Shadow Magic (45 page)

“He’s one of the seven warlords,” I said, unsure. “If he doesn’t know what’s going on, then who would?”

“It might be an imperial order,” Caius murmured, in a way that made me feel like maybe we’d come to the heart of the matter at last—what we’d been trying to say all along, and what we’d had to dance all around first, while Caius tested the waters. This was what little Lord Greylace had been planning on discussing from the very beginning, and Josette and I had somehow managed to stumble right into his trap like painted marionettes.

Well, I, for one, wasn’t going to make things any easier for him than I already had. I didn’t like what was going on, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to pretend that I understood it, of all things.

“You mean he went right around the warlords?” I asked, lowering my voice too, just in case the guards got bored with their pacing and decided to linger next to my door a little, because odds were there was something exciting happening in here.

Well, that was what they got for sticking me in a room next to a madman. That’d teach them.

“I don’t know that he would go that far, my dear,” said Caius, looking at me with the same fondness a man reserved for particularly talented house pets. “I merely believe it possible that he made the decision without their knowledge, then presented it to them as a resolved matter—one which they would have no choice but to agree with lest they seem like traitors themselves.”

Josette leaned forward, elbows braced against her knees. “What reason would he have to do something like that?”

She looked as though she was trying to work it out on her own, frowning and gazing off to one side the way she did when negotiations weren’t going our way. I knew that look. Any minute, Josette would leap up and turn the tides for us. Or at least explain things for my benefit, which no one else had bothered to do.

“Maybe he got sick of listening to their yabbering on and on about nothing,” I said pointedly. “Maybe he just wanted to get something done.”

Caius looked almost disappointed.
“Do
use your head,” he said imploringly. “I know you can.”

“Unless, unless…” Josette was muttering to herself, toying with her too-long sleeves. She’d been dressing in the Ke-Han style of late, which suited her about as well as it suited Caius. Whether that was another mark of diplomacy that I’d somehow missed—dressing like the enemy
to flatter them or whatever—I wasn’t sure. What I
was
sure about was that no one, not even Caius Greylace, was going to get me into another one of those complicated dresses again. They were too damned hard to run in, and I didn’t see any of the Ke-Han warlords dressing like
us
. We’d only won the damn war, but we weren’t supposed to expect any flattery?

Josette suddenly sat up straight, as if she’d caught a nasty splinter somewhere unfortunate.

“Unless
this isn’t the first decision he’s made without their approval,” she hissed, looking at Caius with triumph like she’d solved a riddle I hadn’t even known we were trying to solve.

“Hang on,” I said, still trying to untangle the whole mess of what was going on. Why couldn’t we just
tell
a person something instead of making him work it out like it was a fair question, which it wasn’t? “Why do we even care if he’s the one making the decisions? Isn’t he the man
meant
to be making the decisions? Th’Esar doesn’t have a court of nannying diplomats waiting around to slow down his every decision, and we do all right, don’t we?”

“But is the current Emperor really the sort of man who seems like he ought to be making decisions all on his own?” Caius inquired slyly.

I thought about the Emperor’s eyes when he’d come at me in the outdoor training grounds, and the look on his face when he’d slit the moon princess’s throat.

“He’s a madman,” I said. “Utterly cracked, or cracking, if he’s not quite there yet.”

I didn’t think that it would be a good idea to point out that I thought much the same thing about Caius. Particularly because I wasn’t so sure that I did anymore, and I sure as hell couldn’t explain the distinction between the two.

Maybe part of it was that Caius Greylace was on my side, and he seemed to like me well enough. And maybe part of it was knowing that Emperor Iseul hated me—all of us—maybe even more than I hated him, because the war had been on
his
soil, and it had been his city we shattered.

You couldn’t expect any fairness in war, but that didn’t mean you forgot all your grudges as soon as peace was dropped in your lap, either. I certainly hadn’t, but then again, I wasn’t supposed to be an emperor. The question—one I didn’t know how to answer, because I’d never
known the man
before
—was what had tipped the scales. His father’s death, or his nation’s defeat?

“Think of his brother, poor creature,” said Caius, his voice taking on an odd quality, like it was coming from inside my head instead of outside of it. His lips were moving, though, and Josette was on the edge of her seat, so I could tell that she was listening, too. He was using something, though, some particular brand of his Talent. My head felt clearer, like I’d got a full night’s sleep instead of a full night’s interrogation. As Greylace dealt only in illusions, I was sure it’d wear off soon.

“You must remember how quickly things happened,” Caius went on. “One evening he was enjoying dinner alongside us, and by morning he was a traitor! You know how difficult it’s been for us to decide anything here, how etiquette demands a careful consideration of each option, weighing the positive and the negative out for endless hours. How, then, could a decision such as that be carried out so quickly
unless
it was made by one man, and a very powerful man, at that?”

Josette blinked, and opened her mouth as if to say something.

Caius shook his head, and dragged his little chair closer, indicating that she do the same.

“I have no reason to believe that the prince is innocent of such charges,” he went on, looking almost regretful that he couldn’t clear the little Ke-Han prince then and there, “but I have no reason to believe that he is guilty, either. And if he is not…”

“He’s doing the same thing to us,” Josette whispered, looking scared for the first time since I’d known her. “Isn’t he? That’s what you’re trying to say. He’s having our mail read… He suspects us of something.”

“I am only saying that
if
the Emperor suspects something, then we are in danger,” Caius said. “Just like the prince was; only he had no time to plan ahead, as we do. We know well enough that the Emperor moves speedily in the face of perceived threats, whether they are imagined or not.”

I was starting to feel a little sick to my stomach, though whether that was because of conspiracy theories or just because I hadn’t slept
or
eaten breakfast, I didn’t know.

“I’ll spend more time with Lord Temur,” Josette said, firm and decisive like she thought she had to make up for sounding scared before.

Except I didn’t like the sound of that plan one bit.

“Hold on just a minute,” I said.

“That’s excellent, my dear!” Caius proclaimed. “That’s
just
what I was hoping for from you. I would do it myself, but you have a certain quality that I lack.”

“Yeah, more like two—” I started, only I rethought things real quick when Josette shot me a look. “What I mean is,” I said, changing tack while clearing my throat, “I don’t like this plan.”

“Really, Alcibiades,” Josette said, but she looked a little less murderous, so I guessed she wasn’t that mad at me after all.

“Well, it’s just… the way I thought of it was,” I said, trying my best not to be loud about it, “all those warlords are loyal to the Emperor. So maybe they
are
in on it, what with their obsession with loyalty, whatever that means in the Ke-Han Empire. And if we start sniffing around—and they’re looking for betrayal around every corner, with more than just those mirrors of theirs—then the second you step out of bounds… I just don’t like it.”

We were all silent and grim for a long moment, trying to figure, or at least I was, what we even knew about the enemy, when a few days ago they were our so-called new allies and
friends
.

It was different from the battlefield, where colors signaled who each man was and where his loyalties lay. It was more like subterfuge, all the espionage I’d known took place but was never a part of, even if all the chances for promotion were there and everybody knew it. It was more like the way things got in the very thick of battle, at night, when you couldn’t see what someone was wearing and you couldn’t hear what he was screaming, either, and you just had to hope you were striking out at someone who was on the other side. You just couldn’t think about it. You’d go mad, same as the Ke-Han Emperor.

“It’s the only plan we’ve got,” Josette said grimly.

We both knew she was right, Caius and I, and we sat there for a while longer, just to solidify our intentions. At least we had each other to trust—but after that, it was a free-for-all, a melee of instinct and uncertainty. It was what I’d thought I’d wanted all along—getting back to the dividing line, putting myself on one side and
them
on the other—but the terms were different now, and I was in Josette’s camp. I’d never had anything against Lord Temur, at least not off the battlefield.

But for the moment, all our hopes hung on getting Lord Temur alone.

After that, we were relying on little Greylace, his one good eye afire with the promise of what might come next.

The second border crossing was closer than the first. It had been a little less than a week since we’d left Aiko and the troupe. Although the time seemed to pass for us very slowly as it passed without incident, when I looked back on the number of days that had elapsed, I felt quite surprised.

I knew the country from above like a bird, but the mountains and the plains had been as real as the words next to them, denoting each province distant and remote from my place in the lapis city. Kouje and I had campaigned once in the mountains, but even then we were no more than a few days’ ride from the palace. I had traced the boundaries from childhood, and so I knew how close we were to the second checkpoint. After that, we would be in Honganje prefecture; Kouje’s sister, and her fishing village, lay to the east.

It was a lucky thing that I had memorized my maps so well.

Imagine
, Iseul had said,
that the mountains are the veins upon the back of your hand. The Cobalts are your knuckles. And so you see that all of Xi’an is within your grasp
.

I shivered, and looked to Kouje. Thankfully, he didn’t notice.

We’d already been lucky; too lucky, I even thought, and the burden of that good fortune hung heavy in the air, like the tension before a summer rain shower. At any moment the clouds could break. I did not expect another Aiko to materialize out of trees and mountains beside us and to whisk us across the border as though Goro himself had contrived the device.

We were on our own for the next one. And I wasn’t the only one to be troubled by it.

At least we were sleeping well, though each night I dreamed of Aiko, dressed as the second prince, posing on the stage with the blue makeup of the hero obscuring her face. Her pillow was enchanted, but the sleep itself was deep enough.

“We will come to the crossing by midday,” Kouje said, the morning of the second day apart from the troupe. “I’ve no inspiration for it.”

“I play the role of your wife well enough,” I said, but Kouje shook his head.

“I don’t feel safe,” he replied. What he meant was,
I don’t feel you are safe
.

“If only Goro had written that far.” I laughed. “He would have thought of something.”

The smoke from our fire dwindled; we were delaying setting out on purpose. With no solid plan and no inspiration, we were at a loss. And wasting time; I could see in the set of Kouje’s jaw how anxious that made him.

I traced the veins on the back of my hand. Iseul would have killed me sooner if he’d ever guessed that I might have made it that far. Such a guise was impossible to imagine for someone of my birthright. My brother would have died for honor before he donned the robes I was wearing, but my brother had always known more pride than I. I’d envied him once, but I had come to see how pride had changed him.

All of Xi’an was, and ever would be, within his grasp. My fingers tightened involuntarily. Kouje began to clear up our camp, more meticulously slow than he ever had been. It was more to delay our proceedings—hoping for some grand inspiration, another stroke of luck—while the gods watched us, an impassive audience, rather than the active patrons of country theatre performed in a roadside inn. There were neither cheers nor curses to indicate we were playing our roles well or very poorly indeed.

I watched Kouje when his back was turned. He still held himself like a soldier, especially when we were alone. I myself was no less to blame for mistakes in comportment than he; it was no wonder Aiko had discovered us as quickly as she had. Among the others we’d been less immediately noticeable, but on our own it would be easy enough to discover I wasn’t the woman I pretended to be.

Iseul—the Iseul I’d known from childhood—would have thrown back his head to laugh if he saw me then, both changed and unchanged, dressed as though I were about to sell travelers dumplings rather than lead my people, as my father’s son.

Would Iseul even recognize me if I was caught?

How you’ve changed, little brother
, he’d say.
How common you’ve become. I could barely tell the difference between you and your servant…

“Kouje,” I said, over the sound of him tramping through the brush, kicking branches aside.

He stilled, and glanced back toward me. “Please tell me you’ve just had an incredible idea,” he said.

“Your servant,” I explained. It wasn’t clear yet, but it was my brother himself who’d inspired it. It was right; I
knew
it was. “They’ll never suspect—if you are the lord, and I am the servant.”