by S. C. Emmett
“It is yohaelo, scented with roasted rai.” On safer ground, Kanbina relaxed. “Since we are past the Knee-High, I thought it correct.”
“Quite right,” Yala agreed, inhaling the scent from her own cup. “We do not roast the rai for tea in Khir. It smells delicious, like a meal in itself.”
“It is held to be cleansing for the blood, and to promote friendship.” Kanbina covered her own sathron with reverent movements, closed the case, and let her touch linger upon the clasp. “I would like us all to be friends.”
“Yes.” Yala held the bone-clay cup, her left-hand fingers just below its lovely ridged belly, and toasted her hostess with a slight bow. “General Zakkar Kai and I are allies, Lady Kanbina. And it would please me immensely to call you a friend.”
“Friends are difficult in a palace.” Kanbina lifted her own cup; the round, attentive close-maid behind her cast Yala what was no doubt a grateful glance. Interesting. “But we shall persevere.”
“Indeed,” Yala murmured, and took a single, scorching sip.
A MIGHTY ALLY
Courtiers crowded the great hall with its frozen animals caught in vermilion pillars, but the Emperor had waved them back. Mrong Banh stood in his usual spot at Tamuron’s side, though he had paused at Takshin’s shoulder before ascending to attend the throne as if he wished to offer support.
That was useless, but at least the Crown Prince was next to Takshin, giving his younger brother a single indecipherable glance. It wasn’t like the Emperor to make his prize son sit upon his knees like the lowlier ones, but today the royal brow was clouded and there was a slight, unfamiliar flush creeping up the royal throat.
Takshin performed his bow, and waited.
“Third Prince Garan Suon-ei Takshin.” The Emperor raised a finger trapped in one of the great twin hurai, stroked at his beard. “How is your health?”
“Tolerable, Your Majesty.” Except for the fact that I am in this particular room, which gives me a stomachache. For a moment he toyed with the idea of saying as much, but laid it aside. “And yours?”
It was not quite rude to inquire instead of uttering the formulaic May the Emperor live ten thousand years, but it was close. Takshin settled himself for the skirmish. Of course his father would want to pack him off to Shan again. That was the plan, both to give the shield-country a hostage and to rid the First Queen of half her sons.
While Takshin did not mind the latter so much anymore, the former consideration was past its time.
“Well enough. I am touched by your solicitude.” The Emperor’s dry tone was almost as mocking as Takshin’s own. His forehead glistened. It was not overly hot in the Great Hall today, but perhaps his robes were too heavy. “I have made a decision, my son.”
“And what decision is that?” He ignored Mrong Banh’s agonized look. The astrologer was ever seeking to smooth the folds, but in this case, Takshin was determined to be a wrinkle in any way possible.
“You have a sister, Takshin.”
How observant of you, Father. “Your Majesty be praised; I have two.”
Takyeo’s mouth twitched. The Crown Prince said nothing, but he did shift upon his cushion the slightest fraction. His eldest brother would see the humor in the situation, surely. Bleak humor, but a man took what amusement he could in the face of pitiless authority.
The Emperor continued. “Princess Sabwone is of marrying age.”
Surely you don’t plan to have her marry me. But Takshin saw the game clearly, now. “Is she? It is, no doubt, as Your Majesty says.”
“You are brother to Suon Kiron of Shan, my son.” The Emperor’s flush mounted another notch, and his fingers twitched. His robe was indeed heavy, phoenixes worked with gold thread on a background of spiral-patterned black silk, somber and ceremonial.
For a moment, Takshin thought he might be unable to speak. A curtain of red passed over his vision, and he knew his face had hardened. “I was sent to the Mad Queen of Shan many years ago, yes.”
Let the Emperor test that fact beneath his strong white teeth.
Garan Tamuron regarded him narrowly, and still did not take offense. “First Princess Sabwone will be married to King Suon Kiron of Shan. You will accompany her to—”
“I will not return to Shan.” There. It was said. Takshin raised his gaze to meet his father’s, prepared for the blow.
A muscle in the Emperor’s cheek twitched. He let the statement sit in its own echo for a few moments. “Do you disobey your father, Third Prince Garan Takshin?”
“Did you not send me to Shan to be rid of me?” Takshin did not bother to keep his tone reasonable, or his voice low. Let the courtiers hear, let the eunuchs rustle—and let those who would take gossip to his mother. Perhaps it would even disturb her. “Unfortunately the Mad Queen was not quite up to the task. Perhaps you should have planned more thoroughly.”
Takyeo cleared his throat, folding his hands inside his wide saffron robe-sleeves. “Father,” he began, diplomatically enough, “Takshin has just returned, and no doubt wishes some time to rest. He was in Shan for many long years, with only infrequent—”
“I was.” Takshin again did not bother to lower his voice. “Shall I tell you the tale of the Mad Queen’s hospitality, Your Majesty? You have never inquired of it.”
Garan Tamuron eyed him as if he were a new creature, neither meat nor insect, as the saying went. “I should have thought the marks were visible.” His gaze flickered past Takshin to the courtiers at the far end of the hall, no doubt straining to hear what passed between a recalcitrant son and his royal father.
Cold red rage threatened to return. Takshin smiled, his cheeks bunching and his eyes burning. Soon his lip would begin to twitch. “Indeed.”
Takyeo’s shoulder bumped his as the Crown Prince leaned closer. “Are you trying to provoke him?” A fierce whisper, uttered through motionless lips.
Ah, his eldest brother cared. How touching.
“Let him speak, Crown Prince.” Garan Tamuron folded his hands in his lap. The dark-robed eunuchs and brightly clad courtiers at their scribe-tables among the pillars leaned forward to catch the august words dropping like rain from Heaven. “We have long missed the sound of his voice in these halls.”
And whose fault is that? Still, this was different than the empty formalities exchanged when he first came home, or the passionless recital of evidence after the attempt on Takyeo’s life.
The Emperor wanted something, and he wanted Takshin to give him a reason to get it.
Takshin forced his breathing to slow, willed his pulse to turn deep and hidden as the rank sludge in bandit-infested marshes. There was time enough to consider anything if you simply slowed the world outside enough.
A fly hung in the air over the Emperor’s head, caught between wingbeats. Tapestries and character scrolls draped midripple in drafts rising from braziers. A eunuch—one of Zan Fein’s lean little favorites, with an ill cast to his left eye and a beardless chin—was in the middle of a stifled cough.
Ah. Takshin found what he wanted in mental storehouses, and the world resumed its natural pace. “I shall be happy to be a prisoner within the Crown Prince’s palace,” he announced to both Emperor and the Court. “That is what you were about to suggest, O Great Emperor of Zhaon?” The words reverberated, the most august title of the Land of the Five Winds turned into a festival jest.
Mrong Banh’s expression went through several small changes in a single moment, and Takshin could have laughed. The Emperor’s eyes narrowed slightly, but that was all.
“Ah.” Takyeo folded his hands inside his sleeves. Of course, now he had to play along. “Indeed. I would be honored, Younger Brother. My duties have grown somewhat oppressive, of late.”
Father thought to play the magnanimous patriarch, allowing you to seemingly save me from a return to Shan or a spell in the dungeons. Not that it would matter. If Takshin did not wish to be held, he would not be. One way—or another. “And the sudden swarm of assassins is no doubt a factor in this in
vitation.”
“Takshin…” The Crown Prince sighed, and brought his hands forth to spread them in a peacemaker’s weary brushing movement. “I told Father you would not return to Shan. Is being my guest so unpleasant?”
“The blood-brother to the King of Shan is a mighty ally,” Mrong Banh weighed in. His topknot was very tight today, and only a few critical fractions off-center.
Takshin’s mouth twitched, whether with amusement or distaste he could not quite tell. The Emperor regarded his sons mildly enough, but there was a balked gleam in his gaze. It must irk him, that Takshin had seen the trap.
If he stayed here, it had to be of his own will. On the other hand, where was there to go?
“Of course I’ll stay, Takyeo. I’ll guard you like a wolf guards his lair.” Takshin inhaled, and knee-bowed to the floor, playing at great humility. When he straightened, he delivered the final blow. “After all, you are the only one happy to see me home safely.”
With that he rose, but he did not back from the Emperor’s presence as protocol demanded. He also did not pause as he strode through the crowd jammed at the far end of the hall. They had come like wasps to rotting fruit, eager to witness his humiliation and carry tales of it far and wide, perhaps even to his mother’s heavily hung rooms.
Not today, though. They, like his cursed dam, would have to wait.
I SUGGEST BEFORE LUNCH
Maybe it was because he whistled a theater aria on the way home to his mother’s palace, and that was a certain way to bring the spirits of ill-luck to your door. Or maybe he had offended Heaven in some fashion during the night’s furtive drinking in the city. In any case, Jin, youngest prince of Zhaon, had an otherwise marvelous morning, and doom did not strike until he reached the familiar steps and heard a quite uncharacteristic amount of noise.
First Concubine Luswone was not as elegantly restrained as Second Queen Haesara, but it was unheard of for there to be raised voices in her household. Of course her two children sometimes stormed at each other, but such displays were quickly put to rest by a mother’s intervention—or by the threat of sending the stormer in question to the Kaeje’s Great Hall to answer to the Emperor.
Even favorite daughters quailed before that prospect. And Sabwone was probably very sure she was the favorite, though Jin thought Gamnae had a better chance at that title. She was definitely more pleasant to spend time with.
Jin peered through the wide double front doors, ajar because today was a visiting day. Yes, there was actual yelling. It sounded like Sabwone, and his mouth hung open slightly as he sought to remember if he’d done anything mischievous before leaving for practice.
Nothing really sprang to mind, but just to be safe, he decided he should sneak over the garden wall to reach his quarters. He might have made it, too, had not his old tutor Zan Kanh spied him.
“Prince Jin!” Kanh hurried forward in his dark eunuch’s robe, his high-peaked cap bobbing. Rheumy eyes blinking furiously, liver-spotted hands trembling, and his breath sweetish from khansu,46 the elder shuffled out of the dimness of the pillared hall and beckoned him through the door into the cool gloom of the receiving-hall. “Oh, thank goodness, thank Heaven and the Fifth Wind you have come!”
“Honorable Kanh. Is that Mother I hear?” His heart in his boots, Jin dragged both heart and feet across the fresh-cleaned wooden floor. A statue of two longneck stilt-birds, their beaks dipping gracefully, stood in a pool of mirrorlight. Sometimes, when he was young, he had thought they would come to life, their carved feathers rustling. “And Elder Sister?”
“Indeed, indeed. Come in, come in.” Kanh wrung his limp hands. Thankfully, he didn’t pat at Jin’s shoulder, fussing with soft paws.
Jin hated that.
“Well, what are they arguing about?” He peered into the hall’s depths and saw hurrying kaburei at the far end, servants bustling on a thousand errands, hoping that motion would keep them anonymous and also afford them overheard gossip to spread.
“I won’t do it!” Sabwone screamed from the depths of the house, and there was a shattering noise. She’d thrown something. “I won’t!”
“Oh, it’s terrible, terrible, Prince Jin!” Kanh’s eyes rolled. He was obviously enjoying himself immensely. “Such a display, such, such a display!”
“I can hear that, Kanh. What seems to be the, er, the difficulty?” He was the man of the house, Jin reminded himself, and not a boy anymore. Well, Father was the man, but in this household, it was Jin who should keep the peace.
Not that Sabwone was likely to cooperate.
“It’s simply terrible!” Kanh abandoned himself to theatrical weeping, continuing to wring his old hands. “It’s First Princess Sabwone!”
I can hear that, too. Jin swallowed his impatience. Kai said a real man did not lose his temper, and a strategist—which was, as far as Jin could tell, a step above that—was calm at all times besides.
“She is to leave us, leave us!” Kanh reached for the front of Jin’s robe, and the young prince deftly avoided that moist clutching, stepping aside and plunging past him into cool high-ceilinged space beyond, full of shafts of mirrorlight and a sticky, not entirely unappetizing breeze full of the scent of meatbuns.
His mother must have decided he needed stuffing again, like a prize longneck eggbird. She thought Jin’s leanness dangerous, as if he were still a child at risk of wasting away when a bad spirit caught wind of a concubine’s quiet pride.
He reached the cross-hall just as kaburei and servants scattered like raindrops upon a greased dish; Sabwone, her hair unbound and her embroidered morning-robe flying, burst among them. His disdainful older sister, usually straight-backed with glittering hairpins in her high-piled hair, was now mottle-faced with weeping and wrapped her slim hands in his practice-tunic the way Kanh had failed to accomplish.
“You can’t!” she yelled, and her breath smelled like honey-citrus in tuang tea.
Jin realized, with a start, that he was now a head taller than her. He’d grown again. Now he looked down, his mouth slightly ajar and his sword-scabbard dangling from his left hand. The blade, lean as himself and marvelously balanced, was a gift from Kai, and he carried it everywhere he could.
“Tell her she can’t,” Sabwone raged, attempting to shake him. “Tell her! You tell her, Ji-ha! Tell her!”
He caught her left wrist, but she pounded at him with her other hand, her fist striking the same point upon his tunic, a bird’s ineffectual fluttering.
You cannot strike a girl, Kurin used to say. Unless it’s a kaburei. And then the Second Prince would smile in that peculiar catlike way. You could never be sure if he was joking, or not.
The older he got, the more Jin thought Kurin pretended to joke, just to see what those around him would agree to from a prince. Kai said a true man did not strike a woman, and Jin thought the general was probably right about almost everything.
“Be about your work,” First Concubine Luswone said, resolving out of the hall to the women’s quarters. Shimmering peach silk hung from her shoulders, and her long eyes were wide and snapping with a fire Jin had rarely seen. “All of you. Now.” Her golden leaf ear-drops swung, and her hairpin, thrust hurriedly through a simple twist, glittered sharply in a shaft of mirrorlight.
“She can’t,” Sabwone sobbed, hanging on to Jin’s tunic. “She can’t if you don’t let her, don’t let her, I won’t do it, I won’t.”
“You are making a scene,” Mother hissed, and Jin swallowed, hard.
“Sa-bi, shhh now.” He put his left arm around his sister. “What’s all this, hm? What is it? I can’t help if you don’t calm down and—”
“We have received blessed news.” Mother halted and touched her cheeks, reminding herself to smooth her features. Laughter and grief cause lines, she had often told Jin as he watched her rub attars and oils in with small fingertip circles. A noblewoman must float above such things. It didn’t matter so much for a prince, and he always watched, fascinated by the many steps his mother had to take t
o achieve that grace. Like the lightstep, it took practice and infinite patience. “This is a most auspicious day, which your sister will recognize once she regains her senses.”
“Mother?” Jin cleared his throat, tentatively. Sabwone sobbed into his chest, obviously deciding it was up to Jin to smooth this fold for her. “Uh, hello. You are lovely this morning.”
The slightest of curves visited Mother’s pretty lips. “Thank you, my son.” Her approval, a warm bath on a cool day, was a sweet breeze on feverish skin. “Bring your sister, let us have some tea.”
“To the Infinite Hells with your tea!” Sabwone reared back and shouted at the ceiling, chin tipped up and throat working. “I won’t do it! You can’t make me!”
“Uh, Sa-bi…” Jin gathered himself. “You won’t do what?”
“Your sister is to be a queen,” Mother said quietly. “She is behaving ungratefully, and if this continues, your father the Emperor shall hear of it.”
Even that threat didn’t stopper his sister’s mouth. “Oh, he’ll hear of it! I’ll go to Father, and he’ll tell you not to send me away.”
“You’re… getting married?” Jin blinked. But who would want to marry you? Oh, she was his sister, and you were supposed to take care of mother, sister, and aunt as a dutiful man, but… marry Sabwone?
Who under Heaven’s wide vault would be so foolish?
“Yes.” Mother stretched her hands with a sigh, her chin rising a fraction. “Your sister, the First Princess of Zhaon, is to be Queen of Shan.”
Really? Jin swallowed disbelieving laughter. Mother did not play pranks, it was beneath her; her infrequent jokes were subtle, like her perfume. For a moment he thought she meant Sabwone was to marry Takshin, before he remembered Shan had a young king.
Some of the rumors said Queen Gamwone had intended her own younger son to take Kiron of Shan’s place, but just how the First Queen thought that was going to happen was beyond Jin too. He had never worked up the courage to ask Takshin if it was true, either. “Oh. That’s…” He searched for an appropriate word.