“The woman is insane from the years of pain,” Umenasyo had told everyone as he exited her quarters—all the masters and some of the brightest apprentices gathered in the antechambers, jittery with anticipation. “She can’t be helped.”
“Did she even let you near her?” Kyoda asked him, grim. The most talented apprentice, Kyoda was the first to enter the Queen’s rooms. She’d rejected him instantly.
Umenasyo was shaking his head, a cruel smile of disbelief on his lips. “Not to touch, not to lay a glance on her, not even to say a greeting. She broke down and that was it.”
The silence was never so complete as after these words.
Adzeo went next, alongside master Toyou. There, inside the splendid rooms, adorned and latticed and gilded and sprinkled with flower petals of all the sweet trees, he choked on the words he was meant to say in proper greeting. He stuttered and froze at the threshold. As soon as Amanoori met his eye for a blinking second, Adzeo dashed in the opposite direction. His only true talent.
He didn’t hear what the other apprentices asked him as he rushed through the antechamber, knocking into Kyoda, almost stumbling down. He only stopped several galleries away, clutching his chest and laboring through every breath. He had never been so terrified in his life. Seeing the Kenduan mask’s faint outline at the core of another human person was like a strike of lightning up Adzeo’s spine.
Bent down and trembling was how master Toyou found him.
“You all right, my boy?” Always attentive, she pulled him into a hug, and he didn’t even resist. Much.
“I suppose that’s the extent of my service to the Queen,” he said, too ashamed to lend voice to his words. Toyou had to lean to hear him. Adzeo shook his head and added, “I hope you apologized to her on my behalf, Toyou.”
“Apologize yourself. She wants to see you. Again.” Toyou answered his horrified stare with a smile. From the fold of her batwing robe, she took out a mask wrapped in black silk. Even from the vague shape under the fabric, Adzeo recognized Yungu, the Brave.
“Me?”
Toyou peeled the wrapper silk off the mask, corner by corner and, holding it gently like the precious thing it was, offered it to Adzeo. “Yes, you. Of all the brash apprentices and masters, some of whom are vastly better than you’ll ever be—if I may be so humble to say this—she chose you. She says you’re the only one whose presence doesn’t hurt.”
He let her place Yungu on his face and breathed calmer as soon as the mask molded with his skin.
The glares. The “how can it be you? Such a loser?”-scowls and the narrowing of eyes that greeted him as he went back to the Queen’s gilded halls. Every apprentice and master kept quiet while he passed them. Except for Umenasyo.
“Is this a joke …?” he said in a low voice, but still loudly enough that Adzeo heard.
Before going into the rooms, Adzeo turned, too bold not to answer. Under Yungu’s influence he even grinned. “Yes. Laugh.”
Oh, Umenasyo hated being cheated out of his luck.
* * *
Roof tiles slid and slipped from under his feet and shattered on the flagstone street. Adzeo jumped the buildings and hung from the edges of the walls and skidded his feet to climb the fences to hide behind them. He wasn’t good at fighting or diplomacy. Even in childhood, he could never win a fight or talk anyone out of it. But he could run, and through the years this skill only reached new heights.
Finally, a day—a night—to make use of it.
A window sill, a rafter cross, a rain-gutter filled with mud. Jump, reach out, roll over.
The count of the Hunters and Chasers went down to one pretty quickly. The first to abandon the chase couldn’t make the jump between the buildings, the second slipped on a loose tile. The others? Adzeo only heard Umenasyo’s footfalls after him, and those were the ones that mattered.
He didn’t have time for speaking, nor patience to run the whole city up and down to lose Umenasyo. He had to get to Amanoori soon, whatever the cost, had to speak to her and wash away the guilt and shame and horror of her deed. She did not deserve to be blamed for this and be hauled away into some asylum, kept there forever.
If only Umenasyo would break a leg or twist an ankle, just this one time. Just once.
Not possible. With Shoza, the Hunter’s mask on his face, he was destined to succeed. No one could deny him that.
So Adzeo slid down into the quiet yard welled by the dark buildings around it. A moment before Umenasyo’s footsteps thundered on the buttress from which Adzeo had jumped, Adzeo pulled the Yungu mask on. He retreated into the shadows of the maple trees, slow and careful. Waiting. The night was dark; he could manage this.
Umenasyo dawdled up above. Only his paced breathing broke the silence in the yard. Then he hopped down onto the gravel, knife ready in his hand.
He chose the exact direction in which Adzeo had hidden.
“Lucky Hunter,” Adzeo said and sprang on him, aiming for the knife. He missed, and Umenasyo swerved around to keep away. Adzeo staggered upright, sneering. “You caught me, Shoza. What now?”
Umenasyo held the blade steady, his hand jerking as though to stab the air, as though readying for the actual hit.
“Hunters don’t kill,” Adzeo reminded him. Then he stepped aside, ducked under the branches that rained petals on him. His eyes didn’t stray from Umenasyo’s. He could see the doubt, the waver behind them. “Hunters catch, Umenasyo. You have to change back to the Executioner to succeed in this.”
Umenasyo spat and turned the knife’s handle in his grip to strike easier. “I can act without a mask guiding me.” With this, he reached for his cheekbones, swept his fingers around and peeled Shoza off. He threw it on the gravel. “You?”
Adzeo rammed himself into Umenasyo’s chest. They clutched each other, and Umenasyo whipped his hand in a slicing strike. Adzeo dodged.
The knife struck, again and again, and not once could it hit. Umenasyo growled, spittle flying from his mouth, and Adzeo echoed the pain, the anger, the frustration as they rolled amidst the flowerbeds. Adzeo’s hands on Umenasyo’s throat slipped, his punches missed and hit the ground. For one split second, Umenasyo curled his fingers around the Yungu mask on Adzeo’s face. But he didn’t rip it off. His hand fell away without trying.
“Damn it!” Umenasyo roared and kicked Adzeo off himself. He grimaced, holding his injured rib, while Adzeo got on all fours. Both of them were out of energy or hope to win this encounter. “A Survivor fighting a Lucky One is a joke, for heaven’s sake. It’s not me you need to fight.”
“Surrender my life? Never.”
Umenasyo stared, eyes slowly calming from their anguish. “No. Are you insane? No.”
“I know how it goes.” Adzeo sat back on his heels, glowering at the tree shadows sprawled in a lace pattern on the ground. “I know one of you has to kill me for bringing dishonor to the Guild.”
Umenasyo muttered a curse. “It doesn’t mean I can do it, you ungrateful swine. I, or anyone else. We chase you and we hunt, but none actually wants to succeed tonight. Do you not know us at all?”
They sat in silence for a while, trading looks that didn’t linger for more than a second. Finally, Adzeo asked, “Then what? What are you doing with this knife, chasing after me for half the city?”
Umenasyo groaned again and flung his knife away. “I don’t know. I am Angun. Everyone expects me—me—to chase you down. Everyone expects me to be the one who kills you. Do you know the pressure of being the Lucky One, all the time?” In the darkness, his eyes reflected the moonlight. “Do they care what I want to do and what I don’t? They just think since I can’t fail, I should be the one to do everything. Well, guess what …” He laughed bleakly and flashed a rude gesture to the moon.
“Umenasyo …”
He went on, ignoring Adzeo’s feeble attempt to reach out to his hand. “Sometimes that’s who you need to fight. Not others, or any of the people put against you in life, but the stupid mask at the back of your head.”
Adzeo
slowly rose to his feet.
“I am. I’m trying. Right now, I am going to Amanoori, to plead guilty.”
This time Umenasyo’s laughter was full of genuine joy, or folly. It started soft and rippling, ended with a sigh. “That’s rubbish, Adzeo.”
But Adzeo didn’t need to listen to this. He went around to get the knife, matter-of-factly, without hurry.
Umenasyo continued, “We all know it. You can’t—you won’t—go through with it. Don’t lie to yourself. You can’t defeat the Hirisa on your own and give up your life, even for someone else. However much you want to. It is better to let others deal with that before it drives you crazy.” At last, he returned Adzeo’s stare, and held. “I hope you understand this.”
It was too late to try to respond. Umenasyo flinched at the last possible moment, and Adzeo nearly missed. The knife sunk into Umenasyo’s thigh.
He screamed.
God, how he screamed, high and breaking.
“You bastard! I will tear you apart myself, you—” Umenasyo flung palmfuls of gravel after Adzeo as he scuttled away, up the rafter beams to the roof.
Umenasyo would be fine, Adzeo knew. No major arteries were hurt. He was fortunate like that.
Most importantly, he didn’t have to chase down Adzeo now—precisely as he wished.
“I was lucky to be your friend,” Adzeo called from the roof, but heard only the inane curses in return. The best goodbye a friend can give.
He descended to the street level of the city to run towards the palace, all the while trying to avoid gloomy strangers and inebriated drunks who had their share of free alcohol tonight, in mourning. And, as the distance between him and Amanoori wasted away, so did his resolve.
Hirisa numbed his limbs and dread and chill spread under his skin. His traitorous heart fluttered faster, and he had to pause to catch a breath after every bout. Each of his steps was leaden the closer he got to the Maple Leaf groves. Until he stopped completely.
Yungu snarled in a feral grin under his skin—demanding, ordering Adzeo to go on. But his body locked down, unable to so much as stir.
Please … Adzeo begged himself, the paralysis that clutched him, all in vain.
Umenasyo was right. It wasn’t the chasers and hunters and guards he needed to defeat tonight. It was Hirisa. Himself.
He had to defeat his own survival instinct, honed to perfection through the years. Yungu wasn’t nearly enough help against it. Adzeo had to find another mask to put on.
He had no idea if one like that existed.
* * *
Hirisa and Yungu worked together so well that first time, in Amanoori’s quarters, under her gaze. Adzeo was stiff and aching in every bone and every taut muscle, but he didn’t run away. And she stood so close, too.
He showed her masks and wrote down her answers and her history with the previous tries. He avoided her eyes as much as he could while all she did was watch—and watch, dark lashes still, her gaze coming to life through a film of tears that hadn’t dried yet.
“Adzeo … is it?” she asked when he’d exhausted the long list of masks the other masters and apprentices had given him to try to help the poor woman. Amanoori wasn’t interested in masks. Maybe, just one. “What mask is on the back of your head, Adzeo?”
“Hirisa, my queen.”
“Ah. The Survivor. I wore it once. It nearly killed me.” She kept quiet for a long time, withdrawing back to the curtained part of the room. Adzeo could see only her vague outline beyond the fluttering silks. It was easier when the two of them were so far apart, so he didn’t have the urge to buck when she turned to him again. “Is that why you ran? It told you that I am a danger to you?”
Probably nobody would call her beautiful from simply seeing her face, as Adzeo had now the courage to. But Kenduan had such a visible emanation, a corrosive warping force around her, that it made her more than a mere human woman. Her misery drew people to her like magnetism. The pain followed.
Behind the curtains, she never let her teary eyes wander off Adzeo. “Do you want to run away now?”
He didn’t lie. “Yes, my queen. I wish to be anywhere else but here. That is probably the only reason my presence doesn’t hurt you like the others’.”
“I thought so. It never happened, before.” She smiled, a faint ghost of joy. “It’s funny. And cruel. Because it now hurts you instead of me.”
“Serving you is my honor.” Adzeo bowed. “I will help you find the mask that will fit you, even if that kills me, my queen.” Saying these words was agonizing—Hirisa squirmed all through Adzeo’s body, down to the marrow of his bones—but Adzeo meant them. From all of the mask makers Amanoori had encountered, of course he had to be the one who understood her suffering perfectly. Maybe this was his call—to help this poor woman fight the vile mask at her core even if he couldn’t do the same for himself. Maybe dying for this cause was even worth it. When he rose again, Amanoori slipped through the curtains, a step closer. Had any woman ever smiled at him before, like she did?
His heart squeezed and he wasn’t sure if it was because of Hirisa’s fear, or because of how she looked at him—as though he was the only person in the world worth looking at.
“You want to give up your life to find a mask for me? I hope you’ll never find it, then,” she said.
Of course, he lied when he told her he hoped differently.
Two weeks went by like this—in pain and hidden hopes.
They rushed, each day bearing doom, full of worry and betrayals of the heart. How could he have been so careless? How could he have deafened his ears to Hirisa’s frenzied screams in the background? How did he let her get so close and start thawing in laughter and giggles and tender looks in his presence, filling his thoughts, day and night, with her voice?
There were masks lying between them, and all of them had failed. But Amanoori didn’t need them, really. She was happy just with this—talking and sharing comfort in silence. That seemed more than enough.
Sometimes she looked long at him and he basked in that gaze. Sometimes her slick black hair brushed against his cheek as he bent down to carve new masks shaped to fit her profile perfectly. She looked from beyond his shoulder, and then, for a tiny fraction of time, they shared the same breath before she would get self-conscious and withdraw.
“This one is so beautiful.” She picked up Riani from the velvet cushions on the floor. It was a lovely mask made to endear those who laid eyes on it. Adzeo had brought it among the other similar ones today, because tomorrow the Flower Parade would start, and the Queen had to join her regal husband for the celebration. She could do it, she said, but it was a torment to endure, and so she was already miserable, waiting.
Adzeo’s fingers trembled when he took Riani and offered its silk-lined side to Amanoori. She didn’t even need to try; her features distorted in agony. “I … can’t,” she said. “What is its name?”
“Lover.” Adzeo pulled it away to put back into its case, cradling it like a treasure in his hands.
“Lover?” Amanoori smiled, as though in a joke she wanted to share. “Take Yungu off,” she asked and took Riani, held it up—for him.
“My queen … I—”
“I want to see it on you.”
“Isn’t it forbidden?”
She wrinkled her nose up in a grimace. “Is that a distasteful joke, Adzeo? I would have never believed you could be so insensitive.”
“My Queen …” Adzeo said, mortified, but she was already laughing at him. God, how he loved her laugh. His own lips couldn’t help but ease into a smile, too.
“Come on. Lover,” she said, suddenly serious. She stood too close now. She was drinking in his breath as she waited, Riani in her hand just inches below Adzeo’s chin.
He shouldn’t have agreed. But he did. He would agree to anything she asked.
In Riani, the world seemed different in a flash.
It now seemed entirely possible to grin back at her, even though his body wrung in helpless pain as she
leaned in to give him a kiss on the lips. An agony far greater struck him: knowing that she was married to another man and would never be able to leave him, the King of Kings, the ruler of the Great River kingdoms, for someone as nobody as Adzeo. And with that last thought, dark, bitter jealousy sparked in Adzeo’s heart.
So he said, “My queen, I have an idea on what mask to give you for the Flower Parade.”
He gave her a second Kenduan—to put on her face.
“It can counteract the Kenduan at your core,” he said, his Lover’s words tinted with lie and covered in denial. “You can put it on tomorrow, before the Parade.”
She trusted him.
* * *
Another Kenduan had suited her well; she hadn’t even felt any pain. She was used to such a mask. Only at the plum-petaled square, when the king had taken Amanoori’s hand, one she hadn’t allowed him to seize …
It all had come crashing down.
The night began to pale, and the city slowly came to life as the bakers and the milkmen woke up, first of many, lighting the windows with dim glows through the dark. Adzeo couldn’t go to the Palace, but that didn’t mean there was nowhere for him to go. At the cross of the Potters’ Street and the Eucalyptus Alley, he stopped, tired, dirty, Yungu sitting serene on his face. Master Toyou’s shop was at the end of the street and Adzeo eyed it with no true hope left inside him.
Maybe Toyou knew what mask could counteract a Hirisa completely, but he didn’t want to ask her either. She was loyal to the Guild. She would also have to exact justice upon him, if he came near. Putting such a weight on someone’s shoulders, such guilt, such choice—was beyond cruel.
He knew that. Yet he went anyway.
All the shop’s lanterns shone through the entrance curtains and Adzeo went in unannounced.
Master Toyou didn’t look up from the ledger books stacked on the table. She drummed her fingers over the table’s surface and said, after a heavy sigh, “Of course you came. Poor boy, you had no choice.”
Guilds & Glaives Page 29
