ALCIBIADES

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.

The unofficial leader of our merry band, a man by the name of Fiacre, had told us all beforehand that anything we didn’t recognize was most likely fish, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I guessed he was of a more diplomatic nature than I was though, since at the table just next to ours he was eating everything off his plate and chatting to Wildgrave Ozanne about something that had happened on the way over. Next to him, Josette and Marcy were having some kind of tête-à-tête over something that had eight wriggly legs.

There was some luck in the world after all. That creature hadn’t landed on my plate.

It seemed to me that any man among the Ke-Han wouldn’t be too broken up over the loss of a diplomat, however mysterious the cause of death.

Dinner—endless, uncomfortable, and quiet, since no man dared to say anything so long as the Emperor wasn’t talking—ended with a funny, moss-colored dessert that Caius Greylace insisted was melon-flavored gelatin. My stomach, meanwhile, was growling like one of our long-lost dragons. After the plates were cleared, the man who’d stood out to greet us held up his hand for attention. I guessed he’d been assigned the unhappy position of herding us diplomats until further notice. I wondered what he’d done to piss off the Emperor, getting stuck with a job like that.

“There will be a short recess after dinner for our most esteemed Emperor to prepare himself for the talks,” the shepherd said.

Greylace leaned away from me to murmur something to Marcelline about hiding silverware in their napkins to prepare for an ambush. It wasn’t my type of humor, but at least it made me feel a little better about being so suspicious of the Ke-Han Emperor’s good intentions. If there had been silverware, I might’ve even gone for that sort of thing myself, even though I didn’t have the Talent Marcy did. She could command metal like a breeder gave orders to his pups. It was a beautiful thing to behold in wartime, but that was neither here nor there.

I didn’t know what we needed with magicians at all, now that the war was over, but I wasn’t the sort of man chosen to make decisions. It was the soldier in me, bred in too early and nothing to be done about it now but to follow orders. Maybe I’d be able to scare up some food during this recess.

My growling stomach bode ill for any peacocks I might run across in the courtyards.

Caius Greylace slipped his arm through mine as we stood up, and I nearly flipped him over the table.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I told him.

He laughed, the infuriating little snake. It was a high and tinkling laugh that reminded me that he’d been a member of th’Esar’s court back at home and I hadn’t. Of course, all that nobility amounted to a hill of beans when we’d both been sent packing to Xi’an, and at least common blood like mine didn’t stoop to marrying first cousins or closer.

“Do you think we’ll have time to change before the talks? Although I’d hate to exhaust my wardrobe on the first night, only to be caught wanting later on.” Caius touched the bow in his hair fondly, chattering on without much care as to whether or not I was listening.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Depends on how long it takes the Emperor to ready himself, whatever that shit means. Do you think he’ll be changing?”

“Oh, no,” Caius said, and he looked so certain that I believed him immediately. “That’s traditional dress for the evening; he won’t be changing out of it. Do you know, I heard that, according to custom, the Ke-Han should still be in mourning for their Emperor? Only we’ve arrived early and forced them to speed along their proceedings. They’re a marvelously adaptable people, don’t you think?”

I could think of a few words I had for the ritual-obsessed Ke-Han, and “adaptable” wasn’t one of them. I grunted, just to show I’d heard him.

“No, you’re right, I don’t think I’ll change,” Caius said. “At least, not until I’ve spoken to their tailors. I’m assuming most of the men are wearing green and not blue because they don’t want to offend anyone.” He finished this with a pointed look at my army jacket. Fuck him, I thought. Little rat didn’t know what it meant to be a soldier, and I wasn’t about to sweep all that I knew the Ke-Han were capable of under the carpet just yet.

I adjusted my collar, which wasn’t too tight, and took stock of my surroundings. There weren’t any windows in the place, since it was right in the middle of the palace and surrounded on all sides by the narrow halls—no good for making a quick exit, should the talks turn sour. It felt like being boxed in, like the tunnels in the Cobalts had been modeled after the palace itself.

As far as the Ke-Han were concerned, there wasn’t a friendly face to be found in the crowd. In fact, there wasn’t a face at all in the crowd that didn’t wear a mask of stony indifference, save for one, and that was what surprised me. It was the younger prince himself.

Things were pretty awkward, I’ll give them that, but that was to be expected. Except that Fiacre and another member of the Basquiat, Josette, seemed to be drawn to the younger prince like a horse to the feed, and when I looked over in their direction, they were actually talking to him. Josette was laughing. I shot a glance at Lieutenant Valery, who himself was looking pretty annoyed and pained by Casimiro, who’d somehow snagged himself a conversation with one of the bowing, scraping servants. He’d caught this one midscrape, and she had her head down like she wanted to plan an escape but couldn’t decide whether or not she’d be breaching etiquette. Damn, talking to Casimiro was bad enough when you understood the language. I couldn’t help but think it’d be worse if you were a foreigner.

Marius stood leaning up against the wall and speaking in low tones with Wildgrave Ozanne. They were both observing Fiacre’s discussion with the prince with interest, but also like they were too smart to go over there and get in the line of fire themselves.

The younger prince was flanked by a man who looked as put out by this whole situation as I was. I couldn’t tell how unhappy he was from his face but from the set of his shoulders. He was a soldier, and there was something resigned and tense in the way he held himself—like he thought he was going to be attacked, too.

“Now, that’s hardly fair,” Caius said, almost like he was getting ready to sulk. “I thought it was the height of rudeness to go up and talk to a member of the royal family.”

“Just the older prince,” I replied, distractedly.

It was obvious, at least to me, that while the Emperor was maintaining his mystique or whatever it was he thought he was going to accomplish with this recess, he’d left things up to his more personable younger brother, who was probably making polite conversation about the weather and the price of silk with two of our most esteemed diplomats.

From the looks of the Emperor—from what kind of man he obviously was—it was likely a good thing, I thought, that he wasn’t in the room to see how nicely his younger brother got on with the men and women from Volstov.

“Come,” Caius said, without any warning, giving my arm a fierce tug. I almost flipped him again. That time, it was harder to squash the instinct. It wouldn’t do to make a scene, and the last thing I wanted was to give th’Esar any more reason than he already had to exile me. Not that a diplomatic mission was exile, but it might as well have been, and after it was over I was looking forward to a good long rest back home. I didn’t need to give anyone any reason to be pissed off with me. After all, I’d only just got back from the front lines, to find myself in the thick of it once more. Somehow or another, I’d managed to piss somebody off. Killing a member of the Basquiat in front of all the Ke-Han warriors in the middle of treaty talks, no matter how much I wanted to or how easy it would have been, wouldn’t look nice on my résumé.

So I managed not to kill Caius Greylace. But barely.

“We simply have to talk to him, don’t you agree?” Caius asked. And, for an incredibly small creature, I had to admit, he was also incredibly strong. He made good use of his size, too, squeezing up next to Josette as though he’d been there all along.

The man flanking the prince narrowed his eyes, like maybe he was thinking about flipping Caius Greylace over, if he got any closer. He was a bodyguard then, or whatever the Ke-Han equivalent of that was. His hair was all thick black braids, pulled back into a complicated twist that left them to spill neat as you please down his back—though unlike the Emperor, he didn’t have any fancy jade dangles to make noise when he moved. Didn’t matter though, since from what I’d learned, it was the braids that were important. Something like our version of medals of honor. The man, whoever he was, had been a soldier. I thought it would have been pretty fucking hilarious if we’d recognized one another, but the truth was that all the Ke-Han looked the same to me, and this poor bastard was probably thinking the exact same thing about us.

“I am very pleased to hear you enjoyed the dinner,” the smiling prince said, his words softened and masked by a heavy accent. Still, there was something about the way he looked so delighted to be speaking our language that you couldn’t help feeling a little of it too.

“Oh, the dessert was especially wonderful,” Josette told him. “And so light! I expect I’ll have to be refitted for all my dresses by the time we leave.”

The prince laughed politely, like he’d understood maybe half of what Josette had said, or at least enough to know that it was a pleasantry.

“Who intends to leave?” Caius asked. “You put us so to shame with your hospitality, I’ve half a mind to stay here indefinitely once the talks are over.”

The prince trained his eyes on us, uncertain for a moment while he tried to sort out the words. I thought about that glimpse we’d got of the Emperor, his brother, as compared to the lamb in front of us, lips moving silently like he was reading a book. He looked more like a foreign ’Versity student than a prince. His brother, on the other hand, had looked every inch like haughty royalty. Maybe it skipped the second-born.

“Thank you,” the prince said carefully. “It is my—it is our hope—that you feel comfortable here.”

Caius ducked in a deep and graceful bow. “I’m Caius Greylace.” He elbowed me in the stomach, just above the hip, which I guessed meant I was supposed to bow too.

Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to get him for it later, though.

“This is my companion,” he went on, like we were there together or something.

“Alcibiades,” I said gruffly, because it was too late in the day to be getting into titles, and besides, I didn’t have one.

The prince nodded, taking in the latest display of prostration on my part with clever dark eyes. I didn’t trust him, not for a minute, but then he had fewer braids in his hair than the man who stood beside him. He was more a prince than a warrior, yet.

“This is Prince Mamoru,” Fiacre said, looking pleased to have something to say. “Haven’t managed to catch the name of his stalwart companion yet, but ah, he seems very… tall.”

Prince Mamoru’s eyes lit up with happiness, probably at recognizing his name in among all our messy foreign words.

“Mamoru,” he said, resting a hand against his chest.

He was delicate enough that he reminded me a little of Greylace, though he was certainly quieter, and heaps more reserved—so a Greylace I would have better liked to have around.

“Prince Mamoru,” Caius repeated, replicating the accent and the strange round R like he’d been practicing the language for years. “Might I say quite candidly that I am simply in awe of your jewelry? It’s incomparable to anything in Volstov!”

He reached out a solicitous hand, likely to admire one of those bracelets, or maybe just to make another sweeping bow—I wouldn’t ever be sure, since the man standing next to the prince seized Caius’s wrist with the speed of a practiced soldier.

I found myself reaching for my sword, before I remembered two things: that the war was over, and that it was forbidden for us to carry a weapon within the Emperor’s palace.

Josette’s smile slid off her face like a piece of creamed eel. Prince Mamoru’s eyes went wide. Caius Greylace looked as though he’d never had as much fun in his entire life, even when the man released him, and bowed lower than I would have thought he’d been capable of. He murmured something in a low voice, rough and alien. I could only presume it was an apology.

Fiacre caught my eye and nodded toward the door. The Emperor had arrived, standing with his seven separate bodyguards, or poison tasters, or whatever the hell they were.

“I suppose we’d best take our seats,” Josette said. Her smile was back in place, but it was a diplomat’s mask of a smile, and there was no authenticity to be found in it at all.

The man muttered his foreign apology again before standing and ushering the prince to his seat.

Caius turned to me with the air of a fisherman who’d caught lobsters in his trap.

“That was thrilling,” he whispered, as we moved away to take our seats. “Didn’t you think so? I wonder who that man is. He moved so quickly! Perhaps he was a general, or some other manner of warrior servant. He was so strong.”

“‘Thrilling’? He almost killed you,” I pointed out, just in case Caius hadn’t noticed that part.

“I know that,” Caius said. “Why else do you think it was so delightful?”

He was the only person it was my misfortune to know who would have said almost being killed by a Ke-Han bodyguard was “delightful” or “thrilling.” I was beginning to despair for all of Volstov, if this was what was happening to our nobility. And I was beginning to despair for myself, if this was any example of how the rest of the talks were going to go.

The younger prince had taken his seat once more. I could see him from where I was quite clearly, and his bodyguard, too, in case he wanted to try anything again. I may not have had my sword with me, but then again, he didn’t either. The way I saw it, we could still manage to figure out how to kill each other properly with just our hands.

Prince Mamoru murmured something to his brother, then bowed deeply to him. It made me feel all kinds of uncomfortable to know that we were transacting our business with a people who made their brothers bow to them on a point of formality.

Then the Emperor Iseul lifted his hand.

Even though his father had just died—even though he was new to it, and he had a hell of a lot to prove—he held himself like he’d been doing this all his life, or at least like he’d been waiting for it that long.

“Now,” he said, in a voice made all the more formal by its stilted Volstovic accent. “Lords and Ladies of Volstov, our esteemed guests: the Ke-Han welcome you.”

And the way he said that, I thought, folding my arms over my chest and getting ready for a long night, made it obvious that he was the Ke-Han. Even though he’d been a prince this morning, he was an emperor now. But those were just the times we lived in.