KOUJE

I was a boy when my own father died, younger than either of the princes, but better prepared, since his had been a long-fought battle with illness.

Before his condition worsened, he often took me to the river while my mother slept, her face grown thin and weary with caring for him. He towered over me, then and forever, since I never had the years in which to grow and surpass him.

“Look, Kouje,” he said to me, one large hand placed against my shoulder, his voice ragged with the cough that had taken root in his chest. “See how the river flows ever onward, pouring all it has into the distant great ocean?”

I was still young, and more interested in the sunburnt autumn leaves or the toy boats bobbing cheerfully in the current. Nevertheless, I loved my father. What was more, it was my duty to listen when he spoke.

“Our family has served the Emperor for countless proud years,” he continued. There was more gray than black in his beard, though his hair remained dark as ever, his jaw cut sharp and proud. “When I am gone, you will be sworn to his youngest son.”

My father always looked out at the river. Never at me.

I had not understood then—as I came to in later years—that my father’s message to me was a gift. In his own way, he tried to tell me that the best servant is as the river, patiently giving over everything in its body to the greater ocean. After some time, I came to understand that it was not a simple man’s will that governed this balance but nature itself. It was thus my duty and my nature to watch over Mamoru, the youngest prince, and serve our great Emperor in this fashion. I did this, to the best of my abilities, since the day my lord Mamoru was born, twenty-five years ago. At the time, I was no more than seven.

Then, sudden and violent as all things in war, matters changed.

It was not a cataclysmic change, though many would have argued the fact. When the Emperor took his own life for honor, it was a subtler change, like a shifting of weight that came over the palace where before everything had been well balanced. Our lord Iseul was of course the rightful heir to his father’s legacy, and any man with an eye for strategy could see that it was perhaps not the worst time for him to ascend to the throne. For despite our losses at the hands of the Volstov, the eldest prince had gained much respect among the people for his cunning as a general of war. If anyone could lift us from the depths of our shame and defeat, it would surely be the Emperor’s firstborn son, who was now Emperor himself. Iseul was young enough yet to begin his own era but old enough to have been tested as a warlord and found capable.

It was a better chance at rebuilding than any one man among the Ke-Han could have hoped for.

It had shattered my prince to lose his father in ways that it had not shattered Iseul. But then, that was only to be expected. Of the two, Mamoru was the more tender.

“Ready enough,” Mamoru said, from the depths of his room, “if not prepared.”

“My lord,” I said, bowing low. It was a game we often played before parties or banquets—though it was habit this time, and not youthful nervousness, which compelled the exchange.

The jade ornaments in my lord Mamoru’s hair clacked softly against one another as he stepped past me, the sound of them almost hidden in the hustle and bustle of servants rushing up and down the hall, gossiping with one another over the distant, uncultured thud of foreign boots. It seemed strange to imagine that, not so long ago, the sound would have signaled the approach of enemy troops. Perhaps the lords in charge of talks would remember that, and tactfully request that the diplomats remove their shoes.

Their doing so wasn’t entirely likely. The lords charged with governing the talks had been chosen specifically for their absence from the war itself. As I understood it, they were for the most part courtiers, men who hadn’t seen enough to personalize the conflict and so could approach peace with a clear head.

I envied them their clear heads, just as I envied them their untroubled sleep. They would not reach for their weapons at night when they heard the tremor of heavy leather boots against the floor.

The prince paused at a junction in the hall. Perhaps he, too, was ill at ease among the new flurries of activity everywhere one turned. A servant was not meant to make noise where he or she walked, but with the early arrival of the diplomats from Volstov, many of them had succumbed to near panic, and allowed their footfalls to sound heavily against the floor without care for who heard their comings and goings.

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.