He stepped back.
He stepped back from Styrmir's arms with the specific, automatic movement of a person whose body has decided to move before the mind has issued the instruction, and he walked down the corridor toward the portrait without looking at Styrmir or speaking to him or doing anything except walking with the focused, slightly glazed quality of a man whose full attention has been captured by an object at the end of a corridor.
He stopped in front of it.
He looked at it.
He looked at it for a long time.
It was a formal portrait — the significant kind, the kind that occupied a specific place in a palace corridor for a specific reason. Large frame, quality craftsmanship, the specific, intentional placement of something that was meant to be seen.
The subject was a young woman.
She was perhaps twenty-three, twenty-four — standing in the formal attire of someone being presented rather than simply depicted, with the specific posture of a portrait subject who had been instructed in how to stand and had applied the instruction with reasonable fidelity.
The hair was raven black.
The bone structure was the specific arrangement of the bone structure Gerffron had been looking at for three days.
The eyes were winter-pale gray.
Gerffron looked at the portrait.
He looked at Styrmir.
He looked at the portrait.
He looked at Styrmir.
His mouth was open.
He was aware that his mouth was open and he was not able to close it because the specific, comprehensive neural resources required for the management of his facial expression were currently occupied with the management of what his eyes were telling the rest of him.
He looked at the portrait again.
The plaque at the bottom of the frame read: Late Queen Selara. Aged Twenty-four Years.
He looked at the plaque.
He looked at Styrmir, who had walked down the corridor and was now standing beside him, looking at the portrait with the expression of a man encountering something he has known was here and is seeing it for the first time.
"Oh," Styrmir said.
Gerffron turned to face him.
He turned to face him with the specific, comprehensive disbelief of a person encountering a situation that is so far outside the range of what they had prepared for that the preparation system has simply stopped functioning.
"You—" he started.
Styrmir looked at him.
"You are the—" Gerffron stopped.
He looked at the portrait.
He looked at Styrmir.
He looked at the portrait.
He looked at Styrmir.
"Why," he said, and his voice had the quality of a man who has so many questions simultaneously that the questions are interfering with each other and only the simplest one has made it through, "did you not tell me?"
"I found out myself fairly recently," Styrmir said.
"How recently?"
"A few days ago, i guess?" He said it with the specific, level quality of something that was true and was being delivered without embellishment. He skipped the parts where he had started to receive correspondence from — someone who had information, who had been piecing things together for reasons of their own. He had confirmed enough from that 'someone' who turned out to be none other than Queen Lashina's close confidant, Mel. He is still processing the specific implications.
"You are," Gerffron said, slowly, still looking at the portrait, "the first prince of the Zenos empire!??"
"Apparently."
"The legitimate heir?!"
"By the succession law. Yes."
"The—" Gerffron stopped again. He turned to fully face Styrmir. "You are the person the king has been looking for. For three years. The investigation — the investigation is about you."
"Yes."
"The king—"
"He told me," Styrmir said. "The night of the formal dinner. When he invited me for a drink."
Gerffron stared at him.
"He cried," Styrmir said, "and showed me my mother's portrait and refused to let go of my hands for approximately forty minutes."
Gerffron continued to stare.
"He is — he seems like a good man," Styrmir said, with the measured quality of someone giving an assessment they have arrived at carefully. "I don't know him. I am in the process of — I don't know him. But the portrait of my mother. The investigation. The three years of—" he stopped. "He seems like a good man."
Gerffron looked at the portrait.
He looked at the plaque.
He looked at Styrmir.
He said, "You have been walking around this palace for three days knowing that you are the first prince of the empire."
"Yes."
"You sat across from the queen at the formal dinner."
"Yes."
"You were in the garden maze with me."
"Yes."
"You covered my eyes in a corridor."
"Yes."
Gerffron looked at the ceiling.
He looked at the floor.
He looked at Styrmir.
"You are a prince, whom I saved from slavery..!" he said.
"Technically."
"There is no technically about—"
"There are many things technically about it," Styrmir said. "The legitimacy is not in question but the recognition has not been formally—"
"Styrmir."
"—established through the official succession process, which requires—"
"You are a prince and you did not tell me!"
Styrmir looked at him.
He looked at him with the winter-pale eyes that were now, Gerffron understood with the complete, slightly overwhelming clarity of someone whose brain had been assembling a picture without being told what the picture was, his mother's eyes. Selara's eyes. The portrait in the king's study. The eyes that Mel had written about in her letters.
"You also did not tell me about the suffering that you went through in return of my escape. You too, did not tell me how you knew that your wife is cheating on you. You did not tell me that the 'newborn' that you talked about is a maid's."
"Those are fickle—" Gerffron said.
"Are they really?"
"I—"
"Gerffron."
He looked at Styrmir.
Styrmir looked at him with the specific, direct quality that was his most honest register — the one that had no performance around it, that was simply what was there.
"Now that you know," he said, and his voice was the actual one, the underneath-everything one, "now that you know who I am — does it change anything?"
The corridor was very quiet.
Gerffron looked at him.
He looked at the face that he had been carrying since the boy was eight years old and which had arrived in this palace three days ago wearing twenty-three years of becoming and the dark gold hair and the winter-pale eyes and the infuriating, warm, patient smile.
He thought about the east tower.
He thought about two pebbles.
He thought about the portrait on the third floor of the Wadee estate, and the body he was living in, and the specific, complicated question of who he was and what he wanted and what was available to want.
He thought about last night.
He thought about his wife in another man's room.
He thought about the hand under the table at breakfast.
He looked at Styrmir.
He said: "You are the first prince of the Zenos empire and you have been flirting with a married man in corridors."
"The flirting is genuine," Styrmir said. "The married man is also not a commoner, technically."
"I am technically—"
"The consort of a duke who is increasingly going to require—"
Gerffron punched him in the stomach.
Not with full force — not the punch of genuine anger, but the specific, compact punch of a person who has reached the outer boundary of their capacity to sit with a situation and has found that the most available response was a punch.
Styrmir doubled.
"Ow!" Styrmir said.
He said it with the slightly winded quality of someone who has been punched in the stomach and is being honest about it.
"Jerk," Gerffron said.
He turned.
He walked away.
"Think about it," Styrmir called after him, still slightly doubled.
Gerffron kept walking.
"I'm being serious," Styrmir said. "I am not — this isn't—" he straightened, with the specific effort of someone reassembling themselves after an accurate gut punch. "I have been working toward this for years. This specific — you, specifically. I am not — I want you to know that I mean it."
Gerffron was at the corridor's turn.
He stopped.
He did not turn around.
He stood at the corridor's turn with his back to Styrmir and the portrait and the plaque and the winter-pale eyes and the twenty-three years of becoming and everything that was in the corridor with him.
He thought: I know you mean it.
He thought: I have known for a long time that you mean it. I do not know what to do with the knowing. I know I will figure it out.
He turned the corner.
He was already late for the afternoon session.
He walked faster.
Behind him, in the corridor, Styrmir straightened fully.
He looked at the portrait.
He looked at the corridor turn where Gerffron had disappeared.
He thought: he didn't say no. He never says no. He says jerk and he walks away and his ears go pink and he doesn't say no.
He looked at the portrait one more time.
He thought about the king crying in a chair.
He thought about everything.
He went to the afternoon session.
He arrived, by the precise navigation of someone who knew the palace's layout in detail, exactly thirty seconds after Gerffron.
He sat down.
He did not look at Gerffron.
Gerffron did not look at him.
The afternoon session began.
Somewhere in the palace's western wing, the queen sat at her window and looked at the garden and thought about a young man with his mother's eyes who had been sitting at her dinner table.
She thought about how long she had.
She thought: I need to move.
The afternoon continued.