taste his food for poison and to guard his person from those who would wish him ill. If I could only perform my duty well enough to take in the poison before it reached my lord, in whatever form it came, I could consider my life well spent.
CHAPTER TWO
ALCIBIADES
According to Caius Greylace, it wasn’t a show of solidarity or support for Volstov that the new Emperor had this big red spot on his robes, but that didn’t stop me from feeling better about how eager everyone was to turn colors. I was the only man wearing red at the dinner, save for the Emperor and Caius, who was wearing what looked like some kind of red bow in his hair.
“It’s a local hair ornament,” Caius said.
To my way of thinking, though, he looked too much like one of those stuffed bears you win for your childhood sweetheart at a fair. But, I had to admit, out of everyone who was trying to affect the Ke-Han style of dress and failing, Caius Greylace was the only one who didn’t look like a giant, ass-backwards fool. So that might have been one reason why the crazy little snake had been added to this mission in the first place.
Other than that, the new Emperor’s way of dealing with us was not to talk at all for the first half hour of the meal—as though he thought he could make us crack just by sitting up straight as a rod, with all eyes on him, taking his food from his poison taster and eating it like he was king of the world and not, in fact, the Emperor of a conquered country.
“Isn’t the young prince nice-looking, though?” Caius murmured at my left, putting a hand on my elbow and almost making me drop my bowl of half-cooked food. It wouldn’t have made much difference. I didn’t have a poison taster, and I wasn’t eating it.
I gave Greylace a look that put across all my disgust. He cooed happily, like a pigeon.
“It’s remarkable they’re brothers, that’s all I mean,” Caius murmured demurely. It was a whisper so quiet, I didn’t even know how I heard it.
I hadn’t even noticed another prince. I knew there was one, of course, since before we’d left the country some ’Versity experts had tried their best to teach us which end was up by drawing us all a helpful little chart of the hierarchy in the Ke-Han. The Emperor was at the top, of course, and his two sons below him; beneath them were seven lords that, for whatever reason, he favored more than the rest. I didn’t have to know the whys of it, just who I was supposed to bow lowest to.
Of course, the Emperor had seen fit to off himself—which put us in quite the situation, arriving so awkwardly on the very day of his death. The Ke-Han didn’t seem to hold that against us. At least, not yet.
The man Greylace was indicating sat just as straight as his brother, with white stone jewelry in his hair and around his throat. Maybe if the Ke-Han had spent a little less time dressing themselves in the morning and a little more time planning out their strategies, we wouldn’t have won the war. Never mind the fact, of course, that they’d been tricky enough to see that we nearly lost.
Anyway, next to the Emperor, the younger prince looked like a pale ghost. Since I wasn’t eating, and since Caius didn’t seem at all inclined toward leaving me in peace until I answered his question, I thought about what he’d said. The younger prince’s face seemed more expressive than the Emperor’s did, that was for certain. He looked more like a person, and less like the stern-eyed statues we’d seen standing in the outer gardens.
“He’s smaller,” I said, since I couldn’t say half of what I wanted: that he looked less full of himself, too. Such things went against the spirit of diplomacy, and who knew who was listening and for what purpose?
“Aren’t you eating that?” Caius wanted to know, gesturing toward my plate. “It has the most divine flavor!”
“It looks like—” I stopped myself partway, poking at the bowl with one of the little sticks they’d given us to eat with. They were dainty and delicate and slippery, and I’d managed to snap the other one in half earlier. I was half-expecting my meal to poke back, but it just sat there, soggy, like it didn’t care one way