Shadow Magic (2009) Read online

  Was that how the people of Xi’an viewed their new Emperor? It was a troubling thought.

  “See if you ever track down your brother!” called another member of the audience, one less muzzy with drink.

  Alcibiades sucked in his breath. Sitting as close as I was, I could feel it when he went tense, as though the play had suddenly turned all too real.

  “What would his father have said? Turning against your own flesh and blood,” a nearby woman muttered disapproval to her companion, shouting the last to the rest of the theatre.

  “Perhaps he’s gone mad, like his great-grandfather.”

  “Perhaps we need Prince Mamoru back here to overthrow him!”

  “I can’t hear anything,” Alcibiades complained, looking upset.

  It was then, with a tremendous crash, that the doors broke open.

  Men in deep shades of imperial blue—robes just as fine as the costumes upon the stage—stormed in through the splintered wood and torn paper. They had helmets on, to shield their faces, and each man carried a sword. Not the wooden practice swords I’d grown accustomed to seeing, either. These were live blades, and they glimmered wickedly in the lamplight as the guards marched in.

  One of them stepped up onto the stage, obscuring the actor completely.

  “By decree of Our Lord, Emperor Iseul,” he began.

  Someone to our left booed loudly. They had clearly become carried away with themselves. The noise cut itself off suddenly, as though he or she had received an elbow to the stomach or a hand over the mouth.

  “This play is over!” the guard shouted, driven to the edge of his patience. I felt Alcibiades beginning to stir next to me, and felt a familiar rush of excitement mixed with apprehension. Such interesting things always happened when I was with the general. It was a good thing I’d thought to bring my fan, which I unfurled to obscure my face.

  “What’s more,” the guard went on, unsheathing his sword as his fellow soldiers strode up the aisles in organized lines. “The lot of you are under arrest, pending the apprehension of those responsible for this piece of filth.”

  A shout of dismay went up from the audience. Alcibiades surged to his feet, dragging me up with him.

  There was a moment when I felt suspended in time, like an actor onstage myself. I saw the other patrons—our audience—as though frozen, anticipating the moves of the guards, our villains, dressed in blue.

  The costumes were all wrong. “The heroes are supposed to be in blue,” I told Alcibiades in an excited whisper.

  There was a flurry of crimson movement onstage; and, as though it had all been a part of the script, the pretend-Emperor brought his wooden sword down hilt first on top of the guard’s head. We in the audience had time for a roar of approval, putting all our praise for the play into one primal cry of appreciation.

  Then the guards were on us.

  Alcibiades pulled me forward, choosing to travel down toward the stage and against the flow of the crowd, which was surging back toward the far wall. I had no choice but to follow, since he was a dreadfully strong brute when he had a mind to be. And besides, I was no battle strategist.

  “I shouldn’t think it would look very good for two of Volstov’s diplomats to land in jail,” I remarked, cheerfully tripping a guard who’d grabbed a young lady by the arm. She smiled at me before she wheeled around into the crowd, disappearing from view.

  “We’re not going to,” Alcibiades grunted, pausing a minute to look around.

  I took that opportunity, brief and breathless as it was, to examine the room myself. There were many patrons who appeared to be running for the nearest exit, like ourselves, but to my shock I saw more than one who’d stayed to land a punch or two against the guards. Onstage, the pretend-Emperor’s fellow actors had joined him, with the larger Benkei standing as a defensive wall against the surge of increasingly angry enforcers. I had looked up just in time to see the young prince-actor, delicate as a moonbeam, roundly kicking a guard in the shins, then dropping him down an open trapdoor.

  I let out a whoop of approval. Alcibiades looked at me as if I were mad.

  “Caught up in the moment,” I explained.

  “Uh-huh,” Alcibiades said.

  Then, quicker than I’d seen him move yet, he pulled me underneath the footbridge that traveled from the stage to the audience, connecting the two together in a brilliant stroke of theatrical innovation.

  “We’re going out the back way,” he told me, bent almost double in the low space beneath the bridge. “You’ve got those knives with you, don’t you?”

  “How could I go anywhere without my fan?” I said, pleased that he’d come to know me so well.

  “Use them,” Alcibiades said, in a tone that made me think he must have been a very different person during the war, with so much fighting to keep him busy and less time to be sullen about every little thing.

  The next thing I knew, we were moving again, under the overpass and back into the audience seating. Alcibiades lifted me under my arms—making no attempt to be careful about my clothes at all—and slung me up onto the bridge like a sack of common potatoes. He hauled himself up next and caught me at the shoulder, pulling me to my feet. All around us people were shouting. Some were rallying cries; others were threats of legal action. It was becoming impossible to sort one from the other.

  I couldn’t help but feel a mounting sense of excitement, since Alcibiades had us running straight toward the actors, so that we might actually see them up close.

  A guard pulled himself up onto the bridge and Alcibiades dragged me back behind him. Very shortly I was going to get tired of being so manhandled, as it was behavior I would never allow under normal circumstances, but there was something crudely touching about the whole matter. Never mind that it made me feel quite like the prince in question, and Alcibiades my loyal retainer, sworn to protect me and guard me while nonetheless treating me like merchants’ wares to be hauled about.

  The guard said something that I was quite sure was rude, though his dialect was one I was unfamiliar with.

  Alcibiades moved with the same baffling quickness he’d shown a moment ago, ducking close around the guard’s sword to punch him square in the face.

  I gave a hop of delight, and hurried forward to take his sword. It was much heavier than it looked, but I presented it quite proudly to Alcibiades all the same.

  “What the hell did he say, anyway?” Alcibiades demanded, taking it.

  “He said that your outfit is very dashing,” I told him. “Do let’s make our escape.”

  “After you,” Alcibiades sighed, and booted me down through the trapdoor.

  It was dark beneath the stage, but it was far from quiet. Above us was a cacophony of footfalls, the sounds of set pieces crashing in the chaos. All those pretty things—utterly ruined. What was worse, though, was what might happen to the poor author of the play. He’d certainly landed himself in hot water, and all for the sake of pursuing his art.

  Alcibiades landed with a heavy thud, almost on top of me, though I managed to step out of the way just in time. “Be careful where you’re landing,” I chided him.

  “What do you know about these theatres, anyway?” Alcibiades asked, charging in front of me. “Any more trick doors, or do we have to improvise?”

  “This is how the Emperor came onstage,” I reasoned. “So there must be some way to get backstage—aha!” A wood panel just at my fingertips swung outward, and light shafted in quick and warm into the darkness. We were in a sort of waiting box beneath the stage, and there was our way out. That is, unless the guards had already filed backstage themselves.

  There were clothes everywhere, and prop swords; a few masks set upon low tables, and more face paint than I’d ever seen on the most vain old baroness’s bedside table. There was the red, and there was the blue, and there was the white.

  “Do you think the prince got away?” I asked Alcibiades, catching his eyes for a brief moment.

  Alcibiades snorted. “Which one
?”

  He grasped my wrist and tugged me toward what appeared to be a side exit. And it was just in time, as well, for as we slipped past the door I heard a crash behind us, and the shattering of glass. The backstage mirror overturned as the guards poured into the room.

  Alcibiades pulled me into the dark alley. We were behind the theatre. We could still hear the shouts from within, as well as those that poured out onto the streets. Lights were flickering on all down the length of the theatre district, lanterns peeking out of every window. People were yelling at one another, answered peremptorily by the abrupt orders of the guards. All of that was undercut by the unsteady rhythm of armor against armor and heavy bootfalls.

  “If they catch us, we’re sunk,” Alcibiades told me.

  “I suppose we’d better run,” I replied.

  “Pity you’re not wearing those shoes with the platforms,” Alcibiades said dryly. “You’re going to get the hem of that thing all muddy.”

  “Not if you carry me the rest of the way,” I suggested impishly, before I pushed myself off an alley wall and started off toward a back alley—one of the dark streets I’d been cautioned by Lord Temur himself not to travel.

  Luckily, they were almost eerily empty; everyone had either locked up tight to avoid whatever was happening or had rushed off to join the fray. There weren’t even any poor young women plying their single trade; I could imagine them all, pressed against their windows, watching the lights flicker on and off and straining to catch even one word amidst the chaos of voices.

  “Why is it,” Alcibiades said, shaking his head; he still hadn’t abandoned the sword I’d stolen for him, and showed no signs of being about to do so, either, “that when I’m with you, shit like this always happens?”

  “Oh, my dear,” I replied, stepping out into the main street to find it, too, empty and abandoned, “I was about to ask you the very same question!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  KOUJE

  The actors were preparing for that evening’s show when I drew Mamoru aside, gently, by the elbow.

  “Oh,” he said, his face faltering. “I had hoped we might stay for the show. It’s a version of The Thousand Cherry Trees, about the banished prince, you know. I hear he’s very dashing—though he’s nothing in comparison to his loyal retainer who, I believe, is the coveted star role. You should have heard them all arguing over who would get to play him.”

  “It’s exactly why we can’t stay,” I replied.

  The last thing we needed, in a border town, when tensions were so high—when we’d had such trouble getting across in the first place—was to be caught up in that particular performance.

  My lord never knew the trouble there had been one summer, at least ten years back, when all the plays were about dragons and their riders. The theatre district had nearly been shut down because of it. While the capital was another matter entirely from the countryside, it never served a man to tempt fate when she had been so kind to him already.

  Just thinking of the crowded streets of the city in comparison to the quiet houses of the countryside, cluttered together for only a brief moment along the road, was enough to make a man homesick. Mamoru himself was unused to unpaved streets and thin mattresses—to what it meant to live in the country.

  Honganje prefecture was even smaller than that, a fishing village old as time itself, barely cutting its own survival into the face of the mountains looming over it. The salt and the sand got into everything, as did the stench of fish.

  He’d never be able to live there. It would have been better to stay on with the caravan at that rate.

  “They’re not going in the right direction, anyway,” Mamoru agreed. “And it would be somewhat vainglorious to watch a play that’s about—”

  I hushed him, momentarily, a finger to my lips, as I heard footsteps passing us. It was Goro, looking for his script; or Ryu, looking for his plectrum; or Aiko, searching out a missing piece for someone’s costume, a wig, or a mask. All those details were becoming second nature. If only they had been going in the right direction. But we had no place among them, and I could no more afford to raise my lord’s hopes than I could afford to raise my own. That was most dangerous of all.

  “As much as I’ve been looking forward to the show,” Mamoru amended, toying with his sleeve. It was a habit I’d only seen in him when he was a little boy. The court, his father, Iseul, and even I, had long since trained him out of it.

  It suited him there. At least we were capable of relearning what we’d been forced to forget.

  “As have I,” I agreed. “I’ve lifted enough boxes to enjoy the fruits of my labor.”

  “I’ll go when you deem it best,” Mamoru said. “It seems so rude not to thank them—not to let them know we’re in their debt.”

  “Hey, Goro!” Aiko called from somewhere within the makeshift playhouse—the inn we’d be staying at that evening, if we were staying at all. “If you’ve gone off with that mask again, I’m going to skin you alive and feed you to the mountain demons!”

  “They’ll be busy enough with the preparations for the play that they won’t have a chance to notice we’re gone,” Mamoru said, not allowing himself to sound as wistful as we both were. “Do you remember the poem about—what was it—floating weeds? I always found it so mournful when I was little. Perhaps this is why.”

  “It won’t be that way forever,” I counseled, though I knew absolutely nothing when it came to poetry.

  “No,” Mamoru agreed. “Soon enough we’ll be weeds with roots. I wonder what sort of plant a weed becomes when it is watered by the sea?”

  “Excellent for your constitution,” I promised. “You’ll never have a winter’s fever again.”

  Mamoru rested his cheek against the side of the inn. We were lucky it was summer and there was little danger of my lord catching fever. He didn’t have his brother’s constitution; he never had. It was as though the first son had taken everything he would need to become Emperor, leaving nothing in turn for the second. Now that I understood our new Emperor a little better, it would have scarcely surprised me to discover that was his plan all along.

  “I do still wonder if this might not all be an accident,” Mamoru said. “As much as I once would have welcomed the chance to run away with you, Kouje, I fear the days for such rebellion have long since passed.”

  “You’re not as old as all that,” I reasoned.

  When was the last time we had spoken so freely with one another? My lord had been certainly no older than a boy of five, so I at twelve would still have been too young to realize the impropriety of my informal ways.

  “I did think of it often enough,” Mamoru admitted. “That we might never have to go to war, as my brother did; that you and I could live, with your sister, in some small fishing village, and that I would never have to dress myself as a girl again. At least, I’d thought those days were over.” He laughed warmly.

  “I would never have allowed it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You would have been right to stop me,” Mamoru replied. “I may be well versed in this part, but any other and I would fall miserably short.”

  I moved to shield him—from what was less certain. He seemed so small, and his cheeks were flushed with the heat of memory. It was the same look he got in his eyes when he did have a fever: those long, terrible winters when there was no one but me to visit him, and the servants were all but certain we would lose him that time. “Unless they wished for you to play the prince,” I said.

  “Oh, no, Kouje,” he said. “It would be most difficult to play that role. I’d have no distance at all from it; I’d assume too much.”

  “I’ll get our things once the show begins,” I promised. It was all I had to offer him; that, and a bed of grass for the night.

  Think of how far you’ve come, Kouje, I cautioned myself, before the usual refrain. And think of how far you have yet to go. It was an old trick: Reward yourself before you warned yourself, and you would get far enough on your ow
n two feet.

  We passed from behind the inn to the front, where men and women were filing into the theatre, and Goro himself was shouting advertisements from a stone raised beside it. “The greatest adventure you’ve ever seen!” he yelped, in a voice that was much larger than he was. “You’ll never know such daring and excitement!”

  No one was paying any attention to us; especially not Goro, who was testing his luck every time he called my lord “princess.” All that saved him was the fact that Mamoru seemed to enjoy it, and coming to blows with an aspiring playwright over an innocent nickname was too much even for me. Even where Mamoru was concerned.

  “I’ve heard that the loyal retainer is able to leap from mountain to mountain in a single bound,” Mamoru said, falling into step beside me, just in my shadow. He’d taken to doing that lately, and I’d taken to accepting it. Once, I’d walked behind him; walking at his side should have been anathema to me.

  It was part of the roles we played. If a wife walked before her husband in the streets, there would be such a fuss that the Emperor himself would have come to see the novelty.

  “A single bound?” I asked. “He must have very long legs.”

  “They also say he is so handsome that no one dares to look upon him,” Mamoru added, somewhat slyly. “The women say that, at least.”

  “They talk far more of the prince’s beauty,” I said, though I felt my cheeks grow hot. He was teasing me, and I him, but we had not indulged in such behavior since we were children. It fit a bit stiffly—the same way an old glove might—but it fit nonetheless.

  “They flatter him,” Mamoru said.

  “They flatter that poor retainer,” I countered. “Who will never live up to such a standard. Jumping across mountains? If only he could.”

  The last statement burned more hotly in my throat than I’d expected, and I was grateful it was so dark, so noisy, so crowded upon the street. The gossips were out in full force, along with the other eager theatregoers, travelers and merchants and locals alike, each hoping that some noble grace would touch them through the hand of the make-believe prince. Someone jostled against Mamoru’s shoulder and I caught him, drawing him gently aside.