by Devin Madson
“No? Well, Cousin, I feel proper introductions are in order then, since this is the first time we’ve met. I am Emperor—”
“Oh no, don’t do that. I’m sorry, all right? Malice is… very good at… persuasion. He had a hundred reasons why it was important you didn’t know who I was, and they all sounded sensible. And some of them were. If you had known who I was, you would never have allowed me to do any of the things I wanted to be a part of, would you?”
“Allow you to parade around as a soldier and risk your life for nothing but the fun of it? No.”
“See? I had no interest in exchanging one pair of shackles for another.”
He frowned at me across the table, that expression the brooding look I’d often stared at across a crowded camp, wanting him to look my way. “You could have died,” he said at last. “And what then?”
“Since you didn’t know I was alive, you would never have known let alone cared.”
“But I knew you. And I would have cared.”
The words sent my heart racing, but I shook my head. “Now that is nonsense.”
His lips curved into an amused smile and my heart beat all the faster. “Is it? You’re very sure of yourself. I wondered how different you would be as yourself, how much of Captain Regent had been an act. I’m glad to see not much, since I had begun to like him all too well.”
How impossible to respond to such words with my heart in my throat. This was not the conversation I had expected, and I swallowed hard, trying to recall what I’d come to say.
When nothing came out, Katashi nodded at the cushion next to him. “Come, sit closer. I feel like I have to shout with you all the way down there.”
Almost I refused, the memory of the kiss that might have been a sudden specter. I had wanted it more than anything in that moment and did not trust myself. Did not trust a body that yearned so fiercely to be near him.
I rose and shifted closer, not to the cushion beside him but to the one a spot farther away. “You think I’m going to bite, sweet Regent?” he mocked.
“No, but you probably shouldn’t call me that in case someone hears you.”
“There is no one else to hear me. Now why don’t you tell me what was so important it couldn’t wait until I had finished meeting with my council?”
Could I demand to know how many people he had executed in the last few days? It ought not to have been a question that needed asking. “Did so many people have to die, Katashi?” I said, a softer plea than I had meant to charge him with. “Tili tells me you have not only had Kin’s courtiers and councillors executed if they did not swear to you, but servants too.”
“I have done no more or less than Kin himself did after he took the throne,” he said, brows lifting in surprise. “The number of people who were labelled traitors and executed with my father was in the hundreds, many who had done nothing but be employed by our family. Whatever your maid has told you, I have not gone that far, but neither can I give anyone the opportunity to betray me. If I do, this will all have been for nothing. This may look like a big win, Hana, but my power is fragile until I can consolidate my hold on the north. Or find Kin.” Eyes that had been looking at the table pinned me then. “It would be good to know where he is.”
“You say that like you think I know. I have been asleep for three days.”
“And living with him for three weeks.”
I attempted haughty disdain. “If you think he told me anything of his plans in that time, then you are very mistaken. He trusted me no more than you seem to.”
“You haven’t given me any reason to yet.”
“How can you say so? I may not have told you who I was, but I fought for you.” I reached for his hand only to pull back and rest mine upon the table. “I wanted to fight for the throne and for our family so much that Malice brought his Vices into play. Where would you have been without them? Without us?”
Katashi pulled back his silk sleeve and gently set his hand on mine. His was larger, his skin darker, but both were hands used to work, with calluses and scars and short fingernails—nothing like the hands a lord and lady ought to have. I stared at them. It was just a hand, just a touch, yet again, I was back beneath the Kissing Tree with my whole body aflame.
“I don’t like your Malice,” Katashi said as though he were not holding my hand. “I don’t trust him.”
“Neither do I anymore.”
He’d sent me a message in that blood. A message full of hate.
Katashi threaded his fingers around mine. “The Usurper told me he asked you to marry him.”
“He did.”
“There has been a lot of talk that you were… on his side.”
He looked at our hands, joined in a tangle upon the smooth tabletop. I hoped he could not feel just how hard my heart was pounding. “I did not accept him.”
“People still talk.”
“And they will say I am here now.”
A smile flittered about his lips, and he leant in, closing the space between us that had already been too small. His fingers tightened around mine. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. Once we’re married, I’ll have more claim than—”
“Married?” I slipped my hand from his, leaving the room much colder. “Katashi, I never said I would marry you. I never said I wanted to marry at all.”
“No, you didn’t.” He grimaced. “I had not meant to say it so… presumptuously, but my advisors speak much of your political value.” His admission brought Kin to mind, pacing before me as he spoke of responsibilities and duty. “I didn’t tell them you were already more valuable to me than that. I have regretted not kissing you that night, you know, Captain, every day fearing I might never have the opportunity again.”
When I did not speak, he leant still closer until I could feel the touch of his breath. A delighted shiver rippled through my skin. “Did you think of me too? Or not? My heart is yours to break.”
I had thought of him, had often imagined that kiss, had even imagined his smile made sleepy on a pillow beside me. “Every day,” I said, stupidly truthful, for whatever my mind said, my body yearned for his, intoxicated by his confidence and his smile, his strength and those bright eyes rimmed in long, dark lashes. Always so expressive, always laughing or frowning or mocking or owning a hunger that sent my heart racing.
He traced a line down my cheek. “But you don’t want to marry me?”
“It’s not… you. I don’t want to marry anyone.”
“Why not?” he whispered in my ear, his cheek against mine. “Don’t you want to experience the joys of being a woman? I can assure you they are… quite considerable.”
There was a lot of fabric in my robe and under-robe, and yet his hand seemed to slip through with ease, knowing its way. His lips brushed mine, and with that teasing graze of skin on skin, I could think of nothing but how much I wanted to feel everything his hands and his lips promised.
But it was not why I had come, not what I had wanted, and I fought the haze of desire that made every thought fuzzy. “I’m sure they are,” I said, gripping his arm to halt his hand upon my knee. “But…”
An uncertain little half smile hovered about his lips while his gaze hunted my face. “If you’re worried I only want you for your political value, then I am even more sorry I didn’t say something sooner. I kept telling myself you had to be a Vice. It seemed foolish to hope you were your own master.” I thought of all the times I could have spoken and how different things might have been. “You look surprised,” he added when I did not speak. “Did I need to know who you really were to want you?”
He made to slide his hand free of my robe, but I kept hold of his arm. “I knew who you were,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean my name was the only reason you stared at me.” Once again, he leant in close but did not touch his lips to mine. Heat seared through my every vein. “May I make up for my mistakes now, Captain?”
I leant the rest of the way, thinking of nothing but the kiss that had already
once been denied me. “They aren’t only your mistakes. Captain.”
He laughed, a delicious sound cut off abruptly as he finally pressed a full kiss to my lips, a fierce kiss that pushed me to the floor and left me breathless. The hand he’d wormed inside my robe slid up my leg, and losing all sense, I pressed myself against him. He groaned, and while I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to do, I wanted him to do it now.
What had started as a slow caress of my leg became a frenzied gathering of my robe. He ran a hungry line of kisses down my neck and onto the silk, tracking on down my body until his lips found my stomach and his broad shoulders were between my legs.
I wanted to ask what he was doing but did not want him to stop. I wanted to ask why he was kissing me there but dared not interrupt. And then when his tongue slid inside me, I had no thought of questions except how this feeling could be made to last forever.
A tap sounded on the door, shocking me back to a meeting room where only thin paper screens stood between us and the rest of the world. “Your Majesty, you wanted to know when General—”
The door slid. Pinned beneath Katashi, I could only yelp, but propped on his elbows he reared up with a snarl. “Damn it, Wen, not now!”
As hastily as the door had been opened, the door closed, leaving Katashi and I in an awkward tangle. Lifting my rucked-up robe, he kissed my stomach, but all desire had fled, leaving behind nothing but cold reality.
“No. No! Katashi, please, stop,” I said, gripping a handful of his hair as his lips once more caressed my skin. “I… I think I know why you are doing this, and I still don’t want to marry you.” I wriggled away from him, and as he lifted his head, a flash of anger lit his eyes.
“You want someone else?”
“No! I just… don’t want to be a wife, even of an emperor.”
“Then what do you want?”
I laid my head upon the floor and stared at the heavy beams of the ceiling rather than at him. “I want… I want my own position,” I said, my chest rapidly rising and falling. “I want to make a difference, Katashi. I want to be someone, not just someone’s wife.”
“Reduced to a mere someone,” he said, seeming to mock himself with a breathless laugh. “How utterly set down I am.”
For the briefest of moments, he rested his forehead upon my leg, before he sat up, the fragile sense of companionship broken. “You had better go,” he said, rising to his feet and straightening his robe and his topknot, all hint of a smile vanishing as he turned away. “I have a lot a work to do.”
I got to my feet and tried to tidy my robe and my sash, but fixing one seemed only to make the other sit more askew.
“Wen,” Katashi called, and the red-faced Pike slid open the door. “Ensure Lady Hana makes it safely back to her room.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Katashi would not look at me, and unable to think of something to say, I let Wen usher me out. It wasn’t until I reached my room that I realised I had asked only one of my questions, and I felt even more lost than I had before.
Chapter 2
Endymion
Darius lay upon the divan, unmoving, unspeaking, his expression frozen in an infinitesimal frown. The rise and fall of his silk-clad chest was the only sign he lived at all. Sometimes even his breath seemed to abandon him, so I stayed and I watched, afraid his death would go unnoticed.
Malice had come to see him only once since Katashi’s avowal. He had brought Hope with him, and for a long time, the young Vice had sat with a hand upon Darius’s cheek.
“He won’t let me in, Master,” he’d said at last. “Or maybe it’s that there’s just… nothing to hold on to, I can’t say.”
With his fists and jaw clenched, Malice had departed. The role of nurse didn’t suit him.
Avarice slid open the door, a bowl of warm water in one hand and a bunch of fresh incense caught between two fingers of the other. I had come to rely on his ugly scowl, he and I alone in our anxiety. Beyond this room, the world was changing, but here, there was just Darius. Avarice had given up ordering me out, the loyalty I showed his precious charge helping to temper his dislike.
He put the bowl down, slopping water over the edge. “Anything?”
“Nothing,” I said.
It had become our little ritual.
Avarice wrung out a cloth, and with an old carer’s practicality, he opened Darius’s robe, exposing his pale skin to the sunlight. A scar marred his chest, a raised line, shiny and puckered. There, the knife had been thrust into his body, the pain such that I would not soon forget. Darius hadn’t meant to share it with me, or the memory that had come with it.
The linen cloth sailed across Darius’s chest before being returned to the bowl. Avarice squeezed it out, water dripping from his sturdy fingers.
“You looked after him, didn’t you?” I said. “When Malice did that.”
The cloth paused in its passage across the scar. “Malice wouldn’t have done that. He loves Master Darius.”
“But not as much as you do?”
He didn’t even look up. The cloth sailed on while outside, a woman laughed. People chattered. Bars of hot sunlight cut across the matting, bringing in the endless summer.
Avarice dropped the cloth into the water. “Yes, I looked after him. I worked for his father, and when the late lord passed, I stayed with Master Darius.”
“And now you serve Malice.”
He grunted and said no more. Once he had finished with the cloth, he rose and strode across the room to change the incense. He lit fresh sticks before returning to flip the cushions beneath Darius’s head, fussing about him as though he were a little boy laid up ill. Avarice—friend, carer, father. Nyraek had not been there. He had been in Mei’lian fathering me.
The smell of sandalwood freshened the air, and still that porcelain face did not move.
“Malice needs me,” Avarice said. “Send a message if anything changes.”
I nodded and the man went out, leaving me with the half-brother I had never known I had. Many silent hours spent alone had given me the opportunity to stare at him from every angle, trying to divine some similarity between us. I could find none. But I could see Malice in the way his brows arched and in the fine line of his nose, yet while Malice might be the spider Katashi called him, Darius was a broken bird, his wings clipped to keep him from flying.
Darius’s chest rose and fell, and satisfied that he still lived, I went to the window. Avarice would never open it, but I had been sitting too long in the close air waiting for a groan or a flutter or anything that might herald my brother’s return. I needed to taste life.
With a grunt of effort, I forced it open. Humid air brushed my face, thick with the scent of dying flowers, and I breathed deeply. A storm was brewing to the east. Heavy clouds hung in the sky, flickering with summer lightning.
The castle had changed—its mood, its smell. Now it was Emperor Katashi’s men who patrolled the wall, their black sashes flying proudly.
But out there, another emperor lived.
“Endymion.”
I turned, heart jolting. The door was closed and the room empty but for Darius, blinking at me from the divan.
“Darius.” Three quick steps took me to his side, and I sank to my knees. “You’re awake.”
“Obviously.” His voice crackled from disuse, the syllables running together. “Kin? Hana?”
“Alive. Hana is here.”
“And Kin?” he asked, his fear no longer hidden.
“The Vices got him out before Katashi could have his head, but I don’t know where they took him or why.”
He closed his eyes, a sigh brushing dry lips. “It is enough for now.”
A long silence followed, and I thought him asleep until he gathered enough strength to open his eyes again. “He’s here, isn’t he?” he said. “I can smell him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were my brother?”
His gaze did not waver. “When would you have liked me to tell you? When
I found you locked up in Shimai? Or when you came here to kill me?”
“I didn’t come to kill you.”
“You were angry enough to try.”
He didn’t have to tell me I’d been foolish to listen to Malice, or that Hana hadn’t needed my help, or even how disastrous it had been to give her the blood—they were thoughts that had been with me constantly since, filling the silent days with shame. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” His lip curled. “Sorry for me or for you?”
“For getting you into this. It’s my fault you’re stuck here.” I swallowed hard. “You’re afraid of him, aren’t you? Of Malice?”
Darius struggled to sit, his brows caught close. “Do you know what happens to Empaths who lose themselves?”
“No. Who would have told me? I never met an Empath before Malice.”
A horse whinnied down in the courtyard, and turning my head, I caught shouts and marching steps. One hundred and thirty-four soldiers in the yard, and forty-one on the walls; a scout party of six at the gate; two peasant boys collecting wood in the forest. And stretching the miles through Koi City, one hundred and fifty-two thousand nine hundred and twenty-one souls living through a new day. The numbers were in my head just as if the light of each stood like a flame before my eyes.
“Endymion?”
I shook away the haze. “What?”
“Where did you just go?”
“I was thinking,” I said. “Did you even know I existed?”
Darius took a moment to reply, his shrewd gaze peering through half-closed eyes. “I knew Takehiko existed, but I neither knew for sure you were alive or that you were my half-brother. I assume you realise that makes you Hana’s half-brother too. What fools our parents were to make such a mess.”
“Malice knows,” I said, seized by a sudden desire to spill all my fears and worries. “He thinks I should take the throne, that it ought to be mine, that—”
Darius lay back against the cushions. “Of course he knows. I told him. The rest is not surprising; he is skilled at putting people to good use.”
“You told him?”