these days and whether or not your maiden aunt had a hangnail or what you were having for dinner that evening.
Maybe I was there because I was a soldier, and maybe I was there because th’Esar liked to keep a few trump cards up his sleeve, and maybe I was there because I was paying penance for all the men I’d killed during the war without weighing each option, but at the rate these talks were proceeding, we’d be staying in the Ke-Han for ten years at the least, and only then would we move on to deciding what tile we should use in rebuilding.
Didn’t anybody just want to do something? Didn’t anybody see reason?
But Fiacre was in his element, and Josette, too; their parents must have raised them to be mean little quarrelers, for they could talk circles around the best of them, and if it hadn’t been driving me so crack-batty, I would have been a little proud.
The way I saw it, though, was that we didn’t have to argue about these things. We’d won the war; the Ke-Han’d lost. But then, I didn’t understand the finer points of diplomacy, and maybe it was better to set up a system that worked rather than having the whole thing collapse on you ten, fifteen years down the line.
Whether it was due to it being so damn hard to work things out or due to an unnecessary number of nitpickers all having a field day with each other, I didn’t know. Like I said, I wasn’t cut out to be a diplomat, and now that I knew what diplomacy consisted of, I was damn sure I wouldn’t be making it my life’s work. Even though I’d been pressed into joining the delegation.
Someone, somewhere, was having a real hard laugh at my expense, that was certain.
And meanwhile, I was going stir-crazy.
During the war, I hadn’t had the time to sit still for all of an hour, much less days. I woke before dawn and tucked in early, and a man got used real quick to his specific routines.
In the palace, the finer men and women woke late and turned in even later, on account of all the goodwill everyone was determined to show, meaning that every night we were forced on pain of death to attend stultifying parties.
The one thing I really didn’t get was the Ke-Han music. It was three notes howled at you over and over by a woman who sounded more like she was choking on her dinner than singing. It gave me a splitting headache and it could last for hours if you weren’t lucky.
The dancing was all right, though.
But underneath all the assurances of goodwill, things were tense. The second prince was still missing, the Emperor was still working on us to let him send out veritable armies to hunt down his brother—all while we were getting nothing done—and I could tell I would’ve been privy to some of the nastiest gossip in at least a hundred years if I only spoke a word of Ke-H an. Good thing, then, that I wasn’t a gossip.
Caius Greylace, the carnivorous little flower, was having a field day picking up Ke-Han turns of phrase right and left. Didn’t matter to me, I figured, since the more time he spent gossiping, the less time he spent bothering me.
Most of all, I just wanted my horse back.
After over a week of getting pins and needles in my own damn backside, of being restless at night for lack of doing anything proper during the day, I figured something had to start changing, and that something was me, since it sure as bastion wasn’t going to be the situation. I was out of shape enough already. There was only one half-decent solution.
I started rising when the peacocks woke me.
An interesting thing about peacocks that not many might have known was that the ones in the Ke-Han woke up just like roosters did, like they thought morning light was some alarming sign that everyone needed warning about. It happened every day like clockwork; the ones that ran wild in the Ke-Han palace courtyard shrieked like their tails’d been stepped on with the first light of dawn. Normally I just pulled my jacket over my head, since that was what I’d been using for a pillow in place of the wood block the Ke-Han had outfitted every room with. A man would’ve thought the Ke-Han could make small pillows, since they knew how to make