“Did they send you?”
Aoi closed her eyes.
“We nearly had a normal conversation.”
“Did they?”
“Yes.”
I straightened.
She opened one eye.
“Corvane asked me to talk to you. I was coming anyway.”
“What did he ask you to learn?”
“Whether you could be reasoned with.”
“A broad assignment.”
“Whether you were really a king.”
“A narrower one.”
“And whether you might cooperate once you’d calmed down.”
“I am perfectly calm.”
“You tried to murder your own collar.”
I chose not to contest the evidence.
“What will you tell him?”
“That you’re upset. That you want to go home. That you don’t like being told what to do.”
“All true.”
“I assumed we were trying something new.”
She said it lightly, but there was an edge beneath it.
I put the cloth beside me.
“You could expose me.”
“Yes.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“Because I didn’t particularly want to watch them drag you off that chair.”
“Compassion?”
“Don’t make it sound like a disease.”
I studied her.
She had come alone. Told me privately. Helped with the robe before asking for anything.
None of that made her harmless.
It did suggest that I had been treating the wrong question as urgent.
“What do you want?”
The answer took longer.
For the first time since she had entered, she looked away from me.
“I wanted to hear somebody talk like they were from home.”
I almost replied that she had been criticizing my voice since arriving.
Fortunately, I possessed some restraint.
“How long?”
“About four months. The calendar’s different. I stopped counting days properly.”
“And nobody told you about the return working.”
“They said people were studying it.”
“They are.”
Her eyes came up.
“Don’t.”
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I stopped.
“I know how that sentence works,” she said. “I’ve been living in it.”
The words stayed with me.
She drew her knees toward her chest.
“I thought if I trained enough, if I did everything they asked, then when they worked it out, they’d send me first. Or at least they wouldn’t forget me.”
There were several things I could have said about the incentives of a government fighting a losing war.
Every one would have been accurate.
None would have made me useful.
“They do not know how,” I said.
“I heard.”
“That does not prove there is no way.”
“You sounded certain enough downstairs.”
“I wanted a straight answer.”
“And I was standing there.”
“Yes.”
She waited.
I looked at the crown between us.
“I was wrong to make certainty out of it.”
The admission was brief.
It felt considerably longer.
Aoi watched me as though waiting for the second half: the qualification that would make the first half less expensive.
I had none worth offering.
After a while, she nodded.
Then she asked my name.
“My actual one, I assume.”
“You’ve invented another?”
“Not recently.”
“Then yes.”
The name was there.
The one on my school roster. The one my mother used when she was annoyed enough to pronounce every syllable distinctly. A name that had never sounded fragile until I considered hearing it in this room.
I touched the crown.
One of the gems had begun lifting at the edge.
“I would rather you used Solvane.”
“Why?”
“Because it has been useful.”
“So has my jacket. I haven’t changed my name to Zipper.”
“You would struggle to carry it with dignity.”
“Solvane.”
The way she said it made the evasion rather more obvious than I preferred.
I turned the crown in my hands.
“The boy from the play is not well equipped for any of this.”
“He got you through the afternoon.”
“The King did.”
“You did. In a hat.”
I looked at her.
There was no admiration waiting behind the correction. No invitation to explain the magnitude of my achievement.
Only stubbornness.
I found it oddly difficult to push against.
“The boy with that name did not survive the throne room,” I said. “Solvane did.”
Aoi stared.
Then she pointed at the cloth.
“He is sitting right there. Bleeding on a towel.”
I looked down.
“Yes,” I said after a moment. “A persistent fellow.”
“That is the most alarming thing anybody has said to me since I got here.”
“You met Corvane before meeting me.”
“He spreads his out.”
I nearly smiled.
She leaned back against the hearth.
“You don’t have to give me your name. Just don’t pretend refusing is a funeral.”
For a while, I said nothing.
Then, “Solvane. For now.”
“All right. For now.”
It was a smaller agreement than the one I had tried to make.
Probably a more durable one.
“If we are going to travel together,” I said, “I will not knowingly lie to you.”
“Are we traveling together?”
“I am examining the possibility.”
“By announcing it?”
“A preliminary method.”
She folded her arms.
I amended.
“If we choose to.”
“Better.”
“When I do not wish to answer, I will say so.”
“And when you’re guessing, tell me you’re guessing.”
That one felt uncomfortably tailored.
“Agreed.”
“No using whatever skill you got to poke around in my head.”
“I do not know what skill I got.”
Aoi went still.
“What?”
“I have had other concerns.”
“You haven’t opened your status?”
“My what?”
She stared at me.
Then she lowered her face into her hands.
“Oh, you absolute idiot.”
“I would appreciate a more specialized criticism.”
“You walked into that argument without even checking whether you could survive being punched.”
“I was not planning to be punched.”
“People don’t usually put it on their schedule.”
She stood.
“We’re doing that first thing tomorrow. Before you talk to anyone.”
“You are issuing a great many instructions for someone not yet committed to the journey.”
“Yes. Decide whether you can bear it.”
She reached the door.
Her hand stopped on the latch.
“One more thing.”
The lightness had gone from her voice.
I sat straighter.
“You think being allowed to leave means they’ve given up.”
“I think it is preferable to being forbidden.”
“That part’s true.”
She glanced toward the shadows beneath the door.
“There was someone here before me. Kaito.”
I waited.
“He refused a deployment. Said he wasn’t going to kill people just because somebody had decided that was what his ability was for.”
“What happened?”
“They gave him different work. An escort assignment. Corvane called it an honor.”
“And he died.”
“I don’t know.”
That answer mattered.
She made sure I heard it.
“They said he was missing. Then somebody said the party had been destroyed. Then they told me his records had been transferred and I should stop asking the wrong people.”
“Have you asked the right ones?”
“I’m trying.”
Her fingers tightened on the latch.
“A soldier called Berden went with him. Came back. Got reassigned before I could speak to him.”
“Corvane signed the order.”
“Both orders.”
I looked at the crown again.
Permission to leave.
No need for a cell. No public disagreement over whether the visiting sovereign was permitted to refuse an oath.
A road could solve problems too.
“Does the King know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does Corvane know you are looking?”
“I’ve tried to be careful.”
Not an answer.
She knew it.
I did not press.
“I intend to leave tomorrow,” I said.
“Good.”
“I would prefer not to do it alone.”
“That,” she said, “is the first sensible plan you’ve told me.”
“Will you come?”
“Show me where you’re going first.”
Then she opened the door.
Her shoulders lowered. Her expression became pleasant, tired, unobtrusive.
“His lordship needs sleep,” she told the guards. “He’s still very distressed.”
One of them murmured something sympathetic.
Aoi glanced back at me.
The smallest smile.
Then she shut the door.
For several seconds, I sat looking at it.
Apparently I was not the only actor in the castle.