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His Highness silently took a seat in the chair by the window and said, gesturing to a dresser nearby, “Everything’s in that drawer.” Byeverythinghe meant brushes, combs, nail files, pumice stones, several different types of scissors, straight razors, a leather strop for sharpening, shaving soaps, oils, lengths of clean white linen. Evemer took a careful inventory—it was neat enough, he supposed. It could be neater. He would have to inspect everything in one of his free moments.
He stropped the razor to a perfect edge and lathered the soap. His Highness tipped his head back, baring his throat. Evemer didn’t allow himself to think of anything those next few minutes but the careful glide of the blade, the scrape of the edge against skin and hair.
His Highness kept his eyes closed, kept perfectly still and silent until Evemer had finished, and then he took the damp cloth and wiped the rest of the soap from his face. “Arrange my hair for mourning, please.”
Mourning, was it? He cast an eye to the paper-wrapped parcel on the bed—was it going to be mourning clothes too? “Highness,” he said, and even to his own ear his voice sounded cool.
Mourning, at least for the upper classes and royalty who wore their hair long like His Highness’s, meant severe arrangements—Evemer brushed out the heavy, silken mass of black until it shone like wet ink, braided it as tightly as he could, and pinned it up into a knot at the nape of Kadou’s neck. His Highness sprang out of the chair the moment the last pin was in place and went to the bed as if the parcel were a vicious animal that was going to spring up and bite him.
It was, indeed, mourning clothes. There was a velvet kaftan in funereal colors—a red so dark it was nearly black, lined with black silk, a deep purple underlayer embroidered with mountain laurel and acanthus, and black trousers. By the time Evemer had gotten all the soaps, brushes, razors, and cloths tidied away, His Highness had already changed into the trousers and was doing up the tiny black-pearl buttons of the underlayer with shaking hands.
Evemer silently took over. He could not resist the temptation to firmly brush His Highness’s hands away—even in this, he wasn’t the man Evemer had expected him to be. A prince ought to accept service graciously, rather than scrambling about trying to do trivial things for himself that should have been beneath his notice.
Evemer shook out the heavy velvet kaftan next—the cloth was so dark that it seemed to draw light into it, except where it flashed bright at the folds. Being more formal, it was fitted tighter through the shoulders than usual, with sleeves so restrictively narrow that they had to be buttoned from the elbow—His Highness, thankfully, did not attempt again to do these up, nor the silk-and-black-jadeite frog closures at the front. He stood as still and quiet for this as he had for the shave. There was just the terrible weight of this silence between them.
Surely he must know that Evemer knew.
Evemer unfolded the sash that went with the kaftan—a long length of black silk veiling, fine enough that even soft hands might snag the fabric if it was handled carelessly. His Highness raised his arms, and Evemer looped it around his waist twice and knotted it neatly in a sober style—one of the more fashionable knots wouldn’t have been at all appropriate. The trailing ends of the sash reached nearly to the ground.
Evemer stood back and assessed him from head to toe.
“Do I pass inspection?” His Highness asked with a watery smile—an attempt at a joke.
“Highness,” Evemer said in clipped tones, and His Highness’s expression shuttered off again, into that closed and miserable wretchedness. “How long will Your Highness be in full mourning?”
“Five days,” His Highness said. It was uncertain, almost a question. Was he looking for Evemer’s approval?
Five days was excessive. Evemer risked another sharp glance at him—five days was how you mourned a parent, spouse, sibling, or child. Five days for a pair of kahyalar, even if they had been ones that Kadou knew well, smacked of performative grief. As if His Highness were publicly showing off how contrite and unhappy he was. “Highness,” Evemer said, and his anger mounted higher to see His Highness wince.
The sentient, walking blank wall that had been assigned to him followed Kadou out of his chambers, out through the Gold Gate, and into the Silver Court, silent every step of the way.
At least, sort of a blank wall. He must think himself very accomplished at that stony facade, and Kadou was sure that it probably worked on most people. But Kadou could read him at a glance, just as he’d been able to at the Shipbuilder’s Guild, when he had thanked the distractingly handsome kahya at the door for fetching him something to drink, and the kahya had straightened his shoulders and glowed at him without changing his expression a hair’s breadth.
What he was reading now was cold, hidden fury that Evemer apparently thought he was concealing. He wasn’t the only one who was upset—Melek had cried a bit, the night before, but pretended like çe hadn’t. Istani had, unusually, refrained from grumbling about anything at all. Selime and Hafza, who had stood guard at the door, hadn’t even made eye contact with him when he returned at last to his chambers, let alone smiled as they usually did. The cadets bringing in his meals had fled as quickly as possible.
This one, though, had worked himself up into a rage. Kadou had watched the storm brew darker over Lieutenant Hoskadem’s face as he’d entered the room and pinned Kadou in place with only the weight of his cold eyes and colder judgment. It made Kadou want to huddle down as small as possible.
Kadou led the way to the offices of the intelligence ministry—the kahyalar here were stiff and cool to him too, and he swept past them quickly with his eyes fixed on the ground and Evemer’s steady step just behind him.
Lieutenant Armagan was waiting in one of the ministry’s chambers, solemn faced. “Your Highness,” çe said tonelessly. “I would have been more than happy to come to you instead. You needn’t have made the walk.”
It sounded almost like a rebuke—perhaps Armagan didn’t want to be seen with him either. Kadou wouldn’t blame çem for it. “It’s no trouble. I’m happy to meet with you wherever you’d prefer,” he said softly.
Armagan grunted. “That’s the thing, Highness. I don’t think we will have much reason to meet anymore.”
Kadou’s heart nearly stopped in his chest, and for a moment he thought Armagan might be about to declare that çe couldn’t possibly work with Kadou’s oversight. “What do you mean?” he managed.
“The investigation. It’s a dead end, Highness.”
“But you said just the other day that there was progress. You said slow, but . . . is that not the case?”
“I’m sorry that you came all this way for such bad news, Your Highness,” Armagan said. “We’re wasting our time on it, in my opinion. There’s nothing that would give us clues about the identity of the thieves or how to track them, and nothing to suggest they actually got their hands on any sensitive information.”
“But surely there’ssomething—it’s only been a few days, surely we can’t just give up.” It was too important. Arasti ships, shipbuilders, and sailors were the best in the world, and getting better every year—the guild had been responsible for recent developments in hull technology that several very clever people had attempted to explain to Kadou using lots of new terms likefluid dynamics. All that research had been stored in the guild’s records room, but that wasn’t what Kadou was most concerned about. The research being stolen would be a blow, but the nature of research was that anyone else would have been able to re-create it, if they had enough time.
No, the thing that kept Kadou up at night, the thing that had made this break-in an issue of national security was that besides all the research, the Shipbuilder’s Guild held one-third of the most precious and lucrative secret in, arguably, the world: the trick of passing safely across the sea when the serpents of the deep rose for their breeding season and roved lust-maddened and hungry near the surface, or clustered in their writhing, frothing mating swarms, powerful and violent enough to tear holes in the bottoms of even the thickest-hulled vessels. For six weeks in the summer, the Sea of Serpents—the mercantile center of the world, it was said—was functionally impassable to all but Arasti ships sailed by Arasti captains. Six weeks when theirs were the only ships that would dare leave port for open waters. Six weeks when only they were safe. Six weeks of a total monopoly on trade, at least in this part of the world.
But that secret had been endangered, and so the investigation, in Kadou’s opinion, remained quite literally a matter of national importance.
