* * *
Why are you doing this, again?
It doesn’t matter so much, just glad to get in with a doctor before the winter caravan comes through.
Have you heard what happened up there? Are you on the Yanweians’ side? Aren’t the Benevolents and the churches taking care of it?
I won’t give a copper to those Yanweian criminals. You make sure this goes to good Kaveran citizens, you hear?
She healed broken wrists and countless cuts, gave the same advice to a dozen different faces, and rushed out into the snow with panicking young relatives to deliver two babies. Her crates filled with dried beans, wax-coated hard cheeses, nuts and flour, jars of honey and cakes of sugar.
When a patient came with six jars of strawberry jam as payment, Agna bore up through the appointment, closed the door to the guardsmen’s cubby where she had put out her shingle today, and wept. If Keifon had been conscripted into his countrymen’s cause, if he’d taken an illness in the hospital, if he’d nobly starved to help the less fortunate, would she even know? Word might not get to her on the road, and who would send it?
Agna shook off her spiraling thoughts, splashed freezing water on her face from the ewer in the corner, and opened the door. She wouldn’t know until she got there. Until then, she’d do all she could.
The other travelers heading north with the carriage company gave her a wide berth, until two of them, a pair of ranchers heading to Laketon through Wildern, offered her enough money to fill another crate of food. “The rivalry’s gone on long enough,” one of them said, tugging on his hood in the doorway of another storeroom. “Wildern and Laketon, even north and south, we have to pull together when things get bad. You know?”
The crates of art remained in the company’s freight carriage, where they would not be affected by shifts in temperature. The rest of her useless freight, the books and clothes and effects from her childhood, stayed packed up around them. Her crate of delicacies felt almost insulting. You couldn’t survive a siege on coffee and spices. Of course, she hadn’t known at the time, plodding through the markets in her sun-bathed homeland. When she’d lived in Wildern, she’d had no idea what was happening in Murio, and when she’d gone to Murio, she’d had no idea what was happening in Wildern. She was constantly behind.
She boarded the carriage for another day of traveling. She re-learned her caravan-riding skill of sleeping on the road, curled into a backward-facing corner of the coach. Some days her energy came in fits and starts, but she never let it run too low. She was fired by conviction and small triumphs and the deep, satisfied sleep of the thoroughly exhausted. Every morning, whether she woke in the coach or in a bed in an inn, whether her back cramped or her skin chapped, she knew she could collect a little more today. She could do a little more to help. Her venture to Murio had been a mixed victory, a narrow escape, a compromise. But she would not return empty-handed.
Her training at the Academy had long been a source of pride — she had trained at the greatest institution of higher learning in Nessiny. Now, it had given her a greater gift. If she was resourceful and worked hard, her training meant that she would never be fully powerless. She would always be able to help somehow. Even if the art market crashed and she had to postpone or give up every dream she’d had of opening her own gallery, she would always have this skill.
With the next shipment of food, she included a note to Agent Shora. I’ll return within the month, and I hope to carry a full workload for the foreseeable future. Thank you for this opportunity, but I don’t think I’ll take leave again for some time.
Keifon: Safe Harbor
“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.”
This, in context, was clear in Yanweian, when it would have been ambiguous in Kaveran. It was high-toned, laden with the baggage of history: not their arrangement now, not Kazi’s flight, not the half-eaten dinner Keifon had cooked. He meant his quest, his would-be revolution. Kazi’s notes were splayed out next to his plate, the pen — Keifon’s pen — laid aside in favor of a fork for a few minutes.
He resented Keifon’s presumption in taking the pen out of his hand and setting down the plate. He resented being dragged back to earth, being reminded of his situation. For years, Kazi had been on the cusp of his breakthrough. The world was supposed to recognize his genius. The world was not supposed to hound him into a former lover’s bolt hole and leave him there to rot. That was not part of the grand scheme. Late-night dinners of toasted bread and stewed mushrooms were not part of the grand scheme.
Keifon reached for his water glass. “I take it differently than you do, yes. Most people would. I think you’ve been surrounded by your followers for too long.”
“Are you my adversary now, Kei? Why did you let me in at all?” He took another bite as if it insulted him personally. The bread wasn’t moldy, only dry. Keifon had hoped to stretch this bag of flour for as long as he could, and day-old bread was still edible.
Not for the first time, Keifon felt his stomach flip as he let his eyes trace the aristocratic lines of Kazi’s cheekbones. They were both nameless, and yet Kazi had never needed to eat stale bread or sleep on a former friend’s couch before. Keifon wished he could knock on Bargi’s door downstairs, bring her up, and show her what her leader was really like. But that was petty, and it would hurt Bargi to no real purpose. Instead he went on eating, quelling the one pain he was able to address.
“I let you stay here because it seemed like the right thing to do. Don’t prove me wrong.”
“It’s still the right thing to do! You know what’s at stake, better than anyone. And what’s that supposed to mean, ‘prove you wrong’?”
To push down the hot upswelling of anger in his chest, Keifon focused on the room: the stove, still warm; the cats’ licked-clean food bowls in the corner; the bundles of sage and rosemary and basil he’d hung up to dry from the windowboxes’ last harvest. It was Agna’s home — their home. He had helped to build it. This was his world now. He was the Keifon who had searched through secondhand shops for that washstand and those whisks. He was the Keifon who had traded goodbyes and promises with Agna. He was no longer Kazi’s sad shadow, whipped easily into anger or despair by insinuations.
“What I mean is that it was the right thing to help Kazi na Furujia — Kazi na Leishu,” he added tightly. Kazi the Bastard, the name he’d had when they met. “My former partner. Who meant the world to me once, and needed my help. Not the legendary hero. I have nothing to do with him.”
Kazi tilted his head back, groaning. “Oh, you think you can get revenge on me now, is that it. Wallow in it, now that I’ve been brought low.”
“This is my life.” His knuckles ached as he loosened his grip on the cutlery, but everything ached; he’d been bandaging frostbitten fingers and pushing gurneys along the halls all day. “If you consider this ‘brought low,’ that’s your judgment. I’ve worked hard for this.”
The leader of the nameless revolution crossed his arms. “Fine — fine. Yes. It’s a nice place. I won’t deny you that. You have done well for yourself, I’ve told you that, and I’m glad you have. Whatever this is, I know you chose it.”
He knew the bait, the strings Kazi loved to pull. The words came out anyway. “Whatever this is?”
“This…” Kazi’s hand stirred the air. “With the Nessinian girl. This arrangement.” The word in Yanweian had overtones and undertones in this context, a chord made of infidelity and duplicity.
Keifon’s cheeks flamed, but he kept his voice even. “If you still don’t know what a friend is, Kazi, I feel sorry for you.”
His former lover’s laugh was sharp, and given grudgingly. “Friends buy a round at the bar, Kei. They give you grief about your times in the speed drills. This…”
“This is my life now. This is what I want.” Their meager supper sat uneasily in his stomach, despite his hunger. “I love her, I won’t stand by and hear it called into question, and if you won’t respect that, you can go back to the Eytrans.�
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“I’m not questioning anything. God’s blood, settle down.” Kazi ran a hand over his hair, still cut short to military specifications. Keifon shoved away the memory of how it felt under his fingers. “All I’m wondering is, what are you? What is she? You say you love her, does she return the favor?”
“Yes!”
Shadow had just sneaked into the kitchen, and now bolted to the safety of the living room. Keifon pulled his hand back; he’d reached out guiltily. He’d soothe the little gray cat later, unless both cats decided to hide in Agna’s room.
He thumped his fist softly on the table, rattling the plates. “I know it’s strange. It took me a long time to understand, even while it was happening. And if you don’t understand it, then maybe you can’t. You don’t get attached.” He’d tried not to growl the last part, that echo of their final, catastrophic argument.
“It was for your own good, you know.” Kazi picked at the gravy-soaked bread with his fork. “You said yourself, you didn’t want to be part of this. If you’d stayed with me, you’d be out with the rest of the unit now, running from the police.”
“And so would you. But here you are, right when it’s convenient for you.” He shoved his plate away, then, thanks to the gnawing in his stomach, forked up another wad of bread. It wasn’t that bad, really. Salt and spices would make nearly anything palatable.
He was letting himself get tangled up, wandering through Kazi’s labyrinth. It was long after sunset, and he had an hour or two of semi-coherent thinking left before he was useless to the world. He couldn’t waste it on bickering. “While you’re here,” he said, “and I hope that isn’t long, for both our sakes. Let’s get one thing clear. Don’t doubt my relationship with Agna. You’re free to ask questions. But never forget whose house this is.”
Kazi nodded, granting his point. Question everything had always been one of his favorite mottos. “Fine, then. Why are you here?”
To buy some time, and to loosen his throat, Keifon took a drink of water. “She offered me a place to stay when we came to town. Until I could find a matchmaker. But I didn’t want to leave after all.” The past tense was a dodge. Didn’t want to leave. Not don’t want to leave.
“Are you looking to marry her, then? She’s a foreigner, so…”
So she was in his reach, in other words. Foreigners were no better than nameless, in the old way. In the ways that they were both raised to believe, the ways that Kazi wanted to break. “No. She isn’t interested, and our goals don’t line up. I want to raise a family — well — Nachi if she’s able to visit, of course, but you know I want a bigger family. She isn’t… she doesn’t want any of that.” Nor would she ever talk about it. She couldn’t even give him a solid no, just don’t be silly and it’s impossible. He could picture it now, see the way she’d duck her head and turn away. He missed her like a rock over his heart.
Kazi let out a breath. “If it weren’t for that, then, you’d consider it?”
“It’s too much to get past.” He’d never ask her to raise children she didn’t want; she’d never ask him to give up having them. It was a simple impasse, and not uncommon, but it barred the road all the same.
“Hypothetically,” Kazi said.
“Hypothetically…” Father Tufari had nudged him to play out scenarios in his head sometimes — not to influence his decision, but to help Keifon better understand the dark maze of his own heart. He’d resisted even tracing the outlines of two of the scenarios. They were too molten and bright to bear. The first was if Eri decided to let Nachi stay with him for a while. The other was if Agna came back from her trip and said I’ve given it a lot of thought, and… “I… I think I’d try. I think I’d want to try.” He hated that he was shaking in front of Kazi, thinking about the way she’d knot her fingers together, thinking about her face tilted up to him — not much, he didn’t tower over her the way Laris or Rone or Tai would. I’ve given it a lot of thought, that’s how she’d say it, not saying it at all. I want to talk about our options.
“Hey.” Kazi reached across the table, then withdrew, his brows knitted. “I’m sorry.”
Keifon shook his head, and pressed the heels of his hands against his cheekbones to ease his throbbing sinuses. “It’s not your fault. I never — I just never talk about it. I can’t. I know you don’t care, maybe that’s why I can tell you. It’s just — I haven’t heard from her. Since she left. And I miss her so much. I want to know that she’s all right.” And that she hadn’t forgotten him, but that was both selfish and impossible to change.
“It takes a long time to get mail back and forth from the East, probably,” Kazi said, his voice softer than it needed to be. “I’m sure that’s all it is.”
“Yeah.” He finished his water and rolled the empty glass between his palms. “I know. She says it’s six weeks each way. But I can’t stop worrying.”
Kazi chewed his lip. “You said you go to the priest every week.”
“Yeah.”
“When are you going next?”
“Two days. Day after tomorrow.”
“Mmn.” Kazi was quiet for a while. “You should talk about this with him, I think. Your thing with her. How it’s affecting you now.”
Keifon laced his fingers together — halfway between Tufar’s prayer sign and Lundra’s, coincidentally — and propped his forehead on his hands. “Maybe.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” Talking about it with Kazi didn’t count; he had no stake in this except to save his own hide. Talking about it with Father Tufari was another matter. It would be one step closer to facing Agna. “Because I don’t want to face it, all right? I miss her, yes, and being alone is making this mess you made harder to bear. But it ends there. It has to. Getting into it will only hurt everyone.”
Kazi made a rumbling groan that twisted Keifon’s guts — he knew this sound, the “you’re being adorable and yet ridiculous” sound. Kazi’s chair scraped back, and Keifon clenched his jaw as his former friend rounded the table to stand behind him. He felt Kazi’s hands in his hair, an affectionate ruffling, no more, though his whole body warmed in response. A year and half, now, since Edann. Three full years since he and Kazi had broken up. It took all he had not to lean into the friendly contact.
Kazi’s fingers bunched near Keifon’s temple, and he made a quick, jerking gesture. Pull the cork. Get that garbage out of your head. He’d said it so often that they’d developed their own private sign for it. Keifon reached back and grabbed his wrists, his breath frozen in his chest, suspended between bad decisions. Being an abandoning, selfish, shallow user didn’t make Kazi wrong in this instance. Focus on that. Not about the quiet, about the fact that no one else knew Kazi was here.
After an age, Keifon found some words. “All right. I’ll… I’ll talk to him about this. About her.”
Kazi let him hang on, let him avoid letting go. “Good.”
“But I think I have to talk to him about you, too.” He felt Kazi’s arms tense in his grip. “No names. Nothing identifiable. There are plenty of Yanweian Army members in town now. Just… pulling the cork.” He loosened his hold, leaving Kazi free to step away. Instead, he leaned against Keifon’s chair and ran his hands through his hair again. Keifon shivered. He was dangerously weak, after a year and a half of celibacy, after months without even Agna’s friendly affection. He needed it too much; it silenced the gnawing, angry loneliness that had taken up residence in his chest. The urge to curl up in Kazi’s lap and purr took the edge off the urge to strangle him.
“It’s nice, a little longer like this.”
“Mmph.”
“…You can talk about me, then. All right.”
Keifon felt his mouth pulling up into a smirk. “I wasn’t asking for permission, Major.”
“I think that was flirting, just now.”
“Turn me in, then. I still—” His mouth tripped over hate you, because it wasn’t quite true. “I’m still angry with you. About shoving me aside. Not as much as I
used to. Mostly I had to accept that you are who you are. That you didn’t care how much you hurt me.”
“I cared! I always cared. Hurting you was never my goal, Kei. It was the unavoidable downside of something that had to be done.”
“Getting me out of the way.” Somehow, it was easier to talk about the smoking hole that Kazi had left in his life when Kazi was petting him like this. He was aggravatingly easy to manipulate.
“I wasn’t ‘getting you out of the way,’ not the way you mean it.” Kazi sighed, and Keifon felt the warm gust ruffle his hair. “It’s all interconnected. The plan, you, our people. One can’t be abandoned for the sake of another.”
“You did abandon me. For your plan. And lied to me that it was for my own good.”
“It wasn’t a lie. I don’t lie, especially not to you. I know you don’t believe it, but I do care. Otherwise I wouldn’t have taken you into my confidence. Do you know how scary that is? That you don’t care about anything that matters to me, and yet you know all of it? You could destroy me right now. You could undo everything I’ve worked my whole life to achieve.”
Keifon folded his arms, to keep himself from reaching anywhere. “You have to trust me, in other words.”
Kazi didn’t answer. The would-be hero of his people, the man who dreamed of statues in his likeness, twisted his fingers through Keifon’s hair and kept his silence. He knew how to rouse two nations to follow him, but he didn’t know how to share a dinner with someone he trusted. He didn’t know how to simply enjoy their company. Who had Kazi been protecting, in the end, by pushing him away? Keifon could have been targeted by Kazi’s enemies if they’d been publicly connected, that was true. And yet he was beginning to wonder.
He licked his lips. “It is scary. I know. When I was with you, I knew I couldn’t settle down the way I wanted to. I knew you didn’t want to get married or have a family the way I did. And sometimes… sometimes I wondered whether I was willing to trade that.”
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