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Kadou blinked. “Oh?”
“I don’t want it.” He hesitated, coaxing his uncooperative tongue to move. “But I know I need to have it.”
“What was the primary objective she gave you?” Kadou was looking at him very strangely.
“To keep you safe at all costs,” Evemer said. He thought that should have been obvious.
“Then I suppose you do need it.” The privilege of disobedience was an honor reserved for people like Eozena, who held her position preciselybecauseher judgment was trusted implicitly. It was given with the mutual understanding that it would never be used except in cases of dire peril. Kadou swallowed. “What—what would you do? If I gave you an order that you had to disobey in order to keep me safe?”
“I don’t know. It would depend on the circumstances.”
“Give me one example.”
Evemer shrugged. “I might tie you to one of the kitchen chairs, put you in the cellar, and sit on top of the trapdoor. I will not allow you to put yourself in unnecessary danger.”
“You might have to,” Kadou said.
“I have orders.”
“So do I. She told me to find Siranos. That will take some risk.”
It was good to start negotiations from a place of aspiration, even if you knew you’d be haggled down, so Evemer said, “You don’t have to leave this house.”
“Yes,” Kadou said in steely tones that sent lightning crackling through Evemer’s veins, “I do.” He sounded a little like Zeliha when he spoke like that, like he could bend Evemer to his will like a bar of iron on an anvil.
“No, my lord,” Evemer replied. “You don’t.”
“We have a duty.”
“I agree. My duty is to keep you alive.”
Kadou put his elbows on his knees and rubbed his hands over his face. “And if I ordered you to stay here?”
“I will disobey.”
“And if I dismissed you from service?” This was Kadou negotiating too, feeling around in the darkness to find out where the walls had been moved to, now that they lived in this new strange world where Evemer had this inexplicable, wondrous new gift. Kadou didn’t know what the hell this meant any more than Evemer did.
So he said: “Frankly, my lord, I’d like to see you try.”
At these words, Kadou released a slow breath and a great deal of tension.
Kadou snorted, hands still pressed to his face. After a long moment, he said quietly, “I really didn’t need to apologize so much for kissing you in the alley, did I.”
Another prickle of lightning tingled through him. “I didn’t need disobedience then. You’ve never been able to make me do anything I didn’t want to do,” Evemer said.
“You have to let me leave the house.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Is that the extent of your argument? Simply digging in your heels and being an immovable object?”
“That’s all I need to do. Stay here, where it’s safe. Let me and the others be your hands and eyes.”
Kadou sat up, and Evemer saw the same expression on Kadou’s face that he wore when they were playing chess, right before he started enacting a deliberate strategy. He was going to try to talk Evemer into it, persuade him with perfect fantasies of honor and heroism and fealty. It was the only thing that would have had a chance of working—Evemer saw Kadou’s next four moves as clearly as if the game had been laid out on a chessboard.
Evemer mentally brushed the dust off his hands and moved his general.
Before Kadou could speak, Evemer shifted from sitting before him to kneeling. He took Kadou’s hands, pressing his forehead to the backs of them as he had been aching to do. It filled his heart with light to be allowed even just this.
