“I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY’VE still not given us new orders,” Pallino said, voicing aloud the thought that had been at the back of mine and everyone else’s minds for more than two months. The once-old chiliarch reclined on a low couch against the far wall of my quarters, hands behind his head, staring blankly at the holograph opera unfolding on the plate before us.

Returning from the lift with another bottle of wine, Elara said, “I don’t know . . . it’s nice to have another break, isn’t it?” She seated herself at the end of Pallino’s couch and busied herself refilling the wine cups that congregated on the table.

“Hear hear!” Siran said, leaning in to place her cup with the others and pinch a piece of the spiced Jaddian cheese Elara had sent one of the servants to acquire in the city markets. Her cup recharged, she lifted it. “To not fighting for our lives for once!” Elara joined her, and from his spot on the couch, Pallino raised an agreeing fist, but kept his eyes on the holograph plate. On it, an ancient knight in metal armor vaulted over a castle wall just as the ramparts were engulfed in flame and a dragon landed on the battlements, its massive claws crushing stone and corpses alike.

Valka shifted where she lay against my chest, but said nothing. I was sure she slept.

On the holograph, the dragon moved to devour a group of women cowering in a ruined hall. Its jaws opened! Fire flared blue-white in the gloom! A knight fell from the rafters above, and with his shield held the dragonfire at bay, shouting, “Go!”

It was one of my mother’s operas—though I told this to no one. Oft times when we put in to some Imperial harbor I would search them out, discover that she had made another one or several while I journeyed between the stars. More often than not I would watch them alone, but on rare occasions I would share them with the others—when I found I could not be alone.

“Isn’t it nice, Had?” Elara asked, all smiles.

“Keep it down!” Pallino exclaimed, the picture of focus.

Unbothered by Pallino’s interjection, Elara asked again, “Don’t you think it’s nice?”

Smiling, I answered her, “Elara, Pallino’s trying to watch the holograph.”

She threw a cheese at me. I let it hit the couch above my shoulder before eating it. “I’m only grateful there’s been no word from Alexander.”

“Do you think he’ll do something?” Siran asked, sitting back in her chair and cradling her wine.

“No idea!” I said. “But you saw what he’s like.”

We sat quietly a moment then—much to Pallino’s relief, I’m sure. One of the knights in the opera had jumped upon the dragon’s back with sword in hand and thrust the point downward.

“Well, I don’t think anything will happen,” Elara said. She crossed her legs and rested one hand on Pallino’s knee. “You’re too valuable, Had. So you called the prince a brat. He is a brat. The Emperor’s not going to cast you aside over something like this, surely.”

Mirroring Pallino’s posture of calm repose, I replied, “It’s not the Emperor I’m worried about.”

“What, you think the boy’s going to call for your head or something?” Elara did not seem convinced.

“That boy is a prince of the Sollan Empire,” I said. “He wouldn’t be the first to execute a favorite toy no matter what the Emperor said.”

Siran spoke over me. “All the more reason to get out of here and have done. I don’t know about you all, but I’m tired of fighting.” The whites of her eyes glowed in the dragonfire burning on the holograph.

With a heavy groan, Pallino reached out and slapped the controls to pause the opera. One of the knights—his shield lost and his helmet—stood alone before the dragon on a narrow bridge. The other, who’d mounted the dragon, had fallen off at some point and stood behind with the others, covering the retreat of the princess and the other courtiers. He said nothing, but crossed his arms, staring at each of us with his two, blue eyes.

“I should be an old woman now,” Siran said, one hand going reflexively to her nose. When she’d been elevated to patrician standing, her mutilated nostril had been repaired, erasing her past crimes. Like Pallino’s restored eye, it marked a kind of rebirth, a second life for my old friend. I understood how she felt. Though we palatines might live seven centuries, there is some ancient part of us that remembers we should have died in one tenth the time.

The ancients esteemed the proper span of a man’s years at three score and ten. Seventy. Siran had numbered about half that when we met and Pallino nearly equaled that number. Their patrician enhancements had restored them to the prime of life and kept them there for decades, but such after-market gene tonics and surgeries would hold only so long.

“I feel it, too,” I said. “I feel old.” How young I was, then! But then, I’d felt old before I was thirty, as so many do. It is a folly all of us commit. We imagine youth old age because we cannot imagine age. I am old now, and know I was young—so terribly young—then. I was not yet two hundred. Not yet one-fifty.

I did not know the meaning of the word.

Sometimes I think of Kharn Sagara, who I think must be the oldest man in existence—the oldest ever to exist. Small wonder that he is insane. Discovering new depths of time and age would madden anyone, may madden me in time.

“Do you want to stop?” Pallino asked, peering at me with one eye closed so that it seemed I looked at the older Pallino—the younger one—grizzled and gray-haired. I could almost picture the worn leather patch again, hidden by the shadows. Then he opened his eye, and the illusion faded.

“No,” I said. “The work’s not done.”

“No one would blame you, you know,” Elara said.

Pallino agreed, “Aye. You’ve done more than anyone has for this bloody war. You’re a lord again. You could retire to some nice palace or country villa and fuck your peasant girls raw until that hair of yours goes gray, lad. None would fault you. Ouch! Damn it, woman!” It seemed Elara had sunk her nails into his leg.

I shook my head, glad Valka was asleep. “That isn’t me.”

“No,” Pallino agreed, “you like to be miserable. Would you stop?” He glowered at Elara, who smiled innocently.

“Only if you behave.”

“Behave? I just wanted to watch the holograph. You all had to start talking and ruin it!”

Elara smoothly ignored this, and shook her head. “We’re all tired. I get that. I never thought I’d be in a place like this. On Forum. On a ship at all. Never thought I’d go to a ball at the Imperial Palace!” She was grinning, as if all the years we complained of had fallen away in an instant. “I thought that sort of thing only happens in fairy stories. Growing up in the city, you learn all knights and lords are bastards, you learn not to believe in this.” She gestured at the room around us. Elara and Siran both had been born on Emesh, in the sweating canal city of Borosevo.

I remembered it well, remembered it as a time and place as far from fairy tales as heaven was from hell. But I have lived a long time, and with each passing decade the muggy streets of Borosevo seem to me less real than even the airy halls and soaring towers of Forum, as if they too were only a story. As if we were all stories in the end.

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Siran put in, “but I can’t do this forever. I want to stop before I’m old. Old again, that is.” Her eyes swept over Elara and Pallino, over Valka sleeping against my side. “Always thought I’d have a family.” Was that longing in those black eyes? Sadness? Regret? I was doubly glad that Valka slept. That very question hung between us, dampened by my palatine genes and Valka’s lack of desire. Down that road lay a place neither she nor I dared look, and feelings we dared not name.

“Do you want to leave?” I asked, not angry, not resentful. Only wondering.

“Yes,” she replied, voice stiff. She would not look me in the face. “But not today.”

I did my best to smile, and looked from her to Pallino and Elara. I did not dare put the question to either of them. I feared their answers would be the same.

There are endings, Reader, but this is not one of them.

Not yet.