by Jaida Jones
“Leave the others out of it,” I said, holding up my empty hand. I was between the rest and him. “I’ve used all my magic up, Your Highness, but we’ve got a fight to finish.”
“Ah,” the Emperor said. “An interesting brand of duty, I must admit.”
“Fighting you’s the only reward I want,” I said, “for saving your life.”
Everyone was real quiet after that, and I was satisfied even if the Emperor didn’t let on that I definitely had him there.
“Very well,” he said at length, and, with a flick of both arms that startled everyone around us, began to tie back his long sleeves.
We had an audience—just like last time, only more. There were the people on my side, the bare handful of them, and all of the bastards rooting for him—an assortment of guards and warlords whom I did and didn’t recognize, men caught up in the various blasts and those who’d only just joined us.
“I give you my word that none on my side will interfere,” I added, while he readied himself. “So long as you make the same promise, and we…” I cast my eyes about me for a place suitably distant from the rest of the room—a place far away enough for me to take only the two of us out and leave the rest to their own devices.
All these heroics were making my head hurt.
I wouldn’t have turned down a little Ke-Han wine, either.
“Agreed,” the Emperor said. “I too have wished to come to the conclusion of our… practice.” He smiled at me like he was commenting on what I was wearing. I spat blood out between my teeth. That creepy vial around his neck glinted red.
“You cannot do this,” Lord Temur said, stepping forward. “It is my place—”
“I have no reason to fight a dead man,” Iseul said curtly. “It is for General Alcibiades to name the place.”
“The courtyard,” I said, and jerked my head in its direction. Water was everywhere, pooling between broken rocks and fallen beams, bits of paper floating in the pools like flower petals. It was the perfect site for me to get my ass handed to me, but I wasn’t going to let it go that far.
Emperor Iseul lifted his hand, and the red-faced Jiro stepped forward to offer his sword.
“You cannot do this,” Lord Temur repeated.
I looked him in the eye. “You’re right,” I said. “About Greylace, I mean. Tell him to make sure Yana lives in high style for me.” When Temur’s expression registered confusion, I laughed. “He’ll know what I mean.”
“Enough,” Iseul said, striding past me and into the courtyard. “You have stated your objectives, General Alcibiades. You wish to kill an Emperor. In my court, men die for such treason.”
“And many other things,” I added, limping after him.
I didn’t even plan to draw my sword. The second we were clear of the others, I would burst the final waterway beneath us; we’d go shooting up toward the sky like waterborne stars, and at least I could die for some purpose, which, considering my place as a general, was my duty in life, anyway.
The Emperor, though, was always just a hair too quick for me. His sword was already drawn, and the second I’d stepped away from the others he was on me, the blade whistling through the air and coming up against mine. The impact ran through me, all the way to my toes. I swore I could feel it rock through the ground—or maybe that was another aftershock.
I didn’t have the time I needed to concentrate. He was on me, blow after blow, ceaseless and determined. Maybe he’d sensed, in his own mad way, what my plan had been. He had a keen nose for sniffing out danger. Whatever his motivations were, he was going to kill me. My arm ached so bad that my teeth were rattling in my jaw. It wasn’t a matter of whether or not he’d slice me in two—it was only a matter of when.
Good thing I’d made provisions for Yana, I thought, and brought my sword up just a hair too slow. I could see the blade of his sword as it arced downward toward my nose.
I always knew a Ke-Han would kill me. Bastion, I should consider myself lucky that it’d taken them this long.
I stood my ground and braced myself for death.
It didn’t come.
Instead, Emperor Iseul was frozen in time before me. For the first time, I saw an expression of surprise on his face—pure bafflement, I’d even say—like he’d just seen a ghost. At first, I didn’t know what to make of it—whether or not I should look behind me; if the answer would even be there.
Then Iseul fell.
It took longer than it should have for me to piece things together: the arrow in Iseul’s back—a fine arrow indeed, from one of those damned longbows. The figures in the distance, all wearing red. The shouting behind me, suddenly coming in loud and clear over the blood rushing at my temples. And the second prince, whom I recognized despite how long it’d been, clearer than all the rest, across from me on the opposite end of the courtyard.
“The punishment,” Mamoru said, his face twisted in the dark, “for treason is death.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MAMORU
On the seventh and final day of mourning, Kouje came to my chambers to tell me that my brother was dead.
It was always an ambiguous period, that week one spent in isolation, contemplating the death that was to come.
I’d survived two in my lifetime. I hoped never to have to live through another.
They’d given me the vial he’d worn around his neck, almost like jewelry, a living red stone that changed with every tiny movement. I’d debated on keeping it, for a time. However strange it might have seemed to anyone else, it would have served as a reminder as well as some kind of memento from my brother—but in the end Kouje had convinced me to have it destroyed.
It was too dangerous to have such a thing about. It never ought to have been created in the first place.
The stroke of the longbow had not killed Iseul—not even I presumed myself able to kill a man as fierce and strong as my brother; only the gods could do that. I merely wounded him badly enough to stop him in his tracks before he was able to murder any of the Volstovic delegates. To do such a thing under the banner of diplomacy was unimaginable, the act of someone whose reason had left him entirely. I was not so lucky. I knew what reason told me, that my brother was too dangerous to live with madness coursing through his blood as the fever had through mine.
But I had not been able to kill him. Iseul was my brother, and more than that, he was Emperor over us all. I would not put him down like a mad dog in the streets. He deserved the chance to take his own life, as every man did; he deserved to accept honor in death as he had not in life.
I met with him only once; after that, his last command was that I cease to visit him, and duty bound me to obey. Our last conversation was short and shed no illumination upon the man he’d been and the man he’d become.
“You aimed poorly,” he said. Sitting in his cell, with bars between us, and Volstovic guards standing beside Ke-Han soldiers, his back was just as proud as it had always been—as proud as I imagined our father was, even at the last moment.
“I’m not the marksman you are,” I replied.
My brother the Emperor turned his head away from me. “Father would never accept your excuses,” he said. “When you are Emperor, and these red-coated fools infest our people and change the land, at least try to become a little more ruthless. When you miss your mark, you shame even your enemy. Dismissed.”
That was the last I saw of him, and so I tried to remember him as he was when he was a boy: less beaten; imposing without imparting terror; on his way toward becoming a man.
It had been one week since the attack on the palace. Ever since we’d shut Iseul away in one of the holding chambers that had miraculously remained standing despite the assaults on our architecture by General Alcibiades—the diplomat whose horse we’d stolen—I’d been counting the days, knowing that my brother would do the same as our father before him. There were whispers from some who had come to believe that Iseul had engineered the death of the Emperor before him; I knew that was not so. There
were many things my brother was capable of—I’d experienced a plenitude of them firsthand—but the murder of our father was not one of them.
We were both bound by the same tradition, one that wrapped itself around a ceremonial knife with a handle of carved jade.
Seated in my chambers, which had been my father’s first and Iseul’s second, my fingers traced the shape of one of the jade ornaments my brother had worn in his hair as Emperor.
“My aim with the bow is not as good as it once was,” I told Kouje as he knelt.
I felt like a stranger in my new robes—black to denote mourning, blue to denote the land, and small designs of gold to denote my new station. After all my time outdoors, they felt stiff and nearly stifling. They would take some getting used to, along with everything else.
At least it was only the two of us in the room. Soon, after the sun had set on the seventh day, I would have to begin the long process of appointing new servants for my entourage, not to mention tallying up casualties among the palace guards and the troops my brother had hidden in the mountains, some of whom had starved to death chasing mountain cats while they waited for new provisions.
The Esar had sent a report to the capital shortly after we’d arrived, stating that the matter of the Cobalts had been settled and General Yisun was dead.
Such a turn of events was for the better if not the best, as there were certain men who would never be turned to my side, and the general who’d trained my brother had been one of them. Nonetheless, I was weary to lose so many of the great men of my past, now that they had no place in our present, much less the Ke-Han’s future.
Kouje did not lift his head, his hair braided back like a warrior’s once more. I wondered if his scalp ached the way mine did under the strictness of the style. His clothing was crisp and black; not a single hair was out of place, nor was there even the hint of mud and dust to stain the hem of his robes. It was a return to the Kouje I’d known all my life, and yet seeing him that way seemed strange.
“Provisions have been made for the delegates from Volstov to return to their homes,” he said, “though as I understand it, a great many will be remaining behind not only in order to complete their original mandate of hammering out a permanent treaty but also to keep watch over our new council of warlords.”
I nodded, feeling the sharp ends of the hair ornament between my finger and thumb. It had been my idea to assign a Volstovic diplomat to each of the seven warlords, since it seemed too dangerous to set them loose and too severe to have them all die alongside Iseul.
Perhaps it was naive of me, but I did not want the first days of my rule to be tainted with yet more death.
“We’ll have to bring masons in for the palace walls,” Kouje continued, “not to mention the palace itself.”
I smiled at the humor in his voice and lifted my head at last as he did the same.
“These men from Volstov,” I said, in the tone of someone sharing a private joke with a friend. “They do not know how to get a thing done without tearing the landscape apart first.”
Kouje chuckled, then pressed his lips tightly together as though trying to stem the tide of laughter. Our time in exile together had fostered many bad habits between us. Most of them could be shared only in privacy.
“You should put that in your speech,” he said. “That is, if they can convince you to make one. If anyone will be able to hear you over the cheering. You know they’ve been holding a festival in your honor since we came back? You can hear the drums at night. Well, perhaps you can’t, but they are quite loud down at my end of the palace.”
“They are not observing the period of mourning?” I asked.
“I believe their period of mourning ended the day you came back, my lord,” Kouje answered.
I nodded, unsure of how I felt about that. Would they still hold plays in my honor? Or, now that my fate had been decided, was it more likely their attention would turn to something else entirely?
It was time for my attention to turn as well. An emperor did not have the same freedom as a fugitive to think about the theatre—although one day I would find Aiko and Goro, and at the very least donate a new traveling cart to their troupe.
“As I understand it, there is some special entertainment arranged for the farewell reception,” Kouje went on.
“Is it time already?” I wondered. The light in my chambers was provided chiefly by lanterns, so it was difficult to tell the time of day. It was the best design for those prone to fevers in winter, Kouje assured me.
“I believe so, my lord.”
I stood, and the weight of the fabric was heavy against my shoulders. That weight too would take some getting used to, but it would serve as a reminder until then; it would teach me how, as an emperor, I was meant to walk.
The farewell reception had been arranged to honor the men and women from Volstov whom my brother had taken captive—another gesture to try to mend what Iseul had so nearly broken. My brother had been proud, perhaps too proud to work in tandem with anyone who had defeated him. I finally saw that, though thinking about it was pointless since it made me hopelessly angry with a person from whom I could no longer seek any answers.
Kouje rose only once I’d reached him, and fell behind so that his steps would not take him alongside me.
“I hardly feel regal at all with you towering over me so,” I whispered, hoping that I might cheer myself simply by acting cheerful.
Kouje paused as though I’d surprised him, and I wished that I might look back, just to catch a glimpse of his face. He was far too good a servant, though, and even if I’d looked, I knew I wouldn’t be able to see him.
“I might always walk on my knees, my lord,” Kouje said, catching me off guard so that I had to clench my jaw to keep from laughing at the thought.
Instead, I raised my head and sniffed. “From now on, I think that I will employ only very short servants in the palace.”
“My lord might wish to wait until he has an actual palace to employ from,” Kouje murmured, “and not a very fine heap of rubble.”
I shook my head in despair, even as I felt relief like a warm wind against my face. In a time when everything had changed so drastically, so that even familiar buildings did not go unchanged, there were some things that remained the same.
One window in the hall was open, the lattice shade lifted to let in the sun. Down below the palace, sloping toward the rest of the city, I caught sight of the magician’s blue dome. From that height, it seemed no more than a child’s broken teacup overturned and, however momentarily, forgotten.
CAIUS
For once, Alcibiades and I were in complete agreement. It was high time we crossed the mountains and returned to Volstov—for I was going to come down with a bad case of the vapors, like my poor great-aunt Eurydice, if any more excitement was caused by us or to us in at least the next month.
We’d lived through the death of two Ke-Han Emperors in our short time in the lapis city, and it was time to remove ourselves from the premises before we fostered any further bad luck. I liked the new Emperor; he had a sweet little face, almost like a rabbit’s, and I wanted him to do well. Therefore, for everyone’s sake, I intended to return home, and have a nice cup of tea before I sought out my next adventure.
“You mean you actually want to go home?” Alcibiades asked me, without his usual vim and vigor. He was so tired, poor dear, after his little display, and I’d made sure to keep him resting despite his own wishes. The moment he’d come around after fainting—one couldn’t blame him for that, either, after destroying nearly an entire palace before taking on the Ke-Han Emperor—and learned which way the wind was blowing, it had been his intention to hop the next carriage back to the Volstov countryside. I’d spent all my energy and persuasiveness convincing him to give it a little more time, and once he’d realized just how little leeway his body intended to afford him, he finally agreed.
It didn’t mean he’d been very pleasant about it. But that was merely his way.
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br /> “I thought you loved it in this place,” Alcibiades went on, grimacing.
I patted him on the shoulder. “A change of scenery is necessary now and then. And I wouldn’t trade our time here for the world! It has been exceptional. But someone must see you home safe and sound, and I don’t think anyone else is quite as fond of you as I am.”
“Hmph,” Alcibiades grunted, looking away, and I couldn’t tell whether or not he was pleased—or, rather, I couldn’t tell just how pleased he was.
Let him be shy. He had saved all our lives.
I busied myself instead with all the details: the carriage, the cushions, the blankets in case the evenings grew chill; I made provisions for my peacocks, the ones my admirers had given me, to send them to my country estate for the time being. Perhaps I would donate them to the Volstov zoo—which meant of course I would also have to see my way toward snagging a white tiger. And, if I was lucky, too, one of those darling red pandas I adored so much.
“Cultural exchange, hm, Greylace?” Josette said as she watched me instructing the men carrying the cages about.
“I’m merely stealing a few animals,” I pointed out, “and not a warlord.”
“I was assigned to him,” Josette replied tersely. “The Esar’s orders.”
I had to pause for a moment to shout at some fool who was being careless with the white peacock’s glorious tail. When I returned, I couldn’t help but add, “It’s very lucky of you, then, that he wishes to return to Volstov.”
“Cultural exchange,” Josette muttered. “That’s all.”
All that was left was to have an audience with the Emperor.
“Not on your life,” Alcibiades told me. “I’ve had about enough Ke-Han Emperors for one lifetime, thank you very much.”
“It’s only polite,” I pleaded, trying, however futilely, to fix his tie. Would he never learn how to do it up? “We simply cannot leave without exchanging a few pleasantries. For diplomacy’s sake, Alcibiades—”