by Devin Madson
“I can kill someone with my hands tied, you know.”
“No doubt you can, Miss Marius, but can you kill a body that’s already dead? It seems unlikely. We have a few hours until we arrive, however, so you’re welcome to try it to pass the time.” She pointed to the colour on her cheeks. “Just don’t mess up my paint.”
21. MIKO
The young man stared at me from the corner of the cart. A roughly erected awning protected us from the storm, but the wind still blew rain beneath it, and from its drooping centre a steady stream of drips thudded onto the wooden boards. He didn’t seem to notice. I had considered shuffling out into the rain to put more distance between us, an option that was still open.
Everything from his fair hair to the straight lines of his features marked the young man as Chiltaen, but what was a Chiltaen priest even doing this side of the Tzitzi River? Chains linked his hands as they linked mine, but he looked too well treated to be a common prisoner picked up by the same patrol.
Despite his unblinking stare, he didn’t seem to know I was present. It was the stare of someone whose thoughts were elsewhere, only the clenching and unclenching of his jaw proving he was even alive.
The cart bumped on along the rutted track, flanked by soldiers. I had tried asking where we were going, had tried asking them to loosen the chains cutting into my wrists, had even tried asking who the unresponsive young man was. They had ignored me and on we rolled toward a meeting I couldn’t but dread. Wherever they were taking me, I knew to whom.
Jie.
“He is calling himself Emperor Kin Ts’ai, second of his name.”
It took me a moment to realise the young man had spoken, so little had his expression changed. “Pardon?”
“I said he is now calling himself Emperor Kin Ts’ai, second of his name, not Jie. It was his grandfather’s idea”—I scoffed, but the young man went on—“because what general wants to fight for an unknown and untested boy?”
He winced at the end of his own words and clenched his jaw tight.
Had it really been so obvious I’d been worried about where they were taking me? Had I said Jie’s name aloud?
I narrowed my eyes, taking in his pretty features and tousled hair. “Who are you?”
Still seeming to focus through me rather than on me, he said, “Miko Ts’ai, daughter of Empress Hana and Katashi Otako, born in the spring of—”
“I know who I am,” I snapped, though my heart thudded at the sound of my true father’s name. “I asked who you are.”
Another wince. He blinked rapidly, trying to focus. “Miko? Oh!” He laughed, a chuckle that ended in a gasp of pain despite no sign of injury. “How amusingly does God play his pieces upon the board. Miko Ts’ai. Well, well, you sure have shown up at just the right time.”
“Shown up?” I jangled my chains. “I was captured on the road, I didn’t just wander in.”
“Yes, sorry about that, but I really had no choice. Events are moving much faster than I expected.”
I stared at his distant yet increasingly euphoric smile. “No choice? What in all the hells are you talking about? Who are you?”
“Leo. Leo Villius.”
Dom Leo Villius. The man my mother had planned for me to marry, I the price for a Chiltaen army to support Tanaka’s claim. I parted my lips only to close them again, my heart beating uncomfortably fast. Tanaka had brought Leo Villius’s body back as a trophy. It had lain beside his in the shrine, but it had looked nothing like the young man now staring at me from the other side of the cart.
Silence stretched away before us, broken only by the endless thud of rain dripping from the saggy awning. A wheel splashed into a pothole, jolting the cart roughly side to side. “It was my bodyguard your brother caught and killed,” he said at last, making no attempt to hold on though the cart rocked dangerously. “Even so I was sorry to hear what happened to him. Your brother. Such an awful loss for your family.”
I could only swallow the lump that rose in my throat and acknowledge his kind words with a nod. Leo Villius seemed to have lost his strange abstraction, but went on clenching and unclenching his jaw and hands with rhythmic precision.
“And sadly,” he said when I didn’t speak, “by the time I reached Koi on foot it was too late. We might still have salvaged things, at least I like to hope we could have, but—” He shrugged and made a hopeless little gesture with his bound hands. “I think we have come too far for political marriage to make any difference now, don’t you?”
I had to agree, but no words could find their way past the lump solidifying in my throat, formed as much by anger as sadness and guilt. Whatever his kind professions of peace, Dom Leo Villius had been on the battlefield at Risian—not the act of a repentant priest.
He flicked his straw-coloured hair out of his face with a toss of his head and peered out at the rain.
“I cannot imagine worse weather to fight in,” he said after a time as the cart bumped us along the increasingly muddy road. “But Emperor Jie—I mean Emperor Kin, second of his name, hasn’t got a choice. If he cannot prove to his generals he can retake the city they will find a new leader.” He looked at me as though pleasantly surprised to find me there. “Oh, look! A new leader. What good timing you have, showing up in our hour of need.”
“I am no threat to anyone’s leadership in the south.”
“No? Morale has been low since the city fell. The generals argue amongst themselves. Some want to retake Kisia, others think they should just hold the border. Some want to follow Jie, others scoff at him for a child. Lord Oyamada is not well enough liked and neither are the boy’s attempts to make a leader of himself, to play the emperor when all the generals really want is a puppet that does what he’s told.”
“How do you know this? And why are you telling me?”
“Knowledge is important. How can you do what is right in the eyes of God without it?”
“What do I care what your God wants? And even if I did, is there really a right and wrong anymore?”
The Chiltaen priest shrugged a shoulder clad in the pale linen of his calling. “That depends what you want. There is nothing like war for turning people on one another.”
I did not want to agree. I wanted to tell him that in the face of adversity the Kisian people would come together, would fight together for our land and our freedom, but no sooner had the anger leapt to my tongue than it was ambushed by the memory of Grace Bahain’s defection. Of how I had barely escaped Koi alive in the wake of my mother’s rage. Of how I had turned on Jie, had tricked him, pushed him aside and stolen the throne from under him because I believed it was mine, believed I could do a better job of fighting for Kisia than he ever could.
“Don’t worry,” Leo said, once more turning his beatific smile upon me. “Whatever happens, in the end there is always God.”
The tent stood alone upon the hilltop, its crimson flag snapping in the ferocious wind. Soldiers marked the edge of the small clearing, sunlight glimmering upon their damp storm cloaks. I could not see their faces, yet I stood proud beneath their stares despite my dirty, sodden robe, and counted them out of habit. Twenty I could see, which probably meant thirty in total. Hardly an army. A secret meeting in the last of the daylight, these few men the only ones who could tell this story to the pages of history. If there was anything worth the telling.
I climbed down from the cart, my bound hands stealing even the semblance of grace. Dom Leo Villius followed, seemingly at ease, yet this was Kisian land surrounded by Kisian soldiers, and the Kisian tent flew the flag of the Ts’ai dragon. Fear crept its chill into my bones. We had parted well, Jie and I; it was what had come after that changed everything.
I made no move toward the tent until a soldier gripped my arm. Without him I might never have approached, preferring the unknown. I had been wrong about the Bahains, and without Manshin, without Rah, without even Shishi at my side, I was utterly alone. The Chiltaen at my back did not count as a comfort. He had spent the remainder of t
he journey alternately wincing and humming a dirge.
Golden light spilled through the fluttering gap in the tent as we approached, along with the murmur of voices. My guard cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, we have—”
“Bring her in.”
The guard snapped his mouth shut with a clack of teeth and, still gripping my arm, pushed me before him. I wanted to dig my feet in like a child, to lean back against him and shout that I would not go and he could not make me, but such a show would have been beneath me. Wear the mask. Live the mask. Be the mask. If mother had taught me nothing else she had taught me how to hide my thoughts and my fears behind cold pride.
With no one to hold the curtain aside I was pushed through it, able only to sense a dry, empty space before my captor shifted his hand to my shoulder, buckling my unsuspecting knees. They dropped hard onto worn, spiky matting.
“We found her on the river road near Mei’lian. Exactly where the priest said she would be,” my captor said, ignoring what sounded like a satisfied little grunt from Leo behind us to add, “In the company of a Levanti.”
“Just one?” came a familiar voice though its tone was harsher. Surer. I looked up and my gaze climbed the length of Jie’s fine imperial robes all the way to a face as youthful as I remembered. Jie had not had time to age greatly since our last meeting, but it was a different boy who stared back now. Perhaps he would think the same of me. Perhaps he wouldn’t care.
“Just one, Your Majesty,” the soldier said. “A runaway by the look of him. He didn’t even have a horse.”
Jie huffed out a little burst of air. “Anything else?”
“No, Your Majesty.”
“Then you may let Dom Villius go,” Jie said. “He upheld his end of our bargain.”
A moment of silence followed, not long enough to be an objection but just long enough for the soldier at my back to register disapproval. Long enough that Emperor Jie Ts’ai inclined his head regally, challenging him to utter a complaint. The soldier did not and chains clinked behind me, followed by a shuffle of steps and Dom Villius’s voice. “It was a pleasure to be of assistance to you, Your Majesty. May God guide your steps.”
And with a brief flurry of footsteps and silk curtains, the young priest and the soldier were gone.
“I told you not to let him go,” said Lord Oyamada. The boy’s grandfather and regent hovered behind him, the closest thing the tent owned to a piece of furniture. It seemed they had come in a hurry, bringing nothing but themselves and a silk cage with which to hide this meeting from the world. “Now they will all think you’re weak.”
“Better weak than someone who lies and cheats and reneges on their agreements.”
Silence followed. Silence and the unblinking stare of Kin’s bastard heir. I stared back, determined not to look away, not to admit the shame his rebuke wrought.
“Princess Miko,” the boy said at last.
“Prince Jie,” I countered, watching for a flicker of a smile that never came. If anything he pressed his lips into an even thinner line, and for the first time I could see Emperor Kin’s blood come to the fore. His stubborn chin jutted the same way, and while he didn’t have the same flare of anger in his eyes yet, there was time enough for him to discover what a driving force hatred could be, like his father before him and my father before me.
Lord Oyamada stepped forward. “That’s Emperor Kin, second of his name,” he snapped. “And you will bow and grant the proper obeisance.”
“No,” I said. “I will not.” The man began to bluster his outrage but I spoke over him. “I will not besmirch my honour by professing a loyalty I do not feel nor offer obeisance to an emperor I cannot fight for.”
My words might have been fists, so stunned they left both men. Jie recovered first. Throwing away the mantle of the adult, he glared sullenly at me like the child I remembered. “You did not seem to mind lying to me before. It was very clever of you to trick me into leaving so you could steal my throne. How long had my father been dead? Did you never think I might want to see him before—”
“He was dead before you arrived, and if I had not taken your throne Grace Bachita would have. In your name he would have abandoned half the empire without a fight.”
“Instead of abandoning it after a fight that lost us how many soldiers?”
“At least I tried. He would have had us run like children.”
“So you put an arrow through his head?”
“Yes! And I would do it again.”
I had intended calm. If Jie had too, then we had both failed. He no longer stood straight but bent over to spit his anger in my face, while I bared teeth used to being tucked away behind a false smile. Wear the mask. Live the mask. Be the mask.
I let go a held breath. “This is not helpful,” I said. “Kisia is in danger of being crushed altogether and we are fighting like—”
“Like children?” The boy bristled. “I do not deem it childish to be angry at the murder of my uncle and regent at your hand.”
I prepared to throw his father’s crimes in his face, to paint for him the scene in Koi’s throne room where Emperor Kin had ordered my brother’s immediate execution, but though anger shivered through my skin I said none of it. Tanaka and I had always said that Emperor Kin and our mother had weakened Kisia with their hateful division, however earned that hate had been. We had shaken our heads over it and vowed we would be better, that under our rule Kisia would not be so weakened, so divided. And now here I was reading from the same script that had seen the empire break.
Leo Villius had been right.
A slow, deep breath calmed an anger fast turning to disgust. “We have to be better than this, Jie,” I said, and would have reached out placating hands had they not been tied so tightly. “If we do not unite Kisia to fight as one then we may as well hand the whole thing to the Levanti emperor right now.”
“Unite Kisia?” Lord Oyamada said, lifting his voice to join the conversation with a bold step forward. “The north is gone and the south is already united behind their emperor. You stole the throne and lost it. You will never be allowed to do so again.”
“The north is only lost if we let it be lost! Grace Bahain has seen value in using the Levanti for his own ends, but those who support him in fighting for the Levanti emperor only do so because they have no other choice. Or because when offered the choice between fighting for a foreign emperor or a Ts’ai they chose the barbarians.”
“Then they are traitors.”
“No, they do what they think is best for their families and the people who work and live on their lands. Emperor Kin crippled anyone openly supportive of the Otako claim. What reason have they to think you will be different?”
The boy’s jaw dropped. “The Levanti attacked us!”
“No, the Chiltaens attacked us. Bahain and the Levanti just took advantage of us both.”
Jie turned away to pace a few steps back and forth, clearly troubled, but Lord Oyamada stayed where he was and curled his thin lip. “Defending traitors and barbarian invaders now?”
“Merely pointing out the truth, Lord Oyamada.”
The man leaned in to growl, “The truth is that you are a manipulative Otako bitch who will say anything to get her way. We underestimated you once, but not again. Jie is lord of Kisia now, and—”
“Half of Kisia.”
“—he doesn’t need a snake like you—”
“The half that freezes over in winter and is cut off from almost all trade routes.”
“—hissing in his ear, waiting for your moment to kill him as you killed—”
“How long do you think the food stores will last?” I said, speaking to the pacing Jie while his regent kept railing.
“—Grace Bachita. The best Otako is a dead Otako; Emperor Kin—”
“And should you survive the winter, you will have to choose what is more important to protect, your rice fields or your fishing villages, your people or your capital, all the while knowing you will go down in history as
the emperor who let the Levanti keep half your empire.”
“—knew what he was doing when—”
Jie rounded on us both. “And what would you have me do? I can defend this border, I cannot beat the Levanti in open battle, especially not with all of Grace Bahain’s military might behind them. You proved that at Risian and I am in no hurry to repeat your mistake.”
“I would have you fight! I would have you make peace not with your conquerors but with me. Together we could—”
“Together?” Oyamada scoffed. “Together indeed. Are you proposing an alliance?”
“There is no other way.”
The older man sneered, once more stepping in front of his grandson, emperor or no. “No doubt you understand it is traditional in such cases for each party to bring something to the negotiating table. We have soldiers and land and coin and food and an emperor with the loyalty of his people. What do you bring but a tarnished name that has no value here?”
It was like listening to my mother. So many years of hearing her speak ill of the Ts’ai, of Emperor Kin’s birth and his allies. The Usurper, they had called him, the general who would be emperor. Yet the common people had loved him. Had fought for him. Had believed until the last moment he would defend them from the conquering Chiltaens. How different things might have been had Kisia’s emperor and empress been able to set aside their differences and work together. I did not want to marry, did not want to walk the road of sacrificial duty my mother had fallen from, but we could still do this together. As brother and sister, as Tanaka and I had once planned. We had to. We had run out of other choices.
Hands still bound, I got to my feet. “You forget that I am both Otako and Ts’ai,” I said, glad for once for my extra height. “That I am descended from the true line going back as far as our history recalls, and even to your southern generals that means something. Emperor Kin Ts’ai, first of his name. Emperor Tianto Otako, fourth of his name. Emperor Lan Otako, third of his name. Emperor Yamato Otako. Emperor Tsubasa Otako. Remember? How many of those are Ts’ai? You want to take Kisia back, you need me. I failed at Risian and you might fail here, but we can do it together.”