Kiem followed him. “You do?” He hesitated on the threshold. Kiem always paused when he came into the bedroom to get something. Every time he did it, Jainan was sharply reminded that no matter how impersonally neat he kept the bed, he had driven Kiem out of his own bedroom.
This time, though, Jainan was focused enough on pulling the box out of the drawer that he just looked over his shoulder and said briskly, “Come in. Don’t hover.”
The moment he said it he wished he could take it back—that was appropriate for other students back in his lab on Thea, not the palace where he was a diplomat. But Kiem didn’t take offense, only grinned sheepishly. “Sorry.”
As Kiem came in, stopping a careful two paces away, Jainan lifted the lid of the box and took out a folded cloth. His fingers were oddly clumsy; it took two tries before he could get a proper grip. He held it up, and it tumbled open in a waterfall of stiff green silk.
Now that he looked at the flag, it would take up most of the wall. Whatever had propelled him to pull it out curdled into embarrassment. He had to say the obvious. “It’s too big.”
“It’s incredible,” Kiem said.
The embarrassment was slow to drain away, as if it took time for it to notice it was no longer needed. “Oh.”
“Isn’t it valuable, though? It should probably go under glass. It looks antique.”
“It doesn’t go under glass,” Jainan said. “But—are you sure? This will alter the look of your rooms significantly.”
He had said something wrong. Kiem was staring at him. “They’re your rooms too.”
“I know,” Jainan said. “But this might be a little much.”
“Jainan, there’s hardly any of your stuff here.”
Now he had upset Kiem, and Jainan hadn’t even seen it coming. He closed his eyes briefly and started folding up the flag. “I didn’t mean—I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Kiem said. Jainan couldn’t answer.
In the silence, Bel appeared at the door and saved him from having to come up with something. “Your Highness,” she said, “you are not only terrible at checking your messages, but you’re infecting Count Jainan with your bad habits.”
Jainan jumped and gestured his wristband awake, but Kiem just gave a disarming wave of his hand. “Was it important?”
“That depends,” Bel said. “It’s about the delicate political balance between your two planets, but you can carry on arguing about wall decorations if you like.”
Jainan tensed, but perversely that seemed to puncture all the tension in Kiem like a balloon, and he laughed. “No sense of aesthetics. Go on, Bel.”
“Colonel Lunver and her deputy, Major Saffer, want to see you,” Bel said. “I’ve been chasing the crash data you asked for. The colonel says they have it, but she wants to talk to you about your problem with the Auditor first. She’s the one who took over Taam’s role.”
“She’s got the flight logs from Taam’s crash?” Kiem said.
“She seems to think so,” Bel said. “You have to go in person, though.”
“Well, finally,” Kiem said. “My only other plan was walking into the Emperor’s office and throwing a tantrum.”
“That might have worked,” Bel said. “Either that or got you arrested. I’ll tell them you’re on your way.”
“Her aides would have shot me,” Kiem said. He grinned at Jainan, and for a moment Jainan was almost taken in by Kiem’s unfounded optimism. It made everything that had happened—the Auditor, Taam’s accident—seem like solvable problems, like Kiem thought he could make the world swing onto an easier path by sheer force of expecting that it would. Jainan knew this was absurd. And yet here Kiem was. “Let’s go and see what Colonel Lunver has for us.”
CHAPTER 8
The palace sprawled like a coral reef on a seabed, sprouting wings and structures that housed enough officials and advisors and soldiers and royals to populate a small town. One of the branches was Central One HQ, an imposing military building where Operation Kingfisher had its headquarters. It was on the opposite side of the palace from Kiem’s rooms, but he knew the way. He’d worn a path from the residential wing to General Tegnar’s office every time she was back on-planet, since she all but slept at her desk—though that had been years and years ago.
“So, Colonel Lunver took over Operation Kingfisher from Taam, huh?” Kiem said, as they walked through the gardens laid out between the inner and outer buildings of the palace. “Is she a friend of yours?”
Jainan hesitated. Kiem was getting used to Jainan’s hesitations. Not much came out of his mouth that hadn’t been thoroughly weighed and considered beforehand. “I knew her. She’s worked with Taam before. I don’t believe she would consider me a friend.” He ran one gloved hand along the edge of a low wall as they walked, clearing the snow in front of a flower bed full of bare woody stems. “Major Saffer is a different matter. Taam had a close friendship with him. He would frequently come over for dinner.”
Kiem’s gaze snagged on a tangle of stems in the flower bed and he forgot the conversation. He lunged to catch Jainan’s wrist. “Watch out—”
A small bird erupted from the thicket with a screech of fury, rocketing up into the sky and narrowly missing taking a slice out of Kiem’s ear with its razor-sharp wing pinions. Jainan had jerked back, away from Kiem’s lunge, and now looked up at it in incredulity.
“Ground nesting,” Kiem said apologetically. “They don’t like being disturbed.”
“I will never get used to your wildlife,” Jainan said.
“They don’t generally mean any harm,” Kiem said. He poked a careful finger into the nest it had left behind. “I think they use the creeper flowers to line their nests. There’s not a lot of greenery around at this time of year.”
“Ah,” Jainan said, sounding faintly startled. Kiem saw him examine the climbing creepers at the back of the flower bed and notice the pale, nearly transparent flowers unfolding under the few dark leaves that hung on through winter. “I didn’t realize anything was flowering.” He glanced up at the sky as if the bird might come back, but it had probably found somewhere else to shelter for the day. “It might be charming if that creature hadn’t just tried to kill you.”
Kiem brushed a stray twig off his elbow as they emerged from the gardens and into the front yard of Central One HQ. “It was just being … you know. Enthusiastic. Which entrance do we take for the Kingfisher offices?”
Kingfisher was in a different part of the building to his mother’s old stomping grounds, and Kiem didn’t know the labyrinth of alabaster corridors very well. Jainan silently indicated the way to the right office, though even he had to guess at the last few turnings. “I’ve forgotten,” Jainan said apologetically. “I wasn’t here all that much.”
The junior of the two officers met them at the door. Major Aren Saffer turned out to be a sandy-haired, energetic officer with pale freckled skin and one hand stuck permanently in the pocket of his uniform. A casual wooden pendant on a chain around his neck marked his gender. Kiem liked him immediately. He’d expected Aren to be some medaled stick-in-the-mud like most of his mother’s military friends, but he was much younger than that crowd, and he seemed genuinely pleased when he saw Jainan.
“Oh, don’t stand on ceremony,” Aren said when Kiem shook his hand. The office was a high-ceilinged room with a polished wooden floor and a silver bird emblem mounted on the far wall. Apart from that, it barely looked like the headquarters of a major operation: only a handful of soldiers occupied the rows of empty desks. “We’re still recovering. Losing Taam was a body blow, if I’m honest. Really knocked us off course. But he would have wanted us to keep going—right, Jainan?”
Jainan didn’t respond. He hadn’t come fully into the room, but had stopped to stare at a picture on the wall adjacent to the door: a memorial image, surrounded by gray flowers, showing Taam in full military dress. Taam had the right kind of jawline for that photo. He looked like something out of a war documentary.
Aren
tilted his head to one side, smiling quizzically. The small movement made Jainan start, and his attention came swiftly back to the other two. “Of course,” Jainan said. “I’m glad to see your memorial.”
“Hell with the memorial. I’m glad to see you,” Aren said. He’d been smiling—he had an easy, constant smile—but now he sobered up, and his gaze on Jainan was intent. “You must be finding it hard; I thought you’d dropped off the face of the planet. You should have been in touch sooner.”
Even with his very limited experience of Jainan, Kiem suspected that wasn’t the best approach. Jainan closed up visibly and said, “Your concern is appreciated.”
“Is your boss around?” Kiem said cheerfully. “Understand this is top secret stuff, this crash data. My aide said you had to hand it over in person.”
This worked to smooth over the awkward moment. Aren showed them into an office where an officer with a colonel’s insignia was waiting, her hands clasped behind her back. Kiem had never met her before either: she was maybe in her late thirties, with an air of deliberateness and unusually straight hair scraped back into a severe plait.
The object of her attention was the screens covering one wall of the office. A string of text said OPERATION KINGFISHER—HVAREN BASE. They showed a bustling remote office with the same silver bird emblems mounted around the walls. From the view out the window, it looked to be somewhere out in the mountains; it seemed like a big on-planet office for a spaceside operation, but Kiem supposed the military had to find something to keep itself occupied.
She turned as they came in. “Your Highness,” she said. She waved a hand and the screens on the wall went dark. “Thank you for coming. Please take a seat. Saffer, you too.”
Kiem warily sat on one of the uncomfortable chairs. The office was austere and chilly; he should have brought a jacket. Next to him Jainan turned his head to keep both of the officers in view. “You wanted to see us, Colonel?” Kiem said cheerfully.
Colonel Lunver put her hands formally on her knees and said, “I understand the Resolution has absolutely refused to instate you.”
Kiem felt a bit like he’d opened a door and found an unexpected pit of spikes. “Er,” he said. “I wouldn’t say absolutely refused, as such. It’s more like a delay.”
“A delay,” Colonel Lunver said, her skepticism obvious. Kiem wasn’t sure why she was allowed to interrogate him—he would have expected that question to come from the Thean embassy—then he remembered that Kingfisher operated in Thean space. Jainan clearly thought she had the right to an opinion.
“They must do it eventually,” Jainan said, quiet and intense. “We both have the correct chain of authority. There is no legal reason to deny us.”
Beside him, Aren tipped his head and made a noise through his teeth. “That’s assuming the Resolution thinks like humans,” he said, with an apologetic look at his senior officer. “Not sure that’s the case. Who knows what they’re actually looking for?”
Jainan gave a single nod and folded his hands in his lap. Kiem felt a moment of dismay. He’d been working under the assumption that this was a temporary hiccup. But Jainan was the one with diplomatic experience; if even he agreed they might not get instated, they could really be in trouble.
“We’ve been working on the Auditor from our side,” Lunver said. “I hardly need to explain military affairs to the son of General Tegnar—”
“You really do,” Kiem said apologetically. “I haven’t spoken to her in months.”
“—but we care about keeping the Thean treaty stable just as much as Jainan’s embassy,” Lunver said. “Just as much as the late Colonel Taam, in fact. We’re not the only ones who’ve been nagging the Auditor: Internal Security and the Emperor’s Private Office have also been in on the act. But we haven’t gotten far. Given that, I have a suggestion for you.”
“Go on,” Kiem said. At this point he’d take any advice.
Lunver said briskly, “Step down.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Step down,” Lunver repeated. There was a thin window in the corner of the office; the light coming through it glinted off the flint brooch at her collar. “The Auditor doesn’t seem to like how rushed your appointment was. We can convince him to accept Jainan: he’s Thean, and he was appointed according to due process. The problem seems to be you.”
“Oh,” Kiem said. He felt like a hole had opened up in his stomach, which was ridiculous, because this hadn’t been his idea in the first place. He said the first thing that came to mind: “I honestly don’t know how they appointed me. The Auditor said the problem was Taam.”
“The problem is Taam’s replacement. The paperwork must have been rushed,” Lunver said. She sounded mildly aggrieved, as if intergalactic politics was just another obstacle in the way of her operation. “The investigation into Prince Taam’s death is unlikely to find anything new—even Internal Security can’t make up evidence where there isn’t any. However. If you resigned your position, the wedding was annulled, and Jainan remarried, we could make certain the Auditor is happier with the next representative.”
Kiem tried to get his thoughts straight. “I’ll step down if it will help,” he said. “If that’s what the Emperor wants—”
“Do you have an alternative?” Jainan interrupted. Kiem stopped talking. Jainan was sitting very upright in his seat, staring at Lunver. “Who would you replace him with?”
“Apologies, Your Highness,” Lunver said to Kiem, “but it should be someone less connected to Taam. The representative doesn’t have to be a prince. Upper nobility, or a general, perhaps. With the cooperation of the Theans, of course,” she added, with a nod to Jainan.
“I fail to see how that will solve the problem,” Jainan said.
Kiem, who had been about to open his mouth to say he didn’t mind, stopped and rethought. This was how he screwed things up: he went along with what other people wanted and he didn’t think. “I’m with Jainan here,” he said. “Not sure that’s going to fix anything. The Auditor said the problem was Taam—speaking of, how about that crash data?”
He looked around hopefully, as if they were having a friendly meeting rather than hearing a senior military official ask for his resignation.
“Your refusal has been noted,” Colonel Lunver said. She sighed. “Your Highness, I don’t want to have to take it up to the Emperor.”
“She’ll be so pleased. I think she misses me when I’m not in her inbox,” Kiem said. He changed his tone to plaintive. “The crash data? I thought that was why you agreed to see us.”
Lunver glanced at Jainan as if she’d expected something more from him, then grimaced and rubbed a hand across her face. “Saffer.”
“I’ll get you that,” Aren said, hastily getting to his feet. “This way.”
As they followed him out, Aren frowned over a mini-screen hovering over his wrist. “I have all the personnel records for the unit,” he said as an aside to Kiem, “so the colonel got me to track it down, but I’m not really senior officer material. Too much management rubbish.” He leaned against an empty desk, spinning through some options, and then entered a command sign. “It has to go through Internal Security. There.” He finished the command with a flourish and grinned at Jainan. Even talking quietly, their voices echoed in the old room. Jainan kept glancing at the handful of soldiers within hearing. “That’s a fairly ghoulish souvenir you want, but it should be with you within a week or so.”
Kiem refrained from saying that apparently the officers hadn’t needed to see them in person to transfer the data after all, which was not making him feel any more well disposed toward Lunver. Jainan’s eyes went back to Aren’s face. “A week.”
Aren’s mouth took on a rueful twist. “’Fraid it’s an Internal Security issue,” he said. “They put a block on all the investigation materials, so we have to go up the chain of command to get them released.”
“But you have the crash data,” Kiem said. “Come on. Jainan’s been trying to get it for weeks. I gave i
t a royal seal. I don’t want to start getting official about it—do us a favor.”
“I—” Aren looked between them, but Kiem thought he’d got his measure, and he was right. Aren gave a fluid shrug, shot a mildly guilty look at Lunver’s office door, and gave another command. Jainan’s wristband buzzed. “All right, then. Jainan’s got a copy.” His voice lowered, semi-comically, as if he was letting them in on a secret. “Please don’t hand it to your friends back home.”
The line of tension hadn’t left Jainan’s face. “I wouldn’t.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” Kiem said.
For a brief moment Jainan and Aren both looked as if Kiem had grown a second head. “Oof,” Aren said. He traded glances with Jainan. “How to put this, eh? Kingfisher isn’t hugely popular on Thea.”
“Mm,” Jainan said.
“Sort of dead-cat-in-the-river levels of popular, in fact. Look.” Aren gestured another command and a screen sprang up vertically above the desk. After a moment’s browsing, he threw up a fringe-press article with the headline Iskat’s Mining Smash-and-Grab. And another, with a university logo: Activist Drones Sabotage Refinery. A third just said Sorry, Were You Using Those Minerals? over a smiling picture of Taam.
Jainan had gone a shade sallower. “I hadn’t seen those.”
“Idiots,” Aren said cheerfully. “Students and fringe obsessives, mainly. But to answer your question, Prince Kiem, that’s why we’re running a lot of Kingfisher at high classification. I was assigned to the op as the strategic comms officer to try and fight this sort of bad press, but the positive spin just didn’t take. Hey, there’s a thought.” He threw himself back into a sprawl in the desk chair and eyed Kiem speculatively. “We’ve got a strategic comms post going spare. Spinning Kingfisher to the Thean newslogs. You’d be a natural.”
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