Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders

by Aliette de Bodard

  “I know.” Hong Chi’s face was grave. “It’s a big favour to ask.”

  She was expecting him to say no, in fact—a thought belatedly occurring to him when he saw the way she held herself, braced for rejection the same way she’d always been when they were children and she’d come up with yet another adventurous idea. Thuan thought of Second Aunt, of his cousins; of the citadel and all it contained set afire. “But fine. I’ll see what I can do.”

  * * *

  “An investigation? Into matters of disloyalty? With powers to ignore the constraints of the law?” Asmodeus looked like a child who’d just been handed a red envelope full of unexpected money. “I stand corrected. This might be rather less boring a stay than I’d thought.”

  Thuan had—with difficulty—managed to separate him from the corpse and three rather chastened officials, and they were now back in their quarters, waiting to hear from Thuan’s request for an audience with Kim Diep. Asmodeus was sitting on the bed, sipping from a tea cup, and Thuan was trying not to stress-eat any of the candied fruit in the bowls on the table.

  “You examined the corpse,” he said.

  “Yes,” Asmodeus said. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask to.”

  Thuan sighed. He should have, but since Hong Chi wasn’t going to officially help him—at least not in front of officials—it would have taken a great deal of arguing with the court, something the prospect of which had been exhausting. “I don’t have authority,” he said, curtly. “Can you tell me about it?”

  “Middle-aged woman—a crab, I think? She was a supervisor in the imperial kitchens. Her name was Ai Linh, according to one of these really annoying officials.” Asmodeus relaxed against the bedpost.

  “Ai Linh,” At least Asmodeus’s Viet had improved in leaps and strides, and he could manage to get through basic conversation these days. “How did she die?”

  “In excruciating pain.”

  “Is that really relevant?” Thuan asked, more sharply than he’d meant.

  “It rather depends if that was the main point, or a side-effect to death.”

  “Remind me never to bring you over for Tet ever again.”

  A silence. Thuan found Asmodeus in front of him, a finger resting on his lips—and then Asmodeus’s mouth on his, kissing him long and deep until he shivered—and Asmodeus’s hands, gently pressing on his shoulders until knots he hadn’t been aware of came loose. “Asmodeus,” he said, when he finally came up for air.

  Asmodeus released him, but didn’t move away from him—his perfume of bergamot and orange blossom trembled in the air between them. “Poor sweet dragon prince. I’m finding this rather exciting, but you’re angry and terrified, aren’t you?” It was phrased like a question, but it wasn’t really one.

  Thuan could hardly deny the obvious. “Mmm. I’m not sure I want to talk about it.”

  Asmodeus’s hand tipped his chin up, to look into his eyes. “You do.”

  “Confession being good for the soul?”

  A short laugh. “You do because you need to convince me why we have to do this at all. Right now I’m feeling more inclined to have a word with that cousin of yours and make her change her mind about roping you in to do her dirty work.”

  That got his attention. “You can’t touch her.” That would be a diplomatic mess of epic proportions.

  “I don’t need to. I can be very… persuasive.”

  And he probably could, at that: he’d not risen to become head of House Hawthorn through being unsubtle. Thuan exhaled. “I’ve not really talked about my life before, in the imperial court.”

  “Hmm.” Asmodeus hadn’t moved. He cocked his head as if assessing Thuan, and finally said, “You were a bookish prince who became my betrothed when the field became short of candidates.”

  “Yes,” Thuan said. A pause, but this was his husband, and if he couldn’t say it to Asmodeus, then to whom? “I was the son of a minor sister of the imperial family. No one really expected me to be at court until my grandfather died and the power passed to my eldest aunt, and she decided every close kin member had to move there.”

  “Ah.” A pause: still that odd expression on Asmodeus’s face, inquisitive but aware he was getting close to weakness. “You were unused to it.”

  “I hated every minute of it. The different factions, all my cousins intriguing to be named crown princess, the courtiers, the concubines and the officials, and a never-ending flood of who was allied to whom, the memorials to be read and double-read to be sure I hadn’t missed any meaning and knowing my allowance and position depended on that…” He was sitting on the bed and he wasn’t sure how he’d got there anymore, and there was that tight feeling in his belly, the room being too small and constricted until he thought he was going to choke. He tried to laugh, found only searing emptiness in his mouth. “Bookish. I liked the library. The head archivist let me hide at the back of the shelves, and at least books by dead people have a pretty straightforward agenda.”

  He stopped, then. Asmodeus was standing next to him—looming over him, his broad frame encased in his embroidered jacket. He laid a hand on Thuan’s shoulder, squeezed, lightly. “Oh, dragon prince. You’re doing a terrible job of convincing me we’re staying here at all.”

  Thuan snorted. “You think Hawthorn is better? It’s got exactly the same intrigues.”

  A raised eyebrow. “It does. But you rule Hawthorn.”

  Some comfort. But of course it would be, to Asmodeus. In his world, problems were solved by power, or pressure, or violence, or better yet, all three concurrently. “It wasn’t all bad. I love my cousins. Well, some of them. Hong Chi and I used to share durian cakes in secluded courtyards, and she’d always bring me the memorials that mattered—and she did it because she loved me. And Second Aunt meant well. Politics would have found me even in my backwater countryside, and it’d have eaten me alive if I hadn’t been prepared.”

  “You mean she chose break you herself rather than watch you be broken.”

  “I’m not broken!”

  “No,” Asmodeus said. He sounded… angry? Thuan wasn’t sure he found that reassuring at all, because the target was very clearly Second Aunt. “I meant she tried very hard and failed.” A pause, then. “You love her.” He sounded surprised. Or disapproving. Or both.

  “She’s my aunt,” Thuan said. And, more simply, “She made me what I am.”

  A snort. “Rather. You’re failing spectacularly to convince me I should expend effort trying to save the woman’s throne.”

  Thuan sighed. Explaining duty or family wasn’t going to terribly impress Asmodeus, but he had to try. “A change of dynasty usually means every descendant of the previous one comes to a messy end. That’s all my remaining family in the dragon kingdom, even the ones who’re not at court.” He didn’t wait to see his husband’s face. “I know. I’m no longer part of the imperial family because I married out, and you think we’d be fine even in the middle of an upheaval, but I’d be really upset if those deaths happened.”

  “Hmm.” Asmodeus didn’t look really convinced.

  Thuan squeezed Asmodeus’s hand, trying very hard to hide the fact that something felt terribly loose in his chest. At least his parents were in House Hawthorn now. They were also coming into the dragon kingdom for Tet, but much closer to the New Year’s Eve banquet: they’d never liked the court and Thuan had thought to spare them a long stay, but it turned out they’d be spared in other ways too. “Think of it as the meetings of the Court of House in Hawthorn. Boring and painful but necessary for longer term goals.”

  Asmodeus’s face didn’t move. “Fine,” he said. “But if any point you look to be in too much distress, I’m marching you out of the kingdom and back home.” A smile that was as thin as a knife wound. “And I’ll take great pleasure in cutting down anyone who tries to tell me otherwise.”

  “All right.” Thuan didn’t feel like he had enough energy to argue. “Can we talk about Ai Linh now?”

  A shrug. “Yes.”

&nbs
p; “You said she died in pain. But specifically of what?”

  “Enspelled weapon,” Asmodeus said. “But the murderer was either very sloppy or needed information from her, because I counted fifteen different wounds.” He paused, considering for a while. “The first ones were deliberate, but after these she’d have slipped into shock quite fast.”

  “She’s a crab,” Thuan said. “Wasn’t it what you said? Rông or other supernatural sea spirits heal fast. I don’t think she’d have gone into shock.”

  “She would.”

  “You sound very certain.”

  “Yes,” Asmodeus said. “And before you malign me, that’s not because I experimented on your dragons in Hawthorn. It’s just because one of them had an accident with an enspelled weapon in the Court of Persuasion when I was there. And really, I thought you’d know that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t have personal experience,” Thuan said, mildly.

  “I figured you wouldn’t. But it’s your weaknesses we’re talking about.”

  “That I’d appreciate being informed of,” Thuan said, drily. He didn’t push it further, because he knew Asmodeus did sarcasm as easily as he breathed—but he wasn’t about to let him get away with just anything.

  “Consider yourself informed now.” Asmodeus didn’t miss a beat. “Anyway, the next wounds are more frenzied.” A pause. “I take it back, I don’t think it’s sloppiness. The murderer was running out of time.”

  “Mmm,” Thuan said. “That’s not terribly useful to find out why the society singled her out. Do you think they got what they wanted?”

  “I don’t think so.” Asmodeus foraged inside his jacket pocket, and threw something on the table. It was an empty pouch of purple silk.

  “She found it. What are we talking about here?”

  “It was in her… carapace?” Asmodeus sounded uncertain. “The armoured bit on her chest and belly. I noticed it was a bit loose when I examined her, though there was a spell to make it seem normal unless one was paying special attention.”

  “You broke a khi-water spell with Fallen magic?” Thuan didn’t know whether to feel impressed or horrified. Or both. Fallen had had little experience with khi-elements, the native magic of the Annamites: Fallen could practise it like everyone else, but most found it beneath them, or considered it quaint and weak. As a result, most of them were defenseless against the spells of the dragon kingdom. Asmodeus had never shown any interest in the magic, or so Thuan assumed.

  “You dragged me into the dragon kingdom. Was I supposed to show up there defenseless?”

  Of course not. “I’d say I’d want to be informed but you already knew that.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  Thuan bit back the obvious answer, and bent over the pouch. There was a single, faded character on it he didn’t recognise—he couldn’t even tell if it was meant to be Chinese or southern characters. Traces of a pale opalescent powder clung to the inside, and a faint glow of khi-water lay over them, a shimmering haze that was oddly fascinating.

  Asmodeus’s hand grabbed his and pulled it away—he hadn’t even seen Asmodeus move. He held Thuan’s hand in a grip of iron and refused to let go. “Ouch. Asmodeus—”

  “Don’t touch it,” Asmodeus said. “She quite blithely hid it on herself, but you don’t even know what it is.”

  “Poison? Surely—”

  “Surely a few grains isn’t enough to be deadly?” Asmodeus’s face said, quite clearly, that Thuan was being breathtakingly naive for believing that.

  “You don’t do poisons.”

  “As a weapon, no. As something I need to defend against, I can assure you I studied extensively.”

  “Fine. So our murderer wanted a pouch of mysterious powder from someone who worked in the kitchens.” The immediate deduction wasn’t hard. “The banquet. The New Year’s Eve one.”

  “Ah, yes. If someone from the close imperial family dies—if all of them die—that’d certainly make quite an impression.”

  Thuan shook his head. “Doesn’t even need to be that bad. You’re jumping to the catastrophe scenarios—” he tried, and failed, to remove the vivid images of dragons writhing in agony on tiled floors—“but things are already really bad in the kingdom. All the society need to do is imply bad fortune.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know! Like making all the banh tet be rotted inside, or the tray of five abundance fruit fall to dust on the ancestral altar. It doesn’t need to be big, it just needs to be significant.”

  “Ah. Superstition.”

  Thuan stared at him, and bit back on the first, angry response. “No, appearances. That time you were at House Silverspires for Lady Selene’s birthday and the gifts caught fire? That was a statement that didn’t require deaths. It said, very clearly, that she didn’t have the means to protect her own belongings. Same thing here. The Mandate of Heaven is about a dynasty’s capacity to take care of its own people and possessions, and the right to rule it confers them as a result. We’re not quaint, unenlightened inferiors.”

  A silence. Then Asmodeus said, stiffly, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Thuan breathed out. “It’s ok,” he said, finally, though he still felt winded.

  A look that could have split stone. “Don’t you even dare apologise, dragon prince.”

  Thuan swallowed the words he’d been meaning to say. “Fine,” he said, finally. “Now what?”

  * * *

  Thuan stood on top of the steps of the Flower Peace residence in the six chambers, waiting for a eunuch to come and retrieve him. He’d sent a request for an audience with Kim Diep earlier: he had signed it with his personal seal, which was all he had left. Once, he’d had another one as well, an official one that went with his title—just as the Empress herself had a host of seals she used for official purposes, and a personal one for her private correspondence. He’d had to surrender that when he’d married Asmodeus, obviously—he’d never missed it, but now that he was back in the citadel he had complex feelings about what he’d left behind.

  Fortunately, Kim Diep had not seemed to care about his lack of titles, and had sent back a swift agreement to an audience.

  It had been touch and go, for a while, on whether Asmodeus would let him out of the room at all—he was possessive normally, and being on edge just made it worse. Thuan had had to argue quite strenuously on how utterly weak he’d look if he showed up for an interview with a concubine with his husband darkly hovering like an overbrooding, over-aggressive bodyguard. Finally, he’d dispatched Asmodeus to investigate the mysterious powder, and to haunt the kitchens asking about Ai Linh.

  The chambers were really a long, narrow palace building, its entrance lined with pillars and bathed in the dappled light of the underwater kingdom. The courtyard around them was huge: a clear separation between the six chambers, a space reserved for concubines and that had traditionally been difficult to access for anyone not of imperial blood or not a eunuch, and the rest of the citadel.

  A trio of smiling youths passed him by—two men and a woman, all wearing the concubines’ round flower and mango-bird insignia and giggling as they went towards the coral gardens—the woman was half in dragon shape, antlers framing her topknot, and scales on her cheeks, while both the men looked to be fish, with the same scales on their cheek but less sharply defined fingers and bulging eyes on either side of an almost inexistent nose.

  Finally, a silent eunuch came, and led him to the east side of the stairs, to a small room entirely enclosed by a longevity lattice. Someone was waiting for him there, kneeling on cushions and blowing iridescent bubbles through a mother-of-pearl pipe. “Child,” Kim Diep said, smiling and showing entirely too many pointed teeth in her mouth. An underwater animal, but the predator kind: an orca, with two white eyes spot just above her small, round eyes, and dark skin that shone in the lantern light. She was younger than him but married to his aunt, and that was the relationship that counted.

  “Elder aunt,” Thuan said, bowing.
The way she smiled, he wasn’t sure if he should have used a more appropriate title.

  She had a youth-in-waiting with her, unobtrusively kneeling near the teapot, head bowed. The eunuch took his place near the door, to make sure that nothing untoward happened during the interview. Thuan wasn’t surprised. Concubines might have more responsibilities than a symbol of sexual achievement those days, but propriety was still respected—and there was no way his aunt would tolerate a concubine’s affair.

  Not that he intended to commit incest with someone married to his aunt—it’d have been ludicrous, disgusting and utterly against benevolence and propriety.

  The youth poured some tea, green and delicate and utterly unlike the tea Asmodeus made at home—he’d never gotten the hang of water temperature or shorter brewing time, and everything ended up tasting slightly acrid, with a harsh undertone. Thuan lifted it to his lips, breathing in the trembling smell of his childhood, and thought of white grains in a bag, and Asmodeus’s hand twisting his fingers away from it.

  Poison.

  He stared at the cup, his nostalgia thoroughly extinguished now. “You must be wondering why I’m here.”

  A shrug, from Kim Diep. “I’m assuming you’re visiting your aunt’s favourites.”

  She sounded she was rescuing him from embarrassment, which Thuan had admittedly not expected. He pursed his lips, then said, “I’m coming because of this.” He laid, gently, the coin of the Harmony of Heaven society Hong Chi had given him.

  Walking straight into traps was, admittedly, more Asmodeus’s experience than his. There were times when this was the best course of action, and this was one of them.