Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was snowing in the Palace of Stars. Cliopher’s silk robes were streaked with the meltwater, his knees sodden and painfully cold, his forehead dripping as he raised his face. The shuddering was impossible to contain, but his comfort was hardly relevant now. “My lord—”

“Get up, Kip.”

His Radiancy sounded utterly serene. He was standing there in the centre of the Throne Room, on the lower dais beneath the great merriweather silk banner of Astandalas, surrounded by a billow of mist and steam. As Cliopher scrambled to his feet the water around them warmed.

“Is that w-wise?” He had to ask. Magic had become, in the past hour, a finite resource.

“To prevent my Lord Chancellor from freezing?” His Radiancy, still so controlled, raised one perfect arched brow. Then, conceding, “Conju, bring a blanket. Ser Rhodin, your report.”

Ser Rhodin had not dropped into obeisance. He had handed his spear to Ato as soon as they were inside the cordon formed by the guards, and inside the protective barrier of the Sun-on-Earth’s magic. Then he had collapsed onto the nearest chair, letting Pikabe access his injured shoulder. Now he saluted, with his good hand, and hardly a wince. “They’re securing themselves in the upper levels of the Zuni wing,” he said, without preamble. “The offices are evacuated, and the lower floors. I believe some of our people are barricaded in the suites below the Lord of Zunidh’s apartments, and of course—”

The blanket was not entirely dry but it was a welcome weight and shelter. So was Conju’s arm, which stayed wrapped around his shoulder after placing it.

“I’ll get you wet,” Cliopher hissed, but Conju merely scowled at him and stepped in closer.

The warmth was welcome. He gave in and leaned towards his friend with a small sigh.

“Ridiculous man,” muttered Conju, and for some reason that was the final straw. Cliopher shuddered again, and started to cry.

Conju held him closer.

Rhodin was still talking, in that clear emotionless voice. The fae were taking prisoners, using some form of weirding charm. They had secured most of Cliopher’s household, but had been delayed by a combination of guards and footmen who had activated the failsafe locks on Cliopher’s inner doors. Rhodin and Ludvic had reached his bedroom through the secret passages, just before the doors gave way.

The shuddering didn’t seem to be going away, despite the blanket, despite Conju’s presence beside him. His Radiancy’s hands were clasped behind his back and he was standing very still. Cliopher fixed his eyes on the emperor’s face, trying to draw strength from the iron cast of it.

The Sun-on-Earth turned to look at him, lion eyes hot with a smouldering sense of pressure, of his looming power. Cliopher held his gaze, warmed by the fire there. “I’m fine, my lord,” he said.

His Radiancy’s lips twisted. “Of course you are. And… Ludvic?”

“Held the door for us, my lord,” he said, as steadily as he could. The doors within the Lord of Zunidh’s apartments were far larger than most, even in the Palace. Ludvic had seemed—almost small. Rhodin had dragged Cliopher away, with a growl about the protocol, and they had plunged from the unexpected cold and glittering ice of his bedroom to the musty darkness of a hidden passage behind it.

And that wasn’t the worst of it, because on the floor—crumpled like a sack, like a—Cliopher had seen enough bodies that he should not be prevaricating to himself about this one—had been—also Ludvic.

“A shapeshifter, my lord,” Rhodin explained, still in that eerily calm and cheerful voice.

The fae had startled Ludvic enough to push past him, entirely disregarded Rhodin, and leaped straight for Cliopher.

Rhodin had stepped between them without hesitation and run him through.

“And how—” even his Radiancy’s serenity was wavering slightly at that one.

“His arms, my lord. No gold.”

“Ah.” The emperor shut his eyes. “The marks of the taboos. They would be… difficult to replicate, without Schooled Magic.”

The snow was still falling. It seemed to be forming out of the air around them in tiny pinpricks that glittered gold in the light of his Radiancy’s magic.

The shaking was subsiding, now that the worst of it had been said out loud. Cliopher accepted a handkerchief from Conju and carefully wiped his face.

The golden light was gathering around the person of the emperor, shining from the empty golden throne behind him, gleaming from a forest of gold-chased spears.

“We believe,” said his Radiancy slowly, “That the fae are contained. Our power is sufficient to hold back the soporific effect spread by the device they placed on the heartstone. The Ouranatha are engaged in removing it.”

“And th-the snow?”

On the other side of the room a motley group was gathered around a series of tables, passing notes back and forth and scribbling fast. Analysts in the uniform of the Service, and wizards in the silver glittering robes of the Ouranatha, and a selection of people in all kinds of costume from sleep-wear to formal garb. Some quick-thinking soul had set up a low-slung tarpaulin above the table to reduce the amount of freezing water gathering there.

As busy as they were, there were people at each table paying attention to the room. His Radiancy only had to glance across and lift a hand and one of the wizards leapt up to report.

“Bastards sabotaged the cooling charms,” she said briskly. “We’d reverse it right now if we didn’t need the power to hold them back.”

Cliopher nodded, handed the cloth back to Conju, and sloshed over to the table. “How many are unaccounted for?”

“Including your household and Commander Omo? Eighty-seven.” An analyst handed him a paper. “Some may be asleep and undiscovered.”

Asleep and undiscovered in a snowstorm was most definitely not the same thing as safe.

“How long until the device is removed?”

The wizard shrugged. “It’s delicate work. Could be booby-trapped. A few more hours.”

Cliopher tugged the blanket tighter at his shoulders and turned back to his Radiancy. “That’s too long.”

A few more hours could kill someone lying unconscious in the snow. It would leave his household—it would leave Ludvic—hostage for long enough for the fae to get inventive.

(Ludvic was a hostage. He had to be. The Commander of the Guard was too valuable a prize to— They would not have—)

The golden light surged up behind the slim figure of his lord, bright as a summer day. “Kip. No—”

“They’re trapped.”

“They’re desperate.”

“I can offer them their lives.”

A way out of this stalemate, if they returned their prisoners. Not an easy way—a consequence better than death, but severe enough to discourage future incursions. It had to be possible. The fae had to know by now that they had miscalculated.

The light around the emperor flared brighter, leaving everyone in the room blinking. “It doesn’t have to be you,” his Radiancy said, and his face was fixed into a ghastly imitation of peace, and his voice was rich and throbbing and even breaking with an emotion that Cliopher could not name—”I can send—”

“Who else can speak for you?”

“They came hunting you,” his Radiancy snapped, sparks skittering away from him across the tiled floor. He started walking forward, almost blindly. “They went straight to your apartments. They have your household.”

Cliopher turned to follow him, stepping closer. “I can get them back,” he said, forcing himself to speak with all the confident assurance he could muster. He blinked away a snowflake. “It has to be now, before they have time to think.”

“Cliopher’s right.” Rhodin stood up, shaking off the blanket he had been given. “Let me—”

“You are injured.” This time the sparks hissed furiously as they hit the puddles on the floor, sending up a sputtering cloud of steam.

Rhodin ran a hand over the bandage on his arm. “We won’t be fighting.” At his Radiancy’s disbelieving glare he added, “I’ll take a full squad of guards, in case... But you know I have to go.”

“They have shapeshifters!” His Radiancy’s mouth snapped shut. He stomped forward through the icy water a few more steps, then spun to face them, his wet robes swinging dramatically behind him. “Very well. Very well. You to negotiate, my Lord Chancellor. You to keep him in line, Ser Rhodin, and keep an eye on the magic. A full squad of guards. And—” his face twisted, “One more thing.” He strode back across the room, faster than his usual pacing, slowing only as he neared Rhodin. He stopped at two ells’ distance. “You know what I must do.”

Rhodin saluted again, once more with his off hand. Then he held it out, palm down, the back of his knuckles tilted towards the Sun-on-Earth.

His Radiancy stepped forward. Once. Twice. Rhodin did not move.

Cliopher became aware that his fingers were tangling painfully together, twisting the wet corner of his wet blanket.

Slowly, without taking his eyes from Rhodin’s face, the emperor shook his head.

Rhodin lowered his hand and lifted his chin. They stood and regarded one another, closer than Cliopher had ever seen anyone but Conju and Ylette stand to the Lord of Rising Stars.

His Radiancy, with exquisite care, placed a hand on each of Rhodin’s shoulders. “Only if you want this.”

In answer, Rhodin tilted his head down and leaned in.

Cliopher’s breath caught in his throat, a hot tight pressure like a coal lodged there.

The Last Emperor of Astandalas raised himself just slightly on his toes to press a kiss to his spymaster’s forehead.

There was a small snapping sound, very similar to those flying sparks. Rhodin had shut his eyes. They were still shut as his Radiancy stepped back.

In the centre of Rhodin’s forehead a small golden disc winked in the light.

His Radiancy considered it. Then he said, controlled but somewhat more gravelly than usual. “Your hands, Ser Rhodin. Let us make doubly sure.”

Rhodin lifted his hands. His Radiancy took them, clasping them gently and lifting them to his mouth. The gold flickered and ran until Cliopher hurriedly wiped his face again.

For another long moment they stood looking at one another, Rhodin’s hands clasped firmly between—Rhodin’s face exalted. Then his Radiancy released him and turned sharply away. His expression, in the brief glimpse Cliopher saw of it, was weary beyond all despair. “Select your squad,” he said, and stalked back towards the throne.

He stood there, staring at the list of the gold-inscribed names of vanquished Terrors of Astandalas. The silk of his robes was slick to his narrow shoulders, clinging to his long limbs.

Cliopher heard, as if from far away, the sound of Rhodin speaking with the guards. He stayed where he was, watching his lord. His hands were warm—oh, somebody had thrust a mug into them, and it was hot between his fingers.

“Cliopher Lord Mdang, if you catch your death of cold I will never forgive you. Drink.”

He nodded absently and drank. He had stopped shaking. He was aware of his mind working through the parameters of the position: the fae were trapped, his Radiancy could not quite evict them, there were some number of prisoners, the fae were (or had) shapeshifters.

A corner of his attention was on Conju, who had replaced his blanket with something thicker and drier and was fussing over the state of his robes.

A great deal more of his mind was replaying the blissful expression on Rhodin’s face as their lord took his hands. The gleam of gold. A tingle at the centre of his friend’s forehead, round and rich as a coin and infinitely more of value.

The mug was empty. It vanished. Conju helped him into fresh robes, these spelled to stay dry. “In a gentle summer shower,” the Groom of the Chamber said, with a supremely scornful gesture at the unnatural winter of their surroundings.

“Thank you,” Cliopher said, and meant it. He did feel warmer.

The fae would need assurances that they would not be killed out of hand. The wards had clamped down, so they would have to be escorted off the Palace grounds if they were to get away. Should they be allowed to leave? They were the invaders, trespassing on his Radiancy’s territory. Should Cliopher insist on enforcing the laws of Zunidh? That would mean executions.

It was always tricky to impose legal consequences between worlds. Treaties for that purpose had been drawn up between Astandalas and its neighbours, when the Empire was in a position of strength. They were still on the statute books but… the circumstances had changed.

Here and now his Radiancy could destroy the invaders. If, of course, the Zuni forces discounted the value of their prisoners’ lives, and lived with the icy conditions for however long it took to starve them out.

It was likely that the Sun-on-Earth could kill them in a more direct manner if pressed, although if that were possible without harming his own people this furious caged lion of a man would have done it already.

(Furious? Yes, his Radiancy was furious. Angrier than Cliopher had ever seen him. And desolate. He cared so much, and it was all compressed and held down to bare visibility in the carriage of his head, the stiff regularity of his spine. Cliopher’s heart felt bruised with the ache for him.)

Even if magic would not end the fae, Cliopher could think of several approaches that would be faster than starving them out. If he could accept the collateral damage. His gut twisted, but he had to think these thoughts. He was going to have to convince the invaders that these were the likely outcomes, that settling for arrest and humiliating extradition was the concession they could wring out of him, rather than the prize he was seeking.

Rhodin’s hand-picked squad of inner guards squelched their way through the icy puddles to form up in front of their emperor. His Radiancy didn’t sigh as he turned to inspect them, and didn't show any release at all in his voice or his face. The air moved as he moved, though, sending glittering pale flakes of snow drifting sideways across the analysts’ tables, to a chorus of curses.

One by one, the guards stepped forward to take their emperor’s hands. One by one, the dark head bent to kiss them, the golden light shining from the smoothness of his skull, from the water beading there as the snow melted. At least his Radiancy would not take a chill, lit up from within by the flame of his power.

It was a relief when Aioru appeared beside Cliopher with a report. He brought updates on the population of the Palace, the numbers confirmed with Kiri was out in the grounds organising the evacuees. He also brought the latest strategic assessment of the fae: they were almost certainly not sanctioned by the Queen’s court but might represent a faction there, seeking a glorious adventure to bolster their political support by reclaiming the merriweather banner and crushing the Last Emperor of Astandalas.

“We believe that is why you were their primary target, sir,” Aioru added. “They intended to use their control of you, or your likeness, to extract concessions from his Radiancy.”

Cliopher could have laughed, if he were not so cold. He managed a wry smile. “I’m afraid they would have been disappointed. The protocols are—what?”

Aioru coughed. “Nothing. The protocols have served us well.”

“Yes.” Cliopher supposed he would be able to take pride in that too, soon enough, if Ludvic—when Ludvic was back with them.

“An Vilius. Lord Mdang.” His Radiancy never needed to raise his voice to get their attention. Cliopher thanked Aioru and he and Conju hurried forward together.

The newly bedecked guards were standing aside and to attention. Cliopher began to move down into obeisance, half a beat after Conju, but both stopped at his Radiancy’s curt gesture. “We will dispense with the kneeling until the floor is dry,” he said, in a tone that entirely did away with any further discussion. “Come here, Cavalier.”

Conju took a further step forward. Cliopher knew him well enough to see the slight tension as he fought his instinct to fold to the floor.

The Sun-on-Earth looked at him keenly. “Conju,” he said, his voice almost colourless with the strength of his feeling. “I would not ask this of you, but—they came for Cliopher. They have Ludvic.” He looked up, across at Rhodin, back to Cliopher, back to Conju. “They know my household holds my heart in its keeping—Conju, I could not bear it if—” The ice had melted entirely in the puddles closest to his Radiancy, so that the water rippled as he stepped through it. “Will you—?”

Conju’s hands came up before him. “Please, my lord,” he said, and his voice was hoarse.

For Conju, his Radiancy bent over each hand as he lifted it, pressing a kiss firmly into the back of the knuckles. For Conju, the dark head dipped next to place a single kiss in the centre of his head, at the parting of his hair. For Conju, the emperor looked entirely reverent, his lips sinking softly into the precise middle of the smoothly perfect skin of his forehead.

The Groom of the Chamber stood rigidly to attention, as though the emperor’s touch had frozen him as easily as it melted all the waters at his feet. Unlike Rhodin, his eyes stayed open, wide and dark.

Cliopher watched and shivered and felt the fierce rage kindling in his chest, together with darker emotions. This—this love, this terror—this raw connection—it was wrong that his lord felt forced to—it was right that Rhodin and Conju should be recognised, that the guards should be protected—he was still standing here, forgotten, as his Radiancy lifted his head and released Conju’s hands.

Conju trembled again but stayed standing, fingertips of one hand trailing over the marks left on the other. “You do me honour, your Radiancy,” he breathed.

“You honoured me with your service first, Conju.”

And then the Lord of Rising Stars was looking at Cliopher.

Cliopher forgot to breathe. He forgot the snow, the strangeness of it all, the slow winding tension of his strategising, the fear for Ludvic, and Franzel, and all the rest. He forgot Rhodin, and Conju, and Aioru, and everybody else in the Throne Room.

The only person who existed was standing there shining with magic, shaking with the energies he still held, twisted tight and inexorably around the choices they had to make and the orders he had to give.

“Kip.”

“I am here, my lord.”

“I can’t come with you.”

“I know.”

“Ludvic—”

“I know.”

“Kip,” his Radiancy said again, and this time it was a plea. His hands—those beautiful, long-fingered hands that Cliopher adored—were spread before him.

Cliopher closed the distance between them, almost floating. His lord’s mouth was trembling, though the rest of him was so perfectly under control. His lord’s lips still bore the remnant of gold paint, no doubt part of the court costume his damp robes suggested. He must have been disrobing for the night when the alarm sounded.

Those lips parted, very slightly, as though his Radiancy wanted to speak and found no words.

“I am here, my lord.” He said it again because he saw the tension at the corner of the lion eyes, the fine lines almost invisible against the smooth softness of his lord’s dark skin, the pinch that spoke of subterranean agony.

The words were not enough. Cliopher reached out and took his Radiancy’s hands, one in each of his. The pads of his fingers found softness, warmth, the glistening wetness of snowmelt that added friction as they slid home.

The spark against his skin was sharp, like the first bite of heat when he leaped into the flames. He leaned into it, as he leaned in towards the fire of his dance: the only way through was to keep moving, to press forward, to trust to his speed and his strength and his skill to carry him safely home.

“I’ll get them back,” he promised, and he saw his Radiancy blink away a glitter of tears, saw the twist of his lips as his composure broke—over Ludvic, over Cliopher, over this near and personal danger to them all, as much as it ever had over the great disasters of the world. The smear of shining paint trembled. His lord’s hands tightened on his, clutching; his eyes darkened, pleading.

Cliopher saw the flames licking up, the coals underfoot, heard the beat of the drum in the beat of his heart, and—leapt.

He didn’t think. He tugged those shaking hands down, pulling his lord forward so that he could stretch up and bring their lips together.

The softness burned between them, a living flame like a phoenix feather. His Radiancy made a small surprised sound, a huff of warm air into Cliopher’s mouth. His nose brushed against Cliopher’s, For a giddy moment Cliopher pressed up and in and held the fire.

His Radiancy pulled back, very slightly, and Cliopher rocked back down on his feet and rested there, breathing heavily, resisting the urge to lick his tingling lips.

The Sun-on-Earth was looking down at him with an expression broken entirely open, a raw nakedness of feeling that Cliopher could neither name nor understand. They were both, he realised, breathing heavily, their breath steaming between them in the frigid air.

His lord’s lips quirked up for a moment into a lopsided smile, a brief passing brightness. “Always going above and beyond,” he said, and the words were full of an impossible warmth. Then he leaned down to press their foreheads together. “I wish I could—”

“Shhh.” Their eyes were too close to be more than a blur, but Cliopher could see that his Radiancy’s were full of tears threatening to fall again.

The emperor shushed, perhaps in surprise. Cliopher pulled back and held his gaze. It was different, somehow, holding his hands as well. Feeling the fine tremor of them, the human warmth. “I’ll be negotiating their surrender, my lord. Have we a containment facility?”

His Radiancy’s surprise crinkled into a smile. “Of course you will,” he murmured. “No, not yet, but I will take thought on it while you work. Send a runner every… hmm, quarter bell… and I’ll send them back with a progress report.”

Cliopher nodded, stepped back further, and could not quite bring himself to relinquish his hold. His Radiancy looked down at their joined hands, up at Cliopher’s face, and his smile drained away. “The marks—”

“Are beautiful, my lord,” said Cliopher, proudly, straightening his spine. “And practical too.”

His Radiancy’s hands had been releasing his, slowly. At this they tightened, fingers pressing into his palms. “I never wanted—”

“I did,” Cliopher interrupted again, almost glaring, trying to convey the strength of his feeling in the intensity of his gaze. “I wanted this. From the moment you touched Ludvic, I wanted—”

He caught himself, too late, and flushed for the foolishness of the feeling. His lord was staring at him in disbelief. Cliopher let go of his hands and stepped back, doing his best to draw the mantle of the Lord Chancellor around himself again, aware that his face was flaming.

Around them the Throne Room was full of the quiet of dozens of people doing their best to mind their own business. The murmur of the analysts and wizards comparing notes. The plink of water falling from the priceless banner overhead.

“Go, then,” his Radiancy said, and the magic was rising again around him, richer and more glorious than before. “End this.”

Cliopher bowed, his heart too full for words, his brow shining with the star his lord’s trust had placed there, his lips still hot with his more private vow.

The corridors were full of fine dry snow, stirring and drifting in the freezing air. The guards cleared the passage.

His heart was a firepot, carrying the coals within him.

Chapter Text

Cliopher stood by the windows in the largest room of his apartments as the fae made their vows. The sky was bright outside in sunset colours. Reds and oranges glowed across the soft white layer of snow spread like sunlight across each window seat.

He much preferred to stand in his Radiancy’s presence when acting as his Hands. He couldn't feel the magic, and it was reassuring to know that his lord could, and would ensure all was well. It was always reassuring to know that he was not alone.

He had done this by himself before, when he had to, offering his hands in lieu of his lord, and the magic had been binding. He could only trust in his Radiancy’s power, and hope.

The fae were cold, not pinched and pale like a mortal caught in the snow but fluidly and without any indication of discomfort, like a tree or a wave that took its temperature from its surroundings. So freezing them out might not have worked after all, he thought, as the soft chill of their lips pressed one after another into the palms of his hands, chilling them to the bone.

They had released their influence on the magics that maintained the temperature inside the Palace. They had released, too, the cottony cocoon that they had woven felt-like (he tried not to think, web-like) over every door, window, chink or crack in the walls of the Lord of Zunidh’s apartments.

They had released their prisoners. Those they valued least, first, as a sign of good faith. It had hurt, holding his poise, as Shoänie was led past him, weeping. He had neither acknowledged her nor turned away when she met his eyes. He could not risk showing them that they had misjudged his affection for his staff, that they had handed over too early someone whose pain he grieved.

The grief had curled into his heart, heavy as the dragging and damp ends of his robe, and he set all that weight aside and raised a brow and made one small concession of his own: agreeing to sit together at a table, as if they were negotiating on equal terms.

Dignity for lives. What he should not be able to give, for what they had no right to take.

It was disconcerting that they had insisted on retaining their borrowed forms. He had made some grounds out of the insult, meeting his own eyes and frowning his displeasure. He had held up the whole conversation by insisting that they wait until word returned, written in a note under the Imperial Seal and carried by a page with a password Rhodin had arranged, that his Radiancy had confirmed that each of those released was indeed the person they appeared to be.

He had used the time to ease further conversation out of his tense and miserable hosts. He was fairly sure he could confirm their identities, now, as members of a diplomatic delegation that had the misfortune to get on the wrong side of Empress Zangora IV. The fae were long-lived, and held their grudges.

He had done his best to convince them that the empire that had anchored those grudges was no more, and that they would gain more displeasure from than glory for their Queen by angering the Lord of Zunidh now.

It had worked. It had taken longer than he had hoped. A day, and then a night, and then another day. Food brought in to their tense conference around his dining table. A wary break of a few hours for sleep, when tempers frayed. A regrouping as the sun rose—beyond the thick grey shroud over the windows, so that it brought neither light nor heat—and his growing conviction that Lady Unshirie had realised her position and was playing up her indignation in order to drive her rivals into arguing against her, for their capitulation.

The snow was melting here in the evening sun, as it had in the Throne Room in the power of the Sun-on-Earth. The fur wraps Conju had provided to go over his sandals were sodden. His feet felt heavy with them, even standing still.

Lady Unshirie—he had not used her name, but his reference to the historical embassy had revealed that he knew it, and she had confirmed in the flicker of her form that he was correct—was the last of all her company to stand before him. He raised his eyes, and his brows.

The sparkle of limpid green eyes was entirely out of place in that smooth dark head. She held his gaze with them, for a moment, quirking his Radiancy’s lips into a smile that was as merry as it was wry. “The inner doors will open to my liege,” she said, and knelt.

A small susurration from the guards reflected something of the confusion Cliopher could not help feeling. His Radiancy knelt to nobody, and certainly not to his own Lord Chancellor. The star burned on his brow as he held out his hands. Something hot, like liquid glass, was pooling on top of the lump of grief in the core of his being. The two sat uneasily together, sorrow and—it was not anger, or not just anger.

She took his hands in both of hers, long dark fingers sliding into place to hide all the gleaming gold. She was still looking up at him. He said nothing. He waited.

“You will return us to the Queen.”

This was the final hurdle. “I will.”

The top of his Radiancy’s head was narrower than he would have expected. Dark and gleaming as ebony. He felt an absurd desire to seize it between his hands, to press his fingers against the softness of his lord’s scalp, to find the warmth—

Foolishness. This was Lady Unshirie, lowering her borrowed head to kiss his palms. She had no warmth to offer.

It was done. He hoped it was done. There was no sound or light or signal that the vows had taken hold, not to Cliopher. He looked across at Rhodin, who nodded once. It was done, then.

He had not expected the solution to involve a personal binding, but this was a transaction the fae understood. Now to test it.

“It was forbidden in the law of Astandalas to make a mocking mimicry of the emperor,” he said softly. “We have learned better, on Zunidh. Nevertheless, for the sake of my fellow citizens who revere the Last Emperor—for the sake of those of us who respect him as a man—my lady, choose another form.”

She shimmered all over, and then he was once again looking in a mirror. “It is respect that you have for him?” She laughed. Her eyes were green like lichen, as out of place in his own familiar features as they had been on his lord’s. “As you command, my liege.”

He had talked himself dry, these past hours. These past two days, now, or close to it. His throat was tight and no more words would come. He bowed with slow care, the shallow courtesy of a great lord to a lesser one. His head was swimming, but it was nearly—he straightened again and watched as the guards formed up, every man checking his partner’s golden marks.

The fae filed out, between their new escort, each accompanied by at least four marked guards.

His Radiancy had sent word that a containment facility had been created. Although the personal vows made to the Last Emperor in the person of his Hands would be a greater surety.

Cliopher’s poise held until the great tiger doors of the apartments swung shut. Then he drew one shuddering breath and stumbled forward, drawing the heavy fur-lined cloak tighter round his shoulders.

The floors in here had been swept clean of snow as they talked, but nothing could have prevented the pale drifts building up on every ledge and surface. Water squeezed out of the rug under his feet, slippery with ice. He skidded, catching himself on the corner of a soggy armchair.

Strong hands catching his arm. Warm. He clutched at them, blinking hard to clear his vision, which was swimming with strange dark spots. “Pikabe?”

“I have you, my lord.” Pikabe was, like all the guards who had come up to join his delegation, wearing winter gear and the full formal panoply. The bright disc of his Radiancy’s blessing gleamed on his forehead; his leopard skin cape smelled strongly of damp animal fur. “The door?”

Cliopher nodded, pushing himself up. He was cramped with cold and drained from the long effort, but this was urgent. “Let me—”

Pikabe tucked an arm under his. “This way. Unless you need to sit—?”

“I don’t need—” Cliopher began. He would have pulled free, but he was so—the support was helping. “I’m just tired,” he said instead, “but thank you.”

His heavy feet moved where his legs lifted them. They were numb, and would be painful as the feeling returned. They were painful now to step on, tiny runnels of heat shooting up from his ankle as the pressure tingled across them.

Now that he had been acknowledged by Lady Unshirie he was the only one who could do this. He kept walking. Out of the semi-public dining hall which they had used for the negotiations, in through another room, and another, until—he stopped, panting, and stared up at the barrier that blocked off the private suite at the back of his apartments. His bedroom was behind that pulsing grey web. So was his personal study. So were—

Cliopher pulled away from Pikabe. He trusted in his Radiancy’s protections, after such a vivid demonstration of their power that morning—the burns and bloodstains on both the floor and the wall would tax Franzel and his staff, he thought distantly—but there was no sense in risking both of them if Lady Unshirie was lying.

He lifted a hand, drew a breath, and pressed his gold-mottled palm into the centre of the skein of strange silks.

With a disturbingly organic whispering sound the fine threads or tendrils that made up the weave whispered apart from one another, shrivelling as they split apart. Dry flakes pattered to the floor. The way opened.

He stepped through.

Here were all the most familiar rooms in the Palace. His study. His bedroom. A few other rooms, not all of which he had fully explored, but he was fairly sure that none of them should be swathed entirely in silvery-grey silk that was decomposing before his eyes into a glittering dust.

Sparkles of decaying web puffed up into the air and danced around him as he stepped through the gap. The guards slipped past either side and slid ahead, their movements smooth and dangerous, spears ready. Pikabe put a hand on his arm. “Wait, let them clear—”

Cliopher shook his head. The silvery dust danced around him. He sneezed, fumbled in his pocket for a scrap of fabric, and wiped his face. “They might need me.” He was hazy on what authority Unshirie’s fealty had granted him, except that it covered all of her might and magic and was responsive to his will. In exchange for not binding her with her name, for returning her quietly to her patron, for helping her pretend that this whole sorry escapade never happened.

He had to find out if it had been worth it. He had to see—

The inner apartments were entirely dry, as though the thick cocoon here had held out the sabotaged cooling magics or else superseded them. Great clouds of glitter fountained around them as they moved and stuck to every damp inch of them. Pikabe was a shimmering statue. Cliopher’s cloak could almost have belonged to one of the Ouranatha.

“In here!”

They were in his bedroom, slumped against the floor. Franzel, Baion, two other footmen—one page, who didn’t belong here at all, but must have somehow given the impression that he did—and, on the bed, his arms sprawled limp and wrapped in bloodstained cloths, Ludvic. He was covered in a thick layer of shimmering dust, as though he had been wrapped as tightly as the doors in those grey glittering tendrils.

Pikabe didn’t ask this time, he simply held Cliopher’s arm and kept him standing in the doorway.

“They’re breathing!”

“Get a stretcher!”

“Clear the route!” That was Ato’s voice, its echo muffled oddly against the fibrous material detaching from the walls. “Sorry,” he added, much closer by, “Clear the route, sir!”

Cliopher stepped aside, trembling, as Pikabe turned to help. He watched as half of the remaining guards efficiently shifted the last of the fae’s prisoners onto the magically supported stretchers, strapped them down, and swept them past him out of the room.

Ludvic’s eyes were open and his face was paler than it should be. They didn’t focus on Cliopher as he was pulled past. The golden marks on his forearms stood out all the brighter on his still and faded form.

He was alive. Whatever magical or physical injuries he had sustained, the Palace doctors would be able to tend him now. He was—Cliopher was—

The wall was firm against his back. He was leaning on it for support, his soiled fingers no doubt leaving smudges… He pushed himself away, stared round the ruin of his bedroom, and considered the next problem.

It came as a surprise when the crowd in the main reception room broke into applause as he entered. There were more people than there had been, many of them with mops. He stood and looked them over, uncertain, but sensing that they needed something more from him.

Outside the sun had finished sinking below the horizon, which was all lit up in lurid shades of orange and red. The bellies of the few slate grey clouds drifting low over distant mountains were strips of blazing scarlet.

Around him the room was full of moisture. The air was warmer than it had been, and everything smelled damp. After the crisp cold tickle of snow in his nose for the past two days, it was almost welcome. Almost.

The applause died down. He cleared his throat against the choking dust, against the heaviness that still seemed to be lodged there, against the weariness of his heart. “Thank you. Thank all of you for being here.”

The words came. They listened, from the bright young analysts with scraps of fabric holding dripping hair out of their faces to stubborn Sayo Ixpul who had been saying for years that he would retire from his role coordinating the cleaning staff any month now. Cliopher made himself look from face to face as he spoke. They were all shining with relief. They were—he felt old, older than Sayo Ixpul, older than he had ever felt before, as though somehow the past three days had added weight and substance to all those years that had somehow slipped by since the Fall.

This was not the aftermath of the Fall. This was not the ashy bleak ruin after the inferno at Woodlark. This was a victory.

The spark caught. The cheer rattled the windows. The crowd scattered as he thought of tasks and assigned them.

He sent some to help Kiri handle those who had been forced out of the building. Runners, to coordinate between her, Cliopher, and Aioru and his scratch committees in the Throne Room.

In the absence of half of Cliopher’s own household, Sayo Ixpul seemed to be taking the task of clearing the Lord of Zunidh’s apartments personally. That was a small weight lifted; Cliopher sent a page with a note telling his staff—those who were not already under the care of the healers—to stand down for the rest of the week. He wrote it at Tully’s usual desk, as his was still covered in damp papers that would need careful peeling apart and transcription before it could be cleared.

A page came in with a basket of wood and laid a fire in a grate that hadn’t been used since the last days of Astandalas.

Tully—all the junior secretaries—had been safely in their quarters on the other side of the Palace when the snow started forming. He shut his eyes and shuddered with retrospective relief. If Lady Unshirie had found Gaudy—he did not think her cruel, as such, merely indifferent to the lives and loves of those who were not hers to command or obey.

Gaudy was helping Kiri, and Eldo was in the make-shift infirmary managing the irascible nobles there. Chief amongst them his own father, whose refusal to back down as his guard cornered a straggling fae warrior could have ended far, far worse.

That had been brave, if pointless. There would have to be some form of recognition. Cliopher added a note to his growing list of tomorrow problems and set it aside. The today problems were challenging enough.

All the comfortable chairs were wet. His rooms stank of soggy wool, even with all the windows flung open to the night.

Somebody he didn’t recognise asked whether they should clear his bedroom next. He had enough presence of mind to order them to leave all the spaces that had been behind the silver-grey webbing untouched until a magical sweep had been carried out.

“Shall I prepare one of the guest rooms, sir?”

He blinked. Franzel was not here—was hopefully getting the help he needed—but this prim young woman in the uniform of the Tower was doing an uncanny impression of his subtly disapproving manner. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I can go down to the offices if you need to clear—”

“Here is better,” one of his guards put in. Another person he didn’t know well, but at least the face was familiar. “More defensible.”

“Surely there’s no need—” Cliopher began, and then remembered that under invasion protocol his views on this subject would be irrelevant.

The little disc of gold on the other man’s face winked in the light as he turned and smiled. “His Radiancy would never forgive us for taking the chance.”

“Sir. The Cavalier an Vilius ordered me to find you a bed. Sir.” The woman from the Tower was putting the posture of the Imperial Guard to shame.

Cliopher’s face felt strange. Oh. He was smiling. “Thank Conju for me.” The words came out a little choked, but that would be understandable.

“Yessir!” She spun on her heel. The guard watched her go with speculative appreciation. Well. At least something good might come out of this mess for somebody. Cliopher rubbed his face to hide his amusement and turned back to his triage of the work.

A runner from Aioru brought the welcome news that the fae were contained and that the oath Lady Unshirie had sworn to Cliopher was holding them to obey his Radiancy too. With that authority in hand, the emperor was dismantling the last of the hostile magic.

One part of the nagging fear unwound itself from about his head and his heart. The lifting pressure, alas, only emphasised the constricting ache that had lodged in both places. He frowned and focused on his notes.

If the oath was holding his Radiancy could have no further need to summon Cliopher. Kiri would coordinate the people and Aioru would provide any assistance that their lord might require. Cliopher could help best here.

The floor was drying at last. The heads of various parts of the Palace staff came up for a meeting. The kitchens were all functional—the protocols there had worked even better than he had hoped, and none of the fires had gone out—the plumbing was largely intact despite the freeze and the drain on magic. The cooling charms would have to be recalibrated, which likely meant a few warmer days before they were at full effectiveness again.

“I doubt anybody will complain, sir,” was the view of the head of the lower household, and Cliopher had to agree.

They were laying out the soft furnishings on every terrace and lawn, and anticipated being able to save most of the fabric that way, since it was the dry season. Cliopher had little to add, bar an instruction to make sure they rotated even their volunteer crews enough to give everybody some sleep. “The fae are gone. I know you’re eager to make things good but, unless the water is causing further damage, it can wait until tomorrow.”

“And you, sir?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Will you be able to get some sleep?”

He blinked. “Eventually.” When he knew that it was over. When Ludvic was—

They looked doubtful, but they let him show them out. The guard—Motin, that was his name—motioned Cliopher back from standing too close to the door.

“Sir?” The young woman was back. “Everything’s ready. I’ve drawn a hot bath—”

The thought of being warmed all through made him shiver. But there was so much to do.

“Thank you,” he said, and settled back down at his desk. “I’ll be with you when this is done.”

She bowed and left again, although he had an uneasy feeling that she was hovering just outside the door, waiting for him to be ready.

What he really wanted was a mug of hot chocolate, carried carefully through by Shoänie and placed where he could drink it without thinking.

(He wanted Shoänie to forgive him.)

(He wanted—)

The evening had drawn in but the air flowing in the windows was still warmer and fresher than his apartments had been since the fae arrived. The mage lights were working. The spells that kept out night-time insects had apparently come undone, as several large moths were blundering about the brightest bulbs.

One of them flew directly into the hearth. It fluttered in the flames for a heartbeat before it was consumed.

Two different noble households sent messengers to demand that their rooms be prioritised for cleaning and restoration. Cliopher took great pleasure in watching them attempt to beg the favour of an unyielding Sayo Ixpul, before taking a note to add a moment of recognition and thanks to the Palace cleaning staff to the ‘tomorrow problems’ list.

A third runner came from the household of Princess Anastasiya of Xiputl to complain about the untidy effect of all those damp mattresses and fabrics and sheets waving from every window of the Palace of Stars. As Anastasiya was safely in Xiputl, Cliopher allowed himself to lose his temper, and threatened to write to the Princess about the obstructionary nature of her staff. She could hardly descend to scold him this evening via a letter, and dealing with her in person again was definitely a ‘tomorrow problem’.

The next runner came from the Imperial Apartments and was accompanied by the Groom of the Chamber.

Cliopher finished writing his sentence, pushed the note across, exchanged it with the three updates the runner had to share, and finally looked up.

His friend was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, treating Cliopher to his sternest expression of disapproval. With an effort, Cliopher managed not to shuffle his papers nervously like a witness sitting before a sceptical tribunal of one.

The tribunal raised a hand. He subsided, saying nothing.

“Ludvic is awake,” Conju informed him. “All of them are. Franzel, your footmen… They’re exhausted, but Domina Audry assures us that the curse is cleared.”

Something unknotted deep in Cliopher’s belly. “That’s—that’s good,” he managed. His pen clattered off over the desk as his fingers relaxed. He watched as it rolled off the edge. He had more pens. He could pick that one up later.

“Rhodin is also resting.” Conju took one small step forward. He was wearing a cloak with a downy white lining, like the one he had sent up for Cliopher earlier. That one had, unfortunately, long since soaked through its spells with water and with—the stains would come out, hopefully, the Palace laundry was good at that. More easily than the marks on the wall. The rest of the fae had disowned his attacker at once; Lady Unshirie had gutted her personally, which had not helped reduce the mess.

“Cliopher?”

Conju was beside his desk. Cliopher had not seen him cross the distance. He looked—Cliopher shut his eyes. “Rhodin…?” He should have thought. He should have noticed. Rhodin had been with him almost every hour of the long negotiations, sleeping only when Cliopher did, which had not been often. And he was injured. “Is he…?”

“Rhodin is fine, if one disregards his erratic behaviour. Which is entirely within his usual parameters, I am led to believe. His Radiancy commanded him to stand down, and so he has handed over the guard to young Ato to coordinate.” Conju tapped the nearest piece of paper on the desk. “What,” he enquired, “is this?”

“The messenger schedule,” said Cliopher, pulling it back towards him. “I wanted to—”

“What will happen if I throw it in the bin?”

Cliopher sat back, startled not just by the words but by the tone in his friend’s voice. “What?”

“Will the Palace crash through the worlds and land on Daun if I throw your messenger schedule in the bin?”

There it was again, an unfamiliar glassy sharpness. Brittle.

Cliopher took a breath and bit back the instinctive sharpness of his response by main force. “If you throw my messenger schedule in the bin, I will have to pick it back up out of the bin again,” he said instead, as levelly as he could.

Conju looked like a man who would very much like to find a problem with this.

Cliopher knew him well enough to wait for the inner knife-fight to resolve itself.

It ended with a frustrated humph and an elegant half-turn away from his desk. Cliopher knew enough Astandalan courtly manners—and enough of his friend—to recognise the strength of frustration that slight motion was intended to convey.

He waited.

“His Radiancy has ordered guest quarters in the Tower for them both, as they recover.”

He was too tired for this. He had done enough, or nearly enough. He had fulfilled his promise to his Radiancy.

(His lips tingled.)

(He had stopped raising his hand to them, the first time it set Lady Unshirie’s guard to laughing.)

“I’m glad,” he said, pulling another paper out of the stack at random and looking at it blankly. A list of something. The letters wavered.

He had carried a flame in his heart and a coal on his brow, and he had spoken for his lord, and he had passed his charge back to his lord with the fae’s surrender. That had to be enough. It was a victory.

(Ludvic was recovering.)

(He saw, and did not want to see, the gasping shock on the face of Ludvic-who-was-not-Ludvic. The twist of agony. The way those thick-fingered hands had gripped him, then released, into a slackness that was—)

“That’s good,” he added, and then regretted it. What right did he have to a view on his Radiancy’s decision to host some injured members of his guard? The guest bedrooms of the Imperial Apartments would be a good place for Ludvic and Rhodin to recover. Quiet. Safe. Under the eyes of the healers.

His Radiancy had bestowed those kisses like a benediction. For everyone except Cliopher, who had pre-empted him.

It had seemed simple, in the Throne Room, with the looming problem of the negotiations and the shock and the fear driving away all his inhibitions.

He was not at all sure that it had been right.

He had more important things to worry about.

Conju was watching him. He sorted the papers in front of him, trying to find the notes the runner had just brought in.

“His Radiancy was kind enough to honour me with quarters in the Tower when he appointed me as his Groom of the Chamber.”

Cliopher put his pen down, keeping his hand on it so he didn’t lose another. “Yes?”

“I have ordered a third guest room made ready. It’s waiting for you.”

His fingers clenched against the desk. The pen skidded sideways. “Have you.”

“Come on, Cliopher.”

“I have to finish—”

“You have staff, I believe? Delegate.”

“I couldn’t presume to—”

Conju actually scoffed. “You presume everything. It’s what he lo–”

“Did he invite me?”

Conju’s mouth opened, then closed again. Cliopher recovered his pen and used a scrap of fabric to blot the spilled ink off both the desk and his hands.

After a moment Conju said, “You can’t possibly imagine he would turn you away?”

The fabric twined between his fingers, black ink and brown skin and golden shimmers all together. He saw his Lord of Rising Stars pacing through pools of melting slush, the glitter of frost reflecting back the refulgent gold. Distant, furious, trapped, terrified.

Approaching everybody else before Cliopher.

“I have a bed waiting here,” he told that memory. I took the gold from your hands and your lips and your forehead. I carried it with me as a banner. I won. He cleared his throat, dipped his pen in the inkwell, and looked up at Conju. “You will send for me, if he asks?”

Conju scowled at him.

“Thank you.”

Cliopher had learned from his Radiancy how to make those two words an undeniable dismissal. He kept his eyes on the note in front of him.

A pause, heavy with the argument they were not having. A sigh.

Cliopher wiped his pen again, and listened to Conju’s footsteps leave the room.

Chapter Text

There came a moment when Cliopher put down his pen and knew that he had done everything he could for the immediate management of the building and its inhabitants. Those who could help were helping; those who could be spared were made as comfortable as they could be for the night.

The fire had subsided in the grate. It was a low red glimmer, radiating heat rather than light. The room—the Palace—would no doubt smell of drying furs and fabrics for some time, but the smell of burning wood was slowly permeating everything too and that was. He hunted for a word. Better.

The last message from the Throne Room had announced that the temporary command station there was being closed down, and that the Sun-on-Earth was confident enough in his solution to holding Lady Unshirie and her followers that he had returned to the Tower.

The Throne Room would have to remain out of bounds to the majority of the Palace until the fae had been returned to their Queen, which would make the courtiers restive, but that could be addressed with the promise of a public celebration in the fullness of time. He made a note to set up a recognition committee, not (alas) to be chaired by Prince Rufus, for whom there would be a conflict of interest.

Sending the Prince of Amboloyo to chair committees was Cliopher’s favourite method of keeping him out of the way. He sighed, cleaned his pen, and reflected that two broken ribs might achieve almost the same effect.

“Kip?”

“Yes, my lord?” The response was automatic. Not just the words, but the lift of his pen, the lift of his eyes, the lift of his—the lurch of his heart, as he looked up to see his Radiancy standing framed by the doorway of his study like the icon of a Lord Magus, like a gloriously golden illustration in an old, old book.

His Radiancy was wearing the pearl and golden armour of the Emperors of Astandalas. Cliopher remembered seeing a reference to it in a recent report on the items the Treasury held prepared for use. It was not practical armour, but he had signed off on the associated budget line anyway because it had ceremonial and diplomatic value.

The great sun-in-glory breastplate was, like the merriweather silk banner, halved between sheer white and deep black. The plates clasped to his Radiancy’s arms and legs were polished to a reflective brilliance and encrusted with diamonds that spilled spangles of shimmering light across the walls and floor. The fabric between the metal elements was all Imperial Yellow, from the skirt of the under robe to the puff of the sleeves to the great cape gathered at his lord’s neck.

In the low evening lights the colours seemed impossibly rich and far away.

“Kip?” His Radiancy sounded almost hesitant. As he stepped forward the reddish light of the embers in the fireplace glinted from each glittering surface, turning him into one glorious living flame.

Cliopher could not move.

There should have been a helmet, or at least there had been one listed, but his Radiancy’s head was crowned with a glorious diadem of gold and black and white pearls. Fire flashed from the matching pearls cuffed at his ears, and from the brighter, warmer amber of his golden eyes.

The correct thing to do was to stand when the emperor was announced and to fall into obeisance as he entered the room. Cliopher had entirely missed the announcement and was still tucked behind his desk, and here was the Emperor of Astandalas—the Last Emperor—his Emperor, his Aurelius Magnus—and he couldn’t—he hadn’t—he dropped his pen and scrambled to his feet.

His Radiancy stopped in his tracks, raising his left hand. At least the armourers had managed to restrict themselves to diamonds when encrusting the small plates on his fingers; the pale pearly substance that chased all over the gold on his breastplate would no doubt crack if the emperor had to use his fists in a fight. Not that he was expected to use his fists; his right hand rested on the hilt of the equally ceremonial sword.

The gesture kept Cliopher on his feet. His lord was looking at him with an unwavering intensity, not holding his gaze but scrutinising every part of him.

Cliopher was abruptly aware of the ludicrous contrast he made with the shining Sun-on-Earth. The itch of his unwashed scalp, the heavy stickiness of his formal robes, the thick dusting of the powder that had wafted out of the silvery-grey fibres that had unravelled at his touch. He felt his face heat.

His Radiancy should not be looking at him like that, so intently, with the ruddy firelight gleaming and the gold and pearl shining and the brilliant silk fluttering so that he looked like a man robed in fire.

No, that was wrong, the emperor was of course permitted to scrutinise every member of his household in any way he wished. It was just that Cliopher would have preferred not to stand here blazing up with shame under the lion eyes.

If only he could fall into obeisance. But the desk was in the way.

“Kip, are you—well?”

“Entirely, my lord,” he said, the words escaping oddly empty and breathless to his own ears.

His Radiancy took two swift and clanking steps closer. The tips of Cliopher’s fingers found the smooth surface of his desk, and steadied him.

“Conju told me that you were working here.”

“Yes, my lord.”

There was new gold decoration on his Radiancy’s face, Cliopher noticed with a pang. His lord’s mouth was painted with it again, as smooth and perfect as though it had never been smudged. All the evidence neatly concealed.

Cliopher’s lips tingled. It took an effort of will not to bite them

“Is all well?”

A question about his work. Cliopher breathed in slowly, trying to reinflate his heavy lungs. “Yes, my lord,” he said, far more steadily, and explained about the rescue parties and the snow damage and the recovery teams and his assessment of the protocols and his plans for making the most of this opportunity to celebrate the freedom and the future of Zunidh.

His lord stood and listened, robed in his serenity, garbed all in moonshine and glitter like a creature from—there were stories Cliopher’s cousins on Loaloa had teased him with, when he was learning to dive for pearls. He had seen, they had all seen, the flash of pale light in the corners of their eyes. He had learned to disregard them, and to disregard too the stories about the strange and beautiful beings of the deeps.

He had never understood, then, why those visions were said to lure the unwary.

The words spooled out of him for the most part like his breath bubbling away in the current. He knew they were coherent, or a reasonable facsimile of coherence. As long as his Radiancy stood before him he would offer what he had, even if the best of what he had was—and yet, even at that thought, his tired mind turned over the reality of what he had done, and what his lord had done, and why it had worked.

“Lady Unshirie thought she was attacking the remnant of Astandalas,” he said, and now he was alert again, the ideas taking shape out of the muddle of his tired mind. “She was wrong—she expected to find us already defeated by the Fall, but Solaara is stronger than she anticipated, and kinder too—the empire would have delighted in crushing her, but here you will send her home. And it takes more strength to overpower and trap and release than it does to kill—we should make a proclamation to that effect and ensure it reaches every world touched by Astandalas—I must write a note for Aioru—”

He was already reaching for the pen, dizzily relieved to have found another purpose, another star slipping up over the horizon to turn his prow towards, another shining prize he could strive after and present to his shining Radiancy.

“Sayo Aioru has gone to bed.” There was an unfamiliar note in his Radiancy’s voice. A strange softness, even perhaps a hesitancy. There was certainly a pause long enough for Cliopher’s heart to sink a little before the emperor went on, “He hasn’t slept. I told him to take three days.”

“Of course.” Cliopher should have thought of that. Everybody needed rest. He was not knocked off balance by the absence of one person; he made himself centre his weight, dredged up a smile, and gave a small bow of acknowledgement. “I will send to his deputy.”

Dipping his head set it swimming alarmingly, but his fingertips were braced down against the desk again and he was able to hold his poise and wait a couple of moments for the world to stop spinning.

His Radiancy looked down at all the precious metal clasped about his hands—long enough for Cliopher to follow his gaze and think, slow and stupidly, that it was bespelled for strength and durability, and also no doubt to be light enough to wear, but it could hardly be comfortable.

The gold-chased profile lifted and half-turned towards the fire. The lines of it were striking, dark against the gentle glow of the mage lights.

Cliopher had never seen his lord look so—the expression hurt. His Radiancy spoke low. “My Lord Chancellor, it is past time for you to take your own rest.” He stood looking at the hearth in a silence that might in a man who was not a god be described as a hesitation, but all he added before turning away was a clipped and final, “See to it.”

There was something in those few words that pierced through all the space between them, a sadness that rang Cliopher’s sorrow like a bell.

The back of the armour was figured with a large and gleaming bee, the emblem of the house of Damara. It was banded black and gold and white.

Cliopher stared at it blankly, his mouth cloth and flannel, his fingers heavy on the desk, his head swimming.

He was bone- and soul- weary, and now his lord was going away.

He couldn’t—it wasn’t—his thoughts tripped over themselves, half-formed.

He didn’t want to be left alone again.

“Please,” he said. His voice hitched up over the word so it might have been a sob, and his hand reached out, blindly, because his eyes were blurred.

His Radiancy stopped at once, standing absolutely still, facing the door.

“Please?” Cliopher wasn’t sure what he was asking. The word wavered. He wanted to help, and he had done his best, and he didn’t know what more he could do.

His hand was trembling, and he had to scrunch his face up, and he was trying to find a handkerchief, but these wretched formal robes had no useful pockets, and—

His hands scrubbed over his eyes, no doubt smearing ink and dust across them; he had not cried. He had not—and now they were stinging, and a hot tide of—a tide flooding back in, sliding water slyly across all the bumps and lumps of the seabed he had thought entirely dry and spent.

There was a legend, from one of his books on Ysthar, about a king who ordered the ocean to recede, to remind his councillors that it would not. To make them feel foolish for their extravagant flattery. Cliopher had imagined, when he first read about it, how his Radiancy might love to do the same; his lord had never had much patience with the fawning of his courtiers.

The Lord of Zunidh might in truth be able to prevent the ocean from rising, but he would be persuaded to refrain from doing so if Cliopher had been among those advisors, and able to point out the damage to oceanic ecosystems that such meddling might cause. Or at least to commission a feasibility study and review of the environmental risks.

And anyway, his lord would never make so cruel and crude a joke.

His mind was drifting, or perhaps all of him was, anchored only by the desk pressing against his legs, waiting only for the sound of the door swinging closed. He was shaking with cold, which was foolish when he had been dry and working for so long with a fire in the grate.

He could feel the warmth of the hand that took his. He clung to it.

“Kip,” his Radiancy’s voice, very close, oh—his hand was moving, his Radiancy was holding it and turning him, was coming round the desk, and then Cliopher’s other hand was being held too.

His Radiancy was standing in front of him, was holding his hands, his golden hands, and Cliopher ought to open his eyes and he ought to go down at least on one knee (he wanted to prostrate himself to the floor, to lie at rest, at last at rest, but—)

He couldn’t do anything but stand and shake.

“Oh, Kip.”

His Radiancy’s beautiful voice. Tor’s beautiful voice, saying his name so gently. Cliopher was still crying, somehow, the tears hot on his face. He was—he could not help it—sobbing freely, his shoulders shaking, his eyes clenched shut so he would not have to look up into his lord’s eyes and find pity there, or disgust.

Or perhaps they were shut because he no longer had the energy to hold them open.

This had happened more than once on his long voyage home, when his body or his heart was stretched beyond its capacity. He had learned to lie still until his limbs would move again, to cry until the tears dried, and to hide both of those reactions, to hug them to himself in solitude. He had always managed, before now, to be the only witness to this disintegration.

He had never had anybody to hold his hands before.

The texture between his fingers was smoother and harder than human skin, certainly harder than the sumptuous softness of his lord’s fingers when they had, so briefly, twined with his. Gloves. No, gauntlets. Leather, supple and warmed through because his Radiancy must have been wearing them for long weary hours—

One of them disentangled, gently, from his clutching fingers and brushed instead down the side of his nose, tracing exactly the tingling place where his enthusiasm had brought their faces clumsily together.

“My dauntless Kip,” his lord murmured, and Cliopher hiccoughed in disbelief, his chest aching. He could not even stop crying long enough to point out that he did not feel very dauntless now.

His Radiancy was stronger than he looked, pulling Cliopher towards him. Cliopher found himself pressed into a metal-clad shoulder, clasped tightly against all that beautiful artistry, which he must surely be smearing with dust and sweat and snot.

He ought to pull away. He was still shaking, though, and it was so much easier just to bury his head down against the cold hard metal and let his Radiancy’s leather-clad hand stroke the back of his hair and then rest there on his head, heavy and comforting.

The storm of weeping passed, as some storms do, into a sullen lingering trickle of grief that Cliopher gulped back into his throat. “‘m not,” he mumbled.

His Radiancy’s arm tightened around his shoulder. “You’re not…?”

“Dauntless,” he choked.

Everything trembled as his Radiancy sighed. “And still arguing with me, even now.” The heavy gloved hands moved to Cliopher’s shoulders, prising his face gently off the resplendent breastplate, separating them until Cliopher could look up into his lord’s golden eyes.

They were so close, and so warm.

“Sit down, Kip.”

He sat.

“Shut your eyes. Conju, have you a cloth?”

He shut them. Slippery fabric dabbed at his face with delicate care, far too tentative to make any real inroads in the mess.

“You were right,” his Radiancy said, aside, as the cloth vanished. “Thank you.”

Cliopher might have known what that implied, only it would have required him to focus. His attention had been knocked aside by the dazzle of—and now the focus was gone, and he tried not to think of anything. He couldn’t—he couldn’t—

(The face of the fae in Ludvic’s form had snarled with anger. The expression, as much as the attack, had been entirely shocking. Worse, though, the way the borrowed eyes bulged and the mouth slackened as the creature folded over Rhodin’s blade.)

There was a creak, a clank, and rustle, and a sharp indrawn breath from Conju. Cliopher’s eyes flew open, his body tensing, and—

His Radiancy was kneeling before him.

His Radiancy, who had knelt only once before, in apology to Conju.

His Radiancy, looking up at Cliopher.

All other thoughts were wiped entirely from his mind. His Radiancy’s hands were lifted; Cliopher took them. He had no protocol for this, and knew no rules of etiquette that applied to the situation.

“Kip Mdang. I named you my Hands so that you could go where I cannot and speak for me. I knew—how could I not, after Littleridge?—that you would do so fearlessly and well.” His Radiancy paused, pressed Cliopher’s hands, and then went on less smoothly. “I should have known you would continue to put all other needs above your own. Kip—Cliopher—you have worked a miracle these past days. You—”

Another little pause, as though his Radiancy were mastering a strong emotion. Cliopher could only sit, and grip those gloved hands, and stare helplessly down at the magnificence of the Sun-on-Earth.

It could not be treason if his Radiancy was the one who chose to kneel, could it?

“You saved Ludvic,” his lord went on. “Your household—they would have taken every one of them back as trophies, as thralls—you were the one who saw the way forward. Kip. I am the Lord Magus of this world, and without you I would have been powerless to prevent a tragedy. Instead of which I am now to appear in triumph after a victory that you have won for me.” He shook his head slowly, so that all the glittering brilliance of the diamonds danced. “Not just a victory for Zunidh. For every treaty between the worlds.”

Once more the political consideration appeared in the flow of Cliopher’s confusion like a lifeline. “The proclamation—the Lord of Ysthar will share it, and he is well-connected on Daun and even Eahh—” He broke off, because his Radiancy was squeezing his hands.

“Stop, Kip.”

A direct command. He drew in a great shuddering breath, and stopped.

“Conju. A message, for the Private Offices. Our Lord Chancellor has, with characteristic brilliance, negotiated an end to hostilities and the surrender of the fae. He and I will be closeted together for two—can we get away with three?—three days, so that I can consult with him on the magical and mundane implications while his deputies capably restore the Palace.” His Radiancy did not look away from Cliopher as he said this, nor as he quirked up a brow and added. “We need not say to them that I anticipate the first mundane implication to be a full bell-round of rest and recuperation, but if they should ask after his wellbeing you may assure them that I have taken a personal interest in the matter.”

“Certainly, my lord,” was all Conju said, but Cliopher knew his friend well enough to read the satisfaction in that prim response.

The idea of three days closeted with his lord was nothing new; they had often worked long hours close together, long into the night. The notion of spending one full day in idleness first was what spurred him to say, “But—”

His Radiancy interrupted any objection by tugging Cliopher’s hands closer to him. The smooth dark head bowed over his palms, bright with gems but otherwise just as it had been when Lady Unshirie—when she—

The sudden sharp recollection and resurgence of the impulse to wrap his hands around his lord’s scalp made Cliopher’s breath hitch.

The Sun-on-Earth lifted his head at once and pulled back, releasing Cliopher’s hands. Any slight noise Cliopher made was hidden in the clang of the emperor’s armour as he straightened up on his knees.

“Ah—I seem to have—Conju?”

“Here, my lord.”

“One might think,” the Lord of Rising Stars remarked ruefully, “that it would be possible to avoid making the same mistake twice. No, Kip, stay where you are.”

Another direct command. That did make things easier. Cliopher stayed seated and watched Conju and the guards carefully levering his Radiancy back to his feet. They had learned something from Lesuia, at least, and offered him a spear shaft at once.

“Now,” his Radiancy said brightly, when he was upright, “Let’s get my Lord Chancellor cleaned up. Where are his attendants?”

There was an awkward pause. Cliopher looked at the floor. “Somebody was here earlier. She said there was a bed…”

Another brief silence. Conju, Cliopher thought distantly, was never going to let him forget this. He sagged further. Now that he had no distractions it was harder to ignore the way his muscles ached.

“I see. Let us by all means discover the bed.”

“My lord, you don’t need to—”

“Ah, but have you? No? And so it seems as though I must.” The brightness had a terrible shiny fragility. Cliopher, looking up, caught a twist of his Radiancy’s mouth into what—on another man—might be acknowledged as a grimace. “For you, my dear Kip, I will play the tyrant. Tonight, only. Conju, you have an observation?”

Conju had not expected his lord to turn away from Cliopher so sharply, and had not cleared the frustration quickly enough to avoid being seen. The gold star shone on his brow as he lifted his chin. “Merely that Lord Mdang is badly in need of a tyrant, my lord, all political proclivities notwithstanding.”

His Radiancy’s eyes went wide and then he laughed—not gently, but too hard, so that it shook his body almost like a sob.

“My lord—” Cliopher hadn’t planned to come to his feet, but— “My—Tor?”

The laughter died. His Radiancy was looking at him again, really looking, the light of his power in his eyes. “Come here, Kip,” he said, lifting a hand.

Cliopher came and took it in both of his.

“Now, then.” His Radiancy was close again. He filled Cliopher’s universe. The splendour of his mien. The shimmer of pearl and silk and diamond. The exquisite decoration of his face. The way that, this close, Cliopher could see every line of weariness and strain.

The hand drew him just slightly closer. The beautiful dark head dipped towards him. The air fluttered in Cliopher’s lungs without, somehow, filling them. “My lord?”

“You must be exhausted,” his Radiancy murmured. “A bath first, and food, and then a bed. Come on.”

He didn’t let go of Cliopher’s hand.

The guards swung open the door to Cliopher’s inner apartments. The woman in the livery of the Tower was there in the hall, seated beside a trolley bearing several plates of food. She was comfortably settled with a book and looked as though she had been for a while; some magic must be keeping the contents of the trolley fresh and warm.

The fragrance as the door opened was rich with fresh-baked bread and a savoury spice mix that made Cliopher’s mouth water. He had not thought that he was hungry, but—

The woman looked up.

Several things happened in rapid succession.

Cliopher, swept up and cradled in a wave of golden power, felt his back pressed hard against the wall. His hands had come down each side and his fingers were twisting tense on the carved stone each side of him. His feet were no longer touching the floor.

In front of him, his Radiancy was entirely ablaze with magic, but it was not arcane power that sprang from his right hand.

The guards on either side had lowered their spears and hesitated, because the Sun-on-Earth had slid in front of them in one smooth movement, the great sword loose in his hand, his body moving with dangerous assurance.

The door had slammed shut behind him, before Conju could follow them.

A further whip of golden light and the glamour was torn away from the woman in the Tower uniform, who laughed merrily and swung the glittering mace that she had held on her lap in the guise of a book.

Cliopher made a strangled sound as his Radiancy spun in front of her, letting the brace on his left arm take and dissipate the strength of the blow. Their legs locked together, both armoured in white—his Radiancy’s pearlescent gleam to the fae woman’s glittering frost.

“The emperor!” One of the guards shouted. It was unclear whether it was a plea, a curse, or a warning. His Radiancy paid it no heed. The expression on his face was strangely exalted. Somebody heard, however, and the door behind them burst open again to admit more guards.

Whatever else she was, the fae was strong. Her magic crusted white along the edge of his Radiancy’s golden gleam. They were trembling against one another, shoulder to shoulder, neither apparently able to find the leverage they needed to trip the other.

Cliopher’s heart thudded in his chest as his Radiancy’s sword arm lowered, elbowed down by the head of the fae woman’s mace. His fingers scrabbled on the stone for something, anything, that might help—he would shout, only that might distract his lord as easily as his assailant, and anyway his throat was tight with—

Abruptly and without warning his Radiancy broke the lock. The movement was almost too fast to see: the angle of their arms had come round to the point where the hilt of the sword was pointed at the fae woman’s head and, with a rapid twist, his Radiancy had it free and moving to slam into her forehead with brutal force.

She fell between them all like an axed tree.

The emperor staggered back a step, breathing hard, licking his lips. His eyes were somewhat wild. “Arrest… her.”

Galvanised, the guards leapt forwards. His Radiancy looked up at Cliopher and waved an arm.

The flood of magic buoyed Cliopher away from the wall, bringing him lightly down to land in the centre of the hall.

An ugly burning smell rose through the room. Cliopher glanced back in alarm at the fae, but she was unconscious, loose in the arms of the guards who were securing her. Beside her the trolley was lit up with a pale flame that licked its way rapidly across the appearance of fresh-baked bread, of dumplings, of a savoury stew. The food shrivelled before his eyes, crumbling away into silvery dust.

“Our Lord Chancellor,” his Radiancy rasped, “is under our protection.”

Chapter Text

The man leading his Radiancy’s personal guard—a familiar face, newly crested with gold, though for some reason it took a moment for Cliopher’s mind to dredge up the name Aizurvenne—saluted crisply. “The intruder is secured, Glorious One!”

To his credit he sounded very much like a person who was in control of the situation and not, for example, like someone who had just watched his charge, the Lord Magus of the world, brush aside every member of his imperial guard to personally and physically subdue an assailant.

His Radiancy acknowledged the salute with the hilt of his sword, then looked at it as though surprised to find it in his hand. “Oh.” He glanced around the hall, then down at the fae woman. “Conju, was she… Did she appear to be a member of your staff?”

Conju had come up beside Cliopher. “I didn’t recognise her,” he said, grimly. He wasn’t looking down, as Cliopher had, at the unconscious prisoner. “I didn’t get a good look.”

“Sir!” They all turned, some of the guards stepping aside to reveal Motin, who saluted. “I was guarding Lord Mdang earlier this evening when she first approached him. I thought…” he shrugged. “I didn’t recognise her, but there was something familiar… I thought I must have seen her before, in the Tower.”

“She said she came from Conju,” Cliopher said, slowly, not daring to look at his friend. “To make a bed up for me.” But Conju had come down himself, not long after, and told Cliopher to come to the Imperial Apartments. How had he missed that? “I didn’t notice… I’m sorry.”

His Radiancy frowned at him, briefly. “While I am playing the tyrant, I do not believe you are allowed to be sorry for that, my Lord Mdang.” He looked at his sword, still frowning, as though he had never seen it before. “I should clean the blade.” Then down at the unconscious prisoner. “Her glamour was exceptionally strong and subtle.”

The frown was hardly an expression, more of a tautness in the corners of his Radiancy’s mouth, a lowering of his brows, a minute tension in the centre of his forehead. Without looking away from the fae woman the Sun-on-Earth said, in a cold colourless voice, “Did she give you anything to eat or to drink?”

Horror washed over Cliopher, fresh and stinging, and he thought another flurry. His eyes went to the trolley and all its silver dust. He was drowning in silver dust these days, it seemed.

His Radiancy turned abruptly to face him with the same swift fluidity of motion he had shown in the fight with the intruder. “Did she,” he repeated, in that entirely level voice, “give you anything to eat or drink?”

Oh. He hadn’t answered. He shook his head numbly, his hands twisting together.

All the light of the room seemed to have pooled again into his Radiancy’s face, into his eyes, which were scrutinising him so closely. Cliopher had only one instinctive response to that challenge: he lifted his chin and stared into the sun, heedless of the way it made his own eyes water.

“No, my lord,” he managed. “I haven’t eaten anything since—” he faltered. Since the day before, perhaps? “Since before Lady Unshirie surrendered.” And up until that moment every member of the delegation had been under careful scrutiny by the guards to ensure that no faerie food was tricked or forced upon them.

His Radiancy’s eyes widened with a touch of incredulity, which was an expression Cliopher was familiar with from his usual register. Then he broke into a snort of amusement and shook his head as if in disbelief, which was not.

Released from the brightness of a great mage’s regard, Cliopher blinked hard. More tear tracks could hardly make him look more dishevelled, but he was sure he would feel better if he could only collect himself long enough to make sense of what was happening.

The way his Radiancy moved, with the sword in his hand, was disconcertingly—he must have had lessons, Cliopher supposed, fighting was an acceptable hobby for a young aristocrat, but—it was as though he had shaken loose of his customary controlled majesty, and emerged as a different person.

(It should not make him think of Ludvic’s face, wearing that unfamiliar punched-in scowl of pain and shock as the fae folded over Rhodin’s blade. His Radiancy in all the blaze of his power, in the armour of Astandalas which was magically keyed to him alone, would not be so easy to impersonate.)

Conju did not customarily stand so close, or take his arm as they both stood in the Presence. It had only happened once before, when he stood beside Cliopher in the icy Throne Room and took hold of him to warm them both up.

The fact that his friend was steadying him again was a sign that Cliopher should probably lie down. He would, when his Radiancy dismissed them.

(He didn’t want to be dismissed.)

The emperor was standing over the fae, his face hard, his majesty a cloak about his shoulders, his heavy regard a weight that was almost tangible. There was a long stifling pause.

“She is fortunate indeed that you came to no harm,” his Radiancy said at last, low and steady. His power pooled like liquid light. “My Lord Chancellor. My Hands. If I am to be a tyrant, perhaps I should permit myself to enact a tyrant’s vengeance upon those who threaten you.”

The magic was thrumming in the air now, thick so that even a magic-null man could feel it, the tremor vibrating Cliopher’s teeth. It was certainly the power of the Sun-on-Earth, be he ever so changed by this extremity.

Cliopher knew his lord; knew what he would choose between vengeance and mercy, knew what he had chosen again and again over so many years.

“I have always thought you a b-benevolent tyrant,” he observed.

The tension broke with a tiny glassy pop, like the first drop of rain in the dust. Or, perhaps, like fine ice cracking, letting the water loose. His Radiancy sighed, the sinking of his shoulders so slight that it would hardly have been visible if not for the way the spiked crests there clanked against the other plates of the armour. The light sloshed back to the floor, seeping away.

The eyes that turned back to Cliopher were still luminous, but only figuratively so. “What an extraordinary thing,” his Radiancy said, vaguely. “I am, perhaps, a trifle… ah…”

“Disinhibited, your Radiancy?” Conju asked, so politely that the criticism could only be inferred from the fact he had spoken at all.

If the Groom of the Chamber had intended to remind the emperor of his position, he may have failed. The Lord of Rising Stars’ golden brows raised in surprise that did not look displeased, and then he grinned an alarming and rakish grin. It was as though a different kind of brightness had taken hold of his face; for a moment there was no guard at all on the feelings of the inner man. “My dear Cavalier,” he said, “I am acting out of character, I see. But you will excuse me, because tonight I am a tyrant.”

Whatever Cliopher had seen or grasped of the inner man, he had never known anything like the ease with which his Radiancy moved in armour, or the casual and brutal skill he had shown in using his gloriously decorated sword.

“Kip.” His Radiancy was still gripping his sword, which was shining along one side with a rich smear of red.

“Yes my lord?” That was blood. Fae blood, presumably, because his Radiancy was not—was armoured—had won the short bout with such ferocity and skill as to be personally unscathed.

“We’re going to the Tower.”

“Yes my lord,” he repeated numbly.

They moved quickly through the empty corridors, hemmed in by a tight knot of guards. Cliopher was glad that Conju had not relinquished his arm.

Every window that could be opened was flung wide to let in the night air. Every grate they passed had a fire in it, lit by Cliopher’s special cadre of pages. There were water marks everywhere, but despite the pervasive dampness there were no puddles under his feet.

It was like walking in a dream, except that his legs were waking from their chilled numbness with tiny hot flares of pain. He would have stumbled, if Conju were not keeping him upright.

Stairs. More corridors. The Tower doors, grand and imposing as always. They sprang open before his Radiancy so that there was no need to slow down, in each of the seven anterooms in turn. They hustled past soggy benches for pages and petitioners, past artwork and stonework and magework and mirrors.

The ever-burning branch was flickering with a lively heat, and the wall of sunbird feathers had flared into an ethereal flame that didn’t seem to be consuming anything either, despite the worried attention of a couple of priest-wizards.

Both of these fell into obeisance as their god-emperor strode past. His Radiancy showed no sign of stopping, nor of sheathing his sword, and the pace he set had the guards on either side very nearly running to keep up.

They whirled through the imperial study too rapidly for Cliopher to see what had happened to the room, then back into the more private areas of the imperial apartments. His Radiancy didn’t stop until he was standing in the centre of this personal, if not private, domain. Then he paused, looked down at the weapon in his hand as if seeing it for the first time, and said, “I should clean my sword.”

“Will you let me, your Radiancy—?”

“No.” The emperor surveyed them all with an air of faint exasperation, perhaps the closest thing to direct and decided criticism that Cliopher had ever seen from him. “A warrior cares for their weapons. Bring me cloths, and oil. Camellia oil, if you please. And a leather strop, although,” he lifted the blade, hilt first, and studied it, “it may not be necessary.”

A guard saluted and sped to obey.

“My lord—!” Conju cut off whatever instinctive protest he had been about to make, but his arm tightened on Cliopher’s.

His Radiancy chuckled with such rich humour that Cliopher found himself smiling weakly along with it. “You take care of your tools, Conju, and so must I. And… Cliopher.” The humour faded. “Kip. Ludvic and Rhodin are in the guest suites behind my apartments. There is space for you there, I believe—?”

Conju shook his head. “If it please your Radiancy,” he said, “I had Zala set up a bed for Cliopher in my workroom.” He swallowed, lowering his eyes and his voice. “Where I sleep when attending upon you, my lord.”

His Radiancy, in this newly expressive state, appeared visibly taken aback, a vessel trembling before a contrary wind. “I… see.”

“I intended to stay nearby to ensure he slept in it, my lord. And to remain available to provide for your needs.”

“I see,” said his Radiancy again, in a different tone. “I am not the only tyrant this evening. And were you planning to allow for some rest for yourself, Cavalier?”

Conju’s arm shifted in Cliopher’s as his hands twisted together. “When everyone was safe, your Radiancy,” he said, in that same tightly composed little voice. “I couldn’t—not without—there will be consequences for the broken taboo, my lord, and I wished—”

“Consequences.”

“The priest-wizards—”

“Fuck the priest-wizards.” The curse lashed out with the same wicked speed as his Radiancy’s magic had, stripping the glamour from the fae. “Have they implied that there is some fault…?” His frown deepened as Conju nodded. The light still clung to the pearly shine of the armour; in this pale corridor he looked like a pillar, like a monument, like a marble statue dressed for war. Only his expression changed, gathering wrath. “They overstep. They overstep grievously.”

Cliopher was no fonder of the Ouranatha than the next man, even when that man was his Radiancy. He was accustomed, however, to providing the counterpoint when his lord expressed a strong view.

He was too slow, this evening, to draw together more than the thought that the priest-wizards had a duty to raise such concerns. Before the words had formed on his lips, his lord was speaking again.

“Aizurvenne. The ritual workings are complete, and our loyal Ouranatha are not required in the Tower overnight. They are excused to take their rest; ensure that they understand that, please, and that any member of our staff who wishes to return to their rooms has left. Then you may activate the full wards until morning. Only the healers are to be admitted, on your verification of their identities, until we give further orders.”

Aizurvenne looked relieved, either because of this clarity or because a guard had returned with a bottle and a basket of cloths. Whatever the reason, his relief was short lived.

“The Cavalier An Vilius, our Lord Chancellor, and ourselves will remain in the inner chambers. You are to withdraw and establish a perimeter.”

Aizurvenne saluted, his gauntleted hand crashing into the plate at his breast, but his acknowledging “My lord!” was audibly strained.

“Does that alarm you? Do you consider us incapable of defending our own?”

“No, my lord,” the guard said, miserably.

His Radiancy merely looked at him, assessing.

The guard went down on one knee, lowering his head. “Your Radiancy, we have failed you. I have failed you. I—she should not have been able to threaten—you should not have to—I am sorry.”

He sounded utterly wretched. Cliopher sympathised. It should never have come to this; he should have remembered that there might still be intruders; his Radiancy should never have been forced to directly intervene, to—”

“Rise.” The Sun-on-Earth said, in that new imperious way.

Aizurvenne got to his feet, and looked at them.

“We hereby pardon you, and all our forces, for not being gods of foresight. We…” he shook his head, “I am most grateful for your care, and for your valour. There is nothing else to forgive; the glamour was strong, and I was tyrannical. Do you understand me?”

There was a brief, damning silence before the inevitable, “Yes, your Radiancy.”

“Do you understand me?” This repetition came out with less force and more serenity but Cliopher, who was watching his emperor’s eyes, saw the pleading there. “You must not blame yourselves. Convey my thanks to your comrades.”

That was a dismissal. The guards, all still armoured, saluted so that the hall rang with it. Then… they left. Just like that.

His Radiancy waited until the door had closed before picking up the oil and cloths. “Come on, then.”

Conju and Cliopher followed him through to Conju’s workroom.

There was, indeed, an extra bed in here, tucked in against the opposite wall from the daybed which Conju made use of when his duties left him, as he would say, fatigued. There were no other people present, and there was little sign of water damage. Conju’s assistants had no doubt been diligent in clearing the snow from the emperor’s apartments.

On the central table there was a silver tray, all filigree and elegance, bearing a carafe of red wine, a bowl of pears, and a plate of dainty rolls with generous helpings of colourful fillings: fine curls of meat, pale seafood, a variety of shades of cheese, and some darker medley of cooked vegetables.

His Radiancy went straight to the table and examined it critically, his magic flooding out to wash the room. “All safe,” he announced, before dropping into one of Conju’s working chairs—a lovely gracile thing, but nowhere near grand enough to be considered a throne—and laying his bloody sword across his lap.

He flashed that brilliant smile at the pair of them again. Cliopher felt wobbly with exhaustion. The absence of the guards left him at once relieved of the pressure of all those watching eyes, and also feeling unexpectedly exposed.

That was foolish. There was nobody here but himself, and Conju, and—not his Radiancy, not despite all his splendour. The man reaching eagerly for the bowl of cloths, alight with purpose, was most definitely Cliopher’s Tor.

“This will take a few minutes,” Tor said, as if in answer to the thought. “I believe the first order of your business was a bath, Cliopher? Conju, may I enlist you? As a fellow tyrant.”

Conju took this as an order—if delivered with an unusually grandiloquent tone. “Of course, my lord,” he said, radiating a similar relief to Aizurvenne, and drew Cliopher away.

Cliopher attempted to baulk when he saw where they were heading. Conju was having none of it. “His Radiancy wants you to bathe, Cliopher, so you will bathe.”

“This is the imperial bath!”

“Is it possible you think I have forgotten?” Conju pushed him towards the showers. “Can you remove that…? No, don’t try, stand there.”

He stood there. It was easier than arguing. It hurt less, too.

Conju peeled away his outer robes, making a series of clucking sounds with his teeth. “Only you, Cliopher Mdang,” was all he said, but his hands were gentle.

This might be the one room in the palace that was supposed to be damp, Cliopher thought muzzily. He hoped the pipework had survived the cold. There was no sign of any damage. The tiles were gleaming in that resplendent peacock blue; the fragrant steam rose around them, a billow of roses and warmth.

Oh, he was trembling again. His face was wet.

Conju cupped it, gently, to wipe it once more.

“Sorry,” Cliopher managed.

Conju merely tutted at him, and stepped back. “Do you want to take the rest of those disgusting remnants off yourself?”

Cliopher nodded, and wearily started stripping off his under things. They peeled away from his body, leaving grimy dark marks of sweat and silvery dust together. “How about you?” he mumbled. Conju pretended not to hear him.

The shower had been damaged by ice in the pipes; Conju drew dippers of water from a large basin that seemed unaffected and poured them in a hot tide down Cliopher’s back, overruling his further protests with a tart reminder that this was his Radiancy’s direction, and then with a string of comments about the state of him.

“You haven’t been eating enough,” and “What soap did you say you’ve been using?” were in the usual range of Conju’s comments, but “All these bruises! Cliopher, have you seen a healer?” was not.

Cliopher shook his head mutely.

“That was a rhetorical question, Cliopher Lord Mdang, I know you’ve been holed up with your papers since his Radiancy bottled up those benighted creatures.” Conju sniffed. “Tomorrow, I will ask—”

“Don’t.” That came out less sharply than it might have done, but more miserably than intended. Cliopher’s head was already bowed so that Conju could do whatever mysterious thing he believed was necessary to his hair. He added, “Please,” and, “They’re only bruises.”

His back and sides ached, and his legs were swollen and mottled pinkish-purple, but it was all the natural, healthy, subsiding pain of recovery. To the silence behind him, which radiated scepticism, he added, “I’ve had much worse. A time or two.”

“Someday,” said Conju, tugging his hair back and twisting it with a deft hand so that Cliopher’s head lifted, “I will hand you a large snifter of brandy and ask you for those stories. And you will give them to me, my dear. And tomorrow we will ask a healer to examine you. No,” he added, as Cliopher opened his mouth, “if you do not agree I will tell his Radiancy that you would benefit from an assessment.” He sniffed. “And it would be true.”

Chastened, Cliopher closed his mouth again, and subsided. He let Conju tie his hair back from his face, and bring him clean linen, and a soft quilted robe.

A quiet shrsh-shrsh sound greeted them as they went back through to Conju’s workroom. His Radiancy was leaning forward on his simple wooden chair, intent on the blade on his lap, stropping back and forth along the edge with a piece of leather. He didn’t look up when they entered.

They stopped, at the correct distance, but Cliopher hesitated. His Radiancy was acting so differently. Did he want them to kneel?

(He had not looked glad, when Aizurvenne was making his apology.)

There was, in the metal-clad figure at work, nothing of the still serenity of the golden Last Emperor. There was a man a little older than Cliopher, dazzling in jewels and precious metals, beautiful in his own right in his dark clean-cut features and the simplicity of his focus, lost in meditation of the sword that he was cleaning.

He was smiling. Neither the calm smile of the emperor, nor the blazing grin that Cliopher had seen earlier, but with a small quirk of his lips, lopsided and imperfect.

Cliopher didn’t want to see that quiet amusement retreat back into the imperial benevolence. He didn’t want his Radiancy to have to be anybody but Tor, not here, not now. He didn’t want to lose—whatever this was. He cleared his throat, while Conju was still descending gracefully beside him.

His Radiancy—his shining Aurelius Magnus—his Tor—looked up and met his eyes.

Cliopher’s lips tingled as though brushed across fresh mint. His face was heating, but he had been commanded to bathe and he had bathed, and this casual house robe was heavier and grander than most of the clothing he was accustomed to wear at home. He could not be abashed to be standing here now.

Tor’s smile widened, slowly.

Cliopher’s face heated further. He felt his ears burn.

“Much better,” his lord, the Lord of Ten Thousand Titles and Five Thousand Lands, said approvingly. “Congratulations, Conju. Have you attended to yourself?”

He made the gesture to rise. Conju got to his feet as gracefully as ever. “Not as yet, my lord,” he replied smoothly.

His Radiancy’s smile softened towards sadness. “We are all here, and we are all well, Conju. Or, at least, recovering.”

“Yes, my lord.” There was a thinness to the words.

“Will you rest, for me?”

“Anything, for you,” said Conju, his voice breaking. “Excuse me, my lord.”

For some reason this seemed to surprise his Radiancy. His hands had stilled on the sword. Now his brows rose. “Always, my Cavalier.” He said it so gently that Cliopher realised, with a pang, that he was holding back a strong emotion, perhaps a tremor of his own.

“You should,” Cliopher said, and then when they both looked at him in surprise, managed to elaborate. “You should go to bed, Conju.”

HIs Radiancy laughed, freely, so that his eyes crinkled at the corners. “Another tyrant,” he said, with a return to that grand affect he had assumed in front of the guards. “Well, Conju?”

“I trust that you will not keep his Radiancy from his rest, Cliopher,” Conju said, with a similarly grand style, and bowed, and went back through to the baths.

In his wake, Cliopher realised two things. The first was that Conju’s bed was in this room, so that his friend could scarcely take his rest in it without turning out the emperor first.

The second was that he, Cliopher Mdang, was now alone with the Lord of Rising Stars. That had happened before, a handful of times; shining, perfect shells to string on the efela of his life: on a sand bank. On the breakwater in Gorjo City. On the balcony of a sky ship. In his lord’s cluttered private study, amidst scraps of fabric and haphazardly piled furniture and books.

And now here, in his friend’s workroom, so wrung out with the most profound tiredness that he was buzzing with a peculiar facsimile of energy.

Tor lifted the sword again, studied it briefly, and placed it on the table. He set the leather strop neatly beside it, and looked up at Cliopher where he was still standing lumpen in the middle of the room.

Drawn by an instinct he could not name, Cliopher walked towards him.

“Kip,” Tor said, softly.

“Tor,” Cliopher returned, as soft. He had no purpose. He had no plan. He wanted to be closer—he wanted (oh, how he wanted) to be as close as they had been a short while ago, when his lord had reached out and taken hold of him and given him permission to melt and cry and press his face against the beautiful angular plates of his armour.

He wanted to fall to his knees and lean against his lord’s—his friend’s—legs, and feel those heavy gauntleted hands press down against his head, the leather-clad fingers running through the tufts of his hair, smooth against his scalp.

He swallowed that wanting, hard, and waited, an arms-length from his lord. He had stopped working because his lord commanded him to come, and he had let Conju bathe him because his lord wanted that, too, and now he was here with his hands empty and his heart—and he didn’t know what his lord wanted of him next.

His Radiancy was studying him closely. He stood, and let himself be studied.

“Time to eat, I think,” the emperor decided. “Pull up a chair, Kip, and take a plate.”

Cliopher did as directed. Under his emperor’s close watch he stacked several rolls on the plate, and poured himself a glass of wine with hands that hardly shook at all. He was hungry, in a distant sort of way. He was also noticing that, well—”Have you eaten, my—Tor?”

His lord’s—Tor’s—eyes widened slightly at the address, but what he said in response was, “They brought me food.”

“This food?” Cliopher asked.

His Radiancy nodded, looking slightly abashed. As he should; he evidently hadn’t touched it.

Cliopher looked at the full tray, then took a second plate. He loaded this one high with precisely the same set of rolls as he had chosen for himself. One of every type, and two of the one he thought might be crab paste.

“There,” he said, putting it on the table between them, then nudging it closer to Tor. A second glass of wine, in one of the gold-rimmed glasses that had been purified for the emperor’s use. Then, at the last minute, he remembered to collect a set of eating sticks and place them within Tor’s reach. “Is that…?”

Tor looked from Cliopher to the food and back again. “This,” he breathed out, and treated Cliopher to another of those heartstopping smiles, “is perfect. Sit down, Kip.”

Cliopher cast around for a moment, found another chair, and dragged it across so that he could sit on the other side of the small table. “Thank you, my—Tor,” he said again, cursing himself for his fumbling over the words.

Tor didn’t seem to mind. He watched as Cliopher settled, then picked up a roll.

Cliopher looked at his plate again, meaningfully. “I’ll eat if you will,” he suggested.

His emperor laughed. “I, being wiser than our fae guests, will start out with surrender,” he said, and picked up one of his own.

Chapter Text

Cliopher could hardly have mustered any conversation and Tor thankfully did not seem to expect any. They ate quietly, focusing on the food. The bread was fresh-baked and some quality of the tray must have kept it warm for them; the fillings were, each of them, exquisite of their kind. The wine was one of those rich, scarce Ystharian vintages preserved quite possibly only in the magical stasis cellar of the last emperor of Astandalas.

The company was—Cliopher kept glancing at his lord, when he thought he could do so unobserved. Their eyes kept meeting, and his sliding away, down, and then back up to—he couldn’t say. Except that Tor was eating with him, almost bite for bite, and he was far too skinny. If Cliopher’s challenge helped him eat, he could not withdraw it.

When, at length, they had both cleared their plates, Tor pushed his away with a little sigh. “This rigamarole was not designed as dinnerware,” he observed, perhaps a tad regretfully. “Nor to be removed by the man wearing it. Cliopher, would you…?”

He trailed off, perhaps remembering that the only other person nearby in the apartments was Conju, whom he had already told to go to bed.

“What shall I do?” Cliopher asked. “I could—” he had meant to suggest, send for a guard, but the wine, or the lateness of the hour, or the strangeness of their situation must have shifted something in him, because he went on, “I could help you with the straps?”

Tor frowned down at his own hand, turning it left and right to study the small leather straps and narrow buckles. “Perhaps we should—”

“It cannot be difficult, my—Tor,” said Cliopher, with a confidence that he knew was not entirely warranted, and then, “I know where Conju keeps his gloves.”

He did know, because since moving into the ridiculous apartments reserved for the Lord of Zunidh he had been well-positioned to visit his friend in the evening, many dozens of times, without worrying about the walk back to his old rooms.

The gloves were made of fine spelled muslin. Conju never wore them himself, but he insisted on them for newer members of his staff, and he had shown them to Cliopher once. Had even hinted that Cliopher should ask for a pair, if his duties required them.

They were laid out in neat labelled rows in a wide flat drawer that Cliopher found on the third try. “Here,” he said cheerfully, lifting out a pair.

Tor was sitting motionless again, whether through the stiffness of the armour or his surprise at this (to Cliopher’s mind) entirely practical suggestion.

Cliopher draped the gloves carefully over the table next to the empty tray. His fingers, smoothing them, were already half-golden. His hand paused at the thought, where it lay spread before him, between them both, on the table. He fought a brief, fierce battle with himself. He wanted—but it would be greedy, to ask—and anyway the gloves were fine to the point of filminess, and were designed to make it possible for an attendant to handle any fiddly fastening.

They might have been designed with all the skill and power that the empire of Astandalas had been able to bring to bear, and maintained with all Conju’s devoted diligence, but that did not make them easy to don. Cliopher rolled up the sleeves of his robe and did his best, trying not to mutter curses.

It was only when both hands and arms were covered—all the gold shining behind this pale cloudy fabric, his fingers stretching and twisting to his satisfaction, the heavy sleeves of his robe shaking back down over the bunch of the gloves at his elbows—that he realised how quiet Tor had gone.

The Sun-on-Earth was sitting on a plain wooden chair, his hands tucked tightly around his empty glass. His eyes were fixed on Cliopher’s hands, but he dragged them away and let the fierce glare of his attention track up until their gazes met.

Cliopher felt it like the heat of a brand moving close to his skin, scorching a trail across the front of the robe between his fingers and his face. He wasn’t trembling now. Perhaps that was because of the bath, or perhaps it was because of how warm it was in here.

It seemed that Tor might be about to say something. Cliopher waited, hovering in the warmth like a hawk in an updraft, waiting for whatever turn the weather took.

In lieu of speaking, his Radiancy held out a hand, palm up. The brilliant dots of refracted light from the diamonds danced across the edge of the table, and the floor. Cliopher took it gently, making all his movements slow and clearly visible. So he would take any gift his lord chose to bestow: with reverent care, with tender delight, with—

The fae had never grasped that, he thought, as he turned the metal and leather so that he had a better angle on the straps and buckles at the wrist. They had attempted a smash-and-grab raid, and any number of sly tricks during the negotiations, and then deception, and hidden violence. But all of their attempts to imitate his Radiancy, or members of his household, had been thrown off because they had not known to show how much they cared.

The buckles were stiff and the gauntlet heavy but it eased away as Cliopher loosened them and pulled. He admired the artistry, the way each small metal plate slid under the next to allow Tor’s hand to move freely, the careful placement of the diamonds to add strength and texture as well as beauty to the ridge of each knuckle.

It was an indulgence, a pure greed, to take his Radiancy’s released hand between his own and press it until he could feel the warmth of it, the pulse beating faster than he might have expected, fluttering against his fingers like a frightened thing seeking refuge.

Tor sucked in a brief gasp at the touch. Cliopher held onto those long fingers as they jolted against his, and waited as his lord breathed out. The lion eyes closed, their lashes fluttering too, black against the gold paint that swept back across the lids. This close Cliopher could admire how Conju, or one of his assistants, had turned that sweep of gold into a many-tongued flame licking away from the bridge of his Radiancy’s nose.

He should have realised how tired Tor must be. He had known the extent of the magic that his emperor had wrought, the focus that he had maintained as events careened about them, the range and rapidity of his decisions in the midst of the disaster, and he had even so been taken in by the performance of the imperious Sun-on-Earth.

The exhaustion was showing now. Tor had closed the doors and sent away his guards and asked everybody to rest because he was drooping himself.

It hurt to think that this flowering of the inner man, this revelation of ferocity and power and humour, was all forced out by that exhaustion. That Tor had not wanted to reveal himself, and had done so anyway to protect and care for his household, and had strained his great soul beyond the bounds he had set for himself.

The second gauntlet was easier, now that Cliopher knew what he was doing. He moved steadily on to remove the fine curved plates of metal bound about his Radiancy’s lower arms. They would not move until he had dismantled the peculiar spiked cuffs at the elbow, which were stiff under his fingers. He had to pull quite hard to get them to come loose, but his Radiancy did not seem to mind and so he kept going.

There were more and heavier plates on the upper arms and another complicated interaction with the similar spiked pieces that crowned and bulked his Radiancy’s slim shoulders. Cliopher was absorbed enough in his task that he hardly realised at first that he had come round to stand beside his lord, and then behind him.

The metalwork was supported underneath with leather pads, and under that was a thick leather circle, like a very short poncho, bound tight around his Radiancy’s neck so that it must be holding his chin up and contributing to the sharp line of his posture. The leather was, all of it, pure white and smooth and soft as cream, moulded by the armour above to the shape of Tor’s body below.

Cliopher turned back from finding a place for the second shoulder-piece on the somewhat crowded table to find that Tor had tipped his head right back to look up at him at this awkward angle.

It was the most natural thing in all the worlds to place one hand on each of Tor’s shoulders and lean forward to meet his eyes upside-down. Tor’s face was slack with relaxation, his eyes shining. “Hello, Kip.”

“Hello, Tor. That looks heavy,” Cliopher murmured. “May I—these jewels, do you want them?” His hand slid up without conscious intention, brushing across the diadem so that his gloved palm was, for a moment, cradling the back of Tor’s head.

Whether at the question or the touch, Tor shuddered all over. “No,” he said, and, “Please, will you—? If you don’t—ah—mind.”

The gasp was for the moment Cliopher’s questing fingers found the fastening that bound the diamonds and pearls to his lord’s skull and clumsily pulled it away. There was some tacky substance holding it in place, as well as the ribbon, which relinquished it with reluctance from the gleaming surface of Tor’s scalp.

Cliopher stepped back hurriedly, aware that his instinctive response to yank harder against the obstacle may have been a misstep. “Sorry. I’m—I’m sorry.” The priceless diadem was dangling from his fingers. He had nowhere to put it, now that the table was covered with pieces of mother-of-pearl and diamond armour, and anyhow he had a vague notion that Conju would prefer to see jewellery placed carefully on a cushion.

“Don’t be.” Tor had sat up, all that lovely languor gone, and was rubbing the bareness of his head, feeling out the line where the diadem had rested. He twisted round in the chair, while Cliopher was still casting about for a sensible place to put the diadem, but his grin faltered at the sight of whatever expression Cliopher was wearing.

“Kip. Kip, I am failing in my duty as a tyrant.” He leaned forward, using the edge of the table to haul himself to his feet. “Come here.”

He plucked the shining thing from between Cliopher’s fingers and dropped it carelessly on the seat of the chair. Then he lifted his arms, showing the frill of damp silks at the edge of the leather, his limbs stretching, part-emerged from the armour. “I’ll need help with the top of the cuirass,” he said, “Under the coif at the back of my neck, there are more buckles. If you loosen them—”

The names meant little but Cliopher could, at least, locate the back of his Radiancy’s neck. The leather padding, presumably the coif, was laced down tightly but with some effort Cliopher worked it loose and peeled it away.

The emperor had sweated into the silks at his neck. The buckles there were slippery, the smell warm and human, the relief evident when Cliopher was able to slide metal and leather apart and lift the heavy contraption away. Since the sparkling diadem was on the chair, he lowered the whole construct to the floor where it sat glistening and pale and empty as a discarded shell.

Tor rolled his shoulders and turned around, silk undershirt puffing away from the places where pressure and sweat had stuck it to his torso. “There,” he said, “now sit down, Kip. I can—”

He stopped, because Cliopher was muddled, and tired, and no longer thinking what he was doing, and he had reached out again and caught Tor’s right hand in his own. “Please,” he said, as he had before, when he had thought his lord was going to go away and leave him.

His Radiancy had not abandoned him. His lord had not left him behind. His Tor was here, drawing him close, and now he could see that the luminosity in those softly golden eyes was liquid gathered there, not magic.

“I’m sorry,” said Cliopher, helplessly. The last thing he wanted was to make Tor cry. He couldn’t—he shouldn’t—add another burden to all that weight of the world that the emperor carried on these narrow shoulders with such superlative grace.

(Such effortful grace. He would never be able to forget the tightness of the buckles, and the sweat-stained silk.)

“Kip Mdang, I forbid you to apologise again,” Tor said lightly, in that brittle tone that Cliopher was coming to recognise as, like his serenity, a barrier flung out to distance his lord’s listener from the rawness of the emperor’s exposed self. “You have been trying to tell me that you are at fault since the moment the fair folk breached our wards.”

Tor’s other hand was resting on Cliopher’s hip, no, was gliding back around Cliopher’s waist and pulling him close. Tor’s presence, the warmth and the scent and the strength of him, filled every one of Cliopher’s senses with safety, with comfort, with a place where he could stop and rest. An island after a typhoon.

“You are not at fault, Kip,” his Radiancy said, deep and low and with utter conviction. “You saved them all.”

And then he bent his head and kissed Cliopher again, here in the quiet sanctuary after the storm, here where they stood pressed together, entwined, clasped close. The brush of his lips against the tingling gold sent shivers dancing along Cliopher’s spine.

It was a soft hesitancy, a spring-like tenderness rising as the flowers in the gardens of Astandalas had lifted their shy heads when the Silverheart snows melted away. His Radiancy—Tor—pulled back almost at once.

Cliopher opened his eyes as Tor released him, tasting the fire on his lips, unable to hold in an embarrassing little sigh of loss as his Radiancy’s tight hold slackened.

Tor sighed with him, a voiced sigh, almost a groan. “Kip,” and then, letting go of him entirely. “If you don’t want this—please—just go. I wouldn’t—” the knot of his throat bobbed as he gulped, “I never want to force—”

The words were cut off as Cliopher seized him, both arms round his narrow waist, hands fisting in the back of the sweaty silk undershirt, and pressed their mouths together. There was the flame again, springing between them in the sudden urgency of his motion, in the way Tor gripped him back, in the slick taste of Tor’s lips, parting before his tongue.

It was like hot honey in his mouth. It was like lava spilling over his body, pressing to his breast. It was fire and air and light and—their faces broke apart just long enough to breathe, just long enough for Cliopher to whisper, hoarsely, “Kiss—me.”

Tor growled something unintelligible and obeyed, fiercely this time, kissing Cliopher back. They were melting together, drinking one another in. One of Tor’s hands gripped the small of his back, the other slid up and up, over the neck of the robe, like a flame licking the nape of Cliopher’s neck, burrowing into the back of his hair, gripping tightly and pulling him closer still.

This was not what he had expected. It was not something he had planned. It was only that the spark had caught, and that the whole of Cliopher Mdang was going up in flames. He could not have distinguished between his own body and Tor’s, could only gasp into his Radiancy’s mouth and relish the burn of his lord’s bare hand against his scalp, the rightness of it, the sweet frantic searching of his lord’s tongue against his lips, his tongue, his teeth.

The truth of it sang in his veins and set his heart hammering. Tor wanted this, wanted so much to be held and kissed and tasted and known. And Cliopher could give it to him. Was giving him what he wanted, what he had not had for nearly a thousand years.

They were clinging so tightly together that he had lost all sense of the rest of the room, but he felt how they stumbled sideways. There was, all at once, something solid and cushioned behind him, pressing into the back of his knees. He swayed, caught off-balance, and Tor pulled back to let him steady.

Then they were standing, both breathing hard, Cliopher staring up at Tor, Tor looking down at him with wide-eyed wonder.

Tor lifted his hand until his thumb rested against the centre of Cliopher’s lips. His expression was stricken. “Your mouth, Kip. I—I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—”

“What’s wrong?” Cliopher mumbled this around the pad of Tor’s thumb. Then, as it was there, he kissed it too. “‘f I’m not allowed to be sorry, neither are you,” he added, with all the considerable conviction he could muster.

Tor laughed, but the sound was not a happy one. He released Cliopher. “Gods, Kip, your hair.”

The withdrawal was as dizzying as their embrace. Cliopher had no reserves left to process it with. He sat down, heavily, on the daybed that he had stumbled into. The fire seemed to still be with him, coiling in his belly, tiny sparks of it dancing across his scalp. His mouth felt full and flickering with tiny aftershocks, as though he had licked in the shimmering surface of the sun.

Tor was staring at him in horror and he didn’t know why. “What is it?” he asked again, aware he sounded a little muzzy. It was hard to speak clearly around all this fizzing delight.

In answer, Tor made a strangled sound and dropped to his knees. As the only armour that remained was the metal on his legs, this made a louder clank than Cliopher expected.

“I don’t understand.” Cliopher tried plaintively.

“Kip, you’re…” Tor seemed unable to say what was troubling him, but his hand went to his mouth. Cliopher lifted his own hand to his own mouth in mirror, feeling the delicate fabric slide over the sensitive gold skin.

Over the gold.

Oh. Oh, Tor.

He took a deep, steadying breath. He needed to say this with absolute clarity, so that his lord could neither misunderstand nor misinterpret it.

“Tor. The gold.”

“I’m—” Tor began, but Cliopher cut him off.

“You are not allowed to apologise. I love the gold.”

Tor shook his head. “There’s more of it. In your mouth. In your hair.”

Cliopher touched his hair, feeling out the sparks. “In my hair?”

“I—let myself forget,” said Tor, miserably. “I—I wanted—I should never have—”

“I told you to kiss me,” Cliopher reminded him, bringing his fingers round to find the other points of fire. The smudge on his forehead. The shimmering graze down his nose, along the side of his face. The marks in his mouth would not be visible unless someone was paying close attention, which seemed a shame. There was more at the back of his neck, too. “I wanted it too.”

“I’ve marked you. All of you.” Tor sat back on his haunches. His legs must be uncomfortable, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. His hands rested on the armour of his upper legs. “Permanently. The Ouranatha will want to…” His knuckles clenched, but the words did not come.

“Execute us?” Cliopher offered, because he had known as well as Conju what sort of solutions suggested themselves to the minds of the priest-wizards of the imperial cult.

“It is entirely unnecessary. But we may have to arrange for purifications, to placate them.” He sighed, shoulders sagging. “Which would make the magic easier to realign. The One Above knows I’ve played with it like putty these last four days.”

His Radiancy was not long recovered from a heart attack. He had wielded all the skill and power at his command to hold back the twisty magic of the fae, and then to weave wards strange and substantial enough to secure them until the exchange. And then he had garbed himself in glory and presented might and command of Zunidh to seal the final stages of the negotiation, and then he had fought with his own two hands to protect Cliopher and Conju and his guards from that final stinging attack.

He was exhausted, and disinhibited by that exhaustion, and afraid—and if this new fear led to him taking away all the fire he had shared and smothering it behind the curtain of his serenity—Cliopher did not think he could bear it.

“Tor,” Cliopher said it forcefully enough that his Radiancy looked up at him in surprise. “It’s true, what I told you. Ever since I saw your prints on Ludvic’s arms, I wanted the same for myself.” This was hard to admit, but he needed to see that smile again. “I was jealous. I wanted to wear your marks. The banners of your affection. I—” he blinked away the tears and tried again. “They’re beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

“You…did say that.” Something in Tor’s posture gave way. He slumped to the side, catching himself on his arms.

Cliopher slipped off the bed to help, taking hold of one leg and studying it in confusion for a moment before he realised that all the fastenings were on the other side. “Er—” he said, and Tor shifted as best he could, and by the time Cliopher had found the buckle he was at an unexpected angle indeed and shaking with laughter that was one small gulp sideways from a sob.

It wasn’t funny, but Cliopher started laughing too, and then neither of them could stop. Removing the rest of the armour quickly became a hilarious exercise. It ended with the pair of them sitting together in the middle of a higgledy-piggledy clutter of gold and mother-of-pearl and pure white leather, Cliopher rubbing Tor’s freed legs with his gloved hands

Eventually he sat back, and then they were facing one another. Tor was leaning against one of Conju’s cabinets, his legs propped straight out on the floor in front of him, looking rather like a large and ungainly child worn out by play. Cliopher scrunched his own legs up underneath his body and let his hands sort the pieces of armour into pairs, to make it easier for Conju’s attendants to resolve this mess tomorrow.

He was beyond weariness, beyond all hope and expectation, beyond everything but the urge to relish this unexpected bubble of peace.

Well, almost everything.

Something of the wistfulness must have shown in his expression, because Tor asked, without moving from his slump, “So what is wrong? If it’s not about the gold?”

Cliopher hands had run out of pieces of armour to stack. He tucked them together on his lap. The heat at the back of his neck shivered all over with the new marks there.

He didn’t want to admit this, but Tor already sounded sceptical. If he couldn’t offer another reason, his lord likely would conclude that it was about the gold after all, and that would be worse.

He steeled himself, then spoke to the floor. “Is it wrong if I want—more?”

“More—what?” Tor’s incredulity was sharp enough that Cliopher had to meet his eyes, abashed. The exchange of glances seemed to function as an explanation, if not as an effective argument. “More marks? More than—?” Tor waved a hand in a wrist-flicking gesture that took in all of Cliopher, head to toe.

He could do this. He could ask. It was true, and perhaps it would convince Tor—perhaps at least it would stop him from worrying. “More than the others,” he got out, and hid his face in his hands.

Now that he had said the words he wished he could call them back.

He should go to bed. He should have gone to bed a long time ago, and let Conju look after their lord, and not messed everything up with his persistence in asking for, in being, too much.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and then remembered that he wasn’t supposed to say that either, and had to stop himself apologising for apologising. Which was ridiculous. His head felt heavy, as though he had let some vital lightness slip away with that foolish secret, and was subsiding like a wilting plant.

There was a shuffling in front of him, and warmth hooking into his arms; Tor’s hands hooking into his arms and tugging them back. “You want—more than the others?” Tor asked, his voice husky with—Cliopher could not say what, only that it stirred a huge and deep well of something within him. He nodded.

“You wanted me to mark you, with my magic, more than I have marked anybody else?” The question was precise and clear.

“Yes,” Cliopher sniffed and tucked his head down to rub his face inelegantly against his arm. Tor kept holding his hands. “I wanted—I want—more of you.”

The room seemed to be getting brighter, which was improbable, since both Tor’s hands were clasping his and nobody had activated the mage lights. Tiny flickers of light were shimmering into and out of the air, like the sparks that had filled Tor’s private study, when Cliopher had held the last emperor there.

Tor tugged Cliopher’s hands together and leaned forward to press them to his heart. “Cliopher Lord Mdang,” he said, deep and slow and certain, “You have—all of me. Kip, if you want—if you’re sure that you want—”

“I am,” he said, “You. Your marks. Your magic.” This was what he had always wanted, it seemed, the secret core of wanting that had spurred him onwards, all his life. The secret at the heart of him. “You, to be mine.” He laughed, shaken by the joy and the terror of it. “It’s not about the gold. It’s you.”

Tor, slowly and deliberately, took hold of the muslin glove on Cliopher’s right hand, and peeled it off. Cliopher, hardly daring to breathe, lifted his left hand so that the other glove could be removed and discarded too.

His palms were damp. They shone like golden mirrors, reflecting the sparks of his Radiancy’s magic.

Tor turned them over, gently, his fingers directing each motion. The backs were largely unmarked, except for in those places where the edges of the emperor’s fingers had curled round and found purchase.

Tor bent his head and kissed them, first one and then the other. “Mine,” he choked out. “My Hands, my Lord Chancellor, my Kip.”

“Always. Always.”

“And I am yours,” Tor said, “always.”

They sat together, knee to knee, hand to hand, heart to heart. Cliopher felt himself floating with the spiralling golden sparks, drifting on that tide of safety, and comfort, and—

He cleared his throat. “When the taboos are gone,” he said, “and your quest is done, and—when you are free—will you, if you want to, that is—there is a house, in Gorjo City, that I have bought, with room for—” he could not bear the intensity of Tor’s gaze. He shut his eyes, and squeezed the fingers laced through his. “There is room for Conju, and Ludvic, and Rhodin, and me, and if you want—will you come home with me?”

A heartstopping moment of silence, and then Tor asked, “With you? More than with Conju, and Ludvic, and Rhodin?”

“Yes,” he whispered. Then, before Tor could respond, before his doubts could rise and swamp him, before he could think another thought, he added, “With me, more than the others, and—when you are free—will you ask me what it means to be fanoa?”

The word was another coal on his lips, but they were inured to the fire now. He was Mdang, he told himself; he would not run from its burn.

He opened his eyes.

There, close by, holding his hands, holding Cliopher: his golden emperor, his Aurelius Magnus, his Tor. Loose and familiar and sitting on the floor, no longer supported by the scaffold of his shining armour, or made dazzling by the coruscation of his jewels. The paint was smeared again across his face, the sticky silk of his undershirt was visibly marked with sweat and oil and all the hidden effort of his raiment.

Tor’s eyes were brilliant as stars, and his lips trembled, and his great soul had always been his own.

“Yes,” he said, thickly, “yes.”