My father was not a man: He was an emperor. I hadn’t been the son he wanted, but I was the son he’d been given, and while he and Iseul were better suited for each other—silent even at private dinners in the same grave manner, with wills as swift and fierce as the gods—he had been the father I was given.
Had I ever thought that we would lose? What haunted me was the question that implied: Had he?
It was thus that I fell asleep, or must have, with my cheeks streaked by tears as though I was once again a child. It had been a very long time indeed since I’d last cried myself to sleep—and then Kouje had been there, one hand on my back, the other making shadow creatures dance across the far wall.
Sometime later, I heard the sound of the door in my room slide open. It was Kouje, or must have been, protective as he was, come one last time tonight to check on me before at last allowing himself to sleep. No footfalls followed, but Kouje was quieter than a cat when he chose to be. Those times were either of utmost importance, or to see to it that he didn’t wake me. If he ever differentiated between the two, I didn’t know.
I wished, distantly, as though through a dream, that he would simply go to sleep, but the sound of the door sliding shut with his exit never came.
My father and my brother after him had instincts. They could sense, as a great cat in the mountains could sense its prey, a coming storm, enemy troops, an assassin in the house. For the first five years of my life, I’d been raised far differently than they; it was because of this that I could not sense my own danger like a warrior’s scars aching during the rainy season.
I was just drifting back to sleep when a hand, rough with use of a sword, closed over my mouth.
I could no more see in the darkness than I could scream around the suffocating palm. Something smelled familiar, but I couldn’t distinguish it. Then, I was being dragged to my feet, out of my bed, and into the darkened hall.
KOUJE
During the time of the dragons, I’d spent many a night indulging in the barest artifice of sleep. I would lie prone, the covers over my body and one hand on my sword, but I would not sleep. It was what my body required for rest, but I could not term it restful.
The day they came over the wall, flying straight for the center of the city with fire all around them, was something I dreamed of often. The war had ended, but I still had not found my rest.
When the palace was first designed, it was built with separate, smaller corridors for the use of servants, so that the Emperor might never have to trouble himself with encountering one in the hall. They had long since been closed over, boarded up when it was decided they were too much an invitation for assassins, but there was one less closely guarded than the rest. It was the passage the hostlers used most often when conveying news of their lords’ horses to the main palace, and was tolerated only because the door was impossible to find unless you knew it was there.
It was my duty to know the palace better than I knew the veins lining the back of my own hand.
That was the way I took my lord Mamoru, my heart pounding fiercely as though it sensed the wrongness in my current actions. It beat as a fish’s heart must, upon finding itself on dry land for the first time. Perhaps what I was doing would prove just as fatal, but I could no more will myself to choose another course than I could will myself to sleep at night.
I kept my hand over Mamoru’s mouth, half-carrying him through the passageway and half-dragging him. He’d stopped kicking and beating at my shoulders with his fists, but whether it was because he’d caught sight of my face and calmed somewhat, or because he’d gone rigid with terror, I didn’t know.
It had been so long since I’d last comforted my lord that I’d forgotten the art of it. And, admittedly, kidnapping him in that fashion was something beyond a sad tale, or a bruised shoulder. Besides, we hadn’t the time for it.