by Paul Krueger
Kurihara gaped.
“Think about it,” she said to him. “How many other Tomodanese could I possibly know? How many would I have time to take lessons from? How many,” she added, “would I be comfortable calling by their name?”
Kurihara looked as if he’d just swallowed soap.
“If I might intrude now,” Xiulan said.
With labored slowness, Kurihara at last turned to face her.
“May I inquire as to where you intend to take us?”
Kurihara scowled, but at last he answered. “You, we intend to sell you back to your family in Hagane, at a premium. And you,” he said, turning his attention back to Tala. “You…you…abomination.”
The translation wasn’t perfect between Tomodanese and Sanbuna, but the word was similar enough to what the man in the purple coat had called Mang. Once again, Tala felt the throbbing in the back of her head, and with it the rising urge to rip her cuffs to splinters, tackle Kurihara to the ground, and slip her thumbs into his stupid eyes and just…push…
“The only reason you’re still alive,” Kurihara said, “the only reason, is because His Brilliance specifically tasked me with your well-being. If any harm befalls you, he said he would hold me personally responsible. So you live until I can present you to him myself and prove to His Brilliance that I’ve kept my word.”
Tala’s bloodlust receded slightly. But it didn’t stray far, as if it weren’t yet convinced it wouldn’t be needed.
“Why?” Kurihara said eventually. “Why would he teach you metalpacting? What could you possibly have done to convince him that…” He trailed off, as if the question were too painful for him to finish.
Tala got it. But her inability to care about Kurihara’s feelings had reached spectacular new heights in the past minute or so.
“That’s between us,” she said. “But you’re close to him. I’m sure he’ll tell you the story himself someday.”
Kurihara gnashed his teeth, then gestured at the open refrigerator door. “Throw them back in,” he said.
“Lord Kurihara,” Xiulan said. “I hardly think that necessary, given that you’ve already secured our cooperation.”
“You, perhaps,” Kurihara said. “But this one would eat my heart if she could. Probably stewed in my own blood, if the rumors I hear about Sanbuna cooking are true.”
What he said about neither her nor Sanbuna cooking was untrue, but Tala’s nostrils flared in rage anyway.
“Wait!” Xiulan said, now urgent. “Among your prisoners, is there a tall, striking woman of Jeongsonese descent? I beg you, I must know.”
Kurihara squinted at her. “Jeongsonese? I thought you people killed all those dogfuckers.”
As he chuckled, Xiulan deflated. Tala felt an annoying spike of sympathy for the verbose Shang princess.
“So. As I said: the fridge.” At that, the Cicadas grabbed Tala’s hands and hauled her back up to her feet. “But think of it this way,” he added with a smile as they were led back to their chilly prison. “At least when you reach Hagane, you’ll be nice and fresh.”
And so she and the princess landed right back where they’d started, in the dark confines of a walk-in refrigerator on a battered train as it sped south to Hagane.
“It is a truly breathtaking thing, the number of times I’ve found myself in one manner of cell or another over the course of this journey,” Xiulan said. She toyed with the long bang that obscured her left eye. “I’d never expected to do so much of my traveling in them.”
Tala laid back and closed her eyes. She was so tired, and the throbbing hole in her soul where Dimangan belonged meant that even if she managed to get some sleep now, there was no way it would be restful. She’d never experienced anything like this, but she could see a few moves ahead. Until she was whole again, this was going to eat at her from the inside out.
“So,” the Shang princess said. “Metalpacting. Perhaps you might expound on how you came by such a rare skill for a Sanbuna?”
Slowly, Tala’s eyes opened. “There’s such a thing as being too curious, Your Majesty.”
“Nonetheless, my curiosity persists.”
Tala scowled. She didn’t owe this Shang her honesty, but if it would shut her up…
“Fine,” she said. “You want to know?”
“I believe I’ve adequately communicated that.”
Tala shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. One second, I couldn’t do it; the next, he didn’t have a hand.”
“I see, I see,” said Princess Xiulan, before dissolving into a thoughtful silence.
After a few moments, Tala said, “If you’ve got a theory, share it before I come over there and beat it out of you.”
“There’s no need for that, Sergeant,” she said. “I was merely reluctant to postulate with so little data from which to extrapolate.”
“Then give me your best hunch,” Tala said, struggling to hear her own thoughts over the snarling rage in the back of her throbbing head.
Princess Xiulan’s mouth twisted. “I once read that all the world’s known disciplines of magic were fruits hanging from different branches of the human soul. It posited that when one climbed far enough out onto the branch to, ah, pick the fruit, so to speak, one made it impossible to climb back to the tree. Does that make sense?”
“Only kind of.”
“That will suffice. The author went on to suppose that while going back the way one came on an individual branch was impossible, there were extraordinary life-or-death situations in which a person might, ah, jump.”
Tala raised an eyebrow. “Did he give any examples?”
“They,” Xiulan corrected. “And I’m afraid not. When it comes to the interdisciplinary approach to magic, you’re quite unique. It takes a particular rigidity to pact with metal.”
Unsatisfied, Tala muttered her thanks and closed her eyes again. As the pain returned, she kept it at bay by letting her thoughts wander to the other royal she’d spent time with: His eyes, their intelligence sharpened by the glasses that framed them. His voice, and the surprisingly skilled way it spoke Sanbuna. His body, tangled in his sheets—
Her eyes opened again. That wasn’t helping, either.
She sighed, settling back against a shelf of food (with no meat or coffee, she noted sourly). Wherever Jimuro was, she hoped he was better off than she was.
Jimuro liked the idea of walking.
He was entranced by the fantasy of having his home soil underfoot and his native sky overhead. He liked the stories he’d read of heroes striding on the road toward their destinies, and the romantic visions of soldiers marching in lockstep, singing songs of bravery and valor. And when he’d crashed his and Tala’s car into those Shang, he’d told himself that now would be the time for him to finally experience the magic of a long journey on foot for himself. But after two (non-consecutive) days on foot, Jimuro could admit: Walking sucked.
His feet had been sore enough the night they’d met up with Kosuke. A day spent riding around in his motorcade and aboard the Crow’s Flight had allowed his body to recover some, but by midday of his southward trek with Lee, he felt like he’d already burned through every reserve of energy he had.
“There’s one,” Lee said, pointing down the road. Jimuro squinted through his cracked lenses, and sure enough the high-noon sun glinted off a distant windshield.
“No,” Jimuro said flatly, while his feet throbbed in outrage.
“You’re limping,” Lee said.
“Your sudden concern for my gait is touching.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Lee said, frowning at the car as it zipped right by them. “A big, bleeding heart.”
Jimuro measured his new companion with a look. She certainly wasn’t what he expected from an agent of the Li-Quan, though he did admire her ability to keep an air of dignity about herself, even as they trudged through muck and m
ire. In the hours since they’d gotten to know each other, she’d been sharp-tongued, sullen, impatient, and he was pretty certain he would’ve been relieved of his wallet by now if he were still carrying one. Her Jeongsonese heritage notwithstanding, he suspected she might have actually done well in the Court of Steel, in another lifetime. He wasn’t totally sure what had made her decide to take him to Hagane, and not knowing where she stood meant he had no reason to really trust her.
But then she’d introduced him to the third member of their party.
Jimuro didn’t understand Jeongsonese, so he couldn’t quite make out the name that Lee had given his old friend. But he’d known the dog in her previous life as Kohaku, and the amber color of her fur meant that the name still applied. Besides, while Kohaku had more than tripled in size as a shade, it took only one look at her face for Jimuro to see that she was still the same friend she’d always been.
Apparently, Kohaku felt the same way. The way Lee described it, she and Xiulan had been able to find him because Kohaku had scented him out all the way from Kohoyama.
“But that’s hundreds of kilometers,” Jimuro had said when Lee had dropped that particular grenade.
“I know,” she’d said. “Not like I traveled them all, or anything.”
“I just…I didn’t realize that shades could do that.”
Lee had smirked at him. “For the prince of a country whose whole thing is how much you hate shades,” she’d said, “you’re sure interested in them.”
Jimuro had caught himself. “Hating shades is not our ‘whole thing,’ ” he’d bristled. “And Kohaku isn’t just any shade.”
Lee had crooked an eyebrow at that, but she let it lie.
That conversation had happened hours ago, when the sun was still low in the sky. Now it beat down from its highest perch, but Jimuro’s mind was still on the matter of Kohaku. If someone trustworthy had told him ahead of time that when he next saw his beloved friend she would be a thrall to an outlander thief, he would’ve been hard-pressed to pick out which part of that prophecy disgusted him the most. Enslaving any creature’s spirit was an affront to nature, but enslaving one of his friends was an affront to him.
And yet when the moment had come, there had been no disgust anywhere in his body. He’d just been so happy to see a familiar face. To see someone who was just happy to see him.
And now, her nose was leading them to Hagane.
To his crown and throne.
To the rest of his life.
His breath turned sour in the back of his throat.
To the rest of his life.
The ground was rushing to meet him.
To the rest of his life.
And the midday sun was turning dark…
* * *
—
His cell in Lisan City hadn’t really been much of a cell. He’d had three rooms to himself on the Erega estate. Every way in and out had been under heavy guard, but even a man as privileged as Jimuro was aware that his own troops were being kept by Sanbu in much worse conditions. He’d tried to escape twice, and been easily foiled both times. After the second failure, he’d settled in for the long haul. He quietly hoped his mother might open the floor for a hostage exchange of some kind, but he knew her unyielding nature too well to seriously put stock in the idea.
And besides, what combination of prisoners in Tomoda’s dungeons could have possibly measured equal to him?
When Erega came to visit him, which was often enough, it was usually in the sitting room, where he spent his time drawing, filling up sketchbook after sketchbook all day long. The staff would bring him meals there twice a day, and fresh paper or brushes when he requested them. At first, it had started as a ploy to get his hands on lead-based paint, in the hope of eventually accruing enough metal to effect an escape. But Erega was too wily for that, and neither his paints nor brushes contained so much as a molecule of metal. So as the months of his imprisonment wore on and turned into years, he was no closer to finding a way home, but he’d gotten reasonably good at capturing the essence on paper of each guard assigned to his detail. When Erega came in to visit him that day, however, he was in the middle of painting his new favorite subject: himself.
Despite his promises that he couldn’t manipulate the metal in a mirrored surface, the Sanbuna military had allowed him no mirrors. So as a challenge to himself, he’d begun to paint his own face from memory, guessing at the ways in which captivity might have aged him. He tried watercolors, pencils, even charcoal. But that day, his challenge had just been plain black ink on plain white paper, with only one wrinkle: He had to draw the portrait in a single, unbroken line.
“General,” he said, not looking up from his paper. “I’m glad you chose now to come in, and not when I was working my way around the glasses. If I’d known I would be drawing these someday, I would’ve chosen round frames…”
“Your Brilliance.” Though Jimuro had seen the woman face-to-face hundreds of times, for some reason he couldn’t conjure her visage inside this dream.
Dream? he thought. Am I dreaming?
“But we’re out of the woods,” he said to the general, “and I think this might be one of my better renderings.” He frowned thoughtfully as his brush slid across the page, laying down another contour of his pointed chin. “Actually, perhaps not. But when they write the history of my artistic progression, they’ll call this an important stepping-stone.”
“Your Brilliance, there’s no easy way to say this, especially if you won’t listen to me,” said Erega. “The Palace of Steel has fallen, Tomoda has surrendered, and your mother is dead.”
Jimuro froze. At last he looked up from the paper spread out before him, though somehow the sight of Erega’s face slid off his mind like a slick of spilled oil. “What?”
The general’s grip tightened on her cane. She bowed—not in the collegial way that two equals might, but deeply from the waist. Though it was an appropriately respectful gesture, it wasn’t one typical of the general, who’d begun to develop a bad back.
And it was how Jimuro knew that she was telling the truth, that it wasn’t some sort of mistake. His mother, the great Steel Lord Yoshiko, was dead. He was vaguely aware of Erega’s voice as it sketched in further details: that it had happened in the palace’s beautiful royal garden, that she’d been caught by Shang forces while trying to help the household staff evacuate, that she’d earned herself a good death. But while he heard those words, he’d stopped listening after “Your mother is dead.” It had been Fumiko, and then his father, and now the indomitable Steel Lord herself.
Now there was only him.
“Your Brilliance,” said General Erega. “Your brush.”
Jimuro glanced down. His brush tip had frozen at the precise spot where it had been when he’d heard the news. The fibers of the paper had wicked black ink farther and farther away from that spot, so that half his face was now covered in a cancerous blotch.
“Your Brilliance,” said General Erega again, except her voice sounded different. When Jimuro blinked, her face at last came into focus. Except he didn’t see the craggy, tired eye of Tomoda’s most notorious and legendary foe, but the eyes of a young woman, whose hawklike focus had always been able to pierce right through him.
His pulse quickened at the sight of her. “Tala,” he whispered.
And then the sergeant gave a very un-Tala-like roll of her eyes. “Oh, fuck this.”
* * *
—
A sharp pain shot up and down his ribs, and he sat right up with a loud “Ow!” A few decimeters away, Kohaku barked loud enough to ripple Jimuro’s hair.
Lee, who was poised to kick him again, put her foot down. “Easy, girl,” she said. “Just needed to get him awake. We’re good here.”
“What happened?” Jimuro said, climbing to his feet. His forehead throbbed. “Did we come under attack?”
“Yeah,” said Lee. “You fell right into your enemies’ trap of being a stubborn dumbass.”
“Your sarcasm is neither helpful nor appreciated.”
“Nothing I do is ever helpful or appreciated.”
Jimuro rolled his eyes. The woman had an answer to everything, it seemed. “Very well. We can continue now.”
Lee snorted. “You’re in no kind of shape.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. I’m stronger than you think.”
She shook her head. “Wasn’t your strength that failed you, just now.”
Jimuro felt stricken. “What would you know about it?” he said, too quickly.
“I’ve seen it before,” Lee said. “Had a friend who was always a bit twitchy, but fun when you wanted a drink or a turn in bed. Saw her try to lift a wallet once—”
“You associated with criminals?”
“I wasn’t always a cop, Princeling.”
“How long have you been one?”
“Two weeks and change,” she breezed. “Point is, she froze up with her hand halfway out the man’s pocket. I’ll never forget it. She had this look in her eyes, like the ground had just dropped out from under her feet and the air had sucked itself back out her lungs.”
The familiarity of her words chilled him.
“So you’re found seized up, your hand on a wallet halfway out its owner’s pocket, and you’re Jeongsonese in a country that doesn’t give a shit about you, occupied by another country that doesn’t give a shit about you,” Lee said. “What d’you think happened to her?”
Jimuro’s stomach turned again.
“If I’m gonna throw myself into the teeth of mortal peril, I don’t want to do it when the only person I’ve got to rely on is twitchy,” Lee said. “So what gives? Last night, knowing that come tomorrow you get to sit in a big chair and wear a shiny hat—”
“—the Steel Lord doesn’t do either of those things—” Jimuro tried to interject.
“—you instead decide to turn around and walk right into the jaws of a homicidal maniac?” Lee cut across him.
