by Devin Madson
Avarice had said she died in childbirth. He said Darius had wanted to live, but his unnamed sister had not. Esvar’s last heir. Had the writer believed Darius would never provide the house with another Laroth?
At last, I turned to the final portrait. A boy, no more than ten years old. He looked younger, thinner, and altogether less potent than the Darius I knew, but there was no mistaking those fine features, or the cold look in his violet eyes.
Darius Kirei Laroth, the last heir of Esvar.
Lost his life in the storm of 1359.
May the Sight die and never rise again.
From his portrait, the young Darius watched as I read through the words again, sure they had to be wrong.
“Well, Endymion,” spoke a voice beside me. “I see you have met the family.”
I turned, choking on a cry that leapt up my throat. Darius stood at the end of the hall, half in the shadows, the silver threads of his fine robe glittering like stars.
“Darius,” I managed, my heart pounding. “You’re here.”
“Yes, I am,” he said. “I’m not a ghost. But I did not think to be found so soon. Malice?”
“I left him in some outpost on the road to Rina. Kimiko?”
“Here.”
I looked back at the portrait. The young Darius met my gaze, unflinching. “I hope you enjoyed the family history,” he said at last. “Shall I leave you with our glorious ancestors?”
“No.”
His lips split into a smile so fast had I answered.
“No,” I repeated more slowly. “But who wrote the words?”
“I think you already know the answer to that.”
“You. Or our father.”
“I will pretend you didn’t say that. If you hadn’t noticed, I have not yet gone mad.” He turned away on the words and strode out into the dark passage. I followed, glad to leave the old faces behind.
“He hated his Empathy,” I said, keeping up with Darius’s quick step lest he vanish into the shadows.
“Yes. Or at least he tried to. As you can see, it drove him quite insane.”
“I remember him.”
“You do not remember him.”
He spat the words and quickened his pace. I jogged to keep up, following in the wake of emotions so thick I could not believe they were his. Darius had once been so closed I had thought him dead.
“This is my head. Keep out or get out,” he snapped, stopping abruptly and turning on me. “How did you find me?”
“I followed you.”
“Followed me? We stopped at no inns, and where we did stop, I gave no name. How can you have followed me all the way from Koi?”
I could not meet his eyes. It had been so easy to do, so natural, and yet under his furious gaze, nothing was more monstrous. “Since the night at Koi,” I began, fidgeting. “Since the night at Koi, I have been more… attuned to you.”
Darius stared. Then with slow deliberation, he said, “You can sense me? You can smell me all the way from Koi because I left a piece of myself under your skin?” His gaze flicked down to my chest. “Like Malice did. He marked you?”
“Yes. At least, he tried, I don’t know, I didn’t let him finish, I—”
I faltered beneath the intensity of his stare. “You broke a mark?”
“I…” I thought of the emotion I had poured into it and how desperately Malice had tried to hold on, how desperately he had wanted to keep me from leaving him. “Yes.”
“You and I are going to have to talk about that, but in the meantime, don’t tell Kimiko.”
He did not wait for a reply but continued along the empty passage, eventually bringing us to a wing of the house owning signs of recent habitation. Here, furniture filled the rooms, but still the decorative scrolls were curled and discoloured, and the floorboards were stained with the criss-cross pattern of damp reed matting. There was a musty smell to the air too, and I wondered how long it had been since anyone had opened these doors.
Light greeted us at the end of a passage, shining through the intact paper panes of a sliding door. It felt like the last bastion of warmth and life in the whole world, so long had the house held me in its decaying grip. After the dusty stink of decline, the smell of jasmine tea was uplifting.
“We have a guest, Kimiko,” Darius said, sliding the door. “I found him wandering like a lost sheep.”
Kimiko lay curled upon a divan, snuggled into a pile of thick furs. It was a small, cosy room owning little beyond a cooking stone, the divan, and a low table. A servant’s room, not a lord’s. I could imagine a young Darius lying there, curled as Kimiko was, while Avarice became both friend and carer, entertaining a little boy with stories of the outside world.
“Endymion?” Kimiko said, drawing my attention back.
“Takehiko,” Darius corrected, shooting a challenging look my way.
“Takehiko?” She lurched up onto her elbow and glared at me across the room. “Takehiko Otako? Are you seriously telling me he’s Takehiko, my cousin Takehiko?”
He sat upon the edge of the divan beside her. “Sorry, but yes. Shall I throw him out?”
She didn’t answer, just stared at me long and hard. “You’re my cousin? I thought you were another Laroth bastard like Malice. Oh, that makes sense of…” Kimiko sat up, pushing the furs aside. “I remember when you were born,” she said. “No one celebrated, not like they did for Tanaka and Rikk. For them, there were parties in the streets. But for you, there was nothing.”
“Kimiko,” Darius said, his tone a warning.
“I didn’t understand at the time why everyone was so angry,” she went on, ignoring him. “But now I know. Why celebrate the birth of a bastard?”
I winced and looked away, her words stinging as though she had wielded a whip. I had been unwanted by every family I might have claimed.
Darius moved away. Kimiko’s eyes followed him, her cheeks pale, her fingers clenched amid the fur. “What a mess parents make of the world,” she said, her emotions betraying her smile. “The Otakos are meant to be dead, but now it seems I cannot turn around without walking into someone who is related to me.”
“I’m not,” Darius said, scowling through a narrow window at the thickening night. “And technically, Endymion is not either. His mother was only an Otako by marriage, just another lady who was charmed by my father’s apparent wit.”
“Like Malice’s mother?”
“Malice’s mother was a whore,” Darius said, still not turning around. “Not an empress whore.”
Kimiko laughed. “How charming. Don’t listen to him, Endymion, he’s just cranky because all the tea is stale.”
He looked over his shoulder, laughing back at her, and I felt as little part of the scene as the walls themselves. I thought to leave, but the moment did not last. Kimiko pointed to the cooking stone. “There is rice if you’re hungry,” she said. “Darius keeps forgetting to send for more varied food.”
“It’s not like I’ve had reason to leave the house for the last few days.”
The look they shared made me redden, and I stared at the rice pot. Rice clumped in the bottom of it and its cedar lid sat askew. I hadn’t eaten for days, but I did not feel hungry.
“I must see Kaze stabled and fed first,” I said. “Is there a stable yard?”
“Yes, and even some fresh grain,” Darius said, moving from the window. “Come, I’ll show you the way.”
An old rein hung from the ceiling, holding a trio of lanterns. Each was lit, and Darius retrieved one, the candle flame flickering through a rip in the paper.
Kimiko said nothing, and Darius did not look back as he led the way into the dark passages once again. This time the lantern drew colour from the old house—yellowing parchment scrolls, the red tinge of the wooden floor, and a brilliant green moss gradually stealing the house back to nature.
Still walking, Darius said, “Why did you come?”
“To find you.”
“Afraid for my life?”
�
��No.”
He stopped, lifting the lantern into my face. “What do you want from me, Endymion?”
In the bright light, his expression was more mask-like than ever. “I want your help,” I said.
“I thought we had agreed we were both beyond help.”
“You controlled your Empathy.”
His lips lilted into a sneer. “Controlled, yes. Past tense, as you can see. Do you want to know how?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to be a slave to it? Don’t want to live as the monster that is beneath your skin?”
“Yes.”
“It’s much easier to just be what you were born than to fight against it, you know.”
“But can you teach me how?”
His smile held no humour. “Perhaps. It isn’t easy.”
“I don’t care about easy.”
“And you have to want it. You have to want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything else.” He glanced over my shoulder, back along the passage. “As soon as you want something else more, you will lose control of it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Darius laughed and shook his head. “You really don’t, but maybe you will. I’ll teach you so long as you promise that when we’re done, you will leave. And I don’t just mean leave this house, I mean leave Kisia. Leave Chiltae. Go somewhere far away where your name need cause no trouble.”
“You were the one who told her.”
He shrugged. “She’d have figured it out, and I’d rather not have her angry with me for keeping secrets. I swore you no oath.”
“If you can grant me peace from this, then I will go wherever you want me to go.”
“Peace?” Darius laughed, the long, sustained laugh of one truly amused. “There is never such a thing as peace for us. Either you choose to fight the monster every moment of every day or you struggle with the guilt and the shame and the endless noise. There isn’t an in-between. We are destined to suffer, one way or another.”
He turned away on the words and, with the lantern lighting his path, walked on into the darkness.
Chapter 13
Hana
The soldier’s grip tightened on my hand, crushing bone, but I just gritted my teeth and made no sound, my pain nothing to his.
“Almost done,” Wen said. “Almost done.” And I wondered whether his chanted words were for the soldier or himself as he sawed through flesh and bone. Tili stood on the soldier’s other side, and we looked at one another over the man’s tense and twitching body, neither of us wanting to watch Wen work. The soldier’s breath huffed out hard, and he was biting deep marks into a leather strap, but even once the worst was over, the pain would not cease.
“Almost done.”
I grimaced at Tili and she grimaced back.
“Almost. Almost.”
A meaty thump hit the ground, but it did nothing to loosen the soldier’s grip on my hand. I tried to give it a reassuring squeeze as though that would make any difference, but the man seemed hardly present at all.
“Have you seen Shin since this morning?” I said to Tili as my gaze wandered the small village hall we’d found ourselves in that day. Anything rather than watch Wen work on the man’s bloody stump of a leg.
“No, Your Grace,” Tili said, also hunting the dim space for any sign of him. “He may just be outside. I notice he does not like to be around such things.” She gestured to the injured soldier, and almost I laughed at the thought that Shin, who could kill a man without a flash of remorse, could be uneasy about blood. But now she mentioned it, he had avoided helping the first time we aided the enemy soldiers and always stayed away from the healing tents back at camp.
“What an odd man he is,” I said and left it there, the soldier lying on a pallet behind Tili having turned to watch us keenly.
Injured men were packed into the room, still more into houses around the village and in the market square. The men hereabouts ought to have been out in the fields bringing in the harvest before the rains, but instead they lay dying on pallets.
Surely there had to be another way, a way that didn’t get so many people killed, but as with every time I cycled through such thoughts, I came up with nothing. Kin and Katashi would never compromise, could not, and even if they had been able to, the fervour of their followers would not allow it. The men of Katashi’s council were as uncompromising as he was himself.
“I wanted to be a soldier when I was young,” Tili said, filling the silence Shin’s name had left. “My father was one, you see, and my oldest brother. They always looked so grand in their uniforms. And their crimson sashes. I do not think I am brave enough though, even had I been born a boy.”
“It isn’t bravery you need, it’s conviction. And if you don’t want to die, then it’s a lot of luck you need rather than a lot of skill.”
“Really? I had always thought skill and bravery were all a soldier needed.”
“‘Disabuse no mind already turned toward its purpose,’” I said, a grimace following the quotation as I recalled its origin. “An observation from General Kin’s war diaries,” I added when Tili gave me a curious look. “He wrote a lot while campaigning along the border in 1346. And during the uprising of the tribes in 1349. Darius said they were required reading for every young man of rank and ambition, so I read them.”
Tili opened her mouth to speak only to close it again and look down at the blood-spattered floor. “It must have been interesting to meet His Majesty after that.”
“I didn’t think about it, honestly, but I recall there was always something missing from the diaries, some… level of honesty. Darius said it would have been lost in the transcribing, that whatever he wrote in his original diaries would have been edited to present a particular view of him to the nobility when the works were published. But he is a little bit like that in person too. Occasional flashes of vulnerability and humanity hidden deep inside the thick shell of Emperor Kin.”
Tili screwed up her face. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“I don’t think I do either. But I do wonder where the imperial façade ends and the man begins.”
With a last tear of fabric, Wen finished binding the amputated leg. A swig of water from his waterskin and he moved on, Tili and me in his wake.
A few pallets away, one of the old healers we had lured to our cause with the promise of payment was tending a pair of severed fingers and nodded to Wen, causing the Pike to redden a little at such an acknowledgement.
“You did well,” the man said, nodding in the direction of the soldier whose leg had been amputated. “Where did you train?”
“I didn’t, I… I just, picked things up,” Wen said. “I mean, I always wanted to, just…”
He trailed off, but the old man went on smiling, then leaning closer, he said, “Me too.”
“Really? But you have—” Wen pointed at the special loop of coloured cloth most physicians wore tied to their sashes.
“War teaches much that you need to know about healing,” the man said. “Whether it is the wounds of soldiers or the ailments of the poor left undernourished with dirty water. I learnt through the last civil war because there weren’t enough healers to help all those who needed it and every hand was welcome, and by the time it was over, I knew more than enough to earn the title. And had seen more than I ever wanted to of suffering. War profits none but our rulers.”
The healer’s gaze flittered to me, and I wondered if I had stiffened or twitched or made any show of discomfort to have drawn his attention. Either way, he bowed to me in respect for my title, but his smile had gone.
“Not all rulers care so little,” Wen said, perhaps sensing the awkwardness. “Lady Hana seeks always to do what is right for the people.”
“How can any ruler who lives so high above the rest of us know what that is?”
“‘Those who seek to do right will ever have a beacon to guide them through the murk,’” Wen quoted from the Book of Qi, and seeing the man showed every s
ign of wanting to argue the point, I left them to it and moved on, intent on working all the harder for the rest of the day.
When a new batch of wounded were carried in, Shin appeared with news that the battle fared well for us. The Pike gave no explanation for his absence, nor in the sudden flurry of activity could I demand one. I was too busy running for water, tearing new bandages, and performing every little task Wen apologetically asked of me.
But with every bloodied face and severed limb, with every pierced gut and head wound, and every man who did not make it, more and more doubts wormed their way into my thoughts. I had grown up believing the empire belonged to the Otakos, that we were its rightful rulers, that Kin was nothing but a Usurper, a placeholder, and when I had heard Katashi was fighting for his throne, I had left everything behind to be a part of it.
It is conviction, not bravery, that leads men to war. Another quotation from Kin’s war diaries that had stuck with me over the years, and whether it was the sight of so much suffering, or the weeks I had spent in his court, my conviction was weakening. I still believed we ought to have the throne, that it had been our family’s legacy for so many generations that one clever man ought not be able to supersede it, but how much death and suffering was the outcome worth?
I had no answer, no alternative, and while I hurried mindlessly through the ranks of enemy soldiers and farmers and common folk who lay dying, I felt like I was drowning in a dark sea. All I could do was run Wen’s errands and gulp down bowls of the nasty wine he plied his patients with—anything to keep myself from thinking. From doubting.
By the time I gave in to Shin’s insistence that we return to our camp, my head was buzzing and my vision wobbled. The ride back in the gathering gloom did nothing to help. Perhaps by claiming a headache, I could forgo the council meeting that night, avoiding at least until the following day the inevitable rebukes I would receive from Katashi’s advisors. And worse, from Katashi himself. He had dismissed all my attempts to organise proper care for the wounded enemy soldiers, would not listen to my suggestions for political wins when he could crush Kin in battle, and I was beginning to fear his need for revenge drove him more surely than any desire for the throne.