The king's private study was a room that looked like what it was — the room of a man who read, who thought, who had been managing the weight of a kingdom for thirty-one years and had arranged the space around him to reflect the things that sustained him rather than the things that defined his official function.
Books, primarily.
Not the decorative kind — not the matched leather sets that lined the formal library's shelves for the impression they created rather than the content they held. Real books, working books, books that had been opened and marked and returned to and which sat on the shelves in the specific, slightly irregular arrangement of things that had been used.
A telescope in the corner.
Not a large one — the kind that a man kept in his study for the personal pleasure of occasional use rather than for professional purposes, the kind that was pointed at specific objects rather than systematically cataloguing the sky.
Styrmir looked at the telescope when they entered.
The king noticed.
"My wife's," he said.
He said it in the way that people said things about objects belonging to the dead — simply, without the performance of grief, because the grief had long since moved from the acute stage to the stage where it was simply part of the furniture of the self.
"She was interested in astronomy," he said. "Not professionally. The way a person is interested in things that give them a sense of the scale of the world." He poured two glasses of something amber and warm-smelling and set them on the side table. "I kept the telescope because—" he stopped. "I kept it."
Styrmir crossed to the telescope.
He looked at it.
He did not touch it.
He looked at it with the specific quality of someone examining a thing that has been carefully placed — not examining it for its own sake but for what its placement communicated about the person who placed it.
"Aldric Voss is your patron," the king said, settling into the chair nearest the fire with the ease of a man in a room he knew completely.
"Was," Styrmir said. "He has retired to his village. I am his successor at the Veldrathi court."
"Voss." The king considered. "I know the name. He was at the Zenos imperial court for some years, before — before my time as king, I think, or the very early years. A serious man. Thorough."
"He is thorough," Styrmir said. "He is also kind. Which is a different quality. They do not always coincide."
The king looked at him.
"No," he said. "They don't."
Styrmir sat in the other chair.
They talked about astronomy.
They talked about it the way two people talked about a shared interest when both of them found it genuinely interesting — not the performed enthusiasm of polite conversation, not the instrumental topic-choosing of people managing a social interaction, but the real thing, the specific, meandering conversation that happened when a subject opened itself up and two minds found different things inside it and brought them to each other.
The king knew the sky the way someone knew a garden they had been tending for years — not systematically, not with the professional's comprehensive knowledge, but with the specific, loving familiarity of someone who had been looking at the same thing from the same window across decades and had accumulated a personal relationship with it.
Styrmir knew it differently — with the professional's depth, the working knowledge of someone for whom the sky was the thing he had organized his current life around — but with, underneath the professional knowledge, the same quality of feeling. The sense of scale. The sense of being in the presence of something that had no regard for the human things beneath it and which was, in its indifference, a form of comfort.
They talked.
The fire burned.
The amber drink was good and they were on the second glass when the king said, to his own glass:
"I loved my wife."
He said it in the specific way of non sequiturs that were not non sequiturs — that emerged from the conversation's surface as if from nowhere and revealed, in the emerging, that the conversation had been moving toward them all along.
"We were a love match," he said. "This is not — it is not common, at the level of the crown. The expectation is alliance. Strategic arrangement. The personal feeling is considered — secondary, at best. Irrelevant, at worst." He looked at the fire. "We were a love match. I cannot explain it to you in terms that will make it fully comprehensible if you have not experienced it. Only that she was the person in the room, and every other person in the room was simply the context in which I understood that."
Styrmir said nothing.
He held his glass.
He looked at the fire.
"She died," the king said, "when we had been married five years. She was twenty-nine. The official account was a fever of the lung. The official account—" he stopped. He turned his glass in his hands. "I believed the official account for nineteen years. I had no reason not to believe it. I had a young son's death to grieve alongside my wife's. I had a kingdom to run. I had to place a new queen and a new dynamic and the — the accumulated forward pressure of a life that continued regardless of what it had lost."
The fire moved.
"What I found," he said, "two years ago — what I finally found, when I finally looked — was that my wife had been poisoned. Slowly. Over months. And that the child she had given birth to was not dead."
Styrmir looked at the fire.
His face was composed.
"He was alive," the king said. "A healthy infant. He was taken from the midwife and sold — sold, as if he were a — as if he were a thing that could be—" his voice broke, briefly, on the word. He steadied it. "He was sold to the Duke Bremen's household. He spent eighteen years there. He was malnourished, he was — the conditions were—"
He stopped.
He breathed.
"Eighteen years," he said. "My son spent eighteen years in those conditions because someone decided that his existence was an inconvenience."
Styrmir looked at him.
The king was looking at the fire.
His shoulders had the quality of old shoulders carrying something heavy — not the weight of age, which had a different character, but the specific, personal weight of a man who has been living inside a knowledge for two years and has not yet finished processing what that knowledge means.
"Where is he now?" Styrmir said.
"I don't know," the king said. "My investigator has been searching for three years. He was removed from the Bremen estate before the estate's dissolution. He was helped — someone helped him. Someone who understood the situation and chose to act on that understanding at considerable personal cost." He looked at his glass. "The person who helped him was the Wadee consort. Gerffron Wadee."
Styrmir was very still.
"Gerffron Wadee arranged his escape," the king said. "I am confident of this. The details are still being confirmed. But the direction of the evidence is clear." He paused. "He paid for that act. He paid for it with three years of — the circumstances were severe. I have tried to address what I could address."
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat.
He produced a small object.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he held it out.
It was a portrait miniature.
Not the expensive kind — not the Teivel kind, the lacquered-box, political-statement kind. The worn kind, the kind that had been carried for a long time and had acquired the specific, irreplaceable patina of constant proximity to a person. The leather case was soft with handling. The image inside was carefully preserved.
A woman.
Twenty-something, composed, with the specific quality of a portrait that had been painted by someone who cared rather than someone who was commissioned.
The eyes were winter-pale gray.
Styrmir looked at the portrait.
He held it.
He turned it in his hands.
He thought about Mel at the dock, how she had whispered the late queen's name since he looked exactly like the late queen's male version.
He thought about Aldric in the Helwick study with the wooden box of pebbles.
He thought about three years of knowing, in the outline, what he was and what he had come from, without having the specific, physical form of it in his hands.
He held the portrait.
He looked at the woman's face.
He handed it back.
"Your Majesty," he said, carefully, "is it wise to share matters of such internal sensitivity with a foreign delegate?"
The king looked at him.
His eyes, in the firelight, had the specific quality that eyes had when they were doing the thing that the face around them was trying not to do — when they were, underneath the composure, entirely undefended.
He was crying.
Not dramatically — not the heaving, visible grief of someone in acute distress. The quiet kind, the kind that arrived with the specific, helpless quality of feelings that had been managed for too long and had found, in this room, in this conversation, in this company, something that felt like the first available occasion to be anything else.
"Advisory Consultant Voss," the king said.
His voice was steady.
His face was red from the fire and the wine and the tears that were moving quietly down it.
His shoulders were trembling.
"How long," he said, "should we keep the secret that you are my son?"
The room was very quiet.
The fire moved.
Styrmir looked at the king.
He thought: I do not know what to feel. He is a stranger. He is an old man crying in a chair in his private study. He is the king of the empire that sold me, that kept me in a dungeon, that has been the architecture of everything that has been wrong about my life.
He thought: He had been looking for me for three years. But I had suffered for eighteen years in that dungeon. I do not know what I feel.
The king reached out.
He took Styrmir's hands in both of his.
He held them with the specific, desperate quality of a man who has been holding an absence for thirty years and has just been given something to hold instead.
"I have been looking for you," he said. "Since I knew you existed. I have been—"
He did not finish the sentence.
He pulled Styrmir toward him.
He was sixty-three years old and his grip was the grip of a man who was stronger than his age suggested and who was also not going to let go.
Styrmir sat in the chair beside him and let himself be held by a king who was crying and who had been looking for him for three years and who smelled of the amber drink and the fire and old wool.
He sat very still.
He thought: I do not know what I feel, but I might guess what he feels.
He put his hand, very carefully, on the king's trembling shoulder.
He did not say anything.
There was nothing that was the right thing to say.
The fire burned.
Eventually, the king slept — not dramatically, not all at once, but the gradual, exhausted subsidence of a man who has been carrying something heavy and has finally set it down and whose body has taken the opportunity of the setting-down to do the thing it had been waiting to do.
He slept in the chair.
His hand was still loosely around Styrmir's wrist.
Styrmir looked at the fire.
He looked at the telescope in the corner.
He thought about a woman who had named him in the hour before they took him and had written his name in a diary that had been waiting under a bed for thirty years to be found.
He thought: Selara, I did not know you but I came to know your eyes.
The fire burned low.
He did not move until the night attendant came to check on the king at the midnight bell and found them both there and looked at the scene with the face of someone encountering something he was going to carry carefully for the rest of his life.