Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  “You do? You do. I mean. Yes!” Kiem’s face was incredulous and joyful. “I do too! Of course I love you! I have for ages! Ressid thought—”

  The dam inside Jainan burst. “Kiem,” he said, and grabbed his wrist. “How did they let it get this far?” Kiem came with him, confused but willing, as Jainan turned to the front of the stage.

  “Your Grace!” a reporter shouted, cutting across the babble of voices. “Will you make a statement?”

  “Yes,” Jainan said. He took the microphone from the podium. Elation was running through him like a drug. “I certainly am going to make a statement.” That was enough to quiet the room down. A reporter called out another question from the back but cut off in the middle as Jainan tapped the hovering button.

  “I think I may have been misleading before,” Jainan said. “I am not very good at talking about my feelings. I said in my previous interview that Kiem was a great help. What I meant was: I love Kiem, he is truly extraordinary, and there is nobody I would rather be married to. I hope this is now clear.”

  A ripple went through the room—half shock, half amusement, but the only sound Jainan focused on was a low, involuntary noise from Kiem beside him and the way he pulled his wrist out of Jainan’s grip so he could take Jainan’s hand. Jainan clasped it tight, and it buoyed him up like a wave. He leaned over the microphone and gave the crowd of reporters a beatific smile. “Questions?”

  Several people shouted over each other. Jainan picked out a woman in the front row, who called, “What about the treaty? Is the Emperor granting concessions?”

  “She will be,” Jainan said. At the back of the room, the Auditor had sat up. Jainan turned his head to Ressid, who had the same look on her face as she’d had when Jainan blew up his first experimental shuttle drive. Jainan was exhilarated enough to nearly grin, but he suppressed it and then turned his attention on Kiem. “Does Your Highness have a statement?”

  “Honestly,” Kiem said, the corners of his eyes crinkling, “I think my partner covered it.” He was talking to the reporters, but he was only looking at Jainan, and his words were only the edges of what he was saying, like the breaking crests of waves on a tide. Jainan didn’t laugh, but only because laughter was no more than a fraction of what he felt. He stepped up and kissed Kiem.

  It was easy to ignore the cameras this time. Jainan shut his eyes and didn’t break away even in the bustle that surrounded them, encouraged by Kiem’s arms wrapped possessively around him. They didn’t stop until the coordinating steward announced, “Honored citizens, I believe we should suspend the conference here,” and the Ambassador coughed politely behind Jainan and said, “Your Grace?”

  Jainan turned, putting his polite face on, which was hard because fireworks kept fizzing in his brain. “Yes, Your Excellency?” he said. But he realized what it was the next moment, as Ressid strode across the dais toward him.

  She stopped a bare arm’s length away. Jainan searched her face, not knowing what else to do. She was achingly unchanged. All you could ever tell from Ressid was that she was in the grip of strong emotions, not which ones they were.

  The press conference was breaking up. Kiem was apparently giving an impromptu interview to a handful of journalists at the edge of the dais, so they had a small pool of quiet away from everyone’s attention. “Ressid,” Jainan said uncertainly.

  “Sweet children of God,” Ressid said, and flung her arms around him in a way that was not at all commensurate with her image as a senior diplomat. “I am going to murder you,” she added, low enough not to be heard by anyone else. “Or possibly myself for being so slow. Someone is going to get murdered.”

  She’d last hugged him like this when he’d left for Iskat. He’d last heard her threaten to murder people when they were teenagers. Jainan suddenly wasn’t afraid, only elated and relieved, and he wanted badly to laugh. “I thought they’d made you tone down the death threats,” he said. “What if an Iskaner hears you? How was your shuttle trip?”

  “Somewhat tense,” Ressid said, “‘Full-blown diplomatic crisis’ doesn’t seem to cover it. We need to talk.”

  Jainan realized belatedly that Ressid would be tasked with cleaning up the chaos he had left. “I—yes. Sorry.”

  “We need to go to the Auditor as well, and we’re almost out of time—excuse me? Jainan, don’t you dare apologize.” It didn’t take much for Ressid to default to the extreme condescension that only an older sibling could manage; Jainan probably shouldn’t be glad about that. “You’re the one who pried a decent negotiating position out of this whole mess. Don’t go shy and retiring on me. I’ll need you at the table.”

  “Oh,” Jainan said. “Yes.” The gathered reporters and dignitaries were slowly dispersing around the plates of refreshment provided at the side of the room, but there was a reporter still hovering hopefully at Ressid’s elbow to try and get to Jainan. “Have you met Kiem, by the way?” He could have sworn Kiem’s attention was fully on his conversation with a journalist, but the minute Jainan mentioned his name, Kiem stepped up beside him. His hand brushed Jainan’s. Jainan deliberately caught it.

  Kiem bowed without detaching himself. “I’ve had the pleasure over vid,” he said. “Though I think I’ve worked out some things about the call you gave me on our wedding day.”

  Ressid sized him up. “Hm,” she said. “Me too. We’ll have to catch up.” She eyed the crowd around them. “Go and find a room we can talk in, Jainan. I’ll hold them off. So sorry to keep you waiting,” she added loudly to the reporter edging up to her—that was Dak, the reporter from the wedding, who had apparently managed to avoid being blacklisted. “I’d be delighted to give you a statement on the treaty amendments.” She took Dak’s arm and bore him off firmly, leaving Kiem and Jainan to escape from the others. In the crowd beside her Hren Halesar was holding court with a group of other journalists, and he caught Jainan’s eye and flicked his fingers to his forehead in an ironic salute.

  “’Scuse me,” Kiem said, engineering a path around the back of a particularly burly reporter. “No more questions, sorry, we have to change for dinner. Call me tomorrow. Have a good day!”

  After a few more moments of Kiem’s excuses and innocent-seeming shouldering, they found themselves near the exit, where they could make a polite escape. “I am never going to read a newslog again,” Jainan murmured as his elbow brushed Kiem’s.

  “Are you kidding?” Kiem said. He was grinning at Jainan in a way that made it seem like he’d just discovered Jainan’s face and was delighted with it, which was unfair and exhilarating at the same time. “I’m going to laser tomorrow’s front page posts on our bedroom wall.”

  “I will void the treaty,” Jainan threatened. Kiem laughed and bowed him through the door.

  CHAPTER 31

  Jainan was outwardly sober and controlled again when he left Kiem—who was moving his belongings out of his cell and back into their guest suite—and made his way to the meeting chamber the Theans had secured. It felt like the gravity had been turned down; his feet came farther off the ground when he walked. He no longer even registered the people he passed in the corridors, until one of them blocked his way.

  “Your Grace?”

  Chief Agent Rakal, in a freshly pressed uniform. They dipped their head in a meticulously proper bow. Jainan stopped with a faint trace of unease. But he recognized that fear as part of an old pattern, one that he didn’t have to maintain. He sketched a nod. “Agent Rakal. I’m afraid I have an appointment with the Thean delegation.”

  “I would take it as a personal favor,” Rakal said, “if you could stop your aide from threatening Aren Saffer while he is in my custody.”

  Jainan could not easily categorize his immediate reaction to hearing Rakal say Aren’s name. Aren had always been linked to Taam. Even everything Aren had done felt like something from Taam’s world, spinning on after Taam’s death. Jainan was almost surprised to find he had his own opinion of Aren, separate from Taam: something like cold aversion, as if he wasn
’t important enough for Jainan to spend further time on.

  Then he said, “Bel threatened him?”

  “Saffer attempted to get a message out to his raider allies,” Rakal said tersely. Jainan noticed that despite their ferociously neat appearance, there were shadows of fatigue under their eyes. “We blocked it; I have no idea how she intercepted a copy. It makes it very difficult for me to overlook your aide’s past if she threatens my prisoners with her conglomerate connections.”

  Jainan took a moment to arrange his face to reflect an appropriate degree of seriousness. “I can see that,” he said. “I’ll speak to her.”

  Rakal didn’t move. “One more thing. I have drafted my resignation.”

  “Have you,” Jainan said.

  “I have not yet formally tendered it. If you wish to make a preference clear to the Emperor, please do so over the next couple of days.”

  Jainan looked at them. “Why?”

  There was an unpleasant struggle going on behind Rakal’s attempt at professional neutrality. “My agency failed to handle this as we would ideally have done. In hindsight I should have paid more attention to the … personal angle.”

  Jainan felt a distant stab of discomfort. “The personal angle is often irrelevant.”

  “You came to the Empire in good faith. Internal Security could have looked more closely, and earlier, at Prince Taam’s activities.” It would have sounded like equivocation except for the way it clearly caused Rakal some pain to get the words out. They seemed determined to do it anyway. “Matters were handled improperly.”

  “I don’t think you should resign,” Jainan said.

  “I do not require a polite fiction.”

  “I think,” Jainan said slowly, “that it’s very possible to spend all your energy doing the right thing but still miss something obvious. I think that doesn’t make your effort meaningless. Does that make sense?”

  Rakal’s eyes narrowed, as if this was another piece of an investigatory puzzle. “I will consider it.” They shook their head as if to clear it and moved aside. “I apologize for taking up your time.”

  Jainan gave them a fractional nod and quickened his pace down the corridor. He was late.

  “Jainan!” Gairad hurried to catch up with him outside the meeting chamber. Her work coveralls were gone, replaced by a semiformal outfit with a jacket in Feria green. “Wait for me. I barely know anyone in there.”

  Jainan searched her face for signs she was looking at him differently now that she knew about Taam. He found nothing. She seemed to regard him as a handy clan member who would do as an ally in a pinch, the same as she had before the newslog coverage. It was an odd, refreshing feeling.

  Gairad misread his scrutiny, and her expression turned defensive. “Ressid invited me because I know about Kingfisher, as long as I gave my word not to tell any of my friends. Don’t let me look bad in front of her,” she added, with a sudden flash of nerves, leading Jainan to wonder how Ressid overawed younger clan members so easily and how he had completely missed that gene.

  Ressid opened the door herself. There were nearly a dozen people around a table in the room behind her; half diplomats who had come up in the same shuttle as her, half embassy staff. Ambassador Suleri was at the head of the table.

  When Jainan walked in, Suleri rose. It was a gesture of formality he didn’t have to make; he and Jainan were roughly equal in rank. Jainan had no time for his nerves to return before the Ambassador inclined his head, one diplomat to another.

  “Thank you for coming, both of you,” the Ambassador said gravely. “Please have a seat. Lady Ressid is standing in for the principal for Foreign Affairs until her shuttle arrives.

  Ressid waited until Jainan and Gairad had both sat. “Citizens,” she said. “The treaty signing is in three hours. Any papers to be drawn up must be drawn up now. The Auditor has let us know he sees the possibility of reconciliation. I have promised the Thean press another story on our treaty with Iskat, and Jainan”—a nod to him—“has bought us an opening. My principal wants your agreement on our course of action.”

  The Ambassador glanced at Jainan. “Iskat has broken our trust in many ways,” he said. “However, I encourage the meeting to consider the consequences of a large-scale conflict.”

  “The Emperor is willing to give us a small reduction in trade tariffs,” the Deputy Ambassador said, indicating a document spread out on the table. Jainan realized this was also aimed at him. They had already been through this among themselves. They were nervous about obtaining his support.

  “Taam wanted a war,” Jainan said. “I have no desire to continue his work. What are the other options?”

  Ressid let out a small, satisfied hah, as if Jainan had proved her right. She swept aside the documents glowing on the table, spinning them into oblivion. “Citizens, I propose the Emperor has not offered us a small tariff reduction,” she said. Her smile was that of a shark. “I posit that what she has offered us is, in fact, a blank sheet for our demands.”

  She glanced at Jainan, as if she felt his gaze on her. When he met her eyes, Jainan felt the solidity of his clan underneath him, of all the clans, as if his feet weren’t on the metal shell of a station but on the packed earth of Thea below.

  “Yes,” Jainan said. “And, if you’ll allow me to suggest something, I think I know the person to deliver them.”

  * * *

  The Emperor sat in an upholstered chair the color of alabaster, almost exactly matching the heavy white of her full-formal tunic and skirts. Behind her head, filling the wall of the anteroom, was the gold-brushed curve of the Hill Enduring.

  Her eyes were fixed on a wall screen. It showed a slow bustle in the vast space of the adjoining Observatory Hall as staff prepared it for the treaty signing with dozens of cameras, both fixed and aerial, and a covered table on the dais at the front. On the table was a row of handscribing quills but no papers. The Auditor stood in front of the table, turning his head slightly from side to side, as if he could hear something nobody else could. Some of the treaty representatives had started to file in, tiny on the screen.

  Kiem paused in the doorway to the anteroom, a slim, gold-embossed case in his hand. Vaile broke away from a hushed conversation with a pair of aides and swiftly crossed to him. She was past stressed; instead she had gone distant and steely. “Kiem, what are you doing here?”

  “I need to talk to her majesty,” Kiem said, tilting his head at the statue-like figure of the Emperor. “What’s the status of the treaty?”

  “We don’t know what she’s signing,” Vaile said, brutally honest. “Things change every five minutes. The bloody Auditor doesn’t seem to mind that if we don’t sign it, we’ll be at war within the year.”

  “Can I talk to her?” Kiem said. Vaile gave an ironic go-ahead gesture.

  As he strode across the room, he studied the Emperor’s lined face. She couldn’t be any less worried than Vaile, but you couldn’t see it; even under a degree of pressure that would crack a ship’s hull, she wore the exact expression she used for council meetings and press appearances. Kiem couldn’t help a twinge of admiration.

  The Emperor tore her gaze away from the screen as he approached and raised her eyebrows a fraction. “So,” she said. “Kiem. Have you finished your Thean dramatics?”

  Kiem gave a shallow bow. “You did give me the Thean representative post, ma’am.”

  “I did,” the Emperor said. “You have certainly taken it in directions I did not expect. However, I am currently dealing with larger problems.”

  “About that,” Kiem said. “I might have a solution to one of them.”

  She gave him a look that contained more than a hint of disbelief. “You,” she said, “have a solution?”

  “Well, I’m more like the messenger,” Kiem said. He opened the embossed case, drew out some paper documents—real paper, that crackled under his fingers—and handed them to her. “The Theans drafted this and are willing to sign it. The other vassal planets have seen it. Half t
he Thean newslogs have positive stories ready to run. The Auditor says he’ll accept it if you do.”

  There was dead silence in the anteroom as the Emperor read the papers. Even the aides had stopped muttering.

  She raised her eyes when she had finished reading and examined Kiem in further silence. Kiem had very rarely been the subject of the Emperor’s unflinching, undivided attention. It was a little like standing in front of a glowing rock you suspected was going to give you radiation poisoning.

  “This,” she said, “nullifies our current Resolution treaty.”

  “And forms a new seven-way agreement,” Kiem said. “Yes.”

  “Do you know what this would do?” the Emperor said.

  “It splits up the link trade equally,” Kiem said. He ticked things off on his fingers. “Gives all the vassals an ambassador to the Galactics. Requires seven-way consensus before any changes to the next Resolution treaty. Seems pretty straightforward: I think we’re a federation now. Did you read the coda to the Thean treaty?”

  “I did,” the Emperor said. “I am willing to grant them control of Operation Kingfisher. Total withdrawal of our military from Thean space … we can speak about later.”

  “We can’t,” Kiem said. “In five minutes, the treaty ceremony will start, and you have to sign the whole package or sign nothing. Oh, and one more thing,” he added.

  “Which is?” the Emperor said, in a tone which reduced the temperature of the air around her.

  “General Fenrik retires,” Kiem said. “No advisory role. No part in politics. You can’t just tinker around the edges and jail some soldiers who worked for him, because none of this works if you keep someone in power who tried to start a war. He has to go. Maybe you can find him a monastery.”

  Both the aides and Vaile started to speak at once, but everyone stopped when the Emperor held out the slim stack of paper and dropped it on the table by her side.

  “You’ve got some nerve,” she said.