“What rumor?”
“That Kiem’s the one who was violent to you.” Bel said.
She said something after that, but Jainan didn’t hear it. He had to stare at her and follow her lips until his brain started to make sense of what he heard again. “… after you had that argument at dinner, it’s muddied the waters, and a couple of anti-royalist newslogs on Iskat got hold of it somehow…”
He ceased to hear her again. He felt as though his skin had been stripped away and every particle sleeting through the universe could now hammer into his exposed flesh, tearing away what he used to defend his core. His fingers were numb; his muscles no longer worked.
“Jainan?”
Jainan realized Bel had spoken to him more than once. With an effort, he cut short the fugue state that wanted to take hold of his mind. “Oh,” he said.
“Shut the hell up,” Bel said, jabbing something beside his bed. The beeping that had filled the air stopped. “Jainan? Didn’t mean to give you a relapse. Kiem’s denied it, of course, but nobody knows about you and Taam. It’s hard to explain away some of the evidence without—you know.”
Without telling the truth about Jainan and Taam’s real relationship, which Kiem wouldn’t do. Of course. “It’s not a relapse,” Jainan said. Oddly, his head now felt very clear. “Bel, could I ask a favor of you?”
“Break you out of the med room?” Bel said, only semi-facetiously.
“Not quite,” Jainan said. “I would like the contact details for the Emperor’s Private Office.”
Bel raised her eyebrows. “Going straight to the top? It didn’t work so well for Kiem. She’ll just tell you to keep everything under wraps.”
“I understand,” Jainan said. He did, that was the thing. It was a delicate matter. “I don’t plan to ask her to do anything. I would also like you to contact a visitor for me.”
Ten minutes and a few calls later, Bel and Gairad had gone—Gairad to reassure Professor Audel and Bel to message Kiem. Jainan waited in bed, keyed up to unbearable levels, and jumped as the door chimed.
“Your Grace?”
“Hani Sereson,” Jainan said. He held himself as straight as he could, sitting up in bed. “I hoped you were on the press list. Do come in.”
The journalist gave him a blinding professional smile and sketched a bow. “I must say, I didn’t think I’d ever hear from you like this.” Her eyes flicked over his body and the drip in his wrist with a hungry shimmer of silver. “We heard you were ill. All of us were wondering if you were well enough for the ceremonies.”
“I’m saving my energy. Forgive me for not rising to greet you,” Jainan said. “And thank you for coming on such short notice.” He opened his hand to indicate a chair Bel had brought in from the corridor.
“Believe me, no journalist would turn down a message like the one I just received.” Hani sat down and crossed one leg over the other. “I do hope you’re recovering well from … well, it looks like you’ve been through some kind of ordeal.” Her hand hovered over an expensive mic button, which she detached from her collar and left to float in the air between them. “Do you mind if I record this conversation?”
Jainan’s smile came from some deep, sharp place within him. “Of course not,” he said. “In fact, I would be very pleased if you would.”
CHAPTER 30
“I see where you’re coming from,” Kiem said into the recording. “I want you to know that it’s not true, but I get that you have to tell reporters you’ve done something. Fine. You want me to resign as a patron, I’ll do that.” He swallowed another spike of frustration. “Let me know if I can find you someone else, though. You should have someone from the palace on the board.” He paused. “Stay in touch.”
He cut the recording to the latest charity and slumped back from the tiny desk. The steel of the chair dug into his shoulder muscles. He stretched his arms out. The room was large enough for him to do that, at least, though his knuckles grazed the frame of the bunk bed.
But his surroundings were luxurious compared to what they might have been. The armored core of the station had a holding room that Internal Security used for who knew what nefarious purposes, and when the military and civilian wrangling had been sorted out, that was where Kiem had ended up. For a holding cell, it didn’t lack for frills: there was a tiny bathroom, an exercise machine, and even a flickering screen with hundreds of preprogrammed media in the corner.
Depending on how you looked at it, it might not even be a cell. The door wasn’t locked, just guarded by agents with instructions to keep him in and no sense of humor. Kiem had played with the idea of seeing if he could bluff his way past them to get to Jainan’s med room but had reluctantly abandoned it after the first unsuccessful attempt. It would be a bad idea to make the Emperor any more furious than she already was. He had Bel and Jainan to think about.
He knew what the newslogs were saying. Bel had started sending him copies as soon as they realized Aren, even in detention, had managed to make good on his threat to smear them. Kiem had winced at the abduction articles, but at least they were true. Then the first accusation that Kiem mistreated Jainan had appeared in a small-time gossip log on Thea: it had spread from there to fringe newslogs and anti-royalist streams across both Thea and Iskat, who’d all eaten up the scandal. It wasn’t hard to find pictures of Kiem looking drunk and unreliable. One of the newslogs had even decided their wedding photos looked miserable enough to illustrate the article; Kiem had abandoned his reading at that point and gone to bed. Then he’d asked Bel to stop sending cuttings.
His latest message of resignation—this one his third, for an education charity—hung as a small glowing circle above the table. Kiem drummed his fingers on the edge of the table, outside the sensor area, and sent it before he could give in to temptation and add anything else. His messages were getting more like babbling as the hours went on. He should stick to writing, but even talking to an imaginary recipient staved off the awful silence of not having anyone to talk to. He had seen only Internal Security agents for the past four days, usually Rakal or one of their interchangeable deputies. He was going to go mad if this carried on too long.
When the message was gone, he put his head down on the desk. What he wanted to do was send a message to Jainan—an honest one—but he knew Rakal’s people were reviewing everything that went through his account while he was in here, and he wasn’t going to hand them anything else about Jainan or Taam. It had to wait until Jainan woke up. Whenever he did wake up.
He made himself breathe out slowly. What he needed was a fraction of Jainan’s calm. When things went wrong for Jainan, he didn’t flap around uselessly like Kiem. He just got … more focused. For a moment Kiem wasn’t even afraid for him, he just missed him. Just not having Jainan there hurt.
A message added itself to the depressingly short list in the corner of the desk. Kiem abandoned his attempt at serenity to see what it was.
It was from Bel. Kiem wasn’t expecting much: his messages to and from Bel were short and businesslike, so neither of them accidentally contradicted the details about Taam that Kiem had fudged in his original story. This one was short even by her standards, though, and contained a clipping with a single line above it.