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“No more or less than anyone else.”
“It’s when somebody—and by somebody, I mean usually a government—does something you don’t like—and by you, I mean another government—but you don’t not like it enough to go to war over it, so you—you know when people snub you at a party and then go off to the other end of the room with all their friends to whisper about you to each other and giggle behind their hands? Like that.” Kadou dragged the wine bottle closer and refilled his glass. Tried to refill. He scowled at the mere two fingers of liquid in the cup. “We should go home, I guess.”
Evemer felt a trickle of disappointment and squashed it. His Highness was quite right.
Kadou probably had enough material to talk all night long about economics and coin fineness and whatever other damn fool thing that really ought to be as dull and boring as old bread. Evemer would have listened all night too, wondering (and frustrated, and outraged, and confounded) wherethatKadou went in the light of day.
“Sir,” he said. “May I ask you something?”
Kadou peered up at him again, this time startled. “Eh?”
Evemer wrestled with himself for a minute. “It’s something personal.” Maybe it was fine to ask—if Kadou didn’t want to answer, he’d say so. And perhaps he wouldn’t even remember this in the morning, if he was offended. But why should he be offended? A kahya might trim his nails for him, or nurse him when he was sick, or die for him. Evemer already knew all His Highness’s tailoring measurements by heart, what he liked and didn’t like at meals, how sweet and how strong he took his coffee, the soft-heartedness he showed to his armsmen and kahyalar in chess, and that he couldn’t speak to Siranos or even spot him from a distance without fretting himself to bits over it.Something personalwas, in fact, already fading away in the distance, miles and miles behind them. It had been put behind them the moment Evemer was assigned to His Highness’s service. “May I ask?”
“All right,” Kadou said slowly, sipping at his wine.
Evemer sat down in the chair beside him and dragged it around so he was fully facing His Highness. “You called yourself a coward.”
“Yes?”
“Why?”
“Because I am.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just comes upon me. Like a tiger leaping on me out of the woods.”
“Butwhy?”
“Stop sayingwhyand ask what you mean to ask,” Kadou said peevishly. “Spell it out.”
“Why are you afraid? What happened to make you afraid? When did it happen?”
“I don’t know,” Kadou said. “As long as I can remember? I’ve always been cowardly. High strung. Once, the tutors took me and Zeliha to the poorest parts of the capital and showed us the orphanages and the charity hospital and the lepers’ house, and told us that we’d better be damned careful how we conducted ourselves when we were grown, because those were the people who we’d hurt if we did anything bad. They introduced us to some of them, told us their names, made us ask questions about them and their families and their histories, and then they took us aside and said that if we were bad, then those people would die, and it would be our fault. The first lesson: Misusing our power hurts everyone else before it hurts us. I cried. I wouldn’t stop crying. It was very embarrassing for everyone.” Kadou drank the last gulp of his wine.
“How old were you?”
“I was five, she was nine. I cried because I thought I already had killed someone, you see,” he added. “I remember apologizing and apologizing because I’d thrown a tantrum at breakfast, and I thought that had been bad enough to do it. But instead of comforting me or explaining what they meant, the tutors just nodded and said, ‘Yes, imagine if you’d had a very, very big tantrum. Imagine if you were grown-up, and as powerful as your Lady Mother or your Lord Father and you had a tantrum, imagine how bad that would have been. That’s why you must be ever so careful.’” Kadou looked pensively down into his empty cup. “I think that’s the first time I remember being really afraid. Zeliha handled it well, though. She was serious and solemn the whole time, very queenly. She was old enough to know what they meant. I couldn’t even ask for a second cup of tea for weeks after that. Might have killed someone, you know?” He clenched his jaw. “And then it happened just like they said,” he whispered. “Gülpasa, Balaban. One wrong step, and now they’re dead, and I might as well have done it with my own hand. I’ve been trying to write condolence letters to their families for two weeks, and I’m too scared to do that, even. Afraid of making another wrong step, hurting someone else again.”
Evemer fit this in to everything else he knew of His Highness and turned it over and over in his mind. There was something there, but it needed to finish brewing, like a pot of coffee set over a dish of coals to keep warm.
Ican walk, you know, I’m not that drunk,” Kadou said, yanking his arm out of Evemer’s grasp and deftly avoiding the wall that he nearly swerved into.
“Sir,” Evemer said.
Kadou shook himself, smoothed his clothes, balanced himself against the wall with one hand, and set off down the street again. He really wasn’t that drunk, no matter what Evemer said—tricksy Evemer, asking him questions like that when his guard was down. No matter, he supposed. What did he have to prove to Evemer, anyway? The man didn’t have to like him to be good at his job. He could, come to think of it, tell Evemer anything he wished and be secure in the knowledge that Evemer’s opinion of himcouldn’tsink any lower.
But actually taking that step and talking about himself like that? No, unthinkable. Far too terrifying a prospect, even if he was perfectly safe within Evemer’s disdain.
That thought, though, gave him an idea.
He’d read over the papers from Armagan’s investigation three times in the last two weeks. Evemer had read them too, and Eozena. There hadn’t been any conclusions immediately apparent in either direction: either that Armagan had been correct and there wasn’t a point to continuing the investigation, or that Armagan had been wrong or (Kadou barely dared to think it—çe was akahya) intentionally dishonest.
Kadou’s stupid, anxious fear had kept him from pursuing it further. He kept thinking of the eyes of all the kahyalar watching Tadek run from the dormitories to the Gold Court in his cadet whites, the gossip network through the palace, the way everyone was just holding their breaths for him to make another monumental mistake. If he took a risk and failed, it would be in front of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people.
But now . . . Evemer was the only person around. He, at least, wasn’t holding his breath foranything.
“Hey,” Kadou said. “Let’s go to the Shipbuilder’s Guild.”
