Shadow Magic (54 page)

What I wasn’t expecting was to find Caius serving Lord Temur tea from the hearth in the center of the room, the two of them drinking from the delicate cups and savoring the taste.

“I’ve made enough for you and Josette,” Caius said brightly as we entered. “I know that Josette prefers her tea strong, so I’ve let it steep. Alcibiades, would you be a dear and put a wedge in the doorframe? You never know who will stop by, and it’s best always to be prepared.”

I hesitated for long enough to see Lord Temur’s face—he was watching Josette, and, as far as I could tell from Ke-Han expressions, he was even more glad to see her in one piece than I’d been.

And that, no doubt, was because he’d known the kind of shape she might’ve been found in better than I did.

I did as Caius told me, using two extra wedges for good measure, before I took the cup of tea, because it was something to hold on to. Josette made herself comfortable on the floor, then we all must have realized how crazy we all looked, since after that all four of us—Lord Temur included—were laughing.

“Soldiers get like this in the trench,” I said, once we’d sobered some.

“How fascinating,” Caius said. “What of our fellow soldiers?”

Josette drank deeply from her glass before she spoke. “I’ve been sent to this room and that all day,” she explained, “on someone or another’s
directions. First I was told Fiacre was in a meeting with the Emperor—but they must have known that explanation wouldn’t hold water for long, since the rest of us would’ve been there for that kind of an event, now wouldn’t we? Then I was told he was out in the gardens—which he wasn’t—but a nice young woman in the gardens told me he’d gone back to his room, except he wasn’t there either. As you can see, I’ve been given something of a runaround. Your help really should be better informed, Lord Temur.”

Lord Temur said nothing, but bowed his head and sipped his tea. After all he’d been through, I didn’t blame him for feeling ashamed. I felt it, too, instead of letting myself feel other things in which fear was heavily involved.

And once you let fear in, panic settled over you, so we were lucky, at least, that all four of us had different kinds of level heads.

“So it would seem that our companions have been taken captive,” Caius said, after a long pause, like he was saying, “I do so love that flower arrangement” or “The tea is a tad too strong.”

“It would seem that
we’ve
been taken captive,” I added.

“Just in a different manner of speaking,” Josette agreed.

“Well, we are lucky at least in one respect,” Caius said, blithe as you please, “since we have an asset that our companions were unfortunately lacking.”

All three of us—Caius, Josette, and I—turned to look at Lord Temur, who was holding the teacup in his hand like it was alive and he was afraid of hurting it. He’d drained it, and turned it over on his palm, so that it formed a pale blue dome in his hand. Something like wry defeat passed across his face.

“What do you plan to do?” he asked at last.

“We cannot hope to bring assistance to our companions unless we have gotten word out to the Esar of our predicament,” Caius said.

“But I’m not leaving anyone here,” I countered sharply.

“Nor can I leave,” Temur said. “That far, I cannot go.”

Josette smiled. “Then, General Alcibiades, Lord Temur,” she explained, quick as you like, and her blue eyes hard and pretty as jewelry, “you will cause the distraction that gives us cover to escape.”

“I figured as much,” I said.

I woke in an alien world of clean white sheets and a pillow that was too soft—like resting upon something as untrustworthy as a cloud. It wasn’t the bed I’d had at the palace, and it most certainly wasn’t the ground I’d grown accustomed to sleeping on in recent weeks. My stomach clenched with a sudden rush of panic, followed by confusion. All around me, I heard voices whispering in a foreign language—one I’d taken great pains to learn, once, though it felt like another lifetime of lessons. A bright light streamed from an unknown source, making it impossible for me to see.

There was only one question to ask.

“Kouje?” I croaked, surprised to hear the quality of my voice, which was hoarse and raw, as though I’d been misusing it for some time. Had the fever done so much?

I heard someone issue a command, stern and brisk, but my head was still fuzzy and I couldn’t understand it. The word for “summon” …? Or maybe it had been “call”. The fever had taken my clarity from me, even causing me to awaken with no memory of how we had come from one point to another. I remembered the mountains, and being unbearably cold. I remembered the night sky, and nothing so bright as the light focused upon me.

There had to be something I was missing.

I cast my mind back as far as I could remember. Kouje had spoken of going to Volstov, that there was where we would find the cure to the fever that raged in my blood at night. But Kouje hadn’t answered my call, which meant he couldn’t possibly be there beside me.

I held up my hands, the only thing familiar in the too-bright room, and passed them in front of my face, back and forth, until my fingers took shape and form, and I began to recognize the sight of my own palm. Then I reached over and pinched the skin on the back of one hand. It hurt, and I didn’t wake up.

“Oh,” I heard myself saying. “It isn’t a dream.”

“Hardly,” said another voice. That one was speaking in my native tongue, though it stumbled over the softer consonants, and the familiar words were tinged with an unmistakable foreignness. “Unless you
make a habit of dreaming yourself into medical supervision so that a crack team of strange magicians can eradicate your fever. Nasty business, so I’m told. Not really my specialty.”

At least he knew the language well enough, though his tone was overly formal.

“Excuse us,” said another voice. That one was female and more skilled with our language. “My companion was evidently not chosen for his manners, but rather for his familiarity with the Ke-Han language and customs. Neither of which, I’m sorry to say, he has displayed here.”

“I was being
honest,”
the man protested, in Volstovic.

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see that he had a beard, and was dressed in much the same fashion as the delegates from Volstov had been, if less ceremonial. His companion was a striking woman with dark skin and eyes; no Ke-Han woman had a gaze like that. She pinned me to the mattress with one glance, like a butterfly in a collector’s display. I licked my lips to wet them before I spoke.

“My apologies,” I said, trying to sound like a prince of the Ke-Han and not a mouse caught in the granary. “I am… in Volstov?”

“Thremedon, actually,” said the man.

“If you are looking for your companion, I believe that he is sleeping downstairs,” the woman added. “He was suffering from exhaustion, and even then we had to be quite persuasive with him in order to gain permission to take you here for observation.”

“It certainly caused a scene,” added the man. “I assume they hauled us in as translators to ward off the massacre, since the guards of the Basquiat barely speak
our
language, let alone yours, and that companion of yours is certainly something to be reckoned with when he’s wielding a sword and shouting like the devil. Why, if we hadn’t been able to tie him down—”

“Royston,” the woman admonished.

The man blinked, then turned to me, bowing low in the Ke-Han fashion.

“I speak a great deal, Your Highness,” he said. “Sometimes a great deal too bluntly. If an apology is in order, then you may rest assured that you have my sincerest one.”

I shivered and tried to remember how a prince acted. It was more difficult than I’d hoped.

“Please don’t,” I said, before I could help myself. “It isn’t necessary to be so formal. Not when you have already been so gracious as to take us in.”

“Margrave Royston,” said the man, gesturing toward himself, “and my lovely companion is the
velikaia
Antoinette.”

The lady spread her skirts wide as a fan and bowed in her own, delicate way.

“Our magicians have been working through the night to discover the source of your ailment,” she said. “We are keeping the symptoms at bay through… well, certainly unorthodox means, but… As of right now, we believe that we have it narrowed down, though we were hoping to speak with your retainer to perhaps glean some of the details.”

“Kouje,” I said, feeling a selfish desire to see him, even though it meant waking him. We’d come to a decision, however misty and distant it seemed now, and our friendship, not to mention my own duty, called for immediate action. “Yes. And after that, I—It is imperative that I speak with your Esar,” I said.

Antoinette turned her gaze toward Royston though not before I caught the flicker of interest in her eyes.

“Surely your good health is of the utmost importance at the moment, Your Highness. I’m certain the wait to cure you will not be so long as all that.”

General Yisun would not wait for my fever to recede. I was equally certain of that.

“I’m very grateful for your help,” I said, “but it
is
urgent.”

The translators shared another look.

“Well,” said Royston. “Let’s start by waking the poor bastard up.”

I felt another stab of guilt as two men left the room at a command from Antoinette, going to rouse Kouje from wherever he’d been slumbering in this unknown place. What had Royston called it?
Basquiat
. I wasn’t sure I could quite form my mouth around the word, but I felt certain I’d heard it before. No doubt it was someplace for which my people had another name—perhaps even a name far less favorable.

Not for the first time, I wished for something I’d had at the palace. It was my tutors, who’d known so much more about this foreign city than I could ever hope to learn. It seemed almost unfair that I was seeing it without them. They deserved the experience more than I did.

The room I was being held in was so unfamiliar that I had no way to
translate it, either. A high ceiling, domed from within; decorations in inlaid stone that caught the light and scattered it, vibrant orange, across the floor; a high, polished door with a golden knob; ostentatious furniture, like a cabinet of some sort, also with inlaid knobs. No wonder I felt so blind there.

I drew my robes around me—at least those were familiar—and leaned back against the plump pillows. Perhaps it was difficult for me to remember the way of being a prince because I was in a strange bed, surrounded by people I’d never met and weakened by fever. When I grasped the fabric with my fingers they felt insubstantial, like water.

Somehow I knew that even all that would never have stopped Iseul from knowing how to be Emperor. It was in his blood like the fever was in mine, intractable and waiting for an opportunity to reassert itself.

“Mamoru,” said a voice, breaking me from my reverie, and I found my gaze irresistibly drawn to the door—where Kouje was standing. He looked like a ghost come down from the mountains, all pale skin and purple shadows beneath his eyes. Surrounded by finery for the first time, it was evident
just
how tired he was, and how thin, like an imprint of a man instead of the real thing.

I wondered if I looked much the same. More than that, I wondered how Kouje had managed to get us into the city at all, considering the fact that we looked nothing at all like Ke-Han royalty. Even a palace retainer was better kept than we were.

Even fishermen were.

I drew in a deep breath to speak and realized I was smiling.

“Kouje,” I said.

He came to stand by my bed, eyeing the men standing around us with a wary caution, as though they were something other than magicians or doctors or both. The man who talked too much—Royston—looked delicately away, though the others were not quite as polite as he. Now that I didn’t have to squint, I could see that some of them were scribbling notes, while others were examining strange-looking instruments that shone silver in the bright light. It was fascinating, in a way, and completely different from our ways of medicine, not to mention our magicians, whose power had depended greatly on the great blue dome destroyed by the dragons’ final assault on our capital.

I hadn’t been homesick in all our time on the road. I’d missed
things, certainly, but the danger had still been too close, and the need for vigilance so constant, that I had never allowed myself to sit down and simply miss
everything
before. Now I did. It was a sobering feeling.

“How are you?” Kouje asked, so quietly that I suspected he was wary of our translators as well.

“Better,” I said, not bothering to lower my tone. “But it
is
morning, and they say that they haven’t quite diagnosed it yet. I’m not sure what all this is.” For the benefit of the others around us, I added, “We have no such instruments in the Ke-Han.”

Kouje’s gaze turned troubled, and he glanced away from me for a moment. Not for the first time, I felt the separation between us that had been caused by the fever. He knew things that I didn’t, things I’d missed during my delirium and wouldn’t ever have the chance to know.

If we’d still been in the forest, I’d have reached out to tug at his sleeve, drawing his attention to me that way. Yet we were in Volstov, and I could no longer act like a traveling actor, or even a fugitive. There was a protocol for refugees, especially those of royal blood, and I would not shame my ancestors by pretending to have forgotten it.

I sat up a little straighter, though the pillows helped me more than good breeding.

“Perhaps I should speak with them,” Kouje said, as though wrestling with some invisible foe in his mind. “There are things that I could tell them—things you might not remember, my lord, since you were in the grips of it.”

He had stumbled over not using my given name, so that I knew he’d remembered himself as well and was just as bound not to shame his family. It was almost funny, after how long it had taken me to convince him it was all right in the first place.

“Excuse me,” Royston said, startling me. He bowed when we both turned to meet his gaze, and when he straightened up he kept his eyes on Kouje, as though
he
were someone to be wary of. Then again, I rather supposed he was. I hadn’t been conscious for the scenes Kouje had caused—memories that he and Royston shared, and which echoed in the wary, intrigued amusement in Royston’s eyes.