by Jaida Jones
One matter on which Alcibiades and I might have agreed upon immediately was that all this business of diplomacy certainly had made our jobs more difficult.
“Now,” I said, brightening. “This is much friendlier, isn’t it? I do hate to be a bore and go on repeating myself, but since you refrained from answering me the first time, I’m afraid I must ask again. Who has been reading our letters?”
Lord Temur swallowed, and wet his lips with his tongue.
With a touch of regret—I had hoped, however foolishly, to get through this without applying too much force—I leaned forward, filling his field of vision so that there was only my face to focus on.
Behind me, I could hear Alcibiades give a sigh, though whether it was out of impatience or disgust, I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t afford the distraction of trying to parse his unexpectedly layered mannerisms at the moment, though. I had a duty there. Not to the Esar, but to myself-—and to Alcibiades as well, whether he knew it or not—and surely that was the most important sort of duty a man could ask for.
“Lord Temur,” I whispered.
He murmured something in the Ke-Han tongue.
“What did he say?” Alcibiades asked. “Ow!”
“Be quiet,” Josette muttered. “Let Greylace work.”
I pursed my lips, regretting that I hadn’t been given the opportunity to learn more of the colloquial Ke-Han language. I’d picked out the word the lords used whenever the demon of their Emperor was floating about, and I knew the most academic form, the old dialect used for plays, but no more common tongue.
“The Emperor?” I asked gently, like leading foxes from the hunt. “Is it his command?”
Lord Temur’s jaw clenched, and I sighed a little, myself. If he was going to make things difficult, then I supposed there was no way around it. I twitched the fabric of my sleeve back above the elbow, and pressed cool fingers to his temple.
His pupils dilated sharply like an unexpected eclipse, and for a moment I thought I might have gone too far too quickly. There was no point in worrying about what had been done, though, and certainly no point in mentioning it to the others. Best to concentrate on the matter at hand until we’d got what we needed out of him.
The rest I would deal with later. If there was anything left to deal with, of course.
“The Emperor is having our mail read,” I said, taking a new tack with this unforeseen change in winds. “Does he suspect us of something?”
“This… is treason,” Lord Temur managed, his lips stiff around the foreign words. “For all of you, and… myself, as well.”
“That does not answer my question,” I said shortly, feeling the beginnings of impatience growing within me. I did so want this to go as smoothly as possible, but it had been so long since I’d been given a chance to exercise my Talent, and Lord Temur’s stubbornness was simply begging for a taste of true pressure.
I could have broken him so easily.
Instead, I took a deep breath, running my tongue along my teeth to gather my thoughts.
Lord Temur shifted on the bench, as though he wished to escape, but found he could not quite wriggle out from under my gaze.
“Yes,” he said softly, eyes fixed on mine. There was a seed of fear in his expression, though somehow I didn’t presume that I was the cause of it. “The Emperor…”
He stopped himself, nostrils flared with the effort it took to keep his mouth closed.
“Please,” I said, pressing my fingers against his temple to keep them from twitching. “Don’t make this difficult for yourself.”
He moved with a swiftness I hadn’t been expecting—since so many of my guests in the Esar’s dungeons had been chained, and therefore rendered harmless—grabbing me by the front of my robes and hauling me close.
Behind me, I heard Alcibiades cry out, and the unmistakable sound of a dagger being unsheathed; since the rules still prohibited swords, Alcibiades had taken to hiding one of my smaller weapons in his belt. If I’d had the time to think on it, I’d have been flattered. But Lord Temur made no further move to harm me, and I could hear his breathing, shallow and fixed in my ear.
“It’s all right, my dear,” I said, waving my noble protector off. I’d meant to say more, but that was when Lord Temur began to speak.
“The Emperor sees enemies around every corner,” he rasped, “and ghosts in his teacup. He has not yet managed to catch sight or word of his brother the prince, and that exacerbates his condition.”
“He has become excessively paranoid,” I agreed quietly. People always felt so much better when they were offered agreement, even and especially if they happened to be betraying their lords and countries.
“He has taken certain measures to ensure his victory over Prince Mamoru, though the council of warlords was set against using it unless matters changed so drastically that it became a necessary course of action. There are those among our number who believe that the Emperor, caught up in his imagined world of treachery, will go ahead with this plan without our agreement. It would not be the first time he has done such a thing since assuming his honored father’s responsibility. After the Emperor died…”
Josette gasped softly and put a hand against my shoulder, to steady either myself or her. I wasn’t sure, and couldn’t afford to pay enough attention to the distraction in order to tell.
I’d asked about our mail being read, and instead I had uncovered something dark and rotten at the center of the Ke-Han court. I felt like an adventurer who’d stumbled upon an ancient treasure. My fingers twitched again with the urge to break Lord Temur and draw out all the information I desired as quickly as I wanted.
Something held me back, as stubbornly as Alcibiades himself might have, had he known what I was thinking.
I had to phrase my next question very carefully.
“What is the plan?”
Close as I was I could feel Lord Temur shudder—in horror, or the effort it had taken to resist me this long.
“It is a forbidden magic,” he whispered. “The Old Way. Blood magic, outlawed as too cruel since before the war with your Volstov.”
I felt a shiver of delight pass over me. I’d read accounts of Ke-Han blood magic, but they were all ancient, and terribly outdated, with hysterical illustrations of what fate befell the men foolish enough to allow their spilled blood to pass into the hands of their enemies.
“One only needs a drop,” Lord Temur went on. “The smallest amount is enough to bring a grown man down.”
“The Emperor’s necklace,” Alcibiades said suddenly, and I felt at once admiring and annoyed that I hadn’t been the one to get it—like the cogwheels of a dragon sliding into place upon completion, when she was ready at last to take flight.
All of a sudden I was being jostled aside, and Alcibiades crouched in front of the bench where Lord Temur sat.
“That’s it, isn’t it? He’s got the prince’s blood in that freaky-looking necklace of his, and he’s going to use it to do something. Something bad.”
Lord Temur’s eyes seemed to lose some of their glassiness as he looked at Alcibiades.
“Yes. If he hasn’t already.”
Alcibiades’ next question was better than my own. “Does he have our blood?”
Temur fell silent; darkness flickered across his eyes, and I knew how they must be burning now, desperate just to blink. “The warlords are the most dutiful,” he whispered. These weren’t his own words, but a speech he’d memorized long ago. “Seven of them there are, and honored most beside the Emperor. Each gives his blood at the first; each gives his life at the last.”
“What does that mean?” Alcibiades hissed. He was going to break my concentration, and Lord Temur’s, and there would be no slipping through the cracks again. “I don’t want poetry, I want answers!”
“Duty,” Lord Temur said, then he collapsed.
KOUJE
It was sometime past the heat of midday, while the sun cast jagged shadows all throughout the pass, that I heard the crunch of g
ravel from behind us.
The passes had long since been cleared, one through twenty-seven. I assumed it was an animal of some sort, a mountain lynx, or perhaps one of the big rams the people living in the borderlands hunted for food. But what I heard next was speaking, though—real words from real voices in my own native tongue. It was a man, a low, muttered complaint that made my blood freeze in my veins and my heart stop short with the shock of it. I had enough presence of mind to wrench our horse sideways by its reins, pulling at Mamoru by the sleeve, and dragging them both off the pathway into the sanctuary of the rocks.
“Kouje,” Mamoru whispered, his voice hoarse from the ravages of his illness. He straightened up, taking his weight from my shoulder to lean against one of the smooth blue boulders while I led the horse off farther still so that he wouldn’t be spotted from the road. “I heard—Was that you speaking? It seemed so far away…”
“I don’t know,” I said under my breath, answering his unspoken question. “There shouldn’t be anyone around here.”
The gravel crunched again, and that time I saw the boot responsible, crouched as I was beneath an overhang of rock. Mamoru ducked lower behind the rock as I tried desperately to see and not be seen. The man was clad in a soldier’s uniform, cloth dyed cobalt blue. Dressed that way, he was nearly invisible against the backdrop of the mountains.
He rubbed his palms together and crossed his arms, staring out at nothing.
I couldn’t see his face, which might have been for the best. He might well have been one of my fellow soldiers—a comrade in arms.
“Might as well have sent us to the ass-end of the world,” he grumbled, and I heard a short laugh from somewhere behind him.
My heart skittered sideways with sudden panic. How many of them were there?
“Better than them up at the eighth pass,” said his companion. “Not even a hint of a hope of action there. Least we’re going to be useful.”
“If there’s ever any use for us.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. A man can see the entire capital from here. Thremedon. Like being an eagle, watching a mouse. We’ll be useful, and that’s enough insolence from the likes of you.”
The soldier’s companion passed into view. He was an unshaven, sharp-looking man, with a long scar that traveled raw and ugly from the corner of his eye back past his hairline. His hair was braided like a general’s and parted like a hero’s.
Next to me, I felt Mamoru go still as the stone he leaned on.
“That’s General Yisun,” he gasped in a voice like a ghost’s. “He served under Iseul for the duration of the war. But he’s… He went back to live with his family.”
I held my finger up to my lips, and Mamoru quieted, though he still tormented the ragged hem of his sleeve.
I cast about for anything I might use as a weapon, should it come to that. A large rock. More large rocks. I didn’t think that any kind of rock would be much help against the man who had allegedly trained the eldest prince in place of his father. I’d heard of him, of course, but my own service had kept me with Mamoru and not among Iseul’s retinue of servants and soldiers. I’d only seen him in passing, but I knew enough of his reputation to feel the bile rise in my throat.
I put my hand on Mamoru’s shoulder, signaling that we had best move farther off the path and attempt to keep going. I couldn’t imagine what one of our most formidable generals was doing holed up in the mountains with an unknown number of soldiers at his disposal.
They weren’t the only group stationed, either, if what he’d said about the eighth pass was to be believed.
I paused in the middle of rising to my feet, rooted in place with half curiosity, half dread. I didn’t want to know what was going on. As far as I was concerned, Iseul had stopped being predictable the night he’d declared Mamoru a traitor. To try and understand the motives of such a man was pointless, and time was a resource I couldn’t afford to waste. Not now, when Iseul’s devilry boiled in my lord’s veins. And yet I found that I couldn’t move. I had to know.
What madness had Mamoru’s brother wrought in the time since we’d fled the palace?
Had the war begun again, in our absence?
“There’ll be a use for us, all right,” General Yisun repeated, lighting a long-stemmed pipe and puffing easily, as though he really were home with his family. “Can’t answer for the poor bastards elsewhere, but we’re set to move straight into Thremedon, soon as the Emperor’s given us the signal. Shame his attention’s been diverted by that whelp for so long, but that’ll soon be over.”
“I don’t care what else is going on, so long as we get moving soon,” said the soldier. “It’s too hot during the day and too cold during the night in these damned mountains.”
“Mind your manners before a superior officer,” said General Yisun, and he flicked his ashes into the wind. “I won’t tell you that again.”
The soldier coughed.
I straightened up slowly, ever so slowly, and gently pulled at Mamoru’s shoulder. He nodded, seemingly unable to tear his gaze away from the soldiers down in the pass, so that I had to tug at him again before he would move, stepping as softly as any servant might have.
He had picked up such an eclectic mixture of skills during our time on the run. I felt an odd flush of pride in my chest at his accomplishments, too myriad to denote with simple braids.
“I don’t understand,” he said to me, once we’d rejoined the horse, ducking and weaving through the complex of rocky outcroppings and hideaways. His voice was still shadowed with caution and the effects of the fever.
“There are soldiers in the mountains again,” I said, not that it was an answer. I didn’t understand what it meant. I didn’t see how we could understand, without seeing firsthand in the capital what Iseul was planning. My own concerns were more immediate: traveling as far as we could before the fever set in again and curing the fever once and for all.
I did my best to ignore the nagging voice in my head that wondered what General Yisun had meant by that’ll be over soon. Did he have some information regarding Iseul’s pursuit of us that I did not? All I could know was that he must have been in close contact with the Emperor. As much as I hesitated to speculate, I was beginning to fear my lord’s fever in the same way I feared his brother the Emperor. I hated the power he wielded over my lord and how we’d been blinded to it for so long.
I had to know for certain.
“Stay where you are,” I whispered, holding my hand up to Mamoru as I would have to a skittish horse. “I’m going back.”
“Why,” Mamoru said. “Wait—Kouje—”
I couldn’t listen to him. I had to learn more—for there might come a time when knowledge of Iseul’s next move would be our only salvation. And if there was more that Iseul had up his bright sleeve, I would have to be the shield between that knowledge and Mamoru.
The soldier and the general were still talking when I returned, hidden behind the rock and the lichen, my palms pressed against the rough surface, hoping against all hope that I remained hidden.
“… so that’s his trick,” the soldier was saying, before he whistled softly. “To his own brother?”
“Traitor to the country,” General Yisun replied. His voice was dry, in a way that indicated he didn’t believe that story for a moment but had no trouble agreeing to it. “There’s no punishment too harsh for those.”
“Blood magic,” the soldier said. I could feel the terror in his voice, even when he tried to swallow it down. “Have you really seen it?”
“Our Emperor wears the vial around his neck,” General Yisun said. “It’s just blood, Ichikawa. Now get back to work.”
The sounds of their footsteps faded in the opposite direction. I leaned against the rock to glean strength from the mountain itself before I returned to my lord’s side.
My worst fears had been confirmed. There was nothing to do but move forward.
“Kouje,” said Mamoru, brightening the moment he saw me. He tucked a stray
length of hair behind his ear with fretful fingers. “What is it?”
“I do not know what your brother intends,” I told him. I had no reason to burden him in his state with information, but I had only the horse to speak to—and my lord was far cleverer than I. For the time that he was still cogent, still himself, I needed to consult with him. I needed his permission for what I sought to do next. “And I admit that I am… afraid of what he will do.”
Mamoru was quiet, though his fingers continued to twitch; he bit at his nails, a habit he’d never had, as though he barely noticed what he was doing. “Do you think the fighting’s started again?” he asked at last. “Do you think the talks have failed because Iseul’s been so distracted with trying to find me?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, though it was just like my lord to blame himself for starting a war when he was as far removed from the capital as a field mouse himself. “I admit that I cannot think of any other reason—any good reason—for some of our best soldiers to be stationed in the Cobalts unless they are planning some sort of… attack.” I drew a deep breath. “Mamoru—you and Volstov share a common enemy.”
Mamoru watched me with fevered eyes. His voice was dry. “What did you hear?”
“Your brother will kill you unless I find some magic to stop him,” I said. “There are magicians just beyond this mountain range. But I do not know what I can barter for your safety.”
There they were: all my worries, spread before him. I could no more shield him from the truth than I could think of a solution myself, and so we must counsel with one another for inspiration.
“I am a prince,” Mamoru said. “Which means I must think of my people before myself. Our focus should not be on what we might barter for my safety, but rather, how we might still preserve the peace negotiated first by my father before his death. Iseul has dishonored his memory by betraying that—betraying the wishes of our father—and stationing these men in the mountains as if to start another war on the heels of the first! If Iseul will not think of our people, then it must fall to me.” His cheeks flushed again, though this time, I feared, it was due to a different kind of fever altogether.
