“If I were free to answer,” she said slowly, “I would marry you, Zakkar Kai.” There was little point in dissembling. He was not the worst fate for a Khir noblewoman trapped in a southron court, and she— oh, it was useless to deny it, she rather…liked him. The more he showed of the man behind his sword, the more she found him interesting and honorable, until she could not be sure her estimation of his actions was from their merit or her own feelings.
A high flush stood along his cheekbones, perhaps from morning drill or the heat. Surely it could not be a surfeit of affection for a foreign lady-in-waiting. “But you are not?”
“I must write to my father.” Was that why she continued to deflect a general’s interest? How could she even begin to brush the characters that would explain this? It was craven and ignoble to think that as Zakkar Kai’s foreign-born wife she would not have to face her father’s disappointment at both her failure and her weakness.
“Of course.” He nodded, a short decisive movement of a man well suited to command. “I will not speak to the Emperor until you have word.” His throat worked again, and he did not take his rough fingertips from her face. A strange heat, not at all like Zhaon’s sticky, hideously close summer, spilled from that touch down her aching neck, and somehow eased the terrible hole in her chest. “I will wait as long as I must.”
It was the warrior’s reply to the Moon Maiden. A smile crept to her lips, horrifying her. How could she feel even the barest desire to laugh or seek comfort, here in the house of the dead? “You are quite partial to Zhe Har, scholar-general.”
“Only some few of his works.” Kai still did not move, leaning over her to provide welcome shade, the rest of the world made hazy and insignificant by the mere fact of his presence.
Why had he not been born Khir? Of course, he would be dead at Three Rivers, or Komori Dasho might— as he had told his daughter once— have refused any suit for her hand. It did no good to wish for the past to change, or to ask uncaring Heaven for any comfort. A single noblewoman’s grieving was less than a speck of dust under the grinding of great cart-wheels as the world went upon its way.
He leaned forward still farther, and Yala felt a faint, dozing alarm.
But Zakkar Kai, the terror of Zhaon’s enemies, stern in war and moderate in counsel, merely pressed his lips to her damp forehead before straightening and stepping back, leaving her oddly bereft. “Come.” He offered his arm again. “We must see you home, my lady.”
Home. If her father sent word quickly enough, she could plead filial duty and escape northward. No doubt Crown Prince Takyeo would provide an escort to at least the border. She could be in Hai Komori’s dark, severe, familiar halls by the middle harvest, facing her lord father’s displeasure without the shield of distance, paper, or ink.
Komori Dasho would never be so ill-bred as to directly refer to her shame, but his silent disappointment would be that much harder to bear.
Yala bowed her head and once more took Zakkar Kai’s arm. Her skull was full of a rushing, whirling noise but she held grimly to her task, placing one foot before the other on bruising, sun-scorched stone.
She had been sent to protect her beautiful princess, and failed. All else was inconsequential. The world was a cruel summer-glaring dream, and she was lost within it.
SUBMIT, REGARDLESS
The Jonwa, home to Zhaon’s Crown Prince and hung with the pale paper bubbles of mourning-lanterns, was not much cooler than outside despite its stone floors and high ceilings. The massive sculpture of paired snow-pards in the entrance hall glowed, mellow speckled stone rubbed to satin in a pool of sunlight robbed of heat by a succession of several mirrors. The pards’ flanks cast a somber reflection upon polished wooden flooring, but the statue’s twin heads, facing each other in eternal deadlock, were both shrouded with unbleached linen.
Crown Prince Garan Takyeo, the first in succession to rule mighty Zhaon, sat at his study’s great ironwood desk, staring blankly at an open book upon the ruthlessly organized surface. It was Cao Lung’s Green Book, holding much upon the subject of mourning, but its block-pressed characters would not stay in their orderly falling-rain lines, wandering as the reader’s attention did.
He had been staring at this particular page for some while.
There was a feline scratching at the door-post, and Third Prince Garan Takshin, in a Shan lord’s head-to-toe black except for the pale slash of a knotted mourning-band upon his left arm, stepped through. “It won’t change into an eggbird, no matter how long you look at it,” he said by way of greeting, his scars— one vanishing under his red-black hair, another pleating his top lip into a sneer despite any attempt at pleasantry or even ease— flushed with morning sunshine. He had no doubt been at morning drill, and though the rest of him was freshly bathed his topknot was slightly rumpled.
“At least we would have the eggs if it did.” Takyeo tried a smile, rubbing at his freshly clipped and oiled mustache and smallbeard. Perched upon this backless chair with his wounded leg stretched straight and wrapped in odorous, herb-smeared bandages, attaining a pleasant expression was a more difficult operation than he could quite believe. “And a bright good morning to you, too. Have you eaten?”
“At dawn. Which is why I came; it is well-nigh lunchtime, and none of your servants will brave this room to scold you into keeping your strength.” Takshin’s dark, leather-soled house-slippers whispered as he padded to the shelves of annals, treatises, and other spine-bound or rolled items necessary for a prince’s intellectual exercise. He affected to study a shelf with much interest; the gold hoop in his ear gave a single savage glitter. “I am hungry too, so bestir yourself, old man.”
A thin thread of amusement broke the shell of blank inattention Takyeo had spent the morning in. It was a relief. “You are like an old woman. Come and eat, come and eat.”
“We must look after your health.” Takshin imitated an elderly maiden-auntie’s quaver, accompanying it with a rude gesture often seen in the sinks of the Theater District or Zhaon-An’s teeming slums. Usually, it was deployed when a brothel-keeper had not been paid her portion, or a gambling criminal wished to denounce dice for working against him without quite accusing his opponent’s hand of sleight.
The juxtaposition wrung a weary laugh from Takyeo, who began arranging his robe and his leg for the task of rising. Zakkar Kai’s pet physician swore the wound would heal true, but not if the Crown Prince placed undue strain upon sliced, violated muscle and bruised bone.
It was to Honorable Physician Kihon Jiao that Takyeo owed his ability to stand at all. The arrow that had almost crushed his femur was a heavy, barbarous affair of northern make, but many in outlying Zhaon provinces menaced by horseback bandits also used such things. The assassin’s hiding place— a bramble-choked hedgerow just outside Zhaon-An on a road much used for pleasure-jaunts by prince and noble alike— held no clues, nothing more than a blurred shape in long summer-juicy grass where the man had taken his ease and a leaf-covered pile of droppings showing that he had frequented the spot, an adder lying in wait.
“Shall I steady your cane?” Takshin continued, solicitously enough to be sarcastic, and Takyeo waved an irritated hand.