Chapter Text
“Here,” Rhodin said, “I have something you’ll find interesting, Cliopher.”
“Interesting enough to stop the moping?” Conju muttered.
Cliopher ignored that with as much dignity as he could muster. He had been—busy, that was all. There was a great deal to do now that he officially stood as Viceroy. Now that the reins of the government were officially his, to hold alone, until his Radiancy’s quest was done. “Do you?” he said.
“It’s a letter to the Offices of State’s public communications box,” Rhodin said. “With an anecdote about the annual stipend.”
“Is it?” Cliopher said. They got plenty of those letters, of course; usually reading and responding to them was the first-year secretaries’ job. Cliopher had, when the stipend had first been instituted, answered several personally. More recently, Kiri included copies of the best in her collated reports once in a while, and occasionally on nights when the work lay particularly heavy on his shoulders, Cliopher would break them out and read them. He had hardly had time in the last few weeks, of course, but that they would still be arriving was no surprise. What was a surprise was— “And it made its way to you?”
“Well,” Rhodin said blithely, “it claims to be from Fitzroy Angursell, you see.”
Cliopher stared at him.
“Here, have a look. It got in a couple of weeks ago, but needed to get cleared first. No magic or poison or anything on it, though, it’s clean.”
Cliopher took the letter. It was short, and scrawled out with a hasty, careless hand:
To whom it may concern in the Offices of State,
I recently had the great pleasure of witnessing the annual stipend at work in the course of my travels. It has been a great many years since I have been out in the world, and I have been delighted and pleased by the contrast between how it stood when I left it and the way it is today. It is a humbling thing, the ability to ask for and receive help, not for anything one has done or might do, not for who one is or isn’t, but without reservation or constraint. I have already seen it change the life of a pair of young lovers, and I am certain they will be far from the only ones I meet for whom it will prove transformative.
Please pass my great regard and admiration to those responsible for this quiet bureaucratic miracle.
Yours most sincerely,
Fitzroy Angursell
Oh.
“What do we know about this… impostor?” Cliopher asked. The phrase years since I have been out in the world had caught at his attention. An oubliette, in the palace, magical in nature, his Radiancy had said.
Probably it was only that Fitzroy Angursell had vanished, and any good impostor must claim to be coming back from somewhere, whether imprisonment or the Sea of Stars or any other claim one cared to make—Cliopher had heard them all, over time—but…
“Oh, an utter crackpot, to be sure,” Rhodin said with great cheer. “From the sounds of it he convinced half the village he was a local god, officiated a wedding, and then fell over a waterfall. I love the Red Company impostors, they always have the most character. My dear Impostor, of course, most of all…”
That claim to local godhood did enforce the idea that it was a garden-variety oddball, trying on the identities of all and sundry esteemed and larger-than-life personages, rather than anything… else. Perhaps Cliopher was unduly biased after watching his Radiancy fight so to escape the mantle of godhood and rejoin the fraternity of living, flawed men, but it was difficult to imagine Fitzroy Angursell, a man who loved common and ordinary goods, aspiring to godhood.
Cliopher let himself tune out the rest of Rhodin’s ramble, reading the note again. Cliopher could only blame how long and tiring and solitary the last few weeks had been, that it threatened his composure even knowing that it was the work of an impostor. It was thankless work, at times, that work of ensuring the wheels of the government turned smoothly, that the ordinary citizens who reaped the benefits could see no flaw, no fault in the turn of the wheel. It was—a nice thought, that Fitzroy Angursell, who had called out the abuses and flaws of the old Empire so stridently, could look at the world that he, Cliopher Mdang, had built with his Radiancy, and see something worthy of praise and admiration.
It was a very nice thought. Kind of whoever this impostor was, to send it.
Cliopher read the note a third time. Only then did he look up and interrupt Rhodin to say:
“Has anyone sent a form response back yet?”
Rhodin had a great many opinions about the appropriate ways to write and deliver a letter to the Impostor Known as Fitzroy Angursell.
A great many opinions.
“Do you need a pen to disguise your handwriting?” he inquired, peering over Cliopher’s shoulder. “Or invisible ink?”
“I do intend for him to actually be able to read it,” Cliopher pointed out. Disguising his handwriting wasn’t a terrible idea, though. This entire endeavor skirted rather uncomfortably close to treason—not that Cliopher could imagine his Radiancy reacting to it with anything but laughter, were he to ever find out about it, but Cliopher could not really afford to give the princes an excuse to pull at the leash with his Radiancy so recently departed. He could not sign it with his real name either, more’s the pity.
“Ah, but what kind of Fitzroy Angursell impersonator would you be speaking with, to not be able to decode a simple invisible ink?” Rhodin said, shaking his head. “Why, I opened correspondence with my dear Impostor with a form letter that also served as a ciphered message asking her about her bakery.”
“I suspect that whatever this particular impersonator has been spending his time on is unlikely to be a bakery,” Cliopher said, rewriting his note in a stiffer, blockier hand. (It still looked typeset, just of a different font. Cliopher could only conceal his fundamental nature so much.) No invisible ink for him, nor ciphered message. No: this was to be an entirely ordinary, stock message from the Offices of State, to Fitzroy Angursell. Nothing remarkable about it. That was the joke.
Last of all, the matter of a signature. Cliopher tapped his pen against the corner of his mouth twice as he thought.
On the other hand, it would not do to not do something to alert the recipient of this letter that his mischief had been duly noticed. Signing it as any of the major characters of Fitzroy Angursell’s work was too obvious.
A pseudonym for a main character, however…
Cliopher lifted his pen and, with a flourish, signed the letter Redshank Longworth.
Rhodin leaned over his shoulder. “Is that an Aurora reference?”
“No,” Cliopher lied. Then he paused, pen half put away, as a dismaying realization occurred to him. “Rhodin. Do we know where this impostor is now? You said he—what, fell off a waterfall?” Possibly Cliopher had been writing a message to a corpse.
“My men lost the trail from there, I’m afraid,” Rhodin admitted. “Though they did look. No body that they could find, so he probably survived somehow.”
Cliopher blinked and made a mental note to dig up the reports on this particular impersonator later, when he wasn’t so absurdly busy. He had already spent long enough as it was on an indulgence that could not go anywhere, because: “There’s no way to even attempt to deliver this, then.” He grimaced down at the letter.
“Now, now,” Rhodin declared, “you need to broaden your imagination, Cliopher. I have just the thing. Come along.”
When Conju asked afterwards, Cliopher would have a difficult time explaining the sequence of events that had occurred, Cliopher reflected as Rhodin shepherded him out of the secret passageway that led out of Cliopher’s study and into half the Palace including, apparently, Rhodin’s secret workroom. He had had plans for the evening, which had most assuredly not involved treason, pseudonyms, or magical methods of letter-delivery.
When he tried to broach these concerns, however, Rhodin only laughed at him. “Come now, Cliopher, you can afford a break for the evening, can’t you? His Radiancy specifically left us with instructions to—how did he phrase it—‘do what is in your power to keep Kip from overworking himself too terribly.’ You wouldn’t disobey an order from him, would you?”
That was not playing fair. “There are many matters in need of review now that he’s left,” Cliopher said stiffly. That those matters engaged him enough to keep from startling every time Franzel announced a visitor was irrelevant to the matter at hand. Cliopher had not realized how often his Radiancy had been coming by, by the time he had left, nor how much he himself had looked forward to those visits.
Tomorrow was the Council of Princes. Cliopher had gone in as Chair before, while his Radiancy had been bed-bound after the heart attack, but not since.
Well. Fine. Gods knew he would need all the levity he could get tomorrow.
“But nothing that cannot wait,” he amended. He peered around the small room Rhodin had led him to, curiosity rousing. “What do you keep, in this secret workroom of yours?”
“Oh, this and that,” Rhodin said. “Anything that shouldn’t be officially present in the office of the Deputy Commander of the Guard.”
Cliopher narrowed his eyes at Rhodin. “What kind of items meet that description?”
“Not much, really,” Rhodin assured him. He snatched something up off the crowded workstation and shoved it into a drawer before Cliopher could see what it was. “Nothing his Radiancy or Commander Omo don’t know about. But since you’re set on committing some less petty treasons than usual, I assumed you wouldn’t want to requisition from the Ouranatha’s stash of magical artifacts. Don’t those require a statement of intent?”
They did; Cliopher had written the regulation for it himself. “Whereas you will do no such thing?”
“I only ask that you let me use it if I need to deliver any items to unknown locations in the course of my duty,” Rhodin said easily, and handed over a top hat.
Cliopher took the hat, looked down at it, and then looked up at Rhodin.
“Former property of a Ystharian magician. Put something in it while thinking about the desk over there.”
The hat looked perfectly and entirely normal to Cliopher, but then, what did he know? He stifled the growing suspicion that Rhodin might be playing a prank on him and dropped his response to the impostor into the hat.
It fell neatly out of the air above Rhodin’s desk and fluttered through the air to land on the very edge, the paper fluttering gently in the breeze from the secret passage.
“That’s handy,” Cliopher observed. He reclaimed his message, held it out over the hat, and thought about the person who had written the letter, who was kind enough to have written it, mischievous enough to have signed it Fitzroy Angursell, and chaotic enough to have swanned off afterwards with a smith in a boat. He dropped the message in.
It vanished and did not reappear.
“Well,” Cliopher said after a moment, “I suppose there’s no way to know whether it reached its destination.” He held the hat back out to Rhodin.
“Hang onto it for a while,” Rhodin said. “One never knows when one will need to send a letter to an undisclosed location.”
Cliopher blinked. For a moment his mind was overwhelmed, teeming with ideas—well, one idea—about how he could—
No.
Cliopher smiled painfully and said, “I don’t imagine the need will arise again, Rhodin.”
“Keep it anyway,” Rhodin suggested, voice not unkind, and it was easier not to argue with him, for all that Cliopher knew that this would be the only time he would need it.
Or so he thought until the next letter arrived.
How long had it been? A month or two, at least. Long enough for the Council of Princes meeting to come and go, and the Helma Council after it; long enough for the days to run together as Cliopher worked late into the night; long enough for him to have nearly forgotten the top hat where it sat off to the side in his study, until the evening when he looked over to it and saw a little scrap of paper peeking up over the brim.
In that same messy handwriting—and why did that handwriting strike a bell, he wondered; maybe it resembled a cousin’s—the note read,
To the good citizen Redshank Longworth,
I must congratulate you on your diligence; how your message found its way into my bag is proving, I must admit, a source of great mystery and delight to me on this fine day. Has the Zuni post system been reformed to magically deliver letters to their recipients across world boundaries in the past six days? I must admit such a feat would surprise me; surely it would take two weeks at least.
You will have to pardon my rambling and erratic response to your entirely professional note. I am too pleased with it to say nothing of it to anyone, and my traveling companions at the moment would not properly appreciate the humor of it, I am afraid. I have a dear friend who would find it exactly as amusing as I do, if not more so, but alas, circumstances are currently such that I am denied the ability to barge in on him, surely interrupting a great many more important activities, and gleefully show it off.
Dare I ask what your role and responsibilities are in the Offices of State, that responding to anarchist bards across world lines falls within your purview? Or perhaps you aren’t a member of the Offices of State at all; my letter may well, I daresay, have made its way to the Guard instead. Don’t tell me if you expect it would cause problems, but I will humbly request that you do respond if you do receive this and it is not too much trouble; I am desperately curious as to whether dropping the letter back into the bag where I found this one will actually return it to you, or merely relegate it to a life of mouldering next to the rest of my correspondence.
Yours truly,
Fitzroy Angursell
Cliopher found himself grinning down at the letter. He wished, with an abrupt rush of wistfulness, that he could show it to his Radiancy. Cliopher accidentally stumbling into a correspondence with a Fitzroy Angursell impersonator out of a desire to hit the Offices of States’ quota for responding to citizen feedback was, he felt irrationally certain, the kind of thing his Radiancy would enjoy very much.
He wondered which member of the Red Company the impostor thought would particularly have enjoyed Cliopher’s message. Not Damian Raskae, a man well known for appreciating subtlety in matters of swordplay and nature and disdaining it in matters verbal or written. Not Faleron the Blue either; his sense of humor was too lively in Cliopher’s estimation to appreciate Cliopher’s, which he could admit tended towards the dry. Masseo Umrit, perhaps? But he was not known to have much of a sense of humor at all.
Perhaps it was foolish to try to match Cliopher’s sense of how various Red Company members might respond to his letter to this impostor’s thoughts, like trying to match a painting of a coconut to a sculpture of one by two artists who had never actually seen one in the flesh. Cliopher would hope that anyone with the audacity to impersonate Fitzroy Angursell would have studied his works and his life, or what was known about it, but he knew from experience that was not always the case. Cliopher had once helped Rhodin identify a Fitzroy Angursell impersonator who had the lyrics wrong for ‘Donkey Ears’, which was not even a particularly obscure song of his. (If it had been the alternate version Cliopher could at least have forgiven it as a matter of it being inaccessible due to how treasonous it was, rather than a matter of poor research.)
He put the thought aside for the day, which was a whirlwind of meetings with the Ouranatha, a bevy of lawyers, and several Jilkanese princes, and by the time he returned to the matter had a headache. But he mustered himself to do justice to his response; Cliopher did have his pride, in his work and his correspondences and, well, his love of Fitzroy Angursell’s poetry, all of which insisted he do the thing properly. So: an answer fitting of the letter he received, and perhaps a bit of a test, for this impostor, to see how much he knew and how well he played the part.
The impostor had asked him about his role, after all. And while Cliopher could not directly elaborate on the details without giving himself away, there were deeper aspects to his work that he could put forth. He had spent so long drawing on the Lays to elucidate his philosophy of governance, carefully concealing the degree to which Aurora and the rest of Fitzroy Angursell’s poetry had influenced it as well. There was something intensely satisfying in being able to reach for that vernacular instead for once.
Dear Sayo Angursell,
The government ought to stand for justice on behalf of the weak, for fairness on behalf of the poor, and for untangling knots for their citizens instead of tying everybody up in more of them. Answering letters from citizens is not, strictly speaking, one of my knots to untangle, but the responsibility of ensuring that the knots get untangled and the government serves all its citizens to the fullest is, so I was pleased to have the opportunity to both receive your letter and respond to it. I do hope, Sayo Angursell, that if you have any other feedback, positive or negative, to deliver about the Zuni government that you feel free to deliver it. I am, I must admit, curious what thoughts you might have, especially after a long sojourn from public life.
Cliopher considered the letter. It would be too rude, he decided a little regretfully, to ask directly what this impostor claimed to have spent the last thirty years doing. But he did want to ask something more. His Aurora reference would serve as a small test, but nothing in Aurora could truly be considered niche, even if he had borrowed from the extended song rather than the shorter version that more people knew.
He ought to work in a particularly obscure reference, one that Cliopher himself would not know without The Secret Collection as reference. After a few minutes’ attempt, however, he had to admit that clever wordplay was a task perhaps better suited for a day without a headache so far above the waterline.
Well, perhaps he could at least satisfy his own curiosity at the same time as he probed his correspondent’s knowledge of Fitzroy Angursell, even if it was a tad clumsier than he would like. He set pen back to paper and wrote,
I imagine you may not wish to speak with an agent of the Zuni government about your present activities, but perhaps I may be so bold as to request a tale about the friend you are missing?
It felt horribly presumptuous—probably because it was horribly presumptuous, Cliopher thought, grimacing at the letter. But Fitzroy Angursell had been notorious for his willingness to sing a song or spin a story only for the asking, and he had been the one to request Cliopher write back. And if this impostor did not care to provide a story—well, that would be its own kind of proof, wouldn’t it?
Not, of course, that there was any real chance that this was actually Fitzroy Angursell.
Cliopher put down his pen and pinched the bridge of his nose. It would be a better use of Cliopher’s time to look for the oubliette, only he had, already, multiple times. Of course he had looked. He had never been able to find a thread to pull. If he could find one, even a hint, even a whisper, Cliopher felt certain he could do it, he could free him. Hadn’t he done it for his Radiancy? Once he knew his Radiancy wanted to leave, wanted to be free? Freeing Fitzroy Angursell, whatever the political or magical challenges, could not be harder than those years of work to lift up the world so his Radiancy could come down off his pedestal and walk on equal footing with the rest of the world.
Equal footing. For a moment Cliopher wished, powerfully—
But there was no point daydreaming now. There was still, according to the Ouranatha, more than a year and half until the Jubilee. If Cliopher had—hopes, private and personal ones, around what might happen after—
Right now he had work to do for his Radiancy. Work that did not include writing to a Fitzroy Angursell impersonator, even if the distraction was appreciated. As if Cliopher didn’t have enough correspondents already, even if he hadn’t yet received anything from—
Cliopher signed and sent off the letter. He had budgets to balance; that, he thought, would be more useful work than this. And, hopefully, more preoccupying.
Rhodin asked about the hat a few days later. Perhaps he had gotten wind of Cliopher’s second letter somehow, though Cliopher could not see how; he had sent it off immediately after the writing of it.
He had kept the letter from the Fitzroy Angursell impersonator, though he knew he ought not to. But he had kept more illicit material than that. Cliopher had tucked it away into the hidden compartment of his writing kit, next to The Secret Collection and alongside his notes from his Radiancy. (His Radiancy, he thought, would not mind having his words live side-by-side with ones purporting to be from the famous bard.)
“Have you been making good use of the communications aid I lent you, Cliopher?” Rhodin inquired, with a slightly conspiratorial air.
Cliopher wasn’t certain who the euphemism was for; they were walking down to Solaara alone, Rhodin’s presence being considered sufficient guard for Cliopher to go places so long as it was not a public appearance. In deference to Rhodin’s professional caution, he kept his own voice low when he said, “I have, as a matter of fact. I…” He blinked at the realization that, given he had just written back a second time with a response that requested another letter… “I think I may have managed to start up my own correspondence with an impostor.” Their other friends, Cliopher reflected, could never find out about this. Neither of them would say anything to Rhodin’s face, of course, but Cliopher had always gotten the distinct impression that Conju was faintly scornful of Rhodin’s correspondent and that Ludvic, for some reason, found it very funny.
The sun was setting, and in the dim light it was difficult to entirely parse the expression on Rhodin’s face. His gaze was questioning, almost, perhaps even perplexed.
Then he smiled and said, “Marvelous!” with great approval. “It is excellent to have a wide range of fascinating correspondents, is it not? But don’t forget we don’t know who this is. The post officer who administered the stipend wouldn’t release his books to my agents, but he did confirm that the man did not sign as Fitzroy Angursell.” And, of course, the stipend book magically enforced that the user signed with their real name, with the strongest enchantments on the book that his Radiancy, in concert with the Ouranatha, had been able to devise.
Well. It had been foolish for Cliopher to imagine, even idly, even knowing it was unlikely, any differently. He ought to have known, really. Walking in legends was not for Cliopher Mdang, even if he had once hoped, had once wanted—
Rhodin shot Cliopher a sidelong look; Cliopher dragged his attention back to the matter at hand. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to authorize my agents to access the ledger?”
“The privacy restrictions for reviewing the stipend records are there for good reasons, Rhodin,” Cliopher retorted, “so no, I will not authorize reading them to identify this person. Unless you have reason to believe them a threat?”
“No, nothing of that sort,” Rhodin said with a sigh. “Just be careful, will you?”
“Don’t worry, Rhodin,” Cliopher said dryly. “I’m not in any danger of forgetting that it isn’t actually Fitzroy Angursell who I’m talking to.”
By the time the response came, however, Cliopher had long since decided that he had misled Rhodin and had entirely failed to establish a correspondence after all. It took months, at least by Solaaran standard time, and it felt long in lived experience too, long enough for Cliopher to go to Nijan to sit in judgment, to go to the Vangavaye-ve for one single delightful night, and come back again.
So it startled Cliopher, both to find the letter peeking out of the top hat once again at all, but also to open it and read,
Dear Sayu Longworth,
Quite the model of the dedicated correspondent, aren ’t you? I must imagine the time differences are not quite lining up across worlds, because I tucked my last note into my bag late last night and awoke to discover your response waiting for me some six hours later. I suppose you might be answering correspondence with strangers on other worlds in the middle of the night—it is the sort of thing my friend might do, I must admit, and I have a suspicion his work ethic is contagious among those he works with—but I will hope instead that you are answering these at a leisurely pace and that I am not intruding upon your free time too dreadfully.
But you did specifically ask for a story about my friend, and far be it from me to turn down any opportunity to spin a good tale, particularly one that sings the praises of my humble friend. I daresay from your letters that if I tell you that while he rarely dresses in a cloak of scarlet nor waits for grockles, grackles, or any other beast, still he stands in that office for me, you will understand what I mean.
Cliopher tapped his fingers against the table, turning that puzzle over in his head. No question of whether this impostor had recognized his quote, including that it was from the longer, less popular edition of Aurora. (Tenebra only wore a cloak of scarlet in that first version, before Aurora became associated with scarlet in the second.) Which friend might be the Tenebra to Fitzroy Angursell’s Aurora was a more curious question. Perhaps he needed to reconsider Damian Raskae as an option after all, he being the member of the Red Company that Cliopher imagined would be most useful in stealing one away from towers—though perhaps Cliopher was applying an overly narrow definition of towers here.
Whoever it was meant to be, the impostor spoke of him with high praise indeed.
He once walked among the front of a war where armies clashed and spoke with everyone he met, meeting tension and dissent on every side yet sowing harmony in his wake. He wielded no weapons and raised no fist, but brought peace through his patience and wisdom and skill.
There were stories about the Red Company seeking to turn back armies of the Empire of Astandalas, of course—one of the earliest known appearances of the Red Company fit that mold—but Cliopher could not immediately think of one that fit this particular description. There had been wars on the border of Eahh towards the end of Eritanyr’s reign where the Red Company had been known to intervene personally, but there it had often been through a mix of trickery and tactical prowess, magic and swordsmanship and cleverness, not diplomacy.
Cliopher was, he knew, a great diplomat, but he could not aspire to the level of silver-tongued magic that this story implied. Littleridge had been a grim, grinding slog, sometimes literally through the mud, rehashing the same matters with Princess Anastasiya four, five times in a row, before Cliopher had wearily realized that Imperial Authority was the only force that could check her… But then Cliopher was no hero, no Terror of Astandalas. He could imagine the Red Company walking through a battlefield and leaving a wake of people throwing down their weapons wherever they passed, though.
He just could not think who would have done the talking.
But perhaps he was expecting too much veracity out of this impostor once again.
My friend came back to me after working this miracle and said, superbly casually, that he thought the peace would hold; and so it did. I daresay I have not met a more talented solver of problems big and small, nor a man more gifted at the art of understatement, in all my years.
And so you have it: my incomparable friend. I hope the tale does him justice and meets with your satisfaction. You must forgive me if it is a little rough; I am not so practiced in either the art of storytelling or the art of obfuscating those details that would be identifying or incriminating as I once was.
On that note, as you chose not to share details about your own role, I shan’t pry; I can imagine any number of reasons why you would not wish to disclose such a topic. Still, may I humbly request a story from you in kind? My friend Jullanar once called me as curious as a cat, and twice as nosy, and I will freely admit to the truth in it. Only if you have time, of course; you have more than discharged your duty in delivering your response and requesting further feedback, to which I cannot claim to have any. (Save, perhaps, a desire for the Nijani police to go on strike slightly less often; but far be it from me to ask for miracles.)
Cliopher ought, probably, to take the offered out. He had enough to do, didn’t he? But instead he found himself mentally composing a response in his quieter moments throughout the day, turning over different stories he could tell in return, all of which felt either too thin or else too revealing. He could not help but be tempted to spin a tale from the Lays, but with only two Islanders in the service, it was too close to identifiable to risk.
He had not yet resolved the matter to his satisfaction when, a few days later, a far more diverting matter appeared to distract him: a letter from his Radiancy.
Gaudy handed it to him in the middle of the afternoon between meetings. Cliopher managed, with effort, to see out the rest of his day, to walk back to his room at a pace appropriate for the Viceroy of Zunidh, to pull out his letter-opener rather than ripping it open.
My Lord Mdang, it began, I have an update on my search for an heir, which I hope you will pass on to Rhodin and Ludvic as well; I have found my first lead, in the form of a curious dream…
Cliopher read it over once, twice, a third time. It was… not quite what he had expected, somehow. Though the penmanship was as fine as any of the rare letters his Radiancy had written in his own hand, mostly to his sister, there was a swiftness to it, something nearly casual. Written in haste, so much so that he had not even signed it. (Perhaps, Cliopher thought with a pang of something almost like amusement, he was too accustomed to Cliopher and his other secretaries putting the finishing courtesies on his letter for him.) Cliopher devoured the references, elliptical and brief though they were, as to what he did, where he was now—over the border to Alinor, it seemed. Cliopher wondered if he had gone through the same portal that the diplomatic attachés to Alinor used and had to stop himself from mentally trying to map the path of his Radiancy’s travel. He had wanted, so clearly, to go alone, to find his own path.
Succeeding ably, by the sound of it, too.
Well. It was good indeed, to hear from him, to know that he was well. Cliopher stood and went looking for his friends, to share the news.
Perhaps Cliopher had been working too much over the last few months, as Conju and Rhodin had both already hinted, for he found himself struggling to match the cheerful, lively energy that his evening rendezvous with his friends in the Imperial Household demanded. Well: perhaps cheerful was not quite the word, as Conju had fretted about how his Radiancy was managing alone, at the implication of camping, of all things, until Rhodin had poured him a drink and Conju had taken it in one shot. Matters had devolved somewhat from there. But energetic, to be certain, more than Cliopher could manage.
“I’m going to call it an early night,” Cliopher said, mustering up a smile for them.
Conju was too tipsy already to do anything but flap a hand at him and mutter something about horrifying work ethics, but Cliopher saw Ludvic and Rhodin exchange a glance. “I’ll walk you back to your apartments, Cliopher,” Rhodin said, popping up to his feet.
None of Cliopher’s protestations that that wasn’t necessary made a dent. Rhodin padded quietly down the hall next to him, through the corridors from the Imperial Apartments down to Cliopher’s rooms. Cliopher could not help but breathe a little easier once they left the Imperial Apartments; there was something about the rooms, that familiar sequence of antechambers, that felt curiously empty, hollow, without his Radiancy in residence. Planets and moons let slip from their orbits to wander more aimless paths, no longer held humming to their business by their rotation around their sun.
“Will you write him back, Cliopher?”
Cliopher could not pretend, this time, to not know what Rhodin spoke about. “No,” he said, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
The answer to that came easily to Cliopher’s tongue too easily, as if it had been waiting to be said. (Perhaps it had.) “You said that his Radiancy knew about everything in your workroom.”
“Well,” Rhodin said, “More or less. He and Commander Omo between them do.”
“Did you mention the top hat to him before he left?”
Rhodin hesitated. “I can’t recall,” he said after a moment. “I may have.”
The palace bells were chiming the quarter hour. Cliopher listened to them finish chiming, the reverberations dying, before he spoke again. “Whether you did or not,” he said, “I can’t blame you for not remembering. Why would you need to mention it to him? His Radiancy is the Lord Magus of Zunidh. He constructed the Lights, the greatest mechanism for magical communication the world has ever known. If he had wanted to leave us a way to contact him, he wouldn’t need magical knicknacks.”
“I had wondered if you didn’t need a mechanism,” Rhodin said. His expression was thoughtful, alert, but not pitying; Cliopher appreciated that, at least. “You and his Radiancy have always vibrated on such an exquisite frequency; I thought perhaps it would hold across worlds as well.” Cliopher hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, but fortunately Rhodin continued to something more concrete. “You didn’t set up any protocols for us to reach him if we need him.”
“No, instead I wrote several dozen to ensure we wouldn’t need him,” Cliopher said dryly. He shrugged and wished, for a moment, that he wasn’t wearing the elegant finery of the Viceroy of Zunidh, which had nothing so functional as pockets where Cliopher could put his hands. “He wanted his freedom, the freedom of solitary exploration, unhindered… how could I put any kind of gate or limit on that? He shouldn’t need to put up with the workings of the government any longer, not when I can do that for him.”
And perhaps he had imagined that any letter he might receive from Cliopher would be a professional letter. It had not, after all, been a personal letter that his Radiancy had written him. That Cliopher would have—that he wanted—well.
Some things were still treason. Some things were still better not to dwell too much on.
The letter from the impostor pretending to be Fitzroy Angursell waited for Cliopher upon his return to his room. He sat down at his desk in his study for a moment, considering it, before he set pen to paper.
Dear Sayo Angursell,
I am no teller of tales such as you, but I hope I can manage a simple story to whet your curiosity, at least. I have been appreciating your correspondence particularly, you see, as I have been greatly missing a dear friend of my own, who has been traveling for many months. Perhaps I may offer you a story of him in exchange for yours of your friend.
My friend is a man of many contradictions: often mischievous, often sad; deeply reserved, and yet with a heart greater and vaster than any I have ever known …