Chapter 208: Change the subject [Win-Win]

"That has to have a justification," Liam said, his brows furrowing with an engineer’s doubt. "Did Felix do it?"

Kamal’s eyes returned to him.

For a moment, he looked very old. Not frail, not weak, because his posture remained immaculate and his hands were still folded with the discipline of a man who had served too close to thrones, but old in the way of someone who had carried the same unanswered question for too many years.

"I do not know," Kamal said.

Liam stared at him. "But you tried to find out."

"Yes."

"Your people tried."

"Yes." Kamal’s voice stayed even, but something behind it had dulled with exhaustion. "Those who survived looked for answers. We found fragments, rumors, contradictory records, maps corrected so many times they stopped resembling geography, and witness accounts from provinces that no longer agreed on what they had bordered before the fall. There were old ward readings, but the towers that generated them were gone. There were names without places and places without names."

Liam’s fingers tightened around the cup.

"Enough to prove something impossible happened," Kamal continued. "Not enough to prove how."

Liam leaned back slowly.

The ward beneath his shirt pulsed blue again, soft but insistent. He glanced down at it with irritation, then ignored it.

Kamal did not.

"Lord Liam," he said gently, "we should change the subject."

"No."

"The ward is warning."

"It has been warning all day."

"Marin designed it to report sustained strain. If you continue like this, he will come."

Liam’s mouth tightened. "And do what?"

Kamal’s silence was answer enough.

Liam stared at him. "Sedation?"

"If he decides your channels need forced rest, yes."

For several seconds, Liam looked deeply betrayed by the medical profession, the household, and possibly the entire concept of healing. Then his shoulders sank against the cushions with reluctant defeat.

"This is medical tyranny."

"It is care with authority."

"That is worse."

Kamal did not argue. He simply waited, patient and composed, until Liam picked up the supervised latte again and took another drink.

The warmth helped. He hated that it helped.

"Fine," Liam said at last. "Harmless subject."

Kamal’s expression remained unreadable, though something in his eyes suggested he doubted Liam’s ability to choose one.

Liam looked at him over the rim of the cup. "What was it like working for Goliath?"

The question settled between them with a different weight.

Kamal looked toward the window, where afternoon light rested over the carpet. For once, his gaze did not seem to be searching for vanished roads or a capital erased from the world. It went somewhere smaller. Somewhere inside a palace that had once existed, where doors opened at dawn and orders came before breakfast.

"He was difficult," Kamal said.

Liam blinked.

The simplicity of the answer was almost startling.

"Difficult," he repeated.

"Yes." A faint warmth touched Kamal’s eyes, not quite a smile. "Brilliant, impatient, dangerous when displeased, intolerant of incompetence, and deeply suspicious of praise. He could make an entire council regret entering the room before anyone had spoken."

Liam looked toward the direction Arik had gone.

"That sounds familiar."

"Yes," Kamal said quietly.

The ward pulsed again, but less sharply now. Liam let his head rest back against the cushion.

"What did you do for him?"

"I was steward of the inner household."

"That sounds domestic."

"It was, in part. Meals, rooms, ceremonies, access schedules, correspondence. But it was also poison control, security of the private wing, screening of gifts, and management of who was allowed near His Majesty and who was kept several locked doors away." Kamal paused. "Nuria was not a gentle court."

"No court seems to be."

"Nuria was older, larger, and more convinced of its own permanence. That made it worse."

Liam listened in silence.

Kamal folded his hands more tightly behind his back. "His Majesty trusted very few people. I was fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough, to be one of them."

"Unfortunate?"

"Trust from a man carrying an empire is heavy."

The words were quiet, but they entered the room like something that had been waiting years to be said.

Liam looked down at the latte, his earlier anger softening into something more careful. "Did he ever rest?"

"Not enough."

The answer came too quickly.

Kamal seemed to realize that too, because he lowered his eyes.

"He carried Nuria as if setting it down for an hour would make it bleed. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps he only believed he was. I was younger then, and loyalty makes men mistake endurance for strength."

Liam’s throat tightened.

That, too, sounded familiar.

"Was he kind?" he asked after a moment.

Kamal considered the question.

"Not gently," he said. "Not in the way people usually mean. He did not comfort easily, and he did not soften himself for the comfort of others. But he remembered debts no one else considered important. He punished cruelty when others excused it as custom. He protected people who would never know his name had been involved. He could be merciless in public and send medicine quietly in private."

Liam looked away.

"Yes," Kamal said, though Liam had not spoken. "There is much of him in His Highness."

The room quieted.

Beyond the door, somewhere deeper in the palace, Arik was standing before a piano that might remember more than any of them did. Liam hated being left behind. He hated the locked tablet, the ward, the weakness in his channels, and the way everyone had decided his body had more authority than his mind.

But he did not hate this conversation.

"Did he play?" Liam asked.

Kamal’s expression changed.

"Yes and no," he said. "It depends on the period of his life you are asking about. In the latter part he only listened to others while doing what he really loved."

"Being a smartass?"

Kamal laughed, and even Liam was surprised by how warm that sound was.

"That too. But mostly engineering of ether systems."

Liam stilled.

For one moment, the irritation, the locked tablet, the medical ward, and even the supervised latte lost some of their importance.

"Engineering," he repeated.

Kamal’s smile softened into something older. "Yes."

Liam slowly lowered the cup. "You are telling me that the Sovereign of Ruin, the fallen god, the man George insulted with the confidence of a damp cloth, preferred engineering to ruling."

Kamal’s eyes warmed. "He ruled because he had to. He engineered because he wanted to."

Liam looked toward the direction Arik had gone again.

Something in his chest tightened.

"That," he said quietly, "sounds more familiar than it should."

Kamal inclined his head. "His Majesty could spend six hours in a workshop and emerge with three improved ward arrays, a revised turbine alignment, two burned sleeves, and no memory that an entire council had been waiting for him."

Despite himself, Liam’s mouth twitched.

"Did they dare interrupt him?"

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