Orin’s laugh stirred his hair. Nikoly stretched along Tiiran’s back, then curled in tighter, making soft, pleasant noises. Tiiran forgot about beds or the activities done in them except sleep, only shivering slightly as he settled against Orin’s warmer body.
Chapter Twenty
Tiiran was late to open the library and ready it, but Po had let herself in before him, although all she had done was immediately fall asleep at the copying tables. He woke her with breakfast before hurrying to attend to the work he’d neglected in the past few days.
Except not much waited for him, not as much as there should have been considering the hours Tiiran had spent away from the library. Something he nearly attributed to Nikoly or Po until his tea woke him enough to make him go through the waiting pile of messages again.
There were no information requests. Nor were there any donated copies of old texts or maps.
That wasn’t unheard of. But there should have been at least one or two messages with questions, if not requests for complete copies of books. Perhaps Tiiran been fucked so well that he’d forgotten completing more work yesterday.
In the end, he took the chance to let everyone finish the assignments they had, and to return to finding information to please Nikoly and debating how to properly classify what he did find, and what might make finding it again easier for some assistant in the future.
A small blessing, really, to have that sort of time. Especially with Amie out with the snuffles and Po leaving every so often to go check on her.
But by end of the day, the spot on the front desk for incoming letters remained empty.
“River traffic is slow,” Po offered as explanation, sniffling in turn now. “I don’t know why, but I heard a runner complaining about it when I went to the kitchens for more tea.”
Nikoly, at Tiiran’s elbow to try to get Tiiran out the door to go meet Orin for dinner, had stopped and perked up with interest. “With boats coming to the capital or boats leaving?”
“He didn’t say,” Po answered slowly. “All right, so no letters are coming from the river today. But no messages for us from within the palace too?” She looked away, toward a wall, as if trying to see all the way back to her room and Amie. “Do the nobles know something we don’t?”
No one had an answer, and that had been enough to change the mood. Mattin had quietly left, earlier than Tiiran for once. Tiiran had told the others to go as well if they wanted, and no one had stayed but Nikoly, checking for any wayward scholars in any of the isolated nooks before finally escorting Tiiran out the doors.
They got their answer the next morning.
The day before, a contingent of the Palace Guard had gone into the capital to bring Jola of the Canamorra to the palace. According to gossip, Jola had not been injured or in chains, but since Jola had made it a point to not set foot within the palace walls since she’d come of age, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she had been taken captive and that it was on Piya’s orders.
The gossip also said Jola was currently pregnant, and that her young child of no more than four had been forced to enter the palace with her.
Since then, Jola and her child had not been seen, and perhaps with the arrest of Jola being so public, servants and palace staff had begun to whisper of others gone missing or possibly taken. It seemed there were nobles and their sworn guards, usually from within the palace but a few from the capital, who had not been seen in some time.
Jola wasn’t known for conspiring against anyone. Even Mattin hadn’t known much about her except her name and her famous refusal to enter the palace willingly.
Nobles were fools for conspiring and scheming, and for sending eyes-and-ears after each other, but if the spying had been meant to help guard them against such arrests, it hadn’t worked. Which suggested Piya might not be moving to arrest those whohadacted or plotted against him, but rather those he feltmightdo so.
Trials or at least public accusations might have been less terrifying. At least then people would know what to expect and who to expect it to happen to. Not receiving any warning brought back memories of rulers of the past and the paranoia that had led to summary executions.
Jola had been more or less a child when her parents had been executed for the old queen’s murder. She was the middle of three, the last generation of the few surviving Canamorra. The youngest had left the capital entirely once he’d come of age. The oldest, the head of what remained of the family, was by far the most known, mostly because he’d turned his back on the nobility to join the Outguard. There were songs about him, popular among commoners if not the nobility. But no one knew of any evidence then or now that any of the younger Canamorra had done anything against the ruler.
And if they had, then Piya should have made a declaration about it.
Perhaps for that reason, the palace had come to a halt. Secrecy left people to imagine, and they could imagine a lot. That might have been Piya’s intention, but Tiiran didn’t personally think the king was that clever, although his advisors might be.
Tiiran spent the morning crating originals of various noble histories and then storing them in the cellar that most outside the library didn’t know about. Nikoly helped him, unusually silent, not even speaking to ask why Tiiran was doing it.
The library’s visitors Tiiran left to Po and Mattin, both of them fluttering around the copying tables instead of returning to their rooms to pack up their belongings as some of the others were doing at Tiiran’s insistence. Po kept sneezing, but she was being stubborn. Tiiran finally ordered her out since rest had made his snuffles a lot less terrible and there wasn’t enough work to justify her being there. Whatever she had to do, Tiiran could do it when he was done.
“Best to be prepared,” Tiiran murmured, pushing away the second cup of tea Nikoly had tried to serve him. He drank the third only because the dust had left his mouth dry, and because it was spring tea and he wanted the energy to help him finish as quickly as possible.
Nikoly didn’t leave to pack. Not even as a precaution, although Tiiran tried to insist. For all that Nikoly said he liked to serve, he served only as and when pleased.
Tiiran had nothing to pack and nowhere to go. But he had stayed through palace upheaval before, as had Mattin, which was why Tiiran said nothing when Nikoly finally pushed him down to sit at the copying tables to make him eat and Mattin came up behind him to toy with Tiiran’s hair. There was nothing to do but wait, and do what work needed to be done, and apparently, braid Tiiran’s hair as if he was a beat-of-four while Tiiran forced himself to eat dried current scones and an orange. Then he was back up, back to work, using the lift to bring books downstairs.
By afternoon, the palace was eerily quiet, and they all understood why river traffic was slow; the beat-of-fours and anyone else who could afford to were fleeing the capital.
Tiiran had ribbons through his hair, now arranged in a single sleek, elaborate braid, and a tangle in him so tight that if it had been in front of him, he would have cut the string rather than attempt to untie it. He got himself spring tea and growled when Nikoly tried to take it from him, and finally marched upstairs because he still had things to do.
