into his thoughts like common thieves, and everything would at least have felt a little more normal.
Which nothing was.
Things were—to put it simply—bad. The situation couldn’t be fixed, and it was clear to us all by now that the Emperor had been planning on it all along. We’d just stepped right into his neat little trap and he’d been waiting all that time, laughing to himself, to spring it. There was no way to contact anyone outside of the capital, which meant we were prisoners of a war we’d thought, up until a few hours ago, had actually ended when we crushed the bastards.
Except he hadn’t seen it that way. Apparently being beaten didn’t have the same definition to him.
Lying bastard. I cursed the day Iseul was born, and it must have showed a little in the expression (more like a grimace) I was making, because suddenly Temur was talking like he was the mind reader and not “my friend.”
“Do not think that because an emperor behaves one way he influences the behavior of all his people,” Temur said. “I, too, thought that peace was possible.”
I snorted. “I’m not allowed to say anything,” I said finally. “Josette’ll kill me, for one. Whatever I talk about’ll just make things worse.”
“It is not as though things can get much worse at the moment,” Temur replied, “considering you have taken me prisoner as a counteraction for being taken prisoner, yourself.”
“Well, I don’t want to see if they can get worse,” I replied. Because, chances were and with how everything had been going, they could. And they were going to. And I didn’t want to be behind it all any more than I already was.
If that was even possible. I wasn’t sure anymore, especially considering the company I’d been keeping lately. It was one of the things I’d have written Yana about if it’d been Yana I was writing to and not some poor bastard Ke-Han scribe stuck writing responses to our letters.
“There are not many crimes in the Ke-Han Empire worse than holding a warlord captive,” Lord Temur said, turning his words over carefully. That wasn’t anything new. “You could attempt to assassinate the Emperor himself, of course, but as you no doubt remember, the punishment for that is considerably more dire.”
“Your laws don’t bind us,” I told him, trying to make it sound like I knew what I was talking about and not like I was making it all up as I went along. “What I mean is… Well, you know. We’re not the same. You can’t just stick us in the ground and call us lilies when we’re really petunias.”
Lord Temur raised his eyebrows. “Petunias? I don’t believe I’ve seen that particular specimen in our gardens.”
“Country flower,” I said, crossing my arms and staring down at the floor. My boots still had mud on them from our adventure at the theatre. If Josette came in, she was going to rip me a new one for talking when I’d as good as promised not to. But I was starting to think that maybe our fine captive lord was right, that there wasn’t much worse we could do than kidnapping one of the seven warlords.
Fighting the war had been a lot damned easier when everything had been out in the open. I wasn’t made for all that subterfuge.
“A country flower,” Lord Temur repeated. There was a funny look in his eyes when he opened them, almost like he was sharing a joke with me. “Much like I am. Wouldn’t you say so, General Alcibiades?”
“Suppose so,” I muttered, wondering just when he’d gone and cultivated a sense of humor. Probably planned it just to throw me off for that moment. I knew enough now not to assume anything about the Ke-Han as a whole, but most of them were definitely tricky enough to try a tactic like that.
The thing was, I’d never thought Lord Temur was one of the tricky ones. And even if I’d been wrong and he had been, after the number Caius’d done on him, I’d have been surprised if he could scheme his way out of bed, let alone getting past me. I didn’t entirely like the look of him, pale as the folding screen in my room and tired as if he’d spent the whole night out drinking, which was an image that nearly set me to laughing.
“Am I to be kept here, then?” Lord Temur asked caustically. His eyes flicked from one wall to the other, scanning the