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  After a minute, Mamoru stepped out from behind the stable wall. It was easy enough to see that, despite the shabby clothes, he was every inch the prince, from his posture to the grace of his hands to his very complexion. He’d drawn his hair back clumsily, and covered it with a shawl. I felt my ribs tighten around my heart. My lord was never clumsy. It meant that his hands had been shaking.

  But perhaps his clumsiness would work to our advantage, though it hurt me to think of using my lord’s distress for any good. There was a certain cruelty in such resourcefulness, despite its practical uses. Iseul was resourceful that way in battle, and though it won him much acclaim, it still sat poorly with lesser men.

  I smiled again at my lord, this time mastering the attempt.

  “My lord, do you remember the theatre groups who would entertain at the palace?”

  Mamoru looked at me with confusion, but nodded. “I do.”

  “I thought that perhaps, if you thought of this as… something similar, if you imagine yourself an actor, you might affect the posture of a servingwoman, and one who is ill, besides.”

  It was the only way that I could think to counsel my lord against betraying himself with his movements, his very being. I could not tell Mamoru to be anything other than a prince, but if I could see it so clearly, then others certainly would. Therefore, he would have to think of his disguise as more than that. It was a role, and one that our very lives depended on his playing. I could only trust in my lord’s skills, as he was trusting in mine.

  “Ah, I see,” my lord said. “I do not yet look the part.”

  “My lord,” I began, “it isn’t—”

  “If I do not, there is no need to spare my feelings,” my lord chided. “Here: I will try it better.” After a moment’s pause, he crossed his arms over his chest and bent nearly double, as though attempting to shield himself from a great wind. The parts of his hair that hung loose from the braids shielded his face, and gave him a rather haphazard and common appearance, very much like a servingwoman who’d worked nonstop throughout the day, with no time to pause and fix her hair once more into its proper place.

  He was better at adapting than I had even hoped. Perhaps the gods, in their own way, were on our side after all.

  “That’s very good,” I said, warm where I hadn’t allowed myself to be before. “Nearly perfect, my lord.”

  Mamoru lifted his head. In his eyes, I could see the shadows of a faint gratification at such praise, even in the midst of such a situation as ours. “Thank you, Kouje,” he said, and I knew it was not entirely for my compliment.

  “My lord is a virtuoso,” I said, turning my eyes to the various horses, some of which had awoken at even our quiet conversation, and stared at us now with baleful eyes. Best to take one of the diplomats’ horses, I thought, since it would not be so easily recognized by the guards who manned the gate at night. They knew all the lords’ horses, and I did not trust my lord with a lesser beast. Perhaps the horse we took would even give Iseul some other, more pressing matters to deal with, since a member of the delegation from Volstov would surely question the loss of his mount. Iseul could not give the impression of caring too little for his guests, and so any affront dealt to them would have to be managed most publicly, and with all his resources.

  I didn’t truly believe that a missing horse would be our miracle, but my lord and I were in need of help wherever we could ask it. At best, it would provide a momentary distraction.

  “I think we should take this horse,” my lord said. It was the one he’d suggested earlier, a strong-looking animal with a russet coat. Indeed, it looked more like a farmer’s draft horse than a lord’s mount: perfect for two servants traveling out of the palace.

  My approval must have shown on my face, for my lord did smile then, though it was a small and fleeting thing. I saw it as a victory all the same.

  My plan would not work without Mamoru behind it. If he did not believe in me, it made no sense for us to leave in the first place.

  “Give me your robes,” I said. “If my lord will mount first, then I might walk alongside the horse.”

  My lord looked as though he meant to protest, but he merely turned to retrieve his robes where he’d hung them across the low wall of the stable and handed them to me. I took them, wrapping the fine robes carefully within my own to shield them from any harm, and bundling those again in a plain workman’s cloth, the kind in which a servant carried his few belongings. I waited for Mamoru to mount, then secured the bundle behind him, so as to help along the artifice that my lord was a sick servingwoman ejected from the palace until the time came when she was well again.

  “If you agree, I think it best that I do most of the talking,” I said, easing the stall’s gate open. “At least until my lord learns how to speak as a servant.”

  “Ah, but isn’t that a counterfeit statement?” My lord looked down at me from the horse, his hair all in disarray and his clothing plain and mended countless times over. It hurt my heart to see him so transformed, but there was a hint of a smile still upon his lips. “Servants do not speak at all, so how can I ever hope to speak as one?”

  I found myself smiling, too, as I led the horse through the quiet of the stables, even as I struggled to lift the beam that sealed the door at night. My lord was clever, and he learned quickly. I did not dare to guess at what result our venture would bring, not then and perhaps not ever, but Mamoru could survive as something other than a prince. I was certain of that, if of nothing else. Perhaps he would never learn the self-deprecation inherent in our words, the coarse grammar and the apologetic tone, but he would survive.

  The courtyard was silent and empty, though the spare shapes of the rock statues in the sunken garden rose up in crescents and spheres to our left. White sand crunched beneath the horse’s mammoth, shaggy hooves. Ahead, the main gate was lit with tall torches, and white paper lanterns lined the main path. I found myself holding on to the reins with an unnecessary force, though I did not speed my pace any, and I kept my breathing steady. Even so, the horse could sense the tension in my hand, and he shook his head, whinnying faintly.

  I didn’t dare to look up at my lord more than once, but he had his head down, his arms crossed in front of him, as if in the clutches of some uncomfortable affliction. I could not tell whether he was as nervous as I was.

  Perhaps I was betraying his trust in me by being so nervous myself.

  Then we came to the palace gates, and there was no more room for nerves.

  The guards didn’t ask any questions. They were trained to be as silent as the servants were. Rather, they stopped us, and waited on protocol. I was the one who must speak, to give them my statement as to who we were, and where we were going.

  I’d been practicing it since the moment I’d heard Iseul’s pronouncement, though I hadn’t realized it then.

  “This one’s taken ill,” I said, hardening my voice; I sounded like a fisherman, and I forced myself to ignore the shame of my lord hearing me speak so commonly. “My lord wishes for me to take her out of the palace before the diplomats get wind of it. The last thing we want is for the talks to be ended over something so foolish as her sneezing in someone’s breakfast. Or worse, if you take my meaning.”

  The guard eyed my lord with some trepidation, as though worried the woman in question was going to be ill right then and there. He stepped back to confer with the other guards, who had been listening some distance away. The torchlight flickered and played off the shadows on their faces, the overhang of their antiquated helmets, which combined to give their expressions a masklike quality. If we were a theatre group, and my lord the leading actress, then the guards would be played by men in demon masks, pale white and blood red.

  I felt a soft touch at my hand against the reins.

  My lord was looking at me, his eyes filled with something like pleading behind the curtain of his hair. In the years during the dragon raids, there had been men who went mad with the fear and the anticipation, of waiting night after
night and wondering, Would they come? There were no more dragons now, but in Mamoru’s eyes I recognized some of that same fear. He did not know how long he must wait, or even what he was waiting for. It was why he had reached out to me in the first place.

  I closed my hand over his and held it tight while we waited.

  The guard we’d spoken to broke away from the rest to stand in front of us once more. He looked at me, then the horse and then my lord, all with a scrutiny that I would never have allowed if we had been our true selves.

  Then, just as I’d become certain that Mamoru would bruise my fingers with the grip he held them in, the guard nodded, and the gate began to open.

  “Get out,” the guard said, with a nod toward the gate.

  I fought down the urge to take him to task for speaking so rudely to my lord, but Mamoru gripped my hand with his own pale fingers and hunched over the horse’s neck with a quiet groan. Instead of reprimanding the fool, I thanked him.

  Then we were outside the palace.

  The last time we’d ridden out of the palace together, my lord had been on his own horse. The sun had been high in the morning sky, the air crisp with the fall of autumn, and he had led his own company of foot soldiers and flag bearers, nearly seven hundred men in all under his command.

  My lord shivered, and I led the horse on in silence until the palace walls were the vaguest of shadows behind us, and farther still. I couldn’t be too careful.

  The road we were on led deep into the heart of the city; if we continued to travel on it, we would reach the old dome by dawn. If we’d but had the time, I would surely have stopped and offered up a prayer there, for our safe passage. It was a familiar route, and a well-traveled one.

  I led the horse off the road and under the bower of a maple tree. Its leaves looked black as dry blood in the pale moonlight.

  “If you will permit me, my lord,” I whispered, as Mamoru bent his ear to my lips, “I must join you on the horse for now. We will travel faster that way, else I would never suggest it—”

  “We are no longer in the palace,” Mamoru replied. I could see only half his face, the shape of a scythe moon; the rest was turned away from me. “Act practically rather than on protocol.”

  “My lord,” I consented, and swung myself onto the mount behind him. The horse protested for a moment, but merely out of laziness; he was a mammoth beast, and after the first huff of annoyance, he settled into an easy trot. I wished to ride him faster, but the path was a trail too easy to follow. I urged him instead to the trees. It would be a while before we reached the mountains, but we had a better chance of hiding there than in the larger towns along the main roads, and the idea of being caught out in the open did not sit easy with me. I was a servant first and foremost, but I was also a soldier, and one trained to look to the skies, at that.

  The Emperor was a different enemy we were fleeing, but Iseul was as formidable as a dragon and twice as clever as its rider.

  After a few moments’ stiffness, still curled like the ailing serving woman around himself, my lord relaxed. Sometime after that, he allowed himself to lean back against my chest.

  “It seems like something out of an old play,” he said, very softly, but even the sound of his own voice seemed to startle him, as though he hadn’t known how loud a whisper could be in an empty darkness.

  When I’d comforted him on the eve of his first battle, he’d had the strength of an army and his birthright behind him. He was fighting for an empire.

  I was silent now, the wind blowing his hair against my neck, the horse moving at a steadfast gait. I wondered how he would run, if pressed to it, for he wasn’t a horse built for racing but rather for heavy loads. It was lucky in some ways and a worry in others.

  No one will learn we are gone yet, I told myself. We needed only to disappear, and that required subtlety, not speed.

  Sometime in the endless night, I heard Mamoru whisper, “Have we chosen the proper course?”

  I had no answer for him, and said nothing. Soon enough, he fell asleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ALCIBIADES

  So, the prince was missing.

  Caius woke me that morning by shaking my shoulders and laughing delightedly; I was too dazed and too damn tired to ask him at first why he’d come in, much less why he was sitting on my bed. He was the one who broke the news to me, and how he’d known it first before everyone else, I don’t know if I’ll ever find out.

  “Isn’t it incredible?” he said, beaming from ear to ear. It was the sort of smile that looked like it hurt. “If you don’t get out of bed now, my dear, then we’re going to be late.”

  All I could think about was how we’d been out of bed last night, and how delighted Caius had sounded at the thought of our getting blamed for one scandal or another. The day had only just started, and already I was out of sorts.

  I managed an undignified but satisfactorily indifferent grunt; it must have sounded enough like a question that Caius continued as though I’d asked him, pretty as you please, to explain himself more thoroughly.

  “The Emperor has called an emergency meeting! Well, wouldn’t you? I suppose he wants us all to be there so he can make sure we’re with him when he acts. I imagine he knows we don’t trust him enough yet that it might spoil the talks to have him hauling off and acting on his own over something this important. He says that the poor young thing is a traitor—can you imagine? A traitor! And I was only just complimenting him on his choice of jade—and that he’s been plotting against us all this time.”

  “Doesn’t make sense to me,” I managed, watching as Caius launched himself from my bed and began combing his hair—with my comb, in front of my mirror. “Maybe all that dressing him up like a daughter made him mad or something.”

  “Oh, who knows,” Caius replied. “I can’t imagine that sweet little creature betraying anyone. Still and all, we’re all to be the Emperor’s counsel in the matter. Of course, he can’t decide what to do about Prince Mamoru on his own, now that we’re in attendance. Alcibiades, we’re a part of the Emperor’s grand council!”

  I’d barely got out of bed, and suddenly I was supposed to decide the fate of some idiot Ke-Han prince who’d overstepped his mark? The Ke-Han could do whatever they liked, for all I cared, so long as they left me out of it.

  “No thank you,” I said. “I’m going back to sleep.”

  Caius was back at my bedside in an instant, wearing a look of pure horror on his face. Perhaps he thought to rap my knuckles with my comb, which he still held. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “It’s a direct order!”

  “So we’re taking orders now, is it?” I asked, turning my back on him and wishing there were a proper pillow to be found there—that I might either cover my head and drown out the sound of his voice, or hit him square between the eyes with it. I had an awful crick in my neck from the little wood block that served as my Ke-Han pillow, and I hadn’t slept all that well, either, with my head nearly falling off it every time I turned this way or that. A man had to be comfortable, and I was in no mood to be ordered anywhere by an emperor whose culture had come up with a pillow like that. It was remarkable they were able to sleep at night, much less conquer whole countries and give our armies such a good run for such a good long time.

  Or maybe this pillow was just reserved for special guests, in which case the second prince could assassinate every last member of the Ke-Han council, and I’d be right behind him on it.

  “I don’t see why you insist on being so peevish,” Caius said, in a tone that suggested he might have been pouting. I didn’t want to know what a pout looked like on that precocious little face. “Since we both know you’re coming and that’s final, it doesn’t make any sense for you to put up such a fuss. It’s only embarrassing for you later when you think of the scene you caused, and all for nothing!”

  “Get out of here while I get dressed, then,” I snarled, ready to fling the rock-hard pillow at his head if necessary, but he was already skipping o
ut of the room.

  “Ten minutes!” he cooed back at me, like a songbird.

  I rubbed the back of my neck, which was stiff and sore, and thought about whether or not I could barricade the adjoining door at night with what meager furnishing my room’d been allotted.

  Anyway, that was how I’d wound up in a grand council—and I’d never seen a more mismatched, ill-suited group of surly and impassive faces all crammed together into the same room—listening to the Emperor give some speech about how his brother was a traitor and in some cases you had to cut off your own right hand for the greater good of the rest, should it fall to rot. Josette looked about ready to fall to rot herself, like she’d still have been asleep if it had been up to her, and she kept twiddling at the fancy Ke-Han hair ornament that she’d pinned up her curls with. Marius, seated next to her, seemed wide-awake, but he was frowning down at the table like he wanted it to be the Emperor.

  I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like what I was hearing, then.

  Sure, it was the Emperor’s own brother, and he probably knew the situation better than I could from the outside. But the point remained—and here was what stuck in my throat—that I just wasn’t ready to sit back and eat everything he fed me. There was something about the way he was talking, something about the way he held himself, that stank.

  Even Caius, crooked in the head as he was, could tell that the second prince wasn’t the sort of man who would just up and betray his brother out of the blue. He’d been blushing the other day at the banquet, just because he’d managed to pronounce a few Volstov words right. And it’d been his bodyguard, not he, himself, who’d gone for it when Caius got too close.

  The sort of man who wasn’t on the defensive in the slightest wasn’t the sort who was plotting something.

  In short, the Emperor was selling—and pretty hard, too—but I wasn’t buying. Not yet.

  Then I thought I caught my name, which made me snap to attention quick as anything—though part of that was to do with the elbow Greylace had thrown into my side. He was a sharp little lizard, and I was going to pay him back for that. Just as soon as I figured out what was going on.