Archive of Our Own ^beta

Kip woke in a dimly lit space, the ceiling oddly gray and irregular, head pounding so loudly he could barely think and with absolutely no idea where he was.

The first thing he heard was the steady drip of water coming from somewhere to his left.

The second thing he heard was an unfamiliar voice say, “Kip,” with a startling wealth of relief in it, directly in his ear.

Kip jolted, turned to try and see, and then had to close his eyes, head swimming, at both the movement and the unfathomable reality of there being nobody there.

“I’m sorry,” the voice said instantly. It was still directly in his ear, though his ear was now pressed squarely against the ground. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” The voice was a clear baritone, resonant, and had a precise Astandalan Court accent. “The Liauu’s a mess, Kip, I’m sending help to you but it’ll take some hours. Stay where you are.”

Kip had no idea what to think of any of this. His head felt fuzzy and very strange. He kept his eyes closed.

#

The next time he opened them the light was different and while his head still ached fiercely, it felt less like it was about to crack open entirely.

He blinked up at the ceiling - no, not a ceiling. It was rock, textured and curving down around him. A cave, maybe.

The last thing he could remember was an earthquake, or something like it, only the ground had kept on shaking, shivering and bucking, for what had felt like hours, and the air had been cold.

He wasn’t in his room in the palace anymore, that was for certain. But where was he?

There were voices talking nearby, most of them hushed, with the clear, piping voice of a child cutting through them with, “But then why hasn’t Cousin Kip woken up yet?”

Was this - but yes, it was; the accents were Vangavayen, and the voices… was that Vinyë? And… Aunt Oura, and - and his mother?

Kip cautiously tried to lift his head and was emboldened by the fact that his head only throbbed in a vaguely threatening way.

“Kip!” at least four different people cried at once.

Several strangers hastened over to him, and Kip hurriedly pushed himself up to a sitting position, feeling abruptly vulnerable lying prostrate like this. A sharp spike of pain through his head made him pause most of the way up to grimace through it.

“Careful,” the posh voice said in his ear again. Kip flinched. In the daylight he could definitively see that there was no one there. Was he hallucinating? Had he hallucinated Mama and Vinyë too?

“Kip, how are you feeling?” one of the strangers asked.

She looked like a stranger, but her voice was Vinyë’s.

Kip stared at her. She didn’t look like Vinyë; she was much older. But she did look a little like Mama, something in the shape of her face and the way she held herself.

Another woman clucked and tried to press the back of her hand to his forehead, but after a moment Kip could place her as Aunt Oora, with her hair chalk-white now but otherwise recognizable.

There were two more strangers, younger than him, the younger woman saying, “Uncle Kip,” and a child scrambling towards him and that was his mother looking ancient and -

“What happened?” Kip blurted out. He couldn’t help the horror in his voice.

“A mountain fell on you,” the little girl announced.

Everyone tried to explain things to him at once, which wasn’t an unfamiliar phenomenon where his family was concerned. Normally, though, Kip didn’t have a problem pushing his way into the conversation.

Normally his head wasn’t on fire, normally he knew why he was where he was, normally he wasn’t surrounded by familiar strangers who were all acting like this was expected or at least like there had been a logical sequence of events that lead to this point, instead of -

“But -” he tried, helplessly, “I -”

“Easy, Kip,” the posh voice said quietly. “Take a deep breath.”

It might be a hallucination but Kip thought it wasn’t a bad idea. He took a long, shuddering inhale, and then blew the breath out slowly.

“There you go,” the voice said. Gentleness, Kip thought, sounded odd in the posh accent. “What is it?”

Kip cleared his throat. He refused to talk directly to the - voice, hallucination, whatever it was - so he pitched his voice to cut through his family’s chatter. “I think I’m - missing some time. I don’t remember - how did I get here? Where is this - Liauu?”

The strangers - his family? - looked at each other. “It’s a nature preserve near where you work,” the woman with Vinyë’s voice said slowly. “You like to hike here, you thought you’d show us since we’re visiting you.”

The air was foggy, humid and hot and tropical. “In Astandalas?” Kip said doubtfully. He didn’t recognize the name at all.

Everyone shut up, which was unnerving. “Kip, what… what was the date? The last one you remember?” said Zemius.

Oh, that was a terrifying question to hear after a head injury. “Silverturn night,” he said, and then, reluctantly, because he could see how - how the year might be relevant - “the fourteenth - no, fifteenth year of Emperor Artorin’s reign.”

Everyone stared at him.

“Ah,” the posh voice said, sounding taken aback, and then everyone started talking at once.

#

This was a nightmare, Kip was fairly certain.

He hadn’t woken up upon having that realization, which was what he normally would do, but it still seemed the most reasonable explanation out of the options available. The empire had collapsed? He had lost twenty years of memory? He was hearing voices?

No, this was a nightmare. He’d had this kind often since coming to Astandalas: ones where the world didn’t work right, and he couldn’t parse the rules, and usually he’d forgotten something important, and everyone laughed at him.

They hadn’t gotten to the laughter yet, but everything else seemed to fit. Including, Kip discovered when his family led him to the opening of the cave, dream-like logic.

Namely, there was a torrential downpour happening around them, but the water was hitting the surface of the air above them and running smoothly away, like they were enclosed in a bubble a hundred yards wide.

“What’s doing that?” Kip asked, curious about what the dream logic would come up with.

“We don’t know,” said Kip’s maybe-nephew, frowning out past him at it.

“That would be my doing,” the posh voice said into Kip’s ear again. Kip twitched. “I’m sorry, I must be particularly perplexing, which for once was not my intention,” it went on dryly. “I’m… your friend, and a wild mage. I have no particular talent at scrying, so when you went missing, I went into a deep trance to locate you. Once I’d found you, I realized that rescue would be impossible if the weather continued this way. I’m holding the storm off you until the sky ship arrives, and as I’ll be magically present here with you until I can release the spell, it seemed worth seeing if I could communicate with you as well.”

“Sky ship?” Kip murmured under his breath. He had no idea why he was bothering to try to keep his family from thinking he was losing his mind in a dream, except maybe that they were already fussing over him enough, dream or no dream.

“After the fall of Astandalas, chaos and magic ran rampart among the nine worlds.” The voice, Kip thought, was rather nice, even if it was too posh to be associating with Kip; warm and rich. “Kavanor fell, and in the falling, ripped and tore at the geography and the magic of Kavanduru. A single forest became untethered from the earth and drifts, now, through the sky, following the currents of the air. The wood remembers what it felt like to fly, and ships crafted from them can sail through air.” The voice added, rather more prosaically, “I’ve always wanted to see the forest up close; it looked remarkable the one time I saw it at a distance.”

Maybe this dream couldn’t quite be classified as a nightmare. Having a posh friend who would do powerful magics for him and tell him stories about flying trees wasn’t any more realistic than the rest of it, but it was rather nice for a nightmare, actually.

Kip supposed that if he really was missing some twenty-odd years of memories the way his family had said, including an apocalyptic event, then that would be enough time to make at least one friend in the Palace.

Surely a dream made more sense, though. But, Kip had to think, touching the back of his head very carefully and grimacing nonetheless at the spike of pain that elicited, he didn’t think he’d ever had a dream where he’d been quite so vividly in pain.

“Maybe you should sit down, Kip,” Vinyë said, touching his arm.

That didn’t seem like a bad idea, so Kip sat.

All right, suppose this wasn’t a dream. Kip said, “So this is… twenty years in the future. What am I doing at the Palace?” What the Palace was doing in Zunidh was an even more improbable matter, but fine, whatever, Kip was willing to accept weird magic as a provisional answer, even if it did make the ‘dream’ explanation significantly more plausible. But weird magic couldn’t explain Kip’s presence here.

“…Working?” Vinyë said, in the tone of someone who was resisting the urge to check his head again.

Humiliation fought with impatience and impatience won. “I was leaving,” Kip said, the sour feeling of having to say this at all making his voice sharp. “I spent all last night - the last night I remember, at least - making plans to come home and sit at Buru Tovo’s feet and try to be tanà. Obviously I didn’t do that, so why not?”

After Kip said it, he knew that Vinyë might not know; he’d tried so hard to avoid letting on how miserable he was, how much he was struggling. If he hadn’t gone home… had he just stuck it out?

“You were coming home?” Mama said. Everyone was staring at him now.

“That is what I said,” Kip said. It was a fight to keep his voice even.

Quintus chuckled, a little nervously. “Kip, you’re devoted to your job, we all know that.”

Mama said, “You never said.”

Kip’s temper sparked and caught. “Why would I have? Come home, all your letters said, come home, we can hear you’re miserable, come home. I’d resigned myself to the coming home, but I knew I’d get a full course of it when I got home anyway, the I-told-you-so’s from every cousin, all fifty-nine, because everyone did tell me, I can’t pretend they didn’t. Don’t be a fool, Kip, don’t go chasing viaus, don’t get ideas above your station is how the posh assholes in the Palace put it, but they all meant the same thing, because apparently everyone can tell that I’m exactly that much of an idiot with more dreams than sense. But at least, I thought, at least I wouldn’t have to get it twice, in letters and then in person.”

He was panting, a little, when he was done. Everyone stared at him, shocked, this once, into silence. Oh, and that was a rare enough occasion that Kip couldn’t help but take a bit of spiteful pride from that.

Mama stared at him and said, “You didn’t come home for years, after the Fall.” He could hear the accusation in her voice loud and clear.

Zemius said quietly, “There was a wall of storms cutting us off from the rest of the world. Nobody could get in or out for years. You made it home eventually, but…”

Kip could read the rest of the sentence in their faces. “But I went back,” he said. “Why?” It came out almost plaintive.

Mama said, “Why did you go in the first place?”

Vinyë said, “Your lord?”

“Who?” Kip said.

His family looked at each other. Up above them, the rain hit the top of the invisible bubble and streamed away from them, a great curtain of water enclosing them.

Quintus said, “No, that was later, after he went back. I remember the letter, I thought…” but whatever Quintus had thought then, he didn’t say. Kip hadn’t thought there was a degree of uncharitable interpretation of him that they wouldn’t just say to his face. Who knew!

Kip said, “So I found - what, someone halfway competent to be my boss?” Was that really all it would take to keep him? That seemed unlikely.

“The Emperor,” Zemius said, and Kip couldn’t help himself: he started to laugh.

#

The sun was setting when the sky ship arrived. By this point, Kip had spent at least a couple of hours fending off a small swarm of insects determined to consume what felt like a pint of his blood, his head felt like it was about to split open, and he’d had to accept that this felt nothing like a dream and was almost certainly real.

That realization did not make the rescue process any easier.

As soon as he was on the sky ship, a doctor descended to whisk him away, with his family following behind him like ducklings until she shooed them off. He could barely see at this point - any light sent sharp spikes of pain through his head - and he closed his eyes almost as soon as the doctor steered him to a bed and ordered him to lie down, relieved more than he could say for the break to his eyes and for the quiet.

He relaxed into the examination, responding to the doctor’s questions and requests without engaging much of his brain for the process, and didn’t notice at first when the sounds of the room changed around him, the rustle of movement and quiet rasp of footsteps, until a voice that was no longer completely unfamiliar said, “Kip, how are you feeling?”

Kip’s eyes flew open and he blurted out, “So you weren’t a hallucination!” Then he had to close his eyes again hastily as the ceiling light felt like it stabbed a blade directly into his eyeballs.

“No, I’m afraid I’m quite real,” the posh voice said. “I see you’ve met Domina Audry.” Kip presumed this was the physician, who had not, in fact, introduced herself. The voice went on, “Domina Audry, no need to pause your examination on my account, I only wanted to - check in.”

“My examination is, in fact, complete,” Domina Audry said. “Lord Mdang is as well as can be expected, even astonishingly so, considering his family described his injuries as ‘a mountain fell on him.’”

“Lord?” Kip said, horrified.

Domina Audry ignored him and went on, “He has a concussion, but besides the amnesia, his mental facilities seem perfectly intact."

“And the amnesia?” The voice was perfectly neutral.

Domina Audry hesitated. How reassuring! “I’m afraid it is too soon to tell, my lord. I have medicine for him to help with the headache, and I recommend bed rest for at least a day and ideally for as long as he will tolerate.”

“I will see if I can find someone up for the task of keeping him resting,” the posh voice said.

“I’m still here, you know,” Kip told the ceiling.

“I’ll check in on him tomorrow to assess further,” the physician went on. “Here,” her voice growing louder again as she returned, apparently, to talking to him. “Drink this.”

It tasted strangely soapy and seemed to coat his throat. It was distracting, but not so distracting to keep a small part of Kip’s brain from turning over the mystery of the movements he could hear her make as she left. Walking away, opening and closing the door, yes, but there had been something before that.

Kip cracked open one eye and immediately gave it up as a bad idea and closed it again. “Did she bow?” he asked. “Are you the kind of person I’m supposed to bow to?” Five years at court and Kip was still, apparently, the same fundamental person as he had been when he failed the etiquette portion of the Service exams four times in a row.

“You have a head injury, you should stay exactly where you are,” the posh voice informed him, which was not a straight answer. “You didn’t answer my question, earlier. How are you feeling?”

How did he think Kip was feeling? “Oh, I’m just peachy,” Kip assured him. “I only had a mountain fall on me, lost twenty years of memories, and apparently skipped the downfall of an empire! Business as usual, you know.”

“You say that, but you know, as someone who also was at court during - the reign of Emperor Artorin, I daresay having a mountain fall on me and getting amnesia might actually have been the preferable experience at times,” the posh voice remarked.

That startled a snort out of Kip.

“Kip - Cliopher, do you want your family to come sit with you?”

“Domina Audry just got them to leave,” Kip said with some alarm.

The posh voice huffed out a breath that might have been the start of a laugh. “Let me rephrase. Would you like me to get one family member to come sit with you and run interference with the rest? Vinyë, maybe?”

That was a surprisingly prescient choice; if Kip had to have anyone, he probably would pick Vinyë. With his eyes closed he might even be able to forget how different she was now. “No, it’s fine,” he muttered.

“Should I leave you to get some rest?” The voice was startlingly gentle.

Kip told the ceiling, “You still haven’t introduced yourself.”

A pause. The posh voice said, “Tor. You can call me Tor.”

“Is that short for something horrifying that I’m supposed to bow to?”

“You,” the posh voice said thoughtfully, “are far too insightful for someone with a head injury, Kip. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything less of you.” Another pause. “Cliopher.”

“You can call me Kip, it’s fine,” Kip said. His headache was fading, and he thought that maybe he could open his eyes and look over at Call-Me-Tor, but his eyes felt strangely heavy and resistant to opening now. “It’s good to know I make one close friend eventually - I’d given up getting anyone to even call me Cliopher, let alone Kip.” Should he have said that out loud? It seemed obvious that Tor was a good friend of the older Kip, if he was calling him Kip and fussing over him and being gentle with him, but Astandalan aristocrats were very strange about formality and courtesy. It all seemed horribly limiting to Kip. While he was thinking about that his mouth kept running on: “Although I’m surprised because you sound too horrifyingly posh to be bothering with me.”

Kip really was going to get executed or assassinated or something for not holding his tongue one of these days.

Tor hesitated and then said, “Is this better?” and as he said it he - sloughed off his accent, like a snake shedding its skin, into something much rounder and more resonant than the court accent.

That jolted Kip straight back to full awareness, a live wire to his skin, even through the growing fog of the medicine. “Oh!” he said. “You hide your accent, too?” He cracked open an eye, but no, that was still a mistake. Squinting in Tor’s direction didn’t give him anything besides a vague impression of black and yellow.

When Tor didn’t immediately respond, Kip had to explain. “Everyone is so stupid about my accent that I thought it would be easier if I didn’t have one, so I’ve been trying to pick up a proper court one. I’m not very good at it, though, and it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.”

“I grew up far away from court, and spent my young adulthood… traveling. When I came to court it was out of obligation rather than desire, and I thought…” Tor really did have a nice voice, especially without the court accent. “I thought if I had to be - how did you put it, horrifyingly posh? Then I ought to play the part properly.”

“Did it help?”

“With some things.”

Kip turned that over in his mind but his brain was fogging over again. “Not that it matters now,” he muttered. “Since that was apparently twenty years ago.” Oh, he really didn’t want to think about what was going to happen now - what it would be like to remember, what would happen if he didn’t -

Before he could start to hyperventilate, Tor said slowly, “I don’t know if it helps, but in my deep trance I noticed that you have what looks to be the touch of a god on you right now.”

That interrupted the panic nicely. Kip rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I do? And it’s not from the future me or something?”

“I believe I would have noticed if you had had it before your accident.”

Which meant - “Oh, Eranui and the Five Shells,” Kip muttered. His tongue felt thick and clumsy suddenly. He was starting to drift, carried by the current in a vaha without sails.

“Who? Ah. A question for later. Rest, Kip.”

#

Kip woke up in an ostentatious and frankly appalling set of rooms that apparently belonged to his older self, who was also a lord, with a household and a wardrobe where any three outfits cost more than the sum of all the wages Kip had earned in Astandalas so far. Kip was more than halfway to hyperventilating when he remembered about Eranui and the Five Shells and could take a proper deep breath.

If he had come here through magic and not amnesia, then he didn’t need to fear that this would be the rest of his life, or that he would be wiped away entirely when his older self’s memories returned. He could go back home - to an Astandalas that was apparently about to fall into abject chaos, but this world’s Kip had survived it so surely he could too. This didn’t have to be his future, and in fact it was perfectly likely he’d come here because it shouldn’t be.

That was the way this kind of story went, in the Lays - how Eranui and the Five Shells had gone. If he was here, out of his proper time and place, it was because he was here to learn something and here to do something. There would be a lesson for him to bring home with him, and a task that only he could complete here.

That settled, the next step was for Kip to figure out what they were. This was hindered somewhat by the headache (better today, but still grinding), the order of bed rest, and the fact that these rooms were so hopelessly confusing that he got lost twice within about twenty minutes of waking up before being rescued.

“Uncle Kip, the physician said you needed bed rest,” said the young man - his nephew - Gaudy.

Vinyë had written to him about Gaudy’s birth a few years ago. He’d read the letter and wept bitterly over the fact that it might take a decade to earn enough time off to go home and meet his nephew.

That had been the first time Kip had thought about going home - about giving up. Was that why Gaudy was here, now? To remind him of that?

“I don’t feel that bad,” Kip protested. “I was just - curious about my life here. And I wanted breakfast.”

“Can’t you be curious lying down?” Gaudy asked. “I can tell you about it, if you want - or some of it, at least. I work here in your old office now.”

Kip stared at him, horrified. “Why?”

“Why?” Gaudy said blankly. “Because - because you’re changing the world. Because I wanted to, too. Because I… thought I had something to give.” His voice went quieter, shyer, at the end, and Kip bit his tongue hard on all the things he could say to that, all of them bubbling up and boiling in the back of his throat, because he knew - he knew the sound of a belief held close to the heart when he heard one.

It took a lot of effort.

“Please at least sit down, Uncle Kip?” Gaudy asked. “At least four different people asked me to try and keep you from exerting yourself too fast, including the Glorious One and my boss.”

Kip stared at him and then gave into the inevitable and sat on the nearest available surface, which was an armchair that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a museum. He said, “The Emperor of Astandalas asked you to make sure I didn’t overexert myself?” They had said the Emperor was his boss now, which he had really thought was a joke, but it did at least make the rooms make more sense.

More sense, but not sense. When Kip had seen that portrait of Emperor Artorin from Saya Dorn, and felt - what he’d felt, when he’d decided to go see if this Emperor was - He hadn’t wanted wealth, or power. He’d wanted - stupid things, childish things. He ought to have known, even then, that the rot and the glory of Astandalas corrupted everything it touched.

Including, maybe, himself.

“And Saya Kayakiri, and Sayo Aioru, and Mama,” Gaudy said, with a level of exasperation that made Kip feel quite a lot better about him. It was nice to have company that was almost his own age. His real age. “So please at least try to take it easy.”

Kip considered this. “So I’m very prone to overworking myself?” What for?

As if he heard the silent question, Gaudy said hastily, “For a lot of important things - I wasn’t here for when the sea train started, but I know you made sure it ran to the Vangavaye-ve, and the annual stipend has changed so many lives, and -”

He went on. It was, Kip could admit, an impressive list, a list straight out of the wildest dreams he’d put down in letters to Basil and then tucked away as impossible, viaus that he would never catch.

It was impressive, but -

“Am I married?” Kip interrupted Gaudy to ask. “Or…”

Gaudy hesitated. “No.”

“No children, then.”

“No.”

Was that what the older Kip had given up, to change the world? Having a family of his own, a - a person of his own? How could that ever have been worth it? Kip had spent five years in Astandalas and not made even a single real friend, not one person who liked him enough to invite him places, to be seen with him, to really put in effort.

Is this where you stop? Buru Tovo had asked him, again and again.

No, Kip had said, every time, chin held high. I’ll keep going. And he’d kept going, and kept going, until he was here: struggling helplessly to shift a single lever of the great complex machine of the Astandalan bureaucracy, alone and friendless.

Was this visit to this possible future meant to tell him that he would succeed, if he kept at it? That he would be alone but he could do it?

If that was the lesson, Kip wouldn’t learn it. He refused to. He’d come this far; but this was where he stopped.

#

He wasn’t married or - anything else, he didn’t have children, but he did, at least, apparently have friends. A trio of visitors came by, two aristocrats who introduced themselves briefly as Conju and Rhodin, wished him a speedy recovery, and left, and a third man, a dark-skinned man with thoughtful eyes named Ludvic, who stayed.

Apparently he had been given the day off work today because “Himself thought you might like company that was ‘steady and not posh,’” Ludvic said, with an ironic inflection to the last four words.

Himself? But there was only one person Kip had used the word ‘posh’ to, so - “Tor?”

He had been convinced, or more accurately compelled, to eat breakfast in bed so he could rest, but half of his family were gathered to eat with him, thereby making the ‘rest’ piece somewhat moot. They were all talking among themselves, though, and not listening to Ludvic and Kip, so at least there wasn’t an audience for the look Ludvic turned on Kip and the too neutral way he said, “Tor?”

Kip could feel himself flushing - in Astandalas this was the kind of thing that had lost him jobs before - but he had the excuse of, first of all, amnesia, and second of all, “He didn’t give me any other name!” Kip hissed. “He deflected me off the topic twice!”

“Ah.” Ludvic’s expression cleared.

“What is his name, then? And position?” Tor clearly didn’t mind a lack of formality if he’d gone out of his way to avoid telling Kip any of this himself, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous, in the Palace of Stars, to be overly-familiar with high-ranking people.

Ludvic shook his head, smiling now. “I won’t ruin his fun.”

“Great,” Kip said, “that’s exactly what I want the amnesia to be - fun for everyone!” He at least had enough control over his voice to keep his voice low, but he saw Vinyë glance over at his tone. He shook his head at her slightly and she frowned at him for a moment before she let Leona drew her back into conversation.

“He’s not laughing at you,” Ludvic said. He paused for a moment, thinking, and then said, “He finds the titles isolating. He likes you; he wants you to talk normally with him without them getting in the way.”

Kip considered that. Ludvic could be lying to him - he’d certainly met more than his fair share of people at the Palace of Stars who loved to play that kind of game - but nothing about Ludvic’s accent, the way he carried himself, his reticent speech, marked him as a player of the game of courts.

And Tor was the older Kip’s friend, a friend who called him Kip with warmth in his voice.

“He would be here if he could,” Ludvic added, as if he could hear the direction Kip’s thoughts were running. “His work is… challenging right now.”

Kip could already tell that Ludvic was a man who was deliberate with his speech. He was still getting used to how elliptical people could be in Astandalas, but the weight Ludvic had put on ‘challenging’ was easy to hear. “Challenging how?”

But Ludvic just shook his head and told Kip not to worry about it.

#

But Tor did come by that day, in the end. Not until late in the evening, after Kip had been forced, by the grim advance of the headache, to retreat back to bed and lie in the dark with his eyes closed.

He had made it worse than it probably ought to be, he knew, by trying not once but three times to read, and the last attempt having stuck with it for a good twenty or thirty minutes before even he could not ignore the pounding in his skull.

But Kip hadn’t been able to tolerate another hour in the company of his family, who were at once reassuring in their familiarity and different enough to be nauseating. He kept looking at Mama’s wrinkles and thinking of his father’s face when they’d brought him back, of Navalia’s when - and they were themselves, for better and for worse, and were faintly disdainful of the older Kip’s choice of rooms and vocation - which Kip agreed with, but it didn’t exactly make it easier, to know that even if Kip did achieve a success and wealth and status beyond his wildest dreams that it would never translate into something his family could understand, and he would still, as always, be the one who left.

The older Kip’s friends weren’t much better. Ludvic kept him quiet company for the morning and early afternoon, whittling, and while he didn’t seem to mind sitting quietly, Kip found himself fidgeting. Conju and Rhodin, who came back for a while around dinner, were decent company - Kip could accept that twenty something years after the fall of Astandalas, there were at least a few aristocrats who were all right and willing to associate with a barbarian from the other side of the world - and Rhodin at least never forgot about the memory loss, but Kip was still aware, always, of missing steps in the dance of the conversation. He was too brash or too sarcastic or not quick enough to recognize a joke or a reference. He was not the Kip they wanted.

And then there was Tor, who was too busy to come during the day.

Kip almost missed him when he did come, lying in the dark with his eyes closed, wide awake and bored out of his mind. He’d hummed his way through the first sequence of the Lays when he heard the quiet voices outside his bedroom door, soft enough that they wouldn’t have woken him if he’d truly been asleep.

Kip considered the possible set of people it could be and decided it didn’t matter, he’d rather the company even if it was awkward. He called, “I’m awake, you can come in.”

There was a pause before the door cracked open, backlighting a figure whose silhouette Kip didn’t recognize. “Awake but lying in the dark?” Tor inquired.

Kip was surprised by the rush of - was he really relieved to talk to the one person who hadn’t yet made him feel deeply inadequate in one way or another, and that probably only because Kip had barely talked to him for ten minutes? Surely Kip wasn’t that pathetic.

“I hurt my eyes reading,” he admitted. “The lights in here are too bright, they make the headache worse.”

“Ah. Need I remind you that the physician recommended bed rest? Though I suppose bed rest without reading is somewhat of a cruel and unusual punishment, for you. Did Vinyë play for you? Did she bring her cello?”

It was a little unsettling, this evidence of being known by someone who Kip didn’t recognize at all. He didn’t even know his full name.

“I have no idea,” Kip admitted.

“Hmm,” said Tor. It was a very neutral kind of hum but Kip still thought it might be disapproving. “Should I let you rest? I really don’t intend to keep interrupting you on the verge of sleep.”

“I’m wide awake and bored out of my mind,” Kip said frankly. He almost said, I’d like the company, and had to bite his tongue to remind himself that this was - not Astandalas, but still the Palace of Stars, and that was probably too direct, especially for someone who definitely had a title of some sort. Though it was hard to remember that when Tor had dropped the posh accent again, almost immediately this time.

“In that case, I should keep you company to avoid any further bouts of ill-advised reading. Did Ludvic not sit on you sufficiently to keep you from over-exerting himself?”

“Oh, is that what he was here for?” Kip retorted. “Anyway, I’ll have you know I was doing research. You’re the one who thought I was - god-touched.”

“Yes - you had an idea about that? Era…”

“Eranui and the Five Shells,” Kip finished reflexively. “Yes. It’s a story from -” and then stopped, his throat closing reflexively over the Lays, unable to stop himself from remembering the way Dwian had said, oh, an oral history? That’s quaint.

“The Lays?” Tor asked. “Will you tell me it?”

Try as he might, Kip could hear nothing in his voice but keen interest, so he told him. He wasn’t sure if the darkness that enveloped them both, nothing but a thin gleam of light coming from door to the hall, still slightly ajar, to illuminate them, made it easier or harder.

“…and Eranui, his task complete, woke up again in his own bed, and discovered that a stranger wearing his face had taken his own place for a time but had gone home with his return,” Kip finished. “And so -”

“Ah,” Tor said, more breath than words. In that faint light from the hallway, Kip could see his shoulders loosen as tension eased, a tension he had hidden so effectively that Kip hadn’t realized it existed until this moment of cessation.

Stupid of him. “So you and the others don’t need to worry,” he said. “I’m sure the real Kip will be back before long, and I’ll be out of your hair.” He couldn’t keep the sourness out of his voice.

Tor cocked his head, and though Kip couldn’t see his face at all and was sure Tor couldn’t see his either, he still felt that Tor was studying him, or trying to. “I won’t pretend it’s not a relief to think that our Kip will be returned to us as he was,” Tor said. “But with that reassurance I at least will be able to properly enjoy getting to know you better. I have wished I’d known you at this age.”

“You don’t have to coddle me,” Kip said. He couldn’t keep the edge out of his voice. “You want me to go home, I want to go home, our goals align.”

“Kip,” Tor said, sounding, bizarrely, exasperated. He sighed. “Is total darkness required, or is dim light acceptable?”

“I don’t think the lights do anything but ‘bright.’”

“Fortunately, the room’s lights are not required.” And it was true, because Tor stayed still, but the room started to brighten slowly despite it. The light came from nowhere in particular, but the dust motes drifting through the air were caught and lit, and the floor under the table besides the bed, distinctly lacking in the dust bunnies that would have been there in Kip’s room in Astandalas, and Tor, whose face Kip could still not yet make out with any level of detail besides his eyes, which caught the light in a strange way.

“Oh,” Kip said, inanely, and then, “That’s useful. Are you one of the Ouranatha?”

“No,” Tor said, and his voice was so perfectly blank of any of the feeling that had animated his voice before that Kip was instantly certain that he was firmly biting back an opinion.

Kip took a risk. “Not a fan?” Did Tor have to work with them? He was clearly a mage of no small ability.

A pause. “Not particularly, no. Was I so obvious?” Kip had no idea if that was a pleasantry or if Tor was genuinely curious, and Tor’s body language gave him no clues; he was still standing by the door, unmoving.

Kip shrugged and picked at his blanket. It had been a matter more of instinct than conscious thought; instinct, and the memory of Tor shedding his own accent so easily, and himself having the value of holding his tongue beaten into him again, and again, and again. He said, “I work in the Ministry of Health. The Department of Censorship is to the right of the offices and the Department of Internal Security is to the left.”

“Ah,” Tor said, and this time Kip did hear the note of disdain running clearly through it. “Neither department exists any longer, if it’s any consolation. You made sure of that. Not,” he added, “something that I have yet achieved with the Ouranatha, though I’ve certainly considered making the attempt.”

“Right,” Kip said. “I made sure of it?”

“I know it is somewhat of an alien concept to your family, but I had assumed someone had explained to you by now that the you of this world runs the civil service.”

Gaudy had been clear on that front, but - “It’s difficult to imagine that an uncultured, self-righteous barbarian with no sense of tact or elegance could actually succeed in the Service. It’s been made abundantly clear to me that I’m not the right sort.”

Tor said, “The Service during your time ran on corruption, laziness, and patronage. As you have been a model of competency, integrity, and a commitment to success on your own merit for as long as I’ve known you, I can’t say it surprises me that you had a difficult time of it.”

He said it all so casually. Kip said, “I gave up. I was going home. I don’t -” He almost stopped himself there, but this was the older Kip’s friend, who knew about the Lays and that Vinyë was a cellist and called him Kip; maybe he would know. “I don’t understand why I didn’t.” It came out small.

“You told me you did go; then you came back,” Tor said quietly. His eyes were still strange in the light, which was fading a little, shifting over time. Still, even as the clean yellow of the light faded into a dusky orange, his eyes gleamed. “I have wondered, about that return. But you’ve never… my Kip has always skimmed over the subject so cursorily that I suspect something must have happened, something that he has not yet reconciled with. But it’s only supposition, on my part.”

“You know,” Kip said pensively, “I think if I told my friends from home that I grow up to be a tight-lipped bastard, nobody would believe me.”

It startled a snort out of Tor, breaking the serene line of his posture for the first time as he brought a hand up to his face and his shoulders shook with near-silent laughter. And the light was laughing with Tor, brightening and dancing along with him, changing from an effusive aura of light into small glittering particles that whirled and hovered in the air.

“Oh,” Kip said, unable to help himself, and as Tor let his hand drop the particles of light began to move more deliberately, brightening and dimming in slow pulses like fireflies. Kip found himself reaching out to one, and as he did, it fluttered the last few inches to perch on his hand, a small gleaming pulse of light. Kip stared at it, for once completely lost for words.

It was still difficult to see Tor’s face in the light, but Kip could see, when he looked up, that Tor was smiling at him.

It made Kip feel strangely shy. He wondered if the older Kip was accustomed to this kind of thing, if it was an ordinary part of having a wizard for a close friend, or if it still felt new and novel every time. It was hard to imagine magic like this feeling anything other than extraordinary.

Tor’s posture was resettling back into the still straightness that it had been before. Some semblance of manners finally occurring to him, Kip blurted out, “Do you want to sit down?” He looked around, but there wasn’t actually a second chair. “We can go sit in - one of the rooms. There’s a lot of them.”

“I know you know the definition of ‘bed rest’, Kip,” Tor said, sounding, if Kip was reading him right, faintly exasperated but also fond.

The next step in this dance was an obvious one, which was for Tor to excuse himself and let Kip rest, but Kip didn’t want - he wasn’t tired, anyway, so there was no need -

Kip had been lying down, propped up on several pillows. (Why did his older self have so many, anyway?) He sat up and pulled his legs in towards himself to free up room at the end of the bed and said, gesturing, “You could -” before all of the courtly manners that been ground into him reared up in unison and told him he was being wildly forward and to shut up already. “I mean -” He had no idea how to salvage that. If he needed to.

Tor’s face was only partially illuminated by the fireflies and completely unreadable. He didn’t move or speak for a beat, and then a second one, and then he crossed the room and, with the careful precision of a man defusing an explosive device, perched on the very edge of the bed, back perfectly straight.

Kip had no idea what to make of it and no idea how to ask, or if he even should. Astandalan court manners said he shouldn’t, but Astandalan court manners also thought he’d wildly overstepped about ten times in this conversation, and Tor hadn’t seemed to mind. Until now, maybe; but Tor had come and sat, so maybe not. “I’m terrible at court etiquette,” he admitted.

“Your dislike of it is something I have always appreciated about you,” Tor said, voice easy for all that his posture was still stiff. Not insulted, then, probably. “You will not believe how many people I encounter that need teeth pulled to imply something even three steps away from what they mean. It’s very tiresome.”

Kip said, “Well, nobody has ever accused me of being overly circuitous,” and managed to keep the bite in his voice to a minimum.

Tor laughed softly and said, “Oh, you might be surprised.”

“I suppose another twenty years in the Palace of Stars might do it, even if the last five didn’t,” Kip muttered. A thought occurred to him. “How long have you been at court for? Are you already there, in my time?” That was a thought, though he had no idea how he would be able to find Tor again if Tor wasn’t willing to tell him his actual name. Kip might recognize his voice, by now.

Not that it mattered, Kip reminded himself, because he wasn’t staying. He was going home. He’d decided. This didn’t - this possible future didn’t have to change that.

“Ah, I came at the beginning of Emperor Artorin’s reign and will be there, I daresay, until the end.” There was a humor in Tor’s voice that Kip wasn’t sure he understood.

On the sky ship, Tor had joked that having a mountain fall on him and amnesia might have been preferable to spending time at the court in Kip’s present. Maybe it had gotten better, later, in Kip’s future and the older Kip’s past, hard as Kip found that to imagine, but surely it could only have been worse, in the early years of Emperor Artorin’s reign. “You’re more stubborn than I am, then. I made it five years, but no - no more.”

That made Tor laugh so hard he grew breathless after a minute. “Me, more stubborn than you? My dear Kip, I’m not convinced I have ever met someone quite as stubborn as you are in my life, and with the people I have met that is truly saying something.” My dear Kip? “No, I was taken to Astandalas by force, coerced into taking an oath of service, and then ritually and magically bound there. I should have made it a week, maximum, if I had been free to follow my own whims.”

“What,” Kip said flatly. “What?”

Tor didn’t say anything.

“Every time I think I’ve seen the worst of the rot and atrocities I’m wrong. Who did that?” Kip demanded. He could hear that his voice was whipcrack-sharp, but he could not modulate it or soften it; he was still reeling. “That’s illegal. Even in the empire slavery is illegal. Nobody has the right to your labor or your life, nobody.”

“Ah, but all morals, all ethics, all good things can be sacrificed for the glory of Astandalas, don’t you know?” Tor said. His voice was perfectly empty.

A horrifying thought occurred to Kip. “Are you still bound?”

“No. Or rather, only by my own sense of duty and ethics. I can’t - won’t - free myself at the expense of others’ suffering. You - my Kip is helping me with it. We’ve almost untangled the last of it now. Another year, maybe.”

“What took him so long?” Kip demanded. Twenty years? Maybe less, if he hadn’t known Tor the whole time.

Was that why he’d stayed?

“He didn’t know,” Tor whispered. “Once he did, we started working on it. I didn’t…” He didn’t say anything more for a long time, but Kip could feel faint tremors running through the mattress from where Tor sat and knew that Tor wasn’t as calm as his still demeanor implied. Eventually Tor said, “Thank you.”

“For, what, the righteous fury?”

“Don’t say it like it’s nothing, Kip,” Tor said, voice low. “It’s not - it isn’t nothing.”

As far as Kip was concerned, righteous fury at the enslavement of another person was the lowest of all bars to clear, but - Kip thought of the way that Tor had laughed at his comment about not being circuitous. If the older Kip was used to holding his tongue… He said, “Well, I’ve just finished up a five-year stint of working in the Astandalan secretariat and have vast stores of impotent fury and improper remarks hoarded, so if you want to unleash me on any other problems that would be in need of that, just say the word.”

Tor covered his face, shoulders shaking. “Oh, don’t tempt me,” he breathed. “Not that you’ve not already made a good start of it,” he added after a moment, more normally. “I’ve no idea how you brought this out in me. Although I suppose - I wish -” and then he shook his head once.

Kip’s curiosity was piqued. “What?”

Tor said, “Nothing.”

“I’m here to solve some kind of problem,” Kip pointed out. “What if this is it?”

“Aren’t you here to learn something, too?” Tor countered. “Any idea what?”

Kip considered calling him out for the deflection and then decided it wouldn’t accomplish much, not if Tor was truly unwilling to say. “I was called here the night I was planning to go home,” he said instead. “I’ve wondered if this is - related. If I’m being called to stay. Or if this is to bolster my conviction to go.”

“Have you,” Tor murmured.

His voice was back to being impressively bland. Kip considered what little of him he could make out, but it didn’t tell him much. “You have thoughts, I take it?”

Tor didn’t say anything for a minute. “You shouldn’t ask me for them.”

Kip leaned forward. “Why not? You’re the other Kip’s closest friend, aren’t you?”

Tor had been looking down at his knees, but he turned at that, the firefly light catching and gleaming strangely in his eyes. “You sound very sure of that for someone who’s been here for all of two days.”

Kip smiled. “That’s not a no.” He did like being right.

Tor exhaled and looked away. “I’m not sure I can counsel you as a friend in this the way you deserve. I can’t be objective.”

Kip said, “You’re not making me any less curious, you know.” He was still leaning forward, arms wrapped around his knees. The air felt electric, like - like a challenge song.

Maybe Tor heard it too, because he turned back to look at Kip, held his eyes for a long moment, that strange light still caught in them. “All right,” he murmured, after a moment. “All right. Start with the counter-factual first, then.

“You could go home to the Vangavaye-ve.” Tor said it correctly, which shouldn’t be a surprise - if the older Kip had ever had to correct him on it, surely that had been long ago - but still was. “You’ll be with your family, and your accomplishments will be things they understand. I can’t tell you what those accomplishments will be, since I haven’t seen them, but I do know you, so I feel quite confidently able to say they will be both astonishing and transformative.”

Kip scoffed. He couldn’t help himself.

“No, don’t start,” Tor ordered. “I recognize that banging your head against the brick wall of the Astandalan secretariat for five years has done a number on your self-confidence, but I really must insist on this one. I’ve spent far too long watching you be intransigent and competent to bet against you now. Once you figure out what you want, you’ll do it.”

How could he just say things like that? He was so casual about it, so assured, like it was only normal and natural to believe that Kip could accomplish anything he set his mind to, and not - not an astonishing and precious gift. Basil believed in him, and Navalia had told him to follow his dreams, but other people -

“And you’ll be able to achieve those accomplishments without having to hide your own culture and work within that of the court. You won’t have to fight through the corruption and rot; you won’t have people call you a barbarian when they disagree with you. They might say other things -”

“That I’m chasing a viau, probably,” Kip muttered. That was the ordinary response to Kip declaring that he would do something, not - whatever Tor was doing here.

“They’ll tell you that you’re chasing viaus, then. But you’ll get your way in the end, and you’ll make your home a better place, and you’ll get to be there and live it with them.”

“And the argument for staying?” Kip asked.

“Where to even start,” Tor murmured. “I could probably talk for hours about the things you could accomplish -”

“Please don’t,” Kip said.

“- but no, that’s not right, is it. Too specific. You do better with vague instructions, you would chafe at a line-by-line instruction set, even from yourself. You could be a great champion of all the goods, big and small, in the world here. You could take your Lays and use them as your guide to rebuild the government to be better, juster, kinder. You would be the only Islander in the Service, for a long time, and that would be difficult, in ways that I could not and do not fully understand; but you could also open a door to make it easier for others to follow you, people from all over the world who are not refined aristocrats but who are competent and clever and full of drive, and who also would not have been able to find a place in Astandalas as it was.”

Kip shifted. He couldn’t help himself.

Tor paused, studying him. His voice was gentle when he said, “You won’t convince everyone of your worth, but you will earn the trust and respect of the people who matter. There will be people who understand that you have a gift and a talent, a fire that burns brightly enough to warm the whole palace - the whole world.”

Kip ducked his head and picked at the blanket. That was - He wasn’t sure if hearing it from Tor made it easier to believe or harder. Tor clearly - thought highly of the older Kip, and Kip could already see vividly how much of a lifeline, an anchor, that would be, in the Palace of Stars, but he wasn’t at all sure that didn’t affect how Tor thought other people saw Kip. He might have bosses who respected him, in that begrudging way that the one or two competent people he had worked for in the palace had, where they understood he was skilled and were willing to use it, but it hadn’t ever stopped any of those people from playing games with him or his work: passing his work off as their own; expecting even more fawning to make up for the fact that Kip was smarter than them and they both knew it; making him fight for his projects and prove himself all over again, every single time. Maybe he would have people he worked with who respected him, but he knew, he knew, that he would not get Tor’s effortless confidence in him from any lord or minister or the fucking Emperor of Astandalas.

“Think about it,” Tor advised, when he didn’t say anything or look up. “Even though you can do remarkable things here, that doesn’t mean that you must; as you yourself said, nobody else has the right to your labor and your life if you don’t wish to spend them that way.” He inhaled, as if to speak, and then didn’t speak, and kept on not speaking.

Look first, listen first. Kip lifted his head to look, though he could read nothing off of Tor’s posture or face.

After a long moment, Tor said quietly, “Well, you did tell me to make my argument. Who am I to leave such a thing incomplete? So for completion’s sake, or selfishness, here is one final thing that you could accomplish in the Palace of Stars. A small thing, some would say, compared to eradicating poverty.” Tor took a deep breath and exhaled. “There is a man in your Palace of Stars, entrapped by magic and ritual and a coerced oath, who is desperately lonely and on the verge of losing himself entirely. Should you be able to find this man, your company and friendship would be nothing less than the world to him.”

The palace bells rang the hour. Kip listened to them ring, clear chimes that echoed and reverberated through his ears and his lungs and his bones, striking an echo somewhere deep in his depths.

“Think about it,” Tor said, standing. Something in his voice made Kip think of calm water hiding a rip current, deep and inexorable. “I’ll leave you to your rest.”

Kip stared after him long after the door clicked shut behind him and the last of his firefly light faded.

#

Kip may have had more of an inkling as to a few reasons for the older Kip to have stayed, but the rooms, he thought grimly, getting lost for the fourth time in an attempt to find the breakfast table, were still beyond him. Why on earth did the older Kip put up with them?

It took until halfway through breakfast before it occurred to Kip that he could just ask.

“What’s with the rooms?” he asked.

The existing conversation (something about the Ouranatha and the failure of their weather magic in the landslide) stumbled to a halt. “The rooms?” Zemius asked.

Kip had mostly been directing the question at Conju, who had joined them for breakfast this morning. On the evidence of last night, Kip had had to admit to himself that the other Kip clearly was doing something right on the friends front - certainly better than Kip himself, at least in the Palace of Stars - and had resolved to try to be friendlier to the other Kip’s friends.

Conju snorted. “Let me guess, you hate them? You hated them before, too, you were cross for a solid week after you moved in.”

Kip blinked at him, startled, and from the looks on his family’s faces, he wasn’t the only one. “Why did I, then?”

Conju waved an elegant hand. “Partially politics, partially to please his Radiancy.”

Kip squinted at him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the older Kip putting up with rooms like this to please an emperor.

“Politics?” Quintus asked. The whole family (or the whole of the family who had come to visit the older Kip, rather) was here for breakfast, and they were all listening intently. Conju, to his credit, had seemed perfectly in his element among them, and from the conversation Kip had picked up that Conju had come for a vacation to the Vangavaye-ve with the older Kip once. So, another reason to give him more of a chance.

“Cliopher’s been doing the role of Lord Chancellor for, oh, a decade at least,” Conju said, spooning some honey into his tea. “His Radiancy didn’t officially appoint him until recently because, unlike the vast majority of the palace, a title and the requirement to go to court regularly would be a punishment for Cliopher and not a reward. But since Cliopher’s going to functionally be regent when he’s away looking for an heir -”

“What,” Kip said, as everyone else at the table started asking more or less the same question, at much higher volume.

Conju had an expression on his face that suggested that if he was a less dignified and posh person that he would be rolling his eyes. “You still haven’t explained that?” he asked Kip, and then grimaced as Kip stared at him blankly, visibly re-remembering the amnesia. Kip would have been grimacing himself, but his whole brain was still circling around the word ‘regent.’ The furor of the table was quieting; every member of Kip’s family was visibly percolating in the strong desire to demand details but thwarted by the fact that obviously Kip was the wrong Kip to answer them. “Well, it’s true. He’s leaving you in charge in his absence, and unlike the civil service, the Council of Princes does need you to have the title and all the trappings of power for them to do what you say, much as you might hate it.”

Gaudy reached out and helped himself to a pastry. He looked like the one member of Kip’s family who wasn’t surprised by this. He said, “You said it was also to please his Radiancy?”

Conju snorted. “Oh, he thought Kip was too far away in his old rooms, he wanted him closer. His schedule is relentless and it’s easier to drop in on Cliopher in a free moment this way.”

Everyone, even Gaudy, stared at him for that one. “Does that… happen often?” Zemius asked.

“It’s been known to happen,” Conju said, but the courtly phrasing didn’t hide the way he was starting to frown slightly. “Has he not been by since - since the landslide?”

Kip stared at him. “No?” That almost sounded like - but Conju’s frown deepened the moment he said it, which meant he was right, and Conju actually thought it was strange that the Emperor of Astandalas hadn’t paid him a personal visit over the whole landslide and amnesia business.

Maybe… maybe it wasn’t so strange. Tor had told him, last night, that he had the respect and trust of the people who mattered, and Kip hadn’t been able to believe him, but… Kip had assumed at first that the older Kip had changed, and radically, from the person Kip was today, to live the life that he appeared to be. But that assumption seemed increasingly like a less likely explanation than the idea that the older Kip was - different, surely, but still Kip, and still with the same priorities, and that Kip needed to look harder, listen harder, for the substance of what that life was.

Once Kip had wanted to see if Artorin Damara was an emperor worth staying for.

Kip was quiet for most of the rest of breakfast, listening and thinking. Near the end of it, Kip’s valet (Was that the right term for him? He really had no idea) announced that he had another visitor, and Kip had just enough time to wonder if - but it was Ludvic.

“Come sit,” Eidora said, “have you had breakfast?”

“Yes, come eat,” Conju said, getting up, “there’s tea,” and proceeded to go over and pour some for him, which startled Kip until he realized it was an excuse for Conju to corner Ludvic at the far end of the table and talk to him under his breath, too quietly for Kip to hear but not so far away that Kip could miss the intent look on Conju’s face.

“Do you want another raspberry tart, Kip?” Aunt Oora asked.

Kip looked away from Ludvic and Conju as Ludvic started shaking his head, and missed whatever Ludvic said as he accepted the tart. He tuned back in when Conju said, “I beg your pardon?”

A few heads turned at the raised voice.

Ludvic said phlegmatically, “You may tell him it is beneath his dignity if you like.”

Conju sighed. “Tea, Ludvic. Have a pastry.”

And apparently that was that, as neither Ludvic nor Conju said anything more. Vinyë raised her eyebrows at Kip; he shrugged back at her.

When he glanced down the table at Ludvic and Conju again, Ludvic winked at him, so quick that he almost thought he imagined it.

Kip did manage to corner Ludvic himself before he left. Apparently he didn’t have the full day off today and was just dropping by for breakfast, but Rhodin, Ludvic told him and Conju, did have the day off and would come by later. (Kip wondered who they worked for, that they had such flexible schedules.)

Ludvic waited for him to speak with a patient expectation. Kip floundered for a moment, but the hubbub of everyone getting up and moving to the sitting room wouldn’t last long, so he blurted out, “Is Tor -” and promptly ran out of words.

Ludvic said gently, “He has a meeting he can’t get out of this morning, but I expect he’ll come by later, as soon as he has a spare moment. I’ll tell him you asked for him.”

“No, you don’t have to do that, just…” Kip hesitated, not quite sure what to say. Yesterday he’d wondered if Tor’s absence while the older Kip’s other friends kept dropping in and out meant that Tor was a more casual friend, but after last night Kip felt confident that wasn’t it. “He’s busy?”

“Very,” Ludvic said, “but he would make time for you.”

“No, no, that’s not necessary.” It didn’t surprise Kip, that the older Kip’s closest friend would be someone who worked, and who worked hard. And Kip didn’t need anything, or even feel so off-balance with these familiar strangers as he had been, to need a friendly face. “I was just curious.”

Ludvic considered him for a moment and then said, firmly, “He will come by later.”

Kip was the last one out of the dining room, and as he passed Conju (holding the door for everyone), he heard Conju mutter, “Unbelievable,” under his breath.

Kip waited for Conju to let the door close behind them, but Conju didn’t say anything else or even look at him when he stalked past Kip into the sitting room, so Kip mentally marked it off as something else that he didn’t have the proper context for and proceeded to ignore it.

#

They received a group of unexpected visitors shortly after breakfast. (Kip had to admit that that, at least, felt familiar, like being at home in Gorjo City and having half a dozen cousins drop by unannounced.) One older woman with a court accent, a man around the age that Kip was - that Kip knew himself to be - and, oddly, a Tkinele tribesman.

“Saya Kalikiri!” Gaudy blurted out, jumping up.

“Hello, Gaudy,” the older woman said briskly. “Lord Mdang, I’m sorry to interrupt your recovery.” She startled him by smiling at him a little and saying, “Or should I say Sayo Mdang, for the time being?”

“Please,” Kip said emphatically. Maybe the Council of Princes needed Kip to be a lord (still a bizarre concept) but that didn’t mean other people had to treat him like one, surely.

She actually grinned at him. “Sayo Mdang, I’m Kiri Kalikiri, your second-in-command in the Offices of State. This is Sayo Aoiru, he’s my second-in-command, and this is Zaoul, he’s my secretary for the time being.”

Kip had his mouth open to make reciprocal introductions before the fact that they obviously knew him and at least Gaudy sunk in. “Nice to meet you,” he said instead.

“We won’t interrupt long, we just came to rummage through your desk, if you’re amenable to it,” Aoiru said easily. He didn’t have a court accent, quite the opposite - there was a rhythm to his voice and a note to it that felt far distant from Astandalas. “We’re hoping to find some of your notes from before the amnesia.”

“You know about that?” Conju asked sharply, looking up. Ludvic had vanished after breakfast, to places unknown, but Conju had ensconced himself into a large, luxurious armchair (looking much more like he belonged there than Kip did, for all these were ostensibly Kip’s rooms). Half the family had drifted off somewhere, but Aunt Oora had an armchair of her own, Vinyë sat with Gaudy on the couch, and Dora was coloring on the floor. “Has word gotten out to the palace?”

Kip grimaced. He could imagine the sharks that would come out for that kind of news. Fortunately he would go home before he had to deal with it (he hoped, he hoped).

“No, no,” Kiri said, waving a hand hastily. “The Glorious One read us in, he said we should have the full context since -” and then she hesitated, glancing over at Kip and biting her lip.

Kip could fill in the blanks here, at least, with the way she’d introduced them. “Since you’re doing my job right now?” he asked.

“Well, yes,” Kiri said.

“Doing our best, at least,” Aioru murmured.

“Which brings me to the other reason for our visit,” she went on. “Gaudy, would you be willing to serve as the Glorious One’s secretary the next few days?”

Gaudy said, “Me?” It was impressively even, though Kip thought from his wide eyes that it had wanted to come out as a squeak.

“But he’s on leave,” Vinyë protested.

“You are certainly free to say no,” Kiri said briskly. “You are, as you say, on personal leave. I would have preferred not to ask at all, but -” She sighed. “Regardless, we will make do.”

“No, it would be an honor,” Gaudy said, standing. “Unless - this isn’t because -” and he glanced over at Kip.

“No, this is not because you’re Lord Mdang’s - Sayo Mdang’s - nephew,” Kiri said, sounding oddly exasperated. “You are as bad as he is.” To Vinyë and Aunt Oora, she said, “Never before have I had to worry about a subordinate being treated unfairly badly because of his relation to someone in the office.” As they both laughed, she said to Gaudy, “I am tapping you for this because I need Zaoul with me, Tully managing the flood of people looking for Lord Mdang, and Eldo is in Amboloyo. You four are my most promising secretaries. I need someone with a decent grasp of economic theory, a sharp mind, and who will not be so cowed by the Glorious One that they can’t tell him to slow down for a moment. You are currently my only candidate who fits all of these categories.”

Gaudy squinted at her. “The only one?”

Conju inquired, with an air of mild curiosity, “How many secretaries has he already sent back for the cardinal sin of not being Cliopher?”

Kiri sighed.

“Four,” Aioru said.

“Since Kip got his new job?” Aunt Oora asked.

“In the last two days,” Kiri said grimly.

Gaudy said, “I’ll get my writing kit,” and stood up with alacrity.

“Show us Sayo Mdang’s desk first? If you’re all right with that, Sayo Mdang,” Kiri added to him.

Kip was still gawking at her. He shut his mouth. “That’s fine.”

Vinyë and Aunt Oora were both staring at him - as if he had any more information than they did! He followed after Kiri, Aioru, Zaoul, and Gaudy, partially to escape their astonished looks and partially, he could admit, out of fascination.

He said, a little feebly, to nobody in particular, “I thought I was the Lord Chancellor?”

Gaudy was leading them easily through a dizzying array of rooms, from a much more formal dining room than the one they had eaten breakfast in, through an empty room with gleaming hardwood floors that looked like an exercise room of some sort, through a library with shelves of nearly identical hardcovers with a small reading nook - how could anyone use this many rooms?

“You are,” Aoiru assured him, “but you were the Glorious One’s secretary for either nearly two decades or nine hundred years, depending on how you count the time, before that.” Nine hundred years? Kip considered that briefly and then hastily stuffed the thought away as something completely inconceivable. Twenty years was enough to get on with.

Kiri turned around for long enough to say, “You’ve been doing what ought to be something like four jobs for years, but adding Lord Chancellor on top was too much, even for you.” She grinned abruptly, a surprisingly impish smile. “No matter how many secretaries the Glorious One sends back with his little complaints about how they don’t have enough political theory, or a good enough grasp of economics, and how it really is unfortunate that he also finds you irreplaceable as Lord Chancellor -”

“Surely it’d be six or seven jobs, for someone other than Sayo Mdang,” Aioru said. He shot Kip a rueful grin and said, “You’ve been ignoring your own laws about legal working hours for years.”

“And now we are all paying the penalty,” Kiri said. “Well, that will change.”

Aioru added, in an aside for Kip not quite so quiet that Kiri couldn’t hear it, “Kiri and the Glorious One are conspiring against you, I think,” and winked.

Kip blinked back at him, rather overwhelmed. Oh, but he liked them - he could count the number of coworkers he’d really liked in Astandalas on one hand - and some part of his mind was still trying not to think about nine hundred years - and another part of him was still thinking about the Emperor of Astandalas sending back four secretaries in two days, and calling him irreplaceable, more of that precious and astonishing confidence that he’d only ever gotten from Basil and Navalia and now -

Kip’s feet slowed to a stop in the entrance to what was, apparently, the older Kip’s study. Distantly he observed that Gaudy and Kiri were busy ransacking through the older Kip’s desk, that there were Islander carvings and shells on the shelves, that the chair and desk were gorgeous and probably cost more than a year’s salary for him.

For once Kip was not concerned with the opulence of the rooms. He said, “Are you both drowning in work, then? With me - out?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Aoiru said firmly. “We’re handling everything.”

“Your only job is to get well,” Kiri called over her shoulder.

Neither of those were ‘no’s. Kip said slowly, “And do some of the responsibilities of the Lord Chancellor also go up to the Emperor, in my absence?”

Kiri turned, arms full of paper, to exchange a glance with Aioru, and then said firmly, “You’re not to worry about him, either. Between his household and us, we’re making sure that he has the very best of help.”

That was also most definitely not a no. Also telling, that Kiri’s first reaction had been to reassure him that the Emperor was being looked after.

Kip turned the evidence over in his head, but sift through it though he might, he couldn’t find anything that would contradict the idea that had come to mind, ludicrous as it felt.

“What’s Ludvic’s job?” he asked the room at large.

For a moment, he thought that he would have to clarify with a last name that he didn’t have - which would have been a good enough negative proof as anything, really - but then Gaudy said, “Ludvic Omo? He’s the Commander of the Imperial Guard.”

Huh. Was it triumph he was feeling, that satisfaction of solving a tricky problem? Astonishment, at Tor’s sheer unmitigated gall? Fury, that he’d begun this whole strange experience absolutely certain that the older Kip had lost his way, only to now be discovering that he’d kept with such absolute steadfastness to the ke’e that he, that they, had chosen, when Kip himself had been on the verge of forgetting it?

I came at the beginning of Emperor Artorin’s reign and will be there until the end. Okay, scratch the triumph; Kip was just an idiot. He was going to strangle Tor.

Also, apparently, get arrested for treason.

#

This time, Kip was determined to be strategic. He was not going to have his next conversation with Tor bleary and dazed with a headache and medicine, or shut up in a dark room.

To that end, when he felt the headache trying to take hold again in the late afternoon, he took a novel approach: he took his medicine and took a nap.

Vinyë squinted at him. “Are you sure we shouldn’t send for the doctor? You’ve been doing so much better!”

“I’m being proactive,” Kip informed her, “and taking care of my health.” He wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or not by the fact that this did nothing to soothe the worried crease in her brow. He sighed and added, “And I might have a visitor later, and I want to be alert if he comes. Will you wake me up if - anyone comes to visit?”

This precaution was rewarded by the fact that when Vinyë did come to tap on his door in the late evening, Kip was awake and only a little groggy, studying himself in the mirror (lights on!) and trying to decide whether his hunger or his distaste for having attendants was higher.

“Is there a kitchen here somewhere, do you know?” he asked her.

“I have no idea, I just ask Franzel or Shoänie,” Vinyë said, proving his point. “But if you want to see your guest you should hurry up, I think he would have turned right around to leave when he heard you were resting if Ludvic wasn’t with him to talk him out of it.”

Kip nearly got lost yet again in the continually baffling array of rooms, but followed Vinyë’s directions well enough to catch the sound of Ludvic’s voice right before he made a wrong turn.

“- would want to see you. He asked about you earlier.”

“And you didn’t send for me?” Tor’s voice was sharper than Kip had heard it up to this point.

The lights were off in the room that led in the direction of the voices, so Kip possibly hadn’t taken the right path after all. He banged his shin into a side table and had to stand there for a minute, rubbing at it and biting his tongue so that he wouldn’t start swearing, so he missed the first half of Ludvic’s next sentence.

“- Helma Council, and he asked me not to interrupt you.”

“We all would have taken it as a mercy if you had,” Tor said. There was something sour in his voice. “Kip’s the one who’s good with budgets, not me. It took us at least twice as long as it would have if he was there.”

Kip wasn’t sure where the controls for the lights were, and he was halfway across the room by now, so he just kept going, sliding his feet carefully to avoid bumping into anything.

He was nearly to the door when Ludvic said quietly, “My lord, may I ask an impertinent question?”

“Always, Ludvic.”

“Does seeing this… version of him make it easier for you, or harder?”

Kip paused with his hand on the door. He ought to push it open and announce himself, but he found himself frozen, listening.

“Easier,” Tor said instantly, sounding almost surprised at the question. “He’s still Kip, just… a facet of him that we aren’t as familiar with.” A pause. “Is it harder for you? I know Conju’s finding it… challenging; I’m not sure about Rhodin.”

“He looks the same, but he carries himself differently,” Ludvic said after a moment. “The combination keeps throwing me off guard.”

There was a moment of quiet. Kip tried to convince himself to open the door and failed to. Tor said, “He doesn’t feel like a stranger to me. Though perhaps I will change my mind about that the first time he meets my eyes and looks at me without recognition.” There was a complete lack of inflection to his tone. A sound that might have been an exhale. Very quietly, he said, “I should go.”

Kip pushed open the door.

Two men stood by the door on the other side of the room. One was Ludvic, in what Kip recognized as the panoply of the Imperial Guard. The other…

In the barest flicker of a moment, Kip noted that the other man was a head taller than Kip was, that he had the dark skin of the highest ranking Astandalan aristocrats, that he was clothed in an overcoat of Imperial yellow, which only one man could wear. Then the other man glanced over in response to the door opening, and Kip locked eyes with the lion eyes of Artorin Damara, Lord of Ten Thousand Titles, the Sun-on-Earth, the Emperor of Astandalas.

Kip thought: Oh, that’s why his eyes looked so strange in the light last night.

Kip thought: I really ought to have put more thought earlier into what ‘Tor’ could possibly be short for.

Kip thought: But I do know you.

Part of it was the golden eyes watching him last night in that firefly light. Part of it was that shock of recognition that first day in the sky ship, when Tor had let his court accent slide away and Kip had found, finally, in this strangest of places, a person he had spent the last five years in the Palace of Stars looking for: a kindred spirit. And part of it was that older strangeness of seeing Artorin Damara’s state portrait in Saya Dorn’s house, but magnified tenfold: feeling called, as if by a voice from another room, a familiar voice but one whose name he could not quite place.

Artorin Damara, hundredth and last Emperor of Astandalas, the older Kip’s dearest friend Tor, held his gaze and waited for Kip to say something.

It felt like a challenge song. It was a challenge song. Kip was not the close friend of this man, he was not the great statesman, he was not this man’s irreplaceable Lord Chancellor. But Kip was the one who was here, who had been sent by the gods, the one who was the answer to a problem that the other Cliopher Mdang could not solve. He was here to do a task, and because he was the one who was here, he had to have the right tools for it: he, Kip Mdang of Tahivoa, who had run himself aground on the reefs of the Palace of Stars more times than he could count, who had been worn down nearly to dust by every voice telling him that he could not, that he was a fool, that he should go home.

But this was not where Kip stopped.

So he answered the challenge song the way he knew it ought to be answered, the way Tor had told him in about ten different ways that he wanted it answered, with all of the insouciance and treasonous sentiment that he’d bottled up inside himself to survive and yet fed the flame of with slow-boiling fury over the past five years.

Kip met the lion eyes, and he did not bow, and he did not genuflect. Instead he said, “So were you ever going to tell me you were the Emperor, or was I supposed to go home before I figured that out?”

Artorin Damara’s voice was one Kip knew, even after just these few days, though he had put the court accent back on. “We were having such lovely chats, I couldn’t bring myself to ruin them.”

His voice was that perfect inflectionless tone; utterly serene. Kip wanted, instantly, with a ferocity that surprised himself, to break his composure, to hear that easy warmth back in his voice, to make him laugh.

There were several armchairs clustered together in the center of the room, turned to face a fireplace that was cold and quiescent. Kip walked over to the chairs, dragged one of them back by a foot just to disturb the elegant perfection of the room, and then plopped himself into it.

He looked up at Artorin Damara and said, “Who says we have to stop?”

The Emperor of Astandalas held his gaze for another beat, then two, and then all at once he smiled and he was only the older Kip’s friend Tor again.

Tor sat down in the other chair that was most facing Kip’s own with a smooth grace. As the door clicked shut on Ludvic, quietly letting himself out, Tor said, “Somehow you never cease to surprise me.” There was a friction to the words, some feeling that Kip could not parse.

He frowned at Tor. “What does your Kip call you? Does he call you Tor, or something stuffier?”

Tor’s voice was perfectly neutral when he said, “He calls me ‘my lord.’”

Kip considered all the implications of that. “I hadn’t expected him to be a coward.”

That startled an undignified noise out of Tor. He covered his face with one hand and said, only a little muffled, “Don’t insult my friend, I’m terribly fond of him.”

There was censure there, albeit a very mild one. Kip considered whether or not to ignore it, and tried to ignore his own little flicker of warmth at terribly fond when it wasn’t for him anyway.

Before he could decide, Tor said, “When did you figure it out?”

“Saya Kalikiri and Sayo Aioru came by this morning, they gave me…” Kip considered how to phrase it. “The right context.”

Tor raised an inquisitive eyebrow at him.

Kip could not say that the idea that there was more than one person in the Palace of Stars who liked him and believed in him as much as Tor seemed to was incomprehensible. He could not say that he was so cynical by now that the idea of working for someone that he, Kip, could respect and trust and like had been impossible to him to wrap his head around until he had substituted in Tor, with his dry humor and warmth, for the empty placeholder of the Emperor of Astandalas in his head.

Instead he said, “At some point I started to question what you were so busy with, and they explained that your Kip was doing somewhere between four to seven jobs, and the two of them and you and a small horde of secretaries were trying to make up the difference.” He added, “They said you and Kiri were conspiring against him.”

“A truly insidious conspiracy to force him to improve his willingness to delegate to the point where him being unavailable does not require at least six people to jump on his laundry list of obligations,” Tor said dryly. “What must you think of this future world, where your coworkers routinely plot against you for malicious goals such as ‘making you eat lunch’ and ‘ensuring you take more than an hour to yourself per day.’”

Kip snickered. He couldn’t help himself. It was nearly baffling, that he could like Tor this much on less than a week’s acquaintance. Even taking into account the fact that Tor knew Kip much better than Kip knew him, he’d found the older Kip’s other friends intimidating, had felt like he’d been stumbling through the older Kip’s life trying to measure up to someone he could barely imagine being.

Maybe it was the way Tor seemed to like him on his own merits, and not just for being a shadow of the other Kip. Kip had lost his temper yesterday and Tor had been hungry for it, that fury. How many years had he been waiting for someone to see the injustice behind shackling him to the throne, subjugated to the needs of the empire, and to be angry about it on his behalf? To tell him that it was an injustice; that he had a right to that fury himself?

What else was he waiting for? What else was there for Kip to give him? There had to be something, or else he would have gone home already. At some point in the last twenty-four hours he had set his course again for when he returned; what he’d come here to learn, he’d already found.

“It’s my fault, really,” Tor said, and it took Kip a moment to drag his own thoughts back to the older Kip working between four to seven different jobs. “I didn’t even realize I was overworking you for years, let alone just how badly.” He shot Kip a speculative look. “Did Eranui remember what he’d learned in the other world, when he went home again?”

“Yes, but it was a parallel world, not the future - I don’t know if it’ll work the same way,” Kip admitted.

“Well, if it does, do try and remember that it is not my intent to work you to the bone, and I would very much prefer it if you would tell me when I start,” Tor said tartly.

“If I do remember all of this, I imagine I’ll commit some form of treason within about ten minutes of meeting you, so it may be a moot point,” Kip said.

Tor laughed. “Don’t underestimate how much that would delight me. My Kip started committing petty treasons the first morning, and by the end of the week they were the highlights of my day.”

Kip said thoughtfully, “You know, the fact that any version of me made it long enough to become Lord Chancellor without ever being executed for blasphemy or stabbed in the back for impertinence baffles me.”

“Avoiding it has required a not insignificant amount of effort from myself, my spymaster, and half the Imperial Guard,” Tor said. There was still some humor to his voice, but it was a black humor, and Kip knew that he was not joking. He cocked an eyebrow at Kip. “It occurs to me that you’re talking about your future in the Palace of Stars as a surety.”

Kip smiled. “Yes.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Well, at some point today I figured out that you were the Emperor of Astandalas, you see.”

Tor’s face slid back into that blankness. “That changed your mind?” he inquired, voice perfectly neutral.

Kip grimaced. Right, yes, Tor had gone out of his way to present himself as the older Kip’s friend first and as the emperor second, or ideally never. Of course he had issues about it. Kip said hastily, “Not the way you’re thinking.” The next piece was harder to say, but it so clearly had to be said that there was nothing for it: “I was - after we talked last night I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I also couldn’t figure out why your Kip hadn’t done what I would have done if I liked anyone in my time’s Astandalas even half as much as he must like you, and say, ‘So you hate the Palace of Stars? So do I, do you want to come live with me in the Vangavaye-ve instead?’”

Tor stared at him. Was Kip imagining it, or had his eyes widened?

Kip swallowed. He had to keep going, he thought, but it was - difficult to find the words. But he had to answer that starving hunger in Tor for a friend and not a vassal.

A hunger, of course, that it was difficult for the older Kip to address directly, bluntly, the way Kip could: not because he’d grown used to courtly customs, but because everything about the way the older Kip had lived his life said that this was the person the older Kip loved best in all the world. To say out loud how deeply that love ran would be like splitting open his own ribcage so that Tor could see the raw mess of his heart beating in his chest.

Kip wet his lips. “Did he ever tell you the story of Aurelius Magnus and Elonoa’a?”

“Once,” Tor said, gaze intent on Kip’s face. “He told me that when Aurelius Magnus was beset on all sides by war and despair, he prayed for someone to light his steps and show him a path forward. Then he remembered the great sailors across the sea, who always knew their way and were afraid of no stranger sea.”

Did the older Kip feel certain that he always knew his way? Did his ke’e hold so fast in his mind that he never doubted the ke’ea to follow it?

Tor went on, “The Wayfinders had no kings, but they elected Elonoa’a as Speaker and Paramount Chief, who became great friends with Aurelius Magnus and guided him everywhere he needed to go; and when Aurelius Magnus was taken by the sun, Elonoa’a followed after him.” He paused, and then said, “And we spoke about… about how the next Emperor corrupted what should have been, what ought to have been, a relationship between friends and equals into one of lord and subordinate.”

Oh, but Kip did understand why the older Kip liked this man so much.

Kip said, voice quiet as a confession, “I used to play at being Elonoa’a as a child all the time. I made my sisters play it with me, my cousins -”

Tor’s smile was a small and quicksilver thing. “Basil and Dimiter?”

Kip nodded once, jerky, momentarily speechless once again at the detail with which Tor knew him. “I wanted to go on adventures like that - I wanted to leave my mark on the world like that - I wanted a friend like that.” He couldn’t help the way his voice cracked on the words.

Tor inhaled, once, a single sharp breath.

Kip couldn’t look at him. “On the first day in the palace, before we’d talked much, Gaudy told me… all of the things the older Kip did. The annual stipend, the sea train, the post… and I looked at all of it and I just felt so tired. I knew the older me served the Emperor, but I didn’t - I didn’t know what that meant, I couldn’t imagine it as anything other than - than toiling away on these great works, far from home and away from everyone I loved and everyone who loved me, and I thought - I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to, not - not alone. And he couldn’t have, either.”

Tor’s voice made a good effort at being light, but Kip could hear the finest waver to it. “I’ll be honest, Kip, you did most of the work.”

“Bullshit,” Kip said. Tor laughed, a bark of noise that sounded shocked out of him. “Oh, does he not swear at you? I guess it’s the treason thing again.”

“Please commit more treasons, Kip,” Tor said, with all the gravity of an imperial proclamation. “Go on.”

“Well, if you insist,” Kip said, waving a hand. “First of all, I’ve been to Astandalas before. I thought that I could just fix the government through the application of sheer force of will for, I don’t know, a month? Well,” he amended, scrupulously honest, “maybe longer than that, but only because, as half my family has informed me, I’m too contrary and stubborn for my own good.”

Tor’s face was superbly serene.

Kip said, “But I’m well aware that I - I struggle with the nuances of court, I’m not - I’m not persuasive, I know I have the skills but they mean nothing if all my work lingers in my superiors’ offices because I’m too intense, because I keep accidentally insulting them with how self-righteous I am, because I’m angry and I can’t help it and I can’t hide it, because I’m not a team player, because I don’t know how the game is played -”

Tor said gently, “What did I tell you about insulting my friend.”

Kip took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out. Tor was watching him steadily. Kip knew that his own face could never achieve the kind of calm stillness that Tor seemed to be able to assume so readily when inner turmoil surged. He wondered what Tor saw in his.

“I never realized how deeply your time in Astandalas had wounded you,” Tor said quietly.

“Well,” Kip said, voice thick, and had to swallow to keep his composure, “I hear that later on I get this friend who likes my ideas, and who helps me put them into action, and who thinks I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, and that - probably helps a lot, to heal that wound.”

Tor’s expression was so soft that it was almost difficult to look directly at. “We’ll call the reformation of the government a joint effort, then, shall we? Since you won’t let me give you the lion’s share of the credit.”

Kip wiped his eyes as subtly as he could, which was not very. “If the end result is greater than the sum of its parts, then surely that’s a sign of a good -” It wasn’t more audacious than what Tor himself had said just earlier, was it? But Kip found his throat closing over at the sheer realization, once again, that this was the Lord of Rising Stars -

“Partnership?” Tor offered.

“Yes,” Kip said, voice low. Yes. That was the word he had wanted to use.

They sat quietly for a while. Tor, Kip thought, might be giving him time to compose himself again. Kip found that he himself had no words. He felt wrung out, and yet also light, at the same time. Unburdened.

Kip ran a thumb against the velvet of the armchair, a blood red that was plush to the touch, and reflected that if anyone had thought to explain the rooms to him as a thing the older Kip had agreed to in order to make his friend happy, and to be able to spend more time with his friend, that he should have understood the matter much better much earlier. They were still dreadful, but his chair was comfortable, cushioning him and enveloping him, and the mage light keeping the room lit was a nice cozy brightness, and Tor, for all that he was still sitting perfectly straight, looked relaxed nonetheless, staring absently over to the dark fireplace.

A flash of pain spiked, abruptly, though Kip’s skull. Sharper, this time, than it had been, earlier, and unprompted, Kip thought, by anything he’d actually been doing. It felt, oddly, as if for just a moment the other Kip had split his head open to peer out through his eyes at Tor. Wanting to come home, maybe.

Tor’s attention snapped back to him. “Your head?”

Kip waved him off. He wasn’t done yet. He had done two things, he thought: that righteous anger over what must be, he realized now, Tor’s unwilling ascension to the throne, and his assertion that the older Kip valued Tor as a friend and partner first and an Emperor second. There ought to be a third thing; that was how it worked in the Lays.

Kip said, “Why doesn’t he call you Tor?”

Tor looked down at his hands, clasped carefully in his lap. He held himself so still. “He told me once that the whole Palace was designed to make everyone know that the god in its center is me.”

Kip pursed his lips. “Hmm.”

“You’re unconvinced?” Tor wasn’t smiling, but Kip thought there was a hint of humor in his voice.

“You’re not a god, so clearly it’s entirely propaganda,” Kip said, he thought reasonably (if blasphemously by some standards).

Tor snorted, a smile starting to tug unwillingly at the corner of his mouth.

Kip just couldn’t see why - “Did you ask him to call you Tor?” He just couldn’t see why he would have said no, not when it clearly mattered to Tor, not when the older Kip cared so deeply for him.

“A request from the Emperor is as good as an order,” Tor said curtly, “and so I do my best to avoid requests.”

Kip considered him. “Twenty or a thousand years seems like a long time for me to have never said no to you ever.”

Tor said, “You have your ways of -” and then narrowed his eyes at Kip. “Don’t say it, Kip.”

“And those ways wouldn’t apply to this?” Kip inquired. “Somehow I seem to have no problem saying it, you may have noticed. Of course I am a good devout Astandalan who would never blaspheme -” Tor’s mouth was twitching. Kip kept his own voice prim with an exertion of great effort - “or commit treason. What a horrible thought. I’ve certainly never picked a fight with a priest wizard about ontological east -”

“You have not told me that story and I want to hear it,” Tor managed, his voice steady even though there was a slight tremor in his shoulders.

Kip was going to break that composure. “Or committed petty treasons in front of the Lord of Rising Stars.” This would be rather easier if he knew what treasons the older Kip had actually gotten up to since he’d met Tor, but Kip still thought he could keep this list going for as long as he needed to. “I’ve also definitely never stolen a book of Fitzroy Angursell poetry from the Censors and memorized every word of it, or written anonymous letters to any newspapers about how the Red Company are heroes -”

Tor cracked. He covered his face as he started to laugh. Kip leaned back in his chair to watch him, knowing that he had a deeply smug smile on his own face and completely unwilling to hide it.

“You,” Tor managed after a moment or two, “are unbelievable.”

Kip squinted at him.

Tor flapped a hand in his general direction, still snickering into his other hand. “Compliment, Kip.”

“Most people who call me ‘unbelievable’ are not saying it in a complimentary sense,” Kip informed him.

“Most people aren’t me,” Tor retorted.

Well, fair enough.

When Tor’s laughter had fully faded, he shot Kip a look that Kip thought was maybe somewhere between affectionate and exasperated. “I ought to ask my Kip to call me Tor, is what you’re saying?”

Kip shrugged one shoulder. “Or other requests you’ve been holding back on. He can’t be afraid to say no to you; I could never respect someone who ruled from fear. And he loves you, obviously, so I think you can ask him to call you by a nickname.”

Another sharp spike of pain through his head. Kip hoped he would remember this when he went home. If not all of it, then at least enough to remember that his ke’e was true, that someone was waiting for him in the Palace of Stars.

Tor said softly, “Obviously?”

Kip said, “I spent my first few days here thinking that the choices my older self made didn’t make sense at all. Then I rearranged my equations to map ‘Tor, my older self’s closest friend’ to ‘the Emperor, who he’s been working with for the last two decades’ and his life trajectory abruptly made perfect sense. So, yes, at least to me, it is obvious.”

Tor looked at Kip, not quite smiling, except with his eyes. “Thank you, Kip.”

Kip said, gravely, “You know, if you’d told me yesterday what you needed irreverent and improper remarks inflicted on, we could have managed this even quicker,” just for the pleasure of coaxing his smile out to his full face.

The world was starting to feel less real, the velvet less silky under his hand and more the memory of softness, but Kip hoped he still had a few more hours left in this place. He thought he’d done good work, here, but work half done was easily undone, which meant he had a sternly worded letter to leave with his older self. Just to be sure.

My lord, honestly.