MAMORU

The second border crossing was closer than the first. It had been a little less than a week since we’d left Aiko and the troupe. Although the time seemed to pass for us very slowly as it passed without incident, when I looked back on the number of days that had elapsed, I felt quite surprised.

I knew the country from above like a bird, but the mountains and the plains had been as real as the words next to them, denoting each province distant and remote from my place in the lapis city. Kouje and I had campaigned once in the mountains, but even then we were no more than a few days’ ride from the palace. I had traced the boundaries from childhood, and so I knew how close we were to the second checkpoint. After that, we would be in Honganje prefecture; Kouje’s sister, and her fishing village, lay to the east.

It was a lucky thing that I had memorized my maps so well.

Imagine, Iseul had said, that the mountains are the veins upon the back of your hand. The Cobalts are your knuckles. And so you see that all of Xi’an is within your grasp.

I shivered, and looked to Kouje. Thankfully, he didn’t notice.

We’d already been lucky; too lucky, I even thought, and the burden of that good fortune hung heavy in the air, like the tension before a summer rain shower. At any moment the clouds could break. I did not expect another Aiko to materialize out of trees and mountains beside us and to whisk us across the border as though Goro himself had contrived the device.

We were on our own for the next one. And I wasn’t the only one to be troubled by it.

At least we were sleeping well, though each night I dreamed of Aiko, dressed as the second prince, posing on the stage with the blue makeup of the hero obscuring her face. Her pillow was enchanted, but the sleep itself was deep enough.

“We will come to the crossing by midday,” Kouje said, the morning of the second day apart from the troupe. “I’ve no inspiration for it.”

“I play the role of your wife well enough,” I said, but Kouje shook his head.

“I don’t feel safe,” he replied. What he meant was, I don’t feel you are safe.

“If only Goro had written that far.” I laughed. “He would have thought of something.”

The smoke from our fire dwindled; we were delaying setting out on purpose. With no solid plan and no inspiration, we were at a loss. And wasting time; I could see in the set of Kouje’s jaw how anxious that made him.

I traced the veins on the back of my hand. Iseul would have killed me sooner if he’d ever guessed that I might have made it that far. Such a guise was impossible to imagine for someone of my birthright. My brother would have died for honor before he donned the robes I was wearing, but my brother had always known more pride than I. I’d envied him once, but I had come to see how pride had changed him.

All of Xi’an was, and ever would be, within his grasp. My fingers tightened involuntarily. Kouje began to clear up our camp, more meticulously slow than he ever had been. It was more to delay our proceedings—hoping for some grand inspiration, another stroke of luck—while the gods watched us, an impassive audience, rather than the active patrons of country theatre performed in a roadside inn. There were neither cheers nor curses to indicate we were playing our roles well or very poorly indeed.

I watched Kouje when his back was turned. He still held himself like a soldier, especially when we were alone. I myself was no less to blame for mistakes in comportment than he; it was no wonder Aiko had discovered us as quickly as she had. Among the others we’d been less immediately noticeable, but on our own it would be easy enough to discover I wasn’t the woman I pretended to be.

Iseul—the Iseul I’d known from childhood—would have thrown back his head to laugh if he saw me then, both changed and unchanged, dressed as though I were about to sell travelers dumplings rather than lead my people, as my father’s son.

Would Iseul even recognize me if I was caught?

How you’ve changed, little brother, he’d say. How common you’ve become. I could barely tell the difference between you and your servant…

“Kouje,” I said, over the sound of him tramping through the brush, kicking branches aside.

He stilled, and glanced back toward me. “Please tell me you’ve just had an incredible idea,” he said.

“Your servant,” I explained. It wasn’t clear yet, but it was my brother himself who’d inspired it. It was right; I knew it was. “They’ll never suspect—if you are the lord, and I am the servant.”

Kouje shook his head. As understanding dawned on him, I could see his disapproval; it went against everything that we were, and of course that was the point. No one would ever believe that a prince would lower himself so close to the ground as to play the servant. “No,” he said. “I don’t think I understand, Mamoru. There’s got to be something else, if we just spend more time on it—”

“Your clothes now aren’t all that wrong,” I continued. He would have to overcome his misgivings; I would have to convince him to overcome them. “If you took the sash—my sash, from before—it would even look right. And you hold yourself better than a country lord; they’d believe you. And they’d never guess that anyone, anyone, would let the prince walk behind him, carrying our bags like a common servant. I could even lead the horse, and they would never even pause to look at me. If I were your servant, Kouje, they would not even notice I was there.”

“No,” Kouje insisted. “Mamoru, that is—You don’t understand. It is too much.”

His propriety would be both our undoing. I was up from my seat at once, and grasping him by the front of his shirt. “It is the only way, unless you wish to live here in the woods like two wild men. Perhaps, as Goro suggested, we might see the mountain spirits, and beg them for some supernatural power—then I could fly to your sister, and carry you with me! But should that fail, we will have done no more than to tarry here, wasting precious time, and angering those same gods who have given us all our chances thus far by squandering the same inspiration they have given us!”

“We would anger those gods if I led you along behind me like—Like chattel,” Kouje said. His eyes were all dark anger. I recognized the darkness from nights in the mountains, when the dragons flew overhead; or when they tore through the wall, and the air rained fire down upon the capital, and all the animals of the menagerie were set free into the streets, and we could not find one another.

But this was not the same. This was pride—the same pride that had so changed my brother; the same pride that made Iseul believe all of Xi’an was written, like the future, upon the back of his hand.

“You are a prince,” Kouje said.

“Not anymore.”

Something went hard in Kouje’s face, so that for a moment I truly thought that pride might be our undoing. Not some cruel, random act of fate, but something well within our bounds to control, and I was so angry I thought of striking him.

It would have been as ineffectual as a small bird trying to take its frustrations out on the tree that sheltered it.

“We must do this, Kouje,” I said quietly, hand still twisting in the fabric of his shirt, more anxious then than angry. “Do you not see?”

“You do not understand what you ask me to do,” Kouje answered, and I could hear the reluctance in his voice at having to deny me. He had always spoiled me, had always sought to give me what I desired, even when those desires had been headstrong and foolish.

Even when they’d been impossible.

If he’d been able to do it once, he should have been able to do it again. I pushed at that weakness, hating that I had to do it and hating the situation that made it necessary.

“Do this,” I commanded, crushing all soft hints of begging from my voice. I raised my head to look at him, not as a friend, but as his lord. “It is not a request.”

There had been a time once when I had wanted nothing more than to learn how to look at Kouje as a friend and not his lord. But it seemed I had to forget that once again in order to get us past this next border crossing.

“Do this for me,” I added, trying to impress on him how important this was. “If you truly want my safety, then you will overcome that which holds you back and will remember your duty to me.”

Kouje held still so long that I thought my words had woven some kind of forest magic and turned him to a statue. Then he lifted his hand, and put it over mine against his chest.

I felt a flutter of hope and tried not to let it show on my face.

“Will you?” I asked.

“I will do whatever you ask of me, my lord,” he said finally, in a granite voice that was much like a statue’s.

“It is for the best,” I told him, and went to fetch our packs from the horse.

Kouje was silent all the while as I tied my sash around his waist, adjusting his shirt and pulling at the fall of his jacket to make it drape properly. There was nothing to be done about the shoes, of course, but country lords rarely saw fit to buy expensive shoes when they were just going to be mucking them up in the fields.

I stepped back to admire my handiwork, biting down on the inside of my cheek to keep myself from asking if he’d ever forgive me.

“That looks right,” I said, faltering at the last. “You look very handsome! Just let me cover my hair, and… Well, it’ll be a moment.”

I turned away to fix my own clothing. We’d borrowed things from Aiko, leggings that might fit me, and which would prove less cumbersome than the robes I’d donned as Kouje’s wife. In some ways I was still wearing women’s clothing, but it could be made to look like a servant’s with a few tugs here and a few adjustments there.

I was nearly done, and struggling with the wrap for my hair, when I felt Kouje’s hand on my shoulder.

“Let me,” he said, and I let go immediately, allowing his capable hands in place of my own.

I remembered how we had stood in the same positions once, though reversed. I had been the one to adjust Kouje’s hair, all his fine braids gone as if they’d never been there to begin with.

Did the accomplishments mean anything, if what one had to show for them was gone? Was I still a prince if I lived in the forest with no one to see me but the birds?

“There,” said Kouje, stepping away once he’d finished.

“Thank you,” I murmured, not daring enough to raise my eyes. I couldn’t bear it if Kouje were to decide that I’d done something unforgivable. Not after everything else.

“You look… very strange,” he said at last. Something in his voice gave me the courage I’d been needing to look up.

There. It was very small, and rather forced, but Kouje was smiling.

I felt so relieved all at once that I couldn’t help smiling back at him.

“You can pretend it’s a play,” I told him. “Such small things do not anger the gods. Plays only anger the mortal men who watch them.”

Kouje shook his head quickly though I thought his smile looked a little less forced.

“It will be all right,” I said, wishing just for a moment that I had my brother’s force of will to put behind my words. Whatever else Iseul was, he was a man that people heeded.

Fortunately, where Kouje was concerned, I was that sort of man as well. I didn’t know what I’d done to inspire such stubborn loyalty, one that extended far beyond the call of duty and what honor bound him to me and the palace. Kouje had acted against our code—the code of the Ke-Han—in order to save my life. When this was all over, I would have to ask him why.

“If you say so,” said Kouje, thawing at last enough to put his hand on my shoulder. I could tell that he was beginning to regret his earlier reluctance, and that if I didn’t move quickly, he’d be apologizing for that soon enough.

“I do,” I said, ducking away to continue where we’d started packing up our belongings.

The clothing I’d changed into was much more freeing than what I’d grown accustomed to at the palace. I scarcely believed how simple it was to move around, and soon discovered that I would have to work a little at making sure my steps did not take me beyond Kouje when we walked together in the road. I had spent so many years clad first in women’s clothing, then the cumbersome robes of the palace, that I had naturally learned to walk one way. It would not work with my legs suddenly so free.

“I feel odd,” I confessed, coming to stand at Kouje’s shoulder, just behind him as he had stood for me countless times before.

He lifted one of our large packs and slung it over one shoulder. “You’ll get used to it.”

I raised my eyebrows, gazing at the pack on his shoulder.

“Ah,” he said, seeming to take my meaning. He eased our luggage off his back, then looked hesitant. “Maybe you should carry one of the smaller ones. I can put this on the horse.”

“Kouje,” I said, and stuck out my hand for the bag. The best way to make the illusion believable was to make it as real as possible. I knew that as an avid admirer of the theatre, though I’d never guessed it might help me in such a way on our journey.

“You’re determined to kill me with this, I see,” Kouje said, but there was something admiring in his voice. He handed our luggage over.

It was heavy. Fortunately I’d been expecting the weight, since I was certain if I’d buckled under it, Kouje would have insisted on its going with the horse, authenticity or no. I wouldn’t be able to carry it on one shoulder, the way Kouje did, but so long as I held my back straight and kept my head down, it was certainly tolerable.

“You might as well ride the horse,” I told Kouje, sharing a private, wry smile with him while I still could. “You’ll look properly noble that way.”

“Now you’re just torturing me,” Kouje said, but he swung into the stirrups and mounted our animal.

“It shouldn’t be long to the checkpoint,” I murmured, for myself as much as for him.

He gave a short nod and we started out.

It was much swifter traveling on the main road than on trails Kouje found—or sometimes made—for us, and it was not quite midday when we came to the place where the road widened. I could see a small crowd building where the traffic slowed to form an orderly line, and guards in black and dark blue were patrolling up and down to make sure no one got too impatient.

I felt the beginning of something sick and nervous in my stomach and took a deep breath to quash the feeling. I couldn’t afford to be nervous. Nor could I risk looking to Kouje for comfort, when in my guise as a servant it would be considered the height of impropriety to lift my eyes to my lord. Instead I kept my eyes fixed on my sandals, where the dust danced and swirled with each misstep, and my mind on the road ahead.

“Wagons form a line to the right,” one of the guards called as we passed by. “All those on foot to the left.”

Another guard approached us and I was too apprehensive even to flinch.

“Might as well dismount here, my lord,” he said to Kouje. “We’re leading everyone through on foot.”

“Very well,” Kouje replied, and if he was nervous, I couldn’t hear it in his tone.

He dismounted, and I scurried forward to take the reins from him.

The guard moved down the line to yell at a merchant whose chickens had got free of his wagon and were milling about in the road, clucking indignantly at all the fuss.

I breathed a quiet sigh of relief and tried to ignore the sense of mounting dread as the line crept forward. Kouje stood in front of me, silent and impassive as the border wall, but I drew what strength I could from his solemnity. Worrying about what might happen would only serve to make me look more suspicious, and I couldn’t afford to do anything that might catch the attention of the guards.

I’d never spent so much time observing my feet before. It closed the world out, drawing everything that mattered to rest right there at my toes. There was a crowd there, and the line moved slowly under the sun.

At least, I thought wryly, I knew that there would be no holdup because the prince had been found. I scuffed my sandal against the dusty road and thought of what it meant to be a servant.

They were always small—smaller even than I was, though I’d never be an imposing man like Iseul or my father. Smallness was a state of mind, one which royalty were not encouraged to foster, but it was a different smallness from the mincing steps the women of the court took in order to better display their skirts and sleeves. They were small in the same way I’d realized, with a terrible shock on my thirteenth birthday, that even Kouje—Kouje, who’d always seemed so big—was small. Small by comparison, I thought, and hunched my shoulders around myself.

I reminded myself of sleeping on dirt, of catching my own rabbits to eat; I reminded myself of the way my brother treated the men and women of the house—as though they weren’t even there.

I was concentrating so hard on what it meant to be small that I forgot, it would seem, what it meant to listen.

“I said, move it along” one of the common guards repeated to me, kicking dust toward my feet. Beside me, Kouje stiffened, but I murmured the usual apologies in time-honored form before I scuffled in the right direction.

We were just at the door, where the wall opened up into a white-pebbled courtyard. There were the barracks where the border guards slept in rotation, the low walkways between humble buildings; and there, just beyond, were green fields with tall grasses, stirred by the wind. The low roofs were thatched, not shingled. Truly, we were in country provinces, as far from the capital as my imagination had taken me. We were in the commander of the Guard’s territory: a man so unimportant that I’d never been required to learn his name. Country nobles and those from the capital rarely saw eye to eye, and had even less reason to. It wasn’t as if we ever sat down to share our meals.

That was for the best. No man there would recognize me.

I knew the commander first by his shoes: fine, strong boots, not as muddy as the common guards’ were, and he walked with a presence of bearing that revealed his status. I chanced a look no higher than his knees as he walked past us.

“Two,” he said, addressing himself to Kouje, “is a very unlucky number these days.”

“So I’ve heard,” Kouje replied, adopting a country accent. Later, I would have to ask him whether or not it was from his own hometown, or something he’d conjured on the spot. “I’ve spent time enough already just trying to get back to my sister. She’s just had a boy, you know.”

“My congratulations on your honor,” the commander said.

“My thanks on your congratulations,” Kouje replied.

He was being careful, addressing the commander with the strictest courtesy available. It was a mystery to me how he’d slipped into the role so easily, until I realized that Kouje, being a better servant than I, had mastered both the art of being small as well as the art of listening. He was echoing everything he’d heard, every conversation that had taken place before him as though he were nothing more than a mirror. He’d learned from them, well enough to play at being a noble himself.

I had to prevent my face from showing surprise when I realized that Kouje was everything my brother feared most in his servants. He was too clever, almost, and I was glad he’d come with me before anyone in the capital had had reason to discover his intelligence.

I stared at the commander’s boots instead, afraid to be caught observing anything higher. He moved back and forth between us like a hunting dog deciding upon its prey; but, at the very least, he hadn’t yet addressed me at all. If he continued to glance over me—like my brother glanced over his servants—then we’d be safe.

“So you are headed to Honganje,” the Commander went on, “in order to visit your sister’s newborn son?”

“Traveling since the war ended,” Kouje replied stiffly, clearing his throat.

“Not a ruffian, I hope,” the commander said.

“Just can’t seem to settle down, that’s all,” Kouje said.

“You traveled all this way alone?”

“I had some companions with me. Men I met in the war.”

“And your companions?”

I could hear a smile creep into Kouje’s voice. “Lost them to the bright lights of the capital, I’m sorry to say. Just couldn’t drag them away from the pleasure quarters. But me? I couldn’t settle down in a place like that, with all the women looking at me behind my back like I’m some kind of bear. I need more space than those rooms allow.”

“Hm,” the commander said. “You’ll forgive me for all the questions, my lord. We must take as many precautions as we may.”

“I understand your duty as well as I understand my own,” Kouje replied.

The commander cleared his throat, and I saw him gesture with a willow branch toward two of the guards—whose feet were waiting, boots caked with dust, just behind him.

“Pardon our interference,” the commander said. “It will only be a moment, but our duty demands that we search your belongings.”

“I understand completely,” Kouje replied.

But he couldn’t, I thought desperately. My clothes were in there—the fine silk robes I’d worn the night Iseul meant to kill me. Those were no country lord’s effects, nor were they a courtesan’s parting gift. They were too fine for that. The moment the guards saw them we would be suspect. Had Kouje forgotten them, or had he simply seen no way to prevent the search without appearing yet more suspicious?

If only I could have seen his face. His eyes would have told me everything. But, without that, I knew I had to warn him.

We were close enough that I managed, with my free hand, to grab at his sleeve.

The guards, just at our horse, stood still.

“Your manservant is overly familiar,” the commander said. “What a curious choice for a simple lord such as yourself.” He advanced upon me, lifting the willow branch as command. “Show me your face, man,” he ordered.

“No need,” Kouje said, a terrifying steel in his voice. “He has shown such disrespect before, and I have always taken care of it.”

“Perhaps not well enough,” the commander said. “Show me your face.”

Kouje moved more quickly than I knew he could, as quickly as the fabled warriors of old lore. With a sharp cry—to anyone but me, it would have seemed a noise of rebuke, but all that I heard was pain—he’d grabbed the commander’s willow branch in one hand.

And then he was beating me with it.

The first lash was too much of a shock to hurt. I registered no pain at all, but the second was fierce enough to send me to the ground. I fell, and the dust clouded up around me as Kouje brought the willow branch down upon me like a lash. Like, indeed, a master beating his servant.

I brought my arms up to shield my face, though I noticed too late that he was not aiming there, but for my forearms and shoulders—where, perhaps, I might not be too badly injured. Pebbles dug into my legs and I curled in around myself, wondering whether or not Kouje had taken leave of his senses entirely, if the madness of our escape had at last driven him mad.

Surely he had a reason.

The willow branch sliced into the rough cloth at my elbow and tore it. Blood had been drawn, and I was not the only one to know it.

“That should be sufficient,” Kouje said, hoarse and breathless.

“You have been too cruel,” the commander replied. There was some rebuke in his voice.

“Servants must learn their place,” Kouje countered, and kicked at me. “Get up.”

“Still…” the commander said, but trailed off. No man dared to tell another how to treat those under him. It was up to his discretion, and interference was an insult.

I stumbled to my feet, the bags I carried heavy, my mind swirling with the dust. Of course, I realized in a sudden burst of misery and relief, Kouje had distracted them from their purpose. They wouldn’t think to look in our bags. What servant would ever beat his master so? What loyal subject would ever strike his prince?

We were of no more interest to them. We were irrelevant to their duty.

But Kouje, I knew, would never forgive himself.

The guards by our horses stepped away at a gesture from the commander, and I tried to feel grateful, not muzzy with pain and the gentle wet dripping of blood into my sleeve. I thought of rocks, and mountains, and the forbidding, solid posture of the men who played heroes in the theatre and I held my place. I didn’t sway, or stumble. If I had done that, then surely everything would have been lost. As it stood, I was unsure and afraid of what was holding Kouje together.

I knew that it would be terrible when whatever he was clinging to crumbled at last.

“My blessings on your nephew,” said the commander, which meant we could go. His voice was less cordial than it had been before, as though he’d decided that Kouje was not a man he’d like to know after all.

The injustice of it rose thick in my throat like the dust, so that I had to swallow around my unhappiness. I held silent, and dropped my gaze so that I could not even see the commander’s boots.

“My thanks for your courtesy,” Kouje said, and handed back the commander’s willow branch.

If the gesture was a little too swift and abrupt, it could be taken as apology for the commander’s displeasure. The bow that came next could be taken for the same, but I knew that it was only so that Kouje could take shelter in a brief moment of hiding his face.

I took the horse’s reins once again, my movements perfunctory, as though I were a puppet putting on a show of humanity.

Kouje walked ahead of me. He did not look back even as we passed out of the courtyard and into Honganje prefecture.