The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

the domes that Maia was used to, and on the walls were painted the devices of the gods, both the seven with which he was familiar and many with which he was not. The cold, bare, stone floor was so freshly scrubbed that it was still damp in places. A small spring bubbled up in a niche beside the arched opening to the antechamber; it tumbled over the edge of its natural bowl and disappeared into a hole in the floor. Maia could faintly hear it becoming a river somewhere in the dark below.
    A lantern hung in the tall arch of the doorway; Tethimar reached up and lit it with his candle. He said, his beautiful voice quiet and grave, “The water is sanctified. You may drink it. We will return at sundown.” And he, with Cala and Beshelar following, turned and began to climb the stairs back to the world above. Maia locked his throat against the impulse to call them back, to beg them to stay, not to leave him down here alone in the dark. The lantern light mocked him, a taunting reminder of the light of the world. He shut his eyes so that he would not have to watch the light of the candle recede, and counted slowly to one hundred. When he opened his eyes, he looked around at the cool darkness, this well of silence, the weight of rock and loneliness, and thought, This is what it is to be emperor.
    He drank a little water, mostly to wash the taste of panic out of his mouth, then sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor and began patiently and without emphasis to think about his breathing.
    He had been too young when his mother died to inherit much of her Barizheise mysticism, but she had taught him the few small, simple things that a child’s bright butterfly mind would hold to. Setheris, who professed the fashionable agnosticism, had no patience for what he called “flummery”; Maia had clung to the fragments of his mother’s teachings mostly out of defiance. As he grew older, he discovered that he could use the breathing exercises she had taught him to calm himself, or to combat his fear and boredom when he was being punished for infractions of Setheris’s rigid rules. He had missed the habit over the past two days, but there had never been—
    He lost his rhythm, almost choked, realizing in a new and heavily visceral way that he had lost his privacy permanently. He assumed—desperately hoped—that there was some compromise allowed for sexual activities, but emperors did not have privacy. Even behind the grilles of the Alcethmeret, the servants would be there, and if not the servants, the nohecharei, and although their function was largely symbolic in this day and age, their presence was not. He imagined losing his virginity under Beshelar’s critical eye and was seized by a lunatic fit of shrill, painful laughter. But even when he calmed again, that cold lump of truth was still lodged in his throat: he could not get privacy without demanding it, and he could not demand it without explaining his purpose. The court would not care for a mystically minded emperor; they might well take it as proof that Varenechibel’s bitter calumnies had been true.
    Perhaps canst meditate with one other in the room? he offered, aware of his own doubtful tone, like a man offering a screaming child a sweet. Cala would not laugh, nor would scorn thee nor bear tales. But he could not imagine it.
    He settled himself, inhaled deeply, exhaled, and began again the patient contemplation of his breathing. His mother had taught him a prayer that could be used as a mantra: Cstheio Caireizhasan, hear me. Cstheio Caireizhasan, see me. Cstheio Caireizhasan, know me. One did not ask for more than awareness from the Lady of the Stars; hers was the gift of clear sight, not of mercy or protection.
    He let himself sink into the mantra’s rhythm. As a child, he had recited it faster and faster until it degenerated into a gibber of nonsense. Chenelo had giggled with him over it, but then said gently that the point of the mantra was not to finish it, nor to say it