Archive of Our Own

I tested my own name in my mind, the way I might have tested the words of a poem.

Names are such odd things. They are the most meaningless and the most precise of words. If I had encountered the words 'Cliopher Mdang' before my secretary had walked into my office, they would have meant nothing at all to me; now those same words meant something that no number of adjectives could describe.

Every other word belongs to strangers. To the stranger, Cliopher Sayo Mdang is my personal secretary; he is a bureaucrat; he is, presumably, a Wide Sea islander who is far from home. Names, though, belong to those too close to be satisfied with the other words. To me, my secretary is Cliopher Mdang. Names are the only words in any language, current or forgotten or nearly forgotten, which have that degree of intimacy.

I had once spent a good deal of time considering the question of my own name, though I had not thought of that particular topic a long time.

For 18 years, I was the Marwn. I did not have my own name and that did not matter, for only one person might have thought to call me by it and he was tasked with teaching me why I should not ask to know it. My name belonged to the Empire and it did not please the Empire to hear me called by it.

For 12 years, I was Fitzroy Angursell. I was not meant to have a name and I chose to have one anyway. I belonged to the Empire and I swore to tear it down, vengeance for all of those years when they took from me my questions, my joys and my sorrows, my freedom. My name was known by my friends, by the bards, by the princes of the Emperor's high court, by every child. They, too, belonged to the Empire and from them, too, the Empire had taken greedily.

For 14 years, I was Emperor. The Empire and all that it had taken from its people belonged to me: their wealth, their lives, their hopes. In return, they received the name (my name) that had been taken from me by my predecessor, for my name belonged to the Empire and it pleased the Empire for my name to be known. I had gained ten thousand titles, a name that was known by every person on nine worlds, and not one person to whom that name meant anything other than Emperor.

For a century, I wandered in a dream that felt never-ending. In my dream, I searched far and wide for everyone who had made me Fitzroy Angursell and I could find no one. When the dream ended and I woke up, I learned that of course they had called me Emperor for that period of time.

For six years now, I have not been the Emperor. No, that is not right. For six years now, I have refused to be the Emperor, though certainly no one has forgotten that Emperor I once was. Even I never forgot that I was the Last Emperor of Astandalas, that the price paid to be Emperor was measured in the subjugation of worlds and the price paid to be Last was measured in the lives of millions.

But that afternoon, giddy over the final signatures that turned a tentative ceasefire into a future of peace and incomprehensibly excited by a promised upcoming negotiation of intermundial tax rates, Cliopher Mdang forgot.

After we returned to my study after an even longer than usual ceremony finalizing the Littleridge Treaty, he had launched into an enthusiastic and, to me, barely comprehensible manifesto about the preferential tariffs and how, with the strategic deferrals of tax liabilities, we could encourage inflows of greatly needed workers from the other worlds.

I, feeling considerably less enthused by taxation policy, interrupted him and bade my personal attendant (whom in my mind I called Conju, which was his name) pour us wine from Amboloyo, tithed to my grandmother in the first year of her reign. A practiced courtier would have taken this as an imperial suggestion to change the topic. Cliopher did, in fact, seem to receive that message but he somehow took the wine from our own Zunidh as a segue to domestic tax policy and thus regaled me with the many benefits of a progressive taxation policy which, he assured me, greatly outweighed any costs of its implementation.

My preferences had not been so soundly ignored since the death of Shallyr Silvertongue and I felt quaintly delighted by it. I murmured general assent and feigned interest, glorying in how my input to the conversation did not particularly matter to my secretary who was picking up momentum all on his own and amazingly did not seem to care how I felt for it one way or the other.

As we drank the Amboloyan wine, a thought seemed to occur to Cliopher. He paused in his monologue. He turned that thought around in his mind, considering it, glancing at me and back at his wine, before resuming. He continued with his taxation scheme but focused on one example, with a tender hesitancy that betrayed how important this was to him, of pearl divers in the Vangavaye-ve.

"Is that where you are from?" I kept my voice carefully nonchalant, as if the answer did not matter, as if I were not Emperor, and as if he were not my subject.

"Oh yes, my lord," he answered, as if I were any other man. "Solaara is much closer to the Vangavaye-ve than Astandalas was. It took me half a year of travel over sea and land to get there when I first entered the service, you know."

"Solaara is much closer," I agreed. It was an inane thing to say, but I had not been spoken to as a person in over a century and was not in the practice of it. My sense of amusement had crystallized into a painful kind of wonder.

"I had not passed by Solaara when I entered your service," Cliopher mused. "I had heard of Solaara from my cousin Dimiter, though. He had passed through during one of his travels."

I made an encouraging noise, which I hoped was innocuous enough. It seemed to be, for Cliopher then explained that he had two cousins, and of the three of them, Dimiter was the most adventurous and had been exploring Voonra when he perished before the fall. His other cousin, Basil, was in Alinor with his beloved wife and Cliopher still wrote to him regularly though he had not heard back since the Fall.

I had never been much inclined towards nerves. As a loyal son of the Empire, I had always had everything that I needed and had always been forbidden everything that I wanted. As a youth, my every action had yielded not a single real consequence, positive or negative, no matter how I had tried–until finally one had broken me free of my bonds. As a disloyal son of the Empire, who had been denied everything of real value over the course of my life, I wanted so much and was offered so little that I felt little risk in asking outright for those gifts I desired: for friendship and for poem and for song.

But as Emperor, I had learned the cost of the wrong word, and that there were mistakes from which I could not recover—and here my secretary was offering me the one single thing for which I had yearned for a century. I was overcome by nerves that with a single wrong word this moment of humanity would be taken from me.

I asked cautiously about his childhood, and Cliopher happily described it to me. He told me how they had not much liked each other when they met; how his cousin Basil had once convinced him that their ancestors had left a treasure hidden on the far side of Mama Ituri (which I learned was what the people of the Vangavaye-ve called the volcano over Gorjo City) and they were obligated to find it; how they were an absolute menace to his sister, Vinyë, who was alive and a musician in Gorjo City and had decided that she would carry on her husband's name for he was the last of his line.

He did not need much questioning from me to tell his story, though of course I was brimming with questions I did not ask. It was easier to forget that one spoke to the Emperor if the Emperor did not speak, after all.

Cliopher departed at the midnight bell, his obeisances significantly more confident and slightly less stable due to the wine. "Good night, my lord."

He left in his wake both regret and relief: regret that that fragile moment of humanity had ended, and relief that it had ended whole and not shattered by any intrusion of propriety or rank.

I finished my wine and allowed Conju to take that away as well. I allowed my attendants (one from Nijan and the other two from Damara) to lead me along the nightly routines all the while still marveling that, for a full evening, I had been a person; that as a person, I had spoken to another person. My attendants did not seem impressed by this. They continued on as they always did. Conju occasionally frowned in thought, though he did not allow himself to dwell on whatever thought was occuring to him and was as attentive as always.

For six years, I have not been the Emperor. As they closed the curtains around my bed, I imagined what it would be like to be Artorin Damara.

Cliopher Mdang entered my office the next morning looking rather worse for the wear, which I thought (hopefully) was simply the after-effect of the alcohol. He disabused me of that notion immediately after he rose from his obeisances, whereupon he presented me with a proposal for guidelines for provincial taxation and made it abundantly clear that his current state had less to do with going to bed inebriated and much more to do with not going to sleep at all.

He made no comment at all about the fact that he had revealed to me that he was, in fact, a person with a family who had come from a hometown. I, also, made no mention of it; though when I spoke to him now I knew that I spoke to the cousin of an adventurer and a romantic and the brother of a musician. We spoke instead of preparations for the Council of Princes, which would begin meeting in the following week, since we had ratified yesterday that the self-proclaimed warlords and kings were indeed officially the princes of Zunidh.

As he read out the seating arrangements that my master of ceremonies had sent to me, I decided that I did feel confident enough to test the new waters. I commented, "Princess Aralia has informed us that she will be personally present for the Council."

Cliopher acknowledged this, which was a fact of almost no political importance but some personal relevance as Princess Aralia was the new ruling monarch over the Vangavaye-ve, with a pursing of his lips. "Of course, my lord. Princess Aralia’s dedication to her presence at court is commendable."

I was, at that point in my pacing, facing my little terrace and away from anyone else in the room and so allowed myself a moment to smile before returning to my usual serenity. Thus we acknowledged a new custom wherein my secretary no longer pretended to be anything less than fully human in my presence and, having confirmed this, we continued on with the work of running the world’s government.

(I did read Cliopher’s proposal later that day. It was not the full progressive taxation scheme which he had waxed poetic about to me, as the government of Zunidh did not have the scale in those days to oversee such a work. Instead, Cliopher had laid out not only the rights of the princes with respect to taxing their people and their responsibilities with respect to tithes to myself, but also limits on the taxes they could impose and requirements for the accounting of how those taxes were spent. It was an audacious proposal and took for granted that the princes were beholden to their people as well as to me. I quite approved and, since Cliopher’s duties as chair of the Littleridge Treaty had concluded, created a new committee to oversee the creation of infrastructure for tax collections and set him loose on it.)

The thing about establishing new world orders is that, once established, they have to be maintained. The court of Astandalas had cared more for glory than governance, but it rested on a rule built over four thousand years. Corruption may have gummed up its machinery, but the sheer momentum of tradition and expectation kept it running. After the Fall, with the court decimated and disaster after disaster raining down, that machinery could only govern in fits and starts when it did manage to turn its focus outward from the very real challenge of its own survival. Lady Jivane had left me with a handful of capable ministers and a bureaucracy which could hardly get news from villages surrounding Solaara, much less govern the world.

The Littleridge Treaty rewrote many of the old structures of power and my secretary took that blank slate as a personal challenge. He did not say so outright, but Cliopher clearly viewed the newly crowned princes with some skepticism and thus presented me with proposal after proposal that addressed one obvious need or another, each of which subtly but unfailingly undermined my underling princes and brought the people of Zunidh more directly under my authority.

Therein lay another of the lifelines which he offered me in those years: in these proposals, Cliopher included prosaic anecdotes of common people, the ones I would not be able to find in the Imperial libraries if I had looked (and, once I had resigned myself to being Emperor, I had looked). In the proposal for water management, stories of children carrying water and mothers cooking; in the proposal for road repairs, stories of how merchants now carried emergency horseshoes with them and how blacksmiths made regular circuits on broken roads to find stranded travelers; in the proposal for improving the post, the story of how a letter from his own mother did not reach him for months.

Even if I had not agreed with his aims, I would have struggled to deny his proposals—perhaps if the corrupt ministers of Astandalas had tried to bribe me with stories, I would have given in. Thankfully, I had no objection to Cliopher Mdang’s philosophy of government, and so I did not have to face that moral quandary. Instead, I set him to the task of reshaping my government while I myself focused on herding my princes and on healing the world’s magic, now stable but still jagged and broken.

And if among my personal projects was creating every opportunity for my secretary to be human in my presence, well... he did not refuse those opportunities.

In creating those moments, it seemed I also opened the door for other members of my household who must speak among themselves and must have noticed I was not displeased by my interactions with Cliopher. (Did they see how much I rejoiced in those interactions?) More of my guards would meet my eyes, more of my attendants would return my greetings in the mornings. I dared to ask my attendants their names as they tended to me, to ask my guards their histories as they accompanied me to the palace grounds.

They called me "my lord." I dared wonder when that would become "Lord Artorin" and if it could become just "Artorin." My given name was a mouthful (though my inherited titles were more so) and it still felt foreign to me. If my household could call me "Artorin," perhaps I could convince them to just call me "Tor."

As my work brought greater measures of calm to the world, I turned my attention to the question of time. Time was no longer so erratic as it once had been: no one would leave home one morning and unexpectedly come back a decade later, but rather it was fairly well known that crossing certain rivers meant giving up months before one’s return, or that there were certain directions for certain cities where one could travel for years and be back in time for dinner. This did not particularly bother me, except that it caused my secretary a great deal of concern. It was, it turned out, hard to enforce universal policies across departments in different geographies when one could not be assured of timely communication from all fronts. It also, I inferred, made communication that much harder between Solaara and the Vangavaye-ve. Since Cliopher was busy running my government for me, I felt that fixing the flow of time was the least that I could do for him in return.

I was considering how the time of the world might be brought to order: the current stability was more of a side effect of undoing some of the other ill effects of the Fall. Fixing time itself was a much more complicated matter, as time and magic were deeply interconnected. I feared that this work may require magical formulae, which I did rather detest.

I stopped my pacing and frowned at my desk, on which sat half a dozen reports or so. Well, at least I knew what had to be done now and I knew that my magic would come when called. I moved forward to move the reports aside and get started, so used to being allowed to do when it came to magic, and only stopped when I heard the strangled sound of protest that (presumably) came from Conju, whom I had forgotten was in the room.

I looked back towards him, but I had turned around just as he looked over at Cliopher, whom I had also forgotten was in the room with us, and exchanged a scandalized and somewhat insistent glance, as if to communicate something between are you seeing this and do something about this. Cliopher shrugged at him. They both glanced back at me and, seeing that I was looking at them, immediately returned their expressions to the carefully neutral ones that every single person wore in my presence.

I smiled benignly at my chief attendant. "Will you clear the desk for us, Conju?"

This appeared to appease him and he did so. Cliopher waited patiently with his own reports, which we had been going through before I had been distracted by time.

"We will be starting the work of repairing time," I said by way of explanation. "We will finish these reports tomorrow."

"As you please, my lord," Cliopher said as he packed up his writing tools and reports. As he made his way out after making his obeisances, he and Conju exchanged another amused glance which I caught from the corner of my eye.

Conju brought out sheafs of bespelled paper and a steaming cup of tea. The room settled back into a formal stillness.

I sat at my desk, feeling disquieted.

I was used to being observed. My courtiers watched my every action as they jockeyed for my favor, my attendants watched my every expression for any sign of displeasure. I knew that a great many people discussed my moods and my preferences, that there were those whose position and influence in the Astandalan court had relied entirely on their ability to read me better than their peers. For over a hundred years, I have been the subject of a great many conversations and yet invited into very few of them.

This was not novel to me.

In the early days of my reign, I was the subject of a great deal of disdain from my court, which expected the Emperor to receive his glory with grace. My poor efforts at rooting out corruption had roused frustration, anger, and some petty glee when those efforts fell more harshly on one faction of the court than another. More recently, my great works of magic made me the subject of genuine reverence and awe and some wariness from those who saw the shifting of the balance of power.

I was accustomed to eliciting all manner of emotions from those around me.

But of the many human customs which centered around me and from which I was excluded, wry humor between friends was somehow the most unexpected.

Now that I knew to look for it, I could see the evidence of their friendship all around me. I had somehow missed the budding of a friendship between not only my chief attendant and my personal secretary, but also my oldest personal guard—whose appointment I had demanded after he had escorted me from my bier after the Fall.

When I assigned Cliopher some new diplomatic task which required a heretofore unnecessary standard of etiquette, it was to Conju that he sent a panicked glance. When Cliopher broke some rule of etiquette or another, Conju would look to Ludvic with a pained expression and Ludvic would smile and shake his head reassuringly back. Cliopher was sometimes (when he remembered the taboos, which was not always) alarmed when I instructed my attendants to pour him tea; Conju added a new cup to the serving set, one distinctly too plain for my chambers.

For so long, I had been trapped alone behind such high walls of taboos and etiquette that I clung to merest glimpses of humanity that slipped through the formality. The Fall may have shattered the foundations of those taboos, but the walls were no less high for being cracked and I, having once rammed my entire self against those immovable walls and seen what damage I wrought to those of my people who were obligated to hold them up, was not brave enough to try again.

Then my secretary crashed right into those walls of etiquette and knocked out a chunk of them and for the first time in over a century I could see outside my walls. I had been trapped behind the walls for so long that it was salvation to just see the people on the other side. To have some of them look back at me, for them to clear out the rubble and open the crack further for me, had overwhelmed me with gratitude.

As we continued to pick at those cracks, though, I saw more and more of the world outside of my prison and I wanted to be there.

I did not want to be confined to the personage of the Emperor. I did not want to be set apart and holy. I wanted to join them. I wanted.

Sometimes, I dreamt true dreams.

One time, I dreamt of playing music once again. In my dream, Cliopher played with me and we started to play Aurora. We caught each other’s gaze when we realized what we had done, his expression a wry challenge, and I laughed and declared that we would continue. In the crowd were all of the various connections that made us human: Cliopher’s sister who was a musician, his mother whose letters had been delayed, a girl-child who had greeted me with joy and called me "Lord Artorin." They listened to me, who had once been their Emperor, play that song which was once treason, and sang along in delight.

More often, the music in my dream was the ceremonial chorus of the Emperor’s morning. In my dream, Zunidh no longer claimed me but my empire had reclaimed not only Zunidh but the other worlds as well. My own magic bound the worlds to me and gave weight to my every gesture and power to my every word. Every bit of magic that I wrought pushed the boundaries of the Empire further, bound me tighter. I did not get out of bed before my attendants, gloved and masked, tied enchanted sandals to my feet. My guards did not meet my eyes. My secretary answered with formal politeness only when I addressed him directly. If any of my household ever met one another’s eyes or spoke a word to each other, I did not know of it. I was a god and a ghost, and I was surrounded by ghosts.

Those dreams never exactly ended. When I woke, it was always blurry and I never knew the line between the dream and reality. I would lie in bed, my limbs frozen in dread but my heart pounding with adrenaline as if I had been running for my life. I could not make a sound, not with my guards outside the curtains of my bed and the priests in the hidden room behind the panel and the choir preparing to sing the morning hymns and my skin glowing again and I could not even meet anyone’s eyes or see anyone’s face and—

My skin did not glow.

I forced a deep breath in through my lips. It did not feel like any air entered my lungs, but magic did enter in. I could feel the magic of Zunidh in me, claiming me.

Sometimes, I dreamt true dreams. That meant, I reminded myself firmly, that most of my dreams were only dreams.

I allowed the problem of time to occupy most of my time. The root of the issue was not at all obvious, except that the magic of Zunidh was still twisted and the works that I had wrought to stabilize it were more of a cast around a broken limb than a repair for a broken machine. Rather, it did not surprise me that time was unreliable, but it was so obvious that it should be broken that there was no obvious way to bring order to it—and never mind that order was not in my nature to begin with.

Fixing time would require patience and care; it did not call for a large work of itself but rather that the large works I had created and would create be balanced and rebalanced; it needed for world’s magic to not only be whole but to be wholly uniform. The world did not need for time to be a beautiful thing or an elegant creation of my creation. The world needed time to be a ordered and clean, its flow even and unremarkable, so that upon its surface the world’s people could make their paint their own stories. The world needed its time to be invisible, like the man inside of its Emperor.

Conju came to attend me again at the fourth bell. I allowed him to direct my attendants to take away the cup of tea, now cold, and to prepare me for court with their long instruments.

Before the Fall, the limits of my ability to make any choices for myself were the walls of my personal chambers, and even then I had very little ability to choose most things within those walls. The choice of my robes and rings and crown represented to me the only time in my day that I could go through the same motions of living as the rest of humanity. I had guarded every small freedom afforded to me so jealously that I had tolerated from my attendants not even a hint of an expectation that they might put on me before I dismissed them.

After the Fall—when I awoke to the consequences of choices that were larger than I had realized, when I had accepted the rule that was once forced on me, when I could no longer dream of rescue because the door to freedom was one that I had closed—after the Fall, I had no desire to make any pretense of humanity. I wanted only for my attendants to make the business of living invisible to me. Instead, the men and women who became the grooms of my chamber had done their work as extravagantly as possible to gain my attention and favor. Those that did not excessively perform their duties often neglected them in favor of seeking influence in court. None of the grooms of my chamber lasted longer than six months before Conju enazo Argellevian an Vilius rose to that position.

Conju came originally from Ysthar, which I knew by the magic in him. He had not regularly appeared at court before he joined my household after the Fall, though I did remember him as a younger man who mingled easily enough with the other minor nobles but kept to himself all the same. As my attendant, he had not exhibited any great ambition for courtly influence or any expectation of gaining my notice. Instead, he simply took his work seriously and did it correctly. I had been so glad that the acts of living were no longer actively frustrating that I had paid him very little mind until I caught him exchanging glances with Cliopher earlier that day.

I paid attention to him now.

The attendants under him prepared me for court with an easy teamwork that was nearly choreographed: one to unwind the day’s robes from me while a second gathered the discarded fabric, one to anoint me with sweet scented oils with a long handled sponge with the attendant gathering the discarded garments pausing in his first task to replace that sponge with a newly filled one. Conju directed them with a quiet sort of confidence; I knew from past experience that he was not above joining the preparations himself but for now he stood by with the oils and creams and cosmetics for the day all lined up neatly beside him and handed them to each attendant in turn.

Once they had finished refreshing my body from the day’s work, Conju stepped forward to present me with two choices of robe: the first Imperial yellow, with a style of embroidery that was invented during the reign of the Emperor Kazo, who was my great-grandfather and who had reigned over what was known as the last golden age of Astandalas; the second gold, embroidered in black in a harsh pattern that a small tribe on Voonra called dre’ah biir, which translated roughly as ‘cut by sword.’

The Council of Princes would not meet in full for another three years. With time in the state that it was in, coordinating my subordinate princes was a nontrivial matter and required greater sacrifices for some than others. That night, fourteen of the seventeen ruling monarchs of Zunidh would be present; three had sent proxies. The next day, the council would meet for the last time until the next session to agree on the details of taxation and tithing. The groom of my chamber presented me with two options: the first a carrot, the second a stick. I thought of Cliopher’s proposal, which gave my princes responsibilities to their people in return for their right to tax them, and chose the former.

Conju put the second set aside and came forward to dress me himself. He moved with an economy of motion that was not quite graceful, but the coordination that he required of his subordinates turned the whole process into a kind of choreography.

I knew better than most that my costumes were always my first and final proclamation. Before I spoke a single word, my court would read my dress and begin the process of repositioning themselves around my purpose. I thought of the other choices Conju had presented me in the years he had been my chief attendant. In that time, I had reshaped the balance of power between the Ouranatha and the bureaucracy; I had created ten new principalities and redrawn the boundaries of another three; I had started dismantling entire branches of my army. I had rarely wanted any other than the clothing and accoutrements that Conju presented me to communicate my intentions to my court.

No wonder that my chief attendant, who managed the daily subtextual messages I sent to my court, had bonded with my personal secretary, who kept my schedule and knew what I intended to say.

I thought of Cliopher Sayo Mdang, who was the first commoner ever sent to serve in his position. I thought of how I sent him to mediate between my princes and to pass my commands to noble families who measured their history and rule in centuries.

No wonder that my personal secretary, who did not even always remember how to behave before the Sun-on-Earth, had bonded with my chief attendant, who treasured the language and traditions of court but cared very little for the court itself.

As I stepped out of the dressing room, out of my private chambers, as I walked through the halls, as I entered the court—

As every person in the room save my guards prostrated themselves and waited for me to step alone onto the high throne—

As I spoke the word to allow them to rise—

As they took in the robes on my person that recalled a period of cooperation and prosperity—

As I prepared for the political maneuvering of the next day—

—I recalled a memory I had not allowed myself to think of in a very long time: of a wildly impossible idea that I had shared, of the friends who had rolled their eyes and laughed, of how we had passed possibilities back and forth, and of how we built on those things that were possible for each of us alone and accomplished the impossible together.

I looked down on my court and thought of how my people had struggled to survive day by day after the Fall, and how they could now imagine a future. Peace had been an impossible dream, but my secretary had dreamed it.

It was good that those nearest to me had drawn near to one another. The friendship between them was something that I would be glad for, I decided. Even if I could not share in it, I would be glad for it, for not even a man as brilliant as Cliopher Mdang could possibly hope to maintain that peace alone. With trustworthy friends on whom he could rely, and to whom I would grant the influence that they would need, I thought that perhaps he could keep peace in my world.

I had not thrown myself into studying the problem of time only to distract myself from the discomfort of my emotions, but I had to admit that I stepped into the work of actually fixing it with less enthusiasm once those emotions died down.

This was at least in part because the actual work involved a great deal of formulae, which left me in a somewhat fragile mood. I glared at the papers arranged neatly on my desk (I had left them scattered about, but they were always tidy when I came back to them). Cliopher was packing up his writing materials, about to head out to put into action the plans we had set, and Conju was bringing out coffee, for the boundaries between worlds were still unstable and even my household was starting to run low on tea. I smelled the pungent aroma of the drink, which I normally enjoyed but could not tolerate in that moment, and grimaced.

"Is the soil on Ysthar really that different from Southern Dair?" I grumbled. "Surely it would not take that much work to get tea to grow there."

My chief attendant froze with the cup hovering over my desk. My secretary sat back down. I could practically see the thoughts as they ran through his mind. I shut my mouth with a snap.

Apparently, I was spending too much time with my secretary for I, too, forgot that I was once Emperor. I considered that, as far as I knew, there was no other mage of sufficient power to completely rewrite a region’s climate anymore. I also considered that there were major centers of learning left in the remaining cities and that just as much good (and bad) could be done with science as with magic. Finally, I looked around the room at the men in it and considered whether I could convince them to ignore their Emperor’s words.

Cliopher’s thoughts seemed to reach a conclusion. In an incredible display of impropriety, even for him, he said carefully, "The Duchess of Old Damara included in her tithes an herbal drink called luntsa. Perhaps my lord would like to do her the honor of sampling it."

Conju stared at Cliopher in shock at the man’s audacity to outright refuse his Emperor and in consternation at how they could possibly get tea to grow on Zunidh and in concern for his friend who had very deliberately crossed a very clear line. He took a deep breath, replaced the coffee on a tray held by another of my attendants, and bowed low to the ground. "Luntsa is known for its rejuvenating properties, my lord. Its flavor is less astringent than Ystharan tea but more floral, if it pleases my lord."

My guards did not move but I felt their gazes on me, waiting for my signal. I swallowed. "We will be pleased to try the tithe from our sister."

Conju performed a full obeisance again, which he was rarely required to do as my personal attendant, and hurried to remove the offending cup from my sight. Cliopher had not moved and, when I looked at him, he looked back with nervous resolution before remembering himself and hurrying out of the chair to bow before me. I dismissed the formality with a flick of my hand and he continued packing up his materials, looking not surprised but certainly relieved. Before he left, he turned back—but what was this breach of etiquette after what he had just done?—and glanced between me and my desk piled high with the plans for a great magic, and gave me a sympathetic smile before he left me alone.

I put a hand on my desk and gripped at its edge, feeling both ashamed and grateful but more, I thought, the latter.

(Cliopher had decided to toe the line of absolute obedience by deliberately misunderstanding me, it turned out. I received a report in a few days’ time detailing every single difference between the soil and climate of the tea growing regions of Ysthar and those of the rolling hills of Southern Dair. His eyes were not reproving as he handed the report to me, but were instead filled with laughter as if we were sharing a joke between us. Yes, I decided. I was grateful.)

On one of my tours of the Private Offices, I had overheard two of my ministers speaking loudly before I entered the room. "It’s another of Sayo Mdang’s mad starts," they had said—about the reformation of the postal service, I believed. That had amused me, but a few months later as I read the reports that Cliopher had compiled for me that day, the phrase seemed wholly appropriate.

The order of the day’s reports was nothing short of insolent. There was a standard order to these things: emergencies first (which had not been part of the standard order in the Astandalan days), immediate priorities such as budgets and upcoming policy negotiations, updates on ongoing projects, and finally reports on the day to day functions of my government. What Cliopher presented to me instead was this:

First, a report on one of the strange geographical changes that occurred after the fall. A particular forest in Kavanor had survived the fall by gaining the ability to fly. This forest was now a migratory part of the landscape and seemed to have reached a stable circuit in the principality of Amboloyo, which was ruled by the most ambitious and aggressive of my princes.

Second, an entirely theoretical paper by an unknown engineer from one of the minor colleges in Zangoraville. This engineer had ancestors from the Vangavaye-ve, which I presumed was how the paper came to my secretary’s attention, and speculated that with wood from the flying forest she could create ships that sailed through the sky.

Third, another theoretical paper from that same college wherein a weather mage presented calculations for the travel time between each principality if one had ships that could fly. The ships would cut journeys of months between the furthest provinces down to weeks.

Fourth, a legal analysis of the new requirements for tithes as set forth by laws regarding the rights and responsibilities of my princes, which had been the last policy ratified by the Council of Princes before their three year recess. The legal professor who wrote it concluded that I was owed ‘the crown jewels of all that was produced in each province’ and that, while this typically meant the best of each industry, in certain cases this could mean the entire output of an entire industry. Ahalo cloth was the example scrawled in the corner by my secretary.

Fifth, a report from my secretary himself noting the political implications of being able to call my underling princes to attendance annually rather than once every handful of years. Additionally, being able to send proclamations and expect that they would be received in a matter of weeks rather than in an indeterminate amount of time would bring great efficiencies to my government.

In short: after months of wrangling and cajoling my princes to agree to give up certain of their powers in return for a stable rule, Cliopher wanted the most ambitious reigning monarch on Zunidh to relinquish an entire nascent industry so that we could improve the postal service.

I had once looked at the night sky and asked my friends if we could swim in the river of stars. I had never asked from them anything as reckless as what my secretary proposed in this report.

Then again, I mused, none of my friends had been the Last Emperor of Astandalas.

And that felt incredibly right so I repeated it to myself. I was, I decided at that moment, a friend to Cliopher Mdang. I was a friend to Conju an Vilius and a friend to Ludvic Omo.

They might not call me their friend, but I could and would call them mine. They might never ask me my life’s story, but they had offered their own to me. They might never think me a companion in their life’s travels, but they had nevertheless allowed me to walk alongside them. Their stories might only tell of the Emperor and never the man, but I would at least know of the role that I, the man behind the Radiancy, played in the stories of these men whom I loved.

(I could, I thought with a flash of amusement, distract a self-important prince while my reckless friend stole an entire forest from him.)

They may never call me by name, but I could call them by theirs.

And this, I thought, would be enough.