he’d seen that queer necklace the Emperor had been wearing. Marcy’d disappeared, and I guessed it had been on my mind more than I’d thought.
“He wasn’t wearing it last night, as far as I could see,” I added, trying to shovel my rice into my mouth straight from the bowl with those infernal sticks. There was no other way to use them, I was sure of it.
“He wasn’t,” Caius agreed, then, on sudden inspiration, jabbed his own sticks excitedly toward my face. He was going to have to stop tempting me to hit him and call it simple reflex. “Oh! I know what it might be. Have you heard of the Ke-Han blood magic?”
“Rumors,” I admitted, however grudgingly. Those were the kinds of stories that had been told around the campfire—born of fear and breeding more fear. A soldier told those stories to other soldiers so it was easier to hate the enemy. “Blood magic” had a definition that varied, depending on who was telling the story that night, and though it might’ve had some grounding in truth once upon a time, it’d grown beyond that. One time it had to do with killing lions and drinking their blood; another it had to do with how the magicians in the lapis city worked their magic by using blood as ink when they practiced their calligraphy. I’d stopped listening to the stories a long while back since I didn’t need any more reason to hate anyone, especially the Ke-Han.
It was the sort of information I’d needed to purposefully put from my mind in order to embark on this trip without taking my grievances up with th’Esar himself. As a reward, I might have said, for all my good services to the crown, d’you think I could have had a damn vacation and not some more fucking work? And, promptly, I’d’ve been banished from my home, which, after years of fighting, was the last thing I wanted. So I’d swallowed the memories and kept biting my tongue.
Only the very phrase brought back campfire nights, in the belly of some mountain, listening to the rumble of the dragons overhead, or the howl of the trebuchets as they let each new fireball loose.
“You’re wearing a curious expression,” Caius said.
“Don’t like the rice,” I answered.
“Hm,” Caius said, not entirely satisfied, but clearly not yet willing to be deterred from imparting what he saw as vital information. “In any case, I read all about it when I was in exile, you know. Fascinating people, the Ke-Han, with their odd little rituals and their quaint ideas. If Iseul’s wearing that vial of blood—oh, if only we could ask him!—it probably isn’t his.”
“All right,” I said. “How d’you figure that?”
“Because the magic is very simple, really,” Caius said. “In many ways, it operates as a microcosm of the way in which they poisoned our Well: If you poison the river, you poison the whole ocean. Contaminate the source—in this case a mere few drops of blood—and it’s possible to kill the man who owned it. Or so the book said. I’m sure that’s vastly oversimplified, but until I can learn to translate Ke-Han texts…” He shrugged delicately. “Brilliant, though, isn’t it?”
I thought of lying prone in the Basquiat, wondering how long it would take me to die, listening to the god-awful coughing move like it was catching from cot to cot, and how I had a power in me—something to do with water, real useful Margrave Royston had said, then never bothered elaborating on, the horse’s ass—that I’d never asked for and didn’t want, running like blood through my veins and making it easier to strike me down without so much as a warning.
Brilliant wasn’t exactly what I’d call it.
Twisted, maybe. Tortured. The product of a people we’d been fighting and hating—both, maybe, for equally good reasons—for generations. And fucked. I put my rice bowl down.
“Not hungry?” Caius asked, though something in his eyes suggested he’d sensed his blunder and was actually perplexed as to how he’d offended me this time. I didn’t bother acknowledging it and just looked away, since, sitting so close, it was easy to see how strange his eyes were. They were different colors, one of them green and the other one, carefully hidden behind the fall of his silky hair, a pale, murky white.
“Finished,” I gritted out.
“Good!” he said, all good cheer suddenly restored. “Because we’re going to be late.”
The last thing I wanted was another few hours of listening to Fiacre and