THE HAND OF THE SUN KING
Copyright © 2021 by Jeremy A. TeGrotenhuis
All rights reserved.
Published in 2021 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
ISBN 978-1-625675-46-0
Cover design by
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: Student
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Two: Apprentice
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Three: Hand of the Emperor
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Part Four: A Witch of the Old Sort
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Hannah.
I told you I wanted to be a writer.
You married me anyway.
I can’t think of any greater gesture of affection.
Part One
Student
Chapter One
Naming
Grandmother woke me in the dead of night and told me to keep silent. She led me through the forest by half-forgotten paths. Paths the Sienese soldiers would not know. Sticks snapped beneath my sandaled feet, and the wet roughness of the undergrowth brushed my calves. The cries of owls and foxes wafted through the cool, dark air. The stark light of the moon and stars cut through a cloudless sky and made the night feel all the colder. Sleepy confusion gave way to fear.
Did my mother know that grandmother had taken me? And where? I wanted to ask these things, yet I dared not. An air of mystery clung to my grandmother--this old woman who lived beneath our roof yet felt like a creature from out of shadowed myth.
Several nights before I had lain awake, swaddled in silk and cotton, listening to my grandmother argue with my mother on the other side of an oiled paper wall. My father had left on business that morning, and my grandmother’s presence grew to fill the space he vacated. She spoke more openly against the Sienese, and in turn my mother, married to a Sienese man, argued against her generalizations and blanket hatred.
It did not occur to me then to wonder why my grandmother chose to live with us, beneath a Sienese roof, with a daughter she despised and a son-in-law she hated. But I was only a small boy. I knew little of Sien, and nothing of my grandmother’s people, nor their gods, and never imagined that I would become a weapon in the long and bitter war between them.
“You and your brother were named at six years old--your son is eight, and nameless,” my grandmother said, her voice muted by the paper wall.
“It was not a crime when we were named,” my mother said. “There was no danger to it then.”
Their conversation made little sense to me. I had a name, given to me by my father in accordance with the naming traditions of his clan. Wen Alder, a proper continuity from his own name, Wen Rosewood. Why did I need another?
“If not now, then never,” my grandmother said. “And then the only path left to him will be service to the conquerors. Would you rather he become some imperial bureaucrat, his mind turned to calculating the interest owed by starving villagers on taxes they will never be able to pay? That is the path your husband has set him on.”
There was a sob in my mother’s voice. “You will not have my son for your war.”
“Is it better to make him an enemy of the gods? An enemy of his own family?”
Crickets filled the silence between them. I was fully awake now, excited by whispered talk of gods and war. The only god I knew was the Sienese Emperor, whose rituals I had begun to study with my tutor the previous year. I had seen demonstrations of his power at the New Year festivals, when Sienese sorcerers--the Hands of the Emperor--hurled spheres of iridescent flame to dance among the stars. I worshipped the Emperor and venerated the sages alongside my father, as he had done with his father, and so on unto the origin of our clan in the misty depths of history. Of what gods did my grandmother speak?
“I will not make him fight,” my grandmother said. “But would you deny your son half of his heritage?”
I did not hear my mother’s answer. As I followed my grandmother into the forest, stumbling half-awake along an overgrown path, I realized what it must have been.
The interlocking brackets of a roof and ceiling appeared through the thicket before us. The path led to a wicker gate--frayed and brittle after years of neglect--which was guarded by three stone wolves. One stood in the center of the path. The others sat on their haunches to either side of the gate.
“The Temple of the Flame,” my grandmother said, then gestured to the twin seated wolves. “Okara, and his sister Tollu. Their mother, Ateri the She-Wolf, the mate of fire. Learn their names, boy.”
I had always been boy to her. Never did she call me by my Sienese name.
She led me past the wolves. I flinched away from them, even as I committed them to memory as she had instructed. Ateri stood with her head lowered to lunge. Tollu was calm-faced and proud, with piercing eyes over a shortened snout. Okara was the most frightening of the three. A distinctive pattern of scars had been etched across his face, marring his right eye, and his teeth were bared in a vicious snarl. Later my grandmother would tell me the tales of these strange gods--of Ateri’s wisdom, Tollu’s nobility, and Okara’s guile and ferocity. That night she led me firmly but gently by the arm past the wolf gods, through the gate, and to the temple.
Moonlight dimmed the red and yellow paint of the Temple of the Flame. Paper screens had been nailed over the windows long ago. Most were riddled with holes, and one had been torn away by a falling stalk of bamboo. A colony of foxbats clung to the brackets of the ceiling and watched us with bright, glinting eyes. The stink of their guano filled the place.
Grandmother led me up the steps to the altar at the temple’s heart. She unbound her hair and let its thick curls flow freely over her shoulders, a reddish brown tinted gray at the temples. Like all Sienese children the sides of my head were shaved. With a frown she untied my topknot. My hair, so much like hers though combed straight at my father’s insistence, fell to either side and tickled the tops of my ears.
She wiped decades of dust from the altar with a swipe of her hand but did nothing else to clean the temple. This stood in stark contrast to the ritual cleanliness of the Sienese, which I had observed at my father’s side. Our worship had revolved around incense sticks, finely carved and painted idols, and temples kept fastidiously swept, polished, and painted by obsequious monks. Worship could not commence, in the Sienese mind, unless the sages had been properly
honored and welcomed into the sacred space.
My grandmother’s religion centered not around the rite and ritual I knew, but around fire and blood. She bade me sit upon the stone surface of the altar, then produced a knife of black glass from her satchel. Sensing my fear of it, she drew her mouth into a line and set the knife beside me on the altar.
The illicitness of our actions, the stillness and silence of the night, and the strangeness of the other artifacts she removed from her satchel--a clay bowl, a writing brush, a sheet of rice paper, a stoppered gourd, and a scroll of wooden slats tied with leather cord--unsettled me. Again, I wondered why she had brought me here, and I yearned for my blankets, for this strange outing to have been only a dream.
She walked to the back of the altar and opened a small brass door. It was the only metal I had seen in the temple. She stared into the darkness beyond that door, her eyes distant, the crow's feet growing at their corners tight as her gaze narrowed on some distant memory.
“Once,” she said softly, “a witch would tend this hearth day and night. Once, the First Flame still burned here, a kindling from the same fire that set man apart from beasts. Now there is only old coal and ash.”
She stacked wood within the hearth, then reached into the darkness. I leaned over the edge of the altar, trying to watch her hand as it disappeared within.
She snapped her fingers, and whatever path of my life might have followed before that moment, it changed. For the first time, I felt the intoxicating thrill of magic. It seized my chest with a feverish heat, raced up my ribs, over my shoulders, and down the length of my spine. The grain of wood and stone leapt out to me like the writing of an ancient god.
That heady sensation made me recall the memory of one of my first lessons with my tutor, Koro Ha, a year before. We had been studying my pedigree, the list of my father’s ancestors dating back to the beginning of our family. One of many texts I would memorize for the imperial examinations.
Though my father was a merchant of middling station, our family tree had at its root men of influence and power. Greatest among them was Wen Broad-Oak. He had been Hand of the Emperor, a sorcerer and general who helped to conquer the horse lords of the Girzan steppe. It seemed impossible that I, a merchant’s son, could trace my line from such dizzying heights of power.
“Could I be Hand of the Emperor?” I had asked Koro Ha.
“Perhaps, if you work hard,” he had answered, bemused by my childish ambition. “It is an uncertain path from here to there.”
“Could you have been?”
That made him laugh. “No, I don’t think so. And I would not have wanted that honor, were it offered.”
I found that confusing. Always my father spoke of our ancestors as examples to which we should aspire. His mission in life was to restore our family to the heights from which we had fallen. A task which required wealth--which he spent his days pursuing--and prestige--which I would earn through education and imperial service.
“Why wouldn’t you want to be Hand of the Emperor?” I asked Koro Ha. “What honor could be greater?”
“Power always comes with a price,” Koro Ha said. “I have heard--though I do not know it for true--that in exchange for the gift of sorcery the Emperor sees through the eyes of his Hands. Some even say that he hears the echo of their every thought. In any case, I prefer to choose my own path through the world. Power is a burden I do not wish to carry.”
“That’s just an excuse,” I said. “If you could have had it, you wouldn’t have let power slip through your hands. You failed, so you pretend you didn’t want it in the first place. I’m not going to fail. I’ll restore the Wen family and become the greatest sorcerer the Empire has ever known.”
“Oh?” Koro Ha had said, unperturbed by the accusations of his seven-year-old student. “Even greater than the Emperor himself?”
That had given me pause.
“The second greatest sorcerer,” I had said.
Koro Ha had chuckled and said. “Well then, we’d best return our attention to your studies.”
The crackle of fire catching in dry wood rose from the hearth, and the stone altar beneath me began to warm, drawing me back to the present moment. My pedigree had focused only on my father’s line, but now I saw that there was power in my mother’s as well. My grandmother was not Hand of the Emperor, but she had wielded magic. A good Sienese child would have fled from such heresy and betrayed her to his father.
Ambition had already taken root in me, seeded by my father. But his desire to restore our family had never struck me to the heart. His plans for me were a burden that had weighed on me since I grew old enough to feel the pressure of his expectations. I did my best to carry them, but only to do my duty as his son.
What I had felt at the snap of her fingers, though…here was something that gripped at the core of me and stoked my heart to fire. I wanted it as surely as I wanted my next breath. When my grandmother had conjured that tongue of flame I had felt, for an instant, a pattern uniting and constraining all things, and her spell rippling through it like freedom itself. Nothing I had yet encountered in my young life--and nothing I would encounter, even in the most profound volumes of the Sienese canon--held such a weight of truth and power. What could be worth pursuing if not this?
Grandmother unstopped the gourd and poured clear, heady-smelling alcohol into the bowl, then unrolled the scroll of wooden slats. Her mouth formed unfamiliar syllables as she studied the scroll. Its slats were carved with strange symbols, smaller and less intricate than the Sienese logograms I studied with Koro Ha. The last three slats were unmarked.
“Give me your hand,” grandmother said. “The one you write with.”
A pattern of scars that traced the seams of her right palm shone faintly, like the glimmer of moonlight on placid water. I had never noticed the scars before. Without thinking I clasped my hands together in my lap.
“Calm, boy,” she said. “I’ll do nothing to you that wasn’t done to me in my day, and your mother in hers.”
Fear of the knife made me reluctant, but she was offering a peek beneath the veil of mystery she had worn all my life. More, she had given me a taste of magic. Already I thirsted for more, like it was a vital nectar--a thirst that would carry me, in time, to the heights of prestige and the depths of ruin.
I offered my hand. She slashed me once. I yelped, but she held my wrist firm. Blood dripped from my palm into the bowl of alcohol. At last she released me. I pulled away and studied the wound. It was shallow and followed the central crease of my palm. Any scar would not be noticeable, unless one knew to look for it.
“Look here, boy,” grandmother said. “I know it hurts. But you must watch. Your mother won’t teach you. Someday you’ll have children. I can’t make you name them properly, and I’ll likely be dead by then. But let Okara eat my liver if I don’t do everything I can to keep our ways alive. Watch. And remember.”
I peeled my eyes away from my wound. She nodded solemnly and waited for me to return the nod before continuing. She cut her thumb with the tip of the knife, then stirred our blood and the alcohol together with the writing brush. When it was fully mixed she made a single stroke on one of the unmarked slats. Blood and alcohol seeped into the grain of the wood. She pressed the rice paper to the slat, then peeled it away and flattened it on the altar. I leaned in close, trying to understand what she was looking for.
“There.” She jabbed a finger at one angular smear, then another. “Your name.”
With the bloody tip of the knife she carved two symbols into the slat. They resembled the stains on the paper, but only abstractly. She said something in a flat, toneless language, then told me to repeat it. Though I did not understand the sounds I made, they resonated with me, like the power I had felt when she conjured flame.
“That’s your true name, boy. Foolish Cur. The gods have a sense of humor, I suppose.” She pointed to the other slats. “Here is my name. Broken Limb--a prophecy, I think. And your mother’s, though she lost th
e right to it when she married that man.” The symbols on that slat had been scratched away. “And your uncle, Harrow Fox.”
My gaze lingered on that third name, which cast me back to a hazy memory out of my early childhood. Once, when my father had been away on business, a strange, disheveled man had arrived at our home. Often my mother would send such beggars away with a kind word, a few coins, and a cup of rice. At the sight of this man standing in the gateway of our estate, she had been gripped by an anger that rooted her to the ground.
“You dare come to my home?” she had said, while I watched from the doorway of the reception hall. “What, have you tired of sleeping in caves and bushes, hunted like the fox you are?”
The man had smiled, showing a broken tooth. “I thought filial piety was the highest Sienese value. You’ve no love for your brother?”
“There is nothing for you here,” my mother said. “Go, before I send a runner to the garrison.”
He had put up his hands, then retrieved a slip of paper from his sleeve. “Give this to mother for me.”
“I do no favors for you,” my mother said.
“At least tell her to lie low,” he said. “And that we are regrouping in the north, at Grayfrost, should she wish to join us.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
“Then you only put yourself in danger,” he had said, anger flaring. His gaze moved past her to fall on me. “Yourself, and your son. They will come looking for me, and though you may wish to forget that I am your brother, the Sienese never will.”
The man had left, then, and mother had gathered me into her arms and whispered reassurances, though she was the one afraid, not I.
Three days later, a Sienese patrol had come to our estate, and searched it. My mother’s fingernails dug into my shoulders while the soldiers threw open chests and scattered her belongings throughout her apartments.
“Have you had any contact with the rebel Harrow Fox?” their captain had said. No, my mother answered. Did she know the whereabouts of the fugitive witch Broken Limb? No, she answered again--and truthfully, for the day the disheveled man had visited our home my grandmother had vanished, and would not reappear until a week later, long after the soldiers had left my mother with stern instructions to inform them if she learned anything of her family’s movements.
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