the sky. It was the perfect sort of night for a midnight raid on the kitchens. Granted, this wasn’t my country estate, but it was always possible to sniff the kitchens out, and they were the one place in any country that never closed down completely for the night. What if the Emperor got peckish? It would never do to be caught off guard.
I didn’t have much experience in raiding Ke-Han kitchens, of course, but I’d done that sort of thing often enough during my term in exile. Food was essentially the same everywhere you went, once you got right down to the bare bones of it. It didn’t matter one whit whether the Ke-Han pantries were stocked with rice or with bread. Except, of course, to men like Alcibiades.
I stood up, quite glad that I hadn’t changed for bed after all, even if my night set was brand-new, blue silk, to match all the rest.
It was the longest I’d gone without experiencing the need for some variety in my clothing, but I suspected that had something to do with the finery of the garments I wore and the utter foreignness of their shape and style.
Why, it might even take weeks to tire of them. If so, I had grossly overpacked.
Alcibiades looked at me with a carefully concealed measure of hope, as if he thought that I was finally going to sleep, and he could at last retire, or at least close the adjoining door between us. He’d been eyeing it for some time. Fortunately for him, I was in a generous mood, and of no mind to hold such a thing against him.
“Let’s go and find some rice, then!” I said, with the air of someone embarking on a wonderful adventure. Alcibiades seemed like the type of man who needed that sort of nudge in the right direction.
“What?”
It was almost as if the man hadn’t been following.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never gone to the kitchens past nightfall,” I said, though I was privately imagining that Alcibiades probably hadn’t.
He grunted, which I took to mean that I’d imagined correctly.
“I’m used to eating my fill at dinner, that’s all,” he went on, after the fact.
His hunger was most promising if it meant that I wouldn’t have to spend the bulk of my time translating Alcibiades’ grunts into proper words. I wasn’t any good as an interpreter. I slipped my hands underneath his arms and tugged him to his feet. I’d have never managed it if he hadn’t been so surprised, but then I’d rather been expecting him to be heavier than he was.
It was far too early for him to be wasting away to nothing in any case.
“The sooner we leave, the sooner you eat,” I said.
The palace halls were darkened when we slid the door to my room open. At one junction, far off in the distance, I could see a lantern-bearer, his lamplight reflecting in the mirrors set at each corner of the corridor and lighting their way like a staircase of stars around the twists and bends of the narrow corridor.
“Do you think they ever get a terrible scare, seeing their own reflections in the middle of the night?” I asked.
Alcibiades looked at me, then looked at the lantern-bearer. He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe,” he said.
I nudged him with my elbow, fishing again for an entire sentence. “Wouldn’t it frighten you?”
“I’m not afraid of myself,” he said. “Or the dark. So I guess not, no.”
I nodded, taking his arm in a swift gesture. “I didn’t think so.”
It wouldn’t have scared me, either.
As we passed the palace servants, the lanterns lit the change on their faces from a nearly uniform expression of utter boredom to one of concern and slight confusion. Perhaps if they’d known the words to ask us what we were doing, they would have done so. As it was, they merely watched us, hiding their bafflement as best they could after their initial shock. We must have seemed like ghosts in the night to them, unused as they were to our presence.
That cemented it. While I was there, I would almost certainly have to learn the Ke-Han language more idiomatically. It was nearly unbearable to think of all the gossip I might miss out on over something so silly as a language barrier.
I drew close to Alcibiades once we’d passed the lantern-bearers, and the hallways grew dark once more.
“Don’t you think this will put us under suspicion?” I asked him. “Two men from Volstov, out and