by Paul Krueger
Jimuro froze. “I was doing the right thing.”
Lee waved his words off like they were gnats. “Right thing would’ve been to get your sorry ass out of there, Princeling…and it ended up working out that way,” she added with a wolfish grin. “But that man was a factory-grade sausage grinder, and you were going to feed yourself to him anyway. And you did it without even thinking, too.”
Jimuro exhaled. “I was doing what I thought was best for my people. I was serving them.”
“Can’t serve them when you’re dead, idiot.”
“You will not address me as—”
“I’m taking you south to get kinged up, so I’ll address you however the fuck I want,” Lee said.
“No, you’re going south to find your partner. You just don’t care enough about my own mission to stop it.”
“The dogs take me, I haven’t even known you a whole day and I’m already tired of you. Out with it: You don’t want to be Steel Lord, do you?”
“Of course I do!” Jimuro snapped, color flooding to his ears and cheeks.
Lee glanced at Kohaku, then said, “Not according to her, you don’t. She can smell it on you, Princeling. The way she tells it, the throne scares you shitless.”
Scared? Impossible. The throne was his birthright. As far back as he could remember, he’d always known that his mother’s throne would one day be his own.
But not so soon, whispered his mother’s flinty voice. Not before you were ready.
He gritted his teeth and tried to shut her out.
“Be straight with me, Princeling,” said Lee. “How many other times on this trip have you tried to off yourself?”
“I would never be so irresponsible with my life when it’s not my own to spend,” Jimuro bristled. “And even if I’d wanted to, Tala never would have let me come even close.”
But suddenly he was thinking of that moment in the hold of the Marlin when he felt the breeze of Tala’s bullet zipping past his temple. He remembered, with chilling clarity, how readily she’d pulled that trigger at his goading. He considered, with solidifying certainty, how easily she could have ended him. Of the favor she’d almost done his country.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, he felt flat-footed. Where had that come from?
His mother’s voice chimed in again, distant and cold: Where do you think?
Memories of the last few days flashed through his head. Driving a car headlong into a Shang barricade. Giving himself up to the man in the purple coat. Taunting Tala in that hold, to the point that she’d been willing to throw away her duty.
Pushing her again in Shinku until she, his staunchest guard, finally left him in a pit of vipers.
“…Spirits take me,” he muttered.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Lee said. “Look, I’m not saying I blame you. Your family’s dead. The world hates your guts. And once you take that throne of yours, if you don’t watch your step, that blows back on your people. Shit, if I was in your fancy boots, I’d think really hard about eating my gun, too.”
Jimuro’s jaw dropped. “How can you say such things?” he said. “How callous a woman are you?”
Lee shrugged. “I’m not saying you should. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t, because I’d be pissed if I went through all this trouble for nothing. But I get it. And sticking around’s gotta be your decision. If I try to take it out of your hands, you’ll just get it in your head to find some way to try again.” She narrowed her eyes at him appraisingly. “Probably doing something you’d tell yourself was a noble sacrifice, but really was just fucking stupid. So what’s it going to be? You actually want to do this, or not?”
And just like that, his vision swam again, his breaths shortening by the moment. He’d only just understood this about himself. How was he supposed to have a cohesive answer already?
A vision of his mother’s throne room floated before him. Because, Your Brilliance, said a strong voice that was neither his mother’s nor his own, you have to.
“I’m not ready for this, Lee,” he said eventually. “I never even got to say goodbye to my family, and now I have to carry on their legacy all by myself. And if I fail, my whole country pays the price for it. What if I can’t be the Steel Lord they need? What if everyone at these peace talks is just setting me up to fail?”
“Getting boxed in by powerful people who don’t give a shit about you?” said Lee. “Sounds awful. What d’you think that’s like?”
“I just thought…” He hesitated, then forced himself to say the words. “I thought a dead hero would be worth more to the people of Tomoda than a living fool. I thought the world would be better off without me.”
“Well, to be fair,” Lee said, “you’re not wrong.”
Jimuro recoiled as if he’d been slapped. “By the spirits, what’s wrong with you?”
“What?” Lee said. “It’s not your fault. Well, you’re prince of the worst empire in the history of the world, so I guess it kind of is. But what I meant was, you’re a king, or you’re about to be. Not a country in the world that wouldn’t be better off without one, if you ask me. Whole point of this, though, isn’t to get my input.” She placed a hand on Kohaku’s flank, and the dog-shade disappeared in a flash of white light. Jimuro wanted to say something in protest, but no words came. “Do it or don’t. But whatever it is, choose it now.”
Jimuro stared at the empty space on the gravel where Kohaku—or whatever her name was now—had just sat. There were still indentations in the pebbles from where her tails had rested. Carefully, he knelt down to feel the stones, and found that they were still warm to his touch.
He wished Kohaku were here still. He wished his father were, to tell one of his long, meandering stories that inevitably ended with the phrase,…and then I found five masu.
He wished Fumiko were, to smack him upside the head and tell him to get ahold of himself before their mother saw him like this.
He wished the Steel Lord were here herself, to tell him that there’d been some huge misunderstanding, and that he had time yet to learn how to be a good king.
He wished Tala were here. For several reasons.
He sucked in a breath to steady himself, then walked to the side of the road. Already, another car approached. When he saw it, he smiled wanly to himself, and calmly stepped out into the middle of the road.
Lee’s eyes went wide, and she muttered some kind of curse in her native tongue and darted out into the road. “Hey!” she roared, switching to Tomodanese.
Jimuro only smiled wider as the car approached. He’d already done this before, hadn’t he? Last night on the train, he’d done what needed to be done, because circumstance hadn’t allowed him the chance to second-guess himself. In the moment, he’d just acted, with full conviction, to do the right thing.
“You idiot, you weren’t supposed to take any of that shit seriously—!”
The car came to an abrupt stop, its tires screeching on the asphalt. The driver leaned her head out her window and shouted, “What’s wrong with you? What if I hadn’t stopped? Do you have some kind of death—”
Jimuro held up two hands, and both the driver and Lee fell silent. Both women looked at him as if he were crazy, but the truth was that he was calmer than he’d been in days. He’d realized it once before, when he’d thrown his lot in with Kosuke, but now he meant it for real: It was time to stop relying on his own strength, and look to his people for power. “My name is Iron Prince Jimuro, son of Steel Lord Yoshiko and rightful heir to the Mountain Throne.”
The driver squinted skeptically, then drew back in surprise as recognition dawned. She paled and gasped.
Jimuro fought the urge to be alarmed. “I’ll offer up full explanations later,” he said in his most calming voice. “But in the meantime, my friend and I could use a ride.”
The floor of the fridge lurch
ed beneath them as the Crow’s Flight finally came to a stop. Tala perked up. “We’re here.”
Xiulan’s imagination burst to life. Even with full knowledge of where she’d been headed these past few hours or so, she could hardly believe she was actually in the cradle of the demon Tomodanese. The legendary Shining City of Steel.
Hagane.
Xiulan had only read about the place, or seen intricate models in films, made to look large through the magic of forced perspective. It was said to be a world-class megalopolis, and that even before Tomoda’s imperial era it had glimmered with all the metal the island had to offer from its meager veins. With decades’ worth of ore mined from Shang and Sanbu, not to mention whatever they’d plundered from intercepted Dahali shipments, she could only imagine what the grand capital looked like today.
“Sergeant,” she said. “You fought in Hagane before, did you not?”
Sergeant Tala grunted. “Sure enough.”
“What was it like, when you first saw it?”
The sergeant got a faraway look in her eyes as she lost herself in memories for a moment. “The first time I laid eyes on the place, it was Operation: Anvil. Do you know about Operation: Anvil?”
Xiulan did. Following a full retreat of the beleaguered Tomodanese forces to Hagane, General Erega had concocted a pair of complementary operations that were meant to at last bring the impregnable Hagane to its knees: Operation: Hammer, conducted on land, and Operation: Anvil, conducted by sea.
“The Thirteenth Regiment, Fifty-Second Company, Second Platoon was sailing with Captain Maki. He was the bravest sailor General Erega ever had. Give it ten years, and someone will make a movie about him. I’m sure of it.”
Xiulan caught the sudden fondness in her tone, as well as the use of past tense following this captain’s name.
“The point is,” Tala said, “there we are, sailing in, flags flying high. I’m standing on Maki’s deck, and before me I see…you know, Lisan City’s pretty big. Millions of Sanbunas live there.”
“I’m not unaware,” Xiulan said.
“I’m telling you that so you get my meaning when I say Hagane made Lisan City look like a sand castle,” Tala said flatly. “It was a big, glittery sprawl everywhere I could see, spread over the land like oil spilled on water. There were a load of tall, shiny buildings right in the middle, where the palace was. And straight ahead, stretching across Hagane Bay, there was the Bridge of Brass.”
Understanding dawned. The Bridge of Brass had been a massive suspension bridge, remarkable in both its scope and its beauty. It had once been a marvel of engineering so unparalleled that even Shang’s engineers had to concede its superiority.
And as with Tala’s captain, Maki, the key to understanding the bridge came in referring to it in the past tense.
“Right when the first wave of ships passed under, I saw them: explosions. Big ones, like…I don’t know. Angry orange flowers, blooming just like that,” she said with a snap of her fingers. “A whole row of them went off, all up and down the bridge. So I had front-row seats when all that fire and twisted metal rained down on our fleet, and sent our ships to the bottom of the bay by the dozen.”
Xiulan smiled mirthlessly. “The moment Steel Lord Yoshiko cut off her country’s nose to spite its face.”
“If that’s how you want to see it, knock yourself out,” Tala said, shrugging. “It was just a good place to fight and a bad place to die.”
The fridge door opened, and the Cicadas once again yanked them to their feet and marched them out. This time, though, she and Sergeant Tala were led to an open door that led to a train platform of poured concrete, with brightly painted signs everywhere for out-of-towners and tourists. Along the far wall, she saw propaganda posters behind glass: images of brave Tomodanese soldiers, terrifying metal war machines, and noble portraits of an angular woman with a topknot and a pointed face: Steel Lord Yoshiko. There were other portraits, too: Yoshiko’s father, Steel Lord something-ro, as well as the local lord of the prefecture. But none commanded Xiulan’s attention so strongly as Yoshiko.
Xiulan had hoped fervently that it would be the Dahali to greet them at the platform, or even, against all odds, the Sanbunas. But already present on the platform were crisply assembled ranks of red-uniformed Shang soldiers, their shades at their sides and standing at attention. In contrast with most of the platoons she had seen in Tomoda, these soldiers had shades that were all as uniform as their partners: Each one was a tiger. The pacting process had changed them in different ways, but each was a tiger nonetheless. Their presence didn’t bode well for her and Tala. The tiger was the divine protector of Heaven’s Menagerie, and there was one sort of person in Shang who warranted divine protection…
Next to Xiulan, Tala uttered a Sanbuna curse under her breath.
“What’s the matter, Sergeant?” whispered Xiulan.
“I was hoping it’d be my guys,” she said.
Xiulan sighed. “So was I.”
The sergeant nodded appreciatively, and her frown deepened.
Kurihara Kosuke waited on the platform, as well. He wore his steel battle-mask, as did the two Cicadas flanking him as an honor guard of sorts. Xiulan could see the lordling was attempting to look impressive, but it was difficult with his crew so beaten up. “As you can see,” he said theatrically, “I present to you the Twenty-Eighth Princess, whole and unharmed.”
Xiulan’s throbbing, bruised forehead begged to differ. She opened her mouth to relate as much, but an elbow to her side directed her attention to Tala, who shook her head. Xiulan frowned, and wished her hands were free to smoke her pipe.
“The agreed-upon price for her capture was a hundred thousand jian,” Kurihara continued. He’d narrowed his tone to address a single woman in a captain’s uniform at the head of the formation. “Normally, I would demand to be paid in masu. But given the shambles you barbarians have made of our once-robust economy, the jian will be acceptable. I’ll have to see it before we continue.”
The captain he was addressing didn’t answer him, instead studying Xiulan closely.
Kurihara noticed. “Ah, the bruise. An unavoidable consequence of the suddenness with which she ambushed us. She’s been dealt no lasting harm,” said the man who, just last night, had shot her in the face and then tried to burn it off.
Once again, the captain didn’t answer him. She just squinted harder at Xiulan.
“Well?” Kurihara said. “Aren’t you going to say something? I have your princess. I know you have thirty of them lying around, but the least you could do is pretend to be grateful.”
The captain glared at him, then turned to the formation behind her and said in Shang: “It’s her, Your Majesty.”
Xiulan’s whole body felt as if it had been dunked in ice water. There were thirty-three people in the vast nation of Shang who could rightfully be addressed with the style Your Majesty, but she knew in her bones exactly which one was making her way through the parting ranks of soldiers at this very moment.
When the House of Shang had taken the country over from the Serpent Emperor and the House of Zhou, they had done away with the model of the small royal family. The new Crane Emperor was expected to take several husbands or wives and to produce heirs from each, as a way of preventing the stagnant bloodlines that had doomed the dynasties that had come before.
But while that meant she and her sister bore half the same blood in their veins and chromosomes in their genes, Shang Xiulan and Shang Ruomei couldn’t have possibly been more different. Where Xiulan was slender and slight, Ruomei was generously built, with a moonlike face and thick limbs that made her the envy of the Crane Emperor’s other daughters. And while Xiulan bobbed and bounced like the lid on a boiling pot of rice, Ruomei moved through the world with the calculated grace of a surgeon’s knife parting flesh.
She wore a streamlined dress of pink-and-white silk, and her ti
ghtly wound black hair only barely peeped out from beneath an ostentatiously wide-brimmed hat. She tilted her dark round glasses down her delicate nose so she could look upon her sister with the appropriate amount of disapproval.
“You stand,” the captain said in Tomodanese, “in the presence of Her Majesty Second Princess Shang Ruomei, the Flowering Flame.”
Customarily, this would have been the place for subjects to bow, if not kneel. But while the soldiers all followed the protocol, Kurihara and his cohorts remained defiantly straight-backed.
Like her captain, Ruomei ignored Kurihara in favor of Xiulan. “Well, meimei, you’ve certainly outdone yourself,” she said in Shang. “Given the magnitude of the mess you’ve made, I don’t know if I’ve been over- or underestimating you all these years.”
Xiulan glared up at her. All the years of childhood cruelty came rushing back to her: The vandalized books.
The whispers at court.
The mushrooms.
“Sneer at me all you’d like, jiejie,” she said. “I was several steps ahead of you throughout this whole endeavor. I came far closer to capturing the Iron Prince than you ever came to killing him.”
Ruomei’s eyebrows arched up a degree. To most, it would have been a mild reaction at best, but Xiulan knew her sister’s stoic nature well enough to understand it as a look of abject shock and surprise. But then her face resettled, and Ruomei replied by glancing at Tala and saying, “If the woman with you is supposed to be Iron Prince Jimuro, then he’s much more handsome than I’ve been led to believe.”
“Enough,” Kurihara snapped in Tomodanese. “This is my parley, and the terms are mine to set here. And term number-fucking-one: We all speak the same language.”
Ruomei regarded Kurihara, her nose just barely wrinkled enough to make her disdain noticeable. “You harmed my sister. You’re lucky you still have a tongue with which to speak any language.”
Kurihara paled but held fast. “I won’t apologize for how I fight for my country. Now, I’ve honored your terms. Do you intend to honor yours, or will this meeting take an unfortunate turn?”
