34

Ryska stirred a memory and Cordaelae let the memory pull him back, further back than the war itself, back to the last time he'd stood in the Collegium and watched a small girl with a bow too big for her circle her father, unable to stay away from her father.

Twelve years ago, at the Collegium Institute of Magic.

Cordaelae had come to the Collegium on other business entirely, a dull matter of grounds allocation and there he saw her, a child with golden eyes and scales had bow in hand.

"That's my daughter, Ryska Aen" came a voice beside him, and Cordaelae didn't need to turn to know it. He'd have known that voice in the dark, on a battlefield, with his eyes put out.

"Emperor Aen," he offered the honorific even though he knew Vamey didn’t need it and gave soldiers handshake.

"Vidhya Cordaelae," Vamaey let go of Ryska's hand to return the grip properly, and before the handshake had even finished, she'd reached up and taken hold of it again, small fingers closed tight around his fingers the instant it was hers to claim.

Cordaelae raised a brow at that. "You've raised her affectionate, I see."

"She turned out that way on her own," Vamaey said, glancing down at her with the smile. "Can't go a day without me, this one."

"That sounds like a burden dressed up as charm."

"There's a benefit to it," he lifted her onto his arm, and she settled there like she'd always belonged. "She attends council now, just to stay near me," he glanced at her briefly before turning back to Cordaelae. "I suppose it's a blessing, having a daughter who'd rather sit through statecraft than be parted from her father."

Cordaelae's eyes dropped to the bow still clutched in her small hand, half her own height, clearly fashioned for a child who'd outgrow it within a year and been given it anyway.

"I expected fire out of an Aen child." Cordaelae glanced at Ryska, who was watching him with curiosity.

"So did I," said Vamaey.

"Will she be a good archer? Or are you only ruining your daughter's future, giving her whatever she wants?"

"Aye," said Vamaey with a certain smile. "She'll be a good archer."

Cordaelae glanced at him, waited for the rest, the doubt, the qualifier but none came. He just saw a father watching his daughter with a conviction that needed no defending.

"You didn't even consider the second half of the question," Cordaelae said.

"I did," Vamaey looked at her, and turned back to him. "I'll go on giving her whatever she reaches for, ruin or not because that's what she'll remember of me in the end, that I never once told her no."

Cordaelae said nothing for a moment, hearing a man he'd faced across a battlefield speak this plainly, as if for a moment the crown and the war between them had both gone quiet.

"You may think I am a fool," Vamaey huffed something close to a laugh.

"I think," Cordaelae said, "you're the first man I've ever envied for it."

Cordaelae felt the old, familiar sting of it, the same envy he'd carried for this man since long before either of them had drawn a sword against the other. In what day were you born, my friend, he thought, watching him settle her onto his hip, that the gods should favor you so completely, and so entirely without your ever once seeming to ask for it?

Emperor of thirteen kingdoms, he thought, and well loved by all of them, a rare and near-impossible thing among men who wore crowns.

A warrior sworn upon among soldiers, spoken of in the same reverent breath as heroes half a century dead.

A swordsman no man in Myris had ever truly wished to face across a blade, and fewer still had ever managed to survive facing.

A man whose heart, against every sensible calculation of alliance and enmity, had been captured whole by the princess of a house sworn generations deep against his own and who had fought the whole of the known world, kingdom by kingdom, to marry her regardless, and had somehow, impossibly, won that fight too.

And now, Cordaelae thought watching the warmth still lingering plain across Vamaey's face, he had a daughter who could not bear to stay away from him, a daughter who reached deep enough into his heart to make an emperor forget, entirely and without shame, every ounce of the careful, composed dignity a crown was meant to demand of him, and simply pull her up into his arms instead, the way no king in living memory had ever quite managed to do so freely, so plainly, before the whole of his own court.

Gods, man, Cordaelae thought, shaking his head, the envy was softened by something closer to genuine wonder. What luck you carry? What impossible, undeserved, magnificent luck.

"And how fares your daughter?" Vamaey asked. "Shalmali, is it?"

"She takes eager interest in both magic and healing," Cordaelae said. "I have enrolled her at Lashke primary university, to train as a healer."

"Do you wish, then," Vamaey asked, "to make her a mage healer proper, rather than a simple one?"

"She carries far too stable a mind for her age," Cordaelae said slowly. "But I am worried whether she would be fine mage healer."

"How would you know that," Vamaey asked, "if you fear it too greatly to ever let her try?"

Cordaelae fell silent again, the truth of it settled uncomfortably and undeniably across his face.

"Let her try," Vamaey clasped a hand firm upon his shoulder. "Let me take you home with me now, this very hour, for should Mynaka learn you were within these walls, and I failed to bring you before her properly, I do not wish to face the consequences of that particular oversight."

Cordaelae smiled and they made their way together toward the palace grounds, and it was there, in a garden thick with the scent of blooming groves, that Mynaka Mann rose to greet them both and something in Cordaelae eased at sight of her.

She still looks the very same, he thought, even after all these years, the same fine bones, the same proud, unbending set of the jaw I remember, hardly touched at all by time and then, watching little Ryska come running close behind her mother, he understood at once why the resemblance had struck him so plainly the moment, he'd first laid eyes on the child.

Of course, he thought, she resembles Mynaka so thoroughly it borders on uncanny. I suspect, given a few more years' growing, she shall favor her mother in nearly every particular, save the eyes and scales, which shall remain her father's alone, gold where her mother's burn green.

"You look tired, Cordaelae," Mynaka said.

"I have earned the right to it," he managed a small, wry smile.

Vamaey called out across the grounds soon after, and little Ryska came running at once scrambling up into her father's arms the moment he crouched to catch her, insisting through fits of giggling that he carry her off to see whether the kitchens had finished the honeyed bread she'd been promised. He obliged at once, hoisting her easy onto his hip and carrying her off toward the palace's inner courtyard, leaving Cordaelae and Mynaka to settle instead beneath the shade of a flowering tree.

"Shalmali shows promise," Cordaelae said, "far beyond what I expected, if I am honest."

"Then why do you hesitate?" Mynaka raised an eyebrow.

"Because mage healing demands more of a soul than simple healing ever could," Cordaelae said slowly. "I fear asking too much of her too soon."

"You always fear asking too much," Mynaka smiled.

Cordaelae looked at her, at the green of her eyes, the same eyes that had seen through every careful excuse he'd ever offered since the two of them were young enough to still believe excuses worked on each other. Perhaps I do, he thought, she had always been the one soul in this world capable of making him admit such things plainly, without argument, without pride standing foolishly in the way.

He wondered and quickly set the thought aside as he always did, what it might have cost him, all those years ago, had he ever once found the courage to ask her something braver than whether she thought his caution reasonable.