Gunpowder Magnolia

Please note that the chapter below is an early draft. Names and world-building details subject to change. Early chapters are available on my Patreon.

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There were perfectly logical reasons not to kill Princess Yelhwa there on that divan. Foremost of these reasons: it would make a mess of Lanthe and Tairo’s mission. The whole point of infiltrating Yao as Ro defectors was to gather information and, when they did end Yelhwa’s life, make it look like an accident. If Lanthe strangled their target during their first meeting, she and Tairo would almost certainly be executed. The deaths would galvanize Ro and Yao against each other without Ro having any more information than they had when this all started. Lanthe would have failed Tairo, General Chang, her family, and her kingdom.

All these logical thoughts came to Lanthe hours later as she hollowly tried to make herself feel like less of an idiot.

In the breathless moments she had Yelhwa pinned, her mind was empty. Thought and time disappeared in Yelhwa’s black eyes. Lanthe didn’t know how long she stayed over the princess of Yao, frozen. But it was too long.

The knife had driven deep into her shoulder, piercing muscle, and she was starting to feel it. The involuntary shiver in her limbs, the quickening of her breath, the blackening dizziness that rushed to fill her head in the absence of battle fever. Lanthe had charged, brawled, and killed through worse injuries on the battlefield. But this wasn’t a battlefield. The moment Yelhwa had spilled back on the silk cushions, weaponless and smiling, it had become something else. Something Lanthe didn’t understand. Lanthe’s battle power came from motion. Yelhwa’s gaze had stopped her dead and held her immobile—until the strength went out of her.

When the princess rose, pushing against the hand on her throat, Lanthe tipped back. And they ended up sitting on the divan side-by-side, half facing each other like a pair of school friends on a bench.

“Well!” Yelhwa cleared her throat and brushed her fingers back through her hair, restoring it to its unearthly black shine. “That was a bit of excitement, wasn’t it?”

She looked so like a goddess; it was bizarre to be sitting here less than an arm’s reach from her. It was wrong. Lanthe should be attacking or on her knees. One or the other. But in the confusion and growing dizziness, she couldn’t move.

“Apologies for the dramatic greeting, Captain Luyang.” Yelhwa nodded to the knife protruding from Lanthe’s shoulder. “I tired of speculation and needed to determine for myself whether you were the Mage Slayer.”

“You…” Lanthe swallowed, alarmed at the sluggishness of her own voice… “could have just asked.”

“Mmm,” Yelhwa hummed in what sounded like agreement. “I once had a torturer tell me that there are no liars beneath the blade.” A fingertip touched the fine lacquer hilt of the dagger—not pressing, just tapping a faint twinge into Lanthe’s burning shoulder. “There’s truth to that, but not the kind he meant. Of course, people tell all sorts of lies under threat of death and pain. But there are some things no pretender can fake. Like years of training in the Ro military. I like to think I’m quick.” The bridge of Yelhwa’s nose crinkled in mirth. “And you just destroyed me, you absolute beast of a woman.”

The princess’s manner of speaking was surprisingly digestible. Not lower-class, per se, but casual. Easy to understand. Not the way Lanthe would have expected a genius courtier to speak… but maybe a particularly skilled storyteller at the local teahouse. There was an indulgent crunch and flare to her enunciation that caught the ear and pulled it through each sentence. Like a hostage behind a horse.

“I will know your secrets,” Yelhwa said. “How you faked being a man for ten years in the Ro army. But first…” She held out a hand. “I’d like my knife back.”

If this was another test of mettle—to see if Lanthe had the nerve to pull a dagger from her own flesh—it wasn’t a hard one. Sure, Lanthe wouldn’t have removed the knife on the field. Not without an extra pair of hands to stem the bleeding and bandage the wound tight. But as far as withstanding pain…

Lanthe gripped the knife, ready to draw it out—when the princess’s hand moved with supernatural speed. Tiny strokes flashed into being so fast that Lanthe didn’t think even Tairo could have read them as they came.

Graphemancy.

Lanthe started back, yanking the knife from her shoulder. Reflex had taken her again, her training telling her to have a weapon ready when the magic went into effect. But she had miscalculated. The shock of the blade coming free momentarily immobilized her, blasting her vision. When she came blinking back to herself, she was on her knees before the divan. Yelhwa’s hand hovered just above her injured shoulder, an intricate collection of characters glowing at her fingertips. There was no spurt of blood. Not even a slow trickle down Lanthe’s chest. Instead, Yelhwa’s web of characters pulsed warmly around her shoulder—pressing, like a perfectly applied palm.

“Thank you,” Yelhwa said and slipped the dagger from Lanthe’s limp right hand. When Lanthe stared at her shoulder in blank amazement, the princess smiled. “I suppose you thought graphemancy’s only use was destruction? A common perception in Ro, I understand. That little spell will hold you together until we get the doctor to stitch that up.”

“Doctor?” Lanthe repeated, uncomprehending.

Yelhwa was keeping her alive? After near-death at her hands? A commoner could be killed for laying hands on a noblewoman in his own country. And the princess of Yao was going to let a foreigner live after that?

“If you would give me your left hand…” The princess was writing in the air again, sinister magic lighting the tip of her index finger.

She worked so much smaller and faster than the mage at Yansey, each stroke like a lightning slash of her knife. Could it be calligraphy that had made her knife work so quick and smooth? Lanthe had always drawn a connection between Tairo’s elegant writing and his swordsmanship. But brushstrokes alone wouldn’t get a woman to a soldier’s level of skill with a blade. Princess Yelhwa must have trained for combat. But why? What reason would a sheltered princess of Yao have to be handy with a knife?

“Your hand,” the princess prompted, and Lanthe looked down. Her sliced palm was still bleeding. Badly. A dark spot growing on her already filthy skirt. She had been so focused on the more serious wound in her shoulder that she had forgotten the first cut, but the amount of blood certainly explained the confusing excess of dizziness.

“Yes, Your Excellency.” She lifted her bleeding hand with the palm up. “Apologies.”

The floating characters followed Yelhwa’s hand as she hovered it over Lanthe’s, brought it close, and then paused to glance at Lanthe’s face.

“Good Heavens,” Yelhwa murmured in fascination. “You really can’t read, can you?”

Lanthe’s eyes flicked from the princess’s face to the characters glowing between their hands. “What does it say?” she asked.

“In layman’s language: break bone, melt flesh.”

“Oh.”

Out of discipline, Lanthe didn’t move. If Yelhwa wanted to learn more about her prisoner this way, the only thing she would learn was that Ro were very good at tolerating pain.

“So…” Yelhwa swirled the characters playfully over Lanthe’s palm, turning the composition with a fingertip like a child turning a leaf on the water’s surface. “It seems you’ve been at least a little truthful with me, you odd creature. I realize that you have the classic Ro nerves of steel.” She nodded to Lanthe’s injured shoulder. “The test wasn’t whether you would pull your hand back. It was whether you read what I placed above it. Reading eyes move differently from observing eyes.”

Drawing back, Yelhwa made a strange flourish with her hand, banishing the characters into the air. In a heartbeat of flicking fingers, she had four new characters burned into the air above Lanthe’s sliced hand. Like the first spell, this one sank onto the injury and pressed, slowing the drip, drip of blood.

Even as the bleeding ceased, Lanthe felt vulnerable. Like each moment she sat here, Yelhwa’s too-sharp gaze peeled back a new layer of her, bringing the princess closer to the fatal truth.

“Thank you, Your Excellency,” she said and started to lower her head to the floor. Bowing in the Yao fashion might rankle, but at least it would mean that Yelhwa could no longer read her expressions.

“No, no, Luyang of Ro.” Yelhwa stopped the movement with a touch—two fingers beneath Lanthe’s chin. A graceful upward stroke drew Lanthe up to meet her gaze. “I prefer that people look at me when I’m speaking to them.”

Why? Lanthe wondered. So that she could better read the little movements of their eyes? Or so that she could better wrong-foot them with her beauty? At least the latter wouldn’t work on Lanthe. Or it shouldn’t. But again, time seemed to slow on the glimmer of those dark eyes.

Feeling too vulnerable in the grip of that gaze, Lanthe lowered her own eyes a fraction on the pretense of deference. A stripe of light had fallen across Yelhwa’s throat, illuminating the marks Lanthe’s hand had left there. Pink now but rapidly bleeding to a deeper purple. Lanthe couldn’t be allowed to live after doing that kind of damage. It didn’t make any sense.

“Now, I must know…” Yelhwa leaned forward eagerly, fidgeting with the bloody knife like a child with a stick, twirling it between her fingers.

The movement was so seemingly uncontrolled—so human against the princess’s general poise—that it momentarily threw Lanthe. And she abruptly remembered how young this woman was. Just twenty as of the new year. Not a goddess or even a queen, Lanthe told herself. Just a sheltered girl of twenty, with a girl’s curiosity and inexperience. Lanthe refocused. Kaisin Yelhwa was younger than Eng Binan. Younger than Dalin. There had to be weaknesses in her conversation, just as there were weaknesses in her knife form.

“Tell me everything,” said the fidgeting girl.

“Everything, Your Excellency?”

“Well, to start with, apparently, the Mage Slayer cannot read? How can this be? How did an illiterate soldier anticipate a seasoned graphemancer well enough to kill him?”

Lanthe had prepared for this question since realizing that her identity was known in Yao. Of course, Yelhwa would want to know about the defeat of one of her graphemancers. And of course, if Lanthe was being a good defector, she would share the information freely.

“I wasn’t the one who anticipated the graphemancer, ma’am.” Lanthe had rehearsed this story many times in her head, and this was the version that stuck the closest to the physical reality of the situation while taking most of the tactical work off her shoulders. “His name was Shei Dalin. A minor noble’s son who scribed for the captain.”

Lanthe told Yelhwa about how Dalin had come to her after the gates fell and told her that he could read the script the mage was using. When she described the events on the field, she did so from the outside, casting herself as a confused commoner with no understanding of the spells and their time limits.

“I don’t know how Dalin managed it, but he read the mage’s movements well enough to tell one of our snipers exactly when to shoot. Somehow, the bullet circumvented the shielding spells and struck the graphemancer in the shoulder. My only contribution was running in and cutting the mage down once he was already wounded. I saw my opening and took it. Any Ro soldier would have done the same.”

“I see.” It was impossible to tell from Yelhwa’s face whether she was suspicious or not. She had worn the same hungry, contemplative expression through Lanthe’s explanation.

Lanthe hoped she had sold the story. She couldn’t afford to tell Yelhwa the entire strategy when General Chang might be using it against graphemancers in the future. And Lanthe gained nothing by leading Yelhwa to think of her as a tactician. It was safer if the princess saw her as Tairo’s surly muscle and nothing more. Though, Lanthe realized, she had already ruined that with her complex mess of a plan to stave off her execution. Perhaps, it was too late for her to get away with dumb and surly as she had planned.

“And this half-Yao soldier, Shei Dalin?” Yelhwa said after a pause. “What became of him?”

“He died.” Lanthe said, remembering Dalin’s head in her lap, his eyes going empty. “During the fighting that followed, he took a Yao spear to the side and bled to death. He was a better scribe than he was a fighter.”

“The memory troubles you,” Yelhwa observed, though Lanthe wasn’t aware that her voice or expression had changed.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said honestly. “He saved all of us. I was his commanding officer… and I couldn’t save him. Of course, it troubles me.” It occurred to Lanthe then that Yelhwa had displayed no special reaction to talk of her graphemancer’s death. “Does it not trouble you, Princess?” she decided to ask.

“Pardon?” Yelhwa raised her eyebrows, and Lanthe lifted her gaze.

“I murdered the mage you sent to Yansey. I cut off his hand, and when he screamed in pain, I cut off his head. An old man wearing no armor, who entered Ro on your orders and seemed to think himself invulnerable. It doesn’t upset you to hear of this?”

Yelhwa tilted her head, considering Lanthe. Then a new smile split her face—wider and less demure than the others, revealing a gleam of straight white teeth. Here, more than at the knife’s edge, was danger. “Are you quite sure you want to do this, Luyang of Ro?”

“Do what, ma’am?”

“Greater men and women than you have been uneasy about the way I conduct my affairs. Greater men and women than you have decided to pass judgment on my character and take it upon themselves to stop me. Is that what you want to do?”

“I… haven’t decided, Princess.”

It was the truth. Having already choked Yelhwa to the point of bruising, perhaps it was better that Lanthe assume an ineffectually adversarial edge with her. According to all the teahouse love stories she had ever heard, romance thrived in adversity. Maybe Lanthe’s disapproval would make Tairo more attractive to this princess who seemed to relish breaking convention.

“You haven’t decided?” Yelhwa repeated, seemingly not displeased with the answer. Only intrigued.

“Lord Tairo came here intent on courting you,” Lanthe said slowly, constructing this new angle as she went. “I care about him, as I care about all the men I’ve served with. I want to make sure that the woman he pursues holds the same values in her heart. That she isn’t as mad and ruthless as my people say. I have no interest in being enemies with you, Your Excellency, only in protecting Lord Tairo.”

“Then I think we should be able to understand each other. I have no interest in making enemies with Ro, only in protecting Yao.”

With the mocking smile hanging on Yelhwa’s lips, it was impossible to tell if the words were honest. But how could they be honest? Yelhwa had to know that attacking Ro would start a war. And if she had read as many military histories as she claimed, she had to know that, graphemancers or none, war with Ro was suicide.

“Does he know?” Yelhwa asked.

“What?”

“Lord Tairo,” the princess said. “As far as my spies can tell, no one in Ro has any inkling of your real sex. Does your dear friend, Chang Tairo, know?”

“No, ma’am. No one does.”

Fascination lit Yelhwa’s face again, her thumb absently rubbing a bloody smear on the dagger’s hilt. “No one noticed the physical differences, even when you were just a girl starting out?”

“I grew up on a farm helping my parents work the fields,” Lanthe said. “I was already stronger than any noble’s son when I showed up.” Lanthe watched carefully to see if the casual slight on the soft nobility would touch a nerve. But Yelhwa only laughed, seemingly delighted.

“And none of your fellow soldiers ever found out in the next ten years?”

“No, ma’am.” Lanthe met in the middle between the lie and the truth, hoping that part of the truth would be more believable. “A civilian physician found out once when Lord Tairo and I sought refuge in his village after a battle. As far as I know, he never told anyone. That was many years ago, and I’ve been more careful since.”

“But you gave up your disguise here in Yao? After all these years?”

“Lord Chang Tairo’s orders were to stay alive. So, I did.”

“He speaks of you with great trust and affection.” Yelhwa was studying Lanthe with uncomfortable intensity. “Do you think he’ll forgive you for deceiving him for so many years?”

“I don’t know, your Excellency. But I know he wouldn’t forgive me for submitting to execution without a fight.”

“Well, you’ve done well by your lord.”

Yelhwa’s thumb touched Lanthe’s cheek. And how could it be that Lanthe had been here with the princess through a physical fight and a long conversation and still have no understanding of her character? Was she cruel or merciful? Was she delusional? Or just so much smarter than everyone else that Lanthe couldn’t hope to follow her logic? Was she truly that difficult to understand or was Lanthe just hopelessly unused to dealing with women? How did this woman’s touch alone make the world fuzz and blur?

“You’ve lost too much blood, Mage Slayer,” the princess observed, “and my spells are approaching their time limit. I’ll send for the physician.” She stood, cleaning the bloody knife on her robe, momentarily exposing a thigh as smooth and flawless as the silk.

“You really are…” Lanthe said, bemused. “You’re letting me live?”

“I am.”

“I almost killed you.”

“But you didn’t.” Yelhwa finished cleaning the knife and dropped the silk back over her thigh. “I’m sure in Ro you’ll have heard my detractors’ favorite line: that I dispose of people who oppose me. That’s not true. I dispose of people who bore me. You, Captain Luyang”—she tapped the tip of the knife to Lanthe’s nose—“I’m keeping you. I think it was General Hensei of Ro who wrote: The soul is a blade, and there is no whetstone like mortal peril.”

Crossing to a dark lacquer dresser, Yelhwa pulled a silk rope, and a bell sounded somewhere in an adjacent chamber. Lanthe stiffened at the noise, expecting guards to flood the room in the next heartbeat. Instead, the door opened on a single figure. Lady Suzu in her silvery silks with those bizarre bronze arrows strapped to her back.

“Your Excellency.” She bowed at the threshold.

“Suzu, send for my family physician and have the bath in the queen’s old chambers prepared.”

When the doctor arrived, Yelhwa motioned to Lady Suzu, and the two retreated into an adjoining chamber. The physician was a wispy old man with a beard as long and white as his hair. Instead of moving Lanthe to a window where the light was better, he brought in a pair of lanterns and set his tools out on a table beside the divan. He had nothing to say about Lanthe’s bizarre haircut, her physique, or the amount of her blood on the floor. He simply asked her to pull her dress down and treated the wound with skill unlike any that Lanthe had ever seen. He was old enough to be Lanthe’s grandfather, yet he had the steady hands of an archer.

“You have experience as a field medic,” Lanthe murmured.

“I’ve served His Excellency Kaisin Yeldan for his whole life. Including his time at the southern border fighting bandits.”

“Right.” Kaisin was one of the few Yao kings who had bothered with military service. It was why General Chang had always respected him.

Satisfied that the shoulder wound was clean, the physician put a vial to Lanthe’s lips.

“For the pain,” he said when she didn’t open her mouth.

“I don’t need it.” Anything that dulled pain dulled other senses as well. In the safety of her own fortress, Lanthe might have taken the drug. This was enemy territory. And she was already compromised.

“Would you like me to force-feed you, Ro?”

Lanthe glared. As long as she had committed to being vaguely hostile: “Would you like to lose a finger?”

The physician looked more exasperated than intimidated but relented anyway. “Have it your way.”

Lanthe was still as the needle and thread went into her skin. She focused on each burning prick, willing it to wake her. Keep her sharp.

When you cannot overcome, confuse.

Yelhwa clearly played this strategy better than Lanthe. And if Lanthe didn’t catch up, if she didn’t get a read on Yelhwa, she worried that their mission was doomed. Unless, of course, there were other sources of information. Her eyes slid sideways to the old man tending her shoulder.

“You kept your king alive through multiple dangerous campaigns,” she said quietly. “You must feel very attached to him.”

“Naturally,” the physician said as he slipped the needle through Lanthe’s skin again and pulled the burning thread through. “Of course, the only thing that matters is that I do my work well. But I feel attached to all the members of the royal family.”

A bizarre and utterly unhelpful answer. If Yelhwa had induced her father’s illness with poison, this man had to be either complicit or so bad at his job that he didn’t know.

“Done,” the physician said as he clipped the thread. He didn’t seem bad at his job. “You are exceptionally composed.”

“No, sir. I’m just Ro.”

Whatever servants had prepared the water were gone by the time Lady Suzu led Lanthe to the bathing chamber and told her to strip down.

“There’s a towel and robe for you there.” Lady Suzu indicated a stack of fabric on a low stool. “Meet me in the dressing chamber when you’ve finished.”

“The… where, ma’am?” Lanthe was so preoccupied trying to absorb the palatial bath itself that she hadn’t had time to consider the several curtained doorways leading off of the chamber.

Lady Suzu sighed in impatience and pointed to a doorway to their right. “Through there.”

She left, and Lanthe was alone, facing the massive bathing chamber. The bath itself wasn’t a washtub, as Lanthe had expected, but a deep pool occupying the center of a floor tiled with gemstones. The water was as clear as a tide pool in the sun, and when Lanthe dipped a toe in, it was as warm.

God in Heaven, she thought. How many servants must it have taken to transfer so much heated water to this chamber in such a short time? The physician hadn’t taken that long to stitch her up, had he?

When Lanthe slipped into the waist-high bath, her toes found slippery, uneven rock at the bottom. The warm water rushed softly against her skin, pushing at her body so that she drifted ever so gently backwards. This wasn’t a bath filled by buckets, Lanthe realized. This was an indoor stream, fed by one of Kaisia’s springs. Turning, Lanthe found ribbons of blood and dirt unfurling from her skin to snake away and out of sight. The same flow that had smoothed the natural surface beneath Lanthe’s feet continuously carried clean water in and dirty water out.

Yelhwa had said that this was the queen’s old bath. Even setting aside how intrusive it seemed to let a foreign peasant bathe in water belonging to a dead queen, it was an odd choice. If Lanthe had understood Tairo’s explanations of royal life correctly, the chambers of the king and queen belonged to whoever held that title. This bath should remain deserted—maintained but not in use—until a new woman became queen of Yao.

Submerging her head in the crystal water and swishing it back through her hair, Lanthe realized that the self-cleaning, self-heating nature of this bath meant that one wouldn’t need a small army of servants to haul in water. It was very possible that no one except the princess and Lady Suzu knew that Lanthe was here. Had that been the intention in using these chambers? And if so, why? Lanthe still didn’t have a satisfactory theory when she stepped out of the water, dried, and donned the robe. It was the softest thing she had ever felt on her naked skin, smooth as the flow of the springwater, more like wearing mist than fabric. Still feeling naked in the thin robe, she pushed through the curtains into the chamber Lady Suzu had indicated.

The first thing she encountered beyond the curtain was a silk-upholstered bench with two full sets of clothing laid out across it. Lady Suzu had told her to dress when she was finished bathing, but she pulled up short in front of the clothing, utterly confused. On the left lay a silk dress the color of the sky on a summer day, complete with sunshine gold threads and swirls of brocade cloud. On the right lay a man’s long shirt and vest.

“What is this?” Lanthe demanded aloud, knowing someone must be listening.

And sure enough. Lady Suzu emerged from behind a curtain at the back of the lavish dressing room.

“This is where a queen of Yao would be outfitted for a day in the royal court. The queen would, of course, have a dozen servants to help with her garments and hair. You’ll have to make do with me if you need help dressing.”

“I don’t need help dressing,” Lanthe said shortly. “I just want to know why I’ve been given two sets of clothing.”

“It’s a choice.” Lady Suzu folded her arms. “Her Excellency would like you to decide whether the Mage Slayer will enter the Yao court as a visiting man or a visiting woman.”

A choice? Lanthe looked from the folded silks to Lady Suzu in confusion. What did that even mean in this context? “Why would it matter what I choose, ma’am? The princess knows the truth.”

“Her Excellency knows many, many things that never make their way out of these interior chambers.”

The words carried a sinister implication, and Lanthe found herself thinking back on the rumors that Yelhwa had poisoned her father.

“So, if I choose to be a man…?”

“Then your secret will be safe from the public. Whichever you choose, Her Excellency will overturn your sentence and allow you to continue serving as Lord Chang Tairo’s bodyguard.”

“I didn’t realize that a woman could serve as a bodyguard in Yao.”

“What do I look like to you?” Lady Suzu said coldly.

A useless cloud wisp would have been the honest answer. “I meant—I didn’t realize that a man could have a female bodyguard.”

“It would be a first in our history of strange guests,” Suzu said, “but Her Excellency believes that the general shock over your sex would overshadow that.”

Lanthe supposed that Suzu was right. Still, she looked on the blue silk dress and struggled to imagine wearing it at Tairo’s shoulder. When the visual finally formed in her head, it was so ridiculous—so uncomfortable—she nearly recoiled from the garment.

“So, Mage Slayer?” Lady Suzu prompted curtly. “Your decision?”

Lanthe looked between the two sets of clothing again. She might have the physical components of a woman, but she had no experience acting like one. The only way she had gotten away with this character for the last few days was that she was visibly mad. A woman who went around with her hair lopped off and dirt all over her face was hardly going to behave properly feminine. The last time Lanthe had really lived as a female, she had been a little girl. And a woman in court was an entirely different creature from a thirteen-year-old farmer’s daughter. Lanthe wouldn’t know how to walk, how to talk, how to get people to trust her, how to earn their respect. She might as well go blundering around Yelhwa’s court as a horse.

And even setting aside her incompetence in all things feminine, there was another staggering drawback to Lanthe donning that glimmering dress. Tairo was here to seduce Princess Yelhwa. And Yelhwa was aware of his affection for Lanthe. If Tairo knew Lanthe’s sex, that would complicate matters—not for Tairo, who apparently found Lanthe “rugged” and had never been attracted to any woman. But from Yelhwa’s perspective, adding another woman to the mix could make Tairo seem less available.

The choice was obvious.

Lanthe picked up the man’s tunic and found that, under it, there was even a roll of bandages for her to bind her chest.

“Very good,” Lady Suzu said indifferently. “I’ve arranged quarters for you adjoining Lord Chang Tairo’s. Meet me outside when you are decent, and I will take you there.”

Lanthe hadn’t realized what a relief it would be to bind her breasts after days of them squashing, and pulling, and flopping every which way. She breathed easier once they were secured, the tension seeping out of her upper back and some of the pain receding from her injured shoulder.

The rest of the ensemble was less of a relief. The Yao garments were absurdly soft, loose in the sleeves, and tight across the torso. She knew from having seen the palace guards in similar dress that the ensemble looked sharp and tidy, but she certainly wouldn’t choose to wear it into a real fight. The last cloth button closed too tight on Lanthe’s neck, and she frowned down at herself. There was no doubt that this felt more natural than the lady’s dress would have, but it was still uncomfortable. Restrictive. In a pretty, tender way. Like Yelhwa’s spellwork softly squeezing Lanthe’s injuries.

Lady Suzu was waiting in the wood-paneled hallway when Lanthe ducked through the curtains out of the dressing room. The princess’s attendant was holding a sword. A Ro sword. Lanthe’s sword, Lanthe realized when Suzu extended the sheathed weapon, hilt-first, in offering.

“This was recovered from the border captain’s wagon,” said Lady Suzu. “Her Excellency thought you would be most comfortable with your own arms.”

Just the sword, though, Lanthe noted, as she took the weapon and secured it to her over-decorated Yao belt.

“Firearms are forbidden in Yao,” Suzu explained, “and only guards are permitted polearms within the palace walls. Your glaive will be returned to you if and when you leave the palace grounds.” The gun, Lanthe presumed, was gone. “Come.”

Suzu turned, and Lanthe indulged in a scowl, insulted that this woman with her stupid bronze spear-arrows would turn her back on an armed soldier of Ro. Either she was very foolish or she had completely bought into the defector story. Lanthe supposed either one was good for her purposes and let her annoyance go.

A few more turns through labyrinthine, floral-scented chambers with no one in them, and they, at last, reached a space with some daylight. This was some kind of private library or study with shelves of scrolls stretching from floor to ceiling and spindly writing desks placed in the best of the natural light from the high windows.

The princess perched on a stool behind one of the largest of the desks. Since Lanthe had last seen her, she had changed into a dark scholar’s robe with a high collar that buttoned over the bruises on her neck. Lanthe assumed she must be writing, though her brush swept across the paper so fast it didn’t seem like she should be producing more than a meaningless squiggle as it darted, bird-like, from one line to the next, to the next, to the next. Of course, when Lanthe drew close enough to see the paper, it wasn’t full of squiggles but tiny, complex characters.

“Your Excellency.” Lady Suzu dropped to the floor in a bow.

Lanthe followed suit—more comfortably this time, with her knees apart—and pressed her forehead to the floor. More wood. Beautifully polished but marred in places with ink stains.

The swish of the brush above didn’t stop as Yelhwa said, “Up. Both of you.” She was still writing as the other two stood before the desk, and she looked up at them.

“Don’t you look better!” She smiled at Lanthe, seemingly unsurprised by her choice of dress, before her gaze shifted to Lady Suzu. “You will send for the speaker. The palace will report that the foreign madwoman roaming the streets was just that: a madwoman. She happened to bear some physical similarities to the Mage Slayer but was ultimately just a lunatic far from home. Most likely the victim of slave traders, left on the street when her deficiency was discovered.”

Yelhwa hadn’t ceased her brushwork. Occasionally, her hand would pause daintily, a seabird having caught an updraft, just long enough to wet her brush tip on the inkstone. Then she was back upon the page like a gull darting on the waves.

“We will report that the real Mage Slayer was apprehended by the palace’s personal agents and brought to court the previous night. The madwoman some saw entering the palace was deemed harmless and quietly deported. The slaves will find blood in the chamber where she was last seen and speculate that she was executed in secret.”

“And we will allow these rumors?” Lady Suzu said with an unsettled crease in her brow.

“People always need something to speculate about, especially when it comes to me.” Yelhwa smiled, brush hovering over the ink pallet. “Will you tell me this is worse than the alternatives?”

Lady Suzu seemed like she wanted to argue but lowered her gaze, still looking troubled. “No, Your Excellency.”

“I daresay this rumor will be one of our better ones. So titillating”—Yelhwa scrunched her pretty nose like a predator with its teeth in flesh—“yet so irrelevant.”

Irrelevant to what, Lanthe wondered. The things the princess actually had to hide?

“Now, leave me. I have work to do before the light is gone.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.” Lady Suzu bowed.

“When you see Lord Tairo, Captain Luyang, tell him I look forward to our morning turn around the gardens.”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Lanthe said stiffly.

But as Lady Suzu motioned Lanthe to follow, a horrible thought surfaced.

“Wait!” Lanthe pulled up short before the princess’s desk.

Lady Suzu looked back at her scandalized, but Yelhwa glanced up from her writing and said, “Speak.”

“Lord Tairo…?”

“What about him?”

“Will he be told?”

“I have no reason to tell him,” Yelhwa said sweetly. “After all, it seems such a truth would rock the trust between the two of you. And why would I want to do that?”

Lanthe’s insides went cold.

This was a threat. The odd phrasing made Yelhwa’s real message clear: any time she wanted, she could break the relationship between her Ro visitors. For more skilled spies—both able to operate on their own—this might not be a serious danger. But neither Lanthe nor Tairo could afford the rift. Neither could pull off this mission alone.

“The truth would also seem a nuisance, wouldn’t it?”

“A nuisance, Princess?”

“If Chang Tairo finds out your sex, by your tongue or anyone else’s, it wouldn’t be appropriate for you to share close quarters with him. We’d have to find you proper women’s quarters, perhaps with my ladies in waiting, where you would not be able to keep as close an eye on him. A terrible nuisance.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.” And most certainly a threat.

Lanthe couldn’t begrudge Yelhwa her suspicion or her desire for insurance. A Ro lord entered her kingdom, claiming surrender, only for his bodyguard to show up in a ridiculous disguise and nearly kill her. It made sense for her to secure a failsafe against the two strange visitors. Lanthe was just upset with herself for walking into the princess’s trap—choosing the man’s clothes—without considering what that choice would mean. All her strategizing and, in the end, Lanthe was no smarter than Captain Gwalo, tossing his enemies into a wagon with a loaded gun.

As she followed Lady Suzu from the study, Lanthe swallowed against the silk button at her throat, feeling trapped. Beyond the study, the halls were wider, made of stone instead of wood. The pair crossed a great courtyard of stone sculptures–cranes, horses, and Heavenly creatures of fantasy–rendered in glorious white jade.

“A servant will come and see you to your chambers soon,” Lady Suzu said as they reached a curtained doorway at the far end of the courtyard. “Before that, a certain lord has been demanding to see you the moment you were found.”

When they passed through the curtains, he was sitting on a bench with a scroll propped on his knee, reading. In the split second before he noticed her, Lanthe was struck by how natural he looked here, an elegant creature, at home among elegant things.

“Lanthe!” Tairo jumped from his seat the moment he looked up.

“My lord.” Lanthe started to bow but didn’t make it to her knees before Tairo caught her up in an embrace.

“You’re alive!”

“Ah,” she grunted as he crushed too hard into her freshly stitched shoulder. “As are you, my lord. Well done. Now, easy.” She took Tairo by the shoulders and pushed him to arm’s length. “I’m hurt.”

“You are?” Tairo looked her over in concern. “What—?”

“Not badly,” she cut his fussing off shortly. “I just don’t want to reopen anything.”

Uneasily, Lanthe cast a glance to the doorway. Lady Suzu had disappeared. But Lanthe would have bet good shield pieces that the light-footed noble was still there, listening from somewhere behind the whisper of curtains. And if Suzu wasn’t listening, someone was. Lanthe and Tairo had planned around the assumption that the Yao court would be full of ears. If they wanted to speak of anything beyond the mundane, they would have to make liberal use of the well-known Ro habit of embracing to show affection. Any secret information would have to pass in a whisper lasting no longer than the standard soldier’s embrace.

But Lanthe worried that their approach—including the hugging—had already bared Tairo’s point of weakness. This was always going to be a problem: the way he wore his heart on his sleeve. Lanthe had just hoped it would take more than a few days for that weakness to become a liability. The Yao were now aware of the unreasonable degree to which Tairo cared about his common-born bodyguard. And, thanks to Lanthe’s blunders, there were now so many ways Princess Yelhwa could use that against them.

There was one way out of the trap, of course. Lanthe could pull the trigger herself. She could tell Tairo the truth before Yelhwa got the chance and take whatever damage resulted.

An amused smile had lit Tairo’s face as he surveyed Lanthe again. “You look ridiculous.”

“Do I?” Lanthe ran her hands over the watery silk of her Yao tunic. “I was thinking you look rather at home.”

“Softness never suited you the way it did me.”

“About that. Lord Tairo, I…” I have something to tell you. I haven’t been honest with you. I’m not the man you think I am. The words gathered in Lanthe’s throat but didn’t make it to her tongue.

She tried to tell herself that she was holding back for Tairo’s sake. He needed her support too much to bear her dishonesty. He couldn’t afford distraction while he was focusing on the mission. He was too fragile. But the truth was that Lanthe was the fragile one. It was her weakness that made the truth frightening and her fear that had stopped the words on her lips.

This place was full of creatures Lanthe didn’t understand. Yelhwa with her inscrutable smile, Lady Suzu with her bronze arrows, and Heaven only knew what other incomprehensible tittering silk-clad beings. Lanthe had no hope of navigating it if she didn’t know what sort of creature she was. The Lanthe in that dirty green dress had felt like a stranger. A Lanthe in ladies’ silks would be entirely foreign and unmanageable. If she didn’t hold onto Lanthe, man and soldier of Ro, she would be unmoored. Lost. Even more than she was already.

She held her tongue, held fire, and let Yelhwa keep that loaded gun.

“Heaven, you look pale,” Tairo said. “How do you feel?”

Outflanked, Lanthe thought. “Hungry,” she said.

And Tairo laughed. “I’ll send for food.”

That night, Lanthe slept in a room adjoining Tairo’s. On her side, she faced the door and the window that opened onto the gardens, one hand on her sword. The jade cranes stood still against the night. Nothing moved among them. No one came bursting through the lattice shutters to attack. That would have been a kind of assault she knew how to handle. Instead, she lay quiet in her water-soft trap of silks, out of her depth.

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