Shadow Magic (15 page)

“Do you think we will be allowed to see the libraries?” Caius asked delightedly, missing the point entirely. “My grasp of your language, my lord, is rudimentary at best, but perhaps you would be willing to allow me to usurp your time for the cause of history?”

“It would be my pleasure,” Lord Temur replied, because he had to.

Meanwhile, I was watching the black panther. If he had once been a god, then it looked like he still knew it—somewhere, anyway, beneath all the lazy indifference. He was lounging on a low-hanging, stout branch, one paw dangling over the edge and his graceful tail just brushing the ground. He was watching us like we didn’t matter to him one way or another, and it wasn’t because of the bars that he felt so easy.

But the bars were still there, after all, and he was still behind them. God or no, he was a zoo animal, and we were there to make a show out of him, not pay our respects.

Volstov had its own menageries, of course, and its own fair share of caged animals. Still, as the panther lifted its half-lidded slit eyes to me and yawned, I didn’t like the feeling the whole thing gave me, not one bit.

The dim, terrible happenings of the night before—as remote and impossible as the actions of puppets on the stage—should have dissolved the moment I opened my eyes. They felt like a nightmare.

They were not.

When I woke, I barely knew where I was; all I did know was that I was cold and that my arm was stiff and twisted beneath me. Something soft was beneath my head, but the rest of my body felt as though I were lying on a bed of twigs.

I moved, my arm useless, as though I were a veteran of war who’d lost it in the fighting.

Kouje was somewhere, close by as always, and he would tell me where we were and what news the morning brought. I didn’t remember falling asleep. The last memory I did have of the night before was the steady rhythm of the Volstov mount beneath me and the rustle of the wind through the trees all around us, like women gossiping at court.

Were they already gossiping about me?

I sat up, brushing leaves out of my hair while my hand tingled back into feeling. I’d been lying on the ground, underneath the protection of a maple tree; the bundle of my clothes, wrapped around with Kouje’s and then with a plain workman’s cloth, had been under my head to serve as a pillow. The horse was nearby, tethered to a low branch, stomping lazily and poking his nose into the underbrush. He was hungry. My stomach tightened in sympathy. I was hungry, too.

There was a soft rustling from the bushes near us, and I felt a sudden fear take hold of my chest, causing my heart to pound double where it had been nearly calm. Moments later, Kouje emerged from between a parting in the brush, two rabbits held within his hands and a look on his face that suggested he wished for the quiet surroundings of the palace, where there were no bushes at all to rustle and signal his approach. His braids were undone.

“I hope I did not wake you, my lord,” he said.

“You should have,” I countered. It was true, not merely a childish fit of willfulness. If everything that had passed the previous night was true, then I could no more afford to sleep in than I could allow Kouje to go on indulging me as though I were still a prince. I’d conceded all rights to that title the moment I’d left the palace.

I felt a curious melancholy throbbing in my chest as the beat of my heart slowed, but I paid it no mind.

Kouje put the rabbits down and knelt in front of me beneath the bower of the maple. For a moment, it would have been easy to close my
eyes and imagine we were back at the palace, or even on a campaign for the war, and had been separated from our men by a storm the night before. But my clothing was rough and unfamiliar under my fingers, and my back hurt from sleeping on the hard ground, and I could not hide the truth from myself.

It would only make the inevitable conclusion worse.

“Rise,” I told him, swallowing down my darker thoughts. “We don’t have time for such formalities, Kouje.
Please
rise. I see you’ve brought us breakfast.”

Kouje lifted his head, looking apologetic where he might have looked proud. After all, he’d woken before me, and had managed to catch us a meal while I continued sleeping. If anyone should have looked apologetic, it was I.

“I know it is a meager offering, my lord,” Kouje began, “and we have nothing to season them with, but I thought… if you were hungry…”

“They look very fine,” I said, not allowing him to continue. “Why, I’m quite sure we had worse fare in the mountains, come to think of it.”

Kouje laughed quietly, making me feel infinitely better about my small joke. There had never been a worse time to make light of a situation, I felt sure, but that was what drove me to it. I knew that Kouje would never indulge in such humor, but in doing so myself I kept him from becoming overly somber.

It seemed all the more important that we look after one another, and all the more important that I coax Kouje out of the habits that the palace had bred into him. Such deference from him to me, as I was clothed, would certainly lead to us getting caught; if not there in the forest, then inevitably somewhere else.

“I shall prepare them, then,” Kouje said, and rose once more.

I watched him first twist what remained of his braids back out of his eyes, then roll up his sleeves. He bent to gather dry moss and sticks from the underbrush, bundling them together in his fists until he had enough to strike a fire with the flint from his pouch. I looked away when he pulled out the knife, hating to display such weakness. Tomorrow, I told myself, feeling my own hair as one snarled knot at the nape of my neck. Tomorrow, I would be the one to prepare breakfast.

“Kouje?” I set my fingers to the careful task of working the knots out of my hair, one by one.

I wasn’t looking, but I heard the pause in his work. “Yes, my lord?”

“I’ve been thinking. If I am truly to master this disguise, then you mustn’t bow to me, not even in private.”

“My lord,” Kouje began, sounding strangled, as though I’d just suggested he cut off the heads of all seven warlords.

I pressed on ruthlessly. I had to be ruthless. That was what Iseul had always wanted from me, though perhaps it was a joke of the gods that events had driven me to it at last. “And you mustn’t call me ‘my lord’ anymore, either. Don’t you see, Kouje? We’re bound to… give the game away when it matters most. You’re so in the habit of it already; I am as well. I need you to help me, or else I fear we’ll never—Well. I believe it’s for the best if we both learn to unlearn what was customary at the palace.”

Kouje was silent after that. I could hear the crackling of the fire and the sizzle of the rabbits on their sticks, but there was no reply to what I’d said. I turned once I’d completed my braid, with the sinking feeling that I’d gone too far or said too much.

Kouje knelt in front of the fire, his eyes closed, buried deep in thought. His hands weren’t tending to the rabbits anymore, but to his own hair, methodically removing each braid from its place and undoing them, one by one. All at once, I felt a fierce rush of grief run through me, for the loss of my father and now of my brother, too, the subjects and lands that had been ours to shepherd and protect. My friends. My room in the palace. The walk by the gardens. The way the light came in through the window and woke me.

We had lost so much over the course of the years, then had finally faced true defeat at the end of the war. I’d earned my braids alongside Kouje, fighting to honor my father and our country. I’d stood with him as he earned braids of his own. Watching him as he removed them from his own hair was like watching the magician’s dome destroyed in a blaze of dragonfire and smoke. It was like having the years of my life, each triumph, scattered worthless at my feet, so many broken twigs upon the forest floor.

The fire snapped, sending a hiss of sparks up into the air. The rabbit was dripping fat into the flames. I felt as though I couldn’t breathe.

“Your breakfast is ready, my lord,” said Kouje. His hair was kinked from its long confinement, and loose as I had never seen it before. He offered me the smallest of smiles, his own habit from our days at the palace; this, however, was one we could allow. “I apologize. Mamoru.”

The air was awkward between us, and we were separated suddenly by more than just the sound of the fire. Still, for now, this awkwardness would have to serve. Eventually, Kouje would grow better used to speaking my given name, and I would grow better used to hearing it.

No one ever called me by my proper name, save for my father and my brother, but one was dead and the other wished for me to join him. There was only Kouje left to me.

It was the strangest breakfast I’d ever eaten, which was not to say it wasn’t satisfactory; it was merely that fresh meat in the morning wasn’t my usual fare. I thanked Kouje for it nonetheless, and ate my full share. Anything less would have made him worry. Besides which, I
was
hungry.

What I wouldn’t have done, though, for a bowl of rice.

After that, Kouje obliterated all signs of our presence, brushing leaves this way and that and destroying the fire he’d set to cook the rabbits. He spoke very little, save to ask me if I would like to bathe. He must have sensed my reluctance, as well as its reasons—we were too close to the palace yet and I didn’t want to risk any delay. He didn’t mention it again.

Then, we rode.

The farther we went, the more I was certain we were straying farther still from any path I’d ever known. I felt as though I were running away because I very much
was
, but the loneliness I felt beyond that was not simply due to all I had lost: It was due also to all I didn’t know. Even the trees were unfamiliar to me, and I began to realize that I would evermore be the stranger.

“Where do you think we’ll go?” I asked, loud enough to distract myself from my thoughts. I was sorry for it when the birds above us in the tree branches flapped their wings, a few of them even taking sudden flight.

Kouje didn’t admonish me, though I thought perhaps he should have. His silence told me everything.

After a little while, however, he did speak. “We’ll travel as far away as we can from the palace,” he said, his words more quiet and more circumspect than mine had been. I was glad to listen to him talk; if only he were a man better suited for idle conversation. “It takes us a considerable distance out of the way, but…” He paused for a moment, listening to something deeper in the woods, then relaxed. I would have to do
my best to distract him from his own worries, I realized—even if I was able only to chatter on foolishly about the weather. He was tense as a drawn bow behind me. “I’d thought to take you to a small fishing village near the mountains,” he concluded at last. “I should have consulted you, but it seemed the best plan last night.”

“It’s better than hiding in the mountains with the tricksters and the foxes,” I pointed out.

“I suppose that was my thinking yesterday,” Kouje agreed.

The horse’s hooves beat out an inexorable rhythm beneath us. I couldn’t bear to listen to it, the amiable beast bearing me toward an unnamed
elsewhere
. I pressed on through the thicket of conversation for that reason alone. “This fishing village,” I said. “How do you know of it?”

“My sister married a fisherman,” Kouje said, after a long, taciturn pause. “She lives there. It would… be something, for a time.”

I harbored a momentary warmth. “Have you been there before?”

“Never had time,” he admitted. “But I do know where it is, well enough, at least, to find it.”

“Will we… will we stay there, do you think?”

A mosquito buzzed by my ear, and a moment later sang at the horse. He whinnied unhappily, flicked his tail once or twice, and Kouje reined him in, guiding him in a sudden, sharp turn left. We were going west if we were to draw close to the mountains.

The mountains were where Iseul had fought; I’d been beside him in battle once, but they were foreign and remote to me, the distant and jagged symbol of separation. Men who fought in the mountains came back changed, and only on a very clear summer’s day could you even see the top of the range from the palace. They were like the great wall of an old tale, a boundary marked out by nature. My people knew them better than the soldiers of Volstov, but I myself had no knowledge of them, although some nights, when I was much younger, I would dream of being caught in the mazes that wound their way through the rock—trapped, as Iseul once described it to me, by the shifting of ancient stone.

I wondered how anyone could dwell near the mountains without living each day in their massive shadow terrified some change in the earth or breath from the gods would send them crashing down.

“I wouldn’t know how long we could,” Kouje said. “I’ve no idea how to catch fish for a living. Besides, just think of the smell.”

It took me a moment to realize he was teasing me. I hid my laugh against my rough cotton sleeve—an affectation of the court and one I’d have to shake off as well, though it seemed more than awkward to laugh into my palms. Besides which, the latter barely muffled the sound properly.

After that, we rode comfortably enough. Kouje pointed small things out to me along the way to keep us talking—such as the osmanthus trees that grew in a scattered fashion among the hardier trees, and bloomed delicate clusters of white flowers against evergreen leaves. When a bird cawed above us we would play a game to guess which type of bird it was, or if there was a rustle in the bushes that frightened us we’d guess as to whether it was a rabbit or a fox, and so on.

When we stopped at last to give the horse some rest and stretch our stiff legs, I no longer had any idea where we were, nor any idea how Kouje knew.

“How can you follow the sun under so many trees?” I asked him.

“I’ll teach you,” he said, and I agreed. After all, we had the time.

We mounted once again after no more than a brief respite and began the jostling trip anew.

It was senseless, mindless, numbing; we traveled toward a destination I’d only just begun to envision, and one which was farther away than even imagination could calculate. I wondered what the little houses looked like, if they were made of wood or straw or clay, and how the people dressed. I’d never seen a fisherman or, for that matter, a fisherwoman.