Nicholas waited and waited on a sound that never came.

It was the middle of the night, but he was wide awake after sleeping through most of the day. Working hard not to get his hopes up, he climbed out of bed and tested the door.

Unlocked.

The infirmary looked exactly as it had before. There was no hole in the floor, not even a scorch mark to whisper of the attack. The only difference was that Nicholas' hands had been cuffed together rather than to the bed, a precaution that might be touching if he disregarded that he was still cuffed at all, still a prisoner.

Yasmin had come by in the aftermath, her hair a good three inches shorter and a sullenness to her so severe it was like Cairo was playing his illusion tricks, casting her appearance in a smoggy cloud. But there had been no cloud as she provided Nicholas his lunch, just an unsettling lack of sunlight. It made him realize how bright she'd been to begin with, in her own turbulent, maleficent way.

Nicholas had fallen back asleep and woken up to Cairo bringing his dinner and a typical slew of nonsense. He had anticipated the click of the lock like some sad Pavlovian reject, waiting on the respite from the feeling of being watched so long that his soup was cold by the time he sipped it. And he sipped it quietly, still listening, but no click came minutes or hours later.

It could have been a stroke of good luck, but as he crept into the hallway it seemed more like a trap, the kind only the most foolish animal would fall for. What could he possibly gain from sneaking blindly around a hostile castle, except maybe a life sentence?

He continued anyway, following a nameless instinct around corners and up stairs.

He wanted his journal.

Wanted what with it, he couldn't say. Wanted to grab it and run away with it, sure, but that was a pipe dream. He might try it anyway, if he got tired and delirious enough. What more did he have to lose?

Nice try. You're not that brave.

If he was lucky, he could steal it from wherever it was locked up and stash it somewhere in the infirmary to make away with once he'd earned his freedom or figured out an escape. He could study its pages between meals until he learned its secrets. But he would have to bank on its absence going unnoticed, and he wasn't sure about those odds. He could settle just for holding it awhile.

The answers he needed might reveal themselves to him between the pages. The journal might suck him back up and spit him out in his apartment if he stared at it hard enough. He had to at least try.

He tucked himself against the wall like it might give him cover in the vast arching walkways. The torches here were like the city street lights but smaller, bulbs of fire that bounced around in their spherical glass containers, mounted on sconces. The shadows between them were just big enough to step into.

He hadn't seen guards prowling the halls when he walked them with Yasmin and Cairo and could only hope this was true of the rest of the castle. He ventured in the opposite direction of the entrance, where they were most likely to be posted, and left the rest to his crossed fingers, ducking behind columns at the slightest sound.

What was he doing?

He didn't know, but he couldn't stop. It was like he could feel it beckoning to him, his journal. Every time he approached a turn, there was a tug in his gut and he followed it. It was very possible that he was moving aimlessly, each footfall one step closer to his discovery. But he didn't think so.

He studied the walls with a skimming hand, feeling the gaps between stone slabs. A woven map of Caldora tempted him to stop and look, but he settled for slowing his steps enough to confirm that it matched his memory of his drawing, if a bit nicer. He sped up as he passed a series of paintings, overwhelmed by the history of it - royal family after royal family, chronicles of a time that didn't exist. He only lingered over the most recent portrait, a dispassionate little prince sandwiched between a lanky man and woman with his same hard chromium eyes.

What was his childhood like? Nicholas thought. Is it all fake? Does it matter if he remembers it like it's real?

The questions were endless. They hurt his head. He pushed onward, around a turn that just felt right, and he knew.

That room at the end of the hall.

His bound hands twisted awkwardly at the knob and the door crawled open on unfortunately whiny hinges. In the spirit of every welcome he'd received in Caldora so far, he was greeted by an arsenal of knives hanging in the air before him in a loose circle.

"Um," Nicholas whimpered.

They weren't knives, actually, but it wouldn't matter if they came at him fast enough. Pointed at his neck were two pairs of scissors, several fountain pens, a geometric compass, and at least twenty push pins.

The door closed loudly behind him. Not that it made much difference considering the worst person he could have run into sat on the camelback sofa, nestled into the alcove in the far wall, his face half-hidden by Nicholas' journal.

"Sleepwalking?" said Rayan.

"Yup. Yes." Nicholas let his head loll, for emphasis, and reached behind him for the door. "'M gonna sleepwalk back, now..."

The scissors lurched alarmingly close to his jugular and he flattened his arms at his sides.

In a loud theatrical whisper, the king ordered, "Wake up."

He wasn't in pajamas like Nicholas had seen him last, but his appearance was just as strange. A halfhearted attempt at proper presentation. He wore black, but his shirt was loose and billowy, wrinkled where it had been incompletely tucked into his pants and buttoned low enough to betray that he wore nothing else underneath. His hair was only halfway pulled up, and hastily so, like he had gotten tired of it falling into his eyes as he read.

He wasn't wearing his gloves. They lay in a small pile by his hip, topped with four chunky rings. Forcate flickered blue on his index finger.

"Wide awake, Your Majesty."

The deadbolt behind Nicholas clicked. There was a poetic lesson in consequences there.

"You aren't where you're supposed to be."

And regretting it more by the second. "Apologies. Your majesty."

"How did you get out of the infirmary?"

"The door wasn't locked."

"...The door wasn't locked."

"Your Majesty."

"So you came here."

They were in something of an office space, if Nicholas could reconcile a place so beautiful with the three-dimensional manila envelope that was the office he knew. It was crowded by several shelves and a broad desk, all of it mahogany, all of it laden with books. It was hard to pinpoint what exactly was so beautiful about it. The room lacked art or decoration save for a rug made of a hundred patterned squares. But there were designs carved into the doorknob and the desk had cabriole legs, and the leaded window behind the sofa didn't even have curtains, as if to say, why would you ever want to keep the light out?

"I was looking for my book...Your Maj-"

"Stop that."

"With pleasure."

His journal floated a little lower now (as did the scissors and pushpins, thankfully). Beneath it hovered a candle lined with thick waxy veins, sweating. A fat globule dripped down toward the floor and into a silver chamberstick with a gentle plink.

"How did you know it would be here?"

"I didn't. I've been looking around."

"You searched the entire bottom floor, then?"

"There was some, ah, gut feeling involved. Artistry and all that."

"Care to explain why you were roaming my halls in the dead of night in search of your confiscated diary?"

Nicholas didn't even have to lie here, not fully. "I missed it, is all."

"Artistry."

"You get it. I spent a lot of time on that thing."

Rayan leaned slowly into the cushion, hooking one ankle over the other. He was only wearing socks. It made Nicholas feel like he had walked in on something private. Rayan's body, he was beginning to understand, was much more forthcoming than his face. It was a detail that felt important. It couldn't have been less so. He was locked in an office, locked in another world, he didn't have any business thinking about his story unless he'd come up with a plan to get out of it. But he wanted badly to remember this. With the journal feet away and an assortment of pens close enough to grab (if they didn't pierce his throat first), the impulse to add a note to his first sketch of Rayan made his fingers itch. A bullet point beneath the "hard to read" already scribbled there: But not impossible. It's in his body language.

Now, that body language spoke of careful consideration, thinking. Overthinking, but that didn't seem like something Rayan did.

Rayan slipped on his right glove. He directed the journal onto the seat next to him and gingerly caught the candle in the chamberstick, sending it to the windowsill. Everything else, he let clatter to the floor when he removed his ring. Once he had put on his other glove and his stones, he beckoned to Nicholas with two fingers. "Alright. Come."

Do I have to?

Picking carefully over the pushpins, Nicholas approached.

"You may sit."

Nicholas knelt before the couch with his hands in his lap, feeling an awful lot like a toddler at storytime. It wasn't nearly as fun as he remembered.

"You look like a toddler," said Rayan. "Do you expect to look from there, or am I to read aloud and turn the pages around so you can see the pretty pictures?"

Ignoring the honeyed condescension in his words and suppressing the hot spike of irritation that came with it, Nicholas moved to the sofa, pressed so tightly to one arm that he would've tipped over it if the wall didn't bracket him in. Rayan looked unimpressed.

He raised the book again, this time floating it somewhere between them. It opened to a scene near the middle of the story, one of Nicholas' favorites to look at. It took up both pages and had been a pain to draw; the perspective was tricky, what with Rayan leaning out of a high window of his castle on one page and Adrian surging up from the ground to meet him on the other, and both of them needing to somehow be the focus of the scene.

"I think this is the most favorably you've drawn me in the entire story."

The Rayan in the drawing had both arms thrown outward and upward and furious concentration carved around his shout. It wasn't a gracing portrayal at all.

"Emulating our sacred beast with fire." He leaned forward, tracing his finger over the flaming outline of outspread wings. "I never would have thought of that. I'm not certain I'm capable, but it is flattering."

"Is that...?" Nicholas trailed. It was hard to tell. The birdlike form was a blur of flame, but he thought the short, pointed beak spitting warning fire was familiar.

"What attacked yesterday. I wasn't sure you'd seen," Rayan said. Nicholas recalled burnt umber feathers and a fierce caw. "Can you imagine? First time I lay eyes on a true wild Fogus, and it's attacking my castle."

Nicholas' head spun. In the drawing, the fiery apparition was...it was just a bird, any bird. A flame that Rayan conjured up with vigalis, taking the shape of a massive falcon to ward off the almost-king seeking audience in his court. It was a badass defense strategy, not the imitation of some Caldoran totem. But he remembered the sickly sheen on Yasmin's face at lunchtime. Had she been forced to kill it?

And why would a sacred guardian attack its own king?

"Something amiss?" asked Rayan.

"Just. It's a lot, seeing it again."

"You care greatly for this book, don't you?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

That seemed to amuse him. "It is."

He flicked slowly through the pages. Nicholas soaked them in with hungry eyes. He wasn't any closer to having the journal in his hands, but it was a velvety relief just to be near it, roving over the pencil lines and occasional bursts of color.

At some point, Rayan started holding the journal himself. Nicholas shifted to see better, so he was leaning against the arm of the sofa rather than trying to become one with it. His eyes followed inevitably every time Rayan mapped out the drawings or followed the words with his fingers.

"Are you a pianist?" Nicholas asked. Rayan's hand stilled. Caught off guard. Nicholas was starting to see the fun in that particular game.

"I can play. But I wouldn't call myself a pianist, no."

He didn't turn the page. Nicholas warmed to the tips of his ears. Of all places to linger...

"You're very talented," said Rayan. "Though your style is strange."

"Oh. Thank you?"

"I haven't met the heir myself, but I imagine he looks quite like this. Perhaps not so...you made him beautiful."

The Adrian on the page was drawn in profile, pictured from the hip up in full color. Through his sleeveless shirt, his ribs were pulled taut with heaving breath, not from exertion but because a hand had reached out for his waist. His head was tilted up, snagging bark in his short coily hair and catching pools of moonlight in the dips above his cheeks, his deep skin nearly black in the dark. It only made the stars in his eyes all the more pronounced as he waited with plushy parted lips to be kissed. Malik leaned over him, long lashes casting longer shadows over his cheek. Adrian's hand on his jaw was large and stocky, leading to a thick arm encircled by golden cuffs and flexed with the beginnings of a tug, and then Nicholas was back to the sleeveless shirt.

The real kiss was on the next page. Nicholas had spent more time on this one, the build-up.

"Oh," he said again, and left it there. He had nothing else to say to that unless he was to admit, I made you beautiful, too.

It was true, if less immediately so. Adrian was made of softer lines and warmer colors. He had a bountiful smile. Right then, Rayan's most notable feature was probably the sleepless circles under his eyes, but that was him. Dark shades contrasted against strict pallor.

"I have so many questions about you," he said. The corners of his mouth were sharp. If he ever smiled, really smiled, it would probably be captivating. Or spine-chilling. Nicholas distracted himself with Rayan's hands flipping rapidly toward the end of the story. "Others certainly more important than this one, but you've insisted - rather emphatically - that you don't have the answers to those. Is it still selfish, then, to allow myself to ask: why am I the villain?"

He stopped on the penultimate drawing, where he hung limp from the stalk that impaled his chest.

"I told you, it isn't a reflection of my own-"

"And of all the lies I'm sure you've told me, that is the poorest," he said coolly. When he got only a fearful silence in response, Rayan added, "I've already assured you, I will not punish your honesty."

Nicholas chewed the inside of his cheek and mentally parsed through the character notes in his powerpoints and spreadsheets for something that might sound convincing coming from a Caldoran citizen. He stopped, biting down hard as a punishment for wasting seconds, and tried instead to envision the journal page he'd dedicated to Rayan. Those were the only words he could trust to be true.

"A king watches over his subjects. But how can you do that from so far away? I don't mean here, in your castle, I mean..." He pressed a palm over his own chest. Distant, he had written, a bullet point somewhere around Rayan's shoulder. Detached from his people. "You know?"

"I am very protective of my people."

"All of them?"

Rayan waited, the air heavy with expectation. Nicholas understood he had dug himself into a hole. Or created an opening, if he could make the jump.

"If you really put your effort into digging up some record of me, how long do you think it would take?" He didn't leave much room for an answer, but Rayan didn't have one. It's in his body language. Nicholas was getting good at this. He felt the momentum in his throat. "You could search forever. What's one more orphan from South Simona? You won't hurt me because I might be a citizen, you won't release me because I might be a spy. You can't prove it either way, and that's an oversight on your part, but I get to suffer for it.

"Maybe you fear that I'm both - then you would really have to reckon with your own behavior. You shouldn't worry. I don't have it in me. But my life has been shit, and yeah, maybe I've built up this evil likeness of you to take it all out on, but can you blame me? All I know of you is my own bitterness and the way people describe you. The cold, volatile, malevolent king makes for a perfect villain."

Nicholas couldn't remember the last time he'd said so much at once. It was all bullshit, every last word of it fake, but that was fiction, wasn't it? A stylized lie sewn with just enough truth to be believable. He hadn't ever liked the sound of his own voice, he found himself uninspiring on principle, but that had felt good. Like writing out loud. Like a tiny puncture in the stopper plugging his mind-to-mouth pipe, a pressurized gas leak. This king had a way of doing that, poking holes.

"And so the pecking viper finally bites," said Rayan, flipping to an early page covered corner-to-corner in sketches of imaginary beasts. He seemed to know the journal well; how many twilight hours had he spent here, studying it? The creature he pointed to was a two-tailed snake, drawn next to a sycamore leaf to emphasize how small it was. Its fangs were needle thin and still too big for its face. "So soft you might miss it. Lethal all the same. Well? Have I lived up to your expectations?"

Nicholas studied the flyaway hairs framing Rayan's face, the way his rumpled shirt hung too-big around his slouching shoulders, his socked feet tapping absentmindedly against the rug. The short distance between them on the sofa made Nicholas anxious, jittery, but it didn't make him afraid.

Not nearly. It was a disarming thought.

"The details are exaggerated. But every good villain is."