#my favorite thing about this universe is that there are so many unreliable or variously reliable narrators

[artino-c]

Hiii I have a question about The Young and Ancient Light and your headcanons about something specific-- but if you don't want to answer, just ignore it please & sorry ^^

So in Chapter 8, Kamet and Costis have this exchange:

“After the assassination attempt,” said Costis. “When the King was recovering.” He glanced up at Kamet. “My master had nothing to do with that,” said Kamet—answering Costis’ unspoken question. “He was still banished to the family estate. We only learned about the plan after it failed.”

But so, in KoA one of the assassins dies in the Attolian dungeon after naming Nahuseresh and Sounis, and though it isn't stated outright, I always assumed this man was interrogated under torture. We get more confirmation and some motive for Sounis in CoK, but Sophos only talks about the Mede ambassador and doesn't name Nahuseresh.

So is your headcanon that Nahuseresh wasn't actually involved in it, or that Kamet maybe just didn't know? Or did you want the reader to wonder and this doubt is part of the fun? I'm asking because I personally think Nahuseresh's involvement in this plot seems kind of crazy, and I have just taken to a headcanon where the assassin in question either didn't actually imply Nahuseresh by name, or that one of the interrogators prompted him with a name and he just agreed to it... Mostly because I can't imagine the brother to the heir of the Mede empire to be the kind of person who personally introduces himself to assassins... Especially assassins he's recommending for another person's use, idk. But then again maybe it WAS a blunder? I don't know, and I was wondering if you have thoughts!

HAH, well the short answer is that I was basing that theory off of the timeline we have in TAT and my much more recent reread of Conspiracy of Kings, and I forgot to check if Nahuseresh was named specifically in KoA! 😂😂

My response to this got super long so it’s under a cut:

My logic was similar to what you are saying here, though—it didn’t really make sense to me for Nahuseresh to be directly involved in the assassination attempt, particularly in the immediate aftermath of his spectacularly failed invasion, and I didn’t think the logistics worked if he was in exile on the family estate and not even in Ianna-Ir to pull strings! (In my fic specifically I was imagining this as the first sign of the emperor/Naheelid just fully going over his head because they no longer think he’s reliable…) And given that one of the threads throughout KOA is that torture (arguably??) doesn’t work and is bad, I really like your theory that perhaps the assassin who names Nahuseresh isn’t the most reliable source, because we’ve already established from Costis’ POV that people who are being tortured will say whatever they think you want to hear.

But that said, I don’t don’t see other strong evidence that readers are meant to doubt Nahuseresh as the originator of the plot, especially since back in book 3 we had far less worldbuilding about Medea and Mede politics. (Rereading the scene after Gen finds out it’s clear he believes it was Nahuseresh specifically and that is part of what upsets him!) I still don’t really think the logistics make sense, but I guess I can see N funding a half-baked, overreaching assassination plan that fails due to bad intel and underestimating the intended target (all of that screams Nahuseresh, lol)! Maybe this was his first (failed) bid to restore his reputation and get invited back to court? And it’s very, very funny if he followed up his first huge blunder in Attolia with a second, equally embarrassing failed attempt to kill the king.

In terms of Nahuseresh’s willingness to directly, recognizably involve himself in this kind of thing, Kamet talks about having to meet with “criminals” as part of his job executing Nahuseresh’s various sketchy plans in Ianna-Ir, and he is feeling out Erondites’ household in QOA (presumably to figure out how willing Erondites would be to screw over Irene/ally with the Medes), so if Nahuseresh is comfortable sending his personal secretary on that type of errand, maybe he doesn’t cover his tracks very well when he hires assassins, either?? (The part of this that still doesn’t work for me, though, is that while the assassins are hired with Mede and Sounisian gold, we have no reason to think they travelled all the way from Medea…if they were hired by Sejanus (or someone working for him), surely they only know second or third hand who else was behind the plot, no matter how unsubtle Nahuseresh was!)

All of that leaves the question of whether Kamet would have known about this. For purposes of my fic, I’m going with no, he had no idea, even though this is the kind of thing Nahuseresh would have told him about in the past, perhaps for the same (unknown???) reason he doesn’t tell Kamet about Hemsha. In the wake of their narrow escape from Attolia, I do think there was maybe some kind of breakdown in their relationship, from Nahuseresh’s perspective, too, even before the scene that starts the book.

For purposes of more general canon interpretation, tbh I still think Kamet might plausibly not have known and/or not been involved (assassination attempts don’t really seem like his kind of thing, plus he’s isolated and presumably out of the political gossip loop when he’s at Nahuseresh’s estate, so would have less ability to know if Nahuseresh is lying or hiding something). But it would also be very funny if he were involved/aware and just quietly never mentioned it to Relius or Gen, in the same way that he quietly elides other things in TAT.