by Jaida Jones
“I am very pleased to hear you enjoyed the dinner,” the smiling prince said, his words softened and masked by a heavy accent. Still, there was something about the way he looked so delighted to be speaking our language that you couldn’t help feeling a little of it too.
“Oh, the dessert was especially wonderful,” Josette told him. “And so light! I expect I’ll have to be refitted for all my dresses by the time we leave.”
The prince laughed politely, like he’d understood maybe half of what Josette had said, or at least enough to know that it was a pleasantry.
“Who intends to leave?” Caius asked. “You put us so to shame with your hospitality, I’ve half a mind to stay here indefinitely once the talks are over.”
The prince trained his eyes on us, uncertain for a moment while he tried to sort out the words. I thought about that glimpse we’d got of the Emperor, his brother, as compared to the lamb in front of us, lips moving silently like he was reading a book. He looked more like a foreign ’Versity student than a prince. His brother, on the other hand, had looked every inch like haughty royalty. Maybe it skipped the second-born.
“Thank you,” the prince said carefully. “It is my—it is our hope—that you feel comfortable here.”
Caius ducked in a deep and graceful bow. “I’m Caius Greylace.” He elbowed me in the stomach, just above the hip, which I guessed meant I was supposed to bow too.
Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to get him for it later, though.
“This is my companion,” he went on, like we were there together or something.
“Alcibiades,” I said gruffly, because it was too late in the day to be getting into titles, and besides, I didn’t have one.
The prince nodded, taking in the latest display of prostration on my part with clever dark eyes. I didn’t trust him, not for a minute, but then he had fewer braids in his hair than the man who stood beside him. He was more a prince than a warrior, yet.
“This is Prince Mamoru,” Fiacre said, looking pleased to have something to say. “Haven’t managed to catch the name of his stalwart companion yet, but ah, he seems very… tall.”
Prince Mamoru’s eyes lit up with happiness, probably at recognizing his name in among all our messy foreign words.
“Mamoru,” he said, resting a hand against his chest.
He was delicate enough that he reminded me a little of Greylace, though he was certainly quieter, and heaps more reserved—so a Greylace I would have better liked to have around.
“Prince Mamoru,” Caius repeated, replicating the accent and the strange round R like he’d been practicing the language for years. “Might I say quite candidly that I am simply in awe of your jewelry? It’s incomparable to anything in Volstov!”
He reached out a solicitous hand, likely to admire one of those bracelets, or maybe just to make another sweeping bow—I wouldn’t ever be sure, since the man standing next to the prince seized Caius’s wrist with the speed of a practiced soldier.
I found myself reaching for my sword, before I remembered two things: that the war was over, and that it was forbidden for us to carry a weapon within the Emperor’s palace.
Josette’s smile slid off her face like a piece of creamed eel. Prince Mamoru’s eyes went wide. Caius Greylace looked as though he’d never had as much fun in his entire life, even when the man released him, and bowed lower than I would have thought he’d been capable of. He murmured something in a low voice, rough and alien. I could only presume it was an apology.
Fiacre caught my eye and nodded toward the door. The Emperor had arrived, standing with his seven separate bodyguards, or poison tasters, or whatever the hell they were.
“I suppose we’d best take our seats,” Josette said. Her smile was back in place, but it was a diplomat’s mask of a smile, and there was no authenticity to be found in it at all.
The man muttered his foreign apology again before standing and ushering the prince to his seat.
Caius turned to me with the air of a fisherman who’d caught lobsters in his trap.
“That was thrilling,” he whispered, as we moved away to take our seats. “Didn’t you think so? I wonder who that man is. He moved so quickly! Perhaps he was a general, or some other manner of warrior servant. He was so strong.”
“‘Thrilling’? He almost killed you,” I pointed out, just in case Caius hadn’t noticed that part.
“I know that,” Caius said. “Why else do you think it was so delightful?”
He was the only person it was my misfortune to know who would have said almost being killed by a Ke-Han bodyguard was “delightful” or “thrilling.” I was beginning to despair for all of Volstov, if this was what was happening to our nobility. And I was beginning to despair for myself, if this was any example of how the rest of the talks were going to go.
The younger prince had taken his seat once more. I could see him from where I was quite clearly, and his bodyguard, too, in case he wanted to try anything again. I may not have had my sword with me, but then again, he didn’t either. The way I saw it, we could still manage to figure out how to kill each other properly with just our hands.
Prince Mamoru murmured something to his brother, then bowed deeply to him. It made me feel all kinds of uncomfortable to know that we were transacting our business with a people who made their brothers bow to them on a point of formality.
Then the Emperor Iseul lifted his hand.
Even though his father had just died—even though he was new to it, and he had a hell of a lot to prove—he held himself like he’d been doing this all his life, or at least like he’d been waiting for it that long.
“Now,” he said, in a voice made all the more formal by its stilted Volstovic accent. “Lords and Ladies of Volstov, our esteemed guests: the Ke-Han welcome you.”
And the way he said that, I thought, folding my arms over my chest and getting ready for a long night, made it obvious that he was the Ke-Han. Even though he’d been a prince this morning, he was an emperor now. But those were just the times we lived in.
KOUJE
My lord Mamoru was kind. It was always almost impossible to apologize to him.
My forehead scraped the floor of his personal chambers nonetheless. When we’d been younger, and my lord more outspoken, he’d commanded me once to stop my bowing—which, after a long week that made no sense to either of us, I’d explained to him was like asking a fish to live out of water, or a songbird to keep silent. If I’d done my duty as his servant poorly, then it was my job to appease the natural order of things by begging his forgiveness.
“It was a misstep,” I said, my hands in fists at either side. “It was clear he did not intend to harm you. I should not have acted so rashly.”
“Kouje,” my lord said, “surely you’ve apologized enough.”
That was the trouble with my lord: He was too kind. The Emperor had known it, and had done what he could accordingly. My lord Iseul, too, had tried to stamp it out. Some men, however, were made to be like Iseul, and some men like Mamoru. You could no more have taught my lord imperiousness than you could have taught me to stop bowing.
“Indeed, nothing came of it,” Mamoru went on, unplaiting the jade from his hair and setting it upon a low, dark table. It was worn with the polish of true craftsmanship, the fine patina of age. He’d had it since he was a child, and dressed—as was sometimes the custom with second sons—in the swaddling clothes of a little girl, to see him alive and unharmed through his first five years.
Assassins targeted sons but left daughters in their cradles.
I bowed my head again. “My lord,” I protested, “if there is some fitting punishment for the offense…”
“Shall I make you scrub the floors all night?” my lord asked. There was a warmth in his voice I knew well; it meant there was a fond twinkle in his dark eyes. That he was, in some ways, laughing at me. If I would stop my obsequies and lift my head, then we might laugh together.
But things were different now, more serious. I
could not laugh off what I had done as simply as I laughed off other, smaller transgressions. My lord Mamoru was lenient with me, but I had no cause to be lenient with myself.
“My lord knows that they have already been scrubbed twice over for the arrival of our guests,” I said, with as little humor as I could manage. It was still more of a jest than I should have allowed. Having known my lord since his birth, however, had instilled in me some traitorous familiarity that, try as I might, I found incredibly difficult to stamp out.
Mamoru laughed outright this time, the sound of it soft and welcoming. It filled the silence in this part of the palace, where all the servants were either asleep or busying themselves with their last duties before bed. The wing of the palace that had once housed the princes—and was now for Mamoru alone—was kept separate from the newly disruptive intrusion of the delegation from Volstov.
“I suppose there is no fitting punishment at all for what you’ve done then,” Mamoru mused. When I lifted my head, there was a faint smile upon his lips, his braids undone around his face.
When my lord had been much younger, that face had resembled a pale, round moon, or perhaps a mountain peach.
“My lord,” I said, bowing my head again, this time in thanks.
“You might call my servants in to ready me for bed,” Mamoru said. He did not often acknowledge my thanks for his actions, as though he felt that were the only way to behave and not something to be thanked for in the first place. “I’m certainly not going to be able to get out of all this by myself.”
I kept my smile hidden in the left corner of my mouth. My lord had never done very well with formal dress.
“I’ll alert them at once,” I said. “Do try not to create a situation, in my absence.”
It was an old joke between us, in the days when Mamoru had been much more my charge and mine alone, and the weight of the responsibility had made me reluctant to leave him for even a moment.
“I won’t become tangled in my sleeves,” he assured me, with the same faint hint of a smile.
The palace halls were empty and darkened, since the prince had already retired, and there was no one else in that wing who would have need of the servants to bear lanterns. I knew my way by memory, turning at first to the left, summoning Mamoru’s servants, then back up to the prince’s room, where my own quarters were stationed two doors away. It was close enough to hear any approaching dangers, but the distance still bothered me some nights.
On that night, with the taint of unease still shadowing my heart, I did not like the two doors’ distance between my lord and me. Yet, I grudgingly admitted to myself, he was a man grown now, and I could no longer sleep at the foot of his bed.
There was a soft, scuffling noise in the hall up ahead, the source of which I could not make out. I felt instinctively for my sword before privately cursing the laws of diplomacy that had disarmed us, along with the party from Volstov. There was no sword, only a short, ornamental fan stuck into the sash at my waist: a gesture of goodwill to our guests from the conquering nation.
I heard the noise again, closer then, like an unwelcome footfall. But all the servants here were trained explicitly well to serve the prince in a ready manner, swift and silent. Whoever it was approaching was no servant. I pressed myself back against the wall and waited for a shape to appear.
When it did, it became apparent that the approaching noise had been a man, and that it was a man who had drunk too much of our wine.
He said something unfamiliar, coarse and sharp; no doubt it was a curse. And then, upon seeing me, he reached out to grab my arm with unfathomable familiarity. I recoiled before remembering myself, my duty, and what I had done earlier to shame my lord.
The man’s face was foreign, which meant that he too was a member of the diplomatic envoy. I couldn’t afford to offend anyone else so soon. Perhaps he only needed to be led back to his part of the palace. I wasn’t among the servants assigned to herd the Volstovics hither and yon as though they were stray peacocks and not people at all.
“You’re lost,” I said, though it was plain that at least half the men and women from Volstov did not understand our tongue. Interesting, then, that we should have worked so hard and so diligently at learning theirs.
This one seemed to, however, or at least he straightened up and began looking about back and forth, as if confused as to which direction he’d come from.
“Your quarters are this way,” I added.
A firm hand could sometimes bridge what language could not.
Since the man demonstrated no desire to let go of my arm, I curbed my temper and began the task of leading him down the hall, past the servants’ quarters, and out of the prince’s wing entirely. He said something in Volstovic, and he stumbled once when I rounded a corner too swiftly, but the drink had made him amenable. No doubt he was not used to the strength of Ke-Han wine.
We passed the very same room in which the Emperor had conducted his talks, as well as the great hall that led up to the Emperor’s private quarters. There had been some furor over housing the delegation from Volstov so close to the Emperor, but Iseul himself had declared it be so, stating that he was not afraid and nor should any of us be, since the Volstovics were there on a mission of peace and diplomacy, and hospitality alone could rebuild what centuries of warfare had undone.
To house them elsewhere would have betrayed a lack of conviction on our part.
We had only just rounded the corner, my charge and I, when I caught the first glimpse of soft lanternlight. The servants had doubtless been instructed to stay about later in this part of the palace, perhaps to see to it no diplomat from Volstov lost his way as the man by my side had done.
I took the man’s hand from my arm. He seemed to calm once he’d noticed the lantern up ahead. He made a sluggish gesture, starting down the hall before pausing—an inelegant lurch in his motion—to turn around.
“Thank you,” he said, halting and crude in our language.
I bowed as low as was proper and watched to make sure the servant up ahead had taken notice of him.
We were in an important stage in our country’s rebuilding, perhaps the most important. I knew it as well as any other man in the palace. Still, as I turned to make my way back to the other end of the palace, I couldn’t help thinking how I would welcome the day when the delegation from Volstov left us forever. As things stood, their presence was too much like the threat of a headache lingering at the back of my mind.
When I reached the center point of the palace there was a gentle light spilling down the corridor that led to the Emperor’s suites. I felt the same curiousness that had overtaken my heart at the dinner—a nameless dread, all the more powerful because it was nameless as of yet.
I couldn’t see any lantern-bearing servants, which meant the light must have been coming from the Emperor’s rooms somewhere up ahead. I wondered if perhaps another man or woman from Volstov had become turned around. If that was the case, then it was my duty to ask the Emperor what service I might do him. It was possible, too, that my apprehension came solely from the drunkard’s invasion, from knowing that a foreign diplomat could easily stumble into the Emperor’s chambers. Whether he meant to do ill or had merely swallowed too much wine at dinner did not seem to matter much.
I had no wish to spend my night ferrying diplomats from one end of the palace to another, but my duty had nothing at all to do with what I wished.
There were no servants lining the hall to the Emperor’s private audience chamber, which adjoined his private quarters, but I could see the outline of the lantern-bearers through the rice-paper walls, just as I could see the kneeling outline of three men set before the Emperor, and the four kneeling behind them. It was an audience of the seven lords, I conjectured—though of course, I couldn’t be certain.
What did seem certain was that the Emperor would not be needing my services for such an audience.
“It grieves my heart deeply, even deeper still to make such a decree so soon after
the death of our father.” That was Iseul. His voice was unmistakable. My heart began to contract in my chest.
“You are quite sure, my lord?” The question came from one of the seven, his voice less certain in the matter than Iseul’s, but I could recognize the timbre of loyalty.
“Quite,” Iseul said, the word like the sharp edge of a sword.
“You saw the way the young prince was speaking with the delegation from Volstov. Forgive me, my lord, but it’s the truth. And if the Emperor himself doesn’t think he can be trusted, then it isn’t for us to question.”
“Too true,” murmured another lord.
“It’s settled,” Iseul spoke, and his voice held no room for doubt. “As of this evening, Prince Mamoru is deemed a traitor to the realm, to be routed at any cost.”
I knew then why I had felt the heaviness in the air as an approaching thunderstorm, for now I was surely a man trapped in the very heat of it, lightning tearing the familiar shape of the sky I knew so well into jagged strips.
“Be discreet,” Iseul went on, “and be cautious. We wish for this matter to be dealt with swiftly, but we are loath to think of how our negotiations might be disrupted if the diplomats from Volstov were to learn of such a traitor in our midst.”
“Or how they might turn such knowledge to their advantage,” another lord cautioned.
