by Jaida Jones
“Eat peacocks?” he asked. One of his eyes was queerly discolored, and being looked at by him felt like you were having a conversation with two different people, and both of them equally insane.
“Right,” I said. “Eat peacocks.”
I’d heard the rumors about Caius Greylace, the same as any. Kept as the Esar’s pet lapdog practically since birth, for his Talent in visions and his lack of qualms about using them to get information. He tortured anyone who possessed information and quite a few people who didn’t, if the rumors were anything to go by. Then, because he was young and wild, he went after some other poor bastard at court—the reason changed depending on who you asked, but the result was always the same—and drove him mad without blinking an eye. Well, not even the Esar could overlook that sort of thing, so he was banished quicker than a flash, exiled at fourteen and not brought back until three years later, when everyone’d been recalled for the final push. Just before we’d all gone and got slammed by that blasted plague.
He didn’t look so mad as they made him out to be, though—in fact, he just looked small and very pale, with an odd habit of pursing his lips between sentences—but I set no store by appearances. They didn’t mean as much as the deeds a man did.
His were a little queerer than most, but then we’d all done worse than we might’ve wanted, during the war.
“I doubt that’s true,” Caius rallied swiftly, adjusting one of his sleeves. “I believe you’re being truculent.”
The servant stopped a second time, saving me from having to make any kind of reply, and hooked the lamp in a sconce by another of the Ke-Han’s many useless paper-square doors. They didn’t have any locks, and for the servant to let us in, he had to go through a complicated dance of kneeling, sliding the door open, and finishing off, for no reason I could see, by bowing so low his forehead was pressed to the ground.
The whole thing made me uncomfortable.
Caius, on the other hand, seemed right at home. I guessed it had something to do with how he was used to being exiled—and maybe being sent to nanny a conquered nation was a step up from where he’d been last time. It wasn’t my place to judge.
The servant didn’t budge.
“Well,” Caius said, “either they have grossly underestimated our number, or we’re in the same room.”
“Maybe he’s waiting for us to do something,” I replied.
There was no telling if the servant spoke our language or not, and I was pretty sure neither of us spoke his. Chances were we could stand there all night doing nothing while he got intimate with the floor or maybe started kissing our boots for good measure, and I’d never get my chance to sit alone for even a fucking minute, just piecing things together inside my own head and figuring out how it was I’d landed here, when all I’d wanted was to go home.
The war was over, but I was still surrounded by Ke-Han. The world was too funny like that sometimes, only I couldn’t see my way toward laughing along with it.
“Ridiculous,” I snapped, and reached for the lamp myself.
The servant looked up as if to protest, but then scrambled quickly away, bowing his head like his life depended on it. Maybe it did; I didn’t know. The lamp, even though it looked light enough for something made out of rice paper, was surprisingly heavy, but not half so heavy as a Volstov blade. I thrust it inside the room, which lit up bright as day.
Everything—the strange flat bed, the canopy hung above it from the ceiling, the short tables, the pillows, the screen standing in the far corner—was some shade or another of blue.
Next to me, Caius began to laugh—a gentle, curious sound that reminded me of the whispers that’d followed us all the way there.
“Yours must be the next room over,” he said. “And what is that lovely scent?”
Nothing was going to get done if we kept at it, bandying words around like we were already in talks with the statesmen themselves. From the direction the servant was bowing and scraping in, it seemed as though Caius had guessed right about where my rooms were. Without saying anything about the incense—which was like as not going to turn my eyes as red as my coat by morning and do worse to my throat—I got inside my own quarters, slid the door shut hard, and wished to bastion I was anywhere but where I was.
At least my room wasn’t so much blue as it was turquoise green, but I got the picture clear enough.
I was alone finally, so I could unbutton my collar, and there were lamps in the room at least, thank bastion, which were tricky dangling oil-and-wick affairs that took some coaxing to get themselves lit. But they weren’t going to get the best of me, not when I’d lit fires out of less and trickier besides. I got a couple of them going, shadows dancing across the walls whenever I moved this way or that. Mostly, it was just dark, because apparently the Ke-Han, with all their inventing, hadn’t seen fit to invent windows.
Maybe they just didn’t like looking out at their ruined city. For that, I didn’t blame them.
In the next room over, I could hear the sound of water being run. There were some men who couldn’t stand even a little grit on their skin, and I guessed that Caius Greylace was one of those. I didn’t think there was much time for a bath, and I didn’t much want to wrestle with the tub, either, which was round and half-set into the floor and hidden by a standing screen.
No, as far as I could see, there was nothing for it but to wait.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t anywhere to sit, just a few large, seating pillows grouped together in the corners, and the bed, which wasn’t more than a pallet as far as I could see, complete with the most bastion-awful-looking pillow I’d ever seen. At least, I thought it was a pillow. It might’ve been some weird Ke-Han torture device. Whatever it was, I wasn’t sleeping on it—it was no more than a glorified slab of wood. No doubt royalty got a proper bed and pillow, but this was good enough for us Volstovics. I was sure it was just their way of thumbing their noses at us, a good little dig at the victors. Sneaky all over, that was the Ke-Han for you. Well, I was going to ask for some proper chairs.
Aside from that, there were the bath and the screen, and a low, long table and desk, and then something I guessed had to be a chair for lack of anything else it could be. It looked like a crescent moon, made all of black wood, polished so bright I thought for a minute it might’ve been metal.
It didn’t look like a room to live in. It looked more like a room for getting bowed to in, and if there was one feeling I’d learned to hate in the past few minutes, it was being bowed to.
On top of all that, there was only the one door, which didn’t settle my nerves any. Part of the wood on the wall that joined my room to Caius Greylace’s looked different, so there might have been a sliding panel.
And that was it.
My things were coming up later, but I hadn’t brought with me half as much as some of the others. To my way of thinking, this wasn’t some holiday. It was business, the Esar’s business, and I was there to serve him, not take in the sights or dress myself up like a game bird on the table.
So maybe I was predisposed not to enjoy myself, but this was enemy territory. And would continue to be until we signed more than a few provisionary treaties about islands hundreds of miles from here and dragon parts that were barely more than scrap metal now.
I was just about to break my chair down into something more comfortable when the strange panel of wood I’d noticed before slid open, nice and smooth. The Ke-Han kept their doors well oiled, which was something to note, in the service of a silence that got under my skin and stayed there.
“What in bastion are you doing?” I demanded, ready to use my chair as a weapon. It was better suited for that, just the right amount of heavy, and fitted with sharp corners at the ends.
“Are you going to hit me with that?” Caius Greylace, fresh out of a bath and smelling like roses, was standing in the open space; light from behind him poured through into my dimly lit room, and steam, too. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or terrified.”
/> I put the chair down. “Is something the matter?”
“Yes,” Caius said. “Something dire. Something dreadful.”
“Well?”
“I’ve no idea what you’re going to be wearing tonight,” he went on smoothly, brushing damp, pale hair out of his eyes.
“Red,” I snapped, eyeing him warily. “Why in bastion d’you want to know that?”
“No, no,” he said, waving his hand about. “Of course you’ll be wearing red; I ascertained that earlier, in the carriage. I meant what style of garment.”
“Style?” I repeated.
He gave me a look like he thought I was the insane idiot of us two, which made me wonder if I hadn’t been right in the first place when I was still thinking he was a Ke-Han assassin. I should have hit him with the chair. “Style,” he said. “Of garment. That you will be wearing. Tonight. During the festivities. In our honor. Are you suffering from some sort of postwar mental deficiency? I hear it plagues old soldiers something dreadful.”
“I’m going to be wearing red,” I repeated.
“Are you going to be wearing that?” he asked.
I figured he meant my jacket, which was fine as far as I could see, and I bristled. “Served me well enough during the war,” I ground out.
“Yes, I’m sure it did, by the look of it,” he said. “Well, if you insist. I’m not entirely sure I have anything that will match even remotely, but I suppose I shall have to do the best I can under the circumstances.”
“Best you can,” I said.
“Under the circumstances,” he concluded.
“Right,” I said. “Except—we’re matching?”
I was starting to realize that all the stories about Caius Greylace I’d heard from disreputable and reputable sources alike—about how he was seventeen different kinds of cracked, about how his parents had just as good as let wolves raise him, about how you couldn’t be near him without getting the queer feeling that you were riding the center of some wild fucking storm—had been truths, all of them. Mostly I got that from the way he was looking at me, all uneven, because of the unevenness of his eyes.
As if he could read my thoughts—and maybe he could; I didn’t know much about that kind of thorny Talent—he pushed some hair over the bad eye, the left one, and set to examining his nails.
“Of course we’re matching,” he said. “If we’re to arrive together.”
“This isn’t dolls and houses,” I muttered.
“Oh, no,” he said, offering me a sharp-toothed smile. “It’s so much better.”
KOUJE
I was a boy when my own father died, younger than either of the princes, but better prepared, since his had been a long-fought battle with illness.
Before his condition worsened, he often took me to the river while my mother slept, her face grown thin and weary with caring for him. He towered over me, then and forever, since I never had the years in which to grow and surpass him.
“Look, Kouje,” he said to me, one large hand placed against my shoulder, his voice ragged with the cough that had taken root in his chest. “See how the river flows ever onward, pouring all it has into the distant great ocean?”
I was still young, and more interested in the sunburnt autumn leaves or the toy boats bobbing cheerfully in the current. Nevertheless, I loved my father. What was more, it was my duty to listen when he spoke.
“Our family has served the Emperor for countless proud years,” he continued. There was more gray than black in his beard, though his hair remained dark as ever, his jaw cut sharp and proud. “When I am gone, you will be sworn to his youngest son.”
My father always looked out at the river. Never at me.
I had not understood then—as I came to in later years—that my father’s message to me was a gift. In his own way, he tried to tell me that the best servant is as the river, patiently giving over everything in its body to the greater ocean. After some time, I came to understand that it was not a simple man’s will that governed this balance but nature itself. It was thus my duty and my nature to watch over Mamoru, the youngest prince, and serve our great Emperor in this fashion. I did this, to the best of my abilities, since the day my lord Mamoru was born, twenty-five years ago. At the time, I was no more than seven.
Then, sudden and violent as all things in war, matters changed.
It was not a cataclysmic change, though many would have argued the fact. When the Emperor took his own life for honor, it was a subtler change, like a shifting of weight that came over the palace where before everything had been well balanced. Our lord Iseul was of course the rightful heir to his father’s legacy, and any man with an eye for strategy could see that it was perhaps not the worst time for him to ascend to the throne. For despite our losses at the hands of the Volstov, the eldest prince had gained much respect among the people for his cunning as a general of war. If anyone could lift us from the depths of our shame and defeat, it would surely be the Emperor’s firstborn son, who was now Emperor himself. Iseul was young enough yet to begin his own era but old enough to have been tested as a warlord and found capable.
It was a better chance at rebuilding than any one man among the Ke-Han could have hoped for.
It had shattered my prince to lose his father in ways that it had not shattered Iseul. But then, that was only to be expected. Of the two, Mamoru was the more tender.
“Ready enough,” Mamoru said, from the depths of his room, “if not prepared.”
“My lord,” I said, bowing low. It was a game we often played before parties or banquets—though it was habit this time, and not youthful nervousness, which compelled the exchange.
The jade ornaments in my lord Mamoru’s hair clacked softly against one another as he stepped past me, the sound of them almost hidden in the hustle and bustle of servants rushing up and down the hall, gossiping with one another over the distant, uncultured thud of foreign boots. It seemed strange to imagine that, not so long ago, the sound would have signaled the approach of enemy troops. Perhaps the lords in charge of talks would remember that, and tactfully request that the diplomats remove their shoes.
Their doing so wasn’t entirely likely. The lords charged with governing the talks had been chosen specifically for their absence from the war itself. As I understood it, they were for the most part courtiers, men who hadn’t seen enough to personalize the conflict and so could approach peace with a clear head.
I envied them their clear heads, just as I envied them their untroubled sleep. They would not reach for their weapons at night when they heard the tremor of heavy leather boots against the floor.
The prince paused at a junction in the hall. Perhaps he, too, was ill at ease among the new flurries of activity everywhere one turned. A servant was not meant to make noise where he or she walked, but with the early arrival of the diplomats from Volstov, many of them had succumbed to near panic, and allowed their footfalls to sound heavily against the floor without care for who heard their comings and goings.
There was to be an audience that night between the diplomats and our esteemed Emperor Iseul, as well as the seven houses that held a place of honor beneath his crest. Preceding that, there would be a dinner in the Emperor’s own dining hall.
If things had been different, the death of an emperor—so fierce a warrior, so proud a man—would have disallowed feasting in all forms, and only plain rice would have been eaten so as not to offend the gods with excess while mourning.
Things, however, were as they were. No small river could change them.
I had my own interest, carefully concealed, in whether or not the men from Volstov would be able to stomach an exchange of hospitalities with our men or whether our generals would be the first to break. Certainly, there were men of the seven houses who did not have so much to lose as I had by speaking out against this occupation, however prettily clothed it came.
We came to the back entrance of the dining hall, placed specifically for those others sitting at the high table, so that n
o man but the Emperor himself would draw attention by crossing the room to the dais at the back. That was where Mamoru settled himself, between Lord Temur of the western prefecture, and the throne once reserved for his father. Mamoru’s place was at the Emperor’s right hand, just as it had been Iseul’s place before him.
The men and women from Volstov sat at the lower tables in groups, as moths huddled around the reassurance of a flame. Some were dressed in the Volstovic style, but wore the Ke-Han shade of blue—some show of deference, I supposed. We had a history between us of talks for peace thwarted by things so simple and yet so fundamental as the color of our clothes.
Others wore a style of clothing more similar to our own, but the similarity was undone by their broad, expressive faces and the nervous way they glanced about, as though expecting an ambush at any moment.
A man with hair the color of dried wheat laughed too loudly.
“Kouje.” Mamoru lowered his voice, beckoning me to bend my head.
“My lord?”
The doors at the front of the room opened, and Mamoru tightened his posture with the precision of a musician tuning a lute. Three of Iseul’s retainers preceded him into the dining hall, their clothing the plain dark brown robes that denoted their status as distinguished servants. The four men behind him clad in green were the Emperor’s own vassals, trained as warriors to protect their lord at any cost. Their faces, clean-shaven and hard, betrayed nothing. They were the men that the former Emperor had trusted most in all the land. It would be for Iseul to decide whether or not to retain them or to replace them with men he trusted more.
They should not have been dressed so colorfully, but the honorable dead had been forgotten in favor of the honorable future.
The newly anointed Emperor himself wore ornaments of green jade threaded through his many warrior braids. There were rings, perfect smooth circles for victories past and sharply curved pieces that resembled a fierce predator’s teeth; pins that formed the shape of a dragon, a catfish, a maple leaf. On his wrists he wore dozens of deep green bracelets, and heavy strands of stone beads around his neck. His robes were embroidered in green and gold with the symbols for strength and for power—signs the emissaries from Volstov would not be able to interpret explicitly, but which they would sense by his comportment, his posture, the very tilt of his chin. Over his heart was his father’s crest, which was now his own. The fabric beneath the needlework burned a deep, rich red—not the vulgar, glaring red of our Volstovic guests, but the color of a good wine, or the blood that flowed from a too-deep cut.
