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“I,” Cliopher Mdang declared, “don’t believe in soulmates. Or shared dreams.”
You considered the possibility that the Master of Offices had sent you a secretary that was not quite sane. I said, with great interest, “What do you suppose this is, then?” and gestured around us at the expanse of clean white sand, the ocean murmuring on the shore, the shooting stars spiraling down out of the sky above us. I made the gesture as careless as I could, which was not very. Your mannerisms were by far the stronger, and I was devouring the sky, the air, the moon, the nature, too intently to be casual about it.
I ought not to talk to him like this at all. Even in a dream, even in a soulmate dream (and how implausible was that, for the Master of Offices to have sent me a secretary who was not only competent, and unrefined, and funny, but one for whom, the moment I met his eyes, something had clicked into place as surely as a key into a lock?) it was likely not safe.
“I’m dreaming, and dreaming about you, that’s all,” Cliopher informed me. “For one, I don’t believe in fate, or destiny. Second of all, you’re dressed like Fitzroy Angursell, and that’s clearly not right.” Oh, but this really was dangerous, for you and for me. “Third of all, if this is real I’m probably going to get executed tomorrow for the really very egregious etiquette violations I’ve already committed, and I would prefer not to be.”
“Nobody’s executing you,” you said sharply. You were not going to let anyone. Not Cliopher Mdang, your competent, intrepid, unpolished secretary. (Your soulmate.)
“You see?” Cliopher said. “Unrealistic. Definitely a dream.”
Oh, but I did like him. The funniest part about all of this was that I really did not think he could possibly object as stringently as he claimed to. I had had a soulmate or three before, in another life, and had a few nascent soulmate bonds that had never triggered, so I knew that if you were repelled from the idea, they typically, well, didn’t form. And we’d gotten to shared dreams very fast; J— my pragmatic friend and I had taken months about it and then, being hormonal teenagers, immediately regretted it as we’d gotten a larger eyeful of each others’ nighttime fantasies than we’d particularly wanted. “Well,” I said, propping my chin on my hands and considering him, “perhaps you’ll change your mind about it the first time we share a dream in my head instead.”
“I suppose,” Cliopher said, more to himself than to me, “I did choose you, so that part’s all right. But the details seem all wrong.” He eyed me critically.
The next morning you awaited Cliopher’s arrival in your study, at five minutes to the third hour, as you had for the last — how many days had it been? Seven, maybe — since he had first started working as your secretary.
The guards (Ludvic and Sergei, again, as always) announced him.
Cliopher came in and sank into obeisance.
You gestured him up and said, “Good morning, Sayo Mdang.”
Cliopher looked up, met your eyes, and said, “Good morning, my lord.” Yesterday he had dared to smile at you, and you at him; this morning his gaze was sharper, something more searching in it.
What could you even say? You had thought about nothing else since you woke up this morning, staring up at the bed curtains for hours, trying to work through the implications. Considering the balance of power, in the palace, after the Fall. Considering how much power you, the ostensible center of the pattern and god, actually could wield to influence the machinations and mechanisms of the bureaucracy and the court and the priest-wizards.
Ludvic and Sergei both wore professionally blank faces. All your guards swore oaths of loyalty and silence.
So, too, did your priest-wizards and your councilors.
You said, “We will begin today with the food stores.”
“This is a tad unsettling,” Cliopher said.
The walls had eyes, and they were watching me. Well. Us, now.
“I know,” I said. “I’m afraid my subconscious is very transparent.”
“Having two dreams in a row where you are in my dream and debating whether or not we are dreaming and in whose dream we are seems like rather a lot,” Cliopher observed.
“Have you given any more thought to the possibility that you are, in fact, in a shared dream with me?” I inquired around the collar on my neck. It made speech a little difficult.
We were in the throne room, all the splendor and majesty of the empire sprawled out before us in a vast expanse; the room was empty, besides Cliopher and I and the eyes; and I was chained to the throne. (Again: very transparent.) All the eyes followed me, except for when I tried to look at them, at which point they skittered away, refused to look at me. All except Cliopher’s dark thoughtful eyes, which met mine squarely. I kept my gaze fixed to his.
“I did think about it,” Cliopher said, “and I’m thinking rather more about it now, but I’m not dead yet, and nobody’s taken me aside to talk to me about being the Emperor’s soulmate, and you haven’t said anything or indicated in any kind of way that it’s real, so the dream hypothesis still seems like the most likely one. Do you need help getting out of that thing?”
“Please,” I said, and tried to squash a squirm of guilt. You could not give Cliopher an explanation, and he could not demand one of you, so perhaps I did, in fact, owe him one. As he fiddled with the chains, I said, “Official Ouranatha policy states that the Imperial line, being most glorious and most serene and in all ways superior to mere mortals, can only find soul matches within itself. I… it is not clear to me what the historical fates of the soulmates outside of that line was, only that if there had been unofficial but tolerated Imperial soulmates at court, there should be records that do not seem to exist.”
Shamefully, you — I — had looked. I had been curious about whether soulmates were exempt from requiring the purifications, what kind of privileges and protections they might have at court that a canny person could exploit, what I could use if —
The chains rattled where Cliopher touched one behind me. He was out of sight, now. The eyes skittered away when I tried to look at them. I tried to close my eyes and they were pinned open, like a butterfly to a sheet. I — you —
Cliopher’s voice, and its rural sharpness, interrupted my thoughts. “That’s ominous.” Then he added, “Do the Ouranatha keep records? They must. Everybody keeps records.”
Spoken like a bureaucrat. I said, “If they do, they aren’t keen on sharing.”
“Not even with you?” After a moment, Cliopher added, “My lord?” in a very belated sort of way.
You did not grimace. You didn’t mind Cliopher calling you ‘my lord’ in the waking world, where he was among the least obsequious people you knew. Here, though —
The quiet, the clink of chains, the skittering eyes. The collar biting into your neck, restricting my breathing, sealing away — and then abruptly it loosened and fell free, Cliopher reappearing in the corner of my vision with it in his hands, and with my new breath I said, “Especially with me. If I knew what was in their records, I might have opinions about them, after all.”
My voice was sardonic, more so than I had meant it to be, and I thought — you feared — and then Cliopher smiled wryly. “I see,” he said.
I held his gaze for a moment and then let my eyes drop to the collar he held. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me until I get the rest of it,” Cliopher said, and crouched to the right side of the throne to work on the chains there.
That took him back out of my sight again.
I counted to fifty nine, listening to the chink of the chains, keeping my eyes fixed on my knees as best I could, before he spoke again. “Suppose this was a shared dream.”
“That’s still a matter under consideration, is it?”
“It doesn’t do to discard options before considering them thoroughly, my lord.” He sounded so prim about it that I suspected his eyes were laughing and wished that I could see his face to check.
I said, “The all-seeing eyes focused on me aren’t a bit of a clue?”
“I don’t see why the eyes necessarily make it your subconscious,” Cliopher said, somewhat truculently. “All one of them needs is a mouth to call me a barbarian and it could be mine as easily.”
Ah. Court was always court, wasn’t it. I said, “And the chains?”
As if naming them had dispelled their power (and oh, how I wished), the chains loosened around me and slithered free as Cliopher drew them away.
He met my gaze and smiled, suddenly, and ducked his head. “You’ve never dreamed of being a hero? Rescuing somebody from a great imprisonment?”
He said it so casually, as if I hadn’t — as if I’d never —
My dreams had been of being rescued.
Cliopher lifted his head and met my gaze again. His smile faded slowly.
I didn’t know what my face was doing — wearing your serene mask, probably. I wanted to keep talking with Cliopher, as me and not you; you had most of our waking hours, couldn’t I keep the dreams? But I needed to say something, anything, to break the moment. I said, “Searching for a tower bristling with thorns to scale, are you?”
Anything but an Aurora reference, maybe.
That actually made Cliopher grin. “I wouldn’t say no to one,” he said. His gaze dropped briefly to my clothes — I was in the scarlet mantle again — and he said, “I’d almost forgotten my subconscious has also cast you as Fitzroy Angursell for some reason. I suppose that resolves the dream question fairly comprehensively.”
“That unimaginable, is it,” I said.
Cliopher said, “Would you like to come down from there? You can, now,” and he rattled the chains in his hands lightly in illustration.
I stilled for a moment, but — I could, couldn’t I? I pushed to my feet and stepped down off of the throne.
We both looked at it for a moment. Cliopher’s expression was very telling. If he’d been doing his best to keep his face courtly calm in your study, he certainly wasn’t bothering with it here and now.
I started to bite back my knee-jerk response to that look on reflex, but — well. He did think this was a dream, didn’t he?
“Dreadful, isn’t it,” I said.
“Quite,” Cliopher agreed. He put the chains down on the floor and considered the throne for a moment more. Then, he said, “Well, since it is a dream,” and took two steps forward and perched on the arm of it, his face alight with mischief.
And I laughed.
An ungainly, snorting thing, a honk yanked out of my mouth, sounding exactly as awkward and clumsy and free as if it had been the first time I had laughed in — how long had it been? I had lost track long ago.
Cliopher hummed Aurora while he transcribed the next day, one of the sections about Tenebra. You managed, somehow, to keep me from breaking into hysterical giggles in the middle of the study.
“If these are just dreams,” I said, “then you can’t get in trouble for anything you say in them. And you can just ignore me if I make no sense or ask something accidentally intrusive, because, after all, I’m not real.”
“Ye-es, that’s right,” Cliopher said, eying me with some wariness. “Your point being?”
I still had to be very careful. Eventually Cliopher would realize that I was not merely a figment of his imagination and I could not ask him any questions that he would regret answering at that time. But — but surely there were small things, the kind of questions — the kind of questions a man might ask another man, a new acquaintance, that kind that you did not usually allow yourself any longer. (Small talk with a god made people nervous.) I said, “Where is this?”
It had taken me what felt like an eternity to even be able to speak to ask. I was too mesmerized by the sussuration of the waves, rising sometimes into a thundering crash against the sand; the sand which was a thousand little warm pinpricks against my palms and my ankles and toes; the slow baking heat of the sun on my skin.
Oh, gods, the sun.
“Home,” Cliopher said simply.
“The Vangavaye-ve?” I pronounced it with care.
“Yes,” Cliopher said, with a tone to it that I was beginning to recognize from discussions of budgets and audits, one that heralded further clarifications incoming. Lo and behold: “This looks like a cross between a place near Gorjo City, where I grew up, and a beach on Loaloa, my island.” He frowned out at the water and added, “Though the view is from a third island entirely, the beach at the base of Mama Ituri.” He sounded faintly irritable about it, as if cross with his own subconscious for its inaccuracies.
I still knew nothing about the Vangavaye-ve save where it could be found on a map. “You didn’t grow up on your island?”
Cliopher paused, then, his eyes flicking back over to me, so perhaps I was coming up on the line of overly intrusive faster than I had expected to. I let myself lie back on the sand and closed my eyes against the piercing light of the sun, affecting a casual air that suggested that I was only idly interested in the topic and more focused on the beach anyways.
“No, although I spent some time there when I was young.” He didn’t say anything more for a beat, then two, and I thought he wouldn’t say more about it until the moment he said, “For my people, one’s island is… it’s an ancestral home, not necessarily a place you live. The place where the Ke’e Lulai drew their ships to dock and put down roots, the place to where, no matter how far your voyages take you, they will always welcome you home. The anchorage of your soul.” He cleared his throat. “That’s the idea, at least.”
“It’s a lovely one.” Once, when I had been a different person, living a different life, I thought the idea would have appealed to me quite a bit — having a place to come to rest in between wanderings, a place that was mine.
I, the person who I was today, pressed my fingers into the sand, wiggling them deeper until they reached the colder sand, shielded from the light of the sun, and could only try to savor this stolen glimpse.
“When it actually works like that,” Cliopher said, and then didn’t speak again for some time.
The weight of the sun was heavy, the languid heat pressing my bones to the earth. I could have been a lizard, sun-tanning on a rock, letting that distant star-fire warm my cold, serene blood. It wouldn’t be a bad life, being a lizard. Any life that included this type of drowsing in the sun could not be anything but lovely, surely…
“Is the Palace home, to you?” Cliopher’s voice was quiet, mingling with the hush of the waves.
“Mm? No. Do you think it’s anybody’s really?”
“Somebody must like it there, surely,” Cliopher said, though he sounded as faintly skeptical about the idea as I felt. Then, after a moment, “Are you falling asleep? Inside my dream?”
I cracked one eye open so that I could see his expression. Cliopher was watching me with an expression of some bemusement and something that I did not quite dare call warmth. This dream, this glimpse of another place, was already such a precious addition to that cluster of inconsequential gifts Cliopher had been giving me. (Inconsequential was most certainly not the correct word by now, but I could not quite bear to insert the correct one quite yet.) I could not get greedy — I could not be too grasping — I could not forget that my touch would burn. In some ways it might be better if Cliopher never realized this was real, if he went on believing this was only his dream. It might be less dangerous for him.
It might be less dangerous for him if you could break the bond between he and I, take a step back, retreat behind the wall of the Imperial Serenity, but I would have to want to do that to succeed, and I did not want to.
I said, “But it’s such a lovely dream to take a nap in.”
You did not think to wonder about any other possible expressions of the soulmate bond with Cliopher besides the dreams until the morning your magic came back to you. You strode into the study with your magic clinging to you like fog, rippling out behind you like a cloak, dancing in ahead of you like fairy lights to swirl around Cliopher interrogatively.
“Good morning,” you said, because that morning exchange was too important to you to be forgotten, even if you were now abruptly preoccupied with whether Cliopher, who had no talent at all for magic that you could detect, was about to suddenly exhibit the ability to use your power.
Before, in that old life, I had had one soulmate who could light candles with my gift, one who could call up the wind at need, one who set fires when he lost his temper, and three who could do nothing at all with it. For all the wealth of soulmate studies out there (and there were a lot of them), the most reputable, the ones that you (I) trusted the most, could only conclude that the soulmate bond was an intensely idiosyncratic connection. Oh, there were some types of connection more common than others: shared dreams were fairly common; moments of mind-to-mind communcation while awake somewhat less so, though it could sometimes manifest in times of stress; taking literal strength from one another was another popular trope, though not one I’d ever manifested. One of my friends had always known exactly where her soulmates were, down to more or less the square foot, which I’d never heard of before or since.
All this to say that you had absolutely no idea what to expect and for a brief moment studied Cliopher’s face intently for any sign.
Then he said, “Good morning, my lord,” with a somewhat apprehensive air, none of the alarm or shock you would expect, and you let out a breath. “Does your Radiancy propose another task this morning?”
You did.
You set Cliopher to researching the Ouranatha while you went to work magic in the gardens. The report, when you came back and read it, was three and a half pages of limpid clarity, with one footnote that observed that some of this information had come straight from the Ouranatha’s own records, which they kept in the third storeroom in the Tulip arm of the Ystharan wing of the palace.
You shook your head, smiling faintly, at the thoroughness of one Cliopher Sayo Mdang. How he’d managed to do this in one day you had no idea.
You had thought you might find yourself alert and awake in the aftermath of your confrontation with the Ouranatha, lit through with magic and triumph that you were, but instead I found the edge of sleep quickly, my body seeking it out with the easy satisfaction of having done a good day’s work, having exercised my mind and my power well and in the service of real progress.
Zunidh followed me into my dream, the tangled knots of misaligned spells and the expanses of sea and storm, the smell of salt air and flowers and rot, the friction of misaligned plates grinding together and the lava underneath ready to burst forth in cleansing fire and new life.
“What is this?” Cliopher breathed from behind me.
I spun to face him, my cloak swirling and snapping behind me, and couldn’t quite stop myself from letting my arms open wide to complete the drama of the gesture. “Magic,” I said with relish.
“This is what it looks like?” Cliopher was looking around us with wide eyes.
He had no gift of magic himself, I had been able to see that on him, and hadn’t been able to interact with my magic in the waking world. But he could here.
I thought of that ring of pearls surrounding the fire at the heart of me that I had seen earlier in the evening. I still didn’t know why he had come to the Palace, what had brought him here.
But I did know I could show him something lovely.
“Come on,” I said, “I’ll show you,” and beamed at him.
Cliopher cocked his head to the side, studying me for a moment in a faintly quizzical manner, but with a slowly growing smile. Then he said, “Lead the way.”
The next morning, as you paced your routine triangle into the floor, hands clasped behind your back, you said, “We were pleased with your report on the Ouranatha, Sayo Mdang. It facilitated a most productive conversation last night. We will begin today with a request that they release their salt stores for use by the people.”
Cliopher gave you almost an identical quizzical head tilt to the one that he used in our shared dream last night, but said only, “Certainly, my lord.”
They weren’t all good dreams.
The horse rattled and shook beneath me, more wind than flesh and bone, a construct I held together with spit and terror and force of will.
Behind me it was coming.
“Where is this? Where are we going?”
I couldn’t speak. I had to focus. There was a Border to Eahh ahead of me. If I could get there, I could make it. It couldn’t follow me outside of the bounds of the empire, surely — I hoped, I prayed. It could not. It could not. I only had to make it a little further.
Behind me it was coming.
“My lord?”
“We’re almost there,” I managed. “Almost —”
A tendril of golden magic wound around my ankle, a slimy caress. I cried out, I thrashed, I kicked it loose. I could hear the chains rattling behind me. I couldn’t look back. I knew that if I slowed to look, if I lost focus at all, it would catch me. I poured my magic out into the horse, poured myself out, draining myself dry to get another few feet of distance, one last little burst of speed. The Border was right up ahead.
Behind me it was coming.
I cleared the forest and came out to — not the Border.
My tower loomed above me, stone near as dark as night but blocking out the stars that hung behind it, spilling out of the River of Stars and down into the void below, the edge of the world. This was not where I had been running to. This was not — this was —
I fought to turn the horse and I could not. I fought to slow down now and I could not. Momentum carried me sick and inexorable towards my old prison. The door loomed —
I understood then that I would never escape. I could not. That desperate flight of freedom had only carried me straight to the cell. Had it herded me here? Or had I brought myself? Did it live in my head, too, along with those old remnants of spells that I had never been able to lift, the ones that bound my tongue and silenced my secrets? Some old homing instinct brought to life, one last compulsion that I could not remove?
I scrabbled at the door. There was nowhere to go — there was nowhere to run —
It took me.
I screamed. I always screamed. It hurt worse for the anticipation, for knowing what it would feel like, its slimy golden tendrils twining around me, immobilizing my limbs even as I thrashed, the chains weaving themselves in between my bones, the light forcing itself into my mouth and eyes and ears and nostrils.
“No,” someone bit out, “let go of him!”
Then there was a hand, someone was touching me, no no no I couldn’t speak I couldn’t warn him I would burn him I was it was it would no no no no no
Light. Air. It was gone, the chains, the magic. I could see. I could breathe. I heaved once compulsively, wheezing for air. Hands gripped me, still, and I struggled against them with whatever strength was left to me. I couldn’t hurt him, please, not that —
“It’s a dream,” a voice I knew said urgently in my ear, “it’s a dream but it’s over now, it’s done, it’s all right.”
Salt on the air. Stars. Sand beneath my feet. I knew — I recognized —
“No fire?” I gasped. I still remembered, I would always remember, that stink of burning flesh. But all I smelled was salt water.
“No. Why, do you want one?” Cliopher sounded so bemused by this question that it cut through my panic.
“The taboos,” I managed. I was half-collapsed on the beach we had dreamed of the other night. I pushed myself up to a sitting position with hands that shook against the sand. Cliopher was still gripping my arm with both hands.
“Oh! No, I don’t think they do anything right now. We’re dreaming. Sorry, I —” and then he let go.
I scrabbled for his hand, got a grip on his shirt sleeve. “No,” I gasped, “no, please —”
Cliopher stared at me blankly for a moment. Then he put his hand back on my shoulder, his fingertips pressing against the skin of my neck. They were cold, his hand was cold, but it gripped my shoulder firmly.
I couldn’t stop the sob that bubbled out of me.
Cliopher sucked in a breath. Then he scooted over on his knees and hugged me.
No force in the world could have stopped me from crying at that. The solid pressure of his arms, the heat of his body, less vivid here than it would be in the waking world, more the memory of touch than anything, but all my memories of touch had been worn thin by longing by now, and this was new. Tentative, awkward, he was uncertain about it and I could barely help enough to let go of his sleeve so I could grip the back of his shirt instead, but that made it more real and therefore better.
“It’s all right,” Cliopher said quietly. “It was a dream, and it’s over now. It’s all right, my lord,” and that —
That name was —
I had vowed to myself that I would not do this. I would not overstep. I would not ask for things, for intimacies, not from people I had the power of life and death over. He was my secretary, he relied on me for protection and patronage now, however little I could give of either. I could not need this. I could not need anything. Not from him. Not from anyone. I could not —
“It’s all right,” Cliopher said again, only now he sounded alarmed, not soothing.
I had to let go. I had to let go. It wasn’t fair of me to — it wasn’t right of me to — you had to let him go, step back, get yourself under control. You had to —
Cliopher shifted. He was letting go of you. That was what you had to do anyways. You —
Then Cliopher pressed his chest to my back and wrapped his arms around me and ordered, “Deep breath. Focus on my breathing, and match it.”
The order cleared some of the haze, enough for me to realize I was hyperventilating. Oh. When had that happened?
“In,” Cliopher said in my ear, calmly and implacably.
I breathed in.
“Out.”
I breathed out.
Matching his rhythm completely was hard. There were tears still trickling down my cheeks and my nose was running, my breath stuttering sometimes with it. Cliopher didn’t lose patience with me. He kept holding me, and he kept telling me when to breathe, for — how long? I didn’t know. Time wasn’t real here, after all; this was a dream.
This was only a dream. We weren’t in the Palace of Stars. We were in a dream of a memory, in Cliopher’s dream, where I might as well be any other imaginary occupant to him. This wasn’t real. It was only a dream. It was all right. It had to be all right, because I could not —
I dreamed about it until morning came. Cliopher holding me, and narrating our shared breathing.
You were late to your session with Cliopher that morning.
“This is just my dream,” Cliopher said, “and isn’t real. So we can do whatever we like here.”
“That’s true,” I agreed, partly out of curiosity to see where this was going and partly because I would happily agree to any diversion that kept us from talking about what had happened last night. (Ah, but as far as Cliopher was concerned, these were not connected dreams at all, were they, just odd fits of his subconscious, pretending that there was a man hiding inside of the lord that he served. So why would there be anything for us to talk about?)
Tonight we were sitting on the docks in a bustling seaside city, one that I did not recognize. Seagulls cried overhead; the bustle and clamor of the town rose and fall in the background even as the sun set before us, painting the sky with stripes of magenta and crimson; my legs dangled off the side of the dock so that my toes just brushed against the tops of the water, little shocks of cold at irregular intervals. Cliopher sat cross-legged besides me.
“So what should I call you?”
That… was a good question, actually. My heart cried for — but no. It wasn’t safe, not even here. Not even in a dream. I could not in good conscience take the risk to tell him, give him that knowledge that he could not forget. It was not safe for either of us. (If he guessed — but he would not, would he? It was unimaginable, to him, that you and I could be one and the same.)
I had thought about an alternative, back when I first came to the throne, again when he had met my eyes and I had realized what had happened.
“‘Tor’ might be a good nickname. Short, easy to say, a small steep-sided hill.”
Cliopher smiled. “Tor,” he said, in an experimental way. His brow furrowed slightly. “Might be?”
“You’ve seen the bowing and scraping I’m subjected to at all hours, Cliopher, do you think there’s much occasion for nicknames?” I said as airily as I could. Then I heard myself and hesitated. “That is, I should have asked — may I? Call you Cliopher?”
I should not have —
“Please,” Cliopher said, sounding relieved if anything, so that was all right.
And besides, it was a dream.
“You may have noticed formality does not come the most naturally to me,” Cliopher added ruefully. “Or manners. Or etiquette.”
“Courtly etiquette, perhaps, but your manners are merely polished for a different context, aren’t they? I’m certain I should make a much greater hash of it if you dropped me down in the Vangavaye-ve tomorrow.” I looked out towards the ocean. Were we in a dream of the Vangavaye-ve now, or somewhere else? I wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference.
Cliopher didn’t say anything for a moment, but when I looked back to him he was smiling faintly. I raised an eyebrow at him in an interrogative manner.
“Nothing,” Cliopher said, but then after a moment, “I’m going to remember this the next time somebody implies that I’m not too impolite, for a savage barbarian.”
I managed not to grimace. “Our court is, regrettably, full of idiots.”
That startled a laugh out of Cliopher. “I’m going to remember that, too.” He stretched.
I wanted to ask more and didn’t quite dare. I took a moment to find the right words. “You’re a long way from home.”
Cliopher exhaled, a long, slow sigh. “Yes.” His hand reached up to his throat and tugged loose a necklace from beneath his shirt, a pearl one with a round black stone in the center.
I watched him worry at it. When he caught my gaze, he flushed and tucked it away, and I looked back out towards the horizon. I didn’t ask, elliptically or not, any further.
We fell into silence for a time, and I let Cliopher be the one to break it. Eventually he stretched and said, “Do you think we can eat food in a dream?”
I considered the matter. “I think it’s an intriguing experiment to undertake.”
Cliopher smiled. “If I recall rightly, there’s a stand with crab cakes a few streets down, if you’re interested — Tor.”
“Lead the way, Cliopher.” I swung my legs around and up onto the dock and went to push myself up to my feet when a hand interrupted my field of vision.
An offering.
I held still for a moment. Another two.
Cliopher didn’t say anything, but neither did he retract his hand. He just waited.
I had not hurt him before. My hand trembled in the air above his for a long moment before I could take it. His grip was firm and strong, and he more hauled me up than anything. (My limbs were not quite behaving as they should.)
My hand had a firm grip on his, and I knew, as I came to my feet, that I needed to let go. In a moment. Any second now. As soon as Cliopher started to loosen his grip, I would.
After some five seconds, Cliopher said, “This way,” and started to walk without letting go of my hand.
Possibly we were both bad at etiquette, because I was coming up entirely blank on any guidance to cover holding my secretary’s hand in a dream when my secretary was also my soulmate. But Cliopher didn’t let go, and he kept not letting go, so I did not try to make myself give up the warmth of his palm pressed against mine or the texture of his fingers.
We ate our crab cakes one-handed.
“Good morning, Cliopher,” you said the next morning.
“Good morning — my lord.”
The precious daily ritual complete, you proceeded to the day’s work.
I had a dilemma, and my dilemma was this: self-deception was not one of my skills. Lying awake at night, staring up at the bed curtains, I wondered if I had already misstepped with Cliopher. I could tell myself it was a dream all I liked (and I did like to), but it was not only a dream. Even if Cliopher never realized that the me who walked through his dreams was not real, was that not its own kind of violation? To solicit his stories and his — his friendship in a context where he did not know who he truly spoke to?
Soulmate bonds could be broken, or muted, or changed. I knew that well. I could feel, still, if I tried, and I usually did not, the bonds I had once had: three that had only ever been potential, sparks that had never quite caught for one reason or another, and six that had been vibrant and lively and strong, tethers to my friends, that were now dull and — not dead, but quiescent. Unresponsive.
And now the one more.
Connections like these did not live in the unwilling heart. I did not want to break or even dampen the connection to Cliopher, but I could, perhaps, talk myself around into wanting that. I could not bear to harm him or take advantage of him. Those were imperatives that I had to obey or else risk losing what integrity and soul I had clung to through all these long years. If I must give up — these nighttime glimpses of freedom, of speaking and being spoken to like a person, like a peer —
But perhaps I need not. If you found Cliopher another position, one of equal merit but a place where he would no longer take your direct orders…
But you were not willing to give up Cliopher as a secretary any more than I was willing to give him up as a soulmate. Your competent and clever and unrefined secretary, with whom you had already accomplished more in the last however many days, weeks, months it had been than you had done in years beforehand? Your morning ritual, where he looked at you and smiled and greeted you like a person, in the waking world? His humor and his humming? Surely not. You and I both relied on these things.
And you and he could, together, do so much good in the world. Did you, did I, not have an obligation to give up — the common and ordinary good that was only a personal one, that did nothing for anyone but yourself? In service of duty honorably fulfilled?
Even if I — if I —
Is everything all right?
I held very still. The bed curtains were my own; the texture of the sheets a smoother and silkier sensation than my imagination would conjure; when I bit at my lip, it stung, and my surroundings did not change.
I was awake, alone save the ever-present guards and the sounds of their breathing by the doorway, but I could still hear Cliopher’s voice vividly in my mind. And from the sensation of grogginess that was coming through quite strongly, I thought that he was awake as well.
Is something wrong? Can I help? I got the distinct sensation of a yawn echoing down the link.
Everything’s fine, I said. A lie, which I disliked, but a small one. Did I wake you?
Maybe? Cliopher hazarded. You’re thinking very loudly. But I don’t mind.
My apologies, Cliopher. I’ll endeavor to think more quietly in the future. You were doing your best to suppress any of my wilder thoughts about the implications of this.
I said I don’t mind, Cliopher argued. I can listen, if you want. I know how to do that. Look first, listen first, questions later.
I listened to him instead, to his drowsiness, the scattered movement of his mind on the verge of sleep, and let it dull the static in my own as well. That’s all right, I said. Go back to sleep.
Vague skepticism returned to me in answer, but Cliopher didn’t speak again, and neither did I. The connection didn’t close for another five or ten minutes, when the waves of sleep were coming thick and close together for him, and when the connection faded I thought they had probably finally drawn him back under.
Alone in my own head again, all I could wonder, a little wildly, was whether this was enough to finally puncture our silence in the waking world, or whether Cliopher would write the conversation off as one of those dreams that lingered as wakefulness crept over one, such that for the first few minutes of alertness one wondered what was truly real.
It certainly did not seem like my very loud thoughts, as Cliopher had phrased them, had dampened the bond in any kind of way.
…Perhaps they did not have to. Even if my worries spilling over into the bond had precipitated it, I was almost certain it had been Cliopher, reaching back, that had allowed us to actually speak mind-to-mind. The same way he had been stepping over the line in all of our morning sessions: meeting your eyes, making me laugh, humming Aurora. He had been the one to hug me, after that nightmare, and he had been the one to hold out a hand to pull me up. It could not be so bad, could it, to… to respond in ways that I had been invited to? If I let him set the tone, the pace, the limits?
Besides: a soul bond could not live in the unwilling heart. That applied to him as surely as I. I did not even think he could keep the bond alive to please me, not if he did not wish to in his heart.
So perhaps, if I stepped carefully, if I was cautious, if I paid attention, it would not be wrong for me to have this.
I hoped that was the case, at least, because I did not know if either you or I were strong enough to let go. Not while Cliopher kept reaching back.
The next morning, you said, “Good morning, Cliopher.”
Cliopher smiled at you. “Good morning, my lord.”
You could not, in this moment, hear anything from his mind. I could not, did not dare, to reach across that line myself.
At your signal, Cliopher rose and took his seat, and you began the day’s work.
The Bee at the Border looked not quite how I remembered it.
“Is this your dream or mine, do you suppose?” I inquired, as casually as I could, as I sat down at the bar next to Cliopher.
“I’d assumed mine,” Cliopher said. His eyes were dark and curious where they met mine. “You’ve been here before?”
“A lifetime ago,” I said.
A man bustled up to the other side of the counter and said, “Here’s your mead, Kip,” sliding a glass to him across the granite. “Anything for your friend?” He winked at me. He had dark, curly hair, growing long, a cheerful smile, and a distinct resemblance to Cliopher.
“Tor?” Cliopher asked.
Oh, it was such a small thing. To be spoken to as Cliopher’s friend, to be called by name, to be a part of the flow of the world. Once I would have thought nothing of such a thing.
Today I let myself bask in it as I said, “The same, please,” and smiled back at the man behind the counter.
As he bustled away, I said, “A relative of yours?”
“My cousin Basil.”
The mead was quite good, even though we had discovered during our crab cake adventure that food in a dream tasted not quite right. But this one had a sharp scent of ginger, a warm sweetness to it, vivid from what must be Cliopher’s memory of the place, that I liked very much.
Thus far there had rarely been other occupants in our shared dreams, or we had endeavored to escape them quickly; why talk to shadows when we could speak with each other instead? But tonight Cliopher engaged Basil in conversation when he brought my drink over, and I, after taking a few minutes to drink my mead, to watch the easy laughter on Basil’s face and the sharp, starveling hunger on Cliopher’s, slipped gently in and out of the flow of conversation, offering commentary and small talk when there was room for me, falling back and sipping at my drink when the conversation turned to reminiscences or chiming in with encouraging questions.
Eventually a fair-haired woman called Basil away and he vanished with a cheerful wave.
Cliopher scrubbed at his face and left his hand there, covering his eyes, when he said, “Sorry.” His voice was a little thicker than normal.
“Don’t be,” I murmured. “Was he in Alinor, during the Fall?” We had not yet reestablished any kind of communication with Alinor. For all we knew, the entire world could be gone.
Cliopher nodded once.
“Ah,” I said. I could not quite stop myself from adding, “Another voyager far from home.”
Cliopher smiled at that, at least, let out an amused huff of breath, even as I pretended not to notice him wiping at his eyes. “Yes. We used to joke that the two of us and Basil’s twin brother Dimiter were like the three sons of Vonou’a. One went as far as he could to see what there was to see. Dimiter was an explorer, he —”
“Oh, I remember him!” I said, startled to find that I did. “He asked for leave to go explore the Qavaliun river system.”
“Yes. He was lost searching for a land where no one had ever stepped before. The second brother went searching after his heart’s desire. Basil and I traveled here, years ago, and when he stepped through the door, he found his soulmate in the innkeeper’s daughter, and married her before the month was out.”
I stared at him. “You told me you didn’t believe in soulmates!” I couldn’t help the indignation in my voice.
“Did I? I suppose I did. But no, there’s too much empirical evidence to support them,” Cliopher said. “I understand that — other people have them. It just seemed — unlikely. For me.” He stared down into his mead as he said it, not meeting my eyes.
“Pedantry, Sayo Mdang?” I inquired.
He smiled at that, a quick flash across his face that faded as swiftly as it came. “One of my skills, to be certain.” There was an edge to it that I had not heard Cliopher’s humor take on before, and I did not like seeing it directed at himself.
All your instincts, all your built and careful habits, told me to let it go, not to ask, not to push. I could not quite bring myself to do that, but I hid the question behind your serenity, your neutral intonation, when I said, “Unlikely?” and vowed to myself that that was the only question I would ask.
Cliopher shrugged one shoulder. “I’m too intense. Too ambitious. Too argumentative and generally troublesome.” He still wouldn’t look at me.
“I like troublesome people,” I said. “I used to be very troublesome myself, you know.”
That won me a look and a startled smile. “Were you?”
Oh, if only he knew.
“A long time ago.” I thought about leaving it there. I did. I said, “Before I came to the throne. I don’t… think about that time often. Or I try not to.”
“Unpleasant memories?”
I laughed shortly. “The opposite.” I made myself take a deep breath so I could say, as evenly as I could manage, “I didn’t choose to be Emperor. I didn’t want it. I — well. You saw.”
A moment, a second, and then Cliopher sucked in a sharp breath. “That chase — happened?”
“Well,” I said, “certainly my subconscious has embellished a bit since. But in essentials, yes.” Some of that dream had come not from the chase but from the moment I’d been bound to the throne, when those last chains of the taboos had snapped into place around me and the walls of my oubliette had closed.
The moment my soulmate bonds had withered and gone dormant.
I drank the rest of my mead and wished idly that I could actually get drunk in a dream.
“Since this is a dream,” Cliopher said, “perhaps I may be very frank with you?”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Certainly.”
“Astandalas deserved to fall.”
I held perfectly still. “Since this is a dream,” I said, without breaking eye contact, “perhaps I may say that I agree.”
If only it had not cost —
Cliopher was clearly thinking along similar lines. “Nothing could be worth the loss of life that the Fall caused,” he said, “but Astandalas did fall, and so now the wreckage remains to us to determine how to rebuild — and in what shape. I’ve always thought —” and then he visibly remembered who he was talking to and his mouth snapped shut.
I propped my chin on my hand. “You’ve always thought?” I inquired.
Cliopher hesitated for a moment longer. I raised an eyebrow at him.
“The purpose of government is to steward the resources of all for the benefit of all,” Cliopher began, and then he was off.
Oh, his mind. I had the thought just the other day that I did not want to go back to the magic, the world, that had been. That I wanted a new world, a new system. I had not yet gotten so far as to have any particularly coherent vision for what that new world should be, at least outside of the realm of the magical.
But Cliopher did.
I had deliberated the other night whether to give up Cliopher as a secretary or a soulmate, but that was a false dichotomy, was it not? I could see, for the first time, the shape of — not the only thing that we could be to each other, or at least I hoped not, but one thing — a thing that I had given up imagining I could have, after those first weeks, months, years in Astandalas, when on all fronts I had found corruption and worship and schemes, and never —
I could not quite bring myself to name it. All I could manage was to say, when Cliopher finished, “If those are your ambitions, then I like those, too.”
Cliopher’s eyes were wide. For once there was no laughter in them.
When I woke up, the taste of sweet ginger lingering in my mouth, the laughter and ruckus of the Bee lingering in my ears, the room was still lightening, not yet dawn. I had twenty minutes, maybe, before my attendants came to wake me.
I took advantage of the time to do something I had deliberately avoided for years, and let my mind drift into the upper levels of a trance so that I could examine my soulmate bonds.
The nine were as I remembered them: three that were merely unlit kindling, a flame that had never caught, and six that were down to embers, smoldering still somewhere deep but nearly cold.
And then the one tidy campfire, crackling merrily, throwing off enough heat to keep me warm.
I had thought, in those days leading up to my coronation, that my friends would find me, would rescue me. I had been too dizzy with the magic and drugs they had used to transport me to communicate clearly across the bonds, already stretched thin with unaccustomed distance, but I could tell that at least some of them understood that something was very wrong. I had expected — I had waited —
I had believed they would come up until the moment the taboos snapped down around me, and then I had known that they must not, for their own safety. And then the bonds had withered.
At first I had thought that it must be the magic of the empire, the force of the bindings so tightly constricting that no connection could go in or out. Then I had thought that perhaps they had known, they had found me, and been repulsed by what I had become, how I had been remade into the shape of everything we had hated, and broken the bonds themselves.
This morning, for the first time, I wondered if I had been the one to break them. If I, in my horror at what I would now do to my friends if I touched them, if I even met their eyes, in my — call it what it was — grief and fury that they had not found me in time, if I had flinched away from them so sharply and so hard that it had broken the ties that connected us.
I didn’t know. Perhaps I never would.
I went, briefly, to stand by each dead or dormant fire for a moment, remembering. Then I wandered around the misty Borderlands that my mind’s eye situated these fires in, hunting for kindling, and fed my new fire some wood to build the flames higher.
The work of government did not stop for you when I was preoccupied. The matter of what to do about Littleridge, about who to send there, took up more and more of your waking hours, and one morning you did not begin with dictation immediately as Cliopher arrived, instead pacing, looking at the map hung on the wall, and thinking.
Someone needed to go, but who? Not Princess Indrogan; not the Commander in Chief of the Imperial Guard. You could go yourself — (Could you? Did you really think, did I really think, that I could actually soothe all those warring aristocrats and would-be kings and shape peace?)
You paced, your feet wearing their familiar tracks into the floor, and considered. Perhaps… (Did you dare? Did I? It was so far out of his job description.)
You were so tired —
Something exploded.
You staggered, catching yourself on your desk. Your head was ringing, your eyes filled with whirling sparkles. You dug your nails into the wood, trying to get purchase, trying to find solid ground.
In the flood of sensation and fire and pressure, you almost missed the gentle query that brushed up against your mind, a polite knock in the howling winds of a hurricane.
You took one breath, a second, and then you opened your mind and let Cliopher in.
You (I) had expected he would be tentative if we ever acknowledged what was between us in the light of day. He was not. He came into your mind in a swirl of fresh air and sunlight and focus, sorting carefully through the sheer torrent of sensation alongside you, peering at your mental model of the world’s magic and seeing alongside you the eruption, somewhere to the far north, that had punched through the magic of the world.
This was going to do something awful to the situation in the Alixerian Sea. You could only just keep yourself from laughing aloud at the terrible absurdity of the situation, the interconnections that while broken and tangled were still there.
Yes, Cliopher agreed grimly, and then did — something — pushed on something, and abruptly the weight and light and fire and tangle lightened abruptly, because he’d found a way to shove his own metaphorical shoulder under the boulder of it next to you and lift half the weight.
You took a shuddering breath, a second, and straightened.
Cliopher said aloud, “Is there anything I can do to assist?”
He was worried — about me, improbably, I could feel it — and that combined with the thought that I had not quite let myself look at the other night, the mental sensation of him voluntarily shouldering half the weight of the world, shook loose my impulsive, honest question. “I don’t suppose you want to go knock some sense into those idiots at Littleridge, do you?”
“If my lord desires it, I shall go gladly.” Cliopher’s brown eyes were sharp and steady, and in his mind I could feel that he understood what he was offering, what I was asking for.
Someone had to go. I knew now that Cliopher had thought, and thought deeply, about what the government owed to its people, what a peace for the world could look like. Even if he could not execute on those beautiful dreams of his, he was an exceptionally talented secretary. Even if all he did was organize them slightly, get them to talk to one another…
(And I could not pretend, could I, that I did not want to see — that I did not want to know — if he could do this, if that faintest hope had blood and teeth, if one of the things Cliopher could be for me was a partner in the work. Gods, but it was so hard to carry the world alone. I could not help but want, now that I had seen the glimmer of a chance —)
Cliopher felt the assent in my mind. “Is there anything in particular you hope I can accomplish on your behalf?”
“Oh, peace,” you said, your tongue unruly, sarcastic, savage. The edge of it sharpened with that renewed hunger. “Peace.”
And you, I, felt something catch in Cliopher’s mind, like a spark to a flame. “Very good, my lord,” Cliopher said, as if this was a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of him, as if he was not — lighting up inside, slowly, bizarrely, with — what was it, how to define it — with something —
After Cliopher excused himself, you sank into the chair behind your desk, rarely used, and I slipped out of my own mind and down the connection to Cliopher.
He let me in immediately, and I found myself in a mind that — I would have expected something neat and orderly, mechanical and precise as clockwork, maybe. There was a layer like that, to be sure, but I could feel that that mechanism of his relentlessly methodical mind was powered by some furnace, some fire, of tremendous ferocity, and that all around and beneath it there was water, an ocean with deep currents and patterns where I had only yet seen the surface-level stirrings.
Cliopher waited for me to finish my examination with a patient amusement, still feeling lit through with a curious excitement.
I said, How long have you known it wasn’t just a dream?
Honestly? Cliopher said. I had closed my eyes, back in my body, and was picking up flashes through his instead as he navigated his way through corridors and halls. I don’t know.
You don’t know? I repeated.
I could feel his mental shrug. For a long while I wasn’t sure. But it seemed increasingly likely to be real the longer it went on. There’s only so many dreams of the same sort even I can brush off as coincidence.
Hmph. I said, No objections to my giving you an impossible task?
Surely it’s only mostly impossible, Cliopher said, with something in his voice that was not quite pride and not quite pleasure, two emotions that I could not have believed of him had I not felt the way he had thrilled, full-body, to the challenge I’d given him. (Surely he was the impossible one.)
Besides, he went on, I like impossible tasks. And there was a resonance to that, a connection that his mind knew to run down, that I caught just the slightest hint of, just enough to see — myself, in his mind’s eye, chained to the throne with the empire’s magic, a look in my eyes that I thought I had hidden sufficiently, from the world, from him — and the memory of stripping the chains away, in the dreams, and letting me off of the throne —
I could not believe it, I could not understand it, I would have denied it had I not been inside his mind to see it. Cliopher was letting me look, and waiting, and judging my reaction.
At some point he had appointed to himself the task of rescuing me.
I said, only a little unsteadily, One impossible task wasn’t enough for you?
No, Cliopher said blithely. I told you, I like a challenge. In fact — and here I could hear an edge of nerves, an edge of delight, an edge of that same song of challenge — you should give me a third one.
A third one?!
It’ll make a better story that way, Cliopher explained, almost convincing in his earnestness.
— And the thing was that he was right. It would be a better story that way. It would be the best story, an epic, a marvel — gods but he was so —
Cliopher waited, expectant. I could feel his mind mirroring and matching my own rising wild glee, delight sparking off itself and singing through the both of us.
Of course you’re correct, Sayo Mdang, I said. For your third impossible task, and I let the silence bake for a moment, let the expectation in him rise just that little bit more, I task you to steal back my name, the one that I gave myself, from the oubliette that I have hidden it in.
For a moment I wondered if he would meet my challenge right here, in this very moment.
Oh, Cliopher said with great satisfaction, that’s a good one.
Ah, well. He would get there soon enough, surely? He had all the pieces to the riddle already from our shared dreams alone.
Cliopher went on, I should warn you that these tasks may take me some time.
I believe, I said, that such an expectation is somewhat inherent in the impossible nature of them.
But I will do them. He said it with the implacable certainty of someone who intended to make it true through sheer force of will, of someone who had heard as surely as I had the way the universe had bent down close around us to listen to the beginning of a new story.
I believe you, I said, and the most unbelievable thing of all was that I meant it.