He dismounted, and I scurried forward to take the reins from him.
The guard moved down the line to yell at a merchant whose chickens had got free of his wagon and were milling about in the road, clucking indignantly at all the fuss.
I breathed a quiet sigh of relief and tried to ignore the sense of mounting dread as the line crept forward. Kouje stood in front of me, silent and impassive as the border wall, but I drew what strength I could from his solemnity. Worrying about what might happen would only serve to make me look more suspicious, and I couldn’t afford to do anything that might catch the attention of the guards.
I’d never spent so much time observing my feet before. It closed the world out, drawing everything that mattered to rest right there at my toes. There was a crowd there, and the line moved slowly under the sun.
At least, I thought wryly, I knew that there would be no holdup because the prince had been found. I scuffed my sandal against the dusty road and thought of what it meant to be a servant.
They were always small—smaller even than I was, though I’d never be an imposing man like Iseul or my father. Smallness was a state of mind, one which royalty were not encouraged to foster, but it was a different smallness from the mincing steps the women of the court took in order to better display their skirts and sleeves. They were small in the same way I’d realized, with a terrible shock on my thirteenth birthday, that even Kouje—Kouje, who’d always seemed so big—was small. Small by comparison, I thought, and hunched my shoulders around myself.
I reminded myself of sleeping on dirt, of catching my own rabbits to eat; I reminded myself of the way my brother treated the men and women of the house—as though they weren’t even there.
I was concentrating so hard on what it meant to be small that I forgot, it would seem, what it meant to listen.
“I said, move it along” one of the common guards repeated to me, kicking dust toward my feet. Beside me, Kouje stiffened, but I murmured the usual apologies in time-honored form before I scuffled in the right direction.
We were just at the door, where the wall opened up into a white-pebbled courtyard. There were the barracks where the border guards slept in rotation, the low walkways between humble buildings; and there, just beyond, were green fields with tall grasses, stirred by the wind. The low roofs were thatched, not shingled. Truly, we were in country provinces, as far from the capital as my imagination had taken me. We were in the commander of the Guard’s territory: a man so unimportant that I’d never been required to learn his name. Country nobles and those from the capital rarely saw eye to eye, and had even less reason to. It wasn’t as if we ever sat down to share our meals.
That was for the best. No man there would recognize me.
I knew the commander first by his shoes: fine, strong boots, not as muddy as the common guards’ were, and he walked with a presence of bearing that revealed his status. I chanced a look no higher than his knees as he walked past us.
“Two,” he said, addressing himself to Kouje, “is a very unlucky number these days.”
“So I’ve heard,” Kouje replied, adopting a country accent. Later, I would have to ask him whether or not it was from his own hometown, or something he’d conjured on the spot. “I’ve spent time enough already just trying to get back to my sister. She’s just had a boy, you know.”
“My congratulations on your honor,” the commander said.
“My thanks on your congratulations,” Kouje replied.
He was being careful, addressing the commander with the strictest courtesy available. It was a mystery to me how he’d slipped into the role so easily, until I realized that Kouje, being a better servant than I, had mastered both the art of being small as well as the art of listening. He was echoing everything he’d heard, every conversation that had taken place before him as though he were nothing more than a mirror. He’d learned from them, well enough to play at being a noble himself.
I had to prevent my face from showing surprise when I realized that Kouje was everything my brother feared most in his servants. He was too clever,