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“Both fair and reasonable, considering,” Tadek said, nodding, and managed to get himself to his feet without resting weight on his bad leg. “Be right back.”
As soon as he was safely out of earshot of a murmur, Evemer leaned close to Kadou and said, “You mentioned loopholes.”
“Spite is a terrible reason to have not-technically-sex,” Kadou replied, nudging his knee up against Evemer’s again beneath the table.
Just after lunchtime, at long last, the flying squad returned. When the messenger arrived with the news, Kadou fled his meeting with the palace exchequer and went directly across the Silver Court to the hall where the prisoners were already, apparently, being put on trial. The kahyalar at the doors to the courtroom let him in without an objection.
Siranos, Sylvia, and Azuta were grubby with dirt and dust from the road, and chained hand and foot. Zeliha was splendid and terrifying in black-and-gold brocade, the effect not at all diminished by Eyne held in her arms. Tenzin stood at the foot of the dais below Zeliha’s glory, having made no concession to fashion or the colors of allegiance except to tie a Mahisti-blue-and-white-striped sash around her waist.
Kadou picked his way through the crowd—they were all too rapt to notice or part for him until the warden of the court banged his staff of office on the floor and demanded that the room be emptied of onlookers. They filed out slowly, but Kadou pressed his back against the wall and waited it out. When they’d all gone, he was startled to see Eozena toward the front of the room—she was seated in a cunningly engineered wheeled chair with her injured leg propped up straight to ease her aches. He drifted over to her and stood at her shoulder; she looked up, smiled, and squeezed his hand.
“Now that we can hear ourselves think,” Zeliha said dryly. “Let’s have a chat. We know that you, Siranos, were involved in an expansive plot to forge our currency and ship it abroad. We’ve seized your property in the city, rooted out several more of your agents, found the rest of the kahyalar you bribed or threatened into helping you, and seized the two remaining caches of counterfeits hidden in the city. I’m told you had several chests of coins in your carriage as well, confirmed by two touch-tasters in the squad that captured you. How unfortunate that you were caught with evidence.”
“Itoldyou it wouldn’t work, stupid,” Sylvia hissed to her brother. “I said it was a ridiculous plan.”
“We are also aware that you hired mercenaries to kidnap or assassinate Prince Kadou, my brother, and in doing so caused the deaths of several kahyalar. We are aware that you laterdidcapture him, with the intent of holding him hostage and killing his kahya. Your mercenaries attacked our commander of the guard and several other kahyalar when they discovered your headquarters, and you yourselves personally laid hands on another kahya in violence. Furthermore, we are aware that you hired people to break into the Shipbuilder’s Guild with the intent of stealing Arasti secrets.” Her smile was like the edge of a sword. “The former lieutenant Armagan was kind enough to tell us everything çe knew in exchange for clemency. So were most of the rest of the people we’ve found.” She tipped her head toward Tenzin. “Of course, the ones who refused to beg for a plea deal ended up telling us anyway. Anything to add, ladies? Gentleman?”
The three of them tried to argue, of course, all talking at once. Zeliha let them talk themselves out—Azuta fell silent first, and then Sylvia, while Siranos still held forth until he was red in the face about unfair trials and international diplomacy. He seemed to think that he and Sylvia were important enough that their imprisonment or death would cause an upset back home in Oissos.
“Do you know how much of Oissos’s debt Arast owns?” Zeliha asked, interrupting him. “Roughly four hundred and fifteen thousand altinlar—or two and a half million Oissic trachy, at current exchange rates. You are nothing. They are not coming for you, and if they do, we won’t even need to greet them with diplomats,only accountants.”
Siranos fell silent.
“Now that we’re all on the same page,” Zeliha said, “why don’t you tell me how many shipments of counterfeits you smuggled out of the country and to which foreign ports you sent them, as well as whether you planned to sell the information you tried to steal from the guild or keep it for yourselves. Cooperation will put me in a good mood.”
The tides rose higher in the next few days, lapping up to the very edge of the quays, and the last slipper of the crescent of Beyaz, the moon of transformation and impermanence, waned away to nothing. The city was loud with color and noise, and watching from his balcony at night, Kadou could see fireworks going up from six or seven places throughout the city, as well as directly behind him from somewhere in the palace grounds.
For one blazing day, the parade wound around the city. Kadou did not have a pleasant time in the slightest—it was too hot, and the extravagant festival robes were too stifling, and his horse Wing was in a skittish mood and wouldn’t stop shying, and he wasstarving,which was made only worse by the redolent scents of festival food filling every single damn street and making him crave everything that was sticky-sweet, or fried, or both.
He didn’t have a pleasant time that night at the palace’s celebration either, with the gardens of the Gold Court all hung with hundreds of colored lanterns, the residences packed with people for once—all the nobles and provincial governors who had returned from the country for the holiday, and their raucous families. There hadn’t been a quiet corner to be found in days, and if by chance there were, it was probably already occupied by a pair of teenagers up to no good.
The food and drink were plentiful, but by that point Kadou was fairly well dying for something fried and sticky, and all that was on offer was roast peacock, roast ox, and a thousand elegant delicacies that he had no stomach for, served on long tables outside while everyone milled around and grew drunker and louder, and worse at dancing, and more and more interested in having shouty drunken conversations with him about policy.
He made Zeliha play five games of noughts-and-crosses to battle for which of them would be allowed to leave and make the Visit to the kahyalar at the other end of the palace. He only won because she too was already fairly tipsy.
At the kahyalar’s party, he managed to nearly enjoy himself—they, at least, had fried-and-sticky things for him to eat, which soothed his frayed edges, and they had wine that was much more drinkable than what was being served at the Gold Court party, and ale besides. Once he was drunk, he flung off the outer three layers of his festival robes, bundling all of them into Evemer’s arms and leaving him there to blush while Kadou, in his trousers and unbuttoned underlayer, let Melek drag him into the dancing—and this, too, was better than what had been on offer in the Gold Court.
He should have been happy.
Everyone else was happy.
The walk back home, already interminable on a regular day, was nearly impossible. It took Melek and Evemer both to keep him from veering off the garden paths, more tired than tipsy now. Once they made it home, he refused point blank to attempt the stairs up to his room. Melek and Evemer shrugged at each other, braided his hair, and poured him into bed in the unoccupied fourth room of the kahyalar’s quarters.
A soft bed, a safe house, a head full of wine and a belly full of fried things, muscles aching from dancing and from the day’s ride . . . He should have fallen asleep instantly.
Yet hours later, there he was, still wide awake, lying on his back in the middle of the bed in the dark, trembling violently and biting his lip so that he wouldn’t wake Evemer, who was asleep on a pile of floor cushions on the other side of the room.
The fear-creature tore at him, threw all manner of thoughts at him. It didn’t matter that he knew most of them weren’t even true. He muffled himself in the pillow, trying and failing to steady his breathing. He wanted to weep, but could not allow it—Evemer would wake up, and the fear-creature was doing an excellent job of convincing him that that would be a very, very bad thing.
He’d lied to Evemer. He’d outright lied to him for no other reason than pure selfishness. Surely his schedule could have permitted a visit to the temple by now—they could have gone at dawn or midnight. There were surely other solutions. Kadou just hadn’t wanted to look very hard for them. He suspected Evemer knew all of these things, and he wondered whether Evemer thought him pathetic, as he had in the beginning.
He just wanted another few days. Just a little longer of pretending that Evemer was his before he had to once again deny himself his personal wants in favor of his duty to the kingdom. A few more days of the thrilling catch of his heart every time Evemer walked into a room, rather than the cold rush of knowledge that this wasn’t his to keep and never would be.
They’d had a heated debate about what exactly counted as sex for the purposes of annulment. Evemer’s sense of where the hard boundary lay was much more conservative than Kadou’s—it wouldn’t count if there was this condition, and this other condition, and two or three further conditions after that, and Kadou had accepted most of them (fully clothed, hands above the waist, mouths above the collarbones), and protestedvehementlyagainst the final one on the grounds of, “Butreciprocity,Evemer, are you trying to imbalance the whole system of fealty?” But Evemer had held the advantageous position in that negotiation, and Kadou had grudgingly acquiesced.
And now he had a white-hot memory of Evemer leaning over him and watching with undisguised reverence as Kadou melted into a satiated puddle of bliss in his arms, of Evemer kissing him worshipfully, of Evemer’s eyes, as bright as stars and as lovely.
Of Evemer slipping out of Kadou’s bed, unsatisfied because that was the last condition of the technicality, before crossing the room to sleep on the divan again as usual.
