Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  It needed to be large. There were several people there already, not even counting the tall, skeletal presence of the Ambassador behind his desk. Jainan was finding it harder to breathe. He recognized all of them: a scattering of important senior diplomats and three or four people wearing his own clan colors. Gairad was in the corner. If he was going to be hauled over the coals for defaulting on his social duties, it seemed unfair to do it in public like this.

  There were barely enough chairs. They had made up the numbers by dragging in a rickety plastic one obviously from a canteen. Fadith ushered Jainan to the free space at the end of the couch, and before Jainan could intervene, the Ambassador had nodded Kiem to the spare plastic chair.

  Jainan recoiled from the thought of how Taam would have reacted, but Kiem sat without batting an eyelid.

  “Nice to see you all here,” Kiem said. “I’m afraid I don’t have many names—Your Excellency, of course … Lady Fadith … and that must be Gairad in the corner.” He looked around hopefully, as if for more introductions. Gairad had looked up at the mention of her name, focusing a suspicious look on Kiem. Kiem gave her one of his disarming smiles.

  It didn’t do much for the tension in the room. Lady Fadith, still standing, didn’t offer introductions. She rested her hand on the desk beside her and said, “I’m sorry to have to bring you up here, but you know the issue we’re going to raise.”

  “Uh,” Kiem said. “Not a clue, actually.”

  Ambassador Suleri watched them sardonically. Jainan said, through a dry throat, “I do.”

  “Mm,” Suleri said. “Your Highness and Your Grace understand, I assume, that though Thea is small, our relationship as an allied province requires a delicate touch and significant attention from both sides. You will also be aware”—and now he looked from Jainan to Kiem and back again—“that the current arrangements have not been ideal, from our point of view, for quite some time.”

  Kiem frowned. This conversation must seem very odd from where he sat, Jainan thought. “You mean, you’re getting pushback?” he said. “Look, I don’t know what you’re expecting from me, but to be honest with you, I’m not very deeply involved in politics.”

  Lady Fadith inclined her head to Kiem in a half bow. She was rubbing her finger and thumb together in a nervous tic down by her side, where she probably thought nobody would notice. She should be nervous, Jainan thought distantly. She and the Ambassador were bordering on rudeness to an Imperial Prince.

  “It is difficult,” Fadith said, “when we don’t have any communication at all with our treaty principal.”

  Jainan thought of trying to explain, felt sick, and looked at the floor.

  “Um,” Kiem said. “If he doesn’t want to talk to you, then I’m sorry.” There was an odd note in his voice. When Jainan looked up, Kiem was sitting up straighter, almost bristling. He looked ridiculous in his plastic canteen chair. “But if he doesn’t, he probably has a good reason.”

  “Does he?” Suleri said. “Your Highness?”

  “What?”

  The Esvereni had never scrupled to point out what was wrong with other prominent clans, but Jainan had no idea why Suleri would do something as rash as needling Kiem. The last ambassador had been a diplomat. “I hesitate to imply it,” Suleri said, “but some would say it might be quite convenient for your side for Thea to have no representative in the palace.”

  “Wait,” Kiem said. “What are you saying? That I’ve stopped Jainan from talking to you? That’s ludicrous. How would I do that? I’ve only known him a week.”

  The Ambassador merely lifted his shoulders. Everyone in the room was now looking at Kiem. “All I can say is that my staff tell me Count Jainan has disengaged with everyone in this room over the last—”

  “No.” Jainan forced himself to unclench his jaw, which felt like it was locked in place. If he didn’t explain this now, it would poison the entire bilateral relationship, when in fact this was Jainan’s personal problem. “It has nothing to do with Prince Kiem. Your staff know it doesn’t. It’s the security clearance issue.”

  “Ah,” Ambassador Suleri said. He didn’t sound greatly convinced, though his staff must have told him. “Yes.”

  “What security clearance issue?” Kiem asked.

  “My security clearance was revoked a while ago,” Jainan said. His voice was level and only a little hoarse. He could get through this.

  “What? Why?”

  One of the other diplomats leaned forward: the cultural attaché. She was one of Ressid’s friends. “And your security clearance stopped you from speaking to us about anything?” she asked. “Even a message about the weather? You spoke to Lady Ressid for a while after the issue was raised.”

  Jainan shut his eyes briefly. There was no easy way to put this. “I was encouraged not to.” That was true, but it wasn’t the whole story. He’d become tired of being cross-examined over what he’d said; he’d become tired of the arguments; he’d taken the easy way out.

  Kiem pushed back his chair. “Encouraged not to? Who by?”

  “Your Highness, please sit down,” Lady Fadith said.

  Jainan hadn’t even bothered to look up; he recognized Kiem’s I-can’t-sit-still jitters. “Security,” Jainan said. “Internal Security. It was a routine matter.” He took a breath and stopped himself before he said anything else.

  “So,” Ambassador Suleri said, before Kiem could say anything. “Can I take it this will be easily resolved?”

  “No,” Jainan said.

  “Yes!” Kiem said at the same time, then looked at Jainan and amended it to, “Somehow. Maybe not easily resolved, but—what the hell, they told you not to talk to your family?”

  Jainan had pressed a finger to his temple again. This time he didn’t take it away. “Prince Kiem—” he said. He didn’t even know what he was going to say to him, but dragging everyone through his dirty laundry in public—excruciatingly in public—was more than Jainan could stand.

  But even the name seemed to have an effect. Kiem raised both his hands in front of him and said, “Sorry. We’ll talk about it.” He turned back to the Ambassador. “Thank you for raising it. No, really. We’ll look into it.” There was still an odd note to his voice.

  “Please do,” Suleri said, his voice sardonic. “I look forward to our closer collaboration.”

  Lady Fadith murmured, “Jainan, if you would like to have a word in private…?” Her gaze on him felt uncomfortable.

  “No,” Jainan said for the third time, more desperately. “I am feeling slightly unwell, still. Excuse me.” He stood. “Thank you for the invitation.”

  “Yes, very much!” Kiem said, shaking the Ambassador’s hand heartily. “Hope to see you at many more!”

  Jainan wouldn’t have believed it was possible to extract themselves from the room and the reception in less than five minutes. But somehow Kiem did it by clapping shoulders and grabbing hands and making loud comments about the next reception, and they made it out before the pain in Jainan’s head had time to grow any more. Jainan led them down a back staircase to the foyer. Kiem was unusually quiet until they reached the entrance. Then he took a breath, but he was interrupted by Gairad barreling out of the main room and nearly crashing into him.

  “Count Jainan!” she said. “Sweet God, I thought you’d gone and I’d have to trek to the palace. Here.” She passed him the thumb-sized silver circle of a secure data coin. “Professor Audel asked me to give you this. It’s got the files the military let us have from Operation Kingfisher. She says to go through it and see if you can work out what extraction methods they’re using. I’m trying to make a refinery plan.”

  Jainan stared down at the data coin. His mind was so far from Audel’s project that it took him a moment to even process what Gairad had said. “Thank you,” he said eventually, and slipped it into his pocket.

  Gairad didn’t move. “I wanted to say,” she said, “I didn’t know about the security clearance thing.”

  “No,” Jainan said. He
tried to think of something else to say, and couldn’t.

  “So, I’m sorry,” she said.

  Jainan blinked. “What?”

  Gairad drew back uncomfortably. “I’m not saying it again,” she said. She half turned, looked back over her shoulder, and said, “I’ll tell Lady Ressid.”

  “Wait—” Jainan said reflexively, but she was already lost in the crowd.

  “The Ambassador will tell Lady Ressid anyway,” Kiem said from behind him. “As will at least a dozen other people by the end of the day, if I’m reading them right. The attendants can’t find your coat.”

  Jainan turned, distracted. “I came without one.”

  “Why did you—okay, you know what, never mind.” As an attendant opened the door, Jainan felt warmth enveloping his shoulders and realized it was Kiem’s coat. Kiem was still talking as he settled it around Jainan. “I told Bel I was going to walk back. I thought I was going to want to clear my head. Do you mind? The other alternative is that I call her now and we wait, but it’ll take ten minutes.”

  Jainan thought of staying in here where the Ambassador could pull him aside for a word. “No,” he said. “Let’s walk.” He started to shrug out of the coat.

  “No. Yes. I kind of thought that—wait, what are you doing? Please wear the coat.”

  “It’s your coat.”

  “I’m the one who didn’t plan ahead for a lift! Look, I don’t get cold. And I’m wearing a jacket.” Jainan almost glanced at him, but stopped himself before he made eye contact, and didn’t argue further.

  Outside the embassy, the wind hit them with a flurry of snowflakes. The embassy was on the edge of the old part of town; it was a short walk back to the palace along streets covered with powdery drifts of snow and packed ice, all uphill. Kiem started off at a brisk, determined pace quite unlike his usual stroll. Jainan quickened his stride to fall in beside him. He was glad of the coat, even if he wished Kiem hadn’t given it to him: his back was already tight with tension, and the cold would have made it worse.

  After the first exchange, Kiem said nothing for long minutes. Part of Jainan wanted to bring up Taam’s crash data, but this would be precisely the wrong time, when Kiem was already annoyed and Jainan doubted his own memory. All he could think of was Kiem sitting up straight on that ridiculous chair while the Ambassador and the senior staff of the Thean embassy took turns to reprimand him over something completely outside his control. Jainan couldn’t even think of what Taam would have done in that situation; his skin prickled trying to imagine it.

  He threw a glance at Kiem, who was walking beside him with his hands shoved deep in his pockets against the cold. His face was set in a slight frown. After a while Jainan couldn’t bear the waiting any more. “What are you going to do?” he said. Too direct. Much more direct than he would have been with Taam.

  Kiem had started in the middle of a step when Jainan spoke, and now he turned his head. “Huh? What am I going to do?” he said. There was still something off about his voice, and without knowing what it was, just the oddness was enough to flip all of Jainan’s danger switches. “I’m going to find Internal Security and yell at them until they fix this. Sorry, I sort of thought that was obvious. Do you want to come?”

  It took Jainan a couple of steps to even begin to process this, but when he had, he forced the next words out because they needed to be said. “I don’t think the clearance issue can be fixed.”

  Kiem didn’t seem to notice that Jainan had directly contradicted him. “There must be a way,” he said. “What kind of information did you actually pass on to Thea? It can’t have been that bad, I can’t believe—I mean, you don’t seem the careless type. And Thea is our ally.”

  Jainan scrabbled for an answer. “Nothing,” he said finally. It sounded just as thin and insubstantial as he’d expected; perhaps he should have made something up. He pulled the coat more tightly around him with stiff fingers. “I—I suppose there must have been something, but I have very little idea what it could have been. I sometimes discussed politics with Ressid, but only what had already appeared in the newslogs, and I never discussed Taam’s work. I didn’t know enough to talk about it.” The artificially dry surface of the path rose into a bridge that led from the city to the palace with a clear glass windbreak on each side. The city traffic veins weren’t allowed over the palace; tunnels of light arced down from the sky over Arlusk, filled with jostling flyers, and dived into a canyon below the bridge. “I know that sounds implausible.”

  “That should make it easier,” Kiem said. The wind snaked around the sides of the windbreak and threw up goose bumps on his wrists, where the shirtsleeves met his gloves. “Don’t feel you have to come if you don’t want to.”

  Jainan had missed a step in Kiem’s thought process. It was possible that Kiem just hoped Internal Security would take the whole mess off his hands.

  But then again, if that was true, Jainan had information that Kiem needed to know or he would be walking in unprepared. “Kiem,” Jainan said. “About the data.”

  Kiem threw him a nonplussed look. “What data?”

  “The flybug logs from Taam’s crash,” Jainan said. Suddenly they were on the bridge, sheltered from the snow-laden wind by the barrier, and his voice seemed too loud in the stillness. “I—I found a similar example in a textbook.” He swallowed. “In fact, identical.”

  “Oh, just what we needed,” Kiem said. “Great. That’s just great. So, what, fake logs? Or whoever collected them made a mistake—was that Internal Security or Colonel Lunver’s lot? Hell, I really hope it’s a mistake.”

  “It could be a mistake,” Jainan said. “I could have analyzed them badly.” With every word he said, the possibility he had made it all up seemed to solidify. He wished he had kept his mouth shut. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to cause trouble.”

  “Cause trouble?” Kiem halted in midstride. Jainan nearly missed the cue, but managed to stop before he overtook him. Kiem turned to him, and what was on his face was close enough to anger to make Jainan go still.

  “Okay, so let me check if I’ve got this straight,” Kiem said. “The palace revoked your clearance and you don’t even know why. On top of that, your partner dies—might have been killed—and Internal Security can’t even get themselves together long enough to give you the right data about it. And you can’t complain to your family because the palace says that you need clearance to do even that—Jainan, that’s appalling. Cause trouble? You must hate us!”

  For some reason that hurt, like scratching at a scab. “No,” Jainan said. “I don’t.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kiem said, his voice changing to bewilderment. “Why didn’t you tell someone they revoked your clearance? Why didn’t you tell me—Taam—anyone? Or did you?”

  “There was nothing to be done,” Jainan said shortly, because that hurt even more, and he wanted to head it off. “I agreed to marry Taam and live here. That means I agreed to be bound by palace procedures. I have no quarrel with Internal Security.”

  “I don’t get it.” They had come to a stop just before the central rise of the bridge. Behind Kiem, the palace was spread out in all its crystalline glory, the towers blurring with the white-gray snow clouds. “You got cut off from everyone. Just because the palace told you it was a matter of security doesn’t mean that’s okay!”

  Jainan felt a surge of something shockingly like anger. “That’s exactly what it means!” His hands had formed white-knuckled fists in the pockets of the coat. For a moment he felt almost warm, though it was a prickly, unpleasant heat. “I am here to maintain the treaty. I am a diplomat.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  Now this was near mockery. “I know what it is to do my duty by my people,” Jainan said sharply. “I have never shirked that.”

  Kiem looked strange. It seemed to take him a while to form words, while Jainan waited and tasted metal in his mouth.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Kiem said. “I’m sorry, I would never imply�
� I know you always do your duty.” He broke off. “Obviously.” He took a step forward, closing some of the distance. Jainan felt a strange anger course through his body. “But doing your duty doesn’t have to make you this unhappy, does it?” Kiem said. If Jainan hadn’t known better, it would have sounded like Kiem was pleading. He stopped half a pace away and lifted his hand in an empty gesture. “Come on. Not—pointlessly. Not like this.”

  Jainan’s rock-solid certainty started to drain away. He could be intractably stubborn, when the issue was important—it was one of the things that made him a bad choice for a goodwill representative. But this wasn’t anger. He didn’t know what it was, but in the face of it, his conviction was falling apart.

  “It’s how it is,” he said instead. “You know that.”

  “I don’t,” Kiem said. He shut his mouth deliberately, as if challenging Jainan to fill the gap.

  Jainan was silent. Kiem stared at him, still waiting for an answer, and rubbed his arms against the cold. Jainan belatedly realized they’d been standing still for too long. The tension around Kiem’s arms and shoulders was turning into shivers. “Okay,” Kiem said. “I think we might be talking about different things here—what are you doing?”

  Jainan had pulled off the coat and held it out. “You’re cold,” he said before he could stop himself. Too direct: that would hit an Iskaner’s pride. “It’s my fault.” Not much better.

  Kiem stared at him and at the coat between them. He didn’t move to take it. His eyes went back to Jainan’s face, and that odd almost-anger furrowed his forehead again. “This is the same bloody thing.”

  “Excuse me?” Jainan said.

  “Now it’s your fault I can’t survive without a coat?” Kiem said. “Am I the only one seeing something weird about this? Why didn’t you tell me about the clearance issue before? Why don’t I understand anything that’s going on?”