Page 29 of Shadow Throne King

The ravens circled overhead, as though hoping that Naî 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 Eonaî 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 isGeneralBemishu. 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 Eonaî?” 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.

“Twoassassins. 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’tfear. 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. Somethingworsethan 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 herheris gone, and I cannot predict her anymore.” Topi jumped when Naî 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 hisexperiments.”

“What did he need?” I asked.