Chapter 1

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing. – “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, John Keats

Chapter 1

Something wet is dripping down the back of Toru’s neck. His body reverberates with the roar of the audience.

The boys have come from all over, from the stern plateaus beyond the mountains and the heavy mangroves from the far south. Toru has always enjoyed watching them fight, youths with trailing moustaches and cheeks cratered with acne, teenagers with thin ropey arms, oiled brown skin shifting over muscle and dark hair drenched in sweat.

He stares up at the dais where Stuvan is rising from his seat; his crown, inlaid with pigeon-blood ruby and tourmaline, glints in the searing sunlight.

The youth who had flung Toru to the ground bows and presses his hands together as he receives the ceremonial bow from Stuvan and the marigold garland from Queen Suhasini. Stuvan speaks a few words to him that Toru cannot hear, and raises his hands. The crowd simmers into silence without being ordered to. Stuvan moves his gaze across them, deliberate but easy. His saffron robes fall without a crease, and the prayer beads around his arm glint in the sunlight.

“Today,” says Stuvan, “we celebrate the ties between our nations with sportsmanship and goodwill. I present to you the champion of the day, who hails from our great neighbour, Nagashini.”

Toru stops listening. It had been him receiving the garland and bow last year – the first year he had been permitted to compete. Stuvan had given a speech to the audience about Bishinya, and its glorious history, and the gods’ blessings in the form of Toru’s victory. Toru hardly ever uses bows – spears are clearly the superior weapon – but that bow, he hung on the wall across from his bed, so he could look at it before extinguishing the lamps at night.

The victor faces the audience – still not turning his back to Stuvan – and gives a cheeky wave that Toru would be too awkward to pull off. The crowd roars, clapping and whistling and throwing flowers; he catches a coronet of jasmine and brings it to his nose, breathing deep, before laughing and twirling it around his finger. Stuvan watches on with an indulgent smile that Toru knows is an act; his eyes fall everywhere except on Toru. An anemone lands at Toru’s feet and he stares at it blankly.

For weeks, they had planned. Workers had built audience stands with smooth dark wood and woven canopies of dyed cloth. The cooks had prepared cakes glistening delicately with butter, meat tender enough to melt off the bone, pearly white rice with whole quail eggs hidden in their depths. “Only possible because of the hunting restriction,” Stuvan had muttered, in response to Toru’s dinner-plate eyes. Apparently, some of the courtiers had complained that game was growing scarce again in the mountains, so Stuvan had taken swift action against overzealous locals.

Toru had piped up, shyly, “Could we serve crystallised apricot as well?” and Stuvan had smiled and replied, “For the brightest jewel in my crown? Anything.”

Toru’s cheeks had heated up. For a king to take in some dirty orphaned infant and give him a name, a title, and a purpose – such things were worth more than all the gold of every kingdom in the world. It is the least Toru can do to be worthy. He had said so, and Stuvan had laughed and cupped his cheeks.

After the award ceremony, Toru foregoes visiting the physicians – the idea of having his face bared to people any longer is like a nail through his foot. Instead, he steals away to the stream down the side of the hill and scrubs the crusted blood and sweat off himself, and makes himself bear the icy teeth of the water. He remains still, moored in the stream, as the world around him creaks and turns. The smell of wildflowers descends upon him. A starling scrapes its beak against a branch. In a distant way he knows that people are going about their day: hollow-eyed men in shapeless beige tunics placing water chestnuts on weighing scales, women with grim grey faces sawing away at limbs not worth saving, girls on their bellies kicking their legs and doodling in the soft earth when they should be watching their goats. He cuts slivers of comfort from these thoughts. They do not yet know of his shame. He has a day or two before the town realises its prince is unworthy of their king’s generosity.

He stands up and the water closes around his calves. Pale sour-cherry blossoms join the drift – the last of the season. A petal sticks against his birthmark, a dark crescent smudge on the inside of his left ankle; as a child he would try to scrub it off, thinking it dirt or ink. He has been told, ever and again, that it is a mark of great fortune.

The walk back to the palace is a slow and wading thing. He ignores the furtive stares he gets from people passing him by.

For rulers and saints, it is customary to not speak while eating, but even so, at the evening meal, Stuvan’s silence is filed to a steel point. Toru can only choke down a few bites. Suhasini distances herself from the atmosphere, smiling at Toru and Stuvan, and at the end of the meal she compliments the stewed deer and tells the servants to cook it again tomorrow. Toru shrinks into himself, embarrassed that she feels the need to be discreet, that she considers him weak.

When she gets up to leave, Stuvan calls Toru into his chamber. Toru would have gone to his own room, where he would have comforted himself playing the veena; he has been playing it for as long as he’s had memories. The music, his fingers on the strings – these are the closest things he has to friends.

He stands at attention in Stuvan’s chamber, not daring to wipe his sweaty hands on his pants.

“How old are you, Tarulatha?” Stuvan asks from his seat on the plush floor cushion. “Tarulatha” is worse than anything else he could have said. He has rarely called Toru that. To Stuvan, it is a formality, something that is merely scratched onto records because Suhasini insists on it; he says that he can feel its velvet, that he can smell the perfume on it. Toru never paid it much mind; after so long, “Toru” is just who he is.

Stuvan knows how old Toru is, but Toru replies anyway. “Fourteen.” He resists the urge to add “sir”; Stuvan had forbidden it.

Stuvan hums. He has changed out of his evening clothes into wispy wrinkled sleeping robes. His feet are bare and vulnerable. And yet Toru maintains a wide berth; if he goes any closer, Stuvan’s gaze might sear the skin off his cheeks. “How old was Daityakarya when he slew the mountain demon?”

Toru burns. “Fifteen.” Daityakarya is a favourite story of Stuvan’s – he would tell it to Toru often when he was a child, with Toru propped on his knee. A young Bishinyan prince, with a bloodline traced to the founding queen, rising effortlessly above the princes of other lands to be granted godhood.

Stuvan stands up and comes to Toru. Stuvan has never struck him, but there is something in his face that makes Toru brace himself. Stuvan cups his chin, raises it. Toru cannot breathe. Darkness swims at the edges of his vision. “Look me in the eye,” says Stuvan.

Toru has gone a full week without food for a fast. He has fought in a wrestling match with two broken fingers and won. He has walked barefoot up a hillside and almost lost his toes to frostbite. But looking up right now is the hardest thing he has ever done.

“Do you know why I raised you as my son instead of leaving you to waste away in that orphanage, destined to the fate of a goatherd or street sweeper?”

Toru shakes his head. He has wondered, but has never asked for fear of overstepping. He had assumed it was from that strange behaviour which tends to occur in periods of grief and is easily forgiven; two miscarriages and a stillborn is a sufficient reason to grieve, even for a king.

“It was not just because the queen and I were not blessed with an heir,” Stuvan says, as if guessing Toru’s thoughts. “The priests were reading the sky, and they determined there was a good omen; something fortunate would happen that day.” He cracks his knuckles and Toru winces. “I knew that was you. I saw you outside the orphanage, in the matron’s arms, and there was hardly any meat on your bones, and you were not crying like the other infants; you just looked at me, and you were serious, and brave, and I knew you were not just a child some wretched woman had abandoned, but a gift sent by the gods – someone with the purest Bishinyan blood.”

There must be merit to this belief; the priests’ claims cannot be disputed. Even if Toru wanted to, there is also the fact that Stuvan is a pious man. Every morning, before the sun rises, he recites the most difficult mantras from the scriptures from memory; he never takes alcohol; he follows advice from the sages without question. Such people do not take kindly to disagreements about their interpretations.

Toru should apologise, but he can’t figure out how – his disgrace feels too big, a yawning mouth that can swallow him whole. How do you fit an apology around that?

Stuvan continues. “Why else would I have found you right when I wished so ardently for a child?” He sets a heavy hand on Toru’s shoulder. Squeezes. Toru’s bones creak. “You are a symbol of this land. Its long and illustrious past. Its great and merciful gods.”

Toru opens his mouth to speak, but something sticks in his throat.

“Have I failed you in some way? Is it my fault that you were dishonoured today, before our own people? If it is, name my shortcoming, and I will do anything to amend it.” He kneels, holding Toru’s hands, and something in Toru breaks in half.

He finds his voice. “No, I – it was my fault. Perhaps I – at practice, maybe…” He grits his teeth, squeezes his eyes shut. Ignores the wetness on his face, the salt in his mouth. “I will not fail you again.” He goes to his knees; Stuvan should not be looking up at him. No more syrup-slow afternoons, he tells himself. No more pottery making. No more long idle games of dice in the balconies. “This I swear.”

“One does not swear lightly,” says Stuvan.

“Yet I do. No matter the circumstances, I will not fail you.”

“Then rise, Toru, with my blessing.” He keeps his hold on Toru’s hands as they stand up. His face has shed its frost. He embraces him, and Toru is lost in the scent of his robes, incense and sandalwood and new leather. Toru is fine. He is fine.

He has only to not fail again.

The next morning Toru is at the training grounds before Master Vihana is. When she arrives she raises her eyebrows at him, in a pitying way. He tells her what he wants, and she looks like she would have shrugged, if he weren’t the prince. She says she hopes he knows she will not be responsible for his injuries. Toru nods. In an hour his hands are shaking. In two he is bent over the bushes, emptying his stomach, with tears squeezing from his eyes. In three he is blinking awake from a faint.

“Break,” his master announces, as Stuvan enters the grounds. Toru, ashamed at having fainted, struggles to his knees and wishes Stuvan had come even a few moments later.

Stuvan looks at Toru, hunched on the ground with a pallid face and livid bruised ribs, and says that his son is becoming a man. He tells Master Vihana, with excitement, that he will be discontinuing Toru’s lessons in music and mathematics and literature, that she will have more time with him.

Toru watches the sweat from his face drip into the grass, and thinks of his veena. It will only distract him if it keeps sitting there in his chamber, calling to him, and so, before the midday meal, he takes it to the music room and places it in a corner. Something like grief fills him, which is foolish, because there is nothing to grieve. That night he lies awake in bed, pressing his tender bruises and watching the clouds sail amid a sea of cold bright stars through a window.