I swallowed my grief and lobbed him an easy question. “Why didn’t you become a navigator? Why smuggling?”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t find a job. No one wanted to hire a half-Poyer navigator who couldn’t get a recommendation from the Academy. So I went home. And then I was offered an opportunity. I took it.”

“You didn’t want to be a smuggler?”

He tapped a finger against his chin, and I heard a smile in his voice. “Is that another question?”

“Yes. And so was that.” I couldn’t help but smile back. “Now answer mine.”

His voice turned wistful. “I didn’t want it. If you ever meet my mother, you’ll understand why. She has a strong predilection against what she considers immoral activities. She even hates it when my father gambles at cards. But it felt like the only option for me.” The smile faded. “Later on, I did break with the Ioph Carn. I had a wife once. She went missing seven years ago. The only way I could follow her trail was with my own ship, and those are hard to come by without money. So I took the one I had on loan from them. The trail eventually led me to the palace, to the construct of your father’s I fought on the steps. He took her for one of his experiments and she’s dead now. I suppose I knew it a long time ago, that she was gone. But part of me had to know for sure.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was my turn to offer condolences. Somehow it felt inadequate. I felt oddly responsible.

He stood straighter. “Will you ever use bone shard magic again?” His gaze flitted from my eyes to my cheeks to my lips.

I tensed. I’d let down my guard when I shouldn’t have. There was only one right answer here, and I railed against it. How could I make a commitment like that without knowing what the future held? My father might have used it for ill ends; that didn’t mean I had to. “Bone shard magic saved your life,” I said. “Or would you rather have fought off my father’s construct with your staff?”

I watched the movement of his throat as he swallowed. “That’s true. It’s also not an answer.”

I didn’t owe him anything. I was his Emperor. But my father had never bothered to justify himself either. “I don’t know what will happen or all the problems my father left behind. I want to say that I will not, but I also can’t hold myself to something like that.”