“Gentlemen! To the front, please,” the steward said. Belatedly, Kiem held out his hand, and they both turned toward the reporters. Hren flashed him a hand signal that meant Kiem was booked for interviews afterward.
“Your Highness? Count Jainan?” a reporter called out. “What does it feel like to be married?”
“Wonderful,” Jainan said. Kiem felt a tremor go through Jainan’s hand.
That question had been directed at Kiem. He pulled up a smile from somewhere. He didn’t want to know what it looked like. “Great!” he said. “It’s great.”
CHAPTER 4
The empty hoverchest bobbed in the middle of Taam’s rooms, but Jainan didn’t start packing straightaway when he returned. Instead he sank into a chair and held his head tightly, tightly, as if he could squeeze his skull into a better shape and relieve the pressure.
In the few words he and Prince Kiem had exchanged after the ruined ceremony—the ceremony Jainan had ruined—Jainan had tried to find an opportunity to apologize but hadn’t been able to get the words out. Stupid. Useless. All he’d managed to do was turn down Prince Kiem’s offer to help with the packing and retreat, like a coward, to Taam’s rooms. Leaving Prince Kiem to think him ungrateful as well as unfit. He had turned down the post-ceremony interview requests, as well, and hadn’t realized until it was too late that Prince Kiem seemed to have accepted them and had gone off to give the interviews on his own.
Jainan’s head gave another stab of pain. There was always some negotiation around the terms of the vassals’ treaties before the Resolution agreement set everything in stone for the next twenty years. Thea was not a significant political force and did not have the leverage to negotiate more favorable terms. It was the smallest of the Empire’s seven planets; it clung to its allied province status and the independence it brought. Jainan needed Prince Kiem on his side. He had made an appalling start today.
It wasn’t really a surprise that Jainan had made a poor impression. Prince Kiem was confident, charismatic, and as good-looking as Taam had been. Like Taam—like any Iskat royal—Kiem would expect his public and personal life to go smoothly. He had clearly been doing his best to conceal his disappointment in his marriage that morning. Prince Kiem was at least less naive than Jainan had been.
Enough. Jainan rose to his feet. This was self-pity. He had only one duty now—to keep up appearances in his new marriage—and even if he could never be liked, he could at least be agreeable. He wouldn’t cause inconvenience by delaying his packing.
He moved mechanically around the familiar rooms, gathering his possessions and fitting them into the chest. He’d always been neat and he’d tried to keep it that way. It surprised him, though, how little space everything packed down into. His devices, toiletries, and shoes filled only a fraction of the chest. The clothes took longer, as he pulled them out of the wardrobe one by one, trying not to touch Taam’s uniforms that still hung there. He’d meant to send someone a memo about them. His head was all over the place these days.
He had run a superficial search on Prince Kiem when he’d first been given his name. The results seemed hopeless: Prince Kiem at parties, Prince Kiem with a string of partners, and one report where he was apparently tipsy and balancing on a statue in Arlusk’s main square. Jainan knew there was nothing he could do to appeal to someone like that. The only glimmer of hope had been something buried in a long profile by a gossip log: Prince Kiem says he’s easygoing, it said. He likes to enjoy life. Ask him about his career, and he’ll only tell you he didn’t join the army because it sounded like too much hard work. You certainly won’t catch him advising the Emperor.
Jainan hadn’t read further. If Kiem liked things to be easy, Jainan could at least manage that.
The rooms’ storage units were concealed cunningly in the Iskat style, slotted gracefully into the curved white pillars and walls, their handles invisible until you touched the right spot. Jainan opened them all, checking he had missed nothing of his among Taam’s possessions. He didn’t touch any of the contents. But in the lowest unit in the corner, which only opened halfway because of Taam’s desk, he found a box at the back with Thean scribing on it.
His hands slowed as he slid the lid away. He hadn’t seen these in years. A Thean ceremonial knife he’d once thought he would wear at his wedding. A clan flag from his aunt. A slim paper volume of classical poems Ressid had given him, insisting they wouldn’t be available in the Empire—Jainan was not a poetry reader, but he had never been able to convince Ressid of that. He cut off the memory swiftly before it made him unnecessarily maudlin.
These things didn’t really have a place here. Perhaps it was finally time to clear them out. But even as he thought that, he found himself taking the box and packing it in the bottom of the hoverchest. There would be another corner for it, maybe. He’d probably lose it again; he seemed to have been getting steadily less organized over the past few years. Taam would have laughed.
As Jainan turned back from the hoverchest, his wristband gave a chirp that meant it had hit another error. It had been behaving erratically for weeks. Jainan tried to clear the error, but as he did, he saw it was pinging Taam’s account to refresh a backup file. Taam had always stored some of his backup accounts on Jainan’s device. Jainan had forgotten.
His headache sent up another flare of pain at this unexpected responsibility. He tried to convince himself it wasn’t important. The investigators looking into the flybug crash already had all the data from Taam’s devices. Jainan could be forgiven for just ignoring this.
He had never ignored something that had to be done, though. He shut his eyes for a brief instant, breathed out, and brought up a small screen from his wristband to call Internal Security.
The call didn’t go through to the agent working on the case, of course. They had stopped answering him some time ago, when the investigation wound down. The person who appeared on the screen was a low-level Human Intelligence processor.
They recognized Jainan immediately, smoothing out their expression and resigning themself to wasting their time in a way that made Jainan’s skin crawl. He knew they did not consider him credible.
“Yes, Your Grace?”
“I wanted to inform you that I found some more of Taam’s files,” Jainan said. He could hear himself sound even more stiff and formal than usual. “I believe it to be a backup. It is protected by a passphrase.”
Taam’s various messaging and storage accounts had been a tangle of different encryption layers, all of which were compulsory for military officers. Jainan knew Internal Security had managed to get most of the relevant keys and passphrases from Taam’s superiors, but it seemed nobody had known Taam well enough to have a full overview of his life. That person should have been Jainan.
“The investigation isn’t currently active, sir,” the agent said.
“I know.”
The agent paused. “Please pass us a copy and then delete it. Someone may visit to ensure it’s been completely wiped.”
“I will have moved quarters.”
“Yes,” the agent said. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know where Jainan was going. “Thank you for your information.”