CHAPTER NINE

KOUJE

My lord was not speaking to me. I would have liked to think that there were many reasons for that. We were both thinking about the best way to bypass the border crossing, for example, and did not wish to disturb one another. I had a feeling, however, that I knew the truth of the matter, which was that he had yet to forgive me for my fit of temper in the village. And there was no reason why he should have.

Even knowing as I did the insult paid to my lord by Jiang—filthy bastard dog—I could hardly excuse my actions. Better to have held my tongue, along with my hands, and have got us safely through the checkpoint.

Mamoru had done so well in adapting to his new station, despite his noble upbringing and the absence of all the things he’d once held dear. I could not afford to do less, to shame him by being unable to turn aside my duty as it was to protect him. The only difficulty was that I did not know what manner of man I was without my duty to Mamoru, first and foremost. Not when I had gone against the Emperor himself to fulfill it.

“Are you thirsty?” I asked. It was a cursory question, one that had as much to do with keeping my lord well as it did with ascertaining his temperament.

“No,” my lord answered, managing to convey how angry he was with me by that one word, itself like a blow.

“Ah,” I nodded, judging our progress by the distance from the wall. We would cross the border well before nightfall. There was that, at least, to be thankful for.

We rode on, the silence weighing heavily on my heart for all the times before when we had made games of guessing what birds there were in the trees above us, or what animal rustled in the bushes by the roadside. My lord had always been so cheerful in times past, and I had taken it away from him. I feared that if I allowed him to dwell too long on the things that made him unhappy, the well of his misery would rise up and swallow him whole. There was so much that he had lost, after all, and it was only his immutable spirit that kept him strong.

“We should stop here,” I said at last. “Even if you are not thirsty, the horse will need to be watered.”

My lord said nothing, only allowed his slender shoulders to rise and fall with grudging consent.

I dismounted behind him, leading the horse to the stream that was hidden just off the road. The clouds over our heads were a gathering dark, and I hoped that it would not mean rain before nightfall. When it came to helping my lord down, he took my hands—stiff as they were, the knuckles cracked from each unrefined blow—but refused to look at me.

In some ways, it was that which gave me the courage to speak again.

“Mamoru,” I said.

“Don’t,” he said, less angry this time, and with a greater pleading.

There was another rustling in the bushes, which for a moment gave us pause. More than likely it was an animal, though, and one disappointed by the occupation of its favorite water hole. My lord stroked the horse’s mane, as though in need of something to do with his hands. His shoulders were set against me. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him. I waited the barest of minutes before pressing on, heedless of investigating the noise any further.

“I must apologize,” I said, speaking of need and not of duty, for apologizing was akin to drawing the poison from a wound, and even if it was to no avail, it must still be done.

“It does little good now,” Mamoru whispered, as though by quieting his voice he might quiet his anger too. His fingers were knotted in the horse’s mane. I could tell so easily how he wished for some barrier between us. He held himself rigidly still.

“I… cannot tell you how sorry I am,” I added, for indeed, there were no words that would properly convey my regret in having disappointed him so deeply.

“Then why did you do it?” The words burst from him all at once. “You knew how important it was that we cross with another party. I don’t need to be defended! I didn’t tell—I didn’t ask you to do it.”

“He insulted you,” I murmured, lowering my head.

“You didn’t have to strike him!” Mamoru whirled around. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with hurt and anger. “We aren’t… there anymore, Kouje. You don’t have to shelter me so from everything. I would have borne his insult gladly if that was to be the price of crossing the border. We must both make sacrifices.”

“You don’t know what he expected as the price for crossing the border,” I said, the words coming so unexpectedly that I didn’t have the time to stop them. “For their generosity at the noodle house!”

Mamoru sucked his breath in sharply, perhaps in surprise at my sudden outburst, but the words were rushing from my mouth now, as if they’d found a hole in the dam that had always kept them back. I lifted my head to look him in the eyes.

“He said that he didn’t know about Kichi, but that he at least expected a chance between your legs before we parted ways. That it was the proper thing to do—and neighborly. That you couldn’t expect to get anything for free these days.”

I could feel the bile rising in my throat, sharp and hot all over again just remembering Jiang’s words. Even if the man hadn’t known who he was speaking to, it didn’t matter. My obligation to Mamoru ran deeper than the fealty I’d sworn. That had to be true, or else how could I have ignored the Emperor’s command in the first place? The sooner I dealt with the troublesome rebellion within me the better. It was causing problems left and right. I couldn’t tame it. It made me too sharp with him, too cross with myself.

“All the same,” Mamoru insisted, though he looked troubled now, and his voice betrayed the fact that he was growing increasingly distressed. He had balled his hands into fists, and his voice cracked in places, like the spider-line fissures in the fine lacquer of an ornamental table. “I didn’t know that, but as you are not my brother in truth, it is not your duty to protect my honor!”

“It is not for duty that I do it!” I said, raising my voice to be heard over his. I took a breath to rein my temper in. I could not afford to lose it again, so hot upon the heels of the first time. “Mamoru,” I added, more softly. The name still sounded strange to my hearing, such a fine name on such an uncultured tongue, but I had to do my best to please my lord at his command when I could, as it seemed there were many areas where I could not.

I did not know what was worse. That it might become easier to say it, or that it might not.

My lord ducked his head down. When he lifted it, his eyes were bright with tears. They were not the beautiful, elegant tears that I’d seen the women of the court weeping, for the loss of their sons and husbands during the war, or even the restrained weeping done behind fans and closed doors for the death of the Emperor. These were messy tears, streaking down his cheeks and reddening his nose. His breath came in short, painful gulps, as though he was no longer able to control himself. I was reminded sharply of the boy he had been, back when the rules laid on our heads had not been so unyielding. I had allowed myself to comfort him, once, when it had been clear that mere words would not do the trick.

Did I remember the way of it now?

“Why?” my lord asked, the word nearly lost in his next wet intake of breath. “I don’t understand it. Why?”

“Mamoru,” I said again, counseling my voice to hold firm and steady. If I was to calm my lord, I would have to be the steady one. This I knew, above all else.

I reached out one hand to take him by the arm, to draw him close enough to put my arms around him. They knew the way, and it was not so difficult a thing to remember as I’d feared. I could feel the rough, homespun garments stretched thin against his back. He was trembling with the force of his weeping. I could feel it choked and wet against my neck.

“Perhaps what I hold for you is not duty, but something closer to friendship,” I told him in hushed tones, willing him to understand what I myself did not. “Is that not how we are meant to conduct ourselves now that we’ve left the palace?”

It was not entirely the truth, since my disobedience had begun in earnest before we’d ever left the palace. How was I to explain that there were some things that were more important than duty to me, when all I’d known my entire life was simply that? It was everything that I’d been trained for, so that in the end I was shaped as keenly as a sword built for its wielder. Like a sword, I had no other purpose in life save what my wielder gave me. To act alone was unthinkable, and yet I had done it.

“You should have controlled yourself better,” Mamoru told me, his voice slippery and filled with rebuke.

Before I could apologize, or try to put into rational speech the dilemma turning as a tempest within my head, his arms came up around my neck. It told me better than any words that he’d forgiven me.

“I know,” I said, speaking to his former scolding. “I can offer no excuse for my actions. They were inexcusable.”

“Still,” he murmured, snuffling around the word for a moment. “I suppose there is room for a certain amount of irrationality within… friendship.”

“If you are kind enough to allow it,” I acknowledged, feeling myself immeasurably lucky once again for my lord’s particular vein of kindness.

He sighed so deeply that I felt it in my bones. It was a sigh of great relief, from a man who had long been bearing a weight far too heavy for him. Perhaps my lord, too, had been in need of unburdening himself.

“Do you know, Kouje, I feel as though I’ve needed to get that out for ages.”

“We’d best be on the move,” I told him, running my hands sensibly down his back, in a movement meant to induce calm and clear-headedness. “Before the rain starts.”

My lord blinked, and cast his eyes upward to the leafy canopy hiding the clouds that had formed above our heads. To my surprise, he smiled.

“It’s been a dreadfully warm summer,” he said. His face was entirely changed when he was happy. It was all I could do not to swear then and there that happiness was all I would ever seek to bring him. “The land could do with a little rain. I believe it is dry this season. So I have overheard,” he added, and colored at his cheeks and ears.

“In that, you are correct,” I said, ignoring the rest and releasing Mamoru from my hold.

My lord was thinner than he looked, but there was a core of steel beneath all his delicacy that any man would have been proud of. Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to be proud of him, and yet I found that I was anyway, for I had played some part in his upbringing.

“Kouje,” Mamoru said, sounding almost hesitant.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Oh, well it’s nothing really. It’s only… your hair.”

“Ah,” I said, understanding at once the need for such levity. “Well, if you would be so good as to fix it for me, my friend, I would be forever in your debt.”

A smile touched my lord’s eyes at his new title, one more commonly acceptable outside the palace, and yet with a hint of the secret between us.

“You’ll have to sit,” he said, judging the distance between my height and his.

I did.

There was another rustling in the bush, some fox or badger rooting for its evening meal. Our stolen horse snorted impatiently, having finished his own rest and drunk his fill of water. If it was to be raining soon, then we would be better served to leave as quickly as we could. I felt cold dread in my stomach when I thought of what the border crossing might hold for us, but we would come to it sooner or later, and it was my firm belief that sooner was better than later.

That time, when I helped my lord back onto the horse, he smiled at me.

“It shouldn’t be long now until we are at the crossing,” he said. In his voice I could detect none of the worry I myself was feeling.

My lord was, as he’d ever been, determined to look on the future with hope. In that aspect, he was much braver than I, since it seemed far more realistic to plan for a situation that would neither be the best nor the worst possible outcome, but something closer to in between. It was far easier not to fix one’s hope to either. I didn’t understand how my lord could go on being optimistic without the disappointment of his losses eventually dragging him downward. My lord deserved someone who would not worry, as he did.

He needed a friend, and perhaps not a retainer, after all.

“Now then, brother,” Mamoru said, with another relieved sigh. “Mount up.”

We came to the road just as the rain began to fall, fat drops quickly mottling the road dark and light. My lord laughed, and turned his face up toward it, whereas I might otherwise have tried to shield his head from letting a single drop land. At the palace, Mamoru had always carried a parasol, alongside the other fine lords, so as to shield his skin from the sun and the rain alike. On the road, he had already suffered the attentions of the sun, so that his nose and cheeks betrayed a faint pink; the only time I had ever seen him colored so was when he’d been taken over by fever. Just then, it seemed that my lord was about to be rained on, without any recourse or parasols to better our situations.

I’d never have guessed he’d look so delighted at the prospect.

His laughter broke as the sound of wooden wheels creaking toward us caught our attention and startled us each from our more private thoughts. I felt a moment’s reassurance, since that was evidently the sound of rustling I had heard. There was a large wagon approaching, led by a black-and-white horse and followed by a half dozen men and women, their livelihood carried in bundles on their backs. They seemed to me to be a troupe of entertainers, the sort of group of acrobats, dancers, and jugglers that went from town to town to try their fortunes with the crowds in a bigger city. They must have been coming from the border town as we were, since it was the largest hereabouts, and such groups didn’t fare well in small villages, where the men and women had to hold on tightly to what coin they had.

Their caravan bore colorful markings, though as it approached I could see that the red paint was fading in places and one spiraling purple curlicue had all but flaked off. One of their wheels had been recently replaced.

They slowed as they passed us, and I felt my heart give an involuntary jump in my chest. Then, those who rode inside the caravan threw open their doors, and I realized that they had only just noted the rain, as we did, and thought to let their fellows ride inside after all.

One of them, a woman, eyed us curiously as the entertainers rearranged themselves, crowding in while the driver took this opportunity to check all three of the wheels they hadn’t replaced. The woman wore her hair tied back with a piece of red cloth, and dressed in the style of the men she traveled with, leggings and a short jacket. One would never have seen such a thing in the palace, and even then I noticed that Mamoru turned his head aside just slightly—out of deference, it would seem to any stranger, but I knew well enough it was more inspired by shyness.

“Passing through the border?”

My lord half turned, as though to ask me what course to take.

I nodded, though I did not feel entirely secure in my decision, myself.

“We are,” I told her. Then, the memory of my disagreeable temperament with previous people we’d met provoked me to add, “It’s a shame about the rain, though.”

She indicated the caravan with a nod of her head. “You’re free to ride with us, if you like. We could tie the horse to the back.”

“We wouldn’t wish to impose,” Mamoru said, though I thought that I heard a note of hope creep into his voice.

A drop of rain hit her square on her brow. The lady shook her head. “Wouldn’t have asked if it was an imposition.” She looked around for a moment, then stepped closer to our horse. “I’ve heard there’s trouble for couples crossing the border. You’d do better to ride with us. Less trouble.”

“Still,” I said, waiting for that sense of unease to creep over me, “you hardly know whether we are worthy of such a kind gesture.”

Mamoru laid a hand against my arm. She continued to regard us coolly.

“I get a sense about people, that’s all. Goro says I’m better at that than I am in the troupe.”

“We would be very grateful to accept your offer,” Mamoru said, turning to eye me from the side. “Wouldn’t we?”

“All things considered,” the young woman said. “Less trouble, like I told you.”

I smiled, beset from all sides. “I cannot see as how we can refuse now.”

“Aiko!” The driver, seemingly finished with his inspection of the wheels, was waving us over, covering his head with his arms as he did so. The rain was falling harder now.

“Just a minute!” Aiko shouted back. She turned again to us, an enigmatic smile on her face. “Are you two coming?”

I was still waiting for that sense of unease to come. It hadn’t; at least, not yet. Moreover, this was our chance—perhaps our only chance—at crossing the border without detection.

I dismounted, not waiting for my lord to hold out his hands before taking him by the waist and helping him down. Now that we’d made our decision, I didn’t want to incur any annoyance by dawdling.

Mamoru grasped my sleeve, as if to ask whether I was certain that was the best course of action. I smiled, true as I knew how to, and sent him into the caravan ahead of me while I hitched the horse up to the back of the wagon.

“Is this all right?”

My lord leaned close to whisper the question as I moved in next to him, Aiko pulling the doors shut behind us. I nodded, reaching out to clasp his forearm warmly, just to reassure him that I’d taken his words to heart. It was as my lord had spoken. There were things the both of us had needed to get off our chests before they crushed us completely. In their absence, the air between us seemed much clearer, and the distance much smaller than before.

We’d made the decision together, as brothers on the road.

Inside, the caravan was dark and crowded, the men and women sitting close together with their knees drawn up to their chests in an effort to make more space. Nearer to the front there was a man telling jokes, and the crowd around him laughed uproariously at the latest punch line.

Closer to us was a musician tuning his instrument, murmuring a few bars of a song to himself before frowning and turning the keys at the neck a minute fraction over. The instrument howled sadly, but also out of tune, the rain no doubt affecting it.

“So she says, that’s not a melon, my lord…”

“… and hair of river-silk…”

“… it’s two for the price of one!”

The next line of the musician’s song, about eyes that shone like lamplights in the gloom, was lost in the tide of laughter at the jester’s latest joke.

My lord smiled shyly, taking in the scene with wide eyes, as though he’d never seen the like. Neither had I, if it came to that. The actors brought to the palace were classically trained, and even then came only to perform. There was no interaction between them and those who worked at the palace. This was an experience entirely foreign to the pair of us, and I could only hope that my bewilderment didn’t show on my face as obviously as I felt it.

“So, where’re the two of you from?” Aiko asked after we had given our aliases, straightening the edge of her jacket as though it was the hem of a skirt.

My lord glanced at me, and I smiled, bowing my head. “We lived near the capital, before. But my sister’s taken ill, and she lives in the Honganje prefecture.” It was a lie that came far too easily to my lips. What was worse, I was glad of it.

Aiko whistled. “That’s a fair distance. You’re traveling the whole way by yourselves?”

“We didn’t hear about the trouble with the prince until it was too late to turn back,” I explained, willing my voice to betray nothing, as my hands did. “Now it seems we’ll have more trouble crossing the wall points than we thought. My…” I hesitated only the slightest moment. “… wife and I have had enough trouble with disreputable men along the way,” I explained, swallowing thickly. “With the trouble at the border—”

“He’s more impulsive than I knew when I married him,” Mamoru said wryly.

“Well,” Aiko pondered, stretching her arms out in front of her, not seeming to mind when she almost slapped the musician in the back of his head, “that all depends. Your wife is pretty enough that she might get through, or you might get someone with an eye that decides she looks a little too much like royalty. She does, you know,” Aiko added.

In comparison to what passed for women in nearby towns, I supposed that he did.

“Except it seems you’ve helped us quite neatly in avoiding that particular difficulty,” I pointed out, not to be contrary, but because it genuinely baffled me. Were there people going out of their way to help one another on the roads, now that they’d been made so difficult to travel? I didn’t know if I believed it. I didn’t know if my nature would allow me to.

“Like I said,” Aiko shrugged. “I get a feel for people.”

“You can get a feel for me any day, Aiko,” someone called across the caravan.

“Shut it, Goro,” she said, seeming not put out at all.

“We’re grateful,” Mamoru said, with a glance toward me. “We… my husband’s sister, her condition is very poor indeed. And they were so close when they were children. We’re not certain how long she’ll last, so we can hardly afford delays.”

“Oh,” said Aiko, raising one eyebrow as I turned to look at Mamoru in surprise.

He stared straight ahead, his expression betraying nothing but a restrained amusement around his mouth and in his eyes. He was enjoying himself. He would have done well in a traveling theatre group such as that one. I could only hope that my own surprise and amusement would not show too readily on my face.

“Yes,” I said, shaking my head sadly to remind myself that, no matter what new turns this game with my lord took, I had a terribly ill sister. “I am fortunate, however, to have a wife so caring as to make the journey with me.”

“Most would stay at home,” Aiko agreed, though there was something in her voice that suggested she was not one of them.

“Oh, not at all,” said Mamoru, taking my hand. When my lord had been very much younger, he had been vociferous in his approval of the actors who came to the palace, and more than once had declared it would be his calling in life. It pleased me to see him taking up the role with such enthusiasm, that I had been able to give him something after all, in the midst of taking so much away.

“I don’t mean to imply that my husband is an untrustworthy creature, of course, but if you were married to one this handsome, would you think to send him on such a long journey unaccompanied?” Mamoru shook his head gravely. “Certainly not!”

Aiko laughed, not bothering to hide her amusement behind her hand.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “Just married, I take it?”

“Why, what if he were to run into the prince and his retainer?” Mamoru went on, growing more excited. “I might lose him forever to his sense of duty.”

Aiko’s eyes sharpened at this. “What do you mean by that?”

Mamoru lifted his chin, looking so like the prince I knew that it hurt my chest. “My husband knows something about the character of men. You might say that he, too, has a feel for people.”

Aiko leaned her head in closer to mine, and Mamoru did the same.

“What have you heard of the prince?” she asked us.

“Likely less than you,” I said, feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the direction this conversation had taken.

“I’ve heard that his retainer is seven feet tall,” she said, folding her knees beneath her, and lowering her voice to a whisper. “That he fights mountain lions in the north, and wrestles sea monsters into submission in the south at once.”

“Really?” Mamoru asked, his eyes bright as he settled in closer. “Would you care to tell me more?”

ALCIBIADES

I had a splitting headache, like I was back in the Basquiat being held captive during the fever. And all the rest—the Ke-Han, our victory, the diplomatic mission, the plays, the bell-cracked Emperor, Caius—was some dream I’d come up with in my delirium.

The Ke-Han could’ve defeated us with their clear wine.

“Oh Alcibiades!” The all-too-familiar voice of Caius ever-loving Greylace—unfortunately not a dying man’s hallucination—came singsonging to me. It got right between the eyes and settled there, lancing at my brain with remorseless good cheer. “It’s mail time, and Dear Yana has written you again with news from home!”

I rolled over and buried my face against the pillow. No, I thought. Not “no thank you,” and not “come back later,” but an unflinching no. It wasn’t just that it wasn’t the time, but never. I’d never get used to him, nor to the way I felt; nor would I ever start feeling like a man again beyond the dull throbbing between my ears where my brains were supposed to be. They’d been there once, but the wine had done away with them completely, as evidenced by the fact that, just last night, I’d saved the life of the Emperor of the Ke-Han by stepping between him and an assassin’s blade.

I didn’t even like the man. Truth was, I hated him. It was something different from the way I felt about that little bugger Caius, who’d proven both how worthy and how infuriating he was on countless occasions, to the point where I was almost getting used to being driven up the wall by him, and that was frightening.

But I hated the Emperor of the Ke-Han with everything I had in me, for every man I’d lost and every friend who’d died, for every story I’d known was false but had allowed to harden my heart against the enemy anyway. He wasn’t human. He was a fucking monster; anyone could see that as soon as look at him, apparently even his own people. That actor’d looked at me right before he died and suddenly, we were on the same side as one another, except for one thing: I’d fucking stopped him.

“Bastion blast,” I snarled at the pillow.

“I hear you in there, Alcibiades,” Caius said. “Are you decent?”

“No!” I shouted, and meant it, and regretted it almost as immediately, when my head started buzzing like there was an entire hive of bees up inside of it.

“No worries,” Caius said. “I can wait.”

Maybe I’d get a commendation, I thought dizzily as I pulled myself from the bed and stumbled toward the bedside basin. Cold water in there, as always. I resisted, somehow, the urge to stick my head in it, hoping I could drown myself that easily. I might’ve done it, too, to get myself out of there, except I’d never yet run from a fight and that was the fight of my life.

I was General fucking Alcibiades of the fucking Glendarrow. I was a stupid kid leaving home so I could fight in a war I didn’t even understand, so I could be hard and strong like every man I’d ever known, so I could take down the other side and be some kind of a hero or, if I was lucky, I could at least not be dead. I was a soldier, first and foremost, before I’d ever been a general, and I’d fought the Ke-Han Emperor hand to hand just before I’d gone and saved his bastion-damned life.

Only it wasn’t my emperor. It wasn’t the Emperor we’d come to hate but this young bastard of a crazy upstart, and all those stories faded in comparison to what I’d seen.

I’d always assumed the Ke-Han Emperor had his people behind him. Otherwise, what the hell were they fighting for? How in bastion’s name had he managed to make them fight all these years?

Clearly his son wasn’t half the man that he had been.

And between the two I was confusing myself between hate and respect.

The water in the basin was freezing and I was glad for it, splashing it all over my face until I couldn’t feel my nose or my chin. Like being garrisoned up in the mountains during raid season, glad for the cold that meant no one could smell anything and no one had to get naked enough to bathe. Those were the ever-loving days—not a nightmare of being polite and wearing the right things and sitting at low tables while your legs cramped and your eyes crossed and everybody talked and laughed, polite as you’d like, with all the things we’d done to each other during the war boiling under the surface.

Peace? Everyone wanted peace? Was that what Emperor Iseul was thinking when he’d sliced open that poor bastard’s throat, or was it something else?

I’d get on my horse and ride out of here first thing if my horse hadn’t been stolen.

“Let’s see,” Caius called, from the partitioning door. Somehow, the Ke-Han had known this would happen; they’d divined the future and put us together just to make me crazy. “Yana says that the chickens are very healthy. You have chickens? How utterly delightful, Alcibiades! How does one go about raising chickens, I wonder? And don’t they wake you up in the morning something awful?”

I bowed my head over the cold water and closed my eyes. All I could see was Caius standing, probably wearing some feathered night robe made of silk and sunshine, just next to the door separating us. He wasn’t suffering from any headache—though, in all fairness, I couldn’t have said he never got ’em, being velikaia and all—and he probably looked like nothing had flustered him in his entire life. However long it’d been so far, the little creep.

I sighed, felt myself smiling, and made a noise to cover it up—a hoarse grunt.

“Stop reading my private mail,” I muttered, dragging my wet hands through my hair. “And come in or don’t; just pick one.”

“She also wants you to know that she’s thinking of selling the wagon,” Caius went on, having chosen come in, like I’d both known and feared he would.

There was something nasty to be said about my current situation when even a madman was becoming predictable. I didn’t want to think what that said about me, about how I was being slowly driven ’round the bend by a pint-sized magician and his more-than-pint-sized appetite for entertainment.

“Also,” he continued, coming closer so that I could see him in the mirror. I’d been right—not a hair out of place. Certainly nothing to suggest he’d indulged in as much of the clear wine as I had, which I suspected he had; but of course, it hadn’t bothered him one ounce. He pulled a face, managing to look like a tragedy mask but not an actual human who happened to feel sad. “She wants to know why your brothers never write to her the way you do. You’re the most diligent of all, it would seem. How many brothers, by the by? I can’t imagine there being more than one of you—and all in the same house, no less. Your poor, dear mother—not to mention poor, dear Yana!”

“Don’t know if the others can write,” I grunted, head still ringing from my earlier shouting. Words were so loud, and Greylace knew so many of them. I didn’t expect him to understand it, but I certainly wasn’t going to be doing any more talking than was strictly necessary.

I lifted my head—a more difficult task than it should have been—and glared at my own reflection in the small, round mirror set over the basin. Everything was still vaguely blurry, since the pain caused by trying to force my eyes into focus just plain wasn’t worth the trouble, but I still had both ears and both eyes and one good nose, however red-rimmed they all were.

It was more than I could properly say for the assassins, I thought. Even if we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them since their being dragged off, every soldier among us knew what came next. Torture. Hell, even Josette had known, judging by the firm, blank expression she’d pulled last night and the unhappy twist of her mouth later on, when she, the madman, and I had all gone back to our private rooms, nobody saying anything, and everybody thinking too much.

There was something to be said for the atmosphere when even a diplomat was expecting the worst.

Greylace was still reading my letter, holding it up in front of him like an official carrying an edict from th’Esar. Maybe he thought that falling silent would throw me off the trail, like I was some kind of bear trying to catch his scent in the woods. Unlucky for him that I’d been learning from our little encounters, and while to all appearances I was feeling my cheeks to decide whether I could leave off shaving another day, I was really watching my fine friend the snake with the aid of my mirror.

It was a Ke-Han trick I’d adopted to keep tabs on Greylace. That ought to have upset me, but with all there was going on in my head at the minute, there wasn’t much room for feelings, upset or otherwise.

His guard was down. I was about ten times bigger than he was. That was my chance, my perfect moment, to reclaim what was rightfully mine.

I moved all at once, my muscles sore from their practice with Lord Temur, not to mention their not-quite-practice with the Emperor. I liked to think I’d learned things from that day too, though—like how to be sneaky when it suited my purpose. And when my purpose was to expropriate a letter from the hands of one Caius Greylace, sneaky was the order of the day. I turned and plucked the letter from his fingertips, not quite managing to keep from smiling with triumph as I held it very, very high above his smug little head.

As far as I was concerned, it was all worth it for the look on his face—pure shock and concern, as though I’d finally managed to get one up on him.

“I’ve been practicing,” I reminded him, and smoothed the paper flat out of habit while keeping my body between him and the letter.

“Oh, my dear,” he said, shaking his head so that I noticed he was wearing drops in his ears, some kind of red stones that caught the light and bothered my eyes. At least he was wearing red—had been wearing red, I admitted to myself grudgingly, for a few days. Out of misplaced camaraderie, probably not out of any feelings of nationality he harbored for our homeland. “There’s something dreadfully wrong about this letter.”

“Wrong,” I snapped, eyeing him darkly. If he’d thought joking around was the order of the day when something was wrong back home, then I was going to crack his head open like an egg against the wall before breakfast. Finally, an excuse for it.

I glanced down at Yana’s penmanship, scanning the letter’s contents briefly. Reading was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to be avoiding at the moment, but—well, I didn’t like that look on Caius’s face, that was all. Yana’d never mention if she was sick, or anything like that, but there was always the chance that one of the others…

“Am I reading this right?” I asked, like it didn’t bother me a heck of a lot even to have to ask for an outside opinion. As much as I hated to admit it, though, Greylace was the only other person who’d read one of Yana’s letters, and in my current state I didn’t know if I trusted myself to be the last word.

Caius pushed a hand through his hair, so that I caught sight of his bad eye before the strands fell back into place. Why didn’t he just wear an eye patch? He could even put jewels on it, have different ones to match his every outfit. Hiding wasn’t the sort of thing I associated with Greylace; it didn’t suit him. Nor was he the type to fidget—at least, not so unconsciously. Everything he did—every movement he made—was calculated, planned out for a certain effect to add to the overall appearance. Much like that performance last night, and just as fucking deadly, too.

There were times when I figured he could easily have been raised by the Ke-Han, for all they were similar in most of their insanities.

He reached a hand out as if to take the letter, then withdrew it.

I didn’t like this. Not one bit.

“I don’t know,” he said at last and sighed, producing a fan from inside his voluminous sleeves. He snapped it open in one smooth flick of his wrist and studied its ridged horizon with his one good eye. “Did you know that noble ladies sometimes carry weapons in their fans,” he remarked, as though he imagined I cared. There was something serious in his voice, though, or maybe it was the absence of his usual unflagging delight.

“I didn’t know that,” I said, trying my best to rein in my temper. “I wouldn’t doubt it, though. Women are dangerous. I was asking about the letter.”

Yana hadn’t even mentioned my temper in this one. That was another funny thing, besides. She never missed a chance to correct my flaws. It just wasn’t like her.

In fact, the whole letter was off, like someone else had been writing it. Someone who didn’t come from the country, who’d learned a long time ago the proper way of sentences, who wrote perfectly fine but without any real flavor.

“That’s precisely what I meant, my dear!” Caius’s gaze flicked up to me, that time. He looked wounded that I hadn’t been able to follow the fevered ramblings of his brain. Like that was something new.

“Humor me,” I said flatly.

Maybe he could give words to the feelings I had.

Caius closed the fan again and stepped up on his tiptoes to smack me on the nose with it, like a bad dog who’d made a mess of the kitchen. By the time I’d got over the shock—which didn’t take me long—he’d danced out of range and into the center of my room. He wasn’t laughing, but he’d opened the fan again and was holding it in front of his face.

It wouldn’t’ve surprised me to learn he had a knife hidden in that fan. He was just the type for it.

His one good eye sparkled wickedly, like a chip of green madness in an otherwise mundane marble statue.

“You see before you an ordinary fan,” he called out as I reluctantly followed after him. I sat on one of the too-small chairs, clutching Yana’s strange letter in one hand.

All right. An ordinary fan. Whatever that had to do with anything.

I supposed I could agree with him on it, though. The deep reds of the silk and the pale wood of its binding were all I did see, and it seemed ordinary enough. Quite plain, even, for Caius Greylace’s tastes.

“Watch carefully now,” he counseled, while I privately resolved that he was going to regret it if he chose to hit me on the nose again. It was still sore. That crafty little bastard.

Instead, he pushed the fan shut with both hands this time. When next he opened it, there were small knives, thin-bladed and cruel, hidden in the fan like the spaces between fingers.

I lifted my eyebrows. Caius giggled a high-pitched giggle, and covered his mouth with one hand, quite carried away with his own success at managing the trick. He’d probably been practicing it, waiting for the right moment to reveal all to me, like the magician that he was, through and through.

My patience was wearing thin. There was indulging a man his peculiarities just so you could get to the point, and there was wasting precious time. I wasn’t even sure why I’d been in the mood for the former, but I certainly wasn’t going to allow the latter. Not where Yana was concerned. Definitely not with this bastion-cursed headache.

“I don’t see what this has to do with the letter,” I said, calm as I could.

“Oh, don’t you see?” Caius cast the fan down in frustration, and I moved my feet to make sure neither of them caught a knife by “accident.” “It is one thing made to look like another! The danger concealed in something quite ordinary. I did think I’d made it clear as possible.”

He’d made it clear as mud, I thought, but I kept that to myself.

Caius paused, and I could almost see the change coming over him, like some kind of invisible comb made to sort out and straighten anything that had gone astray in his momentary fit of temper. I made a joke of it often enough, but there was madness in the Greylace blood. It was common enough knowledge, and it was little things like this that reminded me of it. Something just wasn’t right—like a dragon with a bolt gone missing. Couldn’t trust him, even if you wanted to.

Which I didn’t.

“My apologies,” he said, in a low, calm voice. “What I mean to say is that someone has clearly written this letter in place of your dear Yana.”

His robes pooled elegantly around him when he ducked to pick up the fan, and his knives. I defnitely wasn’t anywhere near calm anymore.

“What are you saying?” I demanded. Not the most eloquent, but he made it damn hard. “She’s not in trouble, is she?”

“I should think not,” Caius replied. “At first I thought that she might have taken ill; that the unusual tone was the product of dictation, perhaps. I worried for her health, and wondered if I ought to write to someone—have a doctor sent out to visit her in the country. You absolutely cannot trust country doctors, my dear; we both know that much. And since she’s so very important to you—you’ve had so much weighing upon you of late, I didn’t want to worry you—I thought to keep it to myself. Perhaps rewrite the letter so that you wouldn’t notice anything was off, either, while I took care of things.”

“Wait,” I said. “Greylace. Just how often are you reading my private things?”

“You’re welcome,” Caius went on, smooth as buttermilk. “It was very kind of me; but I do it because I’ve grown so fond of you, and since you refuse to take care of yourself, the burden falls on those long-suffering souls like myself and Dear Yana. However, Alcibiades, I do not think that Yana is ill.”

“Course not,” I muttered, though I was relieved nonetheless. The letter was crumpled and small in my hands, themselves stiff from so much practice with a foreign blade. “She’s got a constitution like a bull.”

“Naturally, as all fine women do,” Caius acquiesced. “So it was with a mixture of relief and dread that I continued to theorize. What sort of change might come over a woman, a woman like Dear Yana, strong as a bull and set in her particular grammatical ways, to alter her tone so drastically as to sound like…” Caius trailed off, then waved in the direction of the letter with a pained expression—the sort of face he pulled when he saw some kind of outfit that, he said, was indicative of poor workmanship. “Well, like that,” he concluded at last, and chose that moment to take my favorite chair all for himself.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. I didn’t know. It could always have been the madness talking—except I knew that it wasn’t. Caius Greylace was absolutely, without a doubt, at least three cards short of a deck, but he was smart as a whipcrack and he wasn’t about to create a conspiracy where none existed.

“Exactly,” Caius said. “Neither did I, really, so I don’t blame you for being at a loss.”

“Well,” I muttered. “If you’ve got the solution, we don’t need a dialogue about it.”

“Humor me,” Caius Greylace said.

“Don’t I always?”

“Not really,” Caius said, and clapped his hands together. “All right then, I will tell you, but only if you promise to have breakfast with me. I’ve already ordered it, and some nice soap that you can use when you bathe and shave today. How does that sound?”

“You’re bribing me,” I replied.

“Only a little bit,” he admitted.

I sat back in my uncomfortable Ke-Han chair, eyeing the letter in question. The handwriting was exactly right, loop for loop; the paper was the same as always, coarse and from the countryside, heavy and stiff and nearly impossible to tear. But everything else was wrong. It just didn’t sound like her—and Caius, of all people, knew why. How long had he been snooping through my things? And when had he found the time to do so? I wondered if he spent most of his time sneaking around my room while I was sleeping—last night, for example, when I was practically dead to the world—and the very idea made me shudder. At least I knew that he was on my side. It was clear now that he could have killed me, with one of those fan-knives, for example, at any time he wanted.

So he considered me quaint, like a pet. Worth keeping around for whatever happened next. Almost the same as I considered him, except I was sane and he was loopy as Yana’s letters.

“Breakfast, huh?” I said.

“I think I have managed to procure us some fried eggs,” Caius added. “I left extremely specific directions with the servants. And everyone is all too ready to give the great hero what he wants. You are a hero now, you know. I am sure the Emperor will wish to speak with you at some point today—I’ll go with you, of course; I don’t trust you alone with people.”

“Neither do I,” I agreed, almost overwhelmed. The headache was coming back.

Without speaking, Caius was suddenly standing and gliding across the room, quick as you like, to stand by me. He ruffled his fingers through my hair—he was actually touching me, but now that I’d finally started to get used to him, I was going to have to kill him—and pressed his thumbs against my temples, where the blood pounded all too hot.

Everything stilled and cooled; the world slowed around me. It was like the night before, with the incense and the wine and the music. It was like being in another place, on the bastion-damned moon, floating out into the night among the stars. For all I felt imaginary at that one moment, I might as well have been a painting on a standing screen: some bowlegged crane or a flower-dusted pine tree, bent and knotty with age.

He was pulling his mind magic on me.

“What’re you…” I muttered, trying to struggle against it as he pulled a blanket up over my slumbering brain. “Stop that… Tickles…”

“I’ll be more careful,” he murmured. “It is only that I thought I might cure your headache. I’ve had my share of them myself, you know.”

“Stop it,” I said, but even I could hear my voice held no conviction.

“Besides,” Caius went on, his voice hushed, “this way, we are closer, and I may speak to you in private. It is my suspicion that Yana Berger wrote to you as she always does, with the peculiar patterns she always did, but that someone has intercepted her letter to you and rewritten it.”

I struggled against the sleepy heaviness in my head. At least it didn’t hurt anymore, but that didn’t make it any less impossible to think. “Why would anyone do that,” I said. “It’s just Yana.”

“Someone paranoid enough to screen all our letters,” Caius said.

A little shiver ran down my spine, the fingers of some unseen hand, and I didn’t even once suspect it was part of Caius Greylace’s Talent. “Tabs’re being kept on us,” I snarled. “Aren’t they?”

“That was the very same conclusion I came to, myself,” Caius said, “as I pondered this dilemma while you drooled into your pillow.”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Fuck,” Caius Greylace agreed. “What a horrible word that is, but I suppose it will serve. In this instance only, mind; I don’t approve of it otherwise.”

“You’re not…” I began, but Caius clucked.

“I’m not Yana?” he supplied.

“What about my letters to her?” I demanded. “Have they been changed?”

“That I have no way of knowing,” he replied. “I do hope, however, you haven’t been indiscreet, and that, if you have had any private information, any suspicions, you have kept them to yourself and away from her. We don’t want to draw any further suspicion; you’ve already caused a great deal of commotion. And, exciting as it may be, now that all eyes are on the dashing hero Alcibiades, it makes it very difficult for us to investigate anything at all.”

“Your,” I managed, forcing my brain to work. “Your Talent—You’re a velikaia. Why don’t you find out who’s pulling this shit, and we’ll—”

“We’ll what, Alcibiades?” Caius asked.

I snorted. “I’ve a few ideas,” I said. “Just leave that part to me.”

“My Talent doesn’t exactly work that way.” Caius sighed. For a moment I saw that familiar, fleeting pout pass over his features, and I was almost comforted by how familiar they were, the only thing I recognized anymore amidst all the smoke and mirrors, the hanging scrolls and the standing screens, the painted doors that slid open to reveal everything rotting away behind the gilded colors. “It is much more complicated than all that. If only things were different… But they aren’t, and I am as I am, and we must do things more slowly. Perhaps that’s for the best—it will give you time to cool your heels. Think of the bright side, my dear: Yana Berger is safe and sound with her chickens and your brothers, and we are the ones who may keep her that way!”

With that, Caius Greylace removed his hands and my headache from my head. I was caught with a sudden dizziness I couldn’t shake off, and by the time my thoughts had cleared, he was once again sitting in the only comfortable chair. Damn him, I thought, but there was some respect there.

He was useful, anyway. And clever.

“So what now?” I asked, folding the offending letter and setting it down on the table beside me.

“Breakfast, I imagine,” Caius replied, his lips spreading into a soft grin with a flash of pearly white teeth behind it. “And then we shall sit down to compose a long and detailed epistle to dear Yana telling her how wonderful things are in the Ke-Han Empire.”

MAMORU

“You,” the playwright said, waving me over. “That’s right, you. I don’t bite, unless I’m playing substitute for the fox. That man of yours keeps a close eye on you; we both know it. But I’ve a line or two that needs testing.”

If Kouje had been beside me, he would have bristled at the tone the man chose to take with me, even if he didn’t mean anything by it. As it was, most of the group had managed to rope Kouje into hard labor as we stopped for the night, hauling trunks of costumes and juggling sticks and the like from the back of one cart to another. He’d been given time enough only to cast one helpless look over his shoulder toward me before Aiko pulled him in the direction of working for our suppers. And, of course, the border crossing.

The wall rose high above us in the night, illimitable and fearsome. If we could just get across it, then we would be all right; I knew it deep in my bones. But for the moment it stood between us and our escape, and I was as frightened of it as I had been of the Volstov dragons. It was on the same scale and, beyond that, it meant just as much—a cruel, stark metaphor, the symbol of oppression.

Yet it was only a wall.

I’d been left to myself, or so I’d thought; apparently there were rare few among the group’s number that were useless, and I and the playwright were together in that count. In the distance, I heard one of the actors shouting, and the sound of Kouje’s voice answered him, clear and stronger.

“Well?” the playwright asked. “It’s not like you’ll be of any help lugging boxes. You’d break as soon as look at some of those coarse creatures—and I’m only talking about the women, ha-ha!”

I approached the playwright, who was in the midst of reading through a long scroll of rice paper and chewing upon a length of bamboo—which, I realized upon closer inspection, was actually serving as his pen.

“I’m not an expert,” I began, but the playwright hushed me with one hand.

“All the better,” he said. “If I can win you over, then I’ve got anyone on my side. You catch my drift?”

“Ah,” I agreed, and, after a moment, sat upon an empty trunk, folding my hands in my lap. The trunk belonged to the playwright—whose name was Goro, I thought; or at least, that was what Aiko had called him—and he didn’t seem to mind. Besides which, he was too caught up in the writing to notice anyone sitting on anything.

“The prince and his loyal retainer—not ours, of course,” Goro intimated, brushing stray hairs back into his ponytail. “From back in the day; I’ll find a reference, make it work, attract all the right sorts of attention and none of the wrong if I’m lucky. And if I’m not…” His eyes twinkled. “Be famous forever, I suppose.”

“Go on,” I encouraged, though I felt suddenly uncomfortable. There were stock plays, of course, familiar stories that could be repurposed for relevance according to current events—but they also worked to circumvent the law, since any writer could claim that they were merely staging a revival of an old favorite, and it had nothing at all to do with the current state of affairs. It also made the creation of a new play a relatively quick affair: The structure was all there to begin with. Perhaps I ought to give him suggestions.

Then again, perhaps not.

“They’re in the mountains on this one, fighting a demon—you know what, I’ll just set the stage for you. Where’s Ryu? Probably off getting drunk as a lord and badgering all the women. It’s nothing without the music. But think of it like this: They’ve just evaded the guards from the palace, and the two of them are making their way up the mountainside to call upon their ancestors for assistance.”

As Goro spoke, his face transformed into a specter, a fascinating play of light and shadow upon features as still as though they were part of a blank mask. This was no ordinary playwright, I supposed; but it was nonetheless quite strange to see someone else imagining the very story I was living.

At least there had been no mountain demons. Not yet.

“The prince is caught,” Goro continued, striking the hero’s pose. “And I was torn on this line—do you think he ought to say ‘Halt!’ or something a bit more poignant? The poetic hero’s popular these days, but with these country bumpkins—”

“All right, Goro, that’s enough,” Aiko said, coming up behind him. “You’ve got two good hands. Why don’t you ever use them?”

“I’m creating something marvelous,” Goro said, with a flourish and a bow. “There are men in this group that’ll kill to play the prince’s role.”

“I’m far more fond of the loyal retainer,” I said, almost quiet enough that neither of them would hear.

“Come on,” Aiko said. Her gaze was sharp and clear; but that might well have been the starlight. “I’ll save you from this ruffian. They’ve got your husband lifting the heavy stuff now. Little did you know we’d be kidnapping you like this.”

“It was all a part of Aiko’s cunning plan,” Goro added, saluting me with his makeshift pen. “Then again, what isn’t?”

“We’re very grateful,” I said quickly, hoping that I hadn’t ruined their clever jesting with my own earnest interruption.

I had always loved playacting, but it seemed that I was still no good at playing anything but serious. It was all I’d been trained for.

“That’s just because you aren’t the one doing the lifting, am I right?” Goro winked at me, settling himself against the trunk I’d been sitting on.

“All right,” said Aiko, slipping her arm through mine. “This one’s not up for being recruited. You’ll have to get your inspiration from the same place everyone else does.”

I saw Goro throw his hands up in exasperation as Aiko pulled me, gently but insistently, away. It was hard not to feel just slightly regretful. Though I knew the idea was foolish, I couldn’t help but wish that perhaps Kouje and I might stay on there awhile—among the sounds of people and not birdcalls in the night, rustling animals through the brush startling me awake at every turn. Laughter was a comfort, and so much sound was like a shield. Perhaps it would be too much to ask that Kouje act, of course, but there were many other talents to choose from. Perhaps he might be a sword dancer—one of those graceful yet deadly entertainers.

Yet, when I tried to imagine it, all I could conjure up was Kouje looking plaintively at me from the sidelines, as though even inside my own head he disapproved of the matter entirely.

I couldn’t help but sigh. It caught Aiko’s attention as we drew nearer to the fire they’d built, and the sharp, rhythmic sounds of trunks being unloaded or rearranged.

“They’ll have him currying the horses next, if you aren’t careful,” she said, but she was smiling, so that I was fairly certain she was joking. Mostly.

I settled myself carefully next to her on the ground, arranging my robes with care. It had been ages since I’d last donned women’s clothing; so long ago that I scarcely remembered it at all. I was perhaps fortunate, then, that my clothing at the palace had been infinitely more complicated than what I was wearing. I’d stand out awfully if I were tripping over my own feet everywhere we went.

“I don’t think he’d mind it, to be honest,” I said quietly, sharing a smile of my own. “He’s used to hard work, and he has a fine hand when it comes to horses.”

Aiko’s eyes took on that bright, clever look again, that made me feel almost uneasy, as though I’d given away something I ought to have kept hidden. Something of my discomfort must have shown on my face, because the look soon softened before it disappeared entirely. Aiko stretched her legs out in front of her, reaching her feet toward the fire and tilting her head back to look up at the sky.

“Might rain tomorrow,” she said. “Clouds make for a warmer night, but there’s no telling what they’ll bring in the day.”

I looked up too, disappointed. It had been so long since I’d seen the stars. I ought to have been grateful for the opportunity to look at all.

“You’d be no good for the role, you know.”

Confused, I turned my head to glance at her. How could she wear such clothes, I wondered. They would never have allowed that in the palace. And yet she looked so comfortable—as though she didn’t realize it was improper.

“The loyal retainer,” she elaborated, waving a hand to where we’d left Goro, bamboo brush pen stuck behind his ear as he muttered to himself. “You said you preferred him, didn’t you?”

“Ah,” I said, feeling the twist of anxiety in my stomach. Where was Kouje at that moment to rescue me? Probably tending to the horses. I would have to have words with Goro, and indeed with any and all playwrights we encountered from that day out—someone would have to correct all false impressions of the loyal retainer’s impeccable timing and bravery where his lord was concerned. Horses. I’d never forgive him.

“Ah?” Aiko asked.

“Well, you see,” I said, arranging my sleeves with the utmost care, as though I was embarrassed. It wasn’t that difficult to feign. “He reminds me a great deal of my husband.”

I lifted my head, half-dreading what I might see. To my relief, this seemed to be the answer Aiko had been looking for. She was nodding and smiling once more.

“Don’t worry,” she said, as though now we shared a secret between us. “My lips are sealed.”

“Keeping secrets now?”

I heard Kouje’s voice before I heard his footsteps, that same rigid training that he could not quite seem to erase from our days at the palace keeping his movements silent. Had there ever been a time when the most I had to worry about was the sound of servants’ footsteps interrupting my thoughts? It was very difficult to imagine just then, seated in the shadow of the border wall.

Kouje took his place next to me, settling on the ground with a stretch and a yawn like one of the great lions in the menagerie. I couldn’t help turning my head just slightly to stare, since he had never been so informal in front of me. Perhaps it was the influence of the actors, and no doubt his shoulders ached from all that lifting.

All at once I felt like a child, privy to the dressing room where actors removed their mantles and became the real people they’d always been underneath.

He looked first at me, then at Aiko, since neither of us had responded to his question. My own reply had been delayed out of surprise and delight, and likely Aiko was waiting for me to speak. It was my place as a wife.

I giggled, unable to help myself, and hid my face behind my sleeve.

“Oh, I see how it is. That’s just fine,” Kouje said, stretching once more and leaning back to lie on the forest floor. “I’m not invited to share women’s talk, I understand. I was only lifting things all night with the thought that I might come back to the ministrations of my darling wife, but I see now that it was all for nothing.”

I stared at him, gaping mouth hidden by my sleeve. He was acting not at all like himself.

“What’s got into you?” I asked, though my question was not a part of our jest.

On my other side, Aiko shook her head. “The actors are a terrible influence. Rough lot. Not suited for finer folk.”

Kouje smiled, and I caught his eye in the dark. Where had this skill in acting come from? And why had I possessed no knowledge of it until that very moment?

“Husband,” I said, lowering my voice as other men trickled in toward the campfire, some of them toting blankets, “if you run away to become an actor, I shall be terribly cross with you.”

“I have always wanted to play the hero,” Kouje confided, eyes practically gleaming with wickedness.

I sighed. His enthusiasm was infectious, and I had always been particularly weak when it came to resisting enthusiasm.

“Aiko, what am I to do with this man?” I asked. “Who will explain to his dear sister, who once had such high hopes for him?”

“Every man wants to run away to become an actor at least once in his life,” Aiko told me in the midst of setting up her own bed for the night. “It’s the real fools who actually do it.”

“We should worry about crossing the checkpoint,” I said in a whisper, and the shadow of the wall came over me again, chill and sudden.

Kouje seemed to sense it, for he sat up, hesitantly putting a hand against my arm.

“Better to worry about getting a good night’s sleep tonight,” he said, low and calm, in the voice I recognized best of all.

“All right,” I agreed. To the soothing cadence of actors laughing in the night, I slept.

I woke with the bump and jolt of the caravan in the morning, my face against Kouje’s shoulder. I couldn’t believe that I’d been sleeping so deeply as to miss our getting under way, but it seemed we’d commenced with me snoozing on like a baby.

Slightly embarrassed, I clutched at Kouje’s arm and peered around curiously. I couldn’t tell from our position inside the caravan how far along we were.

“Are we stopped?” I whispered.

Kouje half turned, his face bearing none of the impulsive humor from last night. “We are at the checkpoint,” he said. “They’re queuing up wagons and caravans to go through a separate gate.”

“We’ve got all our papers,” Goro muttered, “so what’s the holdup? Morning, princess,” he added as an afterthought just for me.

“There’s a lot of people going through,” Aiko said, sterner than she’d been the day before. “That’s the holdup. No problems. We’re in order.”

I could feel Kouje go nearly rigid with concern next to me. I laid my hand carefully against his shoulder, leaning my head against his back to calm him.

“We’ll be through,” I murmured privately, for myself as much as him. I could feel my heart hammering like a hunted animal’s, but I willed myself to ignore that. We’d made it that far, hadn’t we? That much had seemed impossible, once.

Our carriage moved with miserable slowness, inch by aching inch, as though with each passing moment we grew farther from our goal. The countless ways in which we might be caught ran through my mind—something like a play, I supposed, though one which Goro would never have the inspiration to write—and I could hear Kouje’s heart hammering in his chest from where my ear was pressed, up against his back.

Where was his skill with playacting from the night before? The disgruntled husband, snared by the allure of the open road? And where had my laughter gone?

“Hey,” Aiko said, pausing for an instant before she covered my soft hand with her own rough fingers. “If they see you looking like that, they’ll never let any of us across.”

Our eyes met, and she pulled her hand away from mine as though she’d been burned.

“Sorry,” she added. “I’m needed up front.”

The carriage—if it could have been dignified by such a name, held together as much by the will of its inhabitants as it was by craftsmanship—rolled to a stop, and Aiko disappeared into the front. I could hear the sound of guards and Goro’s laughter changing seamlessly into obsequious apologies and formalities.

“We are sorry to have troubled you,” he was saying, and I closed my eyes.

The image of the guards—perhaps they were even men I had known and trained alongside; friends of my brothers; members of the extended family—seemed more terrifying to me than any quarrelsome demon perched in the trees above on a steep mountain pass. I could imagine the border guards in full theatrical regalia, the vivid red makeup denoting the villains’ roles stamped clearly across their white faces. I could even see Goro playing the wicked captain as he drew back the curtain and peered inside the carriage.

I was not ready for the stage, though I did have a moment where I paused to wonder if I would one day be in the audience, watching my own antics being reenacted. Yet in that play, I knew, the villain would not have been any mere captain of the guard. He would have been my brother. Iseul.

The door in the back of the carriage was flung open and one of the guards, a face I was relieved not to recognize, barked out orders in a tone that was familiar. Even Kouje had used it more than once during campaigns.

“Out,” the guard said.

One by one, we filed into the sunlight; before us, the guards were arranged in immaculate order while we, a ragtag group of the commonest caliber, milled together uncertainly.

“I know I’m an awful playwright,” Goro began, but the guard had only to hold up one hand, and all was silence thereafter.

“These?” the guard demanded, nodding toward two jugglers who stood together.

“Brothers,” Goro replied, his head lowered; he was on the verge, I realized, of kowtowing, dragging his brow through the dirt. “We picked them up a year ago, my honorable lord.”

“And these?” the guard continued.

“Actors,” Goro deferred. “Very poor ones. Of no interest to you, my honorable lord.”

“And these?” the guard asked, stopping before us. I lowered my head in a stiff bow, every bone so brittle I knew they were certain to break. Beside me, Kouje was doing the same, both of us hiding our faces by means of simple custom.

“The man’s hired on for the season,” Aiko said, in the smoothest lie I’d ever heard. Even I, for a wonderful moment, believed it. “The woman’s a seamstress. Fixes our costumes, my honorable lord.”

There had been no need to lie, I thought dizzily. At least, not as far as Aiko knew. I didn’t lift my eyes as the guard took me by the chin and lifted my face toward his, inspecting it.

“A fine woman, cast among this lot,” he said, and for a moment, I recognized what I saw behind the steady mask that obscured his finer emotions. He was regretful. He was only a man beneath it all, and it pained him to think that I, “a fine woman,” had been reduced to traveling with such a crowd. No doubt the times troubled him as much as they troubled anyone else with capacity enough to think beyond orders.

I missed home when I saw his face, but in that moment I was equally grateful to be away from it.

“We’ve often said so,” Aiko said, in a tone I couldn’t quite place.

“And these,” the guard asked, moving down the line toward the next suspicious couple. They were the last, and cleared as actors as well. It was, I supposed, just that easy. I almost wished to apologize to the guard—for it was my own fault that he was stationed there, away from his family and the finer life he craved, searching for someone who had just slipped through his fingers.

“There,” Aiko said, once we were settled back in the carriage and leaving the wall behind us. “Told you lot, no problems.”

“He took a fancy to you, princess,” Goro said, grinning as he chewed, somewhat nervously, I thought, on his bamboo pen. “Pity you’ve already hitched your carriage to another horse. He might’ve made a real lady out of you.”

“She’s a real lady already,” Kouje said quietly. For the first time that morning, I could feel him relax.

After that, Ryu began to tune his instrument, and Goro began to sing the prince’s solo—something about, as I’d suspected, the cruelty of fate and the loss of palace life—and I could not even see the border crossing disappear behind us, as one by one the actors and the jugglers and the musicians and even Aiko began to laugh and joke again, about nothing and everything at once. They were relieved. We all were. And we were in the next province; the first border crossing was finished and done.

“You’d best not run off with a border guard,” Kouje murmured. “They live a hard life, you know. It’s not all palace living and fine parties.”

“I hadn’t once thought of it,” I replied, gripping his hand. “Besides, I’ve heard the women at the palace can be so cruel to one another.”

“And he’d never be home,” Kouje added. “Always off for this or that.”

“All right, you lovebirds,” Aiko said, clapping Kouje on the back. “No need to make us all jealous. We’ll be stopping in town soon enough, and we’re expecting a performance this evening, so prepare yourselves for some hard work. You too, seamstress,” she added, but she didn’t quite look at me—as though she were unable to meet my eyes.

CAIUS

I’d done something wonderful, but of course Alcibiades wasn’t going to be pleased.

We both needed something to take our minds off trouble “at home,” or at least “at the palace.” I could have grown used to living in such a place—except for the spying, of course, which didn’t bother me as much as it did Alcibiades, yet nonetheless was a point of some concern for both of us—but that was neither here nor there where Alcibiades was concerned. We’d been here a day short of one month precisely. A distraction was necessary, and I had just the means for it.

“The theatre,” Alcibiades said flatly.

“The theatre,” I repeated. Sometimes it was very difficult to get anything at all through his head.

“You want me to go to the theatre,” Alcibiades said.

“I want you to go to the theatre,” I confirmed. “Don’t worry—I hear it’s all very exciting. I’m sure you won’t fall asleep right away.”

“I hate the theatre,” Alcibiades said. “I hate the theatre in Volstov, and I hate it here.” He leaned against the wall of my room and glowered at the ceiling, very much like a little boy in the midst of a good, long sulk.

“You can’t possibly know that if you’ve never been,” I tried to reason with him, though why I thought reason would be effectual, I’ll never know.

“Yes,” Alcibiades said, “I can. I’m not going, and that’s the end of it.”

The door separating our rooms snicked shut behind him as he left, but it was no fun sulking without an audience and I knew he’d be back. I didn’t have to be a velikaia to see very clearly exactly what he was doing in his room: checking his cheeks in the mirror to see whether or not he needed a shave in general, and whether or not he needed a shave now that he was going to the theatre with me tonight. His brow was furrowed beneath his unkempt hair while he pondered the best way to agree to the theatre because he truly was interested, even if he refused to admit it. For now that he’d been so adamant about not attending, capitulating was quite difficult.

I knew him so very well. It was a pity he didn’t know himself better.

Five minutes later, just as I was setting out that evening’s outfit for him, I heard the door slide open.

“What’s it about?” he asked. “The play, I mean. Some stupid history? If there’s singing, I’m not going.”

I whirled around, trying my very best not to look as though I’d been expecting that. My face was the very picture of surprise. At least, I hoped it was. I was an appreciator of the theatre, but never an actor myself.

“Oh, do come and get dressed,” I implored him, not entirely answering his question. I had a tragic dearth of knowledge when it came to Ke-Han theatre. I only knew what I’d managed to squeeze out of Lord Temur, that there were familiar stories, changed and updated according to the tastes of the people but never truly different. There was something delightfully traditional about it, and wicked as well, since as I understood things, it was a clever way to get topical political commentary past the censors. My only concern was that I had failed to ask whether or not there would be singing.

He glared at me, then at the clothes I’d set out for him. They were neither red nor blue, but a delightfully stony green I’d discovered after I’d been fortunate enough to run across the palace tailor making his way from the Emperor’s chambers. Some explanation of my situation, as well as my dear friend Alcibiades’ predicament in terms of suitable attire, had been required, and after that it had only been a matter of slipping into the general’s rooms in order to purloin an outfit of his for the purpose of measurements.

“What’s that,” he asked, regarding the clothes as though they might well contain poisonous vipers.

“They’re your clothes for the evening, of course! You don’t expect to wander into the heart of the city dressed in that awful old coat, do you? We’d be turned away at the doors. Come, come.”

I took it upon myself to pick them up, pressing them into his arms and shooing him from the room so that I could get dressed appropriately, myself.

“So what is it about?” Alcibiades bellowed through the wall between us. “I’ve had about enough of moon princesses, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh no, my dear, it’s the most scandalous thing,” I replied, delighted by the informal nature of speaking through the wall in this fashion. Like something out of a story. “It’s a new play. Said to be about the prince and his retainer! Though it’s not said, of course, since that would land everyone in a spot of hot water, but it seems quite evident to the people themselves. Or so I’ve heard. From my sources. By which of course I mean our delightful tailor! They’ve been popping up all over the place since the prince’s disappearance, so I suppose one can’t call it new, precisely, but it’s the latest thing in the theatre district and I mean to experience it.”

I heard a confused swish of fabric, and what was doubtless Alcibiades trying to sort out the layers of his outfit. I did hope he wouldn’t be too angry with me procuring something in the Ke-Han style for him, but truly, it wouldn’t kill him to blend in every now and again.

“Are you quite all right, my dear?”

Alcibiades grunted, and I heard a loud thump that sounded as though he might have kicked a footstool toward the adjoining door between our rooms.

“You stay on your side,” he said. “Anyway, how’d you get tickets for this thing, if it’s supposed to be so scandalous or whatever?”

“Oh, they’re advertising it quite enthusiastically in the streets,” I informed him. “It’s merely at the palace that we have to keep things so tightly under lock and key. It seems we’re worlds apart up here from the glorious goings-on down there.”

“Right,” he said, as though he didn’t believe me. “Well, I can keep my mouth shut, in any case. Seems to me that—hang on a minute.”

I went to the mirror to don my earrings. Pearl drops, this time, to complement the dusky grays and bright whites of my own outfit. I did hope that Alcibiades had been speaking only in jest when he’d claimed to be sick of moon princesses.

“Do you need help with the sash?”

“No,” came the indignant reply. “Just a minute!” Another thump, perhaps moving the footstool from where it had fallen, and the door between our rooms slid open. Alcibiades lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. “What I was going to say is that it seems to me if there’s something the Emperor doesn’t want us seeing, then it’s our job to go out and see it.”

“So it’s our duty to attend the theatre!” I turned once more, clapping my hands in delight. “And don’t you look handsome.”

“Don’t I?” Alcibiades asked, sounding grumpy about even that. He’d done the knot in his sash all wrong, bless him, but it really was a good effort, and the color suited him marvelously. I felt a flush of pride in my own handiwork once again.

I’d train him yet.

“You do,” I assured him, extinguishing all the lanterns in my room. “I’d invite Josette in to agree with me, but I didn’t think to get the poor dear a ticket since she’s been so busy with Lord Temur these past few days, and it would be dreadfully rude not to invite her, don’t you think?”

“I guess so,” Alcibiades said, as though agreeing with me was something very difficult for him to do. “Wait, what was that about her spending time with Lord Temur? How much time?”

I slipped my arm through his as we left the room, taking that opportunity to readjust the sash before he noticed what I was doing. All in all, I felt quite accomplished. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, my dear. Josette’s Volstovic through and through. I believe she’s just absorbing some of the local culture, which I might add, it is high time you did. In fact, it is what we are about to do right now!”

“I think I’ve absorbed enough local culture,” Alcibiades said, rude as ever. At least he’d had enough sense to keep his voice down. That time.

I hadn’t been able to make the connections necessary for arranging a carriage into town. The only man we’d encountered with such power was Lord Temur, and though I felt sure he liked us as much as his upbringing permitted him to, I felt equally sure that Alcibiades and I would not be able to enter the city without at least some questioning. I wouldn’t have blamed him in the slightest for it, either, but by my thinking it was much easier just to bypass the entire difficulty. I had an excellent sense of direction, after all, and we’d traveled the route once before.

Besides, it was a warm evening. Perfect for walking.

It seemed that I was not the only one with that idea, since the streets were teeming with people young and old, men and women, finely dressed and shabby alike. Here they were all allowed to intermingle—ourselves included in that tally. I held firmly to Alcibiades’ arm, confident that with such a large and forbidding companion, I would not find myself the victim of pickpockets or their like.

“You sure you know where we’re going?” Alcibiades asked with an expression of mild concern, as though he believed he knew the directions better than I.

That was just like him.

“Yes,” I answered, doing my very best not to be exasperated with him. He was coming to the theatre, after all. Perhaps there was just so much room for change or surprise in Alcibiades, and he’d used up his quota all at once in agreeing to come with me. “Just follow along, my dear. I shall lead the way.”

The sun was just setting. Some of the street-side vendors seemed to take this as a sign to begin closing up shop, while others remained open, confident that the warm night would bring them yet more customers. It was true that the closer we drew to the theatre district, the more vendors I saw lining the walkways. Perhaps it was common to buy food to enjoy during a performance?

I was just about to ask Alcibiades if he would consider sharing some sweet dumplings with me when I noticed that his head was already lifted—like a dog detecting scents on the wind—and that he was already cutting his way through the crowd to absorb some local culture of his own. The fried dumplings. I ought to have remembered.

I stepped quickly to keep up with him, since it was either that or be dragged away through the crowd.

“I’ll have one of those as well, my dear,” I said, examining the stand to see if there were any distinctive markings, or whether I was going to have to use Alcibiades’ excellent nose whenever I wanted to track down the fried dumplings for myself.

He looked down at me, almost disappointed, as though he had wanted to keep the entire cart for himself.

“All right then,” he said, holding six fingers up to the vendor. “We’ll take six.”

“Six?” I repeated, aghast.

“You’ll hold these for me, won’t you?”

Then, without waiting for a response, Alcibiades took two sticks in each hand, and handed two to me.

I told the vendor thanks, and then hurried after my companion, lest he become caught up in his feeding frenzy and do something inexcusable like wipe his hands on his new clothes.

“It’s good food,” he said, around what must have been three dumplings in his mouth, judging by the empty stick.

I felt my mouth twitching in laughter before I could help it. Perhaps through dumplings, I would convince my friend to enjoy his stay there after all. At least, if the matter of Yana’s letters could be resolved.

Alcibiades had gone through two more sticks of the dumplings by the time we reached the theatre, so at least my hands were free to reach for the tickets. I’d made certain to leave enough time for us to find truly excellent seats, and once inside the theatre proper I took off like a shot, slipping away from Alcibiades so that I could examine the stage from every viewpoint, in order to decide where it would be best to sit.

Fortunately, whoever had designed the theatre had kept in mind the comfort of all the patrons; there was no one seat, no matter how far removed from the stage proper, that would leave its owner with a poor view of the play. There were also wooden walkways, suspended just above the general seating area, that bisected the audience—and which, I realized, must have allowed for the actors to come out into the audience; to join with them, however momentarily, as one. The theatre itself was not so large that sitting far removed from the stage would ruin our view; the question was merely whether or not we would be able to find two seats together amidst the crowd.

“Quit swooping around like a bat in the belfry and just sit,” Alcibiades said, crossing his arms like he was rethinking the entire night out.

“Eat your dumplings, my dear,” I told him. There was nothing to do when he got into these moods except pay him no mind whatsoever and go on with my business. That was precisely what I intended to do.

It seemed that eating his dumplings was a course of action that Alcibiades and I could both agree upon, since he fell silent after that, munching away like a contented monkey.

Truly, there were so many animals the general resembled that it was very difficult to characterize him.

I came to a rise just left of the center, set so that one could see all of the stage, and just the tiniest bit of the area backstage, where Lord Temur had told me the actors might congregate before they were ready—that is, if they chose to enter through normal means. The theatre in the Ke-Han style, Lord Temur had also told me, was in this particular incarnation enamored of unorthodox entrances: Puffs of smoke were not uncommon, nor was it out of the question to expect an actor to appear from the rafters above us, dropping directly onto the stage as though he had leapt from the heavens.

It was perfect.

“Here!” I called, settling delicately down against the cushions and sitting straight up with excitement. Alcibiades followed me to where I’d settled, looking somewhat mollified by fried food and the prospect of a large cushion to sit on.

“More comfortable, anyway,” he admitted, peering forward to try to catch a glimpse of the goings-on backstage. We both saw a flash of red at the same time, the flutter of silk and a pattern I could just barely make out: three golden diamonds, nesting one inside the other.

“Who do you suppose that was?” I asked, and gripped Alcibiades’ sleeve. “I do so love the theatre.”

“Hm,” Alcibiades replied, in a way that intimated he was just as excited about what came next as I was.

The shows began in the morning, much to my disappointment, and could last as much as the entire day. That was typical of plays in the capital, I’d learned, whereas the more provincial shows in the countryside resembled an evening of Volstovic theatre and took place only at night. Sadly, I knew that it would be quite impossible to trap Alcibiades into a full day of cultural activity, from dawn to well after dusk. His constitution simply wouldn’t allow the affront. And thus I was left to pick my battles very carefully; he would have been immensely impressed if he had known what a clever strategist I was becoming, just for him. The final act was what I was most curious about.

The audience was far more rowdy than the pristine palace would have led anyone to believe the Ke-Han people could be. But there, gathered in the theatre with us, were the merchants and umbrella makers, the artists and the farmers, even peddlers with an extra coin or two to spare for their entertainment. Whoops and calls emanated from the audience in the native, if slurred, Ke-Han tongue. From what I could understand of the situation, they were all calling for the appearance of one man—an actor—no doubt the star of the stage that night.

“They are waiting for it to grow dark outside before they light the lanterns,” I whispered to my companion. Alcibiades grunted, and looked up to the ceiling, where the fat paper lamps hung in two straight lines, bisecting each other at the center.

The entire place was full of the scent of food and sweat and, my very favorite, anticipation. We were all as one, every member of the audience, leaning forward as we waited for the moment that the lanterns were lit: And then we were bathed in the golden glow of atmosphere, the perfect, supernatural experience just before smoke began to roll across the stage, and a howling voice began its narration.

“What’s he saying,” Alcibiades hissed, as the cheers and cries quieted and the audience fell hushed with momentary reverence. From what little I already knew of the Ke-Han theatre—Lord Temur had warned me against going due to all this vulgarity—that silence would not last.

Fortunately, where my knowledge failed in the common slang, I was quite capable of a rough translation of such formal language.

“‘Long have I traveled this dark road,’” I translated. I kept my words no louder than the barest of whispers. “‘Long have I searched for a port in the dark storm. But I am cast out from my home—who will be loyal to me now?’”

I was given no further opportunity to continue, for with a sudden explosion—miniature fireworks, how utterly exquisite!—an actor appeared on stage, body frozen in a sharply angled pose. He looked more like a statue than a man, so still and so expressionless. His robes were made of the deepest cobalt blue and I caught on his back the three golden diamonds I’d seen before.

My fingers twitched at Alcibiades’ sleeve, and he was so distracted by the glorious display he even patted the top of my hand.

“‘My lord calls,’” I whispered, wishing I did not have to translate for the general. Nonetheless, it wasn’t particularly unexpected that he wouldn’t know this, the most formal dialect of the Ke-Han, reserved now only for the classics and performance scripts. “‘I hear him upon the wind. Who needs now the presence of a man loyal when the world is not? It is I, noble warrior! We fight as one!’”

The actor’s face began to change, but not through any motion he made. Rather, it was through the subtle changes of emotion. I knew at once that he was the loyal retainer. Even I, stranger that I was, could feel the purpose behind his performance.

“Uncanny,” Alcibiades muttered.

The cheering from the audience began.

“‘Never shall we be separated,’” I continued, savoring each word. “‘I have pledged my life to thee, and thine it is, no matter who chases us down.’”

“I know who chases you down!” someone shouted from the audience. He was followed by such a chorus of hooting and jeering that I wondered what sort of training the actor must have had to ignore it completely—to carry on as though he were alone in the world. Indeed, alone like the prince and his retainer upon the high mountain.

“‘Is that you, Benkei?’ That must be the prince, offstage,” I said, as I leaned closer to the stage. “I wonder how he’ll appear—I wonder if he’s as beautiful as the one we were so lucky to see for ourselves—”

“Shh,” Alcibiades hissed. “You’re being rude.”

My cheeks were hot with amusement and pleasure, and the close atmosphere of the theatre, the heavy air made damp and close by all the bodies pressed together, waiting for the prince to arrive.

“Benkei, my sorry ass,” said a man sitting next to us, before he settled back to scratching the back of his neck as though he might have had fleas.

“‘My lord, I have brought you your sword,’” I whispered. “‘By your side I shall be as your sword. We shall fight as one, and safety under the gods will be ours.’”

“A little bit much, isn’t it?” Alcibiades murmured, shifting uncomfortably. It was either because he’d finished his dumplings or because the emotions of the people there had finally caught up to him. “A little bit queer, too. In Volstov, he wouldn’t be such…” Alcibiades trailed off, chewing the words over while he observed the actor, imposing and fierce and lit with glowing lamplight. “Well, such a damn hero.”

“Unless there was some good reason for his change of loyalties,” I added.

“Ch’. Foreigners,” the man sitting next to us said, casting us a disapproving look.

“My sincere apologies,” I said. It meant only that I had to settle myself closer to Alcibiades so that we would disturb no other patrons of the arts with our commentary and with my translation, which I did. “‘Here you have come to complete your training. Even the spirits of the wind and trees respect your plight, and weep for it.’”

“This,” Alcibiades said, “is downright insane. How do they get away with it? What in blazes does their esteemed Emperor think?”

“They’ve given them different names, you see,” I replied mildly. “I think that makes it all less obvious.”

“Huh,” Alcibiades snorted, then, “bastion.”

The prince had appeared.

It was not with fanfare and fireworks, as had his lord Benkei. It was not even with a shower of tinsel or through a trapdoor. He had merely come onto the stage as though he owned the stage, gliding across it like a spirit of the wind and trees himself. He, too, was dressed in blue, though it was scattered across with gold and silver, like light upon a deep lake. He was beautiful—though not, I noticed with some interest, as otherworldly as the true prince had been, the prince upon whom this entire madman’s charade was based.

I thought of Emperor Iseul’s eyes as he bore down upon Alcibiades, as though he meant to kill him. Indeed, he was not a man who would allow something so simple as substituted names to stop him from killing the playwright behind this insult and the actors who perpetrated it. Perhaps not even the members of the audience were safe, on account of their tacit participation.

It was much like being in the lion’s den while the lion was out. At any moment, the great beast might return to reclaim his territory, but for the moment, it was ours.

“The prince!” someone called from the audience. The cheers began in earnest over the dialogue I could barely translate properly when it was all I could hear.

“I’ve heard he’s got an army of spirits up north,” a nearby patron told his companion. Then, his voice hushed, he added, “Prince Mamoru.” The tone he used to speak the name was almost reverent.

“They’ve made him into a deity,” I told Alcibiades, my eyes wide with wonder.

“No,” Alcibiades replied. “They’ve made him into a god.”

I was about to correct him—to tell him the two were one and the same—only then I didn’t. He was right. A deity was too small for what the second prince had become onstage, moving past his retainer with the grace of a moonbeam. Alcibiades was right. He had become a god.

I couldn’t help wondering if he knew it, the poor dear creature. At least he had someone with him. Someone as loyal and as unfaltering as time itself, as the narrator might have said. I felt a thrill run up my spine at the prospect; and, at the same time, I wondered where they were hiding themselves. If they truly were still alive.

It was as though Alcibiades and I had become caught up in a story, a tale of heroes and villains. There was something about the city that night, the smoke and the stage, that made reality seem very close to the stories. It was almost difficult to tell the difference between the two.

The smoke rose once again over the stage, and I thought I saw the flicker of screens being changed, the apparition of another face in the gloom.

“What now?” Alcibiades murmured, craning his neck to see.

There was a figure emerging onstage. He was taller than the prince, but more slender than his retainer. He stood rock-still at the center of a platform as it rose from somewhere below the stage, his eyes cast down, his arms stretched out to either side of him. His palms were upturned, as though awaiting adulation, and through the smoke I thought I saw a flash of the same crimson red we’d seen backstage. Indeed, even his face it seemed was painted in harsh, thick lines of the same color, and his robes were the color of blood. It was Alcibiades’ Volstovic red: the very same hue.

There was a sudden rush of movement from all around us, as everyone in the audience suddenly began to stir, whispering to their companions or stretching to get a better view. I sat up straight as I could, wishing not for the first time that I might borrow just a little of Alcibiades’ height.

The narrator was wailing again.

“‘My search is nearly over,’” I translated hastily, while using Alcibiades’ shoulder to lever myself up to see. “‘Soon I will have—’”

“Murderer!” someone nearer to the stage yelled. His words were slurred, as though he’d been drinking.

I saw our row-companion’s eyes go wide with shock, though all around the theatre there was a buzz of approval.

The actor playing the Emperor did not falter, but rather held so still that I found myself a captive of his presence, unable to look away. There was no trace of remorse on his face. Indeed, there was no trace of anything at all. Rather, his expression was blank, devoid of any recognizably human emotion. It was like a palace mask, and yet unlike it, since the lines painted on his face made him look more demon than man.

Was that how the people of Xi’an viewed their new Emperor? It was a troubling thought.

“See if you ever track down your brother!” called another member of the audience, one less muzzy with drink.

Alcibiades sucked in his breath. Sitting as close as I was, I could feel it when he went tense, as though the play had suddenly turned all too real.

“What would his father have said? Turning against your own flesh and blood,” a nearby woman muttered disapproval to her companion, shouting the last to the rest of the theatre.

“Perhaps he’s gone mad, like his great-grandfather.”

“Perhaps we need Prince Mamoru back here to overthrow him!”

“I can’t hear anything,” Alcibiades complained, looking upset.

It was then, with a tremendous crash, that the doors broke open.

Men in deep shades of imperial blue—robes just as fine as the costumes upon the stage—stormed in through the splintered wood and torn paper. They had helmets on, to shield their faces, and each man carried a sword. Not the wooden practice swords I’d grown accustomed to seeing, either. These were live blades, and they glimmered wickedly in the lamplight as the guards marched in.

One of them stepped up onto the stage, obscuring the actor completely.

“By decree of Our Lord, Emperor Iseul,” he began.

Someone to our left booed loudly. They had clearly become carried away with themselves. The noise cut itself off suddenly, as though he or she had received an elbow to the stomach or a hand over the mouth.

“This play is over!” the guard shouted, driven to the edge of his patience. I felt Alcibiades beginning to stir next to me, and felt a familiar rush of excitement mixed with apprehension. Such interesting things always happened when I was with the general. It was a good thing I’d thought to bring my fan, which I unfurled to obscure my face.

“What’s more,” the guard went on, unsheathing his sword as his fellow soldiers strode up the aisles in organized lines. “The lot of you are under arrest, pending the apprehension of those responsible for this piece of filth.”

A shout of dismay went up from the audience. Alcibiades surged to his feet, dragging me up with him.

There was a moment when I felt suspended in time, like an actor onstage myself. I saw the other patrons—our audience—as though frozen, anticipating the moves of the guards, our villains, dressed in blue.

The costumes were all wrong. “The heroes are supposed to be in blue,” I told Alcibiades in an excited whisper.

There was a flurry of crimson movement onstage; and, as though it had all been a part of the script, the pretend-Emperor brought his wooden sword down hilt first on top of the guard’s head. We in the audience had time for a roar of approval, putting all our praise for the play into one primal cry of appreciation.

Then the guards were on us.

Alcibiades pulled me forward, choosing to travel down toward the stage and against the flow of the crowd, which was surging back toward the far wall. I had no choice but to follow, since he was a dreadfully strong brute when he had a mind to be. And besides, I was no battle strategist.

“I shouldn’t think it would look very good for two of Volstov’s diplomats to land in jail,” I remarked, cheerfully tripping a guard who’d grabbed a young lady by the arm. She smiled at me before she wheeled around into the crowd, disappearing from view.

“We’re not going to,” Alcibiades grunted, pausing a minute to look around.

I took that opportunity, brief and breathless as it was, to examine the room myself. There were many patrons who appeared to be running for the nearest exit, like ourselves, but to my shock I saw more than one who’d stayed to land a punch or two against the guards. Onstage, the pretend-Emperor’s fellow actors had joined him, with the larger Benkei standing as a defensive wall against the surge of increasingly angry enforcers. I had looked up just in time to see the young prince-actor, delicate as a moonbeam, roundly kicking a guard in the shins, then dropping him down an open trapdoor.

I let out a whoop of approval. Alcibiades looked at me as if I were mad.

“Caught up in the moment,” I explained.

“Uh-huh,” Alcibiades said.

Then, quicker than I’d seen him move yet, he pulled me underneath the footbridge that traveled from the stage to the audience, connecting the two together in a brilliant stroke of theatrical innovation.

“We’re going out the back way,” he told me, bent almost double in the low space beneath the bridge. “You’ve got those knives with you, don’t you?”

“How could I go anywhere without my fan?” I said, pleased that he’d come to know me so well.

“Use them,” Alcibiades said, in a tone that made me think he must have been a very different person during the war, with so much fighting to keep him busy and less time to be sullen about every little thing.

The next thing I knew, we were moving again, under the overpass and back into the audience seating. Alcibiades lifted me under my arms—making no attempt to be careful about my clothes at all—and slung me up onto the bridge like a sack of common potatoes. He hauled himself up next and caught me at the shoulder, pulling me to my feet. All around us people were shouting. Some were rallying cries; others were threats of legal action. It was becoming impossible to sort one from the other.

I couldn’t help but feel a mounting sense of excitement, since Alcibiades had us running straight toward the actors, so that we might actually see them up close.

A guard pulled himself up onto the bridge and Alcibiades dragged me back behind him. Very shortly I was going to get tired of being so manhandled, as it was behavior I would never allow under normal circumstances, but there was something crudely touching about the whole matter. Never mind that it made me feel quite like the prince in question, and Alcibiades my loyal retainer, sworn to protect me and guard me while nonetheless treating me like merchants’ wares to be hauled about.

The guard said something that I was quite sure was rude, though his dialect was one I was unfamiliar with.

Alcibiades moved with the same baffling quickness he’d shown a moment ago, ducking close around the guard’s sword to punch him square in the face.

I gave a hop of delight, and hurried forward to take his sword. It was much heavier than it looked, but I presented it quite proudly to Alcibiades all the same.

“What the hell did he say, anyway?” Alcibiades demanded, taking it.

“He said that your outfit is very dashing,” I told him. “Do let’s make our escape.”

“After you,” Alcibiades sighed, and booted me down through the trapdoor.

It was dark beneath the stage, but it was far from quiet. Above us was a cacophony of footfalls, the sounds of set pieces crashing in the chaos. All those pretty things—utterly ruined. What was worse, though, was what might happen to the poor author of the play. He’d certainly landed himself in hot water, and all for the sake of pursuing his art.

Alcibiades landed with a heavy thud, almost on top of me, though I managed to step out of the way just in time. “Be careful where you’re landing,” I chided him.

“What do you know about these theatres, anyway?” Alcibiades asked, charging in front of me. “Any more trick doors, or do we have to improvise?”

“This is how the Emperor came onstage,” I reasoned. “So there must be some way to get backstage—aha!” A wood panel just at my fingertips swung outward, and light shafted in quick and warm into the darkness. We were in a sort of waiting box beneath the stage, and there was our way out. That is, unless the guards had already filed backstage themselves.

There were clothes everywhere, and prop swords; a few masks set upon low tables, and more face paint than I’d ever seen on the most vain old baroness’s bedside table. There was the red, and there was the blue, and there was the white.

“Do you think the prince got away?” I asked Alcibiades, catching his eyes for a brief moment.

Alcibiades snorted. “Which one?”

He grasped my wrist and tugged me toward what appeared to be a side exit. And it was just in time, as well, for as we slipped past the door I heard a crash behind us, and the shattering of glass. The backstage mirror overturned as the guards poured into the room.

Alcibiades pulled me into the dark alley. We were behind the theatre. We could still hear the shouts from within, as well as those that poured out onto the streets. Lights were flickering on all down the length of the theatre district, lanterns peeking out of every window. People were yelling at one another, answered peremptorily by the abrupt orders of the guards. All of that was undercut by the unsteady rhythm of armor against armor and heavy bootfalls.

“If they catch us, we’re sunk,” Alcibiades told me.

“I suppose we’d better run,” I replied.

“Pity you’re not wearing those shoes with the platforms,” Alcibiades said dryly. “You’re going to get the hem of that thing all muddy.”

“Not if you carry me the rest of the way,” I suggested impishly, before I pushed myself off an alley wall and started off toward a back alley—one of the dark streets I’d been cautioned by Lord Temur himself not to travel.

Luckily, they were almost eerily empty; everyone had either locked up tight to avoid whatever was happening or had rushed off to join the fray. There weren’t even any poor young women plying their single trade; I could imagine them all, pressed against their windows, watching the lights flicker on and off and straining to catch even one word amidst the chaos of voices.

“Why is it,” Alcibiades said, shaking his head; he still hadn’t abandoned the sword I’d stolen for him, and showed no signs of being about to do so, either, “that when I’m with you, shit like this always happens?”

“Oh, my dear,” I replied, stepping out into the main street to find it, too, empty and abandoned, “I was about to ask you the very same question!”