Chapter Eighty-Three: Bracing Cold

The Flowering Maiden’s Fall featured a plotline where the heroine, Lady Marazan, was forced to watch her beloved enter an engagement with another woman. It was a dreadful read—even Lord Solandis’ extravagant cake-themed downfall barely moved him—but Osmund hid himself in a corner and scarfed it all down anyway. A teaser in the back suggested that in the next book, Revenge, Marazan’s love rival would be revealed conveniently as a traitor (typical) and removed from play without much fuss. Rather than gratified, Osmund felt bitter. Of course for the heroine of a novel, suffering would be so fleeting.

Emre found him. “There you are. I talked to Cemil,” he said, with the cadence of someone about to launch into his next point. But then he paused.

Self-consciously, Osmund turned the page. “Yes?” he mumbled.

The other man knelt beside him with a sigh. His voice was surprisingly soft when he said, “Here.” In his hand was a silk handkerchief.

Osmund stared at it numbly for a moment, willing the offering to disappear. He resented how pathetic he must look. But Emre didn’t relent, and so at last he took it, dabbing at his eyes with the corner in a futile effort. The tears themselves were long dry.

Emre accepted back the handkerchief, shoving it haphazardly into his pocket. “Nice hiding spot,” he remarked, looking around at the little disused storage room and the nook into which Osmund had crawled.

“I can hear them all laughing at their foolish games,” Osmund complained, feeling petty. “Dreadful echo in this place.”

After a hesitating moment, Emre stood. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go for a ride.”

“Right now?”

“Up. Before it’s dark.”

Osmund saddled an eager Banu, while Emre tended to a happy and pliant Adalet. They rode in near silence awhile, savoring the stunning views of the red-brown sloping landscape, until they passed a rushing waterfall, the current’s loud egress forcing them to pause their idle talk momentarily. This seemed as safe a place as any. “What did Cemil say?” Osmund asked once the falls were at their back.

“He’s not much keener on Pravin than we are,” Emre reported. “He won’t hear a word against Taranuz, though even he had to admit it strange that she wouldn’t let us in to investigate, or to help you. I think there’s a chance she’s in Pravin’s pocket.”

Osmund swiped a stray hair out of his face impatiently, but the wind continued its harassment. “Do you think Cemil will entertain Pravin’s offer?”

“Honestly, it was difficult to get anything useful out of him.” Emre lowered his voice in an imitation of his brother. “‘I don’t know, Emre. I don’t know much about him. I’ll consider it. Can you stand to the side, I’m trying to glare at that wall.’”

The impression was quite good up until the last bit. “What’s got him in such a temper?”

He felt Emre’s disbelieving stare. “You can’t guess?”

“True, he’s got a lot on his mind.” Osmund tallied the list. “There’s the unrest in Şebyan after the arrest of half the Guild…the Videlari affair, and his, his arranged marriage…”

“Knowing he made you cry,” Emre added. “That you won’t see him.”

“I only asked to lick my wounds awhile in private,” said Osmund defensively. “I think I’m allowed.”

An unseen bird called in the brush. Crickets added their voices to the midday chorus. Very gently, Emre said, “But you must have known it was coming.”

It was one thing to know Cemil must eventually marry, and quite another to know that this faceless, bodiless specter now had a name. Nicoleta. And in just a matter of days, she and Cemil would…

“I don’t have to like it.”

“Cemil likes it even less than you do.”

Osmund was too busy feeling sorry for himself to have much sympathy for Cemil just yet. “Do you mean to tell me to stop sniveling? Is that what this is about?”

“He’s my brother,” said Emre, pulling Adalet to a halt at the crest of the hill. “And he’s in one pit of vipers, about to walk into another. He needs people on his side, now more than ever.”

Osmund felt his hurt fracture until it was another sort of pain altogether. “…I know.” He took a deep breath as he brought Banu to a stop alongside the little black horse. “I know I have to be strong about it, for his sake. He’s got plenty to worry about before having to take my feelings into account.”

“I’d feel fucking shitty too, for what it’s worth,” said Emre quietly.

“Hah. I think that does help.”

Their voices fell into the cacophany of birds and insects. The more Osmund sat with his thoughts, the more he felt an utter bastard. Emre hadn’t said so, but he was sniveling, wasn’t he? Cemil had told him from the start what to expect, over and over and over again. And Osmund was the one who’d said he’d stay. He’d stay. He’d stay.

And oh, heavens. Emre. How did Osmund have the gall to complain about anything?

“Emre. Please. Are you really alright with this? Being sent away to spy on Safet? Being made into an enemy again?”

“I’d rather do a lot of things with my time,” Emre admitted with a mirthless grin, “but stay here isn’t one of them.”

“They can’t force you.” At the look this produced, Osmund amended, “Well, I suppose Cemil can, but he wouldn’t.”

“I’ll enjoy seeing Nadir and Lalezar gone as much as Cemil’s abhorrent father will.” Emre looked out over the sprawling vista. “They’re dangerous. Nothing good can come of unstoppable superweapons, no matter whose hands they’re put into.”

“Imperial spymaster,” Osmund muttered. “Is that a lofty title?”

“Under Cemil, it could be.”

Osmund ventured, “You might change the Empire a great deal at Cemil’s side. And Sakina, she…she would help you.”

Emre was quiet a long time. “I know a comfortable life can be mine if I only let it,” he said. His voice was very soft again. “I might be fulfilled, even, and think little of the collar they’ve put around my neck, until one day I stop noticing it at all…”

The sun began to set. Osmund tapped Banu on the side while turning her about. “We’d better head back. Only…Emre?”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering what Cemil said back at the house. When he compelled you by mistake. I know he said it wasn’t anything serious…”

“Don’t feel responsible,” came the tired sigh. “They were parting words. He told me to keep you out of harm’s way.”

After sending Emre ahead to the lodge, Banu and her stoop-shouldered rider soon came again to the waterfall. Osmund dismounted and sat by its obliging roar. Here at last was somewhere truly private.

He willed himself to have the cry which he’d denied himself since yesterday. The real one. Better here where nobody was listening. But nothing came. Numb, in mind and increasingly in body. A shiver went down his arms. He was resigning himself to the pointlessness of it when a sudden noise from Banu made him jump, but it was only a grasshopper that had startled her. A grasshopper, he thought with a smile. Not a wyrm.

He shucked off his riding gloves and splashed the running water against his face. It was freezing; he shuddered against the bracing, bitter cold. He was awake now, truly, without that veil of fantasy to shield him from the world. Soon he’d be a married man’s lover. He would have to either accept it, or leave.

Leave.

In the sanctuary of the forest, barricaded from the world by the loud rushing water, he allowed himself to picture it. Saying goodbye to Sakina and Emre. To Cemil, if he could stomach it. Getting right back on Banu—he’d surely be allowed to take her back to the house, at least—and heading for Şebyan, the city which was his home.

And then what?

Ansley. Sigebert. Ken. And—Rylan.

“I’m a serious man,” Rylan had said, not looking away. “I’ll try my best. If he gives me a chance.”

Osmund doused himself again. Rylan was good and honest, and a devoted guardian to his younger sister, and many other admirable things besides, but—he was still little more than a friendly acquaintance. Just like Cemil, Rylan didn’t know Osmund’s secret.

But. What would happen if he did?

Rylan wasn’t a foreign prince with an eye on a great destiny. (At least, not unless he was sitting on a humdinger of a secret to rival Osmund’s.) He would have no reason to feel betrayed. They hadn’t known each other long enough for the unsaid thing to gape like a wound between them.

This thought, undammed, led to something new. A realization that made the cold water feel like it had seeped through Osmund’s bones into his soul.

There was a time he could’ve told Cemil the truth.

He recognized that now. If, when Cemil had first found him on the street—or even in the months following—Osmund had opened his mouth and claimed to be a runaway Tolmish prince, Cemil would have been dubious to be sure, but…but, he wouldn’t have used him against his wishes. He wouldn’t have sold him out to Pravin. He would have kept him around. He would have been kind.

They might’ve still become—fond.

What would it have meant, if Cemil’s lover wasn’t some nobody? If he was instead a valued foreign ally, one even higher-born than Nicoleta, who was only a prince’s cousin?

What if they might have…?

Osmund yanked his gloves back on, blinking hard. It didn’t matter.

It was much too late.

Man and horse approached the lodge in the liminal evening hour. Even in the distance, seeing the building’s silhouette, at once Osmund sensed the wrongness of it. He spurred Banu faster, that sudden sour feeling twisting tighter until it sat in his gut, heavy as a stone.

The same band of merrymakers littered the garden, but every last soul was trembling on their feet, waiting in unison by the front entry, hunched and tense. Even the musicians had stopped playing.

Two dour-faced older women in ruffled skirts pushed their way out of the lodge, and a man with rolled-up sleeves hurried through in their place. All three wore the garb of the imperial mages.

Healer’s garb.

Osmund nearly leapt off of Banu’s back and desperately scanned the crowd for a familiar face. No Emre, no Sakina. No Cemil. He heard tense voices coming from inside the building. Somewhere, a woman was crying. Men argued.

There. That blond head. The impostor.

“What’s happened?” Osmund demanded as the man turned to face him, blue-green eyes wide in his pale face.

“It’s chaos,” babbled the other, aghast. “Lunacy. I don’t know if they’ve even survived.”

“Who?!”

The impostor shook in Osmund’s fervent grip. “They’re saying an assassin has made an attempt on the two imperial princes!”