[CH I]

Air rushed back into my lungs and I choked on it, coughing, grabbing out at whatever was near me before I even opened my eyes, almost before I was even aware of being conscious again. My hands seized into rough fabric and leather, and I was suddenly cradled up against a warm, familiar body, strong arms curling around me. Keyd.

"Alan," I heard, somewhere miles above my head, a muted sound that felt like it was coming from underwater, followed by a rush of quiet noises. The only thing I really understood out of it was my name. I could hardly comprehend that Keyd was talking at all, let alone try and figure out what he was saying. His words were just sliding by me, slipping across my brain without catching and grabbing on.

I dragged my eyes open, and brilliant white sunlight seared right into my brain, starting a murderous headache pounding at my temples. Something surged and rolled in my chest, up into my throat, and I twisted as much as I could in Keyd's arms before I threw up, choking and retching. I heard it splatter against the ground, and the sound of my own thick and desperate breathing echoed in my ears. It felt like it had been years since there'd been oxygen in my lungs. My heart felt weird and rubbery in my chest, beating at a blubbering rhythm that just made the nausea worse. I could feel energy going haywire and insane around me, sparking off of everything and crackling in the air, running along my skin and surging through my body.

Keyd's arms were still around me, holding me close against him with his hands twisted up in my clothes, and I was just glad I hadn't thrown up on him. That'd've been really gross.

"Keyd," I managed to say, but my voice came out really thick and bubbly. I cleared my throat, which made my head swim, so I gave up on speaking. I tried opening my eyes instead—everything seemed over-bright and shimmery and unfocused. But I could see that I was on the ground, the upper half of me mostly across Keyd's knees where he was kneeling in the dust. I could hear people yelling and running around, dimly, in the background, but it was all under the roaring and ringing in my ears.

I stared up at Keyd and tried to center on his face. He was leaning over me, his arms under mine and curling up around my back, holding me up. The sky was a white supernova behind him, throwing halos and flares of light behind his head and shoulders, and I saw mostly shadows in his face, little shimmering blobs swimming over him every time I blinked. I worked my jaw a little bit, trying to talk again, and nothing really came out. My lips and tongue felt heavy and sluggish, like a bad trip to the dentist.

I reached up—my hand was trembly and kind of numb feeling—and rested it on the side of his head, touching his hair. He leant down a little closer, his own shadow blocking the sun and pulling his face into better focus. His eyes were wide and his pupils were blown out about as big and black as they could go. He was breathing roughly through his teeth and he was shaking.

"Alan—" he said again, and his voice sounded so weak and scared that I knew something was really wrong. Well, obviously something was wrong, I didn't usually throw up and lose my ability to talk and have my body feel like a power switching station every day. But something that was making Keyd lose it like this had to be kind of crazy. He didn't get upset easily.

"Keyd—I—what," I managed to say, but it came out kind of goopy and slurred. My thoughts were bouncing around so fast and wild that I couldn't even catch one of them to form a coherent sentence, not even to ask what the fuck had just happened. But the thick ringing in my ears was dying down a little, and my vision was getting better. I tried to sit up a little, and Keyd instantly moved to grab me, helping me get up into a half-sit. Just doing that was exhausting, and I slumped against his shoulder, rolling my eyes back and forth because I didn't have the muscle control to use my whole head to look around.

Keyd and I were on the ground by the huge wooden front gate of the barracks. When had we gotten over here? The last thing I remembered was talking with Rysa and Damao back near the soldier's bunks. Keyd had taken my hand, and then—I couldn't remember what had happened to get us over here, on the ground, in the dusty grass. And something was seriously wrong with the bond. The part that went between myself and Keyd was wildly out of control, buzzing and jangling with an overload of energy. But the half connecting me to Rysa felt mostly normal, if not a little more tense than usual, and close. Close enough to mean that she literally had to be standing less than ten feet from me.

And when I squinted a little harder to focus on stuff around me, she was. Standing a little bit away, looming over a guy lying on the ground. He was all wrapped up in thick black lines, a little bit of blackish-purple smoke wafting off of them. That was Rysa's magic—I could see where the lines were attached up to her hands. She'd basically hog-tied this guy, whoever he was, and he was lying flat in the short grass, breathing through gritted teeth. I recognized him, suddenly—he was the same rookie kid who had seemed so angry at the little meet-and-greet session from before.

Behind Rysa, a bunch of soldiers had grouped around in little clusters, staring. Rysa was snapping at them a little, trying to shoe them all away, but they weren't really going anywhere. When the guy tied up on the ground started twisting and fighting and rolling around, she planted her boot in the middle of his back and shoved him back down. The kid hit the dirt face-first and lay still.

Rysa turned to us. "Mrikot agmi jinnhe?" she said, her voice curt and a little higher-pitched than normal. She also looked kind of pale and anxious. Dammit, why wasn't she using frequency? It was easy enough to understand what she'd said when I put a little effort into it—are you both all right—but I didn't want to deal with translating right now. My head hurt so much.

I tested out my voice again. "I think I'm okay," I said. It came out sounding pretty normal this time. I could feel my body again and I could see and hear and talk, so that felt okay enough for me. Except for the headache, and the way I felt like I'd stuck a fork in an electrical socket and then maybe licked a cattle prod. Keyd shifted a little, and when he moved I noticed that his wings were out, but kind of wilted and folded up and dragging in the dusty grass.

"Khe a degonjian bahn, heipan dejj," he growled at Rysa, and tightened his arms around me. Maybe whatever had just happened had knocked me out of frequency. And I really didn't think I could concentrate well enough to get back in it right now. Even though I did know some of this language now, Keyd had spoken fast and hard for me to catch. It sounded like he might have said something about killing somebody.

"Daval bahn," Rysa said. That one was easy—you can't.

"Shajran bahn ahsat," Keyd spat back—I don't care. His mismatched wings lifted up then and swept around us, the disconnected pieces crossing together in front of my face. It felt incredibly protective, like Keyd was shielding us from everything. He was also pretty close to choking me to death with his grip at this point, so I reached up and caught at his face, touching him in what I hoped was a gentle way. My body still felt weird and clumsy, so it was hard to tell exactly how my hands were working.

"Hey," I said to him. "Hey. It's okay. I'm okay." I think. "I want to get up."

Keyd shuddered a little, took a breath, and loosened up his arms just a little. Then he started to get to his feet, bringing me up with him at the same time. He was careful with me, steadying me every two seconds, and I had a feeling that he would have just picked me up and carried me in his arms if he hadn't known I'd give him hell for it.

Although, I might not have. Because when I got back to my feet again, I was shaking so hard I could barely keep myself that way. I had to sling my arm around Keyd's waist and hold myself up that way, with his arm around my back and under my shoulder. Keyd was still shaking a little himself, tremors that vibrated through him at the same time that weird zaps of energy would fire off him. Our bond felt like a stretched rubber band that had been twanged, vibrating like crazy.

"Kahyva a," Keyd said to Rysa, once we were mostly steady. She nodded, and made a sharp upwards motion with her hand, yanking on the black threads. The kid lying on the ground jerked up like a puppet, flailing to his feet with his arms still twisted and bound behind his back. The ropes of energy around his legs loosened up and disappeared, so he could balance on his own. A clump of hair had fallen over his eyes, and he was still breathing hard through his teeth, his face red and twisted in fury.

"Mrik bihyte kaatsri!" he spat out, and then literally spat, into the dust at Rysa's feet. Then he raised his head and glared straight at Keyd. "Mrikot chakt, jamativ jyet, kodaraemajvi iet kodro—"

Rysa made another little movement with her hand, I felt a shift in her energy, and a thicker rope of black-purple flickered out of her fingers and wrapped up the kid's mouth. His yelling turned into muffled mumbling, and he jerked so hard that almost lost his balance again. The only parts I'd understood of that had been the insults, which was most of it. Not mild ones, either.

"Issket cha," Rysa said to him, which basically meant shut up.

I kind of had no clue what the fuck was going on right now. All I really wanted to do was lie down somewhere and sleep off this massive headache. Maybe if I could understand what the hell people were saying around here, that would help a little. I took a second, focused, and brought myself back into alignment with the frequency. It was a little harder than normal with all this energy pulsing back and forth between me and Keyd. And because my head hurt so much. I felt like my skull was cracking open at the top of my spine.

A second later, Marjaehl came pushing his way through the crowd of rookies and soldiers and whatever other random people that had gathered around gawking. The woman who had hustled him away in the first place was right behind him. Instantly, Rysa drug the kid over to them, still stumbling and grunting and huffing out his nose, and shoved him back down to his knees in front of them.

"This soldier is under arrest," she said to Marjaehl. "For an undeclared attack on a legitimate government member and the antshil of the agistar. There was no incentive to attack or challenge issued, and they were not dueling."

"Hasjir Kojoa, is this true?" Marjaehl said, looking at the rookie in surprise.

"Mmnggh!" the kid said, his face now so red it was almost purple. Marjaehl nodded at Rysa, and she gave a reluctant flick of her fingers. The energy strands covering the kid's mouth broke apart and dissolved into the air, and he threw his shoulders back and tossed his black hair out of his face with a jerk of his head. He was still on his knees, but he wasn't acting like it. He started saying stuff to Marjaehl, but my head was hurting so bad that I couldn't even concentrate on it.

And I'd been listing slowly into Keyd as all this was going on, and the bond was still twanging away like mad and my eyes were burning and my stomach was twisting and churning. I felt awful, just fucking awful. Like I was going to throw up again or fall over or cry, or all three at the same time, and I seriously didn't want any of that to happen. Not in front of Marjaehl and a bunch of rookie soldiers I didn't know.

"Keyd," I said, in a pathetic little whisper, and he leaned closer in towards me. He still had one arm wrapped tightly under my shoulders to hold me up, and the other pressed firmly against the middle of my chest. His wings were still out; I could see one dark and shimmering in my side vision. "Keyd, I—I gotta sit down, or something. Just for a second, I'm sorry, but I really—have to—"

"Okay," Keyd said quietly. Rysa and Marjaehl were still talking, and the rookie kid was standing by, looking angry and insolent and with his entire upper body still wrapped up in Rysa's energy. Keyd tugged at me a little, and I let him guide me wherever he was moving, leaning against the side of his shoulder with almost my whole weight.

"Agistar Keydes—" I heard Marjaehl start from behind us, but Keyd must have done something, because he went quiet. Keyd and I moved into the cooler shadow of one of the barracks buildings, and I heard the sound of a door creaking open. My next step was on bare wooden flooring, the sound of our boots clunky and echoing around whatever room we'd just gone into.

I didn't even care where we were, because I saw a chair in front of me, and that I was all I wanted right now. I collapsed into it and hung my head between my knees, taking in long, steady breaths. Keyd knelt down next to me and put a hand on my shoulder and another on my back, rubbing it back and forth between my shoulder blades. I just kept breathing, concentrating on a steady rhythm, my eyes closed and hands gripping into my knees.

After a minute or two I didn't feel like crying or throwing up anymore, and I lifted my head up again. Keyd had rested his forehead against the back of the hand that he'd put on my shoulder. He still hadn't put his wings away, and the ends of them were trailing across the floor like pieces of broken dark glass. I touched his hair, stroking it back off his temple.

"I'm okay now," I said, even though my voice sounded rough and abused. Keyd jerked up at once, both his hands going to my face and cupping it gently.

"Alan," he said softly, and shuddered a little. He looked really—well, scared. And Keyd didn't look like that often.

"What the hell just happened out there? Who was that kid? And what the fuck did he do?" I said. Talking too loud hurt my head, so I had to whisper. Keyd pressed his lips together a little and stared hard at the arm of the chair. That was his version of a scowl.

"Kojoa Gannekein," he said, after a moment. He hesitated again before adding, "he's Arirsanya's son."

"Shit," I said. Had I known Arirsanya even had a son? I couldn't remember. But it looked like his giant assholiness was hereditary. That out-of-nowhere attack and the kid's near inability to be civil to Keyd was making a hell of a lot more sense now. Although I couldn't really remember the last few minutes, something must have happened that had just made him finally snap.

"What did he even do to me?" I said, in my strained half-whisper.

"He—" Keyd closed his eyes, and drew in a breath. "Where he hit you," he said, touching his fingers very lightly to the back of my neck. Something crackled and sparked there, and I smelled something dry and burned. Keyd jerked his hand away, and clenched it against his chest. "It's a dangerous area—a weak spot, especially when energy is involved. For any of us. Even with your ability—it was too much, too fast, and you weren't prepared for it."

"What does that mean?" The back of my neck was still tingling, and uncomfortable shudders were marching up and down my spine. Something in the air still smelled singed and ashy.

"It means that—" Keyd took another breath, and his voice wobbled a little when he spoke again. "What he just did should have killed you. It…did. For a few seconds."

"Oh shit," I said. I suddenly felt like I needed to sit down. But I already was sitting down, so I grabbed onto Keyd's wrist instead. The bond pulsed out another jangly, uneven wave. I let go again. "Um. I. Oh god. Fuck. I—why…why then…why am I okay?"

"There was still some of the bond left," Keyd said, so softly I could barely hear him. "Just enough. And I used it to—I don't even know what I did. I opened it completely, and I pushed a lot of energy through, I didn't even know if it would really work, it—doing things like that is always unpredictable, but I had to—I just reacted."

"But I'm okay now," I said, reeling. At least, I thought I was okay. Maybe I wasn't. I'd been dead? For a couple seconds, just still—holy fuck. That was not anywhere near okay. Keyd moved forward suddenly, closing his arms around my back and dropping his face to my shoulder. I hugged him back, awkwardly because of our positions, but hell. I had just—seriously? I'd had a near-death experience before, but it had been from a legitimate enemy at the time; Ahieel. This kid was supposed to be on our goddamn side of the war.

"It happened too fast," Keyd said, his voice muffled and breath hot on my skin. "I didn't realize what he was doing until it was done, and—I couldn't stop him."

"I'm sorry," I said, even though it couldn't have been less of my fault. "Fuck, I'm sorry."

The really scary thing was that I had probably just been a stand in for Keyd. This kid couldn't have attacked the agistar, that would have definitely gotten him killed or something much worse—but I was just a foreigner with a fairly useless job. No one really cared about me, beyond the circle of super loyal friends I had here. Outside of them, most people were ambivalent about me. Or, if they were in the government, just outright wanted me totally gone. Gone as in just not present anymore, whether that meant dead or in another world or something else it didn't seem to matter. Just gone.

I tried pulling back a little from Keyd—it took him a second to let me go. "What's happening right now?" I said, because I'd rather think about that then the fact that I'd almost just died. "Out there, I mean."

"He'll be arrested," Keyd said. "Rysa made formal accusations against him, And hopefully he'll be tried for it."

"Hopefully?"

Keyd sighed, and curled his fingers tighter into my hair. "Like I said, he's Arirsanya's son."

….and Arirsanya was on the ghereen and had power and influence and could probably get his kid off the hook, even for something that had been witnessed by about forty other people. Because I was just that foreigner that nobody really knew how to deal with.

"Great," I muttered.

Keyd moved one of his hands to cover mine, squeezing my fingers. "I should really go back out there and deal properly with this," he said, glancing at the closed door. "Will you be—"

"I'll be fine."

"I don't want to leave like this—"

"Keyd," I said, and gave him a little push. "Go. Do what you have to do."

Keyd's expression set a little, and he nodded. Then he leaned forward again, using the hand already in my hair to pull me to him, and kissed me hard. Really hard, the kind of kiss where my chest started burning from not being able to breathe well and his fingers dug so hard into my hair I was pretty sure my scalp was going to bruise. But who cared. I kissed him back, just as fiercely. Apparently he didn't care that I'd just thrown up and probably tasted disgusting. When Keyd finally pulled back, it was with an abrupt little yank that meant he really didn't want to stop, at all.

"Wait for me," he said, and I nodded. Well, yeah. What else was I going to do—leave? But Keyd looked so serious and stricken that I didn't want to say anything. He got to his feet, took a step back, and hesitated, still looking at me.

I gestured vaguely over my own shoulder. "Wings," I said, and Keyd glanced around like he hadn't even noticed they were out at all.

"Oh," he said, and drew them back in. I felt it, like I always did in a peripheral sort of way when he did anything with his oen, but it wasn't a smooth settling feeling like usual. It felt like a thick piece of yarn being dragged through a really tiny needle eye. It definitely had to do with what our bond was up to right now, but it made my shoulders burn with phantom sensations. Keyd looked a little unnerved by it too, but he just took a deep breath and walked out of the room. A lot of the jangly, spastic feel of the bond went with him.

I let out a long breath when the door closed, and rested my face in my hands for a few more seconds, trying to relax into the cool darkness behind my eyelids. I didn't like it that I felt better when Keyd was gone, but it was just because of the bond and whatever he'd done through it to, well—save my life, basically. My mouth tasted like I'd just licked a bunch of sweaty socks and maybe the inside of a dumpster, which wasn't helping me feel better much.

After a minute or so, I lifted my head up and looked around. Whatever this room was, it was pretty small and bare. Made of wood like most of the buildings in the barracks, with a few low windows. There was a desk in one corner and a couple of sets of bookcases along one wall. Then the chair that I was in, which was actually more like a bench; longish and low with armrest on both sides. Wooden and plain and very simple, pretty much like this entire room. It was very quiet in here, and I couldn't even hear voices from outside.

Which meant I was getting anxious. I always hated not knowing what was going on. Especially if it involved me in any way. I still didn't trust myself to stand, so instead I braced my feet on the floor and held onto the bench and pushed it backwards. I scooted across the floor until I could see out the window to the left of the door. Keyd and Rysa and Marjaehl were all in my line of sight. They were talking with each other a couple dozen yards away, the rookie kid still tied up by Rysa's oen. Most of the soldiers who had been watching before had moved away or just moved back, watching more subtly now from doorways and around corners. Seriously, didn't they have soldiery things to be off doing somewhere?

Even just sitting up like this for this long was hard. My muscles ached and shook and burned like I'd run a couple of miles, uphill, with someone riding piggyback on me. And I was still dizzy. And I couldn't tell what was going on outside, anyway. So I lay down on the bench, on my back, which helped the world hold still a little. Christ, I felt awful. But at least I wasn't dead. That would have been way fucking worse.

I was still trying to sort out why the hell this had even happened. I mean, I could guess that it had to do with me and Keyd and our relationship. It wasn't like the whole 'being gay' thing here had just suddenly become okay overnight. Far from that. It had suddenly become not instantly met with execution, thanks to Keyd and his father, but a lot of the clar were still really biased and…close-minded. Keyd and I didn't get face-to-face harassed about it much by anyone except the Worthies, but that was because Keyd was the agistar and outside of the elitist government people, he was pretty damn popular. A lot of it had carried over from his father, who'd been a respected and beloved leader. But Keyd had also launched a seriously progressive campaign to get their world back, which had earned him his own respect.

So the fact that he was also gay was just something most people tried to ignore. A lot. That was one of the biggest reasons I had this platonic secretary title, and why we never did anything in public, even just holding hands or whatever. We didn't want to punch it into people's faces, even if we wanted to be accepted. It was going to be a long, long, long time before that really happened. And maybe not even in mine or Keyd's lifetime. But neither of us—or anybody else—deserved to die for it. And most people, at least, seemed to have been onboard with that revolutionary idea so far.

And besides that whole issue, there was also the fact that I'd still kind of betrayed the whole race a while ago. That was something that could definitely get someone pretty angry at me, too. I mean, barely anybody knew about it, because Keyd had really kept it quiet even when I'd been under arrest back then. But a few people did know, although I could almost count that number on one hand. And maybe this kid had somehow found out about it. And even beyond that, there was still the issue of me being a foreigner. The clar weren't big on foreigners, even though they'd fight wars to save their planets. Hypocritical, but when is any group of people ever not?

Whatever the reason behind it had been, the whole thing was incredibly fucking scary. I'd been around these people, been in their society, learning it and adapting to it and trying to respect it, for almost a year. I'd had a few problems just from being a foreigner so close to Keyd even without the whole gay stigma, but nothing like this. This was the first time I'd even been physically attacked. And it had nearly worked. And it scared me, a hell of a lot.

#

I fell asleep at some point lying on that bench, because I woke up again when I felt myself being shifted around in someone's arms. I didn't feel like opening my eyes—even the dim light pressing against my closed eyelids burned, and I still felt kind of sick—so I put my hand up and touched Keyd's hair. It was him, of course, I knew that even without looking. I would have known it was him even without the bond between us.

"Where are we?" I managed to say. My voice still sounded like a scratchy whisper.

"We're in the city," Keyd's voice said, somewhere in the dark above my head. Jat Tou, I figured he meant.

"Are you carrying me?"

A soft laugh. "Yes. Sorry."

"'s okay."

"You were asleep—I didn't want to wake you. A healer at the camp looked at you and said you seemed all right. But I didn't want to take you back through a rift right away, so we're guests of Kamm Na-ri for the night."

I couldn't remember who or what Kamm Na-ri was right now, so I just hmm'd a little and kept my eyes closed. I could hear another set of footsteps other than Keyd's; so someone else had to be with us. It sounded like it was a hard wood floor, so we were probably inside somewhere. I'd never been inside any buildings in Jat Tou, and it would have been interesting to look around if I didn't still feel so tired and sick and jittery.

Not for the first time, I was really glad that I didn't wear my glasses anymore. I didn't have to worry about where they were all the time, like I would have been right now. Keyd's family healer had fixed my vision for me a while ago. Fixed it, just like that. It had taken him all of five minutes. I'd say it was just like magic, except—it was magic. I probably even saw better now than I ever had with my glasses. The only thing about them I missed was the way Keyd had always taken them off of me, gentle and careful, before we jumped each other.

I heard the sound of a door opening, and an unfamiliar girl's voice speaking in the quick native language. Keyd replied stiltedly in the same—since Xot was a muted world there wasn't an easy way to communicate other than aligning everyone you met into frequency, or just learning the spoken languages. Keyd knew a lot of basic phrases in several of them. I opened my eyes just in time to see a dark-skinned girl in a deep orange dress touch her fingertips to her chin, dip her head and disappear through a door. Wherever we were, the light was dim and yellowy and didn't hurt too much to look at, and everything was in shades of dark reddish wood.

"I'm going to put you down," Keyd said to me, and levered me down until I could get on my feet and catch my balance. I felt better than before, still a little shaky and woozy, but I could definitely stand. But Keyd didn't let go of me, and I hung onto him just because he was there and I didn't really care about being all manly and tough. I felt so far from it right now that I couldn't even pretend. Having Keyd's arms around me was the best feeling in the world as I lifted my head and looked around the room we were in.

At first I thought it was entirely empty—just a glossy dark wood floor and a huge wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that opened to the city. We were really high up, and glowing lights spread out in gold and white grids below against the dark blue mountains and purpling-red sky. I'd been asleep for a while, apparently. It wouldn't get much darker than this, because the oenclar being here meant it never really did. There were glass lamps in bronze mountings set into the walls of the room, all giving off this sort of nice-restaurant ambience, a low warm golden light. An arched doorway across the room lead to another little room done in pale tiles, so that had to be some sort of bathroom. I just wasn't sure why this entire room was empty.

Then I realized; it wasn't. There were sunken square "rooms" inset into the floor, with little sets of stairs leading down into them. The one closest to us had two pale green things that looked like bean-bag/couch hybrids down at the bottom of it, pushed up against the dark wood walls, and a narrow table in between them that looked like a polished slab of granite. If someone had been standing down at the bottom of the little room, their chest would be about level with the floor. There were a couple of other square holes in the floor of the room, but we weren't standing close enough for me to see down into any of them.

"Weird room," I said. We were definitely on another planet, in case I'd forgotten that.

Keyd made an agreeing noise in his throat. "Kamm Na-ri arranged it for us, for the night or…however long we want to stay."

I was remembering who Kamm Na-ri was now—he was like an ambassador, whose job was really to take care of public relations between the city and the oenclar barracks. He was also some sort of politician in the local government, but Keyd only dealt with him as an emissary. I'd met him before; he was a jolly little guy and really nice to deal with politically. Unlike a lot of people Keyd had to make nice with.

"I think there's a bed, over there," Keyd said, and started guiding me across the room, his hands firm on my elbow and waist. I definitely could have walked a dozen or so steps on my own, but Keyd was in his protect John Connor mode and sometimes I just had to let him do it a little. It was easier than arguing about it.

Like everything else in here, the bed was sunk into the floor. It was a huge cushioned square at the bottom of a couple of upholstered stairs circling the whole thing, except for at the bottom 'wall'. There was no paneling or stairs there, and instead the bed just pressed up against the huge windows, opening down into the view of the bright, lit-up city below. Keyd led me over to the bed and made me sit down on the top edge, on the polished wood boards of the floor. He brushed some of my hair out of my face, and then started undressing me. Both of our clothes were dusty and dirty, and mine smelled a little like burned hair and vomit. I had to be the most unsexy boyfriend ever right now.

And I figured I could at least get out of my own gross clothes, so I made a little effort to push his hands away. "I can do—"

"No," Keyd said, hanging on. "Let me."

He was breathing shallowly, his eyes were huge and dilated, and I let him. He took off the things I was wearing, stripping me down completely and setting everything aside. He brushed his fingers over the pendant I wore around my neck on a cord, just a flat piece of metal with the word lan, the word for fate, inscribed on it in the clar alphabet. His hands trembled the whole time.

My chest ached, seeing him like this. I caught his face in my hands and kissed him roughly, not even caring that our teeth clacked together and his nose mushed weirdly against mine and that I still tasted gross. Keyd let out a tiny sound and grabbed at my hair, dragging me closer and winding one arm around my shoulders, nearly crushing me in his grip.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I breathed against him, squeezing my eyes shut and touching him anywhere I could, grabbing his clothes and hair and pulling him against me as tight as I could.

"No, no," Keyd was saying at the same time, "no, no, don't—"

Somehow, we fell and rolled and somersaulted down into the sunken bed, tumbling down the padded stairs into the mess of blankets and pillows at the bottom. Keyd clutched me so hard against himself that I thought I might pass out again, but I couldn't let go of him either. It was really hitting me, maybe both of us, that something really fucking awful had almost happened today. And what if it had been Keyd who'd taken the hit? I don't think I could have saved him the same way he had me. I didn't even know what he'd actually done—he didn't even seem to know. It sounded like he'd hit me with a magic defibrillator.

"Alan," Keyd said against the top of my head, his breath hot and harsh through my hair. "Alan."

"I'm right here," I said. "I'm right here. I'm—I'm here." I grabbed his wrist, pulled his hand down against my chest so he could touch me, feel my heart, which was pounding against my ribs like a rabid drum. I was very damn alive, and staying that way.

"'I don't know what I would have done," Keyd said softly. His hand flattened out against my skin, his fingers warm and firm and comforting. "If you had—I don't know how I could have kept…I don't know."

I couldn't say anything to that. I dug my hands into his clothes and helped him drag them off, throwing them up and out of the bed, landing somewhere on the floor above us. And then we were skin to skin, chest to chest, lots of body parts to lots of other body parts, tangling ourselves around each other until we were just a twisted up knot in the middle of the sunken bed. He was still trembling, and I didn't know if it was from the way our bond was acting right now or that he was still scared or something else.

"I put us at risk today," Keyd said in a mutter, after a minute or so of our desperate silence. "It was my doing, and I knew I shouldn't have."

"Hey," I said. I wasn't sure what he might have done, because I couldn't remember it. But it probably wasn't his fault anyway. "Hey, look. It's okay, all right?"

"It's not okay," Keyd said, pushing himself back a little to look at me. "How is it okay? What happened today might not even get judged as a crime, it will probably be overlooked and made to disappear. Because of the Kojoa family's status, because of…you. It's not equal, and it isn't fair. This is not—" he drew in a little breath, and continued more quietly, "this is not okay."

"Yeah," I said, sighing. "I guess it isn't. Sorry. I just hate seeing you like this."

"I hate being like this." His curled hand on my chest was shaking, and I closed my own fingers over his. Keyd blinked up at the ceiling, his mouth pressed into a hard line. "I would have killed him, Alan. I wanted to. I still do. If you hadn't…survived that, I would have. I wouldn't have cared about the consequences."

"Whoa," I said. "Whoa, slow down. Come here, just—" I caught his face in my hands, pulled him back down against me. He resisted a little, but finally tucked his forehead against my neck and let me stick my fingers into his hair and mess with it. He was still completely tense and locked up, and each breath sounded like a fight for control over his own lungs.

"Come here," I said again, reaching around his back to hold him closer to me. "Come here, just—you're freaking me out, okay?"

"I'm sorry," Keyd said, and it sounded uncomfortably desperate. I didn't like him sounding like that. "I'm sorry that I couldn't even protect you—"

"Don't," I said. "Don't even do that, okay? You didn't know that kid would flip his shit like that, this is not your fault. Okay? It's not. No fucking way."

Keyd went quiet after that, but it seemed like an effort. I remembered when, a long time ago, it had been really hard to get Keyd to talk at all. Now sometimes I could barely get him to shut up, especially when he was determined to say stupid stuff or apologize for things he couldn't control. And even when he wasn't talking, I could still tell how upset he was.

"Keyd, hey, c'mere," I said, creeping my hand up around the back of his head and kissing him, just lightly, before pulling back. "You gonna be okay?"

"Hn," Keyd said, which wasn't really an answer. But it usually meant no, even if he pretended it meant yes. His arms shifted a little around me, and tightened. I put my head against his chest and listened to the steady beat of his heart. A little faster than normal, still. I didn't know how to reassure him, or do anything, and I hated feeling so helpless. The bond burned and crackled between us, but not as bad as it had been before.

I couldn't say anything to him—nothing that would do any good, anyway. I just held him harder against me and hoped that would be enough. Having him warm and alive and breathing in my arms was enough for me. I wasn't sure how long we stayed like that, tangled up and gripping into each other, with this helpless quiet between us. Long enough so that despite the fact that I'd just been asleep for at least a couple of hours, I drifted off again.

#

On normal mornings, Keyd woke up around dawn. And unfortunately, his habits had rubbed off on me over time. But no power on any planet could make me a morning person. I would get up with him, but I'd be useless for a long time, shuffling around and spacing out at everything. Keyd usually used the morning time to do exercising, meditation and long graceful series of movements with his body that reminded me of tai chi. I could manage the getting up early part, but not getting up early to exercise. That was his own thing.

But when I woke up this morning, it was way after dawn and Keyd was still sleeping. He was right next to me, one arm thrown over my side and his face inches from mine on the same pillow. His mouth was open and his hair was all over his face and he was even drooling a little. I loved it when I got to watch Keyd sleep, because he was always looked sloppy and uncomposed like this. He could have just been any normal guy, not a king or a warrior or anything else.

I touched his shoulder, running my fingers over the scar tissue that wrinkled up around it. It was all that was left of a huge burn, an injury he'd gotten from the first battle to try and reclaim Clarylon. The healers had done a pretty good job on it, and it wasn't as ugly as some burn scars I'd seen. But it was big, and noticeable—it covered him from nearly his elbow all the way up to his neck, down his chest almost to the oen mark in the center, and curved around his shoulder to flay across his back. But his shoulder was the worst; it was where he'd taken the brunt of the hit.

Keyd shifted a little under my hand, half-opened one eye above the pillow, and muttered something at me that wasn't comprehensible. But he didn't sound happy to be awake.

"Nope, sorry," I said, trailing my hand off him. "You can keep sleeping."

"Nff," Keyd said, and turned his face back into the pillow. I kissed his shoulder and then rolled away, out from under his arms, and slid an extra pillow in there instead so he had something to hold onto. He curled around it like a cat.

I got to my knees, then pushed myself to my feet, and half-climbed half-crawled out of the sunken bed. It took some effort. I still felt a little shaky from yesterday, and the bond between Keyd and myself hadn't really settled down yet. Because I wasn't hitched up to the actual physical oen entities, Keyd and Rysa had made the bond with me by running their existing one through me. The half connecting with Rysa felt normal, a subtle hum, muted because she wasn't very close to us right now. But Keyd's side still felt like a crackly, stretched out rubber band, and I wasn't controlling how much energy was going from me to him very well. I really hoped this would calm down, because it was starting to feel like electrified heartburn.

I grabbed my pants, then wandered across the cool wood floor towards the bathroom, trying to avoid falling down into any of the other sunken rooms. One looked like an eating area, with a table and chairs around it, another had a desk. It was still a really weird way to build a room, even if it was kind of cool. I made my way through the arched doorway that led into the huge pale-tiled bathroom, and looked around. If I had built a weird hotel with rooms in the floor, where would I hide a toilet?

In the corner down some more steps, apparently. It was kind of a curvy-shaped raised basin in the floor. I had to check it out a little first, to make sure it wasn't just a fancy sink for really short people. It wasn't. There was also a huge sunken bathtub in this room, more like a bath swimming pool, actually. Whatever kind of place Kamm Na-ri had set us up in for the night, it was super upscale. I was starting to wish Keyd and I could just hole up in here for a few days and take a break from life, the world, and everything. A deserved vacation.

There were mirrors all over the walls in here, and when I wandered sleepily back out of the bathroom I caught my reflection in at least three of them. And startled myself, because my hair was black. That didn't happen much anymore, not since I'd learned how to control all this energy business and really actually use my abilities. If it ever did happen, it was usually because it was really easy to lose focus during sex. But I knew how to get it back to normal myself; I didn't have to wait weeks for it to do it on its own.

I was willing to bet it was black now because of what had happened yesterday. Taking a hit of energy strong enough to kill me definitely would have done it. Fuck. At least it hadn't laid me out in bed for half a week, like the last time I'd been hit by an uncontrolled energy blast. A little of the anxiety about yesterday was filtering back to me now that I was waking up more, forming into a cold, hard knot deep in my stomach. It had been so nice to be here in this hotel or whatever it was, alone with Keyd, that I'd forgotten why we were here. Or at least I'd strategically ignored it.

I tried to look at the back of my neck, where I'd gotten hit. It was hard to do, even with all the mirrors, but I didn't see anything there. Not a mark or a burn or anything that looked like something had happened to me at all. I couldn't even feel anything back there, and the only thing that even seemed weird was that I could still smell something burned in the air. Touching the skin back there hurt a little, like poking at a bruise, but nothing more.

I went back into the main room and back across to the bed, climbing back down into it. Through the window, glass and metal of the city sparkled and gleamed in the morning sun, and in the far-away streets I could see the weird space-age cars zooming around like tiny toys. Keyd looked like he was still sleeping, but he'd let go of the pillow and rolled onto his back, his arm thrown over his eyes and his hair spread everywhere. He was completely naked, except for a sheet tangled around one leg, all lean muscle and long limbs and scars and marks like the darkest ink. He was so fucking beautiful.

I sat down next to him, and trailed my fingers over the arch of his hipbone, then rested my hand on his thigh. Keyd shifted under my touch, moving his arm off his face and blinking up at the ceiling. He pulled himself up to one elbow, dragging a hand through his hair and arcing his back to stretch. He looked a hell of a lot better than yesterday—more calm, for once thing, and less exhausted. He let his arms drop and caught me looking at him, and smiled a little. Then he crawled forward to me, settling his chest against my back and resting his chin on my shoulder. One of his arms slipped under mine and wrapped around me, his warm hand splaying over my collarbone. The other went around my waist. I couldn't help smiling and curving back into him.

"Mm, hi," I said, and Keyd murmured something in reply against my shoulder that I wasn't sure what language it was in, and pulled me closer. This was nice. Really damn nice. The most time we'd had alone together for months. And I didn't feel rushed, like we had to go anywhere or meet anyone or do anything. It was relaxing, despite what had brought us here. I closed my eyes and just let myself feel Keyd's arms around me and his body pressed close to mine, the warmth of him and the rhythm of his breath and heart.

"Do you feel weird?" I said, after a minute or so of nice snuggle time. Keyd being so close to me like this was tripping the bond out again, although nowhere near as bad as yesterday. It felt like squirmy electric worms under my skin. Seriously uncomfortable, but I didn't want him to let go.

"Yes," Keyd said. His voice sounded weird because his throat was pushing against a hard bone in my shoulder. "The bond is still transferring a lot of excess energy between us right now. I think to compensate for what I did yesterday."

"It's gonna stop, right?"

"I hope so," Keyd said. His breath was warm on my bare skin.

"That's…wow. Comforting."

"I've never done anything like that before. It was just—I just reacted. And our bond isn't typical to begin with. I didn't know what it would do."

"It's just weird, you know? But you saved my life, so I'm totally not complaining here."

Keyd brushed a hand over my temple, messing with my hair a little. "You've saved mine before."

"Yeah, but—forever ago, and everything was all pretty screwed up back then anyway; I think we came out of that even."

"Hnn," Keyd said, and shifted his chin against my shoulder. I was really glad to see him acting more normal today, not totally losing it like last night. Keyd only lost his cool when things were really bad, or when he felt completely out of control. I hadn't seen him do it for a while. And yesterday there'd been that clusterfuck of a Council on top of what had happened to me, so he'd definitely had reasons to freak out.

"So what are we gonna do about that kid? Gannekein?" I said, and Keyd grunted a little and pressed his face into my shoulder.

"I don't want to think about that," he said, and his fingers dug into me a little. "Please."

"Okay," I said. I guess he didn't want to talk about the part where I'd died for a few seconds yesterday. I didn't really want to talk about that either. Or think about it. Or remember it had even happened. I was still feeling the effects of it, and that was enough.

"What about the Council, then?" I said then. "Because, seriously, what happened had been bothering me. It has to be worrying you."

"Only what Oredaiken said, and did," Keyd said, shifting his hands on me again. "He was right. I haven't been dealing with things as I should. I've only lost respect with the ghereen since my father—since I've taken this title. And I haven't been strong enough to reclaim it."

"I don't know what else you could do," I said. "You've made more progress in Clarylon than your father ever did, you made the treaty with Nuam that Eldronrhet told you to your face you'd never manage to do—what the hell else do they want?"

"It doesn't really matter what I do," Keyd said. "Because it's only building on top of a foundation that they all think is rotten and weak. And Eldronrhet has other reasons to dislike me, other than this. But none of them can—or will—respect anything that I accomplish until they first value me. I've known that, but, I haven't done anything to change it."

"You can't force anyone to respect you," I said. And a part of me couldn't help thinking, me. It's my fault. They don't respect him because he's openly doing something they've condemned and persecuted for generations. And he only did it because of me.

"Don't think what you're thinking," Keyd said suddenly. "Stop."

"Oh man, get out of my head," I said. I had to joke because if I didn't, I'd take a head-first plunge into one of my guilt trips about how I was affecting Keyd's success as the agistar.

"Don't think it," Keyd said again. Sometimes it was a little weird that he knew me this well now. But I knew him just as well. I guess that was the kind of thing that happened in long-term relationships. But I'd never really had one before this.

"Sorry," I said. "But you know that it's part of it."

"Nothing would be better if you weren't with me," Keyd said. "Nothing. I hate that you even think about it. And we didn't fight this hard or this long to give up now."

Yeah. He was right—we hadn't. Keyd's father had once told me that we'd always have to fight. And I'd known that, and I'd been willing, and I was still willing now. But sometimes, I just felt tired. Of how hard it was, of how we never got a break from it, and how we couldn't back down an inch without getting run down. And sometimes being tired of it meant that I thought stupid things, like that everything would be solved if I just bowed out for a while. It was stupid, but a part of me was never going to let it go.

I turned and pushed my face against the side of Keyd's, lifting my hand to catch at the other side of his face. "I'm not giving you up," I said. "No damn way. I just—I want things to be better. And I wish it wasn't me making them harder."

"You make it easier," Keyd said. "I could have never done this without you; had a life that wasn't a lie. Everything about this—what we have to fight for now—is easier to defend because it's true, and real."

"You're such a sap," I said, and tugged his hair. "Quit it."

Keyd just made a soft noise and pressed his face into the side of my neck. I leant into him and watched as a couple of tiny birds darted past outside the plate glass windows. The city below looked bright and open and promising in the morning sun, the oenclar camp and mini-village beyond it just a hazy tan cluster on the faraway hillside.

"I still want to make this better," I said.

"You can." Keyd's hand skated down my back and rested against my hip, and he nudged his face against the side of mine. "Take a bath with me," he said.

"You're way too easy to please," I said, and Keyd laughed softly.

"That's all I want right now," he said. His other hand fell to my wrist and curled around it, tugging me away from the window and up to my knees. But he hesitated before pulling me to my feet. "You're okay?"

"I'm okay," I said, and gripped his wrists and pulled myself up.

#

The bath-swimming-pool-tub was pretty fun to use. And we didn't even do anything naughty in it; the bond was still doing way too much crazy stuff to really try that. And seriously, it was just nice to enjoy something more than what I was used to by now for getting clean—like a bucket and rag, or a river, or something else kind of Spartan and basic. Afterwards, when we were dried off and dressed and sitting on the edge of the sunken bed and not doing much of anything but leaning against each other and relaxing, there was a knock on the door.

"It'll be Rysa or somebody from the city," Keyd said, getting to his feet.

"M'kay," I said, and got up too. If it was someone from the city it wouldn't be professional of me to be lolling around near the bed. I was technically Keyd's secretary, after all, and it wasn't exactly a nine-to-five job.

Keyd got to the door first, and opened it. An older man stood in the hall, with a slender bald-headed girl next to him. She was wearing a long sleeveless dress the color of an overripe plum, and he was in muted greens and yellows. They were both dark-skinned, and the man had streaks of grey and white in his close-cut hair, and creases by his eyes and mouth. His eyes were a deep yellow-gold, like an owl's eyes—bright and alert. He was a roly-poly little man, built like a snowman, and both he and the girl were shorter than me.

I recognized both of them. The man was Kamm Na-ri, and the girl was his assistant, whose name I wasn't really sure of. Both of them looked super happy to see us, but that was kind of how the people around here were. Intensely friendly, but in a bearable way. For some reason, they just loved everything and everybody and nothing ever disappointed or upset them. Not that I'd seen, not yet. They were the easiest people in existence to deal with, politically or otherwise.

Keyd bowed low to both of them right away, his hand on his chest in the clar method of being polite. Then he straightened up, put the backs of his hands together in a reverse sort of praying position, and then gestured them outwards to Kamm Na-ri and his assistant. I was pretty sure that was a local thing here, because both of them did it back. Then the girl stepped forward and gave us a big smile, showing lots of very straight, very white teeth, and pointed at both of her temples.

That was an invitation to align her into frequency. The people in this area didn't entirely trust magic. They were just careful around it, and just in case something went screwy with it they didn't let anybody of any real authority mess with it. It would probably go the exact same way on Earth if the oenclar had ever really had to deal with my planet—nobody there would ever let some crazy aliens do mind-melds on them, especially if they were government figures. And Kamm Na-ri was an important guy here in the city, so he let his assistant play translator.

Keyd had used to always let Rysa do this kind of interaction stuff, because she had always been the natural diplomat between them, even though Keyd had been raised for it his whole life. But now they weren't always together, and Keyd was the agistar, and just had to. He still wasn't that great at social stuff and usually ended up being way too stiff and self-conscious, but he'd been getting better. And thing like this, he was fine with. Keyd reached out and touched his fingers lightly to the girl's temples. I knew exactly what she would feel—like a buzzy little insect had just flown straight in one ear and out the other. It never lasted very long, and after about five seconds the girl reeled and blinked a little, and touched her shiny bald head with her fingers.

"You're all right?" Keyd said, dropping his hands from her head.

"Yes, yes, perfectly fine," the girl said, flashing us another bright smile. "Now we understand each other."

"Yes," Keyd said. "Thank you. I apologize again for my ignorance of your language." He directed that more at Kamm Na-ri than the girl.

Once she'd relayed that to Kamm Na-ri, the man's face split into a huge white-toothed grin, and he reached up and slapped Keyd in the shoulder a couple of times. Then he burbled out a rapid-fire incomprehensible monologue, complete with excited hand-waving. The girl listened intently to it the entire time, and when Kamm Na-ri was done, she turned back to us.

"Don't worry!" she said. "Kamm Na-ri knows five language of his own country, and knows how difficult it can be to even keep those straight. He doesn't find it rude that you, who has traveled to dozens of worlds, can't speak a language he understands. He also wants you to know you don't need to apologize every time you meet."

"Of course," Keyd said with a little bow, but in a way I knew meant, I'm still going to do it every time. He stepped back from the door then, and added, "please, come in."

Kamm Na-ri immediately bustled in, heading over to the sunken living room sort of area, and going down the little set of stairs that hugged the edge. The girl turned back into the hallway for a second, and picked up a glossy black tray that had been sitting on a little shelf outside of the door. There was a ceramic jug and a couple of little cups on it, along with a couple of bowls of stuff that looked edible. She followed Kamm Na-ri down into the living room thing with the tray, and Keyd and I headed after her.

We sat together on the couch opposite the one Kamm Na-ri had already taken, while the girl put the tray on the polished granite-looking table and started unstacking the cups. There was a bowl filled with dried fruit-looking things, and a plate stacked with things that looked like puffy reddish dough balls. Hooray for food, seriously; I wondered how many of those things I could scarf down before I started looking really rude. I snitched two or three of the fruits and one of the doughy things while the girl poured tea for us—which came out a color somewhere between blood-red and burnt orange, and smelled like cinnamon. The fruit tasted sort of like dried apricots, and I kept munching away on them as Keyd and Kamm Na-ri had their conversation through the girl.

"We are very grateful for your hospitality," Keyd was saying. "For last night, here, as well as the continued allowance of our presence near to your city. We owe your people a great boon, for the use of your resources and farming lands and your peace with us."

"Oh, but your people once did our people a great service," the girl said for Kamm Na-ri. "We haven't forgotten the protection and security that you brought to us against your…others. We have no debts to each other here!"

"This was my father's success," Keyd said. The girl offered me a cup of tea while Kamm Na-ri replied, and I took it from her. She threw me another one of those huge smiles when I did. She had really nice teeth, and big dark eyes.

"And you are very young yet," she translated to Keyd. "Far less experienced, but still doing admirably for your people. It's not difficult to see how hard you work, and how sincere you are at it."

Keyd almost fidgeted—as close as he ever came to it, anyway—by twitching his fingers a little. He was having a hard time taking Kamm Na-ri's compliment, probably because he didn't believe it. But I was still glad the man had said it, because it was true, and eventually Keyd was going to have to realize he wasn't Superman and he wasn't his dad. At least, not yet. He was trying pretty hard to get there.

Kamm Na-ri was talking again, and lengthily, so I took a sip of the tea. It was strong and kind of earthy and spicy—not bad. It went pretty well with the dried fruit thingies and the puffy little dough balls. They had some kind of paste in the center, maybe meat but maybe not. By now I was used to eating weird food that I had no idea what it was. At this point I just assumed it wasn't going to poison me or start up some bizarre allergy, because nothing had yet.

"He said a lot, so I'll summarize," the girl said cheerfully when Kamm Na-ri was done talking. "He hopes your accommodations here have been acceptable, and that there was nothing you needed that you weren't provided."

"It's been far more than acceptable," Keyd said, bowing as well as he could while still sitting down. Kamm Na-ri smiled widely once the girl had relayed that, and then looked over at me before saying something else to her.

"And your husband," she translated to Keyd, but she looked at me. "He is all right now?"

I snerfed a little bit into my tea at that. Husband? Whoa, translation error. Keyd didn't even flinch. He did turn a little pink, but he reached his hand out to me at the same time.

"Yes," he said. I slid my hand into his and squeezed, and Kamm Na-ri beamed at us and clapped his hands like an overjoyed little kid. He said something to his assistant, and then reached forward and enthusiastically patted our joined hands.

"He says you are beautiful together," the girl translated, and then added with a little smile, "I think so too."

Keyd's grip on my hand got tighter. "Thank you," he said, softly, and then looked at me. I felt my mouth go a little dry, and this weird fluttering heat went up in my stomach. Something twinged and ached a little in my chest, and suddenly our clasped hands felt sweaty and burning hot. The way Keyd was looking at me made me feel like I was the only person in existence, like everything had just dropped away around us. It reminded me why we fought so hard. Moments like this. Where nothing mattered except that there was this, us, and everything between us that I couldn't even put into words.

But pretty quickly I remembered that there were other people in the room with us, and this wasn't a real appropriate time to start throwing hearts and fluffy bunnies at each other. I could feel Keyd's heartbeat through the bond, and mine—both of them fast and heavy. I cleared my throat a little and Keyd startled and blinked, and both of us looked away from each other.

Not that it did much good. Kamm Na-ri's assistant was smiling against her fist and the man himself looked like he'd just seen a really feel-good chick flick. He patted one of his cheeks a couple of times, then leaned over and said something to the girl, who giggled into her hand.

"Well, our business is through, so it may be the right time for us to leave," she said to us, and I flushed so badly that I felt it all the way to my scalp. It was pretty embarrassing when the political emissaries could tell we wanted to jump each other. Not to mention completely unprofessional. But both she and Kamm Na-ri stood up off the little couches, and Keyd and I scrambled to our feet to see them out.

"You are welcome here as long as you need to be," the girl said with a smile, when we were all at the door. "Meaning this room, as well as the city."

I think that might have been another reference to our unprofessional sexual tension, but it's hard to read subtleties through language barriers. Keyd just bowed to her and Kamm Na-ri and then said a couple of syllables in their quick language, but he was blinking so often that I knew he had to be embarrassed by something. Kamm Na-ri gave Keyd a friendly clap on the shoulder, his assistant touched her chin with the tips of her fingers, and then both of them disappeared through the door.

As soon as it closed behind them, I pushed Keyd up against the nearest wall and kissed him, catching his wrists and pinning them up by his shoulders. Keyd's fingers curled in a little and he hummed softly, body relaxing and arcing just a little into me. I pulled back a little and nudged his chin with my nose. Keyd's eyes drifted open, and he looked down at me.

I slid my hands up until they were palm-to-palm with his. "Hi," I said.

Keyd gave me one of his full, stunning smiles. My heart beat a little faster. He could still do that to me, just with his smile. "Hi," he said back. He ducked back down and kissed me again, slow and thorough, and sliding his hands out from under mine and catching at my waist, dragging his fingers up my ribs and around my back, over my shoulders and up to my neck. He drew me back from him a little, then reached up and cradled my face in his fingertips, his breath warm on my mouth.

"Can I…take you to bed?" he said, his voice rough and low.

"Oh, hell, yes," I said. I didn't care anymore that the bond wasn't really normal yet and we probably should have been taking it easy. I'd almost died yesterday. I didn't even want to imagine what Keyd would be doing right now, at this exact moment, if I hadn't survived. I didn't want to think about what that would have done to him. If things were reversed and I was in his place right now—I'd be so fucking freaked out I probably wouldn't be functioning.

Sex sounded like the best damn thing in the world. And above all, we actually had time to do it in. I pulled Keyd off the wall and we moved together back towards the bed, navigating between all the sunken sections of the floor, tugging and shoving at each other, untucking and pulling at clothes, dragging hands across muscle and mouths across skin, gripping at hair and wrists and asses. Keyd started breathing in little gasps, and I could barely catch my own breath, either from kissing or the bond seizing up again and punching hard bursts of energy between us, I didn't know. I didn't care.

Then someone knocked on the door.

We both froze, only halfway across the room. I had my teeth sunk into Keyd's lower lip and his hands were nearly down the front of my pants. His eyes met mine and it only took one second of silent mutual agreement before we pulled away from each other. Keyd moved his hands to somewhere much more polite and I let go of his mouth, both of us pulling our clothes back into place. As soon as we looked decently professional again, Keyd called out a slightly strained, "yes" towards the door.

It opened, and Kamm Na-ri's assistant peeked in, looking real apologetic and embarrassed. She probably had already guessed at what she might be interrupting.

"Sorry, very sorry, but I forgot to mention one thing!" she said, waving her hands back and forth in front of her face. "The woman of your entourage has been asking to be allowed to come to see you. The one who is tall and quite fierce, and her hands are covered in your marks—"

"Oh," Keyd said, while I was busy trying not to laugh at her description of Rysa. "Yes, allow her in. Thank you."

The girl flashed us a smile, wrinkling her nose up, and then slipped out of the room. The door clicked closed again.

Keyd and I looked back at each other, heat and want practically smoldering between us through the bond, intensified by the way it was still acting up. But Rysa would be up here any minute and now we just didn't have time. God, maybe I could just get on my knees real quick or something, or get a hand down his pants, but—Rysa had walked in on us once before. Once was bad enough.

"Well," I said. "Dammit."

Keyd drew in a long, slow breath, closing his eyes for a second. "Later," he said, reaching out and brushing his hand against mine. "Later. I miss you."

"Yeah," I said. It was definitely really sad that I couldn't actually remember the last time we'd been together. Other than rushed fumbles in a tent somewhere, any spare moments we caught when one of us wasn't working or sleeping or planning or training or in a council or in a fucking battle. But I'd known that, I'd known that when I threw myself headfirst into this thing with him. I knew who he was and what was expected of him, and I wouldn't complain about how much sex we didn't get to have or how much of our time wasn't really ours. Keyd never complained either. But we could still both be frustrated about it.

I stepped back from him just as the door to the room flung open and Rysa strode in. She took one second to scan the room and spot us, and then she was on us. She threw her arms around me and practically scooped me right off the ground in a fierce hug. Just my toes were still on the ground. She didn't say anything, not that she was glad I was all right or was I still all right, because that just wasn't really how she was. And that silent concern was comforting. I smiled against her shoulder and hugged her back, and she reached out with one arm and caught Keyd and pulled him in too.

My ribs were aching a little from being crushed against them both when Rysa finally let the both of us go. Then she turned to me and grabbed my shoulders and held me in place, looking me over and checking for herself if I was still okay.

"Your hair," was the first thing she said, reaching out and dragging her fingers through it.

"Oh, shit, right, I forgot," I said. I focused on the energy in me, letting some of the excess spark out of the tips of my fingers and diffuse harmlessly into the air so I was all balanced out again. "By the way, where's your boyfriend?" I asked her, while I was doing that. Rysa gave me such a look that I laughed and held up my hands. "Sorry!"

"I didn't feel it was appropriate right now," she said. "As neither of you know him well."

"I'd like to," Keyd said. "You do know that."

She looked at him. It was one of those deep looks, where they had an entire conversation without words and in just a few seconds. The three of us were connected in a lot of ways, but that kind of thing was still just between the two of them. I was glad they had that, actually.

"The bond between you feel strange," Rysa said then, when Keyd broke their contact.

"It is," Keyd said. "Though better than yesterday."

"I can feel it," Rysa said. "It's not affecting me, but I feel what's happening between you."

"It's not fun," I said, and she lifted an eyebrow.

"I can't imagine it would be," she said. "But other than that. Both of you are fine."

"Yeah," I said. "I mean, the bond is freaking out, but I feel okay."

"I'm all right too," Keyd said, just as Rysa turned to ask him. "But I wasn't the one who was hit."

"Yes, well," Rysa said, a little darkly. "About that. Gannekein has been taken to a holding house while the accusations we made are documented. They need you back to sign the official record on it. Also, Korenrajh wants to know why he waited three hours yesterday for a meeting that never took place. And Eldronrhet has sent that obnoxious new messenger of his to insist on a date to be set to continue the Council. He won't leave without word from you."

Keyd slapped his hands to his face and dragged his fingers down against his skin, muttering something that sounded like 'completely unnecessary'. Then he sighed, dropped his hands, and straightened up. "I suppose we ought to go back, then. I should have known I couldn't afford to stay out of contact for this long."

I sidled up next to him and caught his hand. He pushed his fingers between mine and held on, and the bond buzzed a little harder. I ignored it.

"I'm cool," I said. "I'm fine to go back." Our little night-long vacation had been nice, but we both should have known people would overreact to it. Nobody liked the agistar disappearing without any warning, even if they knew exactly where he was.

"I figured you'd say that," Rysa said to Keyd. "We have transportation back waiting for us."

Keyd smiled at her. "Thank you for handling things," he said.

Rysa cocked an eyebrow at him. "Well, it is my job now," she said, a little smile curling at one side of her mouth. "That little hairless girl told me that everything here is taken care of; so you can leave whenever you want."

"I suppose that should be now, then," Keyd said.

#

The oenclar barracks were about a mile outside the city, which got me wondering suddenly how we were going to get back there, or how Keyd had even gotten me here yesterday. Had he flown with me? Usually when Keyd went into the city someone came out and got him in one of those Dr. Suess cars, or Kamm Na-ri came to him. Maybe he'd taken us in one of those. Although Keyd still hated any kind of transportation that wasn't walking, flying, horseback riding, or rift-travel, and he had a serious grudge against anything similar to a car.

Turned out our transport back to the barracks was a car, and Damao was driving it. Which was kinda weird to see, but since he was stationed here most of the time I guess he got a crash course in local stuff like that. Keyd, Rysa, and I piled in, and crushed ourselves into the cramped backseat area. It wasn't exactly built for people as tall as they were. The trip back out to the encampment only took about five minutes once we got out of the city, maybe a little more. It was a jittery, bouncing ride over rough terrain, and at one point I found myself holding Keyd's hand. I wasn't sure if that was to reassure him, or me. I was still trying to deal with the fact that I'd really nearly died yesterday.

But I didn't get much time to think about it. Keyd had to get back to work right away, which meant being incredibly busy for the rest of the day. He and Marjaehl finished up their own meeting that had gotten cut short yesterday, then he and Korenrajh had to talk endlessly for hours about things that were sometimes important, sometimes not (the guy was chatty, and stuff with him always took a long time). Keyd also had to sign the document that officialized Gannekein's arrest, and he told Eldronrhet's messenger that the man could go fuck himself. Not in those words. He was very polite about it, but the basic message was pretty clear.

"I need to speak with Oredaiken privately before I reconvene a Council," Keyd muttered to me, after Eldronrhet's gofer had skulked away. "I think I need his advice. He knew my father better than most—better than I did, certainly. If he thinks I'm not living up to what my father would have expected, I need to change that."

I bit my tongue on that one. Keyd's dad was dead and Keyd still had inferiority issues. They'd had a completely complicated relationship that that mostly consisted of Keyd hating his dad but idolizing him at the same time, while his dad had loved and accepted him but hadn't known how to show it. It had made for a lot of miscommunication between them, but since Maedajon's death Keyd's anger and frustration towards him had mostly burned out. Which just left the desperate need to live up to him. I knew it was one of the reasons Keyd had been overworking himself; taking on a lot of stuff he probably could have delegated out to someone else.

Keyd's schedule had been thrown totally off by our overnight stay in the city—we were already supposed to be back in Lojt by now, doing…something. I wasn't sure what. I was still a little scrambled up in the head from yesterday. But we were still being bogged down by stuff here that was supposed to have been finished up yesterday, and so by the time night rolled around again, we were still there. Keyd was reading and authorizing endless papers Korenrajh had given him about exports from the farmlands the oenclar used here. I didn't have anything to do, and I was just relaxing on the little cot in the barracks room Keyd was using as a temporary office.

He hadn't wanted me to go anywhere by myself. He'd kept me right with him the entire day, even in the meeting with Korenrajh, which usually he would have just dealt with alone. I knew it had to do with yesterday, and so I hadn't said anything. But now it was pretty late in the day, and I hadn't had anything to eat since early in the morning, and Keyd sometimes forgot that because he ate only about a third as often as I did. I could just slip out for a few minutes and grab something; he was concentrating so deeply he probably wouldn't notice.

Except he did. As soon as I got up and walked across the room to the door, Keyd's head snapped up. He made a sound and pushed back from the desk, obviously meaning to follow me or stop me.

"Whoa, hey. I'm just getting something to eat," I said. "I'm starving, and the mess hall is only like fifty feet away, so I'll be fine. I'll even get something and bring it right back, but I can go alone."

Now Keyd looked furious with himself that he'd forgotten about our eating differences. "Alan—"

"Do not say you're sorry. I know you didn't mean to forget. Make it up to me by not freaking out if I leave for five minutes."

Keyd actually chuckled. "Okay," he said, raking a hand back through his hair. "Okay. I'm—no, I won't say it."

All right, secretly, I actually loved his protective side, how all the quiet worrying he did just showed that he gave a damn about me—a hell of a lot more than that, even. But if I let him do the knight in armor thing too much, he would never stop. At some point there was a middle ground that he just had to stick in, and that was right about now.

"Be right back," I said, and went out the door.

It was kind of an awkward time to be eating at, and there wasn't anybody in the building that served as a mess hall, and I had to go around into the kitchen area and beg food off of some of the guys in there. They were all real nice to me, way more than I was used to, and I had an idea that Marjaehl might have given the entire encampment some kind of lecture about how to treat people close to the agistar. Or something like that.

I headed back to the barracks room with my food, and a soldier I didn't know was just coming out of the door when I got there. He saw me, gave me a little nod—I felt kinda bad I didn't know who he was, but I was easy to recognize around here—and walked off towards the center of the camp. I just hoped whatever he'd been in to see Keyd about wasn't bad news, or more work for him to do. He needed a damn break.

Keyd was standing over the desk when I went inside, looking down at a folded up parchment that had one edge dipped in dark blue ink. I knew what that meant—it had been sent from the Keeper caste. It definitely hadn't been there when I'd left, so it had to be what the soldier had brought him. Keyd glanced up when I came in, gave me an unenergetic smile, then went back to staring at the paper.

"What's that about?" I said, dropping down on the cot with my food. Keyd unfolded the parchment and flattened it out on the desk, moving some little paperweight stones on top of the corners. Like a lot of things personally sent to him, it was protected by a spell and looked completely blank.

"I think I already know," Keyd said. He licked his thumb and pressed it to the center of the parchment, and spidery ink lines spiraled out across the page, filling it up from top to bottom with handwriting. Then he leant over it, bracing his hands on the desk, and went quiet.

"What is it?" I said, after giving him a minute or two to read it over. Keyd sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, leaning back.

"What I expected. A trial notification," he said. "For Kojoa Gannekein. And both of us are being summoned to it."

#

Trials didn't seem to happen very often with the oenclar—there wasn't much of a crime rate when your people were spread out through a dozen or so worlds and didn't have real cities or homes, and everybody was more focused on the survival of the race than screwing over your neighbor. Keyd had been to a few in the past year, most of which had involved problems between an oenclar soldier and a native of another world. But the clar put such an emphasis on polite diplomacy that even that was rare.

What I knew about their judiciary system was this. If you were the agistar, or of the line, a Council made most of the decisions about what to do with you if you did something against the laws. Like the way that Keyd's coming out had been dealt with by a Council first. But everybody else went through a system arranged and run by the Keeper caste. So those were the people who now had all the information about Gannekein and what he was being accused of—which seemed to be something like assault and battery. Against me. But that was it. No mention of any ridiculous homophobic prejudices or anything, because the most likely reason of why he'd attacked me wasn't exactly illegal.

Keyd explained the basics of what this all meant while I was eating. And, according to the summons, the trial wasn't even going to happen for another couple of weeks. I got a little anxious about that, since I was supposed to be going to back home for my dad's birthday about the same time. I didn't think I could choose between them—seeing my family or a trial for a guy who'd tried to kill me. Especially since Keyd had said that I pretty much didn't have a choice about the trial—I had to be there.

"I'll make sure for you that they aren't on the same day," he said, and I felt even guiltier about not inviting him to come with me to see my family. I should, dammit, I really should, but before I could even start to bring it up, Keyd started talking again.

"I wish it was sooner," he said, turning the trial notification thing over in his hands and frowning at it. "This gives Arirsanya time to pull his influence on the ones that he's already swayed towards his views. He will anyway, undoubtedly, but he might even reach out to the Keeper caste itself."

"So, basically, this kid is probably going to get away untouched," I said.

"Yes," Keyd said. "But at least there's going to be a trial, even if it's simply perfunctory. There never would have been, when I was younger. It would have been you instead, who was put on trial. Gannekein would have been seen as…acting against a traitor. Applauded, not arrested."

"That is such shit."

"It is," Keyd agreed. He was sitting next to me on the bed by this point, and he reached up and touched my hair. "But at least this is a step."

"So, what? So the next time some crazed high-blooded douchefuck decides to take another shot at me," or you, I thought but didn't say, "then maybe that trial will mean a little more? Maybe someone will take it seriously? Jesus Christ."

Keyd looked like he hadn't really thought about that. His fingers curled around the back of my neck and tried to pull me against him; I resisted, but only because I was really tensed up. My body didn't want to move at all. I'd just accidentally thought about what I'd been trying to block from myself—what if this did happen again? I knew how to use my abilities pretty well by now, but I hadn't been able to expect or guard against a head-shot, and I was only alive because Keyd had been right fucking there. And there were plenty of anti-gay/foreigner/whateverpeople who'd be willing to try the same thing, especially if all they'd get as a punishment was a finger-wag and slumber party in jail for a week. Shit.

I'd never really felt unsafe here, with Keyd, even with a lot of people around who weren't really my fans. But suddenly it seemed like I was in an incredibly dangerous situation. And suddenly I understood why Keyd hadn't wanted to let me go even fifty feet on my own earlier. I wasn't sure I wanted to, now. And what if someone got ballsy enough to attack Keyd? I probably couldn't save him, not like he'd done for me. We'd really been fucking lucky, but we probably wouldn't be again.

Keyd was still tugging on me, trying to pull me closer, and I finally let him. My face rolled into his shoulder and I breathed through my teeth into his shirt, trying hard not to just totally freak the hell out. Wasn't really working too well.

"I'm sorry," Keyd said, stroking his hands over my head and back, clumsy but gentle. "I don't know—how to fix this. I don't want you to feel afraid. Not here, or anywhere."

I grabbed Keyd's arms and pushed myself back from him. I could feel myself shaking, but I ignored it. "We gotta make sure that something happens at this trial," I said. "That this Gannekein kid doesn't just get away with it. That's the only fucking way."

Keyd was frowning. "Alan—I don't know how to make that happen."

"I don't either," I said, except I was already starting to think of something.

"It's already a breakthrough that there is a trial—" he started, but I pressed my fingers over his mouth and cut him off.

"I think I have an idea. Somewhere to start, anyway," I said. Keyd closed his mouth under my hand, and just looked at me. "Darban's still stationed in Abyah, right?"

"Yes," Keyd said, his breath hot on my fingers. "Why?"

"I want to talk to Kir, and finding Darban is the easiest way to find him," I said. Keyd nearly smiled, and he pulled my hand away from his mouth and tangled his fingers with mine.

"True," he said. "I should go with—"

"I'm on top of it," I said. "You're busy."

Keyd exhaled, and pinched up his mouth. "All right," he said, after a second or two.

I caught his face in my hand and turned him to me. "Hey," I said. "I can't just hide away from everything because of one stupid kid. I mean, that's what I want to do pretty much, but I can't. I can't get paranoid about this because…I'll never go anywhere ever again if I do."

Keyd was still holding my hand, and he rubbed his thumb over my knuckles. "I hate that that makes sense," he said.

"Yeah, me too."

He sighed, a deep exhale that seemed to take at least some of the tension out of him, and squeezed my fingers. "But I—djamt rier kahle dejj massu kaihnan."

"Keyd," I said. "You remember I do kinda understand your language now." Because back when I hadn't, he'd used to say things in it that he was too shy to tell me otherwise. What he'd just said hadn't been real soppy, but I was pretty sure he'd've never said it in frequency anyway.

"I know," he said. "I like being able to say things to you in it. But it's just—it makes me think that you've done so much for me, things like this, and it doesn't seem like I can ever do enough back."

"I'm not asking for anything," I said. "Not anything more than what you already do. What happened yesterday was not your fault, and I think the only thing we can do is try and make it matter. Not let it get brushed aside. It's the only idea I've got, anyway."

Keyd nodded. He still didn't look happy, at all. The flickering lantern light threw shadows under his eyes and made him look gaunt and exhausted, and much older. With everything else already in his life he had to worry about, it was so damn unfair that he had to deal with this now, too. He might have thought he wasn't doing enough, but keeping me around was getting to be serious high-maintenance. And there was going to be a point at which it wasn't worth it. Unless we managed to do something about it.

"Hey," I said, reaching out for him. "Hey, I—I don't want to talk about this anymore tonight. Just…come here. Please."

Keyd looked like he'd been waiting all day for me to say that. He practically fell into my arms and rolled us both down to the little cot, then just tucked himself against me and held on. He didn't say anything and I didn't really need him to. What I needed was this. What both of us needed. I stroked my hands through his hair, combing through it with my fingers, felt his breath on my neck and his heart beating against mine.

We maybe could have picked up from what we hadn't been able to do this morning, but I was pretty out of the mood. I'd rather just spoon up close to Keyd and drowse off in the warmth of his body. Also, I was sure both of us were thinking that the spartan little barracks room wasn't much of a place to have any kind of good romantic session. The cramped little cot was hardly big enough for both of us and I was pretty sure that this morning when Keyd had said I miss you, he hadn't meant that he missed minute-long fumbling trysts in the dark.

He fell asleep on me almost right away, his breathing and heartbeat slowing down to a slow, gentle rhythm. I stayed awake for a while and watched the lantern burn itself out, just thinking. About my idea. Maybe a stupid idea, and maybe a pointless and unachievable one, but it was something that I'd thought about a lot, and for a long time. But I definitely needed help for it, and Kir was the best choice. He was probably the smartest guy I'd ever met in my entire life, and he was one of my closest friends. And he was constantly giving me too much credit for the whole advocating gay rights thing, so he'd probably jump at a chance to contribute.

#

The next morning, Keyd and I headed off to different places—both of us headed to the same world, only different cities. He was going to Lojt, the main oenclar city and current political hotbutton, and the place I was going to was an uninhabitable ruin that had one of the bigger oenclar camps in it at the moment; an ancient city called Abyah.

I came out of the rift into dim, blue-tinted light, and practically face-first with a crumbling, moss-covered wall. I had to catch myself against it with my palms. Rifts sometimes shifted around a little, which sometimes meant coming out of them ankles-deep in a river or dropping on top of some unlucky nearby person. I always had this tiny fear that someday I'd come out in a wall or a person, but that I'd never heard of it happening, and nobody else seemed to worry about it.

I pushed myself away from the wall and about-faced. I was in the middle of the little area that housed all the different rifts inside little tents—just to keep them apart and easy to keep track of. There were two shadowy soldiers nearby, probably manning rift traffic. One of them was giving me the Look. The tight-mouthed, narrow-eyed look that meant he knew who I was, and really didn't like it, and would probably be disappointed to hear I hadn't actually died the other day. I was used to the Look, and it had—mostly—stopped bothering me. The other soldier was giving me more of mild huh kind of look, so he was definitely the safer bet to talk to.

"Heihaph, aritjja Enten Kirbeylas omokan ikyr," I said to him. It really threw these guys off when the short blond foreigner knew some of their language. Plus I liked to practice what I knew, even if I always butchered the pronunciation. What I'd said had been simple, basically 'hi, I'm looking for Kir', but the guy I'd spoken to did a serious double-take.

"Brisnjja isva hrapre," he said, after he had a second of blinking surprise. Talk to the commander, he'd said; that meant Darban. "Kaprisul ojal dejj." In the main tent.

I tapped my fist against my chest. "Iaymat irad," I said, and then walked off, leaving the guy looking like he had no idea what had just happened. I heard the other guy, the one who'd been giving me the Look, say something kind of snippy at him before I got out of earshot.

The main tent in any encampment was always easy to find. It had the tallest flagpole. I could see it from even where I was now, flying a banner that looked black in the constant night of Clarylon, snapping briskly in the wind. And below it, a couple of smaller flags, each one with a different symbol for each of the high-ranking commanders currently in the camp. I recognized Darban's, hung right below the main flag. Which meant he was the highest ranking guy here right now.

It didn't take long to get to the tent, but I still hesitated a second before going in. Darban and I—well. We were still friends. We got along fine. But there was just this little cracked place that hadn't ever been filled in right between us. He'd been completely stunned and hurt by what I'd done in betraying them to the clarbach a year ago, and even though that mess was way over Darban had never treated me exactly the same as he had before. He still seemed to like me fine, it was just a little more…distant.

He wasn't alone when I finally ducked inside. There were a couple of other people in there with him, two men and one woman. Neither of the men was Kir, so this was probably some kind of upper echelon meeting with the other commanders. Nobody was in armor or dressed up, so it didn't look too serious, but I hated to interrupt anything. I loitered around near the door until Darban glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and did a double-take.

"Alan, hello," he said, sounding a little surprised. All the other people in the tent turned to stare at me. The woman looked familiar, and I probably had met her before, but her name had fallen right out of my head. "Are you here with Keyd?"

"Ah, no," I said, trying not to fidget under all the eyes on me. "It's just me. I didn't mean to bother you if you're busy, but is Kir around?"

"He's in our tent," Darban said. "Or he should be. It's just behind this one, not far."

"Thanks," I said. "See you later, all right?"

Darban nodded at me and turned to say something to the woman at his right, and I scampered back outside. That hadn't been too bad.

The tent directly behind the main one was smaller, army-green, with one door flap tacked open. One of the oil-burning lanterns was stuck on a pole outside, throwing off flickering orange light. Two little scrolls were hung up on either side of the door, with Kir and Darban's family names written on them—definitely the right tent. The way to 'knock' on these tents was to use a little thing that looked sort of like an afro pick, usually hung up next to the door flaps, to scratch at the canvas. But since the door was open, I didn't think I really had to. I just walked in.

Kir was sitting crosslegged on the floor of the tent, bent over a folding wooden table not much higher than his lap. His long black hair was braided, like always, and hanging forward over his shoulder and down into his lap. He was looking at maps. They were spread out over the whole table, some of them rolling off the edge and trailing onto the tent floor. There was a little pot of ink with a quill in it near his left hand, and another lantern near his right.

He glanced up briefly when I came in, and then did a serious double-take. "Alan!" he said, and got right to his feet, came across the tent and caught me by the shoulders. "We heard what happened in Jat Tou—are you all right?"

Damn, word had gotten around fast. It hadn't even been a whole day yet. "Yeah, yeah, I'm totally fine," I said. "Don't worry. I'm okay."

"Good," Kir said. He relaxed his grip on me a little then and looked me over, like he'd just realized I was here. "What are you doing here?"

"I want to talk to you about something. Do you have some time right now?"

"Of course," Kir said, and gestured at the low table. "Please, sit down."

I did, while Kir shuffled some of the maps out of the way and rolled them up off to the side. They were hard to read when I was looking at them upside down and in a different alphabet, but one of them had looked like a closeup of the Kitsa valley, with little markers in different colors for troop positions.

"So," Kir said, resting his elbows on the cleared table and his chin on his clasped hands. "What is it?"

"I need your help, with something," I said. "Can you still access all the Keeper stuff? Records and things like that?"

Kir blew out a breath, and shook his head. "No," he said. "I gave up that right when I left the caste."

"Oh," I said. Well, fuck. That was a nice big obstacle in my clever plan.

"What did you need to look at?" Kir said. "Maybe I can still help."

"I…well, a long time ago, when I first came here," I said, "I talked with Maedajon about why he'd gotten so supportive of Keyd being gay. He told me that something had made him reconsider the whole—I don't know, just the way everybody looked at it, and why they did. He told me that there were really detailed records about the history of it, and that looking at those made him think differently about it. I wanted to look into that."

"Oh," Kir said, and dragged his hand through his bangs. "That's—well. An interesting idea. You know Keydestas would be allowed access to the archives."

"Yeah, I know. But he's so damn busy, I don't need to add another project on him," I said. "Plus, you're the smartest person I've ever met and I'm pretty sure that if anyone can make sense of a couple hundred years of records, it's you."

"Alan, you have to stop flattering me like that," Kir said, rubbing at his eyebrow and wincing. "And you know that I was never trained as a Keeper."

"I didn't say anything about that. I said that you're smart and you can do this. And that's true, not flattery," I said, grinning, and Kir rolled his eyes a little.

"I'm sure that Keydestas could negotiate a temporary access to the archives for anyone," he said. "But, Alan—what do you want to achieve with this?"

"I don't really have a solid plan yet," I said. "I guess maybe if I knew more about this myself, and got it more public, maybe people could at least understand a little more about why they think how they do. I guess I figure that if we're trying to break down the biases, people should know why. The More You Know." I swooshed my hand in an arc and hummed a little, and Kir stared at me. "Never mind. But it just seems like this trial could be a really good opportunity to drag some of this out—because no one ever wants to talk about it."

"It's a nice idea," Kir said, but he was frowning. "I don't know how much of an effect it will have, but….I suppose…there's really no harm in trying, is there?"

"Awesome," I said. "So you'll help?"

He looked at me, and nodded. "Of course I will."

#

Within two days, Kir and I both had special granted access to the Keeper archives, which were kept in a huge building in Lojt; an endlessly long room filled with enough dusty books and endless rolls of parchment to embarrass any other library I'd ever seen. None of it had ever been taken out of Lojt, even when the city had been abandoned—there were copies of them all in other places, spread around to half a dozen other worlds to keep them safe. But the originals were all here, compiled in one single place, and that was what we needed.

The first time Kir and I walked in there, I almost gave up right away. The room was so huge I almost couldn't see the back wall of the place from the front door. Hundreds, or maybe thousands—hell, maybe millions—of rows of full shelves ran the length of it. And it had three levels, and every inch of every wall was full of books and scrolls with ladders running everywhere over them, and I just…couldn't—fuck. I understood why they hadn't wanted to transport any of it to a safer place out of the city—there was just too much of it.

"Never mind," I said, turning around. "This was a stupid idea."

Kir caught me by the shoulders. "It's not," he said. "I've been thinking more about what you said to me, and—you're right. We keep these records for a reason. And if they can't be used for something useful; like to correct generations of intolerance, then I don't know why we should bother."

"There's no way we're gonna find anything in here," I said, still trying to muscle past Kir to the door. But he was pretty strong under that deceptively slim build, and kept me in place.

"There's an order to it," Kir said. "I have a familiarity with how it's arranged, through I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable as a true Keeper. But—Alan, we can do this. Do you trust me?"

I stopped fighting against him. "Yeah," I said, after a second. "I do."

"I think this trial is as good a time as any to start addressing these issues," Kir said. "If we don't start now, then when?"

"Yeah, that's—that's what I kind of meant to do, I guess," I said. "But I really don't know what to look for."

"We should start with law amendments," Kir said. "And make a timeline to reference from. Records of our laws are very easy to find."

"I'm so fucking glad you're smart," I said, and followed him in.

It still seemed hopeless, at least for the first few days. But Kir was dogged, and methodical, and his determination really helped me. Plus after a few days, I lost some of the paranoid anxiety that had me looking over my shoulder every two seconds, waiting for another Gannekein to pop up and strike. The archive building was pretty much empty, other than the Keepers who'd come back to take up their old posts now that Lojt had some people in it again. And I was pretty sure a couple of librarians weren't going to up and shank me. I could actually relax.

We had a limited amount of time for this too. Not just because of the trial, but because I was going to visit my family in between then and now. The clar had a super confusing calendar system I hadn't mastered yet, so I just kept my own so that I always knew what the date was on Earth. With Keyd's help I'd figured out that the trial date was about two days after my dad's birthday. So it was cutting it real close, but it would work out. My dad's birthday was right in the middle of October, on a Sunday, so I'd been planning to go home at the beginning of that weekend. It was the end of September right now, so we had just about three weeks before I'd leave for home.

But there was still a ton of stuff to go through, and Kir and I had a lot of work to do. And all by ourselves. I could read and write in the clar alphabet now—slowly and with effort, but I could do it. Keyd had taught me. But it didn't matter, since even if I could read the words, a lot of the time I didn't know what they meant. So Kir did most of the grunt work, going through endless records and books; I just ran around and got him stuff and made copies of the records that we figured were relevant, after Kir had read them out to me. And copies as in, I handwrote them on another paper word for word. No Xerox here.

The archive was arranged in a system I completely didn't understand. Kir did a little bit, but he really was a soldier more than a Keeper, and everything he knew was left over from his childhood. So we only had that to go off of. Parchment scrolls about trials were color-coded with little ribbon tabs, which helped. Black always meant a trial for execution. We looked at a lot of those, but early trials for being gay hadn't always ended that way. Only stuff from the last few hundred or so years was easy to find, because by then it was an obvious crime with an obvious punishment. Sometimes the trial records weren't even trials—just blind convictions. Just hearing some of this stuff made me a little sick, and I was understanding more and more why Keyd had hated this about himself so much. It was talked about like such a traitorous, shameful thing—no wonder he had complexes. Anybody would. I knew Kir had, too; enough that he'd basically estranged himself from his family to join the warrior caste, to atone for it.

"Do you ever regret becoming a soldier?" I asked him after a few days, after I'd been watching him act like this was a totally normal environment for him, buried under books and papers and quill pens. I'd seen Kir in action before, I knew what he could do and that he was a completely capable soldier, but he'd fallen into this research thing pretty naturally.

"No," Kir said, without even hesitating. "I never have. I only regret that my family couldn't understand the choice I made."

His family followed a strictly non-violent religion, and Kir's choice to join the army basically meant that they wouldn't acknowledge him anymore. I knew that he didn't even know where they were living—there were half a dozen places in different worlds that the oenclar had settlements in, all places that his family could be. So he couldn't even get in contact with them, and they'd never tried to contact him either. He didn't talk about his family much, but any time it came up he always got really quiet, much more than normal.

"Do you think you'll ever be able to fix things with them?" I asked. "I mean, they can't hold a grudge forever, right?"

Kir actually laughed at that. "They're Keepers," he said. "Of course they can. And I'm sure my relationship with Darban wouldn't make them forgive me any faster."

"Do they know about that?"

"I couldn't know if they do," Kir said. "But sometimes I speak to soldiers I've never met before, and they've heard our names, know about us. I wouldn't be very surprised if my family had somehow heard about it as well."

"Man, isn't it fun to be infamous?" I said, and Kir gave me a look. "No, you're right, it totally sucks."

Still, I was glad he seemed to be happy enough with his life. Keyd had put him on some kind of official leave or something, so that he wouldn't be called away anywhere on duty while he and I were working on this idea of mine. Darban was still doing his commander thing in full force, but he'd managed to get himself stationed temporarily in Lojt so he could be near Kir. He'd presented his reasons for it with a whole bunch of tactical stuff about the Kitsa valley and wanting to be involved in the strategic response to what the clarbach were doing there—it was all basically bullshit, but no one had called him on it. So he was nearby, and he usually came around near the end of the day to pick Kir up. He wasn't allowed in the actual archive room, so he always stood around outside the doors until Kir went out to him.

Keyd and I were hardly seeing each other at all. I was temporarily living in a room in the same building as the archives just for convenience (and, you know, a little paranoia), and Keyd was all over the damn place, between all different worlds and cities. I wasn't sure if he really understood exactly what Kir and I were doing here, but he knew that I thought it was important. So he didn't complain. And I didn't either, but I missed him like hell. Even though all the time apart was helping our bond settle down from the trauma it'd experienced from that Gannekein kid.

When we did see each other, we talked politics more than anything else. He'd had the talk with Oredaiken that he'd wanted to have, and even though he didn't tell me much about it, he seemed a little more confident for it. Though there hadn't been another capital C Council yet since the big failure of the last one, mostly just little meetings about what to do in the Kitsa valley and other specific foreign politics issues. The Kitsa valley was the big issue right now, and I could look out the windows of the archive room every day and see more oenclar soldiers coming in from other places, filling up the streets of Lojt. Nobody had made any moves yet, but everyone was building up like hell in case the other side did.

"What do your people fight each other over?" Keyd asked me, on one of the days that he had managed to come by and spend a little time with me.

"Lots of things," I said. We were out on a balcony of the building that housed the archives, looking down into the dim streets of the city. Mostly empty now, because it was late at night, but the lights of the soldier camps and the civilian district gleamed in the distance. The rain had let up for once, but the streets were still shimmery and wet. Keyd was leaning his wrists on the railing, and I was propped on my elbows next to him.

Keyd glanced at me. "Are they worth it?"

"I don't know. Maybe some of them. We had one a while back that probably was. One real bad guy trying to take over a lot of countries and kill a lot of people he didn't like in them. Everybody kind of agrees that was a good one to fight."

"Hmm," Keyd said. He'd always thought it was really weird that we fought people on our own planet. I'd tried to point out to him that so did the oenclar—they and the clarbach had originally been one race, and they were all from the same world too. But Keyd hadn't thought it was the same thing at all.

"If we have to move civilians back out of Lojt because of this," Keyd said, after another minute, "then I'll never hear the end of it. Not from Eldronrhet or any of the others. I only have the upper hand on them when we have the upper hand in the war."

I slipped my arms around his waist and leant into his shoulder. "You need a goddamn vacation," I said, and Keyd laughed a little.

"If I had somewhere to go," he said.

Come home with me. Come meet my family. That's what I should have said, but I didn't. I wanted him to come with me, I really did—but I had some sort of block that kept me from bringing it up. I don't know what I was really afraid of; maybe what my family would do, how Keyd would act around them, or if I could keep up with the lies I'd built up to explain where and how I was living. It just seemed like inviting a huge hot mess to come in and stomp all over our already messy life.

I didn't manage to say anything to him about it that night, but the conversation we should have had about it played in my head all through the next day. Kir and I had gotten into a research routine by now, showing up at roughly the same time each day and usually getting down to work without much pretense. I was getting faster and better at reading and writing their alphabet because of all this, and Kir was helping me with the speaking part too. More like he was forcing me to practice by speaking Isji to me almost constantly, without frequency. I understood a hell of a lot more than I could say back, but Kir was even testing me on that by sometimes pretending like he couldn't hear what I was saying unless I was doing it in Isji. He was kind of a hard-ass about it, but it really was helping me do better. Whenever I tried speaking it with Keyd, he usually gave me a break when I was obviously struggling, but Kir just wouldn't.

We'd been at it nearly a full week before something different happened in our daily routine. We weren't even in the archive room; we were sitting outside in the courtyard and taking advantage of the one hour of sort-of sunlight in the middle of the day. It still meant that it barely looked brighter than dawn, but it was something. I was eating lunch (which I'd tasked Rhet with bringing me every day from one of the camps in the city) and Kir wasn't. But I was used to this by now, with Keyd, so it didn't bother me. Kir was doing some sort of meditation thing anyway, sitting with his eyes closed and hands cupped loosely in his lap.

There was never anyone else in the building with us except the other Keepers, and they didn't ever come around very often. So when I heard footsteps coming down the corridor, I had a very tiny moment of panic. I was still pretty jumpy after what had happened in Jat Tou, even though I was trying hard to get over it. I glanced around, trying not to look too panicked, and kind of wishing Kir would snap out of it and pay attention.

But the guy I saw coming down the lantern-lit walkway between the shadows of the tall pillars didn't look very dangerous. He was wearing all dark blue, which the Keepers seemed to wear. Not always, but over half the time you met someone wearing mostly navy, they'd be from the caste. This guy was also wearing a thing on his head that definitely only Keepers wore—sort of like a headband, made of dark lacquered wood and almost invisible against his black hair. Once I'd joked to Keyd that maybe it held their brains in, and he'd smiled and said that he'd heard that said before.

At first I'd thought he was just one of the Keepers who hung out in this building, but he was obviously heading right to us. I jostled Kir a little, snapping him out of his trance, and jerked my head towards the guy. Kir looked past me, and then got to his feet right away, his eyes widening. I stood up too, figuring if Kir knew this guy somehow I should probably get involved here. I was done with lunch, anyway.

It's really hard to guess the age of any of these people, but when the guy got closer to us he didn't look much older than his late twenties, maybe. Around the same age that Kir looked—although Kir was nearly ninety years old. The guy's hair was short and a little curly, and his eyes were light grey. He was kind of average looking. Not unattractive but not real handsome, either. Just a normal looking dude, one that was about a head and some taller than me. Kir did a really polite bow to him at once, crossing both arms over his chest and dipping way lower than normal.

"Jarynphar," Kir said when he straightened up, keeping one hand pressed against his chest. "It's—good to see you."

The way Kir said it, it sounded a lot more like what are you doing here than what he'd actually said. This guy, Jarynphar, didn't seem to be surprised by that. He bowed back, even lower than Kir had.

"We haven't seen each other in years, I know," he said, when he leant back up. "But we were friends, once, and I heard you were here."

"Yes," Kir said, but he sounded uncomfortable. "Can I do something for you?"

Jarynphar glanced towards the doors that led back into the archive room, and smiled a little. "I know what you're doing. And I want to help you."

Kir went rigid. I practically felt his energy tense up in the air around him. "Surely you know what this trial involves, if you know what it is we're doing here," he said, after a hard pause. Nothing in his voice changed; he still kept everything polite and civil. But he was definitely on edge.

"I know." This guy Jarynphar glanced over at me, as if just noticing that I was there, and I jumped to attention.

"Heihaph jyannat," I said, which was a good way to say hey to someone you didn't really know. I put my hand to my chest, the place where a heart-mark would be if I had one, and did a half-bow at him. I didn't know his rank or status or anything, so I felt like a generic greeting would work okay. "I'm Alan."

"Yes," Jarynphar said, giving me a little nod back and touching his own hand to the center of his chest. "I know of you, of course. I am Chaje Jarynphar; you may call me Jaryn."

Excellent; I liked when these guys let me do the nickname thing. Hell of a lot easier. I suddenly noticed that Kir wasn't out here anymore—he'd disappeared back into the archive room. That was weird; this guy had shown up wanting to help and Kir had basically brushed him off. But he hadn't said Jaryn couldn't help, and frankly, we could use it.

"You really want to help us?" I said to him, just to double-check. Jaryn nodded, keeping his hand over his chest and even adding the other one on top of it. That was a pretty sincere gesture. "Okay then. Good enough for me."

Jaryn followed me back into the archive, where Kir was already back at work digging through old parchments. He didn't seem surprised at all that I was trailing Jaryn along behind me, and didn't even look up when we came in. He opened up a parchment scroll over the table and started moving his finger along under a line of tiny neat print at the top. I glanced at Jaryn, but all he was doing was looking at Kir.

"Please tell me why," Kir said, after a really awkward half-minute of silence. Jaryn shifted a little, balancing out his stance and folding his hands behind his back.

"You were never happy," he finally said. "No one ever saw you smile. When you left the caste, some of us even thought you'd joined the forces for ychendre. You always told me that it had just felt like where you needed to go. But—you were running away."

"Don't," Kir said. His finger had stopped moving on the page, but he still didn't look up. I didn't know the meaning of the word that Jaryn had used that hadn't translated, but I tried to remember it. I could ask someone later.

"You think I'm judging you," Jaryn said, and Kir drew in a thin breath through his nose. "Because now everyone knows why you did leave, what you were running from. But I don't care. I would like to help you, as a friend. And I know neither of you have the training for this."

"True," Kir said. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and then stood up and turned around to face him. "I'm sorry," he said to Jaryn. "You offered to help and I shouldn't have dismissed you the way I did."

"It's all right," Jaryn said. "We were children a long time ago, and I almost wasn't sure if you would even remember me. But my offer is sincere. If you'd allow me, I'll do anything I can."

Kir didn't do anything for another very tense quarter-minute. Then, finally, he nodded. "Thank you very much for the offer," he said. "Any assistance is greatly appreciated."

That was probably as close to a yes as Jaryn was going to get, and he took it.

After that, he joined us in the archives every day. Usually for a few hours after the middle of the day, because he had his real Keeper job to do somewhere else for most of the time. But he was really helpful in our quest to hunt down and organize these recorded histories of trials and instances and new laws being made and when it had all been done. He was a real Keeper, he'd trained all his life for it, while Kir had been around it for only his childhood. Kir knew a lot, but Jaryn just knew a hell of a lot more. He knew the set up of the archives a lot better, found things faster, and even personally knew some of the trials from having been to them. He was a huge help.

But things were really weird between him and Kir, and neither of them would tell me why. They were the same age, and Jaryn was married and had two kids. That was all I could get out of Kir, along with the fact that his family and Jaryn's family knew each other. I just had to figure there was some history between the two of them, something Kir didn't want to talk about. And he really didn't want to talk about it. The first time I tried to bring it up when Jaryn wasn't there, he got so tensed up that he accidentally snapped a quill in half.

I would have asked Jaryn, but I didn't know him that well. He seemed like a good guy, even if he'd taken Kir's annoying lead and spoke to me mostly in Isji. After watching Kir talk to me for a day or so he'd seemed to gauge what level I was at, and figured out what I understood and what I didn't. And then spoke to me a little bit above that level. Sometimes I really understood why Keyd got annoyed with the Keeper caste. They were kind of smug about being smart.

Three weeks had not been enough time to do this in. It probably would have taken months to really get a clear outline of how being gay had turned into a crime punishable by death. We had bits and pieces of it, trials with outcomes that had made new laws, even council records that had officially changed some of those laws, but it wasn't anything like I'd hoped we could get. And it probably wouldn't change anybody's mind in this upcoming trial. But Kir had already told me that this was something that we should keep working on, trial or not, because it was important. I'd known that, but the trial would have been something fairly public—a good place to start dragging some of this out.

Still, we did keep working on it. Pushing it right up to the deadline, basically; I had like a day or two before I was planning to jump back over to Earth for my dad's birthday. And speaking of that, I still hadn't fucking gotten the balls to ask Keyd along. It was almost good I hadn't been seeing him much lately, because I would have felt even more like a big giant coward. All I wanted to do was bring my boyfriend home to meet my family who was pretty firmly sure I was straight. That wasn't a big deal. Yeah, right.

"Kirbeylas," Jaryn said suddenly, and I startled out of my half blanked out thoughts. It was always funny hearing Jaryn always call Kir by his full name; nobody else did. I was used to it with Keyd, because for him it was a respect thing that nobody called him by his shorter name. I usually forgot that Kir or Darban or Rysa had longer versions of their names.

Kir had glanced up too, from behind a tiny mountain of books he'd built around himself. Mostly between himself and Jaryn. There really was something weird between them, and I kinda wished I knew what it was. "Yes?" Kir said, not really looking at Jaryn anymore and instead sliding a book he was looking at closer in.

"I think this may be relevant," Jaryn said, putting a rolled up parchment near Kir's elbow. One edge had been dipped in black ink, which marked it as a record of a trial for execution. Kir glanced at it, then reached out and pulled it towards himself.

As he tended to do with stuff Jaryn brought to him, he unrolled it very carefully. Like he was afraid it was going to grow teeth and gnaw his hand off. He spread it over the table and leaned over it, going quiet for a few minutes as he read. He spent a lot longer on it than he usually did, and he kept moving back to reread certain parts. But he was just as good as Keyd was at not really showing reactions or emotions on his face, and I had no idea what he was thinking. Jaryn wasn't giving me anything either; he was just watching Kir.

After at least ten minutes, Kir raised his head and sat back. He had a weird look on his face, somewhere between confusion and realization. He was even shaking a little. He looked over at Jaryn, blinking a few times, and then back to me. Jaryn was just sitting quietly, his hands folded on the table.

"Hey—what is it?" I said to Kir. "What's that say?"

"I'll read it to you," Kir said, softly, with another sideways glance at Jaryn. "It might be the most relevant thing we've found."

#

The good part about the clar keeping mile-long records of everything was that there were always thousands of details. Details, details, details, until you just starting wishing they'd learned to invent Reader's Digest. Trial records always told you exactly who was part of it, who was presiding over it, anybody vaguely involved, any other people there, and at least a few people that all those people were descended from or related to. And this record that Kir read off to me wasn't any different.

The trial it was about involved two women, who'd been having a long-time affair with each other and had finally been caught at it. But only one of them was being tried for it. Because she was from a high-blooded family of serious respect, and was being given an out. All she'd had to do was speak out against her lover, condemn her to death, and she'd be forgiven. The trial record basically just said that, straight out. Not even any reading between the lines needed.

The high-blooded woman, whose name was written out as Emesk Abeleshua, had been married and had children. Another reason she was being given a chance to recover herself; she'd added to the growth of their race. So her crime wasn't entirely unforgivable at this point in the clar's history—the trial was dated from about three hundred years ago, which was before any really hard laws had been drawn up.

The other woman was from a regular family, unmarried, in a less important occupation. Her name was written out once as Naske Halanya, but she was mostly referred to by just one letter, H, for the rest of the record. Kir explained to me how that was actually an insult, not a courtesy of anonymity, because of the way the letter h was written in their language. It was kind of complicated, but it came down to the fact that shortening her name down to just H was like recording her as a blank; an empty space.

The trial procedures were pretty straight-forward. People came forward to denounce Halanya, or defend her. Not so much on the second half, a few members of her family who basically just denied that she was in a relationship at all. She didn't really have anyone on her side, and even without her lover's testimony she probably would have been found guilty anyway. Everything was stacked against her.

And finally Abeleshua was put on the stand, or whatever the clar had that was the equivalent of the stand. She was supposed to be the final shoe-in for condemning Halanya, because if she did, her own crime would be completely erased from record. Even just in writing, it was easy to see that this woman regretted agreeing to it. Someone had to actually take her by the arm and lead her up to the stand, because she didn't want to go up to it on her own. And once she was there, what she said was all really vague and inconclusive—she was waffling like hell. But she did admit to the affair, which had pretty much been what they'd wanted anyway. Once she'd finally declared it was true, she'd been handed the dagger.

Kir had to take another time-out to explain to me what the dagger meant. It was a literal dagger, ceremonial, a sort of metaphoric object to represent the opinion of someone of social status and power, which Abeleshua was. It didn't have anything to do with the final outcome of the trial, but it was still an important symbol. Basically, she was supposed to have either sheathed the dagger, to show a support of innocence, or thrown it at Halanya's feet, in favor of condemning her. And she was expected to do the latter. But she hadn't done either one.

When Abeleshua had been given the blade, she'd turned it around and killed herself with it. Right in the court room, in front of everyone. She'd slit her own throat, and bled out on the floor before anyone could do anything about it. Apparently she'd looked at Halanya and said something to her, right before, but for some reason what she'd said hadn't been recorded. And Halanya had been packed off and executed anyway, but nobody had expected what Abeleshua had done.

It was because of that incredible messy failure of a trial that they'd decided to stop allowing political outs to high-blooded people accused of homosexuality. It was written there right at the end of the document. And at first, I thought that was why Jaryn had thought it was relevant. And it was—but there was more to it than that, because once Kir had finished reading and put the parchment down with shaking hands, Jaryn spoke up.

"A branch of the Emesk bloodline joined the Kojoa family," he said, from the end of the table. He'd been sitting there quietly, the entire time that Kir had been reading aloud, his hands folded on the table.

"That's what I thought," Kir said, quietly, and I wrung out my brain to remember where I'd heard Kojoa before. I remembered with a speed I was almost impressed by—Kojoa was the family name of Arirsanya and Gannekein. Douchebag Sr. and Douchebag Jr.

"Emesk Abeleshua had one child," Jaryn said. "At the time of the trial, he was following the duty of his bloodline and serving in the military. With a wife and children of his own. He wasn't implicated in the trial, nor persecuted afterwards."

"Why would he have been?" I said. Kir made another little noise in his throat, and squeezed his eyes shut. Even Jaryn looked uncomfortable.

"People like Arirsanya, like Eldronrhet, or any who have ever thought the same way they do, consider this to be mostly a sickness of the mind," Kir said, after a moment. "But it doesn't mean they don't fear it continuing through blood, either. At the same time that people were condemned for not helping to perpetrate our race, it was thought that children of anyone sick in that way would be more likely to…develop it themselves, or be more prone to fall to temptation. A hypocritical way of thought, but one that certainly helps us now."

"It does?"

"Emesk Abeleshua's son had two daughters," Jaryn said. "One of them is Arirsanya's grandmother. And Gannekein's great-grandmother."

I still didn't really get this. "You think that because the Kojoa family had someone gay a million years ago in their bloodline years ago, it will…do what? What's the point?"

"Because with his family history, it won't be very difficult to make it seem as though he acted through repressed urges, carried down through the blood of his ancestry, when he attacked you," Kir said, grimly. "That his hate is borne through frustration and self-denial, rather than bias and ignorance. If nothing else, he will look far less reliable and sympathetic."

Because we'll be pushing him down closer to the level that they all see me at, I thought. That felt almost like…backstabbing, or something. Or at least a not entirely moral way of doing this. But then again….these people, like Eldronrhet, had never done anything by the rules either, and they'd made up their own system of unfair ethics a long time ago. Maybe we were going to have to start playing a dirtier game too, just to keep up.

"Do you think Arirsanya knows this?" I said. "About this great-great-whatever of his, I mean."

"I would assume not," Kir said. "I'm sure the Emesk family did all it could to divert attention from this mar in their blood, which would include hiding it from their descendents. And this was long enough ago that certainly no one alive remembers it—and most likely it was kept very quiet in order to minimize the knowledge of Abele's transgression, as she was being given a chance to redeem herself of it."

"You really think this will change anybody's opinion?" I said. I trusted Kir, a hell of a lot, and I didn't understand a lot of nuances and subtleties about the clar culture like he, or anybody, knew naturally. But I still had to ask.

"It will do something," Kir said. "Exactly what, I can't say." His hand gripped into the paper a little. "We should copy this, and it should be brought up at the trial."

"I can present it," Jaryn said. "It will be easier for me to gain permission to speak there."

Kir put the paper carefully down to the table, pushed back his chair, stood up, and walked over to where Jaryn was sitting. And then he bowed low to him, bending his upper body nearly parallel with the ground, his braid falling forward over his shoulder and nearly brushing against the floor. Jaryn startled, pushing himself back from the table and starting to get to his feet.

"Kirbeylas—" he said. Kir straightened up, and drew his hand down the middle of his face in a gesture that meant a formal apology.

"I'm sorry I've…been unfriendly to you," he said. I blinked a little—unfriendly? Kir had been completely polite to Jaryn, from what I'd seen. Maybe even too polite. "I have to admit I didn't trust you, or understand why you were working to help us."

"I know," Jaryn said, relaxing back into the chair. "It's all right, I didn't expect you would."

"I'm afraid I still don't," Kir said. "But, this—" he glanced back at the unrolled parchment on the table, "—is truly the most useful thing we've found. And I have to thank you for it, and for—everything else you have done. No matter why you did it."

Jaryn leaned forward, like he wanted to say something, then he just sat back again and nodded. "It was no trouble," he said. Which was a total lie, since he'd been putting in a couple of hard hours here every day for two weeks.

The rest of the afternoon we spent putting our meager research results into some sort of order, but Kir was right—the best thing we had was this trial record Jaryn had found. That had been serious good timing too, since I was headed out of here soon to go back home. I'd been planning to try and cram in some extra hours here tomorrow, but now maybe I could just take it easy for a day, because we probably weren't going to find anything better. I could definitely use a break. Kir looked like he could too—he seemed distracted and jumpy for the rest of the day, and he kept rubbing at his eyes and sides of his head.

At the end of the afternoon, right around the time we were usually finishing up anyway, Darban came around. I saw him first, leaning in the doorway and looking a little expectant. He gave me a nod, and I nodded back and reached over the table and knocked Kir in the arm. Kir glanced up, and Darban smiled at him.

Kir's returned expression didn't look much like a smile. Without a word, he got up and went to Darban, stepped into his arms and curled himself up against his chest, pressing his face into Darban's shoulder. I'd never seen him do anything like that before—it was weird and vulnerable and even Darban looked stunned. His arms came up, hesitantly, and closed gently around Kir's shoulders. He said something, too quiet to hear, and Kir shook himself and stepped back a little. But not much.

"Alan," he said, without really looking at me. "I—

"Yeah, no problem," I said. "Take off, it's cool. I'll see you later."

Kir nodded, and Darban put his arm around his shoulders and nudged his face against Kir's temple, saying something quietly to him as they moved away from the door, into the golden light of the hallway. I heard their footsteps echoing back for a few moments before fading away. I noticed Jaryn was watching the doorway too, and when he turned back around, he caught my eye.

"Do you think I did something to upset him?" he said, and he sounded honestly concerned.

"You?" I said. "Don't think so. I think it was that trial thing. Shook him up or something."

Jaryn nodded, but he was still frowning a little.

"You…know, right?" I said to him. "About Kir, I mean."

He glanced at me. "Of course, I know," he said. "It isn't much of a secret anymore that one of the gheret has a male lover named Enten Kirbeylas. I haven't seen him in a very long time, and I didn't even know where he was until I started hearing these rumors. I've been wanting to speak with him for some time, but I couldn't get the courage to until I heard about what he was doing here."

Jaryn sighed and ran a hand through his hair, his fingers bumping into the lacquered headband thing he always wore. "I should be getting home myself," he said. "I'm sorry to leave you with this—" he gestured at the table—"mess, but I do have my family."

"It's cool," I said. "It's not that bad. Hey. Can I ask you something?" Jaryn nodded, so I took a breath and just kind of threw it out there. "Was that really the only reason you helped us; to see Kir again? I mean, I know you're married and everything. Unless…"

"No," Jaryn said. "I am perfectly happy with my wife, this is not about anything like that. Kir was once a close friend of mine, when we were children. But he…" Jaryn brushed a hand through his hair again. "I suppose I'm considering it my apology, and repentance," he said. "For unknowingly being a small part of the reason he abdicated our caste, excommunicated himself from his family, changed his entire life."

I got it, suddenly. A lot of drifting pieces of knowledge I'd learned over time about Kir, and the way he'd been acting recently, suddenly snapped together into something completely logical. "Oh, shit," I said. "He was in love with you."

Jaryn closed his eyes and breathed in. "Maybe," he said, when he opened them again. "Of course he never said. But, when I learned that the man he pledged antshil with has also been his lover, I suddenly understood a lot more about him that had always puzzled me. The way he acted as a child, how he interacted with everyone. And...especially with me. If not love, it was certainly something he was ashamed and afraid of. Enough to help him to chose to change his life the way he did."

No wonder Kir hadn't really trusted this guy. He probably though Jaryn was there to mock him or rub it in his face or something. But Jaryn was just incredibly sorry, for something that wasn't even his fault. I didn't really know much about this guy, but I liked him more just for that.

"Kir's happy where he is," I said, and Jaryn looked at me. "Really, I just asked him about this. He said he doesn't regret being a soldier or the choices he made. So…you don't have to feel so bad about it. I don't think he blames anyone, including you."

Jaryn sighed, like he was relieved but still didn't really believe me. "He was treating me so formally, I just thought—"

"Well, he probably thought you were here to get on his case about it," I said. "People like us don't get treated real well around here, you know."

"What?" Jaryn said, startling. "Even you and…"

"Yeah, even me and Keyd," I said. "Surprise."

"But, as the agistar—"

"It doesn't matter," I said. "It's all the same. They hate him, they hate me and Kir and anybody else who'll ever come forward about it. That's why we were doing this." I gestured around at the archive room.

"Then I'm even more glad that I've helped you here," Jaryn said, lifting his chin up a little. "I did this for Kirbeylas, but if it helps others, including the agistar…Keydestas wasn't given an easy role at an easy time, or an easy transition into it. I don't know how well anyone could have done, in his place, at his age—but he's done well. Better than many thought he ever could, even."

"I'll tell him you said that," I said. Keyd could really use hearing it. "And—thanks again for helping us. Seriously. I kind of can't say that enough."

Jaryn smiled a little and bowed at me, hand on his chest. "I'll see you again, I hope," he said.

"Yeah," I said, returning the gesture. "Definitely."

He gave me a last nod, and then walked out into the lantern-lit corridor, his shadow falling blue and long behind him. One more guy for our side, and that was a good thing. We needed everybody we could get, and especially people like Jaryn.

I finished up myself a couple of minutes later, just putting back all the stuff we'd moved out of place because the Keepers liked stuff all orderly. And we were pretty much done in here, at least for now. My new priority was going home. And first, finding Keyd. He'd been in and out of Lojt for the past few days, and through the bond I could feel that he was here now. I was pretty sure he was at the rhun—like a city center or town hall, which he and the gheret had started using sort of regularly again—and when I felt out through the bond, it told me that he was definitely in that direction.

Outside of the archive building, the streets were dark (like always) and wet with rain (also almost like always). It took me a couple of minutes to get over to the rhun, and I was pretty soaked by the time I got to the big flight of stairs in front of the building. It rained in Lojt a lot. I wasn't even sure how that even worked, without any real source of heat or light to make any sort of water cycle happen, but it happened anyway. Constantly. I ran up the stairs into the circle-shaped domed entrance room, my shoes squeaking on the polished stone of the floors, then shook myself off like a wet dog, raking my sopping hair out of my face.

I was still pretty wet and cold. So I used a convenient little trick that I'd figured out how to do—there was a whumph in my ears, like a gas fire lighting up, and heat charged up in the air around me. Two seconds later, I was completely dry. My hair was a little staticy and frizzed out, but that was a small price. I loved handy little things like that, and they were really easy to use and didn't take much effort. And they helped me control the amount of energy I had in me.

The rain kicked into serious overdrive as I headed down one of the corridors of the rhun; the place was built like an X, the circular entrance room in the center where the arms crossed. The arched windows were like views to the dark underside of a rushing river, with sheetsof water pouring down over them now, wiggling along the thick glass. There were a couple lanterns lit up in little niches in the walls, which glowed out with warm orangey light.

Even more light was coming out of the open doorway of the room that Keyd normally used. When I stuck my head in, Keyd was sitting at the desk over a pile of papers, a lantern flickering near his hand. A couple others were lit around the room, throwing deep yellow light against the blue shadows. As I watched, Keyd set down his pen, sat back, drew in a long breath, rubbed his hands up his face and dragged his fingers through his hair. Then he picked up the pen and leant forward again. Whatever he was doing, he was concentrating enough that he wasn't sensing me through the bond. I reached at him through it, prodding him a little. He twitched, and raised his head to look at me.

"Hey," I said, moving a step or two into the room. Keyd looked exhausted, just—completely stripped down and worn out, pale even in the warm light of the lanterns. Everything I was going to say, about what Kir and I had found and what we thought it could mean, died in my throat. Instead, I went to him and put my hands on his shoulders. "You okay?"

Keyd nodded, leaning back into my hands. "Busy," he said. Yeah, of course. Like always. I could feel his exhaustion through the bond, like a physical weight settling in my bones. These past couple of weeks he'd really been overworking himself, or something—he'd just felt way more tired and drained than normal. He always worked hard, but he usually stopped before it got to him this much.

"Take a break," I said. Keyd made a noise and shook his head. "Christ, Keyd, that's not even a request. Just stop. Nothing's going to fall apart if you stop for ten minutes."

He sighed a little and sat back. That was about as much of an agreement as I was going to get. I grabbed the back of his chair and dragged it back from the desk, then swung around and threw my leg over his legs, sitting myself on his lap. Keyd made a sound like a laugh, rested his hands on top of my thighs and leant in to kiss me. Well, that was promising. I caught the sides of his face between my hands and kissed back. All the time apart had really helped the bond settle down again, so it felt almost normal now, even when we were this near each other.

But because it was normal again, I could feel very clearly how worn out he was. It was almost all I could feel, plus the way his heartbeat was picking up from me sitting on him. But even that wasn't as much as usual, and after a couple of seconds he broke away from me, and slumped forward until his forehead was against my collarbone. Then he sighed, gripping into my legs a little.

"I'm sorry," he muttered into my shirt. "I'm sorry."

He was too tired for this. It would have almost been funny if I wasn't getting so damn worried about him. I let him rest against me and drew my fingers through his hair, once in a while pressing a kiss against the top of his head.

"It's okay," I said. "It's not a big deal. I mean, yeah it is, if you're killing yourself with work here—that's a big deal. Are you doing okay? You feel kinda…over heated."

He did. There was a feverish feel to his skin that I didn't like, especially in this cold stone room with its pale flickering lanterns and icy rain hammering down outside. But Keyd actually laughed, into my shoulder. "Alan, I can't—"

"—get sick, I know. Show off," I said. I brushed his hair off his forehead and kissed him there, his skin burning under my mouth. But the clar really couldn't get sick. The entities in them worked like the most impenetrable immune system ever created. The downside to that was that sometimes, rarely, it turned around and killed them. Keyd's dad had died that way.

"I'm not doing anything more than usual," Keyd said, shifting a little bit under me. "I'm just…I've been tired."

"Yeah," I said. "I feel you." Three weeks of intensive research for hours and hours every day had been tiring for me. Felt like being back in college for a while there. Nothing like Keyd's full time job, but still. I was pretty worn out too.

Keyd made a soft sound and lifted his face up against my neck, curling one hand around the back of my head, and just held on. We stayed like that for a while, resting against each other. I was glad we even could, now that the bond wasn't freaking out so much anymore. It still flared up more than normal when I touched his oen marks, so I was careful of my hands and just didn't touch them. The rain roared on the roof overhead, muted through layers of stone.

"You're a little—prickly," Keyd said against my throat, and when he dragged his thumb over my jaw I heard a dry sccrtch.

I laughed. "Hm, yeah, I've been forgetting to shave. I'll do it before I go home."

That had just kind of spilled out—I hadn't meant to bring it up, not when Keyd was so visibly exhausted. And he went a little still under my hands, and there was the smallest pause in his breath.

"The day after tomorrow," he said. He'd been keeping track. I felt worse about it instantly. But now we were talking about it, and we almost were out of time to do even that.

"Yeah," I said.

Keyd nodded against me once, and didn't say anything more. I felt a sort of clench in my stomach, and hated the way that Keyd was used to just accepting the fact that I never asked him along. He'd never tried to get me to ask him, but I could just see it get worse every time. How much he wanted me to.

I caught his jaw, turned his face up to look at me. I had to do this now, before I lost my nerve again. "Keyd," I said. "Come with me."

It took a second for it to sink in. Then he drew in a quick breath, his grip on my legs tightening. "You—really?" he said, and there was such a hopeful, boyish excitement about the way he asked that I instantly felt worse for not making the offer before this. Family was so important to the clar, and Keyd had so little of his—I should have done this way, way long ago.

"Yeah," I said. "Really. If you still want to."

"Of course I do," Keyd said. He looked more awake now then he had for weeks, and he felt more awake through the bond. "I want to meet your family very much."

"Yeah, I know you do." I leant forward until my temple rested against the side of his jaw. "You know I can't exactly tell them who you are," I said. "It wouldn't make sense, they couldn't understand, so I just can't do that."

"It's all right. I don't mind."

"And we can't align them, obviously," I said. "You think you can do okay, with English?"

"I think I can," Keyd said, in English just to prove it. "If you tell them I'm foreign."

I laughed. "You do remember that crazy story we made up to tell them about where I am, right?"

"Some of it," Keyd said. "Do you?"

I nodded. I had to keep track of it or I'd be stuck in my own lies. Well, not lies, just…a more believable explanation. We'd kept it fairly simple, but there were certain people in my family who would jump on inconsistencies. My sister Ashley, for one.

"But start speaking to me out of frequency," Keyd said. "It will help me get used to thinking in English a little."

"Okay," I said. "You're really sure you want to do this?"

Keyd nodded, gripping at me again. I leant into him and wrapped my arms around his back. He really did feel too hot; it even came through his clothes like the thick heat of a furnace. Our bond throbbed where my chest was pressed to his, but I ignored it. He was right; he couldn't get sick, and it probably was just from being overworked. I wouldn't worry unless it got worse.

"Thank you," Keyd said into my hair. "I never wanted to pressure you, but—I must have been obvious about it. I just didn't want you to do something before you were ready. I would have waited, as long as you needed."

He was really willing to go through a lot for me. But I was willing to do the same for him. That, I thought, was really one of the things that had made this work for so long, despite how much resistance and difficulty we'd been hit with, on top of how different we were from each other. When it really came down to it, we were both just to goddamn stubborn to quit on each other. We both wanted this too much.

---

This took a ridiculously long time and it's totally my fault. I didn't have writer's block, per se. More like writer's suck. But finally it's donnnnnne (and huge!). And there should be another soon.

Also some people have noticed it already but I have a formspring now, where you can ask me stuff! It's at www .formspring. me/ter0main (without the spaces).