to be until we signed more than a few provisionary treaties about islands hundreds of miles from here and dragon parts that were barely more than scrap metal now.
I was just about to break my chair down into something more comfortable when the strange panel of wood I’d noticed before slid open, nice and smooth. The Ke-Han kept their doors well oiled, which was something to note, in the service of a silence that got under my skin and stayed there.
“What in bastion are you doing?” I demanded, ready to use my chair as a weapon. It was better suited for that, just the right amount of heavy, and fitted with sharp corners at the ends.
“Are you going to hit me with that?” Caius Greylace, fresh out of a bath and smelling like roses, was standing in the open space; light from behind him poured through into my dimly lit room, and steam, too. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or terrified.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re going to be wearing tonight,” he went on smoothly, brushing damp, pale hair out of his eyes.
“Red,” I snapped, eyeing him warily. “Why in bastion d’you want to know that?”
“No, no,” he said, waving his hand about. “Of course you’ll be wearing red; I ascertained that earlier, in the carriage. I meant what style of garment.”
“Style?” I repeated.
He gave me a look like he thought I was the insane idiot of us two, which made me wonder if I hadn’t been right in the first place when I was still thinking he was a Ke-Han assassin. I should have hit him with the chair. “Style,” he said. “Of garment. That you will be wearing. Tonight. During the festivities. In our honor. Are you suffering from some sort of postwar mental deficiency? I hear it plagues old soldiers something dreadful.”
“I’m going to be wearing red,” I repeated.
“Are you going to be wearing that?” he asked.
I figured he meant my jacket, which was fine as far as I could see, and I bristled. “Served me well enough during the war,” I ground out.
“Yes, I’m sure it did, by the look of it,” he said. “Well, if you insist. I’m not entirely sure I have anything that will match even remotely, but I suppose I shall have to do the best I can under the circumstances.”
“Best you can,” I said.
“Under the circumstances,” he concluded.
“Right,” I said. “Except—we’re matching?”
I was starting to realize that all the stories about Caius Greylace I’d heard from disreputable and reputable sources alike—about how he was seventeen different kinds of cracked, about how his parents had just as good as let wolves raise him, about how you couldn’t be near him without getting the queer feeling that you were riding the center of some wild fucking storm—had been truths, all of them. Mostly I got that from the way he was looking at me, all uneven, because of the unevenness of his eyes.
As if he could read my thoughts—and maybe he could; I didn’t know much about that kind of thorny Talent—he pushed some hair over the bad eye, the left one, and set to examining his nails.
“Of course we’re matching,” he said. “If we’re to arrive together.”
“This isn’t dolls and houses,” I muttered.
“Oh, no,” he said, offering me a sharp-toothed smile. “It’s so much better.”
KOUJE
I was a boy when my own father died, younger than either of the princes, but better prepared, since his had been a long-fought battle with illness.
Before his condition worsened, he often took me to the river while my mother slept, her face grown thin and weary with caring for him. He towered over me, then and forever, since I never had the years in which to grow and surpass him.
“Look, Kouje,” he said to me, one large hand placed against my shoulder, his voice ragged with the cough that had taken root in his chest. “See how the river flows ever onward, pouring all it has into the distant great ocean?”
I was still young, and more interested in the sunburnt autumn leaves or the toy boats bobbing cheerfully in the current. Nevertheless, I loved my father. What was more, it was my duty to listen when he spoke.
“Our family has served the Emperor for countless proud years,” he continued. There was more gray than black in his beard, though his hair remained dark as ever, his jaw cut sharp and proud. “When