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Evemer hadn’t let go of his hand, and Kadou also, increasingly, found himself both unwilling and unable to do so.
“All right,” Kadou whispered, when they’d stood there in the dark for long minutes, unmoving. Their palms were getting clammy, clasped tight as they were, but it didn’t matter. “All right. We’re not dead. You’re not dead. That’s taken care of.”
“Yes,” Evemer said, and Kadou turned blindly toward him.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I won’t accept an apology.”
“I just—I had to do something, and that was all I could do, and—”
“It was all you could think of,” Evemer said. “Kadou. Highness. My lord.” He dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead against the back of Kadou’s hand.
“What are you doing?”
“You could have let them kill me,” Evemer whispered. “Three times now, you could have left me to die and you didn’t. How many of my lives must I owe to you?”
Kadou wrenched his hand away. He regretted it immediately—it made the room so much colder. “Don’t say that,” he said.
“Don’t. I shouldn’t—I forced you! I ordered you to do it! You’d be well within your rights to be furious with me.”
“Why?”
“I held your life in my hands, you didn’t have a choice—”
“You held it in your hands only long enough to wrench it out of theirs, and then you did the one thing you could to give my life back to me,” Evemer said, his voice low and . . . angry. Actually angry for once. “Again, you’re doing this? Again? My lord, how many more times will you hand me a great gift and then tell me that it’s worthless? Stop it.”
Kadou backed away a few steps until he bumped into a wall. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t lie to me. You just bid me to hear your words and know they are true. So don’t lie.”
Kadou flinched. He heard Evemer shifting in the dark, maybe getting to his feet again. “I told you—we talked about it, that time in the bathhouse, I explained—I have so much power over you, I can’t be careless, I—”
“Do you?”
“What?”
“Do you have power over me?”
“Yes!” Kadou spluttered. “I’m your lord, I’m the prince, you’re—”
“I’m your kahya,” Evemer said in a low voice. “And Her Majesty the sultan of Arast granted me the privilege of disobedience. Whatever power you have over me comes from what I’ve given to you, and from the oaths Iwillinglyswore to you.” A footfall in the dark. His voice came a little closer now. “Regardless of the privilege I’ve been granted, I can take my willingness away. If you broke the oaths between us, I would have nothing binding me to serve and obey you. I could turn my back on you and leave you. A vassal should not give his service to an unworthy lord.”
“I am unworthy,” Kadou whispered. “I could hurt you before you had time to turn away from me.”
Evemer’s hands closed on his arms and Kadou squeaked in surprise—Evemer was so close he could feel the warmth radiating off his skin. “Why don’t you trust me?”
Kadou had no answer. He could only stay there, frozen and still in Evemer’s hold.
“This morning, I told younoin the firmest possible terms. I threatened to tie you up to keep you from going out alone. Upstairs,” Evemer said, his voice barely louder than a whisper, “you swore an oath as nothing and no one butyourself,without distinctions or glory or the trifling and meaningless trappings of mortal honors. And Iaccepted you.”
“You had to,” Kadou whispered.
“I’d do it again.”
“There was no other choice but death.”
Evemer was quiet. Kadou could hear him breathing. His grip tightened, not quite to the point of pain. “My lord.”
