Brienne-le-Château, August 1779, that same night
Napoleone lay on his cot long after the dormitory had gone quiet, staring at the dark stone ceiling, turning the day over the way he always did before sleep finally took him.
You did well, Marcus said, unhurried, the old voice settling into the back of his thoughts the way it did less and less often these days, only when it actually had something worth saying. Better than well, honestly. I've watched consuls fumble simpler intrigues than the one you just walked four boys through without a single lie.
I noticed you were quiet through most of it.
You didn't need me. That was rather the point. There was something almost like amusement in it. Though I'll admit, the trunk search was clever. I once had a general accused of embezzling grain stores. Took me three months and two senators to prove what you managed with one nervous boy's honest memory of a handkerchief.
Napoleone almost smiled in the dark. Three months. You're slowing down in your old age.
I was an emperor, not a magistrate. I had an empire to run in the meantime. You have Latin conjugations. A pause, dry as dust. Which, I notice, you still haven't finished for tomorrow.
I'll do them at breakfast.
You said that yesterday too.
And I did them at breakfast yesterday, so the method is sound.
Something that might have been a laugh, if a laugh could exist without a mouth to make it, passed through him and was gone. It was strange, Napoleone thought, how much less formal Marcus had become since Autun. In those first months the old voice had arrived draped in maxims, every observation dressed up like something carved into a Roman wall. Lately it just talked to him, the way Joseph used to talk to him, or the way he imagined a much older, much stranger brother might, if he'd had one who'd once run half the known world and had opinions about absolutely everything since.
Léotade worries me more than Verrier ever did, Napoleone admitted, after a while, the humor draining out of his thoughts as the real weight of the day settled back over him. That thing he said. About the hawk and the mouse.
I heard it.
You didn't say anything.
Because there wasn't anything useful to say in the moment, and you already knew that yourself, or you wouldn't have kept walking instead of answering him back. Marcus's tone shifted, not solemn exactly, but careful, the way a man is careful stepping onto ice he isn't fully certain will hold. He's not wrong, you know. About what he sees in you. He's only wrong to think it's troubling. A boy who can see the whole board isn't a danger by default. He's only a danger to the people who assumed nobody in the room was looking that closely.
That's not especially comforting.
I didn't say it to comfort you. I said it because it's true, and you're old enough now to hear true things without needing them softened first. A beat. Also because moping about it in the dark won't make Léotade forget it by morning, and you have Latin to do.
I said I'd do it at breakfast.
You did. I remain skeptical.
Napoleone rolled onto his side, pulling the thin blanket up against the August night's lingering chill, and let the silence stretch a while, comfortable rather than heavy now, the particular quiet of two very old habits of mind that had gotten, somewhere along the way, genuinely used to each other's company.
Can I ask you something, he said eventually, that has nothing to do with Verrier, or Léotade, or any of it?
You may. I make no promises about the answer.
Did you have a Rocher? Someone who meant well and nearly ruined everything trying to prove it?
There was a longer pause this time, the kind that meant the old voice was actually thinking rather than simply being clever.
Several, Marcus admitted finally, and something in the admission carried a weight Napoleone hadn't quite expected, old and specific and entirely unphilosophical. An empire collects them the way a coat collects burrs. Some of mine cost considerably more than a stolen watch. Another pause, shorter, and lighter again, like a man deliberately setting down something heavy before it could ruin the rest of the evening. You handled yours better than I handled most of mine, if it's any comfort. You only lost a night's sleep over it. I lost rather more than that, more than once.
That's the least comforting thing you've said all night.
I did warn you I wasn't in the business of comfort. A pause, and then, unmistakably lighter, almost fond. Go to sleep, Napoleone. Whatever Léotade decides to make of you, he can decide it in the morning. The mouse, for what it's worth, generally does better when it's rested.
Napoleone closed his eyes, the old stone ceiling fading into the dark, and let the last of the day go with something that wasn't quite peace, but sat close enough beside it, for one night at least, to pass.