Meanwhile--

Helping someone cheat on their spouse is much more boring than Asher had been lead to believe. He should probably complain about inaccurate representations of adultery in popular culture. 

His dick was inside his lover's mouth when her husband opened the front door and Asher was shoved, naked, into a closet, where he has been for the past two hours, stuck between a fur coat and a velvet blazer. He's shivering from cold. His foot has fallen asleep. He can't make a sound. Fortunately she'd also shoved in his phone, so he could text Ben about the internal politics of Morgendammerung, read some more of a history book Kaleva recommended, and congratulate his younger sister on her first flambé.

Even so, he is bored. He eavesdrops a little on his lover and her husband's boring domestic quarrels, mourning that he has nothing better to do than listen to two people arguing about who did the dishes last. Then realizes that he has a brain and therefore always has something better to do than listen to people arguing about doing the dishes, and instead entertains himself seeing how much of trigonometry he can reinvent from the two days of class he actually bothered to attend. 

The argument noises turn into squeaking bed noises. His lover, it seems, has decided to distract her husband from the teenage boy in their closet by fucking him. 

He is more than familiar enough with the sounds of her arousal to know that she's faking. Still, it's a pretty hot pornography soundtrack, and her husband is pretty good-looking, and reconstructing what must be happening from the gasps and whimpers and creaks of the bed is more entertaining than trigonometry. 

Asher is a teenage boy, and he didn't actually get to get off before he was so rudely shoved into a closet, and there are two reasonably attractive people fucking two feet away from him, and if his impulse control was any good he probably would not have found himself in this situation in the first place. So he finds his hands stroking up and down his chest and his thighs, and then his dick finds its way into his hand. He bites his lip and throws his head back and imagines what must be happening, imagines her legs wrapped around his back and his face contorted in pleasure and the way his dick would look sliding in and out of her pussy. He can't make a sound or he'll get caught and the danger itself makes his heart race, puts him on edge; he feels alive. 

The husband finishes with a grunt and rolls over. Asher bites his hand hard to keep from making a sound, imagines that it's his turn inside her next, imagines them both taking her, imagines the sounds she makes when she comes around his dick, and finishes. 

For lack of any better method, he licks his hands clean. Then he returns to contemplating trigonometry. 

Kaleva has words, now, for the sort of person he is. 

He's a sodomite.

Sodomites, he learns, are not capable of true love. True love is only between a man and a woman; only a man and a woman can perform true love magic, the most powerful of all magics. Kaleva might feel sadder about this, but he'd always figured he was too ugly and awkward to ever be truly loved anyway, so it's not like this is much different.

(He's sad that he can't really love Chen. That hurts.)

He learns that there are places where sodomites meet other sodomites. Bars, bathhouses, certain public toilets, places to meet for sex. You don't date, if you're a sodomite. Two men can't get married and they can't love each other, there wouldn't be a point. It's not useful information, because Kaleva is pretty sure the only person he wants to have sex with is Chen. But maybe someday he'll be desperate enough to try.  

It is possible to do sex things to yourself when you are awake. It causes hairy palms, which he doesn't particularly care about, and weakness of the brain, which he absolutely does. Fortunately, the concept of touching himself, as opposed to Chen, is already kind of gross, so he's not really tempted by it.

The knowledge is mostly theoretical, and it's probably going to stay that way, as long as he only wants Chen. But still. It's good to know.

One night Ben curls up with his head on Chen's shoulder and says, "I'm not sure that my dad was a very good king."

He pulls Ben closer and says "What brings this up?" 

"You know that the dwarves and fairies went on strike?"

"I'd heard about it, yeah." 

"All of my human advisers think I should send troops out to put them in an anti-magic field and arrest them, and my nonhuman advisers don't want to disagree."

"...there are plenty of people who'd react that way to human strikes too," but he knows that isn't the real problem. 

"The problem is that"-- he sighs-- "I feel like maybe they're actually right? They can't leave their jobs and they're not getting paid in money."

"...it's definitely much better than what genies had before your father." 

"The genies are talking about joining the strike. They can't stop granting wishes but they can interpret them as maliciously as possible."

"That sounds likely to become a disaster." 

"Yeah. If the dwarves go on strike it's whatever, diamonds are going to be a little more expensive, but if genies go on strike-- Well. My advisers are talking Isle."

He thinks about that. 

"I'm not sure that wouldn't also be a disaster, just a longer-term one." 

"How so?"

"Right now, genie wishes are the most reliable magic we have, if we put a bunch of genies on the Isle not only are we losing that resource but also even the genies who aren't on the Isle just — aren't going to be interacting in good faith, and even if they aren't interpreting wishes as maliciously as possible that still seems likely to end badly in the long run." 

"They want to be free and not in their lamps anymore. And... on one hand we really don't want a bunch of all-powerful free agents running around, even if we can use anti-magic fields, and genie wishes are useful. On the other hand, I definitely would not want to live in a lamp forever."

"Yeah," he says, very softly. "I don't know either." 

"And I keep thinking-- what do I know, you know? I'm sixteen. Probably my dad is right."

"I think in general you're better than you give yourself credit for." 

"Of course you think that."

"Doesn't make me wrong!" 

"But-- all the adults are there like 'this is fine, would the nonhumans even know how to interact with people in an economy, fairies and genies are dangerous and we need to control them, it would destroy the diamond industry' and I'm like 'but... keeping people as slaves seems wrong' and they're like 'they're not slaves, slaves are human, they're nonhumans treated with appropriate regulations for nonhumans' and I'm like 'it definitely does seem like slavery to me.'"

"...genies being dangerous is fair but —" and he doesn't know how he was going to finish that sentence, only that he definitely was going to finish it. 

"Any human can torture a mouse to death pretty trivially but if the mice locked us all in solitary confinement cells I think... that would be wrong."