and bats of fear around me like the tendrils of a cloud. They were vague images, flashes of loss and unhappy memory, generalized and therefore clumsy. The more specific I was the more effective I was. This was the equivalent of throwing a net into the waters and hoping the holes were just the right size to catch the fish I was looking for. One or two would be too little; they would slip right through. Those I would have to trust Josette to take care of—and I did trust her.
What did the Ke-Han fear most? Betrayal, loss of honor, dragons.
The vision was gathering strength, and I was pulled along with it. I could feel it growing less and less transparent; it was almost enough to toss before me like a barrier between myself and these strange men.
Just then, the earth began to shake beneath us. It rumbled ferociously, cracking down the center of the gate path like a great snake slithering through water. The stones themselves parted as though they were no more than liquid; the sounds they made were unlike anything I’d heard before from any earthquake or explosion.
It seemed as if our mutual friend General Alcibiades had been lingering where he ought not to have been. Why, the dear worried about us far more than he’d let on!
A geyser burst up from the hole and my horse reared, her eyes white-rimmed with panic. One of the guards screamed and disappeared beneath the ground, while the other men scrambled about, trying to hold formation for a few brief, useless moments before they scattered, desperate to escape the earth itself as rock and dirt jutted upward, tossing heavy paving stones about as though they were nothing more than pebbles, and destroying the carefully-thought-out Ke-Han architecture every which way.
“Go!” Josette called to me, over the howls of the guards and the thundering of the earth. Her horse seemed less upset by that turn of events than my own, though it was dancing restlessly.
“Honestly,” I said, sharing a look with her before turning my own mount in the direction of the inauspicious gate. “He might have hit us!”
KOUJE
I still remembered the day my lord had come to tell me there were no more dragons. It was after the fires in the great dome had been doused, and after the tigers had all been gathered up from the capital and returned to their menagerie. It had been in the early days of the provisional treaty—which was, I’d discovered, when Lady Antoinette and her companion had learned our customs—before the negotiations had begun in earnest. Before the Emperor had taken his life for honor, leaving his eldest son a madman and his second son a fugitive.
I still remembered that day because I remembered the feeling it had given me. Many loyal servants who’d devoted their lifetimes to fighting in the war had felt greatly displaced after its ending.
For those of my generation, the war had been a fact of life since birth. Many had assumed it would end at our deaths, and not before that. So for a great number of people, perhaps even all of us, the end of the war had meant a feeling of confusion and dissatisfaction. No one knew his place in life without the war to give it structure. We were all like the tigers, turned loose in the city streets and found again a bare day later, hiding ourselves in familiar, small spaces. It was all that we knew—a way of life better suited to us than freedom.
My own place, however, had always been at Mamoru’s side.
There had been no uncertainty in my heart at all over the absence of those metal beasts. In its place there was only a kind of peace, and perhaps a relief that came from having served one’s purpose during a difficult time.
I’d never imagined I would find myself riding at Mamoru’s side once again, between the standard-bearer and the scouts, with a legion of foreigners in red at our backs.
I hadn’t been able to speak with Mamoru properly since we’d left Volstov, so I couldn’t know how the new responsibility was weighing on him. The colors were all wrong, and the mountains should have been between us and the sunset, not the sunrise.
At the very least, there was color in Mamoru’s cheeks again—and we both owed that to this foreign land and their foreign magicians—some the very same men and women who had created the dragons in the first place. They