by Devin Madson
“Men who sit on thrones may be able to live by such honourable ideals, but only after they have paid in blood to be there. You think Kin got to sit on the Crimson Throne by sparing all the lives he could? No. The only way to survive is to be ruthless, that’s the lesson the Usurper taught me before I was even old enough to understand it.”
“There must be other ways, Katashi, ways that don’t involve bloodshed!”
“You think Kin will give a damn about anything else?” he raged. “Do you think anything else will make him break? This is a man who has let the pirate enclave raid up and down the coast for years, pillaging villages because that trouble was far away and not harming his power. See how he likes it when those same pirates sail right up the Tzitzi River and burn Shimai to the ground. That is the only show of power that can make a man like him surrender.”
“Is that what you plan to do?” I said, shock stealing strength from my voice.
“Yes, because I will do whatever it takes to win this.”
He spat the last words in my face, his bright eyes wild, and I stepped back, trembling at his ferocity. A whole city. He was planning to let pirates sack and burn a whole city, no regret in his words, no remorse for the men already dead, just chill fury. He would watch the whole empire burn if that was what it took.
“Now you finally have your answer, my dear,” he said, a sneer twisting his lips. “Plenty of time to wish you had not asked. Go on, get out. I have oaths to receive.”
I ran. There might already have been soldiers outside waiting to take their oaths, but I saw no one for the tears that stung my eyes as I hurried the short distance to my own tent. Tili was still there, and as I burst in with a sob, she looked up, worry creasing her brow.
“What is it, Your Grace? What has happened?”
All Katashi’s reasons chased his crimes to my tongue, but looking into Tili’s worried face, I recalled her warnings and could not help but think of the heads mounted on spikes in the passage at Koi and the blood on the executioner’s block—all the things I had chosen not to see. All Kin’s words I had chosen to ignore. Katashi was still my emperor, but I could not let him do this.
“Tili, fetch ink.”
She brought the lap table and knelt, stirring the ink and mending my brush while I tried to steady shaking hands. I kept looking toward the tent entrance, expecting Katashi to appear as though drawn by the treason I contemplated.
“Find Wen for me,” I said when Tili was done. “But make sure he is alone when he comes.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
She went out, leaving me staring at the blank page, wondering what to write, my hands still shaking as I nibbled the tip of the brush. In the end, I managed nothing more than a few short sentences, carefully crafted for anonymity. I rolled up the paper and thrust it into Wen’s hand the moment he walked in. “I need you to get this to Kin through one of the physicians tending his soldiers.”
“Your Grace?”
“Please, Wen, I need you to do this for me. It’s extremely important and no one can know. I can trust you not to betray me to Katashi, can’t I?”
Chapter 14
Darius
I left Kimiko sleeping. Curled up as she was, she looked no bigger than a cat, her hair fanning from her head like a magnificent aura. I dressed at the other end of the room and watched her breathe, the covers rising and falling with every reassuring sign of life. A lifetime ago, Avarice would have stood just so, watching me sleep, checking in as often as he could to be sure I was still alive. This room had been his and it had become my sanctuary, the home of a child long left to the ministration of an ever-dwindling number of servants.
As I tied my sash, my gaze shied to the panel behind which I’d long ago hidden my treasure box. It had contained the first Errant set I had learnt to play with, a favourite book, a silver cup, and my mother’s pink sash. But keepsakes were sentimental, emotive. Weak. I had cast them into the fire the night my father died. It had cost me a pang to burn the book, but by the time my mother’s sash slipped into the flames, I had thought myself free.
I tugged my sash tight and turned my back on the room. Out in the hallway, Endymion was fighting wakefulness with many a long sigh and rustle of covers. He had piled old blankets on top of himself as though it were the middle of winter, but now they lay strewn across the floor from an uneasy sleep. His chestnut hair stuck to his brow in a damp tangle, his Larothian features more apparent at rest. Avarice had called it an “arrogance of brow,” and looking at Endymion, I could see why. He never looked proud when awake, but the natural resting state of his face owned something of Malice’s arrogant look. No doubt Kimiko would say I had it too.
The set of his features changed while I watched, becoming more like the Endymion to whom I had grown accustomed. “You’re awake,” I said.
He opened his eyes. “Why are you staring at me?”
“Because you are such a handsome specimen of manliness.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Do you see me laughing?”
Endymion propped himself up on an elbow. “You sneer a lot, but do you ever laugh?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “When something is funny. I am no less a man than you, you know.”
“I know.”
I heard extra meaning in those words and wondered how much he could see of my inner fears. I had come here in the hope that continuing to fight for Kin whether he wanted me or not would return the burden of control to his shoulders, but the situation was fraught with too much fear and anxiety to just let it go. Losing too many battles to Katashi might lead to losing the whole war, and under those conditions, I could not relax, could not be still, could not just accept whatever would come.
And then there was Kimiko.
“Get up,” I said, cutting that thought off where it began. “It’s time to play.”
“Play?”
“Errant, of course. How else do you expect to learn anything?”
“But I don’t know how to play.”
“Then it’s time you learnt that too.”
I continued along the passage, leaving Endymion to scramble up behind me, but it would take more than determination to understand what he wished to learn. I was not even sure I could make him truly understand with a few words what it had taken me years to recognise. That the root of Empathy was not compassion; it was fear.
Out in the courtyard, early morning sunlight was breaking through the thick covering of vines, the air heavy with a sickly-sweet scent of fallen petals. It was a smell to which I had grown accustomed but not one I had ever liked. I ought to pay someone to sweep the stones and trim the vines, to paint the gates and fix the kitchens and send up all the food Kimiko kept reminding me we needed, but… while each was a little thing, the whole was a level of care I could not bring myself to take.
“Where do we play?” Endymion asked, looking around, and for the first time, I envied his sheltered upbringing. He had never had to live here, unwanted and forgotten and unloved.
“You’re standing on the board.”
He looked down. Numerous Errant boards were carved into the stones, each with its own pot of obsidian pieces. Everything here had once been decorated in obsidian, mined from the pits that had brought money to the estate.
“We sit on the ground?” Endymion asked.
“That is a very Chiltaen objection.”
He shook his head. “I was merely thinking about that robe you’re wearing.”
“This robe is already beyond salvation. Why is it everyone assumes I would never recover from the mere dirtying of my robe?”
“Perhaps because you always look so neat.”
I had to smile. “I never used to be,” I said. “Ask Avarice one day.”
“The last time I asked Avarice about you, he told me that I talk too much.”
“He used to like talking.”
Endymion shrugged. “Time changes men, I suppose.”
“No,” I said, holding back
a sigh and pointing to the pot of pieces. “Empathy changes men. Bring the pot.”
He asked no more questions, just went to fetch the pot, half-carrying, half-dragging it across the moss-bisected stones while I settled myself on the ground. Cross-legged, the silk of my robe fanned out around me.
Endymion settled himself opposite. “Well?” I said, finding him staring. “Get the pieces out. You know how to set up the board, I assume.”
“I recall being taught how, before Jian gave up on me.”
“Your priest never gave up on you,” I said.
The old clay screeched as Endymion slid off the lid and dug out a handful of smooth stone pieces. He scattered them across the board, returning to the pot again and again until he had them all.
“Don’t you want to know if he’s alive?” I asked when he made no further mention of his priest.
“I already know he is. I looked for him.”
“Looked for him?”
“The same way I looked for you. I think it only works with people my Empathy has touched before. He’s that way.” He pointed in the vague direction of the capital. “And he’s not in pain anymore.”
I examined his features, looking for the young man I had first seen back in Shimai. He was there in the tousled brown hair, in the carelessness, in the set of his soulful brown eyes and the restlessness of his hands. But he held himself up now, straight, tall, his gaze direct, his lips slightly curled. He was becoming the god he wanted to beat, and he couldn’t even see it happening.
“That,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady despite the fear of such words, “is not something you should be able to do.”
“I know.” He looked up from his examination of the empty board. “That’s why I’m here. I’m scared, Darius. The moment I relax and let my mind drift, it… really drifts. It’s getting harder to focus.”
I pointed at the pieces. “Then let’s play.”
“All right. Teach me.”
“If I must teach you from the beginning, your education has been very poor.”
“Who taught you to play? Our father?”
Bitterness. He thought he was the one who had missed out. “No,” I said, taking up the pieces. “Avarice.”
His surprise rang clear in a way his other emotions weren’t, but he accepted the answer without question and gathered the pieces I had left behind. “I know there is one king, with a crown painted on the bottom,” he said. “I know I can place it wherever I like and shouldn’t let you know where. I know we’re supposed to jump pieces and I know we’re supposed to make it to the corner.”
“The Gate,” I corrected. “Yes. That is the general idea.”
Seeking my king in the cluster of painted obsidian, I set it on the board, followed by the rest, one after the other. Endymion watched me, then did the same, the usual click of wood on wood replaced by scraping stone.
“Lead or follow?” I asked when he had finished.
“Which is better?”
“One is not better than the other. Errant is played the best of three rounds. The person who chooses to lead starts first in the first round and follows in the second.”
“And what happens in the third round?”
“In the third, the pieces are placed at random.”
“So I won’t know where my king is?”
“No.”
Endymion stared down at the board. “Lead,” he said.
“As you wish.”
“Why do I feel like I made the wrong choice?”
“Perhaps because I am looking at you with disdain,” I said. “But is that because you made the wrong decision? Or because I want you to think you made the wrong decision?”
“Or because you’re an ass?”
It was the sort of quick wit that made Kimiko’s company so enjoyable, and I laughed without thinking, able only in its aftermath to fear such lack of control.
“I thought you didn’t have a sense of humour,” he said, even as I crushed the smile between hard lips.
“And I thought you wanted to learn.”
“I want to learn how to control myself. I don’t see what that has to do with Errant.”
I sighed and pointed at his pieces. “No lesson worth learning is ever straightforward,” I said. “Play.”
“That sounds like nonsense.”
“And that sounds like someone putting off making their first move because he doesn’t want to mess it up. Play.”
Endymion pinched a piece between thumb and forefinger. “To the corner?”
“The Gate, yes,” I said. “Or you can win by turning my king.”
“But I don’t know which one it is.”
“Perhaps if you watch the way I play, you might figure it out, yes?”
He gave me a strange look and moved the piece forward. I copied without pause, the world vanishing as I gave my mind to the game. Endymion stared at the board, but I could feel the weight of his Empathy against me, sticky like a humid summer day. It ranged around me, touching, searching, though he appeared unaware of it, his sole focus the carved board between us with its army of black glass.
“Do you know what empathy is, Endymion?” I asked, watching him pinch the top of another piece like a court lady lifting the lid on a teapot. “True empathy, not the sort you were born with, but the way other people experience it.”
“Feeling other people’s pain.”
“Vicarious participation in another’s emotion is the way our father put it. To imagine yourself in another’s place. Whether that is painful or pleasurable is not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“The point, dear brother,” I said, “is that Empaths are not empathetic. We do not choose to participate in another person’s emotions on compassionate grounds. In fact, compassion is the only thing that’s making you want to control what you are now, control the invasion of another’s privacy, control the pain you can so easily cause. Compassion is the opposite of our Empathy in many ways.”
He pinned me with a gaze frightening in its intensity. “Is that why you wanted to control it? Because you didn’t want to hurt people?”
“Is it not your reason?”
A frown flickered across his face. “I’m… not sure. I mean, yes, of course I don’t want to hurt people. Brother Jian taught me all the tenets, and I don’t want to harm anyone, but… he also believed my skills could be used for good, and… maybe he’s right, I don’t know, but it’s eating me, Darius, and I can’t stop it.”
Repressing a shiver, I pointed at the board. “Play. We’re going to start with a thought exercise. Tell me, did your priest ever teach you how to lie?”
“No.” He turned a pair of my pieces though seemed to be paying little attention to the game.
“Did he ever teach you what it looks like when other people lie? Fidgeting, touching their nose and their lips, unable to make eye contact.”
“No.”
“Good, because that’s only what bad liars look like. Do you trust me, Endymion?”
Again, he looked up from the game, and I forced myself to meet his gaze. “Yes,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
“You believe I won’t lie to you?”
Endymion didn’t answer.
“Let’s try this then,” I said, jumping three of his pieces. He showed no interest when I turned them, unwittingly letting me know none were his king. “Ask me a question and then tell me if I lie.”
“What is your name?”
“Darius Kirei Laroth. Who’s the ass now? Ask me a question you don’t already know the answer to.”
He was slowly edging his king toward my Gate, shifting it with a nonchalance that was terrible to behold. Perhaps he hoped such carelessness would be infectious. “Where were you born?”
Behind me, I could feel the house like prey feels a stalking predator. “Beneath a bush,” I said. “In the gardens beyond the house.”
Those eyes scanned my face, but they would find nothing. I had learnt to
control my expression.
His Empathy struck like a sharp gust of air, its ghostly hand crushing me in its grip. Snarling, I lifted my shield with the strength of desperation. “Not like that!”
The pressure dissipated, pulling away like a beast to lurk, reluctantly, beyond my range.
And he hadn’t even touched me.
“Look at my face,” I said, each breath coming a little too quick. “Look at my face and tell me if you think I am lying.”
Endymion stared at me mildly, seemingly unaware of the leashed creature he held in his hands. “You’re lying.”
“Am I? Why do you say so?”
“Because even peasants aren’t born beneath bushes.”
“And that’s what you’re basing your decision on? The probability of my words being true?”
“What else?” He moved a piece, jumping three of mine without touching the stone board in between. At the end, he put the piece down, and turning only the middle man he had won, he flipped my king. Its white crown faced the cloudless sky. “I see with the eyes I was born with,” he said. “I have no others.”
I stared at the board. I had deliberately formed an appealing string for him to jump, close to the Gate and away from my king, but he had gone the other way. He had known. He had felt it, and I had not noticed the intrusion.
Again, I forced myself to meet that direct gaze.
The eyes he was born with. Malice had always called Normals blind, deaf, mute—like a pale brood of mice shut away in the dark. Without the Sight, the world was dulled, every sound, every smell, every colour, every taste.
I picked up my Errant pieces and turned them over and over in my hand like a nervous child.
“Did our father try to kill you?”
The question came from nowhere and I flinched. “Stay out of my head, Endymion.”
“I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?”
“You know nothing about it,” I returned fiercely. “He showed you more kindness than he ever showed me. I was nothing more than proof of his sickness, something that needed to be eradicated. So yes, he did try to kill me, and he failed because he was weak. He couldn’t do it himself, couldn’t stick his sword into me and have done. No. No such quick death for his only legitimate son and heir. Why not let nature kill what it had created instead.”