Chapter 30 #2
Maro watched the bee-eaters darting about the trumpet flowers outside. Every so often, one would catch an insect in its beak, killing it. “I don’t wanna be heir to the dynasty. I wanna be a peasant.”
Master Ganji hit him. With the hard rod of the scroll, right on his seal-bearing cheek. It stung terribly.
“One day you will grow up, Maro, and you will finally understand how good you have it. Men have fought long wars for the kind of power you hold. You will learn to value it. You will learn just how easily it can be taken from you. And you will be grateful.”
Maro was grateful. He might throw tantrums sometimes, or act childishly on occasion, but most of the time, he was the prince everyone expected him to be—filial, hardworking, and dutiful.
On days he was not in the peach garden with Terren, he stayed in his mother’s Dawn Pavilion, practicing his swordplay until he was too tired to stand.
He studied classics long into the night, until the candles in his lanterns burned to stubs, and the replacements burned out too.
Even when he was too sick to read, even when he was confined to his bed with his eyes shut, he still memorized poems by running them over in his mind.
One day, as he was bedridden with a cold, he heard his mother coming in. “I have brought some herbal medicine,” she said, setting a tray at his bedside. “It will help with the cough.”
She was crying. She was trying hard to hide it, but Maro noticed anyway and sat up, alarmed. “Mother, what is the matter?”
“Terren has written his first Blessing,” she said, sobbing into her sleeve.
“A powerful one.” She recounted to him the events of the day, about the carp and the healing spell, the admiration on the faces of everyone present.
“What if the emperor names him heir instead? All that grueling training, all that arduous studying—and he still ended up better than you. I am frightened, Maro, that we have both sacrificed so much for nothing.”
Her words stung worse than Master Ganji’s rod. Seeing her cry—because of him—was the worst feeling in the world. Maro left his bed in shame and fell to his knees before her. “I’m sorry. I’m an unworthy son. Forgive me.”
His apology seemed to cheer his mother, at least a little.
She gently cupped his cheek, the one with a seal, and said, “You must not let your brother get any further ahead. You must write a Blessing too. I will tell your masters to relieve you of your lessons for now, and you will spend all your time composing instead.”
He dipped his head. “Yes, Mother.” She gave him a kiss on the top of his head and left him.
Worthless, he scrawled into his journal that day, his calligraphy messy and anguished. Worthless worthless worthless. Why can’t I be smarter? Better?
News of the second son’s Blessing spread through the palace like pollen in spring. Soon, even the lowliest maid was gossiping about it while washing sheets in the river. The same people who had called Terren a waste of Heaven’s magic were suddenly praising him nonstop.
“I knew it all along,” said one gardener to another as they trimmed the trumpet flowers right outside Maro’s window.
“The second prince is the one Tensha has been waiting for, a child extraordinary enough to change the fate of dynasties. His older brother, on the other hand? He is competent but nothing special…”
Maro hid under a blanket and blocked his ears until they went away.
Soon, an imperial edict arrived from the South Palace. “The emperor’s birthday is in three months’ time,” the messenger read off a scroll. “He invites his eldest son to demonstrate his literomancy in front of the leaders of the Great Clans and other distinguished guests.”
Maro knew exactly what the edict meant.
Father was disappointed in him. Father wanted him to write his own Blessing, as soon as possible, to avoid the embarrassment of his first son and heir being outshone by his second. Father had set him a deadline.
Worthless, he wrote again, in huge characters that took up an entire page.
He didn’t leave the Dawn Pavilion after that.
In Hesin’s account, it had seemed as if Lady Sky was the one who’d kept him there—not to be disturbed except for one meal a day, the eunuch had said—but that had painted her as unfairly cruel.
In truth, the resolve had come from Maro himself.
He forbade himself from doing anything except study, and he did so from dawn to high moon.
When his own mother knocked on his door any fewer than three times, he did not answer.
When servants entered for any other reason than to refill his inkpots and paper supply, he would yell at them to go away.
Every day, in his journals, he tracked his progress.
I think I’m close, one entry would say. I can feel the warmth of magic under my pen.
The one after it might declare, dejected, No, everything is still awful.
I’m not close at all. As the emperor’s birthday drew nearer—as the three months turned to weeks, then days—his entries became more and more frantic.
I could tell exactly which days he cried, because the ink would be blurred and the paper wrinkled.
Two days before the deadline, Maro heard movement outside his window.
When he opened it and saw who it was, he felt sick in the stomach. “You can’t be here! What if someone sees?”
Terren had to stand on tiptoes to reach the windowsill. He rested his chin on the ledge, between all the golden trumpet flowers, and his eyes were wide and pleading. “Ma-ro. Play with me.”
“I can’t.”
“Please?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Please?”
“Find other friends.”
“Please!” He produced a crinkled-up paper from his pocket and held it out over the windowsill. Its characters shone lively as fireflies, and Maro’s breath caught right in his throat. A Blessing.
Terren knew. Of course he knew. He was far too clever to not have figured out why his brother had stopped going to the garden.
Maro took the spell with a shaking hand, eyes tracing over that beautiful, familiar calligraphy. There was so much magic in those words. Words that, in two days, would save him.
Words that would impress not just the emperor, but all his distinguished guests too. Words that would finally make his mother and his tutors proud of him. Words that would make all the people of Tensha respect him at last, instead of seeing him as a source of shame.
His brother’s words, but it wouldn’t matter, because nobody would ever know the truth.
“Thanks.” He smiled and gave them back to him.
Terren’s eyes widened with surprise. “You don’t like it?”
“Of course I like it!” Maro laughed as he pressed his own cheek to the windowsill, watching the bee-eaters and the golden flowers, the hazy peaks in the distance.
“But I’ll be emperor one day, remember? I’ll have to lead the nation.
And when I do, I’m going to do it with integrity.
With pride.” Your veins are Tensha’s flowing rivers, your beating heart its capital, your flesh its mountains and fertile valleys.
“I can’t begin my reign by cheating, you know.
I can’t make my people believe I wrote a Blessing that I didn’t.
I would rather fail with honesty than succeed without honor.
Better the whole world be ashamed of me than for me to be ashamed of myself. ”
“Ma-ro.”
“Hmm?”
“Catch it!”
When Maro blinked in confusion, Terren only kept tugging at his sleeve excitedly. “That feeling,” he squeaked. “Catch it! Catch it in a poem!”
I will lead the nation with integrity, with pride.
Better the whole world be ashamed of me than for me to be ashamed of myself.
My veins are Tensha’s flowing rivers …
In the two remaining days, Maro spun his emotions into a poem, and the poem turned out to hold magic.
When he cast it in the banquet hall, in front of the emperor and all those important men, the entire floor began to burst at its seams with grass and wildflowers.
Mountains and valleys sprang up between banquet tables, rivers curved into life around the pillars.
Miniature forests bloomed into existence, tiny tendrils of mist weaving through their canopies.
The entire room had turned into a living map of Tensha. And standing at its capital, at the crossroads at the top of the empire, was Maro, holding his brother tightly. “I did it,” he whispered. Then louder, laughing, “I did it.” And Terren grinned just as wide and hugged him just as tight.
The emperor rose from his seat and smiled for the first time Maro remembered. “This map is quite accurate,” he said. “It pleases me. I shall make this my new strategy room.” He then nodded to his advisor. “Hesin, make the appropriate arrangements.”
Except it didn’t happen like that, not exactly.