of gladness for this day, when we could still perform our customs with pride in the face of our enemies’ occupation. The shade was there, though, and I could do nothing but push it aside with the experience born of long practice.
Things were not as they should be. My father, even weakened by illness as he was, would still have summoned the will to refuse to dine under such an inauspicious roof.
I sat at Mamoru’s right, just behind him, that I might better taste the food as it came and before it reached my lord’s own lips. I had only been poisoned this way once before, by enemies of the Emperor’s house. It had caused a dreadful fever in my blood, rendering me unfit for duty over a long and torturous period of weeks. In the end, it was nearly a month. Such an experience, however, was made worthwhile when I considered how I had done my duty for my lord and how Mamoru had been spared the suffering.
The rice came first, and there was no taste of any malevolence to mar its clean flavor. I passed it up to the table.
Mamoru nodded his thanks, the gesture curt and mannered.
The men from Volstov were staring up at the high table still, their mouths open in awe, as though, in all their years since birth, they’d never learned to close them. If they were waiting for the Emperor to make a speech, they would be waiting a long time. Custom dictated that discussions of politics were to be had only after a proper dinner. Fire could be lit in an empty belly. In a full one, there was no room for it.
Iseul seated himself with a rustling of fabric, his taster at his left, so that no man would come between him and his brother. It was important, now more than ever, to make a show of unshakable unity.
If pressed to the point of a sword, I might have admitted that my unease did not subside throughout the course of the meal. Rather, it remained fixed firmly in my mind, impossible to ignore, like the weight in the air before a lightning storm.
I had grown up alongside Iseul. I had never been assigned to his service, but we were nearly peers in age, and as such I had been privy to his growth into a man simply because I had been doing the same thing at the same time. As such, I could recall an incident with Volstovic prisoners of war, taken captive when my lord Mamoru had been just shy of four, and I myself had been eleven. I was allowed into the great reception hall for the first time that year while my lord took his afternoon nap—his condition being particularly delicate in his earlier years—and it was there that I first saw the elder prince in full regalia, dressed every inch like the heir to the empire, and seated beside the Emperor himself with the gravest of expressions on his face.
“It is for my son to decide their fates,” the Emperor had said. “For soon enough, every decision for the well-being of this country will be his, and how else might he learn than through practice?”
The seven warlords had nodded their assent, any mistrust carefully hidden beneath their courtly masks. How could a child be trusted, after all, to understand the gravity of their situation?
The young prince had raised his head, eyes sharp and lined with kohl.
“Have them killed,” he said. “The chance for escape is too great. We fight Volstov from outside our borders, and we cannot afford to fight them from within as well.”
I could not have read any of the expressions in the room, even if I’d tried. The experienced members of court had all been trained since birth to keep everything to themselves, and as someone relatively new to palace life, I could not hope to breach those barriers. Yet I was still experienced enough to perceive that his decision had been an unexpected one.
No one, of course, expected a child to have such capacity for ruthlessness. Iseul proved himself to be a man filled with surprises from a very young age.
It was an impression I have never forgotten since—the first indication of his capabilities, but certainly not the last.
Soup came after the rice, then the fish course. All were untampered with. In my time at the palace, and with the war’s end it was my charge to look after the prince Mamoru, to