by S. C. Emmett
Finally, he had said it. She could now answer I am still in mourning, and be done. She could turn her shoulder and deliver the cut with the calm chill of a noblewoman well used to clothing a sharp edge in pretty syllables.
Instead, she watched his eyes, muddy like a half-Khir’s. Within a single generation of admixture the gaze lost its directness; some held that the pale grey of nobility ran through the great houses because the Blood Years had forced them to marry their own more than was quite wise. Zakkar Kai’s face was not sharp enough to be even quarter-Khir; he did not have mountain bones. Gossip spoke of some barbarian in his vanished bloodline, a common brat-foundling taken up by a warlord who became Emperor of this terrible, choking, luxurious land.
Barbarian or not, he was mighty among his fellows and measured in courtesy. His careful generalship— standing fast to bleed his enemy, breaking away to replenish his army and tire his foe with chasing— had broken the back of Khir’s resistance, and the victory at Three Rivers had brought her princess to perfumed, hot-cloying Zhaon as matrimonial sacrifice.
That Crown Prince Garan Takyeo had been kind to his foreign bride was beside the point. This country had swallowed Mahara and her lady-in-waiting whole, and now Yala, bereft, was a pebble in the conqueror’s guts.
Another traitorous tear struggled free and followed its elder sister’s path down her cheek. As Yala should have followed Mahara, had she not been gainsaid at the pyre.
Leather made a soft noise as Kai’s callused fingertips brushed the droplet away. It was the first time a man other than her own brother had touched her thus, and Komor Yala almost swayed.
His was the hand wielding that antique dragon-hilted sword, cutting down many of Khir’s finest sons. It was the same hand sending the sword’s point through an assassin in a darkened dry-garden upon a wedding-night, defending Yala. That he had thought her the new Crown Princess was irrelevant; it was also Zakkar Kai who had brought her back to the palace complex after tracking a clutch of conspiratorial kidnappers who had definitely mistaken Yala for her princess.
How could she possibly put each event onto scales and find their measure? She was no merchant daughter, bred for and used to weighing.
“If I were free to answer,” she said slowly, “I would marry you, Zakkar Kai.” There was little point in dissembling. He was not the worst fate for a Khir noblewoman trapped in a southron court, and she— oh, it was useless to deny it, she rather…liked him. The more he showed of the man behind his sword, the more she found him interesting and honorable, until she could not be sure her estimation of his actions was from their merit or her own feelings.
A high flush stood along his cheekbones, perhaps from morning drill or the heat. Surely it could not be a surfeit of affection for a foreign lady-in-waiting. “But you are not?”
“I must write to my father.” Was that why she continued to deflect a general’s interest? How could she even begin to brush the characters that would explain this? It was craven and ignoble to think that as Zakkar Kai’s foreign-born wife she would not have to face her father’s disappointment at both her failure and her weakness.
“Of course.” He nodded, a short decisive movement of a man well suited to command. “I will not speak to the Emperor until you have word.” His throat worked again, and he did not take his rough fingertips from her face. A strange heat, not at all like Zhaon’s sticky, hideously close summer, spilled from that touch down her aching neck, and somehow eased the terrible hole in her chest. “I will wait as long as I must.”
It was the warrior’s reply to the Moon Maiden. A smile crept to her lips, horrifying her. How could she feel even the barest desire to laugh or seek comfort, here in the house of the dead? “You are quite partial to Zhe Har, scholar-general.”
“Only some few of his works.” Kai still did not move, leaning over her to provide welcome shade, the rest of the world made hazy and insignificant by the mere fact of his presence.
Why had he not been born Khir? Of course, he would be dead at Three Rivers, or Komori Dasho might— as he had told his daughter once— have refused any suit for her hand. It did no good to wish for the past to change, or to ask uncaring Heaven for any comfort. A single noblewoman’s grieving was less than a speck of dust under the grinding of great cart-wheels as the world went upon its way.
He leaned forward still farther, and Yala felt a faint, dozing alarm.
But Zakkar Kai, the terror of Zhaon’s enemies, stern in war and moderate in counsel, merely pressed his lips to her damp forehead before straightening and stepping back, leaving her oddly bereft. “Come.” He offered his arm again. “We must see you home, my lady.”
Home. If her father sent word quickly enough, she could plead filial duty and escape northward. No doubt Crown Prince Takyeo would provide an escort to at least the border. She could be in Hai Komori’s dark, severe, familiar halls by the middle harvest, facing her lord father’s displeasure without the shield of distance, paper, or ink.
Komori Dasho would never be so ill-bred as to directly refer to her shame, but his silent disappointment would be that much harder to bear.
Yala bowed her head and once more took Zakkar Kai’s arm. Her skull was full of a rushing, whirling noise but she held grimly to her task, placing one foot before the other on bruising, sun-scorched stone.
She had been sent to protect her beautiful princess, and failed. All else was inconsequential. The world was a cruel summer-glaring dream, and she was lost within it.
SUBMIT, REGARDLESS
The Jonwa, home to Zhaon’s Crown Prince and hung with the pale paper bubbles of mourning-lanterns, was not much cooler than outside despite its stone floors and high ceilings. The massive sculpture of paired snow-pards in the entrance hall glowed, mellow speckled stone rubbed to satin in a pool of sunlight robbed of heat by a succession of several mirrors. The pards’ flanks cast a somber reflection upon polished wooden flooring, but the statue’s twin heads, facing each other in eternal deadlock, were both shrouded with unbleached linen.
Crown Prince Garan Takyeo, the first in succession to rule mighty Zhaon, sat at his study’s great ironwood desk, staring blankly at an open book upon the ruthlessly organized surface. It was Cao Lung’s Green Book, holding much upon the subject of mourning, but its block-pressed characters would not stay in their orderly falling-rain lines, wandering as the reader’s attention did.
He had been staring at this particular page for some while.
There was a feline scratching at the door-post, and Third Prince Garan Takshin, in a Shan lord’s head-to-toe black except for the pale slash of a knotted mourning-band upon his left arm, stepped through. “It won’t change into an eggbird, no matter how long you look at it,” he said by way of greeting, his scars— one vanishing under his red-black hair, another pleating his top lip into a sneer despite any attempt at pleasantry or even ease— flushed with morning sunshine. He had no doubt been at morning drill, and though the rest of him was freshly bathed his topknot was slightly rumpled.
“At least we would have the eggs if it did.” Takyeo tried a smile, rubbing at his freshly clipped and oiled mustache and smallbeard. Perched upon this backless chair with his wounded leg stretched straight and wrapped in odorous, herb-smeared bandages, attaining a pleasant expression was a more difficult operation than he could quite believe. “And a bright good morning to you, too. Have you eaten?”
“At dawn. Which is why I came; it is well-nigh lunchtime, and none of your servants will brave this room to scold you into keeping your strength.” Takshin’s dark, leather-soled house-slippers whispered as he padded to the shelves of annals, treatises, and other spine-bound or rolled items necessary for a prince’s intellectual exercise. He affected to study a shelf with much interest; the gold hoop in his ear gave a single savage glitter. “I am hungry too, so bestir yourself, old man.”
A thin thread of amusement broke the shell of blank inattention Takyeo had spent the morning in. It was a relief. “You are like an old woman. Co
me and eat, come and eat.”
“We must look after your health.” Takshin imitated an elderly maiden-auntie’s quaver, accompanying it with a rude gesture often seen in the sinks of the Theater District or Zhaon-An’s teeming slums. Usually, it was deployed when a brothel-keeper had not been paid her portion, or a gambling criminal wished to denounce dice for working against him without quite accusing his opponent’s hand of sleight.
The juxtaposition wrung a weary laugh from Takyeo, who began arranging his robe and his leg for the task of rising. Zakkar Kai’s pet physician swore the wound would heal true, but not if the Crown Prince placed undue strain upon sliced, violated muscle and bruised bone.
It was to Honorable Physician Kihon Jiao that Takyeo owed his ability to stand at all. The arrow that had almost crushed his femur was a heavy, barbarous affair of northern make, but many in outlying Zhaon provinces menaced by horseback bandits also used such things. The assassin’s hiding place— a bramble-choked hedgerow just outside Zhaon-An on a road much used for pleasure-jaunts by prince and noble alike— held no clues, nothing more than a blurred shape in long summer-juicy grass where the man had taken his ease and a leaf-covered pile of droppings showing that he had frequented the spot, an adder lying in wait.
“Shall I steady your cane?” Takshin continued, solicitously enough to be sarcastic, and Takyeo waved an irritated hand.
“Stop fussing, or I shall tell the physician you have a cough.” His hand felt strange without the greenstone hurei denoting princely status, returned to its owner by Zakkar Kai with a lack of comment and tucked carefully in the sleeve-pocket of whatever robe Takyeo wore. Even after dropping the ring upon the floor of the throne room and stalking away, Takyeo could not quite slip the traces of responsibility.
Gossip said the Crown Prince had flung the heavy greenstone band with its deep sharp seal-carving at his lordly father; gossip was wrong, and yet for once in his life Garan Takyeo wished it was not.
“He won’t believe it; I am generally held to be too sour to take ill in summer.” Takshin turned his back upon the study, staring at the shelves again. “He sent another letter this morning, Ah-Yeo.” The childhood nickname, born of lisping younger siblings’ half-swallowed attempts to honorably name their elder, brushed along paper and leather spines, touched the carved ends of neatly stacked scrollcases of segmented babu.
“Mh.” Takyeo left the Green Book where it lay. After lunch, he would try again. It was merely a question of will, was it not? Like everything else. “Of course it was not a Red Letter.” Those imperial missives, with their giant scarlet cartouches, could not be turned away. The Crown Prince’s orders to his steward Keh were very specific— nothing from the Emperor but a Red Letter could be brought into Takyeo’s presence.
Inside the Jonwa, he was the ruler— at least until his father ordered succession differently. There was no point in even hoping for such a change, since it would not alter the underlying battlefield.
Nothing would.
“Of course.” Takshin ran a callused fingertip, scraped from near daily, always punishing practice with weighted wooden sword and blunted knife, along a shelf of classics, his head cocked slightly. “He expects you to submit, regardless.”
“He does.” Takyeo had submitted all his life. Be princely, their father always said. You are my heir, and must behave as such.
It was unexpectedly easy to refuse. Or, if not quite refuse, then to drag his half-lame heels and parry the expectations hung upon him from the cradle. Sometimes Takyeo wondered what his long-dead mother would say of all this, but the painting of her in the ever-lit shrine Garan Tamuron attended daily— as well as the portrait enclosed in his eldest son’s own household shrine— merely smiled emptily.
The age of miracles, of painted mothers finding their voices to chide husbands and errant descendants, was long over, if it had ever existed outside of tales told to gullible children. No intercession could be expected, especially when Garan Tamuron, Emperor of Zhaon and Heaven-blessed father of many sons, had decided upon a certain course.
Takyeo paid his respects to his mother’s portrait in the Jonwa’s shrine daily too, like any good son. Since the wedding, his foreign wife had too. She has a kind face, his wife had said of his long-dead, barely remembered mother, and added her own shy smile.
An entire morning spent seeking to avoid thinking upon his grief was wasted now, and the strange buzzing inside his bones mounted another notch. He was no closer to discovering the source of that maddening, unsteady feeling. There was nothing about it in any of the medical treatises he had read in the course of a princely education, and he did not think Kihon Jiao would consider it a symptom.
Takshin half-turned, not quite glancing aside to regard his eldest brother. It was an unexpected mercy; either of them could say what they wished, not having to scrutinize the other’s face for a reaction. “I am glad you will not,” he said, finally, in a level tone stripped of his usual sharp sarcasm. “’Tis high time he learned what it is to be balked, and by you, no less.”
“It is not disobedience.” Takyeo found his leg was not overly stiff; the silver-headed cane propped against his desk took his weight admirably. “Merely disinterest.”
“So I have pointed out, but I do not think he takes it as comfort.” Takshin’s smile was not gentle at all. He had been a prickly but soft-hearted child before his first trip to Shan, prone to flinging himself into battle to right every perceived wrong. Now he made no move to aid his eldest brother, a welcome change from everyone else’s flitting and fussing.
Takyeo suspected any attempt to thank his younger sibling for such forbearance would be met with either indifference or a snarl, so he made none. “He probably suspects you enjoy my recalcitrance.”
“He suspects correctly. I only wonder it took you this long.” But speaking of their august father was not Takshin’s sole purpose, and nor was baiting his brother to lunch, the gleam in his eye said. “Your housekeeper is beside herself. You have given some orders she does not think are quite wise.”
Lady Kue was not given to gossip, but she could hardly keep such preliminary arrangements from the notice of another member of the household. Takyeo took a tentative step, found his balance and leg both held, and wondered how long the mercy would last. “I doubt she says as much.”
“You are correct. Still, there is a proverb in Shan about a master’s foolish wishes, and I would wager she is muttering it today.” Takshin’s chin almost touched his shoulder, keeping his brother in peripheral vision. Still, he did not turn, his broad back exposed. It was, like all his poses, only partly disdain, and wholly a message. And now Takshin, choosing his own course as usual, arrived at the heart of his business with his eldest brother. “Do you truly intend to withdraw to the countryside?”
Perhaps he was the only one who could— or would— ask in such a manner. Even Kai did not mention the rumors, though he was patently aware and had probably guessed Takyeo’s departure date as well, though such information lingered only in the secret cavern of the Crown Prince’s head-meat as of yet. “My household has undergone some changes of late, Taktak.” Takyeo made certain his robe fell in its usual folds. Pale silk, both bleached and unbleached, strict mourning, though he could have chosen regular cloth and an armband three days after the pyre. A wife was not a parent, and yet he wished to mark the fact of her absence even more profoundly. “Surely you have noticed.”
“Very well, we shall retreat to a country villa to lick our wounds.” Takshin took no offense. His slight, ironclad smile stayed just the same, not stretching or diminishing by any fraction. “I’m certain Lady Yala could use a change of scenery as well.”
“No doubt.” Takyeo was equally certain that consideration weighed heavily in his brother’s scales. It was not quite clear whether Takshin was simply fond of the Khir lady-in-waiting, or if he harbored other designs. If it was the latter, it would be the first time he’d evinced any real interest in a court lady, and it was just like Takshin to c
hoose a foreign one. “I have not asked her plans or preferences. When her mourning is done, perhaps we shall find an accommodation for her.”
It was, after all, the least a Crown Prince could do. His wife would have wished her friend safely placed.
“Perhaps.” Takshin did not rise to the bait, unwilling as always to show his true feelings— and have them used against him. But he did turn to face his eldest brother fully, and that was an encouraging sign. “Well, are you ready to hobble to table, Eldest Brother? If we wait much longer I shall begin chewing your shelves.”
Takyeo’s grimace was good-natured, and only partly pained. “You travel upon your stomach like a merchant.” A bird called in one of the Jonwa’s gardens, a high sharp piercing trill, and he wondered, before he could stop himself, if his wife had heard the sound.
Did her shade linger? You were not supposed to hope for such a thing. It generally meant there were matters left unaddressed and a spirit could not rest. Such diaphanous presences rarely stayed beneficent.
“Or an army.” Takshin’s smile was that rare beast, a sliver of genuine amusement from the Shan-adopted prince. That barbarous land with its mad, now-dead queen had taken his bristling, heart-soft younger brother and returned this fellow, who showed only infrequent flashes of his former self. “Come.”
For all that, Takshin could be relied upon, and not merely because his adoption removed him from the line of succession. Even if Zhaon’s throne were offered him with both palms, Taktak might refuse with a sneer and a sword-cut, especially if the offer was made in a manner he considered impolite, pitying, or even merely jesting.
The Crown Prince took another experimental step. His leg held. Perhaps after lunch Takyeo could summon his wife’s lone Khir lady-in-waiting and they could desultorily speak upon the classics. Discussing the Hundreds in fits and starts, Lady Komor visibly and audibly searching for safe subjects to converse upon, the occasional silences between them restful instead of pained…somehow, it helped.
