died for honor before he donned the robes I was wearing, but my brother had always known more pride than I. I’d envied him once, but I had come to see how pride had changed him.
All of Xi’an was, and ever would be, within his grasp. My fingers tightened involuntarily. Kouje began to clear up our camp, more meticulously slow than he ever had been. It was more to delay our proceedings—hoping for some grand inspiration, another stroke of luck—while the gods watched us, an impassive audience, rather than the active patrons of country theatre performed in a roadside inn. There were neither cheers nor curses to indicate we were playing our roles well or very poorly indeed.
I watched Kouje when his back was turned. He still held himself like a soldier, especially when we were alone. I myself was no less to blame for mistakes in comportment than he; it was no wonder Aiko had discovered us as quickly as she had. Among the others we’d been less immediately noticeable, but on our own it would be easy enough to discover I wasn’t the woman I pretended to be.
Iseul—the Iseul I’d known from childhood—would have thrown back his head to laugh if he saw me then, both changed and unchanged, dressed as though I were about to sell travelers dumplings rather than lead my people, as my father’s son.
Would Iseul even recognize me if I was caught?
How you’ve changed, little brother, he’d say. How common you’ve become. I could barely tell the difference between you and your servant…
“Kouje,” I said, over the sound of him tramping through the brush, kicking branches aside.
He stilled, and glanced back toward me. “Please tell me you’ve just had an incredible idea,” he said.
“Your servant,” I explained. It wasn’t clear yet, but it was my brother himself who’d inspired it. It was right; I knew it was. “They’ll never suspect—if you are the lord, and I am the servant.”
Kouje shook his head. As understanding dawned on him, I could see his disapproval; it went against everything that we were, and of course that was the point. No one would ever believe that a prince would lower himself so close to the ground as to play the servant. “No,” he said. “I don’t think I understand, Mamoru. There’s got to be something else, if we just spend more time on it—”
“Your clothes now aren’t all that wrong,” I continued. He would have to overcome his misgivings; I would have to convince him to overcome them. “If you took the sash—my sash, from before—it would even look right. And you hold yourself better than a country lord; they’d believe you. And they’d never guess that anyone, anyone, would let the prince walk behind him, carrying our bags like a common servant. I could even lead the horse, and they would never even pause to look at me. If I were your servant, Kouje, they would not even notice I was there.”
“No,” Kouje insisted. “Mamoru, that is—You don’t understand. It is too much.”
His propriety would be both our undoing. I was up from my seat at once, and grasping him by the front of his shirt. “It is the only way, unless you wish to live here in the woods like two wild men. Perhaps, as Goro suggested, we might see the mountain spirits, and beg them for some supernatural power—then I could fly to your sister, and carry you with me! But should that fail, we will have done no more than to tarry here, wasting precious time, and angering those same gods who have given us all our chances thus far by squandering the same inspiration they have given us!”
“We would anger those gods if I led you along behind me like—Like chattel,” Kouje said. His eyes were all dark anger. I recognized the darkness from nights in the mountains, when the dragons flew overhead; or when they tore through the wall, and the air rained fire down upon the capital, and all the animals of the menagerie were set free into the streets, and we could not find one another.
But this was not the same. This was pride—the same pride that had so changed my brother; the same pride that made Iseul believe all of Xi’an was written, like the future, upon the back of his hand.
“You are a prince,” Kouje said.
“Not anymore.”
Something went hard in Kouje’s face, so that for a moment I truly thought that pride might be our undoing. Not some