Shadow Magic (23 page)

“They have the right idea, don’t you think?” Mamoru said mildly, ignoring what apologies I might have made altogether. “Perhaps we’d better turn in.”

I wanted nothing more than for Mamoru to enjoy what comforts he could while he could. If I had the means to provide us both with soft beds for the evening, then it only made sense for us to take full advantage of them. Who knew how early Jiang and Kichi would expect to leave in the morning?

For that matter, who knew when we would ever get the opportunity to sleep so well again?

“It’s a fine idea,” I said, allowing myself to praise it as my lord’s own and not Kichi’s. I paid for our dinner, then ushered Mamoru up the creaking wooden stairs ahead of me.

Our room was just off the landing, second on the right. I was almost gratified to hear that the floorboards creaked as loudly as the stairs did. No one would be able to surprise us in the middle of the night; naturally, it was not a building built with the same niceties of architecture as the palace, and for that I was grateful.

I slid the door open for Mamoru out of habit, managing not to bow only as a cursory remembrance. My lord was doing so well at playing his part. It dealt a great blow to my humility to think that I was not.

Our room was plain, with two narrow mats stretched out in the center of the room and a lamp set on the back table. It flickered uncertainly from time to time, as though unsure as to whether or not its presence was welcome. Outside the window, the moon waxed like a ripening fruit, pale and elusive.

Mamoru slipped his new shoes off and began to undo the tie that held his hair. Out of habit, I paced over the length of the room, searching into all the corners and listening to the sound of the floor as I walked it.

“Kouje,” Mamoru murmured, his voice as soft as a moth’s fluttering, “I do not think you’ll find any assassins here.”

“Mamoru,” I said, fighting the urge to bow. “I did not mean to disturb you. It is merely a habit. If you find it offensive…”

My lord smiled warm in the lamplight. “No. You needn’t stop. I find it almost reassuring, truth be told, and… I am in need of some reassurance tonight.”

He drew back the thin, summer-season coverlet. It was imprinted with a design of trees, ones that held the most elegant of songbirds. My lord had always enjoyed listening to the songbirds in the menagerie. On some occasions, if the night air was right, he said that you could hear them singing all the way from the palace.

I knelt on the mat next to my lord’s. “Everything will be well tomorrow,” I told him, “now that we’re traveling in a larger group. No one will take any notice of you.”

“My face,” he said, touching one smooth cheek thoughtfully. “That man said that they were stopping everyone with a regal air about them.”

“I shall counsel you to amend your posture,” I said firmly. “And leave your hair uncombed in the morning. And perhaps we might cover your face in dirt,” I added, as an afterthought.

“Kouje!” Mamoru looked at me for a moment, stunned and amused in equal measures. “Surely our companions would notice something peculiar about such a thing?”

I shook my head. “It was unwise to bathe when we did. I see that now.”

My lord sighed fondly, in a way that did not betray his exasperation in the slightest. “Next time, I’m sure we will both think twice, and learn to live peacefully enough in each other’s stench.”

“Indeed,” I said, allowing myself the smile I’d been holding back. I couldn’t help looking around the room once more, since there were other habits a man accumulated during his lifetime, ones less easy to break than the familiarity on the tongue of a certain title. “Is there anything I might fetch you, before the day is out?”

Mamoru cast his eyes toward the window, and the moon that had risen high over the trees.

“I believe the day is already out,” he said, then, “I’ve everything I need, Kouje. Thank you.”

I rose to extinguish the lamp, trying and failing to make my feet sound noiselessly against the floors, the way I could at the palace. That I couldn’t was some reassurance, but some loss also. I heard a quiet sigh, and the shifting of fabric as Mamoru tucked in underneath the
coverlet. I tiptoed back as softly as I could to my own bed and pushed the covers back in the dark.

“Thank you,” my lord said again. Already his voice was coming slower, half-ragged with the pull of sleep.

“You have nothing to thank me for,” I assured him in a whisper that would not break the tenuous threads of sleep forming around him like a spider’s web. “I merely felt the need for a proper bed. You have forgiven me for my indulgence, and I’m very grateful. There’s no more to say on the matter than that.”

“No more to say on the matter,” Mamoru murmured, the words nearly swallowed up in a yawn worthy of the menagerie lions.

“Good night, my lord,” I said.

A quiet snore was his only response. I lay awake after that for some time, listening to the creak of men and women walking the halls, finding their rooms for the night or leaving them. Gradually the noise subsided as the rest stop closed down for the night, and then there was no sound at all but for Mamoru, sleeping peacefully in the bed next to me. In such a small roadside stop as this one, there were no gamblers or pickpockets roaming the streets at night, so there was only silence from the road beneath as well. I lay on my side, staring at the wall across the room before turning over, noiselessly as I could so as not to wake my lord.

There were no crickets to chirp and buzz in the night, and no frogs to hum their mating calls to one another from the streams. The bed was soft beneath my back. I should have been able to sleep, but I couldn’t.

The only way I realized that I’d eventually dozed off was when the light woke me in the morning, striking me full in the face like an unwelcome hand. I was up at once, looking about the room with considerable confusion before I realized where we were, and recalled the arrangements we’d made to slip past the border checkpoint later in the day.

My lord was still asleep, even after I’d gone to the window to judge the relative position of the sun. It was early yet. If I hadn’t promised to wake him whenever I myself was awake, then I might never have found the heart to do it, but I knelt at the side of the bed and took gentle hold of his shoulder.

“Mamoru,” I said, as softly as I dared.

He was awake immediately, in his eyes the same dread as the
morning before. He seemed to calm when he saw my face, though, and relaxed back against the futon with an odd, sleepy smile.

“I had the most wonderful dream,” he said, in a voice tinged with melancholy.

“When we’re on the road,” I promised, “you may tell me about it.”

Memory passed across his face like a shadow and he sat, his hair something of a mess. Had he slept restlessly during the night? I didn’t remember the sounds of his tossing and turning, but he might have begun to sleep poorly after I myself had managed to drift off.

Mamoru left no time for concern, sitting up at once and tucking back the hem of the coverlet with delicate regret, a dreamy grace. “Well,” he said, after a moment’s pause, beginning to pull his hair back into a clumsy braid. “Let us attempt the border crossing.”

The more time I spent with the Ke-Han, the more time it looked like I was going to have to spend with the Ke-Han.

If I’d said it once, then I could say it a hundred times: I wasn’t any kind of diplomat, not even a piss-poor one, and I didn’t see how decisions that shouldn’t even need to be discussed could take hours, sometimes whole days, to go over. Were we ever going to get to the real meat of the problem? How much longer was this nitpicking—and some on both sides of the debate had perfected nitpicking like it was a bastion-be-damned
art
—going to take?

Forever, maybe. And I had to sit through all of it.

Also, I was starting to feel like we were being horsed around—really taken for a ride. But Fiacre liked negotiating so much that he hadn’t caught on to it yet, and the only reason
I
had was because I didn’t. We hadn’t discussed any of the particulars of the provisional treaty yet, let alone anything to do with the new one, and all because the new Emperor was so hell-bent on tracking his brother down that he’d kept us on the topic for the better part of a week. I was starting to think he was just doing it on purpose.

We’d finally agreed to adjourn the talks when Ozanne had fallen asleep right at the table and knocked over his cup of frothy, bitter tea. I’d have done the same if I’d thought I might get away with it, but for all
I knew two cups of spilled tea in one night spelled a diplomatic incident for the Ke-Han.

They’d never have stood for it in the war. When you were a soldier—especially when you were a soldier who knew what he was doing well enough to get promoted beyond the ranks of miserable, Ke-Han fodder nobodies—you made decisions. Sometimes they weren’t the right decisions, but you didn’t have the time for sitting around and weighing each option, and making sure all the factors had been carefully considered when most of those options were irrelevant anyway, like what the weather was like and how much cotton was going for these days and whether or not your maiden aunt had a hangnail or what you were having for dinner that evening.

Maybe I was there because I was a soldier, and maybe I was there because th’Esar liked to keep a few trump cards up his sleeve, and maybe I was there because I was paying penance for all the men I’d killed during the war without weighing each option, but at the rate these talks were proceeding, we’d be staying in the Ke-Han for ten years at the least, and only then would we move on to deciding what tile we should use in rebuilding.

Didn’t anybody just want to
do
something? Didn’t anybody see reason?

But Fiacre was in his element, and Josette, too; their parents must have raised them to be mean little quarrelers, for they could talk circles around the best of them, and if it hadn’t been driving me so crack-batty, I would have been a little proud.

The way I saw it, though, was that we didn’t
have
to argue about these things. We’d won the war; the Ke-Han’d lost. But then, I didn’t understand the finer points of diplomacy, and maybe it was better to set up a system that worked rather than having the whole thing collapse on you ten, fifteen years down the line.

Whether it was due to it being so damn hard to work things out or due to an unnecessary number of nitpickers all having a field day with each other, I didn’t know. Like I said, I wasn’t cut out to be a diplomat, and now that I knew what diplomacy consisted of, I was damn sure I wouldn’t be making it my life’s work. Even though I’d been pressed into joining the delegation.

Someone, somewhere, was having a real hard laugh at my expense, that was certain.

And meanwhile, I was going stir-crazy.

During the war, I hadn’t had the time to sit still for all of an hour, much less days. I woke before dawn and tucked in early, and a man got used real quick to his specific routines.

In the palace, the finer men and women woke late and turned in even later, on account of all the goodwill everyone was determined to show, meaning that every night we were forced on pain of death to attend stultifying parties.

The one thing I really didn’t get was the Ke-Han music. It was three notes howled at you over and over by a woman who sounded more like she was choking on her dinner than singing. It gave me a splitting headache and it could last for hours if you weren’t lucky.

The dancing was all right, though.

But underneath all the assurances of goodwill, things were tense. The second prince was still missing, the Emperor was still working on us to let him send out veritable armies to hunt down his brother—all while we were getting nothing done—and I could tell I would’ve been privy to some of the nastiest gossip in at least a hundred years if I only spoke a word of Ke-H an. Good thing, then, that I wasn’t a gossip.

Caius Greylace, the carnivorous little flower, was having a field day picking up Ke-Han turns of phrase right and left. Didn’t matter to me, I figured, since the more time he spent gossiping, the less time he spent bothering
me
.

Most of all, I just wanted my horse back.

After over a week of getting pins and needles in my own damn backside, of being restless at night for lack of doing anything proper during the day, I figured something had to start changing, and that something was me, since it sure as bastion wasn’t going to be the situation. I was out of shape enough already. There was only one half-decent solution.

I started rising when the peacocks woke me.

An interesting thing about peacocks that not many might have known was that the ones in the Ke-Han woke up just like roosters did, like they thought morning light was some alarming sign that everyone needed warning about. It happened every day like clockwork; the ones that ran wild in the Ke-Han palace courtyard shrieked like their tails’d been stepped on with the first light of dawn. Normally I just pulled my jacket over my head, since that was what I’d been using for a pillow in
place of the wood block the Ke-Han had outfitted every room with. A man would’ve thought the Ke-Han could make small pillows, since they knew how to make large ones, but apparently not. Everyone in the palace slept so late that there didn’t seem to be any point in doing anything else.

That was when I’d had my brilliant idea. Instead of going back to sleep, I started going through some of the exercises we’d been taught in training camp during the years before a man became a fit enough soldier to fight on the battlefield. It was the sort of thing every man practiced in the lull between battles, so they wouldn’t get rusty in the interim. Being rusty meant life or death—usually the latter, when being in shape counted for something. I was rusty as an old iron gate just by letting myself go so long, but that was what living among the Ke-Han did to a soul, I supposed. Especially with a madman next door.

The only exercise I’d had lately was avoiding Caius Greylace at dinner, or barring the door against him with whatever I could find to wedge it closed.