Chapter 5: The Summons
The rider who dismounted outside their door was not a bandit or a debt collector, but a guardsman in the silver and deep blue of the royal household, and when he dropped to one knee in the mud of the front path and addressed Fen, he did not use the name Kael had spent three weeks learning to say.
"Your Highness," the guardsman said, breathless, "forgive the hour. Her Majesty the Empress Dowager has taken gravely ill. The physicians fear for her, and she has asked for you by name, again and again, since she learned you had disappeared from the palace."
Kael stood very still in the doorway behind Fen, the word settling over him slowly, the way cold water settles into cloth, spreading further the longer it is given. *Your Highness.* He had heard it, and some part of him understood, immediately and with total clarity, exactly what it meant, and another part of him, the part still reeling from a night that had begun with a kiss and a silver pin, refused to let the two pieces of information touch each other yet.
Fen did not turn around. His shoulders had gone rigid, and for a long moment he said nothing at all, as though the guardsman's words had to travel some great distance before they could be answered.
"Tell them I am coming," he said finally. "Tell no one else where you found me."
The guardsman rose, bowed again, and led his horse a short distance off to wait, granting them, with the practised discretion of a man used to royal households, whatever privacy remained to be had.
Fen turned back toward the house, and toward Kael, and for the first time since the Choosing, Kael saw something close to fear cross his face, not fear of the ride ahead or the sickroom waiting for him, but fear of the man standing in his own doorway, of what that man had just heard and how he might look at him now that he had heard it.
"I owe you the whole of an explanation," Fen said quietly, "and I do not have time tonight to give it to you properly. I am sorry for that more than I can say."
"Then tell me only what I need to know tonight," Kael said, keeping his voice level with an effort that cost him more than he let show. "Are you in danger. Am I. And will you come back."
"I am not in danger," Fen said. "You are not, either, so long as I have any say in it. And I will come back, and when I do, I will tell you everything, all of it, whatever it costs me to say aloud." He hesitated, then added, low, "I have owed you the truth since the moment you looked at me before you threw that wreath, and I have been a coward about giving it to you. I mistook silence for kindness. It was never kindness. It was only fear."
Kael studied him a moment longer, weighing three weeks of careful, consistent gentleness against one unexplained title spoken by a kneeling guardsman in the dark, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that the scale did not tip toward suspicion the way he might once have expected it to.
"Go," Kael said. "Your mother needs you more than my curiosity does tonight."
Something in Fen's face broke open at that, gratitude and grief and something else entirely too large to name in the space of a single sentence, and he crossed the distance between them, drew Kael into an embrace that held nothing back, and murmured against his hair, "I will come back, and I will tell you everything." He drew away only far enough to look at him properly. "Whatever you learn about me before then, from Ren, from rumour, from anyone, please believe that none of it changes what I told you by that fire tonight."
He kissed Kael once more, briefly, and then he was gone, striding out to the waiting horse, mounting it with a competence that no beggar should have possessed, and riding off into the dark toward the pale lights of the palace on the hill above the capital, leaving Kael alone in the doorway of a house that suddenly felt far too quiet.
Before he left, Fen had drawn Ren briefly aside, and told him, in words meant to be heard only between the two of them but overheard regardless by Kael standing near enough to catch them, that Ren was to watch over the house and its occupant while he was gone, quietly, without announcing himself unless danger required it, and that whatever else Ren did, he was to remember that this was protection and not surveillance, and that Kael had every right to know the whole of it if he asked. Ren had nodded once, solemn, and said only, "I have told you before you should have said it sooner, Your Highness. I will say it again when you return."
***
Alaric
The ride to the palace felt longer than it ever had before, though he had made it a thousand times in a life he had spent most of the last three years trying to escape in small, stolen hours. He kept his eyes on the road and his hands steady on the reins, and still his mind would not stop circling back to the doorway he had left behind, to the careful, deliberate calm on Kael's face, the calm of a man choosing not to fall apart rather than a man who was not afraid.
He had told himself, every night for three weeks, that he would explain everything the following morning, and every morning had arrived with some small, ordinary happiness, a shared breakfast, a lesson in civil law, a quiet evening by the fire, that he had not wanted to risk breaking. He understood now, riding through the dark toward a mother who might be dying because she feared she had already lost her only remaining child, that he had mistaken cowardice for patience for three entire weeks, and that Kael had paid the price of that mistake tonight without ever having agreed to it.
*He does not know he married an emperor,* Alaric thought, and the thought did not bring him any of the relief he might once have expected from finally being seen clearly by someone. It brought instead a colder, more precise fear: that Kael had chosen Fen, a man with nothing, freely and without hesitation, and that Alaric Voss, Emperor of Virellon, might never be certain whether that same man would have chosen him.
He reached the palace gates as the moon climbed higher over Elmsgard, and did not slow his horse until he was through them.
The corridors of the palace felt foreign to him in a way they never had before, though he had grown up beneath these same carved ceilings, had learned to walk before he had learned to speak in these same wide halls. Servants and courtiers alike startled at the sight of him, dressed still in a beggar's worn coat, his hair disordered from the ride, his face bare of the leather mask he had worn every day for three weeks, and he understood, passing them, that he had spent so long being no one in particular that being recognised again felt almost like an accusation. He did not stop to explain himself to any of them. He went straight to his mother's rooms, where the Empress Dowager's physicians stood in a worried cluster outside her door, and pushed past them without ceremony.
Y'sabel lay pale against her pillows, thinner than he remembered her being only a season ago, and when she saw him standing in the doorway, still travel worn, still very much alive, something in her face crumpled with a relief so total it frightened him more than her illness had.
"You came back," she said, her voice thin but steady enough to carry. "I told them you would. I told them, and they looked at me as though I were a foolish old woman clinging to hope instead of a mother who knows her own son."
"I am sorry," Alaric said, kneeling beside her bed and taking her hand in both of his. "I should never have let you believe I had vanished for good. I only meant to disappear for a little while. I did not think of what my absence would do to you."
"You never do think of what your absence does to anyone," Y'sabel said, with a flash of her old sharpness even now, "which is precisely why I have spent three weeks making myself ill with worry." Her gaze moved over him, taking in the state of his clothes, the calluses on his hands that had not been there before, and something in her expression sharpened with curiosity rather than anger. "Where have you been, Alaric. And do not tell me nowhere. A man does not come back from nowhere looking like that."
He did not answer her fully that night, only enough to reassure her that he had been safe, and cared for, and that he intended to explain the whole of it once she had rested, but even in the little he allowed himself to say, he could not keep a certain warmth from entering his voice when he mentioned, briefly, that he had married. Y'sabel's eyes, tired as they were, missed nothing, and she said only, before sleep finally claimed her, "Bring him to me, when you are ready. I should like to meet the man who taught my son to look like that when he says the word husband."
***
Kael did not sleep that night, though he lay in the small bed they had shared for three weeks and stared at the low ceiling until the fire in the next room burned down to nothing. He turned the events of the evening over and over, the guardsman's kneeling posture, the title spoken like a confession, Fen's face breaking open with something that had looked, for one unguarded instant, almost like relief at finally being caught. By the time grey morning light began creeping through the shutters, he had not managed to be angry, only tired, and strangely, stubbornly certain that whatever waited to be explained, it would not undo the three weeks that had come before it.
A folded card arrived by messenger not long after dawn, sealed with the crest of House Ashworth, summoning him, despite his severed name, to a formal presentation of dowries and marriage gifts to be held at his former family's townhouse within the week, the kind of event that custom required even a disgraced son to attend, so that the family might not appear to have lost all standing along with him. Kael read it twice, set it aside, and stood a while longer at the window, watching the empty lane where a horse had disappeared into the dark the night before, and thought, with a weariness that had nothing left in it of self pity, that whoever Fen truly was, Kael would have to walk into that townhouse alone regardless, and face whatever waited there on his own two feet.