Chapter 48 A Fight for Dawn
A FIGHT FOR DAWN
It was a stale morning, Maro wrote in his journal, about the day he met with his brother in the peach garden for the last time. The blanket of mist covering the ground was as high as my waist, and the air hung so still that blossoms fell like stones.
Terren was sixteen now, and grown.
Standing twenty paces away, across the bridge and on the other side of the pond, the second son had gained a new menace in his posture. Eight swords hovered in a ring around him.
“Brother,” Maro said.
He did not reply or move.
“Why must you stand so far away? We are family, are we not?”
Silence.
Maro took a tentative step forward, towards the bridge.
The peach garden smelled wetly of rotten blossoms and abandoned things.
The cobblestones had gone unswept, the bushes wild and untrimmed, the pavilions into disrepair.
Swallows dove in and out of the cracks in the pagodas’ roofs, having made their nests among the wooden beams.
Anything that happened here, nobody would know.
“You left this back in the mountains.” Maro made it to the middle of the bridge and set down the chest he’d been carrying. He hoped that Terren could not see his hands shaking. Somehow this was harder than diverting the Aricine River, worse even than the long months building the Salt Road.
Terren still didn’t move from his shore, but his eyes drifted to the ornate tortoises carved in the mahogany.
Maro knelt next to the chest, trying to ignore the frantic pounding of his heart. “I’ve brought you something.” He unclasped it, drew out a heaping plate of flower-shaped desserts, and set them onto the bridge. “Mung bean cakes. Would you like to share some with me?”
Terren’s eyes narrowed, likely suspecting poison.
Maro had prepared for this possibility. He took one of the cakes and placed it into his own mouth, biting open the tiny antidote vessel that he kept in the corner of his cheek. He swallowed it along with the cake.
Serpent’s Tongue. Master Ganji’s voice echoed in his head. A little-known poison, and nearly undetectable. It does not show up black on silver needles, and its symptoms are generic and indistinguishable from a common illness.
So long as you get him alone, far from his advisors and food tasters, you will be able to kill him.
Terren still looked suspicious, but there was confusion in his expression now, as if the situation had deviated from his predictions.
“Remember?” Maro made himself smile. “When we were really little, you could never reach the banquet tables. I used to have to steal these for you. Every time I gave you one, your whole face would light up. You would look at me like I was a hero, and I would feel…” He had gone back to his journals to remember what it was like, to have a brother he loved so dearly.
“I would feel important. Enough. Like I could do something right, even if I had to be a disappointment to everyone else.”
Terren still didn’t move, but the blades at his side wavered where they were suspended.
“I also brought our oakwood swords.” Maro took them out from the chest and set them onto the bridge, next to the cakes. “In case you wanted to spar. I don’t think I can win against you anymore, but it was never about who won. I think you knew that too.”
“I use steel now,” he said.
They were the first words Terren had spoken to him in years, without going through his eunuchs. Maro felt his throat suddenly tighten, unbidden.
It’s progress, he told himself. The West Palace didn’t have much time left. The Aricine Ward was almost completed, and Terren had all but secured the throne. The future of Tensha depended entirely on whether Maro could gain his brother’s trust.
But why couldn’t he be happier about the progress?
“You promised a line,” Terren said, into the silence. There was no humor in his voice.
“I have it.” Maro drew the last item from the chest: a scroll inked with half a quatrain. He held it out for Terren.
If he wanted it, he would have to come closer to get it.
Terren eyed the scroll. For a brief moment, Maro thought he saw a spark in them, the same one he always had as a child before a game of “dueling couplets.” Then it was gone.
His swords followed him as he took seven slow steps forward, until he was halfway over the bridge.
He seated himself across from Maro, on the wood, just close enough to take the end of the scroll but no closer.
He unrolled it in his lap, eyes flickering as he read the words.
From one branch, two azaleas blooming,
Fighting for a piece of the dawn.
“I admit the metaphor is a little transparent.” Maro managed a small laugh.
“But this is just one poem. We can write many more together, starting today, and they will be even better than this one.” It wasn’t true, of course.
If everything worked as intended, this would be their last. Maro pushed the plate towards him and said, “Here, have a mung bean cake as you think.”
Terren set down the scroll and eyed the sweets, but did not reach for any. “You didn’t bring me here just to play ‘dueling couplets’, I presume.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Say what you came here to say, then.” There was impatience in his voice, mixed with cold contempt. “Tell me I’m stupid, shameful, and a disgrace, and be done with it. I’ll kill some birds and we’ll part ways.”
Maro took a deep breath and met his brother’s eyes. “I’m not here to condemn you this time. I’m here to apologize.”
That caught him off guard. His swords jerked once in the air before righting themselves again.
I’ll gain his trust, Maro had told all his allies, until I manage to kill him.
“Over the years, you’ve said sorry to me a hundred times, maybe a thousand. Even more, if we count the times you said multiple sorries at once. But I have never once said it back. I want to say it now. Terren—I’m sorry.”
He had gone as stiff as ice.
“I’m sorry I kept myself from you, after you wrote your first Blessing.
I should have brought my books to the garden and let you teach me how to write mine, but I was too proud and wanted to do it all alone.
” Maro took a deep breath. He didn’t know why, but it was getting harder to speak.
He forced himself to anyway. “I’m sorry that I stopped playing with you, after our father’s birthday banquet.
The world wanted us to be against each other, and I was young and foolish enough to listen. ”
Terren was still silent, but his bottom lip had begun to tremble.
Keep going, Maro told himself. The fate of the nation is at stake. The Aricine Ward is days away from being complete.
You must kill him before he becomes unkillable.
“I’m sorry for how I treated you in the mountains, too.
For being mad at you. For telling you to go away.
For thinking you were weak because you couldn’t raise a steel sword, because you couldn’t fight the way I could, when you were brilliant in so many other ways.
I’m sorry for shouting at you when you told Doctor Shu about my condition, when you were only trying to keep me safe. ”
Now he was shaking all over.
“And I’m sorry…” Maro could barely get the words out now.
“I’m sorry for hitting you. Even though I knew that it would break us, that it would make me no better than everyone else, that it would scare you away from me forever.
I have regretted it for years and years, and it hurts every time I think about it, and if I could do my whole life over it would be the first thing I changed. ”
The knives around Terren shivered and fell, clattering onto the bridge. He suddenly looked very fragile, the way he had when he was still tiny.
“And because of that, I wasn’t there for you afterwards,” Maro whispered.
This part was not planned, but the words wanted out anyway.
They forced themselves—dragging, stuttering, limping—out of his throat.
“After we were separated in the mountains, I didn’t protect you like I should have.
I … think I know what happened to you in Tieza.
You fell off a tree, didn’t you? A big one, bigger than either of us had ever seen, and I never asked you to show me, and I’m more sorry than I can express in words. ”
Terren was crying now. Two big tears dribbled from his cheek to his chin. “Maro, turn me … Turn…”
“Turn you?” Maro prompted gently.
The words came out with a heaving sob. “Turn me into a fish.”
Beside them in the blossom-covered water, the carp played joyfully, knowing nothing.
“Or a flower.” All the azalea bushes lining the garden, their plumage vibrant even through the pale mist. “Or a peach tree. You’re good at spells, aren’t you?” His voice was as brittle as a crumbled leaf. “If you’re really sorry, then turn me into something nice.”
“Terren,” Maro said softly. He felt close to tears himself. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He wasn’t supposed to—
“Or, at the very least, turn me little again.” He wiped his eyes with a sleeve, and stared at the plate of mung bean cakes.
“Little enough that all I wanted to reach for was the banquet table. When all I knew to desire was a sweet cake. And even if everyone punished me, or yelled at me, or hated me, at least back then I didn’t know why.
If you can’t turn me into a fish, at least turn me little. ”
The younger boy lifted one of the flower-shaped cakes and cupped it in both hands, preciously, like it was a beautiful snowflake that could melt at a moment’s notice.
For a long while, he stayed hunched over it, tears dripping onto the bridge as he cried quietly.
Then, with shaking hands, he moved it to his lips.
“Terren, don’t!”
The next moment Maro wasn’t thinking anymore. His hand flew out, of its own accord, and knocked the cake out of his brother’s grasp and into the water. Then he shoved the entire plate off the bridge too.
Terren looked up, startled.
For a while, they just stared at each other, breathing fast. Then Terren let out a strangled cry and rushed to the side of the bridge.
He leaned over the railing, eyes bulging as he watched the carp pick at the felled cakes with their big, circular mouths.
“No,” he wailed. “What have you done?” He grabbed for a stick nearby, found one of the toy swords, and began tracing a panicked Blessing on the bridge.
Two of the fish were already floating on their side.
A third, spasming, was beginning to turn belly-up.
“Help me save them,” he shrieked. “Maro, help me—”
An arrow struck Terren in the leg.
Maro didn’t see it until its tip had already come out his brother’s thigh, red.
Terren cried out and stumbled backwards, right as four more arrows came flying towards him, but he was paying attention this time and sent his swords darting back to deflect them.
Another volley of arrows, another deflection, Terren gasping in pain as he made for shore.
“What…” Maro finally reacted enough to look up, and that was when he saw all the archers.
Camouflaged amidst the peach trees, squatting on the roofs of the pavilions, perched atop the garden walls.
Someone darted out of the trees and grabbed him.
Mei Yu. He pulled Maro out of the way, into the shelter behind a tree, just as another volley of arrows met Terren’s knives.
“What’s going on?” Maro cried, panicked. “The plan was for me to meet him alone.” He tried to wrench himself out of his friend’s grasp, but a second set of hands found him and held him tight.
“Master Ganji was worried you might not go through with it,” Song Siming said, soothingly, as if speaking to a small child, “so he had us prepare a backup plan.”
“Don’t worry,” Mei Yu chimed. “You at least helped distract him. If you hadn’t, we would have never gotten that first shot in.”
Rustle. Swish. Maro twisted around the tree and watched in horror.
The next volley was as dense as rain, far more arrows for Terren to fend off with just his swords.
But he didn’t die. The arrows never reached him.
Before Maro even had time to blink, Terren’s sigil had begun gleaming—bright as a bonfire in the mist—and then the arrows were changing course midair, curving around him, thumping harmlessly into the blossoms and peat.
With the arrow still in his leg, he was half running, half crawling towards the garden’s gate. The archers kept shooting at him, but he redirected almost all the arrows with his sigil magic; the rest clattered off a shield, made from crude swords, that he had somehow grown out of the ground.
He was getting away.
Several fighting men were giving chase on foot now, desperate not to let the second son out of their grasp.
But they were failing. Terren might be slow, he might be injured, but he had all his weapons and now he also had the arrows.
With every flare of his sigil he sent them flying back by the dozen, and nobody could get remotely close to him, not even Master Len—especially when an arrow went into the old swordmaster’s skull and came out the other end.
Maro started to scream, but Siming shoved a cloth into his mouth. “Quiet, Your Highness. We can’t let the rest of the palace hear.”
They didn’t catch him in the end.
They cleaned up the arrows afterwards, the swords, to cover up the attempted treason. Any blossoms stained with blood they swept away.
“The fish?” someone said. The entire pond was floating with dead carp, their bodies bent at stiff, horrifying angles. “It will be suspicious if the pond is emptied.”
“Leave them,” Master Ganji said. “Even if someone notices, they’ll just assume it was Terren who killed them.”