31

Cordaelae was satisfied; he had come here expecting Rosaete to be the same man with the same values he’d held since his youth, and he hadn’t disappointed him.

Rosaete recognized that face, he smiled and walked to window, his eyes halted on Aethoria, on all five academies where there had only ever been four. "You too know Norvaente well," Rosaete's gaze stayed on the fifth academy.

Cordaelae crossed the room and came to stand beside him, and for a moment neither of them was a Vidhya or a King, only two men who had once been boys together, students of these very halls, and a third who had been louder than either of them, back when the three of them still shared a single boyhood between them.

"Better than most men living," Cordaelae said. "I knew him when he was only ever the boy who could not lose a game without breaking something over it."

A softness of a man remembering a version of himself, and of a friend, that had cost him nothing yet appeared on Rosaete's face. "He was always that."

"He still is," Cordaelae said. "Only now the things he breaks are cities."

Rosaete sighed and wondered whether Norvaente had truly done the things the war's whispers said he had done to the Draconians, the things men spoke of only in half-sentences and only when they were certain no one was listening. He wanted, badly, to believe the whispers were only whispers, the way frightened people spin monsters out of smoke and rumor when the truth is too plain and too dull to satisfy them.

"I knew he would restrict the Collegium the moment the war turned in his favor," said Cordaelae. "I knew he would starve it slowly until it existed only in name, until it was a rumor men told their children, a place that had once been rather than a place that was," his jaw tightened. "I also knew he would erase its very identity, until no living soul remembered it had ever stood taller than Vialthor, until the name itself curled up and died in some forgotten archive no one thought to open."

"You prepared for the slow death of it," Rosaete looked at him.

"I had no idea he would burn it," something in Cordaelae's face had not healed, and perhaps never would. "I still cannot believe he did."

"None of us did," Rosaete said quietly.

"It was the one thing I would have staked my life upon him never touching," said Cordaelae with a sigh and both of them turned their gaze to Aethoria.

Ashes had reached the world's oldest institution once and now a letter had arrived bearing the same seal as the one Cordaelae remembered from seven years past, the same clipped urgency dressed up as formality, and it felt as though those seven years had never happened at all, and also as though seven centuries had passed since the last time either of them had stood in a room and believed the Charter would hold against whatever came next.

They were watching it happen again, the same shape of thing wearing a different letter, and there was nothing in either of them now that could say with any certainty that ash would not reach Aethoria too, in time, the way it had reached everything else that had once seemed too old, too settled, too protected to burn.

Rosaete let his eyes move over the whole shape of it, the five academies set into the cliff-face in their long, curving arrangement. Bridges and stairwells stitched the whole of it together, stone paths climbed and crossed between buildings that had never been meant to stand apart from one another.

He had walked those bridges once himself, young and certain the way only the young ever were, footsteps that had long since worn into memory more than stone. Vehase had walked them after him and now Valere walks them too, the one Rosaete had least expected to want any of it, and yet there he was, somewhere below them in that curve of stone.

"My son is at your university," he turned towards Cordaelae.

"He is, Your Majesty."

"Do you suppose he harbors any prejudice towards the Draconian girl?" Rosaete asked. "He is a decent man, though with that young man one can never be entirely certain."

"I do not believe he does," Cordaelae offered. "I think Your Majesty has done an admirable job in the raising of your children. Whatever uncertainties may surround a young gentleman's heart, the quality of his upbringing is plain enough to see."

My Valere carries the same reputation wherever he goes, the thought settled warm in Rosaete's chest. It was no small thing to have a son whose name arrived ahead of him, in a court built on whispers and strategies, and never once needed correcting once he did.

"And how does he fare otherwise?" He asked after a while. "Stubborn as hell, that boy, always has been. Tell him black and he'll swear to you it's white just to see how long he can hold the argument." A dry huff escaped him. "His brother indulged him limitless, never once told him no, and now the rest of us get to live with the consequences of that kindness."

"Your Majesty, I've never once known him to be discourteous about it," Cordaelae offered.

"I'd have raised him to yield a point once in a while, but his brother taught him to hold his ground without ever raising his voice over it and that's the trouble as much as the virtue," the king laughed. "The boy listens to no one else, say a thing that doesn't come from his brother's mouth, and he'll nod politely and do exactly as he please before you spoke."

"His Highness the crown prince was no different, Your Majesty." Cordaelae paused to choose his words with care. "His Highness had a decent mind, and he knew how to use it and by all accounts, he was Aethoria's most brilliant student."

"I assume, I am blessed by Mother Panini, then," Rosaete gave a smile and looked at sea visible from window. "Both my sons turned out to be decent boys, a rare trait in princes."

Cordaelae studied him a moment before answering, and something in the king's face gave him pause, not the smile itself, but what moved beneath it.

"Your Majesty," Cordaelae said slowly as he walked and stood beside him, "if I may..."

"You may not," Rosaete said, "but you'll say it anyway, so go on."

"You're thinking of Her Majesty," Cordaelae said.

"Was I so obvious?" Rosaete didn't turn from the window. "I missed things a father ought not miss."

"Children learn from the way a father lives, the way a mother lived," he looked out at Aethoria with him. "You may have missed things, but they were watching you carry a crown and a grief at once, and never once let either one turn you cruel."

"She would have liked them, both of them." His voice had gone somewhere private, somewhere Cordaelae recognized from forty years back, from a boy who live with him in Abbys. "She always said Valere had her stubbornness and his brother had her patience, and I used to think it was just mother's love."

"Her Majesty would have been unbearably pleased to be proven right about both of them," Cordaelae offered gently.

That pulled a real laugh from the king, brief but real and he let himself watch Aethoria a while longer.

Cordaelae said nothing further, he had always believed that the truest version of a man is the one being shaped out of adolescence, that is there that a person comes closest to their truest self and he liked to think that version of Rosaete was still there if a person knew where to look.