Chapter 25
Haru
They came for me at dawn.
Not servants. Not guards.
Officials.
Three of them, their faces gray with exhaustion and something worse—something that looked like fear wearing the mask of formality.
“Heika.” The eldest one’s voice cracked. “The Grand Minister requests your presence in the council chamber immediately.”
I was already dressed—I’d barely slept since Father’s death, and when I had, the dragon’s words had followed me into dreams.
Heaven will not wait.
The urgency of it still thrummed in my blood like a second heartbeat.
“What has happened?” I asked, though some part of me already knew it would be terrible.
“The Grand Minister will explain, Heika. Please, we must hurry.”
The palace halls were too quiet for dawn. We’d been in mourning since Father’s poisoning, the entire palace draped in white, but this felt different, somehow worse, if that was even possible.
Servants we passed averted their eyes.
The guards stood rigid at their posts, faces carefully blank.
Something was very wrong.
The council chamber doors stood open, which never happened. Inside, I saw movement—officials clustered around something I couldn’t make out, their voices low and urgent.
The smell hit me before I crossed the threshold.
Unwashed bodies. Blood. Something fouler underneath.
Grand Minister Satoshi—Uncle Satoshi—saw me and his face went slack with relief. “Haru-sama—Heika—thank the gods.”
The cluster of officials parted as I approached, and I saw what they’d been standing around.
A rice sack.
All this commotion for a bag of grain? It was lying on the floor like someone had dropped it by mistake. Coarse burlap painted with the Imperial mark, the kind farmers used for grain tribute, stained dark in places, tied at the top with rough hemp rope. It looked so normal—
Except rice sacks didn’t smell like death.
“What—” I started.
“It was left at the southern gate before dawn,” Satoshi said, his voice steady but his hands trembling. “The guards found it with the morning patrol. No one saw who left it, but there was a message tied to it.”
He held out a scrap of parchment. The characters were written in a child’s hand, crude and deliberate:
Your prince. Returned as promised.
The words didn’t make sense.
Your prince?
We had no princes being held hostage.
Kioshi was lost, presumed dead, but there’d been no ransom demands, no—
No.
No!
My hand moved before my mind caught up. I grabbed the hemp rope and pulled, my fingers clumsy with sudden, terrible certainty.
The knot came loose.
The sack fell open.
And Kioshi stared up at me with empty eyes.
Not Kioshi. Kioshi’s body. Kioshi’s corpse.
My brother lay shoved into a rice sack like refuse. His skin was gray-white and waxen. His lips were blue. There was a hole in his chest where something—someone—had torn out his heart.
The room spun.
I heard someone make a sound, and realized distantly it was me. It was a low, primal noise that didn’t belong to a prince, didn’t belong to anything human.
Hands grabbed my shoulders. Uncle Ryuji’s voice whispered close to my ear: “Breathe, Haru. Breathe.”
But I couldn’t breathe.
The air had turned to ice in my lungs.
Kioshi. My brother. The Crown Prince. The future emperor. Crumpled in a rice sack like garbage, as though he was nothing, as though he meant nothing.
I’d known he was dead. Deep in my heart, I’d known. And my dream had confirmed it. Still, seeing him, seeing the hollowness in his eyes that once held such joy and life . . .
“Who did this?” My voice came out broken. “Who—”
“We do not know for certain, Heika.” Satoshi’s face was ashen. “But the message makes it clear this was meant to be a statement.”
A statement?
Someone murdered my brother, tore out his heart, and returned him in a burlap sack to show what? Their contempt? To show what they thought of our family? Of the Empire itself?
Rage came, hot and clarifying. It burned through the shock, through the grief, leaving something harder in its wake. The dragon had been right.
Heaven would not wait.
I straightened slowly, Uncle Ryuji’s hands falling away as I rose. Around the room, officials watched me with wide eyes, waiting to see if I would break, if I would collapse the way I had every right to after seeing my brother’s desecrated body.
Instead, I reached down and closed Kioshi’s eyes.
His skin was cold—so cold—but I made myself touch him anyway, made myself show everyone in that room that I would not flinch, would not turn away.
“Cover him,” I ordered. My voice came out steady. It felt strange how steady it sounded. “With silk, not burlap. He is . . . was Emperor, if only for a time.”
“Heika—” Satoshi began.
“Cover him!” I shouted.
Someone scrambled to obey.
Within moments, golden silk emblazoned with the Imperial chrysanthemum was draped over my brother’s body, hiding the hole in his chest and the gray pallor of his skin, hiding everything except the fact that he was dead.
“We need to inform your mother,” Satoshi said quietly. “And . . . the funeral for your father is scheduled for this afternoon. We will need to postpone—”
“No.” The word came out sharp. “We will not postpone. My father’s funeral will proceed as planned.”
The room went very still.
“Heika,” Satoshi said carefully, “with your brother’s body just discovered, surely we should delay to prepare proper—”
“We will burn them together. It is what Father would have wanted. It is what I want,” I interrupted, and this time I let steel creep into my voice, let them hear the command in it. “This afternoon, both of them, father and son, emperor and emperor. We will honor them both.”
“But the rituals require—”
“Do you think our enemies will wait for proper rituals?” I turned on my uncle, and he actually took a step back.
“Do you think they will pause while we spend days preparing ceremonies? They sent my brother back in a gods-damned rice sack, Grand Minister. They are not concerned with our traditions or majesty or mourning.”
Satoshi’s mouth worked soundlessly.
“The gods warned me. In my dreams, they spoke to me,” I said, and my voice carried to every corner of the chamber. “Heaven will not wait, they said. We do not have the luxury of time.”
I looked around the room, meeting the eyes of every official, every advisor, men and women who’d served my father, who’d watched me stumble drunk through palace halls and dismissed me as worthless.
They were about to learn differently.
“My brother will burn beside my father this afternoon,” I said.
“The temple of Kinkaku has already been prepared for the Emperor’s funeral.
Send word that Kioshi will join him. Citizens of Bara have been gathering since dawn—they came to mourn one emperor; they will mourn two.
And tomorrow—” I paused, making sure they understood every word.
“Tomorrow I will bind myself and become what this Empire needs, what Heaven demands.”
“Heika—” Satoshi began.
“I have spoken, Grand Minister.” I let the silence stretch, locking eyes with my uncle until his face went white and his head bowed.
Around the room, men shifted uncomfortably.
This was not how princes spoke to their father’s ministers.
This was not how things were done. But nothing about this was how things were done.
The normal rules died the moment my father was poisoned.
They died again when Kioshi was stuffed into that bloody sack.
“Yes, Heika,” Satoshi said finally, bowing low. “We will . . . we will make the arrangements.”
“Good.” I stepped forward and placed a hand on Uncle Ryuji’s shoulder. “Tell Mother. Gently. She should not learn of this from anyone else. Leave my brother here so she might mourn—and clear this chamber. No one enters save the Imperial family.”
My uncle, the Dai Shogun, stared. His eyes were full of something that might have been pride. Or grief. Or both.
“Of course, Heika,” he said, bowing low.
Then Uncle Ryuji bowed again—a real bow, deeper than he’d ever given me before—and left to carry out my orders.
Mother’s chambers were silent when I arrived.
Too silent.
Her ladies-in-waiting clustered outside the door, their faces drawn. Uncle Ryuji stood among them, and when he saw me, he shook his head slightly.
“She knows,” he said quietly. “I told her as gently as I could. She . . . hasn’t spoken since.”
I pushed past him and into the chambers.
Mother sat by the window, still wearing her white mourning robes from Father’s death. She looked small in them, shrunken, as if grief had physically compressed her. Her hands were folded in her lap, perfectly still. Her eyes stared at nothing.
“Mother?” I approached carefully, like I might startle a wounded animal.
She didn’t respond, didn’t even blink.
“Mother, I’m so sorry. About Kioshi. About—”
“My sons are dead.” Her voice was flat. “Three in truth. One to diseases, another to poison, and the third now to the throne. My sons are gone.”
The words nearly staggered me. “I’m not dead, Mother. I’m right here.”
“No.” She finally looked at me, and her eyes were hollow. “You are Emperor now. Whatever you were before—whatever my Haru was—died the moment you gave those orders in the council chamber. I have already lost my boys.”
“Mother—”
“Get out.” Still that flat, dead voice. “The Empress Dowager must prepare for the funeral. She has no time for ghosts or hollow words.”
I stood there, frozen, while she turned back toward the window.
I’d been dismissed by my own mother. She’d cast me aside so many times, but this one stung more than I cared to admit. Still, she was right—I wasn’t simply her son anymore. I couldn’t be, not when I had to become a god.
I stepped out and slid the door closed behind me.
Uncle Ryuji looked up. “Give her time,” he said quietly. “She has lost everything, and now her youngest son is about to become something she cannot hold on to. She needs time to grieve.”