Bel gave a quiet hah. Her opinion of Hren Halesar wasn’t high. “I hope Press Office is really enjoying today’s coverage, then. Want to see the reports? They made me laugh,” she added, which was never a good sign.
“Let’s see the damage.” Kiem threw himself onto the couch. It was going to be a far cry from the glowing coverage of Jainan’s first wedding. “Shit, Jainan’s schedule. I should have asked him—” He broke off, glancing at the closed door of the bedroom.
“He’s awake,” Bel said. “He went out to exercise in the garden.”
“He did?” Kiem crossed over to the big windows and looked out into the courtyard gardens, where slender trees rose from between the paths in the shadow of the palace towers. The sun glowed white behind a haze of freezing mist.
Jainan was a whirl of movement in the space between the trees. He held a stick in his hands and went through some kind of martial arts drill like it was a dance, so fast that the stick was almost blurred as he spun and thrust. His undershirt left his arms bare to the shoulder even in the morning cold. His feet crunched into the frosted grass. Kiem stared.
“Quarterstaff,” Bel said. “It’s a Thean thing. I’ll send you a primer.”
Kiem made himself turn away from the window, rubbing a hand across his forehead. He had no right to be staring, not after he had screwed up so spectacularly last night. “Right. Yeah. Thanks.” He should at least know what it was, if Jainan was that good at it.
“Headache?” Bel said. She was giving him her neutral private secretary look.
“Sort of,” Kiem said. He saw her glance at the folded sheet and groaned. “Oh, look, fine. I might need another pillow for the couch. Don’t leak it to the newslogs.”
Bel, uncharacteristically, hesitated. “I can get you another bed.”
“Not worth the risk,” Kiem said.
“A folding bed, then,” Bel said.
“The couch is fine.”
“The couch is not fine. Nobody will see a folding bed.”
Kiem found he was leaning back against the wall. He drummed his fingers on it. He wasn’t used to feeling defensive. “Yeah, all right. Whatever.”
“Kiem,” Bel said bluntly. “Are you okay?”
Kiem opened his mouth, then shut it again. How did you say that? How did you say, My partner thinks it’s his duty to sleep with me, even though he isn’t into it in the slightest? Kiem hadn’t ever been in bed with someone who wasn’t fully on board with the idea, and he’d now discovered he didn’t like it one bit. He couldn’t remember what he’d done to give Jainan the wrong impression. He’d thought Jainan had been flirting. He’d been badly wrong.
But none of those were things he could air out of the bedroom, even to Bel. “Yeah. It’s not me you should be feeling sorry for.” He gave his best nonchalant shrug. “Could have been worse. I know a whole bunch about heraldry now. Ask me about clan patterns. Now let’s see those cuttings.”
He reached over to the table for the red press folder, a collection of text filmies between discreet blank covers. It updated itself every day but he usually dipped into it once a week or so, just to check that there wasn’t anything awful. As he sat down and opened it, a fan of images reshuffled themselves above their accompanying articles. Most of them showed the post-wedding kiss or the official final photo—Jainan’s smile was sweet and dignified, Kiem’s looked inane, but that was normal—but a couple of the newslogs had gone with shots of them signing the contracts. Kiem’s hand still had red ink on it.
Kiem looked morbidly over the headlines that went with them. Restrained but romantic: Prince Kiem marries Thean count in discreet ceremony. The Resolution and the treaty renewal had been discreetly relegated to the second paragraph. And another one: Prince K’s royal wedding—it’s the perfect match. They’d put in the quotes from his press statement, which he’d virtuously stuck to during all the interviews afterward. Kiem was usually not that bothered about press coverage, unless it actually got him exiled, but he could imagine what Jainan would think when he saw those articles. Most of them had raked up Taam as well, in a “tragically grieving Jainan finds love again” way that made Kiem feel ill. It would almost have been better if they’d gone all-out on the Galactic politics.
“Turn over,” Bel said.
“I don’t think I want to.” Kiem turned to the back, where the press office usually put the negatives. Two images appeared of them all trying to rescue the documents from a pool of spilled ink and Kiem looking perilously close to laughing. Luckily they hadn’t gotten Jainan in those shots. Then the third came up.
The kiss itself was fine. There were only so many ways a kiss could photograph badly. But one of the aggregators had managed to get Kiem approaching Jainan just a few seconds before it, and it was easy to read the panic on Kiem’s face. Forced for the Galactics? the headline blared. Playboy prince hitched to Thean after last partner’s death.
Kiem slammed the folder shut and put his head in his hands. He bet that had been Dak. They’d have blacklisted whoever sold the photo, but that didn’t help now. “Don’t show Jainan that,” he said. “Do you think he reads the news? Shit, of course he reads the news.”
“How much context do you want?” Bel said. She held out another folder.
Kiem looked up at her. It was the same press-office red, but it had a different serial number on the front. “Where did you get this?” He opened it to find the folder packed with headlines and tiny newslog articles, so dense that he had to touch an individual article to enlarge it. The one he’d picked turned out to be something incomprehensible about trade tariffs. The newslog it came from was unfamiliar.
“Press Office. It’s a copy of the Thean Affairs folder,” Bel said. “Thean sources. I thought you might want to stay up to date, but I’ll send it back if you don’t.”
Kiem nodded slowly. The mass of text made his brain hurt, but it usually paid to listen to Bel. “I guess we should have it for Jainan, anyway.”
“Jainan—that was another thing,” Bel said. She turned to the desk and picked up a pearly, bubble-like diagnostic shell wrapped around a wristband that wasn’t hers. She threw the diagnostic display up on the wall. It blinked up an error and a passphrase request. “Jainan and Prince Taam seemed to have shared accounts. Prince Taam’s has been deactivated, so the system keeps trying to wipe Jainan’s.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Kiem said, holding up his hands. “Shared personal accounts? Maybe Jainan and Taam shared an official account.”
“Jainan said he didn’t have an official one,” Bel said. “This is the only one the wristband has access to.” She clasped her fingers together, and the warning disappeared. “His account was a subsidiary. If he gave his passphrase I could tie it to yours instead, but then you’d be able to see his messages.”
Kiem pressed his knuckles against his forehead. Every time he turned around he seemed to see the shadow of Jainan and Taam’s marriage. It seemed pretty unlikely that he and Jainan would ever be close enough to read each other’s messages. It didn’t even sound that romantic to Kiem, which was probably further proof they were badly matched.