wine had done away with them completely, as evidenced by the fact that, just last night, I’d saved the life of the Emperor of the Ke-Han by stepping between him and an assassin’s blade.
I didn’t even like the man. Truth was, I hated him. It was something different from the way I felt about that little bugger Caius, who’d proven both how worthy and how infuriating he was on countless occasions, to the point where I was almost getting used to being driven up the wall by him, and that was frightening.
But I hated the Emperor of the Ke-Han with everything I had in me, for every man I’d lost and every friend who’d died, for every story I’d known was false but had allowed to harden my heart against the enemy anyway. He wasn’t human. He was a fucking monster; anyone could see that as soon as look at him, apparently even his own people. That actor’d looked at me right before he died and suddenly, we were on the same side as one another, except for one thing: I’d fucking stopped him.
“Bastion blast,” I snarled at the pillow.
“I hear you in there, Alcibiades,” Caius said. “Are you decent?”
“No!” I shouted, and meant it, and regretted it almost as immediately, when my head started buzzing like there was an entire hive of bees up inside of it.
“No worries,” Caius said. “I can wait.”
Maybe I’d get a commendation, I thought dizzily as I pulled myself from the bed and stumbled toward the bedside basin. Cold water in there, as always. I resisted, somehow, the urge to stick my head in it, hoping I could drown myself that easily. I might’ve done it, too, to get myself out of there, except I’d never yet run from a fight and that was the fight of my life.
I was General fucking Alcibiades of the fucking Glendarrow. I was a stupid kid leaving home so I could fight in a war I didn’t even understand, so I could be hard and strong like every man I’d ever known, so I could take down the other side and be some kind of a hero or, if I was lucky, I could at least not be dead. I was a soldier, first and foremost, before I’d ever been a general, and I’d fought the Ke-Han Emperor hand to hand just before I’d gone and saved his bastion-damned life.
Only it wasn’t my emperor. It wasn’t the Emperor we’d come to hate but this young bastard of a crazy upstart, and all those stories faded in comparison to what I’d seen.
I’d always assumed the Ke-Han Emperor had his people behind him. Otherwise, what the hell were they fighting for? How in bastion’s name had he managed to make them fight all these years?
Clearly his son wasn’t half the man that he had been.
And between the two I was confusing myself between hate and respect.
The water in the basin was freezing and I was glad for it, splashing it all over my face until I couldn’t feel my nose or my chin. Like being garrisoned up in the mountains during raid season, glad for the cold that meant no one could smell anything and no one had to get naked enough to bathe. Those were the ever-loving days—not a nightmare of being polite and wearing the right things and sitting at low tables while your legs cramped and your eyes crossed and everybody talked and laughed, polite as you’d like, with all the things we’d done to each other during the war boiling under the surface.
Peace? Everyone wanted peace? Was that what Emperor Iseul was thinking when he’d sliced open that poor bastard’s throat, or was it something else?
I’d get on my horse and ride out of here first thing if my horse hadn’t been stolen.
“Let’s see,” Caius called, from the partitioning door. Somehow, the Ke-Han had known this would happen; they’d divined the future and put us together just to make me crazy. “Yana says that the chickens are very healthy. You have chickens? How utterly delightful, Alcibiades! How does one go about raising chickens, I wonder? And don’t they wake you up in the morning something awful?”
I bowed my head over the cold water and closed my eyes. All I could see was Caius standing, probably wearing some feathered night robe made of silk and sunshine, just next to the door separating us. He wasn’t suffering from any headache—though, in all fairness, I couldn’t have said he