Kouje flushed, and laughter sparked momentarily in his eyes. “Perhaps we’ll figure out some kind of veil, then,” he agreed. “Though I don’t know if it would suit you.”
“It would cover my face,” I pointed out. “Which might be useful, all things considered, for reasons beyond protection from the sun.”
“Still,” Kouje said, “it wouldn’t suit you.”
It might, I thought, allow me to avoid any further comments from Kichi as to what a delicate flower I was, or how it wasn’t fair of Kouje to be so dead set against my receiving compliments. After all, I wasn’t that young, and Kichi was certain there’d been a young gentleman or two—probably, he added with a wink, more like a whole army of them—knocking down Kouje’s door to be the lucky bastard who could convince my brother he was worthy, and was that what we were on the road for, hm? Running away from all my blockhead suitors?
I was grateful, at least, that I was convincing in my part. When Kichi went on and on in that fashion, it was easy enough to blush and duck my head, for all the world acting like the delicate flower he thought I was.
What I was most worried about was being too delicate. Even though we were a party of four, I couldn’t run the risk of being too aristocratic.
Occupied by my thoughts, it wasn’t long before we crested a hill and Kichi reined in his horse for long enough to wave back at us and gesticulate toward the horizon. What I saw there took my breath away.
One of the many great walls lay before us, large gray stone weathered by time and bleached by the sun, and a thriving wallside town in the valley below. It was a busier place than we’d seen in a long time, more people than we’d been among since we left the palace, houses and shops crowded together beside the protection offered by the wall.
“How tall do you suppose it is?” I managed to ask Kouje once I’d regained my breath.
Kouje paused for a moment to appraise the height, with the horse whinnying and snuffling below us in annoyance at our strange whims.
“Fifteen feet I’d say, at the least,” he answered finally. “Can’t tell for sure until we’re closer.”
“Are you gonna spend all day staring at it?” Kichi howled back at us, though it was clearly a good-natured demand. “Or are you gonna get a move on? Hicks!” He let out a cheerful whoop and spurred his horse suddenly on, tearing off down the hill, leaving Jiang to give us a long-suffering look and follow after at a more dignified pace, with us trailing behind him.
The town wasn’t nearly so big as the capital, but it was large enough for me to realize how much I had missed city life—even though most of my opportunities to observe it were through a palanquin window, it was still the knowledge of its bustling presence, its constant activity, its arts and pleasures and luxuries, that I’d been missing. We might have grown accustomed to our isolation in the woods, to sleeping on beds of leaves and to hearing the owls hooting in the night, but I’d never once stopped missing what I’d lost. All that became painfully clear the moment what I’d lost was, in some ways, returned to me—the noise and the light and the excitement of a real city. I could smell dumplings cooking, ducks being roasted, could hear the commotion of shop owners chasing orphans away from their doorsteps or calling to the passersby, trying to tempt them inside. My stomach grumbled so loudly I knew Kouje must have heard it—I didn’t like that he should have to catch me out in a lie, no matter how necessary it was—but he didn’t say anything, and I willed the grumbling to be silent. We barely had any money left, and I tried my best not to stare at the children by the roadside eating their dumplings, entirely oblivious to just how lucky they were.
“Fried eel,” Kouje said, almost without thinking.
The smell was torturous, but I breathed in deeply anyway, storing the scent and trying to let the memory of what fried eel tasted like fill my stomach. It didn’t work as well as it might have, but it was the only taste of eel I would have for a long time, and I savored it.
All around us, people were talking in the cruder dialects I was coming to