Chapter Text
Inside the courtyard the dark and raindrenched silence. Someone had taken his horse away, exhausted from three days’ hard riding through prickly wilderness and treacherous slopes but better off than its predecessor. He tracked it through a nightjar’s eyes for as far as seemed prudent. A soft-spoken steward ushered him into a hall, only pausing for a moment at the flutter of wings around his shoulders.
“No animals, my lord. Please.”
He had not heard the language for years and its strangeness almost obscured the strangeness of the request. Surely they knew him by name though he had not been here for over a decade. Perhaps they had forgotten. Some queer custom of Noureddin’s.
Urgency overswept caution and he assented with a slight dip of the head—slipping one wren into a sleeve of his tunic with arms crossed behind the back. An old magician’s trick, it used to delight courtiers at parties that they had attended as children. Even Vasily laughed. He’d been frowning, last he saw him, Vasilissa’s seal still fresh on the parchment that lay open on his desk. So, Dimitri had drawled, sneering in disbelief at what neither of them could bring themselves to trust—that the hag would simply give up her throne. This is her final gambit? And Vasily gave him a tired drawn look that said what both were thinking. That there was some trick in it went without saying, but what?
They found out soon enough. It was almost too obvious: her people still on the councils and Poltiarsky’s dratted son as Lord Chancellor, that snivelling demoniacal whelp, to push through the laws that would tie the tsar’s hands. All they needed was Vasily’s face and name; the rest might as well be offal. He’d had the sense to flee before the arrest warrant came down for him—loathe as he was to leave Vasily, he’d be more use free than dead or rotting in some dungeon.
So here he was to beg aid from a cousin he scarcely knew, whom he had not seen for years—since their first and only diplomatic function, after Vasilissa had married that wretch Poltiarsky, though their brats had already scampered about for years. How old was he then? Fifteen? Sixteen? Lermontov’s ashes still cooling in the urn, and Leonid Arturovich trailing them like a sniffling shadow. Noureddin had been perhaps twenty-three and freshly crowned, radiant with smiles, learned enough to discuss philosophy with Vasily and even coax the boy Arturovich to go hunting. He had not spoken much with Dimitri, which was just as well with him. He had never quite liked this so-called king of kings.
It was difficult to glean much of the interior from under the fold of his sleeve. After a time he stopped trying and simply let his other senses guide him, stroking a finger over feathers to soothe the frantic beating of its heart. Easier perhaps to use his mind but there was something in the repetitious motion that steadied him as well.
They walked through a series of endless-seeming and faintly rose-scented halls. Just as he remembered; spring in Surovo was muddy and grey but here verdure seemed to bleed into the very air. “This way to the sultan’s study,” murmured the steward, Amir or Ammar he thought his name was. Something about his voice made Dimitri suspect him for a eunuch.
Finally they stopped atop a flight of stairs. “Please, wait here,” said the steward. “I shall inform His Majesty of your arrival.”
Dimitri nodded curtly. Footsteps, a rustle of fabric, then the man was gone.
He chanced to loose the bird from his sleeve a little, just enough to peer around the immediate space. They seemed to have passed through the outer courtyard and public halls, into the sultan’s inner chambers. Through the creature’s abysmal night-vision he could just make out the staircase they had ascended and beyond a vast hall hung with tapestries. Somewhere a fountain burbled. Silently he cursed himself for not bringing a nightjar; had judged them too valuable to risk a venture of this sort. The rest were perched around the palace at various angles, on rooftops and atop trees, at the limits of his consciousness—by now he could reconstruct the compound’s architecture from the outside. But where was he, inside? Before him was an archway hung with heavy drapery beneath which light peered. Noureddin’s study.
He had just enough time to scoop back the animal when the steward reappeared. “His Majesty thanks you for your patience, my lord. He is most pleased to receive you.”
Dimitri followed the man’s footsteps, listened for the rustle of curtains that he drew back. He emerged into a vague impression of light. A fire crackling, air thick with woodsmoke and some obscure perfume.
“Hullo, coz,” said a familiar voice. “Lord of Lights, what on earth have you done with your hair?” Age did not seem to have dampened his incorrigible levity. “My, but you look terrible. Ammar, fetch the man some towels and a drink—something hot.”
Dimitri bowed stiffly. “Shāhanshāh." An ancient title, no longer strictly in use in the sultanate, but Noureddin seemed to prefer it. "In the name of our shared blood, I humbly beg the House of Jiruk for sanctuary.”
There was something wistful about Noureddin’s laugh. “Oh, Dimitri. You know you don’t have to stand on ceremony. Of course you’re welcome here. How’s Vasily?”
Something prickled at the back of his neck. Too easy.
“Indisposed,” he settled on. “We must ask your aid in a—political matter.”
“Ah,” said Noureddin. “About that. I’m afraid, dear coz…”
The silence curdled.
“...that someone else has beat you to the chase,” said a voice that froze him where he stood. “Remember me, Prince Dimitri?”
The wren’s heart beat wildly in its ribcage; he nearly crushed it in his fist. That voice. Here. Unbidden: a memory of himself a gangly youth, the huge roughshod figure seen from a windowsill, framing his own silhouette. The hot rush of shame.
She was already here. They had won.
One, two, three steps to the staircase. There were no railings. The fall should be sufficient.
Forgive me.
He turned—and was intercepted by hands, gloved hands at his arms and shoulders. Huge hands, that terrible strength. Some distant part of his mind screamed at him to still himself, wipe his face of emotion. It was happening again. A man of thirty nearly and useless, useless, useless.
“Leaving so soon?”
Vsevolod Ilyich, career criminal and consort to his mother, stood between him and the doorway, pinning his arms as easily as a cat with some limp rodent. Dimitri struggled to turn in his grip, pale with rage, straining sightlessly toward where he knew Noureddin sat.
“You.”
“Terribly sorry, coz.” He had the gall to sound genuinely contrite. “But she offered us very good terms.”
“Bastard,” Dimitri hissed, making sure to enunciate every word, “by all laws of gods and men, you should be gutted. Your innards salted and thrown to the—“
A hand clamped down over his mouth.
“Now, is that any way to speak to your host?” A rumbling laugh, smell of sweat and old leather thick in his nose; he felt a sudden urge to vomit. “What times have we come to, that a lowborn lout like me must school a prince in manners.”
A muffled chirp—the bird, he had forgotten about the bird, caught between them as his wrist twisted painfully back—and the hand twisting it further until he released it.
“What’s this?”
With his other hand Ilyich raised the creature before him until he regarded his own face reflected in its terrified eye: gaunt and disheveled, tense with affront, the blindfold smeared with dirt and slipping off.
“Not very polite either, to pull a dirty trick like this, eh?” That exaggerated, long-suffering sigh. “Honestly, my prince, it’s enough to make a man think you must be taught a lesson.”
With exquisite deliberation, he placed thumb and forefinger on each side of the wren’s head—and pulled until the tendons of the neck gave out and the head came wetly off. The image cut out. Dimitri did not care to know where he dropped the remains, but could not entirely suppress a shudder when something wet was wiped, offhandedly, against his neck.
“That’s enough, if you please,” said Noureddin, with an authority that betrayed some distaste. “Dimitri is still our honored guest. Ammar, would you show the prince to his rooms?”
“Majesty, may I have that honor?” The nausea intensified. “Your boy here’s a dear, but I worry the prince may try something… unwise.”
Silence, for a moment.
“Only if you ensure he is unharmed—completely.” Again that steely undertone. There was something he could work at, here, surely; Noureddin was too prideful to suffer Vasilissa’s creature for long. “Don’t forget where you are, rider. Do I make myself clear?”
“Aye.” Ilyich removed the hand from his mouth, tightening his grip on Dimitri’s arm. “After all, the prince and I are old friends. We’ll have a swell time, won’t we?”
“You’ll regret this,” he said to Noureddin.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” He could almost see it, the rueful smile, the contrite little wave. “Goodnight, Dimitri.”
As Ilyich shoved him out into the hallway, he could faintly hear Noureddin speaking to his servant—something about installing guardrails above the stairways.