He stands up and stretches.

"You can do what you like with the next twelve hours; I'm going to spend them flying," he says. "I'll meet you back here at sundown."

"Okay. Um, are there any books or anything in my room, I haven't looked at it very much yet."

"Yeah. Do you want a portal back to it?"

"Yes please."

Portal. Forehead-kiss.

She beams at him and twirls off to her room to investigate the books.

And he shrugs out of his coat and pulls off his shirt and tosses them through the portal and lets it fade and climbs the railing and steps off the edge of the island. His wings shimmer into being as he falls, an owl's wings, huge and grey and soft and silent. He skims the waves and hauls himself back up into the sky and glides under the island, flipping upside down to look at the cracks and swirls in the rock. A chunk of the western edge has come loose and fallen off. He calls the wind to lift him up and touches the broken place and makes more stone to fill it, then falls away again, glides, soars, has the wind pull him up into the sky until the island is a distant speck beneath him and his lungs can no longer draw breath.

Okay.

Lyrame's mother.

He owns her now, he can find her as easily as breathing. And her family, there's a connection there that he can follow. He doesn't spy on any of them, but he reaches out to feel their presence, to trace the bonds of heart and blood that link them together; and, spiraling down in a long glide, he maps the shape of the missing piece...

Half an hour before sunset, exhilarated and satisfied, he lands on the southwestern edge and lets his wings dissolve on the breeze. A billow of smoke and a couple of stray feathers blow away, off the edge of the island and out over the ocean far below. He stretches, then climbs down off the rocky outcropping where he landed. It'd take an hour to cross the whole island to the east gardens from here, but he wants to walk for a few minutes before he portals into his rooms to collect his Lyrame.

There is someone there, leaning against a wall and watching him darkly.

—he stops.

He looks at Alemar.

"Evening," he says, not quite casually. (There's no way he didn't see that landing, and people may not know the Emperor's face very well but the wings are a big hint. It is just barely possible that Alemar has failed to connect the two tall shirtless men he's seen in the last minute; it's far likelier that somebody's been looking at purchase records, and is pretending not to know which of course entails pretending not to have just found out.)

"Evening," he says coolly.

He smiles wryly and shakes his head. "You know, I'm really starting to like you. It's a pity you've got such a good reason to hate me."

"It would be really easy to fix that," he points out.

"Would it really?" he wonders. "If I said 'oh, sorry, never mind, guess I'll free her after all'? I'm not going to, but if I did, would that be it, no hard feelings?"

"I can't promise that it would all be instantly better, but it would be better, and it's not ever going to be all better if you don't."

He shrugs. "Yeah, that's fair."

He studies him. "I think I understand it even less than I did this morning, though."

"Mm?"

"You could tell her--or anyone--to do anything you wanted anyway."

...he laughs. "True. It's - not really about that, though."

There is really no point in - oh, who is he kidding, of course he's going to say it -

"I fell in love with her this morning. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I noticed I already had."

"She's never going to love you back."

"I thought that anything good between us would be shattered the moment I told the scribe to mark her with the Imperial sun. The fact that she's ever going to willingly look at me again means I'm already well ahead of what I could reasonably have expected."

"She does like you," he allows. "It's just that as long as she has no choice about whether you can claim any other part of her, she will never, ever give you her heart. That's the one thing that doesn't belong to you, and for as long as that's true it cannot be otherwise. I admit that I take some small satisfaction in the fact that for all your power, there is one thing you would like to have that your magic cannot get you."

He shrugs again. "Yeah, fair."

A thoughtful pause.

"...I suppose if you already know who I am there's no more benefit to keeping it from you - I've spent the rest of the day doing the groundwork for resurrecting your mother."

"Fine, I stand corrected."

...he laughs.