Archive of Our Own

Jullanar often says, and I will freely admit to it, that I have a mischievous streak. I am perfectly capable of restraint when restraint is called for, of course — one does not spend a thousand years as the Last Emperor without developing a strong sense of gravitas — but I will admit that because I have spent so long stifling the urge that I find it very difficult to resist the temptation when there is a scenario that I might safely indulge it.

In this particular scenario — on a small adventure in search of evidence of financial misdeeds on the part of one of the princes; wearing a glamour so that nobody will recognize me; with Kip, who is dressed up in all the elegance of the Viceroy of Zunidh and watching the prince’s steward fling himself into a deep bow with carefully concealed mild exasperation — well. I will admit that I do not try very hard.

So when the steward rises at Kip’s gesture and says, voice quavering, “Be welcome, your excellency; I will tell the Princess that you and your…” and cuts a glance to me in a questioning manner, I don’t hesitate to leap in.

“Oh,” I say airily, “I’m his secretary.”

I look over at Kip as I say it, of course. His expression is a delight. I really will never tire of discomposing him.

“I will inform her that you and your secretary are here right away,” the steward assures Kip. “If you will follow me, your excellency?”

Kip and I look at each other. His eyes are still wide, but the corner of his mouth is starting to twitch, ever so slightly.

Cliopher Lord Mdang, I know very well, never wanted to be a lord and resists the formalities where he can to this day. He tolerates the bows and the honors and the titles, but ‘sir’ is about the highest honorific he will accept from anybody he works with on a day to day basis.

I know all of this, and none of it stops me from sweeping him a bow just a tad deeper than his station deserves and murmuring, “After you, my lord.”

Because the steward’s eyes are on us, Kip sweeps ahead, his sumptuous and elegant robes flapping around him, but he mutters as he passes me, “You are a menace, you know that?”

I whisper, “I do know that, actually,” and manage to get my grin under control by the time I rise and fall into step behind him. A careful two steps behind and to the right, of course.

The Princess of Western Dair, who recently inherited the position from her uncle, Prince Belu, is thrilled by the personal visit from the Viceroy of Zunidh. Well, she is thrilled for the first thirty minutes of it. Then the auditors who she turned away a week ago arrive to demand entrance to her palace and access to her financial records, and she discovers that Cliopher Mdang has a strong belief that all people, including princesses, are subject to the rule of law.

She’s less pleased with our visit after that.

“We’re going to have to watch her like a hawk,” Kip says with a sigh, sinking back in his seat. We have been settled in the princess’s best guest suite (or rather, Kip has — as his secretary, I technically have rooms down the hall), which include large, overstuffed armchairs the color of quicksand and with as much swallowing power, a rug thick enough that I am tempted to take my socks off so that I may wiggle my toes into it, and a merrily crackling fire that Kip fussed over for a good fifteen minutes until it met his approval. Kip goes on, “And stay until the auditors are finished. I don’t know whether to hope that they find nothing, and she’s merely this intransigent out of a misguided sense of noble privilege, or that she’s committed some minor financial crimes that we can slap her wrist for so that hopefully she behaves going forward.”

“So long as it’s nothing severe enough that a Lord Magus is required to oversee the trial,” I mutter. Or if it is, one where the trial can be successfully postponed to after the Jubilee.

“She only inherited a month ago,” Kip offers. “Surely that’s not enough time to have gotten into any serious mischief?”

I raise an eyebrow at him.

Kip grimaces. “You’re right, I shouldn’t tempt fate.” Then a gleam enters his eyes. “Unless it will be something sufficiently dramatic to plunge us headfirst into an adventure.”

I will admit to some skepticism that financial crimes could ever rise to the level of intruiging enough to merit adventure status. “Like what?”

“Smuggling illegal goods in and out of other worlds,” Kip says promptly. “Eahh, maybe, or Daun. Someplace the empire never touched.”

I smile at that. “And we’d go investigate it, would we?”

“Such a lapse in border security has implications for the safety of Zunidh, my lord,” Kip says, in his most earnest bureaucrat’s voice. “Surely someone ought to ensure the matter is thoroughly understood by the mundial government?”

“I do know how diligent you are, my lord Mdang,” I say gravely. We can only keep up the facade for another two seconds before we are both snickering like schoolboys. When the laughter fades, I admit, “That would be nice. Though our friends would protest if we slipped away to another world without them again.” They haven’t accompanied us on this little detour primarily because everybody expects it to be very boring. (Well, that and the Red Company has not, historically, been particularly good with undercover work. Or subtlety.)

Technically, not even I have to be here. When we got the letter from Aioru, apologizing for the presumption, but he knew we were in the area and if it wouldn’t be too far out of our way, et cetera, I wanted instantly to say no, and Kip saw that on my face.

I can go, he said. The Viceroy of Zunidh will serve for this as well as the Lord Magus would, beloved. You don’t need to —

I don’t need to, it’s true. Kip has made that much clear, more than once. And yet here I am, albeit undercover, because — well, because it felt wrong, the idea of sending him off to deal with political problems alone while I frolicked around on adventures. (Again.)

And there is, I can admit if only to myself, a particular pleasure to a small solo adventure, just my fanoa and I. Even if — “It’s probably going to be tax fraud or something equally dull,” I observe. I cannot pretend to a financial mind that equals Kip’s, but a thousand years of being head of state for a world has impressed upon me that, as far as financial crimes go, one can never go wrong betting on tax fraud.

Kip opens his mouth and then shuts it again, looking a little sheepish.

It only takes me a moment to make the connection. “You wouldn’t find tax fraud dull at all, is that it?” I say, overrun in an instant with a fierce wave of affection for my Kip, ridiculous man that he is. “You’d bury yourself in her ledgers for an afternoon and come out humming and rejuvenated, wouldn’t you.”

“I,” Kip says loftily, “spent several centuries slowly weeding out loopholes in the tax law and simplifying it to the degree that ordinary citizens could navigate it effectively. If there are any loopholes that I missed, I would merely be curious to see what they are.”

I am about to retort when the door opens, admitting a woman who introduces herself as the princess’s majordomo. She addresses herself to Kip, of course, to ask whether his excellency is entirely comfortable, if there is anything that he needs, and so on and so forth, but I can see the dart of her eyes to my face now and then.

Secretaries, of course, are not meant to be friendly with their lords, to sit and chat about things with them as if they are equals, as if they are —

Kip opens his mouth to speak and I am instantly, painfully certain that I know exactly how the next several minutes will play out. Kip will attempt to send her away immediately, both because he hates being fussed over and because we won’t be able to speak freely with her here. She will look at the Viceroy of Zunidh requesting privacy while having an informal conversation with his secretary, the only person he is traveling with despite being entitled to a much greater entourage, and a suspicion will occur to her. She will say nothing to Kip, of course, but afterwards, especially if I do not go out to the secretary’s rooms…

And it will simply not occur to Kip to imagine that half the princess’s household could end up gossiping about whether he is sleeping with his secretary. (No matter that we’re not even sleeping together like that.) There is every chance that we could inspire all manner of rumors and leave with him still blissfully unaware. But if he does realize, it will upset him.

And me? How will I feel about it?

I slide smoothly out of my seat and say, “My lord, were you not concerned about the quality of the sheets? His excellency,” I add, in the unctuous manner of a servant who thinks he is superior to those around him by virtue of the high position of his lord, “is accustomed, as you might imagine, to the finest quality linens.” My impersonation, if I do say so myself, is excellent. I have had a great deal of time to learn all manner of obsequious and smug behaviors that surround power, much to my chagrin. “My lord, will you dictate your correspondence to me now, or do you wish to rest after your travels?”

Kip and the majordomo each give me a Look, although Kip’s is well-disguised enough that I do not think the majordomo sees it. Kip doesn’t understand, I don’t think, but he plays along regardless: “Now, please,” he says. So I have an excuse to go get my journal from my Bag of Unusual Capacity while the majordomo flatters Kip around the quality of the linens and dispatches several servants to tidy the bedroom to the standards of one of his exalted status and Kip tries to pretend to be someone who has never slept on the floor of a vaha in his life.

It isn’t until I have my journal in hand that it occurs to me that this, too, will look strange. I flick a look at Kip.

The majordomo is out in the hall summoning servants, so Kip can murmur without anyone hearing, “Surely my secretary would use my writing kit?” and raise his eyebrows at me in a deliberate challenge.

Well. Far be it from me to fail to answer one of Kip’s challenge songs. “Only the best tools and the best work for the Viceroy of Zunidh, of course,” I say. I retrieve his writing kit from his bag instead and take it over to the desk.

It occurs to me as I try not to fumble the catch that I have seen Kip open and use this writing kit immeasurable times, but I have not handled it myself since — well, since I first enchanted it for him. In my sight the enchantments thrum steadily along, still holding up well for the most part, though there are a few fraying and, now that I think about it, a few that I had not thought to add, back when I had not yet thought to wonder whether Cliopher Mdang had an adventurous spirit as well as a clever and funny and methodical one.

I table the thought for the moment, as several servants are entering the rooms to fluff pillows and dust under bureaus and other such things, and focus on bringing out paper and pens and ink to assume an appropriately secretary-like pose. I am not so practiced as Kip is at it; but then, who would be?

I dip my pen to ink, lift it over the blank page, and raise my eyebrows at Kip.

He hesitates for one beat, two, and then his eyes crinkle with secret amusement and he says, “Let us begin with correspondence to Chancellor Aioru. While it’s too early to issue a proper report about these circumstances, not to mention…” and his eyes track our audience, the servants diligently pretending to ignore us, the majordomo visibly focused on supervising their activities, “…but I may still provide an update on another matter of longstanding interest. I had a number of thoughts recently relevant to the Nijani police force.”

I stare at him.

His eyes are dancing. “Let us begin with standard greetings,” he says. “Regarding the recent strikes in Nijan, it occurred to me to wonder if…” and then we are off.

There is a reason, I discover immediately, that secretaries use shorthand. I cannot possibly keep up with him, not even abbreviating proper nouns, not even when he slows down to make it easier for me. He pauses after the first paragraph, giving me time to scramble to write down the last two sentences. Was it ‘merited’ or ‘malignant’ that he said in this last one? I decide to come back to it later and jot down an m so that I may take a time that approaches reasonable to finish writing the last sentence and look up at Kip expectantly, ready for more.

He is trying very hard not to laugh. “Asking me to repeat myself is acceptable, you know,” he says under his breath.

I’m aware, of course, but he never needed to with me. Not that it is a competition — well. Perhaps it is a little bit a competition. Which I will obviously lose, but nonetheless I feel the need to make as good a showing as I may. I refresh the ink on my pen and say, “Of course, my lord,” in my best demure tones. “What next?”

For this next paragraph I take the approach of writing down only the first three letters in every word, which serves me better. I am mildly miffed at first that he slows down again, pausing between each sentence, even though I do not actually need the time to catch up, until he inserts a sly aside about anarchy and a reference to The Customs-House of Colhélhé, which is a joke most assuredly meant for me and not Aioru. Well, of course it is; he is unlikely to send this at all, and I knew that, but it still takes the reminder for me to slow down and actually listen to what he says instead of merely scrambling to record it onto paper. I can hear the buried humor in his voice as he takes us through legal niceties that we had once — well, I would not call it bickered over, but I can’t pretend I didn’t once hear Rhodin describe it as such to Conju. I manage to bite my tongue through one of Kip’s favorite gripes about internal police service factions, which is actually fairly easy to scribe because I know his rant about it word-perfect by now, as the servants and majordomo trickle out. But when he moves on to the three centuries’ old dispute between the duke’s faction and the police service about whether the duke once called the union the scum of the earth, which I have re-litigated at least seven times since, I cannot help it: I put down my pen and lift my head to glare at him.

Kip starts to laugh, his own composure thoroughly dismantled. We are alone again now, so he may smile at me without restraint, his whole beloved face lit up by it, and it coaxes a laugh out of me too, helpless to do anything but join him in his delight.

“Well, Fitzroy,” Kip says, when the laughter has passed, “did this satisfy your sudden impulse to take dictation?”

“It has satisfied any lingering questions about my aptitude for it, certainly,” I say ruefully, but there is a question in his voice, and I make myself answer it. “I was afraid that we were rather failing at pretending to an ordinary lord and secretary relationship.”

Not, of course, that we were ever particularly successful at such a thing.

“Ah,” Kip says. He cocks his head to the side, studying me. “Worried about what people might think?”

Am I? I don’t know. Ordinarily that is his fear, not mine, and one I find frustrating at times. Back when we were secretary and lord in truth, before our vacation, I had worried at times, monitored Cliopher’s status in the court through Conju, but he was too intransigent about regulations and proper procedures, too stubbornly resistant to favoritism towards anybody but especially himself, for any accusations to stick. I had fretted far more about what he thought, what he felt, about whether my cautious overtures — invitations to play chess, to eat with me, to speak with me as a person, now and then — were crossing a line, whether he felt obligated. Weighing on the one hand his petty treasons, his laughing eyes, his jokes; on the other, his — his service, dedicated and devoted, that I feared —

It is all tangled in my head. I shrug one shoulder. “It would be an unfortunate thing for my whim to besmirch the reputation of the incorruptible Cliopher Lord Mdang.” Another facet of this occurs to me and I grimace, scrubbing at my face. “We should decide on sleeping arrangements tonight.” My rooms, as the secretary, are down the hall.

“Fitzroy. Beloved.” Kip crosses the room and comes over to my side of the desk, settling back to lean against it, so he can take my hand. “You hate it when we sleep in separate rooms.”

I do hate it. We’ve been over this. I have trouble sleeping if I’m entirely alone, and I want my fanoa closer than separate rooms, close enough that I can hear him snuffle in his sleep and exchange drowsy good mornings with him, and I really should have thought of all of this before I had the fun and excellent idea to pretend to be his secretary. “And you’ll be entirely comfortable with it if rumor does run rampant around the castle that you’re sleeping with your secretary?”

Kip makes a face that says clearly that he will not be. Then his expression shifts into a familiar stubborn set. “There’s more important things than rumors.”

I exhale. Then I turn his hand over in mine and squeeze it. “I can magic the doors so that we won’t be disturbed,” I offer. “And maybe put a bit of magic on the room down the hall to sound like me telling anyone who knocks to go away.”

“I defer to your judgment on the matter,” Kip says, and leans forward to drop a kiss on the top of my head.

I wind my arms around him instead of letting him pull back afterwards and let my face rest against his chest. His arms settle around me immediately.

After a moment, I say, “I think I’m getting the hand of taking dictation.”

“Are you,” Kip says, amused. “And would you actually be able to recreate that letter from your…” From the way his body curves, I can tell he’s leaning over to peer at the desk. “…shorthand?”

“Yes,” I say, with significantly more confidence than I actually feel. My memory is excellent and I have my notes, muddled though they are; surely it can’t be too bad?

“Hmm,” Kip says. I can hear the smile in his voice. “Well, fortunately I don’t imagine a great deal of dictation will be required tomorrow.”

“You never know. Perhaps it will turn out to be tax fraud after all.”

“Perish the thought,” Kip says, and then yawns. “I think I’m going to go wash up, unless you want first bath?”

“No, you go. I want to polish up some of the enchantments on your writing case.”

“Remember it doesn’t need to actually be indestructible,” Kip suggests, as he disentangles himself from me.

“I see,” I say, “a challenge.”

Kip smiles, squeezes my shoulder, and then goes.

I don’t turn my attention to Kip’s writing case right away. I sort out our rooms first, placing a light alarm spell on the doors to these rooms that will wake me if someone tries to enter them, and then a second, more complex working for a simulacrum of myself to walk out of the door and down the hall to the secretary’s rooms. A maid in the hallway sees it; that will do. One more spell on the door of those rooms, and then I draw back to magics I will enjoy more.

But my messy scribblings catch my eye as I turn my attention to the case. Kip did not, I know, mean his casual comment about recreating the letter as a challenge, but what can I say? I’m curious.

I am prepared for decoding my messy, faux-shorthand to be fiddly and full of guesswork, which it is. What I am not prepared for is how long it takes. Oh, certainly a great deal of it is a side-effect of the difficulty I have decoding my own handwriting, deciding whether the m is in fact merited or malevolent, whether a ‘bri’ is brine or bright or bring, but not all of it.

No; some of it is merely the work of re-copying Kip’s words in my cleanest hand. My best penmanship is, if I daresay so myself, elegant, but it requires effort to make it so; it is not like Kip’s, which I have never seen be anything but crisp enough to be typeset.

I wonder how many hours — hundreds of hours — thousands of hours — Kip has spent making clean copies of my dictation, to make it so.

I read the clean copy through once I am done with it. It is not, I can tell, entirely correct; there are a handful of phrases that sound off, unlike Kip, where I likely mangled the wording, especially at the end where I was paying as much attention to the substance of the letter as the words. But the core of it is there, all the same; I can practically hear, looking at a few sentences, the concealed laughter in Kip’s voice.

I smile down at the paper and decide that perhaps I will file it away with the other papers in his writing kit, as a surprise for him. A few minutes’ examination of the contents puts lie to this plan quickly, however; with half the papers in shorthand and, more importantly, the ledger to Kip’s filing system denoted entirely with incomprehensible acronyms, I will inevitably misfile it. I could, of course, just leave it on top, unfiled, but that isn’t as funny as tucking it primly and properly away with the rest of his correspondence.

My eyes catch on one of the pages in shorthand, and I lift it carefully to inspect it. It isn’t in Kip’s hand, so it must have been written by one of his (actual) secretaries back in Solaara. I don’t even pretend to entertain the idea of deciphering it; it looks entirely like swooping scribbles, and if I did not have centuries of watching Kip write shorthand I would not even be able to guess that it was not he who wrote it.

The mind is a curious thing. The thought coaxes forth a memory that I had long since forgotten, like a river brushing silt away from a buried shell. In the days after the Littleridge treaty was signed, in what I realize in hindsight must be when Kip was beginning to fall ill with bonebreak fever, he once included several pages of shorthand in the morning reports by mistake. I was fascinated by them for days, maybe weeks. I had before that not thought to wonder how Cliopher, or indeed any of my secretaries, had managed to keep up with my dictation; the lack of consideration had shamed me as much as it had inflamed my curiosity. (In my defense, before Cliopher I had not had a secretary competent enough for me to need to question how they had written fast enough.) I had pored over those squiggles and swooshes and tried, in vain, to puzzle out what they said, what document they corresponded to. I briefly considered asking him, only to dismiss the thought at once. What if he thought I was criticizing him? I knew, too well by then, that an emperor could not merely have an idle curiosity; an emperor was not meant to wonder about his secretary’s work; an emperor was not meant to be hungry for windows into the lives of the people around him, into the life of someone he —

I place the paper back carefully into its place. I don’t disturb my Kip’s careful filing system; instead I close up the writing kit, place my shoddy dictation to the side, and reach for my magic.

By the time I emerge, blinking, some thirty minutes later, I have fixed up all the magic on the writing kit that needed maintenance, added a few extra protection spells and a secrecy spell on the hidden compartment (albeit several centuries too late to actually provide any proper protection for the seditious materials he carries around in there), and Kip is perched on the edge of the desk, flushed from the bath and watching me with soft eyes.

“It’s not entirely indestructible,” I tell him, stretching, “but it should hold up well enough. Don’t drop it into any lava, though. Would it be helpful to put a spell on it to teleport it to you if it gets too far away from you?”

“Given our lives, I think that’s actually more likely to lead to a ‘dropped in lava’ scenario rather than less,” Kip says. He touches my clean copy on the desk with two fingers. “I didn’t intend to actually send this, you know.”

“I do know. I was curious about how much of it I could reconstruct.”

Kip picks it up and reads it. He’s smiling a little, the corners of his eyes crinkled.

I say, as diffidently as I can manage, “Will you teach me shorthand sometime?”

Kip’s attention switches back to me immediately. “Probably not by tomorrow,” he says. His voice is as casual as mine, but his gaze is focused.

“I assumed as much. Still.”

“Of course, if you’d like.”

I would like. Not that he writes with shorthand often any longer; not that I need this any longer, to be close to him. But I am curious, still, and I think he will enjoy teaching it to me. I still remember his little flare of what I am almost certain was jealousy at the fact that I learned Islander from Gaudy and not from him. I could not ask him then; I can now.

And it will be fun, to have our own little written language that none of our friends and family know.

“Please,” I say, and he smiles at me. After a moment I say, “How’s the bath?”

Kip shrugs. “Luxurious by my books.” A flashing smile. “But you’re the bath connoisseur between the two of us.”

“I’ll have to perform my own audit.” I stand and crack my knuckles, and then, because I can, I touch his shoulder and skim my fingers across his back to his other shoulder as I navigate around him towards the bath. He leans back into my touch. I say, “Are you tired?”

“A little,” he admits.

“You don’t need to wait up for me.”

“Not that tired.”

“I won’t be long,” I promise. And I am not, even though the bath does, in fact, meet my standards for luxurious as well as Kip’s.

I do pause, on my way back through the sitting room, to pick up my clean copy of the dictation I took. I read it one more time: an imperfect thing, but still a record, in precise black ink, of Kip teasing me.

I tuck it away with my journals and papers. Far less organized than Kip’s, but I will be able to ferret it out again if I want it.

“Buttons,” Kip says dourly.

I glance up. “Buttons?” I inquire.

We are getting ready for the day — well, Kip is; I am still in bed, reading — and Kip is glowering down at his bags with eyes that are still heavy with sleep. “Buttons,” he repeats.

The passage of time is a curious thing. Most days, waking up to a Kip who is a little bleary and unfiltered until he gets his coffee feels so unremarkable I don’t even think about it, one of my little common and ordinary goods. It is only on rare days that I remember to marvel at how astonishing it really is, that this is my life now, that I get to have this.

Why today is one of those days I — well. Perhaps I do know.

I put aside my book and slide out of bed, asking, “And what have the buttons done to offend you so at this hour of the morning, my lord Mdang?”

“Oh,” Kip says, “there’s just a lot of them. I don’t know why I even packed this court costume.” He scowls down at it.

I know why, and it’s the same reason he’s fished it out of his bags for today: it’s the most severe court costume that he has, one of the earliest things Féonie made for him before she developed a good grasp on Kip’s taste and preferences, and he thinks intimidation might be required to back up the auditors.

“It does seem like one that’s not really meant to be worn without an attendant to help put it on,” I observe. Then a thought occurs to me. I add, “You know, for the Viceroy of Zunidh to be traveling with only his secretary is really a bit below his station. Perhaps his secretary is also trained as a personal attendant?”

Kip blinks up at me as I join him. “You want to, what, help me dress?”

“If it pleases my lord,” I murmur, dropping my gaze so I can peer at him through my eyelashes. “Though,” I add after a moment in a more normal register, conscious of who I’m talking to, “I have heard rumor that Lord Mdang is a particularly self-sufficient man, so perhaps not?”

Kip considers this. The drowsiness is rapidly lifting from his expression. He says, “I think Lord Mdang could probably make an exception for clothes as intricate as these.” Then a spark enters his eyes and he adds, “Unless, of course, his attendant would recommend a different outfit for the day’s work?”

I raise an eyebrow at him despite myself.

He grins at me. “Do you actually want to pass up a chance to pick out my clothes for me, Fitzroy?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” I say. He laughs; I turn my attention to his bag.

Now this is a challenge for me. Oh, I could choose the outfit he picked out, ridiculous buttons and all, but he doesn’t like it much, and for all it is appropriately severe, I’ve seen Kip exercise authority enough to know that he no longer truly needs an outfit for a crutch. Something that he will like better, but still finicky enough that my offer to help him dress will not immediately become a farce…

Aha. The vest is a deep blue with delicate golden embroidery, patterns and swirls that evoke the movement of waves to me, and lacing in the back. I pair it with an ahalo cloth mantle that I know he’s fond of and a shirt that is unremarkable besides a set of tiny golden buttons at the cuff, extending slightly higher up the arm than ordinary so that they may flash and catch the eye when he gestures.

I twirl so that I may hold them out to him with a flourish. “Do these meet with my lord’s approval?”

“They do,” Kip says, with appropriately lordly gravitas. Then his brow furrows. “Should I…”

“Here,” I say, “let’s…”

It is awkward and fumbling, for a moment, as he shrugs into the shirt and I hover, uncertain where to help, trying to find my entry into a dance that I have only ever been on the other side of. Then he goes to start buttoning his shirt and hesitates, looking to me, and I answer my cue: I step forward to button it for him.

“You know, I never actually let Féonie do this for me,” Kip says. But when I shoot a quick glance to his face, he’s smiling faintly, though there remains something faintly bemused in his eyes.

“On the contrary, I daresay Conju would have fainted dead away if I even thought about touching a button,” I murmur. My fingers are deft on his, now, but — “I worried about it before I left on my quest. Buttons, dressing myself. Well, I worried about everything. How much I would remember, how much my skills would have atrophied after…” I fumble for words.

“After not being allowed to do things for yourself, for so long?” Kip offers.

That’s as good a description as any. “Yes.” I am done with his buttons, besides the tiny ones at the cuff, which I leave for the moment out of habit (Conju always did those up last), and hold out the vest for him.

“I have thought that we did you a disservice, all those years,” Kip says quietly, as he slides his arms into the vest, “trying to ensure you had nothing to worry about but the work.”

“Said as if Conju would not have knifed you had you tried to interfere with his work or that of my other attendants.” I step around behind him to lace the vest up.

“Maybe,” Kip says, “but I don’t mean just that. Being allowed to care for — for other people, for yourself — that’s a common and ordinary good, isn’t it?”

And I — my throat is tight, abruptly, hot with —

Kip reaches for his cuff buttons. I fumble, for a moment, for the right response — and then I have it, and make the little disapproving tch noise that Conju would have — well, perhaps not dared with me, but that I have heard him make at Cliopher a number of times, albeit mostly when he thought I was not within earshot.

Kip laughs immediately, dropping his hand. “My apologies,” he says. “I don’t mean to deprive you of this opportunity to emulate Conju’s example.”

“Thank you, my lord,” I say, in the prim precision that is as close as I can get to a mimicry of Conju’s voice. I lace up his vest for him, tying it off, and take the moment where he can’t see my face to compose myself, because I am enjoying this game, I don’t wish to spoil it with my — with whatever it is I am feeling.

 Kip holds out his wrist for me, when I circle around to face him again. His eyes are bright, alert with humor, with affection, with something indulgent, maybe, and I — It isn’t that I haven’t gotten the chance to care for him, since we became fanoa, because I have. I did after our return from Sky Ocean, when he was so lost and gray; again after a couple of days of heavy research abruptly drove home that he could no longer do the same kind of intensive work sessions that he could before the concussion; and once after he drank a tad too much during the festivities after Faleron rejoined us.

By the time I finish with his left wrist, he has seen something in my expression, because his gaze is intent and no longer amused. He squeezes my wrist before I can retract my hands, a question in his eyes.

“Memories,” I say. It’s all the explanation that I can find.

“Any you want to tell me about?”

The question does help. I think about it for a moment. “Not at the moment,” I admit. “I’m still…” and I make a vague gesture with my free hand. “Putting the pieces together.”

“All right,” Kip says. He studies me for a moment longer before he lets go. There’s a little furrow in his brow, now, and I search for the right words to ease it.

 “I believe, my lord, that my work is not done. If you’ll allow me?” I say, holding out a hand, and he lifts his right wrist to my grip immediately. I just cradle it for a moment. “I feel like I ought to have some choice gossip or the like for you,” I say. “That was always Conju’s offering of choice in the mornings and evenings. I think I should have been blind to half the workings of court without him.” Kip doesn’t try to hurry me along; he just waits patiently until I start in on the buttons.

“Well,” Kip says, “it’s early in the day yet. You still have time to ferret out the sources of gossip in this place.”

“True,” I agree.

“Though you may have enough on your plate already, with your secretarial tasks. Will you assign yourself guard duty over me as well?”

“You say that as if my magic is not always doing such a thing.” I slip the last button into place and step back so that I may sweep the mantle over his shoulders and fasten the clasp.

“Well?” Kip asks. “Do I pass inspection?”

I study him for a moment. He doesn’t look like the Viceroy of Zunidh who I left behind as I left for my quest. Between the light of Sky Ocean that still clings to his face, the feathers braided into his long hair, and some indefinable shift in his posture, he is more: more certain in himself, more visibly lit by that inner fire, more indisputably Kip.

“The princess doesn’t stand a chance,” I say, and tuck the braid with his feathers behind one ear. Then I brighten as a thought occurs to me. “Will you help me pick out an appropriately secretarial outfit? I don’t think we have one of the uniforms, do we?”

“I don’t think we have either a uniform or anything particularly secretarial, but let’s see what we can do,” Kip says.

The outfit we manage to scrounge up is — well.

“Well,” I say, studying myself in the mirror. “It’s certainly…”

“It’s certainly something,” Kip says.

“Very… brown. Bland.” I suppose bland is what we are aiming for.

“For a certain definition of ‘bland,’” Kip murmurs.

I am wearing a misfitting dust-colored surcoat (possibly containing a coating of actual dust; it came out of my Old Bag of Unusual Capacity, so its provenance is questionable), brown leggings, my leather boots, and a plain white shirt. I would like to be wearing one of the conical hats of the Secretariat, but Kip, not having a bag that is larger on the inside than the outside, chose not to pack such a thing for our adventures. (I pointed out to him once that he could probably fit everything he owned inside his writing kit and he retorted that it would mess up his filing. I love Kip dearly, but sometimes I do question his priorities.) Instead I have a short cylindrical hat that is decently popular in Western Dair, in black with a pleasing little tassel, which I acquired earlier in the week to blend in with a cult of bankers on the other side of Csiven. Plus the gold-bangled bracelet that I have used to anchor the glamour spell that keeps me from looking too much like Artorin Damara to the unwary eye.

“Maybe if the hat matched the surcoat?” Kip suggests, applying a considering eye to my outfit. “Could you magic it?”

Adding the hat to the glamour is easy enough. Then I have to tweak the mirror so that we can actually see what it looks like, as I’ve already exempted myself and Kip from seeing the glamour (it being altogether too strange otherwise).

“Oh,” I say blankly.

It is — odd. Seeing someone other than myself in the mirror. The person looking back in the mirror looks — a little like me, but with all the character wiped away. Restrained hair. A rounder face. Dust-brown hat, dust-brown surcoat. Brown eyes.

This is what I wanted, isn’t it? To blend in. To play at a secretary’s role, whose job it is to fade into the background behind his master.

“I suppose it’s better than Imperial Yellow,” I remark. I can’t quite resist a shiver as I turn away from the mirror.

There is a tight pinch to Kip’s brow that makes me frown in sympathy. “What?”

“Can I — tweak the look, a little bit?” Kip asks. “And use your bag for a moment?”

“Oh,” I say, “of course,” and hand it over to him. “Turnabout is fair play, after all,” I add, in an attempt to make him smile, but Kip is entirely focused on rooting through the Bag.

I cannot quite stop myself from darting little looks to the mirror as he looks. It is — I suppose my clothes do bear some passing resemblance to the Fifth-Level Secretary uniform that I grew so accustomed to seeing on him in those earliest days. I know, I have always understood, that whoever designed the uniforms of the lower-level secretaries meant for them to be unattractive, to blend in. The purpose of a uniform is to conceal individuality, make every person wearing it interchangeable within their role.

I watched Kip wear a uniform for a thousand years. Have I really never asked him how he felt about it before?

“Kip?”

“There we go,” Kip says with satisfaction, hand emerging from the bag. “Yes?” he asks as he steps close enough to fiddle with my surcoat at the breast.

“Did you dislike wearing a uniform?”

“No, I rather liked it, actually,” Kip says absently. “I didn’t have to make decisions about what to wear in the morning.” He adds, a little ruefully, “And I blended in, even as Hands. Princes didn’t pull me aside to ask me questions about committees then, or not usually. How’s this?”

He takes my shoulder and turns me gently to face the mirror.

“Oh!” I say. He’s fished out a glittering blue and green peacock feather brooch and pinned it to my lapel. It looks like something that I would choose to wear and delight in, because it is. I finger it lightly. “It’s not too flashy?”

Kip says, “I passed laws that hairstyles could not be regulated by employers. I think Lord Mdang probably lets his secretary wear whatever he likes.”

I waggle my eyebrows at him in the mirror. “Lucky me, then, to have such an understanding employer.”

Kip snorts, and then something passes over his face like a wave, and he steps up and hugs me from behind, arms wrapping tight around my waist and squeezing.

I can’t hug him back like this, but I can touch his arm. “What brought this on?” I murmur. I dispel the magic on the mirror as I do, so that I am only myself again in it.

“I just wanted to, that’s all,” Kip says, half into my shoulder, sounding faintly mulish about it.

After all the preparation, the reality of pretending to be Kip’s secretary around the Princess and the auditors is somewhat of an anticlimax: nobody looks at me. Well, that was the point of the exercise, I suppose. It is not so unlike the role I played when we arrived in the Vangavaye-ve after our adventure in the Sea of Stars: to step back, to let Kip take the lead, the focus, to make myself not small but not the center of attention.

Perhaps that’s not entirely accurate. Are secretaries meant to make themselves small?

I don’t feel small, not even trailing after Kip while keeping deliberately quiet, because Kip and I exchange half a dozen commiserating looks in the first five minutes of Princess Aria speechifying, and I can see his mouth twitch every time I give him a speaking look instead of actually saying a politely cutting comment aloud. But perhaps the Princess’s secretary feels differently. She is dressed in the personal livery of the Princess, a muddy teal that fades besides the violently violet taffeta that adorns Princess Aria, and shoots me one distinctly judgmental glance before she turns her attention back to her lady. (She, I cannot help but notice, has a conical hat. I adjust the angle of my much shorter hat carefully. I am, at least, taller.) Princess Aria has yet to spare her a second glance.

“Your excellency, surely you don’t wish to observe the auditors all day?” the Princess twitters. (Perhaps that is uncharitable of me, but there is something birdlike and fluttering about the movement of her hands and the way she darts about.) “Perhaps we might take tea in the gardens? Have you been to our palace before? The view of Csiven is most excellent.”

Kip gives her his best apologetic smile. “I am certain it is most lovely. Pardon my interest in the auditors; I wrote the legislation to create their department, you see, and so I have something of a vested interest in their performance, for all that retirement means that I no longer may oversee affairs directly.”

It is a good lie, one that trades on his years of devotion to his work, his investment in the success of his reforms. I might almost believe it myself, had I not seen his wistful gazes back to our friends as we broke away to come on this little adventure, had I not heard — not anything specific, from Kip, exactly. Say instead an absence, where once I would have expected him to regularly write to Aioru, to fret about affairs in Solaara.

“Oh, of course I understand,” Princess Aria chirps. “I can imagine they do need… supervision.” She gives the auditors a slanting glance, and then takes a step closer to Kip so that she may say, not quite so quietly that her secretary and I do not hear, “Commoners often do.”

The most ironic thing is that I can see she means it as flattery for Kip, to set the two of them aside from the auditors, her secretary, myself: we are better, not like them.

He stares at her. “I’m a commoner by birth,” he says, voice flat.

“A-and the Glorious One clearly, in his eternal and esteemed wisdom, saw that you were — a cut above the pack, a —” Eternal and esteemed, is it?

Kip just looks at her.

She changes tactics and drops into a curtsy of second-degree apology, so she does have some sense.

Kip’s face stays hard, looking down at her, which means he is legitimately upset and not putting on a heightened facade of it to put her in her place. I cannot interfere, not pretending to be his secretary — I might not even as myself, not when he has it well in hand, for all that I always want to — but I must shift or make some other small movement, because Kip glances to me and then something eases in his posture, some frustration released.

He makes the gesture to both accept the apology and release her from the curtsy and says, “Perhaps, Princess Aria, since you have little interest in the auditors’ work, you might leave us to it.”

She takes the dismissal for what it is and flees.

Kip waits until she and her secretary have both vanished around the corner before he scrubs at his face. “I used to be better at not letting that get to me,” he mutters under his breath, quiet enough that only I, already stepping closer, can hear it.

“My dear Kip, as far as I am concerned, that you no longer are regularly subjected to this kind of drivel to a degree that you are inured to it can only be to the good,” I murmur. I am conscious of the auditors, as I am always conscious of being watched, but they almost as one look away from us, one of them beginning to issue orders to the others in what I can tell is a too-loud voice. For a moment I don’t understand, and then I am overwhelmed with a fierce rush of affection for these people I have never met. The Ministry of the Common Weal has always been Kip’s ministry; I ought not to be surprised that its members, or at least these ones who may have had occasion to work with him before, might be as protective of him as he is of them.

Kip grimaces. “It’s not even a good insult,” he grumbles; I bite back a grin, though I can see on his face that he knows I am laughing a very little bit at him silently. “Rufus has given me loads more potent. She just reminds me of —” and then he snorts, shaking his head.

“Of?” I prompt, raising an eyebrow.

“A former employer,” Kip says. Oh, that is a strange thought. I am perfectly aware, in theory, that one does not become a Fifth-Degree Secretary without doing secretarial work for various persons along the way, but somehow the thought of Kip being somebody else’s secretary still rankles. “A Countess — Dana? Dawn? I can’t even remember. I suppose I only lasted — what, two weeks in her service? Maybe less. She told me that I was well-spoken, for a barbarian,” he adds, almost off-handedly. His mouth twists. “I gave her a terrific tongue-lashing and it was back to the Master of Offices for me.”

“She fired you because she was rude to you?” Well. Obviously she wasn’t a good enough employer to deserve my Kip anyway, but it’s the principle of the thing. I frown. “When was this?” Perhaps shortly after he’d first arrived in Astandalas? It’s hard to imagine Kip losing his temper so spectacularly when I’ve seen him take much worse without batting an eye.

“Maybe a month before we met?” Kip’s brow scrunches. “Or two?”

I stare at him. “A month?”

Kip blinks at the surprise in my voice and then half-smiles. “Have I never told you about this? I had an awful time of it when I first got back to Solaara after the Fall. There was a power struggle between Princess Indrogan and the Master of Offices, and I was… well, fairly unhappy, and it all coalesced into my being fired from eight positions in rapid succession.”

“Eight?” I am flabbergasted. My ghast is most definitively flabbered.“How did that even happen?”

“Well,” Kip says, “as we have established, I have always been rather dreadful at truckling to authority.”

I wave that off. “But you were quite literally the perfect secretary! The failure at truckling to authority is a happy bonus!”

Kip laughs. “Fitzroy,” he says, “you are the only person who has ever thought this about me.” His voice is fond, but there’s a shadow in his eyes too. “I expect if the Master of Offices hadn’t sent me to trial as your secretary — which he only did because he wanted to set me up for failure — I shouldn’t have made it another six months in Solaara before I had to give up and go home in disgrace.”

And what a terrifying thought that is, that Kip might never have made his way to me. I wish that I could reach out and take his hands, but like this, under the eyes of the auditors, we have already talked too long and too casually. I murmur, “Lucky for me that all your past employers were idiots, then, I suppose.”

Kip smiles. “For me, too.” One of the auditors, in the background, drops a book onto a table with a thump, and Kip continues, voice still low, “How many of them do you think are trying to eavesdrop on us right now?”

He turned his back on them to speak with me, so he cannot see. I cast a quick glance at them over Kip’s shoulder. There’s still several stubbornly loud conversations, but a small cluster of them nearby us have fallen suspiciously quiet and are working very diligently with their papers. “At least four.”

Kip snorts. “I have not missed being under the court’s eye,” he mutters, and then he turns, face shifting into his court mask, and strides forward into the thick of it. “Auditor Veralis, how goes it?”

Veralis is an ambiguously gendered person in their forties or so, wearing the auditor’s uniform but with a pocket square of embroidered florals and a necklace of silver chain link fastened tight around their neck, both of which I approve of. “Eh, can’t complain. Thanks for that, sir. And for coming out for this.”

“We were in the area,” Kip says. We, not I. For all Kip’s many skills, pretending I am nothing more than my role has never been one of them. “What have you found so far?”

Veralis pivots effortlessly into the mode of reporting to the head of the Offices of State. From the faintly chagrined look Kip flicks in my direction, he did not actually intend to take control of this investigation; but it is as familiar a role for Kip to be cast in as it is for Veralis to cast him in, and I can see him sliding more deeply into the mantle of Viceroy of Zunidh as Veralis talks him through the audit.

As they reach the end, Veralis says, “Is there anything in particular you would like us to take a closer look at, sir? Or think we might be missing?”

“No, your plan has everything well covered, I think,” Kip says absently. “We will have to insist on access to the Treasury, but I can assist with that if Princess Aria proves resistant.” Which she seems likely to. “You’re starting here to ease her into it?”

“Yes, sir. Gets her staff accustomed to taking orders from us.”

“Good thought. Is there anything else I can do to assist you and your team?”

“No, sir,” Veralis says. Then they pause, evaluating Kip, and say smoothly, “Unless, of course, you would consider your visit to fall under the scope of the Barres-Thorn regulations, sir? You may recall regulation three-one-b, which states —”

“That nobility observing the auditors should fill out a statement of intent regarding their presence,” Kip finishes. “I do recall.” I have seen deserts drier than Kip’s voice; several of the auditors are visibly trying not to laugh. “I suppose as I am no longer officially associated with the Offices of State, I do fall under that category. If you have the form handy —”

The expression on Veralis’s face is perfectly and delightfully blank as they pass the form over.

“— we’ll begin on it right away,” Kip concludes, and passes the form back to me as he continues, “starting, I think, with a copy of Chancellor Aioru’s letter.” That is directed at me, over his shoulder.

I have watched the development of Kip’s ability to assume command, to assert his authority, over the years. I have taken no small pleasure in seeing the Palace of Stars slowly bend to give him the respect and deference that he has long since earned.

What I have not seen before today is that casual authority directed at me.

I manage not to fumble taking the form from him, almost but not entirely derailed by — what? How wrong it feels; how right it feels. The presumption rankles. The transgression thrills. I am out of my depth with this task of governance, and half my self finds that delightful and the other half frightening. I —

Kip turns to look at me and flushes a deep and splotchy red immediately, which is how I realize that he fell so smoothly into the role of Viceroy of Zunidh, onetime Lord Chancellor, that he forgot that I was the one playing the role of his secretary today. The tips of his ears are red; did I even know they could do that?

I immediately forget every single conflicted emotion I felt and decide that I’m fine taking orders from Kip, actually.

“Of course, my lord,” I murmur, and dare to add, quietly enough that I think Veralis will not hear me over the snickering of the auditors, several of whom have devolved into outright laughter, “Perhaps my lord will instruct me?” and raise an eyebrow at him. A dare, and an invitation.

I watch his face as Kip’s mortification fights with his complete inability to back down from a challenge song, and the challenge song wins. “Certainly,” he says, “perhaps — over here, so that we will not distract the auditors from their work more than I have already done.” There is a pointed edge to that sentence that quiets the auditors and returns them to their task.

He leads me to a table off to the side; I sit, because I refuse to drop his writing case in the process of trying to get writing instruments out of it. (Spells to keep his compartments sorted and in place even if he drops it, did I add those yet? No, I did, that’s all right then.) Kip leans against the edge of the table.

He is taller than me, like this.

Did I tower over him, as I paced past him in the study? Did it feel as strange for him to be a single fixed point as it does for me in this moment, trying not to fumble his pens, wishing I could walk and write? I am so used to Kip as a stable point that I orient my movement around; I don’t like to be pinned down. Kip and I are different in this, though, I think. Kip likes to feel anchored, to feel certain of his footing.

Kip says, “I think Aioru will laugh his head off if I actually submit a three-one-b for the favor he asked us to do for him.”

He’s offering me an out. I don’t want an out. “Are you suggesting, my lord, that the Viceroy of Zunidh needn’t follow the Office of State’s regulations?” This is a somewhat facetious argument; the Viceroy of Zunidh commands the auditors, albeit through the Offices of State, he cannot possibly be said to be improperly interfering with them by observing them. But Aioru, doubtlessly, could use the laugh — gods know the Lord Chancellor job can be grueling enough — and I know perfectly well how Kip will respond to the implication of granting himself improper partiality.

“Certainly not,” he says. Then he hesitates. “Instruction, you said?” Possibly I ought to be the one offering him an out. But his jaw firms into a familiar obstinate set even though his eyes are still a little wide and the tips of his ears are still red, and his chin rises.

Which means I get to play one of my favorite games in the world and try and see how much I can further discompose him.

“Very well,” Kip says. “Begin with the form boilerplate — the date, my name, my titles — yours only if you very much want to fluster some auditors as well as me, as someone is likely to ostentatiously read it once we turn it in.”

Only his, then. But it is a good reminder to make my handwriting neat and elegant, because this is no longer only a game between the two of us, a bit of play — though of course it is still that. But the auditors have seen me begin to write; they will expect a properly filled form at the end of the game.

I hold his gaze. “As you command, my lord,” I say.

His eyes widen just a fraction.

I keep my smile off my face as I begin to write.

It is only when I have made it to titles, writing the H in ‘Hands of the Emperor’ with a little extra flourish, still my favorite of the few titles he has accepted from me, possibly because he’s carried it for so long, possibly because he likes it best, that it occurs to me that something in the tenor of his voice has changed. It was still a command, but a gentle one, and one with choices for me built in.

“Does my lord ordinarily permit his secretary to opine on the subject of their work?” I murmur as I write out ‘Viceroy of Zunidh’ with only a little less satisfaction than I took naming him my Hands. “Particularly such a junior one?”

“It depends on the secretary. And on the work.”

“Very permissive of you.”

“Well, I was a highly opinionated secretary with a very permissive lord once. Next the statement of intent; we received an invitation from Chancellor Aioru, et cetera, and then the text of the invitation.”

He’s settling into a rhythm, losing that first flustered reaction; I am falling down on the job, clearly, of properly ruffling Kip. Not that he is winning this particular game either; for all that he is directing me almost as if I were his secretary, I am fairly certain Kip doesn’t look at his secretaries with this kind of indulgent affection.

“I observe you have not yet begun to write,” Kip says. Something about the cadence of it catches at my ear, but I can’t quite put my finger on — “Is there a problem?” And then Kip raises a single eyebrow at me.

That makes it click. I narrow my eyes at him. “Stealing my gestures, my lord Mdang?”

Kip’s half-shrug at that is supremely unrepentant; his eyes are laughing at me. “They’re excellent ones. I’ve cribbed half my authoritative gestures from you; you never noticed?”

I scowl down at the paper and have to hastily move my pen over to the inkwell; it’s dripped a bit on the statement of intent. “That can’t be right. You’re not intimidating in the slightest.”

“You wouldn’t have been either, not without all the theater and power imbued in the person of the emperor.” Kip says it like it’s — obvious, and not — “If you’d been Lord Chancellor instead you’d have charmed the whole Offices of State within the first week.”

That should not sting now, surely, and yet — gods, what I would not have given to have that. To be looked on with the easy camaraderie and relaxed trust that Kip gets? To be treated in the way that Kip’s friends and family in the Vangavaye-ve responded to me on our vacation, with easy confidence in my good humor and good nature, but from half the Palace of Stars?

“Fitzroy?”

I shake the moment off. What good is there in dwelling? I have long since determined that I cannot let myself think about all the different courses my life could have taken; that way lies madness. I need to —

I ought to properly fluster Kip. Win our game. I cannot quite find my way back to that easy, competitive fun that was yesterday’s dictation, however; it is hard not to be aware of our audience, the auditors, wearing their Palace-neat uniforms, at least a few of them glancing over at us with idle curiosity fairly frequently.

“Perhaps, my lord, this statement of intent ought to have some florid language about how honored and flattered we were for the invitation?” I suggest. “Surely Chancellor Aioru all but expects it now.”

That is not the right way to fluster Kip, it is too Kippish of a thing to do, to instruct instead of receive instruction, to be impertinent. But Kip’s eyes crinkle at it, face brightening with humor even through the remnants of concern, and he murmurs, “You’re quite right, Aioru must expect as much by now,” and I decide all at once that to make Kip laugh instead would be as good, as satisfying, perhaps better in this particular moment, though I could not articulate why.

Floral language I can do, at least; this is the kind of flattery I can recite in my sleep. I have to exert some effort to not dash it off in a careless scrawl, the way such words deserve, but instead keep my lettering smooth, elegant. I never wrote many letters or formal documents, as Lord Magus — who would have let me, and anyway why would I have needed to, when I had Kip with me? So this is one of the first, and I want to imbue it with an appropriate gravitas, for all that this whole endeavor is half a joke between Kip and the auditors and (eventually) Aioru. But it will still be seen by Kip’s former colleagues, will still go to them under his name; I want it to be good, to be right.

The thought rings an echo of a bell, a chord I’ve heard before but cannot name, in the back of my mind. I hold still a moment to see if it resolves, but it does not.

Kip fidgets a bit where he leans against the table. He wishes he was holding the pen instead of me, I think, or else had something else to do with his hands to keep them busy.

This is not his restless motion of choice, but given the circumstances… “You could pace, you know,” I suggest, keeping my face smooth and serene. He will, I think, be able to see the laughter in my eyes. “Here, I can provide the musical accompaniment for once,” and I start to hum Aurora.

Kip laughs at that, a proper, full-bodied thing that he has to bring his hand up to his mouth to muffle. Several auditors look over, only to look away again when they can’t see us do anything of note. I keep writing and keep humming and do not even try to keep my smug smile off my face, satisfied by my success.

Princess Aria does not, as it happens, wish to give the auditors access to the Treasury. She sweeps in to meet us there, accompanied by a fussy, precise man half a head shorter than her with a mustache who she introduces as her lawyer.

In retrospect, the tome of the Law-Code of Astandalas that he has under one arm ought to have given that away, although in my experience, a lawyer who needs to aggressively telegraph that he is, in fact, a lawyer is probably not a particularly good one. But I can appreciate the value of a good prop for emphasis. He does have a nice hat, too, a black top hat that comes out almost half an inch taller than Princess Aria.

“Auditor Veralis,” Princess Aria says, drawing herself to her full height. Then she quails. “Your excellency.”

“Princess Aria,” Kip says, with perfectly blank politeness. “You understand, I hope, that your obligations as head of your province include providing the State Auditors access to your Treasury?”

The not-very-good lawyer clears his throat primly. “Actually, your excellency,” he titters, “I think you’ll find, if you review the clause in Addendum C of —”

“Oh, the abuse of auditor status clause? I’m afraid that only applies to this situation if you have a written affidavit presenting a reasonable case that one of the auditors present on the team today, or who signed the writ to come investigate — that would be Lord Chancellor Aioru, in this instance — is biased against you and unable to fairly evaluate your good standing in the eyes of the Zuni government. Do you have such an affidavit?”

The lawyer puffs himself up a little higher. He’s shorter than Kip is. “Your excellency, I think you’ll find that if you examine the text of the law, it is significantly more broad than that. It states that unexpected incursions to provincial palaces requires signed approval from the Prince or Princess permitting it, and —”

“No, I’m afraid it doesn’t state that at all. I wrote that regulation, you see,” Kip explains, a little apologetically. “If you did have an affidavit that was approved by the Lord Chancellor or Lord Magus — or Viceroy, I suppose — then you would have the right to review the auditor names and request the replacement of individual auditors. Again, I must ask if you have such an affidavit?”

From the way he splutters, it is fairly obvious that the answer is no. This lack of an affidavit does not, sadly, dissuade him. From the nervous glances he sends over his shoulder at Princess Aria, I suppose that his employer would frown on abandoning his efforts, even if I am beginning to suspect the lawyer knows this is a futile endeavor. (I wonder if this is another thing that Princess Aria has in common with Kip’s former employer, Countess Dana-or-maybe-Dawn. I have seen too many examples of the type to truly boggle at it, but willfully ignoring those who you employ as subject matter experts will never fail to baffle me.) Instead he decides to compensate for the lack of an actual legal leg to stand on with an attempt to bamboozle Kip with a dizzying array of nonsense, produced at as great speeds as he can manage.

My Kip has many long years of unfortunate experience with nobles attempting to trample on him with any number of tactics, including this one, and he does not let the lawyer get away with it. He interrupts back, retorts with facts, with laws, with regulations, counters the floundering with carefully applied dismissive eyebrows (stolen, again, from me — I should charge royalties). Eventually, however, the lawyer gets a single half-decent hit in, a reference to a legal case that — while still a case of zero relevance to this matter of Treasury access — happened in the first six months after Kip’s ascension to Lord Chancellor, and which, from the way he blinks at it, was not a case that made it to his radar in the slightest.

The mediocre lawyer pounces on this. “Not a case you followed, your excellency?” he inquires solicitously. “I can provide a precis, of course —”

It didn’t make it to Kip’s radar because I had still been handling all legal matters at that point in his assumption of duties. I clear my throat. “If you would allow me, my lord?” I say.

This, I can admit, is a moment when I can see the value of a good prop. I don’t need one, I remember the case perfectly well, but having a newspaper or book to open to read from ostentatiously would be a lovely little touch to add authenticity, only I don’t know of any in Kip’s writing kit —

Oh, but I do know of one, don’t I?

I flip the writing kit open to its back and pop open the secret compartment carefully — well, not quite carefully enough, a couple of papers flutter to the floor, I’ll pick those up in a moment — but carefully enough to be able to retrieve The Secret Collection without either dropping it or the writing kit, at least.

I flip it open and look up at Kip.

His mouth opens just a little. Then it shuts.

“The Csiven Law Review analyzed the case in great detail,” I say. My voice is smooth as butter. I don’t break eye contact with Kip. “I believe the editor described the case as —” Here, irritatingly, I do need to look down at the book, so that my quote may conceivably come from it instead of my mind, “‘An intellectually stimulating but ultimately facile exercise in reasoning through the applicability of legal remnants from Astandalas designed to protect plundered riches from being returned to their conquered populaces to regulations designed to hold Princes accountable to the people they rule. If the laws the plaintiffs are citing survive another year of Cliopher Lord Mdang’s tenure as Lord Chancellor, I will eat my hat.’” I snap the book shut again and look back up. “If I recall correctly, the case was thrown out by the Lord Magus himself.”

“Nonsense!” hisses Princess Aria, glowering at me. “The Lord of Rising Stars would understand that the concerns of the aristocracy are — are at times above the comprehension of mere commoners —”

“Your highness, he called the case ‘a ludicrous attempt at impeding our servants, the auditors, from carrying out our will.’”

“You forget yourself,” she says drawing herself up to her full height. “What could someone like you possibly know of his thoughts and intentions?”

I let my eyes flick to Kip. His mouth has closed and now becomes a thin, white line. He is biting his lips, I realize, to keep from laughing. It is bright and clear in his eyes, though.

I cannot possibly resist the urge to push a little more. “Perhaps we might ask the Viceroy of Zunidh here? He must know the Lord Magus’s mind best, given his status as his chosen proxy. Though my lord did not, I believe, actually get around to repealing that particular law before embarking on his retirement, as the editor theorized.” I pause for a single, deliberate moment. “Pity about the man’s hat.”

That does it. Kip’s face scrunches in a silent, helpless paroxysm of laughter, composure thoroughly cracked. He’s turned towards me and away from Princess Aria, so she cannot see his face at least, and I can see him put in a valiant effort to keep his shoulders from shaking.

Possibly I ought not to have so deliberately disturbed his court mask at the same time that I diverted attention to him. (Although, truthfully, neither Princess Aria nor her lawyer concern me altogether much as opponents in this negotiation, and alienating either of them in the service of making Kip laugh feels to me, in this moment, like a perfectly acceptable trade.) Still, distracting them while he gets himself back under control is the least I can do, so I add to the lawyer, “Although surely you are familiar with the result of the case in question, as you were the one who raised it?”

I manage to push him onto the back foot while Kip gets his face under control. Kip gives me one glare that would have significantly more bite to it if his mouth was not still twitching, and then he turns to face the princess and her lawyer and is the Viceroy of Zunidh once more.

“We are getting away from the point, I am afraid,” Kip says. “Princess Aria, you are, of course, welcome to file a legal challenge to the auditors’ investigation of your Treasury. You may provide us with a verbal intent to file now if this is your desired course of action, upon which…”

This is a spiel that I am familiar with, and so I tune it out and crouch instead to pick up the papers that I dropped. I don’t intend to read any of them, only gather them together, but my eyes flick over them as I pick them up and that is enough to think: is that my handwriting?

It is. I dropped three pages, and they are all things I wrote. Not even letters, but small things: a hastily scrawled note that just says Going to the arcane library with Aurelia, will endeavor to not find any necromancers this time but come looking if we’re not back by four anyways; a messy, rambling missive about Master Tutor that I wrote him at three in the morning after a nightmare, abandoned mid-word because he woke halfway through the writing of it; a grocery list where we had an argument in the margins about what kind of milk to get.

There is a considerable stack of paper in the secret compartment of Kip’s writing kit. It’s not until I go to place my three notes on top of it and have to consider what order to place them and decide reverse chronological order that it occurs to me to wonder about the rest of the stack, if —

But I’ve barely written Kip anything personal, a small stack of letters from my quest, nothing substantial enough to be a drop in the bucket in this pile. Maybe this is where Kip keeps his personal correspondence and notes?

I shouldn’t pry, I should wait to ask him about it later, but I am fiercely, burningly curious. I compromise with myself and lift the whole stack gently and look at one single note, at the very bottom of the pile, which reads:

Ah, you found it! Well done. Always going above and beyond.

A sledgehammer to the chest would land on me with less force. He kept that? All these years? All twenty or nine hundred or whatever calendar we’re counting by? I gave him his writing kit so early, before I dared to invite him for refreshments, before the first time I ventured a tentative question about his family, long before I invited him to play chess with me. Early enough that all we had was that first year as secretary and lord, our morning dictation sessions, the daily ritual of exchanging good mornings.

Even then? For that long?

The tenor of Kip’s voice changes in a way that tugs my attention back up to the little scene playing out in front of me. I put the notes away, seal up the secret compartment and with it the emotions attached, to take out later to examine in more detail.

“— penalties if you are found to be deliberately wasting mundial government resources and time, and have no reasonable grounds to challenge, as I am certain you are aware. But,” Kip adds, deliberately offhand about it, “since you would of course do no such thing, I am certain that need not worry you.” He gives that a moment to sink in. “Do you wish to inform us of your intent to legally challenge the auditors’ investigation?”

The lawyer looks at Princess Aria. Princess Aria says nothing. As typical of one raised to court reserve, her face stays blank and calm, but I look at her hands to see her pinching her thumb and index finger together hard.

Kip assesses her for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice has warmed some handful of degrees. “Princess Aria,” he says, “when I instituted these audits, I spoke at length with the Council of Princes about their purpose, and what I hoped to achieve with them. I know you were not the recipient of those speeches; perhaps you will permit me to summarize them to you now?”

Princess Aria nods. It is a graceful motion, but there is something nonetheless in the way she carries herself that I recognize as the presence of tension.

“They are meant as a tool for the mundial government to confirm that the provinces are running appropriately and resolve any problems if they are not: nothing more and nothing less. It is not meant to be punitive or intrusive; it is meant to allow…” The speech goes on for a while in that vein. I love Kip dearly, but concision, when he gets going on matters of state, is not his strong suit.

What is, however, is reading his audience. When he says, “…when correction is necessary, it is meant to be proportionate to the crime. Deliberate corruption might need to be met with harshness, but an honest mistake should be met with guidance,” and Princess Aria shifts, something in the set of her mouth changing, Kip slows, wraps up the train of his thought. He holds Princess Aria’s gaze as he asks, “Does that clarify matters, your highness? Or do you have questions for me?”

Princess Aria inhales, holds her breath with her lips pressed together, and then abruptly drops into a deep curtsy. “Your excellency,” she says, “the contents of the Treasury have presented me with — with something of a dilemma. My uncle always spoke of you as a man of — of great discretion and care.” I can see Kip exerting effort to keep his face mild; Prince Belu had much to say about Kip over the years, but praise was rare. “Perhaps I might — consult with you about them? Before the auditors go in?”

“Certainly,” Kip says. He turns, then, so that he can meet my gaze for half a second, long enough to study my expression, and then shifts so that his gaze, and his next words, also encompass the auditors. “Give us a few minutes, please.”

The princess swallows, then raises her chin. “It will be easier to show than to explain. If you will follow me?”

Kip doesn’t look back at me as he does; that would be suspicious given the role that I am playing, and I know it. I am not particularly worried, not with the protections I have wreathed him in over the years, not with the general level of competency that Princess Aria and her underlings have displayed thus far, but I twine a single strand of magic around him, enough so that I will hear it immediately if he calls for me.

The doors to the Treasury shut behind them with a clang. The auditors settle in to wait, and so do I.

I expect to feel — what? That same prickle of irritation at the order as I felt at the one he gave earlier? Frustrated that he acted without consulting me? Displeased at being kept from the action, at having no finger to place on this scale in this moment?

But I don’t feel any of that. If any other person had stood in Kip’s shoes, I expect I would have; if Kip had forgotten who he spoke with the way that he had in that moment earlier, I expect I would have. But that briefest of looks was enough, in the way that so many we have given each other have had to be enough, in the Council of Princes or court or the study, when we had to politely pretend that only my opinions mattered even as his design reshaped the world.

It worked because Kip is Kip, and I am myself, and we are what we are to each other.

That is to say: it worked the same way that it has always worked.

“Really, I should have known,” I say. “The two constants in life: tax fraud and pornography.”

We have left the investigation of the Treasury in the auditor’s capable hands and returned to Csiven, despite Princess Aria’s stubbornly dignified offer to continue to host us as long as we liked. She looked about as relieved as Kip and I felt when we politely declined. Somehow having to discuss her late uncle’s procurement and peddling of illicitly produced pornography with Kip seems to have had a dampening effect on her delight in his presence; funny how that happens.

A thought occurs to me. I lower the book I am ostensibly reading. “Does this count as both? Tax fraud and pornography?”

“I would consider it both, yes,” Kip says absently, working at the laces on his vest behind his back as he frowns at himself in the mirror. We are in our room at the inn, our rendezvous point with our friends, who have vanished… somewhere, presumably some sort of adventure; Jullanar’s note was hasty and not particularly transparent. If they are not back in a few days we may need to go looking for them, but as it is I am perfectly content to sit in our little room, wood-paneled with a patchy rug and an end-table wedged so close to the wardrobe and mirror that I have already tripped over it twice. Despite the comparative lack of creature comforts to the rooms we had up in the Palace, I am significantly more comfortable in it already.

“Do you know,” I say, “I’d thought there was no way to make tax fraud less than horrifically dull, but adding pornography to it might do it. Was it any good?”

Kip snorts. “Hardly. Your epic is better.” As I open my mouth to insist on further details, Kip twists so he can look at me and adds, “It was all very pedestrian.”

“Truly the greatest sin, in erotic paraphernalia,” I say. Actually, it probably is, for Kip, given how little of a grasp the erotic ordinarily has on him. “Well, at least we needn’t worry about prosecuting Princess Aria about it, presuming she’s telling the truth about knowing nothing about it until she inherited.”

“I believe her,” Kip says. I do, too. He twists his head over his shoulder so he can study his back in the mirror and says, “Did you pick out the most complicated vest I own, by any chance?”

He hasn’t made much progress on the laces, as far as I can tell from his angle. I’ve already changed into my own clothes again, but his are, admittedly, significantly more complicated than mine were. “Would you like help?”

The words slip out without my meaning to. I find myself hesitating after I’ve said them, for some reason. Other words are crowding to the tip of my tongue, It’s only fitting given I did indeed pick them out for you, or perhaps, Your attendant would clearly be falling down on the job otherwise, except that our game is over now, surely —

Kip doesn’t give me a chance to say any of them. He’s turned back to look at me, dark eyes focused on me with a look that, for some reason, makes me want to hide behind my book. “Please,” is all he says.

So I put it aside and go to help him. The lacing on the vest isn’t actually complicated, merely meant for another person to do, so it is easy enough for me. “I’m surprised you even packed this vest, given it’s meant to be put on with the assistance of attendants,” I say, as airily as I can manage. “Harboring a secret desire for Féonie’s presence on this adventure of ours?”

“Well, you know I adjusted so gracefully to their presence, it’s hard to do without her and the others now.” Kip meets my eyes in the mirror and adds, voice as light as mine, “Shall I do the cuff buttons, or leave them for your ministrations?”

I wonder sometimes in moments like this what it is that gives me away to him. I am almost certain, just from the way that he’s watching me, that he knows — “Leave them,” I say, and can’t help but add, “they’re intricate enough to be tricky one-handed, aren’t they?”

“They’re a tad fiddly,” Kip agrees as I draw the vest down through his arms and off. He’s humoring me, of course; Kip has never in his life let a problem being fiddly stop him from applying all his stubborn self-sufficiency to it. That he is even willing to humor me in this surprises me, although not as much as it would have before this particular little adventure of ours.

I twist to place the vest on the bed, and as I turn back to him, Kip leans back the last four inches that separate us until his back presses against my front. He looks up at me in the mirror, chin lifting slightly to meet my gaze, and waits, only the faintest flicker of uncertainty visible somewhere in the set of his mouth.

So easily does he strip away my last vestiges of plausible deniability, that this could still be a part of our earlier game or a convenience, and not something that I am doing for my fanoa because I want to. I cannot even be sorry for it; I can never be sorry about touching Kip.

“Here,” I say. My voice is quiet, now. I take his wrist in mine and draw it up to where I can see what I am doing. Like this, undoing the buttons with both my hands, I am loosely holding Kip in the cradle of my arms. I expect him to fidget, I expect him to grow restless or embarrassed at my care, deliberate and slow that it is, but he does not. Somehow this has brought out his patience instead, that steady deliberation that carried him through five attempts at the Imperial Bureaucratic Examinations and a thousand years of slow, painstaking work to reshape the world.

Kip speaks first. “You like this?”

His voice is curious, without judgment, and barely a question — obviously he has grasped that I like this — but some part of me is tempted to shy away from the question anyway. I wrestle that part down and admit, “Yes.”

He doesn’t ask a follow-up question, but there is one present in his gaze regardless.

It takes me another four buttons to find the right words. “I like taking care of you,” I say. I can see that this is not a surprise to him. He doesn’t interrupt; he’s still patient, waiting, leaning into me. Letting me take my time with my words, with the buttons, with caring for him. “The common and ordinary good of caring for someone I love, as you put it earlier, but also… I watched you work yourself to the bone for years, and I wanted… and you hated being fussed over so —”

Kip stirs a little at that. “It’s not — I wouldn’t say that I hate it,” he says.

I’ve finished with the buttons on his left wrist. I stroke my thumb gently down the exposed skin of his arm. I’ve undressed people in a sexual context before, but never like this, as an end in and of itself. “But you often find it difficult to accept care, I think.”

Kip swallows. I watch the bob of his throat in the mirror. “Yes.”

“But you’ll let me, now.” I let go of his left wrist and reach for his right; he raises his hand to my grip. I can feel no tension in his frame, no resistance, only a looseness, a willingness to let me move him where I want him. “You trust me to care for you.”

“Yes.” Kip is watching me in the mirror; I can see it out of the corner of my eye, for all that I am looking at the buttons, undoing them one-by-one. This moment, the intimacy of it, feels soap-bubble thin beneath my fingers; I am almost afraid to breath on it lest I shatter it. “I don’t need care right now, though.”

“It’s not about need.” It could be. It has been before, after Sky Ocean, or any of the other times he has been ill or worn. “Although I’m glad to be able to care for you when you do need it, too.” In some ways that would be easier, or simpler, than what we are doing now — to have the necessity be excuse enough. Easier, but not, I don’t think, better. “But there’s — it’s nice, like this, isn’t it?” I can’t look at him. I thumb at the tiny golden buttons instead. “When you’re not sick, or hurting, and I don’t have to be worried or scared for you. I can just — we can just —” Too late, it occurs to me there’s a question I ought to have led with. “Do you like this?”

Kip hesitates.

Oh. That’s — well, it was a game, wasn’t it? We tried it out; anything’s worth trying once, surely — I go to step back, to pull my hands away.

Kip’s hands twist fast to catch mine in his before I can. “Fitzroy,” he says. His grip is firm and unflinching. He waits for me to look up at him in the mirror before he says, “I don’t not like it. I —” His face does something complicated. “I need — a moment to find the right words.” It’s a small plea.

He did that for me, didn’t he? Let me take my time explaining it. “Yes,” I say, chastened. “Sorry.” He hasn’t let me pull away, but I am not at ease as I was before, and I know he can feel that, and I still can’t manage to find my way back to it. Or I can’t, at least, until he begins to fidget.

I like every way of touching Kip that I have tried, but I do have a particular partiality for holding him like this. Not least among the reasons for this is the fact that Kip, when restless or thinking, will fiddle with whatever is at hand.

Which, in this particular position, tends to be my hands.

He laces our fingers together absently and unlaces them as quickly, pushes my thumbs around with his, rubs the side of his index finger against mine. I let him manipulate my fingers as he likes, keep my fingers loose and pliable for him, and feel the rest of my body loosen under that thoughtless touch too, some vise around my heart easing slowly. I always wonder if he realizes what he’s doing, when he does this; I’m not actually certain.

“I’m not… I don’t like needing to be cared for,” Kip says eventually. He’s looking down at our entwined hands, so perhaps he does know. “Usually it’s because I’m sick, or hurt, and I don’t want to be, or I don’t want to slow down to deal with it. Sometimes…” He pauses, presses my palms together, draws them apart again. “Usually I feel useless, or like I’m failing at what I’m meant to be doing, or — or like I’m failing at taking care of myself, which I — objectively I know that’s…”

“An absurd notion?” I suggest, when he fumbles for words.

“Yes.” He untangles his hands from mine so that he can line up his fingers to the backs of mine, then laces them together again. “But it’s — harder to not feel it. It is different, like, this, when I’m not sick or hurt. Being taken care of, just — just because. Just because you want to…” He makes a vague gesture with our hands.

“To dote on you?” I have to say it airily, but I can say it with him playing with my hands like this. (My Hands in a particularly literal sense at the moment.) “To care, and take care? You were the one who called it a common and ordinary good.”

“Yes, but not —” Kip stops and swallows. His voice is barely above a whisper when he says, “It’s just — hard to imagine myself as someone who — who gets taken care of. Let alone doted on.”

Ah. This time it is his turn to struggle to meet my eyes in the mirror. I bring our entangled hands around him into an embrace and squeeze him against me. “You could be,” I murmur. “If you’d like to be.” I watch the little expressions flicker over his face. The conflict. I hesitate a moment, but — he’s not indifferent to the idea; I am certain of that at least. “Or if you’re… amenable to exploring it.”

Kip looks up at me at that and then closes his eyes almost immediately. His nod is very small.

All right. I can work with that.

It takes a bit for Kip to speak again, but his voice is steady when he does. “Would you like it? Being cared for like that?”

“No.” It comes out on instinct, without having to think, and I have to make myself pause and give the question more serious consideration. “At least not right now,” I amend, after a moment. “It’s not… I didn’t enjoy it, back in the Palace. It felt stripped of love.” It is only in doing it myself, for someone else, that I can feel myself find the honest care, the love, in it again.

Kip thinks about that for a moment. His thumb rubs idly against the side of my hand. “It wasn’t always, I don’t think, you know. It… I know why you had to assume obligation. But I know Conju, so I think I can safely say it was done with love, with him.” He hesitates. “And with me, always,” he adds, voice low.

I could make another joke, here, about Kip not serving as my personal attendant; I do not. I know that’s not what he means. It’s easier to believe him now than I would have found it before this little adventure of ours.

“You like it when I do your hair,” Kip observes. Still stuck on this, I see. Abruptly, ruefully, I feel for him earlier. It is easier to offer than to accept, isn’t it?

“My hair is different.”

Kip considers that. He has an ideas face on. “Would you like it if I washed your hair?”

That — hmm. “Maybe?”

Kip smiles, quick and flickering as a candle flame. “You would be amenable to exploring it, perhaps?”

“Stealing my lines again, my lord Mdang?” I ask, and prop my chin on the top of his head and mock a glower at him in the mirror. Kip’s eyes crinkle at me. “But — yes. I think so.”

Outside, a laughing party passes by the door to our room in a creak of floorboards and cacophony of voices, but it doesn’t penetrate the tender stillness of our room, the simple comfort of the warmth of Kip’s body pressed against mine, the quiet we are brewing between us. At some point this moment will break, and I have another question, one I want to ask him while I am still holding him, before he or I moves to step away.

“Kip?”

“Mm?”

“Would you tell me what it meant to you, for me to be your lord?”

Kip’s attention sharpens to a fine point on me immediately. His dark eyes are focused, with the steady attention that he has always turned on matters of import, like delicate negotiations with the Council of Princes, dancing the fire, and me. “What brought this on?”

I raise an eyebrow at him.

“Well,” Kip admits, “besides the obvious.”

I consider the different ways I could answer him. The thoughts that I have been steeping, that have been growing increasingly defined like clay on a potter’s wheel, like a piece of wood under Ludvic’s knife. I could tell him of the divination I’ve been doing, like casting stalks of yarrow and parsing out meaning, the understanding I’ve been fumbling closer to by wearing his role for a while, but I don’t want to. I want him to tell me, without my preconceptions and thoughts muddying the water. “Mostly it is the obvious, I’m afraid.” I can tell him more afterwards, if he is still curious.

“It’s a broad question.” But I know what the wheels turning in Kip’s mind look like, and I can see them shudder to life behind his eyes. “Hmm.” I watch Kip think. Some wisps of hair have come out from behind his ear, and I am tempted to tuck them away for him, but I don’t want to distract him.

“Have I ever told you about why I went back to Solaara, after my long journey home after the fall?”

“A little,” I say. “Bits and pieces.” And a bit more than that that I have inferred, from the shape of his silences around it, from seeing him with his family.

“There wasn’t a place for me there,” Kip says. “Not for the person I was then, who wasn’t the person I had been when I left. I thought — I thought about trying to force it, for a while. To try and find a way back to that person. Maybe I could do it. Could fit myself into the shape that they wanted me to be.” His gaze has drifted; he looks up at me at that.

I look back. “What a pair we make, hmm?” I murmur.

Kip snorts out half a laugh, and I am still riding that curve of ironic humor — mirror and match indeed, the two of us — so it blindsides me completely when he says, “Only I kept thinking that if I did that, someday I would go out swimming and not come back, and I didn’t want to do that. So I couldn’t stay.”

Nothing could stop the way my grip on him tightens, the breath that punches out of me, the hot knot of reflexive, useless fear that ties itself up in my vocal cords.

Kip drops his gaze. I can see in his posture, feel in the way that he is tense against me, that we are skirting up against a painful topic for him, that the wrong word — the wrong expression — the wrong breath — and he will seal up about this again, close up like a clam around the vulnerable spot. And so I make myself breathe through the fear, and I make myself loosen my grip on him, and I make myself say, as lightly as I can, which is not very, “Then I am glad indeed that you left, even putting aside my personal biases.”

“It didn’t help, at first, being back in Solaara,” Kip says distantly. He tugs at my hands to loosen my grip on him. I let him pull one hand away, but disentangle the other from his so I can keep holding him against me. This time I am certain he does know what he is doing, when he takes my hand in both of his and plays with it so that he has an excuse not to meet my eyes. “I struggled too much to be politic, you see. I couldn’t change anything. My work went nowhere. I kept getting fired. There was no — no purpose, to any of it. To me. And then the Master of Offices tried to get rid of me by sending me to the most finicky and difficult position that he knew, and I found you.”

So he did. So he did.

“And I found — a place where I fit. A lord who joked with me. Who respected me, who was kind to me. Who gave me a purpose, and work to do that mattered, and the tools to do it well.” Kip swallows and presses my hand between both of his. “I have no idea if this is answering your question,” he confesses, voice rough. “I — it meant a thousand different things to me. It meant trusting the orders that I got for the first time, and trusting you to listen if I asked oblique questions about them, if I wanted to tweak the edges of them. It meant delighting all day in making you laugh and then lying awake all night wondering if it counted as blasphemy. It meant working long late hours and lying to myself that it had nothing to do with how heavy the world rested on your shoulders and how badly I wanted to lift some of that weight.

“I couldn’t — I couldn’t hug you when you went far away in your head. I couldn’t touch you; I had to pretend that I didn’t ever want to. I could only give you the best of my work and of my days and hope that was enough.” He drops my hand then and twists, his arms stealing around me, as he says, “It was just — the only way I had to love you, then.”

I touch his face with my hand, tip his chin up so I may press a lingering kiss to his forehead. Then I let him hide his face against my chest the way he so clearly wants to, tuck his head underneath my chin, and hold him.

“I love you,” I say. It gets easier to say every time. Perhaps one day it will feel so easy and so natural that I will want to embellish it, to add flourishes and twirls to it, instead of letting it sit in its full simplicity; but maybe not. I spent so long concealing it behind the language of official proclamations and invitations to games of chess and a gift of a writing kit. Maybe I will always value being able to say it so simply and so directly.

Kip wants to hold me when we go to sleep. I agree, of course, even though neither of us sleeps particularly well while touching. It is worth it for the soft solid heat of him pressed up against me, the arm draped over my waist, for feeling the breath enter and leave his body, the steady rhythm of it, the metronome my world turns on.

“Did you enjoy it?” he asks the back of my neck, as I snuff the light with a moment’s magic. He’s alert, still, I can hear in his voice. Maybe we will whisper to each other in the dark until he grows drowsy and I can revel in cataloging every step of the way his voice changes as he does. It’s a lovely thing, finding that I know him better than anyone and yet there is so much left to learn of him. “Pretending to be my secretary?”

“I did find it surprisingly gratifying at times,” I decide, “but I think next time I’d rather come as your fanoa.” A delightful idea occurs to me. “Perhaps,” I say, “I should have shown up as your fanoa, Fitzroy Angursell, no glamour or anything — after all, who would dare to ask if I was also Artorin Damara?”

Kip hits me with a pillow, but he’s laughing, so I consider that both a victory and permission, should the situation ever arise again.