Chapter Text
The day after your coronation, they had brought you what Eritanyr had no doubt considered his “leftovers”. You had feigned ignorance of their intentions, their expectations. You had given the children scholarships to top schools.
By the first anniversary of your coronation, they had worked out at least that your desires were unlike your uncle's. They presented you with three classically beautiful eighteen-year-olds. You gave them scholarships to Morrowlea.
Each anniversary they tried something different. Beautifully muscled guards, lithe dancers and acrobats, champion athletes of all shapes and sizes. I, who had travelled with Sardeet, Pali, Damian, and Jullanar of the Sea, was not tempted. You awarded them prizes, jobs, titles.
They did not give up. You knew, as your tenth year on the throne approached, ten years chained in place, they would try again. Something more spectacular, some further waste of your people's time and talents.
You were paraded through the streets of Astandals the Golden, shut away in your palanquin. There was a feast that lasted far too long, where your great aunt kept giving you the special look she reserved for when she felt you were failing in your duty. There were four new symphonies composed in your honour, and to your relief one of them was even good.
Serene, you floated through your official study, and the breakfast room, to the largest of your private reception rooms. And yes, there they were. A selection of twelve 'exotics' from the Atlas of Imperial Peoples. No Alinorel scholar, or member of the junior secretariat, not even anyone dressed like the people in the city just outside the Palace gates.
They all performed the obeisance perfectly. You wondered how much time, how much of their time, had been wasted learning it. Wasted purifying them, coaching them, bringing them here. After ten years, these emotions did not even flicker near your face. Any approbation, you knew, would be taken out on the lowliest in the room.
You bid them rise, and then went to each in turn. You asked them a few questions, daringly. Knowing that even if they had been tutored well on court etiquette, they might let something slip about themselves, having not been brought up swimming in it. And then you turned their answers into gifts. Scholarships, appointments, imperial warrants for goods. You did your best, to set them up with something, some consolation.
Last in line (was it alphabetical?) was the Wide Sea Islander.
The others had dressed the parts required, although you suspected none of them wore those clothes in day-to-day life. They were the clothes of festivals, of historical plays. It was hard to tell who was uncomfortable simply from your presence, and who was uncomfortable in their dress, but you suspected it was both.
The Wide Sea Islander was perfect. He looked the spitting image of the picture in the Atlas. Not just his clothes, but his face too. (You carefully did not look at his eyes, to see if those matched. It should have been safe, but still.)
There was a pride in his bearing, and a sense of rightness in the way he wore those clothes. The skirt, the arm bands, the necklaces. You suspected he could have pointed out several inaccuracies in the recreations the court costumiers had made.
"Ah, the Wide Sea Islander, from Zunidh," you said, stating the obvious, so the courtiers could feel smug that they also knew. “What island are you from?”
There was a slight hitch in his shoulder, as if this was not the question he had expected.
“My island is Loaloa, in the Vangaveye-ve, Glorious One,” he said, his voice slightly nasal, his vowels slightly long.
You couldn't remember a region with that name, but perhaps it was the local name for somewhere. The Sociable Isles, or the Vonyabe.
He seemed unlikely to still be a student, and did not have the calluses of manual labour on his hands. There was, perhaps, the smallest ink stain on his right hand, where a pen would rest. “And what is your contribution to the Empire? Scholarship? Teaching?”
Another hitch of the shoulder, and a small flush of embarrassment. “I am a page in the Imperial Bureaucratic Service, if it pleases you, Glorious One,” he said, in that beautiful voice.
Well, they hadn't had to go far to find this man. You wondered if they had originally planned for someone else, and that person hadn't arrived with enough time. Then this man, who presumably lacked a patron to protect him from this kind of action, was taken up in their place.
It also made it much harder to offer him anything. Part of the point of these gifts was to allow these people to return home, in safety and security. The other part was to keep them away from you.
You were not (as your priest-wizards feared) immune to the charms of beautiful people, intelligent conversation. So you did what you could to keep that temptation distant. They could not say no to you, and so you had to protect them however you could.
You would not become your uncle.
You could not ask him what he wanted, of his hopes and dreams, of why he came to the Palace. He would have to say that he wanted to serve you, they all would have said the same. It would also be cruel to send him home, when he presumably had worked very hard to get here.
If you sent him back to being a page, that would mark him as less than the others, as some special failure. It would probably damage his future career to have been rejected by the Emperor. In theory, it was your Bureaucratic Service, and you could appoint and promote as you liked. But like anywhere in the Palace, in the whole Imperial system, it was rotten to the core. As soon as you turned away, any position you gave him would likely melt away.
It was only after you had rooted out the worst of the corruption in the Army and Navy that you had begun offering appointments there. You had not (yet, but there never seemed to be enough time) made much attempt to reform the Service.
"We appoint you as Our undersecretary," you intoned serenely. You had never had an undersecretary, although there was a desk for one just outside your official study. You hoped he was competent, or at least less irritating than the usual crop of young nobles you were sent as your secretaries.
The man bowed low, overawed as was to be expected. It was indeed a promotion far beyond his current station, at least a Third-Degree Secretary role.
You moved on, having dealt with the problem for now. It was well past midnight. You strode into your dressing room, standing perfectly still, so your attendants could undress you. And then you could (finally) go to bed.