by Devin Madson
Early morning sunlight broke through the thick covering of vines in the courtyard, the air heavy with a sickly-sweet scent. It was a smell to which I had grown accustomed, but not one I had ever liked.
Overhead the rapacious flowers continued their crusade to reclaim the portico.
‘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, feeling the hatred of a house long turned against its owners.
‘You’re standing on the board.’
He looked down. Numerous Errant boards were carved into the stones of the courtyard; had been as long as I could remember. In each corner a pot contained a complete set of obsidian pieces, all mined from the pits that had once brought money to the estate.
‘We sit on the ground?’ Endymion asked.
‘You have an 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, pointing to one of the pots. ‘Empathy changes men. Bring the pot.’
He did so, half carrying, half dragging the heavy clay pot across the grass-dissected stones while I settled myself on the ground. Cross-legged, the stained and dirty silk of my robe fanned out around me. It stank. I needed something else to wear. Kimiko would have to go into town, because however much I had tried to change, they would still know my face.
Having settled himself opposite me, Endymion sat waiting. ‘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.’
The boy sounded as though he did not care. There were no lines of worry upon his face, no trouble in his tone, nothing but the matter-of-fact acceptance of truth.
‘Your priest never gave up on you,’ I said. ‘You know they tortured him? The guards in Shimai.’
‘At your orders, Your Excellency?’
‘No.’ They had stopped at my orders. They had burned his hands and the hair off his head before I arrived.
The old clay screeched as Endymion slid off the lid then thrust his hand inside to dig 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 is alive?’ I asked.
‘Does it matter? Will it help?’
I thought about the possessions I had burned, trying to cut myself off from the past. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It won’t.’
‘Then I think I can go a little longer without knowing.’
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 eyes and the restlessness of his hands. But he held himself up now, straight, tall, his gaze direct, his lips slightly curled. Takehiko was taking over. He was becoming the god he wanted to beat, and he couldn’t even see it happening.
‘Well?’ he said, nodding at the pieces. ‘Are you going to teach me how to play?’
‘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.’
I felt surprise, clear the way his other emotions weren’t. He picked up 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 have made the wrong decision? Or, because I want you to think you have made the wrong decision?’
‘Or because you’re an ass?’
I grinned and he grinned back. For five years a smile had been something I constructed on my lips, and now I could not control it. The mask was broken. Even the house wasn’t helping.
‘I thought you didn’t have a sense of humour,’ he said.
‘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 shivats 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, a furrow between his brows. He appeared to be concentrating on the game, but I could feel the weight of his Empathy against me, sticky like a humid summer day. It ranged around me, touching, searching everything and everyone while he appeared unaware of it, his sole focus the carved board between us with its army of pieces in 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 what makes us want to control what we are; control the invasion of another’s privacy; control the pain we can so easily cause.’
He looked up at me, those dark eyes frightening in their intensity. ‘Is that why you wanted to control it? Because you didn’t want to hurt people?’
‘Is it not your reason?�
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A frown flickered across his face. ‘I suppose.’ He looked back down at the board, the touch of his Empathy undiminished.
‘Did your priest ever teach you how to lie?’ I asked, watching him turn a pair of my pieces.
‘No.’
‘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 that gaze. The little furrow returned. ‘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, moving my king to jump three of his pieces. He showed no interest when I turned them, unwittingly letting me know that 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. They would find nothing. I had learned to control my expression.
The blow was like a sharp gust of air, a ghostly hand crushing me in its grip. With a snarl I closed myself off, lifting the shield with the strength of desperation. ‘Not like that!’
The pressure dissipated, pulling away like a beast to lurk, reluctantly, beyond my range.
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, hardly seeming to be aware of the leashed creature he held so lightly 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 looking 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 muted, every sound, every smell, every colour, every taste.
I heard the scrape of stone and looked down. I had picked up my Errant pieces without thinking, turning them over and over in my hand like a nervous child. The house had failed me, its memories little more than ghosts. But that’s a lie. It’s not the house that’s failing you.
‘Did our father try to kill you?’
The question came so suddenly it was like a slap. Endymion wasn’t even looking at me. He was concentrating on the board as he set his pieces for the second round.
‘Stay out of my head, Endymion.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?’
‘What would you know?’ 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. For me it was the storm. Let nature kill what it had created.’
The words stopped spilling and I was breathing fast, the memory so real that for an instant rain lashed my face, obscuring Endymion’s intent gaze. I wanted to push him away, to demand he stop staring at me, but that would only crack my armoured skin further still.
‘He loved and hated the Sight in equal measure,’ Endymion said, shifting the pieces to ensure they were perfectly centred.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Just like you do.’
I controlled the urge to hit him. ‘What makes you say that?’
Endymion shrugged. ‘You think about Malice a lot. You miss him. You’ve marked Kimiko. You like the control, the mastery. Yet this house reminds you what your Sight can do and you hate it. You hate fighting it. You’re tired.’
‘Tell me how many people are in this house, Endymion?’
‘Two.’
‘How many people in Esvar?’
‘One thousand, seven hundred and nine,’ he said. ‘Two new babies born in the night, one death, four travellers.’
His eyes grew vague, and I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. ‘And The Valley?’
‘Twenty-two thousand, eight hundred and seventy-seven.’
It was a truth I could not verify, but with about a hundred and fifty villages farming the land it seemed accurate enough.
‘And Kisia?’
Endymion didn’t immediately answer. Eyes closed, he grew still, his long fingers resting lightly upon his linen-clad knees. The lines of his frown deepened. Then his lips began to move.
‘They took my husband in the last war,’ he said in a scratchy whisper. ‘They won’t take my son. Forty bushels? That’s barely enough wheat for thirty. Wine, girl, not water, what stupid bitch gives a man water? That ship will never come back. The storms are coming.’
He opened his eyes. ‘One million, three hundred and twenty-one thousand, four hundred and two.’
I held out my hand. ‘Touch me.’
Endymion did as I asked, lifting his cold fingers to take mine, and our hands connected over the stone board. He did not have to force it. At the first touch our souls joined and I could feel him drawing me out, thoughts and memories sliding through my fingers. He had done the same at Koi, but I had given it to him then. Now his every breath sucked emotion, sucked life. And he wasn’t even trying.
In the darkness men were screaming.
I pulled my hand away, fingers shaking like the wisteria as a breeze gusted through the court, picking up a flurry of petals. Malice had been right. Endymion was dangerous. Barely more than a week had passed and already his strength had doubled. If he lost control of himself there was no way I could control him on my own.
‘You’re losing,’ I said.
Endymion glanced over my shoulder. ‘So are you.’
Turning, I saw Kimiko standing in the doorway, and the world grew sharper. Birdsong, the thick stink of the wisteria, and her breasts rising and falling with every breath.
Endymion’s piercing gaze had not shifted from my face. He was losing. There was a reason the Traitor’s Mark had been copied from ours, and now it stared at me from his cheek. And I had ordered it done.
Kimiko stood out of earshot, but my whole body was attuned to her presence, my skin tingling at the thought of her watching me.
‘You love her.’
It wasn’t a question. Endymion was looking down at the board, not needing to see my face for the answers he wanted.
‘My head tell you that, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
He looked up then, h
is brow crinkling. ‘What?’
‘I said no. Empaths cannot love.’
‘Then you must not be an Empath, because you wear it, even outside your skin, you wear it.’
His eyes bored into mine and I could not turn away. Kimiko had become my anchor. I had let it go too far.
There was something like pity in his expression. ‘You didn’t know?’
I got to my feet, leaving the Errant pieces set for a game not yet played. ‘Keep out of my head, Endymion,’ I snapped. ‘I won’t warn you again.’
My sandals scraped on the stones as I turned toward the house. Kimiko was there, leaning against the doorframe, a small smile parting her pink lips.
‘He’s coming.’
The words halted my steps like a hand upon my shoulder. Endymion had not moved. He knelt upon the stones, wisteria vines rising behind him like a throne.
‘What did you say?’
He touched his palm to his chest, the pale linen bandage a reminder of what he had accomplished. ‘Malice. He’s coming.’
I had known Esvar would be the first place he would look, but the plan had never been to stay. A couple of nights in the house ought to have strengthened my resolve and allowed me to move on, but I felt more lost than ever, caught in a place between the man I had always been and the one I had forced myself to become.
‘He’ll be here in a week, perhaps a little longer. We should leave.’
‘If we leave now, you’ll never learn,’ I said. ‘We leave when I say.’
He bowed. ‘As you wish, Lord Laroth.’
I bowed back. ‘Takehiko.’
‘Endymion. And Darius?’
‘Yes, Your Highness?’
‘Learn to hide it better.’
Chapter 13
‘You’re lucky it doesn’t need stitching,’ Wen said as I hissed. ‘Not the sort of stitchery you were taught, my lady.’
‘What makes you think I was taught embroidery?’
Wen dunked the cloth back into the bowl, squeezing out bloodied water. ‘You’re an emperor’s daughter.’