Yes, it is, she thought, but it didn’t work out that badly for you, did it? Her lips curved in a tender smile. He was already plump, poor thing. But there was something so … endearing about him. Like a gawky puppy. I wonder how many times he’d been told he had to marry me to legitimize the dynasty? I know how many times they told me I had to marry him to make sure the legitimate dynasty’s blood still sat on the throne! But he was so eager, so earnest, about trying to put me at ease. And I think he probably thought the only reason an attractive young lady would have looked at him—if she hadn’t had to marry him for reasons of state, of course—was because he was a prince. But he never was really fair to himself. He always thought of himself as a clever little man, not simply as a man … when he was all the man anyone could ever have needed.
A single tear brimmed at the corner of her eye, but it wasn’t a tear of sorrow. Not anymore. Regret, perhaps, for all the years they’d lost, but the memory of all the years they’d had—that defeated the sorrow. And she only hoped Mahrya and Zhan would find the same happiness she and Nahrmahn had.
And at least they probably won’t have to worry about figuring out where the various parts go, the way we did, she told herself with a suddenly impish grin. That’s something. Besides—
“Excuse me, Ohlyvya,” a deep, familiar voice said behind her, and she turned quickly.
“Merlin!” Her eyes widened in surprise—at seeing him here, not that he’d managed to get to her balcony without anyone spotting him along the way. “I didn’t expect you. Why didn’t you com?”
“Because this is something best done personally,” he told her with a bow which was deeper than usual and oddly formal. “It’s not the sort of conversation we should have over the com.”
“Really?” She regarded him more narrowly. “That sounds faintly ominous, as Nahrmahn would have said.”
“Interesting you should mention Nahrmahn,” Merlin said with a strange smile. “He has quite a lot to do with this visit, as a matter of fact.”
“What?” Her brow furrowed in confusion, and he waved one hand at the balcony’s marble bench.
“Why don’t you sit down? I have a story to tell you.”
* * *
“And that’s how it happened,” Merlin said, twenty minutes later. “I know I had no right to make a decision like that without consulting him—and you. But there wasn’t time, I didn’t know if it was going to work, and you had enough grief without hoping for something that might never come to pass.”
Ohlyvya stared at him, her face pale and streaked with tears in the balcony’s lamplight. She pressed her hand to her quivering lips, and he could almost physically feel the tension trembling through her muscles. At that moment, he thought, what she’d learned from him and Owl in the last two years must be at war with everything she’d ever learned before that.
“I can’t—” She broke off and swallowed hard. “I can’t … take it in,” she said then, her voice hoarse. “He’s dead, Merlin. I buried him!”
“So is Nimue Alban, Ohlyvya,” he said gently, his blue eyes dark and bottomless.
“But … but I never knew Nimue.” She lowered her hand and managed a tight, strained smile. It was fleeting. “Intellectually—here—” she touched her temple, “I know the man I see in front of me is really a machine with someone else’s memories. But that isn’t real to me, Merlin. Nimue isn’t—you are. It’s … different.”
“Is it really? Or is it just that you feel like you’d be cheating?”
“Cheating?” She looked at him. “Cheating who?”
“That would be my own attitude,” he told her. “On the other hand, I haven’t committed myself to a rebellion against the only Church, the only faith, I’ve ever known. The Church of God Awaiting is nothing to me but an enormous con game, a scam perpetrated upon the entire human race by a batch of megalomaniacs who were loony as bedbugs, whatever their intentions may’ve been. It’s not hard for me to kick over that anthill, Ohlyvya, but I think it could be harder for you than your intellect’s ready to admit.”
She opened her mouth, but he held up one hand, stopping her.
“I’m not saying your rebellion isn’t absolutely one hundred percent genuine. In fact, it’s probably even more genuine—if that’s an allowable term—than my own, because it did require you to think about and reject the lies you’d been taught all your life. But human minds are funny things. Sometimes, they punish themselves for doing what they know was the right thing because someone they loved and trusted once told them it was the wrong thing. So are you punishing yourself for having dared to defy the archangels by feeling as if you’d be cheating to accept that Nahrmahn isn’t really gone?”
“I—” She began, then paused suddenly and looked around. “Is he watching us right now?”
“No.” Merlin shook his head. “He’s had Owl take his VR offline until you or I tell him to put it back online. He wanted you to be able to think or say anything you wanted to—or needed to—without worrying about how it might affect his feelings. This decision is up to you, Ohlyvya. He doesn’t want to put any more pressure on you than he can help, because—as he put it—God knows just sending me to tell you about him has to be pressure enough for any long-suffering wife to put up with.”
She gurgled a strained laugh.
“Oh, that does sound like him! Just like him.”
“I know.” Merlin rose, crossed to the balcony railing, and looked out across the garden. “I can’t tell you for certain that this is really Nahrmahn, Ohlyvya.” His voice came back across his shoulder. “That’s because I can’t tell you for certain that I’m really Nimue Alban. I think I am … usually, but I suspect I’ll never know for certain until the day this PICA finally powers down for the last time. Maybe when that happens I’ll find out all I ever really was was an electronic echo of someone who died a thousand years before I ever opened my eyes on this planet.”
He turned to face her once more, his eyes dark.
“Maikel doesn’t think that’s going to happen, and as a general rule, I’m prepared to accept his expertise where souls are concerned. If that man doesn’t have it right, no one I’ve ever known did. So all I can tell you is that I think this really is Nahrmahn, the man who loves you. That’s what I believe. And he asked me to tell you one more thing.”
“What?” she asked very softly.
“He asked me to tell you he thinks he’s Nahrmahn, and that he loves you. That there are still things the two of you have never told each other—that he always meant, or at least wanted, to tell you. That he wants to tell them to you now. And that he’s pretty sure that if he isn’t the ‘real’ Nahrmahn, the original couldn’t possibly object to your taking what comfort you can out of at least talking to him. After all, he wouldn’t.”
She laughed again, a much less strained sound this time, and shook her head.
“And that sounds even more like him! I can even see his smile when he said it! He always was an unscrupulous devil when it came to getting what he wanted.”
“I see you’re an excellent judge of character,” Merlin said with a chuckle, and she laughed yet again. The laugh segued into a smile, pensive and still more than a little strained, but definitely a smile.
“He hasn’t told me this, Ohlyvya,” Merlin said after a moment, “but I think he plans on having his VR terminated on the day you die.”
Her smile disappeared and her eyes widened, one hand rising to her throat, and Merlin shook his head quickly.
“I don’t mean he’s going to terminate tonight if you don’t feel you can talk to him! I just mean that when the time comes for you to die, he intends to follow you to wherever it is you go. I think … I think he doesn’t want either of you to be left behind. And I think he believes that if he isn’t really Nahrmahn, if despite everything he thinks and feels neither he nor I are truly ‘real,’ it won’t matter one way or the other when he shuts down. But if he is Nahrmahn, he’s not going to hang on to an existence here when it might
cost him the opportunity to follow you, or whatever of both of you survives.”
Her eyes softened, and she drew a deep, tremulous breath.
“Do I have to decide tonight?”
“No. And it’s not like you’re going to leave him on tenterhooks while you think about it, either.” Merlin grinned suddenly. “Now that I think about it, that might be another reason he had Owl take him offline. It would be like him to combine selflessness with self-interest, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, it certainly would,” she said in a rather more entertained voice, a trace of amusement glinting in her eye. “Just like him!”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that—‘just like him,’ I mean,” Merlin pointed out gently.
“I know. It’s just … hard.” Her expression was calmer, her eyes deep and thoughtful. “I’ve been through losing him. I think part of it is that I’m afraid of finding out it isn’t really him after all—that I’ll have to go through losing him all over again.”
“I guess it’s like Maikel’s always telling us.” She looked at him and he shrugged. “There comes a time when we just have to decide, Ohlyvya. Sometimes all we can consult is our heart, because the mind doesn’t supply the answers we need. So what it comes down to, I think, is whether or not you’re willing to risk that. Do you have the courage to open yourself to that sort of possible hurt in the hope of finding that sort of possible joy?”
She looked at him oddly for a moment, then rose and crossed to stand directly in front of him. She reached out, laying both palms flat against his armored breastplate, and looked up into those dark blue eyes.
“Merlin,” she asked quietly, “was Nimue ever in love?”
He froze for a long, quivering heartbeat, then very gently covered the hands on his breastplate with his own.
“No,” he said, his deep voice soft. “Nimue loved many people in her life, Ohlyvya. Her parents, Commodore Pei, Shan-wei, the people who fought and, in the end, died with her. But she was never brave enough to love someone the way you loved Nahrmahn, the way Cayleb and Sharleyan love each other. She knew they were all going to die, that they could never have a future together, and she wasn’t willing to open her heart to the pain of loving someone when she knew what the end had to be.”
She stared up at him, hearing the stark regret, tasting the honesty it had taken for him to admit that. And then she bent forward, laying her cheek atop the long-fingered, sinewy swordsman’s hands which had covered hers.
“Poor Nimue,” she whispered. “Trust me in this, Merlin. If she ever had opened that heart of hers, if she’d found the right man, it wouldn’t have mattered to him how little time they had. And”—she drew a deep breath—“I think I see now another reason why you love so deeply here, on Safehold.”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe I never will. But I do know the people I’ve met here, on this world, are worth everything. They’re worth what Commodore Pei and Pei Shan-wei and all the others of the Alexandria Enclave gave, and they’re worth everything Nimue Alban gave.”
“No, we aren’t,” she told him, head never moving from where it lay against his chest, “but because you believe we are, we have to be worth it anyway. You don’t leave a choice.”
They stood there for at least two full minutes, and then she drew a deep, lung-cleansing breath and straightened. She leaned back, looking up at his face once more, and cupped his cheeks in her hands.
“Damn you, Merlin Athrawes,” she said softly. “Damn you for making all of us pretend we’re characters in some legend somewhere! It’s a lot more comfortable being one of those people who just tries to get along in the world, but you couldn’t let us do that, could you?”
“That’s me,” he told her with a crooked smile. “Just a natural-born troublemaker who never could leave well enough alone.”
“Which sounds a lot like someone else I once knew, now that you mention it.” She drew another breath. “And since it does, I suppose I’d better talk to him about all this, hadn’t I? Did you say I could ask Owl to … wake him up?”
“I think he’d like that,” Merlin told her, touching her cheek in return. “I think he’d like that a lot.”
.XV.
Royal Palace, City of Cherayth, Kingdom of Chisholm, Empire of Charis
Irys Daykyn tried to still the flutter deep in the pit of her stomach as she followed Edwyrd Seahamper down the passageway to the suite reserved for Sharleyan and Cayleb whenever they were in Cherayth. She hadn’t spent much time in the royal palace—as Archbishop Maikel’s charges, she and Daivyn had been housed with him in a guest suite in Archbishop Ulys’ palace adjoining the cathedral—but she knew very few people were admitted to this wing, and even fewer of them to Whiterock Tower. The second oldest part of the entire palace, the tower had been thoroughly renovated at least twice during its lengthy lifespan. It also happened to be the most secure, heavily fortified portion of the entire complex, a grim reminder of a time when this palace had been, in very fact, a fortress … and one which had been needed, more than once.
Seahamper was only a sergeant, but she’d noticed lieutenants, captains, and even majors—with one exception—tended to defer to him. She supposed that when someone had been Empress Sharleyan’s personal armsman since she was a little girl, and when that someone was also the only survivor of the guards who’d died to protect her at Saint Agtha’s, he acquired a little extra authority.
She suspected Tobys Raimair was going to find himself in a similar position where Daivyn was concerned, one day.
Assuming Daivyn survived.
My, aren’t you the gloomy one? she thought. Anything else you’d care to be depressed about today? It’s sunny out, but I’m sure clouds could come up and a tornado could sweep through. Or we could have a nice roaring fire that burns the entire city. Or … I know—a tidal wave! That would be just about perfect, wouldn’t it?
She snorted at her own perversity, then felt herself unconsciously straightening her shoulders as Seahamper paused, glanced over his shoulder, and knocked gently on a polished wooden door.
“Your Majesty?”
“Yes, Edwyrd,” a voice came back through the door. “Show them in, please.”
“Of course, Your Majesty.” He tugged on the bright brass handle, opening the heavy slab of wood—it was at least two inches thick, Irys saw; probably a leftover from the old fortress days—and bowed to her and her companions.
Irys’ eyebrows tried to rise as she realized she, Coris, and Daivyn were to be admitted to Sharleyan’s presence without a single Imperial Guardsman present. Not only that, but Coris wore a belt dagger, and Seahamper didn’t even ask for it. From the look in his eyes, the sergeant wasn’t what anyone would have called overjoyed by that minor fact, but he only held the door patiently, waiting.
“A moment, Sergeant,” Coris said, and drew his dagger. He flipped it in his hand, extending the hilt to Seahamper. “I promise it would have stayed in its sheath,” he said with a whimsical smile, “but I think we’ll probably both feel better if it stays here with you, instead.”
Seahamper looked at him for a moment, then bowed again, more deeply, and took the weapon. He smiled—not so much at Coris, Irys thought, as at some memory—and closed the door quietly behind them.
The Corisandians crossed a vestibule into a chamber, fitted as a sitting room, which was surprisingly large, given the Tower’s dimensions. It must take up most of this floor, she realized, and there was another stair in the corner, leading to the floor above.
Sharleyan sat alone in a comfortable chair beside a cavernous fireplace in which someone had installed one of Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s iron stoves. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through the window behind her, touching her black hair with hints of fire, lighting stray wisps like coppery wire, and Crown Princess Alahnah was in her lap. Irys felt an even stronger flicker of surprise and—she admitted to herself—satisfaction at the thought that Sharleyan was prepared not simply to meet them herself without a bodyguard but to
do the same thing with her daughter and the heir to the imperial throne. She couldn’t imagine another crowned head of state doing that.
Except for Cayleb, she thought then. Except for Cayleb.
“Please, be seated,” Sharleyan invited, and Irys and Daivyn sat in the two chairs facing hers. Actually, Irys sat and Daivyn perched, balancing on the front of the chair seat, his wiry young frame tense. She doubted he fully understood what this meeting was all about, really, but he understood enough to be acutely nervous. Despite which, and despite all the uncertainty and fear which had touched his life, he’d trusted Coris and her without question, and she suppressed an almost overpowering urge to reach out and smooth that unruly hair back from his forehead.
Coris didn’t sit. Instead, he positioned himself behind them, with Daivyn to his left and Irys to his right. He stood with one hand on the back of each chair, and Irys saw Sharleyan smile slightly as she noticed the empty dagger sheath.
“I see history has a tendency to repeat,” she murmured. Irys cocked her head questioningly, but Sharleyan only shook her own head and waved one hand. “Never mind. It was just an old memory. Maybe it will turn out to be a good omen as well.”