Unwashed bodies. Blood. Something fouler underneath.
Grand Minister Satoshi—UncleSatoshi—saw me and his face went slack with relief. “Haru-sama—Heika—thank the gods.”
The cluster of officials parted as I approached, and I saw what they’d been standing around.
A rice sack.
All this commotion for a bag of grain? It was lying on the floor like someone had dropped it by mistake. Coarse burlap painted with the Imperial mark, the kind farmers used for grain tribute, stained dark in places, tied at the top with rough hemp rope. It looked so normal—
Except rice sacks didn’t smell like death.
“What—” I started.
“It was left at the southern gate before dawn,” Satoshi said, his voice steady but his hands trembling. “The guards found it with the morning patrol. No one saw who left it, but there was a message tied to it.”
He held out a scrap of parchment. The characters were written in a child’s hand, crude and deliberate:
Your prince. Returned as promised.
The words didn’t make sense.
Your prince?
We had no princes being held hostage.
Kioshi was lost, presumed dead, but there’d been no ransom demands, no—
No.
No!
My hand moved before my mind caught up. I grabbed the hemp rope and pulled, my fingers clumsy with sudden, terrible certainty.
The knot came loose.
The sack fell open.
And Kioshi stared up at me with empty eyes.
Not Kioshi. Kioshi’s body. Kioshi’scorpse.
Mybrotherlay shoved into a rice sack like refuse. His skin was gray-white and waxen. His lips were blue. There was a hole in his chest where something—someone—had torn out his heart.
The room spun.
I heard someone make a sound, and realized distantly it was me. It was a low, primal noise that didn’t belong to a prince, didn’t belong to anything human.
Hands grabbed my shoulders. Uncle Ryuji’s voice whispered close to my ear: “Breathe, Haru. Breathe.”
But I couldn’t breathe.
The air had turned to ice in my lungs.
Kioshi.My brother. The Crown Prince. The future emperor. Crumpled in arice sacklike garbage, as though he was nothing, as though hemeant nothing.
I’d known he was dead. Deep in my heart, I’d known. And my dream had confirmed it. Still, seeing him, seeing the hollowness in his eyes that once held such joy and life . . .
“Who did this?” My voice came out broken. “Who—”
