Blood of Tyrants. Naomi Novik

deny it had done splendidly to ease his aches.

      When ushered into the office this time, he was able to fold himself down in a better imitation of what was evidently the polite kneeling posture; his legs still complained of the position, but he was not so weak he was at every moment in danger of tipping over and having to reach out a hand to steady himself awkwardly against the floor with his fingertips.

      Kaneko was frowning, however: Laurence’s sword lay on the desk before him, unsheathed, and in the sunlight coming through the open window looked even more splendid than Laurence had recalled: jewels gleamed from the dragon’s-head of the hilt, and the blade shone. His fingers itched to hold it again. “Where did you have this from?” Kaneko asked, touching the hilt.

      Laurence could not bring himself to make the fantastic if honest answer that he did not recall: in any event, he did not feel himself compelled to answer such a question, personal and unjustified. “Are you proposing, sir,” he said, “that I have stolen it? The sword is mine, as are the coat, the shirt, and the trousers you found upon me; I am sorry to be equally unable to provide you with the bills of sale for any of them, if you should require the same to restore them to me.”

      Kaneko hesitated. “This is a very fine blade,” he said, finally.

      He seemed to want something more, but Laurence could not provide it. “Yes,” he said, unyielding, as he could not be otherwise. “I am a serving-officer of His Majesty’s Navy, sir; I rely upon my sword.”

      He waited; he did not entirely understand what concerned Kaneko so about the blade. Finally, Kaneko said bluntly, “It is of Chinese make,” and Laurence inwardly flinched not with surprise, but with the absence of surprise: he realized he knew as much, and had not even thought it strange, before.

      “I have another of Spanish,” Laurence said, swallowing his confusion, “and one of Prussian. Do you mean to keep it?”

      Junichiro twitched as if with indignation, but Kaneko did not answer, only looking down still at the sword: Laurence had an impression he was dissatisfied with the answer, but why he should have cared where the sword had come from, Laurence could not say. “If not,” he added, “I would be glad for its return.”

      “Ah,” Kaneko said, and tapped his fingers once upon the desk, before stilling his hand. “The bakufu has directed that only a samurai may bear a long sword.”

      “If that is, as I suppose, a knight,” Laurence said, “I am the third son of the Earl of Allendale and, as I have already said, a ship’s captain: I must consider both my birth and my rank adequate to my arms by any reasonable standard. I will speak plainly, sir: if you mean to pillage me, I should be hard-put to prevent you under the circumstances, but I will thank you not to dress it up with justifications as ungentlemanly as they are unwarranted.”

      “How dare you speak so to my master?” Junichiro flared up, half-rising on his knees. “You should have died, but for his intervention—”

      “I did not request your aid,” Laurence said flatly, to Kaneko rather than to his squire, “and should rather have had none of it than a pretense at the same: I consider it no favor to be fed and clothed, and held against my will. If you are making yourself my jailor, sir, I should care to know on what grounds I am to meet with such treatment. So far as I know there is peace between our nations, and a shipwreck has in every civilized society all the claims to human sympathy which any man should care to receive, himself being the victim of such a disaster.”

      “One who breaks the law may desire sympathy and yet not deserve it!” Junichiro said, and then subsided: Kaneko had raised his hand a very little.

      “If a man may break the laws of your nation merely by being hurled unwillingly upon your shore,” Laurence said dryly, “then they seek to constrain not the will of man, but of God.”

      “Enough, Junichiro,” Kaneko said quietly, when the young man would have answered hotly again. “The objection is just: I have not been of true service to you, as I vowed to be.”

      He sat in silence a moment, looking down at his desk, while Laurence wondered at vowed: he had done nothing to earn any promise of service himself; was Kaneko under some sort of religious obligation?

      “The obligations of honor are many,” Kaneko said at last, “and often contradictory.”

      Junichiro made a violent motion of protest, a hand chopped across the air, outstretched as if he meant to catch the words even being spoken. Kaneko glanced at him, and with affection but sternly said, “Enough, Junichiro.”

      “Master,” Junichiro said, “not for this. Not—”

      Laurence watched them, disturbed: the young man’s voice was breaking, though Kaneko seemed as placid as a lake; he felt abruptly as awkward as though he had wandered into a stranger’s house, and found it full of family quarrels addressed only obliquely, through hints.

      “I must write to Lady Arikawa,” Kaneko said, “and offer her my apologies. I see now that I have acted wrongly: I did not have the right to undertake an oath which might expose her to charges of disobedience to the bakufu. I regret that you must endure a delay in my answer,” he added to Laurence. “It must be her will, and not mine, whether I am permitted to fulfill my vow with honor by offering you assistance, and then make her my amends.”

      “Pray Heaven she commands otherwise,” Junichiro said.

      “You will desire no such thing,” Kaneko said, sharply, and after a moment, the young man looked away and muttered, “No.”

      Kaneko nodded once, and then dismissed them both silently but pointedly by returning his attention to his writing-work as thoroughly as if he had been alone in the chamber.

      Laurence hesitated, but the decision seemed made: he followed Junichiro’s shoulders, hunched forward a little as though he still felt his master’s reproof, back through the corridors to his own chamber. “I should like my own clothing again, at least,” he said abruptly, when they had reached the small room, and he had stepped inside, “if there is no objection to that.”

      “If you wish to look like a ragged beggar, I suppose it can be accomplished,” Junichiro said, savagely, and closed the wall-panel behind him. But Laurence for the moment was as glad to be shut in with his own thoughts.

      It seemed plain that the law here was inhospitable in the extreme to foreigners, and only some kind of vow—now-regretted—had impelled Kaneko to undertake the forms of charity towards him, evidently at real risk of his own disgrace. This Lady Arikawa, whoever she might be—perhaps his liege, certainly a person of authority—would be under no similar constraint. Kaneko might wish to leave his fate to the will of this lady, and so propitiate her, but Laurence felt not the slightest inclination to accommodate his plans. If return he owed, for hospitality so unwillingly given, then removing himself from the situation was all the return he was prepared to make.

      The house was large, but hardly fortified, and he had seen only a few manservants. If the law generally barred the possession of blades, his own lack might not be an insurmountable obstacle if he could not get at the sword; although that, too, might be accomplished. The chief difficulty was not an escape, he thought, but its sequel. He could with an effort summon up the shape of the nation, on a chart, but he had never sailed this way in his life. If he had been asked to find Nagasaki by latitude and longitude, from memory, he might as well have made for Perdition straightaway.

      But with any luck he could find his way back to the coast, whence perhaps some fisherman might be prevailed upon to carry him in secret to the port: and if he had not dreamt it in his delirium, the buttons of his coat had been gold. If not, in any case there might be a few coins in a pocket, or slipped through into the lining, if his things had not been pillaged.

      They had not. Junichiro returned only a little while later with a servant trailing him, who set down on the floor just inside the room the bundle of clothing. And when the door had closed, and Laurence held the salt-stained and ruined clothes, he found the buttons, still firmly sewn on, were gold; and so, too, were the long narrow bars athwart