Shadow Magic (5 page)

There was to be an audience that night between the diplomats and our esteemed Emperor Iseul, as well as the seven houses that held a place of honor beneath his crest. Preceding that, there would be a dinner in the Emperor’s own dining hall.

If things had been different, the death of an emperor—so fierce a warrior, so proud a man—would have disallowed feasting in all forms, and only plain rice would have been eaten so as not to offend the gods with excess while mourning.

Things, however, were as they were. No small river could change them.

I had my own interest, carefully concealed, in whether or not the men from Volstov would be able to stomach an exchange of hospitalities with our men or whether our generals would be the first to break. Certainly, there were men of the seven houses who did not have so much to lose as I had by speaking out against this occupation, however prettily clothed it came.

We came to the back entrance of the dining hall, placed specifically for those others sitting at the high table, so that no man but the Emperor himself would draw attention by crossing the room to the dais at the back. That was where Mamoru settled himself, between Lord Temur of the western prefecture, and the throne once reserved for his father. Mamoru’s place was at the Emperor’s right hand, just as it had been Iseul’s place before him.

The men and women from Volstov sat at the lower tables in groups, as moths huddled around the reassurance of a flame. Some were dressed in the Volstovic style, but wore the Ke-Han shade of blue—some show of deference, I supposed. We had a history between us of talks for peace thwarted by things so simple and yet so fundamental as the color of our clothes.

Others wore a style of clothing more similar to our own, but the similarity was undone by their broad, expressive faces and the nervous way they glanced about, as though expecting an ambush at any moment.

A man with hair the color of dried wheat laughed too loudly.

“Kouje.” Mamoru lowered his voice, beckoning me to bend my head.

“My lord?”

The doors at the front of the room opened, and Mamoru tightened his posture with the precision of a musician tuning a lute. Three of Iseul’s retainers preceded him into the dining hall, their clothing the plain dark brown robes that denoted their status as distinguished servants. The four men behind him clad in green were the Emperor’s own vassals, trained as warriors to protect their lord at any cost. Their faces, clean-shaven and hard, betrayed nothing. They were the men that the former Emperor had trusted most in all the land. It would be for Iseul to decide whether or not to retain them or to replace them with men he trusted more.

They should not have been dressed so colorfully, but the honorable dead had been forgotten in favor of the honorable future.

The newly anointed Emperor himself wore ornaments of green jade threaded through his many warrior braids. There were rings, perfect smooth circles for victories past and sharply curved pieces that resembled a fierce predator’s teeth; pins that formed the shape of a dragon, a catfish, a maple leaf. On his wrists he wore dozens of deep green bracelets, and heavy strands of stone beads around his neck. His robes were embroidered in green and gold with the symbols for strength and for power—signs the emissaries from Volstov would not be able to interpret explicitly, but which they would sense by his comportment, his posture, the very tilt of his chin. Over his heart was his father’s crest, which was now his own. The fabric beneath the needlework burned a deep, rich red—not the vulgar, glaring red of our Volstovic guests, but the color of a good wine, or the blood that flowed from a too-deep cut.

Everyone at the high table bowed as one, their foreheads scraping their plates. The diplomats from Volstov moved to stand—as was, no doubt, their poor way of recognizing a king of kings—before they too hung their heads in ungraceful bows. They numbered nine, men of all sizes—and two women, an unorthodox practice among our own people. Some were clearly soldiers, brawling men built for a good fight, while others were clearly scholars, men who had no doubt been recruited for their knowledge. There was even one who could not have
been long past his boyhood, pale as the koi my lord favored so highly and dressed up like a peacock.

Iseul’s face was blank as he took his seat, his eyes as cold and as dark as flint-rock. His poison taster sat down at his side, just behind the lord Maidar from the southernmost prefecture.

Our new Emperor looked every bit the part, and I could feel my lord Mamoru’s pride in him. It was as evident as if he’d spoken it aloud.

There was no reason for the shade that rose like a mist over my heart. There was no reason why I should not have felt the same pride in my new ruler, and even a kind of gladness for this day, when we could still perform our customs with pride in the face of our enemies’ occupation. The shade was there, though, and I could do nothing but push it aside with the experience born of long practice.

Things were not as they should be. My father, even weakened by illness as he was, would still have summoned the will to refuse to dine under such an inauspicious roof.

I sat at Mamoru’s right, just behind him, that I might better taste the food as it came and before it reached my lord’s own lips. I had only been poisoned this way once before, by enemies of the Emperor’s house. It had caused a dreadful fever in my blood, rendering me unfit for duty over a long and torturous period of weeks. In the end, it was nearly a month. Such an experience, however, was made worthwhile when I considered how I had done my duty for my lord and how Mamoru had been spared the suffering.

The rice came first, and there was no taste of any malevolence to mar its clean flavor. I passed it up to the table.

Mamoru nodded his thanks, the gesture curt and mannered.

The men from Volstov were staring up at the high table still, their mouths open in awe, as though, in all their years since birth, they’d never learned to close them. If they were waiting for the Emperor to make a speech, they would be waiting a long time. Custom dictated that discussions of politics were to be had only after a proper dinner. Fire could be lit in an empty belly. In a full one, there was no room for it.

Iseul seated himself with a rustling of fabric, his taster at his left, so that no man would come between him and his brother. It was important, now more than ever, to make a show of unshakable unity.

If pressed to the point of a sword, I might have admitted that my
unease did not subside throughout the course of the meal. Rather, it remained fixed firmly in my mind, impossible to ignore, like the weight in the air before a lightning storm.

I had grown up alongside Iseul. I had never been assigned to his service, but we were nearly peers in age, and as such I had been privy to his growth into a man simply because I had been doing the same thing at the same time. As such, I could recall an incident with Volstovic prisoners of war, taken captive when my lord Mamoru had been just shy of four, and I myself had been eleven. I was allowed into the great reception hall for the first time that year while my lord took his afternoon nap—his condition being particularly delicate in his earlier years—and it was there that I first saw the elder prince in full regalia, dressed every inch like the heir to the empire, and seated beside the Emperor himself with the gravest of expressions on his face.

“It is for my son to decide their fates,” the Emperor had said. “For soon enough, every decision for the well-being of this country will be his, and how else might he learn than through practice?”

The seven warlords had nodded their assent, any mistrust carefully hidden beneath their courtly masks. How could a child be trusted, after all, to understand the gravity of their situation?

The young prince had raised his head, eyes sharp and lined with kohl.

“Have them killed,” he said. “The chance for escape is too great. We fight Volstov from outside our borders, and we cannot afford to fight them from within as well.”

I could not have read any of the expressions in the room, even if I’d tried. The experienced members of court had all been trained since birth to keep everything to themselves, and as someone relatively new to palace life, I could not hope to breach those barriers. Yet I was still experienced enough to perceive that his decision had been an unexpected one.

No one, of course, expected a child to have such capacity for ruthlessness. Iseul proved himself to be a man filled with surprises from a very young age.

It was an impression I have never forgotten since—the first indication of his capabilities, but certainly not the last.

Soup came after the rice, then the fish course. All were untampered
with. In my time at the palace, and with the war’s end it was my charge to look after the prince Mamoru, to taste his food for poison and to guard his person from those who would wish him ill. If I could only perform my duty well enough to take in the poison before it reached my lord, in whatever form it came, I could consider my life well spent.

According to Caius Greylace, it wasn’t a show of solidarity or support for Volstov that the new Emperor had this big red spot on his robes, but that didn’t stop me from feeling better about how eager everyone was to turn colors. I was the only man wearing red at the dinner, save for the Emperor and Caius, who was wearing what looked like some kind of red bow in his hair.

“It’s a local hair ornament,” Caius said.

To my way of thinking, though, he looked too much like one of those stuffed bears you win for your childhood sweetheart at a fair. But, I had to admit, out of everyone who was trying to affect the Ke-Han style of dress and failing, Caius Greylace was the only one who didn’t look like a giant, ass-backwards fool. So that might have been one reason why the crazy little snake had been added to this mission in the first place.

Other than that, the new Emperor’s way of dealing with us was not to talk at all for the first half hour of the meal—as though he thought he could make us crack just by sitting up straight as a rod, with all eyes on him, taking his food from his poison taster and eating it like he was king of the world and not, in fact, the Emperor of a conquered country.

“Isn’t the young prince nice-looking, though?” Caius murmured at my left, putting a hand on my elbow and almost making me drop my
bowl of half-cooked food. It wouldn’t have made much difference.
I
didn’t have a poison taster, and
I
wasn’t eating it.

I gave Greylace a look that put across all my disgust. He cooed happily, like a pigeon.

“It’s remarkable they’re brothers, that’s all I mean,” Caius murmured demurely. It was a whisper so quiet, I didn’t even know how I heard it.

I hadn’t even noticed another prince. I knew there
was
one, of course, since before we’d left the country some ’Versity experts had tried their best to teach us which end was up by drawing us all a helpful little chart of the hierarchy in the Ke-Han. The Emperor was at the top, of course, and his two sons below him; beneath them were seven lords that, for whatever reason, he favored more than the rest. I didn’t have to know the
whys
of it, just who I was supposed to bow lowest to.

Of course, the Emperor had seen fit to off himself—which put us in quite the situation, arriving so awkwardly on the very day of his death. The Ke-Han didn’t seem to hold that against us. At least, not yet.

The man Greylace was indicating sat just as straight as his brother, with white stone jewelry in his hair and around his throat. Maybe if the Ke-Han had spent a little less time dressing themselves in the morning and a little more time planning out their strategies, we wouldn’t have won the war. Never mind the fact, of course, that they’d been tricky enough to see that we nearly lost.

Anyway, next to the Emperor, the younger prince looked like a pale ghost. Since I wasn’t eating, and since Caius didn’t seem at all inclined toward leaving me in peace until I answered his question, I thought about what he’d said. The younger prince’s face seemed more expressive than the Emperor’s did, that was for certain. He looked more like a person, and less like the stern-eyed statues we’d seen standing in the outer gardens.

“He’s smaller,” I said, since I couldn’t say half of what I wanted: that he looked less full of himself, too. Such things went against the spirit of diplomacy, and who knew who was listening and for what purpose?

“Aren’t you eating that?” Caius wanted to know, gesturing toward my plate. “It has the most divine flavor!”

“It looks like—” I stopped myself partway, poking at the bowl with one of the little sticks they’d given us to eat with. They were dainty and delicate and slippery, and I’d managed to snap the other one in half
earlier. I was half-expecting my meal to poke back, but it just sat there, soggy, like it didn’t care one way or another whether I ate it, which was pretty much in line with what I’d learned about the Ke-Han so far. “Well, I’m full anyway.”

“Then you won’t mind if I help myself,” Caius reasoned, merrily plucking away whatever pale, uncooked thing had landed in my bowl to begin with.