by S. C. Emmett
Yet.
And she misunderstood him, this time. Of course. “It is too late,” he informed her, knowing she would still misunderstand. His fingers loosened, one by one. There was a luxurious sense of release in going too far to halt. “Do as you will.”
It was not painful at all. A pinch, a stinging, and the unfamiliar weight in his ear was a dull throbbing when she laved it again with jau. The hoop was small but felt much heavier than it should, and as she took the dabbing cloth away the faint sheen resting upon her forehead had intensified. When she held the burnished bronze mirror, he did not see the scar upon his throat or his lip, or the seam under his hair. A gleam winked from his left earlobe. Mellow gold, brushed along a flaw to seal it shut.
Instead of a broken jar, he was a decorated blade. A transformation, a passing god or sage performing a feat of illusion-made-truth.
“There,” she said, softly. “Now you are marked as one who has ridden to the Great Fields, and your ancestors will not call you before your time. Do you like it?” She settled onto her cushion, and there was no pity or disgust in her strange, pale Khir gaze. Merely interest, and the faint consciousness of a task well done.
I do not care. “Do you?”
She examined him critically, a faint line between winged black eyebrows. Finally, Lady Yala nodded. Blue gleams showed in her black braids. “It suits you, Your Highness.”
“I told you to address me informally.” He sounded irritated, could not help himself.
“Then you would address me so.” She lowered the mirror. “And that is not correct.” Lady Komor Yala rose, gracefully, putting the table between them, tidying the implements. Retreating.
His course decided and the tension of indecision vanished, Takshin allowed it.
For now.
AN EXCITING MORNING
Summer lay over the Great Market, but underneath its bell-dome the work of commerce went on unabated and Zakkar Kai, sweating in his half-armor, was on the hunt for something that could not be found at the Artisans’ Home. The Left Market was also out of the question, for it held nothing a woman might want unless she was swelling unexpectedly or looking to rid herself of another impediment.
No, he wanted something small, and subtle, and glorious, and so it was the Great Market’s vast clamor he quartered that breathless afternoon. The year had turned into the stretching of the rai and the deepgrass brushing mares’ bellies, the rich lands of Zhaon bursting with food not yet ready for harvest, a promise of abundance at every step and upon every fingertip, every eyelash.
The promise, burgeoning, was painful to a man. So was uncertainty. Some affected to like it, valuing the chase more than the possession, but Zakkar Kai was not of their number. The work of victory was better than the prospect of defeat, even if bought with bowel-cut and blood.
Still, this battlefield was a gentler one, and hence he was uncertain.
Lady Komor visited the Second Concubine often, bearing small gifts and playing the sathron. Her skill with the instrument was only middling, but he saw the fluidity in her wrists and the way she did not commit her weight until the step was sure, and it reminded him of the darkened garden and an assassin’s gurgling death.
Which was nothing a woman should have been party to, and yet Kai found himself thinking of it often, always with the same sick thump in his stomach. What if he had not been passing by, catching the flicker of motion where none should be near the top of a wall? What if he had not been curious? Most distressing of all, what if she had not been trained in the use of that sharp, slender blade?
Such things were not spoken of in the Hundreds, he thought sourly, as he pushed between a pair of arguing silk merchants and halted to contemplate a wall of osier cages, the birds inside lamenting their loss of freedom and waiting for a larger confinement with a lady’s hand to scatter grain and fill the water-dish.
Or for a poor girl to keep them in a hovel, and eat them in a lean year. Songs did not fill a hungry belly.
Sometimes Kai wondered what he would be if Garan Tamuron had not plucked him from the ashes. What was a fire without fuel? He probably would have starved to death, a witless, wandering child.
The Emperor’s rash had spread, turning into suppuration. Kihon Jiao was able, with a salve made of bellyroot and crimsonpod the cousin of sleepflower, to ameliorate the irritation, but the Emperor was short-tempered these days and Council sessions stormy. Just that morning, Takyeo had openly disagreed with his father upon the question of the salt tax, and Hailung Jedao was full of dire prognostications about the imperial purse if the smallholders and peasants were not burdened afresh. The salt flats were a Daebo concern, but the Second Concubine’s family was still in the custom-mandated half-mourning for the loss of a highborn daughter before she passed her new husband’s doorway, and Luashao Tualih was thin-lipped and uncommunicative.
Apparently First Princess Sabwone had sent her uncle a letter from the road to Shan full of allusions to certain passages in a lady’s novel, and there was much concern. Kai frowned, laying a hand to his own purse as he spotted a gang of pickpocket children sizing up the crowd in front of a puppet show. The story of a princess married to Shan and becoming queen was popular now, scraps of red cloth wrapped around a female stick with high-painted eyebrows, the groom shown as a fearsome triangle with a high-peaked Shan hat and stamping boots. He bleated and gobbled in an approximation of a strange language, and a dragon popped into being overhead, showering the puppets—and no few onlookers—with cheap confetti. Exclamations of delight rose, and the pickpockets went to work.
The children would pay a portion of their gleanings to the puppeteers, no doubt, and would take the rest to their thief-hive. The quickest and most canny among them might even survive to adulthood and create their own hives, or hire themselves for darker work.
Kai walked on. His half-armor and the sword at his back earned him some small measure of room among the crowd’s buffeting. Another wall of birdcages, and vats of bronzefish in tepid water, flicking their tails and waiting to be scooped out for travel in buckets to rai patches or small garden ponds, and other tiny pets—crickets, a clutch of ornamental goats, live eggbirds flapping and squawking as they were examined by prospective buyers—added to the noise. He turned aside, passing another puppet show—they were in fashion now; festivals and feasts always made for great interest. Those with a few alloy bits to spare went to the theater, but all you needed for watching puppetry was a set of eyes.
A pair of acrobats cavorted upon a faded blanket set in the sun, sweat greasing bare coppery limbs and close-cropped hair. Kai halted again to watch. How long had he been here in the dust and the noise, and had not found a single suitable gift? A hairpin was a lover’s token; other jewelry was improper upon their acquaintance; she already had a borrowed sathron, but perhaps he should commission another?
He knew what would please six princes and two princesses, a gift that would please the Emperor of Zhaon himself, and others that would delight his adoptive-mother. Why was a simple token for a court lady giving him such trouble?
Excited babble rose, sharp voices arguing. Kai craned his head and set off for the source of the hubbub. It was perhaps time to return to the palace, scrape the dust away, take a tepid bath. No doubt the next Great Council session would be fractious too. It was a day of inconveniences and frustration.
Or so he thought, before he saw a familiar shape, a long flow of deep blue—she favored that color, it seemed, and someone in Khir had sent her silk for a dress or two. This one was new, cut in the Zhaon fashion, and her hairpin held a single thread of silver glitter ending in a winking topaz eye. Her sunbell, a red flower, bobbed as she half-turned, and the shadow beside Lady Komor was Third Prince Garan Takshin, glowering in black with his wrap-hilted sword in his left hand, held carefully away from his companion but still ready, in the manner of a Shan warrior.
Lady Komor pulled at his sleeve with two fingers, her sunbell dipping and bobbing even more. A small bag hung from a stra
p on her right wrist, brushing her skirt as she sought to draw the Third Prince away, and as Kai forced himself between two burly bare-chested layabouts in loosened laborer’s pants obviously on their way to a tavern for a midday refresher, he saw the danger.
It was a mixed show—puppets much larger than usual and masked actors as well. One of the large puppets balanced upon sticks and chortled, holding a vile-green bar dripping streamers of the same color. It was in black and had the same triangular figure as a Shan puppet, but it had a Zhaon topknot and a dried-puddle crackquilting of red threads cruelly cut its fabric face. It screeched something and a plague-dragon appeared, waving over the heads of the live actors—slim youths in ragatag mockery of court dress cowering before a stiff wooden replica of a padded throne-bench. Upon the bench, a puppet in imperial robes clutched at his heart, while a red-clad female puppet was bundled into a palanquin and drawn away.
The throne-bound puppet declaimed, in a bass voice, a list of symptoms, and the plague-dragon bubbled overhead, twisting sinuously on long sticks. The puppeteers were masters of their craft, indeed.
Kai’s skin flushed, but his insides turned to ice. So, news of the Emperor’s illness was common. It had been only a matter of time, certainly, and yet he had hoped for more room to maneuver. So had Tamuron.
“Plague in the East!” the dragon shrieked, and the Shan-clad puppet with the scarred face did a jumping dance of glee. “Plague in the West!”
Lady Komor’s mouth moved. No doubt she was remonstrating with Takshin, who wore a remote, icy expression Kai knew all too well.
Zakkar Kai strode forward. The audience scattered as his own dragon-hilted sword left the sheath, a high ringing note of metal drawn, and he barked a battle-cry as his feet found the makeshift, waist-high wooden stage. It flexed and trembled underneath him, not meant for a warrior’s moving, armored weight, and his bright blade cleaved the plague-dragon’s supple length.
It even gave him a grim manner of joy to do so.
Shrieks and curses rose behind the curtain, and the stage thudded underfoot. The sudden application of his weight forced a splintering groan from thin wastewood. Live actors scattered, their painted, sweating faces now pictures of real consternation. Kai plunged past the billowing curtain at the back, following the lines of the black-clad Shan puppet, and found a portly stickmaster in a clout, sweating oily-profuse and screeching as Kai grabbed his topknot and tore him past cloth into unforgiving daylight, tossing him upon the stage. Which, with its own sense of the dramatic, decided it had endured enough and splintered around the crashing impact.
Kai leapt free of the rubble, and such was his furious look that the crowd scattered, actors vanishing, puppets falling. The Emperor-puppet swayed drunkenly on its sticks, clutched by one of the child-actors in a tattered version of a eunuch’s robe.
Zan Fein would not find that amusing, Kai thought, and a grim smile touched his mouth. “Who is responsible for this?” he barked, this time at the pudgy, splinter-striped man moaning amid the stage’s wreckage. Whistles sounded in the distance—the Market Guard was on its way.
Good.
A blot of crimson in Kai’s peripheral vision was Lady Komor’s sunbell. She hurried toward him, a thin thread of jaelo scent bright amid the dust, reeking sweat, fear, and smoky fury. “General,” she said, somewhat more loudly than necessary. “General Zakkar, my friend, please, calm yourself.”
Takshin trailed in her wake, two bright spots of red high upon his cheeks. Gold glittered at his ear, and Kai recognized the jewelry. Several Khir at Three Rivers had sported the same thing—a closed loop, so their ancestors would not call them to the afterlife too quickly.
So. Kai set himself, stiffly, and gazed down at the pudgy stickmaster. “Well?” he demanded, once more. “Who is responsible for this?”
“General Zakkar, please.” Lady Komor’s sunbell dipped and wove. Takshin, catching up, steadied it, but she did not glance gratefully at him, and his motion was impersonal, a quick instinctive movement.
“Kai.” Takshin’s topknot gleamed under fierce sunshine. “Kai, my brother, enough.”
More whistles, shouts, the crowd pressing close. Explanations would be necessary. Takshin gave one passionless glance at the blubbering stickmaster, who visibly realized just who had torn him from his hiding place and exposed him to scrutiny.
Kai lifted his left hand, spread his fingers, and the light caught his hurai. Greenstone glittered, and onlookers took in a collective breath. “Hello, Takshin. I did not know you were a-marketing today.”
“Takyeo asked me to accompany Lady Komor.” A shrug, spreading his free hand too, a subtle indication of his own status. Takshin surveyed the wreckage of the stage. “And you?”
“Looking for a certain article. But what I find is treason.”
“Is it?” Takshin sounded merely interested, but that glint in his dark eyes promised trouble. Oddly, the stickmaster did not seem nearly as frightened of the sword-point at his throat as of the black shadow at Lady Komor’s side. “An actor may not portray royalty, so, puppets.”
“Insulting any member of the royal household carries a penalty.” It was a new sensation, to be the one restrained from temper. It held a certain freedom, but was not quite comfortable. “Your father, may he live long, will hear of this.”
Lady Komor’s pale eyes were wide, and her mouth turned down. “Perhaps it would be better to ignore this particular puppet show,” she suggested in an undertone. “My lord general, perhaps it would be wise—”
“You are the soul of decorum, Lady Komor. Takshin, perhaps the lady should be returned to the palace. It is very warm, and this is an unpleasant sight.” Kai leaned forward—not much, just a fraction, and the sword-point pricked a little harder.
The Market Guard appeared, green plumes on their brown leather helmets, and a moment of confusion ensued before they realized they were dealing with two princes and a collection of street artists who had clearly overstepped their bounds.
It was Takshin who graciously insisted they be freed, though Kai refused any idea of reparation for their broken stage. Lady Komor, a fan produced from her sleeve, drew back into shade and watched, a lone spectator upon a suddenly deserted slice of Yaol Street. The Guard took the pot of alloy bits and a few triangular coins, leaving the actors and the head of the troupe—the cowering, crafty-eyed stickmaster—only a handful and a strict warning to choose better subjects for their foolery next time.
Since the alternative was a stint in the local guardroom before being hauled before a magistrate, the stickmaster bobbed and bowed. Kai finally consented to letting the man slither away, and Takshin tossed the head guard a pierced silver for his pains—a princely show of generosity, indeed, and one the man would have to share with his fellows, since it was given him in their sight. The remaining actors and sticktossers hurried to pack up whatever of their gewgaws and props had not been broken, and fled after their master.
It was unlikely any of them would be with him come morning. Skilled workers liked to avoid ill-luck.
Which left Kai and Takshin in attendance upon a very pale Lady Komor, her brow glittering damply and her fan fluttering. “Quite an exciting morning,” she said, in her light, lilting Zhaon spiked with Khir consonants. “The news will no doubt reach the palace before we do.”
“There is no need for you to worry.” Kai settled his sword-strap more firmly, rolling his shoulders to make his half-armor settle. “It is known that I am the Third Prince’s friend, and better for me to cause a scene than him to appear to take offense.”
“I was not about to take offense,” Takshin said, somewhat grimly. His lip was not twitching, which was a very good sign. “I might have pointed out the scars were in the wrong place, if anything.”
Lady Komor cast him a single, almost nervous glance. “Was that intended to be you, then? And… the Emperor?”
“Plague from the East, plague from the West.” Kai shook his head. “Come, my lady, you are wilting. Let us find a
more congenial climate for you.”
“There is illness in Zhaon, as there is every summer. It is the season of heat and bad air.” Takshin’s knuckles were white upon his scabbard. No, he perhaps was not about to take offense, but had he drawn, there might have been corpses instead of a tale spread of Zakkar Kai’s umbrage and the Third Prince’s magnanimity. “The Emperor should hear of this.”
“Did you know?” Kai glanced at the market-aisle, just beginning to liven again. As soon as the trio of nobles left, ragpickers and other carrion would descend upon the shattered puppet-stage, stripping it of anything even slightly valuable. They were probably impatient to begin their work. “That he is… ill?”
“Everyone knows,” Komor Yala said, flatly, and closed her fan with a snap. “Though none say it directly. Yes, General Zakkar, we should leave here. Will you and Third Prince Garan Takshin accompany me to the palace gates, at least? After that, no doubt you will have men’s business to attend to.”
“We shall see you to the Jonwa itself.” Takshin offered his arm. “I think it would be wise to speak to the Crown Prince first.”
“Indeed.” Kai’s hands itched. It took an effort not to let them curl into fists. Takshin had never shown this much attention to a court lady before. The Third Prince was also uncharacteristically polite, in her presence.
It was maddening. But as much as Kai’s insides writhed, he was only glad he had not made a fool of himself. After all, Takshin was a prince, and Kai merely a lowborn general who had slaughtered many Khir.
“Very well.” Lady Komor took Takshin’s arm. To do so, though, she handed her sunbell to Zakkar Kai, so he must keep close to her side through the Market, and her skirts brushed his knee more than once.
And Kai, uselessly, angrily, could not help but hope the walk would be slow.
TWO SMALL PEARLS
Stretch, my princess.” Yala, in loose-legged linen trousers, leaned forward, her legs spread into the straight bar of a li character. Then she bent, almost touching her forehead to the floor. Mahara followed suit, though her hips ached and she could not lower herself as far. Yala exhaled, and her body turned to water. “Zakkar Kai was there. He drew upon the stickmaster.”