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  Alcibiades, I supposed, was part of some sort of misguided military representation that included two lieutenants whose names I hadn’t bothered learning. They seemed like dreadfully boring sorts, in any case. We had a scholar by the name of Marius—another survivor from our little study group at the Basquiat—and bringing up the rear were Margrave Josette and our leader Fiacre, who I could only assume were both here to represent good common sense.

  In order to somewhat soften the blow that the Ke-Han were the conquered nation—and, I presumed, in order to avoid causing an international incident wherever possible, since most of us were quite sick of war—we had retired our more garish colors. None of us wore red, the Esar’s royal color and favored for generations among the court, except as subtle reminders—hints of satin lining, perhaps, or the stripes on one general’s regulation jacket. We did this to show respect, if not deference, for we had conquered the people across the Cobalts despite how nearly they had come to conquering us.

  The Ke-Han much preferred the color blue. Again, I was delighted, for blue suited my complexion much better than Volstov’s overly assertive red. During my exile, I wore blue at every possible occasion, but one couldn’t be so rash before the Esar himself. This diplomatic mission was my opportunity, therefore, to dress as I pleased, and I was one of many such peacocks trussed up in conciliatory colors—though thankfully I wasn’t one of the awkward soldiers adjusting their tight collars or the red-faced magicians frowning out the windows of their carriage.

  Rather, I was dressed all in splendid midnight blue, though it was accented with the aforementioned discreet red lining, and I was thrilled to have the chance to dress so. Also, it appeared to be causing Alcibiades great displeasure, firstly because he was my lone carriage companion, and secondly, because he himself was dressed entirely in his red uniform.

  When first we’d met—weeks ago during that unpleasant period of quarantine in our own Basquiat—I admit I found him somewhat akin in coloring and in shagginess to the long-haired golden dogs that were favored by the Esarina a hundred years ago, and could thus be found in every single portraiture of that period, slobbering all over everything and looking wildly pleased with themselves.

  Alcibiades, however, never looked wildly pleased with himself, or indeed with anything. In the carriage, he simply looked wildly red. When I broached the subject with him—quite tactfully I thought—I was met with something resembling a horse’s snort and a brusque, “I’m Volstovic, not a bastion-bloody Ke-Han.”

  I liked the man already. It was at some point between Thremedon and Ke-Han land that I decided we would be friends, although I was yet uncertain how to make this equally obvious to Alcibiades himself.

  By the time we reached the Ke-Han gardens, which were both opulent and refined at once—nothing at all like the wildly overgrown greenhouses with their vibrant colors and abuse of perfectly good tulips that one is subject to in Thremedon—the strict formality of the place made me realize that there would hardly be any time for such diversions as friendship. The gardens flanked us on either side, deceptively tranquil. The palace itself rose before us, tiered roofs dark blue and black. And, standing still as little statues, there were at least fifty retainers in the bleached white courtyard, stark and square and rather like a box.

  Their faces betrayed nothing. They might just as well have been statues for all their eyes revealed.

  Our carriages erupted into their world with the stomping and whinnying of horses, the commotion of wheels on the sand, and the immediate chaos that began as nine delegates from Volstov stepped out of their carriages all at once.

  Fiacre kept his composure best, stepping neatly from his conveyance only to turn right around and offer a hand to his carriage companion, Margrave Josette. She declined the gesture, stepping down and stirring up a delicate cloud of white dust with the prim swish of her skirts. Next, and nearest to us, was Wildgrave Ozanne, who was busily adjusting the length of his sleeves as Marcelline pursed her lips next to him, looking relatively unimpressed with the whole affair.

  “Hello, my dear,” I murmured as an aside.

  “Greylace,” she said, looking wary but nonetheless unsurprised.

  On our other side were Lieutenants Casimiro and Valery, their names coming to me in a fortuitous coincidence with Alcibiades’ grunted greetings. They looked very uncomfortable in their new uniforms, especially Casimiro, the larger of the two. He kept glancing to one side at Alcibiades, as though to somehow divine the mystery of how he’d managed to wear his own reds across the border unscathed.

  Lastly, and quite alone, that fortunate creature, came Marius, a scholar at the ’Versity as well as a magician associated with the Basquiat. In fact, now that I counted our party, the numbers were overwhelmingly in the favor of magicians, myself included. This meant that the only men without Talent were Casimiro and Valery, though Alcibiades’ Talent was as good as nonexistent for all he used it.

  What a curious group. We seemed more like a circus than Volstov’s best—the soldiers looking like clowns, and the magicians from the Basquiat even more so. For a man as uncomfortable around magicians as the Esar was, he’d certainly chosen a great number of them to represent his interests. Or perhaps he merely considered us expendable, should any trouble arise.

  And amidst the chaos, there was Alcibiades, a bright red thumb in the noonday heat.

  I drew up close to him, the silk of my blue jacket—cut especially after the Ke-Han style—rustling about me.

  “One of these men is rather unlike the rest,” I murmured, taking his arm.

  He stiffened, as if I had just produced a dead mouse from his pocket. His eyes were alert, and I decided then that he must be far more intelligent than the fashionably long-haired, golden dog that I too had once owned as a pet, to see what all the fuss was about; though her eyes had been very kind, they had never once been what any man might label “alert.”

  “All the same to me,” he muttered in an undertone, which was more of a reply than I’d got to many of my observations during the long carriage ride. I felt especially heartened.

  He was alert, but not particularly perceptive, then, for there were certainly differences in the men ranged before us, close together as though in defensive battle formation. Surely it wouldn’t be prudent to spend all my time among the Ke-Han thinking in terms of our warring past, though, and I dismissed the thought as swiftly as it had come. Our men and women of Volstov began to arrange themselves close as well, as though they’d been prodded into a showing of proper etiquette by the Ke-Han delegation arrayed before us.

  We didn’t manage to stand nearly as straight or as still as they did, though.

  We’d been counseled before coming over, by three separate professors from the ’Versity no less, that the culture of the Ke-Han was one deeply fixed in ceremony and that our most royal presence the Esar would be vastly disappointed if any of our number derailed the course of diplomacy simply by erring in decorum. Subsequently, our preparation for the journey had included an intensive course in ceremony, which I had thoroughly enjoyed. There was a certain grace and purpose of reason about all their cold and calm rules that I found quite fascinating. It was a shame I’d found no one to share my enthusiasm with, but that would soon change once I’d brought Alcibiades around. It would be more difficult, perhaps, than training a dog, but then I was accustomed to such challenges.

  One of the Ke-Han diplomats stepped forward—not the one I’d singled out, but the one standing just over his shoulder. He wore his hair tied back in the thick-braided style of their generals, though I hadn’t had the proper time to study the significance of each plait. Indeed, it was a shame my own hair was not quite long enough yet to adopt a similar style, for I thought myself rather in need of such a change, and surely it would be a most flattering display of solidarity. The diplomat clasped his hands and bowed low to our arrival party. Unlike our own clothing in varying patterns of the same shade, the men of the Ke-Han were dressed in many different colors, wi
th seemingly no rhyme or reason. Each, however, wore a sash of midnight blue that denoted their patriot status in what I felt was a very tasteful and stylish display. Perhaps I could speak with Alcibiades about doing the same, though perhaps that conversation would be better saved for later, once I had discerned the best possible way of phrasing it. I could be quite convincing when I put my mind to it.

  “Welcome,” said the diplomat, speaking as though he could not quite wrap his tongue around our thick Volstovic vowels. The Ke-Han language was quick and darting, quite musical and lovely in its own way; but it was on conqueror’s terms that we had come, and even on foreign soil it was to be our men who dictated the terms of the treaty.

  I was a velikaia, and even though my Talent lay in creating visions and not reading minds, I could still sense the animosity behind each impassive face.

  “We have prepared rooms for your arrival,” the diplomat continued, slow but certain of his wording. “Shortly we will dine, then begin our talks.”

  Some of the men seemed surprised at this, though I myself was only too grateful not to be leaping headfirst from carriage to conference without even so much as a hot bath in between. Whatever could be said of the Ke-Han—and I was certain I’d heard the bulk of it in recent years—their hospitality was a marvelous thing. At my side, Alcibiades snorted—though whether it was out of some specific affront or the burden of having to bear any length of time among the Ke-Han, I couldn’t say. Knowing him only as well as I did, though, I could imagine that he’d been eager to dive into the talks straightaway. Perhaps his ideal would be for us to have been finished by nightfall, though among our number there were a great many men who enjoyed the sound of their own voices a little too much for that to be a possibility.

  The diplomat clapped his hands, and into the courtyard filed a line of men and women in robes the color of ripe persimmon. They bore lanterns and kept their eyes averted to the floor. Like the diplomats, they maintained a stony silence of expression that I would have admired were it not for the creeping loneliness of the thing. Surely, outside the confines of diplomacy, it would not be amiss upon occasion to express a human emotion, and I would have said as much to Alcibiades if for a moment I thought he might appreciate the irony in my words.

  We were going to have such high times, he and I.

  ALCIBIADES

  There were seventeen ways to bow to a Ke-Han statesman, and I didn’t know a single one of them. Which, by my way of thinking, was just fine, because I wasn’t bowing to any Ke-Han, statesman or no.

  The Esar had his reasons for sending me along with the rest of the diplomats, no doubt because I knew Ke-Han ground pretty well, and I suppose I was there as backup in case a sticky situation got stickier and there wasn’t anything to do about it besides reach for the sword. I guessed it was also to do with my Talent, more like a disease to my thinking, but there wasn’t really much I could do about it now. The Esar’d said that it was more likely to be useful than not, having a magician no one knew about in along with the rest of the diplomats, and I couldn’t exactly argue with him on that—much as I hated thinking of myself as a magician. There were enough of those already, and I didn’t exactly see how sending me was a big secret when more than half the people along with us had been stuck in the Basquiat right alongside me during the magician’s plague. Caius Greylace, Marcy, and Marius had even been in on the little group we’d put together to try and figure it all out—before Margrave Royston’s child-bride farm boy had gone and done it for us, that was.

  Anyway, point was, it was no big secret that I had a Talent, except to the Ke-Han, and I guessed that was probably the point.

  There were other military men there besides me, at least—Lieutenants Casimiro and Valery—who’d somehow got roped into this sorry state of affairs the same as I had. Casimiro was a big fellow who talked too much, and Valery was a little man who didn’t talk ever, but we respected each other well enough to stay out of each other’s hair, and that was good enough for me.

  That didn’t mean I had to like this arrangement, though. It was uncomfortable days of riding in a carriage to come to a place I didn’t want to set foot in, to put on a smile I didn’t want to wear on my face, and to bow to men who’d just as soon have cut me down if everything had worked out a little differently.

  It was too short a period of time to go forgiving an entire country for fighting so underhanded that they almost won. There were some tactics you never forgave.

  I didn’t like their blank expressions, or the way their women hopped-to quick as soldiers might’ve, just to serve the enemy. That was the sort of behavior that made a man wonder what the women he knew back home would’ve done if the coin had fallen to the other side. Everyone in the Ke-Han palace was too fucking polite.

  At least I hadn’t slapped on enemy colors just to keep them happy. I could feel every last one of them staring at me, but I wasn’t playing any games or crawling into bed with an enemy I’d only just got the better of. This was Volstov’s victory. It was bad enough being sent there to hammer out the terms of a more lasting treaty; I didn’t have to make it worse by dressing like them and pretending I didn’t hate it just as much as they did.

  Their whole palace was a tricky affair designed to be treacherous, its narrow hallways winding around each other like the individual threads of a spider’s web and its walls made of paper so thin you could see shadows passing before them, in the rooms hidden just on the other side. Whispers chased us when we got too close, and now and then the sound of a woman’s ghostly laughter followed close behind. On top of that, with all of us feeling like exhibits at the zoo, there were mirrors slanted against the ceiling, fitted into every corner where simple lamps should have been. Any sort of light you wanted came from your own personal tight-mouthed Ke-Han groveling bastard, who followed you around like he’d stab you in the back as soon as light the way for you.

  We were esteemed guests, all right—so esteemed we wouldn’t be able to go anywhere or do anything without having someone watching us. Well, I told myself, if they wanted to assign some poor fool the job of listening to me snore and being privy to when and where and how much I shat, that was fine by me. Chances were it’d be worse for him than it would be for me. It was a waste of everyone’s time, and I wasn’t bothering myself any by thinking about it.

  “Do you know,” said Caius Greylace, coming up on me unannounced like some kind of winter ailment, “that the mirrors show you everything happening all along the halls? How clever!”

  I wasn’t in the mood to praise Ke-Han ingenuity like some fat country noble might praise his favorite spaniel. Chances were, this Caius creature would get bored soon enough and find someone else to bother; it didn’t matter who, so long as it wasn’t me. I didn’t like spaniels.

  “Looks like,” I said.

  “I suppose they must have an awful lot of trouble with assassination,” Caius went on. He was dressed half like a woman and half like a lunatic, breezing through the halls behind our lamp-bearer, the fabric of whatever it was he was wearing swishing all the way. “Or perhaps they’re simply inbred. I hear it causes paranoia in noble bloodlines as old and as carefully guarded as theirs.”

  I didn’t say anything to that at all.

  We were all split up by where we slept—a fact I didn’t enjoy for a second. And I would have made it clear at the time I realized it, too, if Caius hadn’t exclaimed over a peacock wandering across the courtyard, effectively ending all conversation on the matter of lodgings.

  What really set all the warning bells off in my head was the way we were put here and there, and most of us halfway across the palace from one another, with real careful regard paid to status and nothing else. Josette, Fiacre, and Wildgrave Ozanne were all quartered together in the West Wing of the palace, for example, whereas Casi and Val were somewhere in the south nearer to the stables and the menagerie. I hadn’t even seen Marcy and Marius since we’d arrived, which tickled me the wrong way. I didn’t like a second of it. I didn’
t like it especially because the whole East Wing of the palace, which was where I’d be spending bastion-only-knew how much time, stank of some particular incense that burned my throat and my eyes. It was real distracting, and I didn’t doubt that they were doing it on purpose. Ke-Han was made up of tricky bastards.

  “In any case,” Caius continued, moving neatly around a corner, then pausing to wait for me to join him, “I believe we’re staying above the… eastern gardens? Is it the eastern gardens? The peacock certainly was a distraction. I wonder if we can have one brought in especially for entertainment. They’re very rare, but I would so like a closer look.”

  “Heard the Ke-Han eat them,” I ground out.

  The servant leading us paused for a moment, but it was only because we’d fallen behind and it was his duty to wait for us. I picked up my pace, and this time it was Caius who hurried to keep alongside me, rustling all the way.

  “Eat peacocks?” he asked. One of his eyes was queerly discolored, and being looked at by him felt like you were having a conversation with two different people, and both of them equally insane.

  “Right,” I said. “Eat peacocks.”

  I’d heard the rumors about Caius Greylace, the same as any. Kept as the Esar’s pet lapdog practically since birth, for his Talent in visions and his lack of qualms about using them to get information. He tortured anyone who possessed information and quite a few people who didn’t, if the rumors were anything to go by. Then, because he was young and wild, he went after some other poor bastard at court—the reason changed depending on who you asked, but the result was always the same—and drove him mad without blinking an eye. Well, not even the Esar could overlook that sort of thing, so he was banished quicker than a flash, exiled at fourteen and not brought back until three years later, when everyone’d been recalled for the final push. Just before we’d all gone and got slammed by that blasted plague.