“Yeshin’s bitch pup,” he said under his breath. He shook his head. “I thought you were different. I thought—”
“Because I was courteous to them?” I asked. “Perhaps it is you who disappoints me, Kaggawa. After all of your talk, you’re no better than a Jinsein royal, taking offense at every perceived slight. I never gave Lord Huan anything more than the hope that I may start thinking about moving forward if I can prove Lord Rayyel’s lack of interest in returning to me. Clearly, he grew tired of waiting—he married another while I was away. Or were you not paying attention to these things?”
“If my daughters spoke to me like you do…”
“I am not your daughter, Kaggawa. I am your queen. You will let me speak to you however I want.”
Dai curled his lip, eyes dancing. “Is this how you want to play it?”
“I wasn’t aware we were in a game. You really didn’t expect that I lived out in isolation in Oka Shto, did you?”
Judging from the look on his face, I realized that perhaps he thought I did. The reputation of the Bitch Queen was a hard one to shake off.
“I understand your concerns about them,” I continued. “It’s in our best interests to prevent the same sort of disaster Rysaran’s dragon did to our land. But until I find evidence, my hands are tied. The council won’t entertain baseless accusations.”
“The Anyus will try to speak ill of me when you are alone with them,” Dai said in a low voice. “Warlord Ojika will do everything in his power for you to see me as the enemy.”
“Perhaps he will, perhaps he won’t.”
“Yesterday, you were laughing with them like every other simpering royal I’ve met. But I suppose I’m as wrong about you as I was with your husband. As we were with your father. You are all alike—Ikessar hens and Oren-yaro dogs with your empty words and your empty smiles and your meaningless tenets, dragging this land down, bringing us all to ruin.” He leaned across the table, breathing hard. “I am not your enemy, Queen Talyien, but you’ve left me no choice. I will not begrudge you of dallying with your fellow royals, but I need the assurance that you will return to us. That you will not scheme with the Anyus because you think I’ve let my guard down. When you ride to Yu-yan this afternoon, your men must stay behind.”
I stared at him, speechless.
“I’m dealing with a queen who doesn’t understand half of what’s going on in her kingdom,” Dai continued. “I think I’m being fair. Lenient, almost.” He calmed himself with a quick breath and pulled away. “You can take the boy. The rest stay. Remember that their lives are at stake, should you decide to do anything drastic.” He walked to the door, where I heard him call for his men and order my people brought to his dungeons. I didn’t stop him. Everything else told me I should—my father’s teachings, my hand on my sword, the hard Oren-yaro values that I used to think ran through my blood—but the voices seemed to have lost all power over me. Meaningless tenets. Perhaps the merchant had it right, after all.
~~~
A commoner’s tongue, a royal’s temper, so the saying went. It hurt to see the look on my companions’ faces as the hospitality was pulled from under their feet and they were dragged away like common prisoners. I had never felt the leaden weight of the Queen’s mask bear down on me as hard as that moment. I remember Khine telling me how much it angered him—how much I anger him whenever I fell back on that familiar pattern. You think that would’ve been enough.
The Anyus came to fetch me that afternoon. I greeted them with my head held high, as if nothing was amiss. Lord Huan’s eyes twinkled as he bowed to me. He was a handsome man, almost near Rayyel’s equal if the women’s gossip were anything to go by, though it was his easygoing manner that briefly attracted me to him. I remember that night—a drunken kiss during one of the loneliest times of my life, a quiet promise of consideration, and nothing more. Small moments that others could easily set aside. Not me, it seemed. Good intentions don’t come cloaked with instructions. Seeing myself through the eyes of a man like Kaggawa, who was completely unimpressed with anything that had to do with the royal castes, was the final straw. I thought of the girl who wouldn’t cry at her father’s deathbed and could feel the last threads of his shadow slipping from me. Have you discarded who you really are because you’re not who you think you’re supposed to be? I must’ve. Trying to find yourself in a heap of broken shards shouldn’t have to be this hard.
We rode north with only Cho and Lahei as my guard. Cho followed closely in silence, grumbling under his breath once in a while. When I found the opportunity, I rode next to him. “You’re not in Shang Azi anymore, boy,” I murmured, tapping the sword on my hip. “You Zarojo think the Jinsein uncouth, uncivilized. Keep your mouth shut and maybe you’ll see the truth of that.”
He was too shocked to speak back. It wasn’t even that I was exaggerating. Back in the Zarojo Empire, murder was seen as an offense worth dragging someone to court over. In Jin-Sayeng, heads could roll and it would come down to the warlord’s judgement. A necessary death could be reduced to an unfortunate circumstance. Even the idea of blood money was foreign to us. If Lo Bahn was Jinsein, the men who died under his watch would’ve been written off as casualties. The families would’ve been lucky to get an apology.
Yu-yan was a testament to how much the warlords get away with. Once a thriving city known for open trade and bustling markets, it was now a walled fortress against a mountain backdrop, with soldiers at the gates. Soldiers were a common sight at many checkpoints throughout Jin-Sayeng, so that by itself wasn’t strange—even my own father once taxed visitors to Oren-yaro to help pay for the roads. It was the contrast between what Yu-yan had once been to what Warlord Ojika had turned it into that was remarkable. It made me understand Dai’s animosity towards the Anyus, if not his methods of dealing with it. Perhaps I should have visited years ago.
The gates opened as soon as we came within sight of the city. I heard Lahei give a small gasp, which told me this was out of the ordinary. I looked past the soldiers and noted a long line of people on the side of the road, waiting to get in. “What is the security for?” I asked, as soon as we stepped past the bridge and the gates closed behind us.
“Thieves, bandits, general riff-raff,” Huan replied. “It’s mostly a formality. We don’t really require much in the way of paperwork—just a quick description of what a visitor means to do in the city and how long they’re staying for.”
I heard Lahei snort.
Huan smiled. “Do you disagree, Mistress Kaggawa?”
“You know I do,” she said. “Not that my opinion means anything to you.”
“The rice merchants think we’re being too harsh, you see,” Huan explained. “Quite unfortunate, really. All this resistance…if they would only work with us, we could bring the province into progress further than we already have. Look to your left, Beloved Queen.”
I turned and saw a grand tower, the sort that wouldn’t be out of place in Old Oren-yaro or Shirrokaru or Sutan. Only this one was newly built, not old and crumbling, and it rose taller than the surrounding walls, cresting up almost halfway to the mountain against which Yu-yan was built. It was clearly a dragon-tower.
I turned back to Huan and Eikaro. They were beaming. “You’re not even trying to hide it, are you?” I asked.
“Hide what, Beloved Queen?” Eikaro asked.
“You’re trying to tame the dragons,” I said. “This thing—why have I never received reports of it? It couldn’t have cropped up overnight. You will explain this at once to me, Lord Huan, Lord Eikaro. I had been led to believe that our relationship was amicable all these years. Was I wrong?”
“Let me guess,” Huan said. “Kaggawa’s doing?”
Lahei’s face twitched, but she refrained from commenting.
“I’m not blind, my lords. I don’t need Kaggawa to tell me what I’m looking at,” I pointed out. “If the Dragonthrone had known all about this, we would’ve put a stop to it. The land still carries scars of what Rysaran’s dra
gon had done. I can’t gaze out of my balcony in Oka Shto without the bleak reminder staring back at me. You’ve both seen the ruins of Old Oren-yaro. We couldn’t even rebuild on top of it after everything that had transpired.”
“We knew you would react this way, Beloved Queen,” Eikaro replied. “But remember—we invited you when Huan asked for your hand in marriage. We were only starting construction then—had you come, you would’ve received full reports on everything.”
“And then you disappeared,” Huan said.
Eikaro grinned. “Life…”
“Had to go on, right,” I grunted. “So you’ve told me how, but not why.”
“Kaggawa is only partly correct,” Huan said, glancing at Lahei with a smile. “We’re trying to tame the dragons…but only to help defend the city against the onslaught of wild dragons, which attack once in a blue moon. We built the dragon-tower as the first line of defense—if we succeed in taming our own, we can easily traverse to and from the city.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m lost. Are we talking about the same dragons? The mad dragons that have been plaguing these lands for years?”
Eikaro and Huan gave each other a quick look before turning to me. “The idea that these dragons are mad was perpetuated by Kaggawa,” Huan said. “No offense to Mistress Lahei, of course.”
“Don’t even bother with the pleasantries,” Lahei replied. “We all know what you really mean.”
Eikaro grinned. “But maybe we should give you a tour while we talk, Beloved Queen. We hope what you will see will ease your mind.”
“Very little does that these days,” I said with a sigh. “But let’s go.” I dismounted from my horse and followed them down the street and up the wide, stone steps that led to the tower.
Chapter Nine
The Dragon-tower
If you are ever lucky enough to find yourself in the library in the Dragon Palace in Shirrokaru, make your way to the end of the first aisle, where you will find an entire shelf dedicated to dragon-towers. Maps of old locations, sketches, renderings of towers that were never built…it is an endless trove, one which has fascinated me back in the days when I was a student there. I can still remember curling up in bed with those thick tomes, poring over the fading illustrations while the monsoon rain beat a steady rhythm outside the glass windows.
Back when they first kept dragons, it was common to have landing towers made out of logs lashed together. The decks were often painted with the local ruling clan’s symbol, which were visible from the air even in bad weather. As the years went on and the Jinsein clans started moving east, it became dangerous to keep the dragons in the rapidly growing cities. Some provinces solved this by banning dragons within city limits. Others, like Shirrokaru and Oren-yaro, began building the dragon-towers. The towers themselves kept the dragons away from the populace, but there remained the persistent problem of dragonfire, which would build up inside a dragon’s belly and needed to be released every so often.
The solution were large, stone wells built right into the towers, into which dragons were encouraged to release their flames on a set schedule. These wells led to a system of tunnels under the dragon-towers. The build up of dragonfire was so strong that people began connecting the tunnels to their stoves and bathhouses to make use of it. The inevitable result was the rise and prosperity of cities with dragon-towers. Shirrokaru invested most of this back into their own infrastructure. Oren-yaro, in the meantime, focused on building its army.
I didn’t mention to the Anyu brothers that I could tell it didn’t take them mere months to build this tower from scratch. I strongly suspected that had I made this trip when I was first invited, half the tower would’ve been erected already. The base was enormous, easily twice the throne room in Oka Shto, and made of heavy white stone with a dull sheen. There was what appeared to be a dragonfire well in the middle of the hall, covered with an iron grate. I resisted the impulse to peer through it. It was big enough to look like a prison, and if creatures lurked underneath the tunnels below, I didn’t want to know.
“This looks nothing like the old dragon-towers,” I said, looking up. From where I was, the ceiling looked like an enormous grey sky, lined with shadows that danced with the flickering torches. The doors closed behind us.
“An entirely new design,” Huan assured me. He gestured at the hall. “As mentioned, we built this partly for defense against the onslaught from the mountains. The old—and shall we say, diminutive—dragon-towers of the past were not equipped to deal with what we have now. This tower forms part of a wall that wraps around the mountain ridge beside Yu-yan. The dragons like to come from the northwest, using the ridge to drop right into the city.”
“If this was such a problem for you, why have you never alerted the council?” I asked. “We would’ve sent men to help you.”
“It’s because they don’t want to deal with it,” Lahei said in a low voice.
Huan smiled at her. “So you people like to say. The truth is less interesting, I’m afraid. Our father is a proud man, and he knows the other clans’ eyes are on him. We need to be able to stand on our own, to say that all of this was accomplished through hard work and resourcefulness…”
“—and thousands of lives…” Lahei droned.
Eikaro laughed. “I wouldn’t say thousands. We have lost workers. Progress has its price. We must all be willing to lay down our lives for the good of this nation.” He beckoned for me to continue walking.
“This stone…” I started. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“It was cheaper to import from Cael,” Huan said.
“Can it resist dragonfire?”
“Our builders assure us it will.”
“On pain of death, I suppose.”
Huan gave me a soft smile before tugging at the thin moustache over his lip. “Do you think so poorly of us? May I remind you that one of your own laws prohibit the mistreatment of trades and craftsmen. Your wish was that they be allowed to practice without fear of a warlord’s wrath.”
“Of course.” It was one of Magister Arro’s proposals, actually, which he drafted and left in my study after five builders lost their heads in Kyo-orashi. There had been an accident that wasn’t entirely their fault—the design of a platform they built prohibited more than fifty people on it at one time. Warlord San, for some reason, decided that if he could squeeze twice that number into it, it would still work. It didn’t; ten festival-goers dropped into gaping chasm of the sea below. Warlord San killed the builders in response.
I found myself wondering what Khine would’ve thought about all of this. You could find much truth in the idea that I relished Khine’s company because it filled the void Arro left behind. I saw Cho scowling at the gleaming floor and made the split decision to hold on to that belief.
We came up to the end of the hall. Here, the ceiling shot straight up to the top of the tower, giving me a glimpse of every level. A set of stairs started from each side of us, long and wide. Two women came down to meet us as we arrived. “May I present our wives, Grana and Tori,” Huan said.
The women bowed to me. They were quite unlike many of the royal wives I had met over the years, foregoing face paint and silk dresses in favour of trousers and short-sleeved tunics, better suited for the more humid weather in the west. They had daggers on their belts and the one Huan had introduced as his wife, Grana, was holding a spear taller than she was. The one called Tori wasn’t, but she was also heavy with child—I judged her close to be seven, maybe eight months pregnant. How long had I been away?
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Queen Talyien,” Grana said with a sweeping bow. “We’ve heard so much about you, but we’ve never met before, to our misfortune.”
“You’re twins too, aren’t you?” I asked.
Both women laughed. “Ah. You can see our fatal attraction to these brothers, then.”
“We met these sisters on a trip to Kyo-orashi,” Huan said. “Daughters of an aren dar Ishi, so I trust th
e marriage is to the Beloved Queen’s approval.”
“Ishi is an old, noble clan. Your ancestral home is in the southwest islands, isn’t it?”
Grana nodded. “You flatter us with your knowledge, Beloved Queen. We are a simple folk who subsist on fishing and silk farms, nothing like the grace of you eastern royals.”
“We are but fingers in a hand,” I quoted from Kibouri, which made Lahei roll her eyes. I gave her a small grin before turning my attention back to the sisters. “Knowing these two, you met at Kyo-orashi for one of Warlord San’s festivities?”
“For the opening of his arena, actually,” Huan said, folding his arms.
“The last time I remember, that was still in the planning stage. Much has certainly happened while I was missing and possibly dead.”
Grana laughed. “You have no idea, Beloved Queen. Shall we talk about them while we continue this tour?”
“Please do. I’ve given up hope that someone would say that in the three or four days since I’ve returned.”
~~~
Neither Grana nor Tori gave me anything in the way of news. Gossip was the closest thing you could call it; for the next hour or so, I was treated to every marriage, birth, and scandal that happened from one end of the kingdom to another. For simple folk who subsisted on fishing and silk, they were well-informed. It was difficult to pay attention to everything they told me, though I tried to keep what seemed most important in the back of my mind.
They also showed me the rest of the dragon-tower. There wasn’t much to it at the moment—each level was empty hall after empty hall. We reached the top, which opened up to a railed platform just like the old dragon-towers were. The symbol of the Anyu clan was painted in bright red in the middle: a brace of oxen attached to a yoke. I stared at it for half a second before tucking my arms together against the sudden breeze.
“Enlighten me, my queen,” I heard Grana say behind me.
I craned my head towards her. “I’m sorry?”
The Ikessar Falcon Page 32