Page 87 of The Poet Empress
“I’m sorry for how I treated you in the mountains, too. For being mad at you. For telling you to go away. For thinking you were weak because you couldn’t raise a steel sword, because you couldn’t fight the way I could, when you were brilliant in so many other ways. I’m sorry for shouting at you when you told Doctor Shu about my condition, when you were only trying to keep me safe.”
Now he was shaking all over.
“And I’m sorry…” Maro could barely get the words out now. “I’m sorry for hitting you. Even though I knew that it would break us, that it would make me no better than everyone else, that it would scare you away from me forever. I have regretted it for years and years, and it hurts every time I think about it, and if I could do my whole life over it would be the first thing I changed.”
The knives around Terren shivered and fell, clattering onto the bridge. He suddenly looked very fragile, the way he had when he was still tiny.
“And because of that, I wasn’t there for you afterwards,” Maro whispered. This part was not planned, but the words wanted out anyway. They forced themselves—dragging, stuttering, limping—out of his throat. “After we were separated in the mountains, I didn’t protect you like I should have. I… think I know what happened to you in Tieza. You fell off a tree, didn’t you? A big one, bigger than either of us had ever seen, and I never asked you to show me, and I’m more sorry than I can express in words.”
Terren was crying now. Two big tears dribbled from his cheek to his chin. “Maro, turn me… Turn…”
“Turn you?” Maro prompted gently.
The words came out with a heaving sob. “Turn me into a fish.”
Beside them in the blossom-covered water, the carp played joyfully, knowing nothing.
“Or a flower.” All the azalea bushes lining the garden, their plumage vibrant even through the pale mist. “Or a peach tree. You’re good at spells, aren’t you?” His voice was as brittle as a crumbled leaf. “If you’re really sorry, then turn me into something nice.”
“Terren,” Maro said softly. He felt close to tears himself. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He wasn’t supposed to—
“Or, at the very least, turn me little again.” He wiped his eyes with a sleeve, and stared at the plate of mung bean cakes. “Little enough that all I wanted to reach for was the banquet table. When all I knew to desire was a sweet cake. And even if everyone punished me, or yelled at me, or hated me, at least back then I didn’t know why. If you can’t turn me into a fish, at least turn me little.”
The younger boy lifted one of the flower-shaped cakes and cupped it in both hands, preciously, like it was a beautiful snowflake that could melt at a moment’s notice. For a long while, he stayed hunched over it, tears dripping onto the bridge as he cried quietly. Then, with shaking hands, he moved it to his lips.
“Terren, don’t!”
The next moment Maro wasn’t thinking anymore. His hand flew out, of its own accord, and knocked the cake out of his brother’s grasp and into the water. Then he shoved the entire plate off the bridge too.
Terren looked up, startled.
For a while, they just stared at each other, breathing fast. Then Terren let out a strangled cry and rushed to the side of the bridge. He leaned over the railing, eyes bulging as he watched the carp pick at the felled cakes with their big, circular mouths. “No,” he wailed. “What have you done?” He grabbed for a stick nearby, found one of the toy swords, and began tracing a panicked Blessing on the bridge. Two of the fish were already floating on their side. A third, spasming, was beginning to turn belly-up.
“Help me save them,” he shrieked. “Maro,help me—”
An arrow struck Terren in the leg.
Maro didn’t see it until its tip had already come out his brother’s thigh, red. Terren cried out and stumbled backwards, right as four more arrows came flying towards him, but he was paying attention this time and sent his swords darting back to deflect them. Another volley of arrows, another deflection, Terren gasping in pain as he made for shore.
“What…” Maro finally reacted enough to look up, and that was when he saw all the archers. Camouflaged amidst the peach trees, squatting on the roofs of the pavilions, perched atop the garden walls. Someone darted out of the trees and grabbed him. Mei Yu. He pulled Maro out of the way, into the shelter behind a tree, just as another volley of arrows met Terren’s knives.
“What’s going on?” Maro cried, panicked. “The plan was for me to meet himalone.” He tried to wrench himself out of his friend’s grasp, but a second set of hands found him and held him tight.
“Master Ganji was worried you might not go through with it,” Song Siming said, soothingly, as if speaking to a small child, “so he had us prepare a backup plan.”
“Don’t worry,” Mei Yu chimed. “You at least helped distract him. If you hadn’t, we would have never gotten that first shot in.”
Rustle. Swish.Maro twisted around the tree and watched in horror. The next volley was as dense as rain, far more arrows for Terren to fend off with just his swords. But he didn’t die. The arrows never reached him. Before Maro even had time to blink, Terren’s sigil had begun gleaming—bright as a bonfire in the mist—and then the arrows werechanging coursemidair, curving around him, thumping harmlessly into the blossoms and peat.
With the arrow still in his leg, he was half running, half crawling towards the garden’s gate. The archers kept shooting at him, but he redirected almost all the arrows with his sigil magic; the rest clattered off a shield, made from crude swords, that he had somehow grown out of the ground.
He was getting away.
Several fighting men were giving chase on foot now, desperate not to let the second son out of their grasp. But they were failing. Terren might be slow, he might be injured, but he had all his weapons and now he alsohad thearrows. With every flare of his sigil he sent them flying back by the dozen, and nobody could get remotely close to him, not even Master Len—especially when an arrow went into the old swordmaster’s skull and came out the other end.
Maro started to scream, but Siming shoved a cloth into his mouth. “Quiet, Your Highness. We can’t let the rest of the palace hear.”
They didn’t catch him in the end.
