The Ikessar Falcon

by Villoso, K. S.

  I turned to Huan, who was staring intently at his horse’s mane. He gave me a look that said he was still deferring all judgement to me. “Very well,” I murmured with a measure of reluctance. I hated waiting, but I could see the sense in Seo’s words.

  Seo whistled, guiding us up one last hill. When we reached the top, I heard the rush of water. We continued to ride on until the brush cleared and we stumbled upon a shallow basin, formed underneath a cascade of water tumbling over a staircase of flat rocks.

  I dismounted, allowing Seo to take care of the horse, and approached Huan. He fidgeted when I drew close. “I shouldn’t have let you get this far,” he said. “This isn’t…my father will not be pleased if you get hurt.”

  “I won’t lie to you, Lord Huan. While your brother’s safety is the first thing on my mind, I’m also curious to see how you are handling this entire situation. After all, a lord just admitted he had been sending me false reports.”

  “I never…”

  “Kaggawa had a copy of the reports you were not sending to Shirrokaru. You said the Anyus wanted to deal with this problem yourselves. The council was never alerted to the high number of deaths occurring in your city.”

  He tightened his fists.

  “You have to talk to me, Lord Huan. Your brother is possibly dead because of what your family has been hiding all these years. You see that?” I gestured at the sky, at the dazzling blue that was starting to spread through the blackness. “I know what it looks like when agan is spilling into the air. Don’t take me for a fool.”

  “I am not, my queen.”

  I placed my hand on his arm. “We were children together, Lord Huan. You knew me before I was queen, before these responsibilities were thrust on us. Of all the lords in the land, I always thought I could count on both of you—if not as friends, then at least as honest men. Was I wrong?”

  Huan tilted his head towards me. “Beloved Queen,” he said kindly. “It isn’t that simple.”

  “We’re rulers,” I told him. “It’s not supposed to be. But we’re supposed to help each other out. We’re supposed to put the land above ourselves, our clans, and our own interests.”

  He smirked. “Prince Rayyel always said you were an idealist, like your father.”

  “I—he said what?”

  “An old conversation before you were wed. Eikaro…” His face flinched at the sound of his brother’s name. “We were visiting the Dragon Palace at our father’s urging. He was entertaining the idea of having us participate in the studies for the royal children, like you did.” He gave a mirthless chuckle. “Of course, neither of us were keen on the idea. To be closeted with stuffy royals, most of whom looked down on us anyway—we wanted nothing to do with it. But it is difficult to sway our father once he gets it into his head that a thing has to be done, and so we went.”

  “I don’t ever recall seeing you there. This must have been before my time.”

  “It was, else we wouldn’t have talked about you so freely. I asked Prince Rayyel how much he was looking forward to your rule together. Nothing but courtesy…I wasn’t really expecting him to reply beyond courtesies himself.”

  “Rai’s the sort of person who can’t tell the difference,” I murmured. “Tell me what he said.”

  “I probably shouldn’t.”

  “I know my husband, Lord Huan. I won’t hold it against you.”

  He gave a soft smile. “He said you were a spirited child, and that you had more ideals than sense.”

  “Nevermind that I could clobber him over the head with the exact same thing myself…he must’ve told me a version of that more than once during the entire time we knew each other,” I said. “Is that it?”

  “He was concerned about you following your father’s footsteps. That we had narrowly avoided Oren-yaro rule once and should take great care to guide you so that such a thing may never come to pass. He believed that hope for the land lies with Ikessar values, not the slaughter and bloodshed your father was known for.”

  I lifted my chin. “He thought I’d grow up to be like my father?”

  “He was all but convinced of it,” Huan said. “It gave him little hope that your wedding would ever yield peace and quiet for him. He thought the queen mother was…insane…to have agreed to this.”

  “She is not,” I pointed out, “the queen mother. Who calls her that?”

  “Some of the warlords do,” Huan said. “In any case, Prince Rayyel thought she was misguided in allowing the betrothal to proceed in the first place. Bed with wolves, do you not expect to get bit? It was not a conversation we were prepared for, Beloved Queen, and we tried to remind him as best as we could that you were but a child. He agreed with that, but admitted he remained cautious over how that child will grow up.”

  He grew silent. Up in the distance, I heard the shrill call of a bird. “If you think you can distract me with talk of my husband…” I started.

  “It used to work,” he said listlessly. “I remember back in Oren-yaro, that ruckus you made in that restaurant after that cat-eyed wife of Warlord San’s decided to ask you if you remained unaware of Rayyel’s whereabouts, or were you even looking? You dropped about half a dozen threats within the blink of an eye. I had never seen Magister Arro so flustered in his life.”

  I smiled at the memory of those simpler times, even if I would have never admitted it back then, with the weight of Rayyel’s departure still so fresh in my mind. “That won’t work anymore. Not these days.”

  Huan gave an exaggerated sigh. “Well. I tried. The dragons, my queen, have two souls—their own and another, one that doesn’t quite belong to the body.” He hesitated. “This talk is…if the other warlords find out…”

  “I don’t see them anywhere,” I said. “Go on.”

  “We believe if you can separate the other soul from them, then taming them becomes as easy as it ever was. You need the dragon whole and untainted, with only one, pure soul inside of it.”

  “And you’ve been able to do this?”

  “We’ve tried, in part, with no success. The other soul always kills the dragon before we can get close. We were hoping the hatchlings would work better, especially if we try it at the tower. That’s why we built a tower larger than any in history. We wanted to start the process there.”

  “Dai said you have mages under your employ. Zarojo mages.”

  Huan grimaced. “It’s not as bad as he makes it sound. I don’t even know why he’s so opposed, considering what he is.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “A man with two souls walking inside of him.”

  ~~~

  I woke to the same, shrieking call I had heard last night. Seo was sitting right across me and looked up from the spear he was sharpening. “That’s a dragon,” he said casually.

  “That doesn’t sound like a dragon. I thought it was a bird.”

  “Well, when they’re not trying to scare us shitless, that’s what they sound like. Probably a mother trying to call her brood back to the nest. Some of them take them out at night, you know, teach them to hunt bats and civets to eat.”

  “I thought you don’t know that much about their habits.”

  “That’s just Captain Seo’s theory,” one of the men broke in while he saddled the horses. “He makes them up himself. Who knows what they do out there?”

  “We see bodies of the little creatures sometimes,” Seo explained. “I figured they don’t have enough meat for the grownups.”

  “Not for hatchlings, either,” the man pointed out.

  “Why is Dai so convinced they’re mad?” I asked.

  “You must have read about how the creatures used to be. They were always as powerful as you saw them, but they weren’t so mindlessly aggressive, especially unprovoked. That one that attacked us at the tower wasn’t even looking for a kill or it would have snatched the closest living thing and made off with it. That’s not even the worst we’ve seen. Sometimes, they…change.”

  Despite everything I kn
ew and had seen, I felt myself shivering.

  “Do not scare the queen, Seo,” Huan said, striding up to me with a steaming tin cup. He thrust it into my hands. “I’m afraid it’s only water with stewed herbs, not plum wine, but it’ll put something in your belly.”

  “Did you mistake me for one of the gilded ladies at court? I thought you knew me better than that.”

  He gave a sharp bark of laughter. “I’m trying to be courteous. My own wife would bite my head clean off for forgetting to offer her a seat, and when it came to Eikaro Tori would…” A shadow crossed his face.

  “We’ll find him,” I said.

  “Alive?” He made a sound in the back of his throat. “If he isn’t…I will have to raise his child. I’m not looking forward to that. He was always better with children than I was.”

  “I used to think the same about Rai. He had more patience for the younger students…he’d sit with them long into the night to explain all sorts of obscure topics. Me? I would’ve thrown a book at them and told them to look for the answer themselves. And then when Thanh was born…” I paused. The memory of my son brought more pain than solace these days, worsened the closer—and further—I got to him. I held my breath. “Rai barely held him as an infant. I don’t think he ever changed Thanh’s nappies once.”

  “A prince changing nappies…” Huan gave a soft chuckle.

  I took a sip of the tea and immediately regretted it. It tasted like sour wine that a cockroach had died in. “It’s not that hard. I did it myself all the time. I wasn’t going to run down the hall in the middle of the night to rouse the servants and get them to do it for me.”

  “I thought Prince Thanh had nursemaids.”

  “I stole him from them as often as I could get away with. Rai didn’t approve, of course—said I was spoiling him, but what did he know? Man like that, raised by monks…” I took another sip, because the tea did have a pleasant effect on my empty stomach.

  “You have changed,” Huan said. “We’ve been talking about Prince Rayyel the past few minutes and yet you haven’t shown the slightest inclination of throwing hot tea at me. Have you truly come to an agreement with him? I find it hard you would let it all go so easily after how you had been the last few years.”

  “I thought I dealt with it all well enough.”

  “Well enough!” He laughed. “My queen, you were a dog bristling for a fight.”

  “I’d forgive you if it weren’t for this tea. Now I feel like throwing you in prison,” I said lightly.

  “As long as I get to keep my head, I’ll consider it an honour.”

  I pressed the cup against my belly. “What did I look like to you in those years?”

  Huan scratched his ear. “Like a woman grieving,” he finally replied.

  For love. For love lost. For what it could have all been if we knew better. I stared at the green liquid in front of me, at the stalk bobbing on the surface. After a moment, I picked it up and flicked it away.

  “And now…” I started.

  “Now, you look like someone who had buried the dead.”

  I swallowed, feeling the rustle of the wind around us.

  “Why are you risking your life here?” Huan asked. “Back then, if someone had told you Prince Rayyel was in the other end of the city, you would’ve torn the door down and thrown yourself into his arms. And now—here you are, helping me chase after my brother in dragon-lands while your husband is alive somewhere…waiting for you?”

  “He was in Zarojo land,” I replied quickly. “Making his way to us as we speak. Why does it matter? I didn’t know my personal life was under scrutiny.”

  “I made it my business to learn what I could when I courted you. You’ll be surprised at how many books have been written about your relationship with Prince Rayyel. Your err—obsession with him.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” I groaned. “I need to go burn down some libraries after this.”

  “The price of being a public figure, Beloved Queen.”

  “So the reason you went and married someone else before I formally refused you...”

  “I didn’t want to get entangled in all of that,” he said, gesturing at me. “My queen, I respect you, but I wanted a marriage where there was a fair chance of my wife falling in love with me, too—a thing my father found terribly inconvenient. Your anger in those days told me you cared too much about Prince Rayyel, no matter what you said…or did.” Huan coloured. “I found it fascinating, really, considering how mismatched you were. Nevermind that there have been no recorded marriages between an Ikessar and an Orenar in all of history—your temperaments seemed ill-suited for each other. Prince Rayyel is a sensible man, strict, traditional, and uncharismatic to all but librarians and accountants—”

  “Priests seem to love him, too.”

  “And you,” Huan said, with bow, “are out here with—as I’ve heard some people call us—the scourge of the west.”

  “Perhaps your assumption of me is correct, but you misjudge Rai. He isn’t as horrible as you think he is.”

  “I never said there was anything wrong with what he was. But I do have one question, if it’s all right with you to indulge the curiosity of a man trying not to think about how to arrange his brother’s funeral pyre.”

  “Since you put it that way.”

  “Why does your voice no longer quiver when you say his name?”

  I opened my mouth.

  Seo arrived with our horses, sparing me from having to answer. “My lord, the men spotted a trail of smoke from the hill.”

  Huan’s eyes lit up. “A campfire?”

  “We don’t know, my lord. We are in dragon territory. They set things on fire all the time.”

  “Then you would’ve reported a blaze.” He swung into the saddle. “Which way?”

  I mounted my horse and cantered after them. My mouth tasted acrid, but it was amazing how the state of my nerves was keeping my hunger at bay. I found myself riding beside Cho. His hair was ruffled from sleep. “Worn out?” I asked.

  “Like you care,” Cho retorted.

  “I appreciate what you did for Tori back there,” I said. “If you hadn’t intervened, things wouldn’t have gone this way.”

  “Are you blaming me that it took the lord instead?”

  I stifled a sigh. “I’m trying to thank you, you little wretch.”

  He didn’t reply. But he didn’t need to—the conflict and irritation were plain enough on his face.

  “If this is so difficult for you,” I finally said, “why don’t you head on back? The way to the tower is clear enough. Take the horse and tell them I’m sending you on. Go back to Kaggawa and report everything that’s happening. He’ll want to know about Lahei, if he doesn’t already.”

  “Right,” Cho said, giving a short bark of laughter. “Khine will kill me if I leave you behind.”

  “Do you at least have any expressions other than sulking?”

  He nudged his horse forward without a word. I finally let out the sigh, wondering if I would’ve tolerated his behaviour if he wasn’t related to Khine. Huan’s words about my husband came back to me. Why does your voice no longer quiver when you say his name?

  We rode up a shallow gorge, one that must’ve been a riverbed once. The trees were starting to crowd around us again, and the land rose sharply on both sides, the sharp cliffs fringed with moss-covered boulders. Such wildness was uncharacteristic of the Jin-Sayeng I knew. Back home, the hills rolled gently, and though the canopy was denser, the trees did not rise as tall as the ones around here did. And the shadows, instead of being sun-dappled like in the woods in Oka Shto, felt like an endless void into which you could walk into and never be found again.

  “If it was Lord Eikaro, how would he have started a fire?” one of the men said.

  Huan grunted. “He’s resourceful, and there’s dragons everywhere.”

  “We’re getting deeper into dragon territory,” Seo broke in. “I suggest you all keep your spears ready. Never throw them—you nee
d strength to pierce dragon scale, and a number of them have learned to catch the spears in their mouth and break them in half. That last scout didn’t get much further than this—I believe their memorial is up at the next bend.”

  “Were you with them, Captain Seo?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I was with a party half a day away. You have to understand, Queen Talyien, that it took years for us to muster the courage to map the ridge this far. The dragons roamed closer to Yu-yan in the days when Warlord Ojika first took over and we spent the first decade or so just trying to keep ourselves alive. Yu-yan was in ruins. They accuse Warlord Ojika of treachery, but all my lord ever did was try to save the city.”

  “All the more reason the Dragonthrone should’ve known about your predicament.”

  “There was ahh—no Dragonthrone in those days,” Huan reminded me. “There was only Warlord Yeshin.”

  “He wasn’t Regent. His authority never left Oren-yaro.”

  “My father remembers it differently. Warlord Yeshin was involved in all affairs concerning the Dragonthrone in those years. I’ll let you imagine exactly what that entailed, Beloved Queen. Arguments and bloodshed come to mind.”

  “Arguments and bloodshed aside,” Seo continued with the small smile of someone who knew how royals handled affairs, “when we were able to build the walls, we finally had a fighting chance. When it once took at least the deaths of two or three people to kill a dragon, now we could go for days without losing anyone. The dragons learned to keep away from Yu-yan. For a while, they went for the villages and fields.”

  “It’s one of the reasons Kaggawa is so irritated with us,” Huan said. “He believes we should have expended more effort to track stray dragons beyond our walls.”

  “You rule the Sougen now,” I replied. “Isn’t it your responsibility?”

  “My queen, we don’t have enough soldiers to spare. Most of the population of Sougen is clustered in Yu-yan and we need all we can get on the walls. We explained this to the rice merchants. Unfortunate as the circumstances are, if their servants and livelihoods are being threatened, then perhaps they should shoulder the expense? Oh, but you see Kaggawa foam at the mouth if you ever bring up such a thing to him.”