The Winds of Tepr

Sunlight, thin as watered milk, slips through the carved lattice of the Summer Palace windows and scatters itself into slanted stripes across the corridor. The hall is arched high—too high for a child's neck to crane comfortably—its ceiling painted with hunting scenes that never seem to end: riders chasing antelope, riders skewering antelope, riders drinking beside antelope that are now rugs. The palace likes its stories tidy. It likes animals either flying free in murals or lying very still under feet.

In the vented braziers, beeswax is melting over coals, releasing a sweet, clean smell that tries hard to smother the palace's other odors: damp stone, lacquer, and the faint, sour trace of sweat that seeps out of the drill-yards like a rumor. Exotic incense claims the corners, curling in lazy spirals, but it can't reach every crack. Nothing in Qixi-Lo reaches every crack.

Along the corridor sit cages—enormous, gilded things, extravagant enough to be small apartments, each holding a parrot kidnapped from a jungle no one in this palace has ever bothered to see. The parrots are all colors the walls aren't allowed to be: sapphire, lime, blood-orange. One of them, a bird with a throat the color of deep water and an eye like a polished seed, hammers its beak against the bars. It does this in a steady rhythm.

At a low window recess between two cages, a boy crouches on a cold marble ledge that has never been designed for knees. Puripal is seven and small for it—long-limbed in a way that suggests he will grow quickly if the world doesn't cut him down first. His robe is pale, stitched with little cloud motifs that are already dirt-smudged at the hem. His hair is tied in a neat topknot that has begun to lean slightly left, the way a stubborn tree does when wind keeps nudging it.

He is oblivious to the murals, the incense, the parrots' complaints. His entire world at the moment is a finch.

The finch lies in his hands, a warm, frantic bundle of feathers, its wing bent at a sharp, wrong angle. It had flown into the lattice—Puripal heard the thump and the little indignified squeak afterward. Now it trembles, beak opening and closing as if it is tasting the air for escape. Its heart is a fast drum against Puripal's palm. He holds it as though he's been asked to cradle fire.

A nursemaid hovers near the corridor's pillar, wringing her hands without actually doing anything with them. She is young enough to still fear making a mistake in the wrong direction. Her name is something Puripal doesn't know, because rooms here teach you to remember faces, not servants' names. She starts to step forward.

"Little prince, don't—"

Her words die when footsteps approach.

These steps are soft, measured, and utterly unhurried. They have the confidence of someone who knows the corridor will move out of her way.

Puripal does not look up at first.

Then the air changes. The incense seems suddenly too thick. The parrots go quiet in the same way a crowd goes quiet when a shadow crosses the stage.

He looks up.

His mother stands three paces away, framed by a doorway of carved cedar. She is beautiful, but not in the way ballads are allowed to say aloud. Her beauty is angular, like the edge of a new knife, like a mountain ridge at dawn where one wrong step turns you into a story. Her robe is dark teal, embroidered with silver thread so fine it glints like frost. She wears no jewelry besides a single thin ring at her thumb—jade, old, and dull with use. The ring is the sort of thing an heirloom becomes when it has been pressed into too many throats.

Her hair is pinned high, sleek as a raven's wing. Her face is still. Not cold—still. The stillness of a pond.

She does not ask what he is doing. She sees the finch first.

Her gaze flicks down to Puripal's hands. The movement is so quick Puripal almost misses it, but he has learned to catch quick things. The finch catches it too; its body stiffens, then thrashes.

Puripal instinctively tightens his hold to protect it.

His mother steps forward, and before Puripal can adjust, she reaches in and lifts the finch out of his hands by its legs. The bird flails, beak gaping, wing strap flapping loose. It is a single, helpless pendulum.

She doesn't squeeze. She doesn't need to. Her fingers are the kind that do not have to prove strength. She inspects the finch the way she might inspect a bruised plum.

"Still thrashing," she says. Her voice is calm, as if she is commenting on the weather. "Then it's not dead."

Puripal swallows. He opens his mouth.

"It— it hit—"

She turns slightly and hands the finch to the nearest servant without looking at the servant's face.

"Kitchen," she says. "Soup will waste less than pity."

The servant bows so fast his forehead almost meets his own knees. He scuttles away with the finch, which squeaks once. It is not a dignified sound. Puripal's eyes follow it until it vanishes through a side door. Something in him jolts like a caught breath.

His mother watches his face the way a general watches a horizon.

Puripal thinks he is being good. He thinks kindness must be good. The palace has told him so in fables, and then laughed when anyone tried it. He is not sure where the joke begins.

He tries to keep his expression smooth. His mouth obeys him, mostly. His eyes don't.

A muscle flickers beside her mouth. Not a smile. More like the memory of one, long ago, somewhere that might not exist anymore.

She crouches to his height with the economy of someone who has knelt before bigger men and never stayed there.

"Look at me," she says.

He does. His throat tightens anyway.

She pinches his chin between her thumb and index—not painful, not gentle. She tips his face left and right like she is checking for cracks in pottery.

"You do not flinch," she says softly. "Flinching is an invitation."

Her voice carries no anger, but it carries a command. It is not a suggestion about courage. It is a rule about survival.

Puripal forces his shoulders down. He feels the finch's frantic heartbeat still in his palm, gone now, lingering like an echo. He is angry—at her, at himself, at the corridor, at the way the world is arranged—but he does not understand anger yet. It arrives in him like heat with no name.

She sees a smear on his thumb: a tiny bead of blood from the finch's wing, bright as a pomegranate seed.

She draws his hand closer, takes her sleeve, and wipes it away—slowly, as if she is polishing something precious. The cloth comes away tinged red. Without pausing, she lifts the sleeve to her mouth and licks the stain.

Puripal's eyes widen despite himself. His nursemaid makes a strangled little sound somewhere behind a pillar; she seems to shrink into the wall.

His mother lowers her sleeve and meets Puripal's stare.

"See?" she says. "It tastes like iron. Remember the taste."

As if iron has ever been something he's tasted on purpose.

She rises. Puripal slips off the marble ledge, his feet landing softly on the rug. The rug is Keshik-woven, expensive enough to buy a village, and he has been told not to step on it with wet soles. His soles are dry. His heart isn't.

His mother reaches into the wide sleeve of her robe and produces a small lacquer box. It is the color of dried blood—no, that's not fair. It is the color of sunset on the desert. The box clicks when she opens it, the hinge singing a tiny metallic note.

Inside are sugar-plums. Perfect little spheres dusted with pale powder, each nestled into velvet hollows like eggs in a nest. They smell faintly of honey and rosewater. Their sweetness hits the air like a promise.

Puripal stares at them. His mouth waters. His stomach twists.

He knows these are not gifts. In this palace, gifts are always lessons wearing perfume.

His mother lifts one plum between thumb and forefinger, holds it just in front of his lips.

"Open," she says.

He opens. His jaw feels too loose.

She places the plum on his tongue with her own fingers, slow enough that he feels the ridges of her fingerprints—and the faint coolness of her ring when it brushes his lower lip. He bites down. The sugar shell cracks. Syrup floods his mouth, thick and golden, sweet enough to make his eyes sting.

He chews obediently. His jaw works. His throat swallows. His whole body tries to pretend this is only a treat.

His mother watches the movement of his throat like she is counting.

"Good," she says. There is something almost like approval in it, but it is not warm. It is the way a teacher says "good" when a pupil correctly recites a dangerous passage.

Puripal licks a stray drop of syrup from the corner of his mouth. He doesn't want to, but sweetness demands it.

She takes another plum. This time, she does not feed it to him. She holds it up between them, letting the sunlight catch its glossy skin.

"Sweet things are safest," she says, "when you control them."

...

The safehouse is a warehouse only by political courtesy. On old tide charts it is listed as a salt store, and on Seop tax ledgers it is listed as nothing at all. In truth it is a lung for the revolt—low-ceilinged, cramped, breathing in men and plans and breathing out smoke. The air in here tastes like fish guts and lamp oil and the metallic afterthought of fear, as if someone has been sharpening knives on the tongue of the room.

A row of guttered lanterns hangs from rafters blackened by old kiln fires. Their light makes the map on the worktable look like a flayed animal: Bo'anem's streets inked as arteries, its seawalls as ribs, the inner precinct as a protected heart that keeps beating no matter what you do to the limbs.

Sen has colonized a full corner with her inventions. Springs, coils, tar-wrapped rollers, water-clock wedges that ooze wax onto the floor, a line-thrower she keeps calling her "spider," as though naming it makes it less likely to bite the wrong person. She is kneeling in a puddle of her own excitement, whispering at a brass hinge.

"If you jam it here," she mutters to no one and everyone, "the gate doesn't know it's dying until it's already dead. Like bureaucrats."

Na'er and two runners argue in tight voices over black wagon timings. Old Nettie sits on a crate, feet dangling like a child's, despite being old enough to have personally invented most of Bo'anem's curses. Ta's parchment clutter spreads across another table; patrol routes, guard habits, the precise angle of a lantern swing annotated with alarming devotion. Temej stands over him like an offended statue, arms folded, jaw working.

"This is stupid," Temej says again, because when a man is right and scared, repetition feels like a shield.

Puripal reclines on a broken chair that once belonged to a dock foreman. Somehow he makes it look like a throne. His posture has the lazy poise of someone who has never had to fight for furniture, even when he's in a fish-smelling hole with discontented steppesmen and half-mad Seop rebels. His hair is tied back with a thin strip of silk; someone—probably Sen, accidentally—has smeared soot on the edge of his cheek, giving him the air of a prince who has been kissed by a chimney.

Between his fingers he rolls a small sugared fruit, translucent as amber. It's a Seop preserved plum, dusted in starch. He does not eat it. He turns it as if he is checking for weak points.

Across from him, a pair of Yohazatz officers do the same thing with their own patience. Each man stands with hands behind his back, faces blank, mirroring their prince without trying. They are swords racked upright.

The safehouse door opens without anyone touching it.

A gust of brine and wet night arrives first. Then Shan Xi steps through with the unhurried violence of a storm deciding it has been polite long enough.

Here, under rafters and lantern smoke, she seems to take up unreasonable space. Her coat is split at one sleeve, and the wool is blackened by powder singe. One ear is rimmed with dried blood. Her boots leave puddles on the floor that smell faintly of harbor rot. Behind her come three pirates with rope-darts coiled at their hips and smiles that belong to people who have only ever been taught one kind of greeting.

One pirate is dragging something.

At first glance it is a sack. Then it shifts and groans.

A militia man—plainclothes by the cut of his trousers, official by the way terror has already started to make him respectful—skids onto the boards. His wrists are bound behind him with a sailor's knot that knows no compassion. He has a fresh hole in his left thigh where something went in and stayed for a while. He is awake enough to understand where he is.

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"Found him behind the salt barrels," Shan Xi says, voice bright with the kind of cheer that makes dockside widows lock their doors. "Trying to listen to your fish-scented lullabies. He's either very brave or very stupid."

"Those are not mutually exclusive," Old Nettie croaks.

The militia man tries to lift his head. One of Shan Xi's pirates puts a boot on his neck like a paperweight and grins down at him.

"Don't worry," the pirate says. "If you hear anything useful, you can still tell your friends. We'll mail it to them with your teeth."

Sen, without looking up from her hinge, adds helpfully, "Teeth are very aerodynamic in jars, if you pack them in salt first. Less rot."

Temej makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a prayer. Ta doesn't look up at all.

Puripal finally glances toward the door, and the glance alone quiets the room more effectively than a shouted command. His thumb pauses on the sugared plum.

"Captain," he says.

"Little Khan," Shan Xi shoots back. She tosses her wet braid over her shoulder. "Still sitting? I am starting to worry your legs have grown decorative."

She stalks to the table, stops with both hands on the map, leaning over it like she intends to bite a hole through the paper to get at the city beneath. Her pirates fan out around her. Water drips from their sleeves. The rebels in the room straighten unconsciously; the atmosphere adjusts to a larger predator.

"We don't have the luxury of waiting for sunrise prayers and steppe consensus," Shan Xi says. "They have the prince. They are breaking the Slump into bite-sized screams. We go in tonight."

Her finger taps Salt-Grief intersection. Na'er nods, vindicated. Shan Xi's nail is chipped, lacquer black. It leaves a crescent mark on the map, as if the paper itself has been struck.

"Black wagons pause here. We hit the wagons on the pause. We open the seawall culvert at the toothpick's door when Sen's wedges complain. Powder smoke in the alleys for retreat. Culvert pull takes us under. We yank the boy out. We let the city light itself on fire behind us."

There is a silence so tight the lantern flames look nervous.

Puripal doesn't move. The plum turns again between his fingers.

Temej speaks first, bluntly, because he is used to being the person who says the ugly thing everyone else is thinking.

"This is stupid," he repeats, as if the map might have changed in the last five minutes. "We wait for Naci."

Shan Xi's lips twitch. Not quite a smile.

"You wait," she says. "You always wait. On horses, in yurts, under whatever sky is convenient. Seop doesn't get to wait. Seop gets dragged into alleys and made to confess names it doesn't know."

One of her pirates pats the militia man's head with mock sympathy. The man whimpers. The pirate winks at him.

Puripal speaks as if he has all afternoon.

"Captain, with respect," he says, and the phrase is so clearly theatrical that even the militia man blinks, confused. "Understanding your… appetite, my people do not bleed for Seop thrones. We agreed to hold position until my sister-in-law lands. The Banners are the decisive blade. Tonight's plan is—" he glances towards Sen's piled gadgets "—ingenious. Also suicidal."

One Yohazatz officer murmurs assent. Another crosses his arms tighter, as though afraid his chest might be drafted into the revolt by accident.

Shan Xi looks to the ceiling, as if asking the rafters for patience. The rafters give none.

"You agreed to hold position because holding position protects your throne," she says. "Not because it protects our city."

"That is politics," Puripal replies lightly. "A field where not every wind belongs to you."

"And this is rebellion." Shan Xi touches the map with her palm now, flat and deadly. "A field where the wind belongs to whoever is willing to drown in it first."

Puripal watches the rebels, then Shan Xi, then the plum. His face is calm, but there is a shift around his eyes—the faint tightening someone might mistake for boredom if they haven't watched princes their whole lives.

"Your revolt is admirable," he says. "But the objective is not to die beautifully. The objective is to win. If we annihilate ourselves in the inner city tonight, we give the Republic exactly what it wants: a tidy pile of corpses and a story about terrorists. We save the boy by saving the war."

Shan Xi laughs once.

"Ah. There it is. The imperial sermon. Save the war, save the boy. Save tomorrow so today can burn quietly."

She leans closer toward him, close enough that saltwater shakes loose from her coat and lands on the edge of his sleeve.

"Tomorrow does not exist for the people in Wharf-Serpent cage lines," she says. Her voice drops. The room bends toward it. "They are dying right now. You can call them 'collateral' if you want. I call them crew."

Puripal tilts his head.

"Then go," he says, soft as silk over a blade. "If your heart is set on martyrdom, do not let me ruin your romance. My cavalry will remain outside the city perimeter. We will not commit to inner-precinct fighting without Naci's flag."

It lands on the table in two cold pieces: refusal and finality. No raised voice, no flourish.

Shan Xi stares at him for a heartbeat. The safehouse holds its breath.

Then she reaches, not for a weapon first, but for the preserved plum in his hand.

She plucks it between two fingers and studies it like she might be deciding whether it's food or bait. The starch dust leaves a ghost print on her thumb.

"Pretty," she says. "Sweet. Safe, if you don't bite."

Puripal's brow lifts almost imperceptibly. A flicker of amusement, perhaps. A flicker of old instruction, perhaps.

Shan Xi drops the plum on the boards.

Her heel comes down on it.

The sugar shell cracks with a small, wet sound that somehow slices the room deeper than a shout. Syrup spreads like blood-honey under her boot.

"Fine," she says. "Keep your pretty cavalry clean. Then the gutters are ours."

She turns and barks orders in the same breath. Her pirates surge into motion, hauling rope-darts, slinging powder pouches, checking knives with the relaxed efficiency of people who have no intention of living polite lives.

"Na'er," Shan Xi snaps. "You guide us to Salt-Grief. Old Nettie, I want those wagon pauses. Sen, your spider comes with us. If it bites a friend, I'm feeding you to your own invention."

Sen beams. "She understands me."

Temej steps forward a half pace, instinctive, caught between rage and the urge to stop a ship from sailing into cliffs.

"Captain," he growls. "This is madness."

Shan Xi pivots just enough to look at him. Her grin is a knife flash.

"Madness is letting someone else decide who gets to live because your timing feels pure," she says. "You want to wait for your tempest? Fine. I am the tempest tonight."

The militia man tries to speak. "Please— I— I don't know—"

A pirate crouches beside him, cheerful as a butcher.

"Oh, you don't need to know." She draws a short blade and slides it between his ribs like tucking in a blanket.

There is a wet gasp. The man arches once, eyes wide with surprise that death is so mundane. Blood runs out in a thin, fast stream, soaking into cracked boards. The pirate wipes her knife on his coat, neat as if she's cleaning a spoon.

Shan Xi doesn't look back. She is already halfway to the door.

Her crew pours after her in a flood of boots and oaths. Someone laughs about who owes whom rum if they survive. Someone else bets on whether the militia's wagons will smell worse than fish by midnight. The safehouse empties.

In the wake they leave behind, the lantern light seems thinner. The rebels stand frozen for a moment, staring at the blood pooling under the dead man's cheek. Na'er's jaw works like she wants to follow, but her eyes flick to Puripal, because alliances have gravity even when they disgust you.

Puripal remains seated. His officers don't move. His calm is a wall. He looks down at the syrup smear, at the crushed fruit glistening between floorboard seams. He doesn't flinch. He doesn't reach for theatrical morality. He simply watches the stickiness spread, measured and silent.

Then, slowly, he bends, wipes the sugar off his palm with a cloth like blood he won't taste.

The safehouse breathes differently once the pirates leave. The air doesn't get cleaner—if anything the blood makes it thicker—but the room loses its teeth. Someone drags the militia corpse out by the ankles; the boards squeal, then settle. A thin trail of red remains, wandering toward the door like it can't remember where it meant to go.

Puripal's officers file out to organize the perimeter, murmuring to each other in clipped Yohazatz.

Dukar stays.

He doesn't mean to. It's just that his legs don't move at the same pace as everyone else's right now. The whole room feels like it's on a slope and the downhill direction is "atonement." He's been too many men for too many people in the last years: brother, general, traitor, savior, puppet, lover. When a man becomes that many things, he either learns to shed names or he starts carrying them like stones in his mouth.

Puripal rises at last, smooth as a prayer any palace could approve of. He dusts his hands as though sugar and blood are the same kind of dirt. He turns to go, then discovers Dukar still by the table. For a heartbeat, his face stays impassive. Then it softens at the edges.

"You're lingering," Puripal says. The line comes out mildly amused, but the last syllable is quieter, private. "Do I have a smear of rebellion on my cheek again? I'm told it clashes with my eyes."

Dukar snorts despite himself. "Your eyes clash with everything," he says. "It's their job."

"Oh? I thought that was your job."

"Mine is to clash with you," Dukar replies. "It's a more specific calling."

Puripal's mouth curves. He gestures with his chin. "Walk with me."

They step into the adjoining room—what used to be an office for counting salted fish. Now it's a holding pen for whatever tenderness survives war. A half-broken screen leans against the wall; someone has painted gulls on it in a style that suggests they learned to paint by watching things flee. Behind the screen sits a low cot and a brazier with dying coals. Two cups of tea have been abandoned there, the leaves long gone bitter.

Puripal shuts the door with his heel.

Dukar lets himself sag against the wall a moment, rolling his shoulders as if he can shake off the dead city clinging to them. Under his cloak his shirt is stained at the wrist with old blood—someone else's, maybe his, he's stopped cataloguing. Puripal is unbloodied in the visible places, which is almost worse; it makes him look like he's still wearing palace armor that no one else can see.

There is a small dish on the low table between them. More preserved plums, Seop style. Someone has tried to comfort their nerves with sugar. The fruits are glossy, docile, each powdered like a tiny moon.

Dukar eyes the dish and then looks away. Puripal notices. Of course he notices. He notices as if the world's survival depends on counting every breath you don't take in front of him.

"Sit," Puripal says.

Dukar doesn't. He pushes off the wall and crosses to the cot, drops onto it as if it's a saddle he's been forced to share with ghosts. The cot creaks in protest.

Puripal sits afterward, careful, as if the cot might be a treaty. For a while they say nothing. Outside, the safehouse's main room has gone distant. You hear a shout, a boot, a runner's laugh that's mostly nerves. Farther out in the city, a muffled boom rolls like a drum under streets. Shan Xi has started her gutter war.

Puripal pours tea from the pot that's been refusing to die. The tea is cold. He doesn't seem to mind; he can drink cold tea. He hands a cup to Dukar.

They don't touch their cups right away. They hold them like objects you might need to throw.

Dukar's eyes stay on the tea's surface. It reflects the lantern flame as a trembling circle.

"You said he made his choice." Dukar's voice is low, roughened by dust and other people's screams. "Ta."

Puripal doesn't answer immediately. He takes another plum from the dish, rolls it between his fingers again.

"Yes," Puripal says finally. "He did."

"Did you mean it?"

Puripal glances over. His expression is calm, almost bored in the way a man is bored when he knows he's about to be stabbed and wants to see if the other person flinches first.

Dukar doesn't let him.

"I'm not asking as your general," Dukar says. "I'm not asking as your loyal dog, or your conscience."

Puripal's brows lift slightly. The line lands, and for a heartbeat he looks almost startled, like a man who forgot that intimacy is a weapon too.

Dukar continues, voice steady. "Do you really not mind if he dies here?"

A shout outside. Copper laughter. Another distant boom. The city is eating itself.

Puripal takes a sip of tea. He swallows without shifting his gaze from Dukar. Then he sets the cup down carefully, as though it might shatter if he handles it wrong.

"I mind," he says.

The words are spare. Not a confession dressed up in philosophy. Not a dodge. Just two syllables that cost him more than a battlefield.

Dukar watches him, searching.

Puripal's hands clasp loosely in his lap. The thumb rubs the pad of his other forefinger; it's an old habit, the kind that shows up when he's trying not to reach for a knife or a lie. His eyes are a little brighter than they were in the main room.

"I mind because he is…" Puripal pauses as if surprised by the path his sentence is taking. "He is irritating. He is also brave. He has the bad hair of a man too honest for his own safety. It would be… a loss. Strategically."

Dukar's mouth twitches. "Strategically."

Puripal gives him an unimpressed look that doesn't quite hide relief. "If you want the sentimental version, you will have to wrestle it out of me. And I don't think the cot survives that twice in one week."

Dukar laughs once—short, incredulous, edged with pain. "Maybe that would be a mercy to the cot."

"Don't play shy. You've killed men on furniture worse than this."

"Not my proudest campaigns."

"No, but certainly among your more athletic ones."

There it is: their comedy, a thin golden thread they keep pulling from wreckage to remind themselves they're still human. It warms the room for a few breaths.

Then Dukar leans forward, elbows on knees, and the warmth turns sharp again.

"You mind him dying," he says. "But you said you'd let him go anyway."

Puripal doesn't blink. "I said I would not throw my men into the inner precinct to save their prince without Naci's intervention, yes. Those are not the same thing."

"They feel the same when your brother is in the gutters."

Puripal lifts a hand in a placating gesture, almost a joke, but it fails to complete itself. "He is not my literal brother."

"He is." Dukar's voice firms. "The palace might have tried to make you all strangers with the same father, but you're still blood. Even if blood means nothing to you most days."

Puripal's jaw tightens. A muscle in his cheek flickers. He is not used to being told what blood is allowed to mean.

"Dukar," he says softly, warning and pleading at once.

Dukar doesn't stop. He has the look of a man who has stood in too many fires to fear his own throat.

"You talk about hands holding swords," he says. "About not letting weapons choose throats. Fine. But you're not a hand holding Ta. You're the hand holding me. And I've told you before what matters to me."

Puripal's eyes soften again, unwillingly. The prince's posture stays upright, but something in him leans toward Dukar without moving.

Dukar reaches out, not touching yet—hovering his fingers near Puripal's knee. "Trust," he says. "That's what you promised me after Qixi-Lo. That's what I asked for when everything else was burning. I can live with your lies to enemies. I can live with blood on your fingers. Sky knows I have mine. I can even live with your ruthless little chess games, if you tell me what the board looks like."

Puripal's gaze drops to Dukar's hand. There is a faint tremor in Dukar's fingers; he wants to touch and doesn't want to plead.

Puripal lifts that hand and sets it on his own thigh, closing his fingers over Dukar's gently but firmly, like a man accepting a pledge.

"You are not a pawn," Puripal says.

Dukar exhales. "Then don't treat me like one."

"I don't want Ta to die," Puripal says again, quieter. "I don't want to want things that don't serve the war. But I do. He is… important to you... and me. And if he dies because I held back where I shouldn't have, I will have to carry that."

Dukar watches him. "Then don't hold back."

Puripal lets out a small, dry huff. "You heard Shan Xi. She already decided the gutters are hers. If I march Yohazatz in there now, with no muskets and no Tepr banner, we don't save anyone. We just add exotic corpses to Seop propaganda."

"Maybe."

"Not maybe." Puripal's gentleness hardens for a breath into the prince he is. "I cannot risk the perimeter. If the inner precinct holds, the city can still be strangled by supply. If the perimeter collapses, there is no war left to win. There is only a good death."

Dukar looks away, jaw clenched. He hates how right it is.

Outside, a second boom, closer. A woman screams—brief, cut off. Then chanting rises, hoarse and furious, from somewhere down the street.

Dukar turns back. "You told me once you'd prefer not to become like your mother."

Puripal smiles faintly. "Did I?"

"You did. Right before you stabbed your way onto the throne."

Puripal gives a helpless little shrug. "Hypocrisy is hereditary."

Dukar snorts. "So is fear."

Puripal's hand tightens on Dukar's. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to keep Dukar anchored.

"I am afraid," Puripal says. "Not of dying. Of losing everything because I chased one person into a fire when my duty was to hold the line. You know this. You've held lines."

Dukar swallows.

"Then say that to me next time," he murmurs.

Puripal laughs, quiet and real this time. It shakes something loose between them. Dukar lets himself smile back, and the room feels, for a breath, like something other than a bunker.

Then Dukar leans in. He presses his forehead against Puripal's, a simple contact that carries more trust than any oath. Puripal meets it without flinching. He smells faintly of cold tea and sea brine and the clean soap of someone who grew up in palaces.

"You don't get to decide alone who's expendable," Dukar whispers. "Not if you want me beside you."

Puripal's breath catches. His voice is barely a thread. "And if I tell you I'm not deciding he's expendable… only that I can't throw you into the same pit by chasing him?"

Dukar closes his eyes. "Then I listen. Even if I hate it."

Puripal's lips brush Dukar's temple. A quiet, exhausted thank you.

They sit like that for a heartbeat longer. Outside, the city roars again. The safehouse shifts on its foundations as if Bo'anem itself is trying to crawl away from what is happening inside it.

Puripal pulls back just enough to look at Dukar fully. "When Naci lands," he says, "we move. Until then, I hold."

"And Ta?"

Puripal inhales. "We pray his stubbornness buys him luck."

Dukar doesn't like the answer. He doesn't fight it either. He reaches for the plum dish and, after a moment's hesitation, takes one. He turns it in his fingers, considering sweetness as if it could be a weapon.

He pops it in his mouth.

The sugar cracks. Syrup spreads warm on his tongue.

He chews, grimacing at the sweetness. "Still tastes like honey," he says around the mouthful. "Not iron."

Puripal watches him eat it, expression unreadable and strangely tender. "Give it time," he murmurs.