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Cliopher was very tired. That would be his excuse, afterwards, for why he got out of bed and let his feet carry him out of his rooms.
He should not go. He needed to rest. It had been a long week and would be a longer one still before it was done. His Radiancy’s amnesia, thankfully temporary though it had been, had thrown half the government into disarray due to his inability to fulfill his duties for a good week. The other half of the government was due to be thrown into disarray beginning tomorrow, as Cliopher’s schedule had been entirely upended due to the injection of the accelerated purification ceremonies into it.
Cliopher’s fingertips brushed against the side of his left elbow before he realized his hand had moved. He forced it back to his side.
He should turn back. Go back to bed.
The walk to the Imperial Apartments was not long, not from his no-longer-new rooms. Once in a long while it felt strange all over again, years though it had been, to be making the shorter walk from the Lord of Zunidh’s apartments and not the longer walk from his old room in the Alinorel wing. He was standing before the first set of doors before he knew it, carried by habit and by his wandering mind. This was where he turned back — where he had to turn back — because his Radiancy wouldn’t want to see him, anyhow. Not for this. He could not let the guards announce him, ask why he was here.
But they did not ask why he was here at this hour; they did not announce him. They stepped aside and let him pass.
It made the entire experience feel vaguely dreamy. Perhaps the whole awful week could have been one long and strange nightmare, where Cliopher’s lord’s replacement by Fitzroy Angursell, of all people, could be laughed away by merely Cliopher’s over-active imagination substituting one of the men who he admired and respected most in the world for the other, instead of —
He might go sit in the study, for a moment, maybe, at his old desk, and remember simpler times. Or just listen to the quiet of the Imperial Apartments at this hour, freed from the frantic scramble of their late night conferences trying to determine whether the amnesia was reversible, the hustle and bustle of Domina Audry and her staff, the Mother of Mountains working magic, Fitzroy Angursell’s familiar-strange voice asking what was over here, or there, and were they sure he ought to stay in here, it couldn’t hurt to just peek into the wider Palace of Stars, could it —
He should turn back. He should go. But he wanted the reassurance, paper-thin though it was, of the quiet of the rooms, the dim lighting, the contented hum of the Imperial Apartments brought back to late-night peace by the restored presence of their master.
“Cliopher,” Conju’s voice hissed, “what are you doing here?”
Cliopher blinked at him. He had, he realized belatedly, been letting habit carry him, and had followed that familiar path deeper into the apartments towards the study. Where, oddly, Conju sat in the last antechamber, brow pinched. “Hello, Conju,” he said.
“Cliopher,” Conju repeated, with the edge in his voice that had rarely left it, since the moment the stranger wearing his Radiancy’s face had blinked around at the Imperial Apartments and said, “Haven’t you people heard that colors besides yellow and gold and white exist? I’m rather partial to scarlet myself.”
Cliopher blinked himself out of the memory and let go of his left elbow again. Conju had asked him a question. “Walking. I couldn’t sleep,” he added, for he understood that ‘walking’ would not be answer enough for Conju, even if it felt like an end in and of itself to Cliopher in this moment.
“And why, exactly, are you not walking in your own apartments? Or in the garden?” Conju demanded. “Must you speak with his Radiancy tonight? Can’t it wait until morning?”
At dawn the purification rituals would start. “I don’t need to see him,” Cliopher said. “Don’t wake him.”
“He’s not asleep,” Conju said. “You know what? No. I am not dealing with this. You two are as bad as each other. See if you can do something with him, will you? Here,” and then, while Cliopher was still staring at him in bewilderment, Conju opened the door to the study and propelled Cliopher firmly inside.
“Kip?” his Radiancy said, looking up from the desk, and oh, it soothed something deep in Cliopher to hear that beloved voice call him by that name.
Muscle memory carried him and Cliopher sank into the obeisance. With no little irony, he said, “Good morning, my lord.” They called it ‘three in the morning’ for a reason, didn’t they?
“Good morning, Kip.” The amusement in his voice was very dry. Cliopher thought he might have laughed, were it not the middle of the night. Although in any other circumstances it would not have been halfway to a joke, so — “What are you doing here at this hour? I would have imagined Conju would know better than to wake you to try and talk sense into me. Is he still lurking out there?”
“Yes,” Cliopher said. “No, he didn’t, I.” His mind was sleep-sluggish and soft, still, for all that sleep itself had eluded him. “I wanted —” What did he want? The reassurance that his Radiancy was himself, which he now had. Something else that he should not want and could not ask for. The company of his friend. His friend with the secret name, whose secret name was Fitzroy Angursell. “I’m sorry,” Cliopher said helplessly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I can — I should go.” Somehow his body was failing to obey this direction.
“You don’t need to,” his Radiancy murmured. “Please get up, Kip.”
Cliopher forced himself to his feet, wobbling just a little bit. He had the wild thought that if it were still the young Fitzroy Angursell here, wearing his Radiancy’s face, that he would have offered Cliopher a hand to pull him up, thoughtlessly, with that wide open expression on his face.
Cliopher’s Radiancy watched him with grave eyes and an intent focus captured in the lion eyes. Knowing that his Radiancy was likely tired and worried did not lessen the impact of that gaze; Cliopher could not help but be soothed by it. “Will you come sit with me on the terrace for a bit?”
Cliopher followed him. A suggestion, from the Sun-on-Earth, was as good as an order, but that was not why Cliopher went. Cliopher would have followed him anywhere so long as it was his lord, his friend, who was the one asking. Belatedly he said, “Are you not tired, my lord?” Why wasn’t he in bed?
“I couldn’t sleep. A common affliction tonight, it seems.”
Cliopher huffed out a quiet breath at that. “Is something troubling you?”
“Just bad dreams.” Something in the way he said it was a closed door, a do-not-enter sign affixed to it. Cliopher let it rest.
The air on the terrace was brisk and bracing, and it cut through enough of the haze to remind Cliopher vividly that being here, in the middle of the night, for a purpose that he had not even been able to admit to in the privacy of his own head, much less find the courage to say aloud to his Radiancy, was the height of absurdity.
“Are you cold?”
Cliopher wasn’t, not really, but his right hand had found its way to his left elbow again, and perhaps that looked like he was hugging himself for warmth, for his Radiancy was — Cliopher’s mind stuttered to a halt over the bewildering fact of his Radiancy shrugging out of his heavy overrobe for long enough that he didn’t manage to intercede before his Radiancy deposited it onto his shoulders.
The part of Cliopher’s brain that understood propriety and spoke sometimes using Conju’s voice tried to shriek that Cliopher had to give it back immediately, but the overrobe was thick and heavy and warmed though with the heat of his Radiancy’s body. To hell with propriety; Cliopher could do nothing but pull it tighter around himself.
His Radiancy watched him do so with an expression that was unparseable.
Cliopher looked back at him.
His Radiancy sat, so Cliopher did, too. It was comfortable out here now, burrowed into the warm robe, as if his Radiancy was —
“Will you tell me what’s bothering you so, Kip?” his Radiancy murmured.
“It’s nothing,” Cliopher said, and then to the unwavering, unimpressed look, amended it to, “It’s foolish.”
His Radiancy countered that with a singular raised eyebrow.
“You won’t like it,” Cliopher confessed, and closed his eyes.
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
Cliopher felt very certain that his Radiancy wouldn’t like it. He had not been subtle about the horror he had felt, when he had seen the mark his other self had left. Cliopher knew that he himself had not helped that reaction; he had not entirely been able to hide the way he felt about it, which was not the uncomplicated horror that he thought his Radiancy felt, but something more complex, some tangled knot of pleasure-revulsion that he could not even begin to untangle.
“Ah,” his Radiancy said, voice gone flat.
For a moment Cliopher wondered, absurdly, whether his Radiancy could read his mind. Then he realized he had been rubbing his left elbow again.
“Does it hurt?” his Radiancy said, still as a statue and as serene.
“No,” Cliopher said hastily. “No, nothing like that.” It had itched, a little, at first.
“I could try to remove it. I am not certain I would succeed, but I am a planetary mage; there must be a way.”
“No,” Cliopher said, “no, it’s all right.”
“It is not. I’m sorry, Cliopher.”
“Please don’t be sorry,” Cliopher said plaintively. “It’s not your fault.” He hadn’t been there to step away. He hadn’t been the one who tripped. “And anyways it was an accident.” Such a little thing. Cliopher had stumbled over the upturned edge of a rug; and the stranger, the young Fitzroy Angursell wearing his Radiancy’s face, had caught at his elbow to steady him. And Cliopher, despite all the long centuries of working around the taboos, all the knowledge and practice and ritual, had let him without even flinching.
“I could —”
Cliopher could hear that he would not let this go without a stronger assurance. “I don’t want you to try to remove them. That’s not what I — that’s not why.”
His Radiancy considered this for a long moment. “But you did come about the marks.”
Cliopher could not quite bring himself to nod, but he thought his Radiancy could see the answer on his face.
His Radiancy didn’t say anything for a few moments. Cliopher breathed in the cool air and listened to a soft hoot of an owl and wished that he could see the sea from the terrace.
“May I see them?”
Cliopher shrugged his left arm out from under the robe and rolled up his sleeve as far as it would go, turning his arm so his Radiancy could see. They weren’t extensive, like Ludvic’s; three fingertips, half a finger, the smudge of the palm, all a burnished gold.
His Radiancy looked at them without an expression. Cliopher tried not to read a thousand different interpretations into that face and failed miserably. He looked away.
“You don’t wish for me to try and remove them. Is this about the purifications?”
“No. Not really.”
“Not really,” his Radiancy repeated. “If you have concerns about the priest-wizards, or — the procedures —”
“It is only very incidentally about the purifications,” Cliopher amended. He could still not quite see a way out of this conversation, but he could at least stop his Radiancy from going down this particular rabbit hole. “I have no concerns about the priest-wizards or the procedures. I would have had to do them for the Viceroy ceremonies anyway, we’d already thought that seemed likely to be necessary.”
“They’ll be unpleasant.”
“I know. I’ve seen you go through them. That doesn’t bother me.”
“But something is bothering you.” Tap, tap. His Radiancy was drumming his fingers against the table. He sounded, at least, as curious as he did tired now, for all that curiosity wasn’t particularly helpful for Cliopher in this instant.
“It’s not important,” Cliopher tried.
“Isn’t it? You’re here at an hour of the morning that should be reserved only for owls, crickets, and other nocturnal creatures, despite having worked an unconscionable number of hours over the last week during my… absence — no, don’t interrupt, I did look at your planner — and having dawn purifications this morning. Shall I see if I can guess, Kip? Will that be easier?”
Cliopher didn’t have the heart to stop him. “If you like,” he said quietly.
“It is something to do with the purifications, but only incidentally. Incidentally with regards to the timing, perhaps? I imagine if this was not, shall we say, a time-sensitive worry of yours that you would… perhaps not have slept easy tonight, but not found your way to my door, either. Yes?”
Cliopher nodded silently. He dared to look back at his Radiancy, whose dark face was alert, now, growing absorbed in the puzzle of it all, studying Cliopher’s face as he spoke.
His Radiancy went on, “Reservations around undergoing the purifications still seem like the obvious option, but you’ve assured me it’s not that. Something conflicting with the timing of the ceremonies? There’s nothing in your schedule that can’t be modified around them, I’ve told you already that I’ll sort out any issues with the Council of Princes or the Helma Council. And there’s nothing of the sort this morning, either. I’m getting off-topic, here, though, aren’t I? Because we’d already established the marks are —”
He fell so absolutely silent that Cliopher was immediately and miserably certain that he’d gotten it. He closed his eyes. “I told you you wouldn’t like it,” he managed.
His Radiancy didn’t say anything for an awful moment. When he spoke, he at least did not sound repulsed or appalled, for all that the good humor the little puzzle had coaxed out in him had vanished entirely. “You did say that. I’ll admit I didn’t entirely believe you. You want me to — what, give you more?” Incredulity was seeping into his voice by the end.
“Yes,” Cliopher whispered.
His Radiancy said nothing for a long, dreadful minute. Cliopher could not bear to open his eyes and see the expression on his face. He hugged the robe more tightly around himself. He should not have come here. This would make it worse than doing nothing, wouldn’t it? The memory of how appalled he was at even the thought of —
“Will you explain why?”
That was not what Cliopher had expected. He opened his eyes.
His Radiancy’s expression was distant and entirely serene. It cut far deeper than anger would have.
“I’m sorry,” Cliopher said, fighting to keep his own voice, his own expression, as calm, as even. “I didn’t mean to — I didn’t intend to ask. I can go.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Cliopher could not even explain it in the privacy of his own head. He did not know how he could do it out loud. “It was foolish of me even to —” He pushed back his chair, tried to lever himself to his feet. Being swaddled in the robe made it difficult.
“Cliopher — Kip.” The serenity had faded enough to reveal a frown that was — puzzled, maybe, but not —
The overrobe was warm and soft around Cliopher, and he did not know any longer whether it still carried the heat from his Radiancy’s body or merely his own.
“Kip,” his Radiancy said again. “Don’t — you’re right that the idea is — I don’t like it, but you knew that, and yet here you are, so it must not be — You wouldn’t ask for something that would upset me on a whim.”
“Of course not.”
“This means something to you. Help me understand it.” The voice had softened, had returned almost entirely to being the voice not of the Emperor but of Cliopher’s friend.
To his friend Cliopher could confess, “I’m not sure that I can. I — It’s —” He had to stop, then, and grope for the words.
His Radiancy let him for a little while before he said, “I could have sworn you dislike the scars.”
“I do,” Cliopher said, “as — as they are now. But not for the reasons you think.”
“No?”
“They’re not —” He still felt as though he was groping along in the dark to it, but his Radiancy’s expectant, patient gaze helped him to persist. “Ludvic’s marks are —”
“Extensive?” his Radiancy offered after a moment. “Highly visible? Grievous?”
“They’re beautiful.”
His Radiancy opened his mouth and then closed it again.
Cliopher had found his way to the nefalao, could see that pearl of a secret tucked away in it now, but could feel as surely the crushing depths of the water, the sharp edge of the shell, the danger that still lay in coaxing the pearl out to the surface. But he had come too far now to stop. “He touched you,” he said helplessly. “You touched him. He held your hand. He could.” The words kept coming, bubbling up inexorably. He couldn’t look at his Radiancy any longer. “These are — The other you — He looked at me like I was a stranger. I don’t want to remember your face looking at me like that when I look at them. I want to think about you.” Cliopher was aware, suddenly, that he was on the verge of tears. He wanted to go — to hide away from —
“Do you, now,” his Radiancy said, very softly, and his voice was — Cliopher felt pinned beneath it, held precisely in place. “I can’t pretend I didn’t think it, can I,” his Radiancy went on, so quietly Cliopher had to strain to hear him. He was looking at the marks on Cliopher’s arm, those five golden smudges. “He got to touch you. I am not permitted even the privilege of the memory of it.” Those golden eyes slid slowly up to Cliopher’s face. Cliopher felt entirely emptied out of words or thoughts, held mesmerized by those eyes.
But his Radiancy didn’t speak again, and he didn’t move, and after a long, honey-thick moment Cliopher realized that he would not — that this was as much encouragement as he could give.
Cliopher fought his way free of it so he could consider his words carefully. “I don’t want to ask you for something that would grieve you, now or later.”
His Radiancy did think about it. Cliopher had no idea what thoughts or calculations were happening behind the lion eyes, only that his Radiancy’s gaze moved to the far distance for a minute or so, and eventually came back to the marks, and then to Cliopher’s face, and then the conflict settled, a decision made. “And if I think that it would not?”
Cliopher swallowed. He checked the fold of his shirt where he had rolled it up well above the elbow. He scooted his chair carefully from the ritually prescribed distance closer, to more the distance Cliopher would sit apart from Conju or Ludvic or Rhodin, and then he dared another six inches closer than that. “Then — please?” He held out his arm.
His Radiancy only looked at it for a long moment. Cliopher knew so many of his expressions, how to parse out deeply buried flickers of feeling from the slightest quirk of his eyebrow, but he did not know what he felt in this moment. Then he reached out.
His hand trembled where he pressed his fingertips to the marks, his palm to the smudge of gold. It would smudge the clean precision of those fingertips, and that brought forth a little burst of triumph, of relief, in Cliopher’s throat: to be allowed that evidence that his Radiancy had done this, that he, too, had been moved by this.
They held still, the both of them, with those little tremors the only movement either one of them made. After a long moment his Radiancy exhaled a shuddering breath, half a laugh, and murmured, “Well, my lord Mdang? Are you satisfied?”
Cliopher knew that he had already read the answer off of Cliopher’s face, but he also knew by now that for this, Cliopher would always have to ask. He shook his head very slightly.
His Radiancy took a deep breath. Then his hand slid just that quarter inch closer, so that it went from an incidental touch, what had the other day been a fleeting one to stabilize Cliopher’s balance, to a deliberate one, where his Radiancy cupped Cliopher’s elbow in his hand.
Cliopher exhaled. The heat of his Radiancy’s hand was a furnace against Cliopher’s skin in the morning-cool air.
“Better?” his Radiancy asked softly.
And it was, it was, only it was still not — still not quite — but Cliopher didn’t want to be greedy, he didn’t want to ask for too much, for anything that would tip his Radiancy over the edge into that horror again, never that.
“Kip.”
“More?” Cliopher whispered. He closed his eyes. “Only if you want.”
“Hmm.”
And then his thumb stroked very gently against the soft sensitive skin at the crook of Cliopher’s elbow.
“Oh,” Cliopher breathed.
“Is that —” his Radiancy’s voice shook.
Cliopher had to look at him, then, had to make sure he could see Cliopher’s face, that he could know — “That’s very, very good,” he managed.
His Radiancy’s eyes were huge, and there was fear in them, but Cliopher could see it starting to fade.
Perhaps he could speed up that process, just a little. He dared to say, “Now that you’ve done it once…”
A little flame of humor sparked and caught behind his Radiancy’s eyes. “I don’t know why I expected you to be anything less than emphatically opinionated about this,” he murmured, and then his thumb rubbed against that crease of Cliopher’s inner elbow again, and again. Stroking slowly back and forth.
Cliopher went boneless so quickly it was a marvel he didn’t fall out of his chair. Between the lift of that tight knot of miserable helpless wanting in his chest that had driven him up here in the first place and the way his Radiancy was touching him, he felt light, now, loose, unburdened.
“You do like that, don’t you,” his Radiancy said, almost wondering. “Is this what you wanted, Kip?”
“Yes,” Cliopher whispered. When he looked at these marks, at his elbow cast in gold, he would remember only this. The gentleness with which his Radiancy touched him, the warmth and comfort of the overrobe that his Radiancy had wrapped him in, the intent focus of his Radiancy’s gaze; the way he felt held and warm and cared for, the way he felt — “Thank you.”
His Radiancy exhaled out another of those stuttering laughs, but he didn’t explain what was funny, and Cliopher didn’t ask.
After a pause that could have been seconds or minutes or hours (Cliopher wasn’t entirely convinced time was working properly, at this moment): “I nearly burned someone alive with my touch, once, in the early days, and here you are, falling asleep to it.”
“‘M not falling asleep.” If he were, Cliopher would have to extricate himself from this and excuse himself and go back to his rooms, and he didn’t want his Radiancy to stop touching him.
“No? My mistake. It would be very understandable if you were, however; my earlier remark about an unconscionable number of working hours still stands.”
“Not,” Cliopher repeated. His Radiancy was still petting Cliopher. It made it hard to form intelligent and coherent sentences. “Feels nice. Safe.”
“Safe,” his Radiancy echoed, very quietly. “Even after this week?”
Cliopher cracked an eye open so that he could squint at his Radiancy. (When had he closed them?) His head was sideways for some reason, cheek propped up on the back of the chair. “Yes? I always feel safe with you.” In retrospect that was probably how this entire mess had come about. He knew the taboos with his mind, but he didn’t feel them in his body, didn’t have the kind of deep fear it would take to flinch away from his Radiancy instinctively. He had only ever wanted to reach back to him.
“Ludvic said you were frightened.”
Cliopher let himself take a moment to be irritated with Ludvic, even if he understood the reason why Ludvic wouldn’t have even thought to clarify what Cliopher, what they all, had been scared of; it was perfectly obvious from Ludvic’s perspective, of course. “Scared for you,” he clarified, “not of you. I didn’t know if you were coming back.” He didn’t mean to say it, but it slipped out anyway: “If you’d remember me.”
“My dear Kip, you are eminently unforgettable,” his Radiancy said softly. “I doubt the amnesia ever stood a chance.”
Cliopher was falling asleep, or starting to. Drifting. But there was something he’d left undone, something he hadn’t — oh, that was it. “Will you tell me about your dreams?”
“You know, I really did think you’d forgotten about that. That’s what I get for underestimating you and that mind of yours.”
“I’m almost sleeping,” Cliopher offered, letting his eyes close again in illustration. “So I wouldn’t have to even hear it or remember it tomorrow unless you wanted me to.” He wanted to be safe for his Radiancy, too. A safe person to tell secrets to; a safe person to be scared in front of.
“Is that right,” his Radiancy murmured. “Oh, it was nothing too unusual. Hurting people without meaning to. Calling lightning. Terrified faces. You’ve been very efficient and banished them alongside your own worries, so you needn’t spend any more time on them.”
Cliopher might not need to, but he would remember anyways. Perhaps tomorrow… tomorrow…
“Your neck won’t thank you for this tomorrow, but it’s only a couple of hours until the purifications and I think any rest must be better than none,” his Radiancy mused, from what felt like a far off distance. “Sleep, Kip, I’ll wake you when it’s time.”
Cliopher did.