Chapter Text
Part I: A Brief (Ha!) History of the Nijani Police Force
Aioru asked to speak with Cliopher sixteen hours before he and Rhodin were due to set out for Alinor.
“Yes, of course, send him in,” Cliopher told Franzel, standing from where he’d been looking through his bag. He was already packed, and had been for a few days, but he found himself prone to an uncharacteristic fretting about its contents. He knew how to pack for the trip to find Basil. He knew, even, how to pack for adventures, for difficult journeys to unexpected places. He still found himself worrying about his other objective; he wasn’t sure where they would even begin to look for his Radiancy.
Cliopher had a vain hope that it might be a perfectly benign visit, one to see him off, perhaps. One look at Aioru’s face when he came in dashed those hopes. “What happened?” Cliopher said.
“The Duke of Nijan is dead,” Aioru said.
“How did it happen?”
“Best as we can tell? Stabbed. It’s not clear yet whether it’s murder or an assassination.”
Cliopher absorbed this blow. “Remind me, is the police force —”
“On strike again? Oh yes. There’s rioting in the streets. The other Jilkano princes are sending forces in —”
“Which is liable to set the whole city off,” Cliopher finished. He was mentally running through the list of staff in the Private Offices in his head, trying to come up with another name who had spent as much time in Nijan as he had, another person who could speak to both the citizens of Nijan and the Council of Princes, somebody else.
It was useless. He knew it was useless.
“I’m sorry to have to ask,” Aioru said.
Cliopher exhaled. He kept his face under control with an effort. “No, I know,” he said. “I know there’s no one else. Let me…”
His gaze skimmed over the packed bag resting on the table in the sitting room. One room over, in his private study, the desk was swept clear, matters put away.
He opened his traveling bag and retrieved his writing case. “Let me send a page for my secretaries,” he said finally. “And one to Rhodin, to let him know we won’t be able to leave tomorrow morning, after all.”
Ludvic took Cliopher and Rhodin down to his bar three days later, once the dust had settled enough for Cliopher to have the time and for it to have become obvious that Cliopher would be going nowhere anytime soon, unless it was to Nijan to listen to people shouting.
“Rós or beer, Cliopher?” Ludvic asked.
Cliopher considered rós’s reputation for ferocious strength, the fact that he had to be in the Offices of State by the first bell of the morning tomorrow, and the infrequency with which he typically drank. He also considered the absolute disaster of a Council of Princes meeting that he’d had to preside over today, the likely equally monstrous meetings and correspondence he’d be embroiled in all day tomorrow, and the fact that he’d asked Franzel to finish unpacking his things before Ludvic had arrived to spirit him away. “Rós.”
Ludvic clapped him on the shoulder and went to relay their orders to Giya.
“It won’t be that bad, Cliopher,” Rhodin said.
Cliopher stared at him.
“Yes, all right, it probably will be exactly that bad,” Rhodin admitted. “I won’t pretend I know the politics of it as well as you do, but gods know I’ve heard you and his Radiancy talk about Nijan enough to know that much.”
Cliopher could be grateful, he supposed, that his Radiancy didn’t have to be embroiled in this particular mess. Few dilemmas had exasperated him quite as much as the Nijani political system had. Cliopher could deal with this for him, and be — and be glad for him, that he was off having his grand adventure. Free of it all.
He could. He could.
Ludvic came back with a trio of shot glasses for the table.
Rhodin lifted his. “I would make a toast, but all my ideas are too grim,” he declared. “Cheers.” He took his shot in one go.
Cliopher considered his, shrugged, and tipped the whole drink into his mouth. He managed not to spit it out, but it was a near thing.
Ludvic was laughing at him with his eyes.
“I know,” Cliopher said, and tried to smile at him.
Ludvic said, more seriously, “I’m sorry, Cliopher.”
Cliopher didn’t want to talk about it. “I know why I’m morose,” he said, “but Rhodin, I didn’t realize you were looking forward to the trip so. You could still go, to Alinor or — was it Voonra, where your correspondent lives?”
“It is Voonra,” Rhodin admitted. “I can’t say I like the idea of ambling off on a trip of my own while the two of you weather such a crisis.”
“It won’t put the government in any better position for you to resume your position and then retire shortly anyway,” Cliopher pointed out. “I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t the Nijan expert in the Offices of State.” He rolled his shot glass around in one hand. The problem with drinking it all in one go was that now there wasn’t any more. “No reason for all of us to be stuck here. Sorry, Ludvic,” he added belatedly.
He thought that Ludvic had to be feeling a little bit of that same call to adventure too, surely — Masseo Umrit was out there, already traveling with his Radiancy — but Ludvic just shrugged. “I’m used to it. One of Rhodin or I would always have had to stay through the first couple months of the new Lady Magus’s tenure, just to have a firm hand on the reigns through the transfer of power. You know Himself would blame himself if anything went wrong.”
Cliopher did know. “Still.”
“It won’t be so long now regardless,” Ludvic said. “Six more months until the Jubilee; another two for the transfer of power after that.”
He was right, it wouldn’t be so long. Cliopher could be patient for another six months.
He had vowed, to his Radiancy and to every province, to keep the world safe for him until he came home. Cliopher could hold the world for him for six more months.
Cliopher resigned himself to it, or at least stayed busy enough that he was able to stop thinking about it, which was almost the same thing. So he thought, at least, until the next batch of letters came, the day before Rhodin was to head out to look for his penpal alone.
This time, Cliopher had four. One from his Radiancy; three with handwriting he didn’t recognize. He opened his Radiancy’s first.
It read,
My dear Kip,
Important news first: Basil, Sara, and Clio are alive. Their letters should have come through with mine; go read those first, I know you’ll want to. I assure you mine can wait.
Cliopher sank blindly into the chair in his study and fumbled his letter opener twice before he could get the other three letters open. His hands were shaking. Had he truly forgotten what Basil’s handwriting looked like? Had it been that long?
It had. He knew it had.
The longest letter was signed Basil. The shortest letter was addressed to Uncle Kip.
Cliopher had to stop, then, until he could compose himself. Weeping and reading were activities that did not particularly mix.
He did put aside his Radiancy’s letter for the moment in favor of Basil’s, which read,
Dear Kip,
Three hundred and twenty-seven letters. We got them all in one go, you know, around four months ago. And you must have sent far more than that, with how bad the post’s been on this side; those are only the ones that got through. Oh, Kip, I am sorry I didn’t have your faith. I thought you were dead until the spring. Someone last winter was going to Zunidh, and I thought about writing home, but I didn’t know what to say, not after so long, not if you wouldn’t be there to read it. I didn’t know how to go home if you wouldn’t be there to meet me.
I will come home now; we all will, Sara and Clio and I. The border to Zunidh opens every six months on this side, you may remember, and it will open in about three weeks for us. Your lord (more on him in a moment) and I tried to estimate what that would amount to on your side, but in his words it is ‘one part magic, one part math, and one part chance, and I’ve never been particularly good at math,’ so who knows. Expect us hopefully soon. Our plan is to come to Solaara and stay with you either until you get sick of us, the family elders shout loudly enough that we have to divert to the Vangavaye-ve for a time, or the Jubilee happens.
Now, as promised, your lord. He is here at the Bee, as you have likely gathered, along with — oh, I had better start at the beginning, I think. Since we last spoke, I have not reformed any governments nor accomplished any great tasks besides being able to make very good mead, but I have made one rather excellent friend. When I first discovered Jullanar of the Sea lived in Ragnor Bella, and indeed at many moments since then, I have thought both that you would be delighted and that I wished I could introduce the two of you. I look forward to actually being able to do so now, the two of you will get along splendidly, I think. But I am getting distracted. All this to say that Jullanar recently divorced her husband and vanished to places unknown on an adventure, so it was, despite our years of close friendship, a little surprising when she showed up on my door with half the Red Company in tow, including Fitzroy Angursell. More surprising still, when he came straight up to me and said, “You’re Kip’s Cousin Basil! He’s told me so much about you!”
I stared at him. “Somehow he’s never mentioned to me that he knows Fitzroy Angursell.”
“Ah,” Fitzroy said, “well.” He sounded a little sheepish. “He knows me by another name. Artorin Damara?”
I must admit I laughed my head off. Only you, Kip. “In that case,” I said, once I could talk again, “I have heard a great deal about you. You’d better come inside.”
I do hope this is not how you’re finding out about all this. Fitzroy seemed vaguely optimistic that perhaps you already knew, but I have to say, if you found out your beloved lord was Fitzroy Angursell and then never managed to hint at it once in three hundred letters then I will be shocked at your skills at dissembling. Although you have been circumspect about other things in your letters: I have noticed that, despite a good three hundred letters extolling your lord to the skies, there’s a word you never call him. Why is that?
Well, I won’t tease you, at least not now; it’s less fun in letter form when I can’t see your face anyhow. I like him very much, Kip. I thought I would from the way you talk about him, but it is one thing to read about him and another entirely to see exactly how long he can talk about how amazing you are and how impressive all of your many accomplishments are. (Twenty-seven minutes, in case you were wondering, I lost a bet to Jullanar about it. I actually think he could have talked for longer but Pali wandered in at that point and muttered something about ‘this again’ and he cut it short.) I wish you were here with us; he played with the village musicians the night he arrived and all I could think about was how much you would have enjoyed playing with them too, getting to flex your repertoire of Fitzroy Angursell songs for the man himself. I’m sure you have half of them memorized still, even if the ban against playing them is probably more strictly enforced in Zunidh than it is here.
Somehow it is easier to talk about current events than to try and sum up the last fifteen years of my life. Where to even start? And having been working my way through your letters it somehow feels like I could just start talking about the last few weeks, as if we have been talking together all this time, or as if I could simply pick up exactly where we left off and go from there.
But I think you will want to know about more than just the last fortnight. Clio…
Cliopher had to put the letter down, then, and breathe through the hot flood of feeling that was creeping through him, so that he would be able to do the rest of the letter justice. It had been a week and a half ago, his and Rhodin’s original departure date, and two days to the Alinor Border. He could have been there by now, to hear these words in Basil’s own voice. He could have clasped Basil’s forearms and pressed their foreheads together and breathed the same breath. He could have embraced Sara and gotten to see Clio — Clio, a teenager! Cliopher only remembered his namesake nephew as a baby, the fierce clutch of his small hand at Cliopher’s pinky finger, the way he’d wailed when anyone but Sara or her mother tried to hold him.
He could have been there when his Radiancy arrived, to share the joy of it with him, to play with him with the village musicians.
Cliopher wiped at his face. This was the dissolution of one of the great sorrows of his life, an ember of hope that he had tended for a thousand years only to see it grow into a grand bonfire. Why couldn’t Cliopher just let himself ride the tide of joy? He had gone a thousand years without Basil, only to find that he lived. Surely that could be enough for him, for however long it took for Basil, Sara, and Clio to get here? For six more months? Why couldn’t he be uncomplicatedly glad?
Cliopher let that hot fierce feeling burn itself down slowly to embers, but the fire of it didn’t go out, merely settled into a quiet smolder, ready to be stirred to wakefulness once again.
Then Tully came to knock on his door to tell him he was about to be late for a meeting with Ludvic and Aioru, and he had to get up and wash his face and put his court mask back on.
His court face was not good enough, today, to fool Ludvic, whose eyebrows went up the moment he saw Cliopher. Cliopher shook his head slightly at Ludvic, meaning ‘later’, and Ludvic subsided.
“Thank you for coming, sir,” Aioru said, glancing up briefly before immersing himself back into reports, parceling out a few to pass over the table to Cliopher. They were in a small meeting room near Aioru’s office, which had once been Cliopher’s. The privacy spells on the walls and windows muffled the sounds of the Private Office outside, but Cliopher could still faintly hear the steady bustle, the ebb and flow of people at work.
“How was Nijan?” Cliopher asked, sitting at the third seat at the table. He and Aioru had sent messages back and forth through the Lights as fast as they would go, several times a day for the entirety of Aioru’s trip, and he’d read Aioru’s preliminary report, of course, but he wanted his unofficial opinion as well.
Aioru shrugged. “About as bad as you’d expect. The rioting’s calmed, and it didn’t seem like it was going to start up again the second I left. They missed you, though, sir.” He gave a rueful smile. “Especially the duke’s daughter.”
“Of course she did,” Cliopher said with a sigh. “How many times did she demand to schedule her investiture?”
“Only about seven times,” Aioru said. “And I only had, oh, about eight people corner me to talk about democratic elections, and three people who threatened revolution if they couldn’t have them.”
Cliopher pinched the bridge of his nose. Up to this point, Cliopher and the rest of the mundial government had always been able to help the various Nijani factions stabilize, which had usually looked like the duke remaining nominally in power, even as their fledgling new form of government slowly sapped away the power from him. Although that somewhat undersold the volatility of the whole process; responsibilities shifted back and forth with every strike, every protest, every reformed faction and broken alliance. No faction had yet tried to break away from the mundial government with any real effort. The duke’s daughter was more popular than her father had been, with her own faction, but Cliopher did not think she was popular enough to be able to overcome the determination for self-governance that had been brewing in Nijan for the last two decades.
And Cliopher did not want her to be able to. He wanted to see Nijan stabilize into a more fair, more equitable, form of government. But such a thing was easier said than done.
“Meanwhile, here, all four of the Jilkanese princes implied to me that they would take control of Nijan by force sooner than see us take power away from the duke’s daughter or use this as an opportunity to make Nijan its own administrative district,” Cliopher said wearily. Their division of labor, Aioru to Nijan and Cliopher to remain in Solaara, had been in part so that the Nijani factions could start to get used to Aioru, and Aioru could get more hands-on familiarity with the Nijani factions, but also so that Cliopher could do his best to keep the princes contained, who had all been in Solaara for a Council of Princes meeting regardless. “Their excuse is that the assassination might have been done by radicals, and giving them what they want would only incentivize more political violence.”
“Not untrue,” Aioru muttered, scrubbing at his face. “Commander Odo, any information yet on who might have been behind it?”
“Not yet,” Ludvic said. “Rhodin’s network is investigating. So is the Nijani police department, but.” He shrugged. Unspoken was that they were all wary of blindly trusting the results of the Nijani investigation, given the stakes and the incentives for the department to return with specific types of findings.
“Right,” Cliopher muttered. Then a thought occurred to him, and he grimaced. “Please tell me I don’t have to tell Rhodin to come back from his retirement too. We just convinced him he could still travel.”
Ludvic shook his head. “No, his successor is managing the network fine. There’s nothing Rhodin could do differently.”
“Well, that’s something,” Cliopher said, leaning back in his seat. “Can we keep the situation stable until we can figure out who was responsible?” If they could prove it wasn’t politically motivated, they would defang at least one argument from the princes against letting Nijan elect their next ruler themselves.
“The duke’s daughter won’t stand for putting off her investiture for that long,” Aioru pointed out.
Cliopher considered this. “Isn’t she a suspect too?” he inquired. “She does, after all, stand to inherit the duchy of Nijan from her father’s death.”
Aioru considered it. “That could work.”
“I’m doubling your guard until this is all over,” Ludvic informed him.
There was more to hash out, of course, but by the end of it they had a number of strategies to deploy with both the princes and on the ground in Nijan to attempt to stabilize the situation (though Cliopher had to admit, in the privacy of his own head, that he felt optimistic about none of them). “And perhaps let me talk to the Jilkanese princes now that I’m back?” Aioru suggested to him. “They do need to see me as an authority, and the sooner the better.”
“Of course,” Cliopher said. “And I…” He could not and should not try and take on more responsibilities, new responsibilities, not with his retirement only deferred for the bare minimum of time. On the other hand, he could not leave himself, retire in truth, not with the situation wavering on the brink of outright warfare.
Aioru’s smile was sympathetic. “Take some time for yourself?” he suggested.
If Cliopher had to sit around twiddling his thumbs he would lose his mind. “I’m going to legalize the rest of Fitzroy Angursell’s poetry,” he said, without entirely meaning to. To Aioru’s widened eyes and Ludvic’s raised eyebrows, he said, “I need a project, it’s non-essential to government functioning, and he’s Zunidh’s poet laureate now. Having half of his works be illegal for sedition is absurd.”
“I don’t believe anybody actually expects us to enforce those laws at this point,” Aioru said.
“Then nobody will care that I’m changing the laws to match the expectations,” Cliopher retorted.
Aioru shrugged and smiled. “Well, I won’t complain.” He stood and stretched. “I’d better get back to it before more urgent dispatches from the Lights arrive.”
Cliopher stood as well, but as the door clicked shut behind Aioru, Ludvic looked up at him and said, “What happened?”
Cliopher had actually, for half of that meeting, forgotten. He could hear his own voice wavering with the sudden rush of startled joy as he said, “Basil’s alive. He’s alive, Ludvic.”
Ludvic stood so he could grip his shoulder wordlessly. “I’m glad,” he said quietly.
“He’s going to come visit me,” Cliopher added, smiling suddenly down at the table. Oh, he would be glad of the free time, wouldn’t he? Once he had visitors again? “He and Sara and Clio. Once the Border opens on their side.”
He could keep himself busy until then. And if his Radiancy wouldn’t come with them, if that reunion would have to be deferred — well, Cliopher could make things easier for him when he did come back, make it as easy as possible for him to return to Zunidh wearing Fitzroy Angursell’s mantle. That, at least, was work Cliopher could do with his whole heart.
It was easier, after that, to bring himself back to the letters. To let himself savor Basil’s words, Sara’s, Clio’s, the visions of what their lives had been like, and imagine them showing up on his door. Probably not showing up as petitioners, the way Ghilly, Toucan, and Bertie had, but perhaps he would be working in his study and Franzel would come to tell him he had visitors; perhaps he would walk out of a Council of Princes meeting and Gaudy would be there to greet him, alert and excited about the arrival of their family…
He had already begun the process to reverse any remaining bans on Fitzroy Angursell’s poetry and, along with it, to repeal and amend the last of the sedition laws still in existence since the Fall, before he came back to his Radiancy’s letter. The sting of guilt he felt at that, though, was eased by the fact that the very next line of it was, You’ve read Basil, Sara, and Clio’s letters? Caught up appropriately? Good.
It was a cheerful, meandering letter, especially in contrast to that heartbreaking uncertainty in the last one. There were a solid four pages of description of Basil and Sara and Clio, the Bee at the Border, their lives there, the town, as if his Radiancy knew (and he probably did) how badly Cliopher would want to be there with them, and wanted to illustrate the scene vividly enough that Cliopher could close his eyes and breathe in the smell of honey.
His Radiancy only spoke about himself near the end of the letter:
Things have been easier, since my last letter. Not easy, precisely, but easier. Domina Black and I had a chance to speak; she apologized to me for an argument that we had. And I have found another friend, one who recognized me in the official portraits; it did soothe something in me, to know that I was not completely unrecognizable, all this time. If there are still — oh, but I would rather not get into it right now. I am tired of the glumbles, Kip, tired of the inside of my own head sometimes, and I am enjoying the way my time at the Bee has been a reprieve from it, even if I suspect it won’t last. Basil and Sara in many ways have both a better grasp on what I have been up to for the past thousand years and fewer preconceptions of who I ought to be than my friends do, and I am enjoying spending time with them, even if Basil’s resemblance to you is strong enough that I walk away from half our conversations wishing I could speak with you instead.
Cliopher found himself rereading that passage, along with the cheerful descriptions, again and again over the days following, sometimes with a bittersweet sting, and others as a fortification of sorts against the endless meetings with the princes.
Convincing the princes to agree to overturning the sedition laws was straightforward, at least once Cliopher had politely reminded them of some of the insults many of them had called him to his face, and inquired whether their ideas had therefore been less valid to consider. The only one to provide any real resistance after that had been the Princess of Xiputl. (Prince Rufus had complained that most near-retirees just took up fishing, but Cliopher did not count that under legitimate complaints.) This had confused Cliopher until he remembered the princess’s bitter comments to his Radiancy about the Red Company, at which point he had smiled his mildest smile at her while the vote passed despite her objections.
The Nijan issue, predictably, continued to be nightmarish to deal with. The Council of Princes had gone from a body that met every six weeks to one that met either officially or unofficially roughly every other day, with endless maneuvering and countless attempts to break the stalemate of the future of the Nijani government, all unsuccessful thus far. At one point, Cliopher suggested to the Jilkanese princes that Nijan could remain part of its existing Jilkanese administrative district, the duke’s daughter could inherit the title of duchess, but the actual ruling power of the duchy could be split into a separate, elected position.
“Which of course the duchess would be eligible to run for,” Cliopher told them. “Surely if she is, as you say, the best candidate for the position, she would have no trouble being elected to the position?”
The Prince of Haion City banged his fist on the table. “You just intend to reduce the strength of our voting bloc!”
“I just said that the Princess Jilkano-Ngurai would continue to serve as ruling Princess,” Cliopher pointed out, thinking as he did that the Prince of Haion City had perhaps never forgiven him for the time that Cliopher had suggested that Haion City be merged into one of the other Jilkanese provinces.
“But of course I could not in good conscience disenfranchise our good Duchess without good reason,” the Princess Jilkano-Ngurai said, watching Cliopher intently.
Never mind that the only way the new Duchess could hope to actually keep her ruling authority without immediate deposition was to earn the consent of the governed, Cliopher thought grimly, while he hunted for more politic words to say exactly that.
So it went.
Cliopher reread his Radiancy’s letter again that night, though it ached more than it soothed to read about those cheerful little adventures wandering around Basil’s village. Over time, however, he found his gaze returning repeatedly to one little aside, early in the letter:
You ought to have told me that Basil was at the Bee on the Border, I should have stopped by when I first came to Alinor to look for him! Well, no matter, it worked out serendipitously enough in the end.
That casual assertion that of course his Radiancy would have gone looking for Basil, those lovingly detailed passages of Basil and Sara and Clio’s lives, tangled up in Cliopher’s chest. He had nothing to offer that could possibly be equal to this gift, given so casually. He could not find the Red Company where the Astandalan government had long tried and long failed.
He could, perhaps, make it a little bit easier for the members of the Red Company to find one another. So when Cliopher officially stamped the overturning of the sedition laws and the legalization of the entirety of Fitzroy Angursell’s repertoire, the official communications to the provincial governments included a note that every member of the Red Company had been officially pardoned by the mundial government. After some thought, Cliopher also arranged for similar messages to be sent out to Alinor, Ysthar, Voonra, and Colhélhé. He had no authority to encourage any of them to do the same, but he could at least make clear that Zunidh would not prosecute any of the Red Company, and remove one excuse any other world might have to arrest any of them.
It was all Cliopher could think to do, and so he had to be content with it. And he was, more or less, until the first letter from Rhodin arrived.
It began,
Dear Cliopher,
You will not believe my fortune! The Merrions must have smiled on myself and my beloved Sardeet, not an imposter as it turns out after all, for I had barely stepped foot over the border into Colhélhé when who should I run into but her and several of her comrades, including one Fitzroy Angursell, who as it turns out is none other than…
Cliopher put the letter down very slowly. To his empty study, he said blankly, “You have got to be kidding me.”