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It took me a few minutes after waking to realize that something was wrong.
At first I could not place what had woken me at all, head hazy enough with sleep that I could not place where or when I was. My mind bounced off the stillness and quiet of the air, ricocheted against the too-soft cushion beneath me, and pinged against the distant, muffled sounds of voices and eventually, helpfully, told me inn. Only after that did I place Kip’s breathing, and even then I thought, stupidly, foolishly, that he had only moved around a bit and woken me.
I had been finding it more difficult than I had hoped to adjust to sharing a bed with someone else after a thousand years of solitude. Once I had been somewhat notorious about sleeping like the dead; Jullanar had ridiculed me for months after the time she had had to barge into the room where I had been asleep next to a handsome stranger to literally shake me awake because Imperial guards were in the taproom of the inn we were staying in. (I have done more undignified things in my life than climb naked down a patch of ivy that turned out to have poison ivy growing at the base of the wall, but that one, as you might imagine, was particularly memorable.) My younger self had slept better than I, if not as well as he once had, so I had some hopes I would adjust somewhat eventually.
Still, I would happily take every night that I startled awake two or three times at Kip’s movements if it meant he would have fewer of those gray mornings. The exhaustion in him on those days did not frighten me so much as the way that he could drift, staring off into his coffee for ages, forgetting that he was hungry, mind gone wandering to a place I did not know how to follow. So I would tolerate far worse if it helped keep Kip present and anchored and with me, and it was helping—Conju and I had shared a tremulously joyful look just yesterday when Kip had emerged from his coffee and promptly inserted himself into washing dishes, humming absently under his breath as he had worked, and then begun reorganizing our hosts’ spice cabinet. (I had managed to intervene when he started turning a speculative look on the rest of the kitchen, at least.)
It wasn’t until Kip made a little whimpering noise in the back of his throat that it finally penetrated that I had awoken because Kip was having a nightmare.
“Kip,” I said, “Kip.” It took effort to make my voice loud enough to cut through the sleepy quiet, to not match the soft darkness. I touched his shoulder. “Wake up, Kip.”
The touch was enough. Kip hiccuped out a little breath and then said, “My—Tor?” with a voice that wavered.
“Here,” I said instantly. Kip had been good about my name, recently, good enough that I thought perhaps this lapse meant he needed— “I’m right here, Kip,” I said, and made my voice as calm and firm and reassuring as I knew how, borrowing just a smidge of your gravitas, and tugged gently at his shoulder, trying to draw him to me.
He resisted. “Sorry,” he said, voice tiny, “sorry, I—I’m sorry,” and his breath hitched, and I knew that he was crying.
Gods, but it was painfully typical for Kip to apologize for waking me, even when he was this distressed. “Shh, no, it’s all right, it’s fine, Kip,” I murmured. “Come here.” I wanted desperately to be holding him.
“No, I’m sorry, I should—I should go,” Kip croaked. “I didn’t mean—I tried to tell him—” and he tried to pull back, away from my touch.
The flash of memory was momentary but visceral. I—my younger self—had clapped Kip on the shoulder, a casual moment, or so he’d—I’d thought, and Kip had flinched away, and the look on his face, that brief moment of wide-eyed woundedness before the court mask had slammed down, had been—
He succeeded in tugging free of me while I was caught up in the memory, leaving me abruptly cold. He was a huddled mass at the other end of the bed; he hadn’t managed to get up yet, at least, though I could feel the little hitches in his breath through the way the mattress trembled with them. “It was just a dream, Kip,” I soothed. “Just a nightmare. It’s all right, I promise.” I kept my own rapidly rising unease out of my voice as best I could. I didn’t understand—Kip had so consistently reached for me for reassurance, since I had—returned, and I did not at all like—
“You’re not angry?” Still in that painfully small voice.
“No,” I said instantly, “no, of course not—why would I be angry with you, Kip?” Well. Admittedly the pair of us shouting at each other on a beach about his decision to tell, oh, absolutely nobody about a creature from the abyss trying to prey on him had been recent enough that—
“You chose—I tried to tell him,” and here Kip’s voice hiccuped over a sob, “that we should—should respect—”
Oh, gods. I breathed out hard and had to squeeze my eyes shut around my own tears. “No,” I croaked, “no, sweetheart, no. I didn’t choose that. I would never choose to leave you. Never, never. It was just a nightmare.”
Another sob. “Oh. Oh, I—”
I held out my arms to him again, and this time he did come, sliding across the mattress until he could burrow into my side and press his hot face into the crook of my neck, and I could squeeze him tightly against me.
I murmured nonsense reassurances against his hair while he snuffled into my shirt and tried, oh, I tried, not to think about how many nights Kip must have lain awake and fretted about whether I would hate him for calling me back to myself while my other self had slept easily. I tried not to wonder how many nights, even after I had returned, he had woken with this exact nightmare and tried to go back to sleep afterwards instead of coming to knock on my door. (As if I would not have been desperately grateful for something to do, anything to be able to help.) I tried not to think about how casually my younger self had said, The creature took his memories and the pain that came with them, so I could be myself again.
It was, I must admit, occasionally irritating that my younger self was long gone and I could neither shake him nor transform him into an armchair. Either would have been cathartic.
Ah, but I knew better by now. There were and could be no grand gestures or easy escapes from the hurt; hadn’t I, hadn’t we all, been burned enough by those by now? No. There was nothing to be done but carry the regret with me, and live with it.
I hated it.
Kip was relaxing slowly, going limp against me as I rubbed his back. “Sorry,” he said, and I had to fight to keep from tensing, but for all that his voice was fuzzy still with sleep and the aftermath of tears, that awful misery had faded. There was some embarrassment, maybe, but even that was not as strong as I had expected. “I—you know those dreams that are vivid enough that they feel real when you wake, for at least a few moments?”
“Yes,” I said, “I know.” I had only had one nightmare so far of Kip turning to face me at the pier, eyes gone wide and blank, empty of recognition; but I doubted it would be the only one. I tilted my head to press my cheek to the top of his head.
I could feel Kip breathing, with him tucked against my side like this. “Sorry,” he said again, and ah, yes, there was the shame. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
I contemplated the range of responses available to me, and then flicked his ear. “Stop apologizing,” I said. “I’m glad you did. I want you to.” And then, feeling a little abashed about the ear flicking, kissed the top of his head in apology.
He didn’t try to argue with me, at least, though that was not quite the same as agreeing affirmatively to wake me if he needed me. But I did not need to try to coax that promise out of him tonight; I would not adjust to his presence while I slept overnight.
Though I almost was tempted to press him on it, because while there was a different question that I thought I needed to ask instead, I could admit, at least to myself, that I dreaded the answer. “Would you tell me about your dream?”
Kip stiffened against me.
I was tempted to take the question back, to deflect, to ease away from it. I did not. I left it to hang quietly in the silence between us.
“It isn’t—I know it isn’t real.”
“I know you know that. That isn’t what I asked.” I let my fingers skate up and down his back, sketching out idle shapes, obscure patterns. Irregular movements, ones that he could focus on, ones to keep him present, in the here and now where he was tucked up against me. When he still didn’t speak after a minute or so of that, I added, as lightly as I could, “If it helps, I’m perfectly capable of coming up with any number of distressing options myself, as bad if not worse than whatever your mind spun up for you. I have, as you may know, an excellent imagination.” I let him consider that for a moment, before I said, “It would be easier to know.”
I did not like to push him; I did not dare not to. It had the advantage of being true. The back of my mind was already busy churning through images of what words Kip’s dreaming mind might have put in my mouth, what tone it might have given to me, that he could wake with tearful apologies coming first and easiest to his mouth. The cold, impersonal aloofness of the Lord of Ten Thousand Titles, speaking to—to an inferior who had displeased him? The sharp reproach I had turned on him when Pali had come, lashing out at him for daring to speak to me as a friend in my fury and grief? The rawer anger I had let loose after I had interrupted his conversation with the creature, when I had been frantic enough with terror for him that I had let it slip through my self-control?
Kip’s breathing was changing, gone shallower and faster, picking some of the tension back up that had left him in that first flood of relief as reality had come flooding in. I kept touching him, lightly, constantly, and hoped desperately that I had not misstepped here. I did not say more. The hardest lesson to learn for me, in magic or in speech, had always been when to hold still and allow forces already in motion to act without further interference.
When we—when my younger self, my other self, had crossed the border to Zunidh the first time, he—I—he had marveled at the Lights. I still had the memory of it, sharp and clear, of looking at the works of my own magic, my own power, clear and elegant and unmistakable, and thinking: I could never build this. And I—he—we had been right, in a way; the man I had been at thirty-two could not have, not even with a thousand years to work in. He could not have untangled Zunidh’s magic after the Fall, those myriad tangles and snarls of pain and loss and grief that had snagged on the fabric of the world, warping or tearing at the great tapestry of it. He had not yet learned patience, not the way I had, driven deep into my bones over fourteen terrible years. He had felt, I remembered feeling, frustrated that several months’ work had not been time enough to win Kip over. I could laugh at it if it did not make me want to throttle him so. He was not capable of sitting before a tangled knot of hurt and coaxing it apart, strand by strand, giving each thread of the knot the care and patience and time it required to coax the core of it free.
But I could.
“You remember the way we anchored the sky ship east of Dinezi, for—when we went to Woodlark?”
I breathed out. “Yes. Yes, I remember.”
“Of course you do. I—” My fingers traced light circles on Kip’s back. He did not finish whatever he had been about to say. Instead he said, “That's where we are in the dream. F—the other Fitzroy, the younger Fitzroy, he’s—he wanders about by the windows, exclaiming at—at the sights.”
Of course he does. Of course he would. Of course I would have. Had we ever passed by Woodlark? I can’t even remember. I would not have known; I would not have noticed, in all likelihood, not even with Kip and Ludvic with me, however they might have reacted. Gods know I spent enough time treating Kip’s court mask like a challenge and not a warning, a sign of how constantly he felt he needed to be on his guard around me. What would be one more moment of that, one more—
“Sorry,” Kip whispered, “sorry, I—”
I said, “Keep going.”
But he didn’t, not for a minute or so. I stared up at the ceiling and listened to Kip’s rabbit-quick breaths, the little puffs of air against my nightshirt where it was damp still with his tears.
“He wants to disembark. I try to tell him we should keep going, but he says no. And then we’re—it looks like Mama Ituri, mostly, I’m chasing him up the volcano. I can’t keep up, he’s left me behind—I can’t explain—he doesn’t listen.”
My own reaction to the little bubble of misery in his voice at that caught me by surprise. My hand fisted in the back of Kip’s nightshirt, and I had to take a moment to consciously relax it, to rub lightly at the creases left behind in wordless apology.
It was only when my hand had resumed its lighter touches that Kip tried to go on. “I find him—I find you at the top, and you—” His voice cracked.
The lighter touches were, abruptly, wrong. I suspected they had already begun to fade into the background, and I did not want to fade into the background. I did not want to let Kip vanish into his head. I needed to keep Kip here with me first and in the dream second; I wanted to overwrite whatever appalling venom his mind had dripped into his ears using my mouth with the certainty of tenderness instead.
I held him against me with one arm and brought my other hand up to coax it into his hair. I murmured, “I say something dreadful, I suppose.” And then, with carefully deliberation, “It really is a pity I can’t transform myself into a grandfather clock or the like,” which I was pleased to discover achieved exactly what I meant it to, which was to make Kip splutter against my shoulder.
When he spoke again, it was all at once, a sharp staccato, and I could tell from the sound of it that he had decided to rip the bandage off as quickly as he dared. He said, “You’re holding a chunk of obsidian. In the dream I know that it’s what restored your memories, and you—you toss it to the side, and it—shatters.”
I hummed a quiet acknowledgment. Kip shifted against me for the first time, then, his grip on me loosening as he made an abortive gesture. The efela he always wore, with the obsidian pendant, was visible with his sleep tunic, which had a lower collar than his uniforms always had. He didn’t reach for it, though I thought for a moment he might; I had seen him do that before when he needed reassurance. I didn’t think he always even knew he did it.
“Sometimes you don’t speak. Sometimes you say, ‘Why have you called us back?’ You always wear a spectacularly lavish court costume in Imperial yellow, one of the ones that you hate.”
I felt quite certain I had never leveled a verbal opinion on my court costumes to Kip; I would never denigrate Conju’s art so. But it was true that it was sometimes impossible to not feel a certain resentment towards the instruments of my godhood. I murmured, “How foolish of me. I would happily never wear a scrap of Imperial yellow again.”
Kip didn’t huff out an amused breath or splutter. Kip was still tense. There was more, still.
I said, “What did I say tonight, Kip?”
Kip breathed against me, in-out, in-out, in-out. I stroked the hair at his temple with my thumb. Kip’s voice was thin when he said, “You looked down at the court costume and said, ‘I thought I was free of it at last’ and you sounded like you’d, you’d never left the cage,” his voice cracking on those four last words back into misery, and I—
It skewered me. Not the words; I had been prepared for cruelty, though not of this form. But that my Kip, who I’d hurt so badly in my foolish, stupid carelessness, was wretched over the thought that he might have hurt me.
I already held him; I could not tug him closer, not really. Instead I cupped his head in my hand, cradled him against me, and pressed quick, featherlight kisses to his hairline. “Oh, Kip,” I whispered, “my greatheart. You’ve been carrying that one a long time, haven’t you? I’m sorry.” I’d thought I was done giving him burdens to carry.
Strange, dislocating moment it was, now, to remember those arguments. I—my younger self—I had had to fight to convince Kip to help restore my memories; I had not been able to answer his fears that my memories would bring unhappiness then, only held my own surety that no matter how dark the memories I would restore might be, so long as there were lights amid the darkness then I wanted them nonetheless. And how could I doubt there would be, with the promise of the constellation of the friends who had come to help me? Rhodin; Ludvic; Conju; and Kip, always and especially Kip, the brightest star in any sky.
I murmured, “Have I thanked you, yet, for helping to get my memories back? Because I am desperately glad you did.”
“I did very little,” Kip whispered.
“Now, I know you know that I remember those days, so you know I know that’s not true.” I had to take a moment after that to contemplate whether I had ordered my ‘know’s correctly.
“But I wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t talked me into it.” There was a frisson of shame in his voice.
“But you did.” I absolutely refused to permit him to develop any new snarls of hurt about this. I had wanted to make certain he knew— “I would never have been angry or hurt by it. Only glad to remember you.”
Kip squirmed. “I should have known—”
“Stop, Kip.” I let my voice shade into imperiousness and waited a moment, to ensure he was listening. “I am not criticizing you. That is, in fact, the opposite of my goal. You accomplished ridiculous feats despite painful circumstances; I wish you had not had to, and I’m grateful that you did. Am I prohibited to praise you for it?”
That last sentence was half a joke, but if Kip could hear that, he didn’t let on. His voice was barely audible when he said, “I don’t feel particularly proud of—much of anything I did in the last six months, in all honesty.”
I breathed out. “I know,” I said. “I know, Kip; why do you think I need to say it?”
Kip stirred, at that, lifting his head where it had been tucked against my shoulder. “But I haven’t—” I could hear the frustration in his voice. His movement dislodged my hand from his hair; I let it fall to rest on his elbow instead. “You knew that it had been an accident, Ludvic knew, Conju knew, but I—”
Gods all save me from Kip’s stubbornness. “I did not know, if you’ll recall.” Wild, absurd understatement. Every time I remember my blithe assertions that I chose to forget I have to fight back the urge to try to physically outrun the rush of shame by launching myself out the nearest window.
Wrestling with it froze up my tongue for a moment, and I almost let it go, I almost left it at that, but—but. I didn’t know if I had ever told Kip this in so many words, and if it could help, even a little— “And when I did know, it was only because of you.”
In the enveloping dark of our room in the inn, where only the last vestiges of the hall lamps creeping in under the door coaxed out gradients in the darkness, I could not see Kip’s expression well. I did not need to, to hear him say, “Was it?” and be able to hear in his tone a certain reassessing, a pause to gather further information. We could have been in the Palace of Stars, standing before the Council of Princes, Kip preparing for another bout.
Well, perhaps not. Kip’s bearing was at once more open and more brittle than it had ever been in that council room, honest in a way that he would not have allowed himself there. Didn’t I know that, better than anyone? How many days in these last months had I watched his face close over, seal up, meet all my questions and entreaties with that mild smile while in his eyes—
I breathed out. I flattened my palm against his back and felt his lungs expand and contract. He had rested his chin on his arm where it was draped over my chest. I wondered if I would ever again take it for granted, the prickling and precious gift of his vulnerabilities.
“I assumed right away, fool that I was, that I had chosen it; that it had not been a mistake,” I murmured. “Partially because the taboos had so clearly been torture; partially because I knew I had not wanted any of it, to be Emperor, to be Lord Magus; but partially too, I suppose, because… because the I that I was then felt like an entirely natural one, and the man who could have served as Lord of Zunidh for a thousand years the stranger.” I sighed. “From there the idea that it had all been irredeemable followed as the inevitable corollary, because I knew that I would only have chosen such a thing if it had been irredeemable. I have never believed in flinching from the darker parts of life.”
“‘For where come the loveliest sunrises if not past the darkest night?’” Kip murmured.
That was an Aurora quote. I smiled despite myself. “Just so.” The smile was short-lived; I felt it fade as I hunted for the next words. This I had not yet had to articulate to anybody; perhaps not even myself. “The idea of me—the self that I had been before the amnesia, as an entire person, distinct and different—that did not feel particularly real,” I confessed, my voice falling to a murmur. But in this quiet space between us it still rang loudly enough to be heard. “Artorin Damara was a—a stranger, a mask, a fraud. But you—” I took a deep breath, counting. “You wanted him,” I whispered. “You loved him. So—so there had to have been those sunrises. There had to have been a me who was worth loving, who was worth saving.”
Kip’s hand covered mine where it rested on his elbow and squeezed. I turned it so that I could entangle our fingers together and said, “As soon as I understood that, then I knew that that first assumption had been wrong. That I would not have chosen it after all.”
Early enough, in the grand scheme of things; but too late to take back those first careless words. Oh, I had tried! He would acknowledge the possibility of it, give me that mild smile of his, deflect.
And always, in his eyes, doubt.
“Only that, and you were so certain?” Kip murmured.
I hesitated, but I did not want to lie to him. “Yes. Well,” I amended, “I was so certain that I wanted the memories back, regardless of whether it had been an accident or not.” But I had not believed it to be deliberate from that point on, not truly.
I wanted to ask—so badly, I wanted to ask, but I could not, I could not find words that Kip could not twist into an accusation—
But perhaps his mind wandered down the same roads as mine, because he answered my question unprompted. “I only cared if you would want them back, not if your younger self would. But it was an unanswerable question. I couldn’t know…”
I listened. I let him turn our linked hands together. I dared not speak.
“I didn’t trust my own judgment,” Kip whispered. “I wouldn’t have thought you would… but there was so much else that I wouldn’t have thought. I had missed your name. I had missed so many implications and little moments that might have told me… couldn’t I have missed this, too? That you were so unhappy that you needed—this?”
I rubbed my thumb over his knuckles. “Did I seem so unhappy, Kip?”
“No. No, but I—” His voice wavered.
He did not go on. I watched him, seeking out signs and star-paths in the shadows of his face, gleaming as much insight as I could like gold from silt. For a moment my thoughts glanced off of the memories of the great rivers of Ixsaa which I had explored with Jullanar and Damian, so soon after my escape from my tower. I would like to show Kip those, someday. “Kip,” I said, “before—all this, what would you have said, if someone asked you to describe my state of mind… let’s say before our vacation.”
“Sad,” Kip said. “Sad, and growing sadder. More distant, too… a fire burning low.”
I thought of my heart’s fire, surrounded and protected by a ring of pearls. “And after the vacation?”
“Lighter. Happier, I would have said. Restless, too, and eager to go, to be done, but—more spirited.”
“Less lonely, too,” I murmured, “now that I could talk so much more freely with my dear Kip.”
His breath hitched.
“And when I left?”
“Happy,” Kip whispered. “Uncertain. Excited, and afraid.”
I could not step away from the ledge here; I had staked out a path, and I had to follow it to the end, no matter how this final question frightened me. “And how did you imagine I felt about you, then, when I left? Or the rest of our friends?”
He didn’t answer at first.
Once I had felt certain he could answer this; once I had felt certain that he knew, that he understood, that I—The laughter in his eyes, that bright amusement and affection with which he had said, Have fun. I had heard no final goodbye in those words, not from Kip, not from the friend who had held my hand when I had been anxious about what awaited me, who had reached for me without fear when I had asked him to show me how to greet people—
“When we were in the Vangavaye-ve, for the Viceroy ceremonies, I—” Kip stopped. He swallowed.
I held his hand and I waited, helpless to do anything else.
Kip said, all at once, in a rush of quiet words, “When we were in the Vangavaye-ve, I bought a house.”
“Rhodin told me,” I said, and let my curiosity nudge the nerves aside. This would be relevant, I knew, but I could not quite see—
Like flint to steel, my mind sparked on—I could not think it yet, could not hold it in so many words in my mind. Curious, is it not, how the mind can know and not know a truth at once. When I had lost my memories, when I had lost myself, I had not recognized Kip when I saw him for that second first time; and yet the first time we had walked together, when we had set out on our journey, my pace had fallen into step with his like clockwork, like lodestones always pulling towards one another. I recognized my love for him first in its absences, the great cavernous emptiness its loss had left behind; in the echoes within that cave, my younger self had cast his voice forth and heard me answer.
And then, like lightning following a wire, or leaping down the branches of the tree, seeking that swiftest path to the ground, my mind leaped again, and put forth to me the idea that perhaps this was what the hope had been like, for Kip: neither able to be answered nor rejected, living as a specter tucked up alongside his heart. I had put aside my dreams, once, in those sad and growing sadder days; I knew what it could be like, to want something desperately enough that the hope of it could not be borne, not without the promise of its fruition.
Kip hadn’t gone on yet. In the first moment I took it for him hunting for words, but as the seconds crept away I could see his shoulders start to hunch, I could see him fighting for words and losing, teetering on the edge of some vast emotion.
I let my palm stroke up and down his back and murmured, “What color is it?”, which was not at all an important question except in that it drew Kip’s attention back to me.
“White, but the paint is so peeled it’ll need repainting for sure,” Kip said. “Nobody’s lived there for a long time. It used to have these lovely window boxes… but it’s not—it’s not all broken down. It has beautiful ironwork staircases and a courtyard with the view of the lagoon, and—and—”
“And plenty of Character, it sounds like, which as far as I’m concerned is far more important than the upkeep,” I observed lightly. “Harder to instill later. Probably not a secret passage, I suppose?”
“Not that I’ve found, though there is a dumbwaiter. I thought of you when I was buying it. Whether you might like—whether you might want—I wasn’t brave enough to ask, but—”
“You should ask me now so I can say yes,” I said instantly, and then had to caveat it with, “If you still want to.”
Kip’s smile was abrupt, wide enough to be visible even in the dark, even as his voice wavered as he said, “Not going to wait for the question, first?”
Kip could ask me to walk through fire and I would say yes in a heartbeat if he asked like this, with a bravery that was fragile the way that recently healed bone or the trunk of a young tree were, new and not yet grown into certainty. “I’ve considered the realm of possible questions and can’t think of one that I’d want to say no to, so—”
“Do you want to live there with me?”
“Yes. Yes, please. Yes.”
I could feel Kip’s stuttering exhale against me. He whispered, “Okay. Good.”
I squeezed his hand in mine and wiggled my toes a little and hoped that he could see that I was smiling like a fool. Making Kip of all people speechless, or at least nearly, was always gratifying.
“I thought—I think, now, and I knew then too, if I remember right—” and it took me a moment, here, to recall that I had asked Kip a question, and he still meant to answer it. “I thought that you would like to travel, though perhaps not how much, but that—that you might like—a place to come home to, a place that could be yours. Ours,” he added, barely audible.
That struck me momentarily speechless, and I had to take a moment to breathe through the overwhelming flood of gratitude, that I could still have this, that my moment of foolish carelessness had not broken it beyond repair. Oh, it would take time, and care, and patience, but I could see the path before us: moment by moment, knot by knot, brick by brick relaid in the foundation until the fear and grief and doubt had been laid to rest in full and only love and trust and surety remained.
I let the feeling roll over me, and then I set it aside, because Kip had reminded me that I had been trying to make a point, and it was an important one.
“Exactly right,” I said. “Perfect. You see?” I drew his hand to me and kissed his knuckles. “You know me.”