by Fonda Lee
Kaul Sen sniffed loudly. “Because he has fire and thick blood. I’ll give him that. A Weather Man should be respected, but a Horn has to be feared. That boy should have been born fifty years ago; he would have struck terror into Shotarian hearts. He would’ve been a fearsome warrior, just like Du.”
The patriarch’s eyes narrowed and his stare turned scrutinizing. “Du was thirty years old when he died. He was a battle-hardened leader of men. He had a wife and two sons and a third child cooking in the womb. Carried his jade light as a god. You might look like him, but you’ll never be half the man he was. That’s why the other clans think they can disrespect you. That’s why Eyni left you.”
Lan was speechless for a second. Then a dull rage broke and pounded behind his eyes. “Eyni,” he said, “is not part of this conversation.”
“You should have killed that man!” Kaul Sen threw his arms up into the air and shook them in disbelief of his grandson’s stupidity. “You let a jadeless foreigner walk off with your wife. You lost face with the clan!”
A fleeting and horrible desire to shove his grandfather out of the second-story window crossed Lan’s mind. That was what the old man wanted after all, wasn’t it? Flagrant egotistical violence. Yes, Lan thought, he could have challenged Eyni’s lover—fought and killed him in the way any self-respecting Kekonese man would feel entitled. Perhaps it would have been a more fitting way for a Pillar to act. But it would have been pointless. An empty gesture. He wouldn’t have kept Eyni; she was already determined to go. All he could have done was trample out her happiness and make her hate him. And if you loved someone, truly loved them, shouldn’t their happiness matter, even more than your honor?
“How does not killing a man in a romantic dispute make me an unworthy Pillar?” Lan demanded, his voice clipped. “You named me your successor, but you’ve yet to show me support or respect. I came only to ask for your help with Doru, and instead I get ramblings and insults.”
Kaul Sen stood up. The move was sudden and unexpectedly fluid. The blanket around his shoulders slid to the ground. “If you’re a worthy Pillar, then prove it.” The old man’s eyes were like obsidian, and his face was a dry, harsh desert. “Show me how green you are.”
Lan stared at his grandfather. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Kaul Sen crossed the short space between them in a heartbeat. His body rippled like a serpent’s spine as he slammed both hands into Lan’s chest. The whip-like blow sent Lan stumbling backward. He barely managed to Steel himself; the shock reverberated through his frame with concussive jade-fueled power. Lan dropped to one knee and gasped. “What was that for?”
His grandfather’s reply was to launch a bony fist at his face.
Lan rose and deflected the strike easily this time, as well as the three others that followed in quick succession. Lan felt the air hum with the clash of their jade energies.
“Grandda,” Lan snapped. “Stop it.” He backed away until he bumped into a table, still fending off a volley of blows. Lan grimaced at the old man’s nearly out-of-control speed. It’s really time he stopped wearing so much jade. Like automobiles and firearms, jade was not something that deteriorating elderly folks ought to possess. Not that Kaul Sen would ever willingly relinquish even the smallest pebble from the bracelets or heavy belt he wore at all times.
“You can’t even beat an old man.” The elder Kaul was like a badger, all sinew and bone and oversized bad temper. His lips were pulled back in a taunting leer as he jabbed and weaved. Lan moved to avoid him and knocked over an antique clay bowl; it landed on the hardwood floor with a heavy thud and rolled. “Come on, boy,” his grandfather wheezed, “where’s your pride?” He slipped a strike under Lan’s arm and drove his middle knuckle between his grandson’s smallest ribs.
Lan grunted with surprise and pain. Reacting without thinking, he cuffed his grandfather across the head with a cupped hand.
Kaul Sen staggered. His eyes rolled; he folded to the ground with a look of childlike bewilderment.
Lan was mortified. He caught his grandfather around the shoulders. “Are you all right? Grandda, I’m sorry—”
His grandfather drove two extended fingers, stiff as nails, into a pressure point at the center of Lan’s chest. Lan collapsed, coughing violently as Kaul Sen rolled over, got to his feet, and stood over him.
“To be Pillar, you have to act with full intention.” For a moment Kaul Sen’s age fell away and he was once again the towering Torch of Kekon. His back was straight, his face was hard. Every piece of jade on his body bespoke strength and demanded respect. Briefly, Lan saw through a haze of anger and humiliation the war hero his grandfather had once been.
“Only full intention!” Kaul Sen barked. “Jade amplifies what you have inside you. What you intend.” He tapped his own chest. It made a hollow sound, like a gourd. “Without intention, no amount of jade will make you powerful.” He walked back to his chair and sat down. “Doru stays.”
Lan got to his feet without a word. He picked up the fallen bowl and placed it back on the table, then leaned a hand heavily on the wall in a moment of epiphanic sorrow. Only in this, just now, had his grandfather truly made him Pillar—by proving to him beyond a doubt that he was alone.
Silently, Lan left the room and closed the door behind him.
CHAPTER
5
The Horn’s Kitten
When Kaul Hilo got behind the wheel of the Duchesse, Tar leaned his forearms through the open passenger side window. “So what did he say?”
“We’re shoring up the Armpit,” Hilo said. “No killing,” he added. “Just protect what’s ours. Our Lantern Men, our businesses.”
“And if they challenge us? You okay with holding back?” Tar asked in a skeptical tone that implied he knew his boss better than that. Hilo suppressed a sigh; Kehn rarely questioned him, but Tar had been his classmate at Kaul Du Academy and talked back sometimes. The younger Maik never made it any secret that he thought Lan was too conservative, that Hilo was the stronger of the two Kaul brothers. Of course, it was self-serving of him, and Hilo did not appreciate it as much as he suspected Tar thought he did.
“No killing,” he said firmly. “I’ll talk to you both tomorrow.” He started the Duchesse, circled the roundabout in front of the house, and rolled back down the long driveway.
He did not turn before the gates, up the narrower drive toward the house behind his brother’s, the one appointed for the Horn of the clan. The previous Horn had been a grizzled general of his grandfather’s, and his taste in decor left much to be desired. When Hilo had moved in, the house had smelled of dogs and fish stew. The carpet was green and the wallpaper was checkered. A year and a half had passed, and he had still not renovated the place. He meant to but could not be bothered. It was not as if he spent much time there. He was not the sort of Horn to issue orders from behind high walls and closed doors and leave the work to his Fists. So the house was a place to sleep, that was all.
As he drove away from the Kaul estate, Hilo rested an arm out of the open window and drummed his fingers in time to the beat from the radio. Shotarian club music. When it wasn’t Espenian jiggy—or worse, Kekonese classical—it was Shotarian club. Many people of an older generation still refused to buy Shotarian-made products, listen to Shotarian music, or watch Shotarian television shows, but Hilo had been less than a year old when the war had ended and he was not one of them.
He was in a better mood now. He hadn’t been granted all the leeway he’d asked for, but he’d spoken his mind and knew what he had to do next. The thing Tar didn’t understand was that Hilo did not envy his brother’s position in the least. Handling bitter old Grandda, that freak Doru, KJA politics, and the Royal Council … perhaps Lan had the patience for all that, but he, Hilo, certainly didn’t. Life was short. He understood and embraced the simplicity of his role: lead and manage his Fists, protect his family’s territory, defend No Peak from its enemies. Enjoy himself along the way.
He drove for thirty minute
s, leaving behind the moneyed outskirts of the Palace Hill area around the Kaul home, speeding first down the wide boulevard of the General’s Ride, then turning onto a two-lane avenue, and finally navigating increasingly narrow streets as he entered Paw-Paw, an old, working-class neighborhood crammed full of small shops, questionable street-food vendors, and twisty alleyways that trapped careless rickshaw drivers, mopeds, and stray dogs. Paw-Paw had stood nearly untouched during the war and changed little in the time since, largely ignored by both questing foreigners and the pace of progress. At night, the streets were particularly labyrinthine; the Duchesse’s side mirrors barely cleared the space between the far smaller and rustier parked vehicles on either side of a street of brick apartment buildings, built so close together a person could lean out the window and nearly touch his neighbor’s wall.
Hilo parked his car five blocks away from his intended destination. He was not worried; he was deep inside Kaul territory. But he did not want his recognizable car to be noticed in the same place every night. It made his movements appear too routine, and it was important for his presence to be unpredictable. Besides, he liked to walk. The temperature had finally come down, and it was a fine night. He left his jacket in the car and ambled leisurely, enjoying the peace found in that space between hours considered late and those considered early.
He ignored the front door and climbed the rickety fire escape to the fifth floor. There was a light on in the apartment. The window was unlatched and cracked wide open because of the heat. Hilo let himself in, swinging his legs across the chipped sill and treading silently across the carpeted floor toward the light in the bedroom.
She was asleep, an open book on her lap. The bedside lamp cast a veil of orange light across the side of her face. Hilo stood in the doorway, watching her chest rise and fall in gentle, undisturbed breaths. The bedcovers came up to her knees but no farther. She was wearing a sleeveless cotton top with thin straps and blue panties with white lace trim. Her dark hair was spread against the whiteness of the pillow, tendrils of it curving across the paleness of her smooth, unblemished bare shoulders.
Hilo admired her until the waiting became too much to bear. He crossed the room and took the book from her fingers, marked the page, and set it on the bedside table. She didn’t stir; he marveled at this: at her utter deafness to possible danger. She was so unlike a Green Bone she might as well have been another sort of creature from him entirely.
He switched off the light, plunging the room into darkness. Then he climbed on top of her, pinning her body and covering her mouth with his hand. She came awake in a start; her eyes flew open as her body jerked under his weight. She let out a muffled scream before he laughed softly and whispered into her ear, “You should be more careful, Wen. If you leave the window open at night, men with bad intentions might come through it.”
She stopped struggling. Her heart still pattered against his chest, exciting him, but her body relaxed. She pulled his hand from her mouth. “It’s your fault,” she snapped. “I fell asleep waiting up for you, and in return you scare the shit out of me. Where were you?”
He was pleased that she’d stayed up for him. “I was at the Twice Lucky, dealing with some trouble.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Trouble involving gambling or strippers?”
“Not anything so fun,” he promised. “Ask your brothers if you don’t believe me.”
Wen squirmed provocatively underneath him, her bare shoulders and thighs rubbing against his clothes. “Kehn and Tar wouldn’t tell me a thing. They’re too devoted to you.”
“Give them some credit.” Hilo pulled her earlobe into his mouth and sucked as he worked his belt and pants off. “I’m sure they conspired to kill me. When they saw how I looked at you? They knew right away I was planning to pop their little sister.” He pulled her panties down and stroked between her legs, then slid his first two fingers inside her. “I had to make them my closest Fists or they would’ve gutted me.”
“You can’t blame them,” she said, moving her hips encouragingly. His fingers glided in and out, slippery and warm. She undid the next three buttons of his shirt and pulled it over his head. “What could a son of the great Kaul family want with a stone-eye—especially from a disgraced family like mine—besides an easy lay?”
“Many easy lays?” He kissed her hard, impatiently, attacking her mouth with his lips and tongue. His cock was excruciatingly stiff against the inside of her thigh. Wen reached up to bury her hands in his hair. She ran her fingertips down his neck and chest, mapping the jade pieces studded all along his collarbone and through his nipples. She touched and licked them utterly without fear, envy, or want, appreciating them only as a beautiful part of him, nothing more. He’d never let any other woman touch his jade, and it made him wildly aroused, this fearless intimacy he had with her.
He pushed inside her, all at once. She was delicious—a riot of sensation. Sunlight and ocean, summer fruit and musk. Hilo growled with pleasure and seized the headboard of the bed, wanting even more. His jade-sharp senses roared with blinding intensity: the crash of her heartbeat, the thunder of her breath, the fire of her skin on his own. He regretted turning off the light; he wished he could see her better, drink in every detail of her body.
Wen lifted her hips off the mattress, clenching him, her eyes fixed on his, two tiny motes of reflected streetlight like candles floating in a pool. Her intense adoration pushed him higher. He sucked her cherry nipples. He dove into the valley of her breasts and drowned in her incomparable perfume. Wen grabbed his hips and drove him relentlessly, and he came, careening delightedly out of control.
He lay on top of her, consciousness dancing away from him, breathing into the soft crook of her neck. “You’re the most important thing in the world to me.”
When he awoke, it was dawn. The sun was forcing its way into the crevices between the buildings, seeping into the windows. It would be another hot day.
Hilo gazed at the beautiful creature lying asleep beside him, and an intense urge rose and took hold of him: He wanted to seize and envelop her, and through some magic, pull her into himself, so he could hold her nestled safe inside him wherever he went. Before Wen, he’d enjoyed women and experienced warm, even tender, feelings for them. But that was nothing compared to what he felt for Wen. The desire to make her happy was like a physical ache. The thought of anyone harming her or taking her from him filled him with feverish rage. She could ask anything of him and he would do it.
True love, Hilo mused, was sensual and euphoric, but also painful and tyrannical, demanding obedience. It was clearly altogether different from the rebellious infatuation Shae had had for that Espenian, or the sensible affection that had existed between Lan and Eyni.
Being reminded of Eyni deflated him a little. It had taken a few weeks, but he’d finally tracked down that whore and the man who’d so grievously insulted his brother. They were living in Lybon, in Stepenland. He considered hiring someone to do the job, but a clan insult ought to be handled directly by the clan. So he asked Tar to book an airplane ticket using a fake name and passport, but when he told Lan his plans, the Pillar had been ungrateful, angry even.
“I never told you to do that,” Lan had snapped. “If I wanted their names whispered, I would’ve done it myself, so it should’ve been obvious to you that I don’t. Leave them alone, and from now on stay out of my personal life.”
Hilo had been greatly irritated at the wasted effort. That’s what he got, for trying to do his brother a favor. Lan always played his feelings so close to the chest, so how was Hilo supposed to know?
Wen stirred and made a delightful sleepy sound. Hilo forgot his rumination and crawled under the sheets to wake her with his mouth and fingers. He worked on her patiently, was gratified when he brought her to a shuddering climax, then made love to her again, more slowly and leisurely this time.
Afterward, as they lay in a sticky tangle, he said, “What you said last night—about your family—you shouldn’t think that. What h
appened with your parents was years ago, and no one doubts Kehn and Tar. The Maik name is good with the clan now.”
Wen was silent for a moment. “Not with all the clan. What about your family?”
“What about them?”
She rested her head on his shoulder. “Shae has never trusted me.”
Hilo laughed. “Shae ran away with an Espenian naval brat, and now she’s crawling back like an apologetic puppy that pissed on the carpet. She’s hardly in a position to judge. Why would you worry about what she thinks?” From the unkind tone of his own voice, he realized with some surprise and disappointment that he still hadn’t entirely forgiven her.
“She’s always had your grandfather’s ear. I don’t think he’d approve of me even if I wasn’t a stone-eye.”
“He’s a senile old man,” Hilo said. “Lan is Pillar now.” He gave her a reassuring kiss on the temple, but his demeanor changed; he rolled over and lay staring pensively at the yellow ceiling fan as it spun around and around.
Wen rolled to her side and looked at him with concern. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Tell me.”
When he told her about the previous evening’s events at the Twice Lucky and the conversation in the driveway of the Kaul estate, Wen propped herself up on one elbow and pursed her lips in concern. “Why did Lan let the boy go? A jade thief at such a young age; he’s incurable. He’ll only be more trouble for you later.”
Hilo shrugged. “I know; what can I say? Lan is an optimist. How did he become so softhearted, my tough big brother who always used to put me in my place? He’s green enough, but he doesn’t think like a killer, and Ayt is a killer all right. It’s obvious war with the Mountain is coming—can’t he see that? That self-important old ferret Doru isn’t steering him right.”
“Surely Lan ought to listen to you over Doru.”