given me the vial he’d worn around his neck, almost like jewelry, a living red stone that changed with every tiny movement. I’d debated on keeping it, for a time. However strange it might have seemed to anyone else, it would have served as a reminder as well as some kind of memento from my brother—but in the end Kouje had convinced me to have it destroyed.
It was too dangerous to have such a thing about. It never ought to have been created in the first place.
The stroke of the longbow had not killed Iseul—not even I presumed myself able to kill a man as fierce and strong as my brother; only the gods could do that. I merely wounded him badly enough to stop him in his tracks before he was able to murder any of the Volstovic delegates. To do such a thing under the banner of diplomacy was unimaginable, the act of someone whose reason had left him entirely. I was not so lucky. I knew what reason told me, that my brother was too dangerous to live with madness coursing through his blood as the fever had through mine.
But I had not been able to kill him. Iseul was my brother, and more than that, he was Emperor over us all. I would not put him down like a mad dog in the streets. He deserved the chance to take his own life, as every man did; he deserved to accept honor in death as he had not in life.
I met with him only once; after that, his last command was that I cease to visit him, and duty bound me to obey. Our last conversation was short and shed no illumination upon the man he’d been and the man he’d become.
“You aimed poorly,” he said. Sitting in his cell, with bars between us, and Volstovic guards standing beside Ke-Han soldiers, his back was just as proud as it had always been—as proud as I imagined our father was, even at the last moment.
“I’m not the marksman you are,” I replied.
My brother the Emperor turned his head away from me. “Father would never accept your excuses,” he said. “When you are Emperor, and these red-coated fools infest our people and change the land, at least try to become a little more ruthless. When you miss your mark, you shame even your enemy. Dismissed.”
That was the last I saw of him, and so I tried to remember him as he was when he was a boy: less beaten; imposing without imparting terror; on his way toward becoming a man.
It had been one week since the attack on the palace. Ever since we’d shut Iseul away in one of the holding chambers that had miraculously remained standing despite the assaults on our architecture by General Alcibiades—the diplomat whose horse we’d stolen—I’d been counting the days, knowing that my brother would do the same as our father before him. There were whispers from some who had come to believe that Iseul had engineered the death of the Emperor before him; I knew that was not so. There were many things my brother was capable of—I’d experienced a plenitude of them firsthand—but the murder of our father was not one of them.
We were both bound by the same tradition, one that wrapped itself around a ceremonial knife with a handle of carved jade.
Seated in my chambers, which had been my father’s first and Iseul’s second, my fingers traced the shape of one of the jade ornaments my brother had worn in his hair as Emperor.
“My aim with the bow is not as good as it once was,” I told Kouje as he knelt.
I felt like a stranger in my new robes—black to denote mourning, blue to denote the land, and small designs of gold to denote my new station. After all my time outdoors, they felt stiff and nearly stifling. They would take some getting used to, along with everything else.
At least it was only the two of us in the room. Soon, after the sun had set on the seventh day, I would have to begin the long process of appointing new servants for my entourage, not to mention tallying up casualties among the palace guards and the troops my brother had hidden in the mountains, some of whom had starved to death chasing mountain cats while they waited for new provisions.
The Esar had sent a report to the capital shortly after we’d arrived, stating that the matter of