Page 135

I’d never heard my father curse before. “I’m sorry. I know it’s my fault…. I shouldn’t have—”

“I want to see your arm,” he said. “Your brothers told me what the demon did. That he…he injured you.”

That wasn’t what I expected.

I rolled up my sleeve carefully and undid my old bandage. I’d bathed since my return, but I still smelled strongly of the ointment Takkan had slathered over my skin, and it prickled my nostrils.

Father’s jaw tensed at the gashes on my arm. It was a good thing Bandur was already locked away, because he looked ready to stab the demon and chop him into bits for stew.

“Your hands, too?” Father asked.

“Those are old wounds,” I explained of the scars on my fingers. Usually in his presence, I hid them under my sleeves, but now my hands moved while I spoke, and the scars on my fingers tingled. I’d stopped paying attention to them sometime on my journey to Ai’long. They’d served as a painful reminder of the price I had paid to save my brothers. But lately, I was starting to see them in a different way—as a sign of strength and all that still must be done.

“The bandages will need to be changed,” Father said. There was a bucket of hot water behind him, which made me realize he’d been waiting for me.

I started, but Father blocked me. “I’ll do it,” he said.

He chuckled softly at my surprise. “I wasn’t always an emperor, you know. Like your brothers, I trained to be a sentinel. My father made sure I laced and polished my own armor, scrubbed my own bowls, stitched my own wounds—same as any other soldier. Hold still, this may hurt.”

I bit down on my lip while he cleaned my wound, fixing my attention on the wooden window screen.

Father’s quarters were sparse, with a simple rosewood table, a matching shelf filled with scrolls and books, a long divan embellished with cranes and orchids, and a bronze mirror that had been in the palace since the reign of Kiata’s first emperor.

After Mother died, his quarters became his private sanctuary, and guests were permitted only into the forecourt. Even my brothers and I could count on one hand the number of times we’d been invited into Father’s residential apartments.

Yet here I was, shedding bandages onto a woolen carpet gifted by a king of Samaran, my wound stanched by raw silk that’d traveled the Spice Road from A’landi to Kiata, and my flesh sewn together by an emperor of the Nine Eternal Courts.

I couldn’t help thinking how, without the armor of his ceremonial robes and his gold headdress and medaled belts, he looked simply like a father who’d stayed up too many nights worrying about his children.

“Relax those shoulders, Shiori. Did you think I sent for you to punish you?”

“It’s no more than I deserve.”

“Many would agree with you.”

The ministers, obviously. Likely most of the court too. The whole of Kiata, actually. “Have you spoken to the council?” I asked carefully.

My question made Father’s face harden once more. “It has been dissolved for the time being.” A pause. “While you were away, Hawar confessed that he poisoned you.”

“Hawar confessed?” That shocked me.

“He said his actions were justified,” Father said with a dry laugh. “After you seemingly attacked me in the Holy Mountains, he thought it safe to admit that two cultists had approached him months ago with poison. He said he had refused to even consider harming a princess of Kiata, but when you showed signs of a magical affliction…he said he had no choice but to protect the realm.”

I shivered. “What’s happened to him?”

“He was executed yesterday,” Father replied without feeling. “His accomplices have not been named, but I have faith your spectacle in Gindara will provoke a few to come forward.”

I said nothing. I was wondering how many in the palace secretly agreed with Hawar that I was a problem. Maybe that was why the mirror of truth had not shown me my assassin’s identity—because he hadn’t acted alone.

Father made a grim face. “There are few I trust these days.”

I could hear the words left unsaid: Can I trust you, daughter?

I flinched. “I’m sorry I lied. About going to Iro. About everything.”

“Your lies I’m used to,” said Father. “But not your brothers’.”

The rebuke made me wince, but I deserved it. I bowed even deeper.