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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Yelhwa lay down alongside Ingna at the roots of a twisted tree.

Lanthe watched the princess tuck an arm under her head, black hair that had long since come out of its riding braids spilled like ink across the leaves behind her. With a few deep breaths, both women settled into a convincing imitation of sleep.

Lanthe was surprised at how easily the princess lay down, how easily she had agreed to the plan. Had Lanthe’s rationale really been that compelling? True, it wasn’t at all implausible that the two overtaxed noblewomen would need to rest while their male companion kept watch until dawn. The rest of the ruse wasn’t as solid—or at least, it relied on a level of deception Lanthe wasn’t sure she had in her. But it had to be Lanthe. As a Ro, she was the only one their Medyan prisoner had any reason to talk to.

With the women in position, Lanthe set her weapons aside, sank down by the unconscious Medyan, and waited.

It wasn’t long at all before the Medyan stirred and groaned. Lanthe had a hand clamped over his mouth before his eyes flickered open.

“Shh,” she whispered as he jerked against her. “I’m not going to hurt you, soldier.” She spoke to him in slow, deliberate Ro. “Calm yourself, and I can help you.” Slowly, his eyes focused and tracked to Lanthe’s blue godmarks. His heavy brow furrowed as though he wasn’t sure what to think.

“Promise not to make a sound, and I’ll untie you. If you wake the graphemancer, we’re both dead.” Lanthe nodded to indicate Yelhwa lying with her back to them several paces away. “I’m sure you understand?”

A tense breath of hesitation, the air from the man’s flaring nostrils hot on the back of Lanthe’s hand. Then he twitched his head in a nod.

“Good.”

Removing her hand from his mouth, Lanthe moved to free his wrists. There was no time to slowly build trust with this man, but untying him should get Lanthe close enough. She was encouraged when he didn’t immediately move to attack her when the belt dropped from his wrists.

“Sorry, I don’t speak Medyan,” she said, still speaking low on the pretense of not waking the ladies. “Do you understand Ro?”

Another tentative nod. “A little.”

“I’m not armed. Look.” Lanthe stepped back with both hands up and nodded to her empty weapons belt. “I mean you no harm.”

She hoped that the fact that he was so much bigger than she was would put him at ease—and it seemed to. At the very least, he didn’t immediately start swinging. Lanthe could have concealed a knife somewhere in her silly Yao silks, but she hadn’t. Instead, she was gambling that she would be able to overcome the giant in a barehanded struggle if it came to that. An unwise gamble, perhaps. But that was the irrepressible Ro in Lanthe; if she was going to stoop to this kind of duplicity, she needed to know she could back it up with raw power.

“I’m an agent of King Josan of Ro,” Lanthe continued. “Myself and my comrade were sent to spy on the princess of Yao.”

The Medyan’s eyes narrowed on Lanthe in the moonlight. “You say you are a spy for King Josan.” His Ro was clunky but blessedly intelligible. “Yet you fight for her.” He indicated Yelhwa, feigning sleep nearby.

“Because my king doesn’t have all the information he wants. That’s the only reason she lives.”

Lanthe knew that Yelhwa was listening. It was a dangerous game, dancing so close to the truth, but Lanthe was hoping she could manipulate the ensuing footwork to her advantage.

“I can’t let you kill her,” Lanthe said, “but I can let you leave unharmed.”

The Medyan eyed Lanthe with extreme skepticism. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because we’re not enemies,” Lanthe said. “Not unless you have designs against Ro. I take it that you’re only here to kill the princess?”

“Indeed.”

The Medyan had clearly decided against attacking Lanthe outright, but the way he held his muscular body was still guarded and wary. There was no trust here—and no time to build it. If Lanthe wanted information, she wasn’t going to get it with direct questions.

“Go on, then,” she said. She assumed that if the man had really wanted to flee with his life, he would have. Something kept his boots rooted to the ground. “You can rejoin the rest of your party and live.”

The man scoffed. “My party did not mean to make it back from this mission.”

“No?”

“We have only the one purpose.”

“To kill Princess Yelhwa.”

He nodded.

“Why?” Lanthe said—then wanted to kick herself; no direct interrogation, Lanthe. He doesn’t trust you. She quickly softened the question with her own assertions for him to confirm or deny. “As you see, she isn’t a strong military tactician, despite her unique talents. If I had any concern about Yao’s military movements, I would want to keep her on the throne as long as possible. I mean, look how easy it was for your people to get a hundred men—” Lanthe picked a specific number, hoping to prompt a correction—“and their horses and several cannons into the heart of Yao without her knowledge.”

“Seventy.”

Perfect. “Pardon?”

“Seventy men with shoulder cannons.”

That answered Lanthe’s questions about the Medyans’ mobility, especially considering he hadn’t denied the part about the horses. Full-sized cannons required multiple horses to haul. Shoulder cannons were far more manageable.

“And we didn’t get in without help.”

“So, you’ve also been in contact with General Inshu?” Lanthe asked, deliberately presuming again so the Medyan could disagree.

As she had hoped, his baffled expression gave her the answer. “General Inshu? No. Not help from inside Yao.”

Lanthe responded with her own look of confusion. “Well, if you were getting help from my kingdom, I’m troubled that my comrade and I were not informed.” Lanthe knew perfectly well that these assassins could not have come through the Ro-Yao border. That was ridiculously far to travel over open plains without detection. Again, she just wanted to hear how the Medyan responded.

“Your superiors have not withheld information from you,” he said. “We didn’t come through Ro.”

“Then where—”

“It doesn’t matter.” The Medyan stood, something changed in his bearing, and Lanthe was reminded abruptly of just how massive he was. The top of her head barely reached his chin. “Because we are at an impasse, Ro. You wish to keep the princess alive, and I must kill her. So, with respect to your mission, I will need you to get out of my way.”

He took a step forward, but before Lanthe could even move to get in between him and the two ladies, he pulled up short, eyes wide, and cursed in Medyan.

Lanthe followed his gaze—and experienced the same jolt of surprise.

Ingna was still where she had been, curled up at the roots of the tree. But Yelhwa was gone. “What—”

Lanthe was shamefully unprepared for the enormous fist that crashed into her head.

The world rocked sideways and went black for a split second—which was too long.

By the time Lanthe registered the ground beneath her back and started to push herself up, her enemy was on top of her, crushing weight across her hips, those huge hands around her neck. As her vision seethed with stars, she took a swing at where she approximated his face must be—and she wasn’t wrong; her reach was just insufficient. Her fist clipped the man’s chin without doing significant damage.

As the Medyan slammed her back into the ground, squeezing, Lanthe knew better than to fight for breath or try to pry his fingers free. The strength difference was too steep. Instead, she grabbed his left arm where Yelhwa’s spells had seared flesh and dug her fingers in hard, making him growl in agony.

She didn’t expect the pain to loosen his hold. It was a distraction while her left hand groped for a rock. If this awful terrain was good for one thing, it was providing rocks of all sizes. Lanthe’s fingers closed on a shoe-sized hunk of stone with a good handhold.

Given that she hadn’t reached her assailant’s head with a fist, she was unlikely to reach it with a rock. She would have to shatter his arm to bring him close enough to deal fatal damage. Right elbow first. Before she passed out. She gripped her rock tight, extended her arm for maximum leverage, and—

Steel burst through the Medyan’s mouth.

In a sluice of blood, the longsword blade seared a gash across Lanthe’s cheek before sinking into the roots beside her head.

Blinking blood and stars from her eyes, Lanthe found Yelhwa over her attacker’s shoulder, wreathed in moonlight. The princess had put her fine sword through the back of the man’s neck, right in the soft juncture of neck and skull. No easy feat for such a slight combatant making her attack in the dark.

Dead hands slipped from Lanthe’s throat. Her body automatically jerked breath into her chest—too fast—and for a moment, she could only cough violently. As Lanthe choked, Yelhwa planted a foot on the back of the Medyan’s neck and hauled the weapon free with considerable effort. Before the dead man’s bulk could fall back on top of her, Lanthe got a knee between herself and the body and shoved it away. Her heel braced on the man’s shoulder, and another shove scooted her back against a tree trunk, where she slumped as she worked to get the breath back in her lungs.

“Good shot,” she rasped after a moment and cast her rock away with a thud.

“No need to sound so surprised.” Yelhwa frowned. “I may not have trained all martial disciplines to your Ro standards, but I know how to use a sword.”

“I see that.” Lanthe took a moment to clear her throat, but her voice still came out hoarse. “I thought we agreed that you would stay down unless he came at you.”

“Well, he did,” Yelhwa said, and Lanthe gave her a flat look.

Based on how far Yelhwa must have moved through the trees to attack the Medyan from behind, she must have risen well before it was clear that he meant to kill her.

“Alright, fine. I was lying there, listening, and I thought about what you said earlier—about him being unmanageably big. I wanted to be ready to help you.”

Lanthe couldn’t tell if it was a lie. “You understand that, as a Ro, I can’t take that as anything other than an insult.” Lanthe touched her face and immediately regretted it. The salt of sweat from her palm intensified the sting where Yelhwa’s blade had grazed her cheek. “Also, next time you attack an opponent directly on top of your ally, you might want not want to stab directly down—unless you were trying to take the both of us out in one move.”

“You know,” Yelhwa said indignantly. “I think that if I can learn to humor an uppity Ro, you can learn to just say thank you.”

Lanthe sighed and let her hand slide down to touch her neck, which was going to hurt for a few days yet. “Thank you, your Excellency.”

Lanthe’s heart was still beating harder than she would have liked. Something about being trapped under another body always took Lanthe back to the horrific Ro defeat at the Angtei border. The first time a commander had failed her.

To her credit, though, this time, the commander had come to Lanthe’s aid—and was now standing in blood-splattered riding gear, studying Lanthe with black pearl eyes that were a little too sharp. Yelhwa, the tactician, was back and, with her, a wholly different set of dangers.

“You know something, Luyang? From the moment we met, I’ve had the feeling that you consider me a honey-tongued backstabber. I’m just now realizing what a hypocrite that makes you.”

“Pardon?”

“You’re quite the smooth liar when you want to be.”

The words made Lanthe’s blood run cold. Swallowing her apprehension before it could show on her face, Lanthe rasped a laugh. “And from the moment we met, you’ve been calling me a brute and a barbarian.”

“Your point?”

“Well, I believe that your body count tonight has far exceeded mine—with some finesse to be desired. If you’re going to mock my attempt at a soft touch, I’m going to call you a brute.”

Lanthe expected the words to raise the princess’s ire. That was the intention: to pull Yelhwa’s attention off the dangerous idea of Lanthe as a deceiver. But Yelhwa didn’t rise. Instead, her gaze fell to the blood covering her sword and the Medyan bodies littering the surrounding forest. Her eyelashes fluttered tremulously, her shoulders dropped, and she just stood there, looking younger than she had even in her petulance. Looking overwhelmed.

“Your Excellency?”

“A kingdom can only stand on a stable foundation,” Yelhwa said softly. “Is this any kind of foundation? Am I…?”

“A foundation?” Lanthe said in weary amusement. “God in Heaven, no, your Excellency. You’re a storm.” When Yelhwa stayed still in sedate mortification, Lanthe cocked her head in confusion. “But… you knew that. Every other decision you’ve made as ruler has been designed to destabilize your kingdom—entertaining suitors without taking a husband, sending high-ranking lords to die in battle, teaching commoners calligraphy—”

“That’s not destabilization.” Yelhwa’s eyes flashed wrath. “It is the foundation. You know nothing of my designs.”

“That’s true, your Excellency.” Lanthe decided to back off. She was out of energy for finicky non-interrogation. “Apologies.” Casting about for an avenue to change the subject, she looked to where Ingna lay, still curled up on her side. “I take it Lady Ingna actually fell asleep?”

“I believe so.”

Lanthe held out her hands with her palms up. And it spoke to how out of place Yelhwa was in this environment that she didn’t immediately understand the gesture.

“Your sword, your Excellency.” Nobles didn’t clean their own weapons.

“Oh,” she said quietly and lay her sword across Lanthe’s palms.

Gripping the beautifully balanced weapon by its handle, Lanthe dug a cloth from the ammunition pouch she had stolen and shook it out.

“You should sit, your Excellency.” Lanthe didn’t say you need to rest your body and your nerves, even though Yelhwa clearly did. “This will take a moment.”

As Lanthe carefully cleaned the blood from the blade, Yelhwa sank down on the tree roots beside her. She sat oddly, like she wasn’t sure how to arrange her legs on the forest floor. Eventually, she seemed to settle on tucking them daintily off to the side.

“I assume you listened to that whole conversation?” Lanthe said with a nod to the dead Medyan.

“I did.”

“And I assume you can understand Ro?”

“Of course. Why? Were you hoping I didn’t?”

“No, your Excellency.” Lanthe knew Yelhwa better than to hope that. “I just wondered if you learned anything new from my attempt at interrogation? Or if that was just me.”

“Well,” Yelhwa said, “I learned that you’re not an agent of King Josan.”

Lanthe cloth paused on the princess’s blade. “What do you mean?”

“Your king wants me dead, no questions asked. No agent of his would press to know more about my conflict with Medyan. King Josan would rather all I know die with me.”

“Why would he want that?”

Yelhwa studied Lanthe in the pre-dawn light for a moment. Like the dead man in the leaves before them, she hadn’t decided whether she trusted Lanthe with new information. But she was contemplating the question. That was a new development. It was progress.

“You don’t trust me to know,” Lanthe said when the silence had stretched long enough to constitute an answer. “I’m not offended, your Excellency.”

“It’s not that.” A muscle clenched in Yelhwa’s jaw. “I don’t… it seems that I can no longer trust my own instincts or intelligence.”

It was the first time Yelhwa had not just admitted her shortcomings aloud but done so with no veneer of aggression or pride. She seemed immediately self-conscious about her words and looked away from Lanthe, letting her hair slip forward to conceal her face.

“I don’t think blind faith does a person any favors, your Excellency,” Lanthe answered Yelhwa’s raw honesty with her own, “be it faith in oneself or one’s superiors. No one’s instincts will ever be perfect.”

“That’s not acceptable to me,” Yelhwa said darkly. “The fate of Yao hangs on my judgment. It must be perfect.”

“Well,” Lanthe couldn’t help a smile of amusement. “Before you aspire to be a perfect commander, you might start with being a passable one.”

A leaf crunched beneath Yelhwa’s near hand as her fingers clenched in the dirt. “Bear in mind who you’re talking to, Luyang.”

“It’s impossible to forget, your Excellency,” Lanthe said. “I’m talking to a descendant of Sunsai, a sharp mind, the best Sen player I’ve ever met. But it’s not enough to be able to apply great military strategy within the safety and certain parameters of a Sen board.”

“I know that—”

“I’m not saying that command on the field comes naturally, even to the intelligent. Many, many soldiers who perform well in training—or nobles who understand military theory—fall apart in battle.”

“I’m no mere noble.”

“No, your Excellency,” Lanthe agreed. “You have a broader view of these conflicts than anyone else. A supreme commander’s view. And it’s not as though you’re unable to handle complex situations involving many variables. That’s all you do all day in your court. That’s why I think you can see through the chaos if you take the time to adjust your thinking to the new circumstances. No one as good at Sen as you is incapable of commanding. You just have to find your calm.”

“My calm?”

“The variables here are different from the ones in court—the quality of terrain and weaponry instead of… the length of someone’s shawl, or the thickness of their calligraphy, or whatever it is that loses or gains a person ground in the palace. But it’s all just information. The noise and blood and physical exhaustion… You can learn to filter it out.”

“Is that what you do, Luyang?” Yelhwa finally lifted her head to meet Lanthe’s eyes again. “Filter out the noise? Picture a Sen board?”

“I…” Lanthe thought for a moment, then came to a strange realization. “No, your Excellency. But I’m odd.”

“Odd?”

“The chaos and intensity of battle focuses me. This is where I’m at my sharpest… where I feel alive.”

“Hmm.” Yelhwa assumed a thoughtful expression that abruptly made Lanthe regret her honesty. It was clear that she had given Yelhwa a loose thread to tug at, and she was apprehensive about what it might unravel. “So, battle is the thing that gives Luyang Lanthe life and clarity… I assume this is why you’d do anything to hold onto it? Even deny your sex and deceive your closest comrades?”

Lanthe opened her mouth… then closed it. Yelhwa tilted her head as if to punctuate the question. And that was when Lanthe realized, uncomfortably, that for all the time she’d spent trying to parse Yelhwa, the princess of Yao had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to parse Lanthe in turn. Why? Beyond the question of whether or not she posed a danger, Lanthe was no one. The finer points of her being should be irrelevant.

“I won’t deny, Luyang, you exhibit extraordinary power on the field. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to lose that power. You fear losing it, don’t you?” Yelhwa’s gaze was too sharp again, stinging like her blade on Lanthe’s cheek. “Hence the deception at all costs.”

Everything Yelhwa said was true.

Lanthe knew these things about herself. She had known since that moment of total fear when she had thought General Chang would dismiss her from his army. But acting out of fear—especially lying out of fear—was so antithetical to all Ro ideals that Lanthe tried not to consider the deceptive aspects of her existence too closely… But the only thing more cowardly than feeling fear was denying it.

“What do you want me to say, your Excellency?” she asked quietly. “I’m a good soldier. I know where I stand in battle. I don’t think I’ll ever have that clarity anywhere else…” The sword across Lanthe’s knees was clean and had been for some time, but she hadn’t left off the rag. “I don’t know how to be anything else.”

“But you could learn,” Yelhwa said. “Everyone who outlives their prime changes. Soldiers become husbands, then fathers, and then wise old men.”

“Not me, your Excellency. Obviously. Not me.”

“So, you’ll be something else as you age.”

The next words slipped out in a whisper, so small and so fearful, Lanthe didn’t recognize her own voice. “Some man’s wife?”

“I don’t think so.” Yelhwa squinted as the first light of sunrise threaded her inky hair with gold. “At least, I don’t see that in you.”

For a moment, Lanthe was too stunned and too full to speak. Those were words she had never expected to hear. Not from someone who knew what she really was. Even General Chang looked at her and saw a potential wife for his sons. Lanthe hadn’t judged him for that. How could she when it made perfect sense? What did a person see looking at a woman other than a wife and mother? Was there anything else? Lanthe had always feared the answer—because she thought she knew it was no. Beyond the battlefield, there was nothing for Lanthe but a man’s arms and the walls of a home closing her in.

“What do you see in me, your Excellency?” Lanthe whispered when she found her voice. “Beyond the soldier?”

The rising sun had wreathed Yelhwa in light, and for the first time, Lanthe understood the way the princess’s handmaidens and suitors strained toward that light like flowers. Yearning.

“I haven’t found the words for it,” Yelhwa said with a sweet half-smile, “but I’ll dig for them, Captain Luyang.”

“Dig where, your Excellency?” Lanthe said incredulously. “Deeper than the well of histories and poetry you know off the top of your head? What words do you expect to find outside man and woman, husband and wife?”

Yelhwa just smiled and held a hand out for her sword. With one hand on the handle and the other wrapped in the rag to protect the blade from finger oils, Lanthe offered the weapon to the princess.

“My love of poetry—not just the consumption of it but the composition—came from a need to define my being and my place in the Kaisin Dynasty.” Yelhwa brought the shining longsword around in front of her and seemed to survey her face in the flat of the blade. “There were no women, nor any men, in the poems like me. There were no words for what I was… nor the things I wished to become. But I thought of how there was no word for ‘gun’ in all the Ten Kingdoms until a poet fused the words for ‘steel’ and ‘thunder’ to create one. So, I delved. I studied. I played. And in Yao’s old languages, I found powers no graphemancer had ever touched.”

“That mirror-like spell…” Lanthe said slowly. “That reflected force instead of light… Sunsai couldn’t do that, could he?” At least, Lanthe had never heard of anything like it in the legends.

“I have nothing but respect for my ancestors.” Yelhwa carefully slid her sword back into its sheath. “But the world they made is breaking. If we’re going to save it, we must transform it. Take their old words and spin them into new forms to master a new reality.”

Yelhwa was describing the impossible—the downright laughable. A month ago, Lanthe would have laughed at the idea of changing language and reality. But in coming to Yao, she had committed to playing the game of kingdoms—either with Yelhwa or against her—and Yelhwa wielded the impossible at her fingertips. If Lanthe was going to engage on this new field of battle, it meant getting used to the idea of changing the fate of kingdoms and the fabric of reality.

“Gather your weapons and wake Ingna,” Yelhwa said as the sun spilled over the ridge and through the trees. “We head for the road.”

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I hope you enjoyed this chapter of Gunpowder Magnolia! You can get early chapters + more serialized content from the world of Altima on my Patreon.