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“Yes,” Evemer said, without hesitation.
Aunt Mihrimah nodded and sipped quietly at her tea. After a moment, she said, “When you say you would not burden him with your feelings, are you protecting yourself or him? Do you fear he would not be kind with your heart? Or do you fear it would hurt him to know this thing about you?”
“The latter,” Evemer whispered.
“Ah,” she said.
“I only want to be as good as he is, and I’m not. If I were good enough, I wouldn’t be weak like this.”
“Mm, again you mention weakness, and we are back at vulnerability again. What happens if you are weak?”
“If I am, then what’s the point of me? What is the point of my position? How can I serve?”
“You said you were contemptuous of him because you thought he was weak.”
Evemer gritted his teeth. She wasverygood at drawing connections between things. “I saw in him the thing I fear in myself.”
“And now what do you see?”
“What I aspire to.”
“Which is?”
“To be a better man.”
She nodded. “Let’s put this on the hearth and let it simmer for now. What other of your burdens would you like to discuss?”
Evemer left about an hour later, feeling drained and raw but not as if his burdens had been lightened—if anything they seemed weightier, as a heavy pack did when it was shifted into a new balance that he was not accustomed to.
He thought of going back to the garrison, the training grounds. Kadou wouldn’t be expecting him until noon. But he was tired and strangely sore in his heart and brain, the way his body was sore after a hard morning of martial drills.
He wanted Kadou. He wanted him like a small child wanted their favorite soft blanket. He wanted to sit at his feet and rest his head in Kadou’s lap and merely exist for a time without having to pick apart everything he thought he knew about himself.
So he trudged all the way back across nearly the full length of the palace, and let himself in just as the cadets who brought breakfast were slipping out.
Kadou used the lower level of the residence, one large trapezoidal room, as his parlor. The windows were all thrown open, letting in the morning breeze and the distant scent of the sea. The cadets had laid out breakfast on the low table, as usual, as well as partially on the carpet next to it, because Tadek was taking up half the available surface with some enormous map and holding forth passionately about parade routes while Kadou nodded placidly and Melek, who had only returned to service the day before, assembled full plates from the breakfast offerings.
Tadek paused his tirade, assessing Evemer with a single glance. “Good gods, is something the matter?”
“No,” said Evemer.
“Didn’t sleep well?” Melek asked.
“Slept fine.” The divan in Kadou’s room again. It was getting familiar now—his bed in the kahyalar’s quarters remained untested. “I went to the temple.”
“Oh?” Kadou said, with a studied casualness that Tadek surely must have been able to see through. “Melek, it seems like it’s going to be hot today, and I think this kaftan is a bit warm, can you go get me a lighter one?”
“Of course,” Melek said. “Right now?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
As soon as çe had left the room, Kadou turned to Tadek. “Three minutes, please.”
“I don’t get sent on a trivial little errand to make me leave the room? I just get unceremoniously kicked out?” Tadek said with a mock pout, but he stood up. “I see how it is.”
“You didn’t have to send him away,” he said, as soon as Tadek was in fact safely away with no danger of being called back. “I only went to unburden myself.”
“Oh,” said Kadou in a rather different tone of voice. “How . . . How was it?”
