Chapter 8: Chapter 8: Eclipse Explains the Kingdom (Badly)
A year passed.
"So there’s the king," Eclipse said, holding up one finger like this was the start of a very serious lecture that she expected him to take notes on. "That’s Papa. And then there’s the queen, except it’s not only Mama, which is stupid, but that’s how it works. Don’t ask me why it works that way because I already asked and the answer was very long and didn’t actually explain anything."
Alex, propped against a cushion with the focused attention of a man reviewing a hostile takeover, said nothing.
"The other queen has a son," Eclipse continued, holding up a second finger. "Valerius. He’s my age. He’s awful."
’Noted. Expand on that.’
"Why is he awful?" Alex asked, because he’d recently unlocked the word why and intended to get his money’s worth out of it.
Eclipse’s face did something complicated. "He called my hair common."
He turned that over.
It did not, on its face, seem like a hanging offense.
"...that’s it?"
"That’s enough!" Eclipse said, scandalized that he’d even ask, like the question itself was a personal betrayal.
"He said it in front of three people and he said it the way people say things when they want you to know they’ve been thinking it for a while, and his mother was standing right there and she didn’t tell him to stop, so."
She crossed her arms with the absolute conviction of someone who had never once been wrong about anything.
"And his mother looks at Mama like she’s something stuck to her shoe. I’ve met her twice and both times she did the smile that isn’t a smile, you know the one. I don’t like her. I’ve decided."
’Not the most rigorous threat assessment. Surprisingly close to mine anyway.’
He filed it all anyway.
"What about Papa?" he asked.
Eclipse’s whole posture changed, softened around the edges.
"Papa’s busy. He has the whole kingdom, which is a lot, and there are always people needing things from him, the way a kingdom works, all the different parts of it, and it’s a lot of parts. But he visits. He just..."
She paused, working through something she wasn’t quite built to articulate yet, her brow pulling in slightly.
"He looks tired in a different way when he comes here. Happy-tired. Not council-tired. Those are different things. Council-tired is when his eyes go far away and he forgets you said something. Happy-tired is when he goes quiet but he’s still actually there."
"Anyway," Eclipse said, abandoning the thread entirely the way she abandoned most threads, like a bird that had spotted something more interesting mid-flight.
"You have to learn the map. I’ll teach you. This is the nursery." She gestured grandly at the room they were sitting in, sovereign over all of it.
"This is the most important room in the whole palace."
"...why?"
"Because you are in it," she said, like this settled the matter beyond all argument and she was mildly surprised he’d needed it spelled out.
He laughed.
It came out as a strange little huff of air, his current vocal range not yet equipped for the genuine article, but it was real, and Eclipse beamed at him like he’d handed her a medal she’d been campaigning for.
"See," she said. "You agree. Best room in the palace. I’m going to remember that you said that."
...
She tried, over the following weeks, to teach him the rest of the map, and her version of palace geography turned out to be roughly forty percent accurate and sixty percent vibes.
Eclipse, for her part, remained blissfully unaware that her brother was running a quiet intelligence operation out of her bedtime stories.
She kept narrating, kept correcting herself mid-sentence, kept circling back to complain about Valerius approximately every third conversation regardless of what they’d actually started discussing, like his name was a splinter she kept accidentally pressing on.
He found, against every professional instinct he’d spent a lifetime building, that he didn’t mind being lectured to by someone with questionable cartography skills.
He minded it less than almost anything else in this entire strange new life.
"You’re doing the listening face," Eclipse said suddenly, narrowing her eyes at him with the specific suspicion of someone who has just caught a person being more alert than they were pretending to be.
"...what face."
"The one where you look like you’re thinking very hard about something boring, except your eyes are doing a thing that means it’s actually not boring and you just don’t want me to know what you’re thinking about. I noticed weeks ago, I just didn’t say anything because I was gathering evidence first."
’She’s not wrong. About any of it. Including the gathering evidence part, apparently, which means she’s been watching me the same way I’ve been watching her.’
"...not boring," he said instead, because admitting she was right on the first try seemed like bad long-term strategy, and also because she was around thirty and he wasn’t ready to explain that he’d been cataloguing her instincts as a professional intelligence resource.
Eclipse studied him a moment longer, head tilting its usual seventeen degrees, reading something in his face she couldn’t quite name yet.
Then she apparently decided the mystery wasn’t worth pursuing today, or decided to let him think that.
She picked her wooden shape back up and went right back to explaining, with total confidence, exactly which corner of the rug belonged to whom.
He let her talk.
He kept mapping anyway.
It turned out you could do both at once.
That was, he was beginning to suspect, going to become something of a specialty.
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