I am gone, you will be sworn to his youngest son.”
My father always looked out at the river. Never at me.
I had not understood then—as I came to in later years—that my father’s message to me was a gift. In his own way, he tried to tell me that the best servant is as the river, patiently giving over everything in its body to the greater ocean. After some time, I came to understand that it was not a simple man’s will that governed this balance but nature itself. It was thus my duty and my nature to watch over Mamoru, the youngest prince, and serve our great Emperor in this fashion. I did this, to the best of my abilities, since the day my lord Mamoru was born, twenty-five years ago. At the time, I was no more than seven.
Then, sudden and violent as all things in war, matters changed.
It was not a cataclysmic change, though many would have argued the fact. When the Emperor took his own life for honor, it was a subtler change, like a shifting of weight that came over the palace where before everything had been well balanced. Our lord Iseul was of course the rightful heir to his father’s legacy, and any man with an eye for strategy could see that it was perhaps not the worst time for him to ascend to the throne. For despite our losses at the hands of the Volstov, the eldest prince had gained much respect among the people for his cunning as a general of war. If anyone could lift us from the depths of our shame and defeat, it would surely be the Emperor’s firstborn son, who was now Emperor himself. Iseul was young enough yet to begin his own era but old enough to have been tested as a warlord and found capable.
It was a better chance at rebuilding than any one man among the Ke-Han could have hoped for.
It had shattered my prince to lose his father in ways that it had not shattered Iseul. But then, that was only to be expected. Of the two, Mamoru was the more tender.
“Ready enough,” Mamoru said, from the depths of his room, “if not prepared.”
“My lord,” I said, bowing low. It was a game we often played before parties or banquets—though it was habit this time, and not youthful nervousness, which compelled the exchange.
The jade ornaments in my lord Mamoru’s hair clacked softly against one another as he stepped past me, the sound of them almost hidden in the hustle and bustle of servants rushing up and down the hall, gossiping with one another over the distant, uncultured thud of foreign boots. It seemed strange to imagine that, not so long ago, the sound would have signaled the approach of enemy troops. Perhaps the lords in charge of talks would remember that, and tactfully request that the diplomats remove their shoes.
Their doing so wasn’t entirely likely. The lords charged with governing the talks had been chosen specifically for their absence from the war itself. As I understood it, they were for the most part courtiers, men who hadn’t seen enough to personalize the conflict and so could approach peace with a clear head.
I envied them their clear heads, just as I envied them their untroubled sleep. They would not reach for their weapons at night when they heard the tremor of heavy leather boots against the floor.
The prince paused at a junction in the hall. Perhaps he, too, was ill at ease among the new flurries of activity everywhere one turned. A servant was not meant to make noise where he or she walked, but with the early arrival of the diplomats from Volstov, many of them had succumbed to near panic, and allowed their footfalls to sound heavily against the floor without care for who heard their comings and goings.
There was to be an audience that night between the diplomats and our esteemed Emperor Iseul, as well as the seven houses that held a place of honor beneath his crest. Preceding that, there would be a dinner in the Emperor’s own dining hall.
If things had been different, the death of an emperor—so fierce a warrior, so proud a man—would have disallowed feasting in all forms, and only plain rice would have been eaten so as not to offend the gods with excess while mourning.
Things, however, were as they were. No small river could change them.
I had my own interest, carefully concealed, in whether or