the bed next to me. In such a small roadside stop as this one, there were no gamblers or pickpockets roaming the streets at night, so there was only silence from the road beneath as well. I lay on my side, staring at the wall across the room before turning over, noiselessly as I could so as not to wake my lord.
There were no crickets to chirp and buzz in the night, and no frogs to hum their mating calls to one another from the streams. The bed was soft beneath my back. I should have been able to sleep, but I couldn’t.
The only way I realized that I’d eventually dozed off was when the light woke me in the morning, striking me full in the face like an unwelcome hand. I was up at once, looking about the room with considerable confusion before I realized where we were, and recalled the arrangements we’d made to slip past the border checkpoint later in the day.
My lord was still asleep, even after I’d gone to the window to judge the relative position of the sun. It was early yet. If I hadn’t promised to wake him whenever I myself was awake, then I might never have found the heart to do it, but I knelt at the side of the bed and took gentle hold of his shoulder.
“Mamoru,” I said, as softly as I dared.
He was awake immediately, in his eyes the same dread as the morning before. He seemed to calm when he saw my face, though, and relaxed back against the futon with an odd, sleepy smile.
“I had the most wonderful dream,” he said, in a voice tinged with melancholy.
“When we’re on the road,” I promised, “you may tell me about it.”
Memory passed across his face like a shadow and he sat, his hair something of a mess. Had he slept restlessly during the night? I didn’t remember the sounds of his tossing and turning, but he might have begun to sleep poorly after I myself had managed to drift off.
Mamoru left no time for concern, sitting up at once and tucking back the hem of the coverlet with delicate regret, a dreamy grace. “Well,” he said, after a moment’s pause, beginning to pull his hair back into a clumsy braid. “Let us attempt the border crossing.”
ALCIBIADES
The more time I spent with the Ke-Han, the more time it looked like I was going to have to spend with the Ke-Han.
If I’d said it once, then I could say it a hundred times: I wasn’t any kind of diplomat, not even a piss-poor one, and I didn’t see how decisions that shouldn’t even need to be discussed could take hours, sometimes whole days, to go over. Were we ever going to get to the real meat of the problem? How much longer was this nitpicking—and some on both sides of the debate had perfected nitpicking like it was a bastion-be-damned art—going to take?
Forever, maybe. And I had to sit through all of it.
Also, I was starting to feel like we were being horsed around—really taken for a ride. But Fiacre liked negotiating so much that he hadn’t caught on to it yet, and the only reason I had was because I didn’t. We hadn’t discussed any of the particulars of the provisional treaty yet, let alone anything to do with the new one, and all because the new Emperor was so hell-bent on tracking his brother down that he’d kept us on the topic for the better part of a week. I was starting to think he was just doing it on purpose.
We’d finally agreed to adjourn the talks when Ozanne had fallen asleep right at the table and knocked over his cup of frothy, bitter tea. I’d have done the same if I’d thought I might get away with it, but for all I knew two cups of spilled tea in one night spelled a diplomatic incident for the Ke-Han.
They’d never have stood for it in the war. When you were a soldier—especially when you were a soldier who knew what he was doing well enough to get promoted beyond the ranks of miserable, Ke-Han fodder nobodies—you made decisions. Sometimes they weren’t the right decisions, but you didn’t have the time for sitting around and weighing each option, and making sure all the factors had been carefully considered when most of those options were irrelevant anyway, like what the weather was like and how much cotton was going for