by Jaida Jones
One of the red-faced lords seated next to the Emperor was speaking. He looked like a kettle ready to whistle, trembling slightly with the force of his words. Or maybe it was just his reaction to the Emperor, who was looking at him with intent interest. I was real glad that the Emperor’d never had cause to look at me like that, but I was even more glad that I wasn’t the man next to him, who seemed to be experiencing his own personal rainstorm of spittle.
“Not that I wish to cast aspersions,” he went on. “I merely wanted to bring it up as a matter of course so that we might dismiss the possibility up front and get along with our business.”
I was still lost. Casimiro snorted, his hands folded against the table. Josette was staring daggers at me, and Greylace was sitting still as a little doll, neat and unhelpful as you please.
That was just great.
Fiacre opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think the better of it and turned to me.
“General Alcibiades, I imagine, can explain himself quite capably.”
Just as I was thinking that I might have to toss pride aside for sense—and kick myself for it later—Josette shifted in her seat and sat up straight.
“This is all so silly,” she began, drawing a fan out of her sleeve as though she was embarrassed, which was about the most ridiculous thing I could imagine, since I was pretty sure Josette hadn’t been embarrassed since the day she was born. “I’m afraid it’s my fault, only General Alcibiades is too much the gentleman to place the blame on a woman. The fact of the matter is we were all up quite late together, the three of us, discussing what a lovely reception we’d been given in your honored palace. I quite lost track of the time, so that it was well past midnight when I sent him and Caius Greylace back to their rooms.”
The Emperor raised his eyebrows and settled back into his seat. There was a smile on his face, but it wasn’t a kind one.
“They were seen near the kitchens,” he pointed out, as if commenting on some minor mistake Josette had made in an equation, and not like he knew she’d just spun that whole story out of nothing, which she most definitely had.
“Surely you can’t expect everyone to have memorized their way through your magnificent palace already,” Josette said coyly, but with a hint of steel.
The Emperor tilted his head, resting it against forefinger and thumb while he gazed at Josette like he was trying to decide whether or not to have her removed from the room. Caius laid his hand against my arm underneath the table, and I was so keyed up I almost hit him. Tensions like that always made my blood run hot—it was like the calm before a battle.
Then just like that, the Emperor nodded and shifted to sit up straight once more.
“Lord Jiro, I thank you for your concern, but I do not believe any man or woman from the delegation was responsible for the disappearance of my brother. We are all… united in our wish for peace, and such an act would make our talks impossible.”
Fiacre nodded, not betraying one way or another how he felt about the matter, but I was pretty damn sure he was going to be chewing Josette’s ear off the next time we adjourned.
I tried to catch her eye, but she was waving her fan back and forth and wouldn’t look at me.
“Back to the matter at hand,” the Emperor said, leaning to one side to reach for a sheaf of papers.
When he moved, his jewelry swung, and I caught sight of something he hadn’t been wearing the night before. It was a strange little necklace, with what looked like a red pendant at the end of a thin silver chain. Except that as I caught sight of how it refracted the light, and how the color changed depending on which way he moved, I realized it wasn’t a pendant at all, but a little vial of blood dangling pretty as you please and resting just over his heart.
That was just creepy, any way you sliced it. I’d have to ask Marcy later if she’d seen it.
“… in the best interests of Volstov,” the Emperor was still rattling on. His translator was hard pressed to keep up with him. “Gentlemen and ladies, surely you must understand our distress. We have done our best to prepare for your arrival, only to encounter such a betrayal. We will do all we can to protect the terms of the provisional treaty. If you give your permission—for in the spirit of the relationship we hope to foster, we would not act without it—we will employ all our might to unearth the traitor and bring him before a bipartisan court—a court both Ke-Han and Volstovic, for we would have none other.”
Caius, sitting next to me, sat up straighter. No doubt he was just excited about the idea of getting to decree a real, live Ke-Han beheading. Across the table from me, Ozanne looked rather pale.
“Of course we understand your position,” Fiacre responded, when it was our turn to speak. He had a nice, friendly voice, but it sounded smart, too; the sort of man you wanted to be head of your peace talks because he was slippery but he didn’t sound it, at first. Real smooth. And he’d shrewdly chosen a translator who managed to echo his diplomat’s tone. “And we do not wish a traitor of any kind to run loose in your kingdom. And yet we question the wisdom of releasing so many soldiers in pursuit of him. Surely, to show such an armed presence will merely…”
And so it went, on and on, long past what should have been breakfast and even through what I could only guess was supposed to be lunchtime. By the time there was any kind of pause, my stomach had turned into a tightened, empty fist and it was making the kinds of noises that were sure to offend some petty Ke-Han lord having a real bad morning—one who was just looking for a fight.
“Lunch?” Caius offered, and for once, I actually agreed.
Back in our rooms, we ate our rice—I was going to get sick of that very soon, I could tell—and, glad to have something in my belly at last, I made the mistake of asking him if he’d seen that queer necklace the Emperor had been wearing. Marcy’d disappeared, and I guessed it had been on my mind more than I’d thought.
“He wasn’t wearing it last night, as far as I could see,” I added, trying to shovel my rice into my mouth straight from the bowl with those infernal sticks. There was no other way to use them, I was sure of it.
“He wasn’t,” Caius agreed, then, on sudden inspiration, jabbed his own sticks excitedly toward my face. He was going to have to stop tempting me to hit him and call it simple reflex. “Oh! I know what it might be. Have you heard of the Ke-Han blood magic?”
“Rumors,” I admitted, however grudgingly. Those were the kinds of stories that had been told around the campfire—born of fear and breeding more fear. A soldier told those stories to other soldiers so it was easier to hate the enemy. “Blood magic” had a definition that varied, depending on who was telling the story that night, and though it might’ve had some grounding in truth once upon a time, it’d grown beyond that. One time it had to do with killing lions and drinking their blood; another it had to do with how the magicians in the lapis city worked their magic by using blood as ink when they practiced their calligraphy. I’d stopped listening to the stories a long while back since I didn’t need any more reason to hate anyone, especially the Ke-Han.
It was the sort of information I’d needed to purposefully put from my mind in order to embark on this trip without taking my grievances up with th’Esar himself. As a reward, I might have said, for all my good services to the crown, d’you think I could have had a damn vacation and not some more fucking work? And, promptly, I’d’ve been banished from my home, which, after years of fighting, was the last thing I wanted. So I’d swallowed the memories and kept biting my tongue.
Only the very phrase brought back campfire nights, in the belly of some mountain, listening to the rumble of the dragons overhead, or the howl of the trebuchets as they let each new fireball loose.
“You’re wearing a curious expression,” Caius said.
“Don’t like the rice,” I answered.
“Hm,” Caius said, not entirely satisfied, but clearly not yet willing to be deterred from imparting what he saw as vital information. “In any case, I read all about it when I w
as in exile, you know. Fascinating people, the Ke-Han, with their odd little rituals and their quaint ideas. If Iseul’s wearing that vial of blood—oh, if only we could ask him!—it probably isn’t his.”
“All right,” I said. “How d’you figure that?”
“Because the magic is very simple, really,” Caius said. “In many ways, it operates as a microcosm of the way in which they poisoned our Well: If you poison the river, you poison the whole ocean. Contaminate the source—in this case a mere few drops of blood—and it’s possible to kill the man who owned it. Or so the book said. I’m sure that’s vastly oversimplified, but until I can learn to translate Ke-Han texts…” He shrugged delicately. “Brilliant, though, isn’t it?”
I thought of lying prone in the Basquiat, wondering how long it would take me to die, listening to the god-awful coughing move like it was catching from cot to cot, and how I had a power in me—something to do with water, real useful Margrave Royston had said, then never bothered elaborating on, the horse’s ass—that I’d never asked for and didn’t want, running like blood through my veins and making it easier to strike me down without so much as a warning.
Brilliant wasn’t exactly what I’d call it.
Twisted, maybe. Tortured. The product of a people we’d been fighting and hating—both, maybe, for equally good reasons—for generations. And fucked. I put my rice bowl down.
“Not hungry?” Caius asked, though something in his eyes suggested he’d sensed his blunder and was actually perplexed as to how he’d offended me this time. I didn’t bother acknowledging it and just looked away, since, sitting so close, it was easy to see how strange his eyes were. They were different colors, one of them green and the other one, carefully hidden behind the fall of his silky hair, a pale, murky white.
“Finished,” I gritted out.
“Good!” he said, all good cheer suddenly restored. “Because we’re going to be late.”
The last thing I wanted was another few hours of listening to Fiacre and the Emperor go back and forth, with the occasional addition by Josette or another member of our merry band, while the rest of the Ke-Han warlords kept silent as the grave. But that was what I got. I was going to fall asleep in the middle of it all if it went on too much longer, and that was a hard enough task to manage, since they had us set up in parallel lines facing each other down the length of a long, stuffy room, sitting on nothing more than uncomfortable pillows. It was worse than Volstov diplomacy, which was sheer torture if you caught the men from the bastion on a day for arguing taxes. But at least, in Volstov, they had the decency to provide you with chairs.
One of my legs had lost all feeling, and I’d stopped listening entirely, when suddenly everyone was putting something to a vote.
I looked around the room, desperate for some clue. What were we deciding on? It was still only the first day of deliberation, so it couldn’t have been anything that crucial, but the look on the Emperor’s face implied otherwise. He looked determined behind that stony mask, a statue carved out of pure iron will.
“Don’t worry,” Caius whispered. “It’s for whether or not we should spend the rest of the day trying to decide how many men should go after the prince, or retire for now and finish the day that was planned for us, before this… unforeseen event arose. The Emperor himself isn’t voting, however—it’s bad form.”
The way I saw it, the Emperor was clearly hoping for the vote to go toward the former. If he could keep us trapped there even an hour or so longer, he’d probably wear Fiacre down into agreeing on a number. If we started afresh the next day, new stubbornness would have set in after the night, and it would be harder to convince our men of anything.
I already knew which way I was voting.
The other men and women from Volstov must’ve been thinking along the same lines as I was, since the vote came down to retiring for the night. Maybe they were just tired; I didn’t care. I took grim satisfaction in being able to think I’d thwarted the Emperor. Maybe it was petty, but then again I’d never told anyone I was the man for this sort of job. It’d just been decided for me, and I was going to play it the way I saw fit, short of getting into any real trouble.
“Ah, fresh air,” Caius said, standing next to me and breathing in deeply before letting out a fluttery little sigh. I’d heard women make that kind of noise. “Well! What do you think we should do now?”
“What should we do?” I spluttered, since I’d been looking forward all day to finally shaking him off once night rolled around.
“I thought,” Caius went on blithely, “that we might request guidance to the menagerie. Of course, it won’t be what it was before the war—so many of the animals were lost or killed, you know, during the final attack of the dragons on the capital—but I still hear it’s uncommonly beautiful. Just the sort of relaxation we need after a hard day deliberating, don’t you agree?”
I didn’t, and I had half a mind to tell him exactly what I did agree to. And none of it involved him.
Except he’d turned his back on me almost immediately and, in the midst of the crowd—stony-faced warlords and passive servants and stretching men and women from Volstov, all of whom suddenly looked just as tired and uncomfortable as I felt—he was waving down some hapless creature.
“Menagerie!” he said, gesturing wildly with his arms. I thought he looked like a bird—but that was probably what he was going for. “Animals? We’d like to go there.”
The servant shook his head. No doubt he thought the pale-skinned sprite was mad. He was right.
Caius sighed, and said something I didn’t understand. Half of it sounded like a question and half of it sounded like a command, but all of it sounded like the Ke-Han.
“Seems you’re a little too fluent,” I said.
“Oh, I know the odd elementary phrase here and there,” Caius replied.
“And ‘Would you take us to see the menagerie’ is one of them?”
Caius’s lips twitched unevenly, the left corner lifting higher than the right. He looked like an imp. “I learned what I thought I’d need,” he said. “And as you can see, it’s served us both. This patient young man is going to show us the peacocks.”
“You’re going to see the menagerie?” Josette asked, suddenly beside us. “You know, I think that’s just the thing I need this evening. Is it very far?”
Caius tapped the side of his jaw with one finger. The nail was a perfect oval, manicured like that of a woman at the Fans. “It isn’t too far a walk, from what I recall. Certainly the sort of brisk evening stroll to put color on a lady’s cheeks.”
“You should enjoy it too, then,” Josette said wryly.
I’d never minded Josette, at least. If I was lucky—which I wasn’t, but I still liked to hope—then he’d talk to her all night and leave me right out of it.
“You will pardon my intrusion,” a Ke-Han-accented voice said from just behind me, “but if you are going to the menagerie, then it is only fitting you should be taken there by a guide, and not a servant.”
I turned, not liking the way he spoke—he was too confident at it, for one thing, and a confident man of the Ke-Han set off all kinds of alarms, no matter how much I’d supposedly trained myself out of those old soldier’s reactions.
It was the lord who’d sat to the left of the Emperor. He’d been introduced the night before, and when I tried to remember, the name came back to me as one of the most important in the quick tutorial the ’Versity students had given all the diplomats who didn’t know their asses from their elbows: Lord Temur.
Caius, of course, was ecstatic.
“Would you offer your services to us, my lord?” he asked, like a blushing maiden entertaining her suitor. “I’ve been so looking forward to seeing the peacocks!”
He was laying it on a little bit thick, I thought, but Lord Temur proffered a faint, unreadable smile. A civility, as far as I could tell, but at least he was trying. His hair boasted more braids than the young prince’s had, but fewer than his formidable b
odyguard’s. I was starting to judge men by the quality of their hair—a peculiarity I didn’t altogether enjoy noting in myself, but it was useful there. Lord Temur looked fierce, but fewer braids meant that he was more of a diplomat than he was a soldier. Or maybe he had men to do all his soldiering for him. I didn’t know, and I didn’t plan on making polite conversation with the man until I could find out.
“That’s very kind of you to offer,” Josette added, ever the diplomat. I thought that the lord hadn’t so much offered himself as given a shrewd counsel, but that was the danger in coming too close to the swirling tornado of conversation that was Caius Greylace. Even an important Ke-Han warlord wasn’t immune to getting swept up, turned all about, and spat back out again whenever the storm grew tired of its latest plaything.
But Lord Temur didn’t seem too concerned about that though he couldn’t have realized the danger yet. Instead of running for the hills, he extended to Josette the same thin smile he’d given Caius and offered his arm. There was just enough time for Josette to look surprised then flattered before Caius launched himself into the gap between them like a small, very well-groomed dog doing a trick with a hoop.
“You are too kind,” he murmured, beaming that grin that made him look more like a jack-o’-lantern than a person. He laid his hand delicately on Lord Temur’s arm like he was used to getting that sort of treatment. “Oh! What a lovely fabric.”
I didn’t think that Lord Temur was the sort of man who concerned himself with what fabric his robes were made out of though there was no way of telling that from the expression on his face. Disregarding that smile, I hadn’t ever seen his face lose its calm, blank stare. Not even during the talks.
“The menagerie is this way,” he said, and bowed, before turning around and starting off. Caius looked pleased as punch.
“Now, you mustn’t think me rude, but are you quite certain that all the lions are safely within their cages?” he asked.
