Work Text:
Dear Kay,
Forgive me for addressing you by your old name. It feels too strange to call you Kamet—let alone Kamet Who Called Him the Great King—even though I know, now, perfectly well now who you are.
I write to you about your papers. As you wished, the account you wrote of your journey from the Mede Empire is safe here, shelved away from prying eyes. Perhaps one day it will be moved to the main collection. Currently, when visitors look up your name in our records, they find only the annotated copies of the Enoclitus treatises you made when you were here, and the two dialogues you translated into Mede. You had just begun a third translation when you left, and I am sending you your notes, along with my own copy of the original text, in the hopes you will complete it—although I suppose in your new life you may not have time for such things.
In sorting through the box you left, I also found some additional papers you probably did not mean to leave behind. They appear to be from an early draft of your account, and I assume you removed them for a reason. Instead of shelving them, I am sending those papers along, too, for you to keep or destroy as you wish.
I wish you success in your endeavors. That is what the Attolians say these days, is it not?
Your friend,
Zobiya, Chief Archivist in the Temple of Moira, Reyatimi
***
We did not talk much, as we climbed the Taymets.
The journey was not as difficult as I had feared, but for several nights in a row it was very cold. During the day, the sun warmed our path just enough to melt the snow as we walked through it, and the snowmelt soaked through the gaps in our sandals and into the strips of cloth we had wrapped around our feet. Once our feet were thoroughly damp, night would fall, and everything would freeze again.
Each night, the Attolian and I peeled off our sandals and sat close by the fire, trying to get warm again before we went to sleep.
On the third night, we found a shallow cave, and we sat at the mouth of it, with our backs to the cave and the fire in front of us. By accident or design, the Attolian had angled himself so that his broad shoulders shielded me from most of the wind. I wasn't going to admit it to him, but I was quietly grateful.
"It's worse than this in parts of Attolia," said the Attolian apologetically, glancing at me.
I smiled at him, and shook my head, because I knew he wouldn't criticize his own country unless he was going out of his way to be kind.
"Not in the capital."
In the winter, the city had certainly grown cool—except for the palace itself, which was heated by an ancient, malfunctioning hypocaust system that roasted the inhabitants of the palace more often than it warmed them. But I had seen snowflakes in the air only on the coldest days.
I had not minded. I had liked looking at the snow, and the paths outside the palace had always been swept clear of it before I had to walk on them.
The Attolian nodded. "Not so much where I grew up, either. I saw a lot of snow when I was stationed in the foothills, though, during the war with Eddis."
I glanced down at the Attolian's bare feet, which he had put as close to the fire as he dared. We had both unwrapped our feet, and spread the cloth wrappings out to dry on the stone next to us.
"I suppose you had boots, when you were in those foothills."
"So I did," he said, regretfully. "And a much warmer cloak."
I pulled my own cloak tighter around my shoulders and stared into the fire, thinking about the war my master had started. The Attolian would have been even younger then—probably a new recruit. I wondered if he had known what he was getting into, when he joined the Queen's Guard instead of becoming a tinsmith.
The Attolian interrupted my thoughts with a sigh.
"You are shivering, Kamet."
I suppressed my own sigh. It was not like I was doing it on purpose. We had both lost weight since the start of our travels, but the Attolian's greater bulk still probably kept him from feeling the cold quite so badly as I did.
He shifted a little, turning towards me. We were sitting very close.
"Let me—" he started to say, and suddenly the Attolian's arm was draped over me, dragging me closer. I flinched.
"Oh," said the Attolian, and he moved his arm back, scooting away so that no part of his body was touching mine.
There was a very long pause.
"I'm so sorry," said the Attolian.
I breathed for a minute, not looking at him. I thought about what happened after the Namreen sliced open my head. The Attolian had hugged me. My first panicky thought had been that the Attolian was going to try to kill me, too, and I had struggled in his arms, desperate to get away. But it had just been an expression of sympathy, the kind of comfort a normal person like the Attolian would have offered to anyone.
When I knew my voice would be steady, I spoke.
"You startled me."
"I'm sorry," said the Attolian again.
I was the one who should be apologizing—he had really not done anything wrong—but I was too cold and too tired to bring myself to do it. Instead, I turned my head so I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He was watching me, frozen in place. I was close enough to see his face clearly in the firelight. He looked stricken.
I wanted to grab the Attolian's hand and pull his arm back around me without having to explain or say anything, but I thought that would probably just make everything more awkward.
"It's all right," I said.
He didn't move. I sighed.
"Put your arm over me again," I said. "I don't mind, and I am freezing."
A moment later, the Attolian's arm settled around my waist. This time, instead of flinching, I leaned against him.
"I'm sorry," said the Attolian, for the fourth time in one night. "I should have asked."
"You were just being kind," I said, tiredly. "It doesn't matter."
With my head against his shoulder, I couldn't see his face, but I could tell he disagreed.
"People don't usually touch me," I admitted.
The last person who had really touched me, other than the slavers who had beaten us both outside of Koadester, was Nahuseresh. For a moment, I imagined how the Attolian would react, if I told him how gently my master had bound up my broken ribs, rubbed salve into my bruises, and put me to bed. Probably a mixture of pity and disgust, I thought, no matter how politely the Attolian hid those feelings behind the stubborn, blank face he made when I told him shocking things.
I felt sick thinking about it.
Then I thought about what the Attolian would do when he found out my master had been dead this whole time, and that made me feel even worse. I wasn't cold anymore, but the Attolian's arm was like a weight around me.
"Not even your friends?" asked the Attolian.
I didn't say anything.
"You were lonely in Attolia," said the Attolian.
I specifically remembered telling the Attolian I had not been lonely, but it didn't matter enough to correct him.
"Unappreciated," said the Attolian, correcting himself, because he could be an idiot but sometimes he read my mind. "Whatever. I thought that meant that in Ianna-Ir there were people who did appreciate you."
Suddenly I wished I could snap at him.
If you thought I was so appreciated in Ianna-Ir, I wanted to ask, why in the name of your stupid Attolian gods did you think I would agree to leave with you?
Instead I said, "I had a place in Ianna-Ir. I was respected, and I knew what was expected of me."
And the people around me had known what was expected of them. They had known not to ask prying, personal questions. Laela and I had gotten along very well without asking each other almost anything.
I didn't want to think about Laela, who was dead.
"I told you I didn't have equals in Attolia. But I did not really have them in my master's household, either—or in the Emperor's palace. I was friendly with some of the other palace secretaries, and with some of the temple scholars in Ianna-Ir, but I could never trust that someone's kind overture was not just them trying to put me in a position where I owed them a favor."
"What about Marin?" asked the Attolian.
If I didn't want to think about Laela, I doubly did not want to think about Marin.
"That was a long time ago," I said, finally. "Besides, I told you she could see the good in everyone. Once she decided to be my friend, there was no putting her off."
I shifted a little, and the Attolian lifted his arm to let me settle, then put it back.
I knew that I could pull away and stop talking and go to bed, and the Attolian would almost certainly let me. The Attolian would realize, belatedly, that he had overstepped and should not have asked. If I were lucky he would never bring it up again. If I were lucky, after we finished crossing the Taymets I would figure out how to slip away, and the Attolian would never ask me anything ever again.
"When I met Marin we were both too young to be worried about that kind of thing."
I didn't know why I was being so chatty.
"It was a few years before Jeffa died—the old secretary, before me—and I was still living in the dormitory with the other slaves. Marin was there too. We were more or less the same age, still practically children. While I was learning languages and arithmetic she was learning dancing and poetry and—all the other things dancing girls have to know how to do."
"Poetry?" asked the Attolian.
"Most powerful men want mistresses they can talk to," I said. "It's the same in Attolia."
Perhaps not exactly the same, but the Attolian, who grew up on a farm, didn't correct me.
"She had to memorize a lot of love poetry," I said. "She thought most of it was so stupid. She would tell me the correct version of a poem and then do it again, but with the words changed to make it funny, or inappropriate, or to be about something else completely."
I had been so envious the first time I heard her do it. Dancing girls didn't get language lessons. All of Marin's poetry was in Mede, or translated by somebody else into Mede. But she could improvise like it was nothing, and when she composed her own poetry she never needed to write anything down.
Once, she told me a poem, translated from the Ensur by somebody else, about a young man with dark hair and kind hands.
"That's not right," I told her. I recognized the poem from my own lessons. "It's part of a longer epic about a warrior—he's supposed to have strong hands."
I pronounced both of the Ensur words for her, carefully enunciating the difference.
"Bad scholars mix them up because the spelling is so close."
I was showing off, and I only meant to criticize the translator, not Marin. But somehow my explanation hurt her feelings. She sniffed and told me that I was being pedantic, and she didn't need a spelling lesson.
Then she recited the poem again, changing the words so that it was about a young man who was scrawny and annoying. The new version still scanned perfectly.
I didn't know what to say to that, and Marin rolled her eyes at me and left the room—late for something, or pretending to be.
"When Jeffa died," I told the Attolian, "I moved out of the slaves' dormitory and into his office. I had to live in Nahuseresh's apartments, so that if he needed me I would always be there."
Marin had snuck out of her dancing lesson the morning after Jeffa died, and she had run to my room to find me packing away my few belongings. I shared the room with two other boys, but they had their own work to attend to, and neither of them had lingered to say goodbye. I hadn't wept about Jeffa—I never would—but Marin had wrapped her arms around me and pressed her wet face into my neck. She hadn't needed to say anything. Before I left, she kissed me.
"I thought we would have more time," Marin whispered, and I had still not cried. I picked up the box that held my scrolls, and my penknife, and my extra clothes, and left.
"A year later, when she became Nahuseresh's mistress," I told the Attolian, "I was happy."
That wasn't exactly true. But I could not think of a more accurate word, in Mede or in Attolian. No single word could capture how I had felt.
"It meant I got to see her again."
It was an awful year. Jeffa suffered in his last weeks; looking back, he must have been ill for months. But he had hidden his illness for as long as he could, and the fever that killed him, when it finally came, had been sudden. I had been young and full of myself, and I thought he had already taught me everything. I didn't realize that was wrong until after he died.
Whatever minor friendships I might have formed during my apprenticeship were meaningless now. In the blink of an eye, I was granted a fraction of my master's power to command and punish—and I was so afraid of using that power unfairly that I found it easier to simply cut ties. Even if I had tried harder to maintain my friendships, there was simply no time. When I was not tallying accounts or shadowing Nahuseresh in endless meetings, I threw myself into my language lessons, which had not stopped, and tried to focus all my energy on more perfectly reading Nahuseresh's mind.
I still saw Marin, of course—but only in passing, and never alone. Then Nahuseresh noticed her, and suddenly she was in the apartment nearly all the time. It was like watching someone else strike a match after living for a whole year in the dark.
The Attolian was so quiet beside me that I wondered if he had gotten tired of my story. I lifted my head to check.
"I’m listening," he said. His face was unreadable, but something in it made my stomach twist.
I put my head back on his shoulder so I wouldn't have to look at him.
"We didn't pick up where we left off. At first it was just nice to have someone to talk to, someone who understood—what he was like. She didn't just know how to manage him, she often seemed like she actually understood him. Sometimes she even—"
I broke off. I didn't know how to talk about this, and even if I could put my thoughts into words, I did not expect the Attolian to understand.
It was not love. Neither of us had loved Nahuseresh. But he had been at all times the center of our universe, the sun around which we were forced to orbit, and it had been comforting, in an unexplainable way, to know that when Marin looked at him, she saw the same person I saw. Not just our implacable, unpredictable master, but a man who was jealous of yet loved his brother, whose ambition stretched beyond his talent, whose taste was at times refined and at other times horribly idiosyncratic. Marin had somehow managed to look at Nahuseresh with a heart full of pity. She could talk about him—and even sometimes to him—like he was just another person, and not a monster or a god.
Marin's empathy for Nahuseresh had, of course, led us both to a terrible miscalculation, but that was not the point.
I didn't know how to explain any of this to the Attolian, who would just take it as more evidence that I was brainwashed on the subject of my master. The Attolian seemed to hold this opinion simultaneously with his mistaken belief that I was here in the first place because I had chosen to run away—a ridiculous contradiction to which I dared not draw his attention.
"Never mind," I said. I began again.
"It was nice to have someone to talk to. It was nice just to see her on the other side of the room, if Nahuseresh or one of his guests was acting ridiculous, and to not need to say anything or make any kind of a face, but to know that she was thinking the same thing as me."
The Attolian laughed at that.
"As time passed we were alone more often. She would forget our master's schedule and come to his rooms when he was gone to ask him for a favor—and then ask me instead when she saw he was not there. Could I make room in the budget to buy a different kind of silk for her new dress? Would I please tell Nahuseresh to hire someone to redecorate her new room? Little things that she was not supposed to ask for, but that we both understood Nahuseresh's new favorite probably could ask him for."
I had been so annoyed with her for doing this. I had not understood why Marin, usually so considerate of others, was so determined to waste my time asking me for things I could not give her.
The day Marin asked about the dress, she had begun by sending the houseboy away. It was just the two of us. Because we were alone, I dropped all pretense of politeness and snapped at her that no, the silk Nahuseresh already paid for was good enough. I told her I was not going to waste our master's time—or more importantly my own—redoing the budget so that she could have something else. Marin insisted to my face that I should check my math. Then she actually reached around me to grab the accounting book off my desk, and in doing so knocked a bottle of ink all over everything. The ink spilled all over my carefully kept accounts, all over Marin's dress, and all over my hands as I tried to stop her.
I stood there, frozen with anger, and she kissed me for the second time. This time I did not walk away from her. Later, I scoured my hands until my knuckles bled to get rid of the ink stains, and I stayed up until dawn to recopy the accounts on clean pages.
Marin must not have been able to get the ink stains out of her dress. I never saw her wear it again—a shame, because she had been beautiful in it. The dress that replaced it was made of reasonably priced, high-quality silk, but unfortunately the dressmaker had followed Nahuseresh's instructions exactly about the cut and color. The exotic, sickly green fabric looked horrible against Marin's skin; and the cut was out of fashion. She wore the new dress with a perfectly straight face.
"She was making excuses to see you," prompted the Attolian, and I realized I had stopped talking some time ago.
"Just so. And the excuses only became flimsier. Every time we did not get caught, we became more stupid."
It was a miracle we were not caught that very first time. Nahuseresh had been out visiting a favorite aunt and could have come home at any moment. But instead of making us cautious, our luck made us reckless.
Marin had been so unhappy. She hid it well, but the more wrapped up we became in each other, the more obvious it became, at least to me. She had laughed often when we were younger, but now she rarely even smiled, unless she was putting on an act. She still liked hearing poetry, but if I asked her to recite something of her own, she would shake her head and say it was too much trouble. Now, she only performed for Nahuseresh, or for his guests—not for herself.
So even though I knew we were courting trouble, I swallowed my fear and told myself it didn't matter. What were a few stupid risks, if I could make her happy?
"Once or twice, I have wondered if Nahuseresh knew the whole time, and only put a stop to it when he realized we were planning to run away."
The Attolian—perhaps guessing this was safer ground to ask about—wanted to know more about our plan.
"How would you have done it?"
"We were going to wait until the summer," I said. "Nahuseresh spent far more time at the palace than he did on his own estate. He did not get along very well with his wife. But even he left the palace to go home every summer, to escape the heat. Everybody does."
"Do you think your master would get along better with his wife if he didn't bring dancing girls home with him once a year?"
It was a non sequitur, but a fair question. I matched the Attolian's bland tone when I replied.
"That may have been part of the problem, yes."
I couldn't remember if Marin had felt one way or the other about Nahuseresh's wife. Years later, Laela had been quietly, angrily afraid of her. I had never quite asked her why.
"Marin thought that she could slip in with someone else's attendants at the very beginning of the summer, when the nobility first began to leave. Once she was out of the palace, the group she left with would be less likely to miss her, and she could slip away and meet me."
"Because you could leave the palace on your own. Clever."
"The timing would have been hard to get right," I said. "If either of us were missed too soon, it would be impossible for the other to get away. And there was a chance that once we picked a day to leave, Nahuseresh might decide he needed one or the other of us to spend the day with him. We thought we could steal clothes ahead of time from the palace laundry, but that was risky too. We didn't want another slave to be blamed, or accused of helping us by accident.
"We didn't have a plan about how to get out of the city, or where to go, or how to pass ourselves off as anything other than very obvious runaways. We never got that far."
"You told me once that he caught you talking about it," said the Attolian, remembering.
"We weren't even talking about the plan. I think if he had realized we actually had one, he would not have been so lenient."
I waited a moment, in case the Attolian had something to say about my choice of words.
Apparently not.
"When Nahuseresh walked in on us, we were making up a fantasy: how many rooms would there be in our house? How many pomegranate trees in our yard? How many—"
I shut my mouth. Marin had smiled at me—a real smile, I was certain—and said, "How many children should we have, Kamet?" I had not known what to say. Before I could answer, she had reached up to touch my face.
Then Nahuseresh had walked into the room and asked, very quietly, "Where exactly is this house of yours going to be, Kamet?"
After that, it was over.
I remembered lying on the floor, not very hurt yet, trying to get up. Marin had not started screaming yet. She caught our master by the elbow, and said, in a low, calm voice, "Nahuseresh, please. You are killing him."
He turned on her.
"What did you call me?"
"Master," she said, sinking to her knees. "Master, please."
But it was too late. The rest of my memories bled into each other, hopelessly out of order. I remembered falling to the floor again, much later, and lying there afraid to move, the world spinning around the pain in my head. I remembered the sound of Marin weeping, a room away—not silently, the way we had both learned to cry when we were children, but loud, undignified, angry sobbing, as though she had decided she no longer cared who heard her, or what happened to her.
I breathed.
"I told you I saw her one more time," I said.
"I remember," said the Attolian. His voice was gentle. "You said she was free, but married."
I had focused very hard, over the years, on that final memory of Marin: pouring the coffee in her husband's house, with a polite smile on her face. I had tried to forget everything else. Instead of remembering what we had wanted, I had tried to imagine a life for her that was as pretty as the sunlight in that room—as if by imagining, I could will it into existence and force it to be true.
"So," I said. "I told you that I thought she was happy."
The Attolian didn't say anything.
"I hope that she is," I said. I could barely get the words out. I had told the whole story without crying, but now I had to brush a hand across my eyes.
"I told myself that it was kindness, but it must have also been a test. Showing her to me." In the dark, I could admit to the Attolian what I could not bring myself to say the first time we talked about this. I pitched my voice lower, imitating Nahuseresh. "What will little Kamet do when I show him the only woman he has ever loved, when I tell him exactly where she is? Nothing."
"There was nothing you could have done," said the Attolian.
"Nothing?" I asked. "Would you have done nothing? I didn't even—I didn’t even dare speak to her. We just looked at each other from opposite sides of the room."
My eyesight had been better then.
"I suppose I would have tried to save her, if that was what she still wanted," said the Attolian, even though my question was obviously rhetorical. "And without a soldier's training, without a safe haven to go to—I expect that would have meant death for both of you."
I wondered if the Attolian would have admitted this a few months ago, at the start of our journey. I thought maybe not.
"Do you still love her?"
I blinked at the Attolian's question. It hardly mattered now.
"Not the way I think you mean."
There had never been anyone else. My love for Marin had been active—hopeful, despite how unhappy we both had been. I had imagined a future with her.
After Marin was gone, those feelings had simply stopped. I had kept on hoping for professional success, for fame, for power—but I had not pinned those hopes on other people.
I did still love Marin, of course. I loved her the same way I still loved my mother, and my sister, and my little brothers. I was never going to see any of them again. They all might as well be in the Grey Lands already, with Laela and Jeffa, although I hoped with my whole heart that they were not.
"Do you think you could ever—"
The Attolian broke off. I waited, curious what he had wanted to ask, but he didn't finish his thought.
"Never mind."
In the silence that followed, I thought about the song the Attolian had sung a few days earlier at Hemke's farm, the one about the girl a soldier left behind. It was a cheerful song, at least the way the Attolian sang it, with a jaunty tune that had been stuck in my head, on and off, ever since. But from the girl's point of view, the song was sad—almost cruel. From the very first chorus, it was obvious the soldier was never going back for her.
The fire was dying. The Attolian got up to tend to it, and when that was done, we got out our bedrolls and went to sleep.
I fell asleep with the Attolian's song in my head.