I didn’t know what Mamoru was thinking. Without the experience, I couldn’t.
Once again, no sound issued from the palace, no footsteps approaching or receding to alert us to the presence of the lords who’d spoken. If I dared, I would have offered some words of comfort to my lord, but the walls in the palace were thin for a reason. It was then that Mamoru released my sleeve and turned back the way we’d come—back toward the stables.
My only relief came with the knowledge that the lords we’d overheard had not spoken as if anything were amiss. No one had yet discovered my lord’s flight. If I could be glad of my actions at all that night, I could at least commend myself for acting quickly.
It was time we needed to distance ourselves from the palace. I didn’t know how Iseul would hunt us, though I knew as well as any how clever a general he’d been in the war, and a fiercer man in battle, besides.
I was a mere servant by comparison, but I would die before I let any harm come to Mamoru.
That was the choice I had made.
My lord looked very small in the large, airy stables. He stood next to one of the Volstov horses, his head bowed in deep thought, or in deep sorrow. I would have cut out my own heart before ever I harmed my lord’s so, but to save his life, such hurts were necessary. I could only trust that he would be strong enough to survive them, that I had not been weak in training him. At least, I thought, with the wild desperation of a man who has abandoned one duty for another when he’d once been able to serve both, my lord had made his decision. We were there in the stables; he was determined to flee.
“My lord,” I said.
“We’ll take this horse.” Mamoru lifted his head, his voice that of a commander on the battlefield—the very lord whom I’d served under for years. In his face, I saw the Emperor himself, a resemblance that had never shown itself before.
If I could have comforted him the way a hostler comforts a horse by touch, I would have been glad to do it. But my lord stood some distance away from me, remote and unapproachable. I’d brought dreadful news to him, and he might yet blame me for betraying his brother and his empire simply by favoring my loyalty to him.
“If you permit me to make a suggestion,” I offered, as though we were playing a game of stones, or he were laboring over a troublesome page of calligraphy. I’d thought things through almost too well, and my lord knew it; his eyes on me were keen and sharp.
“Go on,” he agreed.
“I would not suggest it under any other circumstances…”
“Go on, Kouje,” my lord said again.
Use the old trick against the men who invented it, I thought to myself. It seemed fitting, a small and private revenge, but I couldn’t phrase my words that way for Mamoru. “A disguise,” I explained, as carefully as I could. “In order to make it past the gates. If we are dressed as servants, then even when questioned, no man will truly think to take note of us.”
“Two men riding out on the eve that the prince and his retainer disappear?” Mamoru asked. “Kouje, I don’t think—”
“We do not necessarily have to be two men riding out, my lord,” I said. “They are poor clothes, and hardly fitting for a prince, but the woman who wore them first kept them clean and in good repair. They should fit you well.”
“And for yourself?”
“Something less fine than my banquet clothes,” I admitted. It was a shame to acknowledge how much I had prepared without first consulting him, but fear for his life had panicked me. At least, I told myself, what mattered was Mamoru’s safety and not how able I was to be proud of myself.
“You’ve thought of everything,” my lord said, his usual sweet mirth replaced by a dull dispassion. He moved like a little ghost, away from the horse, to rest one hand against the wall. “What if I had not come?”
“I would have returned the garments to their proper place,” I replied. “No one would ever have noticed them missing.”
“They’ll notice them now. Perhaps someone will piece together the mystery…?”
I shook my head. “My lord Iseu—The Emperor will not truly have the time or the inclination,