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There was something that never got shared when they told the story to other people. A lot of that was because it couldn't be expressed in words. Kamet was a poet and a translator, though, and he tried his best to convey some small part of it.
Costis... didn't even really try. But Eugenides could always get things out of people they hadn't even known were there.
Costis could read Kamet's thoughts on his face a lot of the time, but there was always something buried, something desperate and frightened, that he couldn't quite figure out. Maybe, he thought often, because Costis had never been a slave, had never lived in a place where slaves were thought of the way they were here.
Costis treated people like equals by some kind of instinct, an instinct that got away from him often enough and got him into trouble. See: punching Attolis.
More often than he probably deserved, that instinct resulted in other people treating him like an equal right back. See: the results of his punching Attolis.
Treating Kamet like an equal did not have that effect.
The funny thing was, Kamet treated no one like an equal, and, in fact, he managed to treat Costis like both a master, an owner, and like something foul-smelling he had found on the bottom of his shoe.
Perhaps the two concepts weren't so far separated, in his mind.
So Costis tried to keep some distance, since when it came down to it, he had no reliable way of knowing how Kamet would react to any given situation. But they were living side by side, helping each other to survive, and so what Costis's attempt at distance translated to was thinking of Kamet the same way he would think of a fellow guard if he wasn't sure whether he could trust them or not.
"GUT HIM!"
It was frustrating, watching the man fail to fight. The opponent he was facing was either entirely incompetent, or hardly trying. And yet Kamet stood, stumbling back, making no move to attack. Making only an ineffectual attempt to evade. Soon enough he was down.
Costis dispatched their opponents, then moved to Kamet. "Why didn't you gut him? He had no guard up at all."
Kamet dropped his bloodied hands from his head, uncovering his face, and like a wall falling, that barrier between them, between Costis-everyone's-equal and the desperate and frightened place in Kamet that was what it must mean to be a slave, was gone.
Kamet was babbling about blades, about what it meant to be a slave. Spilling all of his terror along with his blood. Costis could see him coming apart, see the frayed seams where he'd held himself together all these years finally ripping. All that had been locked inside him was coming out, and now that Costis could see how terrible that was, all he wanted to do was put Kamet back together.
Let him keep his secrets buried. Let him keep his strange ideas about his place in the world. It wasn't worth the pain.
So Costis took Kamet in his arms, held him tight as if he could hold him together. But Kamet didn't stop falling apart. Instead he panicked, flailed, then cried, like a child, like one of Costis's young cousins when they were hurt or afraid. So Costis did what he would have done for them, hushed Kamet and rocked him gently and told him that everything would be all right.
He just caught himself before he kissed Kamet's forehead to ease the hurt there. This was a grown man and what he would need most was stitches, like any other man injured on the edge of a sword.
Stitches would put him to rights. Put him back together. It was a process Costis knew well, and it soothed him, in a way.
Made him think that things really would be all right.
But in the following days, Costis found that Kamet had gotten put back together differently. Or, the two of them got put back together a little differently. Gods knew it had broken Costis a little, to see Kamet like that.
From there until the end of their journey, Costis felt like Kamet was treating him as an equal, as much as Kamet understood how.
Kamet believed his Attolian dead for a full half a day.
It felt much, much longer. And it felt like one long moment, frozen, repeating itself.
The stranger who insisted that the Attolian had been a friend only made the whole thing more surreal. But friend wasn't quite right.
Part of him refused to think the word, because how awful would it be to have a friend for the first time, and only realize it once he was gone?
Still, once he had realized it, he'd well and truly realized it.
It was like a heavy weight on him, until he heard that quiet, tentative voice, asking, "Kamet?"
"You're alive?" Kamet asked in return.
"Of course I'm alive!" and then he muttered something that sounded like "Die of a fall. Eugenides wouldn't drop me now," but that couldn't be right.
As soon as Costis was standing on the ground again, as soon as Kamet could reach out and touch his warm skin again, the solidity of all that he felt stopped being a weight, and started being... something else.
He didn't know what he felt, but there was a lot of it. No wonder that the Attolian was somewhat taken aback.
He couldn't pinpoint it all, but there were some elements he knew. The sheer joy of seeing he was alive, of laughing with him, was more joy than he'd felt at once in any other place or time.
When Costis got up out of that well, he felt wretched. But he was here to rescue Kamet, and he would do so if it cost him his last breath.
And there was nothing Kamet could have done, anyway. So Costis kept insisting he was fine.
Which, of course, didn't work.
It made him think of his king, of Eugenides and his tricks.
Kamet frowned like Costis's pain was his own.
"Actually I am inches from death from a putrid sore throat and you should leave me in the nearest ditch."
"What?" Kamet looked taken aback. Denied that he would. Because for him, it was close enough to hurt. He wasn't used to an existence where things like that could be joked about. He wasn't far from a place where people really would share this much time together and then leave one another in a ditch.
Costis made a start at explaining. "I've seen someone else do it that way." But the mood wasn't repaired.
Why had he done that? Costis wondered. It was odd enough that he'd treated the man like a baby cousin when he'd been hurt. But now he was echoing the manner of Attolis with his queen, his wife. That wasn't the kind of relationship he and Kamet had.
Was it?
No, he thought. No, we are not like them, not so much like them, or it would have worked. Kamet would have been comforted. But... some part of me sees us that way, sees him that way.
Huh.
After pondering that for a moment, Costis dismissed it as a question for later. First, they needed to get safe home.
His Attolian was sick.
Sick in a city haunted by the specter of the plague. It was a terrifying prospect.
And then he got worse. He hallucinated, he babbled. Kamet took care of him as best he could. Tried to comfort him through the worst of it.
Later, when he was writing to Relius, Kamet didn't think it pertinent to mention that when Godekker rounded the corner, Kamet had been running his fingers through Costis's sandy hair.
Godekker, of course, had been horrified. Kamet understood why he would be.
"It's not because he loves me," Kamet said, and he knew what he spoke of, had seen what it was to have a master who claimed love. His experience of love was that it was another place to set the wedge of power, another way to get someone to do your bidding.
His Attolian would never do that.
Was it because how Costis treated him was something other than love? Or was it because love in the Attolian language meant something other than it did in Mede?
Was it because Costis was just Costis, and Kamet loved him for that?
Kamet supposed it didn't matter. Whatever they felt for each other, it was not something he could explain to Godekker so that Godekker would understand.
Costis frowned. Kamet hadn't been seasick before Sukir.
That closed-off place in Kamet was tightly knotted again. After what happened last time, Costis would not make him reveal more of himself than he was comfortable with. But it was hard, watching him. The closer they got to Attolia, the worse he looked.
Kamet told him not to worry.
Oh. That was why it didn't work. At all.
There was something wrong in Kamet's world, something very wrong, and Costis wanted, more than anything, to fix it. Kamet insisting that there was nothing felt like an insult. Felt like adding insult to grave injury.
On the day they arrived in Attolia, Kamet came out of his cabin looking like a dead man. But still, it was only fine, fine, fine.
Until the guards came for them both. And then it all tumbled out of him.
He'd only come with Costis because his master was dead, and he'd be killed, or worse. He'd kept it a secret so Costis would help him get out of the Empire alive.
He'd wanted to run. He'd wanted to run the whole time.
"I thought we were Immakuk and Ennikar." The heaviness in his gut was grief. He was losing a friend. Losing what he'd thought was a friendship, what he'd suspected was even more. But no. "Just Senabid and his master."
Kamet hadn't trusted him with this because Kamet had never trusted him at all. Never even came close to seeing him as an equal, let alone a friend.
Insult to injury indeed. What an idiot Costis had been.
So. He was in Attolia, and he was not dead.
Kamet had thought himself doomed, and then everything was turned on its head. A boy he'd taken first as less, inferior and unskilled, and then as almost an equal, a friend, had appeared standing in the shoes of a powerful king.
The boy was the king. The Annux.
For the first time, Kamet understood how Costis could so easily approach a person without assuming their worth. Eugenides Attolis played with dignity and status as though they were children's toys.
It was only later, in Nahuseresh's (now his) rooms in the Attolian palace, as his sobs relented, that Kamet truly thought about how much he had risked by addressing the king, by admitting his deception of Costis, the king's agent.
He had risked everything. Why?
Because he had lived with the thought of his own torture, his own death, for as long as he could remember. He had lived side-by-side with the idea that he and his fellow slaves could be taken away at any moment, tortured on a whim. He had measured their fates against his own, always protecting them when he could also protect himself. Doing for Laela and the others only what he could afford to do, and no more.
But the thought of those things befalling Costis was unbearable.
It was the same fate. The possible price of serving a powerful but sometimes capricious master. And Costis had more choice about it, in some ways at least, than Kamet ever had.
He had lived with that threat every day for most of his life. It was the way things worked. Everywhere in the world. Here, among the Mede, it mattered little. We all die. But his mind rebelled at the same things happening to Costis.
If it was certain to befall one of them - which it had seemed at the time - there was no hesitation. It must be Kamet who took the blow.
Kamet could not ever remember a time before this when he had weighed another person's fate more dearly than his own.
It was an odd thing. A thing Kamet did not yet know how to explain.
Costis knew he would be speaking to the king about his mission. For the life of him, he could not predict how that conversation would go. He felt so very many things about it, and all of them seemed to pull him in different directions.
When they spoke that evening, it was on the roof, but not, thank all the gods he'd ever heard, on the crenelations.
"So. Nahuseresh's secretary has defected to Attolia." The king looked pleased.
"I suppose he has."
"You brought him here. Thank you, Costis."
"I wish I hadn't," he blurted without thinking.
"Why?" the king frowned.
The answer was so large, he wasn't sure where to begin. "He thinks we can't read," Costis said ruefully. He thought a little before he said more. "He doesn't trust me as far as he can throw me. He's not used to how people treat each other here. He's learned, but not enough to fit in. He doesn't want to live here. He probably never will. I wish I'd known."
"I'm glad you didn't," Eugenides told him, not without sadness in his voice, but without regret.
Costis laughed unhappily at himself. "I don't know why I care so much."
"You love him," Gen said, as if it was obvious.
Costis took a breath. "Yes," he agreed.
"Does he love you?"
Costis was silent for a long moment. "I don't know if I'd know, even if he did," he told his king. "I can read some things in his face, but not others. Do you know? Can you tell me? What should I do?"
Eugenides pressed his lips together, considering his answer, eyes on his hook. "My experience of the progress of love is not, perhaps, what anyone should be looking to as an example," he said.
Costis shook his head, looking at his king with widened eyes. "But you have come through so much to be where you are, and what you have now is without price."
Eugenides's expression softened. "That it is, Costis. That it is." He looked at Costis then with a glint in his eye.
Well. Costis knew him well enough to know what that meant.
"So tell me what your plan is."
The king put on an entirely false expression of innocence. "You think I intend to engineer some kind of... elaborate romantic trap?"
"Yes, my king. I do."
"So, so, so." The corners of his mouth curled upwards. "I think... you should go home to your family. Spend time with them while you can. I have somewhere else to send you, and this task may keep you away from Attolia much longer than the last one did."
Costis just looked at his king. No one knew what his king knew.
Eugenides sighed. "Kamet has just had his entire life uprooted. By you, in many ways, and in many ways, you have been his only constant since. I think it would benefit you both to let him learn what his life could be without you, so that when he decides for himself what he wants his life to be, he will know what it means to choose to have you in it."
"And you already seem to know where that choice will take him."
"With a little nudging," Eugenides admitted, "yes."
So, so, so.
Costis liked to say, these days, that he saw everyone as his equal, and although it got him into trouble, it had also gotten him here, and so he refused to regret it.
It wasn't quite true, Kamet thought.
Costis saw the different levels of society clearly enough. Costis knew well enough how he was supposed to act. The respect that society thought he owed one person more than another. And in everyday matters, he went along with it.
But in matters of the heart, he ignored that, because every person's heart, that Costis weighed equally.
Well. Maybe Costis weighed Kamet's heart a little dearer, in the end.
And that was love, Kamet supposed.
That was the part of the story that was too important to put to paper. Kamet knew better than most that even burned, words put to paper and seen by other eyes were dangerous.
So Kamet never used the word "love," or any that could mean the same. He couldn't bring himself to.
It didn't really matter in the end, he thought, as he sat next to Costis on the sofa facing the windows with the wondrous view of the sea, and kissed his cheek. Relius could read between the lines. Relius would tell Attolis the important thing that could hardly be put into words.
That the two of them were living happily ever after.