Kordas leaned in earnestly to Star, trying to pour his feelings out after so much tension. “Here at the Palace, everyone is well fed, and they gossip, and they present themselves as ‘acceptable’—but they’re joyless and without quirks, all the time, because those quirks could be questioned along with their loyalty. I’m the only one who sits at the tables and talks about things that I love that aren’t pointedly to the Empire’s benefit. I’m the only one who just talks about what they like. Everyone else—maneuvers. They keep what they love, and how they love it, hidden away so no one above them in rank can use it against them.”

He stood up to gesture more freely, and showed the back of his Ducal Crest. “This thing—the charm that I was given to protect my thoughts. It’s helped me survive here, in a way that they probably didn’t intend. I think into it, about Valdemar. About what I love about Valdemar. And then, sometimes, I imagine Valdemar as I’ve described it to you, becoming like this place. The quirks we love could be interpreted as seditious. Something like playing a war game on a table and having the Empire lose might be interpreted by a scrying mage as a sign of incipient revolt. The order comes from on high that the games are illegal now. Punishable. The inspiration of musicians and poets could be blunted by decree. The courting rituals we laugh over could be shut down because they are inefficient.” He picked at the loose paint and plaster around the window. “When a ruler gives up on empathy and sentiment, it is a sign of desperation. It means they’re paring away emotion in favor of efficiency and numbers and a twisted fantasy of a better life without the joys and burdens of caring about something outside of themselves. Contempt for kindness and generosity is the surest sign there is that someone has nothing else left to them but a horrible emptiness much worse than weakness. It’s an—anti-strength. And the dying monster plods along, unaware it’s rotting.”

Kordas faced Star fully again. “No one lives forever, but—in a very real way, everyone in that Court but me is already dead. It’s just a matter of degrees of dead. And I’m their fool, mocked for actually feeling. I amuse them with my trite and naive love of things. They see my talk as a display of an idiot’s weakness. But I’m more alive than all of them. That’s why we have to get our people out of here. Out of the Empire, your people and mine. I don’t say it lightly that, if it is a decision between what this system would make of us, and living with joy—the Empire will die before I let them take our loves from us.”