seemed almost unfair that I was seeing it without them. They deserved the experience more than I did.
The room I was being held in was so unfamiliar that I had no way to translate it, either. A high ceiling, domed from within; decorations in inlaid stone that caught the light and scattered it, vibrant orange, across the floor; a high, polished door with a golden knob; ostentatious furniture, like a cabinet of some sort, also with inlaid knobs. No wonder I felt so blind there.
I drew my robes around me—at least those were familiar—and leaned back against the plump pillows. Perhaps it was difficult for me to remember the way of being a prince because I was in a strange bed, surrounded by people I’d never met and weakened by fever. When I grasped the fabric with my fingers they felt insubstantial, like water.
Somehow I knew that even all that would never have stopped Iseul from knowing how to be Emperor. It was in his blood like the fever was in mine, intractable and waiting for an opportunity to reassert itself.
“Mamoru,” said a voice, breaking me from my reverie, and I found my gaze irresistibly drawn to the door—where Kouje was standing. He looked like a ghost come down from the mountains, all pale skin and purple shadows beneath his eyes. Surrounded by finery for the first time, it was evident just how tired he was, and how thin, like an imprint of a man instead of the real thing.
I wondered if I looked much the same. More than that, I wondered how Kouje had managed to get us into the city at all, considering the fact that we looked nothing at all like Ke-Han royalty. Even a palace retainer was better kept than we were.
Even fishermen were.
I drew in a deep breath to speak and realized I was smiling.
“Kouje,” I said.
He came to stand by my bed, eyeing the men standing around us with a wary caution, as though they were something other than magicians or doctors or both. The man who talked too much—Royston—looked delicately away, though the others were not quite as polite as he. Now that I didn’t have to squint, I could see that some of them were scribbling notes, while others were examining strange-looking instruments that shone silver in the bright light. It was fascinating, in a way, and completely different from our ways of medicine, not to mention our magicians, whose power had depended greatly on the great blue dome destroyed by the dragons’ final assault on our capital.
I hadn’t been homesick in all our time on the road. I’d missed things, certainly, but the danger had still been too close, and the need for vigilance so constant, that I had never allowed myself to sit down and simply miss everything before. Now I did. It was a sobering feeling.
“How are you?” Kouje asked, so quietly that I suspected he was wary of our translators as well.
“Better,” I said, not bothering to lower my tone. “But it is morning, and they say that they haven’t quite diagnosed it yet. I’m not sure what all this is.” For the benefit of the others around us, I added, “We have no such instruments in the Ke-Han.”
Kouje’s gaze turned troubled, and he glanced away from me for a moment. Not for the first time, I felt the separation between us that had been caused by the fever. He knew things that I didn’t, things I’d missed during my delirium and wouldn’t ever have the chance to know.
If we’d still been in the forest, I’d have reached out to tug at his sleeve, drawing his attention to me that way. Yet we were in Volstov, and I could no longer act like a traveling actor, or even a fugitive. There was a protocol for refugees, especially those of royal blood, and I would not shame my ancestors by pretending to have forgotten it.
I sat up a little straighter, though the pillows helped me more than good breeding.
“Perhaps I should speak with them,” Kouje said, as though wrestling with some invisible foe in his mind. “There are things that I could tell them—things you might not remember, my lord, since you were in the grips of it.”
He had stumbled over not using my given name, so that I knew he’d remembered himself as well and was just as bound not to shame his family. It was almost funny, after how long it had taken me to convince him