She leaned forward, frowning again. “Tatsu, you don’t have to do this.”
He did. He could taste it in the acid that burned the back of his tongue, and he could hear it through the ringing in his ears. It wormed its way through his thoughts and memories, blossoming up as if it had always been there, an acorn erupting into a mighty oak tree. There was a hot prick of tears at the corners of his eyes, more of a reflex action than anything else, and he wasn’t sure which emotion had prompted it.
His fingers fell away from his mouth as he sighed, swallowing down as much of his terror as he could. “Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
Tatsu shook his head. “You should go and find the others. I told him that I’d wait for him, but you don’t need to.”
Leil didn’t say anything else, but she did cast one last curious look at Tatsu’s crumpled form before she disappeared off to where Jotin had taken Alesh and Ral. Alone in the hall, Tatsu stared up at the seam of where the walls met the ceiling, wondering if clawing out his betrayer of a heart would help. Maybe the only solution was the act of holding the wretched organ in his hands. Maybe watching his feelings drip down his fingers in red sobs would rid him of the ache curling up from the pit of his stomach.
He pressed his fingers against his brow, wanting to laugh and cry at the same time. He wasn’t sure whether the trembling in his fingers was from the overwhelming reality facing them all or from the truth whispering out from his shadowed, swallowed desire.
You’re a fool, his mind screamed, raw and desperate, and this is going to kill you both.
Eight
After what had to be at least an hour, Tatsu’s knees began to cramp and his stomach started to growl. He slowly extracted himself from his huddled position against the wall and made his way down the hall. The others had long since left the kitchen, but there were several palace servants still inside, and they quickly served him a bowl of a steaming half-mashed grain mixture with reedy vegetable roots. As he sat eating, trying to blend in with the wall behind him, he watched the Joesarian servants move around the kitchen in their practiced waltz and wondered what they’d been told, if anything, about their unexpected visitors.
When he finished, Yudai hadn’t come out of the council chambers yet, and Tatsu wasn’t entirely sure what to do. Jotin had been instructed to take them to their rooms for the day, but Tatsu hadn’t paid attention to where they were. He found himself standing in the center of the hallway, looking from door to door and feeling quite lost, until Ral appeared seemingly out of nowhere to stand in front of him.
She cocked her head at him, waves of dark hair falling over her shoulders. “Tired?”
“All the time,” Tatsu said with surprising honestly. “I can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel exhausted.”
Ral just gave him a small, sad sort of smile, and reached forward to take his good hand. “Tatsu, come.”
She led him down the hall into a narrow wing that ended abruptly and contained only three doors. The sun had come up during Tatsu’s time spent on the ground. The hallway itself had only a few windows that were mere slits in the stone, and they were so high they nearly touched the seam of the ceiling. The sunlight spilling in painted the opposite wall with impossibly bright rectangles of yellow that repeated themselves in a warm pattern across the space. The temperature had gone up, but the height of the openings kept the interior still relatively cool by allowing the hot air to slip out the windows as it rose.
Ral opened one of the smooth wooden doors and gestured for Tatsu to go in. The inside of the room was comfortably shabby. The table and chair were made of well-worn wood, and a light-colored linen hammock hung to one side, tied up with thick, bleached ropes.
Tatsu sank down into the chair and let his head fall back into his good hand.
“Ral, what’re we going to do?” he asked. “Everything is falling apart.”
“Tatsu fine,” Ral replied. She knelt in front of him, crossing her arms over her knees.
“But it’s not about me.”
Her face softened a bit as she nodded. “Bad things.”
“Every time that I think we might finally be able to fix something, there’s just another problem thrown at us,” Tatsu said. “And we can’t keep up, because we never get the chance to solve any of them before dealing with the new one. We’re barely staying afloat as it is, and now this?”
Ral moved forward to grab Tatsu’s hand, and her fingers were warm and smooth.
“Leaving was supposed to solve the problems,” Tatsu whispered. “It was supposed to be our escape, and look what it’s turned into.”
“Needs you,” Ral told him. “Be strong.”
“I don’t know if I can.” Guilt was thick on his tongue, left over by the runny dinner he’d choked down without really tasting.
Ral’s fingers tightened around his as she leaned in. “Tatsu strong. Chosen for strong.”
Tatsu barked out a laugh and squeezed his eyes closed for a moment. “What a joke that turned out to be. Life chose me for something I’m ill-equipped to deal with.”
“Not life,” Ral said, voice soft. “Not life, Tatsu.”
Tatsu stared at her for a long moment. Her brown skin was the color of the bronze Chaydese omn in the bits of daylight filtering inside the room, and the beams that made contact with her hair created a backdrop behind her head, illuminating her shoulders. She’d always carried with her an aura of calm, and even in a strange building in a faraway land, that remained the same—with her, Tatsu’s body wanted to soften in relaxation. He squeezed her hand, partly for additional reassurance and partly to convey his gratitude for her empathy.
“Do I tell him?” he asked.
When Ral just looked at him with an enigmatic expression, Tatsu let his eyes dart around the room.
“This is Yudai’s room, isn’t it? You brought me to Yudai’s room.”
She stood up but kept her hand in Tatsu’s, and Tatsu suddenly wanted to cling to her and her certainty. It had to be a burden to know too much, to see too far. Ral was a mystery that he wasn’t sure he would ever truly understand, but he appreciated how often she used her gifts to help him when it was never her job to do so.
“Thank you,” he murmured, and hoped that she understood the rest of the words that got stuck behind his teeth.
“Tatsu fine,” she said, and a smile crinkled across her face. “Tatsu be fine.”
Tatsu looked down at their entwined fingers. “You know too much, don’t you? That’s what the fortune-teller said. You see everything that’ll happen down the path, and you have to walk it anyway.”
Strands of her halo-like hair fell over her shoulders as her smile stretched wider.
“Is it hard, knowing what will come to pass?” Tatsu asked.
“No. Life moves.”
“Yes, it does,” Tatsu said, studying her. “Alesh assumed her whole life that she had to take care of you, but I’m starting to think that it was always the other way around.”
Ral’s only response was a breathy little giggle as she let go of Tatsu’s hand. She took several steps backwards towards the door, and after surveying Tatsu sitting on the chair, she nodded. She seemed content with the situation, and somehow, that helped settle the rest of Tatsu’s nerves too.
“Be strong,” she repeated.
“Sleep well,” he said, and then she slipped out the door, leaving him alone.
He didn’t end up waiting very long. With only the sunlight on the wall to gauge time by, Tatsu guessed that he had been in the room for only twenty minutes or so before he heard footsteps and voices outside the door.
“—will go after nightfall. Thank you for taking me here,” Yudai said, muffled on the other side of the portal before the door was opened. It took a moment for Yudai to notice Tatsu seated within, but when he did, his whole body seemed to unwind, a visible sigh that traveled through his form.
“This will be fine,” he continued to the unknown figure next to him, without taking hi
s eyes off Tatsu. “Thank you.”
Yudai stepped inside and closed the door behind him, and in the light of the sun, the dark circles beneath his eyes stood out like rings of coal streaked across his skin. At some point, he’d washed off the remnants of the black blood from his face, though the stains on his shirt remained.
“Is it all right that I’m here?” Tatsu asked. “I probably shouldn’t have presumed it would be.”
“Yes,” Yudai replied, fingers falling free of the door handle. “I’m glad you’re here.”
As Yudai crossed the room to sink his weight down into the hammock, Tatsu asked, “You were in there for a long time. What did they say?”
“A lot.” Yudai sighed and ran his hands slowly over his face. “I explained my situation to the High Council and gave them the background on Nota and Zakio, and the incident in Dradela.”
“And?” Tatsu’s throat closed in apprehension.
“They aren’t arresting me.”
The fire seemed to disappear from Tatsu’s blood in a cold flash, and he sat back, even more weary than he had been before. “Good. That’s… quite good.”
“I have to meet the representative from the temple tonight and see what she has to offer about my situation.”
It took a moment for Tatsu to sort through his memories and piece together what he’d been told en route to the city. “The temple is where mages go in Joesar?”
“Yes, but it’s not here in Moswar,” Yudai said. “There’s always a representative here to work with the High Council and hear their requests, but the mages themselves reside far out in the desert.”
There was too much talk of mages. It turned Tatsu’s attention back to the morning’s events.
“What happened at the market wasn’t your fault,” he said.
When Yudai turned to meet his gaze, his eyes were hooded. “It still happened at my hand.”
“My mother…” Tatsu shook his head. The words felt too intimate to describe someone he’d never met, so he corrected himself. “Nota did this. She sent people to kill you—”
Yudai laughed, and the sound wasn’t happy. “She’ll never stop trying. She’s lost me as her pawn. Now I’m a threat again, and she won’t rest until she sees me killed.”
“You think they’ll keep coming?”
“I think anyone who hired mercenary assassins to off me will accept nothing less than success,” Yudai said darkly, glaring at a spot on the wall shrouded in shadow. “I doubt they were cheap.”
A knot had taken up residence in Tatsu’s belly, and it pulsed angrily in time with his heartbeat. He didn’t want to think about his own flesh and blood being cruel enough to send hired men just to guarantee a death. He searched for something, anything, to take his mind off the darkness weaving webs behind his eyes, and the distraction he found offered him no relief.
“Yudai,” he started, searching for the right words, “I was talking with Leil…”
“Ah.” Yudai’s sigh seemed to know too much.
“She said that your father was… benefitting from the drain,” Tatsu said. “That it was going to unnaturally extend his life so that he could rule for hundreds of years. I think that was part of why the Queen of Chayd wanted to use you.”
Yudai’s face disappeared into his palms, and for several moments, it felt as if nothing in the room dared to move. Then Yudai sucked in a deep, hissing breath that caught between his lips, and he slid his hands down his neck.
“I think I knew,” he said, voice low. “I think part of me always knew.”
“Yudai, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s another piece to the puzzle, right?” Yudai said, and although he flashed a smile, the expression looked very forced.
Tatsu rose, propelled forward towards the hammock for reasons he wasn’t brave enough to name yet, and sat down next to Yudai’s hunched figure. “This doesn’t change anything about you. Don’t let this dictate who you are. You’re better than that.”
“I’m not sure my father ever really cared about me as a person,” Yudai said down to his palms, eyes focused on nothing. “Certainly never as a son.”
“Well, as life would have it, it seems that I sort of know how you feel.”
Yudai laughed again, bitter but genuine. “I suppose you do.”
“There are people who care about you,” Tatsu said after a pause stretched thin around them. Yudai looked up then to meet Tatsu’s gaze, and there was so much to his expression that defied definition.
“I know.”
Tatsu’s heartbeat was pounding so furiously that he could feel the echo of it down his bad arm, and it took longer than he would’ve liked to admit to recognize the sensation. When it finally sank in, he gasped, wrenching his eyes away to stare at the linen sling covering his hand. He still couldn’t move his fingers, but his elbow throbbed, the pain radiating down to his wrist.
“How’s your arm?” Yudai asked.
“I think it’s getting better.”
By the time Tatsu looked up again, Yudai’s face had closed off somewhat, and his smile was slightly strained. The abrupt change in atmosphere threw Tatsu off his game, and he stumbled over what to say in the sudden shift.
“It would probably help if you got some sleep,” Yudai said. His expression was maddeningly blank. Tatsu wanted to get some kind of hint, even if it was anger, but there was nothing.
He ignored the pang that blossomed out from his stomach when he tried to move, muscles cramping from too much time in one position. “And we meet with the temple representative tonight?”
“Yeah.”
Tatsu stood, feeling light-headed. “Then we’ll see what she says. Maybe she can detect something we can’t.”
Yudai didn’t say anything more as Tatsu left, and the room across the hall was empty when Tatsu tried the handle. He sank down into the linen hammock, the gentle rocking of the bed more distracting than soothing. Staring up at the ceiling, he willed the world to slow down around him, but even after the room settled into a quiet peacefulness, Tatsu couldn’t quite seem to drift off.
With eyes that felt full of Joesarian sand, Tatsu rose early into the evening, giving up completely on the idea of rest. At dusk, the halls were lit with a soft rosy glow and devoid of other people, and the calm serenity of the corridor seemed to help. A single servant passed Tatsu and pointed him down a second, wider hallway with the promise of a rejuvenating bath, and he followed the instructions to a set of reinforced double doors.
Moswar’s not-palace expanded out into twin baths, larger in size than some of the shops in Dradela had been and fully surrounded by high walls. The space between the gender pools was piled with mottled stones and a few palm trees that cast oscillating shadows across the water. Tatsu wasn’t sure about how pleasing a hot bath would be in the desert, but after he’d stripped down and waded in, sinking down into the water was glorious.
He had woken early enough to be alone, so he lazily lapped the pool a few times to wake up his muscles. Near the back of the bath was a stone basin built into the wall that held several bottles half-full of milky liquids. Pouring some into the palm of his hand revealed the offerings to be various types of soaps, and he ran one that smelled of jasmine through his hair before rinsing it out. A less thick one carrying hints of cinnamon he slathered over his body. It’d been quite some time since he’d been able to clean himself with anything besides river water—in fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a warm bath at all. Despite the day’s shimmering heat, the feeling of the bath’s heat was soothing against his skin.
Tatsu stayed until his fingers started to wrinkle and then got out to towel off with one of the folded towels near the entryway. He made his way back to the large kitchens he had visited that morning and found a few servants already there working on dinner, as well as Alesh, sitting by herself behind the notched tabletop.
Tatsu sat down across from her. It was nice to see the familiar sight of her long braid hanging over her shoulder and brushing across
the top of the wood. Her hair looked slightly wet as well, and he assumed she’d also been to the baths at some point in the afternoon.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked with a wan smile.
“Too much in my head.”
One of the kitchen workers brought him a small bowl of spiced vegetables swimming in a thick broth, along with a small handful of roasted nuts and a mug of slightly sweet water. They ate across from each other in companionable silence until Tatsu’s spoon began to scrape the bottom of his bowl.
“Why are you here?” Tatsu asked quietly. “Why did you come?”
“I told you,” she said. “I had to come with Ral.”
Tatsu glared down at the remnants of his soup stuck to the underside of his spoon. “But that’s not why you came, not all the way out here to a country that you’ve never been to.”
Alesh was silent for a spell. Around them, the swell of the kitchen workers’ movement bubbled up as fires blazed and iron pots clanged against one another.
“I think you did the right thing in Dradela,” she said. Her fingers played with the bottom end of her braid that curled slightly around her digits. “I don’t think anyone should be used like Yudai was. Honestly, the more I thought about the way we found him strapped to the chair, the angrier I got. When Ral began itching to go after you, it wasn’t much of a decision.”
“Thank you,” Tatsu said and wasn’t entirely sure why he had said it.
Alesh shrugged. “You don’t have to thank me.”
“But not everyone would do that. Think of how many people would be willing to let it happen because it didn’t concern them.”
“I don’t think the number is that high.” She frowned. “Many people would try to stop something horrible like that, even if it took them a little time to come around to it, like with me. You just always think the worst of people.”
Tatsu didn’t answer.
“Remember when we were kids?” Alesh said. “You thought the worst about everyone in Dradela too.”
“But people always whispered about me behind my back.”
The Mage Heir Page 10