by Jaida Jones
Everyone at the high table bowed as one, their foreheads scraping their plates. The diplomats from Volstov moved to stand—as was, no doubt, their poor way of recognizing a king of kings—before they too hung their heads in ungraceful bows. They numbered nine, men of all sizes—and two women, an unorthodox practice among our own people. Some were clearly soldiers, brawling men built for a good fight, while others were clearly scholars, men who had no doubt been recruited for their knowledge. There was even one who could not have been long past his boyhood, pale as the koi my lord favored so highly and dressed up like a peacock.
Iseul’s face was blank as he took his seat, his eyes as cold and as dark as flint-rock. His poison taster sat down at his side, just behind the lord Maidar from the southernmost prefecture.
Our new Emperor looked every bit the part, and I could feel my lord Mamoru’s pride in him. It was as evident as if he’d spoken it aloud.
There was no reason for the shade that rose like a mist over my heart. There was no reason why I should not have felt the same pride in my new ruler, and even a kind of gladness for this day, when we could still perform our customs with pride in the face of our enemies’ occupation. The shade was there, though, and I could do nothing but push it aside with the experience born of long practice.
Things were not as they should be. My father, even weakened by illness as he was, would still have summoned the will to refuse to dine under such an inauspicious roof.
I sat at Mamoru’s right, just behind him, that I might better taste the food as it came and before it reached my lord’s own lips. I had only been poisoned this way once before, by enemies of the Emperor’s house. It had caused a dreadful fever in my blood, rendering me unfit for duty over a long and torturous period of weeks. In the end, it was nearly a month. Such an experience, however, was made worthwhile when I considered how I had done my duty for my lord and how Mamoru had been spared the suffering.
The rice came first, and there was no taste of any malevolence to mar its clean flavor. I passed it up to the table.
Mamoru nodded his thanks, the gesture curt and mannered.
The men from Volstov were staring up at the high table still, their mouths open in awe, as though, in all their years since birth, they’d never learned to close them. If they were waiting for the Emperor to make a speech, they would be waiting a long time. Custom dictated that discussions of politics were to be had only after a proper dinner. Fire could be lit in an empty belly. In a full one, there was no room for it.
Iseul seated himself with a rustling of fabric, his taster at his left, so that no man would come between him and his brother. It was important, now more than ever, to make a show of unshakable unity.
If pressed to the point of a sword, I might have admitted that my unease did not subside throughout the course of the meal. Rather, it remained fixed firmly in my mind, impossible to ignore, like the weight in the air before a lightning storm.
I had grown up alongside Iseul. I had never been assigned to his service, but we were nearly peers in age, and as such I had been privy to his growth into a man simply because I had been doing the same thing at the same time. As such, I could recall an incident with Volstovic prisoners of war, taken captive when my lord Mamoru had been just shy of four, and I myself had been eleven. I was allowed into the great reception hall for the first time that year while my lord took his afternoon nap—his condition being particularly delicate in his earlier years—and it was there that I first saw the elder prince in full regalia, dressed every inch like the heir to the empire, and seated beside the Emperor himself with the gravest of expressions on his face.
“It is for my son to decide their fates,” the Emperor had said. “For soon enough, every decision for the well-being of this country will be his, and how else might he learn than through practice?”
The seven warlords had nodded their assent, any mistrust carefully hidden beneath their courtly masks. How could a child be trusted, after all, to understand the gravity of their situation?
The young prince had raised his head, eyes sharp and lined with kohl.
“Have them killed,” he said. “The chance for escape is too great. We fight Volstov from outside our borders, and we cannot afford to fight them from within as well.”
I could not have read any of the expressions in the room, even if I’d tried. The experienced members of court had all been trained since birth to keep everything to themselves, and as someone relatively new to palace life, I could not hope to breach those barriers. Yet I was still experienced enough to perceive that his decision had been an unexpected one.
No one, of course, expected a child to have such capacity for ruthlessness. Iseul proved himself to be a man filled with surprises from a very young age.
It was an impression I have never forgotten since—the first indication of his capabilities, but certainly not the last.
Soup came after the rice, then the fish course. All were untampered with. In my time at the palace, and with the war’s end it was my charge to look after the prince Mamoru, to taste his food for poison and to guard his person from those who would wish him ill. If I could only perform my duty well enough to take in the poison before it reached my lord, in whatever form it came, I could consider my life well spent.
CHAPTER TWO
ALCIBIADES
According to Caius Greylace, it wasn’t a show of solidarity or support for Volstov that the new Emperor had this big red spot on his robes, but that didn’t stop me from feeling better about how eager everyone was to turn colors. I was the only man wearing red at the dinner, save for the Emperor and Caius, who was wearing what looked like some kind of red bow in his hair.
“It’s a local hair ornament,” Caius said.
To my way of thinking, though, he looked too much like one of those stuffed bears you win for your childhood sweetheart at a fair. But, I had to admit, out of everyone who was trying to affect the Ke-Han style of dress and failing, Caius Greylace was the only one who didn’t look like a giant, ass-backwards fool. So that might have been one reason why the crazy little snake had been added to this mission in the first place.
Other than that, the new Emperor’s way of dealing with us was not to talk at all for the first half hour of the meal—as though he thought he could make us crack just by sitting up straight as a rod, with all eyes on him, taking his food from his poison taster and eating it like he was king of the world and not, in fact, the Emperor of a conquered country.
“Isn’t the young prince nice-looking, though?” Caius murmured at my left, putting a hand on my elbow and almost making me drop my bowl of half-cooked food. It wouldn’t have made much difference. I didn’t have a poison taster, and I wasn’t eating it.
I gave Greylace a look that put across all my disgust. He cooed happily, like a pigeon.
“It’s remarkable they’re brothers, that’s all I mean,” Caius murmured demurely. It was a whisper so quiet, I didn’t even know how I heard it.
I hadn’t even noticed another prince. I knew there was one, of course, since before we’d left the country some ’Versity experts had tried their best to teach us which end was up by drawing us all a helpful little chart of the hierarchy in the Ke-Han. The Emperor was at the top, of course, and his two sons below him; beneath them were seven lords that, for whatever reason, he favored more than the rest. I didn’t have to know the whys of it, just who I was supposed to bow lowest to.
Of course, the Emperor had seen fit to off himself—which put us in quite the situation, arriving so awkwardly on the very day of his death. The Ke-Han didn’t seem to hold that against us. At least, not yet.
The man Greylace was indicating sat just as straight as his brother, with white stone jewelry in his hair and around his throat. Maybe if the Ke-Han had spent a little less time dressing themselves in the morning and a little more time planning out their strategies, we wouldn’t have won the war. Never mind the fact, of course, that they’d been tricky enough to see that we nearly l
ost.
Anyway, next to the Emperor, the younger prince looked like a pale ghost. Since I wasn’t eating, and since Caius didn’t seem at all inclined toward leaving me in peace until I answered his question, I thought about what he’d said. The younger prince’s face seemed more expressive than the Emperor’s did, that was for certain. He looked more like a person, and less like the stern-eyed statues we’d seen standing in the outer gardens.
“He’s smaller,” I said, since I couldn’t say half of what I wanted: that he looked less full of himself, too. Such things went against the spirit of diplomacy, and who knew who was listening and for what purpose?
“Aren’t you eating that?” Caius wanted to know, gesturing toward my plate. “It has the most divine flavor!”
“It looks like—” I stopped myself partway, poking at the bowl with one of the little sticks they’d given us to eat with. They were dainty and delicate and slippery, and I’d managed to snap the other one in half earlier. I was half-expecting my meal to poke back, but it just sat there, soggy, like it didn’t care one way or another whether I ate it, which was pretty much in line with what I’d learned about the Ke-Han so far. “Well, I’m full anyway.”
“Then you won’t mind if I help myself,” Caius reasoned, merrily plucking away whatever pale, uncooked thing had landed in my bowl to begin with.
The unofficial leader of our merry band, a man by the name of Fiacre, had told us all beforehand that anything we didn’t recognize was most likely fish, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I guessed he was of a more diplomatic nature than I was though, since at the table just next to ours he was eating everything off his plate and chatting to Wildgrave Ozanne about something that had happened on the way over. Next to him, Josette and Marcy were having some kind of tête-à-tête over something that had eight wriggly legs.
There was some luck in the world after all. That creature hadn’t landed on my plate.
It seemed to me that any man among the Ke-Han wouldn’t be too broken up over the loss of a diplomat, however mysterious the cause of death.
Dinner—endless, uncomfortable, and quiet, since no man dared to say anything so long as the Emperor wasn’t talking—ended with a funny, moss-colored dessert that Caius Greylace insisted was melon-flavored gelatin. My stomach, meanwhile, was growling like one of our long-lost dragons. After the plates were cleared, the man who’d stood out to greet us held up his hand for attention. I guessed he’d been assigned the unhappy position of herding us diplomats until further notice. I wondered what he’d done to piss off the Emperor, getting stuck with a job like that.
“There will be a short recess after dinner for our most esteemed Emperor to prepare himself for the talks,” the shepherd said.
Greylace leaned away from me to murmur something to Marcelline about hiding silverware in their napkins to prepare for an ambush. It wasn’t my type of humor, but at least it made me feel a little better about being so suspicious of the Ke-Han Emperor’s good intentions. If there had been silverware, I might’ve even gone for that sort of thing myself, even though I didn’t have the Talent Marcy did. She could command metal like a breeder gave orders to his pups. It was a beautiful thing to behold in wartime, but that was neither here nor there.
I didn’t know what we needed with magicians at all, now that the war was over, but I wasn’t the sort of man chosen to make decisions. It was the soldier in me, bred in too early and nothing to be done about it now but to follow orders. Maybe I’d be able to scare up some food during this recess.
My growling stomach bode ill for any peacocks I might run across in the courtyards.
Caius Greylace slipped his arm through mine as we stood up, and I nearly flipped him over the table.
“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I told him.
He laughed, the infuriating little snake. It was a high and tinkling laugh that reminded me that he’d been a member of th’Esar’s court back at home and I hadn’t. Of course, all that nobility amounted to a hill of beans when we’d both been sent packing to Xi’an, and at least common blood like mine didn’t stoop to marrying first cousins or closer.
“Do you think we’ll have time to change before the talks? Although I’d hate to exhaust my wardrobe on the first night, only to be caught wanting later on.” Caius touched the bow in his hair fondly, chattering on without much care as to whether or not I was listening.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Depends on how long it takes the Emperor to ready himself, whatever that shit means. Do you think he’ll be changing?”
“Oh, no,” Caius said, and he looked so certain that I believed him immediately. “That’s traditional dress for the evening; he won’t be changing out of it. Do you know, I heard that, according to custom, the Ke-Han should still be in mourning for their Emperor? Only we’ve arrived early and forced them to speed along their proceedings. They’re a marvelously adaptable people, don’t you think?”
I could think of a few words I had for the ritual-obsessed Ke-Han, and “adaptable” wasn’t one of them. I grunted, just to show I’d heard him.
“No, you’re right, I don’t think I’ll change,” Caius said. “At least, not until I’ve spoken to their tailors. I’m assuming most of the men are wearing green and not blue because they don’t want to offend anyone.” He finished this with a pointed look at my army jacket. Fuck him, I thought. Little rat didn’t know what it meant to be a soldier, and I wasn’t about to sweep all that I knew the Ke-Han were capable of under the carpet just yet.
I adjusted my collar, which wasn’t too tight, and took stock of my surroundings. There weren’t any windows in the place, since it was right in the middle of the palace and surrounded on all sides by the narrow halls—no good for making a quick exit, should the talks turn sour. It felt like being boxed in, like the tunnels in the Cobalts had been modeled after the palace itself.
As far as the Ke-Han were concerned, there wasn’t a friendly face to be found in the crowd. In fact, there wasn’t a face at all in the crowd that didn’t wear a mask of stony indifference, save for one, and that was what surprised me. It was the younger prince himself.
Things were pretty awkward, I’ll give them that, but that was to be expected. Except that Fiacre and another member of the Basquiat, Josette, seemed to be drawn to the younger prince like a horse to the feed, and when I looked over in their direction, they were actually talking to him. Josette was laughing. I shot a glance at Lieutenant Valery, who himself was looking pretty annoyed and pained by Casimiro, who’d somehow snagged himself a conversation with one of the bowing, scraping servants. He’d caught this one midscrape, and she had her head down like she wanted to plan an escape but couldn’t decide whether or not she’d be breaching etiquette. Damn, talking to Casimiro was bad enough when you understood the language. I couldn’t help but think it’d be worse if you were a foreigner.
Marius stood leaning up against the wall and speaking in low tones with Wildgrave Ozanne. They were both observing Fiacre’s discussion with the prince with interest, but also like they were too smart to go over there and get in the line of fire themselves.
The younger prince was flanked by a man who looked as put out by this whole situation as I was. I couldn’t tell how unhappy he was from his face but from the set of his shoulders. He was a soldier, and there was something resigned and tense in the way he held himself—like he thought he was going to be attacked, too.
“Now, that’s hardly fair,” Caius said, almost like he was getting ready to sulk. “I thought it was the height of rudeness to go up and talk to a member of the royal family.”
“Just the older prince,” I replied, distractedly.
It was obvious, at least to me, that while the Emperor was maintaining his mystique or whatever it was he thought he was going to accomplish with this recess, he’d left things up to his more personable younger brother, who was probably making polite conversation about the weather and the price of silk with two of our most esteemed diplomats.
From the looks of the Emperor—from what kind of man he obviously was—it was likely a good thing, I thought, that he wasn’t in the room to see how nicely his younger brother got on with the men and women from Volstov.
“Come,” Caius said, without any warning, giving my arm a fierce tug. I almost flipped him again. That time, it was harder to squash the instinct. It wouldn’t do to make a scene, and the last thing I wanted was to give th’Esar any more reason than he already had to exile me. Not that a diplomatic mission was exile, but it might as well have been, and after it was over I was looking forward to a good long rest back home. I didn’t need to give anyone any reason to be pissed off with me. After all, I’d only just got back from the front lines, to find myself in the thick of it once more. Somehow or another, I’d managed to piss somebody off. Killing a member of the Basquiat in front of all the Ke-Han warriors in the middle of treaty talks, no matter how much I wanted to or how easy it would have been, wouldn’t look nice on my résumé.
So I managed not to kill Caius Greylace. But barely.
“We simply have to talk to him, don’t you agree?” Caius asked. And, for an incredibly small creature, I had to admit, he was also incredibly strong. He made good use of his size, too, squeezing up next to Josette as though he’d been there all along.
The man flanking the prince narrowed his eyes, like maybe he was thinking about flipping Caius Greylace over, if he got any closer. He was a bodyguard then, or whatever the Ke-Han equivalent of that was. His hair was all thick black braids, pulled back into a complicated twist that left them to spill neat as you please down his back—though unlike the Emperor, he didn’t have any fancy jade dangles to make noise when he moved. Didn’t matter though, since from what I’d learned, it was the braids that were important. Something like our version of medals of honor. The man, whoever he was, had been a soldier. I thought it would have been pretty fucking hilarious if we’d recognized one another, but the truth was that all the Ke-Han looked the same to me, and this poor bastard was probably thinking the exact same thing about us.
