Chapter 27: What the King Reads in Private
Chapter Twenty-Seven: What the King Reads in Private
"Carriage," Bhaltair said, appearing in the doorway with none of his earlier calm left in his voice at all. "His own colors. No mistaking it. Third street and closing."
Osmund didn’t waste a single motion on panic. He crossed the room, hauled a section of shelving away from the wall with the practiced ease of a man who had built this exact escape into his own house on purpose, and gestured Milo toward the black gap behind it.
"In. Now. Don’t argue with me about dignity, there isn’t time for it."
Milo went. The shelf swung shut behind him with a soft, final click, and the world narrowed down to a sliver of lamplight bleeding through the gap at the hinge and the specific, suffocating awareness of his own heartbeat.
"You’re certain he won’t check," Milo whispered, barely breath, barely sound at all.
"I’m certain he won’t think to," Osmund whispered back, already straightening his coat, already becoming, in the space of one breath, a different and more composed man entirely. "That’s not the same thing, and it’s the only thing keeping either of us alive right now, so let’s not test the difference tonight."
Milo understood, crouched in the dark with his own pulse deafening in his ears, exactly why Osmund sounded so certain.
A man who owned an unkillable army, who could bend anyone’s knees with a look and never once needed to raise his own voice to be obeyed, had never in his life needed to develop the specific, humble habit of double-checking his own work. Why would he. Verification was for men who could fail. The King’s Claim had never failed him, not once, not in twenty years of casual, occasional use — and a man that thoroughly convinced of his own infallibility simply didn’t waste his considerable attention wondering whether tonight might be the exception. He would walk into this room assuming Loof was exactly where the Claim had left him, doing exactly what a claimed man was supposed to be doing, because the alternative had simply never once needed to occur to him.
Overconfidence, Milo thought, crouched in a dark that smelled like old paper and older dust, was apparently the one crack absolute power never bothered patching, because absolute power had never once been forced to notice it was there.
The King’s voice, when it finally arrived, was nothing like the version Milo had spent the last several hours afraid of. It was light. Almost giddy.
"Osmund! Wonderful, you’re actually home, I half expected to have to send someone chasing after you across three provinces the way I usually do."
"Your Majesty honors my house," Osmund said, and Milo, listening through a gap barely wide enough for sound, marveled at how completely the warmth in his voice matched exactly the same register Milo had heard him use minutes ago on Milo himself. Whatever else the man was, he was extraordinarily good at building rooms that felt safe to whoever currently stood in them.
"Don’t waste the flattery, I’m not staying." Something rustled — parchment, or a list, Milo couldn’t tell which. "I need something from outside the border. The southern trade route, the one only you seem to manage without losing half the cargo to bandits or bad weather. There’s a new printing out of the free cities. Seven volumes. The Lay of Kaledros — the whole cycle, not the abridged nonsense the local copyists keep butchering. I want the real thing, properly bound, before the season turns."
Milo felt something in his chest go very still and very cold, because he already knew, with the specific dread of a man watching a joke land exactly where he’d feared it would, precisely what that title was and precisely what it meant that the King wanted every volume of it delivered to his own private hand.
"Forgive my asking, Your Majesty," Osmund said, careful, the particular careful of a man who has learned exactly how much curiosity he’s allowed to spend on a King who owns his loyalty outright, "but The Lay of Kaledros is a saga. A story. I’d assumed—"
"You’d assumed I only read the practical things. Ledgers, treaties, the occasional skill manual worth the parchment it’s copied onto." The King’s laugh was easy, unbothered, entirely without shame. "I do read those too, don’t misunderstand me. A king who doesn’t understand his own tax structure is a fool wearing a crown. But stories, Osmund — stories are the only thing in this entire kingdom I’ve never once had to pretend to enjoy for someone else’s benefit. I have forty-one of them, properly catalogued, in a room three of my own ministers don’t know exists."
"And the ban on commoners owning the same," Osmund said, and Milo, hidden in the dark, held his breath at the sheer nerve of the question, "Your Majesty finds that—"
"Necessary," the King said, without even the smallest pause to consider it. "Come now. You already know the answer, you’re simply testing whether I’ll say it out loud twice in one evening for you." Amusement threaded through every word of it, light, entirely untroubled. "A commoner who reads a story starts imagining a life he wasn’t born into. That’s dangerous, Osmund — genuinely, structurally dangerous, the kind of danger that ends kingdoms if you let it breed long enough unwatched. I am not a commoner. I have already imagined every life worth imagining and chosen, quite deliberately, to remain exactly the one I currently occupy. The danger the ban exists to prevent simply doesn’t apply to a man who has nothing left to be tempted away from."
"Of course," Osmund said. "How foolish of me to have wondered."
"Don’t sulk about it, it’s an entirely sensible policy and you know it." Something shifted — boots, a chair, the sound of a man readying himself to leave rather than settle in. "Seven volumes. Properly bound. I’ll have coin sent by morning, and Osmund—" a pause, and even through a plank of wood and a curtain of shadow, Milo heard the smile reattach itself to every word, "—do try to resist reading them yourself before delivery this time. I noticed the binding on the last set. You’re not as careful with the spine as you think you are."
"I make no promises, Your Majesty."
"No," the King said, delighted. "I don’t imagine you do."
The carriage took considerably longer to leave than Milo expected, and by the time the shelf finally swung open and let him back out into real light, his knees had gone stiff enough that standing took more effort than the conversation he’d just overheard.
"He does this," Osmund said, before Milo could ask, already pouring two more glasses like his hands needed something normal to do. "Once or twice a year. Some new printing catches his attention, and I become, for exactly as long as the errand takes, his favorite person in the kingdom." He handed Milo a glass, and something dry and exhausted moved behind his eyes. "The ban’s never been about the stories themselves, Loof. It’s never even really been about danger. He simply cannot stand the idea of anyone owning something he hasn’t personally decided they’re allowed to want."
"I know," Milo said, and something in his own voice must have carried more certainty than the moment strictly called for, because Osmund’s eyes sharpened on him immediately.
"You know."
"I know he has forty-one volumes in a room three ministers don’t know about," Milo said, slowly, feeling his way forward the way he felt his way through every hard truth this story handed him. "I know he prefers sagas to anything practical, whatever he tells himself about ledgers. And I know—" he hesitated, weighing exactly how much of this was safe to say out loud, and decided, watching Osmund’s patient, unoffended stillness, that a man who’d just heard this much honesty probably deserved a little more of it, "—I know Loof has stolen from that same collection before. More than once. It was reckless. It was also, apparently, the only genuinely rebellious thing he ever did before tonight."
Osmund set his glass down very carefully. "That’s not knowledge a stranger to this story should have."
"No," Milo agreed. "It isn’t."
Neither of them said anything for a long moment, and it was Milo, in the end, who broke it, because the idea sitting in his chest had grown too large to keep politely quiet about.
"You can get books out of this kingdom that no one else can touch," he said. "Not just stories. Skill manuals too — you said it yourself, he trusts you with exactly that kind of cargo, because you’ve never once given him a reason not to." He set his own glass down, untouched, and made himself hold Osmund’s gaze the way he’d learned to hold difficult things directly instead of glancing away from them. "I need to get stronger, Osmund. Considerably stronger, considerably faster than any normal path would allow, and I don’t have the years this story seems to think I’m entitled to spend earning it the ordinary way. If I told you why — if I told you exactly what I actually am, and how I learn, and what that could mean for both of us if you helped me do it properly — would you be willing to hear it, even knowing it’s going to sound like the kind of thing that gets a man locked in a very different sort of room than the one you keep hiding people in?"
Osmund studied him for a long, unreadable moment, the same stillness he’d worn listening to a King discuss his private library now turned fully toward the stranger sitting across his own fire.
"Bhaltair," he said, without looking away from Milo once, "close the door. I think our guest is finally about to tell me the truth."