from Caius’s tinkling laughter that it was the height of Ke-Han wit.
Josette gave me a baffled look, which was as clear an indication as I was going to get that she thought Caius as nutty as I did. Maybe it was best to let our fine Lord Temur deal with him all night, though it’d give him a really odd cross section of the diplomats.
If anytime, that was my chance to escape.
“Oh, no you don’t,” said Josette, a suspicious look in her eye. “You’re not bolting and leaving me here with Greylace and one of the seven Ke-Han warlords.”
“I think he likes you,” I said.
Caius and Lord Temur were walking up the white sand path, and coming to the garden that contained all the strange stone statues. We were going to have to run to catch up to them. Surprisingly, I didn’t mind the idea. I’d been waiting all day to stretch my legs.
Josette gave me a look that suggested if she hadn’t been such a diplomat, she’d have punched me square in the jaw for that last remark. Then she started off down the pathway, leaving me to catch up with her. I didn’t offer her my arm when I did, but she took it anyway.
I didn’t really see the purpose in going to a zoo at night, especially when it was nearing dark already, the sky stained a mottled blue-purple, like the ribbon Caius was wearing in his hair. (Knowing him, he’d probably calculated what night looked like, and picked out a ribbon that morning to match.) At least the air didn’t get a chill in it as soon as the sun went down, the way it did in Volstov. That was one positive thing I could say for the Ke-Han and their country though I wasn’t going to be making a habit of it or anything.
Up ahead of us, I could hear Caius’s fluttering laughter as they discussed the price of tea, or the artwork in the diplomats’ rooms, or the quality of silk, or all the trivial what-have-yous that Caius liked to talk about. I couldn’t tell from Lord Temur’s voice whether he was bored out of his mind or just plain bemused. From what I’d heard of the Ke-Han language, it was common to speak all in monotone. I guessed it went along nicely with not having any expression on your face, so that nobody could ever tell what the hell you were actually thinking. I couldn’t even imagine what he thought of Caius’s theatrical Volstovic.
Josette pointed to a distant hill, some ways outside the garden where a bunch of fat, colorful flowers was growing. “Oh, look!” she cried, sounding more like Caius than I’d ever heard her. “Chrysanthemums!”
Lord Temur turned around at that, his eyebrows raised. I didn’t like how he understood everything we were saying so easily. Some might have looked at it like a gesture of goodwill, but to me it just felt like spying. The ’Versity scholars had explained that the Ke-Han language was one that took years to perfect, and that speaking it halfway was loads worse than not speaking it at all, but I couldn’t help feeling like we were at a disadvantage, since the Ke-Han could retreat behind their soft, hurried consonants, and we had nowhere to hide at all.
“They are a symbol of the Emperor’s reign,” said Lord Temur, shielding his eyes from the setting sun to look up at the chrysanthemum garden. “No one else is permitted to cut them.”
“Ah, I see,” said Josette, and she looked more disappointed than I’d have thought, over a handful of too-big flowers.
“He’s better than a guidebook,” I muttered under my breath.
Caius shot me a reproving look. It figured that he would have freakish hearing on top of his freakish everything else.
“We have nearly reached the menagerie,” said Lord Temur. “As I have assured your companion, all the lions are safely within their cages tonight.”
It wasn’t so much the lions that gave me cause to doubt, but then I supposed there wasn’t much harm in going to look at a bunch of animals, of all things. Besides, there were three of us and one of him, so if things got ugly, we could just feed him to something that liked fresh meat and hope for the best.
The gates of the menagerie were wrought-iron bars, shaped into a graceful and purposeless design, the way the Ke-Han seemed to like best. The stone walls were a clean white—the sort that only stays