The Game of 100 Candles by Marie Brennan

Author:Marie Brennan [Brennan, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Media Tie-In, Fantasy, Epic, Historical, General
ISBN: 9781839082153
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Ryōtora had barely made it back to a part of the palace grounds where he felt safe when Tanshu raced into view, snow flying from his paws.

His first thought was that the dog was trying to warn him of pursuers, and he looked frantically around for a place to hide. But Tanshu had come from the other direction, and Ryōtora didn’t think there was any way the guards at the pavilion could have alerted someone in the palace proper to intercept him.

Tanshu skidded to a halt and barked once. Then he pivoted to go back the way he’d come, looking over his shoulder, and barked again. When Ryōtora still stood, mute and uncomprehending, the dog resorted to grabbing a sleeve-end in his teeth and dragging.

He wants me to follow him. Ryōtora didn’t know why, but he trusted Tanshu, and so he went.

Across a bridge spanning a frozen pond, through an open gate in a garden wall – and then Ryōtora stopped again, because now he knew why Tanshu had come for him.

At sufficient distance, Sekken’s behavior might have been mistaken for normal: one arm slung over his sister in a display of brotherly camaraderie. From behind, the extent to which she was holding him up might have been mistaken for assistance offered to a man with an injured foot. But seeing Sekken’s face, gray with exhaustion, Ryōtora knew it was nothing of the sort.

Ginshō’s step hitched at the sight of Ryōtora, unbalancing Sekken enough that the man began to slip. Ryōtora leapt forward to help catch him, taking Sekken’s other arm over his own shoulders. “What happened? Did he fall asleep? Where did you find him?”

She cursed with all the earthy inventiveness of a soldier, trying to reclaim her brother’s weight entirely for herself. “It’s not that; it’s just one of his usual–”

The words cut off, but not soon enough. The warmth brought on by Ryōtora’s flight from the pavilion deserted him. “One of his usual what?”

He heard voices in the distance. So did Ginshō, and she cursed again. “Help me get him out of here and back to our mansion. We can talk after that.”

Ryōtora himself was better off leaving the palace, and he understood her urgency, if not its cause. He clamped his mouth shut, hitched Sekken’s arm to a better position, and began to move.

•••

They got Sekken into a litter without being spotted, though Ryōtora had to walk alongside Ginshō all the way back to their family mansion. She refused to say anything while they were in the streets, but she didn’t have to; a suspicion was already forming in Ryōtora’s gut.

One of his usual– What word would have finished that sentence? Fits? Collapses? There were plenty of options… all of which Ryōtora had used to describe himself.

That drained, enervated look on Sekken’s face, and his inability to even protest while Ryōtora and Ginshō dragged him across the grounds and stuffed him into a litter. Ryōtora wasn’t sure he’d been fully conscious by then. It was a state he recognized all too well, though in his own experience it was rarely quite so bad.

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