Promotion
arjun mirza & circe
muskaptilo
arjun mirza & circe
muskaptilo
"What is that?"
The thing about Circe was that 'aging' didn't seem quite like the right word for what she had done. Arjun had aged. There were lines on his face where before there were none, every papercut now seemed to scar, and his sight had gone badly enough that he needed glasses now – never mind that he was only thirty.
Circe, she had blossomed. Her eyes were kohl-rimmed earthy pools, her hair did not fall as much as it cascaded, and the freckles on her dark skin made her look absurdly youthful.
"That is my ship," she said proudly, in the midst of wrapping yet another rope around one of the columns on the old bell tower.
"Your flying ship."
"My flying ship, yes." Somehow she managed to make it sound like he was being dense, rather than that she was mad. "That's actually why I need to see the King."
"You need to see the King about your flying ship." Circe always managed to do this to him, have him repeating everything she said as if to confirm that she had said it at all, that he had not somehow imagined in a kind of fever dream.
It wasn't a bad looking ship. It was all dark wood and light gilding, decorated in unnecessarily elaborate filigree, and it would have been a fine thing to see on the seas. It just didn't seem to belong in the sky, like some sort of hot air balloon gone wrong. It had to have been magic, to fly like that, but no one on Muskaptilo had witchery in their blood.
It was a rare sunny day, the skies blue and tinged with pink, and in the sunlight Circe's hair looked almost red. "Yes, that's what I said," she confirmed with a roll of her eyes, "I have a business proposition for him."
"A…" Arjun sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose before realizing Circe was already trying to head down toward the palace. He took her by the shoulders, redirected her to right in front of him. He remembered when they were children, when she'd been taller than he was, but now she seemed impossibly tiny. "Look, why don't you tell me about this idea of yours, before you go storming the castle."
Circe groaned and rolled her eyes dramatically, as if she could imagine nothing more tedious. "Fiiiine. Here's what I'm thinking: when's the last time Muskaptilo had a navy?"
Arjun blinked. "Muskaptilo has never had a navy. We're pacifists."
"Right! But what if we did have a navy? A flying navy?"
"… what would we do with a flying navy?"
Circe seemed to vacillate at this, the way she always did when it came time to reveal the actual meat-and-bones of one of her plans. "It wouldn't be a proper navy, technically speaking. It would – do you know what a privateer is?"
"Words of the ancestors, Circe," Arjun swore.
"Okay, so you have – but, no, hear me out! The King writes me a letter of marque, authorizing me to act with all the authority of the Muskaptilian Navy. There are no borders in the ocean, so technically I can raid any ship I'd like and claim it was infringing on our borders. They can't follow me back here, not unless they have an airship of their own, not in any ship large enough to be a threat. And even if they did, because I'm still technically acting as a private citizen, the King could disavow all knowledge of any such activities. And! And! There are so many villages and towns and cities out there, Arjun, far away from their rulers, far away from any ruler! Not even part of any proper country, a lot of them, and I could bring in goods for trade, I could bring goods there. I've met so many merchants, so many caravans. I could sell Nadra's flowers! New fabric for Anya, new books for the library! It would be wonderful, Arjun, the King will have to see that."
"What you really want," he countered, and it was difficult to be sensible in the face of her obvious excitement, "is a safe harbor for you to hide in after committing the acts of piracy you are already planning to commit anyway."
"… maybe. Sort of. A little. But Arjun! If we do it this way, think of how good it will be for Muskaptilo. You know I still love my country, really."
Loved it enough to leave in a rickety basket on a threadbare balloon, no steering and no expectation of survival. Foolish and adventurous and brave Circe, and no island could contain her. Only the sky was big enough. "Before you go demanding your letter of marque," he said finally, "there's something you should know."
Circe, who had been standing on her toes in her excitement, lowered herself slowly at the look on his face. "What? What's happened?"
She really had no right to look so worried, to sound so distressed, when she'd been gone so long. So many things could have changed, of course things would be different now. "King Sen is dead."
Circe took a step back, away from the hands that Arjun had rested on her shoulders. "What?" She knew as well as Arjun that Sen had never borne children, had never expressed even the slightest interest in such. There had never been any obvious line of succession, though it had not been the sort of thing to concern either of them when he'd seen her last. "But then – who?"
Arjun took a deep breath, because this next part was going to be a bit difficult to explain. "If a King dies without leaving any heirs," he began slowly, "succession defaults to the second-highest authority in the country." Circe stared at him blankly, because she'd never much cared for keeping track of authority. "The – the librarian. The Royal Librarian. Is the second-highest authority."
Circe continued to stare, but slowly her eyes began to widen with dawning comprehension. "No. No! That's not – no! You don't mean–?"
"Arjun Mirza, fourth generation Royal Librarian of the librarian house of Mirza, and… King of Muskaptilo. Yes." He half-assed something almost like a bow, and sighed as Circe – as expected – began to cackle.
"But where is your crown, King Mirza?" Circe demanded, reaching up to ruffle Arjun's hair even as he batted her hands away.
"Too damn small," he muttered, but that only made her laugh harder.
"Does this mean," she said suddenly, clapping her hands together with delight, "that you get to use–?"
"The Royal Waterpipe? Yes. And as my honored guest, you may be the first to join me with it."
"So then I said – 'But if that's your wife, who's that under the table?'"
"You are so full of shit," Arjun declared, but he was laughing as he said it. They were in a room of the palace that was rarely used, the one for foreign dignitaries or other such travelers, honored guests of the King. Spiraling fractals were carved into the domed roof, the floor tile arranged into concentric circles all leading to the center. The tall glass pipe was placed in the center, as was traditional, and Arjun was reclining beside it. The cushions they were using had been embroidered by the tailor when she'd still been young and enthusiastic, entirely too impractical in their design to have been made by anyone over the age of twenty-five. Circe was sitting upright, the better to gesture wildly with her hands, and her mouthpiece to the pipe sat neglected on her knee.
"If I lie," she said, holding up a solemn hand, "may lightning strike me down." She lowered her hand to the oja gourd by her feet, and took a dainty sip through the metal straw.
"Aha!" Arjun said, pointing an accusatory finger in her direction. "You said lightning powers your engines. You have an incentive to lie." He inhaled from his mouthpiece, sweet oja smoke passing over his tongue, and blew a ring toward her.
"Politics has made you cynical," she said, setting the gourd back down so she could fall back on her cushions.
"Life has made me cynical," he corrected, propping his head up on his hand.
Circe sighed, and it was a thoughtful and serious sort of a sigh that meant she was about to say something Arjun wouldn't like. "There's something I haven't mentioned yet."
"You're dying," he guessed. "You're pregnant. You're dying because you're pregnant."
She threw a small cushion at his head, laughing. "No, you imbecile, I am none of those. I – there's someone on the ship. I brought her with me."
"Really?" he groaned. "You brought home a lover?"
"Not a lover. She's only twelve."
"Only – what?" He did not quite sit upright, but raised himself higher to look at her incredulously around the pipe. "Why would you bring a child here?"
"I had to get her away from where she was," she said helplessly, and he raised a hand in the universal sign for not wanting to know. Mainlanders.
"What is she even going to do here?"
"… I told her she could have goats."
"… what."
"She likes animals! I said there were goats, she was excited about the goats, I figured no one would mind letting an aspiring goatherd lay claim to a few of the wild goats." Circe grabbed her mouthpiece and took a drag of oja, still laying back, blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling.
Arjun fell back down to lounging with a groan. "Fine. We will find a place for your little goat girl. But don't make a habit of this, we can't have you bringing along mainlanders every time it strikes your fancy."
"… why not?" she dared to wonder, as if it weren't self-explanatory. "Would it be so bad, Arjun, to have children on the island again? New blood?"
"This island is dying, Circe," he said with a sigh. "Our society was built on a foundation of barren rocks and spite, it was never going to last. Let it die."
"Even your books?" she wondered, prodding him in the leg with the tip of one foot.
"Even the best-kept books rot away eventually," he said, dragging on oja again.
"How fatalistic," Circe accused. "What happened to the Arjun I used to know, who worried so much about preserving Muskaptilian culture? Where's your mishta? When's the last time you did poetry?"
"Mishta is for children," Arjun scoffed, though he smiled faintly as he said it. "What would even be the point, without a dancer? And there are no other poets to recite with, since you left. There is nothing here for me but books, now."
"You," Circe decided, "need a wife. I am going to find you one, just wait and see."
"I do not," he said, horrified, and this time it was his turn to throw a cushion at her head. "The last thing I need is you assaulting me with mainland women."
"You don't want a kolopita of your very own, swooning over your tattoos and boiling all your food?" she teased, catching the cushion and sticking it beneath her head as if he'd done her a favor.
"Have you even read that poem?" he asked. "It is an awful poem."
"We all read that poem," she reminded him, though he couldn't remember her actually paying attention when they were in school. "You used to like it."
"Children are not renowned for their good taste."
"What happened to your romance, little Mirza?" It was absurd that she would call him that now, when puberty had given her over a head's height advantage over her. It was more absurd that she would sound so sad, that she would sound as if she had a right to sadness when things were always certain to change while she was gone.
"The love of my life," he said, "found the act of laying with me so repulsive that she swore off men forever."
"Arjun," Circe gasped, her voice high-pitched with indignation, and she threw a much larger pillow much harder. "You know that isn't what it was like."
"Wasn't it?" He was trying not to sound bitter about it, and he was failing. He didn't even bother avoiding the cushion boffing him in the face.
"If it hadn't been for you," she said more softly, "I'd not have bothered with men at all. Only for you."
Arjun closed his eyes with a sigh, rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. "Fine," he said, and he sounded resigned.
"It is not fine," Circe said, still clearly unhappy with his views on all that their relationship had been. "You were–"
"No, not that," he interrupted, waving his hand through some of the smoke that filled the room. "You need a… what? A letter of marque? For our new navy?" Her squeal of delight almost made him smile. "But no more passengers," he added, as sternly as he was capable.
"We'll see," she said, sing-song; rather than argue, King Mirza took another drag on the pipe, and tried to remember what the immigration paperwork entailed.
The thing about Circe was that 'aging' didn't seem quite like the right word for what she had done. Arjun had aged. There were lines on his face where before there were none, every papercut now seemed to scar, and his sight had gone badly enough that he needed glasses now – never mind that he was only thirty.
Circe, she had blossomed. Her eyes were kohl-rimmed earthy pools, her hair did not fall as much as it cascaded, and the freckles on her dark skin made her look absurdly youthful.
"That is my ship," she said proudly, in the midst of wrapping yet another rope around one of the columns on the old bell tower.
"Your flying ship."
"My flying ship, yes." Somehow she managed to make it sound like he was being dense, rather than that she was mad. "That's actually why I need to see the King."
"You need to see the King about your flying ship." Circe always managed to do this to him, have him repeating everything she said as if to confirm that she had said it at all, that he had not somehow imagined in a kind of fever dream.
It wasn't a bad looking ship. It was all dark wood and light gilding, decorated in unnecessarily elaborate filigree, and it would have been a fine thing to see on the seas. It just didn't seem to belong in the sky, like some sort of hot air balloon gone wrong. It had to have been magic, to fly like that, but no one on Muskaptilo had witchery in their blood.
It was a rare sunny day, the skies blue and tinged with pink, and in the sunlight Circe's hair looked almost red. "Yes, that's what I said," she confirmed with a roll of her eyes, "I have a business proposition for him."
"A…" Arjun sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose before realizing Circe was already trying to head down toward the palace. He took her by the shoulders, redirected her to right in front of him. He remembered when they were children, when she'd been taller than he was, but now she seemed impossibly tiny. "Look, why don't you tell me about this idea of yours, before you go storming the castle."
Circe groaned and rolled her eyes dramatically, as if she could imagine nothing more tedious. "Fiiiine. Here's what I'm thinking: when's the last time Muskaptilo had a navy?"
Arjun blinked. "Muskaptilo has never had a navy. We're pacifists."
"Right! But what if we did have a navy? A flying navy?"
"… what would we do with a flying navy?"
Circe seemed to vacillate at this, the way she always did when it came time to reveal the actual meat-and-bones of one of her plans. "It wouldn't be a proper navy, technically speaking. It would – do you know what a privateer is?"
"Words of the ancestors, Circe," Arjun swore.
"Okay, so you have – but, no, hear me out! The King writes me a letter of marque, authorizing me to act with all the authority of the Muskaptilian Navy. There are no borders in the ocean, so technically I can raid any ship I'd like and claim it was infringing on our borders. They can't follow me back here, not unless they have an airship of their own, not in any ship large enough to be a threat. And even if they did, because I'm still technically acting as a private citizen, the King could disavow all knowledge of any such activities. And! And! There are so many villages and towns and cities out there, Arjun, far away from their rulers, far away from any ruler! Not even part of any proper country, a lot of them, and I could bring in goods for trade, I could bring goods there. I've met so many merchants, so many caravans. I could sell Nadra's flowers! New fabric for Anya, new books for the library! It would be wonderful, Arjun, the King will have to see that."
"What you really want," he countered, and it was difficult to be sensible in the face of her obvious excitement, "is a safe harbor for you to hide in after committing the acts of piracy you are already planning to commit anyway."
"… maybe. Sort of. A little. But Arjun! If we do it this way, think of how good it will be for Muskaptilo. You know I still love my country, really."
Loved it enough to leave in a rickety basket on a threadbare balloon, no steering and no expectation of survival. Foolish and adventurous and brave Circe, and no island could contain her. Only the sky was big enough. "Before you go demanding your letter of marque," he said finally, "there's something you should know."
Circe, who had been standing on her toes in her excitement, lowered herself slowly at the look on his face. "What? What's happened?"
She really had no right to look so worried, to sound so distressed, when she'd been gone so long. So many things could have changed, of course things would be different now. "King Sen is dead."
Circe took a step back, away from the hands that Arjun had rested on her shoulders. "What?" She knew as well as Arjun that Sen had never borne children, had never expressed even the slightest interest in such. There had never been any obvious line of succession, though it had not been the sort of thing to concern either of them when he'd seen her last. "But then – who?"
Arjun took a deep breath, because this next part was going to be a bit difficult to explain. "If a King dies without leaving any heirs," he began slowly, "succession defaults to the second-highest authority in the country." Circe stared at him blankly, because she'd never much cared for keeping track of authority. "The – the librarian. The Royal Librarian. Is the second-highest authority."
Circe continued to stare, but slowly her eyes began to widen with dawning comprehension. "No. No! That's not – no! You don't mean–?"
"Arjun Mirza, fourth generation Royal Librarian of the librarian house of Mirza, and… King of Muskaptilo. Yes." He half-assed something almost like a bow, and sighed as Circe – as expected – began to cackle.
"But where is your crown, King Mirza?" Circe demanded, reaching up to ruffle Arjun's hair even as he batted her hands away.
"Too damn small," he muttered, but that only made her laugh harder.
"Does this mean," she said suddenly, clapping her hands together with delight, "that you get to use–?"
"The Royal Waterpipe? Yes. And as my honored guest, you may be the first to join me with it."
"So then I said – 'But if that's your wife, who's that under the table?'"
"You are so full of shit," Arjun declared, but he was laughing as he said it. They were in a room of the palace that was rarely used, the one for foreign dignitaries or other such travelers, honored guests of the King. Spiraling fractals were carved into the domed roof, the floor tile arranged into concentric circles all leading to the center. The tall glass pipe was placed in the center, as was traditional, and Arjun was reclining beside it. The cushions they were using had been embroidered by the tailor when she'd still been young and enthusiastic, entirely too impractical in their design to have been made by anyone over the age of twenty-five. Circe was sitting upright, the better to gesture wildly with her hands, and her mouthpiece to the pipe sat neglected on her knee.
"If I lie," she said, holding up a solemn hand, "may lightning strike me down." She lowered her hand to the oja gourd by her feet, and took a dainty sip through the metal straw.
"Aha!" Arjun said, pointing an accusatory finger in her direction. "You said lightning powers your engines. You have an incentive to lie." He inhaled from his mouthpiece, sweet oja smoke passing over his tongue, and blew a ring toward her.
"Politics has made you cynical," she said, setting the gourd back down so she could fall back on her cushions.
"Life has made me cynical," he corrected, propping his head up on his hand.
Circe sighed, and it was a thoughtful and serious sort of a sigh that meant she was about to say something Arjun wouldn't like. "There's something I haven't mentioned yet."
"You're dying," he guessed. "You're pregnant. You're dying because you're pregnant."
She threw a small cushion at his head, laughing. "No, you imbecile, I am none of those. I – there's someone on the ship. I brought her with me."
"Really?" he groaned. "You brought home a lover?"
"Not a lover. She's only twelve."
"Only – what?" He did not quite sit upright, but raised himself higher to look at her incredulously around the pipe. "Why would you bring a child here?"
"I had to get her away from where she was," she said helplessly, and he raised a hand in the universal sign for not wanting to know. Mainlanders.
"What is she even going to do here?"
"… I told her she could have goats."
"… what."
"She likes animals! I said there were goats, she was excited about the goats, I figured no one would mind letting an aspiring goatherd lay claim to a few of the wild goats." Circe grabbed her mouthpiece and took a drag of oja, still laying back, blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling.
Arjun fell back down to lounging with a groan. "Fine. We will find a place for your little goat girl. But don't make a habit of this, we can't have you bringing along mainlanders every time it strikes your fancy."
"… why not?" she dared to wonder, as if it weren't self-explanatory. "Would it be so bad, Arjun, to have children on the island again? New blood?"
"This island is dying, Circe," he said with a sigh. "Our society was built on a foundation of barren rocks and spite, it was never going to last. Let it die."
"Even your books?" she wondered, prodding him in the leg with the tip of one foot.
"Even the best-kept books rot away eventually," he said, dragging on oja again.
"How fatalistic," Circe accused. "What happened to the Arjun I used to know, who worried so much about preserving Muskaptilian culture? Where's your mishta? When's the last time you did poetry?"
"Mishta is for children," Arjun scoffed, though he smiled faintly as he said it. "What would even be the point, without a dancer? And there are no other poets to recite with, since you left. There is nothing here for me but books, now."
"You," Circe decided, "need a wife. I am going to find you one, just wait and see."
"I do not," he said, horrified, and this time it was his turn to throw a cushion at her head. "The last thing I need is you assaulting me with mainland women."
"You don't want a kolopita of your very own, swooning over your tattoos and boiling all your food?" she teased, catching the cushion and sticking it beneath her head as if he'd done her a favor.
"Have you even read that poem?" he asked. "It is an awful poem."
"We all read that poem," she reminded him, though he couldn't remember her actually paying attention when they were in school. "You used to like it."
"Children are not renowned for their good taste."
"What happened to your romance, little Mirza?" It was absurd that she would call him that now, when puberty had given her over a head's height advantage over her. It was more absurd that she would sound so sad, that she would sound as if she had a right to sadness when things were always certain to change while she was gone.
"The love of my life," he said, "found the act of laying with me so repulsive that she swore off men forever."
"Arjun," Circe gasped, her voice high-pitched with indignation, and she threw a much larger pillow much harder. "You know that isn't what it was like."
"Wasn't it?" He was trying not to sound bitter about it, and he was failing. He didn't even bother avoiding the cushion boffing him in the face.
"If it hadn't been for you," she said more softly, "I'd not have bothered with men at all. Only for you."
Arjun closed his eyes with a sigh, rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. "Fine," he said, and he sounded resigned.
"It is not fine," Circe said, still clearly unhappy with his views on all that their relationship had been. "You were–"
"No, not that," he interrupted, waving his hand through some of the smoke that filled the room. "You need a… what? A letter of marque? For our new navy?" Her squeal of delight almost made him smile. "But no more passengers," he added, as sternly as he was capable.
"We'll see," she said, sing-song; rather than argue, King Mirza took another drag on the pipe, and tried to remember what the immigration paperwork entailed.
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