Shadow Magic Read online

  Forever, maybe. And I had to sit through all of it.

  Also, I was starting to feel like we were being horsed around—really taken for a ride. But Fiacre liked negotiating so much that he hadn’t caught on to it yet, and the only reason I had was because I didn’t. We hadn’t discussed any of the particulars of the provisional treaty yet, let alone anything to do with the new one, and all because the new Emperor was so hell-bent on tracking his brother down that he’d kept us on the topic for the better part of a week. I was starting to think he was just doing it on purpose.

  We’d finally agreed to adjourn the talks when Ozanne had fallen asleep right at the table and knocked over his cup of frothy, bitter tea. I’d have done the same if I’d thought I might get away with it, but for all I knew two cups of spilled tea in one night spelled a diplomatic incident for the Ke-Han.

  They’d never have stood for it in the war. When you were a soldier—especially when you were a soldier who knew what he was doing well enough to get promoted beyond the ranks of miserable, Ke-Han fodder nobodies—you made decisions. Sometimes they weren’t the right decisions, but you didn’t have the time for sitting around and weighing each option, and making sure all the factors had been carefully considered when most of those options were irrelevant anyway, like what the weather was like and how much cotton was going for these days and whether or not your maiden aunt had a hangnail or what you were having for dinner that evening.

  Maybe I was there because I was a soldier, and maybe I was there because th’Esar liked to keep a few trump cards up his sleeve, and maybe I was there because I was paying penance for all the men I’d killed during the war without weighing each option, but at the rate these talks were proceeding, we’d be staying in the Ke-Han for ten years at the least, and only then would we move on to deciding what tile we should use in rebuilding.

  Didn’t anybody just want to do something? Didn’t anybody see reason?

  But Fiacre was in his element, and Josette, too; their parents must have raised them to be mean little quarrelers, for they could talk circles around the best of them, and if it hadn’t been driving me so crack-batty, I would have been a little proud.

  The way I saw it, though, was that we didn’t have to argue about these things. We’d won the war; the Ke-Han’d lost. But then, I didn’t understand the finer points of diplomacy, and maybe it was better to set up a system that worked rather than having the whole thing collapse on you ten, fifteen years down the line.

  Whether it was due to it being so damn hard to work things out or due to an unnecessary number of nitpickers all having a field day with each other, I didn’t know. Like I said, I wasn’t cut out to be a diplomat, and now that I knew what diplomacy consisted of, I was damn sure I wouldn’t be making it my life’s work. Even though I’d been pressed into joining the delegation.

  Someone, somewhere, was having a real hard laugh at my expense, that was certain.

  And meanwhile, I was going stir-crazy.

  During the war, I hadn’t had the time to sit still for all of an hour, much less days. I woke before dawn and tucked in early, and a man got used real quick to his specific routines.

  In the palace, the finer men and women woke late and turned in even later, on account of all the goodwill everyone was determined to show, meaning that every night we were forced on pain of death to attend stultifying parties.

  The one thing I really didn’t get was the Ke-Han music. It was three notes howled at you over and over by a woman who sounded more like she was choking on her dinner than singing. It gave me a splitting headache and it could last for hours if you weren’t lucky.

  The dancing was all right, though.

  But underneath all the assurances of goodwill, things were tense. The second prince was still missing, the Emperor was still working on us to let him send out veritable armies to hunt down his brother—all while we were getting nothing done—and I could tell I would’ve been privy to some of the nastiest gossip in at least a hundred years if I only spoke a word of Ke-H an. Good thing, then, that I wasn’t a gossip.

  Caius Greylace, the carnivorous little flower, was having a field day picking up Ke-Han turns of phrase right and left. Didn’t matter to me, I figured, since the more time he spent gossiping, the less time he spent bothering me.

  Most of all, I just wanted my horse back.

  After over a week of getting pins and needles in my own damn backside, of being restless at night for lack of doing anything proper during the day, I figured something had to start changing, and that something was me, since it sure as bastion wasn’t going to be the situation. I was out of shape enough already. There was only one half-decent solution.

  I started rising when the peacocks woke me.

  An interesting thing about peacocks that not many might have known was that the ones in the Ke-Han woke up just like roosters did, like they thought morning light was some alarming sign that everyone needed warning about. It happened every day like clockwork; the ones that ran wild in the Ke-Han palace courtyard shrieked like their tails’d been stepped on with the first light of dawn. Normally I just pulled my jacket over my head, since that was what I’d been using for a pillow in place of the wood block the Ke-Han had outfitted every room with. A man would’ve thought the Ke-Han could make small pillows, since they knew how to make large ones, but apparently not. Everyone in the palace slept so late that there didn’t seem to be any point in doing anything else.

  That was when I’d had my brilliant idea. Instead of going back to sleep, I started going through some of the exercises we’d been taught in training camp during the years before a man became a fit enough soldier to fight on the battlefield. It was the sort of thing every man practiced in the lull between battles, so they wouldn’t get rusty in the interim. Being rusty meant life or death—usually the latter, when being in shape counted for something. I was rusty as an old iron gate just by letting myself go so long, but that was what living among the Ke-Han did to a soul, I supposed. Especially with a madman next door.

  The only exercise I’d had lately was avoiding Caius Greylace at dinner, or barring the door against him with whatever I could find to wedge it closed.

  It was hard to practice without a weapon. I’d had every man from th’Esar on down try to explain to me just how it was a good idea to visit a country that still loathed us without any arms to speak of, but no one could see the wisdom in what I had to say. Instead, they’d told me that was what we had men like Greylace for, whose weapons weren’t the sort that could ever be put down. And men like me, though I didn’t like to think about it, and probably wouldn’t unless I fucking had to.

  So what it amounted to was, th’Esar wanted us to give the appearance of being unarmed. Still, we had some backup defenses, just the kind that were invisible, and not the kind used by those who’d done any actual fighting in the war or anything like that.

  Not having a sword threw off my entire balance in the exercises. A sword’s got a certain heft to it that a soldier had to get used to if he ever wanted to catch the enemy napping. Without a sword, my hands moved too quickly. Without that added weight, I overcompensated once or twice and stumbled over the crescent-shaped footstools that were strewn around my room once more, like the maids were trying to box me in. I’d requested them, and now they too were working against me.

  On the third day this happened, I heard a quiet tutting sound from the next room over. I nudged the footstool aside with the toe of my boot and went on, ignoring what I’d heard—though by now, I knew the sound all too well.

  Maybe if I ignored it, Caius Greylace would just go back to sleep. If luck was with me, I’d be able to finish and sneak in a quick bath before everyone else woke up.

  Luck, as it happened, had abandoned me yet again. I heard the unmistakable sound of the door sliding open, soft as a whisper, and before I had time to pretend I hadn’t seen him, Caius Greylace was standing in the doorway, wrapped up in a cocoon of white silk robes with the front pieces of his hai
r pinned back like a woman’s. It was disconcerting to see both his eyes so clearly, since he normally took great pains to hide the one he’d lost the use of during the sickness. He peered at me sleepily with one green eye, the other one murky and white and without any focus or direction.

  “I daresay, my dear, that you could wait until a decent hour to begin moving furniture around.” He yawned, his little pink tongue reminding me of a cat’s, and looked around the room. All at once, his expression changed from bemused and sleepy to curious, and I felt a sinking feeling within my chest, as though I would never have a moment’s peace again.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, though the battle was already lost.

  He ignored me, and wandered in to perch himself on one of the small chairs I hadn’t managed to knock over yet. It figured that he wouldn’t be too big for them the way I was, even though they’d been put in my room to begin with. Then he yawned again, covering his mouth like a Ke-Han lady did with a fan.

  “Carry on,” he said, with what he probably imagined to be a regal air.

  “If you’re so tired, then you ought to go back to bed,” I told him, but I knew it was hopeless to try to talk Caius Greylace into doing anything.

  Best just to get on with things.

  I did, doing my best to ignore Caius the way I ignored how wrong the exercises felt without a proper sword in my hand. I told myself that the most important thing was working up a sweat, and feeling that sweetly uncomfortable ache in my muscles that meant I was using them, not sitting around on a cushion all day while my ass got a little more numb and my arms and legs turned to cooked Ke-Han noodles.

  I was just about finished when Caius started to clap. I’d done a pretty good job at forgetting he was there, so that the noise startled me out of the neat routine. Try as I might, I couldn’t get my peace of mind back enough to remember what came next. It was hard work, sparring without a partner.

  “Oh, that was marvelous,” Caius said, twirling a loose bit of hair between his fingers. He looked thrilled to the bone, and too excited to sit still. “I’ve never seen soldiers training before. This explains all the noise you’ve been making. Do you plan on doing it every morning? Perhaps you should; it really does look as though you’re in need of some practice.”

  “Looks better with a sword,” I told him, wiping the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. “Works better, too.”

  “Ah, I see,” Caius said, nodding. He rested his chin on one hand, watching me with his off-putting, mismatched eyes.

  “Also,” I added hastily, not knowing why I felt compelled to explain myself to him anyway, “it’s better with two people. That way you’ve got someone to fight back against. It keeps you thinking.”

  “Fascinating,” Caius said, drawing the silk of his robes more tightly around him. Then he stood up as though he’d heard some wake-up bell I hadn’t. “Shall we dress for breakfast, my dear?”

  He turned and swept through the door that joined my room to his like a little lord, his robes trailing down past his feet in a way that was probably planned, if I knew him. And I did, unfortunately.

  The next morning, he showed up before I’d even started my warm-ups. He was carrying a sword. It was a strange blade, thin and curved at the very end, like the sword-maker had got distracted and pulled away too soon. He was holding it all wrong, bundled up in his arms like he thought it was a baby or a cat, and not a real metal blade, sharp and nastiest at the tip.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked. It was nearly as big as he was.

  “Well,” Caius said, looking ever so pleased I’d asked. He was wearing green robes that morning, and his hair wasn’t clipped back over his bad eye, which meant that he must’ve been planning to interrupt and not just jarred cruelly from his beauty sleep. “I asked around, you know, and that charming lord who’s always shouting—Lord Jiro, I believe—said he had a son about my age, and it was every boy’s duty to carry a sword, or something to that effect. I admit my understanding of the conversation waned toward the end of it. Anyway, his servants dropped by my room later that night, and they were ever so kind enough to provide me with this.”

  He held out the sword like it was a dead cat; only it was heavy, because he was holding the hilt with both hands, and swaying under the weight of it. I wanted to laugh, but what I wanted to do even more was to take the sword. I did.

  I was surprised to find that it was lighter than any blade you’d have found in Volstov, and thin like I’d thought it was. When I pulled it out of the sheath, I saw that there was one blunt side and one sharp. All the more useful for when you wanted to maim your opponent rather than kill him, I supposed. I was surprised, also, that the Ke-Han could ever decide which side to use without summoning a council of a hundred, but then maybe that was why they’d lost the war.

  Caius sat down on the crescent seat again, watching me expectantly. I swung the sword through the air experimentally, making a pass here, a block there. It was a good sword.

  “It’s still better with two,” I said, calling out to Caius the same way I’d called out the city boys who’d gathered around the barracks to lean over the fences and watch us fight. If he was going to sit in, he might as well learn something from it—if he could.

  Caius’s eyes went wide, as though I’d genuinely shocked him.

  “I’ll go easy on you and everything,” I said, though privately I was thinking, not that easy. His being a magician, even a reluctant watery one, meant that I’d heard my fair share of rumors about Caius Greylace in my time, and despite his looks, he could definitely take care of himself, spoiled lightweight or not.

  “Oh my,” he said, fluttering like a lady just asked for her first dance. “Wouldn’t the guards think the worst of us again? I’d hate to cause any commotion.”

  Ever since my little mishap with the guards, I’d noticed, they tended to patrol up and down our hallway with greater care, and took their time loitering right outside my doorway since they didn’t know the truth of it, that the whole thing had been Caius’s fault. All the other diplomats had their theories as to why, since no one knew the real reason except me, Caius, and Lord Temur, and there wasn’t one of us opening our mouths on the matter. Still, we were wasting time, and I wasn’t about to be put off from the one thing that kept me sane by a bunch of overexcitable, unintelligible guards.

  “You can use the scabbard,” I said, holding it out to him. “It’s about the same size as the sword.”

  “That’s hardly fair; it’s not really the same at all,” he said. “And you’re such a great brute—you’ll have quite the advantage over me!”

  He took it by the end, like a fishmonger carrying his catch of the day. I waited for him to do something—maybe stand a little straighter, or hold it up as if it were a real sword. Anything. Something. Instead, all I got was a coquettish look.

  “My dear, I do believe you’re staring at me.”

  “You’re holding it all wrong,” I told him, as if that was completely obvious, which up until then I would have said that it was.

  “Oh,” Caius said, looking at me and then at the sword. “Well fancy that!” He adjusted his grip, fiddling for a moment with his long, wide sleeves before settling on something that looked marginally more normal.

  “Haven’t you ever held a sword?” I asked him. I was getting that sinking feeling again.

  “Well, I haven’t ever had to,” he said. “I’ve held knives. Well, they were more like letter openers, but they were decidedly knifelike. You needn’t worry, I’m sure I’ll pick the trick up sooner or later.”

  I began to reevaluate the situation. “Maybe you’d better sit this round out,” I said.

  “Well, if you insist,” Caius said, and went back to his perch. I noticed, though, that he held on to the scabbard—probably because it was the same color as his outfit, and he liked that sort of fussy little detail.

  Eventually, after a couple of days, I was able to forget that Caius Gre
ylace was there at all. He kept quiet—the only place he ever managed to—almost like he actually respected what I was doing, though there was no real way he could’ve appreciated it properly, since he’d never been a real soldier, himself. Maybe the true understanding was lacking, but at least he was able to hold his tongue, like maybe he thought he was watching a performance at the local theatre, and he didn’t want to disrupt the performer. I was no more than entertainment to him, though; that much was certain.

  “I daresay you look much happier with that awful thing than in the company of your friends,” Caius said, after the third morning.

  “What friends?” I asked, but I was grinning while I asked, and wiped the sweat off my brow.

  The next morning, Caius was dressed all in blue—just to spite me, I figured, since there was no other reason for it. He opened the door and clapped his hands together. “Wonderful news,” he said, and immediately I was wary. “Well you needn’t look as though I’ve gone mad,” Caius continued, pouting enormously. “It’s only, I’ve found a better place for you! So you won’t break any more stools.”

  “I’ve only broken one,” I said. The remnants of the stool in question—I’d stepped on it the day before—were piled in the corner of the room, far enough out of the way that I wouldn’t splinter the wood any further.

  “Two,” Caius corrected me.

  “Now, that’s not fair,” I said. “The other one’s barely cracked. It doesn’t count.”

  “Nevertheless,” Caius said, “I’ve the solution to the problem. Why ever do you refuse to trust me?”

  Because you’re a two-wheeled carriage, if you know what I mean, I thought. It didn’t matter whether I said it or not; Caius Greylace could sense an insult as sure as if you’d really spoken it.