Page 5 of Prima (After the End #8)

Chapter Three

The present

You are now mine to do with as I wish.

The light overhead falls softly upon Lady Sun.

Her dress still glitters with restless sparks.

Ren’s gaze is drawn to the hollow of her throat, the shadowy depth of that triangle, while her words burn in his blood.

They should burn like poison, dark and angry, but he only feels an urgency that borders on intoxication.

He leaves the table and returns with a small bottle of rice liquor and two tiny glasses. He pours for her first, to the brim, and then the same for himself: Potent spirits are better suited to the discussion at hand.

“What do you wish to do with me, my lady?”

She sets an elbow on the edge of the table and drops her chin into her hand. “You want specifics, Prince Nineteen?”

“Of course. How else am I to assess the situation?”

She smiles at him. Fondly, which punctures through him as both pleasure and pain. “I believe the sons of the High Potentate came rushing when they heard that the Prima Inter Pares might be seeking a man?”

Prima Inter Pares, first among equals, is the one who casts the tie-breaking vote on the Secretariat. But in Dawan, when the word Prima comes up in conversation, the listeners hear only “Sea Witch”.

“The Dawani princes came rushing in the hope that New Ryukyu might pick a side.”

She picks up a strand of her hair and tosses it behind her shoulder. “And how am I to help the Prima pick a side, except to judge by the tributes I’ve been given?”

He finds that difficult to believe. His three older brothers vying for the throne cannot be more different in their intentions.

Four would continue things as they are, Six plans to withhold education from all girls and a good many boys for their moral improvement, and only Five has any interest in opening the realm to new ideas and new ways of doing things.

But since Lady Sun already knows all that…

He pours the fiery contents of his glass down his throat. “My lady, it would be most remiss of me to offer you only tea and mooncakes. May I also prepare something for your supper?”

* * *

On second thought, this may not be the best delaying tactic.

The lounging area as a whole is not what Ren would consider roomy, but around the galley things become particularly compact. Earlier he and Lady Sun were separated by a table and the space he deliberately kept between himself and that table; now they’re less than an arm’s length apart.

And she is only more beautiful up close in a perverse proof of the inverse square law: Reduce your distance to her by half, and her allure intensifies by a factor of four.

“My goodness,” she says, standing at the narrow opening between the stove and the prep counter. “A man of your elevated station, skilled in the culinary arts? How did you learn, Prince Nineteen?”

Ah, his elevated station. The Potentate’s Palace is an entire society unto itself, separated into almost as many strata.

The Potentate is fickle with his affections and those wives and consorts who occupy the top of the pyramid do so because they have powerful fathers and brothers whose alliances the Potentate must keep.

And then there was Ren’s own mother, who entered the palace as a gift from a foreign dignitary and had no backers whatsoever in Dawan.

“My mother’s health was frail. The astrologer said that it would help her recover if a filial child cooked for her, rather than servants.”

Others in the palace kept trying to poison her—and me—and we no longer dared to eat anything not prepared with our own hands would probably hinder the flow of the conversation.

“So…you went into the palace kitchens?”

Where did she get that idea? “No, into the private kitchen in my mother’s residence.”

She laughs briefly. “I see—silly for me to think otherwise.”

He reaches into the cold storage and takes out a bowl of scallops that have already been cleaned.

When he turns around to put a pot to heat, she looks at him strangely, her expression reminiscent of when she’d bitten into the mooncake and found out that the filling was made from jackfruit, her “favorite”.

Hope. She is gazing at him with a reluctant yet searing hope.

But only briefly. “How is it that you have scallops on hand, sir?” she asks, sounding—and looking—completely normal.

“I had to wait at Dragon Gate before I could proceed further. So I did a little scavenging.”

A great coral reef had sprung up at the feet of those immense concrete pillars. He’d harvested an abundance of scallops from the sandy sea floor nearby.

“Of course you did,” she murmurs. “Did Prince Five select you for the task because you can survive on your own in the wild?”

“He chose me because he thought I could best make the case for him.”

He’s had to negotiate alliances for his own survival since he was a child and is known for having rarely, if ever, put a foot wrong. Which is why he should not say anything along the lines of, “And failing that, he probably hoped that the Prima would find me aesthetically pleasing.”

But he does say it, because it would strike her as amusing.

She smiles widely. He looks away—every time she smiles, he has to restrain himself from staring.

“Our current Prima is a man who has only platonic interest in other men,” she says. “I, on the other hand, do find you extremely attractive, Prince Nineteen.”

He swallows and decants a jar of soup his cook had prepared into the pot. He has preserved his chastity all these years. Was it only to cede it to her?

Why does the thought not alarm him more? Why does it not alarm him at all?

“But I never received an answer about the depth of your acquaintance with Prince Five sans a lifetime of observation,” she says casually, almost breezily. “You mentioned that it is not true that you forgot everything. So what did you forget—and what do you remember?”

That whiplash again. He hasn’t faced inquiries concerning his memory loss in years, except occasionally from Five’s mother, when she was still alive.

The Noble Consort’s questions on whether anything came back to him he was able to answer more or less truthfully, as no erased recollections have ever tumbled back into his mind.

But Lady Sun demands an honesty that is more than invasive: It feels ruinous.

And the device in her valise could be a lie detector, even though it doesn’t resemble any he’s read about.

He sets a layered scallion flatbread to heat and adds a pinch of salt to the soup. But is his attempt at nonchalance meant to reassure his interrogator or himself?

“Mostly I forgot about my mother and my sister—my memories of them from before I turned ten have been preserved, but nothing since,” he manages slowly.

Sometimes a wound no longer hurts if you leave it alone, but the merest collision lets you know, with a stab of pain, that it’s still open, still raw.

“Of the other people in my life, I did not forget anywhere near as much. Specifically, with regard to my brother Five, I only forgot a few meetings we had in the months before my incident—and one meeting from some years before that.”

“How do you know?”

The memory still chills him. He exhales.

“I regained consciousness earlier than I let on and overheard conversations between two of my father’s eunuchs who were in the hospital room with me.

It became clear immediately that the Potentate was extremely displeased at the disappearance of his concubine and daughter, however little thought he gave them when they still lived in his palace.

He ordered everything they’d left behind burned and ransacked my place outside the palace, too.

The eunuchs wondered if I had somehow managed to free them from their tracking devices, the removal of which should have killed them.

“If I could have done anything to aid in their escape, I would have. But I didn’t know what I’d done—or even what I could have done. All I knew was that, according to the whispering eunuchs, I’d taken these two women somewhere and lost them on my watch.”

He flips the flatbread. She now stands on the other side of the transparent splatter guard that separates the galley from the rest of the lounging area.

Her dress fastens down the front in a row of mother-of-pearl buttons.

Small buttons, not exactly round, but scalloped like flowers—even when he’s trying not to look at her, she is all he sees.

“So you decided that a claim of general amnesia was your best bet?”

“A claim of complete ignorance and bewilderment, while suggesting, without ever doing so overtly, that I had been ambushed by the women I trusted the most. That they managed to free themselves from their trackers, then attacked me when I wouldn’t let them leave.”

Did his father ever believe him? Hard to say. But some of his brothers taunted him, telling him that if he was stupid enough to trust women then he deserved his fate.

“Anyway, while I was still in the hospital, Five came to see me. I asked him how we knew each other, and most of what he said accorded with my own memories. At the time, the exception that stood out the most was a meeting he mentioned from ten, eleven years prior. He said I’d made myself a tri-hull and invited him for a trial run, and the tri-hull sailed so fast he was terrified and refused to ever get on it again.

That was apparently the same vessel that was destroyed when I lost my mother and sister—I don’t recall it at all. ”

She toys with the top button on her dress. “Are you going to say nothing of those years of hard labor you had to endure as punishment for losing your womenfolk?”

He lowers the heat on the soup that has come to a boil and places another round of flatbread in the pan to toast, trying not to betray his agitation.

Agitation—and a strange…no, not pleasure, but a stinging, bruising gratification at her scalpel-like interest. “Is that relevant to my eligibility to advocate for Five?”