position, declaring their whereabouts to passersby on the streets by whatever means necessary, this stall seemed almost to cower behind the rest, hiding its wares away from potential customers. It stood half-obscured behind a booth that featured pictures of men in furs riding over a mountain range that wasn’t the Cobalts, and it featured no distinctive markings whatsoever. It was utterly plain, without even so much as a wind charm to alert one to its presence.
In fact, I was rather under the impression that if one didn’t know it was there to begin with, one wouldn’t be able to see it. Perhaps Alcibiades’ instincts weren’t to be dismissed entirely, after all.
Lord Temur turned halfway around once he’d reached it, as though beckoning us over. I felt at once that we were about to be privy to some magnificent secret, so that I was almost disappointed to see that the drawings looked very similar to the others we’d already seen. These were of people, true, and not natural landscapes or sea monsters, but I had been hoping for something more.
“That one looks like the Emperor,” said Alcibiades.
Lord Temur glanced around the street once, his eyes keen as a tiger’s, then nodded once, like a confidence among the three of us. He seemed almost pleased.
My eyes widened in delight. “You mean these are of the Emperor?”
“Some of them,” Lord Temur admitted. “It is not technically illegal, but the portraits are rather… frowned upon, in any case.”
“This one’s of that lord who’s always shouting,” said Alcibiades, pointing out an exact likeness of one of the diplomats privy to our talks, but with an exaggerated coloring—his face was painted a bright red.
There was another of Lord Ochir, who had particular skill for lisping his words, and whose head was painted onto the body of a snake. Another was of a man I recognized as Lord Kencho with a much younger woman, both subjects smiling foolishly for an unseen artist.
“Where’re you?” Alcibiades asked, looking at Lord Temur.
“Ah,” he said, in a tone that was very nearly intimate. I thought he almost sounded amused. Perhaps it was the palace itself that made the men and women in it so quiet and expressionless, and one needed only to remove them from it in order to witness a metamorphosis. “I believe there is one just there.”
I plucked it from the rest before Alcibiades could get his hands on it. The picture showed Lord Temur dressed as a country peasant, standing in the middle of a rice paddy. I thought that it was fairly mild, as far as satire went, though perhaps Lord Temur was relatively well liked among the people, and anything crueler wouldn’t have been as popular. Of the caricatures we’d seen, it was only Lord Temur and the red-faced lord who had managed to keep their dignity more or less intact.
“I think I shall buy this one,” I said. “How much is it?”
But Lord Temur was no longer paying very much attention to me. His entire focus had been caught by another sheaf of porous rice paper, freshly painted and framed in the center of the artist’s display by all the other caricatures. It was of two men, both of whom were incredibly familiar, although I had to admit it took me a few moments to recognize them: the young prince and his overzealous retainer.
Even Alcibiades didn’t have the presence of mind amidst his shock to say anything inappropriate that would spoil the glorious wonder of our discovery.
The scene depicted was a dashing one—if I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought the young prince was a hero of the people, and not a traitor who’d turned on his brother, then fled. But perhaps this artist knew something we did not. He had painted—with loving, haunting colors—the image of the young prince on a small, sleek boat, helmed by his retainer, cutting through a dark sea in the midst of an even darker night. All around them, the only splash of color was the white foam of the waves, which looked more like apparitions and ghosts than the roiling of a common ocean storm. The closer I examined the print, the better able I was to see that in the swirls of foam were sharp, accusatory features—they were, dare I even say it, almost imperial—but the expression the retainer wore was fierce and determined, and the prince, the focus of the piece, seemed to draw strength from his posture. Ultimately, I was given the unshakable