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Kadou groaned. “Thanks, but—hangover. Thinking of clawing my own eyes out.”
“Ah,” Tadek said, sounding more alert. “We can’t be having that. Shall I fetch you something?”
“Please.”
Tadek rolled out of bed and scooped his cadet whites off the floor, pulling them on and tying them closed haphazardly with his sash. “Be right back,” he said, leaning over Kadou for a kiss.
Kadou turned his face away. “Morning breath,” he said, which was . . . well, part of the truth.
Tadek only laughed. “Yours or mine?”
“Both.”
Tadek went to the vanity and brought him a tooth-stick, soft-wood that had been infused with mint and orange-blossom water, and took one for himself as well. “Back in a minute.”
As soon as Tadek opened the door across the room, Kadou heard Eozena. “Good, you’re awake. Is His Highness?”
“Are you awake for the commander, Highness?” Tadek asked, looking back over his shoulder.
Kadou winced and nodded, flopping back into the pillows and gnawing on the end of tooth-stick until the end frayed enough to scrape his teeth clean. The sweetness of the flavors was already clearing the stale taste out of his mouth.
He heard the door shut. Eozena’s footsteps.
He pulled the sheets over his head, tooth-stick and all.
She stopped at the foot of the bed. “Good morning, Your Highness,” she said. “As we are alone, I am using my discretion to dispense with formalities, as per the privileges granted to me by my rank.”
“Yep,” he mumbled around the stick. “Go right ahead. I deserve it.”
“You sure made a decision, eh? There was a decision to be made there, and you really just made theshitout of it. My gods.”
“I know,” he groaned, and pulled a pillow over his head too. “But he made some really good points.”
“Oh, I bet he did.” She snorted. “Unbury yourself a bit, wouldn’t you?” Kadou flung the pillow off, but did not take the sheet down enough to look at her. “I’m not here to lecture you or tell you what sort of relationship you ought to have with your armsman. That is not the relationship thatIwish to have with you. However, I do feel it is my duty, as a person who has known you and loved you since you were born, to sharply prod you from time to time to keep you on your toes. I have now completed that obligation. I feel it is also my duty as the commander of your guard to warn my liege of dangers when I see them, and so I say: Have a care, Kadou. You do not have the luxury of indulging in mere moments of weakness because you’re lonely or upset.”
“In my defense, that’s explicitly what he was offering,” Kadou took the tooth-stick out of his mouth and tugged the sheets down under his chin, peering at her. “I wouldn’t have presumed to ask, otherwise.”
“It might have been what he was offering when he was a kahya,” she said. “But you may find things have changed now. Everything is different—I’m sure you’d be the first to admit that, no?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“You didn’t see him when he was demoted. He was wrecked. He is as upset as you are. He is not handling it well, no matter how good he is at keeping up a front. So again I advise you: Have a care. Make no assumptions. What he wanted last week is not the same as what he wants now.” That was chillingly true. A week ago, Tadek never would have claimed, even in jest, that Kadou was all he had. Now it was stony fact. “Now, would you like to get up? I’ve brought you Armagan’s files about the investigation. I thought we could discuss them over breakfast.”
Kadou shoved down the shivering flare of uncertainty in his chest. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Hehadn’t. She was only warning him, not rebuking him. There was no reason to tear himself to pieces over it. He’d already admitted she was right; all she expected him to do was to go forward carefully, which he would have done anyway. He didn’t need to apologize for anything. But gods, he wanted to. “Could you call in whoever’s on duty to dress me?”
“What for? You think I’m so out of practice that I can’t manage your buttons myself? Such insolence.” Though this last was said with a smile, though heknewshe was only teasing, it struck him in the place already made tender by her previous warning.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “Um. Hand me a dressing gown? They’re hanging in the wardrobe.”
She found one and tossed it to him. He wrapped it around himself, shoving his arms through the sleeves and knotting the ties down the front before flinging the sheets back. He sat in the chair by the window and allowed her to brush his hair while he finished cleaning his teeth. Without needing to be told, she bound his hair up in a knot at his nape, appropriate for mourning and much more comfortable than Evemer’s version the day before—she really hadn’t lost the knack for kahyalar duties.
“Your intelligence network is very good,” he muttered to her. “To know about this,” he gestured to his hair, “and about Tadek.”
She patted him on the shoulder. “When you go wandering around the Silver Court in full formal mourning, it doesn’t take long for me to hear about it. Nor when you have your armsman summoned to your chambers after dinner with the greatest urgency so that the messenger has to race past every set of eyes from here to the Copper Gate, and then your armsman has to take the same path at the same pace, but in cadet whites. At dusk. It was conspicuous.”
Kadou put his head in his hands and cursed himself. Could he never once think things through?
“Kadou,” she said. “Kadou, love, would it help if I were a bit closer, the next few weeks? There are my own duties to attend to, of course, and I won’t step on Lieutenant Hoskadem’s toes by presuming to take over as your primary, but . . . Shall I be nearby? Something of an advisor?”
