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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Most of Lanthe’s body had grown mannish through training. But no matter how much muscle she put on, she retained her rather reedy wrists, flexible like her mother’s. Keeping track of the pistol beneath her back with her left hand, she twisted to her right to find the knots that bound her arms. They hadn’t been well done in the first place and had had a day to slide about and loosen. It wasn’t hard to get her thumb into a loop near the end of the rope and then subtly tug, tug, tug with the movements of the wagon until the end slipped free. Within minutes, she had all the knots undone, the ropes looped uselessly about her arms, and her attention turned more intently to her surroundings.

Now that she had the option of attack, Lanthe had to consider her timing. She obviously didn’t want to wait until they reached the place of execution, where there would be more soldiers. But that didn’t mean immediate attack was the best course of action.

There is good timing and there is perfect timing, General Chang would say. Lanthe had held those words in mind as Dalin called the graphemancer’s shielding spells and she had counted one, two, three… up to Suya’s moment to shoot. For every maneuver, there is a good time and there is a perfect time.

Lanthe waited for a quiet street. The fewer people who witnessed her escape, the better. The last thing she wanted to do was draw attention that turned a three-on-one fight to ten-on-one or worse. She had also noticed that the Yao liked to string their clothing between buildings to dry, as people did in the sunnier parts of Ro. Lanthe waited, eyes on the sky, until the wagon rolled onto the perfect street. No human voices. Just the flap, flap of laundry in the wind.

She sat up and looked around, just to confirm that the location suited her purpose–it did–before Rendai turned in her direction and said, “Hey!”

Lanthe was standing in the bed of the wagon, gun at the ready, before the other two men noticed anything amiss. The only one of the Yao Lanthe really wanted to shoot was Gwalo, but she had set emotion aside and considered which soldier was most likely to outrun her. With a twinge of guilt, she took aim and blew out Kagu’s right knee.

The bang and subsequent roar of agony startled the horses, which Lanthe had anticipated. She leapt down onto the street before Fidget reared, unsteadying the wagon and knocking Gwalo to the ground. The pistol was flipped over in Lanthe’s hand by the time Rendai rushed forward to subdue her. She whipped the clubbed end of the gun across his face, spraying blood and teeth on the packed dirt and knocking him unconscious.

In a moment of ego, Lanthe didn’t hit Gwalo with the gun. She knocked him out with a single bare-knuckled punch. He went down amid Kagu’s continued moans of agony. And it didn’t sit quite right with Lanthe that she had done permanent damage to the two common soldiers while their commanding idiot got off with a black eye. To even things out and make certain she wasn’t followed, she hooked a boot under Gwalo’s right foot and pulled it up onto one of the wagon spokes. With his leg elevated a handspan from the ground, she stomped on his knee. The crack of bone echoes the gunshot, and Gwalo lurched back to consciousness, howling, to find his knee bent the wrong way.

By this time, doors and windows had started opening along the street. Lanthe bolted, vanishing into one of the alleys between houses. In a nearby yard, bounded only by a waist-high fence, she found what she was looking for—a household’s worth of clothes drying on a line. There was a boy in the yard as well—probably ten or eleven—but he was sitting on the lip of a well facing away from the laundry, all his attention on the sewing job on his knee.

Lanthe slipped between rows of clothing, where the slow flap of fabric in the breeze masked her movements. Hoping she estimated her size correctly, she snatched a green dress and two shawls from the line and bundled them under her arm. It was only as she tried to sneak away that the child at the well looked up.

“Stop!” The boy stood, pitching his sewing from his lap. “Thief! Thi—”

Lanthe crossed the grass in three strides, caught the boy around the mouth, and shoved him backward over the mouth of the well. The Yao child squeaked in terror, weak hands clawing at her forearm. But Lanthe’s hand around his mouth was the only thing keeping her from toppling into the abyss. Had the boy been a grown soldier, Lanthe would have gone ahead and bashed his head into the stone before shoving him into the water to die. But he was just a child.

“You look like a young man of many talents.” Lanthe noted a Yao reading tablet lying by the pants the boy had been patching. “Can you swim?”

Trembling, eyes as wide as tea saucers, the boy nodded.

“Good,” Lanthe said. Then shoved him down the well.

A colossal splash echoed from below, followed by a gasp as the boy broke the surface. Alive. In case the child had overstated his abilities, Lanthe let the bucket down, so he would have something to grab onto.

“There,” Lanthe said down the well. “Now, you can scream.”

And she was off again.

“Mama!” the boy shrieked helpfully as Lanthe raced around the side of the house. “Baba! Help! Somebody, help!”

All footsteps in the compound went pelting toward the well as Lanthe slipped off in the opposite direction.

Dress and shawls slung over her shoulders, Lanthe leapt a wall and found herself in a different world. A garden that didn’t quite seem real. The plants and stacked rocks here mimicked the beauty of nature but lacked its chaos. There was a calculated perfection to each splash of growth and jutting rock. A stone path wound through the garden to circle a pond of lilies, edges immaculately defined against the greenest grass Lanthe had ever seen. As though a dozen hands weeded and watered here every day. This, she realized, was probably the household that the neighboring family worked for.

Ducking behind an unnaturally elegant evergreen shrub, Lanthe tore open the buttons of her armor and shed its sweltering weight. Ro mostly trained to get into uniform quickly. But they did, on occasion, train to disrobe quickly as well—in case they needed to cross a marsh or shallow water with their gear on their heads. Lanthe was naked in the time it took to load a gun, her uniform in a regulation roll around her boots and Tairo’s pistol. Lacking a belt, which the Yao had confiscated, she bound the bundle tight using the bandages from her chest. These were repulsive after a week without changing. Permeated with blood and sweat, they had peeled stickily from her chest, leaving impressions of each fiber on her skin, but they worked well when it came to making her damning Ro ensemble compact.

The dress—despite being only one piece—took Lanthe several times as long as her uniform. In her defense, she hadn’t worn a dress in ten years. She had chosen this one because it resembled the garments she had worn back in Heba. She knew how to put it on—which side went over first, which little cloth tails tied together to hold it in place—but it was as if the memories belonged to a different person. A different life. The girl who had worn this style of dress all those years ago hadn’t had much of a chest to support, and Lanthe found that she had to negotiate a few additional ties to keep her unbound breasts in place.

When the dress finally felt secure around her, she took the larger of the shawls and tied it around her waist. Tight, so that the ensemble would stay in place, even if she had to run. Her body was bizarrely slight when she looked down on it. This body belonged to someone else—some servant woman or shop owner’s wife that the real Luyang Lanthe might pass on the way to the next front. But that was good. That was the idea.

Closing her eyes against the dissonance, Lanthe bent her head and tied the smaller shawl around her hair. She didn’t know that head shawls were particularly common in Yao, but nothing would be more conspicuous than Lanthe’s actual head. Not only was her hair far too short for any Yao, but it was shaved along the sides to expose her blue godmarks. The hairstyle immediately marked her not only as foreign, but male and military.

Last, Lanthe dug her fingers beneath the bushes where the ground was moist from shade and spring water, and smeared the dirt across her face. It was a clumsy solution to the problem of her godmarks. Real spies painted over their godmarks with specialized cosmetics to match the common color in whatever kingdom they were infiltrating. Without such tools at her disposal, dirt was the best Lanthe could do. As she rubbed a last handful of grime into her temples, where the blue would be most visible to a passerby, Lanthe knew she had lingered too long.

Commotion had risen beyond the garden walls as people all around presumably mobilized to find the intruder. It was time to move. Creeping out into the garden on bare feet, Lanthe found a decorative stone urn and crammed her uniform bundle deep inside. With any luck, it wouldn’t be discovered there for at least a few days.

There were footsteps approaching the garden now. They might have been soldiers or members of the household—Yao boots were so light that it was sometimes difficult to distinguish their tread from a sturdy shoe—but Lanthe wasn’t waiting to find out. Turning from the urn, she sprinted for the far garden wall. This wall was higher than the first, clearly built with the intention of deterring intruders. As the stone raced closer, Lanthe wasn’t sure she would make the jump. But the moment she pushed off the grass, she remembered that she had trained to jump walls in two layers of armor and a full weapons belt. In only a dress, she soared upward, nearly overshooting her mark, and colliding painfully with the decorative stonework atop the wall.

Clenching her teeth on a groan, Lanthe struggled over the spiky entangling dragons that guarded the courtyard. Her dress caught on a dragon’s spine, and she had to rip the hem free before dropping on the other side of the wall. She landed on the balls of her feet, bending at the knees to absorb the impact and sound. And again, her own lightness took her by surprise. There was little impact and almost no sound when she hit the ground. Was this how women—how civilians, in general—felt all the time? Light and bizarrely insubstantial?

Tugging her dress straight, Lanthe took in her surroundings and thanked Heaven for dropping her in a deserted alley. She could hear people in the garden at her back, a voice with a noble’s accent ordering the others to search behind every hedge. As Lanthe’s pursuers rustled through the garden, she put her head down and strode out into the nearest street. The first people to pass her were a trio of soldiers in red uniforms, hurrying to respond to the alarm calls from the compound. They jogged by without paying Lanthe a second thought as she vanished into the milling crowds of Kaisia.

“Miss…” A hand touched Lanthe’s arm.

“What?” Lanthe looked up, her head falling back against the alley wall where she had been huddled for… how long now? Half a day? When she saw the soldiers standing over her in their Yao uniforms, she smiled, past caring that they might discern the color of her godmarks or raise an eyebrow at her accent. The men looked on her in pity, clearly seeing a harmless madwoman who had wandered far from home.

“I apologize, Miss,” said one of the men. “You’re wanted for questioning in the case of an escaped prisoner of war.”

“Also, a number of citizens have reported you behaving suspiciously,” his companion added.

“Have they?” Lanthe said in her poor Yao. “Thank Heaven! Took them long enough.”

When you cannot overcome, confuse.

Another of General Chang’s little wisdoms. This had been Lanthe’s approach for the past three days.

“I have a plan,” was all she had told Tairo in the wagon on the way to Kaisia. When pressed, she had said, “I can confuse the Yao enough to forestall my execution for one day, maybe more.”

“How are you going to do that?”

By taking my breasts out in front of the executioner, if necessary, Lanthe had thought. No execution was going to move forward as normal after that. The Yao would have to hold Lanthe while they tried to answer a mountain of impossible questions: did they have the wrong person? If so, how had a woman successfully pretended to be the Mage Slayer? If not, how had the Mage Slayer successfully pretended to be a man? Did Chang Tairo know of this double identity? Did anyone in Ro know? Was this all part of some ludicrously elaborate Ro trick?

It would be a cheap and humiliating way to buy her life—if it even accomplished that—but Tairo said that he needed her with him to complete the mission. Whether he could forgive her for all the years of deception… That was something Lanthe would worry about after she had kept her promise to him and stayed alive.

Initially, Lanthe had been glad for the chance to escape Gwalo during the transportation. It certainly let her buy Tairo more time than she would have revealing herself directly to the executioners. Now, the Yao had to find her before they even ran into all the confusion over her sex. This was the ideal scenario for Tairo. But after three days of playing a mute, mad beggar, Lanthe was sick from the anticipation—well, that and the fact that she had barely eaten anything. What she had eaten had been either begged or stolen, and the more of that she did, the more attention she risked drawing, the less time she was likely to buy Tairo. Having bought him far more time than she had promised, it was an honest relief when Yao soldiers took her by the arms and told her that she was under arrest.

“Don’t worry about how I do it,” Lanthe had said. “Just trust that I will buy you at least one day. Your job, in the meantime, is to convince the princess to spare my life.” That was if he could convince her to spare his own. But, failing that, he had already doomed the mission anyway. “Like I said, I might be able to buy more than one day, but consider sunset on the day of our arrival your time.” Well, he had had his time. Lanthe could only hope he had made the most of it.

Looking like a woman was such an odd thing. The soldiers didn’t tie Lanthe’s hands, seeming confident that a gentle grip on each arm would suffice to hold her. Did they not feel the muscle beneath the thin sleeve of her dress? Did it just not register when it was attached to a pair of breasts?

Lanthe had wandered far from the palace in an attempt to avoid discovery. They marched her barefoot all the way back to the heart of Kaisia and its lovely pristine walls—not that Lanthe minded. She would have bet good money that she could walk longer barefoot than either of these mincing city boys in their silly Yao boots. It felt good to be going somewhere after three days of meandering. It felt good to move on to the next phase of the mission, come what may.

Their long walk ended at an intimidating stone prison near the palace. Judging by the bloodstained platform facing the square out front, this was probably the place Gwalo had meant to take Lanthe three days ago. The executioner’s block stood silent now, the bloodstains brown with age, and the square was empty.

Within the stone labyrinth of a building, the soldiers showed Lanthe to a clean cell with a bamboo sleeping mat and a bucket to relieve herself. She could break the bucket against the wall and use the splintered wood to fight in a last attempt to stall for time. But it would only come to that if her guards tried to take her from the cell for execution. Until she knew their intentions, her job was to wait and hope that Tairo had found a way to change her sentence. So she sank down against the far wall, cross-legged to rest her bare feet, and listened.

The men guarding the barred door didn’t speak to her. Outside of that first apologetic explanation—“you are wanted for questioning in the case of an escaped prisoner of war” and “citizens have reported you behaving suspiciously”—no one had had anything further to say to her about crimes. These guards did, however, spend a lot of breath debating frantically outside her cell as though she were not there. Perhaps her blue godmarks and the reports of her rather weak madwoman act had led them to believe she couldn’t understand their conversation. Whatever their reasoning, Lanthe leaned back against the cell wall, made her expression vacant, and silently appreciated the briefing.

“I’m telling you, Mesul, there is no way that this woman is the Mage Slayer.”

“And I’m telling you that all the facts point that way,” said the guard called Mesul. “The servant boy from the Dwei estate reports a Ro soldier stealing one green dress, one gray shawl, and one brown shawl.”

“That boy was in shock from nearly drowning,” the other guard protested. “And anyway, green dresses are popular this year—or so my daughter tells me. And shawls? Every servant woman in Yao has a brown shawl or, if not that, a gray one.”

“But what under Heaven would a Ro soldier want with them? Huh? If not to disguise himself in a way that no one would suspect, why would he even touch a woman’s things?”

“I just can’t believe that a man of Ro could pose as a woman for days on end. They aren’t exactly known for their delicacy. If he is a man, shouldn’t his sex have been apparent to everyone who saw him? Shouldn’t he have been caught the moment he fled the Dwei estate?”

“Well, what’s the alternative explanation, Vanzo? That the Mage Slayer—a man with a long history of service in the Ro army—is actually some girl?”

“Or some girl who entered Yao posing as the Mage Slayer.”

“With General Chang’s son? Whose identity has been verified by the princess herself? How? Why?”

Lanthe lay her head back against the stone and relaxed as they continued arguing. So far, it seemed like her part of the plan was going as well as it could be. If Yelhwa herself had verified Tairo’s identity, as Mesul claimed, that meant that Tairo had at least gotten as far as securing an audience with the princess. Assuming he was still alive, he had now had three days to plead a case he had prepared to make in just one. If he hadn’t moved Yelhwa to spare his companion over three whole days—or if he was already dead—then there had never been any hope for Lanthe.

After far too long, Mesul voiced what to Lanthe should have been obvious from the beginning. “This would all be easier if we could just pull that damn dress off and check.”

But this was Yao, and the guard called Vanzo sputtered in horror. “Bite your tongue! Have you no shame? The palace will be sending a female to check for us, as is proper.”

“Proper?” Mesul demanded, equally horrified. “And what if he actually is a man in disguise as a woman? We’re just going to let a defenseless female in there with him? What are the palace authorities thinking?”

“I can’t say.” Vanzo shrugged. “But these orders come from far over our heads. All we can do is wait for the palace representatives to get here and take the situation in hand.”

“What about the prisoner’s hair?” Mesul’s eyes turned to Lanthe. “We can look at that, at least. You, Ro.” He pointed to Lanthe. “Remove your head shawl.”

“Ha! You see that?” Mesul said triumphantly. “He has his hair cut just like any Ro soldier. In no country is that a woman’s hair.”

“Well… it’s a haircut,” Vanzo frowned through the bars at Lanthe. “Anyone can pick up a knife and imitate a haircut. It’s easy.”

“I don’t think getting your hair to look like that is easy,” Mesul protested. “You need a straight razor, and generally, only men know how to use those.”

The scrape of a door beyond Lanthe’s field of vision made the guards cease arguing and look up. Lanthe didn’t see who came through the door. All she saw were the looks of shock on the men’s faces. The two guards stood stunned for a moment before bowing low.

“Gentlemen.” The most beautiful woman Lanthe had ever seen stepped into view. Perhaps more nymph than woman; Lanthe had trouble believing that two fully mortal humans had produced this creature of light and lotus petals.

If she was indeed mortal, the Yao was in her early twenties, maybe a year or two shy of Lanthe’s age. Her garb was strange, caught somewhere between a guard’s uniform and the flowing dress of a courtier. Lanthe had never seen such clothing, but she had heard that ladies of the Ro queensguard had once dressed this way, with a weapons belt and armor over their feminine finery. This being Yao, the leather armor was made for an archer, mainly protecting the left breast and forearm, and the dress sported more layers and frippery than Lanthe could picture on any Ro. A halo of dangling hair ornaments sparkled each time the woman moved her head, and a translucent gold-laced shawl draped elegantly in the crook of each elbow, ready to catch the moment she went for the bow or sword on her back. Ridiculous.

“Lady Mina!” Vanzo was the first to find his tongue. “Um—forgive the squalor. We were not expecting the palace to send someone of your status to—”

“I know,” the woman said kindly. “You needn’t bother yourself about it.”

And here was the first test of Lanthe’s memory. Lady Mina… she strained back through Hyonang Yinzo’s interminable list of courtiers. Mina was a common name in Yao and, if Lanthe remembered right, there were three currently living in the Kaisin court. One was the blind great-grandmother of the king’s cousin. The other two were both in their twenties, but Yao only called a lady by her given name for the purposes of differentiation—that was, if one or more female members of her household outranked her. Lady Hyudei Mina was the matriarch of her household, which would make this one… Lady Yozun Mina, unmarried fourth daughter of General Yozun Sonnai. Lanthe nearly cracked a smile, she was so pleased that she had remembered.

Tairo would have been proud of her. But she tamped down on the thought before her mind went on to contemplate whether she would ever see her friend again. That was probably in the hands of this Lady Mina. And Lanthe suddenly found herself annoyed that Lord Hyonang hadn’t mentioned more about the young noblewoman’s personality. He had said that Yozun Mina was a coveted beauty and a fervent devotee of Princess Yelhwa’s. That was all.

“I’ll take it from here, gentlemen.” Lady Mina waved the guards away.

“But… my lady,” Vanzo started.

“Step outside.” Yozun Mina’s voice was sweet but firm. “I’m sure if I scream, you’ll be in to save me.”

“My lady, please,” Mesul tried. “This prisoner could be a danger to—”

“Our orders come from the princess,” said a new female voice, lower than the first and less patient. “They are not negotiable. Step outside.”

“Yes, Lady Suzu.” As the guards bowed and backed away, a second woman floated into view.

She wore the same armor as Lady Mina though her gray silk dress didn’t shimmer with quite as much embroidery. She was older than her companion, her godmarks shorter, her features more severe but no less ethereal. The weapon on her back was not a sword but a ridiculous bronze arrow as long as a man's leg—an ornamental thing if ever Lanthe saw one, too blunt for use as a spear and too big to fire from the gold-handled bow alongside it.

Lady Mina unbolted the door, and the two women entered the cell together. Like a flower-scented cloud. Her sweat being less pungent than most men’s, Lanthe rarely had occasion to think about how bad she must smell. Suddenly, it was all she could think about.

“You, Ro, whoever you are,” Lady Suzu said shortly, “on your feet.”

Lanthe rose stiffly, keeping her eyes averted. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so quick to obey this imperious Yao, but what was the alternative? Make a scene? Attack a pair of soft, wispy noblewomen? Whether or not the women in question were carrying ornamental weapons, that didn’t seem right.

“You understand Yao, then?” Suzu asked.

“Well enough, my lady,” Lanthe said.

“Good. Put your arms out and keep them there.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lanthe extended her arms, still confused by her own willingness to take directions from this woman. She had felt nothing but disdain for the other Yao who had tried to give her orders. But the other Yao, she realized, had all been men. And none of them had looked like nymphs of Heaven, come to Earth.

“Hold still.”

Lanthe was well accustomed to male authority and could judge quickly whether she was dealing with incompetence, experience, danger… This jasmine-scented woman was an unknown except for the vague air of a stern mother. Not that Lanthe had had a very stern mother for reference. She had, however, grown up with strict aunts. And when Lanthe had left home, she had still been too young to understand their minds or even think of talking back to any of them. Perhaps that was why, fixed under that unknowable black-eyed gaze, she didn’t know what to say except, “Yes, ma’am.”

“It will not be necessary for you to speak again,” Lady Suzu said and circled behind Lanthe. “Lady Mina, we don’t have all day.”

“Right.” Yozun Mina shook back her pink brocade sleeves.

It was odd. The two guards had recognized and responded to Lady Mina first. She was clearly the higher born of the two women. This Lady Suzu hadn’t even made Lord Hyonang’s list of two hundred relevant courtiers, but here in private, she was clearly the one in command.

Lanthe started when she felt Suzu’s hands at her waist, tugging the shawl from her hips. Until that moment, part of her had thought that the two ladies must be intangible, woven of celestial light.

A fleeting hope that the Yao ladies might be as shy of nudity as their male counterparts vanished when Lanthe felt Mina’s fingers at the ties of her dress beneath her arm. With a hand on either sleeve, the two women tugged the top of Lanthe’s dress open and down around her elbows. Lanthe didn’t move, didn’t speak. She just stared ahead and tried not to think about what her marred and masculine body must look like to such beautiful creatures.

“Well, that seems female enough to me,” Suzu didn’t sound surprised.

“But those muscles…” Mina breathed with a note of disbelief.

Lanthe kept her eyes fixed ahead, hoping that her godmarks didn’t flush too dark as Mina gripped her breasts in soft hands and squeezed.

“They’re real!” the noblewoman exclaimed.

“Of course, they’re real,” Suzu said impatiently. “What did you think they were made of? Clay?”

Mina ran a fingertip over Lanthe’s solid abdominal muscles, hard as rocks and accentuated from three days of hunger. She poked one of them. “Those are real too!”

“Would you stay focused?”

“Of course. Sorry.” Lady Mina took Lanthe’s chin in hand and turned it slightly to observe her face. “Alright,” she said thoughtfully. “We were looking for week-old bruising above the left eye and below the right eye, an old scar through the left eyebrow, and… what else?”

“Evidence of an old spear-wound along the left ribs,”—Suzu’s hand touched the scar tissue on Lanthe’s naked side—“a recent spear-wound scar to the right upper arm, pox scarring to the lower abdomen, and…” Hands gripped Lanthe’s skirt and hiked it up to her hips—“overlapping blade-wound scars on the left thigh.”

“Well, there we are,” Lady Mina said. Lanthe felt the two noblewomen make eye contact over her shoulder.

“There we are,” Lady Suzu agreed.

Lanthe kept her posture drawn in military stillness, her face neutral, but internally, she sagged in relief. Gwalo could have relayed a description of the bruises and scars on her face, but not an exhaustive list of her other battle scars. Only Tairo could have given that. He was alive.

“She’ll be waiting,” said Lady Suzu.

While Mina tugged the dress back over Lanthe’s shoulders and made short work of the ties, Suzu rustled at Lanthe’s back. Lanthe didn’t know what she was doing until a thick hood descended on her head, blocking out all light and muffling the sounds around her.

Hands closed on her arms, and the two ladies led her from the cell. No one stopped them. No one asked where they were going. She’ll be waiting, Lanthe assumed, referred to the princess. The other guards seemed to assume the same about their destination, and Lanthe sensed their bodies parting before the women.

After a few turns, the air changed from the closed musk of the prison to the open breeze of Yao’s streets. The noblewoman didn’t speak to Lanthe except to say “step” when they hit a hole in the road or a set of stairs. They weren’t outside for long before great doors groaned open before them, and the coarse ground beneath Lanthe’s feet turned to cool, lacquer-smooth stone. The air had changed again. From windy and full of bitter scents to still and clear. Slowly, tones of sweet music and sweeter incense made their way through the hood. This was a world Lanthe had never walked before. An imperial palace.

“Step,” Lady Suzu said as Lanthe’s toes bumped against a raised threshold. As Lanthe’s foot found the top of the threshold and stepped over, something whispered, serpentine, on either side of her—curtains, possibly?—sliding against Mina’s and Suzu’s arms.

The floor here was subtly different, warmer, with more give to it—not stone but burnished wood—and there was a muffled quality to the sound here that had nothing to do with the hood over Lanthe’s head. This was a soft space. A closed space.

In unison, Mina and Suzu’s hands pressed on Lanthe’s shoulders. She doubted the two of them together could have forced her to kneel. She decided not to make them and sank to her knees of her own accord. The movement felt so strange in a skirt; keeping her knees apart felt wrong; pressing them together felt even worse. Lanthe ended up somewhere in between when the women’s hands bore down on her anew, bending her forward over her knees. She caught herself with her palms to the floor but didn’t push back. The hood jerked from her head and for a moment, she caught the reflection of her bruised face in the polished wood before something pushed on the back of her head, pressing her forehead to the floor.

That’s right. Lanthe remembered. This was how the Yao bowed to their nobles. Excessively.

“Stay,” Suzu ordered curtly.

Lanthe obeyed as the ladies’ silks and, soft footsteps moved away, deeper into the chamber. No execution room Lanthe knew had wooden floors or smelled of sweet incense. If she wasn’t going to be killed right here, then she stood to gain nothing by resisting before she knew what was going on.

Without moving from her prostrate position, Lanthe glanced to either side of her and found herself surrounded by finery. Silken rugs, a spindly stool with bowed cranes for legs, what looked like a lady’s lacquer dresser, all barely visible in the low light. This wasn’t a room in which to judge prisoners or hold court. This was the private chamber of a very important woman.

Female voices flurried nearby, muffled by what sounded like curtains. Though perhaps that was just the cushy interior of the room. Lanthe strained to hear what they were saying or at least discern how many individuals were involved in the conversation. But she wasn’t accustomed to the nuances of female voices and certainly not in a foreign dialect. Overlapping in such low tones, the speakers were too hard to tell apart. And when Lanthe did catch snatches of their conversation, the words made no sense to her. Their manner of speech was too imperial, too poetic. Just as Lanthe’s neck started to cramp, the voices dissipated like cloud fluff. Silks shuffled as women left the room on light feet and a door clunked closed behind them.

For a breath, Lanthe thought she was alone in the chamber. Then someone spoke from just a few paces in front of her.

“Raise your head.” The voice was as low as any man’s but distinctly, sinuously, female. “Let me look at you.”

Lanthe lifted herself up on her knees—and felt all the breath leave her body.

Kaisin Yelhwa reclined on a silk-upholstered couch with one leg slung over the other, bared up to the thigh. Lanthe had never seen that much of a noblewoman’s leg—or any of a noblewoman’s leg. It was smooth silk all the way up, unmarked by pox, thorns, or blades. No lamps burned in the chamber, leaving light to cut strangely across the princess’s form through latticed windows. A single sash around her minuscule waist held her red robe in place, barely covering her modesty. But her face was in shadow.

Lanthe might not have known this woman was the princess at all but for her godmarks, which caught the meager light to glow slightly in the dark. They were a dusky pink like the last color of a sunset, and they were as long as any Lanthe had seen. Longer than Tairo’s. The metallic pink touched each of the eyelids and brushed the raised line of each cheekbone before not just touching but meeting in the middle to form a solid line across the bridge of the nose. Flawless lineage.

“Officially, I’m finished with audiences for the day.” Yelhwa uncrossed her legs, and that slender thigh slipped out of view behind the dark red silk of her robe. “But since we’re both women, I thought we could talk in here. As women.”

As Lanthe strained to make out more of the princess’s face, black eyes studied her in turn from the shadows.

“My spies told me that the Mage Slayer was a man of modest stature with a noticeable scar through his left eyebrow,” Yelhwa said. “Outpost Captain Gwalo tells me that he blacked both the Mage Slayer’s eyes. My guest, Lord Chang Tairo, gave me a list of additional identifying scars the Mage Slayer might have from his long military service. Now, my ladies in waiting tell me that this woman before me fits every one of those descriptions to perfection.”

The princess rose from her divan like a curl of smoke, loose hair spilling down her shoulders like ink, black eyes eerily bright in the dark.

“Now, there’s been a lot of discussion about what all of these facts mean, in concert. Luck won’t carry a low-born soldier through ten years on the frontlines nor get him promoted to the rank of captain. The Mage Slayer would have to be a great fighter, even by Ro standards. How could a woman claim such a distinction in a country as barbarous and warlike as Ro? Is any woman under Heaven capable of such sustained brute violence? All my advisors have different opinions.”

“And…” Lanthe finally found her voice and erred on the side of deference, “what is your opinion, your Excellency?” That was what would determine whether Lanthe died today or lived to help Tairo complete his mission.

“I think that all these questions you’ve prompted are less important than the sum of their effect… a strategy I happen to recognize.”

“Strategy, your Excellency?”

“If you cannot overcome, confuse.” Yelhwa registered the surprise on Lanthe face and chuckled low in her throat. “I’ve studied the great Ro military leaders too, my dear, read all the same texts as you.”

“I very much doubt that, your Excellency,” Lanthe said honestly. “I can’t read.”

A sharp brow furrowed somewhere in the shadows, narrowing those sunset godmarks. “My, but you’re good at it, too.”

“Good at what, ma’am?”

“Confusing. Confounding.” The princess took a step forward on bare feet. The light shifted mockingly over her figure but still didn’t quite reveal her face. “What sort of creature are you? I might ask, as all my underlings have done. Are you the brute that kept Fort Yansey from me? Could a woman possibly be such a creature? Does any woman possess that strength and savagery? But I find that masses of questions like these are rarely as impenetrable as they seem. You just need to know where to apply the pressure to get yourself a straight answer.”

Lanthe didn’t know where the blade had come from, only that it came driving straight for her face. And here, finally, was a type of interaction Lanthe understood. She deflected the blow and shot to her feet in the same movement. It was pure reflex. There was no time for anything else as the knife flipped over in Yelhwa’s hand and came flashing back at her—this time toward her gut.

A smart fighter would have sprung back. Lanthe wasn’t totally clear on why she didn’t. Either her dusty feet didn’t quite have traction on the smooth floor or some prideful part of her couldn’t stomach giving ground before this fir twig of a woman. In retrospect, Lanthe hoped it was the former because she only saved herself a fatal stab beneath the ribs by stupidly throwing her hand in the way of the blade. Had the knife gone straight through her hand, she could have at least deprived the princess of her weapon. Instead, the edge slid messily across her palm, spurting bright red through a shaft of light.

Yelhwa was fast. And not just fast for a coddled king’s daughter. She matched Lanthe for speed—which was confusing, embarrassing, and not at all ideal. To stand your ground barehanded against a blade, you had to be far better than your opponent or commit to serious blood loss. Lanthe didn’t have the speed to overcome the princess tidily. What she did have was the will and experience to push through severe bleeding. So, as the knife flipped in the princess’s hand again and flashed toward Lanthe’s throat, she resigned herself to pain.

This time she didn’t try to retreat or stop the knife. She surged forward and grabbed the princess by the upper arm. The slower-moving part of the limb was easier to catch but less effective in neutralizing a weapon. Lanthe’s grip didn’t stop the knife headed for her neck, only forced it off course. The finger-length blade bit deep into Lanthe’s shoulder above the clavicle as she breached the princess’s guard. Having anticipated the pain that went screaming through her shoulder, Lanthe ignored it. Her right hand shot forward to clamp around Yelhwa’s throat, and she tackled the princess backward.

Yelhwa’s free hand clawed onto Lanthe’s arm as she lost ground and balance, surprisingly strong fingers digging for a pressure point. But Lanthe wasn’t giving her any chance to take back control. Before her hand had even closed on that pretty neck, she had her weight and momentum plowing into the slighter woman like a battering ram, driving her back. As the princess’s claws failed to find meaningful purchase, her legs crashed into the edge of the divan and flew out from under her. Lanthe slammed her back onto the couch so hard that the wood frame cracked with the impact. Stunned, Yelhwa choked against the hand around her throat, wheezed, and met Lanthe’s eyes.

Lanthe could have ended it there. It would have been as simple as leaning into her right hand and squeezing that spindly neck until it was over.

But light had fallen on the princess’s face when Lanthe pinned her back, illuminating everything the rumors claimed—and more that no rumor could ever do justice. There were those eyes like rainwashed obsidian. There were those lips that perfectly matched the pink of her godmarks without any paint. There was that jawline, as clean as a slice of General Chang’s glaive and just as mesmerizing.

But it wasn’t Yelhwa’s beauty that froze Lanthe in place. It was the look on her face. Total delight. Elation. Verging on madness.

“And there’s our answer.” The words thrummed on Lanthe’s palm like the tremor of an approaching army. “Welcome to Kaisia, Mage Slayer.”

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