Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

BEFORE

Power has a certain taste to it. A hot, golden tang slinking down the throat and trailing smoke in its wake, like seared meat or aged liquor. Something to settle the body, soothe the heart. It is the answer to every type of hunger, an addictive luxury that requires little else in accompaniment, some salve solely made to take up every bit of space it can find.

Power also has a certain taste coming back up. And Anton Makusa can’t say he finds it very pleasant at all.

He takes a shaky breath, fighting to keep his stomach under control. The guards inside the throne room peer through the gold-thread curtains, calling in concern, but Anton wipes his mouth and waves them off. His vision flickers and doubles. His skin screams with raw misery, his qi at once too big for his body and too ill-fitting in its mold. The last minute of his existence tries to escape from understanding. He’s struggling beyond belief to hold on to consciousness, to cling to life. Memories that are both his own and not flash before his eyes. He looks at his hands, and the image lurches. He’s washing blood off. Writing with old ink.

Then, in a snap, the pain eases. Though the nausea remains, his body stands intact. His surroundings register again. One guard steps onto the balcony to ask if he would like assistance to come inside now, and Anton throws his gaze out over the ledge in disbelief.

He doesn’t entirely know how he’s done it, but he has. The guard prompts him again, her eyes flickering to the sludge on the balcony floor where Anton emptied his stomach, and Anton raises a hand to stop her, barely holding down another shudder. Maybe he’s only squeamish over the gruesome image below. Princess Calla Tuoleimi—player Fifty-Seven—has just been declared the victor of the king’s annual games, having slaughtered her final opponent. The loudspeaker continues bellowing the results: A decisive battle… the Juedou draws to a close… the final challenger is dead… and even if Anton shuts his eyes, he can’t keep the images out. His last moments in the arena are trying to coalesce with August’s most recent memories: Calla, luring him close; the council, meeting late at night in the war room; Calla, her forehead resting upon his shoulder; a dove, pressed into the wax seal of an envelope before the paper is torn open; Calla, Calla, Calla —

“I am perfectly fine,” Anton says. The voice is foreign. The voice is entirely familiar. His eyes open, and the world stabilizes. His previous body is facedown on the arena ground. Bleeding, still, even though player Eighty-Six is dead. “Pardon me. This is rather repugnant.”

Asking for any pardon is enough to make the guard uncomfortable, and she steps back into the throne room obediently. Anton doesn’t leave the balcony—not yet. He overlooks the arena, takes in the thousands upon thousands pressed tight against the rope barriers. When his hands curl around the railing, his knuckles are as smooth as marble, silver rings carving dents into his long fingers.

An armory shield hangs from the stone walls of the balcony. His mere conscious existence here proves that he’s succeeded in his escape, and without notice among endless witnesses. Though he knows what he has done, he’s still stupefied when he leans in, when the metal of the shield reflects back a shock of blond hair, combed and ordered under a circlet. This is August Shenzhi’s face. August Shenzhi’s body. The only difference is his black eyes, catching light with the hint of purple instead of blue. Anton’s eyes.

Delirium sets in. A bubble of laughter pushes out, and Anton hardly realizes he’s the one laughing until his reflection moves too— it’s you making that sound. No one else stands on the throne room balcony. It’s you wearing these silk clothes, wearing the prince himself.

There’s an incredible distance between where he stood in the arena and where August was watching. Yet he jumped, without having August in his sights first, without giving off that obvious flare of light. No evidence remains to show what he has done except for the pool of blood in the middle of the arena, noxious with the qi he drew from his previous body to fuel his move as he was dying. Amateur experimentation.

Anton clutches his hands behind his back. August’s sleeves whisper with the movement, the light blue unstained and perfectly unmarred. No one below cares to watch him too closely in this moment, especially not while Calla is being led out by the guards, directed forward into the Palace of Union. He eyes her coldly, waits for a show of regret or some sign that killing him has affected her, but she disappears from view without looking back, her gait steady.

He dared to believe this would have ended differently, but that was his mistake. He may get caught in the next few minutes; he may get away with this forever. Neither one is more likely than the other when such an invasive phenomenon has been performed before, and as soon as Calla strikes, that throne will be his. This should have been impossible. And yet.

And yet.

“You’re weak,” Anton says out loud. He lifts his arm, waving goodbye to the arena audience, and half of them wave back instantly, summoned to attention by the gesture. He hadn’t thought anyone would notice, but of course they do. A jolt runs down his spine, so strong that he has half a mind to check for a wound. He’s comprehending, slowly, the full implication of what he’s achieved. Royal and noble bloodlines have been preserved over the centuries with the belief that their lineage holds favor with the old gods. August Shenzhi was born August Avia. As much as he’s tried to escape it, he can’t change that.

“Please, please, hold your applause,” Anton whispers under his breath, turning on his heel. The words are reminiscent of a different life he lived long ago. This time around, there really is applause to accompany his exit: innumerable eyes upon his gestures and the knowledge that anything he proclaims upon the balcony will be heralded as law. He straightens his shoulders, smooths down his robes. The guards startle when he pushes back into the throne room, the curtains billowing to either side of the door. Though they hasten forward, Anton says nothing—not yet. He had little reason to enter the throne room back when this was the Palace of Earth and he resided in the other wing. The walls shimmer velvet red. Gold pillars prop up the high ceiling, their details carved with renderings of Talin’s old gods. While he walks, slowly taking in his unfamiliar surroundings, his shoes sink into the deep green carpet threads, plush and soft. A smarter man would ask for the vault to be opened, gather whatever he can, and run before the opportunity slips by.

“The war room,” he declares instead. “Let’s go.”

The royal guards must find the request strange. One steps forward—orange eyes, not a Weisanna—and says, “Highness, you’re expected at the banquet. It will begin soon.”

“I know.” Something smells different about the palace, he decides. It’s been years since he was last inside, but his memory of the rest of its layout hasn’t faltered. Exile is lonely. Unforgiving. There was little to do during his quieter nights, and he turned to imagining these rooms in his mind, pretending he had clusters of priceless objects at his disposal rather than another sparse meal of a single fried egg when he woke in the morning.

“Your Highness?”

Anton is already on the move despite the guard, hurrying the few steps down and taking care not to trip when the flooring turns uneven. He passes the nobles at the door and pushes through the flurry of activity, paying no heed to the surprised greetings, the double takes. It’s late. There must have been lurkers waiting to walk with him to the banquet, wishing to gain favor. Now they blink after him striding in the opposite direction, and the royal guards are quick to scatter the waiting palace nobles promising, His Highness will be with you shortly if you could please make your way…

Anton doesn’t stop.

Outside the entrance to the war room, two guards step aside quickly upon sighting him. He asks them to stay there, alongside the royal guards who have followed him from the throne room, and he closes the door after himself before any of them can respond. There’s cheering, somewhere in the distance. The crowds will be dispersing after the arena battle, drifting closer to the palace, hoping to catch sight of the banquet or receive scraps afterward.

Anton bites down hard on his teeth, marching straight for the filing cabinets pressed to the far wall. Talin’s borders have been at peace for the past century, protecting the kingdom within from conflict, but the war room is well used, treated as the center of palace affairs. His fingers skate along the ornate table to the left, brushing across the rough surface and jostling the teacups that haven’t yet been cleared. He opens the first filing drawer he sees, yanking all the way until its latch makes a metallic clang to signal it cannot be pulled any farther. A flurry of dust bursts upward when he fingers through the tabs, reading each one quickly. Theft, Assault, Property Violation, Weapons Use, Protective Orders…

He slams the first drawer closed. Only petty charges within San-Er. Not what he’s looking for. He makes a wider glance around the room, considering where the information he needs would be stored. Instead of screens and machines, the war room is populated with shelves of thick books. The walls are covered in maps with curling edges, browning from age. Someone has drawn the window’s heavy curtains partway closed, but there’s enough of a gap left to allow in the electric light from outside and illuminate his way.

Anton tries the next cabinet. Here, the tabs are separating different provinces of Talin, ordered by proximity to the capital. Eigi, Dacia, Cirea, Yingu, Pashe, Daol…

He closes this one too. Tugs open the next. Employee positions in the palace. Next. Property purchases under the council.

“Where is it?” Anton mutters. He still tastes acid on his tongue.

When he crouches down to open a drawer situated between two overgrown potted plants and no taller than his knee, he finally finds tabs ordered by aristocratic last names. Makusa waits near the back, a file thicker than all the rest.

He stares. A lock of hair falls into his eyes—gold and fine, like sunshine twisted into spun silk. He pushes it out of the way, barely resisting the urge to tear the piece right out of his scalp.

“Your Highness?” A guard is knocking on the door. “Would you like any assistance?”

“No,” Anton replies shortly. It’s not as though August would have answered any more kindly, been any more considerate. The evidence of that is before him, within the file he takes into his hand.

“I’d help if I could,” August had said, when this place was still the Palace of Earth, when Anton practically lived in the training halls, vowing revenge on the attackers who killed his parents. “If there was any resource in the palace I could use, I would. But the palace knows so little. These people are entirely outside of our control.”

Anton flips through the pages in the file. He scans past the family tree, past the different reports that note when each of his relatives was born and when they died, past the graphs showing the other noble families who were connected to the Makusas by blood.

On the last sheet of the family logs, he finally finds what he’s been looking for.

Anton Makusa—storage room 345, north wing.

After Otta fell sick and only Anton remained to suffer the consequences of their crime, the palace took his birth body as punishment. True exile, flung into the cities without any ties to his former life. He has always known that they stashed his body somewhere in the Palace of Union; he just never knew where. The location was purposefully kept secret to prevent Anton from trying to get it back, and the councilmember who delivered the fateful verdict of his penance promised that the palace would take care of his body, that they might return it one day if he served his exile without trouble. He’s almost surprised that they’ve held to their word. The palace puts up a front of valuing nobility—by their own law, the bodies of aristocratic bloodlines should never be destroyed—yet he suspected they would discard his after a few years, merely because they could. Every other Makusa was gone. Anton was the last one left until the palace could sweep this entire file under the carpet, blow away the imprint of dust, and pretend none of them ever existed. How tidy, how neat.

“Can’t you ask Kasa to send people in?” Anton asked. “Come on, August, he’s the king . He has complete reign over Kelitu. He can order palace guards to investigate. Someone in that province must know who did this.”

August was always the reasonable one, Anton the one whose voice got too loud with theatrics. Adults in the palace liked to listen to August.

“He’s tried,” August said levelly. In all the years they remained friends, Anton never could distinguish August’s tells between lie and truth. What other choice was there than to believe him each time? “Trust me. They’ve found nothing.”

Anton rises, brings the file to the desk in the middle of the war room, and lays it down so he can spread out the various sections. The Makusas come from a long history, but not any longer than the rest of the nobility, not enough to justify this much information kept under guard. He pushes away the atlas on his left and the paperweight shaped as an anvil on his right. Section after section, the desk becomes covered with loose paper, scattered with every document Anton reads as he grows more and more confused by the contents.

Copies of his parents’ administrative letters in Kelitu. Snapshots of rural villages and tax reports with boxes circled in red. When Anton peels apart two inventory logs that have become stuck together over time, a small photograph falls out, and he sees himself as an infant in his birth body, staring straight at the camera so that they could put his face into the kingdom registry alongside his identity number.

He can’t fathom why any of this would be collected. Not until he reaches the end and his eyes land on a missive. Digitally typed, then stamped with King Kasa’s personal sign-off.

I will keep this short. While your loyalty should belong with your councilmember, there has come undeniable evidence that Fen Makusa is a revolutionary insurgent. Where ambitions of usurping the throne usually call for arrest and a quick execution, his harm extends much further: he plots for the utter collapse of the kingdom. There is no scenario where this can be allowed to spread. For the sake of your province, and the sake of your people, see to it that the Makusas are eradicated in a manner that will not radicalize their followers. The palace cannot be associated with this punishment.

Though Anton continues reading onward, the rest of the missive stops registering past that line. He returns to the start, then again, and again. Finally, when it seems nothing more will change his understanding, his hands lash out of their own volition, flinging the file off the table and sending documents skittering across the floor.

He inhales shortly. Exhales, but can barely get the breath out of his lungs. He’s certain, in that first moment of panic, that August is trying to kick him out. When he’s still heaving a few minutes later, he holds his breath in a snap decision, and his body responds accordingly. He’s doing this to himself. The only harm to him right now comes from the fact that he can’t keep himself under control. His panic shifts into red-hot rage. It finds its targets in front of him, within him.

His parents are dead because of King Kasa, not because they were the target of some random rural attack. After all these years wondering why his family had suffered something so awful, why his sisters needed to die as collateral, it turns out that the reason was because the palace had ordered it.

Another knock comes on the door. “Highness? What is that noise?”

“Come in,” Anton says. “Just one of you.”

A guard pokes her head through. Her silver eyes take in the papers littered on the floor, then flicker up. “Yes, Your Highness?”

“Who was the last person who put anything away in this room?” Anton gestures around him. “It’s a mess.”

The Weisanna shifts on her feet. She hesitates, and Anton knows she’ll only confirm what he suspects. What he knows, given the guards posted outside the war room.

“Only you and His Majesty are allowed in here outside of council meetings. I garner it must have been the wind if a window was left open for air.”

It’s a tactful excuse that she has come up with on the spot. What she must be thinking is: Your Highness, it could only have been you who made the mess.

Anton glances at the name emblazoned on the front of his family file, which is lying askew by one of the potted plants now. He wants to tear the label off. Slap it elsewhere, as if that might change the fact that this heinous massacre happened to his family instead of someone else’s. A revolutionary insurgent. That’s preposterous. He never heard his parents say anything close to revolutionary. They were palace nobles… why would they have wanted to change that?

“No, it wasn’t the wind,” Anton says plainly. “Wasn’t I the last person to go through these cabinets? I’m the one who keeps this information for King Kasa when he can’t keep up with what happens in his own kingdom.”

The guard flinches slightly, trying to gauge if this is some sort of test. It doesn’t matter. Anton knows: there’s no file in this place that has gone unread under August’s watch. The crown prince takes it upon himself to stay informed using what he has access to. And there was plenty of time between August acquiring access to these rooms and Anton being exiled from the palace.

“Ah, never mind,” Anton says, saving the increasingly anxious Weisanna from a response. He scoops up the file, then the papers, gathering them haphazardly before tucking them beneath his arm. “Make sure no one else comes in here.”

“Yes, Highness—”

He strides past her, through the door. Farther down the hallway, Anton doesn’t take the turn that’ll lead him toward the banquet hall. He proceeds in the direction of August’s bedroom, his polished shoes beating a war drum underfoot. Perhaps Calla has made her strike at the banquet already. King Kasa will die, and then Calla will be free to luxuriate in the only matter she truly cared about.

“Prince August.” Someone hurries to catch up to him. Another guard. “Your presence is strongly requested at the banquet.”

“No, that’s okay,” Anton replies.

Confusion dampens the air, a beat taken where the guard is perhaps wondering whether he was misheard. Anton is expecting rebuttal—of course there should be rebuttal. This is the Palace of Union. Affairs can’t be derailed simply because he doesn’t wish to tend to them.

But August Shenzhi is the heir to the throne, not some noble who has to capture favor. The guard nods in understanding, and Anton is free to continue onward without argument. He pivots left, then into August’s anteroom.

“You can go.”

The guards stationed outside August’s quarters are exclusively composed of Weisannas. No Galipei, so he must be at the banquet, waiting for his charge’s arrival.

“All of you,” Anton prompts. He waves vigorously toward the door.

It takes a few seconds more, but the Weisannas nod and step out, entering the hall. Only then can Anton toss his file onto the desk. Only then does he immediately follow the movement by slamming his fist against the paper too, a zip of pain spiriting down his arm.

See to it that the Makusas are eradicated.

That was all it had taken. A single command, and life as Anton knew it had been decimated. Did King Kasa invent the excuse because his father upset him over some arbitrary matter in a council meeting? Revolutionaries . It is laughable, knowing their lineage. Yet the suspicion worms its way into his mind, wiggles free the faint impressions he has of his childhood. He remembers little of their trips out to the provinces, but they were frequent. There’s a possibility that this was true, but still —

A drum beats throughout the palace, declaring the banquet coming to either a start or an end. Shouting echoes through the halls, either in ecstasy or horror. When Anton glares up, the mirror upon the wall catches his face, reflecting his expression. August dresses so regally, his hair combed neat and his posture straight as a needle. Anton’s sneer turns his appearance off-kilter. He has the desire to pick up the decorative vase on the table and hurl it at the mirror, so he does. The glass shatters. A few jagged pieces fall off, littering the carpet.

“You knew what he took from me,” Anton says to August. August’s mouth moves with each of his words. A mockery, even now. “You let him get away with it.”

August doesn’t have the decency to look remorseful. The broken mirror cuts away parts of his cheek, carves into his forehead, distorts his mouth, yet Anton can find no scenario where his former friend might have apologized. The golden crown prince, only working to procure the throne he desired.

Fine. Fine. If King Kasa wanted to brand the Makusas as revolutionaries, then that is the inheritance Anton will accept. He’ll finish what they say his parents started.

And then, Calla Tuoleimi is going to answer for what she did too.