Thinking in hindsight to himself, after the fact and through his patrols, Yanis had long come to the realisation that replying in disregard to what was decorous was perhaps not the right course of action, regardless of whether he felt that Quintin would have taken another diplomatic response from him.
"It was not my place to speak in such a way, Your Majesty." Thus, he tried, for his own sake, to rectify the transgression.
Nothing good would come from antagonising the personal maid of the emperor, regardless of how short his time might be here.
"Do not do that," Quintin's voice was quiet, but the weariness in it had an edge.
"I have spent all my life listening to people apologise for things they are not sorry for."
Yanis held his tongue.
That stung, faintly, and he had the good sense not to apologise for the apology.
There was simply nothing to say to someone that had just described exactly what he thought of what he had done.
Quintin turned the cup slowly in his hands, "What interested me was not quite what you had said, Yanis. It was what happened to your voice when you said it."
He paused, faintly, glancing down into the liquid within his cup with an undaunted veil to it.
"When you spoke of consequences, it dropped. Like you had caught yourself remembering something you had not meant to."
The fire popped in the hearth.
Yanis kept his posture unchanged, but his hand unconsciously rested easily over the butt of his sheathed blade's pommel.
"You have a good ear, Your Majesty."
"I have a terrible ear for music.." Quintin gave the faintest laugh, then he set the untouched tea on the windowsill and lifted his gaze to face him, "But I have spent my whole life in rooms full of people performing for me. It is only a natural consequence that..."
For a moment, his gaze flickered to the hand Yanis had rested over the end of the blade's pommel.
Then it rose to his eyes, and the darkness of his eyes was almost hidden by the shadow made by his hair, "you hear the difference, after a while. Between someone reciting from a script and someone speaking from experience and understanding."
The room fell very quiet, and Yanis breathed through his nose, slowly.
He had been read thoroughly, and perhaps to the benefit of both of them, without malice.
"I have," Yanis began, and he found himself glancing briefly to Jhela, who, while busying herself with the teapot and another cup, was side-eyeing him. He felt as if he had lost, or some other such flimsy and troublesome sensation in his gut, "Served under a commander long enough to know what their decisions cost other people."
"That is a mch better answer," Quintin said as he glanced back to the cup as Jhela filled it and passed it over to him, laying it , and a finger rested and traced around its rim. "However, it is also not what I asked."
Outside, past the cold glass, the sky had darkened well beyond what the hour should have allowed.
Jhela placed the tea pot down neatly and moved to the far side of the room, where she began straightening books on a shelf with her back to them.
Yanis remained silent for a few moments as he considered his words, and glanced to the side slight, beyond the window and out at the moonlight.
"I served that commander for years." he cursed softly, "And I suppose, quite unlike myself, I believed in his vision. I bled through wars towards his end, for victories that are no longer my own, and have been damned to live through consequences that cost me dearly."
He held back spitting out the sour spite spreading over his tongue and down through his throat to befoul his heart. His wry glance drifted back over to the solemn Quintin.
"So, Your Majesty, consequences are unfortunately, a misery I am intimately familiar with."
"..."
They silently remained locked between the other's gazes.
Quintin withdrew his gaze first, somewhere within the moments of silence that lingered. It drifted off to the side, looking towards the shelves of books.
"My father," Yanis heard the ruefulness in his voice, "had people who brought victories to him that are no longer a part of our court."
Quintin's hand found the edge of the windowsill, "He kept three advisors, all of whom had been with us a decade. They handled his trade agreements, oversaw internal management, and coordinated a number of his borders, keeping the provinces from fracturing through our wars while he sat in this room and signed whatever they placed in front of him," The words came out almost quietly. If not for the silence beyond him, what Quintin said may have even been lost, "just as I was before you arrived."
For several momnts, Quintin was silent, and Yanis had heard him take a deeper breath.
"When the northern territories revolted and many millions died in the ensuing conflicts, he needed someone to blame," was his confession as he glanced toward Jhela, "So, he dismissed all three in a single afternoon and told the court they'd been negligent."
The fire shifted in the hearth as the embers rearranged themselves at the soft collapse of ash. The flame crackled and its light waved, shifting their shadows.
"Today, with my father gone, away from my presence there is not anyone competent I am acquainted with who would say that they were negligent." Quintin said, as he lifted his cup without drinking.
"I would argue that in many areas of what we do, they were the only reason anything worked at all, in this era of dissension."
Neither of them spoke for a few moments. The silence was accompanied by Jhela's movements amongst the books, and then by the crackle of their only other witness, the fire.
Thereupon, Yanis asked with some expectation, "What happened to them afterwards?"
"One found a post in the southern provinces, another left the region entirely, and so his whereabouts are unknown." Quintin did not mention the third as he looked back to him.
'Was he executed?' Yanis dug the thought from the pile of ash within the hearth.
"My father slept well that night." Quintin gave the faintest derisive lift to his face. "I was perhaps reaching my first decade, and I couldn't understand how he could do that to people who'd given him everything, and when I asked him, he told me only that they were a necessary sacrifice."
His voice flattened as he turned away from him again, looking towards the window, out at the moon beyond. "He said the throne requires it. That you protect the structure, not the people inside it. And he said I'd understand when I was older."
Yanis could not tell whether that faint, almost imperceptible expression was bared towards himself, or to his father.
Regardless, his brows fell slightly, and bitterness smouldered into distaste, "Do you?"
"That, I suppose, is what terrifies me." Quintin met Yanis' gaze again, and the light of the hearth brushed across his countenance, agitating the shadow across it, "I am faced with the choice where I must, or there will be more bloodshed."
Herein, Quintin's cup landed a little harder than before.
Yanis' hand fell away from his blade, back down to his side, and he flushed a breath through his nostrils, cleansing his tongue and his heart, his gut, mind and spirit of spite.
"My commander changed his mind about the kind of army he wanted," He said as tension in his chest loosened, "He didn't want soldiers who would win him wars anymore."
Yanis's expression fell the a silently scornful one. His jaw grated his teeth together, and he forced a brief sigh through his nostrils.
"The lords who bore banners against the old wars had bought him out, and they wanted men who looked behaved as they wished and looked good on their horses. And I, because the men I had fought beside still listened to me, was made martyr to mark the dawn of their new order."
Quintin was silent for a moment, seemingly considering his words before asking, "And you did not stand against them?"
Yanis shrugged faintly, "I find it utterly pointless to confront a man who has already outcast you in his head."
He heard the bitterness sharpen in his own voice, and he didn't diminish it.
"So I signed what they put in front of me and left." He scoffed a little, "I told myself then it was just how these things work. And I suppose I even comforted myself with it for a short time, that the structure matters more than any one person in it."
Quintin's gaze over him was studious, "And now?"
Yanis looked away from him, towards the fire.
"It was nothing but a pathetic deception. I told myself that it all mattered more than myself so I would not have to face the fact that I was discarded like a broken weapon."