Chapter 7 #2
“I have a twin, too,” I said.
Topi’s breath caught again, the gasp audible. I didn’t look at her, continuing to walk toward the mountain. It had the effect of most mountains, looking closer than it actually was. I wondered how long it would take to reach the base, how long to climb to the summit.
“I remember,” Topi said. “The pretty girl with you on your first day in court. She tried to save you.”
It was only a few months earlier, but that seemed forever ago now. Eona?’s desperation, my own panic that she was about to make a mistake that would cost both of us.
The pretty girl who was with you. I considered the difference between me and Topi Bemishu. I had spent all these months believing that Eona? was safe. She was north, shielded behind the walls of the Silver City. She was safe.
Topi had given no indication which of the many powerful men on the game board had her sister, and I knew that she must be agonizing about her sister’s safety, unable to act with any certainty that her sister was unharmed.
She didn’t even have that cold comfort to help her sleep at night, a candle holding out against the darkness of winter.
“Eona?,” I said. “She and I were born the same hour, only a few minutes apart, and I don’t think we spent more than those minutes apart for the rest of our lives. She was with me when I learned how to be a northern warrior, and I watched her learn to be empress.”
“Well, hopefully she took to your lessons better than you to hers,” Topi said dryly.
I ignored her. “She could know what I would say to anything. She could answer for me because we knew each other so well that not even our own mother could tell which of us said a thing. She once got so angry at me for ruining a painting of hers that she opened my window in the dead of winter and covered my bed with a bucket of water. It froze, and I slept a week in the main hall until my room had defrosted.”
“And you cannot hate her because you would have done the same,” Topi said, her smile twisted, eyes still not seeing the view in front of us.
On my shoulder, Na? yawned and opened her wings, flapping once before lifting off my shoulder and then diving into the grass.
I heard a helpless squeak as she found a quick meal.
The ravens circled overhead, as though hoping that Na? would leave behind scraps for them.
“I imagine it was different for the two of you, sharing a gender. But I grew up with my sister. There is not a single thing she did or learned that I did not see and know. She was half of my soul. Without her, I did not know who I was.” I kept the words even, aware as I spoke that the past tense was becoming truer each day.
When Eona? had left, I had been so lost.
“We have never been apart.” The words seemed pried from Topi.
She swallowed after saying them, her throat working as though trying to pull them back into her chest. “My mother would dress us the same when we were children. No one in court could tell us apart but her, and it was our special game. My mother is the reason my father got a command at all. She is the reason he is General Bemishu. And yet when she died—”
She broke off, successfully swallowing back whatever she was trying to say.
“I imagine that your father is a man of singular vision, singular obsession.” I tried to keep the words light, and Topi let out a harsh laugh.
“That is one way of speaking about my father,” she spat. “How do you do it?”
There were so many responses to that question, and I wanted to know which one she was asking for before I answered.
“Live without Eona??” I asked. Topi nodded. “Slowly. I find comfort in her safety.”
“He could have killed her, and you would not know. That’s what the Dogs do.
So many simply disappeared under Emperor Millu.
I always told Pito that we were lucky Mother did not simply vanish one night.
At least Kacha wanted our father to know what he’d done, so we never bore any hope of her survival. ”
“You believe Emperor Tallu would do that to me?” I asked. “To his betrothed? To his husband?”
“He is Emperor of the Southern Imperium.” Topi spoke fast, her voice rising.
She glanced behind her to where Asahi still searched for imagined dangers.
“You don’t know because in the palace, it is so easy to forget.
We see him on his throne; we see him as a man.
But he is the emperor. Out here? He is more than that.
The promise is more than just words that lifted House Atobe to the highest seat in the nation.
Out here, the promise is what turned our country into an empire.
And he is no man. He is a god. Ask at the next town what the people think of their emperor.
Ask those who strung me up what the emperor is.
That was my foolishness, my mistake. I forgot exactly what His Imperial Majesty, Dragon Chosen Emperor Tallu is. ”
“And Pito will pay the price?” I asked, keeping the question low.
“She already is. You do not understand what has her.” Topi stopped, her face pale in the fading light, the sheen of her skin clouding into an ashen gray color. “Something I’ve never seen has her. We almost did it. We were almost there—”
In my mind, I pictured a map of the Imperium.
Where would the twins go for safety? Where might they find it?
Or were they even looking for safety? No, they were stung, not by Kacha’s downfall, but his escape.
By the fact that now he had fled the palace and was beyond their grasp.
So, they would have been looking for someone who had the ability to kill him quietly.
Perhaps even someone who could give him the same fate he’d given their mother. A death before morning from a strange illness with no cure.
“Krustau?” I asked. There were mercenaries who lived in the liminal space between the Imperium and Krustau, who knew how to flee to one side or the other of the border when necessary.
They were not bound by Krustau’s strict culture of loyalty and laws of hospitality or even human decency.
“Not the nation but the border. For an assassin.”
Topi looked down, her fingers trailing over the tops of the grass. There were new scars on them. The delicate skin that, in the palace, had looked as though she had never lifted more than a teacup, now bore the marks of a few months on the road. She didn’t say anything, so I guessed.
“Two assassins. For two targets.” If you were killing the man who’d instigated your mother’s death, you might as well also murder the man who’d left her alone to deal with the sharks and sea serpents by herself, even if that man was your father.
She inhaled sharply, as good as an admission.
“You got to the border with Krustau,” I said.
“We didn’t.” Her voice dropped to an intense whisper. “We didn’t make it. Maki’s men were there, and they caught us. I think he thought that we might know something of our father’s plans. He thought our father had been the one to betray him and Kacha. He—”
She held her hand out level with her shoulder, and it trembled, shaking so intensely that she pulled it back.
It wasn’t fear. Someone had twisted her arm, loosening the connections between shoulder and bicep, hand and elbow.
Whatever they’d done to her was permanent.
An inner scar that she would wear forever.
The prospect of harming only one of a set of twins must have Maki salivate at the potential experiments he could do.
That might have been more valuable to him than even the fact that they were his enemy’s children.
“He tortured you,” I said, to make it clear I understood. “And he still has Pito.”
I thought of the two of them, one brave, one less so, switching back and forth so that they could each have a chance to rest, to allow herself a moment of weakness and vulnerability. Now, Topi had to be both: strong enough to save her sister and weak enough to fall prey to Maki’s manipulation.
She turned to me, her eyes wide and round. “He did something to her. Something worse than what he did to me.”
“What?” I asked and put in just enough curiosity that she could once again feel like the courtier exchanging gossip about who was sleeping with whom and what the laundress had said was on the sheets.
“I cannot explain it except that she is no longer my sister.” Topi stopped. Her face flushed, her expression horribly vulnerable, and I worried for a moment that she was playing me, that she’d realized exactly what she needed to do to truly turn me to her side.
But I had agreed to sacrifice my sister, the other half of my soul, to a monster; she had no idea what I was capable of.
“She… I thought I knew everything about her, but whatever made her her is gone, and I cannot predict her anymore.” Topi jumped when Na? lifted out of the brush, her snout red with blood. “Maki said he could change her back if I got him what he needed for his experiments.”
“What did he need?” I asked.
“Metals. Wood, but the right sort of wood. Food.” She bit her lip.
“His men are hungry?” I asked. That was an opening. Men would starve for a cause. Men would die for a cause. But if they wavered at all, we could be there with enough food to ease their consciences.
“They had eaten through all the stores of food. They were in an abandoned military outpost near the border.” Now that she had broken her silence, there was a flood of information, everything that she had kept quiet about for a week came spilling out.
I knew in only a few moments how many men Maki had, what condition they were in, and how few of them were loyal to Maki himself rather than his money.
When she turned to me, her face was alight with hope. She shuttered it so quickly that I wondered if I had been seeing things.