It might have been lust, but it also might have been exhaustion, except he had no good reason to be exhausted except for the drugs that he took by choice specifically to feel exhaustion in the first place. It was probably lust, then, but it didn’t matter because he didn’t really plan on actually trying to fuck her, but the idea of it was something, so he told her she could stay the night, and she agreed, probably for the same reasons with perhaps the addition of fear, though she seemed far less afraid than someone else in her shoes would have been, and he respected her for it. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in a room with a woman in an expensive jacket who wasn't acting terrified, either in earnest or because that was the game.
If anything, Arnica Osten acted like he was doing her a favor and promised she’d be out first thing in the morning to go to the bank and find a hotel to hole up for a few days until she figured her life out. Those were her words, more or less.
When he walked her to the house and let her in, he was glad he’d made the choice because she had a lot of things, and he had no desire to carry them anywhere. A night on the couch would be the better option, all things considered, even if the muscles in his back would argue differently in the morning.
He should have gone to bed then. Told her where the mattress was and the bathroom, and passed out. He didn’t, though. She stood in the doorway beside her things, with her Viollan etiquette, and waited to be invited to sit. Maybe that was why he did it. No, it wasn’t.
"You want something to drink? I got some hemt, some clearwine, and a little bit of flammia."
"Do you have any tea?"
She asked and he shook his head. It was night. Who asked for tea at night?
"I'd love some hot water and flammia, then."
She smiled as she put in the order, like he was some domestic.
Like some domestic, he made her the drink, though. He wasn’t sure why. She looked at him like she could see him in a way no one had seen him since the last time he had a name, and he wasn't used to it, anymore. There was a part of him that liked it and another part of him wanted to tell her to get the fuck out. He didn't have a name, anymore, he didn't need any looks, he didn't need any respect, he didn't need any goddamn letters. Or maybe he did. He made her drink all the same, and made himself the same, and when he brought it out to her, she was sitting on his sofa, reading a wrinkled copy of the week’s Misk-Ionet stolen from the train.
"Thank you."
She smiled at him when she took the drink. Maybe she was just a kind person. Maybe she wanted to fuck him. He wasn't sure.
"I appreciate this. All of it. It took me far too long to find this place when I got off the train and...I knew I'd made a mistake in timing. So...thank you."
"It's fine."
He stood and drank. She didn't look too much like Dianthus. Or, at least, what he remembered Dianthus looking like. That was a good thing, he imagined. She looked Mossi. Or, at least more Mossi than anyone else along the Western coast. Just Mossi enough to stand out. Just like Michael used to say he always looked just Iskan enough to be Iskan.
"How long've you been Maathen's secretary?"
"Six years...but are you really trying to ask me why I'm Maathen's secretary? Or, better yet, why Dianthus Osten's daughter is Maathen's secreatary?"
She drank deeply and he considered he might have respected her. Or at least, he didn't not respect her, not yet, anyway.
"I'm happy to talk, if you'd like, but will you sit, please?"
"The latter."
He sat.
"What should I be?"
She didn't smile and it wasn't a question. Not really. She held the mug in two hands with her index finger on the broken stub of a former handle, and her plastic-coated fingernails tapped the ceramic arythmically.
"I'm not a soldier or a warrior of any kind. I have no particular aspiration towards power, and I'm good enough with people when I need to be, but I'm far from charismatic, and yet I passed the third-rank ministerial examinations, so it was decided that secretary was the best fit. And besides, Vikram Volkov decided he'd rather marry my sister."
He almost laughed, and settled for a smirk. She was sharper than anyone he had had a conversation with in a long time. Maybe it was fun.
"Did you want to marry him?"
"Have you ever met your nephew?
She smiled back. Her lips pressed together tightly, the whites of her eyes were barely tinted from the whiskal, and she was pretty. Very pretty. He shook his head to her question.
"He's a prince. No one really wants to marry a prince. I did want to be Queen, though. As I imagine most who marry princes actually do."
"Do you still?"
He drank. The water softened the flammia enough to taste not bitter fermentation, but the herbs that had been fermented.
"Does it matter?"
She asked.
"No. No, it doesn't."
He shook his head and felt, under her gaze, almost embarrassed. It was a stupid feeling. She was twenty years younger than him, and nothing more than a well-dressed drifter , whether she knew it or not. He was Dunne Volkov, traitor, Imperial General, or Prince; it was all more than she was. But he didn't hate her. Even with her gaze. He almost respected her and he almost trusted her.
"Read this."
The envelope was in her hands before he had time to question his own judgement.
It wasn’t her thoughts he wanted, nor her advice. It was her eyes. It was her existence. It was her status as a person he had never met before from another place who lived another life that was probably far more real than his, and he needed someone like that to read it, from beginning to end, and to tell him if the words he saw were really there. And it was a testament to how weak, how dumb, and how detached he had become that he needed it at all. How could he have ever been who he had once been without trusting his own eyes—eye? But maybe he never had been. He certainly hadn’t been for eleven years, anyway.
Her eyes traced the paper tiredly at first. They were the bleed of brown and green common in the east around the Mossi border and the slightly too large size common to the Mossi themselves. Her nose might have been too flat for her face, or her eyes made it look that way, but it was. Her jaw tensed at the right moment; she read another line and folded the paper back up, running her finger over the King's bloodseal and handing it back to him. She looked into his eyes when she did, and she looked scared of something very, very certain and though not yet speakable. He pressed the envelope back into his pocket.
"You expect it?"
He asked.
"Of course not. No."
"What'd you think it said?"
He had no idea why he was asking.
"I...not that."
Her fingernail had long stopped tapping the mug, and she held it though the drink was almost gone and tepid.
"A pardon, maybe, or a summons...not this. It's legal. It's a legal document. I saw him write it, sign it, seal it. You can test the seal, it's legitimate. I watched him struggle to bleed enough to set the wax. It's legitimate. They'll say it isn't, of course, but...it is. And oh fuck, I'm the only person who witnessed it. And you...any day...any moment..."
"Mmm...I hope he lives. Doesn't matter how. I hope he fuckin lives and I hope it fuckin hurts the whole time..."
He muttered and leaned back. His stomach hurt. He didn't think it would stop hurting for a long time. He wondered if hers felt the same. He suspected maybe it did.
"I can't go home, can I?"
She asked.
"I wouldn't recommend it...not unless you know you got protection, but..."
"She's going to kill us both."
She finished her drink, sighed, and said nothing else for a long, long time.
When she went to bed, he finished the bottle of flammia and slept there, on that horrible sofa, with that horrible parchment under his arm.