The Water Is Wide
In the first few days after returning to Yora, Aymon was too busy to make a determination if things had changed in his absence. He threw himself into the work of re-integrating into the functioning of the government. Herrault took some pity on him, or decided he was less of a dangerous inconvenience to himself and everyone else if he had things to do. There was no hint in his daily schedule, handed to him by an aide, that he was returning home still in disgrace. As early as the second day back, he was being briefed on some piece of policy that Herrault wanted the Council to push through into law, and was told to meet over lunch with members who needed convincing.
He didn’t mind that— but he did mind that everyone he met with understood that he was returning from disgrace. The councilmembers were always polite to his face, but he wasn’t blind enough to not notice that they would all prefer to be talking to Obra. His meetings had been carefully curated to only include the members of the council who were not sensitives. Aymon understood that this was to hide the Emperor’s punishment— any sensitive who shook his hand and tried to test his strength in the way that sensitives often did— the mental equivalent of a too-firm handshake— would discover that Aymon couldn’t reciprocate. Although this was for his safety, it too must have seemed like a punishment to any outsider keeping track of Aymon’s schedule.
He could bear it for a while, but he had to wonder just how long the Emperor would punish him for. It was inconvenient to be without that extra awareness that surrounded him like a second skin, and it felt dangerous to be weak.
It was a feeling he couldn’t help but poke at and return to. Every day when he came home from Stonecourt, he would walk past Halen’s door and think about knocking. He had always been a thrill seeker in that way— he liked the twitchy feeling of his blood turning cold as he pictured Halen behind the door.
After about a week of this little ritual, his pulse fluttering as he took the detour down Halen’s hallway in their apartment building, he turned the corner towards the stairwell, and was surprised to find Obra waiting for him.
“He’s not even in there, you know,” they said. “You’re getting yourself all worked up for nothing.”
Aymon raised an eyebrow, but it was a futile protest, even if it was silent. Obra knew him too well.
“Where is he, then?”
“Everyone’s pretending he’s not a prisoner. He’s out on a walk. He told me he’s never been on a planet before— I told him to go see the ducks at Canal Park.”
“You talk to him?” Aymon’s voice was flat.
“It seems like you’re not going to, and someone should. I’m not really sure why you brought him here, if you’re going to ignore him.”
“I need to get settled back in before I deal with him properly. Can we not have this conversation in the hallway?”
Obra turned and started up the stairs, three more flights until their floor. They didn’t talk as they climbed, and their footsteps echoed in the cavernous concrete shaft. When they reached their floor, they both walked past the closed door to Jalena’s rooms without looking at it at all, though Aymon felt its presence on the edge of his awareness. Obra waited in front of Aymon’s door.
“Not your room?” Aymon asked.
“No, not my room.”
Aymon scowled and opened his door, letting Obra in to the clean and dark confines of his place. He still hadn’t gotten used to being back, not entirely. Before he said anything, he stripped off his cassock and tossed it onto the couch, leaving him in his shirtsleeves. Obra perched on the kitchen island, looking idly down at the notepad on which Aymon had jotted some notes from a phone conversation the night before.
Obra picked up the paper and held it up. “You’ve forgotten every security rule that we were ever expected to follow in your time away, I see.”
“It’s not government secrets, just gossip.” The notes were written in the script of his home planet, Lonn, which in a more practiced hand than Aymon’s would be flowing and clean.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Obra said.
Aymon went into his fridge and got out two beers. Obra watched him without saying anything, and didn’t protest when Aymon came to stand in between their knees to hand the second one over.
“What am I going to do with you, Aymon?” Obra asked. The tone was so resigned that Aymon didn’t bother to push his luck by putting his hand on their thigh, though he wanted to.
“Nothing, I assume,” Aymon said. He turned around, still between their legs as they sat on the kitchen island, but now he leaned back against the cold marble.
“Yeah, probably.” Obra cracked open the beer and drank. They rested their elbows on Aymon’s shoulders, and their fingers idly brushed through his hair, from his temple to his ear. It was nothing, of course, and without the power there was no sense of connection to be had.
“What are you planning to do with Halen?” Obra asked.
“Why does it matter to you?”
“I have to be in this apprenticeship with you.”
“And?”
“Only one of us can become First.”
Aymon scowled, and was glad that Obra couldn’t see his expression.
They continued— perhaps the fact that Aymon was facing away gave them some freedom to speak as well. “Before” —the pain in the word made the meaning clear: before Jalena died— “we could pretend that we could be friends.”
“We’re not friends?”
“Not if you want to be First,” Obra replied. With one finger, they continued to trace the edge of Aymon’s hair, just above his ear. He resisted the urge to shift and lean into the touch or turn around. “Maybe we never were.”
“What were we, then?”
“The only people who could understand each other.”
“And we’re not still?”
“I don’t understand why you brought him here. I mean— I understand if it’s a declaration of war against me. But I want to pretend it’s not that. I can’t, but I want to. And I don’t understand what else it could be.”
Aymon was silent for a second. “Is that the only reason?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know, Aymon.” They both drank their beer. When Obra again rested their arm on his shoulder, he could hear the bubbles popping in the can as they held it by his cheek.
“I loved you, you know,” Aymon said. He didn’t know if he had ever said that to them before. He probably hadn’t— none of them had ever been in the business of sentimentality.
“But you don’t anymore.”
“You won’t let me.”
“That’s not all it is.”
Maybe they were right. Even if Obra had turned him around, placed his hand on their thigh, kissed him like they had for years before— it wouldn’t be the same. He wanted it— he still wanted it so badly that it burned— but that meant nothing. “I don’t want to be betrayed,” Aymon said.
“There. We are enemies.”
That hadn’t been what he meant. Obra had given him up once, which meant that they could and would do it again. But pinning it on their futures as First was an easier thing to blame. “Maybe we are.”
They finally pulled their hands away from his head and leaned back on the countertop. “It’s funny to me that you brought a man here who only wants to kill you, if you dislike the idea of being betrayed so much.”
Aymon laughed darkly. “He doesn’t see a contradiction in it.”
“Oh?”
“He was trying to insult me,” Aymon said. “But he told me that it was obvious that I wanted someone who was living only for me— love or hate.”
Obra was quiet for a moment. “And was he right about that?”
“You were never mine alone.”
Obra leaned forward again, pressing a kiss to the crown of Aymon’s head. “But were you mine?”
“I’m too self-absorbed for that,” Aymon said, trying to dismiss the want that coursed through him at the gentle touch. “You, of all people, should know that.”
“What am I going to do with you?”
“Nothing.” Aymon stepped out from between Obra’s legs, drained his beer, and tossed the can into the bin. “And I’m not going to wait for you to change your mind about that.”
Obra looked down at their hands. “Of course.”
“I’ll deal with Halen when I’m ready to deal with him.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“I would be a very stupid man not to be,” Aymon said. “I doubt he would miss an opportunity to kill me, if he knew I was completely defenseless.”
Obra hopped down off the kitchen island. “May I say something?”
“Have you ever not spoken your mind?”
“Plenty of times. There’s at least one of us who knows how to hold their tongue.”
“What, then?”
“The Emperor is punishing you with this— and him— for a reason. I doubt that they’ll lift the punishment until you spend some time around him. It wouldn’t be much of a punishment otherwise.”
“It’s not?”
“For just you and me, there’s some two million people who don’t have the power. God isn’t punishing them. Might be good of you to remember that.”
Aymon made a derisive noise. “God’s not?”
He could see the gears turning in Obra’s mind as they struggled to think of how to respond. It had been a comment calculated to make them lay hands on him— to toss him around with the power that they still were in complete control of— but Obra knew that was what Aymon wanted.
“You’re such a bastard.” It was a toothless insult, as they went, and Obra’s voice carried nothing but resignation.
He turned away again. Searching for something to do with his hands, he opened the tap and washed them. “I thought you were going to ask me what sin two million people have committed that I haven’t.”
It was Obra’s turn to scoff. “That would be a stupid thing to ask. If anything, it’s the other way around. You have two million people’s worth of sins.”
“Of course,” Aymon said. “It’s good practice for being First. How many people’s sins does Herrault have? Three hundred billion?”
Obra scowled and headed for the door, leaving their half-drunk beer on the kitchen island. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Aymon.”
“Obra—”
“What?”
“I’m going out— do you want to come?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Fine. Suit yourself.” But they were already gone, the door of Aymon’s apartment clicking shut behind them.
Although Aymon should not have been going out, especially not to clubs, the conversation with Obra had left him dissatisfied enough that he needed to burn off the feeling. He craved the complete anonymity of dark and throbbing dance floors, and he was more than shameless enough to admit that he wanted to find a man to follow home for a few hours.
Herrault might end up knowing where he was going, but Aymon didn’t particularly care. As long as the Stonecourt security apparatus didn’t make trouble for him, he could tolerate their unseen presence.
He dressed himself in casual clothing, feeling like a different person without a cassock. There were old colored contact lenses in his bathroom drawer from previous times he had made this exact pilgrimage, and a heavy-handed application of makeup was enough to soften the sharpness of his face, to make him less recognizable in the dark. Looking at himself in the mirror, he turned his own head with his hand on his chin, like he was inspecting a show-animal. Still masculine enough to get what he wanted, but feminine enough to be someone else, at least for a little while.
He took one of the cars that Obra usually drove, and parked it several streets away from the club. He was on the other side of the city— so far from the center that even the Academy on the hill, the tallest point for kilometers around, couldn’t be seen on the horizon. There were other clubs far closer to the Academy— ones that students liked to go to— but since becoming Herrault’s apprentice, Aymon had favored this one, far from people in his usual social sphere.
This was a poorer, rougher area of the city, with the club tucked in between takeout shops and tattoo parlors. Upper apartments on the buildings sometimes had boarded-over windows, and the smell of cheap and greasy food pervaded the air.
Aymon knew the bouncer at the club, and so was allowed to skip the line at the front door, crucially before anyone in the line could get a good look at his face.
Inside, the music was so loud that it was a nearly unrecognizable drone, punctuated by a base throb faster than his heartbeat. It was dark, but the whites of eyes and teeth of men glowed spectral under the blacklight.
He got himself a drink at the bar, leaning against the bartop and surveying the room as he waited. His eyes tipped from one end of the dance floor to the other, categorizing the patrons he could see, and then discarding them when they didn’t fit what he was looking for. When he had arrived, Aymon hadn’t thought he was looking for something in particular, but he was disappointed when that unnameable want failed to materialize.
It would be easier to lower his standards if he were drunk, but it would make dancing less pleasant, too. He had his one drink, then pressed himself into the crowd on the dance floor.
It was shoulder to shoulder, or tighter than that. There was a live band at the front of the room, so the crowd oriented itself towards them, leaving Aymon free to slip and weave unnoticed and unremarked upon through the press of people. He moved with the crush of dancers, occasionally finding himself shoved up against some other warm body, smelling of sweat and alcohol and cologne, chest to chest, or against his back.
It was easy to lose track of time in that space. The songs the band played all sounded alike, what Aymon could hear of them, and every face was an indistinguishable blur. It emptied him out almost as well as meditation did. Being part of the swirling crowd was the closest— second closest— he could get to the feeling every sensitive loved so much: surrendering to some greater abstract will formed by minds lost in each other. Losing the sense of being anything but one part of a greater moving body. When he danced with someone, slid his hands across sweat-slick skin, he was performing on behalf of that larger organism. There was a pleasure in the action and the service.
He claimed, in the part of his mind that was making rational excuses, that he was enjoying dancing too much to follow any of the men when they gestured to leave the dance floor with him. It was what he had come here to find, after all. But his standards were still too high and indefinable. So each time, he shook his head and turned away to find a new momentary and frantic partner in the dark.
Someone came up behind him— shorter than he was: he could feel breath just where the drape of his shirt hung across his back, between his shoulderblades. This already made Aymon lose serious interest, but he played along for the fun of it, to move with the motion of the floor. He pressed himself back onto the new dancer, and was rewarded with a pair of calloused hands slipping from his waist to run up his chest beneath his shirt. His gasp of surprise when one of his nipples was viciously twisted was completely drowned out by the music of the band.
Aymon whirled around, and found himself facing someone he knew— someone he had been expecting to find at all.
His closest friend from his Academy days, Loan Lang was a solidly built woman, with close cropped black hair and a wicked smile. Her flashy attire fit in well with the crowd at the club, but women were in the minority, so she stood out. Several years of physical therapy couldn’t change the lopsided way she stood and swayed with the beat: one of her legs was shorter than the other, and crooked. Last time she had spoken to Aymon, she had said that she was waiting until she had time enough to recover before she would schedule a surgery to fix it.
Loan opened her mouth and said something, but over the throbbing of the music, it was impossible to hear her. When all she got back was a scowl from Aymon, she smiled even wider, and gestured for him to follow her. Aymon thought about refusing, but then gave a glance around at the rest of the club, already feeling disconnected from the greater crowd, and resigned himself to the fact that there was no one there he was interested in.
He was more familiar with the club than Loan was, so he cocked his head at her, and pulled her towards the back, past the bathrooms, towards an emergency exit that he knew had a broken alarm— the staff often left it cracked open to get some cool air as they loitered in the hallway.
Aymon and Lang spilled out into a dark alley, crunching over broken glass and taking up seats on the piled wooden crates beside the dumpsters. It was a cool evening in early autumn, but the crispness of the air was a relief after the heat of the club. Aymon’s ears were ringing, and the thumping of the bass from inside could still easily be heard through the closed door.
“What are you doing here? This isn’t really your milieu,” Aymon pointed, out, as Loan kicked some garbage away from her seat.
“No, but it’s yours. I’ve been here every night for a week looking for you.”
“I’m flattered,” Aymon said. “But it’s not like you haven’t been to my place— you know where it is. You can come find me at any time, or send me a message, like a civilized person.” Something clicked in his mind. “I thought you were at the front, anyway.”
“Was,” Loan said. “I’m in Yora, sans duty, waiting for the results of an investigation. I wanted to talk to you, and I figured you’d show up here sooner or later. I’m glad you finally did— I’m bored of dance music.”
Aymon raised his eyebrows. “What kind of investigation?” He looked pointedly at her leg. “I figured you weren’t likely to do anything else stupid— at least not without me around to get you in trouble.”
“You haven’t read the past six months of reports from the front, have you?”
“I’ve been in space.” And he had assumed that the important information would be summarized for him succinctly in the reports he had read.
“General Karran is dead,” Loan said. She tried to keep her voice dispassionate, but that was impossible. Karran, whom Aymon had met a few times, had been Loan’s mentor— like Herrault was to him. By Loan’s account, they had been fairly close.
In the moment of silence— Aymon not sure what to say immediately— he remembered the week they had been chosen for their respective assignments. He and Loan hadn’t been living together at the time— the Academy staff had seen fit to give them separate quarters after the trouble that had almost killed Loan— but that didn’t stop them from talking. At the end of the last year at the Academy, each student prepared a project to demonstrate their aptitude for future work. He and Loan had tried to game the system, to end up in the same place, by making projects that were designed to work together. This, too, was blatantly against the rules— the projects were supposed to remain secret until after apprenticeship offers were made.
Loan, after the accident, had developed an interest in medicine, of a sort, and so had developed a prosthetic arm, with a power-based simulacra of nerves. Aymon had made a device that transmitted realistic phantom sensations directly to the brain. Two halves of the same coin.
The collusion had worked, and they both gotten the same invitation to apprentice to the stardrive makers, and had promised to accept it together, unless they got other, better offers. But they had each gotten a second offer, too, and Aymon accepted the apprenticeship to First Herrault. Although it couldn’t really be called a betrayal, this had irreparably changed their friendship. Loan hadn’t taken the offer with the stardrive makers either. She went to the fleet, and General Karran. Perhaps it was his conversation with Obra that had made him think of it— it had an unpleasantly familiar resonance.
“In the line of duty?” Aymon asked, shaking himself back to the present, and the fact that he had to respond.
“No one knows,” Loan said. “I don’t— you should read the preliminary report and come to your own conclusions about it.”
“Were you involved?”
“No.” She let out a breath. “I almost was. I just happened— he sent me off on an errand. I would have been with him at the time, otherwise.” She gestured down at herself. “Thus— investigation. I’m the only one who made it out.”
“So, because you survived, someone thinks you killed him?”
“If they really thought that, I would be in prison, and probably writing my last notes, and not just home on Yora waiting for an official report to find someone else to blame.” She shrugged, and kicked the garbage some more. An empty bottle rolled until it hit the wall, then came back to her foot. “I think everyone wants to keep me far out of the way.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not like you.” Loan said. “I don’t inherit his position. But I’m not nobody, these days, or I shouldn’t be.”
“There’s room for you in the fleet. It’s not like a sensitive isn’t always useful.”
“That’s not what I mean. They can give me a new post— I’d been in that apprenticeship for years, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for me to have a career of my own.”
“Are you here because you’re asking me to get you one?”
“I’m not here to beg the disgraced prince for the mercy of his master,” Loan said. Aymon was used to her acerbicness, and it just rolled off him. “I’m perfectly capable of making my own way in my career, thank you. Besides— you couldn’t get me something much higher than could get on my own, and if you gave me a post, that’d always be the stain on it. It’d kill me where I stood.”
“If you say so. You just said you’re being kept out of things.”
“I think they don’t want me investigating by myself.”
“I’m so far not convinced that there is something to investigate. You were at the front, on the ground— a targeted strike on the leadership isn’t unheard of.”
“No, it’s not. But it looked suspicious enough that there was an investigation in the first place. A quiet one.”
“Did the general have enemies?”
“How could he not?”
“Are they being investigated?”
Loan shrugged. “I’m not privy to that kind of information.”
“So if you don’t want me to intervene, you want me to look into it? Is that why you wanted to talk to me in secret?”
“No. It’s not like you could learn anything other than what the investigation team turns up. And I don’t really care what they have to say— they’re going to decide it was the action of the adversary.”
“Well, who do you think it was, if not that?”
“I don’t know,” Loan said. “When I stop being trapped here, I’m going to look, but—”
“What’s your suspicion?”
“I feel like I’m driving myself insane, Aymon. Connecting strings—” She trailed off with a gesture in the air.
“In what way?”
“Karran wasn’t the first sensitive I knew to die this year.”
“People die all the time.”
“Not people like him— or Jalena. And they’re not the only ones, either.”
Aymon scowled. “I know what happened to Jalena. She was—”
“She was trapped by someone who knew how to kill her,” Loan said. “We get basic training on how to kill sensitives. Distract, overwhelm, force them to prioritize… If you look at that fire— it follows the checklist step by step.”
“The investigation into Jalena’s death said it hadn’t been intended for her. She was just a casualty. Separatists on Jenjin trying their hands at terrorism.”
Loan shrugged, and rolled the empty bottle back and forth beneath her foot.
“You think this is connected?”
“I don’t know,” Loan said. “But I’d watch your back, if I were you. Just in case.”
“I think that’s a given,” Aymon said. “I have no intention of dying.”
Loan grinned. “Good. Neither do I.”
“But you think there’s a conspiracy of some kind?”
“I know it sounds insane. It’s not like Jalena and Karran knew each other except in passing. But—”
“But what?”
“It’s just strange. I— Even being in the fleet, I’ve never known someone close to me to die like that. And now it’s two.”
“Jalena would have said that you’re projecting your grief to try to control it,” Aymon said. “I think you might just be paranoid.”
Loan let out a pained little laugh. “Yeah, she always was into naming things like that. But I think I can be forgiven for being paranoid.” She ran her hand through her hair. “It’s messed me up, to have him dead. You know how it is.”
“I’m not sure I’d care if Herrault died.”
“Don’t lie to yourself— you would. And don’t tell me you didn’t care about Jalena.”
“I don’t know why you think I’d say that. But she was different than being my mentor.”
“It’s like I lost— not part of myself, exactly— but the part of me that lived inside him. Like everything he wanted me to be, the person he was shaping me into— she’s dead with him. I don’t know— years of my life trying to be that person, and I’m not sure where I am now.” Her mouth twitched, and she rubbed her broken leg. “Makes me almost feel like I should be back at the Academy with you.”
“Hah.” Aymon looked up at the sky. The smaller moon was traveling right between the cracks in the buildings above them, exactly traversing the line of the alleyway, between the walls that blocked most of his vision. “That’s what the apprenticeship is for, I guess. To have that continuity— the past getting a chance to shape the future. It probably already did its job, though. You’re not here to suggest we do something stupid.”
“No.” She smiled. “I guess I’m just here to make sure you’re not likely to die on me.”
“I won’t,” Aymon said.
“Can I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“You sound sober.”
“That’s not a question.”
Loan reached across the alleyway between them, and grabbed Aymon’s arm, resting on his knees. Almost certainly, she was probing at him with the power, but Aymon couldn’t feel it. The knowledge of something missing made his skin crawl, goosebumps rising on his arm beneath her touch. She looked up at him with a questioning expression, and Aymon looked away, trying to be nonchalant.
“I’m being punished,” Aymon said. “For going behind Herrault’s back again. Like I said, only one of us ever learned our lesson.”
“Fuck,” Loan said, and pulled back. “I can’t believe you’d risk coming here without—”
“Every other person in there does,” Aymon said. “That’s the point, as Obra told me earlier.”
“Every other person isn’t the apprentice of First Herrault, with a target on their forehead. You’re not difficult to find, if someone knows where to look for you.” She gestured to herself. “Clearly.”
“Well, I won’t do it again.”
Loan laughed. “Sure. I’ll believe that.”
“I’m serious.”
Loan shook her head and stood. “You should go back in, before your security detail decides to check in on our little tryst.”
“You saw them, too?”
“Yeah. They don’t dance.”
Aymon laughed at that.
The night was still fairly young when Aymon left the club. Before he returned to his apartment, he checked with Stonecourt security to find out if Halen had returned from his own jaunts around Yora. The answer was no— he was still in Canal Park, despite the darkness of the night.
Aymon decided that there was no better time than now to go find him. Obra had started him on that path, and his unfulfilling night of dancing had pushed him the rest of the way.
Canal Park was very large, several kilometers long and two wide, bisected the long way by the eponymous canal which weaved its way through the city. Although the channel was shallow enough that only small pleasure boats could navigate it, it nevertheless had no bridges within the park, so Aymon was forced to guess at which side he would find Halen on. He expected that in the vast landscape, he would be difficult to find, but this turned out not to be the case. Aymon only had to walk half a kilometer along the side of the canal before he came across Halen, walking the other direction.
The park was lit by yellowy streetlights, but they did little to illuminate any detail on Halen’s figure as he approached. He was a singular, monumental shadow, made taller by the fact that he was balancing on the slender stone wall that separated the walkway from the canal waters below. He moved with a strange gait— a very purposeful swing and sweep of one foot in front of the other, like he was an athlete trying an unfamiliar sport. Emerri’s gravity still probably weighed on him, but he held himself straight regardless.
Aymon was visually unrecognizable in the darkness, but Halen must have been feeling him out with the power, because he stopped in his tracks a good distance away, and watched Aymon approach without saying a word until Aymon was directly below him, looking up into the shadows that covered his face.
Halen’s voice was low and soft. “Are you really so afraid of me that you needed to have your guards hide over there?” He pointed into the dimness of trees at the edge of the path, far behind Aymon.
“They’re not here because of you,” Aymon said dismissively. “I always have my entourage.”
Halen snorted. “What do you want?”
Aymon leaned on the wall, leaving his head near Halen’s calves. For no reason whatsoever, he was tempted to tug on the laces of Halen’s shoes and untie them, but he kept his arms folded and his hands planted on the cold stone, very casual. Down in the water below, a fish caught the glimmer of the lamps, and Aymon watched it as he spoke, before it disappeared from sight. “Have you gotten acquainted with Emerri yet?”
“Why does it matter?”
“I brought you here to work for me. You wouldn’t be very useful if you didn’t know the first thing about living on a planet— if you were too distracted by every bird and bee.”
“You’re tired of waiting outside my door for me to leap out and kill you, so you want to give me more chances.”
Aymon didn’t rise to the bait. “I’ve simply been told that I would be better off if I used the extra set of eyes I’ve purchased. Things have been unsettled recently, in a way that’s dangerous for me.”
“Perhaps.”
Aymon was surprised that Halen agreed with that sentiment even that much. “You agree?”
“You’re afraid of so many things,” Halen said. “You’re not very good at hiding it.”
This did make Aymon bristle. “In what way?”
Halen didn’t answer the question.
“Did Obra say something to you?”
“No.” But Aymon could hear the smile in Halen’s voice— he had won, knocked Aymon off balance, and was fine with Aymon knowing it. He scowled. Luckily, Halen couldn’t see his face.
“Regardless, I want you with me,” Aymon said.
“And if I decide that letting someone else kill you is just as good of revenge as taking it myself?”
“The Emperor will know.”
“But they wouldn’t stop me.”
“You wouldn’t,” Aymon said— and this, he was confident about.
“You don’t know me at all.”
“No, but I’m willing to take that risk. And I’m sure I will know you, if I have you take your duties seriously. We won’t be apart much.”
Halen shifted next to him, shuffling his foot and tensing his legs. It wouldn’t have surprised him if Halen kicked him— or if he leapt into the canal to get away. But Halen did nothing, just stood there in silence.
“Do you know how to swim?” Aymon asked after a moment.
Halen didn’t answer that, either, and instead jumped off the wall in the other direction, landing heavily next to Aymon. He started walking towards the exit of the park, and his long strides forced Aymon to jog to keep up with him.