MAMORU

The dim, terrible happenings of the night before—as remote and impossible as the actions of puppets on the stage—should have dissolved the moment I opened my eyes. They felt like a nightmare.

They were not.

When I woke, I barely knew where I was; all I did know was that I was cold and that my arm was stiff and twisted beneath me. Something soft was beneath my head, but the rest of my body felt as though I were lying on a bed of twigs.

I moved, my arm useless, as though I were a veteran of war who’d lost it in the fighting.

Kouje was somewhere, close by as always, and he would tell me where we were and what news the morning brought. I didn’t remember falling asleep. The last memory I did have of the night before was the steady rhythm of the Volstov mount beneath me and the rustle of the wind through the trees all around us, like women gossiping at court.

Were they already gossiping about me?

I sat up, brushing leaves out of my hair while my hand tingled back into feeling. I’d been lying on the ground, underneath the protection of a maple tree; the bundle of my clothes, wrapped around with Kouje’s and then with a plain workman’s cloth, had been under my head to serve as a pillow. The horse was nearby, tethered to a low branch, stomping lazily and poking his nose into the underbrush. He was hungry. My stomach tightened in sympathy. I was hungry, too.

There was a soft rustling from the bushes near us, and I felt a sudden fear take hold of my chest, causing my heart to pound double where it had been nearly calm. Moments later, Kouje emerged from between a parting in the brush, two rabbits held within his hands and a look on his face that suggested he wished for the quiet surroundings of the palace, where there were no bushes at all to rustle and signal his approach. His braids were undone.

“I hope I did not wake you, my lord,” he said.

“You should have,” I countered. It was true, not merely a childish fit of willfulness. If everything that had passed the previous night was true, then I could no more afford to sleep in than I could allow Kouje to go on indulging me as though I were still a prince. I’d conceded all rights to that title the moment I’d left the palace.

I felt a curious melancholy throbbing in my chest as the beat of my heart slowed, but I paid it no mind.

Kouje put the rabbits down and knelt in front of me beneath the bower of the maple. For a moment, it would have been easy to close my eyes and imagine we were back at the palace, or even on a campaign for the war, and had been separated from our men by a storm the night before. But my clothing was rough and unfamiliar under my fingers, and my back hurt from sleeping on the hard ground, and I could not hide the truth from myself.

It would only make the inevitable conclusion worse.

“Rise,” I told him, swallowing down my darker thoughts. “We don’t have time for such formalities, Kouje. Please rise. I see you’ve brought us breakfast.”

Kouje lifted his head, looking apologetic where he might have looked proud. After all, he’d woken before me, and had managed to catch us a meal while I continued sleeping. If anyone should have looked apologetic, it was I.

“I know it is a meager offering, my lord,” Kouje began, “and we have nothing to season them with, but I thought… if you were hungry…”

“They look very fine,” I said, not allowing him to continue. “Why, I’m quite sure we had worse fare in the mountains, come to think of it.”

Kouje laughed quietly, making me feel infinitely better about my small joke. There had never been a worse time to make light of a situation, I felt sure, but that was what drove me to it. I knew that Kouje would never indulge in such humor, but in doing so myself I kept him from becoming overly somber.

It seemed all the more important that we look after one another, and all the more important that I coax Kouje out of the habits that the palace had bred into him. Such deference from him to me, as I was clothed, would certainly lead to us getting caught; if not there in the forest, then inevitably somewhere else.

“I shall prepare them, then,” Kouje said, and rose once more.

I watched him first twist what remained of his braids back out of his eyes, then roll up his sleeves. He bent to gather dry moss and sticks from the underbrush, bundling them together in his fists until he had enough to strike a fire with the flint from his pouch. I looked away when he pulled out the knife, hating to display such weakness. Tomorrow, I told myself, feeling my own hair as one snarled knot at the nape of my neck. Tomorrow, I would be the one to prepare breakfast.

“Kouje?” I set my fingers to the careful task of working the knots out of my hair, one by one.

I wasn’t looking, but I heard the pause in his work. “Yes, my lord?”

“I’ve been thinking. If I am truly to master this disguise, then you mustn’t bow to me, not even in private.”

“My lord,” Kouje began, sounding strangled, as though I’d just suggested he cut off the heads of all seven warlords.

I pressed on ruthlessly. I had to be ruthless. That was what Iseul had always wanted from me, though perhaps it was a joke of the gods that events had driven me to it at last. “And you mustn’t call me ‘my lord’ anymore, either. Don’t you see, Kouje? We’re bound to… give the game away when it matters most. You’re so in the habit of it already; I am as well. I need you to help me, or else I fear we’ll never—Well. I believe it’s for the best if we both learn to unlearn what was customary at the palace.”

Kouje was silent after that. I could hear the crackling of the fire and the sizzle of the rabbits on their sticks, but there was no reply to what I’d said. I turned once I’d completed my braid, with the sinking feeling that I’d gone too far or said too much.

Kouje knelt in front of the fire, his eyes closed, buried deep in thought. His hands weren’t tending to the rabbits anymore, but to his own hair, methodically removing each braid from its place and undoing them, one by one. All at once, I felt a fierce rush of grief run through me, for the loss of my father and now of my brother, too, the subjects and lands that had been ours to shepherd and protect. My friends. My room in the palace. The walk by the gardens. The way the light came in through the window and woke me.

We had lost so much over the course of the years, then had finally faced true defeat at the end of the war. I’d earned my braids alongside Kouje, fighting to honor my father and our country. I’d stood with him as he earned braids of his own. Watching him as he removed them from his own hair was like watching the magician’s dome destroyed in a blaze of dragonfire and smoke. It was like having the years of my life, each triumph, scattered worthless at my feet, so many broken twigs upon the forest floor.

The fire snapped, sending a hiss of sparks up into the air. The rabbit was dripping fat into the flames. I felt as though I couldn’t breathe.

“Your breakfast is ready, my lord,” said Kouje. His hair was kinked from its long confinement, and loose as I had never seen it before. He offered me the smallest of smiles, his own habit from our days at the palace; this, however, was one we could allow. “I apologize. Mamoru.”

The air was awkward between us, and we were separated suddenly by more than just the sound of the fire. Still, for now, this awkwardness would have to serve. Eventually, Kouje would grow better used to speaking my given name, and I would grow better used to hearing it.

No one ever called me by my proper name, save for my father and my brother, but one was dead and the other wished for me to join him. There was only Kouje left to me.

It was the strangest breakfast I’d ever eaten, which was not to say it wasn’t satisfactory; it was merely that fresh meat in the morning wasn’t my usual fare. I thanked Kouje for it nonetheless, and ate my full share. Anything less would have made him worry. Besides which, I was hungry.

What I wouldn’t have done, though, for a bowl of rice.

After that, Kouje obliterated all signs of our presence, brushing leaves this way and that and destroying the fire he’d set to cook the rabbits. He spoke very little, save to ask me if I would like to bathe. He must have sensed my reluctance, as well as its reasons—we were too close to the palace yet and I didn’t want to risk any delay. He didn’t mention it again.

Then, we rode.

The farther we went, the more I was certain we were straying farther still from any path I’d ever known. I felt as though I were running away because I very much was, but the loneliness I felt beyond that was not simply due to all I had lost: It was due also to all I didn’t know. Even the trees were unfamiliar to me, and I began to realize that I would evermore be the stranger.

“Where do you think we’ll go?” I asked, loud enough to distract myself from my thoughts. I was sorry for it when the birds above us in the tree branches flapped their wings, a few of them even taking sudden flight.

Kouje didn’t admonish me, though I thought perhaps he should have. His silence told me everything.

After a little while, however, he did speak. “We’ll travel as far away as we can from the palace,” he said, his words more quiet and more circumspect than mine had been. I was glad to listen to him talk; if only he were a man better suited for idle conversation. “It takes us a considerable distance out of the way, but…” He paused for a moment, listening to something deeper in the woods, then relaxed. I would have to do my best to distract him from his own worries, I realized—even if I was able only to chatter on foolishly about the weather. He was tense as a drawn bow behind me. “I’d thought to take you to a small fishing village near the mountains,” he concluded at last. “I should have consulted you, but it seemed the best plan last night.”

“It’s better than hiding in the mountains with the tricksters and the foxes,” I pointed out.

“I suppose that was my thinking yesterday,” Kouje agreed.

The horse’s hooves beat out an inexorable rhythm beneath us. I couldn’t bear to listen to it, the amiable beast bearing me toward an unnamed elsewhere. I pressed on through the thicket of conversation for that reason alone. “This fishing village,” I said. “How do you know of it?”

“My sister married a fisherman,” Kouje said, after a long, taciturn pause. “She lives there. It would… be something, for a time.”

I harbored a momentary warmth. “Have you been there before?”

“Never had time,” he admitted. “But I do know where it is, well enough, at least, to find it.”

“Will we… will we stay there, do you think?”

A mosquito buzzed by my ear, and a moment later sang at the horse. He whinnied unhappily, flicked his tail once or twice, and Kouje reined him in, guiding him in a sudden, sharp turn left. We were going west if we were to draw close to the mountains.

The mountains were where Iseul had fought; I’d been beside him in battle once, but they were foreign and remote to me, the distant and jagged symbol of separation. Men who fought in the mountains came back changed, and only on a very clear summer’s day could you even see the top of the range from the palace. They were like the great wall of an old tale, a boundary marked out by nature. My people knew them better than the soldiers of Volstov, but I myself had no knowledge of them, although some nights, when I was much younger, I would dream of being caught in the mazes that wound their way through the rock—trapped, as Iseul once described it to me, by the shifting of ancient stone.

I wondered how anyone could dwell near the mountains without living each day in their massive shadow terrified some change in the earth or breath from the gods would send them crashing down.

“I wouldn’t know how long we could,” Kouje said. “I’ve no idea how to catch fish for a living. Besides, just think of the smell.”

It took me a moment to realize he was teasing me. I hid my laugh against my rough cotton sleeve—an affectation of the court and one I’d have to shake off as well, though it seemed more than awkward to laugh into my palms. Besides which, the latter barely muffled the sound properly.

After that, we rode comfortably enough. Kouje pointed small things out to me along the way to keep us talking—such as the osmanthus trees that grew in a scattered fashion among the hardier trees, and bloomed delicate clusters of white flowers against evergreen leaves. When a bird cawed above us we would play a game to guess which type of bird it was, or if there was a rustle in the bushes that frightened us we’d guess as to whether it was a rabbit or a fox, and so on.

When we stopped at last to give the horse some rest and stretch our stiff legs, I no longer had any idea where we were, nor any idea how Kouje knew.

“How can you follow the sun under so many trees?” I asked him.

“I’ll teach you,” he said, and I agreed. After all, we had the time.

We mounted once again after no more than a brief respite and began the jostling trip anew.

It was senseless, mindless, numbing; we traveled toward a destination I’d only just begun to envision, and one which was farther away than even imagination could calculate. I wondered what the little houses looked like, if they were made of wood or straw or clay, and how the people dressed. I’d never seen a fisherman or, for that matter, a fisherwoman.

When it began to grow dark, the mosquitoes swarmed around us in earnest—whirlwinds of them that whined and stung. Kouje waved them away as best he could while I told the beginnings of the story of the monkey god and his quest to find the setting sun. We, too, were traveling west, and the story was one of Kouje’s favorites.

At last, when it was dark enough that the owls were hooting and my stomach was cramped with hunger, we stopped again by a stream where the sound of running water drowned out the cries of the night birds. Kouje led the horse to drink.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. I sensed that he was not.

“I ate very well at breakfast,” I replied, resting a hand over my stomach in the darkness to quiet it. If I said I was hungry, then Kouje would never have thought twice before he went chasing noises through the shadowy bushes. It was better if we both slept now and ate after the sun rose. “I believe I’m able to manage until morning.”

Whether Kouje believed my lie fully or not, he didn’t press the matter. I lay awake for a long time after that, hearing an errant mosquito flit past my cheek now and then, listening to the water flow over the rocks and to my stomach growling.

For the second time, I woke to find Kouje gone.

Cursing myself, I washed my face in the stream and drank from it, then washed the dust-coated hem of my stolen maid’s costume. There was dust between my toes, so I washed my feet, as well, and did what I could to clean the dirt from under my fingernails.

When Kouje returned, again with rabbits, my own shame was momentarily silenced by my hunger. Matters were less complicated in the woods. I didn’t apologize until after we both ate.

“Next time, you must wake me,” I said, helping him to destroy the site of the fire. “It isn’t a command, Kouje, it’s… it’s a request.”

Kouje looked at me as though the word was something entirely foreign to him. Perhaps it was. Then he bowed his head, but the gesture was more a concession than a display of worship. It would have to suffice, for now.

“My lord—” He stopped himself, looking frustrated and ashamed in equal measures. “Mamoru. I believe we might be best served at passing through one of the villages. We’re far enough away now that there is little chance of being caught out; littler chance still of being recognized. We might barter for better shoes for you there and… if there is any news from the palace, I would like to hear it. Thankfully gossip has more foot soldiers than your brother.”

I twined my fingers together tightly in my lap, doing my best not to betray any weakness at the suggestion of news. It was cowardly of me not to want to know anything, and to want to forget the capital existed at all, now that we’d left it.

Kouje seemed to sense my discomfort, for he stretched a hand across the distance between us and rested it against my shoulder. “We will not listen to idle gossip,” he told me. “I would not suggest we listen at all, except that… if there is any way to know how the Emperor plans to hunt us, I would like not to be caught unawares.”

Of course. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say it, though I nodded, and hoped that it might be enough. I could not help my loneliness, could not help feeling as though I were being left behind somehow. Kouje was adapting to the situation much more quickly than I could hope to.

I would have to work twice as hard, I vowed, so as not to become a burden on him.

This time, when Kouje set to work dismantling the rest of our crude camp, I helped him. We dragged branches across the earth to hide where we’d slept and tossed the stones of our fire pit into the stream where I’d washed my hands and face. Kouje patted the horse down, then we were away once more. I felt the beginnings of a lingering ache in my backside, the result of near-ceaseless riding, and pushed it to the back of my mind. I would not admit such weakness, when I did not know how far off our destination was. For Kouje to think it safe, it would have to be a great distance from here, which meant a great deal more riding.

“Will your sister teach me to fish?” I asked, when the birds had fallen silent and we had no more games to fill the time.

I felt Kouje’s laugh more than I heard it behind me. “After she teaches me, perhaps.”

I tried to imagine what it would be like. It wouldn’t be like the stories, I knew that. There would be no giant peaches to fish from the ocean, no life-changing fortune sent to benefit the hardworking fishermen, since we would be fishermen in counterfeit only. It would have to be for the joy of fishing that we worked, then, and not for the hope of anything greater. We would rise early in the morning, perhaps, when a gray fog still clung to the ocean and the sun was merely a promise on the horizon. Then we would get into our little boat, and—Kouje’s sister having told us all the best fishing spots—we would go to our very favorite of them all, casting our hooks and nets for bonito and flounder. We might well spend all day long underneath the sun, out on the water, waiting for the fish to come. By then, Kouje would have learned to speak easier, and we would talk about whatever came into our heads until the fish drew our attention by tugging at the nets. Perhaps, on very good days, we would come back with eel, and Kouje’s sister would say that we were naturals at it.

Was that a life that Kouje could be content with? Was it a life that I could be content with?

I didn’t know the answer to that, yet. But I was determined to find out.

“Is there a village near here?” I asked idly, tucking hair behind my ear.

“The last time I came this way, there was,” Kouje replied. I refrained from asking him when it was he last traveled through those parts. Remembering would be too raw, yet. We could save the tale for another afternoon.

Soon enough, the trees began to thin out as we approached the village of which Kouje had spoken. It was one of the many little stopgaps between the bustling hubs of activity that were the larger cities, governed by warlords, and the capital itself, the greatest city of all. I had never been through one of these smaller villages, since the main road used by our forces to get to the mountains did not run through such inconsequential places, only past them. I couldn’t help my curiosity, then, overpowering the feeling of strangeness. As Kouje guided the horse down the open dirt path that must have been the town’s main road, I lifted my head to peer inquisitively at the shabby wooden buildings. Some of them looked as though they’d fall apart at the first strong wind, but some of them hung cheerful cloth pennants from their doorways. Now and then, the banner would proclaim this building as an inn, and that one as a teahouse.

All at once, I felt such a sharp longing for green tea that my mouth felt wet with the taste of it.

Men and women lined the streets. Here a middle-aged man swept the dirt from the street in front of his shop, and there two young women were carrying baskets laden with dirt-covered vegetables. There was a fish vendor with a head like an ax who was selling fried eel on sticks to a group of children, all of whom clamored and pushed at one another to be the first-served. In the alleyway next to his stood a woman with a parasol. Her robes were a pale mauve.

Kouje stopped our horse in front of what I judged to be a noodle house. The smells emanating from it were enough to make my knees weak, even though I’d eaten my fill of rabbit earlier that morning. I felt my stomach give a traitorous growl. Behind me, Kouje dismounted, and I found myself hoping he hadn’t heard, that he wouldn’t think me ungrateful for his efforts.

“Perhaps I might try to strike a better bargain for my formal clothing,” he said, “if you are ever again to eat something besides rabbit meat.”

“Oh, no,” I protested. “I couldn’t. Really. It’s best just to have shoes, as you said, and not to waste money on such things.” I didn’t know how long a man could go on eating rabbit once a day, but I vowed that I would do it until our situation improved, or at least until I learned to catch my own fish.

Kouje was wise, but he was also tenderhearted when he did not have to be, and at these times it was up to me to preach sense. We would need sturdy shoes to travel as far as we were going. It was hardly so urgent that I be spoiled with hot noodles.

“I did not mean to suggest we waste money, Mamoru,” Kouje said, and I was pleased that he’d remembered to use my given name. It was still a surprise to hear it sound in his voice, but one that I would overcome soon enough. He held out his hands, and I took them, getting down off the horse.

It was rather a relief to be on my own two feet once more. I resisted the urge to rub my backside, endeavoring instead not to stand up too straight, as Kouje cautioned me earlier. Those who worked all day long for their living tended to stoop, as though a great yet invisible weight bore down upon them, the memory of their physical duties. I could manage stooping well enough, but I noticed that none of the women in this village wore their hair in one long braid, but rather kept it pinned up underneath a wrap of cloth, or looped back under as a bun. I touched my own braid with a sudden self-consciousness. Perhaps I would be better served to imitate the women, that I might blend in with our surroundings all the more.

Kouje had tied his own hair back in the simple style I’d seen worn by the tradesmen who visited the palace on occasion. He’d got his hair to behave for the most part, no longer kinked from years’ worth of wearing war braids, and I wondered whether he’d doused it with river water that morning, before I’d woken up.

“Come,” Kouje said, offering me a smile I did not recognize, until I realized that it was a companionable smile, the smile of equals. Without any warning, Kouje was playing a role, and I was expected to play along.

On sudden inspiration, I took his arm.

“One can learn everything there is to know in a noodle house at noon,” I said, “because at that hour, it is only all the people too important to work that frequent the place.”

“That is from the story of Aoi the Underhanded,” Kouje said, naming one of the legends of a slippery trickster who amassed his wealth from the misfortunes of others. He was more of a highwayman than a man to be respected or immortalized in tale or song, but as children my friends and I had enjoyed his stories best of all. If Kouje knew them better than I did, it was only because he was the one who’d told them to us, so many times over that we’d grown sick of them.

I didn’t know what had made me think of it, since they were stories for children, and I was no longer a child. But as we entered the shop, it was immediately clear that Aoi the Underhanded’s sage advice was as timeless as that of any mountain ascetic.

In other words, it was a time of day where men and women more important and better-monied than we were eating. And over their food, they gossiped.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they were gossiping about me.

It didn’t surprise me for a moment that the story had overtaken us, spreading faster than a fire in the capital. News traveled more quickly, it seemed, than single men could, and anyone traveling along the main roads would have passed the word on with greater alacrity, covering more ground than Kouje and I were capable of with our circuitous and covert path through the trees.

I thought of the other scandals I’d lived through during my time at the palace—when young lady Ukifune had been courted, all too successfully, by Lord Kencho; or when Lord Chiake lost his heart, and his entire year’s stipend, to a young man from a brothel. Those sorts of stories kept men and women alike gossiping for months at a time in their separate rooms, and the subjects of their gossip could never enter a room again—that is, if they hadn’t been exiled from court for their behavior—without all the fans going up, and all the ladies there whispering behind their sleeves.

I’d always felt a mixture of unhappiness and pity when I thought of poor Ukifune, Lord Kencho, and Lord Chiake, and all the men and women who’d fallen afoul of gossip in our court.

When, if ever, would the gossip over Prince Mamoru cease?

“If you’ll excuse me,” Kouje said, suddenly halfway into the noodle house, standing with a deferent posture by the side of one of the busiest tables, “but you say there’s something happened to the esteemed younger prince?”

One of the women at the table, wearing periwinkle blue, gaped at him. She had broad, unrefined features, and especially vulgar lips. She reminded me in many ways of a bullfrog Kouje had caught for me once. I averted my gaze and stared, as so many servants did, at my feet.

“You haven’t heard about the trouble with the prince?” the woman asked, overly familiar.

One of the men slapped Kouje on the arm—which at first shocked me, until I realized it was actually a companionable thing to do—and laughed in disbelief. “You must’ve been on the road a long time, eh?”

“Sit down, and bring your girl,” another man said, taking a mouthwatering slurp of noodles from his bowl. Unconsciously, I licked my lips, then felt my cheeks coloring. At least my disguise was working well enough. “We’ll tell you everything.”

Kouje gestured me over, his pale eyes sorry for the crudeness of the motion. It was necessary, though, and I hurried over, still keeping my eyes fixed to the floor and my shoulders slightly stooped. It seemed the appropriate posture, for no one looked twice at me as we both took our seats.

“He’s stolen a diplomat’s horse and run away from the palace,” the bullfrog-woman said, clearly delighted to be the first one to break the news. “Can you believe it?”

“And he’s a traitor. Was going to kill the Emperor in his sleep.”

“I heard it was with poison. Isn’t that right, Jin?”

“Kamiya down at the tea house said no one knows what the plan was.” The bullfrog-woman slapped me in the arm, and it was all I could do not to wince and to look, instead, appropriately shocked and delighted at once at all the spectacular gossip. Kouje stiffened at my side. If this were the palace, that would have been an offense so great, I wouldn’t have been able to stop him from striking her. Here, it was a rite of passage.

I didn’t think I would be able to summon the strength or the camaraderie to slap her back, however.

“But you know what it probably is,” the bullfrog-woman went on. Her three companions nodded, and suddenly we were all bent over the table while the delicious aroma wafting from the bowls of food made my stomach seize up with hunger.

“It’s the Emperor getting rid of him,” a man with a mole on his right cheek confirmed in a whisper.

“It’s been done before,” another man agreed.

The bullfrog-woman drank from a cup of tea with a noisy gulp, then put the coarse little cup back down on the table, obviously satisfied. “I wonder where the prince is now?”

“His retainer’s gone with him,” the man with the mole added. “Loyal to the last, I say, right?” The other two men grunted in agreement, while the bullfrog-woman merely looked smug.

“Whatever the reason,” she said, taking control of the conversation once more, “the Emperor seems to think they’ll be taking the quickest route to Volstov.”

One of the men spat on the floor at the mention of Volstov, which earned a laugh from his companions. Kouje joined in too, after a moment. I couldn’t place what was so odd about the sound at first, until I realized that I had never heard Kouje laugh in such a loud and unfettered fashion before. It was nothing at all like the soft and courtly laughter he permitted himself in my company.

It made me wonder what else of Kouje I didn’t know. For the first time, I was coming to realize that, for someone whose company I’d kept through my entire life, there were great gaps in my knowledge about him.

“Why would they be heading to Volstov?” Kouje asked, his tone full of contempt for the doings of royalty and the suggestion that good decent people wouldn’t be able to fathom them.

The bullfrog-woman shrugged, and nodded toward the man with the mole.

“Shen here had trouble even getting into the village from Hojo last night,” she said, naming one of the main cities, to the south of the capital and facing the water in the direction of Tado. “They’ve set up checkpoints along all the main roads, and they’ve already reinforced the existing checkpoints between prefectures. He says it takes hours to get through now, especially if you’re traveling alone, or worse, with only one companion.”

Shen—the man with the mole—nodded, and took another slurp of his noodles. I held my hands rigidly in my lap, and willed my stomach not to give me away.

“You’d be better off if you had another woman with you, if you don’t mind my saying,” Shen pointed out, looking me up and down in a way I truly didn’t care for. “This one looks as if she’s liable to drop any minute from starvation. She’s not much for conversation either, is she?”

“It’d certainly aid the numbers problem,” said the other man, who must have been Jin. He laughed, slapping his thigh at his own little joke.

“Actually,” Kouje said, that one word so like iron that for a moment the man stopped laughing, and the bullfrog-woman raised her eyebrows in surprise. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kouje lower his head in contrition. “What I mean to say,” he began again, his words so deferential and so scattered with interruptions that it was all I could do not to stare at him as he cleared his throat and added extra, unnecessary phrases for sheer politeness’ sake, “is that I am hoping to find someone to barter with, that I might prevent her from—as you said—dropping dead of starvation.”

I lifted my head in protest. I was already the subject of gossip in the smallest of road-stop towns. I would have something to say against being discussed like that right to my face.

Shen only laughed, and held up his hands in the sign meant to ward off bad luck. “I didn’t mean anything by it, little miss, and you’ve a pretty enough face when you hold it up that way.”

“I’m here for bartering,” Kouje said. It was a gentle enough reminder, and perhaps I was the only one who could hear the steel behind each word. It wasn’t a threat if it didn’t have to be, but it lingered in the air along with the scent of the noodles and strong, hot tea.

The bullfrog-woman sucked her lower lip in, thinking. I found myself wondering whether or not she would emit a croak, then almost immediately felt contrite.

“It all depends on what you’re looking to sell,” she said at last.

“Some garments,” Kouje told her. “Belonging to a former master of mine.”

Her eyes flashed with amusement. “Stole them, did you?”

Jin shook his head. “Don’t mind her. Old Mayu doesn’t understand that not everyone’s got a closet full of skeletons.”

“Jin, that’s a lie,” she began.

“Just last month, weren’t you trying to convince us all that the paper-hanger who works for Ketano was stealing from him?” Jin asked, laughing.

“And the year before,” Shen chimed in, “when you said that Suzu was in love with a married man one town over?”

I wanted to tell them that Kouje wasn’t the sort of man who would steal things from anyone, let alone his own master, but I was faced with the new and terrifying knowledge that it was not my place. I’d only just begun to grow comfortable with my place as a prince over my most recent birthdays, after the battles in which I’d won my braids, and now I was unlearning each lesson as Kouje had undone each braid.

The idea of having to adapt to another role was almost more than I could bear. I kept my head down.

“Well, what of it?” Old Mayu was sulking now. I could hear it in her throaty, smoke-worn voice. “Mark my words, that’s why she hung herself in the end.”

I wondered if Suzu had been the topic of all their gossip up until I’d fled from the palace. I wondered if anyone would guess at the truth of why she’d done it, or if that elusive thing—the truth—had died along with her.

There was no argument from Jin or Shen, who both seemed to sense that they’d gone too far. It wasn’t the sort of remorse that comes from genuine regret, though, but more a fear of what would happen once Old Mayu had got over sulking and decided she was angry.

“Try the potter,” Old Mayu said to the pair of us. “Down the road from here, next to the inn’s stables. He’s been prospering of late, and his wife’s the sort who’s always bothering him to dress up once in a while. He’ll be your best bet for unloading your garments, stolen or not.”

I lifted my head just in time to see her wink at Kouje.

“Of course if he isn’t interested, you two come right back here and see me. I can’t imagine what I’ll do with only these two for conversation. It’s not every day you meet someone so interesting!”

I didn’t think that Kouje had said all that much, by way of conversation. In fact, most of the conversation had been carried by Old Mayu herself. I thought that perhaps her definition of “interesting” was different from my own.

“Thank you,” Kouje said. He stood, and didn’t wait for me before starting out of the noodle house.

I knew it was just an act, but I’d been caught unawares again, and found myself rushing after him into the light of the street outside. Kouje was standing by the horse, untying the bundle of our clothes. He looked up when I came out, and though he didn’t say anything, there was a penitent look in his eyes.

“What interesting people,” I said, to see if I could make the apology fade. “I’m glad they were so helpful, aren’t you?”

“You did very well,” Kouje said. “I almost lost my temper.”

“Only once or twice,” I said, shading my eyes against the sun and looking down the street, as though that held the secret of what the potter’s house looked like.

“When she touched you…” Kouje began.

“We’d best see the potter,” I said. “Should I stay with the horse?”

Kouje looked down the street, the same as I had, but with a different purpose. My gaze had been curious, but his was challenging and defensive at once. Perhaps, if I looked hard enough, I could see things the way he saw them: most of them threats and all of them gossipmongers.

“You’d best come with me,” he said at last, taking my hand. “News has traveled fast. We can only hope the Emperor’s riders haven’t moved so quickly.”