ALCIBIADES

I had a splitting headache, like I was back in the Basquiat being held captive during the fever. And all the rest—the Ke-Han, our victory, the diplomatic mission, the plays, the bell-cracked Emperor, Caius—was some dream I’d come up with in my delirium.

The Ke-Han could’ve defeated us with their clear wine.

“Oh Alcibiades!” The all-too-familiar voice of Caius ever-loving Greylace—unfortunately not a dying man’s hallucination—came singsonging to me. It got right between the eyes and settled there, lancing at my brain with remorseless good cheer. “It’s mail time, and Dear Yana has written you again with news from home!”

I rolled over and buried my face against the pillow. No, I thought. Not “no thank you,” and not “come back later,” but an unflinching no. It wasn’t just that it wasn’t the time, but never. I’d never get used to him, nor to the way I felt; nor would I ever start feeling like a man again beyond the dull throbbing between my ears where my brains were supposed to be. They’d been there once, but the wine had done away with them completely, as evidenced by the fact that, just last night, I’d saved the life of the Emperor of the Ke-Han by stepping between him and an assassin’s blade.

I didn’t even like the man. Truth was, I hated him. It was something different from the way I felt about that little bugger Caius, who’d proven both how worthy and how infuriating he was on countless occasions, to the point where I was almost getting used to being driven up the wall by him, and that was frightening.

But I hated the Emperor of the Ke-Han with everything I had in me, for every man I’d lost and every friend who’d died, for every story I’d known was false but had allowed to harden my heart against the enemy anyway. He wasn’t human. He was a fucking monster; anyone could see that as soon as look at him, apparently even his own people. That actor’d looked at me right before he died and suddenly, we were on the same side as one another, except for one thing: I’d fucking stopped him.

“Bastion blast,” I snarled at the pillow.

“I hear you in there, Alcibiades,” Caius said. “Are you decent?”

“No!” I shouted, and meant it, and regretted it almost as immediately, when my head started buzzing like there was an entire hive of bees up inside of it.

“No worries,” Caius said. “I can wait.”

Maybe I’d get a commendation, I thought dizzily as I pulled myself from the bed and stumbled toward the bedside basin. Cold water in there, as always. I resisted, somehow, the urge to stick my head in it, hoping I could drown myself that easily. I might’ve done it, too, to get myself out of there, except I’d never yet run from a fight and that was the fight of my life.

I was General fucking Alcibiades of the fucking Glendarrow. I was a stupid kid leaving home so I could fight in a war I didn’t even understand, so I could be hard and strong like every man I’d ever known, so I could take down the other side and be some kind of a hero or, if I was lucky, I could at least not be dead. I was a soldier, first and foremost, before I’d ever been a general, and I’d fought the Ke-Han Emperor hand to hand just before I’d gone and saved his bastion-damned life.

Only it wasn’t my emperor. It wasn’t the Emperor we’d come to hate but this young bastard of a crazy upstart, and all those stories faded in comparison to what I’d seen.

I’d always assumed the Ke-Han Emperor had his people behind him. Otherwise, what the hell were they fighting for? How in bastion’s name had he managed to make them fight all these years?

Clearly his son wasn’t half the man that he had been.

And between the two I was confusing myself between hate and respect.

The water in the basin was freezing and I was glad for it, splashing it all over my face until I couldn’t feel my nose or my chin. Like being garrisoned up in the mountains during raid season, glad for the cold that meant no one could smell anything and no one had to get naked enough to bathe. Those were the ever-loving days—not a nightmare of being polite and wearing the right things and sitting at low tables while your legs cramped and your eyes crossed and everybody talked and laughed, polite as you’d like, with all the things we’d done to each other during the war boiling under the surface.

Peace? Everyone wanted peace? Was that what Emperor Iseul was thinking when he’d sliced open that poor bastard’s throat, or was it something else?

I’d get on my horse and ride out of here first thing if my horse hadn’t been stolen.

“Let’s see,” Caius called, from the partitioning door. Somehow, the Ke-Han had known this would happen; they’d divined the future and put us together just to make me crazy. “Yana says that the chickens are very healthy. You have chickens? How utterly delightful, Alcibiades! How does one go about raising chickens, I wonder? And don’t they wake you up in the morning something awful?”

I bowed my head over the cold water and closed my eyes. All I could see was Caius standing, probably wearing some feathered night robe made of silk and sunshine, just next to the door separating us. He wasn’t suffering from any headache—though, in all fairness, I couldn’t have said he never got ’em, being velikaia and all—and he probably looked like nothing had flustered him in his entire life. However long it’d been so far, the little creep.

I sighed, felt myself smiling, and made a noise to cover it up—a hoarse grunt.

“Stop reading my private mail,” I muttered, dragging my wet hands through my hair. “And come in or don’t; just pick one.”

“She also wants you to know that she’s thinking of selling the wagon,” Caius went on, having chosen come in, like I’d both known and feared he would.

There was something nasty to be said about my current situation when even a madman was becoming predictable. I didn’t want to think what that said about me, about how I was being slowly driven ’round the bend by a pint-sized magician and his more-than-pint-sized appetite for entertainment.

“Also,” he continued, coming closer so that I could see him in the mirror. I’d been right—not a hair out of place. Certainly nothing to suggest he’d indulged in as much of the clear wine as I had, which I suspected he had; but of course, it hadn’t bothered him one ounce. He pulled a face, managing to look like a tragedy mask but not an actual human who happened to feel sad. “She wants to know why your brothers never write to her the way you do. You’re the most diligent of all, it would seem. How many brothers, by the by? I can’t imagine there being more than one of you—and all in the same house, no less. Your poor, dear mother—not to mention poor, dear Yana!”

“Don’t know if the others can write,” I grunted, head still ringing from my earlier shouting. Words were so loud, and Greylace knew so many of them. I didn’t expect him to understand it, but I certainly wasn’t going to be doing any more talking than was strictly necessary.

I lifted my head—a more difficult task than it should have been—and glared at my own reflection in the small, round mirror set over the basin. Everything was still vaguely blurry, since the pain caused by trying to force my eyes into focus just plain wasn’t worth the trouble, but I still had both ears and both eyes and one good nose, however red-rimmed they all were.

It was more than I could properly say for the assassins, I thought. Even if we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them since their being dragged off, every soldier among us knew what came next. Torture. Hell, even Josette had known, judging by the firm, blank expression she’d pulled last night and the unhappy twist of her mouth later on, when she, the madman, and I had all gone back to our private rooms, nobody saying anything, and everybody thinking too much.

There was something to be said for the atmosphere when even a diplomat was expecting the worst.

Greylace was still reading my letter, holding it up in front of him like an official carrying an edict from th’Esar. Maybe he thought that falling silent would throw me off the trail, like I was some kind of bear trying to catch his scent in the woods. Unlucky for him that I’d been learning from our little encounters, and while to all appearances I was feeling my cheeks to decide whether I could leave off shaving another day, I was really watching my fine friend the snake with the aid of my mirror.

It was a Ke-Han trick I’d adopted to keep tabs on Greylace. That ought to have upset me, but with all there was going on in my head at the minute, there wasn’t much room for feelings, upset or otherwise.

His guard was down. I was about ten times bigger than he was. That was my chance, my perfect moment, to reclaim what was rightfully mine.

I moved all at once, my muscles sore from their practice with Lord Temur, not to mention their not-quite-practice with the Emperor. I liked to think I’d learned things from that day too, though—like how to be sneaky when it suited my purpose. And when my purpose was to expropriate a letter from the hands of one Caius Greylace, sneaky was the order of the day. I turned and plucked the letter from his fingertips, not quite managing to keep from smiling with triumph as I held it very, very high above his smug little head.

As far as I was concerned, it was all worth it for the look on his face—pure shock and concern, as though I’d finally managed to get one up on him.

“I’ve been practicing,” I reminded him, and smoothed the paper flat out of habit while keeping my body between him and the letter.

“Oh, my dear,” he said, shaking his head so that I noticed he was wearing drops in his ears, some kind of red stones that caught the light and bothered my eyes. At least he was wearing red—had been wearing red, I admitted to myself grudgingly, for a few days. Out of misplaced camaraderie, probably not out of any feelings of nationality he harbored for our homeland. “There’s something dreadfully wrong about this letter.”

“Wrong,” I snapped, eyeing him darkly. If he’d thought joking around was the order of the day when something was wrong back home, then I was going to crack his head open like an egg against the wall before breakfast. Finally, an excuse for it.

I glanced down at Yana’s penmanship, scanning the letter’s contents briefly. Reading was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to be avoiding at the moment, but—well, I didn’t like that look on Caius’s face, that was all. Yana’d never mention if she was sick, or anything like that, but there was always the chance that one of the others…

“Am I reading this right?” I asked, like it didn’t bother me a heck of a lot even to have to ask for an outside opinion. As much as I hated to admit it, though, Greylace was the only other person who’d read one of Yana’s letters, and in my current state I didn’t know if I trusted myself to be the last word.

Caius pushed a hand through his hair, so that I caught sight of his bad eye before the strands fell back into place. Why didn’t he just wear an eye patch? He could even put jewels on it, have different ones to match his every outfit. Hiding wasn’t the sort of thing I associated with Greylace; it didn’t suit him. Nor was he the type to fidget—at least, not so unconsciously. Everything he did—every movement he made—was calculated, planned out for a certain effect to add to the overall appearance. Much like that performance last night, and just as fucking deadly, too.

There were times when I figured he could easily have been raised by the Ke-Han, for all they were similar in most of their insanities.

He reached a hand out as if to take the letter, then withdrew it.

I didn’t like this. Not one bit.

“I don’t know,” he said at last and sighed, producing a fan from inside his voluminous sleeves. He snapped it open in one smooth flick of his wrist and studied its ridged horizon with his one good eye. “Did you know that noble ladies sometimes carry weapons in their fans,” he remarked, as though he imagined I cared. There was something serious in his voice, though, or maybe it was the absence of his usual unflagging delight.

“I didn’t know that,” I said, trying my best to rein in my temper. “I wouldn’t doubt it, though. Women are dangerous. I was asking about the letter.”

Yana hadn’t even mentioned my temper in this one. That was another funny thing, besides. She never missed a chance to correct my flaws. It just wasn’t like her.

In fact, the whole letter was off, like someone else had been writing it. Someone who didn’t come from the country, who’d learned a long time ago the proper way of sentences, who wrote perfectly fine but without any real flavor.

“That’s precisely what I meant, my dear!” Caius’s gaze flicked up to me, that time. He looked wounded that I hadn’t been able to follow the fevered ramblings of his brain. Like that was something new.

“Humor me,” I said flatly.

Maybe he could give words to the feelings I had.

Caius closed the fan again and stepped up on his tiptoes to smack me on the nose with it, like a bad dog who’d made a mess of the kitchen. By the time I’d got over the shock—which didn’t take me long—he’d danced out of range and into the center of my room. He wasn’t laughing, but he’d opened the fan again and was holding it in front of his face.

It wouldn’t’ve surprised me to learn he had a knife hidden in that fan. He was just the type for it.

His one good eye sparkled wickedly, like a chip of green madness in an otherwise mundane marble statue.

“You see before you an ordinary fan,” he called out as I reluctantly followed after him. I sat on one of the too-small chairs, clutching Yana’s strange letter in one hand.

All right. An ordinary fan. Whatever that had to do with anything.

I supposed I could agree with him on it, though. The deep reds of the silk and the pale wood of its binding were all I did see, and it seemed ordinary enough. Quite plain, even, for Caius Greylace’s tastes.

“Watch carefully now,” he counseled, while I privately resolved that he was going to regret it if he chose to hit me on the nose again. It was still sore. That crafty little bastard.

Instead, he pushed the fan shut with both hands this time. When next he opened it, there were small knives, thin-bladed and cruel, hidden in the fan like the spaces between fingers.

I lifted my eyebrows. Caius giggled a high-pitched giggle, and covered his mouth with one hand, quite carried away with his own success at managing the trick. He’d probably been practicing it, waiting for the right moment to reveal all to me, like the magician that he was, through and through.

My patience was wearing thin. There was indulging a man his peculiarities just so you could get to the point, and there was wasting precious time. I wasn’t even sure why I’d been in the mood for the former, but I certainly wasn’t going to allow the latter. Not where Yana was concerned. Definitely not with this bastion-cursed headache.

“I don’t see what this has to do with the letter,” I said, calm as I could.

“Oh, don’t you see?” Caius cast the fan down in frustration, and I moved my feet to make sure neither of them caught a knife by “accident.” “It is one thing made to look like another! The danger concealed in something quite ordinary. I did think I’d made it clear as possible.”

He’d made it clear as mud, I thought, but I kept that to myself.

Caius paused, and I could almost see the change coming over him, like some kind of invisible comb made to sort out and straighten anything that had gone astray in his momentary fit of temper. I made a joke of it often enough, but there was madness in the Greylace blood. It was common enough knowledge, and it was little things like this that reminded me of it. Something just wasn’t right—like a dragon with a bolt gone missing. Couldn’t trust him, even if you wanted to.

Which I didn’t.

“My apologies,” he said, in a low, calm voice. “What I mean to say is that someone has clearly written this letter in place of your dear Yana.”

His robes pooled elegantly around him when he ducked to pick up the fan, and his knives. I defnitely wasn’t anywhere near calm anymore.

“What are you saying?” I demanded. Not the most eloquent, but he made it damn hard. “She’s not in trouble, is she?”

“I should think not,” Caius replied. “At first I thought that she might have taken ill; that the unusual tone was the product of dictation, perhaps. I worried for her health, and wondered if I ought to write to someone—have a doctor sent out to visit her in the country. You absolutely cannot trust country doctors, my dear; we both know that much. And since she’s so very important to you—you’ve had so much weighing upon you of late, I didn’t want to worry you—I thought to keep it to myself. Perhaps rewrite the letter so that you wouldn’t notice anything was off, either, while I took care of things.”

“Wait,” I said. “Greylace. Just how often are you reading my private things?”

“You’re welcome,” Caius went on, smooth as buttermilk. “It was very kind of me; but I do it because I’ve grown so fond of you, and since you refuse to take care of yourself, the burden falls on those long-suffering souls like myself and Dear Yana. However, Alcibiades, I do not think that Yana is ill.”

“Course not,” I muttered, though I was relieved nonetheless. The letter was crumpled and small in my hands, themselves stiff from so much practice with a foreign blade. “She’s got a constitution like a bull.”

“Naturally, as all fine women do,” Caius acquiesced. “So it was with a mixture of relief and dread that I continued to theorize. What sort of change might come over a woman, a woman like Dear Yana, strong as a bull and set in her particular grammatical ways, to alter her tone so drastically as to sound like…” Caius trailed off, then waved in the direction of the letter with a pained expression—the sort of face he pulled when he saw some kind of outfit that, he said, was indicative of poor workmanship. “Well, like that,” he concluded at last, and chose that moment to take my favorite chair all for himself.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. I didn’t know. It could always have been the madness talking—except I knew that it wasn’t. Caius Greylace was absolutely, without a doubt, at least three cards short of a deck, but he was smart as a whipcrack and he wasn’t about to create a conspiracy where none existed.

“Exactly,” Caius said. “Neither did I, really, so I don’t blame you for being at a loss.”

“Well,” I muttered. “If you’ve got the solution, we don’t need a dialogue about it.”

“Humor me,” Caius Greylace said.

“Don’t I always?”

“Not really,” Caius said, and clapped his hands together. “All right then, I will tell you, but only if you promise to have breakfast with me. I’ve already ordered it, and some nice soap that you can use when you bathe and shave today. How does that sound?”

“You’re bribing me,” I replied.

“Only a little bit,” he admitted.

I sat back in my uncomfortable Ke-Han chair, eyeing the letter in question. The handwriting was exactly right, loop for loop; the paper was the same as always, coarse and from the countryside, heavy and stiff and nearly impossible to tear. But everything else was wrong. It just didn’t sound like her—and Caius, of all people, knew why. How long had he been snooping through my things? And when had he found the time to do so? I wondered if he spent most of his time sneaking around my room while I was sleeping—last night, for example, when I was practically dead to the world—and the very idea made me shudder. At least I knew that he was on my side. It was clear now that he could have killed me, with one of those fan-knives, for example, at any time he wanted.

So he considered me quaint, like a pet. Worth keeping around for whatever happened next. Almost the same as I considered him, except I was sane and he was loopy as Yana’s letters.

“Breakfast, huh?” I said.

“I think I have managed to procure us some fried eggs,” Caius added. “I left extremely specific directions with the servants. And everyone is all too ready to give the great hero what he wants. You are a hero now, you know. I am sure the Emperor will wish to speak with you at some point today—I’ll go with you, of course; I don’t trust you alone with people.”

“Neither do I,” I agreed, almost overwhelmed. The headache was coming back.

Without speaking, Caius was suddenly standing and gliding across the room, quick as you like, to stand by me. He ruffled his fingers through my hair—he was actually touching me, but now that I’d finally started to get used to him, I was going to have to kill him—and pressed his thumbs against my temples, where the blood pounded all too hot.

Everything stilled and cooled; the world slowed around me. It was like the night before, with the incense and the wine and the music. It was like being in another place, on the bastion-damned moon, floating out into the night among the stars. For all I felt imaginary at that one moment, I might as well have been a painting on a standing screen: some bowlegged crane or a flower-dusted pine tree, bent and knotty with age.

He was pulling his mind magic on me.

“What’re you…” I muttered, trying to struggle against it as he pulled a blanket up over my slumbering brain. “Stop that… Tickles…”

“I’ll be more careful,” he murmured. “It is only that I thought I might cure your headache. I’ve had my share of them myself, you know.”

“Stop it,” I said, but even I could hear my voice held no conviction.

“Besides,” Caius went on, his voice hushed, “this way, we are closer, and I may speak to you in private. It is my suspicion that Yana Berger wrote to you as she always does, with the peculiar patterns she always did, but that someone has intercepted her letter to you and rewritten it.”

I struggled against the sleepy heaviness in my head. At least it didn’t hurt anymore, but that didn’t make it any less impossible to think. “Why would anyone do that,” I said. “It’s just Yana.”

“Someone paranoid enough to screen all our letters,” Caius said.

A little shiver ran down my spine, the fingers of some unseen hand, and I didn’t even once suspect it was part of Caius Greylace’s Talent. “Tabs’re being kept on us,” I snarled. “Aren’t they?”

“That was the very same conclusion I came to, myself,” Caius said, “as I pondered this dilemma while you drooled into your pillow.”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Fuck,” Caius Greylace agreed. “What a horrible word that is, but I suppose it will serve. In this instance only, mind; I don’t approve of it otherwise.”

“You’re not…” I began, but Caius clucked.

“I’m not Yana?” he supplied.

“What about my letters to her?” I demanded. “Have they been changed?”

“That I have no way of knowing,” he replied. “I do hope, however, you haven’t been indiscreet, and that, if you have had any private information, any suspicions, you have kept them to yourself and away from her. We don’t want to draw any further suspicion; you’ve already caused a great deal of commotion. And, exciting as it may be, now that all eyes are on the dashing hero Alcibiades, it makes it very difficult for us to investigate anything at all.”

“Your,” I managed, forcing my brain to work. “Your Talent—You’re a velikaia. Why don’t you find out who’s pulling this shit, and we’ll—”

“We’ll what, Alcibiades?” Caius asked.

I snorted. “I’ve a few ideas,” I said. “Just leave that part to me.”

“My Talent doesn’t exactly work that way.” Caius sighed. For a moment I saw that familiar, fleeting pout pass over his features, and I was almost comforted by how familiar they were, the only thing I recognized anymore amidst all the smoke and mirrors, the hanging scrolls and the standing screens, the painted doors that slid open to reveal everything rotting away behind the gilded colors. “It is much more complicated than all that. If only things were different… But they aren’t, and I am as I am, and we must do things more slowly. Perhaps that’s for the best—it will give you time to cool your heels. Think of the bright side, my dear: Yana Berger is safe and sound with her chickens and your brothers, and we are the ones who may keep her that way!”

With that, Caius Greylace removed his hands and my headache from my head. I was caught with a sudden dizziness I couldn’t shake off, and by the time my thoughts had cleared, he was once again sitting in the only comfortable chair. Damn him, I thought, but there was some respect there.

He was useful, anyway. And clever.

“So what now?” I asked, folding the offending letter and setting it down on the table beside me.

“Breakfast, I imagine,” Caius replied, his lips spreading into a soft grin with a flash of pearly white teeth behind it. “And then we shall sit down to compose a long and detailed epistle to dear Yana telling her how wonderful things are in the Ke-Han Empire.”