The Grace of Kings

CHAPTER THREE. KUNI GARU

SEVEN YEARS LATER.

ZUDI: THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST YEAR OF THE REIGN OF ONE BRIGHT HEAVEN.

In Zudi, many stories were told about Kuni Garu.

The young man was the son of simple farmers who had big hopes for their children to move up in the world, hopes that Kuni somehow dashed again and again.

Oh, as a boy, Kuni had shown hints of brilliance — he could read and write three hundred logograms before he had turned five. Kuni’s mother, Naré, thanked Kana and Rapa every day and couldn’t stop telling all her friends how brilliant her little boy was. Thinking that the child had a future as a lettered man who could bring honor to the family, Kuni’s father, Féso, sent him at great expense to study at the private academy of Tumo Loing, a local scholar of great renown, who had served the King of Cocru as Minister of Grains before the Unification.

But Garu and his friend Rin Coda preferred to skip school whenever they could and go fishing. When he was caught, Kuni would apologize eloquently and profusely, convincing Master Loing that he was truly contrite and had learned his lesson. But soon he would be back to devising pranks with Rin and talking back at his teacher, questioning his explanations of the classics and pointing out errors in his reasoning until Loing finally ran out of patience and expelled him — and poor Rin Coda, too, for always following Kuni’s lead.

That was just fine with Kuni. He was a good drinker, talker, and brawler, and soon became close to all sorts of disreputable characters in Zudi: thieves, gangsters, tax collectors, Xana soldiers from the garrison, girls from the indigo houses, wealthy young men who had nothing better to do than stand around all day on street corners looking for trouble — as long as you breathed, had money to buy him a drink, and enjoyed dirty jokes and gossip, Kuni Garu was your friend.

The Garu family tried to steer the young man into gainful employment. Kado, Kuni’s elder brother, demonstrated an early instinct for business and became a local merchant of women’s dresses. He hired Kuni as a clerk. But Kuni professed a disdain for bowing to customers and laughing at their stupid jokes, and finally, after Kuni tried to implement a harebrained scheme of hiring girls from the indigo houses as “models” for dresses, Kado had no choice but to fire him.

“It would have boosted sales!” Kuni said. “After the wealthy men saw the dresses on their favorite mistresses, they’d surely want to buy them for their wives.”

“Have you no concern for the reputation of your family?!” Kado chased Kuni into the streets wielding a measuring ruler.

By the time Kuni was seventeen, his father had had enough of the idling young man coming home every night drunk and asking for dinner. He locked him out of the house and told him to find somewhere else to stay and ruminate on how he was wasting his life and breaking his mother’s heart. Naré cried and cried and went to Kana and Rapa’s temple every day, praying for the goddesses to set her baby on the right path.

Reluctantly, Kado Garu took pity on his little brother and took him in. Kado’s generosity, however, was not shared by his wife, Tete. She took to serving dinner early, long before Kuni came home. And when she heard the sound of his steps in the entrance hall, Tete would bang empty pots loudly in the sink, indicating that there was no more food to be had.

Kuni quickly got the hint. Though he had thick skin — he had to when he hung out with the sort of friends he made — he was humiliated that his sister-in-law thought of him as only a mouth that she didn’t want to feed. He moved out and slept on the floor mats in the houses of his friends, roaming from house to house as he wore out his welcome.

He moved a lot.

The smell of fried pot stickers and ginger-vinegar. The sound of glasses filling with warm ale and cold beer.

“… so then I said, ‘But your husband isn’t home!’ And she laughed and said, ‘That’s why you need to come in now!’ ”

“Kuni Garu!” Widow Wasu, proprietress of the Splendid Urn, tried to get the attention of the young man telling stories at the center of the crowd.

“Yes, my lady?” Kuni reached out with his long arm and draped it around her shoulder. He gave her a loud, wet kiss on the cheek. She was in her forties and accepted that she was aging gracefully. Unlike some of the other tavern keepers, she didn’t slather herself with rouge and powder, and looked far more dignified as a result. Kuni often proclaimed to others how he was fond of her.

Wasu nimbly ducked out of Kuni’s embrace. She pulled him away from the others, winking at the laughing and shouting crowd, who hollered appreciatively. She dragged him into her office in the back of the bar, where she deposited him in a pillow on one side of the desk, and she herself took the pillow on the other.

Kneeling upright and with her back straight in formal mipa rari, she composed herself and put on what she thought was a stern face — this discussion needed to be focused on business, and Kuni Garu had a way of changing the topic whenever one wanted something from him.

“You’ve hosted three parties at my place this month,” Wasu said. “That’s a lot of beer and ale and fried pot stickers and fried squid. All the charges were put under your name. Your tab, at this point, is getting to be bigger than the lien on my inventory. I think you need to pay some of it.”

Kuni leaned back on his pillow and stretched out his legs in a modified thakrido position, with one leg over the other, the way a man sat when he was with his mistress. Kuni narrowed his eyes, smirked at Wasu, and began to hum a song whose lyrics made Wasu blush.

“Come on, Kuni,” Wasu said. “I’m serious here. The tax collectors have been hounding me for weeks. You can’t treat me like a charity.”

Kuni Garu curled his legs back under him and suddenly sat up in mipa rari. His eyes stayed narrowed, but the smirk disappeared from his face. Widow Wasu flinched even though she meant to stay firm with him. The man was a gangster, after all.

“Mistress Wasu,” Kuni said in an even, low voice. “How often would you say I come to drink at your place?”

“Practically every other day,” Wasu said.

“And have you noticed any difference in your business on the days when I’m here and the days when I’m not?”

Wasu sighed. This was Kuni’s trump card, and she knew he would bring it up. “It’s a little better on the days when you are here,” she admitted.

“A little better?” Eyes as wide as teacups, he breathed loudly through his nose, as though his ego had been hurt.

Widow Wasu tried to decide whether she wanted to laugh at him or to throw something at the good-for-nothing young man. She settled by shaking her head and folding her arms across her chest.

“Look at the crowd out there!” he went on. “It’s the middle of the day and this place is filled with paying customers. When I’m here, your business goes up by at least fifty percent.”

This was a gross exaggeration, but Wasu had to concede that bar patrons did tend to stay longer and buy more drinks when Kuni was around. He was loud, told great dirty jokes, pretended to know something about everything — the man had no shame, and could get people around him to relax and enjoy themselves. He was like a bawdy troubadour, a tall-tale teller, and an impromptu gambling hall operator rolled into one. Maybe business didn’t go up by 50 percent, but 20 to 30 percent? That was probably accurate. And Kuni’s little gang also managed to keep the really dangerous men out of the Urn, the sort who would start fights and smash the furniture.

“Sister,” Kuni said — now he was turning on his charm for her—“we need to help each other. I like coming to the Urn with my friends — we all have a good time. And we like bringing you more business. But if you can’t see the benefits of this arrangement, I’ll take my act elsewhere.”

Widow Wasu gave him a withering look, but she knew she wasn’t going to win this one.

“You better tell such good stories that all those Imperial soldiers get totally drunk and empty their pockets.” She sighed. “And say something nice about the pork pot stickers. I need to get rid of them today.”

“But you’re right that we should reduce my tab a bit,” Kuni said. “Next time I’m in here, I’m expecting that my tab will have already been cleared. Do you think you can make that happen?”

The widow nodded reluctantly. She waved Kuni away, sighed, and began to write off the drinks that Kuni and his gang were so happily consuming at the bar.

Kuni Garu stumbled from the Splendid Urn on unsteady legs, but he wasn’t really drunk yet. Since it was early in the afternoon, his closest friends were still at work; he decided that he would kill some time by wandering the main market street of Zudi.

Though Zudi was a small city, the Unification had nonetheless changed its complexion substantially. Master Loing had lectured to the boys about the changes disdainfully, lamenting that his students couldn’t appreciate the virtues of the simpler Zudi of his youth; but since this new Zudi was all Kuni had known, he made up his own mind about it.

Emperor Mapidéré, in a bid to keep the old Tiro nobles from plotting rebellions in their ancestral domains, stripped them of any real power and left them only with empty titles. But that wasn’t enough for him. The emperor also divided the noble families and forced some members to relocate to distant parts of the empire. For example, a Cocru count’s eldest son might be ordered to resettle — taking his servants, mistresses, wives, cooks, and guards with him — to Wolf’s Paw, away in the old territories of Gan. And a Gan ducal clan’s side branches might be told to pack themselves up and move to a city in Rui. This way, even if the hot-blooded younger nobles wanted to make trouble, they would have no influence with the local elites and could inspire no sympathy in the local populace to join their cause. The emperor did the same with many of the surrendered soldiers and their families from the six conquered Tiro states.

While the resettlement policy was very unpopular with the nobles, it did have the benefit of enriching the lives of the ordinary folk of the Islands of Dara. The resettled nobles craved foods and clothes from their homelands, and merchants traveled all over Dara, transporting products that seemed exotic to the local populace but were eagerly purchased by the exiled nobles, who yearned for a hint of home and their old ways of life. In this manner, the scattered nobles became teachers of taste for the commoners, who learned to be more cosmopolitan and ecumenical.

Thus Zudi played host to exiled noble families from all over Dara, and they filled it with new customs, new dishes, and new dialects and words that had never before been heard in the city’s sleepy markets and sedate teahouses.

If you were going to give marks for Emperor Mapidéré’s performance as an administrator, Kuni thought, the improvement in the diversity of Zudi’s markets definitely had to be counted as a positive. The streets were filled with vendors selling all manners of novelties from across Dara: bamboo-copters from Amu — ethereal toys with revolving blades at the end of a stick that could be spun rapidly until the contraption took off into the air like a tiny dragonfly; living paper-men from Faça — the paper cutouts would dance and leap like the veiled dancers on a tiny stage when you rubbed the glass rod in the ceiling with a silk cloth; magic calculators from Haan — wooden mazes with tiny doors at every branch that flipped as marbles rolled through them, and a skilled operator could use them to compute sums; iron puppets from Rima — intricate mechanical men and animals that walked down an inclined slope on their own power; and so on.

But Kuni paid the most attention to the food: He loved the fried lamb strips native to the Xana home islands, especially the hot and spicy variety from Dasu. He found the delicate raw fish served by the merchants from Wolf’s Paw delightful — it went especially well with mango liquor and a dash of hot mustard grown in Faça’s tiny spice estates nestled in the deep shades of the Shinané Mountains. He salivated so much as he admired the snacks on display from the various vendors that he had to swallow a few times.

He had a grand total of two copper pieces in his pocket, not even enough for a string of sugar-coated crabapples.

“Well, I really should be watching my weight anyway,” he said to himself, and sadly patted his beer belly. He wasn’t getting much exercise these days, what with all the partying and drinking.

He sighed and was just about to leave the market to find a quiet spot for a nap when a loud argument attracted his attention.

“Sir, please don’t take him,” an old woman dressed in the traditional garb of the Xana peasant — full of knotted tassels and the colorful, geometric patches that were supposed to be symbols for good luck and prosperity, though the only people who wore them had neither — begged an Imperial soldier. “He’s only fifteen, and he’s my youngest son. My eldest is already working at the Mausoleum. The laws say that the last child can stay with me.”

The complexion of the old woman and her son was paler than most of the people in Cocru, but this didn’t mean much by itself. Though people from the various parts of Dara differed in their physical features, there had always been some steady migration and mixing of peoples, a process accelerated after the Unification. And the people of the various Tiro states had always cared much more about cultural and linguistic differences than mere appearance. Still, given the woman’s Xana garb and accent, it was clear she was not a native of Cocru.

She was a long way from home, Kuni thought. Probably the widow of a Xana soldier stranded here after the Unification. Since the kite rider’s assassination attempt seven years ago, Zudi had remained heavily garrisoned — the emperor’s men never managed to find the rider, but they did imprison and execute many of Zudi’s citizens on flimsy evidence and continued to rule Zudi with an extra level of harshness. At least the emperor’s agents administered the laws without any favoritism. The poor from Xana were treated just like the poor of the conquered states.

“I’ve asked you for the birth certificates for the two boys, and you’ve produced nothing.” The soldier brushed away the woman’s pleading fingers impatiently. His accent indicated that he was from Xana as well. The man was bloated and flabby, a bureaucrat more than a fighting man, and he stared at the youth standing next to the old woman with a cold smirk, daring the young man to do something rash.

Kuni knew his kind well. The man had probably dodged out of having to fight during the Unification Wars and then bribed his way into a commission in the Xana army as soon as peace had been declared so that he could get assigned to one of the conquered territories as a corvée administrator. It was his job to raise up the local quota of able-bodied men to work on one of the emperor’s grand infrastructure projects. It was a position with a little bit of power but a lot of room for abuse. It was also very lucrative: Families who didn’t want to see their sons conscripted were willing to pay a high price.

“I know wily women like you,” the man went on. “I think this story about your ‘eldest’ is a complete fabrication to get out of having to pay your fair share for the construction of a suitable palace for the afterlife of His Imperial Majesty, the Beloved Emperor Mapidéré. May he never leave us.”

“May he never leave us. But I’m telling you the truth, Sir.” The old woman tried flattery. “You are wise and brave, and I know you will take pity on me.”

“It’s not pity you need,” the corvée administrator said. “If you can’t produce the documents—”

“The documents are at the magistracy back home, in Rui—”

“Well, we aren’t in Rui, now are we? And don’t interrupt me. I’ve given you the choice to pay a Prosperity Tax so that we can forget this unpleasantness. But since you are unwilling, I’ll have to—”

“I’m willing, Sir! I’m willing. But you have to give me time. Business has not been good. I need time—”

“I told you not to interrupt me!” The man lifted his hand and slapped the old woman across her face. The young man standing next to her lunged at him, but the old woman grabbed her son’s arm and tried to position herself between the administrator and her son. “Please, please! Forgive my foolish son. You can hit me again for his faults.”

The administrator laughed and spat at her.

The old woman’s face trembled with unspeakable sorrow. It brought to Kuni’s mind the face of his own mother, Naré, and the times when she would berate him for not making more of his own life. The drunken stupor evaporated.

“How much is the Prosperity Tax?” Kuni sauntered up to the three of them. Other pedestrians gave them a wide berth. No one wanted to draw the attention of the corvée administrator.

The man eyed Kuni Garu — beer belly, ingratiating smile, face still red with drink, and unkempt, wrinkled clothes — and decided that he was no threat. “Twenty-five pieces of silver. And what’s that to you? Are you volunteering to take the boy’s place on the corvée?”

Kuni’s father, Féso Garu, had paid off corvée administrator after corvée administrator, and he did have the documents to show that he was exempt. He also wasn’t afraid of the man. Kuni was a pretty good street brawler and thought he would acquit himself well if they came to blows. But this was a situation that called for some finesse, not force.

“I’m Fin Crukédori,” he said. The Crukédoris owned Zudi’s largest jewelry store, and Fin, the eldest son, had once tried to turn Kuni and his friends into the constabulary for disturbing the peace after Kuni humiliated him in a game of high-stakes dice. Fin’s father was also known for being stingy and never spared a copper for any charity — but his son had a reputation as a spendthrift. “And I like nothing more than money.”

“Then you should hold on to it and stay out of other people’s business.”

Kuni nodded like a chicken pecking in the dirt. “Sage advice, Sir!” Then he spread his hands helplessly. “But this old woman is a friend of my cook’s mother-in-law’s neighbor. And if she tells her friend, who tells her neighbor, who tells her daughter, who tells her husband, who might then not cook my favorite braised-eel-with-duck-eggs—”

The administrator’s head spun as he tried to follow this story that was going nowhere. “Stop this senseless prattle! Are you going to pay for her or not?”

“Yes! Yes! Oh, Sir, you’ll swear you have not had real food until you’ve tasted this braised eel. It is as smooth as a mouthful of jade. And the duck eggs? Oh my…”

As Kuni pattered on to the consternation of the Xana administrator, he gestured at a waitress at the restaurant by the side of the road. The waitress, who knew very well who Kuni really was, tried to keep from smiling as she handed him paper and brush.

“… now how much did you say it was? Twenty-five? How about a bit of a discount? After all, I introduced you to the wonders of the braised eel! Twenty?…”

Kuni wrote out a note that entitled the holder to redeem it at the Crukédori family’s house office for twenty silver pieces. He signed the note with a flourish and admired his own forgery. Then he inked a seal that he carried just for such occasions — it was so old and decrepit that the impression came out in a jumble and you could read anything you wanted in its lines — and pressed the seal against the paper.

He sighed and handed the paper over reluctantly. “There you go. Just go over to my family and present it to the doorman when you have time. The servant will bring the money to you right away.”

“Why, Master Crukédori!” The administrator was all smiles and politeness when he saw the figure on the paper. A foolish and rich man like this Fin Crukédori was the best kind of local gentry to cultivate. “I’m always glad to make a new friend. Why don’t we go and have a drink together?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Kuni said, and slapped the Imperial bureaucrat’s shoulder happily. “I didn’t bring any cash with me, though, since I’m just out to get some air. Next time I’ll invite you home for the braised eel, but this time, maybe I can borrow some….”

“No problem, no problem at all. What are friends for?”

As they walked away, Kuni stole a glance back at the old woman. She stood, mute and frozen, her mouth open and her eyes wide. Kuni thought she was probably too surprised and grateful to speak, and once more he was reminded of his mother. He blinked to clear his suddenly warm eyes, winked at her in reassurance, and turned around once more to joke with the corvée administrator.

The woman’s son gently shook her by the shoulder. “Ma, let’s get going. We should leave town before that pig changes his mind.”

The old woman seemed to waken from a dream.

“Young man,” she mumbled after the retreating figure of Kuni Garu, “you may act lazy and foolish, but I have seen your heart. A bright and tenacious flower will not bloom in obscurity.”

Kuni was too far away to hear her.

But a young woman, whose palanquin had stopped by the side of the road while the bearers went into the inn to fetch her a drink, heard the old woman’s words. By lifting a corner of the curtain on the palanquin window, she had taken in the whole scene, including Kuni’s final look back at the old woman and how his eyes had grown wet.

She thought about the old woman’s words as a smile broke out on her pale white face. She played with a lock of her fiery red hair, and her slender eyes, shaped like the body of the graceful dyran, the rainbow-scaled, ribbon-tailed flying fish, stared into the distance. There was something about this young man who tried to do good without seeming to be too good. She wanted to know him better.

CHAPTER FOUR. JIA MATIZA

ZUDI: THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST YEAR OF THE REIGN OF ONE BRIGHT HEAVEN.

A few days later, Kuni was back at the Splendid Urn to meet his closest friends — the band of young men had saved one another in bar brawls and gone to the indigo houses together.

“Kuni, when are you going to try to do something useful with your life?” Rin Coda asked. Still gangly and nervous, Rin made a living as a letter writer for the illiterate soldiers in the Xana garrison. “Every time I see your mother, she sighs and tells me to be a good friend and encourage you to get a job. Your father stopped me on the way here tonight and told me that you were a bad influence on me.”

His father’s comment bothered Kuni more than he wanted to admit. He tried to bluster through it. “I do have ambition.”

“Ha! That’s a good one,” Than Carucono said. Than was the mayor’s stable master, and sometimes his friends teased him that he understood horses better than people. “Every time one of us offers to find you a real job, you come up with some ridiculous objection. You don’t want to work with me because you think horses are scared of you—”

“They are!” Kuni protested. “Horses are skittish around men of unusual character and high mind—”

Than ignored him. “You don’t want to help Cogo because you think civil service is boring—”

“I think you’re misquoting me,” said Kuni. “I said I didn’t think my creativity could be confined—”

“You don’t want to go with Rin because you claim Master Loing would be ashamed to see you dropping allusions to the classics he taught you in soldiers’ love letters. What do you want to do?”

In truth, Kuni thought he would have enjoyed peppering soldiers’ love letters with Master Loing’s pearls of wisdom, but he hadn’t wanted to take away business from Rin, as he knew he was the better writer. But such reasons could never be spoken aloud.

He wanted to say that he yearned to accomplish something extraordinary, to be admired like a man riding at the head of a great procession. But every time he tried to come up with specific details, he drew a blank. From time to time, he wondered if his father and brother had been right about him: He was like a bit of floating duckweed, just drifting through life, good for nothing.

“I’m waiting—”

“—for the right opportunity,” Than and Rin finished for him in unison.

“You’re improving,” said Rin. “You only say that once every other day now.”

Kuni gave them a wounded look.

“I think I understand,” Than said. “You are waiting for the mayor to come to you with a palanquin draped in silk, begging to present you to the emperor as the flower of Zudi.”

Everyone laughed.

“How can mere sparrows understand the thoughts of an eagle?” Kuni said, puffing up his chest and finishing his drink with a flourish.

“I agree. Eagles would gather around when they see you,” Rin said.

“Really?” Kuni brightened at this compliment.

“Of course. You look like a plucked chicken. You’d attract eagles and vultures from miles around.”

Kuni Garu halfheartedly punched his friend.

“Listen, Kuni,” Cogo Yelu said. “The mayor’s throwing a party. Do you want to come? A lot of important people will be there, people you don’t normally get to see. Who knows, you might meet your opportunity there.”

Cogo was older than Kuni by about ten years. A diligent and studious man, he had passed the Imperial civil service examinations with high marks. But as he was from an undistinguished family not tapped into the network of patronage in the bureaucracy, being a clerk of the third rank in the city government was probably as high as he would ever rise in the civil service.

However, he liked his job. The mayor, a Xana man who had bought this sinecure but had no real interest in administration, relied on Cogo’s advice for most decisions. Cogo was fascinated by matters of local governance and had a knack for solving the mayor’s problems.

Others might see Kuni as a lazy, idle young man destined for the poorhouse or a life of crime, but Cogo liked Kuni’s easy manners and his flashes of brilliance. Kuni was original, and that was more than could be said for most people in Zudi. Having Kuni there to joke with would relieve the monotony of the party for him.

“Sure.” Kuni perked up. A party was something he was always interested in — free drinks and free food!

“The mayor’s friend, a man by the name of Matiza, has just moved to Zudi. He’s a wealthy rancher from up in old Faça who somehow got in trouble with the local magistrate. He’s moving here to start over, but most of his assets are tied up in flocks and herds up there that can’t be quickly converted to cash. The mayor is holding a welcoming party for him—”

“The real point of the party, of course, is to get the guests to bring lots of gifts for this Matiza in order to impress the mayor, and thus solve his cash flow problem,” said Than Carunoco.

“Maybe you can come to the party as a servant hired for the occasion,” Cogo suggested. “I’m in charge of the planning. I can get you a job as a waiter for the day. You’ll get a chance to say a few words to the important guests as you deliver them their food.”

“Nah.” Kuni Garu waved the suggestion away. “Cogzy, I’m not going to bow and scrape for food and pay. I’ll go as a guest.”

“But the mayor wrote on the invitation that the suggested gift amount for guests is at least a hundred silver pieces!”

Kuni lifted his eyebrows. “I’ve got my wit and good looks. Those are priceless.”

Everyone broke down in laughter as Cogo shook his head.

Bright-yellow lanterns hung in front of the mayor’s house. Standing on both sides of the front door, young women dressed in traditional Cocru short gowns inhaled perfumed smoke sticks and blew soap bubbles at the arriving guests. The soap bubbles burst against them, releasing their fragrance: jasmine, osmanthus, rose, sandalwood.

Cogo Yelu acted as doorman and greeted the guests while recording their gifts in a ledger (“So that Master Matiza can properly write thank-you notes,” he explained). But everyone knew that the ledger would be read by the mayor later. How easy it would be for someone to get things done in Zudi in the future might well depend on the size of the figure next to his name.

Kuni arrived by himself. He had put on a clean undershirt and his least-patched robe, and washed his hair. He wasn’t drunk. This counted as “dressing up” for him.

Cogo stopped him at the door.

“I’m serious, Kuni. I can’t let you in unless you’ve brought a gift. Otherwise you have to join the beggars’ table over there.” He pointed to a table set up against the outside wall of the estate, about fifty feet down from the gate. Even at this early hour, beggars and malnourished orphans were already fighting for seats around it. “They’ll bring you the leftovers when the guests are done.”

Kuni Garu winked at Cogo, reached into the folds of his sleeves, and took out a crisp sheet of paper, folded into thirds. “You’ve surely mistaken me for someone else. I’m Fin Crukédori, and I’ve brought with me a thousand silver pieces. Here’s a note, to be drawn on my account at the house office.”

Before Cogo could answer, a woman’s voice interrupted. “Such an honor to see the famous Master Crukédori again!”

Cogo and Kuni turned their heads and saw, through the gate, a young woman barely in her twenties standing in the courtyard. She looked at Kuni with a mischievous smile. Her light complexion and curly, bright-red hair, common in Faça, stood out a little in Zudi, but Kuni was struck most by her eyes. Dyran-shaped, they seemed to be pools of dark-green wine. Any man who looked into them was doomed to lose his way.

“Miss,” Kuni said, and cleared his throat. “Is something amusing you?”

“You are,” the woman said. “Master Fin Crukédori came in not ten minutes ago with his father, and we chatted amiably while he paid me several compliments. Yet here you are again, outside, and looking so different.”

Kuni put on a serious face. “You must have me confused with my… cousin. He’s Fin, but I’m Phin.” He pursed his lips, demonstrating the supposed difference in pronunciation. “You are probably not familiar with the Cocru dialect, which is subtle with such distinctions.”

“Oh, is that so? You must be confused with your cousin often, what with Xana officials in markets also not being familiar with such subtle distinctions.”

Kuni’s face turned red momentarily, but he laughed. “Someone has been spying on me, it seems.”

“I’m Jia Matiza, daughter of the man you intend to cheat.”

“Cheat is such a strong word,” Kuni said without missing a beat. “I had heard that Master Matiza’s daughter is a great beauty, as rare as the dyran among fish.” Jia rolled her eyes at this. “My hope was to have my friend Cogzy here”—he gestured in Cogo’s direction, and Cogo shook his head in denial—“let me in under false pretenses so that I could have a chance to admire her. But now that I have accomplished my goal without having to go in, Cogo’s honor and mine are intact. I shall take my leave.”

“You really have no shame,” Jia Matiza said. But her eyes were laughing and so the words did not sting. “You can come in as my guest. You are outrageous, but you are interesting.”

When she was twelve years old, Jia stole some of her teacher’s dream herbs.

She dreamed of a man who wore a plain gray cotton tunic.

“What can you offer me?” she asked.

“Hardship, loneliness, long-flowing heartache,” he said.

She could not see his face, but she liked the sound of his voice: gentle and serious, but with a hint of laughter in it.

“That doesn’t sound like a good match,” she said.

“Good matches are not the stuff of stories and songs,” he said. “For every pain we endure together, there will be a joy twice as great. They will still sing of us in a thousand years.”

She saw that he had changed into a yellow silk robe. And he kissed her, and he tasted of salt and wine.

And she knew he was the man she was destined to marry.

The party from a few days ago lingered in Jia’s mind.

“I have never heard anyone claim that Lurusén’s poem is about waking up in the middle of the night in an indigo house,” Jia said, laughing.

“It’s true that the traditional interpretation is all about high-minded politics and such,” Kuni said. “But listen to the lines: ‘The world is drunk; I alone am sober. The world is asleep, but I am awake.’ This is clearly about the house watering down the liquor. I have research to back it up.”

“I’m sure you do. Did you present this interpretation to your teacher?”

“I did, but he was too set in his ways to recognize my brilliance.” Kuni grabbed two small plates off the tray of a passing waiter. “Did you know that you can dip pork dumplings in plum paste?”

Jia made a face. “That sounds disgusting. The two flavors are not compatible at all — you’re mixing up Faça and Cocru cuisines.”

“If you haven’t tried it, how do you know it’s no good?”

And Jia did try Kuni’s invention; it was delicious. Surprisingly so.

“You have better instincts with food than you do with poetry,” Jia said, and she reached for another pot sticker dipped in plum paste.

“But you’ll never think of Lurusén’s poem the same way again, will you?”

“Jia!” Her mother’s voice pulled her back into the present.

The young man who sat before her now was not ugly, Jia decided, but he seemed to have gone out of his way to make himself appear so. His eyes roamed all over Jia’s face and body, eyes devoid of any sign of intelligence, and a tiny rivulet of spittle hung from the corner of his mouth.

Definitely not the one.

“… his uncle owns twenty ships that ply the trade routes to Toaza,” the matchmaker said. She reached under the table and poked Jia with an eating stick. Earlier, she had explained to Jia that that was the sign for her to smile more demurely.

Jia stretched her arms and did not bother to cover her mouth when she yawned. Her mother, Lu, gave her a warning look.

“Tabo, is it?” Jia asked, leaning forward.

“Tado.”

“Yes, that’s right. Tado, tell me, where do you think you’ll be in ten years?”

Tado’s face grew even blanker. But after a few awkward moments, his face wrinkled into a wide smile. “Ah, I understand the question now. Don’t worry, sweet one. In ten years I expect to have my own mansion by the lake.”

Jia nodded. Her face was unreadable. She stared at the young man’s salivating mouth without saying anything further. Everyone else in the room squirmed. It felt like an eternity.

“Miss Matiza is an accomplished herbalist,” the matchmaker offered, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “She studied with the best teachers in Faça. I’m sure she knows of ways to ensure her lucky husband’s health and give him many beautiful children.”

“We will have at least five children,” Tado added magnanimously. “Maybe even more.”

“Surely you see me as more than just a field for you to plow,” Jia said. The matchmaker poked her under the table again.

“I hear that Miss Matiza is a skilled poet,” Tado ingratiatingly offered.

“Oh? Are you interested in poetry too?” She twirled a lock of her red hair in a way that would appear coquettish to someone who did not know her, but her mother understood her mockery and eyed her suspiciously.

“I love reading poetry.” He wiped away his saliva with the sleeve of his silk tunic.

“Is that so?” That mischievous smile appeared again. Jia was slightly sorry that the rivulet and her object of focus had disappeared. “I have a great idea! Why don’t you write a poem right now? You may choose any subject, and in an hour I will come back and read it. I’ll marry you if I like it.”

Before the matchmaker could say anything, Jia was already up and away, retreating to her bedroom.

Her mother stood at her door, fuming.

“Did I scare him off?”

“No. He’s trying to write a poem.”

“Persistence! I’m impressed.”

“How many eligible young men must you send off ranting and raving? We spoke to your first matchmaker back in the Year of the Toad, and it’s now the Year of the Cruben!”

“Mother, don’t you want your daughter to be happy?”

“Of course I do. But you seem determined to become an old maid.”

“But, Mama, then I would get to stay with you forever!”

Lu stared at her daughter, eyes narrowed. “Is there something you’re not telling me? A secret admirer perhaps?”

Jia said nothing but looked away. This had always been her habit. She would not lie, and so she would refuse to answer if what she had to say would not be welcomed. Her mother sighed.

“You keep this up, and soon no matchmakers in Zudi will want to work with you. You’re gaining a reputation as bad as the one you left behind in Faça!”

When the hour was up, Jia returned to the living room. She picked up the sheet of paper and cleared her throat:

Your hair is like fire.

Your eyes are like water.

I want you to be my wife.

Your beauty gives new meaning to life.

She nodded thoughtfully.

The young man could barely suppress his excitement. “You like it?”

“It has inspired me to think of a poem as well.”

Your eyes are like empty wells.

Your drool like an inchworm.

I want you to have a wife.

How about this matchmaker? She’s good at poking!

The young man and the matchmaker stormed out of the Matiza residence as Jia laughed, long and very loud.

There was no way that Kuni could call at the Matiza house. No matchmaker would be so foolish as to suggest that a prospectless gangster could be a suitable match for a respectable, if unestablished, family striving to move up in society like the Matizas.

Fortunately, Jia had a perfect excuse to be away from the house unchaperoned: She took many trips to the countryside around Zudi to study the local herbs and gather them for her potions.

Kuni brought Jia to his favorite haunts: the best bend in the river for fishing, the best gazebo and tree under which to nap, the best bars and teahouses, places no respectable young ladies of good breeding should be found, places Jia found refreshingly honest, without the stifling conventions and desperate anxieties that always seemed to gather around those concerned with what was “proper.” In these places, she enjoyed the company of Kuni and his friends, who did not care about how appropriate was her bow or how elegant her speech, but applauded when she drank with them and listened when she spoke her mind.

In turn, Jia showed Kuni a new universe that he had never paid much attention to: the grasses at his feet and the bushes lining the long country lanes. At first, his interest had been feigned — he thought her lips far more interesting than the flowers whose uses she tried to explain — but after she showed him how chewing ginger and evening primrose did wonders for his frequent hangovers, he became a true disciple.

“What is this?” he asked, pointing to a weed with white five-petaled flowers and two-lobed leaves shaped like praying hands.

“That is actually not one plant, but two,” Jia said. “The leaves belong to a grass called mercy flax. The flowers are called crowsbane.”

Kuni immediately got on his hands and knees to get a better look, careless about getting his clothes dirty. Jia laughed at the sight of this man behaving like a curious boy. Kuni acted as if the rules everyone accepted didn’t apply to him, and that made Jia feel free too.

“You’re right,” Kuni said, wonder suffusing his voice. “But they really do look like one plant from a distance.”

“Crowsbane is a slow poison, but the flowers are so pretty that the crows, as wise as the Blessed Kana and Rapa have made them, cannot resist their beauty. They pick them to decorate their nests with and over time die from their vapors and juices.”

Kuni, who had been smelling the flowers, pulled back sharply. Jia’s loud laughter echoed in the field.

“Don’t worry, you’re much bigger than a crow. You won’t be harmed by such small quantities. Besides, the other plant, mercy flax, is a natural antidote.”

Kuni picked a few leaves from the mercy flax and chewed them. “Strange that a poison and its antidote would grow so close together.”

Jia nodded. “One of the principles of herbal lore is the prevalence of such pairings. The deadly seven-step snake of Faça nests in shady coves where the crying boy mushroom, which secretes an antivenom, likes to grow. The fiery salamander weed, a good, hot spice for cold winter nights, grows better next to the snowdrop, known for its power to relieve fevers. Creation seems to favor making friends of those destined to be enemies.”

Kuni pondered this. “Who knew that so much philosophy and wisdom could be hidden among weeds?”

“You’re surprised? Because the art of herbal healing is a women’s art, beyond the notice of real scholars and doctors?”

Kuni turned to Jia and bowed. “I spoke in ignorance. I meant no disrespect.”

Jia bowed back deeply in jiri. “You do not assume yourself to be better than anyone. That is the sign of a truly capacious mind.”

They smiled at each other and kept on walking.

“What is your favorite plant?” Kuni asked.

Jia thought for a moment and bent down to pluck a small flower with a full yellow crown. “They’re all dear to me, but I admire the dandelion the most. It is hardy and determined, adaptable and practical. The flower looks like a small chrysanthemum, but it’s much more resourceful and far less delicate. Poets may compose odes about the chrysanthemum, but the dandelion’s leaves and flowers can fill your belly, its sap cure your warts, its roots calm your fevers. Dandelion tea makes you alert, while chewing its root can steady a nervous hand. The milk of the dandelion can even be used to make invisible ink that reveals itself when mixed with the juice of the stone’s ear mushroom. It is a versatile and useful plant people can rely on.

“And it’s playful and fun.” She picked up a puff ball and blew at it, scattering the tiny feathered seeds into the air, a few of which landed in Kuni’s hair.

Kuni made no move to brush them away. “The chrysanthemum is a noble flower.”

“That’s true. It’s the last flower to bloom in autumn, defiant against winter. Its fragrance is exquisite, and overwhelms all competition. In tea, it awakens the spirit; in bouquets, it dominates the arrangement. But it is not a flower that endears.”

“You don’t care much about nobility?”

“I think true nobility is shown in far humbler ways.”

Kuni nodded. “Miss Matiza has a truly capacious mind.”

“Ah, flattery does not suit you, Master Garu,” Jia said, laughing. She turned serious after a moment. “Tell me, where do you think you’ll be in ten years?”

“I have no idea,” Kuni said. “All life is an experiment. Who can plan so far ahead? I just promise myself to do the most interesting thing every time there’s an opportunity. If I can stick to that promise most of the time, I’m sure in ten years I won’t have any regrets.”

“Why do you have to make a promise like that?”

“It’s very scary to do the most interesting thing when the chance arises. Most people don’t dare to do it — like bluffing your way into a party you aren’t invited to. But look how much more delightful my life is now. I got to know you.”

“The most interesting thing is often not the easiest thing,” Jia said. “There may be pain and suffering, disappointment and failure, for yourself and those you love.”

Kuni became serious too. “But without having endured bitterness, I don’t believe one will treasure sweetness as heartily as one should.”

She faced Kuni and put a hand on his arm. “I believe you will do great things.”

A warm feeling suffused Kuni’s heart. Until Jia, he realized, he had never met a woman who truly became his friend.

“Will I?” he asked, a smirk curving the corners of his mouth. “How do you know you’re not being fooled?”

“I’m too smart to be fooled,” she answered without hesitation, and they embraced, careless who saw.

Kuni felt like he was the luckiest man in the world. He had no money to pay her father a proper bride price, but he had to marry her.

“Sometimes the most interesting thing is also the most boring thing, the responsible thing,” Kuni said to himself.

He went to ask Cogo to get him a job in Zudi’s city government.

“You don’t know how to do anything,” Cogo said, his brows knit in a frown.

But a friend was in need, and Cogo inquired around until he found out that the Corvée Department needed a guard to watch the newly conscripted men and petty criminals sentenced to hard labor; they were kept in prison for a few nights until a full squad of them could be sent together to their work assignments. Once in a while, the guard might also be asked to escort the conscripts and prisoners on such journeys. This seemed a job that a trained monkey with a stick could do. Even Kuni shouldn’t be able to screw it up.

“I never quite pictured myself serving the emperor this way,” said Kuni, thinking of the corvée administrator who had, in a way, introduced him to Jia. He’d have to buy his future colleague a good meal to smooth over any hard feelings. “I’m not going to make up any ‘Prosperity Tax,’ though — well, not unless it’s someone very wealthy.”

“As long as you live frugally, you’ll be fine,” said Cogo. “The pay is very steady.”

Steady enough for Kuni to go to the money lenders and pledge his future income for a present sum so that he could go to Jia’s parents.

Gilo Matiza could not understand it. By all accounts, Kuni Garu was an indolent young man with no useful skills and no prospects. He had no money, no property, and until recently, no job — even his own family had thrown him out. He was also rumored to enjoy the company of loose women and had many girlfriends.

Why did his daughter, known to all the matchmakers as impossible to please, favor this man’s suit?

“I prefer to do the most interesting thing,” Jia said. And that was all the answer she would give him.

Nothing would dissuade her. Once her mind was made up, Jia’s will was iron. So Gilo had to at least listen to the young man.

“I know I don’t have a very good reputation,” said Kuni, who was sitting up very straight in mipa rari, his eyes focused on the tip of his nose. “But as the sagacious Lurusén once said, ‘The world is drunk; I alone am sober. The world is asleep, but I am awake.’ ”

Gilo was surprised. He did not expect a quote from Cocru classics. “What does that have to do with your suit?”

“The poet was speaking of the experience of sudden clarity after a life of doubt. Until I met Jia and you, I did not understand what the poem meant. Sir, a reformed man is worth ten men virtuous from birth, for he understands temptation and will strive the harder to not stray.”

Gilo softened. He had wanted to make a good match for Jia — a wealthy local merchant or a young scholar who had a good future in government — but this Kuni seemed learned and respectful, and that was something. Perhaps all the rumors about him were wrong.

Gilo sighed and accepted Kuni’s marriage proposal.

“I see you decided not to share your other reading of Lurusén’s poem with my father. I’m impressed: I could almost believe that speech back there.”

“It’s just like they say in the villages: ‘Howl when you see a wolf, scratch your head when you see a monkey.’ ”

“How many more of these readings do you have?”

“As many as the days we’ll have together.”

Kuni’s brother Kado and his father Féso welcomed him again to their houses, believing that the prodigal son had finally returned.

Naré Garu was so happy that she embraced Jia and wouldn’t let go, soaking the shoulder of Jia’s dress with her tears. “You saved my son!” she said again and again, and Jia blushed and smiled awkwardly.

And so there was a big wedding — paid for by Gilo — that became the talk of Zudi for many days. Although Gilo refused to support the couple in a lavish lifestyle (“Since you picked him, you have to live within the means of his salary”), Jia’s dowry allowed the couple to get a small house, and Kuni no longer had to calculate how long he had before he wore out a friend’s patience and had to find another place to sleep.

He went to work every morning and sat in his office and filled out reports and made his hourly rounds to be sure that the listless men held in prison weren’t up to any mischief while they waited to be sent to labor in the Grand Tunnels or the Mausoleum.

In no time at all, he hated his job — now he really felt he was drifting. He complained to Jia daily.

“Do not fret, my husband,” said Jia. “They also serve who only stand and wait. There is a time for flight, and a time for descent; a time for movement, and a time for rest; a time to do, and a time to prepare.”

“This is why you’re the poet,” said Kuni. “You even make paperwork sound exciting.”

“Here’s what I think: Opportunity comes in many forms. What is luck but being ready with the snare when the rabbit bolts from his hole? You’ve made many friends in Zudi over the years as a ne’er-do-well—”

“Hey, I resent that—”

“I married you, didn’t I?” Jia gave him a light peck on the cheek to placate him. “But the point is, now that you’re a member of Zudi’s officialdom, you have a chance to make different kinds of friends. Trust yourself that this is only temporary. Take advantage of it to spread your circles. I know you like people.”

Kuni took Jia’s advice and made an extra effort to go out with fellow clerks to teahouses after work and to pay visits at the homes of senior officials from time to time. He was humble, respectful, and listened more than he spoke. When he found people he liked, he and Jia would invite them and their families to their little home for deeper conversation.

Soon, Kuni got to know the departments and bureaus of Zudi’s city government as well as he knew its back alleys and busy markets.

“I had thought of them as the dull sort,” said Kuni. “But they’re not so bad once you get to know them. They’re just… different from my old friends.”

“A bird needs both long and short feathers to fly,” said Jia. “You need to learn to work with different kinds of people.”

Kuni nodded, glad of Jia’s wisdom.

It was now late summer, and the air was filled with drifting dandelion seeds. Every day as he came home, Kuni gazed with longing at the tiny feathered seeds carelessly riding the wind, snowy puffs that danced about his nose and eyes.

He imagined their flight. They were so light that a gust of wind could carry one for miles. There was no reason that a seed couldn’t fly all the way from one end of the Big Island to the other. No reason that it couldn’t fly all the way over the sea, to Crescent Island, to Ogé, to Écofi. No reason that it couldn’t tour the peaks of Mount Rapa and Mount Kiji. No reason that it couldn’t taste the mist at the Rufizo Falls. All it needed was a little kindness from nature, and it would travel the world.

He felt, in a way that he could not explain, that he was meant to live more than the life he was living, destined to one day soar high into the air like these dandelion seeds, like the kite rider he had seen long ago.

He was like a seed still tethered to the withered flower, just waiting for the dead air of the late summer evening to break, for the storm to begin.

CHAPTER FIVE. THE DEATH OF THE EMPEROR

ÉCOFI ISLAND: THE TENTH MONTH IN THE TWENTY-THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF ONE BRIGHT HEAVEN.

Emperor Mapidéré had not looked into a mirror for weeks now.

The last time he had dared to look, a pallid, leathery mask had stared back at him. Gone was the handsome, arrogant, fearless man who had made ten thousand wives into widows and forged the crowns of the Seven States into one.

His body had been usurped by an old man, consumed by fear of death.

He was on Écofi Island, where the land was flat and the sea of grass stretched as far as the eye could see. Perched atop the Throne Pagoda, the emperor gazed at the distant herd of elephants strolling majestically across his field of view. Écofi was one of his favorite spots to pass through on his tours of the Islands. Miles and miles away from the busy cities and the intrigue of the palace in Pan, the emperor imagined that he was alone and free.

But he could not deny the pain in his stomach, the pain that now made it impossible for him to descend the Throne Pagoda on his own. He would have to call for help.

“Some medicine, Rénga?”

The emperor had said nothing. But Chatelain Goran Pira was, as always, observant. “This is prepared by an Écofi medicine woman who is said to know many secrets. It might ease the discomfort.”

The emperor hesitated, but relented. He sipped the bitter beverage, and it did seem to numb the pain slightly.

“Thank you,” the emperor said. Then, because only Goran could hear, he added, “Death catches up to us all.”

“Sire, speak not of such things. You should rest.”

Like all men who spent their lives in conquest, he had long turned his thoughts to the ultimate foe. For years, Pan had been filled with alchemists working on elixirs of eternal life and youth. Swindlers and con men had flooded the new capital and drained the treasury with their elaborate laboratories and research proposals that never seemed to produce anything useful; the clever ones always packed up and could not be found when it came time for an audit.

He had swallowed their pills, pills distilled from the essences of a thousand species of fish, some so rare that they were found in only a single lake in the mountains, pills prepared in the holy fire of Mount Fithowéo, pills that were supposed to protect him from a hundred diseases and make his body immune to the passage of time.

They had all lied. Here he was, his body ravaged by a disease that all the doctors gave different names to but were equally powerless against, a twisting, recurring pain in his stomach like a coiled snake that made him unable to eat.

But this medicine really is very good, the emperor thought.

“Goran,” he said, “the pain is much better. This is a good find.”

Chatelain Pira bowed. “I am your loyal servant, as always.”

“You’re my friend,” the emperor said, “my only true friend.”

“You must rest, Sire. The medicine is supposed to be a good soporific as well.”

I am sleepy.

But I still have so much to do.

For centuries, back before the Xana Conquest, back when young Mapidéré was still called Réon, his hair still full and lush and his face unlined, the Seven States had vied for dominance of the Islands of Dara: rustic and arid Xana in the far northwest, confined to the islands of Rui and Dasu; elegant and arrogant Amu, fortified in rain-drenched and balmy Arulugi and the fertile fields of Géfica, the land between the rivers; the Three Brother States of woodsy Rima, sandy Haan, and craggy Faça, nestled in the northern half of the Big Island; wealthy and sophisticated Gan in the east, filled with big cities and busy trading ports; and finally, martial Cocru on the southern plains, famed for her brave warriors and wise generals.

Their web of shifting alliances and enmities was as confusing as it was dynamic. In the morning the King of Xana and the King of Gan might still call each other brothers, and by that night Gan’s ships might already be sailing around the Big Island for a sneak attack, aided by fast cavalry from the King of Faça, who just that morning had sworn that he would never forgive Gan for past treacheries.

And then came Réon, and everything changed.

The emperor looked around.

He was in Pan, the Immaculate City, standing in the middle of the broad expanse of Kiji Square in front of the palace. Normally the square was empty, save for children who flew kites in spring and summer and built ice statues in winter. Occasionally an Imperial airship landed in it, and nearby citizens would gather to watch.

But today the square was not empty. He was surrounded by colossal statues of the gods of Dara. The statues, each as tall as the Throne Pagoda, were made with bronze and iron and painted with bright, lifelike colors.

Long ago, Thasoluo, the World Father, was called away by the King of All Deities, Moäno, never to return. He left behind his pregnant wife, Daraméa, the Source-of-All-Waters. Alone in the void, she cried hot, large tears of lava as she gave birth. The sizzling tears fell from the heavens into the sea and solidified into the Islands of Dara.

Eight children were born. As the gods of Dara, they staked out their claims to the Islands and watched over the native inhabitants. Daraméa, comforted, withdrew to the great ocean, leaving her children in charge of Dara. Later, when the Ano arrived and spread throughout the Islands, their fates also became inextricably bound with the doings and undoings of the deities.

The emperor had long dreamed of confiscating all the weapons of Dara, all the swords and spears, all the knives and arrows, and melting them down into their constituent metals so that they could be turned into statues honoring the gods. Without weapons, there would be eternal peace in the world.

He had always been too busy to convert his grand vision into reality, yet somehow here they were. Perhaps this was a chance for him to plead his case directly to the gods, to ask for long life and good health and restored youth.

Mapidéré knelt first before Kiji, the source of Xana’s strength. The statue depicted a middle-aged man with white sideburns, a bald head, and a white cape on his back. Mapidéré admired the intricate designs on the cape, showing Kiji’s mastery over wind, flight, and birds. On Kiji’s shoulder sat his pawi, the Mingén falcon.

“Lord Kiji, are you pleased by this sign of my piety? There is yet much that I can do to glorify you, but I need more time!”

The emperor wished that the god would give him a sign that his prayer was heard. But he well knew that the gods preferred to work in obscure mystery.

Next to Kiji were the Twins, Kana and Rapa, patrons of Cocru. Kana wore a black dress and had brown skin, long silky black hair, and dark-brown eyes, while Rapa, with a face identical to her sister’s, wore a white dress and had pale skin, snow-white hair, and light-gray eyes. Over the sisters’ shoulders stood their pawi, a pair of ravens, one black, one white.

Mapidéré may have conquered all the Tiro states, but he sought the approbation of all the gods. He lowered his head to the goddesses next. “I honor you, Lady Kana, mistress of fire, ash, and death. I honor you, Lady Rapa, mistress of ice, snow, and sleep. I have taken away men’s weapons and ended their strife so that they may all turn their hearts to thoughts of you. May you see fit to grant me many more years of life.”

The statues of the goddesses shifted and came to life.

The emperor was too stunned to move or speak.

Kana turned her bronze eyes to the kneeling Mapidéré like a woman turning to gaze at an ant. Her voice was loud, harsh, discordant, recalling the scraping of rusty swords across an old sharpening stone.

“Even if Cocru lives on only in the heart of one man, it will bring about the fall of Xana.”

Mapidéré trembled.

“Do you think I will stand by and do nothing?”

Mapidéré looked back and saw that the thunderous, sonorous voice belonged to Kiji, who had also come to life. The statue took a step forward and the ground quaked beneath Mapidéré. The Mingén falcon took off from his shoulder and circled over the statues of the gods; Kana and Rapa’s ravens took off also and cried challengingly at the falcon.

“Have you forgotten our pact?” said Rapa, whose voice was mellifluous, cool, harmonious, but no less powerful than her sister’s. She and Kana were as far apart as ice and fire, yet as close as sleep and death.

“I’m not the one agitating for further bloodshed,” said Kiji. He lifted his left hand, which was missing a pinkie, placed the index and middle fingers into his mouth, and whistled. The Mingén falcon, still gazing balefully at the ravens, reluctantly returned to his shoulder. “Xana has emerged victorious. The time for war is over. Mapidéré has brought peace, however much you may dislike him.”

The statue of Fithowéo of Rima, a lean, muscular man in leather armor carrying a long spear with an obsidian tip, shifted and spoke next. “Taking away men’s weapons will not bring peace. They’ll fight with sticks and stones, and tooth and nail. Mapidéré’s is a peace supported only by fear, as secure as a nest built on a rotten branch.”

Mapidéré despaired at the words of Lord Fithowéo, the god of the hunt, of metals and stone, and war and peace. The emperor looked into the god’s eyes, the cold, dark obsidian from Mount Fithowéo, and saw no compassion. His pawi, the wolf, howled to accompany the end of his master’s rumbling speech.

Fithowéo bared his teeth at Kiji and let out a bloodcurdling war cry.

“Do not mistake my restraint for weakness,” said Kiji. “It has been eons since my falcon pecked out your eyes and you had to replace them with stones. Would you like to experience blindness again?”

“Listen to how you talk!” Kana’s discordant laughter made Kiji wince. “The last time we fought I singed off all the hair on your head and your beard so that you now have to make do with these ridiculous sideburns. I’d be happy to leave you some deeper scars—”

“—or make you lose more than just your pinkie from frostbite,” said Rapa. Her lovely, cold voice made the threat seem even more frightening.

Mapidéré fell to the ground and scrambled away on his hands and knees to the statue of Rufizo of Faça, lord of life, healing, and green pastures. He grabbed a big toe with both his arms, but the cold metal provided no comfort.

“Lord Rufizo,” Mapidéré cried out, “protect me! Stop this strife among your siblings.”

Rufizo was a tall, lanky young man wearing a cape of green ivy. His sad eyes came to life, and he shook his foot carefully, casting off Mapidéré like a dirt clod. He stepped between Kiji, Fithowéo, and the Twins and spoke in a voice as gentle and soothing as the pools fed by Rufizo Falls, whose water was hot year round, keeping nearby pastures green despite the cold climate of the Faça Highlands.

“Enough of this posturing, my brothers and sisters. After the Diaspora Wars, during which all of us caused our mother much grief, we vowed that the gods would never again harm one another, as Moäno is our witness. During all the years of Mapidéré’s wars, we kept peace among us. Today is not the day to break that promise.”

Mapidéré, lying on the ground, was comforted by this speech. He remembered that in the aftermath of the mythical, bloody Diaspora Wars, when the gods had accompanied ancient Ano heroes onto the battlefield, the divine siblings had vowed to never again take up arms against one another. Henceforth they would only interfere in the affairs of men indirectly, by persuasion, trickery, inspiration, or prophesy. The gods also agreed to never again directly fight against the mortals, but to work through other men.

Emboldened by the thought that the gods were honor-bound to not harm him, a mere mortal, he stood up and croaked out to Rufizo, as loudly as his frail body could manage, “You, of all the gods, must understand how my life has been dedicated to a war to end all wars.”

“You have spilled too much blood.” Rufizo sighed, and his pawi, the white dove, cooed.

“I spilled blood to prevent the spilling of more blood,” Mapidéré insisted.

Laughter, as wild as a tornado, as chaotic as a whirlpool, rose behind the emperor. It was Tazu, the shape-shifting god of Gan. He was a lithe figure in a fish-skin tunic decorated with a belt made of shark’s teeth.

“I like your logic, Mapidéré,” he said. “I want more of it.” His pawi, a great shark, leapt out of the pool at his feet, its jaws opened in a deadly grin. “You have greatly increased my collection of drowned men and sunken treasures.”

The swirling pool at Tazu’s feet grew, and Mapidéré scrambled to back up out of its way. Although the gods had promised to not actively aim their wrath at mortals, the great Ano lawgiver Aruano had noted that the promise, like all the laws that bound men and gods, left room for interpretation. The gods were charged by their mother, Daraméa, the Source-of-All-Waters, with the running of the natural world: Kiji governed the winds and storms; Rapa guided the flow of glaciers across eons; Kana controlled the flashy eruptions of volcanoes; and so on. If mortals happened to be in the way of these forces of nature, like Tazu’s famous whirlpool and raging tides, then their deaths would not be a violation. Mapidéré had no interest in testing how Tazu, the most unpredictable of the gods, interpreted his own promise.

Tazu laughed even louder, and the great shark sank back into the pool at his feet. But the pool of water stopped spreading as the ground beneath Mapidéré turned into quicksand as black as the famed sands at Lutho Beach. Mapidéré sank up to his neck, and he found that he could not breathe.

“I have always honored all of you,” croaked Mapidéré, his voice almost inaudible as Tazu continued to laugh. “I have always tried only to make the world of men more perfect, closer to the world of the gods.”

Lutho, the god of Haan, a stocky old fisherman whose skin was as dark as freshly solidified lava, lifted his foot off his pawi, a giant sea turtle, threw out the fishing net on his back, and pulled Mapidéré to safety. “There is often no line between perfection and evil.”

Mapidéré struggled to breathe. Lutho’s words made no sense to him, but that was to be expected of the lord of tricks, mathematics, and divination, whose domain was beyond the understanding of mortals.

“Tazu, I’m surprised,” said Lutho. His old, hazel eyes twinkled with a brightness that belied his apparent age. “I had not expected you to take a side in this coming war. So it’s Kiji against the Twins, Fithowéo, and you?”

Mapidéré, now forgotten, felt his old heart clench. So it’s to be war again? Has my life’s project been in vain?

“Oh, I can’t possibly be bothered with something as restraining as picking a side,” said Tazu. “I’m interested only in more treasure and bones for my underwater palace. I’ll do whatever supplies me more of either. You can say I’m a neutral observer, like Rufizo over there. Except he wants fewer people to die, and I want the opposite. What about you, old man?”

“Me?” asked Lutho in mock surprise. “You know I never had the talent for fighting and politics. I’ve always been interested only in Mapidéré’s alchemists.”

“Right,” scoffed Tazu. “I think you’re biding your time and waiting for a winning side to emerge, you trickster.”

Lutho smiled and said nothing.

Tututika, the ethereal goddess of Amu, spoke last in a voice as calm and pleasant as the flat, tranquil surface of Lake Tututika. The speech of the golden-haired, azure-eyed goddess with skin the hue of polished walnut silenced the other gods.

“As the youngest of you all and the least experienced, I’ve never understood your appetites for power and blood. All I’ve ever wanted was to enjoy the beauty of my realm and the praise of my people. Why must we always end up as a house divided? Why can’t we just promise one another not to be involved in the affairs of mortals at all?”

The other gods were silent. After a while, Kiji said, “You speak as if history does not matter. You know well how the people of Xana were treated by the other states before Mapidéré’s wars. Looked down upon, cheated, taken advantage of, Xana suffered for years and lost blood and treasure until the insults could not be borne. Now that they’re finally treated with respect, how can I do nothing when they’re threatened?”

“Do not presume to speak of only your history,” said Tututika. “The suffering of Amu was also great during Mapidéré’s conquests.”

“Exactly,” said Kiji triumphantly. “If the people of Amu now cry out again for your help as they die, will you stand by and plug up your ears as you enjoy the sunsets on Arulugi Island, no doubt made even more beautiful by the smoke and ashes of burning cities?”

Tututika bit her bottom lip, and then sighed. “I wonder whether we’re guiding the mortals or if the mortals are guiding us.”

“You can’t escape the weight of history,” said Kiji.

“Leave Amu out of it, I beg of you.”

“War has its own logic, Little Sister,” said Fithowéo. “We can guide, but it cannot be controlled.”

“A lesson that mortals have learned again and again—” said Rapa.

“—but it doesn’t seem to take,” finished Kana.

Tututika turned her gaze to the forgotten Mapidéré. “Then we should pity this man, whose work is about to be undone. Great men are always misunderstood by their own age. And great seldom means good.”

The goddess glided toward Mapidéré, her blue silk gown spreading open like the calm sky. Her pawi, a golden carp whose sparkling scales dazzled the emperor, swam through the air before her like a living airship.

“Go,” Tututika said, “you have no more time.”

It was only a dream, thought the emperor.

Some dreams are important: signs, portents, glances of unrealized potential. But others are mere meaningless creations of a busy mind. A great man must pay attention only to dreams that can become true.

It had been the dream of generations of kings of Xana to win the respect of the rest of the Islands of Dara. The men of those other Tiro states, closer together and more populous, had always treated remote Xana with contempt: comedians from Amu mocked her accent, merchants from Gan cheated her buyers, poets from Cocru imagined her a land without manners, barely better than the savages who had once lived in Dara before the Settlement. The insults and slights became part of the memory of every Xana child who encountered outsiders.

Respect had to be earned by force. The men of Dara must be made to tremble before the might of Xana.

The rise of Xana was slow and took many years.

Since time immemorial, the children of Dara had been making paper-and-bamboo balloons, hanging candles from them, and then releasing the paper crafts to drift into the dark night sky over the endless ocean, tiny pockets of hot air floating like glowing jellyfish of the skies.

One night, as Mapidéré’s father, King Dézan, observed children playing with flying lanterns near the palace, he had a flash of insight: Such balloons, properly scaled up, could change the tide of battle.

Dézan began with balloons made of layers of silk wrapped around a wire-and-bamboo framework. They floated on hot air generated by burning bags full of swamp gas. One or two soldiers, carried up in a gondola, could act as lookouts to spot potential ambushes or reconnoiter for distant fleets. Over time, the use of flame bombs — burning jars of sticky tar mixed with hot oil dropped from the gondolas — gave the balloons offensive capabilities. The other Tiro states quickly copied these Xana innovations.

But then came the discovery by Kino Ye, a Xana engineer, of an odorless, colorless gas that was lighter than air. The gas was found only at bubbling Lake Dako, on the side of Mount Kiji. When properly sealed up in airtight bags, the gas provided enormous lift, and could keep ships afloat in the air indefinitely. Propelled by enormous, winglike oars, these powerful airships made quick work of the passive, unreliable hot air balloons put up by the other states.

Moreover, the airships were deadly to navies, with their wooden hulls and cloth sails. A few airships could decimate an entire fleet caught by surprise. The only effective countermeasure involved long-range arrows propelled by firework rockets, but these were expensive and often proved even more dangerous to the other ships on the surface when they fell back down at the end of their long arcing flight, still burning.

King Dézan had contented himself with merely gaining the respect of the other Tiro states. His successor, the young and ambitious King Réon, decided that he preferred to dream a bigger dream, a dream that no one had dared to voice since the days of the Ano: to conquer all the Tiro states and unify the Islands of Dara.

Aided by the great airships, Xana navies and armies swept from victory to victory. It took thirty years of unceasing war for King Réon to conquer all the other six Tiro states. Even great Cocru, with its famed cavalry and skilled swordsmen, could not stand against him in the field. The last King of Cocru jumped into the sea when the capital Çaruza fell because he could not bear to be a naked captive in Réon’s court.

So Réon declared himself Lord of All Dara and renamed himself Mapidéré, the First Emperor. He saw himself as the beginning of a new kind of power, a power that would transform the world.

“The time for kings is over. I am the King of Kings.”

It was a new dawn, but the Imperial Procession remained where it was.

The emperor was still lying in his tent. The pain in his stomach was so intense that he could not get up. Even breathing seemed to take too much energy.

“Send our fastest airship, and bring me the crown prince.”

I must warn Pulo to prepare for the coming war, thought the emperor. The gods have prophesied it. But perhaps it can still be stopped — even the gods admit that they are not always in control.

Chatelain Goran Pira held his ear close to the emperor’s trembling lips and nodded. But there was a glint in his eyes, a glint that the emperor did not see.

The emperor lay, dreaming of his grand projects. There were still so many things to do, so many tasks unfinished.

Pira summoned Prime Minister Lügo Crupo to his own tent, a tiny, unassuming dome next to the giant Imperial pavilion, like a hermit crab sheltered next to a thirty-year-old conch.

“The emperor is very ill,” Pira said. The hand holding the teacup was still. “No one knows the true extent of his sickness, yet, except for me — and now you. He has asked to see the crown prince.”

“I will send Time’s Arrow,” Crupo said. Crown Prince Pulo was away in Rui supervising the construction of the Grand Tunnels with General Gotha Tonyeti. Even Time’s Arrow, the empire’s fastest airship, oaring the air nonstop with shifts of conscripted laborers, would take almost two full days to get there and two more to return.

“Well, let’s ponder that a bit,” Pira said. His expression was unreadable.

“What is there to ponder?”

“Tell me, Prime Minister, who holds more weight in the heart of the crown prince? You or General Tonyeti? Who does he think has done more for Xana? Who does he trust?”

“That’s a stupid question. General Tonyeti was responsible for the conquest of Cocru, the last and most defiant of the Six States; the crown prince has spent many years with him in the field, practically growing up in his company. It’s perfectly understandable that the crown prince values him.”

“Yet you have administered the empire for the better part of two decades, weighed and measured the fates of millions, made all the hard decisions, and did all you could to translate the emperor’s dreams into reality. Don’t you believe that your contributions are worth more than that of an old warrior who knows only how to fight and kill?”

Crupo said nothing in response and sipped his tea.

Pira smiled and pressed further. “If the crown prince accedes to the throne, the seal of the prime minister might be handed to Tonyeti. And someone would be looking for a new job.”

“A loyal servant does not think of things outside of his control.”

“But if young Prince Loshi, your student, were to ascend to the throne instead of his brother, things might be very different.”

Crupo felt the hairs on his back stand on their ends. His eyes widened. “What you are saying… should not be said.”

“Whether I say something or not, Prime Minister, the world will go on in accordance with its rules. Ingaan pha naüran i gipi lothu, as the Ano sages would say. Fortune favors the bold.”

Pira placed something on the tea tray. He lifted his sleeves so that Crupo could take a quick peek. It was the Imperial Seal. Whatever document held its impression was the law of the land.

Crupo stared at Pira with his dark-brown eyes, and Pira stared placidly back.

After a moment, Crupo’s face relaxed. He sighed. “This is a chaotic world, Chatelain. It can sometimes be difficult for servants to express their loyalty clearly. I will be guided by you.”

Pira smiled.

As Emperor Mapidéré lay in his bed, he banked the embers of his vision for how Dara ought to be.

The first project that he had conceived of was the Grand Tunnels. He would chain Dara together by a system of undersea tunnels so that never again would the islands splinter into rival states. With the tunnels in place, commerce would flow between the islands and peoples would mix. The empire’s soldiers would be able to ride from one end of Dara to the other without ever having to set foot in a boat or airship.

This is madness! declared the engineers and scholars. Nature and the gods will not permit it. What will travelers eat and drink? How will they breathe in darkness, under the sea? And where will we find the men to do this?

The emperor brushed aside their concerns. Didn’t they also think that it was impossible for Xana to win? To conquer all the Islands of Dara? It was glorious to fight against men, but even more glorious to bend heaven, tame the sea, and reshape the earth.

Every problem had a solution. There would be side caverns dug every twenty miles or so, way stations for travelers bound between the islands. Glowing mushrooms would be cultivated in the dark to provide food, and water pulled out of the damp air with fog fences. If necessary, giant bellows would be installed at the tunnel entrances to pump fresh air throughout the system with bamboo pipes.

He decreed that every man chosen by lottery had to leave his profession, his fields, his workshop, his family, and go where the emperor wanted him to be, to labor under the watchful eyes of Xana soldiers. Young men were forced to leave their families behind for a decade or more, as they grew old under the sea, chained in permanent darkness, slaving away for a dream as grand as it was impossible. When men died, their bodies were cremated and the ashes sent home in tiny, unmarked boxes no bigger than the wooden tray for holding waste bones and fruit pits. And their sons would be conscripted to take their place.

Petty and shortsighted peasants could not understand his vision. They complained and cursed Mapidéré’s name in secret. But he persevered. When he saw how little progress had been made, he simply drafted more men.

The harshness of your laws is against the teachings of Kon Fiji, the One True Sage, the great scholar Huzo Tuan, one of the emperor’s advisers, said. Yours are not the acts of a wise ruler.

The emperor was disappointed. Mapidéré had always respected Tuan and hoped such an enlightened man could see further than the others. But he could not permit the man to live after such criticism. Mapidéré gave Tuan a grand funeral and published a collection of his writings posthumously, edited by the emperor himself.

He had many other ideas about how to improve the world. For instance, he thought all the people of Dara ought to write the same way, instead of each locale maintaining its own variant of the ancient Ano logograms and its own way of arranging the zyndari letters into word-squares.

Just remembering how the scholars of the conquered Tiro states had howled at the Edict on Uniformity of Speech and Writing brought a smile to the emperor’s face. The edict had elevated the Xana dialect and the Xana script into standards for all of Dara. Virtually all the literati outside of the Xana home islands of Rui and Dasu foamed at their mouths and called the edict a crime against civilization. But Mapidéré knew perfectly well that what they were really objecting to was the loss of power. Once all the children had been educated under one standard script and one standard dialect, the local scholars no longer could dictate what thoughts could spread within their realm of influence. Ideas from outside — such as Imperial edicts, poetry, the fruits of the culture of other Tiro states, an official history that superseded the local interpretations — could spread across all of Dara without the ancient barriers put up by seven incompatible scripts. And if scholars could no longer show their erudition by knowing how to write the same thing in seven different ways, good riddance!

Also, Mapidéré thought everyone should build their ships following the same specifications — ones he judged to be the best. He believed old books were fatuous and contained nothing useful for the future, so he collected them and burned every copy except one, and these last copies he stored deep in the bowels of the Great Library in Pan, the Immaculate City where everything was new, where only those who would not be corrupted by outdated foolishness could see them.

Scholars protested and wrote tracts denouncing him as a tyrant. But they were only scholars, with no strength to lift swords. He had two hundred of them buried alive and cut off the writing hands of a thousand more. The protests and tracts stopped.

The world was still so imperfect, and great men were always misunderstood by their own age.

Time’s Arrow arrived in Rui. There, messengers led by bloodhounds carried the emperor’s letter deep underground and followed the course of the Grand Tunnels, deep under the sea, until the hounds found the scent of Crown Prince Pulo and General Gotha Tonyeti.

The crown prince unrolled the letter and found a small sachet enclosed. He blanched as he read.

“Bad news?” General Tonyeti asked.

Pulo handed the letter to the general. “This must be a forgery,” Tonyeti said after he was finished.

The crown prince shook his head. “The impression of the Imperial Seal is real. See how there’s a chip in the corner? I saw the seal often as a boy. It’s authentic.”

“Then there has been some mistake. Why would the emperor suddenly decide to strip you of your title and make your little brother the crown prince? And what is that packet?”

“It’s poison,” Prince Pulo said. “He’s afraid that I might engage in a war of succession with my brother.”

“None of this makes sense. You are the gentlest among your brothers. You have trouble even ordering these laborers whipped.”

“My father is a difficult man to read.” Nothing his father did shocked Pulo anymore. He had seen trusted advisers beheaded because of one careless comment. Pulo had defended them time and again, trying to save their lives, and for that his father had always considered him weak. That was why he had been assigned to this project in the first place: You must learn how the strong make the weak do their bidding.

“We must go to the emperor and ask him to explain this.”

Pulo sighed. “Once my father’s mind is made up, it cannot be changed. He must have decided that my little brother is more suited to being emperor than I am. He’s probably right.” Gently, respectfully, he rolled up the letter and handed it back to the messengers. He emptied the content of the sachet into his palm, revealing two large pills, and these he swallowed in one gulp.

“General, I’m truly sorry you chose to follow me instead of my brother.”

The crown prince lay down on the ground as if to sleep. After a while he closed his eyes and stopped breathing. Tonyeti knelt down and held the young man’s inert body. Through his tears, he saw that the messengers had all drawn their swords.

“So this is how my service to Xana is repaid,” he said.

His cries of rage echoed in the tunnels long after they cut him down.

“Is Pulo here?” the emperor asked. He could barely move his lips.

“Soon. Just a few more days,” Pira said.

The emperor closed his eyes.

Pira waited for an hour. He leaned down and felt nothing emanating from the emperor’s nostrils. He reached out and touched the emperor’s lips. They were cold.

He came out of the tent. “The emperor is dead! Long live the emperor!”

PAN: THE ELEVENTH MONTH IN THE TWENTY-THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF ONE BRIGHT HEAVEN.

Prince Loshi, a boy of twelve, ascended the throne and took on the new Imperial name of Emperor Erishi, a Classical Ano word that meant “continuation.” Prime Minister Crupo was his regent, and Chatelain Pira took over as the new chief augur.

Pira announced an auspicious name for the new reign: Righteous Force, and the calendar was reset. Pan celebrated for ten straight days.

But many of the ministers whispered to one another that something was improper about the succession, that strange circumstances surrounded the emperor’s death. Crupo and Pira produced documents proving that Crown Prince Pulo and General Tonyeti had been plotting with pirates and black-hearted rebels to seize Rui Island and found their own independent Tiro state, and when their plot was discovered, they committed suicide out of fear. But the evidence seemed to some of the ministers and generals flimsy.

Regent Crupo decided to ferret out the doubters.

One morning, about a month after the death of Emperor Mapidéré, as the ministers and generals gathered in the Grand Audience Hall to discuss the latest reports of banditry and famine with the emperor, Regent Crupo came in late. He brought with him a stag taken from the Imperial Zoo, one of Emperor Erishi’s favorite places in the palace. The stag had huge antlers, and the ministers and generals milling about the hall backed away, giving them ample berth.

“Rénga,” Crupo said, bowing deeply. “I have brought you a fine horse. What do you and the assembled ministers think of it?”

The boy emperor’s tiny figure seemed almost swallowed up by the giant throne he sat in. He didn’t understand what sort of joke the regent was playing. He had always had trouble following his old teacher’s erudite, complicated lessons, and the boy did not feel close to the man, certain that his teacher found him lacking as a student. Crupo was also such a strange man — the regent had come to him in the middle of the night to explain that he would now be emperor, but then the regent had given him almost nothing to do, telling him to just enjoy himself and play games with Pira and be entertained by an endless stream of dancing troupes, acrobats, animal trainers, and magicians. The emperor tried to convince himself that he liked the regent, but in truth, he was more than a bit intimidated by him.

“I don’t understand,” Emperor Erishi said. “I don’t see a horse. I see a deer.”

Crupo bowed deeply again. “Sire, you are mistaken, but that is to be expected, since you are young and still have much to learn. Perhaps the other ministers and generals here can help enlighten you.”

Crupo looked slowly around the room, and his right hand stroked the stag’s back lightly. His gaze was cold and severe. No one dared to meet it.

“Tell me, my lords, do you see what I see? Is this a fine horse or a deer?”

Those who were more clever and sensitive to the winds of change caught on.

“An admirable horse, Regent.”

“A very fine horse.”

“I see a beautiful horse.”

“Rénga, you must listen to the wise regent. That is a horse.”

“Anyone who says that is a deer must face my sword!”

But some ministers, and especially the generals, shook their heads in disbelief. “This is shameful,” said General Thumi Yuma, who had been in the Xana army for more than fifty years, serving even under Emperor Mapidéré’s father and grandfather. “That is a deer. Crupo, you may be powerful, but you cannot make men believe or say what is not true.”

“What is truth?” the regent said, enunciating his words carefully. “What happened in the Grand Tunnels? What happened on the Island of Écofi? These things must be written down in the history books, and someone has to decide what should be written.”

Emboldened by General Yuma, more ministers stepped forward and declared that the regent had brought a deer to the Grand Audience Hall. But the pro-horse party refused to back down, and the two sides got into a shouting match. Crupo smiled and stroked his chin thoughtfully. Emperor Erishi looked from one side to the other and laughed. He thought it was yet another of Crupo’s strange jokes.

As the months went by, fewer and fewer of those who stood up against Crupo on that day remained. Many were discovered to be coconspirators of the disgraced Prince Pulo, and from prison they wrote — after some convincing — tearful confessions of their crimes against the throne. They and their families were executed. That was the law of Xana: Treason was a taint in the blood, and five generations would pay for the crime of one.

Even General Yuma turned out to be one of the ringleaders in the failed plot — indeed, there was evidence that he had also tried to conspire with the emperor’s other surviving brothers. Those other princes all swallowed poison just as the emperor’s palace guards were about to seize them.

Unlike the other conspirators, though, Yuma refused to confess even after being shown incontrovertible proof of his guilt. The emperor was utterly devastated by the news of this betrayal.

“If he would just confess,” the emperor said, “I would spare him, considering his service to Xana!”

“Alas,” the regent said, “we tried to help him regain his conscience through the judicious application of physical pain, which cleanses the soul. But he is very stubborn.”

“How can anyone be trusted if even the great Yuma thought to rebel?”

The regent bowed and said nothing.

The next time the regent brought his horse to the Grand Audience Hall, everyone agreed that it was a very fine horse indeed.

The young Emperor Erishi was at a loss. “I still see antlers,” he muttered to himself. “How can that be a horse?”

“Don’t worry about it, Rénga,” Pira whispered next to his ear. “You still have much to learn.”

CHAPTER SIX. CORVÉE

KIESA: THE EIGHTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

Because Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin were the tallest among the group of men sent from the village of Kiesa to fulfill the yearly quota of corvée laborers, they were made cocaptains. Krima was thin and bald as a polished river stone. Shigin had hair the color of straw, inherited from his Rima-born mother, broad shoulders, and a thick neck that reminded one of a reliable water buffalo. Both had the bronzed skin of Cocru peasants who labored long hours in the fields.

The corvée chief explained to the two their duties: “You have ten days to get the corvée team from here to the site of the Mausoleum of Emperor Mapidéré—may he rest his soul. The regent and the emperor are quite annoyed that progress has been so slow on the eternal house for the emperor’s father.

“If you are late by one day, you will each lose one ear. If you are late by two days, you will each lose an eye. If you are late three days, you will each die. But if you are late by more than that, your wives and mothers will be sold to the brothels and your fathers and children will be condemned to conscripted hard labor forever.”

Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin shivered. They looked up at the sky and prayed that the weather would remain calm as they led the corvée crew and began their journey west to the port city of Canfin, where they would get on a boat to carry them north along the coast and then up the Liru River to the site of the Mausoleum near Pan. A storm would mean delays.

The corvée laborers, thirty in number, piled into three horse-drawn carriages at dawn. The doors were then locked to take away the temptation for desertion. Two Imperial soldiers would ride with the caravan as escorts until they arrived at the next town, where the local garrison would take over and provide two more guards to the next stop.

The men looked outside the windows as the caravan made its way along the road to the west.

Though it was late summer, when the crops should be ripening, the fields were not golden with grain and few could be seen working. Typhoons this year had been worse than anyone remembered for years, and the crops in many fields had been ruined, rotting in the rain and mud. Women whose husbands and sons were away toiling for the emperor’s grand visions struggled to manage the fields by themselves. What crops did survive had been claimed by the Imperial tax collectors. Though hungry men and women petitioned for reprieve, the answer from Pan was always a firm no.

Instead, the corvée quotas and taxes had been increased. The new Emperor Erishi had halted work on the Grand Tunnels, but he wanted to build a new palace of his own, and he expanded the design of the Mausoleum time after time to prove his filial piety.

The men stared blankly as they passed the corpses of starved men and women abandoned along the side of the road: skeletal thin, rotting, stripped of all their possessions, even the rags that constituted their clothes. There was famine in many of the villages, but the garrison commanders refused to open up the Imperial granaries, reserved for use by the army. Everything that could be eaten had already been eaten: some resorted to eating boiled bark and digging for grubs from the ground. Women, children, and old men tried to walk to where there was still rumored to be food, but sometimes they collapsed by the side of the road, their bodies without the strength to take another step, and their empty, lifeless eyes stared into an equally empty sky. Once in a while, a baby, still alive next to its dead mother, mewled with its last ounce of strength.

Young men, those who were not drafted for the corvée, sometimes escaped into the mountains to become bandits, and there they would be hunted down by the Imperial army like rats by exterminators.

The caravan rolled on, past the dead bodies, past the empty fields, past the desolation of abandoned huts, toward the port of Canfin and thence, the splendor of Immaculate Pan, the Imperial capital.

The caravan passed through the square in the center of a small town. A half-naked old man stumbled about, shouting at the carriages and pedestrians.

“Mount Rapa can be heard to rumble deep within for the first time in fifty years, and the Rufizo Falls have dried up. The black sands of Lutho Beach have turned red with blood. The gods are displeased with the House of Xana!”

“Is what he says true?” Krima asked. He scratched his bald head. “I had not heard of these strange signs.”

“Who knows? Maybe the gods really are angry. Or maybe he’s just mad with hunger,” Shigin said.

The soldiers riding with the caravan pretended not to have heard the old man.

They had also come from peasant families, and they all knew people like that back in their home villages in Rui and Dasu. Emperor Mapidéré had left many widows and orphans across Dara, and even the home islands of Xana were not spared. Sometimes, the anger built up so much that people had to scream out their treasonous thoughts just to keep on breathing. Maybe not all of them were really crazy, but it was best for everyone involved to pretend that they were.

The Imperial Treasury may have paid their salaries, but that didn’t mean that the soldiers forgot who they were.

The rain continued relentlessly for the fourth day. Krima and Shigin stared out the window of the inn and then put their faces in their hands in despair.

They were in Napi, still about fifty miles from the port of Canfin, but the roads were too muddy for the carriages. And even if they somehow made it to the coast, no ship would agree to set sail in this weather.

Yesterday was the last day when they still realistically had a chance of making it to the mouth of the Liru River and sailing up to Pan before the deadline. Each minute that passed meant a worse fate awaited them and their families. Whether the Imperial judges interpreted the laws in accordance with the letter or the spirit didn’t matter — in neither was there mercy.

“It’s useless,” Krima said. “Even if we get to Pan, we’ll end up as cripples or worse.”

Shigin nodded. “Let’s pool our money and at least get a good meal for today.”

Krima and Shigin obtained permission from their guards to leave the inn to go to the market.

“There are so few fish in the ocean this year,” the fishmonger told them. “Maybe even the fish are afraid of the tax collectors.”

“Or maybe they are just scared of the hungry mouths of all the starving men in Dara.”

But they paid the obscenely high price for the fish and then paid more for some wine. They used up all their money. Dead men had no use for copper coins.

“Come, come”—they gestured to the other men back at the inn—“even sad men, even men who are about to lose their ears and eyes, have to eat, and eat well!”

The men nodded. This was true wisdom. As corvée laborers, life was simply one whipping after another, and you could only be scared for so long before you decided that filling your belly was more important than anything else.

“Who among you is a good cook?” Krima asked. He held up a large fish by the mouth: silver-scaled, rainbow-finned, as long as his arm. The men felt their mouths water. They hadn’t eaten fresh fish in so long.

“We are.”

The speakers were a pair of brothers, Dafiro and Ratho Miro, sixteen and fourteen, barely more than boys really. Pan kept on lowering the age when men would be available for the corvée.

“Your mother taught you how to cook?”

“Nah,” said Ratho, the younger brother. “After Pa died in the Grand Tunnels, she spent a lot of time sleeping and drinking—” But his older brother shushed him.

“We’re good cooks,” said Dafiro, staring at every man around him and his brother in turn, daring anyone to make fun of what his brother had just said. “And we won’t steal any of the fish for ourselves.”

The men avoided his eyes. They had known too many families like the Miros. They were good cooks because they had to cook for themselves as children or starve.

“Thank you,” Krima said. “I’m sure you’ll do a great job. Be careful when you clean the fish. The fishmonger said that the gallbladder in this kind lies shallow.”

The others remained at the bar of the inn and drank. They hoped to drink until they forgot what was going to happen to them when they did finally get to Pan.

“Captain Krima! Captain Shigin! You’ve got to come and see this!” the Miro boys shouted from the kitchen.

The men got up on their unsteady feet and stumbled for the kitchen. Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin lingered behind for a moment and gave each other meaningful looks.

“This is it,” said Shigin.

“No way out now,” agreed Krima. And the two followed the rest of the men into the kitchen.

Ratho explained that he had sliced the fish’s belly open to clean it, and what did he find in the fish’s belly? A silk scroll filled with zyndari letters.

Huno Krima Will Be King.

The laborers stared at one another, their eyes and mouths wide open.

The people of Dara had always believed in prophesies and divination.

The world was a book in which the gods wrote, much as the scribes did with their brush and ink, wax and knife. The gods shaped the features of the earth and the seas much as the knife carved wax into logograms that could be touched and felt. Men and women were the zyndari letters and punctuation marks of this grand epic that the gods composed on the fly, changing their fickle minds from one moment to the next.

When the gods decreed that only Rui would possess the gas that made airships float, it meant that they wished to elevate Xana above all the other Tiro states and bring about the Unification. When Emperor Mapidéré had a dream of soaring above the Islands of Dara on the back of a Mingén falcon, that meant that the gods wished to glorify him above all men. It was useless for the Six States to resist the might of Xana, because the gods had already decided how the story would go. Just as wax clumps that refused to be shaped properly would be scraped away by the writer, to be replaced by new, pliant wax, so would men who resisted the fates be swept away, to be replaced by those sensitive to the shifts of fortune.

What did it mean that the typhoons were sweeping the coasts of the Islands more than ever before? What did it mean that strange clouds and strange lights were seen all over Dara? What did it mean that the giant crubens were sighted surfacing and breaching all over the western seas but not around Rui? What was the message brought by the famines and plagues?

Above all, what did the scroll in the belly of the fish tell the men who gawked at it, as Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin held it up to the light?

“We are dead men,” Huno Krima said. “And so are our families. We’ve run out of time.”

The men, packed into the kitchen, held their breaths and strained to hear. Krima wasn’t speaking loudly, and the fire in the hearth cast flickering shadows across their faces.

“I don’t like prophecies. They upset plans and make us into pawns of the gods. But it’s even worse to resist a prophecy when it has been given. If we’re already dead by the laws of Xana, and yet the gods tell us different, then I’d rather listen to the gods.

“There are thirty of us here in this room. Throughout the city are many other corvée crews just like us, marching to Pan without hope of getting there on time. All of us are the walking dead. We’ve got nothing to lose.

“Why should we submit to the words written in the Xana Codes? I would rather we obeyed the words of the gods. The signs are everywhere that the days of Xana are numbered. Men have been made into slaves, and women prostitutes. The old die of starvation and the young of banditry. While we suffer and know not why, the emperor and his ministers belch from a surfeit of sweetmeats fed to them by the soft hands of servant girls. This is not how the world was meant to be.

“Maybe it’s time for a new story to be told by the wandering bards.”

Ratho and Dafiro Miro, because they were the youngest and the smallest and seemed the least dangerous, were given the most difficult task. The brothers both had dark, curly hair, and small frames. Ratho, being younger and more impulsive, accepted the assignment right away. Dafiro looked at his brother, sighed, and nodded.

Carrying two trays laden with wine and fish, they went to the room of the two soldiers escorting the corvée crew and explained that the men wanted to do something nice for their guards — perhaps the guards could then look the other way while the laborers tried to drink themselves into a stupor?

The soldiers ate and drank heartily. The warm rice wine and spicy fish soup made them sweaty, and they took off their armor and uniforms and sat only in their undershirts to be more comfortable. Soon their tongues grew heavy, and their eyelids drooped.

“More wine, Masters?” Ratho asked.

The soldiers nodded, and Ratho rushed to refill the cups. But these cups were never to be picked up again. The soldiers leaned back on their cushions, jaws open, and fell asleep.

Dafiro Miro took out the long kitchen knife he had hidden in his sleeve. He had butchered pigs and chickens, but a man was something different. He locked eyes with his brother, and they both stopped breathing for a moment.

“I won’t be whipped to death like Pa,” said Ratho.

Dafiro nodded.

There would be no stepping back from this.

Dafiro plunged the knife through the rib cage of one of the soldiers, right into his heart.

He looked across at his brother, who had done the same with the other soldier. The expression on Ratho’s face, a mixture of excitement, fear, and joy, made Dafiro sad.

Little Ratho had always looked up to him, and he had always protected Ratho in fights with the other boys in the village. With their father gone early and their mother barely awake much of the day even when she was alive, he had practically raised Ratho. He had always believed that he would be able to protect his brother, and at this moment, he felt that he had failed.

Even though Ratho looked so happy.

Two Imperial soldiers arrived at the Leaping Cruben, the largest lodging house in all of Napi. Clearly new recruits, their uniforms did not fit them very well.

The entire second and third floors had been requisitioned by the city as temporary holding cells for the corvée laborers and criminals sentenced to hard labor. The soldiers guarding them stayed in the suite on the second floor closest to the stairs and kept their doors open to prevent anyone in the other rooms from leaving without being noticed.

The two Imperial soldiers knocked on the open door and explained that they had been sent by the local garrison to look for a wanted criminal. Would the guards mind if the two just took a look through the men under their watch?

The guards, who were playing cards, waved dismissively at the two newcomers. “Look all you want. Your man is not here.”

Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin thanked the guards, who went back to their liquor and game, and went to all the rooms one by one and explained their plot to the corvée laborers and criminals. This was their last stop. They had already visited all the other places in the city where men like them were held.

All over Napi, at midnight, the laborers and criminals rose up as one and killed their guards in their sleep. They set fire to the lodging houses and inns and congregated in the streets.

“Death to Xana!” they shouted. “Death to the emperor!” There was exhilaration in shouting the forbidden words, words that were on all men’s minds. It made them feel invincible, just to say them aloud.

“Huno Krima will be king!”

Soon the men in the streets, the beggars and the thieves, the starving and the bankrupt, the women who had watched their husbands and sons taken away to be slaves under the sea and in the mountains, took up the same chant.

Brandishing only kitchen knives and bare fists, they rushed to the armory, broke in, and overwhelmed the soldiers guarding the doors. Now armed with real weapons, they attacked the army’s granary, and soon bags of sorghum and rice and bundles of dried fish were traveling the streets, carried on the backs of men surging through the streets like flood currents.

They ran to the mayor’s office and took over the building. Someone cut down the white flag of Xana, charged with a Mingén falcon spreading its wings, and hoisted up a sheet on which the crude figure of a leaping fish had been drawn — silver-scaled, rainbow-finned, with a scroll around it filled with letters: HUNO KRIMA WILL BE KING!

The soldiers of the local garrison, many of whom were from Cocru, refused to advance against their countrymen. The Xana commanders soon found themselves faced with the choice of surrender or being slaughtered by their own men.

Krima and Shigin were now in charge of a rebel force of a few thousand men — most of them desperate laborers, bandits, or soldiers in the Imperial army who had rioted along with the prisoners.

Those Imperial commanders who surrendered were promised rich rewards and paid immediately with money taken from the treasury of the city — tax money soaked with the blood, sweat, and tears of the people of Cocru.

Having secured Napi and sealed its gates against an anticipated counterattack from Xana troops stationed in cities nearby, Krima and Shigin set about the task of enjoying their spoils. The houses of merchants and nobles were looted, restaurants and brothels celebrated with special deals for the rebels, and contracts and debts were canceled. While the rich wailed, the poor celebrated.

“So we call ourselves kings now?” whispered Shigin.

Krima shook his head. “Too early. You and I need a symbol first.”

To provide a measure of legitimacy to their rebellion, Krima and Shigin immediately dispatched a delegation to Faça to find the heir to the ancient Throne of Cocru, rumored to be a shepherd in exile. The two declared that they would restore the lost heir to his rightful place.

Couriers were sent to all corners of the Islands of Dara, calling for the nobles of the Six States to return to their ancestral domains and join the rebellion. The Tiro states would re-emerge from the ashes of the Unification, and together, they would topple the Imperial Throne in Pan.

A summer storm raged across the sky in the northwestern corner of Dara. The peasants of Rui and Dasu huddled in their houses, praying that the rage of Winged Kiji of Xana, god of winds and squalls, would not destroy the crops so close to harvest.

If one listened carefully, one might make out a voice amid the claps of thunder and sheets of rain.

I never thought you, Lutho of Haan, would be the one to strike first. That bit with the fish and the scroll has your handiwork all over it.

The reply, in the old and leathery voice of Lutho, the turtle-companioned god of calculation and tricks, was as gentle as flippers parting the waves, as soft as a shell scraping across moonlit sand.

I assure you that I had nothing to do with it, my brother. It’s true I have a knack for prophecies, but this one surprised me as much as you.

Then was it the Twins of Cocru, sisters of fire and ice?

Two voices spoke together, discordant and harmonious, indignant and calm, like a river of lava flowing next to a glacier. It was Kana and Rapa, the raven-accompanied goddesses of fire and ice, death and sleep.

The mortals find signs where they will. We had nothing to do with starting this—

But you can be sure we’ll end it. Even if Cocru lives on only in the heart of one man—

Kiji cut them off.

Save your breath. You still have to find that one right man.

CHAPTER SEVEN. MATA’S VALOR

FARUN, IN THE TUNOA ISLANDS:

THE NINTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

In Farun, on North Tunoa, the northernmost of the Tunoa Islands, Commander Datun Zatoma was troubled by news of the rebellion on the Big Island.

It was hard to get reliable information. Things were so chaotic. The bandits Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin claimed to have found the rightful heir to the Throne of Cocru, and this new “King of Cocru” had promised to make nobles of any Imperial commander who led his troops to join him.

The empire was in disarray. Ever since the suicide of General Gotha Tonyeti and the execution of General Thumi Yuma, the Imperial army had been without a proper commander-in-chief. For two years, the regent and the young emperor seemed to have forgotten about the army entirely, leaving all the regional commanders to their own devices. And now that a bona fide rebellion had broken out, Pan seemed stunned, and even after a month, no general had been put in charge of an Imperial force to put down the rebels. Each local garrison commander was trying to decide what to do.

It’s hard to tell which way the winds are blowing, Commander Zatoma thought. Perhaps it’s better if I seize the initiative. The earlier I move, the greater my contribution. “Duke Zatoma” has a nice ring to it.

But he was more comfortable behind a desk than on a horse. He needed good, capable lieutenants. In this he was lucky, being assigned to Farun. Tunoa had long been one of the most martial domains in all of Dara, as it was one of the last places in the Islands to be settled by the Ano, who had to pacify the warlike original inhabitants. In Farun, even the girls learned how to throw the javelin well, and every boy over five could wield his father’s spear without disgrace.

If he approached the right men, they might be very grateful to get a chance to recover some of the honor of their disgraced families and serve him loyally. He would be the brain, and they would be his arms.

As Phin Zyndu walked through the cavernous halls and long corridors of his ancestral castle, he kept the turmoil in his heart off his face. He had not been back here since that day, a quarter of a century ago, when he had been driven away in the darkest hour of the Zyndu Clan. Coming back now at the behest of Datun Zatoma, a commoner in the garb of the conqueror, was not how he imagined his return.

Behind him, Mata hungrily took in the rich tapestries, the intricate iron latticework on the windows, and the paintings depicting the deeds of his ancestors. The heads of the figures in a few of the brush paintings had been torn out by Xana soldiers as souvenirs during the looting right after the conquest, and that lowlife Datun Zatoma had simply left the desecrated paintings in place, perhaps as reminders of the ignominious fall of the Zyndu Clan. Mata ground his teeth to keep the anger within from boiling over. All this, his rightful inheritance, had been soiled by the pig who had usurped his place and summoned them here.

“Wait here,” Phin Zyndu said to Mata. Uncle and nephew exchanged meaningful glances, and Mata nodded.

“Welcome, Master Zyndu!” Datun Zatoma was enthusiastic and — in his mind, anyway — gracious. He clasped Phin Zyndu around the shoulders, but the man did not return the gesture. Awkwardly, Zatoma backed away after a moment and waved for the man to sit. Zatoma folded and crossed his legs, tucking each foot under the opposite thigh in géüpa, to show that they were speaking as friends, but Phin knelt stiffly on the sitting mat in formal mipa rari.

“You’ve heard the news from the Big Island?” Zatoma asked.

Phin Zyndu said nothing. He waited for the commander to go on.

“I’ve been thinking.” This was a delicate matter, and Zatoma wanted to be careful so that his meaning would be unmistakable to Zyndu — and yet, should the emperor’s troops prevail and crush the rebels, he would be able to explain his words satisfactorily. “Your family served the kings of Cocru faithfully and well for generations. Many great generals were Zyndus, a fact known to even a small child.”

Phin Zyndu gave a barely perceptible nod.

“There is a war coming, and in war, men who know how to fight are rewarded. The Zyndus, it seems to me, may have interesting opportunities before them.”

“We Zyndus fight only for Cocru,” Zyndu said.

Good, Zatoma thought. You are the one who said what needed to be said, not me.

He went on, as if Zyndu had not just made the treasonous comment. “The troops under my command are either aged veterans who can no longer draw a strongbow or fresh conscripts who can’t tell a parry from a thrust. They’ll need to be whipped into shape, and quickly. I would be honored if you and your nephew would help me in this endeavor. In a time of change, we could rise together and taste glory side by side.”

Phin looked at the Xana man, a supposed commander of the Imperial army. His hands were white, fat, and smooth, the color of a pearl on a woman’s ring. These were not hands that knew how to grip a sword or swing an axe. A bureaucrat, he thought. A man who knows only how to push beads on an abacus and to curry favor with his superiors has been put in charge of leading soldiers meant to defend the spoils of the Xana Conquest. No wonder the empire has stumbled so badly before a peasant rebellion.

But as he smiled at Zatoma and nodded, his expression did not betray his disgust and contempt. He had already decided what he and Mata would do. “Let me get my nephew from the hallway. I think he would like to meet you too.”

“Of course, of course! I always like meeting young heroes.”

Phin emerged from the commander’s room and nodded to Mata, who followed him back into the room. Zatoma approached, a big smile on his face and his arms opened wide to embrace the young man. But this welcome was a bit forced. The twenty-five-year-old Mata was over eight feet tall and quite intimidating. Also, his double pupils always made others look away. It was impossible to maintain eye contact with him: One didn’t know which pupil to focus on.

Zatoma would never learn to get comfortable looking into those eyes. The first time he looked into them was also his last.

He looked down in disbelief. A dirk, thin as a needlefish and now red with his life’s blood, was in Mata’s left hand and being pulled out of his chest. All Zatoma could think about at that moment was how incongruous the tiny weapon looked in the hand of the giant man.

As he watched, Mata lifted the dirk again and slashed it across his neck, severing his windpipe and major arteries. Zatoma gurgled, unable to speak, and then collapsed to the ground, his limbs twitching as he choked on his own blood.

“And now, you will leave my house,” Mata said. Datun Zatoma was the first man he had ever killed. He shuddered with the excitement of it, but he felt no regret or pity.

He stepped over to the weapons rack in the corner. It was full of beautiful ancient swords and spears and cudgels taken from the Zyndu Clan. Zatoma had seen them as decorations only, and there was a thick layer of dust over every weapon.

He picked up the heavy sword — by appearance, bronze — at the top. Its thick blade and long handle seemed to suggest that it was meant to be wielded by two hands.

He blew away the dust and pulled the blade halfway out of its scabbard, made of bamboo wrapped in silk. The metal’s appearance was unusual: a somber bronze hue down the middle, as one might have expected, but edges glinting cold and blue in the filtered sunlight from the window. Mata turned it around in his hand and admired the intricate carvings — logograms of ancient battle poems — along both sides of the sword.

“This was the weapon of your grandfather for most of his career, a gift from his teacher Médo when he completed his studies,” Phin said, pride in his voice. “He always preferred bronze because it was heavier than iron and steel, though it could not hold an edge as well and wasn’t as hard. Most people could not even lift this sword with both hands, but he wielded it one-handed.”

Mata pulled the sword all the way out of the sheath and swung it through the air a few times, with just one hand. The sword spun in front of him easily, reflecting light like a blossoming chrysanthemum, and he felt its chill wind on his face.

He marveled at its balance and heft. Most steel swords he had practiced with were too light, and their thin blades felt fragile. But this sword seemed to be made for him.

“You move like your grandfather,” Phin said, his voice growing quiet.

Mata tested the sword’s edges with his thumb: still sharp after all these years. He could detect no nicks or fractures. He gave his uncle a questioning glance.

“There’s a story behind those sharp edges,” said Phin. “When your grandfather was made the Marshal of Cocru, King Thoto came to Tunoa on an auspicious winter’s day, constructed a ceremonial dais ninety-nine feet on each side and ninety-nine feet tall, and bowed thrice to grandfather Dazu on the dais so that all could see.”

“The king bowed down to Grandfather?”

“Yes.” Pride overflowed from Phin’s voice. “That was the ancient custom of the Tiro kings. When a Tiro state designates a marshal, it is a most solemn occasion, for the king is entrusting the army, the most terrifying engine of state, to a pair of hands other than his own. The proper rites must be followed to show the great honor and respect the king places in the man he names his marshal. It is the only time that a king bows down to another man. Tunoa, the domain of our clan, has witnessed more of these ceremonies than anywhere else in all the Islands of Dara.”

Mata nodded, feeling once again the weight on his shoulders, the history that ran through him. He was but a link in a long chain of illustrious warriors, warriors who had had kings bow down before them.

“I wish I could witness such a ceremony myself,” he said.

“You will,” Phin said, lightly clapping him on the back. “I’m sure of it. As a symbol of the marshal’s authority, King Thoto gave Grandfather Dazu a new sword made of thousand-hammered steel, the strongest, sharpest blade metal known to men. But Grandfather did not wish to give up his old sword, for it was a mark of esteem from his teacher.”

Mata nodded. He understood the duty of respect one owed to one’s teacher, for the teacher was the model and mold of a man’s skills and learning, as the father was the model and mold of a man’s form and manners. These were ancient obligations, the kind that secured the world on top of its foundation. Though they were private bonds, they were as important and as unbreakable as the public duties one owed to one’s lord and king. Mata keenly and vividly felt Dazu Zyndu’s dilemma from decades ago.

Mapidéré had tried to suppress these private bonds and to elevate duty to the emperor above all, and that was why his empire had turned out to be so chaotic and unjust. Mata knew without having to ask that Mapidéré did not bow down to his marshals.

Phin continued, “Unable to decide which weapon to wield, your grandfather traveled to Rima to seek out Suma Ji, the best bladesmith in all of Dara, for help. Suma Ji prayed for three days and three nights to Fithowéo for guidance, and he was inspired to come up with a solution that also led to a novel method of compound blade making.

“The master bladesmith melted down the marshal’s new sword. Keeping the old sword as the core, he wrapped it in layer after layer of hammered steel, forging it into a new blade that combined the weight and heft of bronze with the hardness and sharpness of steel. When the forging was complete, Suma Ji quenched it in the blood of a wolf, sacred to Fithowéo.”

Mata caressed the sword’s cold blade and wondered how many men’s blood it had drunk over the years. “What is its name?”

“Suma Ji named it Na-aroénna,” Phin said.

“The Ender of Doubts,” said Mata, translating from Classical Ano.

Phin nodded. “Whenever Grandfather unsheathed it, in his heart, the outcome of the battle was no longer in doubt.”

Mata gripped the sword tightly. I will strive to be worthy of this weapon.

Continuing his examination of the weapons rack, Mata let his gaze travel over spears, swords, whips, and bows, rejecting them all as unsuitable companions to Na-aroénna, but finally, his eyes stopped on the bottom rung.

He picked up the ironwood cudgel. The handle, as thick as his wrist, was wrapped in white silk, stained dark with years’ worth of both blood and sweat. The cudgel grew thicker toward the other end, in which multiple rings of white teeth were embedded.

“That was the weapon of the Xana general Rio Cotumo, who was said to have the strength of ten men,” Phin said.

Mata turned the cudgel this way and that, and the light glinted from the tips of the teeth. He could identify some of them: wolf, shark, even a few that might have come from a cruben. Some of the teeth were stained with blood. How many helmets and skulls had it smashed through?

“Grandfather and Rio Cotumo dueled for five days straight on the shores of the Liru without being able to determine a victor. Finally, on the sixth day, Cotumo stumbled because his foot slipped on a loose rock, and Grandfather was able to cut off his head. But Grandfather always thought his victory was unearned, and he honored Cotumo by giving him a lavish burial, and kept his weapon as a memento.”

“Does it have a name?” Mata asked.

Phin shook his head. “If it did, your grandfather never learned it.”

“Then I will call it Goremaw, companion to Na-aroénna.”

“You will not use a shield?”

Mata gave a contemptuous laugh. “What need is there for a shield when my enemies will die before three strokes?”

He held the sword steady in his right hand and struck it sharply with the cudgel in his left hand. It clanged in a sweet, pure note that held for a long time, reverberating in the stone halls of the castle.

Phin and Mata Zyndu fought their way through the castle.

Having tasted his first blood, Mata was now possessed by the killing lust. He was like a shark set loose amongst a herd of seals. In the narrow halls of the castle, the Xana soldiers could not take advantage of their numbers, and Mata methodically dispatched them as they came at him in ones and pairs. He swung Na-aroénna with such force that it crashed through shields and arms held up vainly in defense. He smashed Goremaw down so hard that a man’s skull was crushed into his torso.

There were two hundred men in the castle garrison. On that day, Mata slaughtered one hundred and seventy-three. The other twenty-seven were dispatched by Phin Zyndu, who laughed as he saw the image of his own father, the great Dazu Zyndu, reflected in the bloody young man fighting next to him.

Mata raised the flag of Cocru, a red field charged with a pair of ravens, one black and one white, over the castle the next day. And the chrysanthemum coat of arms of the Zyndu Clan was rehung over the castle door. News of his victory over the Xana garrison became a story, a legend, and then a myth, as it spread among the Tunoa Islands. Even children learned the names of Na-aroénna and Goremaw.

“Cocru has returned,” the men and women of the Tunoa Islands whispered to one another. They still remembered Dazu Zyndu’s tales of bravery, and his grandson compared favorably to him. Maybe there was hope to this rebellion after all.

Men began arriving at Zyndu Castle, volunteering to fight for Cocru. Soon, the Zyndus had gathered around them an army of eight hundred.

It was now the end of the ninth month, two months after Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin first saw the prophecy in the fish.

CHAPTER EIGHT. KUNI’S CHOICE

OUTSIDE ZUDI: THE NINTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

The night before, Kuni Garu still had under his charge fifty prisoners — a few from Zudi, but most from far away, men who had committed some kind of crime and received sentences of hard labor in the corvée gangs.

The prisoners had been walking slowly because one of the men had a lame leg. Since they couldn’t make it to the next town in time, Kuni had decided to make camp in the mountains.

In the morning, only fifteen prisoners were left.

“What are they thinking?” Kuni fumed. “There is nowhere to hide anywhere in the Islands. They’ll be caught and their families will be executed or conscripted for hard labor to make up for their desertion. I treated them well and didn’t have them chained at night, and this is how they repay me? I’m dead meat!”

Kuni had been promoted to head of the Corvée Department two years ago. Ordinarily, escorting a team of prisoners was something one of his underlings would do. But he had taken this particular assignment himself because he knew that the gang would probably not get to their destination on time because of the man with the bad leg — Kuni was sure he could convince the commander at Pan to let it go. Besides, he had never been to Pan, and he had always wanted to see the Immaculate City.

“I just had to do the most interesting thing,” he berated himself. “Am I having fun now?” At that moment, he wished more than anything to be home with Jia, drinking a cup of herbal tea made from some recipe she was experimenting with, safe and bored.

“You didn’t know?” one of the soldiers, a man by the name of Hupé, asked, incredulous. “The prisoners had been whispering and plotting all of yesterday. I thought you knew and were letting them go on purpose because you believed in the prophecy. They want to join the rebels who declared war on the emperor and pledged to free all prisoners and conscripted laborers.”

Kuni did remember the prisoners whispering an unusual amount yesterday. And he, like everyone else in Zudi, had heard rumors about the rebellion. But he had been too distracted by the beauty of the mountains they were hiking through, and didn’t connect the dots.

Abashed, he asked Hupé to tell him more about what he knew of the rebels.

“A scroll in a fish!” Kuni exclaimed. “A fish that they just happened to have bought. That con stopped working on me when I turned five. And people believe this?”

“Don’t speak ill of the gods,” Hupé, who was very religious, said stiffly.

“Well, this is a bit of a pickle,” Kuni muttered. To calm himself, he took a plug of chewing herbs out of his waist pouch and put it into his mouth, letting it sit under his tongue. Jia knew how to make herbal mixes that made him feel like he was flying and caused him to see rainbow-haloed crubens and dyrans everywhere — he and Jia had fun with those — but she also knew how to make mixes that did the opposite: slowed things down and helped him see choices more clearly when he was stressed, and he definitely needed some clarity.

What was the point of bringing fifteen prisoners to Pan when the quota was fifty? He’d have an appointment with the executioner no matter how he tried to talk his way out of it. And most likely Jia, too. His life as a servant of the emperor was over; there was no longer any path back to safety. All the options he had were dangerous.

But some choices are more interesting than others, and I did make a promise to myself.

Could this rebellion finally be the opportunity that he had been seeking all his life?

“Emperor, king, general, duke,” he whispered to himself. “These are just labels. Climb up the family tree of any of them high enough and you’ll find a commoner who dared to take a chance.”

He got up on a rock and faced the soldiers and the remaining prisoners, all of whom were terrified: “I’m grateful that you stayed with me. But there’s no point in going any farther. Under the laws of Xana, we’re all going to be punished severely. Feel free to go wherever you want or to join the rebels.”

“Aren’t you going to join the rebels?” Hupé asked in a fervent voice. “The prophecy!”

“I can’t think about any prophecies right now. I’m going to hide in the mountains first and figure out a way to save my family.”

“You’re thinking of becoming a bandit then?”

“The way I look at it is this: If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.”

To his satisfaction but not surprise, everyone volunteered to stay with him.

The best followers are those who think it was their own idea to follow you.

Kuni Garu decided to take his band deep into the Er-Mé Mountains to minimize the risk of encountering Imperial patrols. The trail, winding slowly up the side of the mountain, was not steep, and the fall afternoon was pleasant. They made good progress.

But there was little camaraderie among ex-soldiers and ex-prisoners; they distrusted one another and were uncertain of the future.

Kuni wiped the sweat from his brow and stood still at a turn in the trail that gave him a good view of the verdant valleys below and the endless flat expanse of the Porin Plains beyond. He picked out another plug of chewing herbs from his pouch and bit into it with gusto. This one tasted minty and refreshing and made him feel like he should give a speech.

“Look at this view!” he said. “I had a pretty leisurely life”—those among the men who knew his history chuckled—“I never made enough money to rent a cabin up here and take my wife on a monthlong vacation hiking in the Er-Mé Mountains. My father-in-law was wealthy enough to do it, but he was too busy with his business. All this beauty was here, but neither of us ever got to enjoy it.”

The band admired the colorful fall foliage, a mosaic highlighted here and there by bunches of bright-red wild monkeyberries and late-blooming dandelions. A few of the men took deep breaths to fill their lungs with the mountain air, smelling of fresh-fallen leaves and loam that had been basking in the golden sun, so different from the air back in the streets of Zudi, which was dominated by the smell of copper coins and running sewage.

“So you see, it’s not so bad being a bandit after all,” Kuni said. And all the men laughed. When they went on, everyone’s steps felt lighter.

Suddenly, Hupé, who was in the lead, came to a dead stop. “Snake!”

There was indeed a large white python in the middle of the road, as thick as a grown man’s thighs and long enough that its tail was still in the woods even as its body completely blocked the trail. Everyone in Kuni’s party scrambled back and tried to get as far away from the snake as possible. But the snake whipped its head around and wrapped its body around a gangly prisoner named Otho Krin.

Later, Kuni could not explain why he did what he did next. He didn’t like snakes, and he wasn’t the sort to rush impulsively into danger.

A surge of excitement coursed through his veins, and he spat out the herbs in his mouth. Before he could think, he had pulled a sword from Hupé and leapt at the giant white python. With one swing he lopped its head off. The rest of the body coiled and whipped around, and Kuni was knocked off his feet. But Otho Krin was safe.

“Are you all right, Captain Garu?”

Kuni shook his head. He was in a daze.

What… what got into me?

His eyes fell on a dandelion seed head by the side of the trail. As he looked at it, a gust of wind suddenly plucked the white puffs from it, and the seeds floated into the air, like a swarm of mayflies.

He tried to hand the sword back to Hupé, but the man shook his head.

“You keep it, Captain. I didn’t know you were such a good swordsman!”

The men climbed on, but the susurration of voices grew among them like a breeze caressing the leaves of an aspen stand.

Kuni stopped and turned around. The whispers stopped.

In the eyes of the men, Kuni saw respect, awe, and even a hint of fear.

“What’s going on here?” he asked.

The men looked at one another until, eventually, Hupé stepped forward.

“I had a dream last night.” His voice was flat, as though he was still surrounded by illusions. “I was walking in a desert, where the sand was black like coal. Then I saw something white lying on the ground in the distance. As I came closer, I could make out the body of an enormous white snake.

“But as I approached the spot, the body disappeared. Instead, an old woman stood there crying. I asked her, ‘Granny, why are you crying?’

“ Oh, my son has been killed.’

“ Who’s your son?’ I asked.

“ My son is the White Emperor. The Red Emperor has killed him.’ ”

Hupé stared at Kuni Garu, and the gazes of the others followed. White was the color of Xana, and red was the color of Cocru.

Ah, prophecies again, Kuni thought. He shook his head and laughed weakly.

“If this banditry business doesn’t work out,” he said, “you can try to become a wandering bard.” Then he slapped Hupé’s back. “But you need to work on your delivery, and you have to come up with more believable plots!”

Laughter echoed in the mountain air. Fear left the gazes of the men, but awe remained.

A hot breeze, as dry and gritty as volcanic ash, rustled the trees near the top of the mountain.

What was that about, sister, my other self? Why have you taken an interest in this mortal?

A cold breeze, as brittle and crisp as a shard from a glacier, joined the first.

I know not of what you speak, Kana.

You didn’t send in the snakes or give that man his dream? It seemed like your kind of sign.

I had no more to do with that than I did with that prophecy of the fish.

Then who? Fithowéo the Warlike? Lutho the Calculating?

I doubt it. They’re busy elsewhere. But… now I am curious about this mortal.

He’s a weakling, a commoner, and… not at all pious. We should not waste time with him. Ice-clad Rapa, our most promising champion is—

— young Zyndu. Yes, Flame-born Kana, I know you’ve liked him since the day he was born… yet, what strange things are happening around this other man!

Mere coincidences.

What is fate but coincidences in retrospect?

Kuni Garu and his men took to banditry well. They made their camp high in the Er-Mé Mountains, and every few days they swept down to attack merchant caravans at dusk, when the drivers and their escorts were tired and sleepy, or at dawn, when they were just getting ready to set out on the road again.

They were careful to avoid deaths and serious injuries, and they always distributed a share of what they took to the scattered woodsmen living in the mountains. “We follow the virtuous path of the honorable bandit,” Kuni taught his men to chant. “We are outlaws only because Xana’s laws leave no room for honest men.”

When garrisons in nearby towns sent detachments of riders to come after the desperadoes, the woodsmen always seemed to know nothing and to have seen nothing.

More and more runaway laborers and deserting soldiers came to join his gang, since Kuni had a reputation for treating his men well.

The attack on this particular caravan had gone wrong from the start.

Instead of scattering to the winds as soon as the bandits approached, the merchants had stayed where they were and huddled next to the campfires. Kuni cursed himself. That should have been a clue.

But his successes so far had made him arrogant. Instead of calling off the raid, he had ordered everyone to press on into the camp—“Knock them on the back of the head with your clubs and tie them up. Don’t kill anyone!”

However, once the bandits were close enough, the oxcart curtains opened wide and dozens of armed escorts rushed out with swords drawn and arrows nocked. Whatever these merchants were carrying, they spent the funds to hire plenty of professional bodyguards. Kuni’s gang was caught completely off guard.

Within minutes, two of Kuni’s men fell with arrows sticking from their necks. Stunned, Kuni just stood there.

“Kuni!” Hupé shouted at him. “You’ve got to order a retreat!”

“Pull back! Abort! Tough marks! High fire! Tight wind!” All Kuni’s notions about banditry had come from listening to storytellers in the markets and reading Kon Fiji’s moral fables. He tossed out every bit of “thieves’ cant” he could remember, having no idea what he was actually supposed to do or say.

Kuni’s men milled about in confusion while the armed escorts for the merchants advanced. Another volley of arrows flew at them.

“They’ve got horses,” said Hupé. “If we try to run for it, we’re going to be cut down like vermin. Some of us have to stay behind and fight.”

“Right,” said Kuni. He felt calmer now that he was given a plan. “I’ll stay behind with Fi and Gatha, you take the rest of the men and flee.”

Hupé shook his head. “This isn’t like a bar fight, Kuni. I know you’ve never killed anyone or practiced real sword fighting, but I was in the army, and so if anyone should stay, it’s me.”

“But I’m the leader!”

“Don’t be foolish. You have a wife and a brother and parents still in Zudi, while I don’t have anyone. And the others depend on you to have any hope of saving their families in the city. I believe in the dream I had about you, and I believe in the prophecy of the fish. Remember that.”

Hupé rushed at the advancing escorts, holding high his sword — carved from a tree branch, since he had given his real sword to Kuni — and yelling fearsomely at the top of his lungs.

Another man fell next to Kuni, screaming and clutching at an arrow sticking from his belly.

“We have to leave! Now!” Kuni shouted. He did his best to rally the rest of the bandits, and they ran away from the merchants’ camp toward the mountains, not stopping until their legs gave out and their lungs were on fire.

Hupé never came back.

Kuni stayed in his tent and refused to come out.

“You should at least eat something,” said Otho Krin, the man who Kuni had saved from the great white snake.

“Go away.”

Banditry wasn’t at all how it was portrayed in bards’ tales and Kon Fiji’s fables. Real men died. Died because of his foolish decisions.

“There are some new recruits here to join us,” said Otho.

“Tell them to go away,” said Kuni.

“They won’t leave until they see you.”

Kuni emerged from his tent and blinked at the bright sunlight, his eyes red and puffy. He wished he had a jar of sorghum mead so he could retreat into oblivion.

Two men stood in front of him, and Kuni noticed that they were both missing their left hands.

“Remember us?” the older one asked.

They looked vaguely familiar to Kuni.

“You sent us to Pan last year.”

Kuni looked closer at their faces. “You are father and son. You couldn’t pay the tax, and so you both had to do corvée.” He closed his eyes as he struggled to remember. “Your name is Muru, and you liked to play Two-Handed Rummy.” As soon as the words left his mouth, Kuni wished he hadn’t said them. The man clearly couldn’t play his favorite game anymore, and he was sorry to draw attention to his loss.

But Muru nodded, a smile on his face. “I knew you’d remember, Kuni Garu. You may have worked for the emperor, and I may have been your prisoner, but you talked to me like we were friends.”

“What happened to you?”

“Because my son broke a statue in the Mausoleum, they cut off his left hand. Because I tried to explain it was an accident, they cut off mine as well. After we finished our year of labor, they sent us back. But my wife… she didn’t make it through last winter because there was nothing to eat.”

“I’m sorry,” said Kuni. He thought about all the men he had sent to Pan over the years. Sure, he had been kind to them while they were under his charge, but did he ever think, really think, about the fate he was consigning them to?

“We’re the lucky ones. Plenty of others will never come back.”

Kuni nodded numbly. “You have a right to be angry at me.”

“Angry? No. We’re here to fight with you.”

Kuni looked at them, not understanding.

“I had to mortgage my land to give my wife a decent burial, but given the weather this year — it’s like Kiji and the Twins are mad at each other — I’m certain I won’t be able to redeem it. What path is open to my son and me but to become bandits? But none of the bandit leaders would take us because we’re cripples.

“And then we heard that you’ve become a bandit too.”

“I’m a terrible bandit,” Kuni said. “I don’t know a thing about leading men.”

Muru shook his head. “I remember that when my son and I were in prison under your charge, you played cards with us and shared your beer. You told your men not to chain my legs because of a sore on my ankle. They say now you follow the path of the honorable bandit and protect the weak against the powerful. They say that you fight serpents to save your followers, and you’re the last to retreat when a raid fails. I believe them. You’re a good man, Kuni Garu.”

Kuni broke down and cried.

Kuni put away his romantic notions about banditry and asked his men for advice, especially those who had been outlaws before being sentenced to hard labor. He became more cautious, scouted the targets carefully, and developed a system of signals. When he launched a raid, he divided his men into teams so they could support one another, and he always made plans for retreat before attacking.

Lives depended on him, and he would not be careless again. His reputation grew, and more men and women who had lost all hope flocked to him, especially people who were rejected by the other bandit gangs: those who had lost limbs, the too young or too old, widows.

Kuni took everyone. Sometimes his captains grumbled that the newcomers had to be fed without being able to do much, but Kuni figured out ways that the new recruits could contribute. Since they didn’t look like bandits, they made ideal scouts and could ambush the caravans effectively — Kuni’s gang managed to conduct a few raids without even drawing a sword simply by setting up tea huts next to the road into Zudi and feeding the merchants drinks laced with sleeping powder.

But Kuni’s real goal had never been banditry alone. His failure to deliver the corvée team had placed his family in danger from official reprisal. Though the Zudi garrison seemed too distracted by the rebellion to enforce the emperor’s laws — or perhaps they were waiting to see how the winds blew — he wasn’t going to take any chances. Maybe the mayor would try to protect his friend, Gilo Matiza, and his daughter Jia, but who knew how long that protection would last? His parents and brother and Jia’s family all had too much property to be able to leave it all behind, and he doubted he could persuade them to join him. But Jia, Jia he had to save as soon as possible.

When it was clear that he had built a stable base, Kuni decided to send someone to bring Jia to join him. It had to be someone who wasn’t well known in Zudi and thus wouldn’t bump into Imperials who might recognize him, and it also had to be someone he completely trusted. He settled on Otho Krin.

“Haven’t we been here before?”

Until now, Jia had let the gaunt young man lead even when she doubted his competence. They had come to the same clearing in the woods for the third time and it was almost completely dark.

Otho Krin had hidden his face from Jia for the last hour by walking ahead. Now that he finally turned around to face her, the look of panic confirmed Jia’s suspicion that they were lost.

“I’m sure that we’re close,” he answered nervously without looking into her eyes.

“Where are you from, Otho?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your accent tells me you’re not from around Zudi. You don’t know your way around, do you?”

“No, ma’am.”

Jia sighed. It was useless to get angry at this pathetic bamboo stalk of a man. She was tired, even more so because she was pregnant. She and Kuni had been trying to conceive for a while without success, but just before he left, she had finally hit upon the right combination of herbs. This was a bit of news that she couldn’t wait to tell Kuni — right after she gave him a good tongue-lashing for leaving her alone with no word from him for a month. She wasn’t mad at him for turning into a bandit, exactly; it was more that she wished he had included her more in his plans. In truth, she was getting restless too; it was time for an adventure for both her and Kuni.

But first, she should take the lead here.

“Let’s just camp here for the night. We’ll continue in the morning.”

Otho Krin looked at Jia. She was not much older than he. She never raised her voice, but the look in her eyes reminded him of his mother when she was ready to berate him. He hung his head and silently acquiesced.

Jia gathered some branches and leaves to make a bed for herself. When she saw Otho standing around helplessly, she gathered more branches and made a bed for him, too.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

The young man nodded.

“Come with me.”

Jia walked around with Otho tagging along behind her until she found some fresh droppings. She bent down and looked around until she found a patch of herbs next to the trail. She plucked the stalks and laid them out neatly. Then she took out a small bottle from her purse and sprinkled some powder over the herbs.

Holding a finger to her lips, she beckoned Otho to follow her. They backed away about fifty feet, ducked down in the shrubs, and waited.

A pair of hares hopped out onto the trail and suspiciously sniffed the pile of herbs Jia had left. But since nothing bad seemed to happen, after a while the hares calmed down and began to eat.

A few minutes later, the hares stuck up their ears, scented the air, and hopped away.

“Now we follow,” Jia whispered.

Otho hurried to keep up with Jia. He was amazed by how fast this lady, by reputation a sheltered daughter of a wealthy man, could move through the woods.

They came upon a stream in the woods, and the two hares were lying next to the water, twitching but unable to run away.

“Can you take care of killing them quickly and without too much pain? It’s bad luck for me to kill things right now… in my condition.”

Otho nodded, not daring to ask what she was talking about. He picked up a large rock and smashed it down on the heads of the hares, killing them instantly.

“Now we have dinner,” Jia said brightly.

“But… but the…” Otho struggled and his face grew red.

“Yes?”

“… the poison?”

Jia laughed. “I didn’t kill them with poison. The herb I picked was harenip, a sweet plant these creatures love to eat. The powder I put on it is my own creation, a mixture of natron ash and dried lemons. The mixture is harmless but gives off a lot of bubbles when it comes into contact with moisture, so the hares were very uncomfortable after eating for a while. They naturally tried to feel better by coming here to drink some water, but that only made things worse. They couldn’t move because their bellies were so full of air that they couldn’t breathe. The meat is perfectly safe to eat.”

“How did you learn such a trick?” Kuni Garu’s wife seemed to Otho a witch or a magician.

“Read a lot of books and try a lot of recipes,” Jia said. “When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon.”

Jia was just about to fall asleep when she heard Otho’s sobs.

“Are you going to cry all night?”

“Sorry.”

But the sniffles continued.

Jia sat up. “What’s wrong?”

“I miss my mother.”

“Where is she?”

“My father died early, and she was all I had. When famine struck our village last year, she mixed extra water into her porridge so that I wouldn’t suspect that she was saving most of the food for me. When she died, I didn’t know what to do, which is why I turned to thieving. I got caught and was sentenced to hard labor, and now I’ve become an outlaw. My mother would be so ashamed.”

Jia felt sorry for the young man, but she did not believe in sentimentality or wallowing in sadness. “I don’t think your mother would feel ashamed. She’d want you to survive because there’s nothing she can do to help you now.”

“You really think so?”

Jia sighed inwardly. Her own parents had cut her off when they heard that Kuni had become a bandit, fearing the consequences once he was caught. But she was trying to cheer this young man up, not bring him down. “Of course. Parents always want their children to run as far as they can on their chosen path. If you’ve chosen to be a bandit, be the best bandit you can be, and your mother will be proud of you.”

Otho’s face fell. “But I’m not a strong fighter. I’m not quick with figures. I can’t even find my way back to camp. And… I had to rely on you to feed me!”

Jia wanted to laugh, but she also felt a wave of tenderness for the young man. “Look, we’re all good at something. My husband must have seen something in you if he sent you to bring me to him.”

“Probably because I don’t even look like a bandit,” Otho said. “And… one time I was part of a robbery that went bad, and everyone made fun of me because I wouldn’t leave the dog behind.”

“What dog?”

“I fed it jerky to keep it quiet while we snuck into the caravan campsite. But then the merchants woke up, and as we retreated, I heard one of the merchants say he was going to kill the useless dog. I felt bad for it and carried it back with me.”

“You’re loyal,” said Jia. “That’s not nothing.”

She reached into her purse and brought out a small vial.

“Here, take this.” Her voice was gentle. “I made it because I had trouble sleeping the last few weeks when I didn’t know what had happened to Kuni. We have to sleep so we can be ready for tomorrow. Hey, you might even see your mother in your dream!”

“Thank you,” Otho said, and accepted the vial. “You’re nice.”

“Everything will seem better in the morning.” Jia smiled and turned away from him, soon falling asleep.

Otho sat by the fire and looked at Jia’s sleeping figure long into the night, fingering the vial. He imagined that he could still feel the warmth of her hand on it.

Jia heard a faint voice calling Mama, Mama.

It must have been her child speaking to her through the womb. She smiled and patted her belly.

The sun had risen. A green-and-red parrot suddenly swooped in and landed next to her. It looked at her and cocked its head for a second before spreading its wings and rising skyward. Jia’s gaze followed the bird. It flew into a giant rainbow that began in the clearing, riding its arch toward the other end.

Jia woke up.

“I heated some water for you,” Otho said, and he brought her a pot.

“Thank you,” Jia said.

He looks a lot better than he did last night, Jia thought. There was a kind of shy happiness on his face and in his posture. Probably remembering his sweetheart.

As Jia washed her face in the warm water and dried her face, she looked around the camp. Everything always did seem so much better in the morning.

She froze. The same enormous rainbow she dreamed of was hanging in the east. She knew they had to follow it.

Before long, she walked into Kuni’s camp.

“Next time,” Jia said, “make sure your lackeys know how to get back to you before you send them off. It would have been easier to send a dog.”

But she gave Otho a gentle pat on the back of the hand to let him know she was joking. “We had a bit of an adventure,” she said, smiling. Otho laughed as his face turned red.

Kuni embraced Jia and buried his face in her red curls. My Jia can always take care of herself.

“Well, we are in a bit of a mess, aren’t we?” Jia said. “Your father and brother are so angry that you’ve turned into an outlaw that they won’t even let me into their houses; they think I’m responsible for turning you to your old, irresponsible ways — am I? And my parents want nothing to do with me, claiming that since I insisted on marrying you, I have to live with the consequences. Only your mother tried to help me by sending me money in secret, and she wouldn’t stop crying when she visited — and that made me cry too.”

Kuni shook his head. “Yet they say blood is thicker than water! How can my father—”

“Being related to a rebel is a crime that can lead to the whole clan being punished, remember?”

“I haven’t joined the rebels yet.”

Jia regarded him carefully. “You haven’t? Then what are you planning to do with this mountain base? I hope you aren’t picturing me staying here for years as your bandit-queen!”

“I haven’t thought through the next steps,” Kuni admitted. “I just took the path that seemed open to me at the time. At least this way, I can keep you out of the hands of the Imperials.”

“I’m not complaining, you know, but you certainly could have chosen a better time to do something interesting.” Jia smiled and pulled Kuni’s head down to whisper in his ear.

“Really?” Kuni said. He laughed and kissed Jia deeply. “Now that is good news.” He looked down at her belly. “You’ll have to stay in camp and not go anywhere.”

“Right, I really need you to tell me what to do, just like you’ve done all these years.” Jia rolled her eyes, but she stroked his arm affectionately. “Did you like that courage herb I gave you?”

“What are you talking about?”

Jia smiled mischievously. “Remember that pouch of calming herbs I gave you? I slipped in a plug for courage. You’ve always wanted to do the most interesting thing, right?”

Kuni thought back to that day on the trail up the mountain, and his strange behavior before the white python. “You have no idea how fortuitously things have worked out.”

Jia kissed him on the cheek. “What you see as luck, I see as being prepared.”

“So, if Otho was lost, how did you find me?”

She told Kuni about the dream of the rainbow. “It’s a sign from the gods, surely.”

More prophecies, Kuni thought. Sometimes you can’t plan things better than the gods — whoever they are — plan for you.

The legend of Kuni Garu grew.

About a month later, two of Kuni’s followers brought a burly man with his hands tied behind him into the camp.

“I’m telling you,” the man shouted, “I’m a friend of your big boss! Treating me like this is a mistake.”

“Or you could be a spy,” his guards retorted.

The man had struggled the whole way and was out of breath. Kuni tried to not laugh when he saw the man’s sweaty face, splotchy with exertion. He had a full, bushy black beard, and beads of sweat hung from the tips of the strands like dew from blades of grass in the morning. He was well muscled, and the guards had lashed the ropes about his arms very tight.

“As I live and breathe. Mün Çakri!” he said. “Are things so bad in Zudi that you’ve come to join me? I’ll make you a captain here.” He directed the guards to loosen the ropes.

Mün Çakri was a butcher who had often drunk with Kuni and caroused about the streets of Zudi with him before he got his job as a jailer.

“Tight ship you run around here,” Çakri said, stretching his arms to get the circulation back into them. “You’ve become notorious as the ‘White Snake Bandit’ for miles around. But when I asked about you, everyone on this mountain pretended to know nothing.”

“It could be that you frightened them with those fists the size of copper pots and that beard — I really think you look more like a bandit than I do!”

Çakri ignored Kuni. “I guess I was asking too many questions, so a couple of woodsmen jumped me and brought me to your lackeys.”

A boy brought out tea, but Çakri refused to touch his cup. Kuni laughed and then asked for two mugs of ale instead.

“I come here on official business,” Çakri said. “From the mayor.”

“Listen,” Kuni said, “the only thing the mayor could want with me is to put me in jail, and I’m definitely not interested in that.”

“Actually, the mayor is tempted by Krima and Shigin’s call for Xana officials to defect. He thinks he might be able to get a title out of it if he presents Zudi to the rebels. And he wants you to advise him, since you’re the closest thing to a bona fide rebel he knows. Because he knew I was your friend, he sent me to come and get you.”

“What’s wrong?” Jia asked. “Isn’t this the opportunity you’ve been waiting for?”

“But all these stories people tell about me,” Kuni said, “aren’t really true. They’re just exaggerations.”

He thought about the deaths of Hupé and the others.

“Am I cut out to be a rebel? The real world is very different from adventures in stories.”

“A little self-doubt is a good thing,” said Jia, “but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories other tell about us. Look around you: Hundreds follow you and believe in you. They want you to save their families; you can only do that if you take Zudi.”

Kuni thought about Muru and his son, about the old Xana mother in the marketplace trying to protect her son, about the widows whose husbands and sons would never return, about all the men and women whose lives the empire had destroyed without a thought.

“A bandit could still pray for a slim chance of being pardoned if enough money is paid,” said Kuni. “But if I become a rebel, there’s no way out.”

“It’s always scary to do the interesting thing,” said Jia. “Ask your heart if it’s also the right thing.”

I believe in the dream I had about you. Remember that.

By the time Mün Çakri, Kuni Garu, and Kuni’s gang arrived at Zudi, it was dusk. The gates of the city were closed.

“Open up!” Çakri shouted. “It’s Kuni Garu, the mayor’s honored guest.”

“Kuni Garu is a criminal,” the soldier atop the wall shouted. “The mayor has ordered the gates sealed.”

“I guess he got cold feet,” Kuni said. “Rebellion seemed good in theory, but when it came time to take the plunge, the mayor just couldn’t do it.”

His theory was confirmed as Than Carucono and Cogo Yelu emerged from the bushes by the side of the road to join them.

“The mayor has kicked us out of town because he knows we’re your friends,” Cogo said. “Yesterday he heard that the rebels were winning, and he invited us to dinner to discuss plans for his defection. Today he heard that the emperor was finally taking the rebellion seriously and would send the Imperial army shortly, and so he did this. That man is like a leaf dancing in the wind.”

Kuni smiled. “I think it’s too late for him to change his mind now.”

He asked one of the men for a bow. He took a silk scroll from his sleeve and tied it around an arrow. Then he nocked it and shot it high into the sky. The men watched as the arrow traced out a high arc over the walls and fell into Zudi.

“Now we wait.”

Anticipating that the vacillating mayor might change his mind, Kuni had sent a few men ahead earlier that day to sneak into Zudi before the gates were closed. They spent the rest of the afternoon spreading rumors that the hero Kuni Garu was leading a rebel army to liberate Zudi from Xana and return the city to the revived Cocru.

“No more taxes,” they whispered. “No more corvées. No more killing whole families for one man’s crimes.”

Kuni’s letter to the city asked for the citizens to rise up and topple the mayor. “You will be supported by Cocru’s army of liberation,” the letter promised. If one considered a band of bandits an “army,” and if one ignored the fact that the King of Cocru had no idea who Kuni Garu was, the letter could be considered to sort of tell the truth.

But the citizens did as Kuni asked. Chaos erupted in the streets, and the people of the city, long resentful of the heavy hand of Xana rule, made quick work of the mayor and his staff. The heavy gates swung open, and citizens watched in amazement as Kuni Garu and his tiny band of bandits strode in.

“Where’s the Cocru army?” one of the riot leaders asked.

Kuni climbed onto the balcony of a nearby house and surveyed the throng in the streets.

“You are the Cocru army!” he shouted. “Do you see how much power you have when you act without fear? Even if Cocru lives on only in the heart of one man, he will still overthrow Xana!”

Platitude or not, the crowd erupted into applause, and by acclamation, Kuni Garu became the Duke of Zudi. A few pointed out that titles of nobility really couldn’t be handed out in such a democratic fashion, but these killjoys were ignored.

It was now the end of the eleventh month, three months after Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin first saw the prophecy in the fish.

CHAPTER NINE. EMPEROR ERISHI

PAN: THE ELEVENTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

In Pan, wine never stopped flowing. Fountains in the floor of the Grand Audience Hall of the palace sprayed and splashed wine of all colors into jade-lined pools. Ditches and ducts connected the pools so that the wines mixed together, frothing and intoxicating the air as those who approached the emperor gingerly picked their way around them.

Chatelain Goran Pira suggested to the young emperor that perhaps the pools could be shaped so that they represented the seas, and the parts of the floor that remained dry could be used to represent the Islands of Dara.

Wouldn’t it be fun, he humbly offered, for the emperor to be able to survey his realm from his throne? Just by looking down, he would see the literally wine-dark seas and enjoy the sight of his ministers and generals island-hopping as they tried to walk up to present their reports and counsel.

The young emperor clapped his hands together in delight. Chatelain Pira — really Chief Augur Pira, but he was so humble that he retained his old title, which he said made him feel closer to the emperor — always had such wonderful ideas! Emperor Erishi devoted many hours to drawing diagrams and directing the workmen as they dug up the golden bricks that tiled the floor of the Grand Audience Hall to put in sculpted models of the most important geographical features of the Islands: red coral for the cinder cone that was Mount Kana; white coral for the glacier-capped Mount Rapa; mother-of-pearl for the smooth sides of Mount Kiji, with a giant inlaid sapphire for Lake Arisuso and an emerald for Lake Dako;… culminating in a miniature garden of carefully cultivated bonsai trees that stood in for the towering oaks of old Rima. It was much too fun for the little emperor to pretend to be a giant striding across the land, dealing out life and death in this shrunken version of his realm.

When ministers and generals came up to him with reports of troubling rebels in remote corners of the empire, he impatiently brushed them away. Go talk to the regent! Couldn’t they see he was too busy playing with Chatelain Pira, a wonderful friend who always warned him not to work too hard and not to neglect having fun while he was young? That was the whole point of being emperor, wasn’t it?

“Rénga,” Pira said, “what do you think about a maze made of fine fish and tasty meats? We could hang all manner of delicious treats from the ceiling, and you could wear a blindfold and try to make a path through the maze by taste alone.”

Now that was another brilliant suggestion. Emperor Erishi immediately set about planning for such a diversion.

If someone had informed him that men were dying every day in the Islands for lack of a cup of rice, he would have been surprised. “Why do they insist on eating rice? Meat is so much better!”

CHAPTER TEN. THE REGENT

PAN: THE ELEVENTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

Regent Crupo did not enjoy his job.

Chatelain Pira was the one who had explained to the emperor that the best way to honor his father was to build the Great Mausoleum, a house for his eternal afterlife that would be even more splendid than the palace in Pan. Since the emperor’s mother had died long ago after displeasing Mapidéré, his father was really the only parent he could celebrate. Didn’t Kon Fiji, the Great Ano Sage, teach that a child with filial piety always honored his parents to the best of his ability?

But it was up to Lügo Crupo to make that dream real. He had to turn the emperor’s childish drawings into real plans, draft the men to make the plans come to life, and order the soldiers to drive the lazy laborers to do their duty.

“Why do you fill the emperor’s head with such foolish ideas?” asked Crupo.

“Regent, remember how we got to where we are today. Do you not feel the ghost of Emperor Mapidéré watching over us?”

Crupo felt a chill going up his spine. But he was a rational man, and he did not believe in ghosts. “What’s done is done.”

“Then feel the eyes of the world watching, scrutinizing us for signs of devotion. As you said, it can sometimes be difficult for servants to express their loyalty clearly. Think of the monument to Emperor Mapidéré as a complicated way for us to earn tranquility of mind and certainty in our places.”

Crupo had nodded at the wisdom of Pira’s words. He made thousands of men into slaves to the memory of the dead emperor and ignored their protests. Sacrifices were necessary in the pursuit of legitimacy.

That early exchange with Pira also established the pattern that would hold between them. He was the regent, holder of the Seal of Xana and the doer of deeds. Pira was the emperor’s playmate, the voice that distracted the emperor. Together, they pulled the strings that moved the puppet that was Emperor Erishi. It had seemed like a good deal, one in which he got the better end of the bargain. But lately, he wasn’t so sure.

He had craved power, yes, lots of it, and when Pira had come to him with that audacious plan, he had seized the chance. But actually exercising the power that came from the Throne of Xana was not nearly as enjoyable as he had imagined. Yes, it had been fun to watch the other ministers and generals cower before him and pay him obeisance, but so much of the work of being regent consisted of mere tedium! He did not want to hear about harvest numbers, petitions from starving peasants, reports of corvée desertions, and this latest plague, garrison commanders complaining about rebellions. Why couldn’t they take care of the bandits in the areas they were responsible for? They were the soldiers, and that was their job.

Delegate, delegate. He delegated everything he could, and still, they came to him for decisions.

Lügo Crupo was a scholar, a man of letters, and he was sick of being bogged down by such petty concerns. He wanted to be the architect of grand visions, of new systems of laws, and new philosophies that would dazzle the ages. Who had time to philosophize, though, when people knocked on your door every quarter of an hour?

Crupo had been born in Cocru, back when it was still the strongest among the incessantly warring Tiro states. His parents, propertyless bakers in a small town, died during one of these border skirmishes. He was captured by bandits and taken to Haan, the most learned of the Tiro states, to be sold as a bonded servant, but in Ginpen, the Haan capital, the constables raided the bandits and freed Crupo into the streets.

Boys in Crupo’s situation generally did not have much of a future. But he was lucky that as he begged for food in the streets of Ginpen as a refugee, the great scholar Gi Anji, famed lawgiver and adviser to many kings, passed by.

Gi Anji was a busy man and, like many who lived in Ginpen, had learned to harden his heart and ignore the many street urchins and beggars who shouted tales of woe — it was impossible to determine which were telling the truth. But on that day, he saw something in little Lügo Crupo’s dark-brown eyes that moved him, a spark of yearning for something greater, not just hunger for food. He stopped and beckoned the boy to come closer.

And so Crupo became Anji’s student. He was not one of those bright boys who mastered subjects effortlessly — like Tan Féüji, the precocious son of a famous Haan scholar and Gi Anji’s favorite. And he had a hard time adapting to Anji’s school.

Anji’s favorite method of instruction was to engage in a group dialogue with his students, asking them carefully crafted questions that probed their understanding, challenged their assumptions, and led them down new avenues of thought.

Whereas Féüji could immediately come up with three different answers whenever Anji asked him a question, Crupo struggled to even understand the point Anji made by asking it. Crupo had to work hard for every bit of progress. It took him a long time to learn the zyndari letters and longer still to master enough logograms to read Anji’s simpler treatises. Often the master grew impatient with the boy and threw up his hands in despair. Conversing with the bright Féüji was so much more pleasant.

Yet Crupo persevered. He wanted more than anything to please Master Anji, and if that meant that he had to read the same book three times to absorb the meaning, that he had to practice carving and writing the same logograms a hundred times, that he had to sit and work out a parable like a puzzle for hours, he did them all without complaint. He was the very definition of diligence as he squeezed every minute out of the day to study: He read while he ate; he did not play games with the other boys; he sat on sharp pebbles instead of sitting mats so that he would concentrate instead of becoming too comfortable and falling asleep.

Gradually, Crupo became one of Anji’s best students. When speaking to kings, Anji often mentioned that of all the young men he had taught in his life, only Féüji and Crupo had understood everything he had to teach them and then gone on into the terra incognita of new ideas.

Once he left Anji’s school, Crupo tried to become an adviser to the court of Cocru, his homeland. But while the king treated him with respect, he was never given an official position. Instead, he had to support himself by lecturing and teaching.

In addition to his lectures and pamphlets, Crupo’s calligraphy was particularly admired by the literati. In contrast to his carefully constructed essays and tightly woven arguments, he shaped his wax logograms with the sensitivity of a child as well as the passionate abandon of a swordsman, and the zyndari letters from his brush leapt off the page like a flock of migrating wild geese captured in midflight over a still pond. Many imitated his calligraphy, but few could equal or even approach his artistry.

But there was a measure of condescension in their praise of Crupo that rankled. Some seemed almost surprised that a man of such humble origins could be the creator of such creative and artistic words. Behind the recognition there was also an implicit dismissal, as if Crupo’s hard work could never measure up to Féüji’s natural brilliance.

Crupo was never as famous as Tan Féüji. Tan became the Prime Minister of Haan at the age of twenty, and his essays on governance were more widely circulated and highly regarded than anything Crupo wrote. Even King Réon of Xana, the future Emperor Mapidéré, who had little good to say about scholars of the Six States, said he found Féüji’s writing enlightening.

But Crupo thought Féüji’s essays insipid. They were so flowery and illogical! All this concern about “the virtuous ruler” and the “harmonious society” and the “path of balance” nauseated him. They were constructed like castles in the air, with soaring rhetoric and lovely turns of phrase, but no care for the foundation.

Féüji’s belief in a ruler who ruled but lightly, stepping out of the way of the people, who could better their own circumstances through hard work and their own initiative, seemed to Crupo hopelessly naïve. If the experience of living in the war-torn Tiro states taught men anything, it was that the common people were little better than animals who had to be herded and corralled by strong rulers advised by men with vision. What strong states needed were severe laws administered efficiently and without mercy.

And Crupo knew that all the kings and ministers, in their heart of hearts, agreed with him, not Féüji. Lügo was the one who said what they really needed to hear, yet they continued to heap praise and honor only on Tan. His many letters to the Cocru court in Çaruza, offering his services, went unanswered.

Crupo was despondent and consumed with jealousy.

He went to Gi Anji. “Master, I work so much harder than Tan. Why am I not as well respected?”

“Tan writes of the world as it ought to be, not as it is,” Anji said.

Crupo bowed to his teacher. “Do you think I am the better writer?”

Gi Anji looked at him and sighed. “Tan writes without concern about pleasing others, and that is why men find his voice fresh and original.”

The veiled criticism stung.

One day, while at the latrine, Crupo observed that the rats in the latrine were thin and sickly. He remembered that the rats he had observed in the granary earlier were fat and lively.

A man’s circumstances are not determined by his talents, Crupo thought, but by where he chooses to put his talents to work. Xana is strong and Cocru is weak. Only a fool goes down with a sinking ship.

He defected from Cocru and went to the court of Xana, where he rose quickly because Réon thought having another student taught by Gi Anji was the next best thing to getting Tan Féuji himself.

But every time he was consulted, he heard behind the king’s words an unvoiced regret: If only Tan Féüji were sitting here with me instead…

Crupo was enraged by the thought that King Réon valued what he could not have more than what he possessed. He was constantly racked by the pain of being deemed only second best, not quite good enough. He worked even harder, trying to come up with ways to strengthen Xana and weaken the other Tiro states. He wanted the king to acknowledge, one day, that he was much more valuable than Féüji could ever have been.

After the fall of the Haan capital, Ginpen, Tan Féüji was captured.

Réon was ecstatic. “Finally,” the king boasted to his ministers, among whose ranks Crupo stood, “I will have a chance to convince a great man to join my cause. There are many in the Islands who admire his wisdom, and having him on the side of Xana would be better than a thousand horses or ten fearless generals. He is as exceptional among mere scholars as a cruben among mere whales or a dyran among mere fish.”

Crupo closed his eyes. He would never be able to escape from the shadow of this mirage, this glib man who wrote of ideals instead of truths. Even when what he said was useless, King Réon wanted the prestige of the Féüji name.

Crupo visited Tan Féüji in prison that night.

Knowing how much the king valued this particular prisoner, the guards handled Féüji more like a guest. He was given the room of the prison warden, and the guards spoke to him with respect. He was free to do as he liked as long as he did not leave.

“It’s been a long time,” Crupo said, upon seeing his old friend. Tan’s smooth, deep-black face was unlined, and Crupo imagined the life of ease he had led, toasted by kings and dukes, never having to scrabble for a living.

“Too long!” Féüji said, clasping Crupo by the arms. “I had hoped to see you at Master Anji’s funeral, but I understand you were too busy. The master thought of you often during the last years of his life.”

“Did he?” Crupo tried to clasp Féüji’s arms with as much warmth. But he felt awkward, nervous, stiff. After a moment, he stepped back.

They sat down on the soft mats on the floor, a pot of tea between them. Crupo sat at first in the formal position of mipa rari, his back straight and tall and his weight on his knees.

Across the table, Féüji laughed. “Lügo, have you forgotten that we’ve known each other since we were schoolboys? I thought you were here to visit an old friend. Why do you sit as if we’re negotiating a treaty?”

Embarrassed, Crupo shifted into the familiar géüpa to match Féüji, with his bottom on the floor and his legs crossed and folded so that each foot was under the opposite thigh.

“Why do you look so uncomfortable?” Féüji asked. “I think you’re hiding something.”

Crupo started and spilled some tea from his cup.

“I know what it is,” Féüji said. “Old friend, you came to me because you wished to apologize for not being able to dissuade King Réon from his mad vision of conquest.”

Crupo hid his flushed face behind his sleeves as he composed himself.

“And now you’re embarrassed because you think an apology inadequate, when Haan has fallen and I am here, a prisoner awaiting execution. You don’t know what to say.”

Crupo set down his teacup. “You know me better than I know myself,” he muttered. He took out a small, green porcelain bottle hidden deep within his sleeves. “Our friendship is stronger than tea. Let us have something that fits better.” He poured the liquor into the empty cup before Féüji.

“You feel responsible for the thousands slaughtered by Réon in his senseless wars,” Féüji said. “You are kind, Crupo, but do not let your heart be troubled by a burden that isn’t yours. I know that you’ve done your best to try to speak sense to the tyrant. I know you tried to save my life, but Réon won’t allow me to live after having defied him for so long. I thank you, old friend, and I forbid you from feeling any guilt! It is the tyrant Réon who is responsible.”

Crupo nodded, and hot tears flowed down his face. “You’re truly the mirror of my soul.”

“Let us be merry and drink,” Féüji said, and drained the liquor in his cup in one gulp. Crupo drank too.

“Ah, you’ve forgotten to fill your own cup,” Féüji said, laughing. “That’s still tea.”

Crupo said nothing but waited. Soon, Féüji’s expression changed. He held his hands to his stomach and tried to speak, but nothing would come except gasps. He tried to get up but stumbled and fell, and after a while, he stopped writhing on the mat.

Crupo stood up. “I am no longer the second best.”

After all these years, Crupo thought he had finally accomplished his dream. He was peerless, the most powerful man in the land. He finally had the opportunity to show the world that he was, all along, the one who deserved their admiration and praise.

He would be respected.

And yet his work was so unsatisfying, so petty.

“Regent, who should we appoint as commander-in-chief against the rebels?”

The rebels? Those bandits? How can they withstand the might of the Imperial army? A trained monkey leading the army would win. Why are they bothering me with this? It’s a transparent case of petty bureaucrats exaggerating threats to wheedle more money and resources from the throne. I will not be fooled.

He thought about who at the court most annoyed him, who he would rather send far away from Pan, out of sight.

Glancing over at the small shrine to Kiji in the corner, he saw a pile of petitions marked urgent. No matter how hard he worked, there always seemed to be so much more for him to do. He had taken to piling the petitions next to the shrine, idly hoping that showing the god how much he had to deal with might arouse some sense of pity and bring about divine intervention to lessen his load.

All the petitions near the top of the pile were from one man.

Ah, he had it. Surely this was a sign from Lord Kiji himself. Kindo Marana, the Minister of the Treasury, had been hounding Crupo for days about some suggestions for improving the tax system. The sallow, small man was obsessed with trivial matters like taxes and finance; he could not understand the grand visions and the big picture that concerned the regent. Sending the chief tax collector, a bean counter among bean counters, to supervise the army against the bandits seemed deliciously absurd, and he was impressed with his own wit.

“Summon Kindo Marana.”

Maybe I will now finally get some peace to work on my treatise on government. It will be better than anything Tan Féüji ever wrote. Ten, no, twenty times better.

CHAPTER ELEVEN. THE CHATELAIN

PAN: THE ELEVENTH MONTH IN THE THIRD YEAR OF THE REIGN OF RIGHTEOUS FORCE.

A chatelain was just a glorified butler, Goran Pira often thought. There was a time, back in the early days of the old Tiro states, when a chatelain led the defense of a castle and was treated as a member of the nobility. Nowadays, his duties consisted of settling disputes among Mapidéré’s wives, disciplining the servants, balancing the palace budget (though it was a very big budget), and being the emperor’s playmate.

Pira had inherited the position from his father, who had served Emperor Mapidéré’s father, King Dézan. Pira grew up in the old palace, back in the old Xana capital of Kriphi, on Rui, and played with young Prince Réon. The two often got in trouble for trying to peek into the windows of the bedrooms of the younger wives of Réon’s father.

When they were caught, Pira always insisted that he was the instigator, the one who led the prince astray. He was the one who was spanked and whipped.

“That was very brave of you,” Réon said. “You are a true friend.”

“Ré,” he said, grimacing with the pain from the spanking. “I’ll always be your friend. But maybe next time you can be a little bit quieter.”

The friendship survived Réon’s ascension to the Xana throne. It survived the years of conquest and war, when Pira often comforted Réon when he was frustrated with the lack of progress or seethed because of some diplomatic insult. It even survived Réon’s many pompous eccentricities after he conquered the Six States and became Emperor Mapidéré. He might make his ministers and generals tremble with the slightest movement of his pinkie, but away from the audience halls, back in the living quarters of the palace, he was still just Ré, Pira’s childhood friend.

But the friendship could not survive Lady Maing.

Maing was from Amu, the daughter of a duke who refused to surrender to the Xana army. She was taken as a captive back to Pan, where Emperor Mapidéré built his new capital, and made to work as a serving woman in the palace kitchen.

Pira had never paid much attention to the women of the palace. It was a necessary part of surviving the job. A chatelain who could not resist the temptation of his lord’s many beautiful wives and captives did not have a very long career.

Pira was married to a girl from Xana picked for him by his parents. They were polite to each other, but they rarely spent much time together since Pira was almost always by Réon’s side. The woman bore him no children, but Pira did not care. He didn’t think the life of the chatelain was so wonderful that he wanted to pass it on to a son. Long ago, Pira had learned to suppress his urges as a man.

But Maing awoke something in him. Was it the way she never lamented her fate, though she had been turned from a duke’s daughter into a slave? Was it the way she never treated herself as a slave, holding her head high and looking straight at you? Was it the way she found joy in the simplest things, teaching the other serving women in the kitchen to turn the dripping of leaky faucets into music and to make finger shadow puppets dance against the wall in the light cast by the fire in the giant cooking hearths? He didn’t know, but he knew he loved her.

They began to converse, and he felt that she was the only person who really understood him, who saw that he was more than the sum of his duties, who knew that he sometimes wrote poetry about watching the melting ice in spring and the summer stars spinning slowly overhead, about loneliness in a crowd, about the emptiness in the heart caused by touching too much silver and gold and not enough of a friendly hand.

“I am but a glorified slave,” he said to her, and discovered that it was true. “Neither of us is free.”

Finally, being with her taught him the meaning of real intimacy. Though he had thought he was close to Ré, they were, after all, not equals, and true intimacy required equality.

One night, Emperor Mapidéré held a banquet for his generals, and Pira wanted to wait until after the banquet, when the emperor would be in a good mood, to ask a favor of him. He would ask Ré, his old friend and playmate, to release Maing from her servitude and let him have her.

Maing served the swordfish steaks that night. She passed before the emperor’s table, the platter of fish held high before her. The emperor had been bored, and he chose that moment to look for something to divert himself. He saw Maing’s narrow waist. He saw Maing’s flowing light-brown hair. He saw a thing that had long belonged to him but which he had been too busy to enjoy.

He summoned her to his bed that night, and she became Lady Maing, another of Mapidéré’s many consorts. Mapidéré had never designated an empress, preferring the new to the old.

Pira’s heart died that night.

Though this was a fate dreamed of by all the other slave women, when Pira came by to wake the emperor in the morning, Maing looked frightened, not joyful. She avoided Pira’s gaze, and Pira carefully spoke in an even voice. In his dreams, he said good-bye to her again and again.

Lady Maing became pregnant, and the courtiers and servants congratulated her heartily. As the consort who brought another royal child, Lady Maing’s place in the palace was secure.

But she said nothing to the well-wishers. As her belly swelled, she looked only more and more withdrawn.

The baby, a boy, was born two months early, and yet he was healthy and hale, and weighed as much as any other boy carried to full term. The doctor, suspicious, sent away the servants and nurses and interrogated the exhausted Lady Maing for an hour. When he finally got the truth out of her, he hurried to Pira with the news.

Since then, Pira had relived that day a hundred thousand times in his mind. Could he have saved his son? Could he have saved Maing? Could he have silenced the doctor with gold and jewels? Could he have thrown himself at the emperor’s feet and pled for mercy? Was he such a coward that he could not even protect the one person in this world he loved? He imagined himself leaving everything behind so that he and Maing could have escaped in a small fishing boat, bound for ports unknown and a lifetime of looking over their shoulders — but she would be alive, alive.

Yet, every scenario ended with the same result: death to his entire family — his parents, his wife, his uncles and aunts. Treason was a taint in the blood, and a traitor’s sin was borne by the whole family.

He could not think of what he could have done differently, but he blamed himself nonetheless.

He had gone to Emperor Mapidéré and told him what the doctor said.

“Who is the father?” the emperor raged.

“She wouldn’t say,” Pira said, his voice dead.

He wanted to try to reason with Réon, to explain that he had met her before Réon wanted her, and so they had not really committed treason. Yet, as chatelain, he knew the laws of the palace well. A slave girl belonged to the emperor, even if he never touched her, even if he didn’t know her name, could not recall her face. They had indeed committed treason, starting with the minute that he looked at her as anything other than the emperor’s possession.

And so he watched, and said nothing, as the boy was smothered in front of Lady Maing. He watched, and said nothing, as the Imperial Guards strangled her. Then he went to dispose of the bodies, and he strained to show nothing in his face as his hands touched her cold skin.

He did make a vow, though: He would avenge her and bring down the House of Xana. He would truly, spectacularly, really commit treason.

“Chatelain, they keep on pestering me with these reports of rebellion. What should I do?”

“Rénga, these are mere bandits and highwaymen, beneath your notice. You demean yourself by even wasting a second of your time to think about them. Announce that whoever brings you reports of such petty matters should be put to death. Let the regent take care of them for you.”

“You are my only real friend, Chatelain. You always think of what’s best for me.”

“Thank you. Now, what shall we do today? Shall we go to the Imperial Zoo and Aquarium so you can pet the baby cruben? Or would you rather see the new virgins brought from Faça?”