The palace of Alpha lies over the lagoon like a white animal that has learned to sleep in water.
Salt has entered everything capable of bearing it. It whitens the lips of the marble, frets the bronze hinges green, pearls along the sandalwood latticework, and wakes each morning on the balustrades in a fine crust that servants wipe away before breakfast and the sea replaces before noon. Reef-lilies open in the courtyards with their throats full of sweetness. Water passes through carved mouths into green basins and goes on speaking there, low and tireless. Swallows needle the colonnades. Curtains of shell and bead lift and settle in the breeze, giving the palace a faintly jewelled sound even when nobody is awake enough to wear jewellery.
The old architects meant all this whiteness to suggest holiness. The lagoon has spent centuries correcting them. Blue lives in every shadow; moss has found the undersides of the steps; tiny silver fish shelter beneath foundations intended to outlast empires. The palace may call itself eternal if it likes. The sea knows where its ankles are.
Wednesday walks through it carrying the morning correspondence and enough composure to survive inspection from a charitable distance.
Closer examination would expose the fraud.
Honeycombed light from the cedar screens moves over her dark skin. Her dark-red hair, long and frizzed and divided into two pigtails by ribbons she tied three times before dawn, has already begun escaping around her face. Her glasses sit squarely. Her shoulders sit squarely. The sandalwood tray held against her ribs sits squarely. Wednesday has spent a great portion of her existence discovering that, if enough small things are arranged correctly, larger things can sometimes be bullied into following suit.
The tray carries petitions from coastal governors, military summaries, temple accounts, trade disputes, three sealed complaints from provincial judges, one invitation Alpha will refuse, one apology he will consider insulting, and a letter from a minor prince who has used six divine titles where three would already have constituted an emergency of taste.
Among these obedient papers rests a golden-glass scrying mirror. The letters have reasons to be there. The mirror has none.
Wednesday has placed it face-down beneath the western trade reports, where tiny black stars interrupt the spiral sigils engraved across its back. The handle, warm from her palm, presses into the soft place beneath her thumb. She has used this mirror to find ships dragged from their routes by storms, inspect sealed cells without opening them, count enemy banners beyond a mountain pass, and once discover a kitchen boy asleep beneath a banquet table while twelve frantic adults searched the palace cisterns.
This morning she has carried it for nearly an hour and asked it nothing that could survive professional review.
Ahead of her, three maids have stopped sweeping.
Wednesday knows before she hears them. Their palm-leaf brooms lean together against a pillar like conspirators, and no servant actually engaged in sweeping allows three brooms to rest in the same place. The youngest maid has both hands over her mouth. The second is pretending to inspect a bracelet she has worn every day for seven years. The oldest leans one hip against the column with the grave ease of a woman who has heard the best version of a story and considers herself responsible for its maintenance.
“With his bare hand,” the youngest whispers. “I was close enough to count his rings. He touched her cheek with his bare hand.”
The second maid gives her a look. “You were carrying towels behind a screen.”
“The screen has holes.”
“That is called latticework.”
The oldest examines a chip in her thumbnail. “She is telling the truth about the hand. She is lying about the rings. Lord Alpha was not wearing any.”
The youngest looks genuinely wounded. “That makes the story better.”
The second maid remembers her broom long enough to raise it an inch, then forgets it again. “What did the woman do?”
“Called him irritating.”
“Before or after he touched her?”
“Before. Then she looked straight at him until he forgot the next thing he meant to say.”
All three women fall quiet.
There are silences born from reverence, silences born from fear, and the very particular silence produced when gossip outruns belief and must wait for belief to catch up.
The second maid finally asks, “Our Lord Alpha forgot a sentence?”
The oldest turns her head. “Do we keep another one in a cupboard?”
The youngest folds herself around a laugh.
Wednesday should continue walking.
Temperance does not linger behind carved screens listening to servants discuss the private gestures of her maker. Temperance has correspondence to deliver, arithmetic to correct before arithmetic becomes policy, names to place beside consequences. Temperance certainly does not shorten her stride by half, and then by half again, until she has nearly stopped beside a cedar screen whose pattern suddenly requires exhaustive study.
Wednesday does.
“What did she smell like?” the youngest asks.
The second maid considers this with an earnestness Wednesday resents immediately. “Rain striking hot stone.”
“Smoke,” says the youngest. “Sweet smoke. I passed her on the lower stairs and my teeth hurt.”
The oldest settles both palms on the broom handle. “Trouble.”
“Trouble does not have a smell.”
“Then you have led a sheltered life.”
Their bracelets knock softly together when they laugh.
No one has spoken her name. The palace has spent the morning speaking around her, and Wednesday is discovering that a name may remain present without ever entering the mouth, the way perfume survives a body after it has left the room.
Heat moves beneath the collar of her dress.
Yesterday she watched Kohana Ohuang-Zhùróng cross the audience hall and refuse every instruction built into the architecture. The threshold asked visitors to slow; Kohana did not. The long runner directed them toward the throne; she stepped off it. The dais established where one ought to stop; she planted one impossible heel on its first stair and argued with Alpha from there.
Black latex held the deep abundance of her body in a dark shine, violet where the reeflight touched it. Her hair followed in a purple fall alive with tiny star-pricks, long enough to make the marble briefly seem insufficient. A silver opium pipe rested in one hand. Everything else about her suggested a woman who had survived too many gods to find another especially impressive.
Wednesday remembers Alpha moving closer.
She remembers Kohana failing to move back.
She remembers the bare hand against Kohana’s cheek with an accuracy that would be admirable in almost any other context.
The body would be simpler if the body were all.
Wednesday remembers Kohana looking directly at a servant who interrupted her and waiting for the woman to finish speaking. She remembers the servant’s startled face afterwards, the little disorientation of somebody accustomed to being heard only until a more important voice arrived. She remembers Kohana calling Alpha by his name, plain and unadorned, after millennia of people constructing titles between themselves and his mouth. She remembers Kohana occupying a chair sideways, one knee over the arm, turning an object designed for posture into proof that posture had lost the argument.
She remembers Kohana laughing at Alpha.
More dangerous still, she remembers Alpha laughing back.
And then there is the considerably less manageable memory of Kohana turning those acid-green eyes on her.
Hello again, my lovely little nonnette.
Wednesday has been attempting to dispose of the sentence ever since. It refuses. It has lodged itself somewhere beneath her breastbone, sweet and humiliating, and every time Wednesday succeeds in dissolving it into something harmless, it crystallises again with all its original edges.
Her fingers tighten around the tray.
One envelope bends.
Wednesday releases it at once and stares at the small crease with the horror of somebody discovering physical evidence at the scene of a crime.
The youngest maid says, “Tell her about the antlers.”
“I am telling this story,” the oldest replies. “Coral caught near the left branch in the west garden. Lady Kohana reached up and took it out. Lord Alpha let her.”
The second maid presses two fingers to her lips. “He lets no one touch his antlers.”
“Apparently he has revised the policy.”
Wednesday’s sandal catches the raised edge of a mother-of-pearl tessera.
The correspondence leaves her.
Letters slide, turn, and scatter across the marble in a pale flock while Wednesday, faced with the immediate collapse of everything she has spent the morning arranging squarely, saves the mirror against her stomach and loses nearly everything else. One provincial complaint sails beneath the abandoned brooms. The prince with six titles strikes a column and drops face-down. A military summary spins twice through the air with considerably more grace than Wednesday currently possesses.
All three maids look at her. Wednesday meets their gaze for one terrible second before her glasses begin their slow descent down her nose.
The oldest recovers first. “Temperance. Your correspondence appears to have declared independence.”
“I—yes. Th-thank you.”
Her voice has climbed several degrees above its authorised register and shows no intention of returning.
Wednesday drops to her knees too quickly, catches the hem of her skirt beneath one sandal, and nearly follows the letters onto the floor. One palm slaps the marble in time to save her. The tray, apparently offended at being excluded from the catastrophe, tips against her shoulder with a bright little clack.
The youngest maid bites the inside of her cheek, and Wednesday pretends not to notice as she reaches for an envelope, misses it, then tries again with considerably less confidence.
The second maid bends toward the western petitions. “Here. Let me take that half before you sort us by culpability.”
“N-no, I can—thank you, but I have them. Mostly. I mean, I will have them.” Wednesday catches three letters against her chest before they can attempt a second escape. “There is no need to—please do not make this into an event.”
“We are servants in a palace,” the woman says. “Everything becomes an event by luncheon.”
Wednesday makes a tiny sound that belongs nowhere in the known taxonomy of Temperance while the oldest maid retrieves the prince from beneath the broom and lays him carefully atop the tray. Her face remains nobly blank throughout, which makes Wednesday like her immensely and resent her with equal conviction.
The youngest clears her throat. “For what it is worth, we were discussing horticulture.”
Wednesday freezes with one petition halfway onto the stack, her glasses slipping another fraction down her nose. “H-horticulture.”
“Very passionately.”
Wednesday pushes the frames back into place with one finger. “I see.”
She plainly does not.
The youngest’s mouth twitches.
Wednesday looks at her, then at the abandoned broom, then at the pile of correspondence, and finally toward a stretch of corridor that has the great advantage of containing no human faces at all.
“If reef coral has r-recently begun growing on His Majesty’s antlers,” she manages, “I suppose I should notify the gardeners.”
The silence that follows makes Wednesday’s eyes widen behind her lenses. That was considerably more sarcastic than she intended.
“I did not mean—obviously I know it hasn’t, I only meant that you were very clearly not discussing—”
The youngest maid makes a strangled sound and converts it, badly, into a cough. Wednesday finally stops talking, recognising wisdom several sentences later than would have been useful.
The oldest woman rises with the final envelope and places it mercifully atop the pile. “Back to work.”
The other two straighten immediately, although the youngest has gone pink around the mouth from the effort of containing herself. Wednesday gathers the tray against her chest and gets to her feet, only for one letter to slip free and flutter down between them.
Nobody comments.
Somehow, that is worse.
Wednesday closes her eyes for half a second, bends, retrieves it, and whispers, “Thank you,” to absolutely no one.
Then she leaves at a pace that would be dignified if dignity commonly fled a crime scene.
Two galleries later, she turns onto a lagoon balcony screened by hibiscus and stops.
Below her, servants rinse bolts of silk in a tide-fed pool. Red fabric darkens under water and comes up shining. Someone sings a song about a fisherman who married a storm and spent thirty years complaining that his house was damp. The others join the chorus with enough enthusiasm to suggest the marriage remains under active debate. Seagrass bends under the clear shallows. The reef beyond it burns turquoise where the morning sun reaches down.
Wednesday sets the tray on the balustrade.
“Temperance,” she tells herself.
The title usually contains instructions.
Temperance is measure. It is the cup stopped before spilling, the appetite named before appetite decides it is a god, the hand that knows how much weight a bridge may bear and how much fire a city can survive. It is not abstinence. Wednesday has corrected enough theologians on that point to feel personally insulted by the mistake. Temperance is proportion, choice, the interval between wanting and taking in which a person proves that wanting has not eaten the whole house.
Alpha made her for this.
He made her from his own substance and intention, from silverbone and blood and the cold bright matter that passes for inheritance in gods. He named her before she knew naming could be either gift or boundary. He taught her to stand beside power without becoming appetite. He taught her to keep what he could not, to watch where he would not, to take the excess from his hands and make it survivable.
He loved her. Wednesday knows this.
He also made her useful before he learned her favourite flower.
Both truths have lived in the same room for centuries without agreeing on the furniture.
Wednesday has never known exactly where daughter ends and instrument begins. Usually she can live without knowing.
Today there is Kohana.
Wednesday looks at the mirror, and relief comes so quickly that for one absurd instant she nearly laughs.
There is an explanation. There has to be.
Alpha desires Kohana, and Wednesday came from Alpha. The correspondence between maker and made has never been metaphor alone: she has tasted his injuries from across continents, known his anger before it entered his face, woken with his magic sour at the back of her tongue after nights when he used too much of it. His blood has always known roads into her that Wednesday herself did not build.
Perhaps this has simply travelled one of them.
His appetite, his confusion, his impossible woman moving through Wednesday’s nerves because the path between them already existed. The explanation is ugly, but it is comprehensible, and comprehensible things can be survived.
Let it be his.
Wednesday closes her eyes, dismantling the image of Alpha with the care she would use on an explosive device: the audience hall, the throne beneath the reef-arch, the antlers and gold eyes, the bare hand against Kohana’s cheek, finally the vast old gravity of standing near the source from which Wednesday herself was cut.
When she has removed everything she knows how to call his, Kohana remains.
Worse, she becomes clearer. Kohana leaning against the reef arch with one hip against the stone and her head tipped back into the wind; Kohana smiling with her whole mouth; Kohana’s dark, generous thighs beneath the shine of black latex; lacquered fingers curled around a silver pipe; wet purple hair dragging galaxies through water that had possessed none before she touched it. Without Alpha occupying the centre of the picture, Wednesday’s imagination does not empty.
It develops appetite.
It does not merely look. It inventories heat. The warm hollow at Kohana’s throat. The deep curve of her waist opening into hips built without apology. The gleam of salt along one shoulder. The faint creak of latex when she shifts. The lower lip she bites when listening. The hands that touched Alpha’s antlers and, worse, the hands that might touch something only because Wednesday asked.
The thought enters her body with nowhere polite to sit.
Wednesday grips the balustrade.
Her lungs forget their schedule. Her stomach drops, not downward but inward, a small violent tide. Heat opens under her skin in places Temperance has never been required to regulate. She has spent centuries studying excess in other people. She has catalogued wine, war, punishment, worship, grief, greed, lust, ambition. She has written reports on kingdoms that ate themselves because nobody knew when enough had arrived.
Now want opens its mouth inside her and Wednesday understands why kingdoms lie.
“That settles absolutely nothing in my favour,” she says.
The scrying mirror catches the sun and throws a coin of gold against her wrist.
She should put it away.
Instead she lifts it.
The glass clouds, clears, and finds the throne room without being told twice. Mirrors are vulgar that way. Give them a desire once and they will remember the route.
Alpha sits beneath the great reef-arch, one long arm laid across the back of his chair. Kohana occupies the step below him sideways, because apparently even furniture must negotiate with her. She says something Wednesday cannot hear. Alpha’s mouth curves.
Then he laughs.
Wednesday’s fingers go numb around the handle.
Alpha laughs rarely enough that Wednesday remembers most instances by century. This one comes with sound. His head dips. Kohana grins at whatever she has accomplished and raises her pipe in acknowledgement of the crime.
Jealousy arrives so cleanly that Wednesday is almost grateful for it. Here, at least, is a pain with lineage. She knows what to do with the old grief of being made by somebody who can recognise his own workmanship in her more easily than he can discover something new.
She wants Alpha to look at her with curiosity instead of recognition, to discover something in her he did not put there himself. She wants him to pause before answering because Wednesday has become, for one impossible instant, information rather than workmanship. She wants the hand that made her to encounter her and wonder.
That grief is old enough to have manners.
Then Kohana turns her face toward the open arch and smiles at something beyond the mirror’s frame.
Wednesday wants the gaze to turn farther.
Toward her.
The second want does not feel like his. That is considerably worse.
Wednesday closes the mirror so quickly the sigils flash beneath her thumb.
Her own face comes back: red hair escaping, glasses low, mouth parted around an argument she has already lost.
His, she thinks.
The word has changed shape.
She tries once more to call the feeling his and discovers the word no longer fits as comfortably as it did ten minutes ago.
She carries the mirror back to her chambers. Her rooms are orderly enough to make breathing seem discourteous. Books stand by subject and height. The bed is smooth. Her comb lies square to the edge of the dressing table. A single hibiscus opens in a clear glass beside the lamp, replaced each dawn by servants who have learned that Wednesday likes flowers and dislikes being observed receiving them. The petals are red enough to be indecent in this room.
She locks the door, throws the bolt, and seals the ward with enough unnecessary care that the final glyph burns twice before settling. Only then does she sit on the floor. The bed is within reach, perfectly smooth and perfectly capable of holding her, which is precisely why Wednesday refuses it. Weeping on a bed would turn this into a scene. The floor can still be mistaken for structural failure.
She sets the mirror before her.
Alpha named her function. Alpha taught her to watch appetite without condemning it, though he himself has always been less talented at this than the curriculum implied. He trusted her with wars, laws, prisons, the aftertaste of his own mistakes. He called her necessary. For a long time Wednesday mistook necessary for the highest form of beloved because necessary was a word he knew how to say without fear.
Kohana has been in the palace for days and Wednesday already wants something necessity cannot purchase. A look chosen freely. A conversation with no assignment attached. Her name in Kohana’s mouth for no reason at all. And yes, because the body has become insolent now that it has been invited to testify: Kohana’s mouth itself.
Wednesday folds until her forehead meets her knees.
She cries quietly at first because quiet has been trained into her too deeply to require instruction. It is the quiet of servants moving around sleeping kings, of children learning which hours their fathers’ attention can afford them, of Wednesday occupying the edge of Alpha’s work without asking him to interrupt it merely because something inside her hurt. But grief and desire are both terrible employees; once admitted, neither respects the established hours.
The first ugly sound tears out of her.
Then another.
She cries because she wants Kohana. She cries because wanting Kohana has uncovered a much older want beneath it, pale and furious from centuries underground. She cries because Alpha can love her and still fail to see where he ends in her, and because Wednesday is beginning to suspect she has helped him with the failure. She has spent so long introducing herself as Temperance that some part of her began to believe there was nobody left after the title finished speaking.
The mirror lies beside her hand.
Eventually she turns the mirror toward the window and gives it nothing grander to hold than the sea, the sky, a hibiscus reflected backwards, and a gull making off with somebody’s ribbon.
“You may spend the rest of the afternoon showing me something I did not steal from anyone else,” she tells it.
For once she asks the glass for nothing beyond what is already there.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
By late afternoon, Wednesday has repaired her hair twice and failed both times. One ribbon sits lower than the other. The knowledge irritates her every three steps. She leaves it. This act of rebellion is so minor that no history will record it, which is precisely why it feels dangerous.
The palace has warmed. Sunlight lies thick on the pearl floors. Somewhere in the eastern kitchens, cardamom and fried plantain have entered the air and begun negotiating with the reef-lilies. Afternoon servants carry amphorae of drinking water under their arms. A page darts past with three seals clenched between his teeth. Two court ladies stand beneath a mosaic of Alpha’s first coronation and discuss a lover with the solemnity usually reserved for troop movements.
Wednesday carries an empty tray because she has already delivered the correspondence and has not yet admitted that she is carrying the tray for emotional support.
High heels click behind her, three measured strikes against marble and then another three, and recognition arrives before she can forbid it: she knows that walk. She knows Kohana’s walk. The discovery sends a hot little betrayal through her stomach.
“Temperance.”
Wednesday stops so quickly the empty tray bumps against her hip. She fumbles it, catches the edge against her stomach before it can clatter to the floor, and stands there clutching it with both hands while her dignity catches up several seconds later. She has already humiliated herself before three maids today; apparently the palace maintains quotas.
Kohana catches up without hurry. She has changed nothing except the pipe; this one is dark silver, its bowl shaped like a little open flower, and a thread of blue-white smoke climbs from it before dividing into tiny constellations against the ceiling. The black latex over her body takes the lagoon light in violet seams. Her hair follows in a heavy purple fall, star-flecks appearing and vanishing with every step.
Wednesday’s body remembers every conclusion reached on the floor of her chambers, and her hands tighten around the tray before she can stop them. “M-Miss Zhùróng.”
Her voice is too high. Far too high. She clears her throat, which accomplishes nothing except announcing that she is aware of the problem.
Kohana looks at her, and Wednesday immediately wishes she had chosen a profession involving masks. The attention is horribly specific: it catches beneath the red frames of her glasses, traces the tender swelling under both eyes, and stays there long enough to expose the previous hour’s faith in optical camouflage as pure superstition. Her spectacles, it turns out, have contributed nothing except decoration.
Kohana’s mouth softens. “You’ve been crying.”
Wednesday’s fingers slip against the tray. “I—” She adjusts her grip and tries again. “It was only—well. That is an unnecessarily severe description of what occurred.”
Kohana gives that assessment a moment of solemn consideration.
Wednesday glances toward the western balustrade, where the lagoon gleams forty feet below in a turquoise so inviting that she briefly resents water for possessing aesthetic timing. “The sea air,” she says, pushing her glasses higher, “is very aggressive.”
Kohana follows her gaze. “The sea already steals shoes, boats, and occasionally husbands. I’m not adding your eyelids to the indictment.”
A tiny, mortifying sound escapes Wednesday before she can prevent it, perilously close to a laugh. She presses the tray more firmly against herself. “You might have allowed me one convenient fiction.”
“I considered it.”
Wednesday looks back at her, suspicious despite herself. “A-and?”
Kohana lets the answer sit between them. “You looked like you’d already spent enough of the afternoon interrogating yourself. I didn’t see any reason to request a turn.”
Wednesday looks at her despite herself. Kohana has not moved closer or inserted herself into the path between Wednesday and the rest of the corridor; she has not softened her voice into that awful confidential register people adopt when they have decided someone else is about to confess. She merely stands there with the pipe loose between two fingers, leaving Wednesday’s three denials, one redirection, and carefully defensible statement concerning salt irritation to perish from neglect.
“You’re… truly not going to ask?”
“Why you were crying?” Kohana turns the pipe once between her fingers, watching Wednesday over the faint blue curl of smoke.
Wednesday’s thumb worries the rim of the tray. She nods.
“You don’t want to tell me,” Kohana says. There is no question tucked inside it, no clever little hook waiting for Wednesday to take the bait.
Wednesday waits anyway. Surely there is supposed to be more.
“B-but you noticed.”
“I was looking at you.” Kohana shifts her weight against one hip, pipe hanging loosely at her side. “That doesn’t mean you owe me an explanation.”
“And usually when someone notices something they—well, they ask about it. Particularly when they have already announced that they noticed it, because otherwise there seems very little purpose in announcing—” Wednesday stops before she can construct an entire etiquette manual around the problem.
Kohana lets out the smallest breath through her nose, more acknowledgement than laughter. “I noticed your face. The reason belongs to you until you decide otherwise.”
Something in Wednesday’s chest gives way so abruptly that she has to adjust her grip on the tray. Relief should not feel this intimate. It certainly should not arrive wearing Kohana’s voice.
Before Wednesday can decide what one does with such a thing, Kohana taps the stem of the pipe against her palm. “I do have another grievance.”
Wednesday’s shoulders rise. “If this concerns the western correspondence, the delay was under four minutes, every seal remained intact, and the prince of Kalavé received all six of his titles in the proper order.”
Kohana blinks.
“I know six appears excessive,” Wednesday rushes on, “and personally I would argue three identify him with sufficient clarity, but they are formally recognised, so naturally I did not omit—”
“Wednesday.”
She stops.
“This isn’t about Kalavé.”
“Oh.” Wednesday straightens the already-straight tray and wishes immediately that she had found something more intelligent to contribute. “Then, um. What have I done?”
“You keep turning up wherever I am and disappearing the moment I notice.”
Wednesday inhales sharply enough to catch reef-lily perfume at the back of her throat. “I have n-not been following you.”
Kohana pauses, pipe halfway to her mouth.
Wednesday hears her own answer and closes her eyes for one brief, terrible second. “That was premature.”
“Very.”
She exhales through her nose and looks back at Kohana from behind the red frames. “You had already said enough for me to know where the accusation was going.”
“I hadn’t actually accused you of following me.”
“N-no, but you were about to.”
Kohana lowers the pipe again, conceding the point without much shame. “I was.”
Wednesday’s cheeks grow pinker. “Then I don’t think I should be punished for anticipating you correctly.”
Kohana laughs, low and startled, and the sound goes through Wednesday with humiliating efficiency. She made that happen. The satisfaction arrives before shame can intercept it and, worse, finds somewhere comfortable to stay.
“I am not following you,” Wednesday says again, quieter now. “I have duties throughout the palace. Many duties. More than enough duties, actually. Your presence has simply… complicated several of my usual routes.”
Kohana glances down the corridor. “I’ve complicated the architecture?”
“N-no. The architecture remains where it was. People, however, do not.” Wednesday shifts the tray higher against herself. “They stop in doorways. They gather beneath arches. Earlier today three maids abandoned active sweeping to discuss the fact that you removed coral from His Majesty’s antlers and then, somehow, proceeded to debate—”
She stops with the final word still hanging dangerously close to her tongue. Kohana waits, and Wednesday realises a fraction too late that she has walked herself directly into the very conversation she meant to avoid.
“To debate what?”
“Nothing of consequence.”
Kohana tips her head, attention settling more fully on Wednesday. “You were doing very well with the details until that sentence.”
“The earlier details concerned an obstruction to palace business.”
“Three maids talking?”
“Three maids who were supposed to be sweeping.” Wednesday adjusts the tray against herself. “For a considerable period.”
“How considerable?”
Wednesday hesitates. “Eleven minutes.”
Kohana lowers the pipe and looks at Wednesday with renewed interest. “You timed them.”
“They were standing in the middle of a corridor.”
“Sweeping usually happens on floors.”
“Yes, well, they had ceased doing that part.”
The laugh Kohana tries to swallow only makes Wednesday warmer. She looks toward the lagoon, which continues glittering uselessly instead of providing a respectable change of subject.
“And what occupied eleven minutes so completely?”
Wednesday adjusts the tray against her middle. “I don’t think repeating it would improve the situation.”
Kohana tips the pipe lightly toward her. “That sounded much more like refusal than forgetfulness.”
Wednesday’s fingers tighten around the rim. “I-I remember perfectly well. Remembering something does not mean I am required to furnish you with a transcript.”
Kohana is openly interested now. This is precisely the outcome Wednesday had been trying to prevent, but it doesn’t stop some smaller, considerably less principled part of her from enjoying the attention.
“What did they say?”
Wednesday wets her lips. “They were discussing…” Her voice catches; she tries again, quieter. “They were discussing how you smell.”
Kohana draws the pipe away from her lips. “They were discussing how I smell?”
Heat spreads all the way to Wednesday’s ears. She survived the original conversation only to drag its subject into a private reenactment herself, which seems an unnecessarily inventive form of punishment. “I-I really should not have repeated that.”
“You’ve already done the dangerous part.” Kohana turns the pipe between her fingers. “What did they decide?”
“Nothing. There was no agreement.”
Wednesday presses her lips together. Kohana does not prod again; she simply waits, visibly curious and apparently prepared to remain that way until age finishes what embarrassment has begun.
“One said ozone over wet stone,” Wednesday finally admits.
Kohana considers that with more seriousness than the subject deserves. “I can see where she got it.”
“Another said blossoms burning on a festival pyre.”
“That sounds expensive.”
A laugh threatens Wednesday at exactly the wrong moment. She swallows it, adjusts her slipping glasses, and immediately regrets having continued at all. “The youngest said…” Her voice diminishes. “Trouble steeped in honey.”
Wednesday keeps her attention fixed resolutely on the tray for several seconds before curiosity commits treason and pulls her eyes upward.
Kohana is looking at her with unmistakable amusement. “And you?”
Wednesday nearly chokes. “M-me?”
“You heard all three. Surely you formed an opinion.”
“I have not been smelling you for comparative purposes!” Her voice vaults high enough to turn the head of a passing page. Wednesday immediately folds inward behind her red frames, wishing the tray were large enough to conceal the rest of her.
Kohana waits until the page has disappeared around the corner before looking back at her. The amusement she had been containing is now quite impossible to mistake.
“Comparative purposes?”
Wednesday tightens both hands around the tray. “That phrase does not benefit from repetition.”
“No,” Kohana says, considering it. “I think repetition may actually be fatal to it.”
“You know perfectly well what I meant.”
“I do.”
Wednesday waits, suspicious.
Kohana regards her for another second. “Which is why I’m being kind enough not to tell you what it sounded like.”
Wednesday’s face grows hotter.
“I meant that I have not conducted any kind of—of scent analysis.”
Kohana goes very still.
Wednesday hears herself.
“That was worse.”
“Considerably.”
“Please forget both sentences.”
Wednesday clutches the tray against herself and hurries onward before Kohana can discover another avenue of inquiry. “The point is that people encounter you and promptly cease whatever useful task they were meant to be performing. Today it was sweeping. Yesterday it was—” She catches herself before inventing another example. “It is becoming a palace-wide logistical problem.”
Kohana takes a slow draw from the pipe. “And here I thought I was visiting.”
“You are visiting aggressively.”
Kohana pauses with the pipe near her mouth, considering this new charge. “Aggressively.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m trying to. Apparently my presence has become a matter of management.”
Wednesday adjusts the tray against herself. “It has become a matter for anyone attempting to cross a corridor without being detained by speculation.”
“Anyone?”
Wednesday hesitates.
Kohana catches it immediately. “You included yourself.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You just described a palace-wide problem.”
“Palace-wide does not mean universal. It describes sufficient distribution to affect the general functioning of the household.”
Kohana catches the opening before Wednesday can close it. “So statistically, you might be affected.”
“That is not—” Wednesday stops, because unfortunately it is exactly what she has just said. Heat creeps higher beneath her collar. “Statistics are not admissions.”
Kohana draws from the pipe again, mercifully allowing Wednesday several seconds in which to regret ever learning mathematics. Irritation arrives before attraction can finish eating her alive, and Wednesday seizes it with gratitude. Irritation has rules. Irritation can be filed.
“The point,” she says, “is that you turn every corridor you enter into a public assembly. I have work to complete.”
“You make it sound like I submitted an application.”
“You didn’t. If you had, I could have denied it.”
The answer leaves Wednesday before she has time to examine it for treason. Kohana laughs, a full, surprised laugh that catches in the smoke and sends Wednesday’s stomach dropping unpleasantly through several floors of the palace. She tightens her grip on the tray until the rim presses into her palms.
“That came out more severely than I intended.”
Kohana examines Wednesday over the pipe for a beat. “Did it?”
“Yes.” Wednesday pauses. The problem with answering too quickly is that the truth sometimes arrives a moment later and demands amendment. “I think so.”
“Mm.”
Wednesday eyes her. “That sound is not reassuring.”
“I was wondering how much of it you meant.”
Heat begins climbing Wednesday’s neck again. She looks away before her face can contribute evidence. “That is an extremely exasperating question.”
“Because you don’t know?”
Wednesday hesitates. “Because I suspect you do.”
Kohana studies her for a beat. “You get less careful when you’re annoyed with me. I hear what you meant before you polish it into palace language.”
Wednesday’s fingers shift against the tray. “And you find that pleasing.”
“I find it easier to talk to you before every sentence has been inspected for structural integrity.”
Wednesday looks back at her. “My sentences do not require inspection.”
Kohana glances meaningfully at the empty tray.
“That is unrelated.”
Wednesday frowns at her. “You make conversation very difficult to administer.”
Kohana exhales a thin ribbon of blue smoke and watches it unravel between them. “That may be because you keep trying to administer it.”
“Conversation benefits from structure.”
“You’ve spent the last ten minutes explaining how badly I interfere with your work while standing here doing none of it.”
Wednesday’s lips part. She glances down at the empty tray, which has chosen a catastrophic moment to corroborate Kohana’s argument. “That is a very selective account of events.”
“Is it?” Kohana’s gaze returns to her face. “You keep finding new charges every time the old one runs out.”
Wednesday shifts the tray against her middle. “Must you sound so pleased about my inability to conclude this conversation?”
“I’m pleased because you’re the one refusing to conclude it.”
The edge of the tray slips straight through Wednesday’s fingers. She catches it against her stomach with an undignified little smack and goes rigid. Kohana’s eyes drop to the rescued tray, then rise slowly back to Wednesday.
“Nothing happened,” Wednesday says.
“Of course not.”
Wednesday narrows her eyes. “That agreement was suspiciously immediate.”
“I’m respecting the official record.”
“There is no official record.”
Kohana takes another draw from her pipe. “Then your secret is safe with the marble.”
Wednesday attempts a glare; unfortunately, her face is still too hot to pull it off. Kohana leans one shoulder against the coral-inlaid wall, and the fastening cord of a ceremonial hanging quivers beside her hair. Wednesday’s eyes flick toward it—the hanging is pulling crooked against its hook—and then away when she realises Kohana has caught the movement.
“The hanging is crooked,” Kohana says.
Wednesday blinks. “It is.”
“And five seconds ago you were looking at my pipe. Before that, the tray. You get nervous and suddenly every object within reach requires supervision.”
Wednesday stiffens. “That is an extremely confident conclusion to draw from ordinary visual attention.”
Kohana lets the pipe rest against two fingers. “Yesterday your ordinary visual attention apologised to a pillar.”
Wednesday’s blood turns cold.
“That incident has been grossly mischaracterised. Whatever version of events you have preserved,” Wednesday adds quickly, “I would like it understood that the pillar and I collided unexpectedly and my response was reflexive. It was not—” Her voice catches on the indignity of having to say this at all. “It was not a meaningful exchange with the architecture.”
“You apologised to it.”
Wednesday stares at her. Somewhere in the palace there must be an obscure office empowered to erase a person from recorded history. She makes a note to find it.
“I walked into it,” she says, with what remains of her dignity.
“You hit it with the tray, jumped backwards, put your hand over your chest, and asked it to forgive you.”
Heat floods Wednesday’s face all over again. “Because it startled me. The collision startled me. I am aware the pillar itself did not act with intent.”
Kohana shifts the pipe between her fingers, visibly struggling not to laugh.
“It was reflexive,” Wednesday continues, because apparently humiliation has not yet taught her when to stop talking. “I would have apologised had I collided with a servant, or a chair, or—well, perhaps not a chair, depending upon who had placed it there, but the principle is the same.”
“So the pillar received a courtesy intended for sentient life.”
“Temporarily.”
A laugh finally breaks out of Kohana.
Wednesday’s glasses have begun slipping again. She shoves them back into place. “There is nothing especially funny about possessing excessively generalised manners.”
“I checked on it this morning.”
Wednesday goes still.
“You did what?”
“Passed through the same corridor. It’s doing very well.”
Wednesday looks at her for several seconds, trying to decide which portion of that statement is most intolerable. “You remembered which pillar it was.”
Kohana takes a slow draw from her pipe, entirely too comfortable beneath Wednesday’s horror. “You made an impression.”
“On the pillar?”
Smoke curls from Kohana’s nose. “That too.”
Wednesday loses the contest with Kohana’s eyes and looks down; unfortunately, down contains Kohana’s shoulder, the dark shine of latex, the elegant line of her collar, and absolutely nowhere respectable for Wednesday to rest her attention. She jerks her gaze toward the hanging instead.
“Why,” she begins, only for her voice to crack cleanly through the word. Wednesday clears her throat and tries again. “Why were you paying enough attention to me to remember something so profoundly unimportant?”
She regrets the question before it is finished. “Not that you require a reason to look anywhere you please. This is a common corridor. I am not suggesting observation itself requires authorisation, because that would be impossible to enforce, and I certainly do not possess jurisdiction over your eyesight—”
“Wednesday.”
She shuts her mouth.
Kohana lowers the pipe again. “Yesterday you corrected a servant’s arithmetic and waited until his supervisor had walked away before you did it.”
Wednesday frowns. “He had transposed two figures.”
“You moved a vase because one flower was bending itself sick toward a lamp.”
“It needed rotating.”
“You told Alpha his guard rotation was badly designed.”
“It is badly designed.”
Kohana lets that sit for a moment. “Then I called you Wednesday and you nearly walked into the wall.”
Wednesday’s fingers curl around the tray. “I did not nearly walk into it.”
“You changed direction in the middle of a step.”
“Because you startled me.”
“By knowing your name?”
“By—” Wednesday falters, colour rising into her face. “By using it like that.”
Kohana turns the pipe once between her fingers. “Is Wednesday too familiar?”
The question catches Wednesday completely unprepared. “I—no. That is, it isn’t too familiar. You already know my name.”
“I do.”
“Then there is no practical reason you shouldn’t use it.”
“Practical reason,” Kohana repeats, her attention settling more fully on Wednesday. “But you still brace every time I say it.”
Wednesday’s fingers tighten around the tray. “I do not brace.”
“You just did.”
Wednesday looks down at her hands and, with considerable resentment, loosens them. Kohana leaves the discovery where it is. The silence stretches just long enough for Wednesday to become conscious of it.
“You think I am frightened of you.”
“I think I’m not the part you’re frightened of.” Kohana taps a little ash from the pipe into her palm. “You seem to manage me perfectly well whenever you’re busy arguing with me. It’s what happens to you afterwards that sends you looking for exits.”
The corridor becomes strangely large around them. Sea-light pours through the lattice and breaks over the pearl floor in moving blue. Wednesday looks down by instinct, catches herself doing it, and forces her gaze upward again. Her glasses immediately begin sliding down her nose. She pushes them back with unnecessary force.
Kohana sees the effort and, mercifully, leaves it unpraised. That may be the kindest thing she has done all afternoon.
“Most people here call me Temperance.”
“Would you rather I did?”
She had prepared herself for teasing and finds the straightforward question much harder to manage. “I—it isn’t exactly a matter of preference. Temperance is what I am.” Wednesday looks down at the tray. Its hammered silver returns a warped little ghost of her red glasses. “I was made for it,” she says, quieter. “It is my office, my nature, my function. Calling it merely a title would be inaccurate.”
The curve at Kohana’s mouth eases first. She lowers the pipe, and whatever teasing answer had been waiting there disappears with it. “Then I won’t treat it like one. Wednesday is still your name, but if I use either one wrong, tell me.”
Wednesday shifts her fingers around the tray. “You are placing a surprising amount of interpretive responsibility in my hands.”
Kohana’s gaze drops to Wednesday’s hands and, at last, to the object they have been gripping with such devotion for the entire conversation.
“And what, exactly, are you still transporting?”
Wednesday follows her gaze. The empty silver tray gleams between her hands.
“I recently had correspondence.”
Kohana looks at the tray, then back at Wednesday. “Recently enough that it might come back?”
Wednesday considers lying. Unfortunately, her face has never possessed the necessary criminal instinct.
“It has been… some time.”
Kohana shifts the pipe to the other hand. “How much time?”
“That depends entirely upon the scale against which one measures it.”
A slow recognition comes over Kohana’s face; Wednesday is attempting to evade a question with chronology.
“Temperance.”
Wednesday exhales through her nose. “I delivered it before you found me.”
“And the tray survived the separation poorly?”
Wednesday clutches it closer before realising that this is, perhaps, evidence. “My hands felt strange without it.”
The admission comes out soft enough that she almost hopes the corridor will swallow it.
Kohana does not laugh. She glances at Wednesday’s hands instead, at the way both are wrapped around the rim as though the empty silver has acquired some necessary weight. Wednesday opens her mouth to continue explaining herself, but Kohana has already pushed herself away from the wall.
“Come west with me, before those maids turn one piece of coral into a branch of natural philosophy.”
Wednesday nearly loses the tray again. “They were gossiping, not conducting research.”
“You timed them for eleven minutes and recorded three competing theories about my smell. Their methodology sounds vigorous.”
“That is not methodology.” Wednesday’s scandal arrives so quickly that, for several blessed seconds, there is no room left for shyness. “They had no question, no controls, no defined period of observation, and absolutely no reason to involve His Majesty’s antlers in any of it.”
Kohana turns toward the western corridor, pipe balanced loosely between her fingers. “So what I’m hearing is that the principal defect was procedural.”
“The principal defect was that they were supposed to be sweeping.”
“Ah. Funding revoked.”
“There was never any funding.”
“A devastating setback for palace scholarship.”
Wednesday follows for two steps before realising what has happened. “You are making this worse because you find my objection entertaining.”
Kohana glances back at her. “I’m making it worse because you forgot that tray was a shield the moment you started explaining methodology to me.”
Wednesday stops.
That is considerably less funny.
She adjusts the tray against herself, suddenly conscious of it again, and gathers what composure she can. “The north-west gallery is quieter at this hour,” she says at last. “The linen staff use the lower stair before supper, so there should be less household traffic, and the upper passage becomes unpleasantly bright once the sun reaches the western—” Wednesday hears herself constructing an itinerary where a simple yes would have sufficed. “It is a more efficient route.”
Kohana gestures ahead with the pipe. “Show me.”
Wednesday does.
The choice is small enough to carry beside the empty tray, though only just.
They pass beneath a painted ceiling crowded with green birds and split-open red fruit. Kohana pauses at a statue everyone else walks past, stooping slightly to read the inscription along its plinth. She asks who carved it, and Wednesday answers immediately. Who commissioned it? Wednesday knows that too. Who quarried the stone?
There, she opens her mouth and finds an infuriating blank.
“I don’t know.”
She looks at the statue again. The missing answer feels personally offensive now.
“But I will.”
Kohana glances sideways at her. “Some archivist is about to lose an afternoon.”
“Only if the records have been indexed irresponsibly.”
“Of course.”
Wednesday elects not to investigate the amusement in her voice.
They make it one gallery farther before a steward hurries toward them with a roll of irrigation plans tucked beneath one arm. “Lady Zhùróng, forgive me—the western gardens—”
Kohana bends over the plans at once, pipe tucked between two fingers while the steward points out a trouble spot along the tidal beds. Within moments, she asks why anyone has planted a salt-sensitive flowering vine beside a feed that floods twice a day.
Wednesday listens for forty-three seconds. Forty-four would imply she has chosen to remain.
The steward is occupied. Kohana is occupied. This is not escape, Wednesday decides; it is merely an excellent moment to stop obstructing a professional consultation. She eases backwards one step, then another, hugging the empty tray to her middle while soil composition, root depth, and tidal salinity close over the space where she had been standing.
She is almost free when her sandal catches the raised edge of a mosaic wave.
The tray swings wildly. Wednesday pitches forward and saves herself against the nearest pillar with both palms, landing chest-first against the cool marble with a small, strangled sound. For one terrible second, she remains there. Slowly, she peels herself away. The pillar, blameless in every respect, stands exactly where it has always stood.
Wednesday looks at it.
“Forgive me,” she whispers.
Wednesday gathers the tray against her chest and walks quickly toward the sea with as much dignity as speed will permit.
She calls it walking until the second gallery.
By the time she reaches the stairs, even Wednesday is forced to admit she has fled.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Sunday stands at the western balustrade where the lagoon gives itself to open ocean.
Beyond the reef-drop, the water has darkened toward indigo, almost black beneath the coming evening, and the late sun lays one long road of fire across it. Wind takes the great red mass of Sunday’s hair and worries it around his horns. Where Wednesday’s red runs dark, his burns with the vivid colour of fresh blood. He has removed his glasses, those elegant rimless rectangles that ordinarily lend his face a severe little civility. Without them, there is nothing between the world and his eyes: the same brilliant red as his hair, fresh blood made luminous. They make him look stranger without making him look less beautiful, all that terrible colour exposed in a face that has spent centuries learning that capability does not constitute instruction.
Wednesday has crossed the archway three times.
On the fourth pass, Sunday speaks without turning.
“Temperance.”
Wednesday stops immediately.
He lets another second pass before adding, “Either come onto the terrace or leave it. You have crossed that arch often enough that I am beginning to resent the sound.”
Wednesday’s fingers twist together at her waist. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I was trying to decide whether this was important enough to bother you with.”
Sunday finally looks over one shoulder at her. “You have spent several minutes pacing behind me while looking recently bereaved. Whatever it is, you have already made it my problem.”
Wednesday flushes. “That was not my intention.”
“Your intentions are becoming less relevant by the minute.”
She lowers her eyes.
Sunday turns back toward the ocean. “Come here.”
She enters at last, nearly clips one shoulder against the arch she has spent several minutes negotiating with, and recovers before Sunday can comment. The balustrade offers warm stone beneath her palms and salt dried white in the carved seams. Wednesday fixes her attention there. Stone is considerably easier to address than Courage.
Sunday permits the silence.
That is one reason she came.
He does not fill quiet simply because another person has failed to. For all his severity, Sunday can leave a thought alone long enough for it to decide whether it wishes to become speech. He learned that restraint late and paid dearly enough for it that Wednesday trusts the result.
Eventually he turns his head. His gaze settles on the swelling beneath her eyes.
“You have already cried.”
Wednesday’s shoulders draw inward. She worries a crust of salt loose beneath one thumbnail.
“I think there may be something wrong with me.”
“You have not told me enough to decide that.”
Her fingers stop against the salt. “I-I only meant that perhaps there is something in me that—”
“Temperance.” Sunday’s voice cuts across the retreat before she can disappear into it. “Tell me what happened. You may condemn yourself afterwards, if the facts still deserve it.”
Wednesday takes a careful breath. The command leaves considerably less room to hide than she had hoped.
“I am experiencing a desire that does not correspond neatly with Temperance.”
“Temperance is what you govern,” he says. “You have made the mistake of assuming it must also govern every private motion within you.”
“It is my Power.”
“So is Courage mine. That did not prevent me from misunderstanding it for several centuries.”
Wednesday glances up.
Sunday turns his glasses once in his fingers. “I thought Courage meant obedience for longer than I care to calculate. Obedience was convenient. Someone gave an order; I endured whatever followed.”
His voice takes on that older weight Wednesday recognises from the rare occasions when he speaks about the wars without turning them into lessons for someone else.
“What changed?” she asks.
“Our Lord did not always tell me what to do.” The answer comes quickly; Sunday’s gaze strays toward the palace and arrests itself halfway there. “And I discovered that a person who requires instruction before every act of conviction possesses obedience, certainly. Courage remained an open question.”
Wednesday studies his profile. Sunday’s devotion to Alpha is impossible to miss and dangerous to name. It lives openly in him without ever submitting to explanation: in the care with which he says His Majesty, in the offence he takes on Alpha’s behalf, in the peculiar intensity of even his disagreements. Sunday can criticise an order, condemn a decision, spend an hour dismantling some flaw in Alpha’s reasoning, and emerge from the exercise no less devoted than when he began. His loyalty has roots beneath argument.
Sunday notices her staring.
“Do not become distracted.”
Wednesday drops her gaze at once. “Sorry.”
“Continue.”
She presses her palms more firmly against the balustrade.
“Alpha made me from himself.”
Sunday gives a small inclination of his head. This, at least, requires no correction.
“There are parts of that inheritance I can measure,” Wednesday says. “I know when he is injured. Sometimes I feel his anger before he speaks. There have been times when his wants have reached me before I knew they were his.”
Sunday’s attention settles more heavily on her.
“And what has changed now?”
“There is someone Alpha wants.”
Wednesday had expected a question. His silence is worse.
“I can feel it,” Wednesday says, and keeps her eyes on the dark water because looking at Sunday would make the admission harder than it already is. “Not everything. I don’t know what he thinks when he sees her, or what he intends to do about it. It is only the wanting itself that reaches me. I know when it is there.” She pauses, but the thought has already carried her too far to retreat gracefully. “And lately I have been trying to understand why I feel something so similar when I look at her.”
Sunday does not interrupt. The wind draws the long red mass of his hair around his horns and over one shoulder.
“I thought perhaps it belonged to him first,” she says more quietly. “That I was only feeling it because he was.”
Sunday’s gaze remains fixed on the darkening water. “The Spectrian General.”
Wednesday turns toward him so quickly her glasses slip down her nose. “You knew?”
“I suspected. I had hoped I was mistaken.”
Sunday folds his arms and spends a moment looking out over the water, his mouth set in a line Wednesday knows better than to mistake for contemplation. “Must it be her?”
The bleak sincerity of the question almost startles a laugh out of Wednesday. She catches it before Sunday can hear. “I did not select her.”
“That hardly improves the situation.”
There is enough displeasure in his voice that Wednesday begins twisting her fingers together again. “You sound angry.”
“I am angry.” Sunday says it without embarrassment or qualification. Once his displeasure has become obvious, he has never seen much purpose in insulting everyone involved by pretending otherwise.
Wednesday hesitates before asking, “At me?”
His eyes move to her at last. “Not primarily.”
Somehow that is worse.
He turns back toward the sea, and the wind catches one of the vivid red curls spilling over his shoulder. “The Spectrian General arrived here and immediately began treating established custom as an inconvenience suffered chiefly by other people. She questions guards in their own corridors, argues with divine law over dinner, handles things after being told to leave them alone, and appears to regard deference to His Majesty as a regional eccentricity. Now she has apparently added Temperance to the list of institutions she intends to disrupt.”
Wednesday lowers her eyes. “She does respect him. Not in the way we do, obviously, but she listens to him. She has listened to him.”
Sunday turns his head just enough to look at her, and Wednesday immediately regrets having volunteered herself as counsel for the defence.
“I have been present for several of these demonstrations of respect,” he says. “His Majesty has also indulged behaviour from the Spectrian General that would have ended very differently for almost anyone else.”
The change in his voice is slight, but Wednesday hears it. Alpha can enter Sunday’s speech as sovereign, argument, grievance, command; sooner or later, the devotion underneath always shows through. He has disagreed with His Majesty furiously enough to shake rooms and never once sounded less his.
Wednesday hesitates. “You mean the coral.”
“Among other things.”
“He let her take it.”
“Yes, Temperance. That is precisely what troubles me.”
Wednesday looks up before caution can stop her. “Because she presumed to do it, or because he permitted her?”
Sunday turns fully toward her. The question dies a natural death.
Wednesday lowers her eyes again. “I see.”
“I sincerely doubt that.”
Sunday adjusts one cufflink, though Wednesday can see perfectly well that nothing is wrong with it. “His Majesty does not give his attention carelessly. He does not rearrange himself around strangers, nor does he ordinarily permit anyone to handle him according to their own amusement. The Spectrian General, however, appears to accumulate exceptions wherever she goes.”
Wednesday hears the offence beneath the observation and, before she has enough sense to reconsider, says, “She makes him laugh.”
Sunday’s hand stops at his wrist. Wednesday feels the mistake arrive in full a moment too late and shifts her attention very carefully toward the sea.
“I only meant that he seems happier when—”
“Temperance.” His voice is calm enough to make the interruption worse. “I understood you the first time.”
Wednesday closes her mouth.
For several seconds, Sunday gives the horizon an intensity of attention it has done nothing to deserve.
“His Majesty’s pleasure is not evidence of her safety,” he says at last.
Wednesday smooths one thumb over the edge of her sleeve, gathering her nerve before she answers. “I have spoken with her several times now. She has had opportunities to be cruel when cruelty would have been easy, private, and of no particular consequence to her. She chose otherwise.”
Sunday considers this without looking at her. “And you have decided that restraint under favourable conditions constitutes character.”
“I think what people decline to do can tell you as much about them as what they do.”
That earns her his attention.
Wednesday squares her shoulders beneath it. “I trust my judgment.”
“So do I,” Sunday says, and the immediate agreement catches her off guard. “That is precisely why I find the present result so irritating.”
There is something almost personal in the way he says it. Wednesday studies his profile for a moment before caution begins tugging at her sleeve again.
“You dislike her very much.”
Sunday’s mouth tightens. “I tolerate the Spectrian General because His Majesty has chosen to keep her beneath his roof, and because thus far she has given me no sufficient reason to challenge that decision. I would prefer she required considerably less tolerating.”
Wednesday’s gaze lingers on him.
It is not the dislike that catches her. She already knew about that. It is the care with which Sunday has arranged the explanation around Alpha, every grievance passing first through the question of what His Majesty permits, what His Majesty enjoys, what His Majesty has chosen.
Sunday feels her looking and turns toward her. Wednesday, abruptly reminded of several excellent reasons to preserve her life, redirects her attention to the sea. He allows the retreat, exhales through his nose, and after a moment returns to the reason she sought him out in the first place.
“You believe His Majesty’s desire may have produced your own. I assume you did more than worry about it.”
Wednesday looks faintly offended by the phrasing. “I tried to isolate the problem.”
Sunday’s expression tells her this is exactly the answer he expected.
“I thought about her when Alpha was nowhere nearby,” she continues, adjusting her glasses with more care than necessary. “I paid attention to what happened when I knew he could not be influencing me directly. I watched her when he was elsewhere. I tried to separate what belonged to him from what remained when he was removed from the equation.”
“And what remained?”
Heat climbs immediately into Wednesday’s ears. She turns farther toward the water, where the dying sunlight has begun breaking apart between the waves. “More than I would have preferred.”
Sunday closes his eyes.
“That reaction is not helpful.”
“I was hoping your methodology would rescue us from this.”
Wednesday turns from the water to stare at him. “Us?”
Sunday opens his eyes again, entirely unmoved by the accusation in that single syllable. “Continue.”
Wednesday decides not to pursue the pronoun. “It became clearer. I began noticing things I had not consciously noticed before—the way she stands when she is listening instead of speaking, the sound her heels make far enough down a corridor that I know it is her before I see her, what she does with her hands when she—”
The sentence catches somewhere between Wednesday’s mouth and the increasingly afflicted expression on Sunday’s face. When she finally looks at him, he is already staring back, and a tiny, shameful pleasure survives beneath all her embarrassment: after spending the entire conversation beneath Sunday’s scrutiny, she has finally managed to make him uncomfortable.
“I think that is sufficient,” he says.
Wednesday presses her lips together.
Sunday’s eyes narrow. “Whatever detail has just made you look pleased with yourself, I have no need of it.”
The pleasure becomes considerably harder to conceal. Her mouth closes, though a smile threatens at one corner. “Thank you.”
Sunday gives her a look meant to make clear that he has done no kindness worth thanking him for. Wednesday pushes her glasses higher and lets the smile happen anyway, which appears to irritate him more than arguing would have.
“If the feeling is mine,” she says, returning her attention to the darkening water, “then I still have the problem of what I am meant to do with it.”
He studies her for long enough that Wednesday becomes conscious of the sentence she has chosen.
“You have barely established that the desire belongs to you, and already you are trying to give it an occupation.”
Wednesday frowns. “I am trying to determine its purpose.”
Sunday rests one forearm against the balustrade. “Desire is not one of your clerks, Temperance. You cannot issue it a post merely because its existence without assigned labour makes you uncomfortable.”
Wednesday turns to him, openly affronted now. “Wanting something without purpose is uncomfortable.”
Sunday remains unmoved. “Some feelings exist long before circumstance gives them any useful shape. Some never acquire one at all. You may dislike that arrangement as much as you please; it will not become less true because Temperance prefers a well-run office.”
She looks back toward the sea. “That sounds intolerably passive.”
Sunday’s thumb passes once along the edge of his cuff before falling still. “Courage is not the compulsion to act whenever action is available. There are things one wants badly enough to ruin by reaching for them. There are things force can obtain only after it has destroyed the very condition that made possession desirable.”
“So I may simply have to live with it,” she says after a while.
“For a time. Perhaps longer.”
The possibility makes something tighten beneath her ribs. “And if it changes me?”
Sunday looks at her again, and this time there is no impatience in it. “Temperance, of course it will change you. Anything allowed close enough to become part of your inner life does.”
Wednesday’s face must reveal more alarm than she intends, because his voice loses some of its severity.
“Change is not ruin,” he says. “You, of all people, should know the difference.”
That quiets her.
Sunday lets the thought remain between them for a while before continuing. “Wanting the Spectrian General gives you no claim on her. Whatever you feel, it creates no obligation on her side and grants you no special permission to cross whatever boundaries she sets. You remain responsible for what you choose to do with the feeling; she remains responsible for what she chooses to permit.”
Wednesday thinks immediately of the corridor: Kohana looking straight at the evidence that she had been crying, recognising it, and leaving the reason untouched because Wednesday had not offered it.
Something of the memory must reach her face. Sunday watches her for a moment before asking what she is thinking.
“She notices me,” Wednesday says.
Sunday’s displeasure returns so promptly that she almost smiles.
“Yesterday I walked into a pillar,” she continues, already regretting the route her explanation has taken. “I apologised to it.”
Sunday turns his head and stares at her.
Wednesday’s voice diminishes. “It startled me.”
He brings two fingers to the bridge of his nose, pressing the place where his glasses ordinarily sit. Wednesday allows him several seconds to endure this information in whatever manner Courage requires.
“The Spectrian General saw you apologising to architecture,” he says eventually.
“She remembered it,” Wednesday corrects, because that is the important part. “She remembered which pillar.”
Sunday lowers his hand. The particular displeasure that returns to his face appears to be directed entirely toward Kohana, who has committed the apparently grave offence of retaining information.
Wednesday studies him cautiously. “You seem unhappy about that.”
“I am unhappy about most developments involving this woman.”
The answer contains enough truth to discourage further investigation, so Wednesday lets that portion of the subject live.
“She noticed my glasses too.”
Sunday glances at the red frames on Wednesday’s face and then back at her, evidently waiting for the significance to present itself.
Wednesday sighs. “She said they were red.”
His expression does not improve.
“I know,” Wednesday says. “That is exactly how she reacted when I tried to explain why it mattered.”
Wednesday touches one corner of the frame. “Nobody needs to notice them. They have no bearing on whether I perform my duties properly. Neither does the way I hold a tray when I am nervous, or which pillar I walked into, or whether I watch somebody’s hands when I am trying not to look at their face.” Her fingers fall away from the glasses. “She keeps finding things about me that are useless.”
The word sits strangely in Wednesday’s mouth. She looks out over the water before she continues.
“I spent a very long time becoming useful enough that nobody needed anything else from me. If I was helpful, if I remembered what was required, if I anticipated what our Lord needed before he asked, then there was no reason for anyone to wonder what remained underneath all of that.”
Sunday says nothing. Wednesday can feel his attention on her, but for once it does not make her hurry.
“Miss Zhùróng wonders,” she says. “Sometimes she asks. More often she simply looks long enough that I realise she has noticed something I never considered worth hiding because I never considered it worth seeing.”
The folded glasses rest across Sunday’s palm while he considers her.
“She is insufferable,” he says after a while, with the gravity of a formal conclusion, “but she is not stupid. If she is paying attention to you, I doubt she is doing so accidentally.”
Wednesday looks at him. For Sunday, this borders so closely on praise that she decides not to endanger it by pointing that out.
Instead she says, very quietly, “That is why I came to you.”
His eyes shift toward her.
“I respect your judgment,” Wednesday continues, and now that the words have begun she cannot seem to stop them before they expose more than she intended. “You understand what it is to have a purpose become so large that it is difficult to tell where the purpose ends and you begin. And you understand devotion, probably better than anyone I—”
“Temperance.”
She stops.
Sunday has turned toward the sea again. The severity has not left his face, but something in it has become more carefully held. Wednesday understands that she has gone far enough.
After a few seconds, Sunday reaches into his breast pocket and produces a clean handkerchief, offering it without looking at her.
Wednesday blinks at the immaculate square of linen. “I’m not crying.”
“At present.”
She gives him an injured look, but takes it. Sunday keeps his attention on the sea while she folds the handkerchief once between her fingers, then again before noticing what she is doing and stopping.
“For what it is worth,” he says, “if the Spectrian General gives me reason to believe she has treated you carelessly, my already limited patience with her will become considerably more limited.”
Wednesday looks at him. Sunday sounds less like a warrior promising retaliation than a man who has already compiled a substantial list of grievances and would deeply resent being handed another.
Wednesday turns the folded handkerchief between her fingers. “And if I am the careless one?”
Sunday looks at her fully. “Then you will answer for what you have done. My dislike of the woman does not make her any less sovereign over herself. You asked me what Courage requires of wanting. Sometimes it requires accepting that the person you want remains entirely capable of refusing you, disappointing you, choosing somebody else, or walking away.”
The evening wind moves through Sunday’s hair, drawing the long curls over one shoulder. Wednesday thinks again of the glance he gave the palace and decides, with an unusual burst of wisdom, not to ask what that particular knowledge has cost him.
“I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she admits.
Sunday’s expression takes on the weary patience of someone discovering that the lesson has survived, but the student remains. “You have already spoken to the Spectrian General. Whatever happened in that corridor did not kill either of you. Speak to her again when you have something you actually wish to say.”
Wednesday’s face warms. “I cannot walk up to her and explain that I have isolated Alpha as a variable and determined that my attraction persists independently of him.”
Sunday looks at her. Wednesday hears the sentence properly only after it has finished leaving her mouth.
“T-that is not how I would phrase it.”
“A pity.” The corner of Sunday’s mouth gives the smallest treacherous movement. “It is the most compelling argument you have made all evening for telling her.”
“She would think I was insane.”
“The Spectrian General has spent enough time in this palace to recalibrate her standards.”
Wednesday presses the handkerchief over her mouth, partly because she is appalled and partly because a laugh is attempting escape.
Sunday lets her struggle with it for a moment before gesturing toward the arch. “Go somewhere that is no longer my terrace. Think about what you actually want from her before you turn the question into another experiment.”
Wednesday rises reluctantly. “That is considerably less useful than an instruction.”
“Then perhaps you are beginning to understand why I refused to give you one.”
She starts toward the arch and catches her sleeve on one of the carved coral branches beside it. The fabric jerks her backwards, nearly sending Sunday’s handkerchief from her fingers. Wednesday fumbles with the snag for several increasingly mortifying seconds before Sunday finally reaches over, frees the caught fold with one impatient tug, and releases it.
“Thank you,” she mutters.
He has already returned to the balustrade. Wednesday smooths her sleeve and makes it almost through the arch before his voice follows her.
“Temperance.”
She looks back. Sunday has unfolded his glasses at last. He settles the elegant rimless rectangles back onto his face and adjusts them once at the bridge, restoring that severe civility between himself and the world.
“If this conversation is ever reported to the Spectrian General,” he says, “I objected throughout.”
“You did,” Wednesday says.
The simple agreement carries enough finality that she knows she has been dismissed. Still, she lingers for another second with his handkerchief held carefully between both hands.
“Thank you, Sunday.”
He turns toward the water rather than answer, making one small motion of his fingers that could mean go, enough, or perhaps something kinder that he has no intention of putting into language.
Wednesday accepts all three and leaves.
Her footsteps diminish through the archway until the terrace belongs to the wind again.
Only then does Sunday let his attention wander back toward the palace. The western windows have begun catching the last red of evening; somewhere beyond them are His Majesty’s rooms, invisible from where he stands but unnecessary to locate by sight.
Kohana has become troublesome in ways Sunday anticipated and in ways he did not. His Majesty indulges her; Temperance has begun listening for her in corridors; half the household seems to possess some story involving her. Now Sunday himself has surrendered the better part of an evening to discussing the ethics of wanting because of her.
He turns back toward the sea before the thought can acquire a name and watches the road of sunlight narrow, break apart, and disappear beneath the dark water.
