Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  Treaties changed, for better or worse, but even in the wrangling that led up to the Resolution renewal, no allied or satellite province in the Empire had ever dropped to special territory status. Jainan could feel his heartbeat speed up. It was the kind of absurd, troublemaking thing that Kaani politicians threw out to set hares running. He clenched his hands under the table and said nothing.

  In the face of Jainan’s silence, the representative gave him a charming, impersonal smile. They could have been discussing the weather. “My embassy’s conversations with our Iskat counterparts have been … unproductive, this time around.”

  “Have you mentioned this to the Thean embassy?” Jainan asked quietly. He couldn’t seem to slow his heart rate. “Do you have any evidence?”

  “Evidence? This is politics,” the Kaanan said. “I have talked to your embassy, as a matter of fact. Everyone has rather cut you out of the loop, haven’t they? And this is honestly just gossip.” They rose to their feet in a rustle of bright formal robes. “Speaking of, I must circulate. Lovely talking to you.”

  “What was that about?” Kiem murmured in his ear.

  All of Jainan’s thoughts fled in a rush of cold alarm. He was supposed to be a goodwill representative. He was not supposed to get involved in politics, and he was especially not supposed to embroil his partner in it. That entire conversation should have been left to the embassy and their Iskat counterparts. He felt his breath shorten. “Nothing of importance.”

  “Thea’s an allied province,” Kiem said. He was frowning, as if this reminded him of something. “The Empire shouldn’t just be able to change that.”

  Jainan could not think straight. His heart would not slow down. It felt like someone was whispering in his ear. “I couldn’t comment.”

  “I suppose not.” Kiem gave him a faint echo of his normal grin. “I was never great at politics. Oh, hey, Vaile,” he added, as someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Haven’t seen you in months. Thought they sent you to Rtul. How’s it going?”

  “Swimmingly! But, Kiem, three kinds of cake?”

  The ornately dressed Prince Vaile gave Jainan a pretty nod. Jainan almost didn’t see her. There was a presence behind her shoulder. For one moment, Taam stood there, much more real than he’d been even during the wedding night dinner. Jainan’s breath stopped.

  This was a remnant-induced hallucination. It wasn’t real. Jainan rubbed a hand swiftly across his eyes, and the image disappeared.

  Vaile and Kiem were talking. Jainan rose. “I must go and, and talk to … excuse me.” He bowed to her, keeping a semblance of control over his ragged breathing, and struck out blindly into the crowd in the stateroom.

  Enough people were starting to rise and circulate that he didn’t stand out. He saw nobody he recognized. He was too on edge to even pretend to be sociable; faces loomed vividly as he strode through the crowd, and he found himself pushing through a glass door to the gardens outside.

  The sudden cold air on his skin was a relief, as was the way the buzzing from the remnants faded out. The geometric hedges of the inner palace garden radiated out from where he stood, snow-covered and monochrome. Jainan picked a direction at random and plunged into the small paths, walking fast, forcing his heart rate to level out. It had been a hallucination. Resolution technology was associated with unpleasant mental phenomena.

  He needed something to focus on. A couple of minutes later, he found himself sitting on a stone bench, breathing the astringent scent of Iskat’s winter-blooming flowers as he opened Taam’s flybug logs to go over them again. The noise of the party had faded into the distance. He knew combing through Taam’s crash data was obsessive and pointless, but it was the only thing he could entirely control.

  Events and visualizations scrolled through his hands in a river of color. He stared at them, forcing himself to concentrate. He could imagine the flybug jolting in the air, failing to respond to Taam’s increasingly desperate commands, slipping nose-down into a death spiral. The compressor had been giving out maintenance warnings for months. It was all in the data.

  The cold stone of the bench pressed into the back of Jainan’s legs. Taam’s perfect, textbook crash data.

  Like a free-spinning gear clicking its teeth into alignment, something in Jainan’s mind started to tick. He gestured a command sequence over his wristband. More screens came up, floating in the cold air, requesting data from various research libraries Jainan had once been a member of. He searched for his old university access keys, slowly at first, and then with more impatience. When he found them the screens changed into lists and lists of materials.

  He found it in a second-year undergraduate textbook under failure analysis. A textbook example of a gradual compressor malfunction.

  He arranged the textbook and Taam’s data side by side. It wasn’t a one-to-one correlation. The component IDs were different. The time stamps on the compressor events also looked different, but when he examined them, they were all offset by exactly the same amount, as if someone had just shifted them forward by the appropriate interval. His skin prickled.

  He would expect a compressor failure to take place the same way every time. It was mathematically possible that the similarities were a coincidence.

  He stared at the time stamps and tried to shake the persistent feeling that he was going mad.

  “Jainan? Count Jainan!”

  Jainan’s head snapped up. He had lost track of time. Through the trees, he could see the conservatory had emptied out, leaving only staff clearing away the meal. The figure hurrying out of a walkway in the opposite direction, huddled into a greatcoat against the Iskat cold, was a Thean embassy staffer.

  Jainan glanced behind him automatically, clenching his fist to kill the screens. But though there were open paths behind him, he was socially trapped. It would be unforgivably rude to ignore her. Jainan rose to his feet instead and bowed stiffly. “A good afternoon to you.”

  “And to you, Your Grace.” Jainan knew the staffer by sight—Lady Fadith of the Nasi clan. The Nasi clan was a close ally of Feria. “Are you leaving for the reception? I just had a meeting that overran, but we shouldn’t miss more than the first ten minutes. May I offer you a lift?”

  A cold wash of dread slid down Jainan’s back. He realized he had automatically suppressed his wristband alerts as if he were still a university student with no responsibilities. There was a stream of messages from Kiem and Bel. He had been out here for—sweet God, half an hour—and they should have left for the reception twenty minutes ago. Kiem must be there already. “You received our acceptances?” he asked pointlessly, to stall.

  Fadith took it in stride. “Prince Kiem accepted for both of you, Your Grace. Have your plans changed?”

  He had effectively run off and hidden himself before a public appointment. His nonappearance would cause Kiem considerable embarrassment, all because Jainan couldn’t control himself or keep track of time. This would test the limits of even Kiem’s patience. It was not a pleasant prospect.

  Lateness would also be embarrassing, but perhaps it could be smoothed over. He pulled himself together. Kiem would already have left in the official flyer, so this would be quicker than asking Bel for a backup vehicle. “No,” he said. “Our plans haven’t changed, but Prince Kiem is going straight there from another appointment.” The next words were hard to force out: he had been proud as a teenager, and a dislike of asking for things had been the one aspect of it that he had never managed to shake. “I would appreciate a lift.”

  He caught a moment’s surprise from Fadith, but Jainan was detached, now, and any embarrassment was far away. “Of course, Your Grace. My flyer is at the gates. Do you … need a coat?”

  His coat. It would be odd to go out without a coat, but they were already late. “No.”

  Fadith paused, then shrugged it off with a smile. “You’re a fully adapted Iskaner, Your Grace. I freeze even in this.” She put her hands farther in the pockets of her greatcoat and strolled toward the palace entrance
. Jainan said the right things in response to her small talk, mechanically, and shivered.

  It wasn’t until they were in the flyer, the city spread out on the hill below them, that Fadith said, “So, I was meeting the Iskaners about the mining operation—”

  Jainan held up a hand, the motion jerky. Fadith broke off. Jainan had to struggle for what to say, after being that rude, but he managed it. “Please,” he said. “I can’t talk about politics.”

  “This is hardly politics, Your Grace,” Fadith said, a note of wariness in her voice. “And you have an interest.”

  “I don’t,” Jainan said. There was a long, tense pause. “I have no interest.”

  “I apologize,” Fadith said. She sounded more distant with every exchange, as if everything Jainan said was the wrong answer. “I didn’t mean any offense.”

  They passed the rest of the journey in an awkward silence. Jainan messaged Bel with a stilted apology. Fadith offered up the occasional comment on the weather, but Jainan was too busy wrestling with his growing sense of nausea to give any more than short replies. A Thean reception. Dozens of Theans, including those he had defaulted on clan obligations to. And Kiem—who would not only be watching how he acted, but would be embarrassed and angry on top of it. It made Jainan’s dilemma over the crash data seem almost unimportant.

  By the time they reached the reception, the wind had got up into what Iskaners called a needlepiercer: a relentless, icy wind that went straight through your clothes. The warmth of the embassy was a shock. The other shock was how Thean the hallway of the embassy felt, after such a long time on Iskat, with its tiled floor and walls covered with brightly colored flags. A square archway led into a crowded room where Jainan could see the colors of several other clans.

  “Jainan! Hey!” Kiem emerged from the crowd the next moment as if he’d been watching for Jainan. Behind him was the person he’d been talking to, who looked taken aback. Kiem’s forehead was creased and he was more intent than Jainan had ever seen him. Jainan slammed down on the unhelpful instincts telling him to move and instead stayed motionless.

  Kiem reached out to take his arm then seemed to think better of it and turned toward the cloakroom, now empty of latecomers. “Um, can we have a moment in private?”

  In private. Of course. Jainan turned numbly to follow him and, as he did, the textbook logs faded into the back of his mind.

  Kiem led them behind a rack of coats and cast a harried look at the back of the cloakroom to check for any attendants. “I couldn’t find you after lunch. Bel got your message—you didn’t have to come, you know. Are you feeling okay? You didn’t look well, and then you just disappeared.”

  They were in for an argument. There was no point in spinning it out and increasing the risk that an outsider would overhear, so Jainan cut straight to the end. “I understand I have embarrassed both of us,” he said. If he could even manage to sound apologetic it might help, but his voice was its normal frustrating monotone. “I was extraordinarily rude. I apologize.”

  Kiem grimaced. “Ouch, okay, I guess I deserved th—wait.” He broke off and looked more closely at Jainan. “You’re serious? You’re serious.” He looked almost lost. “You’re really serious,” he said again.

  Jainan realized he’d pressed a finger to his temple. He took it away. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “I don’t want you to say anything!” Kiem said. He was pressed against an incongruous row of fur coats behind him. It felt faintly absurd, like they were having an argument in a closet. Taam had never shown this much emotion outside their rooms. “Did I say something wrong at lunch, before you left? If it was anything I said about Thea, and if there’s any way I can fix it—”

  “Will you please be clear,” Jainan said, his frustration making it come out louder than he meant it to. “I don’t. I can’t. I can’t read your mind. Will you please be clear what it is you want from me.”

  There was a silence. Kiem said, “What?”

  Kiem had hundreds of expressions. When he was focused on someone—the way he was focused on Jainan now—the tiny shifts around his eyes formed a new one every moment, handling dozens of inputs from his guesses and knowledge about the other person like a suite of algorithms executing, except he somehow ran it on pure instinct. It was obvious how he had no difficulty understanding most people. It was equally obvious he wasn’t coming up with any answers appropriate for Jainan.

  It made Jainan feel even more unmoored from reality. He hesitated to even mention his amateur conclusions from the crash data. It was entirely possible he had imagined everything he had read in the last hour.

  “Count Jainan? Your Highness?” Light flooded into the space as someone pushed the rack of coats aside. “Is there a problem?”

  It was Ambassador Suleri, resplendent in his formal clan robes and a gold chain. An aide pulled the rack further aside. Kiem spun around, looking guilty. “Um—Your Excellency—no, no problem, we were just, um.”

  But the Ambassador wasn’t even looking at him. He was looking at Jainan. And though Kiem had nothing to feel guilty for, Jainan had a litany of dropped clan obligations and snubs he tried not to let show on his face. “Good afternoon, Ambassador. I apologize for my tardiness to the reception.”

  “Prince Kiem told us you were unwell,” the Ambassador said. His voice was neutral, but the look he directed at Kiem had something else in it. “We were not expecting you to come at all.”

  Jainan took a sharp breath, trapped between Kiem’s cover story and his own ill-considered actions. “I was unwell,” he said. “I felt … better, unexpectedly.”

  “How convenient,” the Ambassador said. “I’m glad.”

  Jainan wasn’t looking at Kiem, but his skin crawled at how Kiem must be reacting. He reached at random for something that would get them out of this. “Are there refreshments?”

  The Ambassador’s gaze didn’t break from his. “Indeed,” he said. “In the main room. I will be honored to present you both. This way, Prince Kiem.”

  “Right!” Kiem said. “Right. Honor to be here.”

  Jainan was going to have to face other Theans at some point, whatever he did. He arranged his face into blankness and caught up with Kiem. “After you.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Jainan’s stomach churned as they passed through the square archway and into the large reception room. Two fountains provided a faint mist to break up the dryness of the Iskat winter. The walls held a complete array of clan flags, all of which were as familiar to Jainan as basic velocity equations, and the room was full of expat Theans. Most of them wore Thean fashions with a clan emblem; many had gone as far as full formals. Jainan’s blue-gray ceremonials were technically too subdued for the occasion. He was out of place.

  A few of the small groups near the door broke up to stare at them as the Ambassador personally announced their titles.

  “Offer your arm,” Jainan murmured to Kiem. They were expected to be a couple. Kiem started, then obligingly held it out. Jainan took it, leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He was steeled against the inappropriate change in his heartbeat at being so close—a physical reaction, it couldn’t be helped—but he wasn’t expecting to actually feel the tremor as Kiem recoiled from him. Kiem was too well-mannered to step away, though, and Jainan pulled back quickly enough that nobody noticed the reaction.

  “That boy over there is glaring at us,” Kiem said under his breath.

  “Girl,” Jainan said. “That’s … a clan member of mine. Gairad.” He shouldn’t have come. His head was hurting enough that pleading illness wouldn’t even have been a lie. “We might have to avoid her.”

  He expected to have to come up with an explanation. But all Kiem said was, “Right, can do,” and steered them into a conversation with a mix of Theans and Iskaners on the other side of the room.

  It didn’t go well. Every third Thean they met had some query for Jainan on where he’d been, and how he’d been doing, and why he hadn’t been in cont
act. At Jainan’s silences, Kiem deflected most of the questions, but ten minutes of that apparently put Kiem on edge enough that he started to stress that Jainan was in mourning. It was going badly. Jainan knew it was his fault, and desperately started to plan how he might excuse himself and unshackle Kiem so he had a better time. He could plead a headache and find a quiet corner to check the crash data again.

  He went off to fetch them drinks, leaving Kiem to talk to an intense young staffer about the Resolution. When he returned, he realized with some horror that the man had veered off into a historical description of exactly what the Thean public had thought of each of Iskat’s Ministers for Thea. Kiem was wearing one of his listening expressions.

  Jainan acknowledged the staffer and subtly cut him out of the conversation. “I like him,” Kiem said as Jainan steered them away. “Vivid grasp of metaphor.”

  “Mm,” Jainan said, and handed him his drink before they joined the next set of people.

  Even Kiem’s energy couldn’t last forever. Sometime in the second hour he murmured to Jainan, between conversations, “They’re really not fond of me, are they?”

  Jainan felt cold. “It’s not you,” he said. They had stopped in a niche away from the hubbub of conversation. Above them, a sandstone statue reached out its arms and poured water into a square stone trough beside Jainan’s hand.

  “Well, you know them better than me,” Kiem said dubiously. “But I’m getting the feeling it really is.”

  Before Jainan could reply, Lady Fadith interrupted them. “Your Highness,” she said, “Could the Ambassador have a quick word? With Count Jainan as well?”

  Kiem met Jainan’s eyes. Jainan said, “I’ll go.”

  “The Ambassador requests Prince Kiem’s presence too,” Fadith said firmly. “It will only take a moment of your time.”

  There was no way to politely refuse, although the back of Jainan’s neck was prickling. He almost wished it was about his conversation with the Kaani representative, but of course the embassy would barely see that as significant. This would be about Thean social obligations. He didn’t want to drag Kiem into it. But Kiem just said, “Of course, I’ve been wanting to speak to him anyway,” and followed Fadith into the private part of the embassy, to a large, well-appointed office that was obviously the new Ambassador’s.