now

“You’re so close,” Merlin says. “Surely that’s worth taking some pride in?”

I look over at my old friend. We are in the back room of a Kiev restaurant, waiting for two Carpathians to join us in a meeting I shouldn’t be having and neither should they, and Merlin seems as remote and as composed as ever. I, on the other hand, am weary as shit and I’m sure I look like it. It’s as if everything over the last three years has finally come to bear against me, all these emotional debts have now come due, and I can’t pay them. The cumulative weariness of the office and the campaign and Greer’s loneliness and Embry’s betrayal and my faraway son…and and and.

There will never be an end to the ands. Once upon a time, all I wanted was a horse farm with the soldier boy I loved—now I’m in an Escher staircase of crisis and exhaustion.

“I’ll take pride when it’s finished,” I say, rubbing my thumb along my forehead. “I’m still not sure I trust that it’s real.”

“You’ve built this carefully over three years,” Merlin assures me. “Of course it’s real.”

Careful is another word for secret, and while Merlin has never been uncomfortable with secrets, I certainly have. Perhaps it’s the soldier in me, but all the plotting and late-night phone calls and even this trip, which we hid from the press and everyone else for as long as possible, makes me tired and doubtful. I wanted to avoid war at all costs, but subterfuge doesn’t sit well with me, and all this sneaking around is beginning to feel like a fairly high cost indeed. Especially if we fail.

The door to the private dining room opens and in steps a man I’ve never seen before, short and balding and eminently bland, and then behind him comes the delicate doll-figure of Lenka Kocur, Melwas Kocur’s wife. She is the person who will destroy Melwas. Not me, not Embry. This will be her victory and hers alone.

I stand and take her hands, kissing her on the cheek. She flushes warm and smiles at me. “Hello, President Colchester,” she says in Ukrainian. “May I introduce Denys Shevchenko?”

I release Lenka and give Shevchenko a handshake. His grip is firm and dry, and his face when he meets mine is honest, creased with the faintest edge of concern. And he absolutely should be concerned. I’ve brought him and Lenka here to discuss treason, after all, and if he wasn’t nervous, if he didn’t grasp the gravity of what this meeting could reap for him, then I’d think less of him.

“Let’s sit,” I say, also in Ukrainian. “Mr. Shevchenko, I assume Mrs. Kocur has informed you why we are here today?”

He nods.

“And what are your thoughts?”

“On Melwas? On this plan?” he sighs, and he looks like any middle-aged man sighing over something thorny and difficult. Both his ordinariness and his sighs make me trust him more. When Lenka told me about him, I’d immediately seen the wisdom in the choice. Shevchenko is the current Carpathian minister of state, with a long resume of work for the Ukrainian government before the war and also within various intergovernmental agencies in Europe. He’s a bureaucrat, a genuine diplomat, and however boring he would look giving national addresses, he’s sedate and mild of temper and he knows how to run a country.

“Both,” I say.

“Melwas is a monster,” he says with a shrug. “And this plan could be madness, but I think it is necessary madness. Carpathia will not survive under his rule, and the people know it. And especially once they learn the truth, I think they will be very eager to be rid of him.”

“And you have the support of your parliament? What about the military?”

“They are with me,” Shevchenko says, with cautious confidence. “They are ready to move as soon as the information goes public.”

“And they will support you as interim president?”

At this, Shevchenko gives me a reluctant, sad smile. I recognize my own reluctance in that smile, the same hesitation I showed Merlin when he asked me to lead his new party. “For better or worse, I suppose,” he says. “I still believe it should be someone else, someone with more, ah, charisma.” There’s a self-aware tilt to his lips. “I know I’m not the picture of a leader.”

Lenka shakes her head, puts her hand over his. “Melwas was the picture of a leader, Denys, and look where that got us. We need someone with the heart of a leader now.”

I stare at them both for a long minute, then glance over to Merlin, who is sitting back in his chair with his legs crossed and his head propped on his hand, his expression seeming to say, Well?

I take a breath. Perhaps it had been a formality, insisting on meeting Shevchenko in person, but I’m glad I did, because I trust him.

“You have my support,” I say. “And my country’s, provided you act fast. There’s a possibility I won’t be in office within a few months, and I can’t speak for what will happen then. But you do this now and I will do everything in my power to help.”

Lenka breathes a sigh of relief. “Tonight, then. We will do it tonight.”

I turn to her. “And you will be safe?”

She nods. “Melwas believes I’m visiting family now, but I’ve already arranged for asylum here until he’s imprisoned and it’s safe to return.”

“You are very brave, Lenka,” I tell her. “This is a courageous thing to do.”

Her eyes shine as she says, “I never would have been brave enough to start without that ballroom dance so long ago. Thank you for being patient with me, and for your friendship.”

“Always.”

And then it’s arranged and done, the overthrow of my greatest enemy. And it happened in suits and heels over an expensive dinner, and while it’s everything I’ve always hated about politics, I know we’ve done the right thing by moving slowly and quietly.

We’ve avoided a war, after all.

* * *

Almost three years ago, I asked Lenka Kocur to dance with me in Geneva, and while it was the first time I’d ever met her, it wasn’t the first time she’d met me.

“Bassas School,” she said quietly as we moved across the dance floor. “Do you remember it?”

Of course I remembered it. The insurgents had stormed into Bassas in order to block off a key road, shooting anyone who tried to stop them and lighting almost everything on fire to block our vision. Most of the town had managed to shelter in the high school, and there had been a bitter argument between me and my superior—he’d wanted to secure the entire perimeter before evacuating the school, I’d wanted to secure a safe passage out and start evacuating right away. In the end, I’d pretended not to hear his last radioed order and evacuated the building without securing an entire ring around it, and a good thing too, because the building went up in flames not moments after we got the last people out. I could have been court-martialed, but instead I was proclaimed a hero. Proof that PR makes all the difference in the end, although I only allowed myself a single, short moment of cynicism afterwards. It was enough to have done the right thing, and if I had been punished for it, I would have accepted it gladly, knowing that people were alive and safe because of what I’d done.

“I was one of the people trapped inside,” she continued. “You saved my life that day.”

“It was nothing,” I said, a little embarrassed. “We were just trying to help.”

“It was something to me,” she said. “The revolution—it was supposed to make our lives better. In Bassas, that’s what we wanted. But the revolution didn’t happen the way we thought it would—the young people who joined, it was like they forgot where they came from, and they’d torch their own family’s farm if they thought their family was anti-Carpathian.”

“I know, Mrs. Kocur.”

Her face turned bitter and sad. “It feels like there’s no justice for what happened—we have a new country, yes, but it’s half-empty and most of it is still in ruins, and there’s still so much pain. No one ever had to pay for that pain. They became rich, they became leaders.”

“Like your husband.”

She looked up at me. “Like my husband.”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, trying to be gentle. “Why are you married to him?”

“I had no choice,” she said, blinking back some terrible memory. “They came through Bassas a second time, killed my father and my brother. That’s how Melwas saw me, crying over their bodies, and he told me that he’d kill my mother too if I didn’t come with him. At first I was nothing more than a camp follower, a mistress that he loaned out whenever he pleased, then he had this idea that he couldn’t be a president if he wasn’t married. I suppose I was the convenient choice.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “Can I help?”

“Well,” she said carefully, “I think you might be able to. Do you remember Glein?”

My throat tightened on reflex; I swallowed against it. “Yes.”

“There was footage of that night. A rebel following Melwas had recorded their incursion into the village, wanting to document a glorious victory for the cause. Instead he caught Melwas and his fellow soldiers sending the village’s children out to die on that boat.”

I stared down at her. “There’s proof?”

She stared back at me. “Clear proof.”

“And you have it?”

She nodded.

“What would happen if you released it?”

At that, she sighed. “I don’t know yet. And I don’t know what would happen after it was released—what if someone worse than my husband came to power? What if our country sank into chaos again?”

“You’d have to be careful,” I said, even though my thoughts weren’t being careful at all. My thoughts were spinning, racing. If Melwas could be exposed as a murderer, if he could be imprisoned or impeached, if someone new and safe could replace him…

So many problems, solved.

But it would have to be done with so much caution, and no one could ever, ever know I had a hand in it.

“Will you help me?” she asked.

“I’ll help you,” I said immediately. Because there was caution and then there was passivity, and I refused to be passive. “When can we talk next?”

“Not for a while,” she admitted. “But I go to Berlin to visit family in several months. There I can find a place to call where I won’t be overheard.”

“You call me from Berlin when you can, and I promise I will pick up the phone.”

She smiled, the first real smile I’d ever seen on her face. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

* * *

It took me almost three years to bring down Melwas, and it’s happening right now as I drink my scotch and read through my debate notes on a plane thousands of miles away. It’s anti-climactic…and that’s how it should be. That’s how I wanted it. Democracy is anti-climactic, and so is peace. Peace is working and working and working, and knowing that if you do your job right, most people won’t know you’ve done a job at all.

“It’s why I chose you,” Merlin says out of nowhere, nursing his own drink.

“What?”

“It wasn’t just that you were smart and looked good in a suit, Maxen. I wanted you for this job because I knew that you would do something like this. Pour time and energy into something that stayed hidden. You don’t do things for the glory, you do them because they are the right things to do, and that, above all, is what makes a good leader. And a good person.”

“That’s kind of you to say. Thank you.”

He makes a tsking noise. “You’re allowed to feel proud, you know. Happy. Take joy, even just for a moment, in what you’ve done.”

Proud.

I’m too tired to feel proud, I’m too tired to feel smug—although I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a small part of me that wanted to muster up smugness, that wanted to revel in the satisfaction of having resolved this without war, without violence and without Embry. He had doubted me and I had succeeded.

It should feel good.

But the satisfaction isn’t there, and neither is the pride. There’s only fatigue and the faint worry that somehow this might make things more dangerous for Embry in the long run. The Carpathian extremists have been hating and threatening him with relentless energy over the last two months, and if Melwas is taken down, if the country is put into the hands of a bureaucrat and it’s clear that the extremists won’t get the war they so crave…what then?

No, I can’t think about this right now. That by saving my country and theirs from war, I’ve put Embry in danger.

Except now it’s all I can think about.

I press my fingers into my eyes for a moment, trying to think of the most coherent way to explain to Merlin how far away from proud I feel. “I have a debate in twelve hours, and I haven’t slept in over twenty-four. The press is dragging my name and my son’s and my sister’s through the mud as we speak, and we can’t get anyone to focus on the issues because they’re so obsessed with the incest I committed sixteen years ago. I don’t know right now what will happen to Lenka or Carpathia or Melwas. I don’t know if I can take joy in any of it yet, or if it doesn’t matter because it’s on to the next thing. I want to do the most good for the most people, but right now I’m tired and heart sore and it feels never ending. The things to do are never ending and all my losses feel never ending. I’m at a deficit.”

“Losses. You mean Lyr? Embry?”

I rub my face and drop my hands. “Yes.”

“Lyr will perhaps always be a shadow on your heart, but as for Embry—it was worth his anger to solve the Melwas problem this way.”

I want to raise my voice, I want to scream, but I’m too tired, too broken. “Maybe,” I say, just to end the conversation.

There’s a long pause, a silence in which I want to lay my head on my desk and close my eyes. I settle for staring at the ripples in my scotch, drinking the ripples down. Merlin does the same.

“Maxen, I need to tell you something,” he says after several minutes of this. His tone of voice has changed from his usual cool sharpness into something different. He almost sounds uncertain, and that above all makes me go still.

“I—” He gives a small laugh. “I’m sure where to begin, but I don’t know that it matters. Either way it will be impossible to believe. But I think believe you must, if we are to go forward—”

Belvedere chooses that minute to open the door to my office. Merlin and I both turn.

“Sir, I thought I’d tell you that the news has just broken about Melwas. The Glein footage is everywhere, and Carpathians are starting to gather in protest in the streets. It looks like some people are already calling for his removal.”

Merlin stands. “We can finish this another time. Ryan, make sure that our president gets some sleep after he’s briefed. He needs it.”

* * *

I don’t get any sleep.

The insomnia is too familiar a bedfellow to surprise me, but I do find myself annoyed with it. I try the bed on the plane with no luck, and then after we land in Denver, my hotel. It’s the morning of the debate now, and I draw the curtains against the sunshine and take off my clothes. I close my eyes and meditate like a sixteen-year-old princess taught me to do years ago. I hate that she’s not here now, that she’s doing some campaign event in California for me, because fuck the campaign, I want her with me, in my arms, tracing sleepy circles on my chest.

I breathe. I try to clear my mind.

Melwas is handled.

I’ve already won one debate; I’m well prepared for this one.

I can sleep, I can sleep, I deserve to sleep, I need to sleep, there’s no reason I can’t—

If only Greer were here. If only, if only, if only—

I doze off for a weak hour, my consciousness in and out, and there is a dream, a dream about a boat, a boat that will take me someplace I need to go. The sound of water laps through my dreams and there’s the flash of sunlight off a sword as it’s thrown into a deep, still lake—

My eyelids flutter open and I’m breathing hard. I can still smell the fog and the grass, and the strange tang of blood…

It was just a dream, Ash, I tell myself. I flip over onto my stomach and try meditation again.

Hours of this go by. Racing thoughts, irritation, breathing. Until I realize that I’m nudging close to two days without sleep now, and I need to to get up and shower and dress because it’s time for the debate.

I wish I could say that I perk up as I reach the University of Denver, that my mind somehow shakes off the murk and the gripping haze of exhaustion. I wish I could say that even though I don’t perk up, I still manage to stand beside Embry and deliver a ringing offense and defense of the night’s topics.

I wish I could say that I win.

But I don’t.

Instead, I fumble for answers that normally I know well. I struggle to keep up with Embry’s charming, smiling arguments, and I can’t seem to gather my thoughts together, they drift away like leaves on a lake, they slip through my fingers like water. I sound as I feel—tired and confused—and the debate seems to last weeks. It’s my entire life, these bright lights and the handsome, sweet form of the man I love growing even handsomer and sweeter as he fills with strength and confidence, as he realizes he’s winning. I see him glance at me once or twice, that confidence tempered with concern, as if it worries him that I’m not doing well, and I’m so grateful for those glances that I almost forgive him for winning and myself for losing.

When it’s over and I walk off the stage, everyone is silent. Belvedere and Merlin and Trieste. They don’t say anything as we make for the car, and I don’t say anything, and there’s nothing to say really. I lost. I’m fried from my trip to Carpathia and this campaign and Lyr and everything, and it got to me. I deserved to lose.

A young woman runs up to me, and I recognize her as Embry’s personal assistant, Dinah. “Mr. President!”

We stop and I hold up a hand to stop Luc, who’s just stepped forward to block her path. She’s out of breath, like she’s sprinted all the way to me, and her hand is slightly damp as she presses a rectangular plastic card into my palm. “The Four Seasons,” she says, glancing over to where Merlin and Trieste stare at her and looking a little intimidated by them. “He said he’d be there tomorrow too.”

And with a flush, she turns and leaves.

“Well, you definitely won’t get any sleep now,” says Merlin.