Shadow Magic (36 page)

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?”

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?