MB Chapter 12

Entzi, who had been listening quietly, looked down at her.

Without quite noticing when, the slight smile had left his face.

He was expressionless, and merely expressionless—but that was enough for the long, narrow lines of his eyes to read as cold. The kind of cold that made people standing in front of him feel a chill before they had identified the reason.

After a brief silence, he asked: "What I want?"

"What I want is power."

"Is that so."

"Power that is firm and cruel—power such that I will never be chased by vague anxieties, never have anything taken from me, never need to hide anywhere, and anyone who opposes me will find a blade in their throat before they dare speak of it."

He turned away toward the water. The sound of small waves catching on the hull came up and broke and fell away.

Looking out at the Orion River with the night sky lying whole in it, he continued in a measured voice:

"A middling power—playing puppet on someone stronger's back—is not enough. If there is someone above me, what I have is not my own power. Power over which no one can issue a command, or hold expectations. Even—"

Even were that someone the Emperor. The quiet voice was steady, and it carried.

Goiyo was briefly startled, but she kept that from her face.

"I'm not saying I intend to lead a rebellion. The Emperor is a role with a great many obligations—and I, like you, have no love for this country, and no intention of shouldering all those obligations.

If I have any duty to answer to, the only person I owe it to is the one who pulled me out of the gutter."

He went on.

"I have lived toward this. Pouring out effort that others would call unnecessary, refusing to be content with strength alone.

Cutting down thousands, soaked in blood, retching, dreaming badly—and then growing used to it, until I would not flinch at being called a butchering-fiend."

That only I would call it worthwhile—but.

His voice lowered further. Without close attention, the words would have sunk into the river.

"And so, barely—I have clawed my way here."

The wind came off the water and cut between them.

That cold, composed face. She found herself seeing in it what she saw when she looked in the mirror too long: the ashen look of exhaustion worn down into something practiced—and in the man across from her, glimpses of the same, flickering.

Then Entzi Bethelgius narrowed his eyes.

In a moment the cold drained from his expression. The unfamiliar face settled back into something closer to the familiar one.

"…Or so I might say. What would you do then, Goiyo?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"A joke. I have no dream that grand—what I want right now, if I want anything, is for this marriage to be uneventful."

He gave a small shrug, then reached out and resettled the coat on her shoulder.

"It's cold. You should go in soon."

"It will come to pass. Before long."

She had taken the last of her champagne; she set the glass down on the railing. The cool air coming off the river moved against her cheek like something almost deliberate.

“Your dream, truly.”

'Yes—Entzi Bethelgius’s ambition would come to pass.'

In the future she had lived before her return, it did.

After Alte and Rubiette—the two great ducal houses beneath the throne—she had watched one of them fall. The vacancy left by Rubiette did not stay vacant long; within a few years, and before anyone with ambitions could make a move, it had a new and considerably larger occupant.

Entzi Bethelgius. The man who had risen by military merit from common origins to a Marquisate, had absorbed Rubiette, and from that had taken a Grand Ducal title.

How a man of reputed common birth had managed to hold an imperial succession claim, as a Grand Duke must—at that point his bloodline had been formally, publicly acknowledged.

Current Emperor's half-brother. The late Emperor Mallatoi II's third son, Entzi Bethelgius. A pedigree more than adequate to justify a Grand Dukedom built on Rubiette's remains.

The current Emperor had recognized him as a child of the late Empress, born of her old age, kept from public record because of the boy's fragile constitution. It was a story that barely held together—it was hardly even offered with any particular effort—but there was no one with the standing to contradict it.

Rubiette was gone. Alte was the current Emperor's obedient right hand. And the new Grand Duke was the man who had orchestrated Rubiette's end, a figure formidable enough by sheer individual force to inspire dread on his own merits.

Moreover, before moving on Rubiette, Entzi Bethelgius had gathered the noble faction around himself, standing at their head while quietly accumulating every weakness they had. That his bloodline was not legitimate—that every aristocrat in Solaris knew him to be a bastard—was a truth that could never again be spoken aloud.

In the end, the history books recorded him as the rightful imperial prince of Solaris.

Entzi Bethelgius had received his Grand Ducal title roughly half a year before Goiyo ended her life. By then Goiyo had retreated almost entirely into herself and was not well-placed to hear news, but it had been a development of sufficient magnitude that it reached even her small, sealed world.

Perhaps she had been meant to hear it. She had been of House Rubiette, after all, and perhaps someone had wanted her to.

In any case, to the Goiyo Rubiette of those days, it had been—one way or another—a matter of perfect indifference.

Goiyo Rubiette, who could not even manage her shabby little dream. And Entzi Bethelgius, who had.

He would achieve the dream he'd spoken of. However dangerous it was.

An awkward joke about happy newlywed life. Goiyo smiled without answering. Something in Entzi shifted; he exhaled long and settled beside her.

"…I know you won't believe it, but I do hold goodwill toward you. I may not be able to love you, but I will respect you as much as I can."

"That so."

It was a hollow answer, and she didn't bother hiding that it was—so it sounded hollow to him too.

"You really don't believe me—how sorrowful my heart grows."

'Knowing how you and I end—what is there to believe.'

"Speaking of which, Entzi—have you ever loved someone? Truly, in all your experience?"

"You're not assuming I have no experience, at least."

“That was the flattest joke you’ve told yet.”

"It isn't a joke, unfortunately—I have none."

She glanced at him with a look she couldn't quite keep neutral. "Ah—so purely in terms of the body—"

"Don’t speak as though you understand. Not the body either."

He corrected her, distinctly ruffled. Between Kolave and now Goiyo, he was genuinely at a loss for what kind of person they took him to be. It was, frankly, aggrieving.

"The first time I kissed anyone was you, Goiyo."

"At the ceremony just now?"

"No."

Entzi, who had been standing beside her at the railing, turned to face her. Then, in the same movement, he reached past her on both sides, bracing both hands on the railing, and bent slightly forward, bringing his face close.

The exact posture he'd held on the ballroom terrace. He stretched his mouth into a lazy arc.

"At the ballroom."

Oh. Goiyo gave a small sound of recognition. That's right—at the ballroom she had kissed him on impulse.

Now that she thought of it, there was something she found faintly interesting: the same posture, and the scent coming off him was not particularly unpleasant. After several encounters, perhaps she had simply grown used to it.

But in none of it—not the angle of his face, not the steadiness of his gaze—was there anything resembling tension, or something fluttering, or any of the reactions this sort of situation was supposed to produce.

For Entzi Bethelgius, who was accustomed to people whose composure faltered at a sustained look and a smile, this was a novel and somewhat deflating experience.

"I've thought so before, but you show no nerves at all."

"Did you want me to be nervous?"

"Not quite—it's just that—"

He let it trail. He knew well enough that his looks were conspicuously fine—that there might not be, anywhere in the world, a face better than his own. He'd benefited from it often enough—and occasionally found himself in complications because of it. He'd long since lost count of the ways he'd used it.

Not every person lost their head over appearance, of course—but composure this complete was genuinely new, and he found himself, sincerely, puzzled.

Steeling himself for a reprimand, Entzi asked:

"Have you never thought me handsome?"

"No, I have. The finest I've seen."

A reprimand did not come. It was a plain, considered statement. Caught off guard, the tips of his ears went faintly red. The cold air made it vivid.

She had been watching him with faint suspicion—then a passing thought crossed her, and she tilted her head.

"You're secretly quite shy, aren't you, Entzi."

"I—shy? You're the one who seems quiet and composed and turns out to be quietly impulsive."

"If you're referring to the ballroom, the fault was yours—building up to something serious and then making that sort of joke. And as for appearance—I've never been impulsive about that. It's always been the same assessment."

"I take your point. Please stop."

It seemed there was no winning this particular argument. For Entzi Bethelgius, who had no habit of either modesty or excess in this area, there was something about Goiyo's measured sincerity that was—unexpectedly—embarrassing. He could feel the heat quite distinctly, and the cold air was doing nothing helpful.

He exhaled.

"My wife is rather more of a challenge than I'd expected."

"Wife?"

"Of course—wife. The ceremony's over; legally you are Goiyo Bethelgius now."

Goiyo's eyes went slightly round. In the flatness that had been settled in her chest there came a small, quiet movement.

Wife.

A word she had never heard directed at herself. She had loved Therio Alte and become Goiyo Alte—but he had never called her that. Not once.

She had not let herself want it—the pain had been elsewhere. And so she had never thought to want it.

But hearing it now, spoken plainly: a little warmth rose in her, somewhere near the collarbone.

A little. Very little. The kind you could ignore.

Entzi, interpreting whatever registered on her face in whatever way he chose to interpret it, continued with a theatrical air:

"So it seems you're past the point of running. I'm somewhat possessive, I'm afraid."

"What a low sort of man—not in love with me and yet intending to hold on." She kept her voice easy. "But it doesn't matter."

She had made up her mind, when she resolved to become Goiyo Bethelgius, that she would die as Goiyo Bethelgius. So running had never entered her head.

She had simply never planned to.

Goiyo’s words were plainly what they were—but Entzi Bethelgius, capable as he was, had no way of seeing into another person. And so he received them as something else entirely.

His gaze fixed on her where she stood looking out at the water—the dark hair moving in the wind, the face white in the dark. Something in him went still, and then dry.

At the sensation Goiyo turned her head, and both their eyes met at once.

His heartbeat thudded, and shoved. Entzi's hands moved to cup her face on either side, threading through the long fall of her hair—and he bent toward her and pressed his lips to hers.

She startled, briefly; then her eyes closed. Silence settled over the two of them.

The breath between them was unusually warm—though that, they both agreed, was almost certainly the cold wind.