A great deal of tension went out of Tadek’s shoulders, and he grinned openly. “Good. Good, then. I’ll start keeping a book for you. No more of these paper scraps. Do you know how many times the cadets in the laundry used to shout at me for not going through your pockets before I sent out the washing?”
Kadou made himself smile back. He tried several times to line up in his mouth the other words he should say to Tadek, but none of them sounded right. They were all too harsh and uncaring, and Tadek was smiling and humming again, and . . . gods, Kadou could only imagine howcrushinglywretched it would be to hear something like “About last night, we can’t ever do that again—I mean it this time.” He’d have to wait until they were alone, too. Kadou couldn’t possibly humiliate him by saying something like that in front of Evemer or the other kahyalar.
After lunch, Kadou ordered in a basin of water and washed up alone in his room like he was ill or on a war campaign. The alternative would have been to go to the bathhouse in the middle of the day with either Evemer or Tadek attending him, or to come up with a plausible reason to take one of the kahyalar at the door instead—he thought it was Yasemin and Sanem today—andanyof those options was terrible for different reasons. He wouldn’t be able to relax with Evemer looming and glowering the entire time. With Tadek, he’d have to either deal with the flirting or completely ruin Tadek’s day while both of them then endured the utterly incalculable awkwardness that would follow—he couldn’t break things off permanently with Tadek and then make Tadek bathe him; that would be unspeakably cruel. Yasemin and Sanem, too, were little better than Evemer: they were both still angry at him . . .
So. A bucket and a washcloth, in his rooms, alone.
In a small and private fit of anger, he dressed himself as much as he could manage, everything but the black jadeite buttons on the cuffs of his mourning clothes, before he called in Evemer. He got a stony look for his trouble. Evemer pointedly retied his sash for him and made judgmental eyes at his buttons.
He felt sick as he passed out of the Gold Court, trailing kahyalar and Tadek. Lunch sat in his stomach like rocks, and the velvet was really too warm for the weather. He would have preferred to go straight back to his rooms and lie about on the rugs in his dressing gowns, doing anything but what he was expected to do—his duties as the prince and the Duke of Harbors (more of the latter than the former; princes were expected to be largely ornamental), and the arrangements for Balaban’s and Gülpasa’s funerals.
Having Tadek with him, standing just behind his shoulder and making notes in a booklet of folded paper, did nothing to help the general air of resentment from the ministers. Just the opposite—people he had always known to be cooperative became stubborn, people who had been stubborn were now actively unhelpful. It wore on Kadou’s already frayed nerves, but he breathed through it, and told himself that performing responsibility was the next best thing to actuallybeingresponsible, and that of course it would take some time to recover his footing. Of course it would.
His tenuous equilibrium lasted right up until the moment, toward the late afternoon, when he tried to attend court. He was feeling a little desperate, a little reckless, and there was a voice in his head telling him to justgofor it, just walk straight into court and see what Zeliha’s face did when she looked at him, see if he was allowed to sit in his rightful place, see if he was given leave to speak in front of the ministers and courtiers.
He discovered that he wasn’t allowed past the threshold of the building. The kahyalar at the door were polite but firm: He was not allowed to attend court again until he was invited to do so. The knowledge settled over him with a grim feeling of inevitability. He could not pretend that he was surprised.
He went back to his rooms in a haze. He felt unanchored again, like he wasn’t entirely attached to his own body. On one level, it was almost like a meditative state—nothing could touch him when he was drifting like that, but he didn’t feel like he could touch anything either. He was detached.
He dismissed Tadek for the evening before his nerves could get the better of him and lead him into another moment of weakness, then stood in the middle of his chambers, his hands feeling very empty and his heart yearning aimlessly forsomething. Direction. Comfort. Solutions. Action. Solid ground.
He could feel, too, the palace wrapped around him: the walls of the three nested courts, the thousands of lives filling them, the crushing weight of responsibility, history, legacy. The knowledge that one wrong word spoken in fear to someone offering comfort could send shockwaves through the whole, like ocean waves after an earthquake. Who had ever thought that this was a good idea? Who had decided to build something so delicate?
He sat with the papers that Eozena had brought. He looked at them. He did not read them. The problem with these reports was that they were boring and therefore couldn’t occupy Kadou’s attention, leaving his brain free to sing itself right into a tar pit. He found himself tipping from one thought to another, first slowly and then more chaotically as his stomach soured, the whole world feeling like it was made of sharp-edged glass.
There were old sea captains who could read the weather just by the taste of the wind, who could predict a storm when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. He could taste a storm on the wind right now with the way he was worrying, and he could already tell he was set to have a very rough evening of it unless he found some way to avert the oncoming tempest. He could all but hear the growl of that old familiar fear-creature lurking in the back of his mind, feel it like the tremor of exhausted muscles, like the ache of a nearly faded bruise.
Kadou couldn’t even pretend that he was focusing on the incomprehensible lines of minuscule script in front of him. His hand was cramped from gripping a pen too tightly, and his palms were sweating, his brain running in circles. He felt restless and breathless, his chest tight. Not just a taste on the wind now, this was the seas getting choppy and a looming tower of clouds on the horizon.
What to do? What todo?
Of course he couldn’t tell anyone about this. He was too ashamed to tell Eozena, he didn’t think that Melek would know what to do, and Evemer would be unsympathetic. Tadek knew already, but—no. He was out of the question now.
Kadou put down the pen, laying his hands flat on the top of the table and pushing down. That was a trick that worked sometimes. When it did, it made him feel more grounded, like he wasn’t about to fly out of his own skin.
It did nothing now, just tensed the muscles of his shoulders and arms so he felt instead like he had theleverageto fly out of his skin.
He didn’t matter anymore. He was a prince in name only, and he mattered to no one, not really, except as an assignment they had to endure. In a way, it was ridiculous. Hilarious. He felt a burst of manic laughter clawing at the inside of his ribs. He didn’t matter to anyone, not even Zeliha.
His clothes were too tight. The velvet wasn’t just stifling now—it bordered on suffocating.
He went to Evemer, standing as always at the door, and silently held out his wrists. Evemer undid the buttons without hesitation. The moment they were free, Kadou whirled dizzily away to his bedchamber, working the rest of them open with fingers that were almost numbed to sensation. He turned to close the door and started sharply to see that Evemer had followed him. The jangling of his nerves grew more intense.
He couldn’t stand this. How was it that he had to steal moments alone so furtively? It was easier to hide a lover than it was to have a second of peace and solitude.
He let Evemer peel him out of the velvet kaftan, watched him fold it neatly and put it away in the wardrobe. “There’s a red linen underlayer,” he heard himself say. “And a black kaftan. Left-hand side. Bring them.”
Plain clothes, possibly the plainest he owned. He’d need those. What else? Something to cover his hair. Evemer would know how the common folk tied a turban. That would do.
And then, all at once, he had a plan. It had come backward, first in thehow,with thewhattrailing distantly behind it.
He took the clothes from Evemer’s hands. “Go have a carriage summoned. A small one. Unmarked.” He was being rude. He was running roughshod over Evemer, and he hated himself for it, hated Evemer a little bit too for making it easy to do it. “Leave a note for Melek. Your shift is going to run long.”
He had known Melek for too many years. He couldn’t be cruel to çem, that was the problem, and what he was going to do would be very cruel to any kahya appointed to him. Melek would talk him out of it, or else go along with it and be hurt or confused the whole time.
Evemer, though.
Evemer, with that stone-wall demeanor masking the perpetual glare hiding just behind his eyes. He could take it. He was an immovable object, or close enough to it. In comparison to Melek or even Tadek, he was invulnerable and untouchable. Kadou could do whatever he damned well pleased, and Evemer would be right there, steady and silent and ferociously disapproving. Already Kadou could count on that like he could count on the moons pulling the sea to a king-tide when they waned to full dark.