to find out,” his Radiancy breathed, closing his eyes, and their palms met.

There was no shock, no bright burst of magic, no lightning, no pain—nothing, in fact, changed at all. His Radiancy opened his eyes, and they stared at each other a moment, laughter bubbling up in Cliopher’s chest.

“Well,” said his Radiancy, looking again at their clasped hands. “Well. That was certainly anticlimactic.” But he kept looking at their hands, at the impossible become real, his hammering pulse belying his outward calm. And he did not let go.

It was then that the bells began to ring out the first peals of midnight. Cliopher closed his eyes and, knowing he would be in his bed in the quiet before the dawn, opened them, but saw instead his Radiancy's face, golden eyes luminous, and the bells continued to ring, seven peals, eight, nine, and Cliopher felt the warmth and the weight of his Radiancy's hand, ten peals, eleven, twelve— and all was silent.

And his Radiancy was still there, and Cliopher with him, there together on the other side of midnight. Cliopher opened his mouth to speak and found he could not. His Radiancy spoke for him, his voice little more than a breath.

"A new day.”

Day 1

Cliopher woke in the bright light of day, in his own chambers, to the sound of the Palace bells joyously ringing the first hour after dawn.

He rose and first checked his coffee tin, which was entirely empty of Vangavayen beans, and then dressed in his second-best set of robes—for the first best, astoundingly, lay dirty and rumpled where he had left them across the back of a chair when he had reeled in at half past three, more drunk on giddy, exultant relief than on wine. All of that seemed distant now, in the full light of day, as impossible as any dream. He was a touch hungover, perhaps, and even that was gloriously new.

The feeling of his Radiancy's hand in Cliopher’s, warm and dry and with just a tingling hint of magic—that, surely, must have been a dream. Cliopher opened and closed his hand, trying to fix the sensation in his memory, and saw that his palm and the insides of his fingers were smudged gold, as if someone had taken a brush and streaked shimmering gilt across his skin. He was reminded of his Radiancy daubing ink on the back of his hand, so long ago and yet only—yesterday.

That had been yesterday, really and truly, because it was tomorrow.

He wanted, with a sudden and intractable urgency, to go to the Imperial Apartments as fast as his legs would take him, to look into his Radiancy’s golden eyes under the sun of a new day. But uncertainty plucked at him even now.

Perhaps his Radiancy had only wished for Cliopher’s companionship because there was no one else, thrown together in a world of wind-up puppet people as they had been. Perhaps Cliopher had no right to expect that friendship to continue now, when one day followed the next, when the glittering wheels of court were set in motion again, when his Radiancy was the center on which the whole of the Palace turned, and Cliopher was merely his secretary.

And it had, after all, been entirely Cliopher’s fault.

The path to the Imperial Apartments tugged at him like a well-traveled ke’ea. But for as long as he did not go there, he could hold on to that memory of last night, of a hand in his, of golden eyes flashing bright and merry over a teacup. That was still his, if only for these few hours before he went to kneel at the feet of the Emperor. So he would take his time.

He stopped for breakfast at the refectory, which was largely deserted so early in the morning, and ate slowly, hardly tasting a single bite.

He encountered Tabor in the corridor, let him make his jokes about putting on airs, promised to sit down with him at supper—perhaps would even get the chance to do so. (Fortunately, no rumors seemed to have yet circulated about Cliopher’s presence in the Imperial Apartments so late last night, nor even more fortunately of his Radiancy’s illicit trip to the Ivy. The Tower, it seemed, employed only the most discreet of servants.)

He went out to the Gardens, following the path the curator had led them on so long ago (only yesterday), and spent a long, long time looking at an orchid that had just begun to bloom.

He went to the Imperial Archives, whose entire collection he felt as if he’d read twice over, and requested Beeching’s Magic and Magecraft from Saya Ardeni, who always delighted in searching for it. He must have asked for it a thousand times or more, even long after he had finished with it, just to give her that feeling of triumph when she found it misfiled with the cookbooks. It would not, he realized with a jolt, be in with the cookbooks again tomorrow.

He left the Archives before she returned with the book. He no longer needed it.

At last he stopped dragging his feet and arrived at the great carved doors to the Imperial Apartments. He was startled for a moment to find two unfamiliar guards posted there, but of course a new day came with a new duty roster. He was going to have to get used to things changing.

He was relieved to see, as he passed through the final pair of doors, that Ludvic Omo was on duty again today, flanking his right: a small familiarity that Cliopher clung to as he sank into the formal obeisance, less perfunctorily than his usual habit.

Cliopher saw his Radiancy’s hands make the gesture releasing him—tightened his own gilded palm around his writing kit at the sight—and rose, and for a moment kept his gaze down, fixed on jeweled sandals flashing beneath the embroidered hem of the fine ahalo cloth robe. When he met the lion eyes he would know, one way or the other. He had to know.

He looked up.

His Radiancy’s expression and posture were carefully controlled, though not so tightly wound as they had been in those early days; he wore the Lord Emperor’s serenity now as a cloak, not a shroud. There was, Cliopher thought, a hint of uncertainty there, so faint perhaps no one but him could have seen it.

And the golden eyes, sunrise eyes, his Radiancy’s eyes—smiled.

"Come, Cliopher," said his Radiancy, gesturing Cliopher to his desk. "We have work to do."