A little shiver ran down my spine, the fingers of some unseen hand, and I didn’t even once suspect it was part of Caius Greylace’s Talent. “Tabs’re being kept on us,” I snarled. “Aren’t they?”
“That was the very same conclusion I came to, myself,” Caius said, “as I pondered this dilemma while you drooled into your pillow.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Fuck,” Caius Greylace agreed. “What a horrible word that is, but I suppose it will serve. In this instance only, mind; I don’t approve of it otherwise.”
“You’re not…” I began, but Caius clucked.
“I’m not Yana?” he supplied.
“What about my letters to her?” I demanded. “Have they been changed?”
“That I have no way of knowing,” he replied. “I do hope, however, you haven’t been indiscreet, and that, if you have had any private information, any suspicions, you have kept them to yourself and away from her. We don’t want to draw any further suspicion; you’ve already caused a great deal of commotion. And, exciting as it may be, now that all eyes are on the dashing hero Alcibiades, it makes it very difficult for us to investigate anything at all.”
“Your,” I managed, forcing my brain to work. “Your Talent—You’re a velikaia. Why don’t you find out who’s pulling this shit, and we’ll—”
“We’ll what, Alcibiades?” Caius asked.
I snorted. “I’ve a few ideas,” I said. “Just leave that part to me.”
“My Talent doesn’t exactly work that way.” Caius sighed. For a moment I saw that familiar, fleeting pout pass over his features, and I was almost comforted by how familiar they were, the only thing I recognized anymore amidst all the smoke and mirrors, the hanging scrolls and the standing screens, the painted doors that slid open to reveal everything rotting away behind the gilded colors. “It is much more complicated than all that. If only things were different… But they aren’t, and I am as I am, and we must do things more slowly. Perhaps that’s for the best—it will give you time to cool your heels. Think of the bright side, my dear: Yana Berger is safe and sound with her chickens and your brothers, and we are the ones who may keep her that way!”
With that, Caius Greylace removed his hands and my headache from my head. I was caught with a sudden dizziness I couldn’t shake off, and by the time my thoughts had cleared, he was once again sitting in the only comfortable chair. Damn him, I thought, but there was some respect there.
He was useful, anyway. And clever.
“So what now?” I asked, folding the offending letter and setting it down on the table beside me.
“Breakfast, I imagine,” Caius replied, his lips spreading into a soft grin with a flash of pearly white teeth behind it. “And then we shall sit down to compose a long and detailed epistle to dear Yana telling her how wonderful things are in the Ke-Han Empire.”
MAMORU
“You,” the playwright said, waving me over. “That’s right, you. I don’t bite, unless I’m playing substitute for the fox. That man of yours keeps a close eye on you; we both know it. But I’ve a line or two that needs testing.”
If Kouje had been beside me, he would have bristled at the tone the man chose to take with me, even if he didn’t mean anything by it. As it was, most of the group had managed to rope Kouje into hard labor as we stopped for the night, hauling trunks of costumes and juggling sticks and the like from the back of one cart to another. He’d been given time enough only to cast one helpless look over his shoulder toward me before Aiko pulled him in the direction of working for our suppers. And, of course, the border crossing.
The wall rose high above us in the night, illimitable and fearsome. If we could just get across it, then we would be all right; I knew it deep in my bones. But for the moment it stood between us and our escape, and I was as frightened of it as I had been of the Volstov dragons. It was on the same scale and, beyond that, it meant just as much—a cruel, stark metaphor, the symbol of oppression.
Yet it was only a wall.
I’d been left to myself, or so I’d thought; apparently there were rare few among the group’s number that were useless, and I and the playwright were together in that count. In the distance, I heard one of the actors shouting, and the