Footsteps like drumbeats, slow but nuanced, pregnant with meaning.

“Ah, Yavena.” The Dog-King manifests from around a corner, silhouette turned monstrous by the chiaroscuro of his lamp. “We were just thinking about you.”

The Ovia inclines her head in answer, silent and resentful. It has been hours since Iraline banished her from her company. Hours spent prowling the periphery of the kitchen, seeking entrance, seeking escape from the automata that dog Yavena’s every step. Her simulacra escorts, draped in gauze and off-white silks, still their twitching as the Dog-King approaches, their clockwork eyes whirling.

“How goes your onslaught on the walls of Fort Iraline?”

Yavena shrugs. As one, the automata return their attention to her, talons clicking. “Poorly.”

“We see.” The Dog-King lowers his lamp and pinches the space between his eyes. In the penumbra of the corridor, his features seem softer—the face of an everyman, rather than a monarch. “Well. You still have a few more days before the weekend arrives.”

Bitterness knifes through Yavena’s terse response. “As you say, Lord-General.”

The Dog-King chuckles. A ripple of fingers causes the automata to erupt into movement again. Expressionless, and without so much as a backward glance at Yavena or the Dog-King, the animated corpses melt back into the shadows.

“There. Some privacy. Walk with us, Ovia.”

Silence tightens its stranglehold over the environment, a hush Yavena is reluctant to break. It is only when it becomes evident the Dog-King requires that transgression that Yavena offers a quiet, “Some privacy for what, my lord?”

“Ah, Yavena. So diplomatic, yet so direct.” The Dog-King makes a tutting noise, restarts his languid walk. The oil lamp keeps time with his stride. “To talk, of course.”

The Ovia falls into lockstep, careful to remain a dagger’s width behind him. “There’s really nothing to talk about.”

Cheerily, like someone recapturing the thread of an interesting conversation, the Dog-King says, “Individuality, you know, is sacrosanct among the Gak. We pride ourselves on nuance, on building a legacy that is absolutely unique.”

Yavena cannot resist. “Does it gall you to use the majestic pronoun, then?”

They round a corner. The corridor swells into a massive hall, its walls fleshed with tapestries and naval charts. The Dog-King halts. His laughter, abrupt as thunder, ricochets through the space, unself-conscious, the merriment of someone unweighted by a crown. “Immensely. But we must make sacrifices for what we love.”

“And that love of yours is power?”

“Power is a supplementary bonus,” the Dog-King counters easily, as though debating the price of herbs rather than ownership of a country. “We do not love it. We appreciate it exists. What we do love is our people, our nation. We are enamored of them. Enough to allow our identity to be subsumed by our duty, to stop existing as ‘I’ but instead as the collective power of the throne. Surely you, of all people, can appreciate that—the desire to give oneself up for the sake of others.”