The constantly growing list of books I want to read. Some or all of these might end up being horrible. Presence on this list does not constitute an endorsement.

(summaries taken from book shops or wikipedia)

Imaginary Lives — by Marcel Schwob

A collection of twenty-two semi-biographical short stories by Marcel Schwob, first published in book form in 1896. Mixing known and fantastical elements, it was one of the first works in the genre of biographical fiction. The book is an acknowledged influence in Jorge Luis Borges’s book A Universal History of Infamy (1935).

War and War — by László Krasznahorkai

A 1999 novel by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. It tells the story of a Hungarian man who is obsessed with a mysterious manuscript, which he decides to travel to New York City to write down and post on the Internet. Each chapter of this novel is written in a single sentence.

Toomas Nipernaadi — by August Gailit

Toomas Nipernaadi is the eternal wanderer. Each spring he travels into the countryside, wandering from village to village. Wherever he turns up adventure and trouble ensue. He works as a rafter, impersonates a pastor, drains swampland and becomes the master of a farm. He is full of stories and tall tales and enchants the village girls he encounters who fall in love with his elusive will-of-the-wisp character before he is gone as suddenly as he arrived. There is both a fair-tale element and a darker side to Toomas Nipernaadi who is both the hero and the villain in his own story.

First published in 1928 Toomas Nipernaadi remains one of the most popular books in Estonia. It has been widely translated and made into a successful film.

The Man Who Walked Through Walls — by Marcel Aymé

The excellent Monsieur Dutilleul has always been able to pass through walls, but has never seen the point of using his gift, given the general availability of doors. One day, however, his tyrannical boss drives him to desperate, creative measures – he develops a taste for intramural travel and becomes something of a super-villain. How will the unassuming clerk adjust to a glamorous life of crime? Aymé’s genius lies in imagining the practical unfolding of bizarre and difficult situations. In each story, anarchic comedy is arrested by moments of pathos, only to descend into anarchy and hilarity once more…

On the Calculation of Volume I — by Solvej Balle

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)

The first in a series of seven short volumes making up a single long novel.

The Impersonal Adventure — by Marcel Béalu

A disorienting, de Chirico–esque detective tale of curio shops and eerie antiquities, penned in France’s postwar trauma

A traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a hotel on an island at the city’s edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and offices, he encounters a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman; his spiritual half-brother, the “professor”; and a mute beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the role he is to play as witness to tragedy.

Marshlands — by André Gide

The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing, Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader’s hand.

The Year of the Comet — by Sergei Lebedev

A story of a Russian boyhood and coming of age as the Soviet Union is on the brink of collapse. An idyllic childhood takes a sinister turn. Rumors of a serial killer haunt the neighborhood, families pack up and leave town without a word of warning, and the country begins to unravel. Policemen stand by as protesters overtake the streets, knowing that the once awe-inspiring symbols of power they wear on their helmets have become devoid of meaning. Lebedev depicts a vast empire coming apart at the seams, transforming a very public moment into something tender and personal, and writes with stunning beauty and shattering insight about childhood and the growing consciousness of a boy in the world.

Gargoyles — by Thomas Bernhard

One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.

A Dangerous Encounter — by Ernst Jünger

Gerhard, a young man on the rise, is drawn into the seedy underside of Paris, where he witnesses the murder of a young ballerina.

The story is set in Paris in the late 19th century and follows a murder investigation in a decadent aristocratic environment. The book was published in English in 1993, translated by Hilary Barr. It is the final novel of the acclaimed German writer.

The Seven Madmen — by Roberto Arlt

A weird wonder of Argentine and modern literature, The Seven Madmen begins when its hapless and hopeless hero, Erdosain, is dismissed from his job as a bill collector for embezzlement. Then his wife leaves him and things only go downhill after that. Erdosain wanders the crowded, confusing streets of Buenos Aires, thronging with immigrants almost as displaced and alienated as he is, and finds himself among a group of conspirators who are in thrall to a man known simply as the Astrologer. The Astrologer has the cure for everything that ails civilization. Unemployment will be cured by mass enslavement. (Mountains will be hollowed out and turned into factories.) Mass enslavement will be funded by industrial-scale prostitution. That scheme will be kicked off with murder. “D’you know you look like Lenin?” Erdosain asks the Astrologer. Meanwhile Erdosain struggles to determine the physical location and dimensions of the soul, this thing that is causing him so much pain.

The Mask of Dimitrios — by Eric Ambler

English crime novelist Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul when he makes the acquaintance of Turkish police inspector Colonel Haki. It is from him that he first hears of the mysterious Dimitrios — an infamous master criminal, long wanted by the law, whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Fascinated by the story, Latimer decides to retrace Dimitrios’ steps across Europe to gather material for a new book. But, as he gradually discovers more about his subject’s shadowy history, fascination tips over into obsession. And, in entering Dimitrios’ criminal underworld, Latimer realizes that his own life may be on the line.

The Memoir of an Anti-Hero — by Kornel Filipowicz

The Second World War. Poland. Our narrator has no intention of being a hero. He plans to survive this war, whatever it takes.

Meticulously he recounts his experiences: the slow unravelling of national events as well as uncomfortable personal encounters on the street, in the café, at the office, in his love affairs. He is intimate but reserved; conversational but careful; reflective but determined. As he becomes increasingly and chillingly alienated from other people, the reader is drawn into complicit acquiescence. We are forced to consider what it means to be heroic and how we ourselves would behave in the same circumstances.

Written in 1961, this is the masterpiece of one of the great Polish writers of the twentieth century.

A Dark Stranger — by Julien Gracq

A 1945 novel by the French writer Julien Gracq that tells the story of an enigmatic guest whose presence at an isolated resort hotel in Brittany strangely affects a small group of fellow vacationers.

The Disconnected — by Oğuz Atay

The Disconnected was the first book of Oguz Atay (1934-1977), and was before its time. First published in 1972 it was a cult book among younger writers, but he never saw a second printing before his premature death. Since it was reprinted in 1984 it has gone through more than 70 editions, and is widely reckoned to be the most important book in modern Turkish literature.

“My life was a game, but I wanted it to be taken seriously,” says Selim, the anti-hero of the novel. But the game has a terrible end with his suicide, and his friend Turgut’s quest to understand this is the story of the book. He meets friends whom Selim had kept separate from each other, he finds documents in a kaleidoscopic variety of styles, sometimes hugely funny, sometimes very moving, as Selim rails against the ugliness of his world whether in satire or in a howl of anguish, taking refuge in words and loneliness.

The Beast in the Shadows — by Edogawa Rampo

A reclusive writer of detective stories, Oe Shundei, has gone missing, leaving behind a suspicious trail of blackmailing letters to a former lover. Another detective novelist, his rival, is the only one who can find him. A sequence of macabre and appalling events follows.

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild — by Mathias Énard

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language. Brimming with Mathias Enard’s characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess – and a paradoxically macabre paean to life’s richness.

Independent People — by Halldór Laxness

Bjartus is a sheep farmer determined to eke a living from a blighted patch of land in rural Iceland. Nothing, not merciless weather, nor his family, will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. As she grows up, keen to make her own way in the world, Bjartus's obstinacy threatens to estrange them forever.

The Opposing Shore — by Julien Gracq

The great maritime state of Orsenna has long been lulled by settled peace and prosperity. It is three hundred years since it was actively at war with its traditional enemy two days' sail across the water, the savage land of Farghestan - a slumbering but by no means extinct volcano. The narrator of this story, Aldo, a world-weary young aristocrat, is posted to the coast of Syrtes, where the Admiralty keeps the seas constantly patrolled to defend the demarcation between the two powers still officially at war. His duties are to be the eyes and ears of the Signory, to report back any rumours of interest to the State. Goaded, however, by his mistress, Vanessa Aldobrandi, he takes a patrol boat across the boundary to within cannon-shot of the Farghestani coastal batteries. The age-old undeclared truce is no more than a boil ripe to be lanced.

The Origin of the Brunists — by Robert Coover

The Origin of the Brunists is Robert Coover's first novel. It tells the story of Giovanni Bruno, the lone survivor of a mine disaster that killed 97 of his co-workers, and the apocalyptic cult that forms around him.

Aladdin’s Problem — by Ernst Jünger

Friedrich Baroh, is beset by problems. Anarch, aspiring entrepreneur, and amateur historian of ideas, the aristocratic Baroh is also, unfortunately, a soldier in the East German army. His eventual defection to the West leads to a college degree, marriage, and a good job at his uncle's funeral parlor, but it can't dispel Baroh's other problem, a metaphysical one: each man is alone. Since, paradoxically, this is a predicament he shares with the rest of humanity, Baroh decides to capitalize on it. He embarks on a mind-boggling and macabre enterprise - the construction of Terrestra, an international, nondenominational necropolis situated in the wastelands of Turkey. Soon, secondary businesses are called for: airlines, travel agencies, anything to make Terrestra more accessible to anyone who can afford it. His scheme is so overwhelmingly successful that Baroh is forced to take on help, including the enigmatic Phares, whose unsettling presence and gnomic utterances may, at last, help Baroh to understand the depths of the problem he has set for himself. As mordantly ironic as Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Aladdin's Problem is a richly poetic meditation on the rituals of death. In its prismatic complexity, its philosophical depth, Junger's half-mythical, half-political tale becomes a caustic allegory of the conditions of modern life.

Despair — by Vladimir Nabokov

Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime—his own murder.

Hunger — by Knut Hamsun

One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression. The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation, obsession, and self-destruction, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of the abyss.

The Idiot — by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The title is an ironic reference to the central character of the novel, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young prince whose goodness, open-hearted simplicity, and guilelessness lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight. In the character of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky set himself the task of depicting “the positively good and beautiful man.” The novel examines the consequences of placing such a singular individual at the centre of the conflicts, desires, passions, and egoism of worldly society, both for the man himself and for those with whom he becomes involved.

The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Thirteen: “May came, and its first hot days immediately burst…”

• Chapter Fourteen: “The night of May ninth, Lieutenant Grange slept…”

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The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Ten: “Often, back in his room, he found on his desk the mail…”

• Chapter Eleven: “Toward the middle of January, after snowfalls…”

• Chapter Twelve: “Toward the winter’s end, Grange’s leave came up.”

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The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Eight: “The Autumn lingered on the heights of Les Falizes much longer…”

• Chapter Nine: “It was toward the end of December that the first snow fell…”

(both chapters have page breaks, so Kindle and ebook readers, watch out for those)

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To combat the (slightly troublesome) lack of chapter numbers, here are the first few words of this week’s chapters:

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• Week 1: Chapters 1 - 5

• Week 2: Chapter 6 - 7

• Week 3: Chapters 8 - 9

• Week 4: Chapters 10 - 12

• Week 5: Chapter 13 - 14

• Week 6: Chapters 15 - 18

• Week 7 (Final): Chapters 19 - 21

If this schedule is too fast or too slow, please let me know! I’ve tried to break it into manageable pieces (in my copy this breakdown represents roughly 25-35 pages per week).

In my copy, the chapters aren’t numbered, so I’ve counted them and checked it twice. I’m reasonably sure I’ve got the count correct.

Thank you again for joining The Book Club, I look forward to reading this book with you!

Without further ado:

Some notes on the historical context:

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Thank you all for the enthusiastic response to The Book Club! I’m excited to begin, but I want to give everyone sufficient time to acquire the book. Therefore:

Starting Date:

I have decided on Wednesday April 1st as the official first day of The Book Club. (I promise it isn’t an April Fool’s joke)

On that day I will send out a members-only post introducing…

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When you were a child there’s a good chance someone sat you on their knee and told you a story. Maybe this was your parents, maybe it was a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a grandfather or grandmother, or even a babysitter. The story you were told had a not-so-subtle lesson couched within. Maybe it was a tale about an ogre who eats children who lie, maybe it was fable about little girls who get gobbled up by wolves when they talk to strangers, or maybe it was a story about a brother and sister who worked together to kill a witch who wanted to eat them. Whatever the story, we all heard them growing up. Storytelling is part of the human condition, but its function is not only entertainment, it’s not even primarily entertainment. Storytelling has always been first and foremost formation.

Since time immemorial human beings have understood instinctively that we are more likely to remember the lessons we learn in stories. We also know — though we don’t know how, exactly — that we’re more likely to remember the stories that move us or that make us laugh. A good storyteller does both, sometimes at the same time. For the religious readers out there, you know well that preachers and priests do their best work when they put their Sunday lessons in stories. And parents who want to teach their children complex moral lessons know to do so by telling it to them in a story. No one has to tell us to do these things. We do it automatically.

Storytelling only becomes more sophisticated as the centuries march on. We don’t just tell stories around the hearth anymore, now we also write them down with beautiful prose and rich illustrations. We don’t just write them down, we also perform them on stages with costumes and music! We don’t just perform them on stage, now we can record them and watch the performances in our living rooms, and it all looks so real! Yet, every time a child sits on his mother’s lap, she will instinctively find herself telling him a story. When we get together with our friends, we all rifle through our week in search of a story to relate. Storytelling is arguably the most important and universal feature of humanity.

So much time has passed from those days when all we had were our spoken tales shared around the campfire that we’ve begun to forget the original purpose of storytelling. We’ve begun to forget that stories and, to use the modern parlance, media are formation. Every story we take in, in whatever medium, is forming us. Some formation is good, some is neutral, some is downright horrific.

There are two major ways that fiction — books, movies, video games, television, etc — impact, alter, form, and manipulate your mind:

• First, fiction presents to you an image of reality which you will then use to construct your perception of the real world.

• Second, fiction can subtly change you over time. This includes changing your opinions, your behavior, your tastes, your beliefs, and sometimes even your personality

And yes, even though a lot of what we picture when we hear the word “formation” is generally about children, adults are just as susceptible to alteration and formation as children. Not to speak of the fact that our modern society is becoming increasingly immature… We are all susceptible to the formation that is promised in stories. This is actually a perfectly neutral state of affairs. If a book has no possibility of changing us in some way then what’s the point of reading it? Not all change is bad, just as not all formation is good. In the video I examined at length the various ways fictional media can change and form us, both for the better and for the worse.

Let’s get this out of the way first:

Do Video Games Cause Violence?

(No, obviously, but here are some resources in case you aren’t convinced)

• In 2015 the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violent Media presented its findings that violent video games could be linked to aggression but (they later clarified) not to violent crime. This in-depth examination of that task force’s findings published in 2020 has uncovered a number of factors that call the 2015 data into question. This is a hugely unbiased analysis which refuses to present absolute conclusions but which also refuses to accept conclusions which had been reached through invalid or questionable means. For anyone who genuinely believes that video games cause violence, this is a good place to start, as it demonstrates just how shaky the foundations of that belief really are.

• A point: around the same time violent video games (and movies) fell under scrutiny the “mass media” was becoming more salaciously violent than ever before in American history. Even news reels about the WWII were less violent than a simple sixty-second segment about some guy killing his coworker and then himself in Small Town Nowhere. More than that, the average person’s daily viewing of this salaciously violent media was also hitting new highs. Most people turned on the TV as soon as they woke up, most offices had TVs in the break rooms. Most kids turned on the TV as soon as they got home from school. Most families watched TV through dinner and then after dinner and then until bed, and then sometimes while in bed until they fell asleep. And “if it bleeds, it leads” so anything violent was played on repeat on all the news channels.
  My point is that around this time people were taking in a shocking amount of real life violence. THIS more than any number of violent video games and violent movies was contributing volumes to the desensitization of people, but especially of children and youths.

• This 2007 article on the topic asks simple questions about the validity of the link between video games and real life aggression while also touching on a connected issue: why do all these histrionic video game condemners who insist that video games must have negative effects refuse to also look at the data regarding their positive effects?

  “[I]s it possible that a behavior with such a high base rate (i.e. video game playing) is useful in explaining a behavior with a very low base rate (i.e. school shootings)? Put another way, can an almost universal behavior truly predict a rare behavior?”

• This 2019 study from England conducted on just over a thousand British adolescents found no conclusive link between the playing of violent video games and increases in aggressive behavior. Moreover, this study very helpfully explains the main basis for older studies’ assumption that this was the case, that is, results derived from the general aggression model or GAM. Using this in the way in which it was used was inherently flawed to start with. And the authors explain why before presenting the results of their own own study.

• Another meta-analysis from 2020 which again found countless issues with previous analyses and also found no conclusive evidence that there was any link between video games and aggression.

  “Overall, longitudinal studies do not appear to support substantive long-term links between aggressive game content and youth aggression. Correlations between aggressive game content and youth aggression appear better explained by methodological weaknesses and researcher expectancy effects than true effects in the real world.”

Alright, enough about that.

I. Fiction and Reality

Of course you do. All reasonable adults and most reasonable children know the difference between fiction and reality. And that knowledge does change how certain media impacts our minds — such as with violent images — but beyond that, it just isn’t that simple. You can know that something is fiction, hell, it can be a cartoon and it will still have an impact of some kind on your mind. Here’s how:

I.a. Real Versus Fake (How the Perceived Realism of Fictional Violence Alters the Effects It Has on the Viewer’s Mind)

Closely related to the video game topic is this one. A big reason video game violence doesn’t increase aggression in its players is because the players do not perceive that violence to be real. It really is (more or less) that simple.

The biggest issue with a lot research on the question of violent media leading to violence in real life is that the researchers use merely “violent media” on their test subjects, very often failing to differentiate between fictional violent media and real violent media. I will absolutely concede that real life violent images and news can lead to desensitization, decreases in empathy, and even some degree of heightened aggression, almost as a trauma response to helplessly watching something horrific actually happen.

More important than that, I would say, is the salacious and glamorizing sheen that the media puts on real life violence. For instance, numerous serial killers and even school shooters have expressed that a major contributing factor to their decision to carry out violent acts was that they wanted to be famous or be on TV. I have very little patience or tolerance for any academic study on this topic that fails to acknowledge a clear distinction between real life violence and fictional violence.

The oft-overlooked reality is that there is a mental distinction that our brains make between real life violence and fictional violence. This has to do with “real” violence being metabolized by our mind as an example of actual reality. Overlooking this distinction causes us, as a society, to assume that general “violence” is the culprit, while overlooking the much larger and much more dangerous issue: the news media’s glorification of real-world violent behavior.

In addition, later (more reliable) studies on the topic took into consideration the subjects’ pre-existing personality traits. People who self-reported as more aggressive in general would be more likely to have aggressive reactions to violent media. At least one of the studies I’ve listed below pointed out that little boys are generally more aggressive (not more violent, but more prone to aggressive solutions to problems) than girls, which was reflected in the study’s results.

(By the way, a lot of data out there debunking the links between video games and fictional violence and real life violence often comes with the name Christopher J. Ferguson. Dr. Ferguson is a psychologist who is a professor and co-chair of psychology at Stetson University in Florida. He has also been a professor of criminal justice at Texas A&M. This guy is out there on the front lines trying to undo decades of damage caused by this absurd fallacy. Here’s a link to his academic page on his personal website where he has a lot of interesting stuff archived.)

• This meta-analysis from the 2009 Journal of Pediatrics, which analyzed dozens of peer-reviewed studies, found major issues with the ways in which those studies were conducted which resulted in wildly misleading data:

  “Publication bias was a problem for studies of aggressive behavior, and methodological problems such as the use of poor aggression measures inflated effect size. Once corrected for publication bias, studies of media violence effects provided little support for the hypothesis that media violence is associated with higher aggression. The corrected overall effect size for all studies was r = .08.”

• This important 1974 study — sometimes called a landmark study — describes the result of a fascinating experiment done on elementary school children that measured aggressive behavior in relation to the realism of the violent media they had watched.

  “The aggressive cartoons, however, failed to disinhibit aggressive behavior in either the boys or the girls. These results lend support to previous research reported by Hapkiewicz & Roden1 and Siegel2 who used interpersonal aggression as a criterion measure, and by Osborne and Endsley3 who found the emotional impact of cartoon violence (measured by galvanic skin response) to be much less than that which resulted from viewing violence among human characters.”

  • note: the above link leads to a free PDF of this study which, unfortunately, does not include the charts and graphs. This link might provide you access to the final printed version through an institution if such things are available to you.

• This study from 2013 details a similar experiment carried out on adults. Over two hundred college students were shown violent fictional tv shows and then they were shown deliberately similar violent clips of a real event. The clips they were shown were explicitly marked as fictional or real. After, they were assessed via questionnaire regarding their anxiety, empathy, and aggression state. (Alternative link.)

  “…our results indicate that people responded with more empathy when they knew they were seeing scenes of actual violence with real people being harmed compared with when they were watching fictional scenes. This is an important point, as it provides demonstration that human brains process information differently depending upon whether it is understood to be real or fictional.”

I.b. Is This Real Life? Or Is It Just Fantasy? (How people tend to use fiction to build their perception of the real world)

Okay, so the question of real versus fake is pretty easy to solve for most of us adults, but what about when we know something is fictional and yet we still use aspects of it to build up our baseline for reality?

• This is the 1992 article which I spoke about in the video which examined at length the ways in which the average human acquires data about reality. Specifically this one speaks about the plethora of “mediated” sources for reality to which we subject ourselves every day. Though its emphasis is more on the way virtual reality will, in the future, prove a challenge to our perception of the reality of reality (this article, remember, is thirty-four years old) this nevertheless provides a tremendous amount of eye-opening information about this thing we call Real Life.

  “First, judgments about the reality of mass media events, characters, including fictional characters, are natural, ongoing, probabalistic [sic] (not dichotomous), and relatively sophisticated. In addition, mediated events and people are most easily accepted as real when places and people appearing in stories are similar to or are the same as familiar places, contexts, and people. Also, when an event, if true, has immediate (rather than delayed) implications, the audience will act on a ‘worst-case’ scenario rather than on a careful analysis of all of the facts. Finally, fictional media presentations are most likely to be mistaken for reality when the audience feels stress, strain, or worry about the future.”

  • For anyone curious, the 2012 book by Dylan Trigg The Memory of Place, A Phenomenology of the Uncanny4 is a fascinating foray into the philosophy of how our perception of reality can be altered by various factors, including emotion. My personal copy of this book is one of the most heavily-annotated books on my shelves.

    “Above all, what is ‘weird’ is less a matter of content, and more a position we as human subjects adopt in relation to that content…”

• As I said in the video, “cultivation” is what researchers call it when a person’s mind — opinions, beliefs, behavior, etc — is altered by fiction. This 2009 study examined the possibility that perceived realism would have an effect on the linking of “television exposure and social judgments.”

  “Television influences one’s judgments about the real world. More than 30 years of research into television’s ability to cultivate5 6 or construct7 viewers’ social reality has demonstrated a moderate but reliable link between television exposure and some social judgments8 9 . Although the existence of this relationship is evident, the processes responsible for the relationship are little understood10 11 12.”

• This is the interesting article by Sue Cartwright which does an excellent job of contrasting the story of the Tongan castaways to the widespread influence of Lord of the Flies on our ideas about real humanity.

  Cartwright pointed out that the concept of Lord of the Flies has now become a model for a rash of reality programming in which real people “are plied with alcohol” and are externally motivated to behave in cruel, cheating, manipulative ways in order to get ahead. For a time this led to imitation and even influenced young people to believe that this behavior was both normal and expected.

  “This epic tale demonstrates just how much manipulation is required to bring out the worst in people and the effect this has on our collective consciousness.

  Lionel Trilling, an influential critic of the book said the novel marked a mutation in culture13 and despite this fact, in 1983, the author received a Nobel Prize in Literature for his parables of the human condition. In fact, he was so revered in literary circles he was knighted in 1988 and in 2008, The Times newspaper ranked him third on its list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” [emphasis in original]

  • Information about the incredible true story of the Tongan boys.

• For a laff, here’s the story about the woman who thought she could go to South Korea and scoop up a nice Kdrama boyfriend, only to be disappointed by the existence of reality.

I.c The Science of Propaganda (Some Studies About Effective Ways Media Can Be Used To Change Minds)

This is a massive topic and not quite the subject we’re discussing today. But if we remember that most or all fiction media is attempting to convince you of something (persuade you) and that persuasion — no matter the form, political, marketing, or social — is harnessing certain neurological and psychological factors, this becomes more relevant. Persuasion is used by storytellers all the time. It’s a neutral thing. Writers want to convince you to care about their characters, or persuade you to turn the page or get emotionally invested in the story. More insidious actors might use these principles within storytelling to change your mind about certain moral, social, or political issues without you even realizing that it’s happening.

• This 2017 study about “persuasive communication” experimented to see how much more effectively a person’s mind could be changed if the manipulator had access to that person’s psychological data

  “However, the investigation of large-scale psychological persuasion in the real world has been hindered by the questionnaire-based nature of psychological assessment. Recent research, however, shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.”

  Needless to say, the experiment showed a marked increase in persuasive campaigns’ success when the target’s psychological data had been used.

• This fascinating study from 2016 found that, since many persuasive campaigns rely on emotion — especially positive emotion — to change the mind, physically resisting reactions to those campaigns actually reduces the influence it has on you. The researchers referred to this as “embodied resistance”.

  “Controlling the expression of emotions elicited by an ad (for example refusing to smile) might be a fruitful way to resist the ad’s persuasive potential.”

• This eleven-year-old study in the Journal of Advertising talks about optimal use of repetition. The study’s authors acknowledge that repetition is a key to success but the study’s aim is to determine the most effective way to use that repetition as well as how long the effects of repetition last.

• If you really want to get into the weeds, this study shows how repetition doesn’t just increase a person’s recognition of your brand over other brands, it also decreases their recognition of other, non-repeated brands.

  (Do you see what I mean when I say they’ve spared no expense?)

• This paper, using magic as an example, talks about attentional capture and the neurological limits on the human mind that allow for guided focus by a manipulating, outside source.

  “Psychologist and magicians often think of attention as a ‘spotlight’ that enhances the items or parts of a scene we are focusing on. The attentional spotlight is not an accurate metaphor from a neuroscientific perspective, however: rather than making our object of interest more salient, our attentional system actively suppresses (via inhibitory neurons) how salient everything else is. That is, rather that illuminating whatever draws our interest, our attention gives us tunnel vision: it obscures all the rest1415161718192021222324 . Suppressed crucial information passes us by without ever entering our awareness.”

• This is the 1996 study referenced in the video that talks about how long the Illusory Truth Effect can last after the repetitions have ceased.

• This chapter from The Principles of Social Psychology talks about other methods that can be used to manipulate people with marketing and media, including emotion and perceived trustability.

• There are a lot of studies and analyses out there examining the different neurological and psychological factors that are at play when advertising is attempting to change our minds. The important thing to remember is that these methods are just as effective within fiction.

II. Fiction as Formation

It has long been understood that we ought to take care with the media we consume as it is forming us. Only recently have attempts been made to “debunk” this idea, an idea which has held true for literally centuries, if not millennia. Let’s look at some of the science behind the ways in which our media consumption changes and forms us.

II.a A Note on Desensitization

I mentioned at the beginning that the human mind doesn’t react to fictional violence and real life violence in the same way, and therefore doesn’t become desensitized to real life violence because of exposure to fictional violence. A lot of this overlaps with the question of increased aggression due to (or not due to) watching fictional violence, so please see that section if you want more resources on this topic.

• That said, this study, which I have previously linked, is one of the clearest examples of this point. Young college-aged people were exposed to graphic fictional violence and then they were shown clips of real life violence. It was found that they were not desensitized to the real life violence, that it still disturbed them. Crucially, it was also found that their empathy was not diminished.

II.b Let’s Talk About Porn (The Ways In Which Pornography Damages Your Mind and Your Character)

I can’t believe I have to do this. But for anyone who somehow wasn’t convinced that porn is bad, here’s some proof.

Put in context, fictional violence might not lead to increases in aggression or even violence in audiences, but here we have studies showing that real and simulated or even animated pornography result in increases in violent and aggressive behavior.

For those who already knew, there’s still some interesting information here, including the different ways that women react to pornography (compared to men).

• This article from 2014 cites studies done on men who had lost interest in real life sexual partners after prolonged pornography consumption. The authors explain this in terms of neuroplasticity. That is, our tastes and preferences can change over time with outside influence such as internet usage.

  “The sexual excitement of viewing pornography releases a chemical neurotransmitter named dopamine that activates the brain’s pleasure centres. Since ‘neurons that fire together wire together’, the repeated viewing of pornography effectively wires the pornographic images into the pleasure centres of the brain with the focused attention required for neuroplastic change. In other words, habitual viewers of pornography develop new brain maps based on the photos and videos they see. And since the brain operates on a “use it or lose it” principle, they long to keep those new maps activated. Consequently, pornography has an addictive power. Like all addicts, the men who [Dr. Norman] Doidge treated developed a tolerance to the photos and videos they observed and sought out progressively higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction.”

• This article from the 2013 edition of Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology takes a medical approach to the question of pornography consumption as an addiction. Dr. Hilton’s approach has to do with “an increased understanding of the function of the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward systems”, which is a key factor in any discussion of addiction.

• This article from the Journal of Neuroscience continues the medical side of neuroplasticity, addiction, and the altering of the brain’s tastes and preferences. A lot of this was highly medical and specialized and a bit over my head, but it’s still fascinating to read about how the brain’s ability to change can also make the brain vulnerable to wildly unhealthy habits.

• This peer-reviewed study examined the brains of people with compulsive sexual behavior and compared them to people with healthy brains particularly when viewing sexually explicit materials and non-sexual materials.

  One of the many fascinating things found in this study was that in those with compulsive sexual behavior when viewing explicit material, fMRI scans showed activity consistent with desire but not activity consistent with liking. That is, the reward system in their brain had rewired to desire what they saw despite the fact that they might not have even liked it. Which is consistent with what one sees in drug addicts. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was any medical basis in referring to — and treating — compulsive sexual behavior as an addiction.

• This fascinating experimental study conducted in 2018 attempted to determine if there was a connection between men viewing pornography and their negative behavior towards women. Most interesting was the inclusion of an “erotica” category in the study. The authors found that men who viewed degrading pornography had marked increase in negative attitudes towards women, including objectification and sexism. However, even erotica showed an increase in these areas. It was not as dramatic as the effects of degrading pornography, of course, but it is fascinating to learn that even loving, gentle, consensual erotica had a negative effect on the minds of the men viewing it. And this was only over the course of the study’s duration. One wonders what the effects would be after a year, or five years, or ten…

• In a rare study on the minds of women who consume pornography found that, contrary to expectations, women who consumed pornography did not respond by developing “empowering” sexual behavior, but rather they became more submissive. I won’t detail the nature of this submissive sexual behavior, but suffice to say it is violent, humiliating, and degrading. The younger the woman was when she started to consume pornography, the greater the effect.
  As I have said before, men and women respond to explicit sexual media in different ways. Men become more violent and more aggressive. Women can respond in that way, but typically they do not. They become more submissive and more willing to tolerate or even seek out intensely degrading, violent, even physically dangerous behavior, like choking.

• This Korean survey on over six hundred Korean college-aged heterosexual men determined that those who consume pornography are likely to try to act out porn scenes in real life, a point I think it’s worth underscoring given that many who defend pornography use the common line “we know the difference between fiction and reality” and yet, once again, it would seem that it just isn’t that simple.

• Another study showing that the more pornography a man consumes, the more likely he is to attempt to reenact it during sex and to use its imagery during sex to stay aroused.

• The question of pornography consumption intensifying over time — that is, the viewers’ tastes becoming more extreme as usage continues — is a difficult and complex one scientifically speaking. One can look at anecdotal evidence from people whose usage has become oppressive, people who find themselves drawn to more and more disturbing content, and you can use your own common sense to understand how this could easily happen. But collecting all the scientific data here would triple the length of this list. So I’m providing this link. This article will be frowned upon by many because it was put together by the folks over at fightthenewdrug.org, which is an anti-pornography organization and is therefore inherently biased.
  However, the linked article has over thirty citations from unbiased resources all across the scientific and academic world. It’s also not a piece of alarmist propaganda speaking in nothing but superlatives. It’s an honest, direct, clear treatment of the overall issue insofar as it is understand by respected, certified experts who have no affiliation with anti or pro-pornography organizations. If you’re genuinely interested in a nuanced discussion of the topic, this is a great place to start. I’ve personally looked through several of the studies cited and they provide valuable insight into the way the mind works in general, not just when pornography is being consumed.

  • The article mentions — as many people will tell you — that not everyone experiences this escalation. But to those who think that means that pornography could be safe: you should note that there’s no way to predict whether or not you’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t experience escalating tastes. Considering how deep the pit goes, why would anyone risk that? I read the accounts of several men and women whose tastes eventually made it to CSAM. As I said, there’s a reason it’s called “degenerate”.

• Here is a link to that disturbing video of Minnesota Representative Finke making a case for allowing children access to pornography as it is “sex education”.

  • The “Paxton case” mentioned at the beginning is this case.

  • This is an interesting note defending age-verification laws as not a valid threat to freedom of speech

  • Another point I’d like to make is that even if children are, ostensibly, viewing pornography — or sexually explicit “education material” — for educational purposes, it is still objectively harming them. Please see the rest of this pornography section if, for some reason, that’s not something you entirely believe. When it comes time to teach a person about sex, there are perfectly adequate ways to do so without employing literal pornography.

• Related: This survey put together by the Department of Justice details, among other things, that one of the important strategies which pedophiles employ is exposing children to pornography. This desensitizes the children to the idea of sex and having sex, while easing them into increasingly extreme sexuality in general, and makes them open to producing sexual materials of themselves and giving it to adults.
  Many pedophiles use these methods to get children to make child pornography of themselves which the adults can then sell, a lower-risk method of producing CSAM.

II.c. Becoming What You Consume

There has been a lot of research done on both cultivation (mentioned above: the way fiction can change our minds and opinions and even our perception of reality), and also on formation from fiction. This, in particular, is often called “identification” and refers to audiences’ tendency to latch onto their favorite characters and begin to assimilate their traits and habits into their own personalities. Why this happens has been studied and theorized at length.

• This research paper from 2005 examines young adults’ (ages 18-28) identification to see what specific motivations and traits male and female young adults tended to look for in their favorite characters. The introduction provides highly useful information about the concept of “identification”.

  “All of the definitions [of identification] involve a bond or connection between an individual and another person (or entity), such that the individual adopts traits, attitudes, or behaviors of the other person, or incorporates the other’s characteristics into his or her sense of self.”252627

  Taking it further, the paper goes on to explain the phenomenon of “wishing identification” which extends beyond the time during which the media is consumed. That is, many people identify with or admire a character while watching the media or reading the book, this is one process. A secondary process occurs when the audience begins to wish to become more like the person:

  “Bandura2829 contended that the modeling process goes far beyond simple imitation of behavior, to include the changing of attitudes, values, aspirations, and other characteristics to match those of a model.”

• This interesting study examined closely the possibility of a link between the introduction of specific telenovelas in Brazil and a corresponding drop in fertility rates in otherwise fertile women.

  “We find that, after controlling for time varying controls and for time-invariant area characteristics, the presence of the Globo [producers of the telenovelas in question] signal leads to significantly lower fertility. […] Our empirical analysis on children naming patterns and on novela content suggests that these results may be interpreted not only in terms of exposure to television, but also of exposure to the particular reality portrayed in Brazilian novelas.” [emphasis added]

• This book published in 2017 talks at length about how fiction media can be used to change social norms among a given populace. This book doesn’t focus only on negative social change but also positive, such as de-normalizing child marriage. It is meant to provide a kind of blueprint for identifying and then altering social norms.

  “The media are popular tools for changing target behaviors. The range of technologies may include broadcast media such as radio, film and television, newspapers or pamphlets, billboards, internet, and even public events. Common interventions include information campaigns, edutainment (ranging

  from soap operas to video games), and other more modest form of collective entertainment, such as village theater.” (page 147)

  If you read the book you’ll find that a lot of the science I have talked about in this essay/list of resources is being actively employed with fiction media to deliberately adjust social norms.

  If it is generally understood by those going about changing “target behaviors” that fiction has this ability, then perhaps the targets whose behavior is being changed should also accept this reality.

II.d. Reading Will Make You Smarter

Yet another bit of common sense, but which is fortunately backed up by a lot of science. There are distinct and traceable links between reading level and vocabulary size; there are distinct and traceable links between vocabulary size and cognitive abilities. Therefore, there is a link between reading challenging books and becoming smarter:

• This 1993 article by Keith E. Stanovich was among the first to tackle with scientific rigor the question “Does Reading Make You Smarter?” And his answer was an emphatic “Yes.” This 48-page paper also details the controversy surrounding this idea which has come to be called the Great Divide, which is defined as the understanding that there is a cognitive divide between the literate and the illiterate that goes beyond mere ability to read. Many in different academic fields viewed it as self-evident that literacy and the act of reading improved various areas of intelligence and cognition. But, he explained, in the 80s there arose a movement bent on debunking this idea as a mere myth. Stanovich takes the time to explain how the myth idea is nonsensical. This might be one of the most important and thorough papers on the topic, if just an introduction.

• This meta-analysis of hundreds of studies determined that there was a “small and significant” link between reading fiction specifically and social cognition. This link was determined to be causal, that is, reading fiction was found to directly improve social cognition.

  “The notion that fiction reading and social cognition engage similar processes is further supported by neuroimaging work demonstrating an overlap in the networks recruited during story reading and theory of mind30, and

  increased engagement of the brain’s default mode network while simulating literary passages with social content31. Second, fiction may provide concrete content about human psychology and social interaction, and about distant countries, cultures, and peoples that readers may never have access to otherwise32. In this sense, fiction may help to build up a reader’s social knowledge.

• This study (which was a set of five experiments) found that there was an increase in the readers’ theory of mind when they read literary fiction, as opposed to reading popular fiction, nonfiction, or nothing at all.

  The idea of “literary fiction” itself and even a definition of the genre is difficult to pin down. It has been said that literary fiction can be identified by its more active quality, that is, the reader has to do more active work to understand descriptions and even the events of the plot. The authors of this study provide a loose but somewhat helpful definition:

  “The category of literary fiction has been contested on the grounds that it is merely a marker of social class, but features of the modern literary novel set it apart from most best-selling thrillers or romances. Miall and Kuiken33 3435

  emphasize that through the systematic use of phonological, grammatical, and semantic stylistic devices, literary fiction defamiliarizes its readers. The capacity of literary fiction to unsettle readers’ expectations and challenge their thinking is also reflected in Roland Barthes’s36 distinction between writerly and readerly texts. Although readerly texts—such as most popular genre fiction—are intended to entertain their mostly passive readers, writerly—or literary—texts engage their readers creatively as writers.”

  “Theory of mind” has been described elsewhere as:

  “…the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one's own beliefs and desires.”37

  I don’t know about all of you, but I have personally noticed a marked decline recently in the average person’s ability to understand that other people might hold different beliefs and desires from their own. For myself personally this is most often evidenced in the frequent accusation of “grifter!” by which the accuser presents the idea that they cannot conceive of another person holding a different view from their own and so this person (me) must be faking it for money.

• This study from 2015 looked at the physical brain development of readers versus non-readers or less skilled readers using MRI machines. The results suggested that the children who were proficient readers had a different “development trajectory in brain reading regions”. The analysis found physical brain development to be affected by reading.

• This 2025 study found a direct link between participants’ reading ability and their vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. Interestingly, the study included internet content and found that resources like social media did have as much of a positive effect in this area as books and websites which published news stories and cultural imformation (e.g. longer articles).

Conclusion

The simple reality is that our ability to distinguish between fiction and reality isn’t that simple. How fiction alters our minds and changes our personalities, perceptions, opinions, even our beliefs is extremely complex. But at the end of the day, there is no avoiding the fact that fiction absolutely changes us.

I said throughout the video and I’ll say it again now, one of the major ways we can avoid being completely at the mercy of the storytellers who entertain (and sometimes manipulate) us — and the reason people in the past tended to be more stable in this regard — is by increasing our daily contact with reality. Yet again, this effect will be mitigated and our minds in general will be healthier without social media guiding our perceptions of reality.

Moreover, binge-watching media and binge-reading books is all well and good once in a while, but in our isolated society doing so habitually prevents your mind from being corrected by either contact with reality or by contact with other people who can challenge what you’ve come to believe from the media you’ve consumed in isolation. This total lack of a social element in modern media consumption is unprecedented in history. It is only by touching reality with our own two hands that we can begin to understand whether what we’ve read — or watched — has any basis in reality.

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I have begun hosting a book club here on my substack for paid subscribers. We will be reading, at a leisurely pace, some slightly lesser known selections of exceptional literature: books that I have thoroughly enjoyed and would love to share with as many people as I can.

What To Expect:

As we all, no doubt, are very busy people I would like to keep the reading schedule manageable and accessible. For shorter books we will keep to roughly 3-4 chapters per week. For longer, more challenging books we might read no more than 1-2 chapters per week.

• Every week or every other week (depending on the book) I will publish a discussion post for paid subscribers only. These will include suggested topics for analysis with the comments open for discussion.

• There will also be a private chat for the book club.

Hosting a book club in a digital space is new territory for me, so I think some of the details beyond those listed above will have to be addressed as they’re encountered.

Our first Book Club read, (the current book) is the beautiful World War II novel Balcony In the Forest by Julien Gracq.

If you are a member of The Book Club, you can read the introductory post about this book here:

Hilary Layne

Balcony In the Forest - Week One

Week 1: Chapters 1 - 5…

Read more

a month ago · 24 likes · 32 comments · Hilary Layne

A Note Regarding Paid Subscriptions

The Book Club will be available to anyone who has subscribed to any paid plan, monthly or annual.

When I first started my substack I knew very little about how it functioned and didn’t realize that there were set prices in the “Pledge” section. When I turned on paid subscriptions I just kept the prices at their default settings.

However, I want to make sure The Book Club is accessible to as many people as possible, so starting today I am lowering the monthly subscription price to $5.00 and the annual price to $50.00

After the gate closed the sounds of the town of Osenok were quieted to little more than a distant murmur. With the shade and the absence of the winter breeze, Min La felt both very contained and very exposed. The man before him was a stranger to him, but his House was not. He very much feared that he had been saved from one danger only to be thrust into another.

As Sen Lí Lăsoth waited for him to speak, Min La, uncertain what else to do, bowed and said, “I must thank you, my lord, for saving my life. I have troubled you greatly and you have my gratitude.”

When he glanced up at the young Lăsoth lord he saw that he had narrowed his eyes. Surprise and uncertainty clouded his face, not enough, however, to shake him. Min La could only hope that it was enough for him to find a way to wriggle out of this situation.

There was only one reason why the cousin of the Lăsoth Housemaster would be in such an unimportant mountain town so far from the capital: he was looking for the prince. Given the Lăsoth Housemaster’s relation to So Ga, Min La was inclined to believe that the Lăsoth intentions might not be as hostile as Táno Gín’s. But that didn’t make Sen Lí Lăsoth any less dangerous.

There was no avoiding the fact that So Ga was an incomparably important piece in the game of power that simmered always in the dark alleys between Houses and behind the Palace. Min La had known that it would only be a matter of time before some of the Houses — especially powerful ones like Lăsoth — learned that the king’s son was vulnerable. He had hoped that they would reach Osa Gate before then.

Maybe Sen Lí Lăsoth did intend to protect the crown prince. Or maybe he intended to use him to gain power for his House. But the fact was that anyone who would use So Ga to achieve his own goals also wouldn’t hesitate to kill him to achieve those same goals.

The simple truth was that Min La didn’t trust anyone to protect the prince. And as incapable as he was, at least he could trust his own intentions.

As he thought this, he remembered that not long ago he had been considering abandoning So Ga. But now, faced with the thought of surrendering him to the man who stood before him, he knew he never could.

Sen Lí opened his mouth to speak, but Min La said quickly, “I’m not sure who those men were. Maybe they thought I was stealing. I wasn’t my lord, I swear it. I never steal, I just beg. I might be poor, but I am honest.”

Sen Lí closed his mouth again and tilted his head.

Min La wrapped his arms around his bag. “Maybe they were trying to steal from me.”

“Tell me, friend,” Sen Lí Lăsoth said. “What’s your name?”

“My mother called my Minla,” he answered, deliberately obscuring the pronunciation. “Though she’s gone now. As are all the rest of my kin.”

“And your Housename?”

“I’ve never had a Housename, my lord. Born without it. Like being born without an arm, I suppose. Nothing to be done about it.”

Despite his easy tone, his heart pounded in his chest, partly from his prolonged flight from Táno Gín’s men, and partly from the precarious position in which he now stood.

“And what are you doing in Osenok?”

“Passing through.”

“To where?”

Min La let his gaze linger on the Lăsoth’s pointed face. Then he dropped his eyes as if embarrassed. “If you’ll forgive me, my lord, but what business is that of yours?”

Sen Lí started, and then he clasped his hands behind his back and offered Min La a thin smile. It was difficult to tell if he believed his act. Min La glanced over at the gate in the wall. It didn’t appear to have a lock and the men weren’t blocking his path to it. He wondered if they would stop him if he tried to leave. Gingerly, he put a little weight on his knee. A piercing needle of pain stabbed through his thigh, but it subsided after a moment.

Sen Lí took a step closer to him and Min La responded by taking a step back. “Tell me, young man,” he said. “How long had those men out there been chasing you?”

“I was walking through an alley over there—” Min La lifted an arm and pointed “—and then there they were. When I ran, they followed. I think they wanted to kill me.”

“Indeed?”

Min La held his bag tighter, but said nothing. A long silence passed during which Sen Lí Lăsoth’s gaze lingered on Min La’s neck, searching, he realized with a surge of panic, for So Ga’s seal. If they overpowered him in order to look for it they would find his brother’s martial seal instead and then the situation would change drastically, though it would be no less dangerous.

“Why would they want to kill you?” Sen Lí asked, still looking at Min La’s neck.

“Some types of people don’t need much reason for killing Houseless beggars.”

Sen Lí’s gaze returned to his face. “Those men,” he said carefully, “they have a reputation for hunting bandits—”

“I am no bandit, my lord.”

Sen Lí offered an amused bow of his head. “Forgive me,” he said. “I meant no offense.”

With a look of indignation, Min La stiffly returned his bow and turned toward the door. Sen Lí took a step after him. He did not block him, but seemed to be considering doing so. Min La held his bag tightly and looked at him.

“Where are you going, my friend?”

“Whatever it is between you and those men out there has nothing to do with me. I’d just as soon leave and see about finding some food, if it’s all the same to you.”

Sen Lí said nothing for several long seconds. He studied Min La, as if endeavoring to memorize his face. He wasn’t sure why, but this thought chilled him. There had been something about the way this man’s eyes moved that had unsettled him since they first shone gray and piercing from the shadows. In that moment it occurred to him that Sen Lí had a look about him like a man who was perpetually hungry. In the next moment he realized that this look reminded him of someone else: Íojin, the strange, half-mad creature they had met at the inn in Ŏklo’s lands.

At last Sen Lí held out a hand to one of his men who put a small purse in his open palm. Pulling out a large silver coin, he offered it to Min La.

He stared at it as it gleamed between Sen Lí’s long, thin fingers, reflecting like glass in the dusty yellow light. “What’s this?”

“Buy yourself a warm meal and a warm bed. And see a physician about your injury.”

After a moment’s consideration, Min La decided it would be best to accept the coin. Then he held it in both hands and bowed. “Thank you,” he said.

Sen Lí’s men had opened the gate and gone out to check the street, looking for more of the mercenaries, no doubt. Min La watched as they shook their heads at their master. Then he tucked the coin into his bag and gave another deep bow.

“Thank you again for saving my life,” he said.

“Think nothing of it,” Sen Lí answered, once again offering his thin smile.

As he limped back to the Osenok market — keeping to the alleys and giving the apothecary shop a wide berth — Min La considered the possibility that his ruse had done nothing to convince Sen Lí Lăsoth. If word had spread that the prince was loose in the wilds of Sona Gen, no doubt this news had been accompanied by the detail that So Ga Sona was traveling with a single sword. Even if Sen Lí believed that Min La was not the prince, he might have guessed that he was the prince’s guard. Perhaps he had been let go in order to lead them to So Ga.

When he caught sight of one of the Lăsoth swords in the shade near the bakery where the woman and her twins were still selling their morning bread, he knew he was right. He would have to lose them in the woods outside Osenok. With Táno Gín’s men also nearby, there was no time to find So Ga’s medicine or anything else they needed. In the end the entire trip had been a waste.

Defeated, Min La turned toward the town’s humble gate, his path winding through a narrow passage between a basket shop and a dyeworks. The hanging lengths of brightly colored cloth of pink and violet had made a tunnel through which he walked, his path and his outstretched hands tinted by the reflected sunlight in a way that reminded him of their brief trespass in the Orange Grove. Glancing up as he neared the end of the colored tunnel, he stopped in his tracks.

Standing there — his back to Min La, his eyes on the town’s gate — was a man wearing the distinctive uniform of Táno Gín’s mercenaries. He was taller than the others Min La had seen and his long hair was white at the roots. He stood with his hands behind his back, his feet planted wide, as if he did not intend to move until he had found what he was looking for.

The sound of Min La’s shoes on the gravel road had reached his ears. Shifting in his stance, he began to turn. Min La glanced around for somewhere to hide but all he saw were the fluttering, translucent lengths of pink and violet silk.

At that moment a great crash shattered the relative quiet in this narrow passage. Looking back, Min La saw the man sprawled on the ground, a large, middle-aged woman half on top of him, both of them covered in a thick coating of spilled flour.

She was berating him and apologizing to him in a breathless torrent of words. Her age and her size was making it difficult for her to remove herself from him (“I’m so sorry, my lord, my knees aren’t what they used to be”) while she was surrounded by reminders of what she had lost (“do you have the slightest idea what all this costs?”). People were coming to help untangle them and so Min La took advantage of the chaos. Soundlessly he slipped by, shielding himself with the growing crowd.

Reaching at last the Osenok town gate, he glanced back. Sen Lí Lăsoth stood a little apart from the commotion watching him with that same thin smile on his sharp face. When Min La met his gaze, Sen Lí put his hand on his chest and offered a bow, as if to say, “you’re welcome.”

It was some hours before Min La finally reached the Nal Dor. Already well past midday, the blue sky was covered in a tattered cotton shroud of shining white clouds that moved in a strong, cold wind, casting their shadows on the ground under his feet.

So Ga and Ŏnin greeted him with alarm; he had been gone hours longer than they had expected and was returning somewhat disheveled and with a noticeable limp. Min La explained what had happened while Ŏnin bound his knee in another foul smelling poultice. And after Ŏnin had finished and gone, Min La told So Ga about Sen Lí Lăsoth.

So Ga listened closely, his eyes on his knees and his brow furrowed.

“I have never met Sen Lí,” he said when Min La was done. “I do not know him.”

“Would you trust him?”

So Ga shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Would you trust Bo Han Lăsoth?”

“My uncle?” So Ga sighed and rubbed his pale hands over his pale face. He didn’t answer.

“In any event,” Min La said massaging the muscles in his thigh. “This makes tomorrow a little more complicated.”

“How so?”

“For one thing, I couldn’t get your medicine—”

“I feel fine.”

“—but more importantly, both Táno Gín and Sen Lí Lăsoth are out there looking for you.”

So Ga sighed again and glanced at the upper corner of their little cabin, in the direction of the mountain and its gleaming black fort. “But we’re so close.”

Before Min La could answer, Ŏnin returned, bursting through their door without even a knock.

“Little brothers,” he said breathlessly. “I think you should come.”

Wrapping themselves quickly in blue robes with hoods drawn low to shroud their faces, they followed the old monk up to the Nal Dor’s lantern-lit deck where many of the other monks were busy receiving and stowing an offering that had just been made. Afternoon was fading into evening and the day’s rites were drawing to an end. The crowd on the river bank had begun to thin and the candles flickering on the ground were growing brighter as the sky dimmed.

Ŏnin hurried to one of the monks and retrieved from him a small bundle wrapped in cloth. This he brought to Min La and gave it to him without a word, as if the bundle was expected to speak for itself. Unwrapping the knotted cloth, Min La found within a paper parcel fragrant with the herbal smell of medicine and, with it, a small folded message sealed with a wax imprint that Min La did not recognize.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

So Ga took the paper from him and examined the wax seal.

“Lăsoth,” he said, his voice sharp with surprise. Min La stared at him.

Ŏnin nodded solemnly. “Yes. The young lord Sen Lí Lăsoth has just offered his dead and also made an offering to the River Voyage.

Then he held out an arm, gesturing to a spot on the bank of the river.

Min La and So Ga both turned and saw there, apart from the crowd, a small clutch of armored swords and, standing at their head, the sharp-faced Sen Lí Lăsoth.

“Is that him?” So Ga whispered.

Min La nodded.

“Could he have followed you?”

Min La shook his head. “I think it’s possible that Sen Lí Lăsoth is a great deal smarter than anyone realizes.”

So Ga, who seemed always to fear being looked upon by a large crowd — a habit from his days as a hidden, masked prince, Min La assumed — turned away quickly and went back down to their cabin, Min La limping after him. Once inside with the door closed, he broke the Lăsoth seal and unfolded the message.

He seemed to read it many times over, his fingers moving down the page and then returning to the top, as if to be sure he hadn’t missed anything. Then, with a troubled look, he handed the letter to Min La.

Taking it, Min La read it quickly. It surprised him to see how simple and direct it was. Sen Lí was offering “the young traveler” safe passage to his uncle’s estate in Ŏno Soth. Though he did not name So Ga in the letter and he did not indicate that he knew who he was, it was otherwise very straightforward and bare of artifice.

“I cannot believe that the Lăsoth House would wish me ill,” So Ga said as Min La folded the message and returned it to him.

“Because the Housemaster is your uncle?”

“Is that naive of me?”

Min La thought for a moment. “Which is more important to Bo Han Lăsoth? House or family?”

“Bo Han adheres to the ancient ways.”

“He probably doesn’t mean you ill. But it is a possibility that he intends to use you.”

“Against my father, you mean?”

“Perhaps. Is that something he would do?”

So Ga shook his head. “I don’t know.” Then he looked at Min La with a pained expression. “What should I do?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to return to the Palace. But I don’t know which path to take.”

“Well,” Min La began, stretching his aching knee. “You can accept Sen Lí Lăsoth’s offer of safe passage to his cousin’s estate and hope that Bo Han’s sense of loyalty is greater than his desire to reinforce the power of his House.”

“What about the Koda House? Did they not help us before when they told us that Táno Gín’s men were nearby?”

Min La nodded once. “I think they have been keeping an eye on us.”

“Why? It doesn’t serve them.”

“I don’t know Koda well. But even if they are helping you out of loyalty to your father, it can only go so far. They cannot afford a House war and so they will not try to use you and they will only help you as long as they can do so undetected.”

So Ga looked disappointed. He glanced again at the folded letter in his hand and then at the parcel of medicine. He murmured, “There is no family in the Palace.”

“Or,” Min La said, “we can continue alone. You know you can trust Ko Gŏth Enlin, after all.”

“Provided we can make it to Osa Gate.”

Min La laughed darkly. “Yes, provided we can make it up the mountain. Although I think Koda’s invisible aid might at least make that more of a possibility.”

“Is that what you think I should do?”

Min La shook his head. “I cannot answer this for you. It is not my life they want.”

“I want to trust my uncle,” So Ga said, squeezing the letter so tightly that the thick paper began to crumple in his hand.

“Would he kill you if it served his House?”

So Ga started at the directness of the question. But then he took a breath and shook his head. “I don’t know. Lăsoth has no loyalty to the throne. To them — to my uncle — the throne serves the Houses. And despite my blood, I am not Lăsoth, but Sona.”

“Would he save you for his sister’s sake?”

“I had considered that,” So Ga replied quietly, his eyes darkening. A look of such complete sorrow overtook him that Min La regretted the question.

So Ga sat in silence for several minutes staring at the parcel and the message as if the answer was hidden in them and he had only to decipher it. Min La pitied him but he knew of no other way to help him than to stay by his side no matter what happened. The only thing he could do was to try to keep him alive. There was nothing else a Houseless beggar could do for a royal prince.

After a while, Min La said, “If you don’t know—”

“I do know,” So Ga said resolutely. He turned and gave Min La a warm, tired smile. “I know what I have to do.”

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Spring comes weary over the crest of the world,
carries with him a dew-drenched morning
smelling of tree resin and mint, while behind him trails
fog like a cloak blurring the seam of the horizon.

He comes bristled with pieces of an enemy,
wearing more of him than he does of himself.
I know what night tastes like, he whispers
in the thick air, his skin redolent of war. 

In the ruby redness of dawn he returns, he 
whose death wounds are crystallized by survival,
made deeper, made to heal and then, cruelly, bloom.
What battle? I ask. What war? What price was paid?

Then comes the victorious resurrection of day,
raised from a grave hollowed by river water, 
breathless and gleaming, wet with life. The morning is quiet, 
save for the birds who sing a symphony of waking.

It is cold, save for the concentrated heat
in the red blades of sunlight which slice fire
across my lap, garnet hollows in my unrest. 
Here in the perforated shade, waiting 

for the safety of summer to unbutton my coat,
I wonder at the supernal taste of that
receding world, Night­.
Spring’s voice hums through me: 

It tastes like river water and moss. 
Like smoke from a forest fire. 
It tastes like stars and blood...

Creation, I say. Night tastes like creation.

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Dawn spread across the fragile sky, cracks of pink breaking the night blues as Min La made his way down the road to the town of Osenok. He had exchanged his monk’s robes for a golt of green and a heavy coat of dark blue. Despite So Ga’s protestations, Min La had left the knife with him. Without Min La there to protect him, the prince needed something in case their pursuers chose to ignore the sanctity of the River Voyage. So Ga had not liked letting him go unarmed, but Min La felt better leaving him with steel, if nothing else.

Though he moved with caution, he also felt a certain renewed sense of confidence. After all, he could see Osa Gate now. The sharp edges of the fort had squared a corner of the mountain on which it was perched, as if a piece of black crystal had grown from the thick range. In the brilliant, crisp sunrise he imagined he could see it glint, like the edge of a blade.

Osenok was not a large village, but it benefited both from the proximity of the fort and also, more recently, from the proximity of the Koda House. Their work in Sona Gen had made travel, and therefore trade, easier. Osenok was quickly becoming a common stop on the road from Ŭthol Na to the capital, especially those who preferred river travel. And through it moved a great many of the travelers who lived in the Osa Len Mountains, who had become more willing to venture from the security of their House’s villages and into the wider world of Sona Gen. Koda’s influence had been significant, even if they were countered now and again by the meddling of Ŏklo. This thought returned to Min La’s mind the faces of Nŏl and Hino Son. By now the wedding of Ona Lín Ŏklo and Rin Holok So Hoth would have taken place and the two Houses would be joined by this. Min La found himself wondering how Nŏl was faring in his efforts to curtail the corruption that had festered in his House under the reign of the odious Von Ol. In that moment, too, he remembered Sivo Hin Ŏklo, the royal officer at Osa Gate. Glancing up at the mountain, he wondered if Nŏl’s efforts would have been able to extend as far as that.

The gates of Osenok had been open for some time when Min La arrived. He presented himself wordlessly as he always did, as a Houseless man alone in the world. He considered, as the guards looked him over and said nothing, that this was no longer true.

He had not brought all of their gold with him, but only a few pieces, in case he needed to bribe someone over and above the cost of the medicine. Not willing to burden the monks anymore than they already had, he also wanted to purchase food and other supplies, anything they might need as they made the final climb up the mountain. This thought caught in his mind, but he brushed it away.

A young woman at a bakery just inside the village gate directed him to the village’s apothecary. They had two in Osenok, she informed him proudly while two of her children — a boy and a girl in matching ivory golts — clutched at her skirts, their faces more powdered with flour than their mother’s. She was a bright-faced woman with large honey-colored eyes and a unkempt knot of thick red curls. Two tiny blue dots were painted on her cheekbone. Looking again, Min La realized that her children were the same age and were identical. Her first to survive were twins, no wonder her eyes shone with such light.

“Míkoth is good if you’re injured, they say,” she explained as she put steaming rolls into a paper bag for him. “But if it’s an illness that ails you’ll want the Dol Heno brothers.”

“Dol Heno?” he asked, paying her.

“It’s an old House, you’ll not have heard of it. A lot of them become monks, bless them. Not a lot of Dol Heno babies in general. They like their learning, I suppose. Anyway, they’ve got a shop to the east, there, on the other side of the teahouse. The teahouse is new, you should have a look at it. They say it’s just like the ones in Ŏno Soth.”

He thanked her and took the warm paper sack, tucking it into the bag across his chest.

The teahouse was easy enough to find, it seemed to be a popular attraction in the town. Dawn’s pinkish sunlight colored the wooden structure in warm hues, while the crisp lilac awning the shaded doorway shone like a lake of still water. In imitation of the popular custom in Ŏno Soth, little wooden tables and chairs had been arranged in the front of the teahouse and each was occupied by a leisurely visitor sipping tea or coffee, eyes sparkling in wonder at this novel new luxury. It was not as fine as the capital’s teahouses, but Min La imagined that the people of Osenok would continue to be proud of it, regardless. Surveying the people at the tables he saw more than one pale green Koda cloak. But, he noted with relief, there seemed to be no one among the crowd dressed in the recognizable uniform of Táno Gín’s mercenaries.

Tá Nom Koda had whispered to him yesterday that Táno Gín’s men had been seen in the area. He had said that the Koda House could do nothing to check them without calling attention to the fact that they were aware of what Táno Gín hunted. It had troubled Min La to hear Tá Nom again speak to him as if he was the prince. But he had been relieved to know that So Ga was still hidden in this way. Tá Nom had told him as clearly as he could where Táno Gín’s men had been seen. But, he had warned him, they did not stay in one place for long.

“Make haste up the mountain,” he had said. “Ko Gŏth Enlin can protect you in ways that we cannot.”

Yesterday, according to Tá Nom Koda, Táno Gín’s men had been nowhere near Osenok. Still, Min La had to be careful. One of the reasons he had come alone was because he believed that they would, by now, know to look for a pair of young men on the road. Min La alone would perhaps escape their notice even if they were here.

Just as the bakery woman had described, the little apothecary stood on the other side of the bustling teahouse, as if resting in its shadow. A shorter building, also made of wood, but much older, it had recently been painted a wash of white which, together with the brown curtains covering its doorway, presented a calming countenance, like a gentle face framed by a soft hood.

After glancing around one last time, Min La cautiously opened the curtain and stepped inside.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the lantern-lit interior; all was quite black at first, as if the interior of the shop was filled only with darkness. From within the dark a voice spoke: “Good morning, young master.”

The greeting had the hint of a question. Min La blinked several times and then finally found himself standing before a middle-aged man with a trimmed brown beard and short brown hair, in the Srenléthan style. He wore an ivory golt and a coat of pure white. As Min La looked at him, the man bowed lightly and began taking off his coat. Behind him another man, similar in every way, stood near a wall covered in tiny wooden drawers, also wearing an ivory golt, but over it a dark brown apron.

The man in the apron put his hand on his chest and bowed. “I am Nomo Dol Heno,” he said. “And this is my brother In No. Something is ailing you, young master?”

Min La, a little taken aback to find himself the only person in the apothecary and also the subject of such particular service, remembered the glowing praise the bakery woman had given to these brothers and tried to calm the paranoid flutter in his chest.

“I have come to purchase medicine,” he answered simply, with a humble bow. “For my brother, not myself.”

“Ah,” answered In No, tying on his own apron. As he did so his brother took a short candle and went around the room lighting several other lanterns. Before long the large space was brilliantly illuminated. This front room, Min La saw, seemed to be mainly storage and not preparation. Most of the wall space was covered by tiny drawers and cabinets with rich glass doors. He found himself feeling relieved that he had brought extra gold. The far wall was broken by another doorway, framed decoratively by brown curtains, which led, it seemed, to a kind of storage space and also to an open door into the alley behind the apothecary.

“You must forgive us,” In No went on. “You are our first guest this morning.”

Min La bowed his head a little, unsure what else to say.

“Do you know what you need specifically, or…”

Min La had long had So Ga’s medications committed to memory. He recited this long list now while the Dol Heno brothers watched him with growing amazement.

“This is all for your brother?” Nomo Dol Heno asked glancing at In No in what looked like nervous surprise.

Min La nodded.

“His lungs?”

He nodded again.

In No clicked his tongue as his brother turned to the drawers. “It is a difficult condition to manage. Was he born with the ailment?”

Min La hesitated, watching as quantities of herbs and powders were weighed and gathered together upon a large sheet of waxed paper.

“He was sick when he was a child,” he answered at last. “He never completely recovered.”

In No clicked his tongue again and Nomo, still busy with the drawers, joined him.

“Well,” In No said, “at least he has a good brother to look after him.” And patting Min La’s shoulder, he gestured to the counter where the medication was accumulating in a little fragrant mountain upon the paper.

Min La understood and began digging through his bag for the gold. But then he stopped and said, “Do you have gindun?”

They both looked at him alarmed. Then In No turned to Nomo, who was folding the large paper into a parcel. “Ah, because it can be—” and he patted his own chest.

Nomo nodded and said. “Indeed it can be.”

Turning to Min La, In No answered, “Yes, but Osenok law states that we cannot sell gindun to someone who is…” He pursed his lips and glanced at the floor.

“Houseless,” Min La finished. With a twinge of embarrassment, he began to fish around with one hand in his bag while he said, more to the floor than to the man, “I have— if it’s—”

But In No reached out and grasped Min La’s wrist. “My boy,” he said, his eyes shining. “Please do not demean yourself.”

Then he went to his brother and leaned close, whispering. Min La felt his chest tighten, he found himself regretting asking for the gindun. Nomo nodded as he listened. He put up a hand, forefinger and thumb extended, an inch or so away from each other. Then he nodded again and dropped his hand.

“A small vial,” In No said, turning to Min La. “Enough for one small dose for one person. That is all I can offer.”

He bowed in thanks.

“We keep it locked in the back. Just a moment.” In No left and Nomo, in silence, finished binding the little package of medication into a parcel, using brown string to seal it. Then he leaned on his counter and sighed, smiling at Min La warmly.

After a moment, In No returned empty-handed.

“You are hopeless,” Nomo observed, looking at his brother’s bewildered expression. “You watched me put it in the cabinet last night.”

“It’s the key I can’t find.”

Nomo blinked several times, then he began patting his chest until, with a barking laugh, he withdrew the key from under his golt where it hung on a string of braided silk.

In No laughed, too, and extended a hand for it. “And you call me absentminded.”

He turned to go back to the shop’s little storeroom, but, standing at the curtained doorway, he froze. Nomo said his name but he did not move. Min La felt his blood cool so quickly that a violent shiver coursed through his body. He clenched his hands into fists.

“In No…” Nomo said again. “In No, we do not—”

Turning, In No put up a hand and silenced Nomo. Then he said loudly, “Brother, you should come and show me where you’ve hidden it. You know I can’t stand it when you rearrange things every other day.”

Nomo blinked several times. Then he clasped his hands before him and nodded, his lips pressed together tightly, his face pale.

In No went to Min La and clutched him by the shoulders. Staring into his eyes with chilling intensity, he leaned close and whispered, “Run.”

Out of habit, Min La reached his hand into his bag only to remember that he had left the knife with So Ga. A sense of calm overcame him. As if he had been holding his breath and now that what he feared most had come to pass, he could finally breathe.

In No dropped a paper on the floor as he and his brother disappeared through the curtained doorway. Without thinking, Min La picked it up. Then he scooped the parcel off the counter and ducked through the curtained doorway after them. The brothers were clutched together in front of a cabinet arguing loudly about the proper way to use a key. They did not turn around.

Yellow light poured through the open back door together with the chill of winter and the sounds and smells of the teahouse next door. Min La went through cautiously, but the alley was empty.

Standing for a moment in the unseasonably warm sunlight, Min La glanced at the paper In No had dropped. On it had been written a list of ingredients, the precise ingredients that made up So Ga’s medicine. A vague understanding of what had happened formed quickly in his mind. With a little exhale of anger, he crumpled the paper and dropped it onto the cold dirt alley.

Behind him, he suddenly heard the voice of Nomo: “You’ve just missed him. Can you believe it: he’s stolen from us!”

The calm that had washed over him immediately gave way to panic. Min La’s heart hammered in his chest. He pressed himself against the back wall of the apothecary and considered his options while he tucked the parcel into his bag.

“Where is he?” spoke a familiar voice, the same he had heard in the temple, belonging, he assumed, to Táno Gín himself. Part of him wanted to peek inside, to look at him, this fabled mercenary captain. All this time running from him and he still had not seen the man who hunted them with his own eyes.

“Didn’t you see him?” asked Nomo Dol Heno. “I assume he just bolted out the front like a common beggar thief.”

Táno Gín began to give orders. When Min La heard him tell someone to check the back, he detached himself from the apothecary wall and broke into a swift walk. He couldn’t run, running would attract attention. But the alley was long and there were no places to hide oneself without ducking into the teahouse. Min La suddenly remembered when he had watched the orphan boys in Rensoth dodge city guards by weaving in and out of a crowded teahouse. The doubling of the situation struck him. As if now that he was near the end he had somehow come again to the beginning. He found himself wondering if Héothenin occasionally looped a path.

“Captain!” a voice behind him called.

He’d been spotted. Without turning, he gripped the bag tightly and broke into a run.

The alley opened onto a street which turned left to lead back to the main Osenok market and right to lead to a courtyard of gravel built around a well. He went right, wove around the well, and then ducked into another alley, this one squeezing between two sets of walls that surrounded what looked like apartments of some kind, both of which were only partly built and otherwise empty. Halfway down the alley, he heard a flurry of boots behind him.

“Here!” called a voice.

They were too fast and the town was too unfamiliar to him. He wondered if the wild would be better. He wondered if he should race them back to the boat. Would the mercenaries of Táno Gín respect a River Voyage? They hadn’t respected the temple of Ávoth. Even if they did, wouldn’t that just trap them on the boat forever?

The alley had become too narrow and he had to turn to the side to squeeze through. The man behind him recognized that he wouldn’t fit and turned back. He was going around, Min La realized. And he paused.

His brother’s voice came then, a welcome sound: “You are small, little shadow, and not particularly strong. Speed is all you have. Hesitate and die.”

Min La slipped as quickly as he could through the last narrow length of the alley. He burst from it as if expelled and staggered into a empty avenue between rows of closely built wooden houses, each bordered by a low wall. A woman hanging her laundry glanced over her short wall at him with indifference, then went back to her work. To his right, he saw the mercenary at the end of the road, running for him at full speed.

“Use what you have, little shadow.”

Twisting the bag onto his back, Min La pulled himself up onto the short wall in front him. The woman gave a surprised yelp and dropped a sopping wet golt. As fast as he dared, he ran along the top of the wall until it ended at the rear of the house. Then he hopped to the adjacent wall and followed it around its house until he had looped back to the street where he had started, the unfinished apartments towering in front of him.

Doubting himself a little, he eyed the distance from his wall to the one surrounding the apartment. That wall was much higher, but he could sense that he would reach it. As he leapt, the world quieted and his focus narrowed. Time slowed, extending the length of a breath to what felt like minutes. He was flying, and the sensation returned memories to him that were at once sweet and overwhelming. But then his hands caught the rough stone and his mind settled. That old familiar feeling of triumph rippled through him when his hands found purchase exactly where he had aimed. With more energy than he was used to, he lifted himself up easily and stood upon the high wall. Cautiously, he made his way along the top of it until he was looking down into the gravel courtyard with the well. The mercenaries were nowhere to be seen.

Using the row of stones that bordered the gate in the wall, Min La eased himself back down to the ground. His best option — his only option — was to hide and then try to sneak back to the boat unseen. Glancing over his shoulder for any sign of his pursuers, Min La decided to go back the way he had come, across the courtyard to the alley. But this time he would turn towards the market in hopes that the crowd would provide sufficient camouflage. As he made his way across the courtyard, he undid his hair, which had come loose, and wondered how hard he could run on his bad knee.

He heard the footsteps behind him before he saw the shapes in front of him. It shocked him how quickly he was surrounded. There were four men, golts of dark gray suede and dark cloaks that looked almost blue in the sunlight. These men moved and hunted as if they shared a mind. More and more it seemed to him that time was repeating. Last time, however, it was one of So Ga’s bodyswords who had fallen in a back alley of Rensoth. And there was no one here to save Min La. Suddenly, he realized that he was also one of So Ga’s bodyswords. As he stood frozen in the middle of the courtyard, one of the mercenaries gestured to the others. It was either a signal to attack or a signal to wait. When they didn’t move, Min La knew which and so, without another thought, he put his shoulder down and ran.

Speed had always been his only real strength. Speed and agility. That he was small afforded him a unique ability to outmaneuver even the strongest armored man. Running at the two men in front of him, Min La ducked and slipped under the outstretched arms of one while driving his shoulder into the chest of the other.

The two behind shifted into action and ran after him. Min La had been slowed by his collision but he had not fallen. Glancing back, he continued to run, certain that they would abandon open pursuit in the crowded market.

But then his momentum was brutally arrested when a boot connected with his leg and sent him sprawling to his side. Despite himself, he cried out in shock and pain. One of the men had managed to land a kick on his bad knee and he lay gasping. Adrenaline and fear pulled him to his feet, but he nearly fell again when he tried to put weight on his leg. There would be no running now.

A familiar fragrance filled Min La’s nose and he saw that the medicine parcel had fallen out of his bag and lay open on the ground, its contents blowing away in the winter breeze, mingling with the cold dirt of the road and the powdery gravel of the courtyard.

His vision blurred as panic sent a hot rush of blood throughout his shivering body. He had no options. His only strength had been destroyed and his brother’s voice was silent. Absurdly, he glanced around for signs of a rescuer. If indeed Héothenin had looped his path back to this point, surely there would be a rescuer, just as he had been the rescuer before. He could not believe that he had been brought here to die. What would become of So Ga if he died? Perhaps he could stay with the monks. But for how long? How would he ever be able to return to his father? So Ga still needed him; he could not have been brought here to die.

When the other figures entered the courtyard he believed, at first, that he was imagining it. They moved so soundlessly, so cleanly, appearing like the Ădol’s attendants from the stories, slipping through the barriers between worlds. Two flashes of steel, two throats slit, then confusion as the other mercenaries tried to figure out what was happening.

Just as Min La was about to take advantage of the confusion to make a hobbling-run for the market, hands grasped him around the shoulders and dragged him inside the walls of one of the apartments. He kicked with his good leg and twisted his hips, but two strong men had him by the arms and he was still dazed from panic.

The gate in the apartment’s wall closed tightly and the hands released him. It was much colder in the shade, this was the first thing Min La noticed as he struggled to catch his breath. The pain in his knee nearly caused him to topple when the hands released him. Clutching his bag tightly, he turned with wide eyes to stare threateningly at the men who had dragged him here, like an animal forced into a corner. But all the men turned away from him, many even turned their backs. They seemed to be going out of their way to avoid looking at him, as if they believed that looking upon his face would cause them to go blind.

It was then that a young man emerged from the shadows.

Within the shaded space inside the quiet yard enclosed by the wall, the man seemed to wear shadow. His face, sharp as a crow’s, was almost entirely obscured even though sunlight spilled over his long brown cloak. When he turned to glance at his men who stood by the closed gate, the light caught his eyes which shone gray and alert. Min La found that he felt no less threatened by the sharp eyes of this stranger than he did by the swords on the other side of the wall.

“They will likely take care of their own dead, my lord,” one of the swords said quietly to the sharp-faced man who turned to glance at him. “We have otherwise escaped notice, they do not seem to know we are here, and we are certain that no one saw you.”

“Our master would not want this much attention drawn to our presence here,” the sharp-faced man said. His voice was different from what Min La would have expected; weaker, perhaps, or restrained. “Do not kill any more of them.”

The sword bowed and offered an apology that seemed more fearful than the man’s weakened tone demanded. Then he, too, turned his back to Min La.

The sharp-faced man, however, did not seem to fear looking upon him. Instead, he put his hand upon his chest and bowed his head.

“I assure you,” he said quietly. “You are quite safe. My men and I mean you no harm.”

“Who are you?” Min La demanded, breathless.

The man lifted his head. Only his lips were illuminated as they formed an inscrutable smile.

“I am Sen Lí Lăsoth.”

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When Namo Non lifted the flap of Táno Gín’s tent, the captain expected him to be bringing news of the two boys — it was two, they knew this now because of what Ŏlo Hin had seen — but instead the man fidgeted for a moment before bowing, which could only mean one thing.

“Captain,” he began, but Táno Gín quieted him with a gesture.

“Bring him in,” he said, and poured himself tea.

His tent was a simple one, and quite small. But it was enough to contain a thin mattress on a short wooden frame, as well as one table, one short stool, and a stove. It was before the stove that Táno Gín was sitting, the stool drawn close. A pot sputtered and gurgled on top and the door was partly ajar, spilling warmth into the enclosed space that cut the building, wet chill that had become increasingly bitter.

He was not wearing his cloak but had it draped across his knees. The white roots of his long hair shone orange in the firelight producing the impression that his head was crowned with embers. This was the image the visitor received when Namo Non again opened the tent and showed him in.

Táno Gín knew the man by name, but had never met him before. He was Hŏ Dan1 Orin Han and came from the south, from his master’s estate, to serve as messenger and perhaps spy. Táno Gín had wondered when Orin Han would make such a move, no doubt Housemaster Ulno Ban was growing restless in the absence of news. Or perhaps Hŏ Dan had been sent by the Housemaster’s second, Doma. In either case, he was an unwelcome burden.

He bore his high status within the Orin Han House in his fine silk golt, embroidered in gold along the collar, and in his thick wool cloak lined with white rabbit fur. Despite the cloak, he still shivered in the chilly tent reminding Táno Gín that he was from the south, and also that he was not the kind to allow himself to acclimate to discomfort. With some hesitation, he peeled off a pair of glossy black leather gloves as he entered the tent.

Táno Gín did not stand to greet Hŏ Dan and he, in turn, did not bow. He clasped his hands behind his back and scanned the tent’s interior for a place to sit. Táno Gín motioned to Namo Non, who bowed quickly and left, returning almost immediately with another short stool. This he placed near the stove. Then he bowed and took up a position on the other side of the tent’s opening. Táno Gín gestured to the stool. Hŏ Dan offered his teeth in something like a smile and then gingerly sat upon it. The firelight made his blue-green silk shine like a pool of wet ink. Táno Gín did not offer tea.

“My lord Táno Gín,” Hŏ Dan began, but he was interrupted.

“I am Houseless. I am no one’s lord.”

“Ah, yes. Force of habit, I’m afraid. Captain Táno Gín, I have not come to scold you on behalf of our master. Indeed, I was not sent from Gŏhíth, you understand, but from Ŏno Soth.”

Táno Gín’s gaze flickered over the man. “You were in the capital?”

“Yes.” He showed his teeth again and drew forth a sealed envelope from his golt pocket, handing it casually to the captain. “I have been sent with this.”

Táno Gín glanced at it, recognizing immediately the seal of the Sonen House. Though it startled him to see a message from Sonen borne by a member of Orin Han. He had known for some time the two were aligned somehow, but had always assumed it was a carefully guarded secret.

Hŏ Dan seemed to read his surprise on his fire-lit face and offered a light laugh. “Oh it’s nothing like that,” he said. “My master has need of his man. You know the one.”

Táno Gín’s confusion deepened. “Ŏlo Hin?”

The man made a gesture with the sealed message, to suggest that he read it. And so Táno Gín finally plucked it from his hands and tore it open.

It was true, the message did nothing more than request Ŏlo Hin’s return to the capital.

“Our master,” Hŏ Dan repeated, “has need of him.”

Táno Gín considered that. “Your master? Is not your master the Housemaster of Orin Han, the prince of Gŏhíth? This letter is from Balo Sonen.”

Hŏ Dan smiled, lips covering his teeth. Then he said, “You will obey, of course?”

“Impossible. I have need of Ŏlo Hin. He has seen with his own eyes the one we hunt.”

“I have heard that he has also caused you some trouble.” And Hŏ Dan frowned, sticking out his lower lip.

So, he had heard about the dead Folo Dol sword. Of course he had. Táno Gín said nothing and sipped his tea.

“Will you not offer me some tea?” Hŏ Dan asked, smiling.

“I have only the one cup.”

“Ah.” Hŏ Dan’s smile remained unmoved. “Pity.”

“I will send Ŏlo Hin back to the capital when we have finished our task.”

“No, that will not do.” He clicked his tongue and smoothed his long golt over his legs. “He is needed immediately.”

“Perhaps you do not understand. I require Ŏlo Hin with me. He possesses knowledge I will need in order to complete my task.”

Hŏ Dan laughed lightly, muttering, “complete your task.” Then, shaking his head, he pulled another folded, sealed paper from his pocket. This one was not sealed with the mark of the Sonen House or the Orin Han House, or any House at all. The imprint in the black wax was blank.

“My master has considered that,” Hŏ Dan said, holding the paper out to Táno Gín.

He took it slowly, somewhat concerned about its contents. But inside he found only a list of herbs and—

“This is medicine.”

Hŏ Dan nodded. “Indeed. Apparently, your quarry can’t get far without the things on that list. If you check the apothecaries in the villages around here, I’m sure you’ll find what you’re looking for.” Then he smiled and leaned forward. “Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job.” He pointed at the message, to a section that Táno Gín had not yet unfolded. “There’s a bit more.”

The final section of the message read simply: “Do not enter Osa Gate.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Táno Gín said, rereading the message.

Hŏ Dan stood suddenly, gathering his cloak around his shoulders and putting his shining gloves back on. “It’s simple, really. Kill the little prince before he enters Osa Gate.”

“He said that? ‘Kill the prince’?”

“Does he have to? Are those not your orders?”

“Why must I not enter Osa Gate?”

“It is not my place to know the details, of course, but we do know that the fort is crucial to our master’s plans. It must remain untouched. Ko Gŏth Enlin, too. You mustn’t touch him.”

Táno Gín stared at Hŏ Dan and then looked again at the paper in his hands. There was a thread of contradiction within that he could not quite place and it worried him. He was used to his orders coming from Orin Han, not Sonen. Though he knew Sonen directed most of Orin Han’s actions. Still, his brother Sono Gín was not in the hands of Sonen, but Orin Han. If he was to obey only one—

Hŏ Dan said, “Perhaps you do not yet understand, captain. You have already failed. But if you can somehow prevent the last little prince from reaching Osa Gate, perhaps they will only take one of your brother’s legs, or one of this arms. I suppose it depends on the old man’s mood. Maybe he’ll take one of both. But at least he’ll be alive, right? However, if something happens at Osa Gate…” He let the sentence trail dramatically into silence and for a fraction of a second Táno Gín considered killing him.

But he said merely, “You’ll find Ŏlo Hin on patrol to the north. Take him and go.”

That evening, Min La sat with So Ga in their cabin eating their last dinner in the Nal Dor and in the monks’ company.

“I will miss them,” So Ga said abruptly. “Is it wrong that a part of me wishes I could stay with them, maybe even shave my head and grow old in the service of Ávoth? It seems a simpler life.”

Min La nodded. “It does.”

“Have you ever considered it? After you were—?” He stopped short, then averted his eyes.

Min La offered him a reassuring smile. “Many times. But it never seemed like the right choice.”

“What do you mean?”

He chewed a potato thoughtfully and searched for the words. “One shouldn’t become a monk in order to hide, I don’t think. It’s too important a calling to be diluted that way. I think doing a good thing for the wrong reasons will warp the goodness in the end, and make it ugly.”

So Ga watched him speak with a small smile upon his face, but he said nothing.

“What?” Min La demanded.

“Nothing.” He shook his head. Then, after a pause, he added, “You are wiser than you look.”

“Are you saying I look stupid?”

“Yes,” So Ga answered solemnly. “Very.”

Min La raised his potato as if to throw it at him, while the little prince smiled and hid behind his arms. At that moment a knock came and Ŏnin quietly entered their cabin.

Min La lowered the potato but So Ga could not conceal the mirthful smile on his face. Ŏnin looked from one to the other and gave a solemn bow.

“It is good to see your spirits restored. We will be saddened to see you go.”

“We have burdened you long enough,” Min La replied. “And the kindness you have shown us is beyond what we could ever repay.”

So Ga smiled as he watched Min La speak.

The monk took a step closer to them and said, “It is another matter that has brought me this evening. I had told you that we would give your brother a final dose of medication before you leave us, but alas, we have no more ingredients.”

Min La’s face fell. He thought for a moment. “Is there a village nearby?”

“There are several. The largest is called Osenok and we will reach by morning. They will have a well-stocked apothecary.”

Min La nodded. “I will collect what we need in the morning and then my brother and I will leave immediately after.”

Ŏnin smiled and bowed. “If that is what you wish,” he said. And his gaze lingered on Min La before he left the little cabin, a sorrowful look on his aged face.

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Sixth day of the River Voyage

All monks of Ávoth maintain boats. The rivers are as much a home to them as their tidy blue temples.

Before they departed, Min La learned that the village in which they had found themselves — the one where the monks had labored to protect and also to heal them — was in a little village called Tŭbar1, meaning “gray cover” as the sky there was so often enclosed in the gray cotton shroud of storm clouds or else in a thick fog from the river.

The monks’ boat was named Nal Dor, “blue hand”. It was a fitting name. The hull was painted blue entirely, from bow to stern, with the name and a fine image of Ávoth’s head painted crisply upon the transom.

Fresh white rigging matched the crisp white mainsail which had been painted, on the luff side, with the tall figure of the mournful Ădol, his bare feet nearly touching the shining blue boom.

The many cabins below deck had been arranged and outfitted in much the same way as the modest rooms at the temple. There was also a simple galley for preparing meals. Min La and So Ga had been given a cabin nearest the galley, deep in the bowels of the Nal Dor, where the two young brothers could feel safe. Ŏnin had seen to this and had made a point of showing Min La just how difficult it would be for anyone to reach them. This cabin had been the least desirable to the monks as it had no porthole. But, as Ŏnin had suspected, this made it particularly pleasing to Min La.

They spent the first two days of the River Voyage recovering. So Nan — or So Ga, as his brother called him — slept frequently but seemed to recover his appetite quickly. His color and his energy soon followed and though he was loathe to be parted from his brother, he did submit to another dose of medicine on the first evening. With the permission of his brother, he soon took up a position in the galley helping old Brother Noba prepare meals for them all.

Min La took longer to recover, as Ŏnin suspected he would. Driven to the brink of exhaustion, he had slept even longer than his brother. Waking, he had not seemed rested, but instead moved fitfully below deck, standing occasionally at the foot of the ladder gazing up at the pale daylight as if it was threatening him.

His spirits seemed to improve when So Ga showed signs of recovery. For a time, however, Min La avoided his brother, keeping apart from him though close enough to watch him. Ŏnin knew that he still blamed himself for what had happened at the temple. Ŏnin believed that there was very little in this world for which Min La did not blame himself.

On the fourth day So Ga took food to Min La — who had skipped several meals — where he sat on a stool near the foot of the ladder that led up to the Nal Dor’s deck. Pulling him by the arm, he took him up into the brilliant blue twilight and they remained there, talking quietly for some time. Thereafter Min La’s behavior seemed more at ease. He began to eat again, perched near his brother, and even allowed himself to be put to work by the monks. Ŏnin was glad for it. Though it seemed the young man was always near exhaustion no matter how much he slept. Perhaps that would only change once they reached their destination.

Every evening the Nal Dor would move north down the Osa Lí River, and every morning they would dock and erect the temple tent where pilgrims could come to offer their dead. This was a large, open structure made by stretching blue waxed linen over a simple birch wood frame. This frame was easily disassembled into smaller pieces which could then be stored below deck and easily assembled within an hour in the morning. Min La proved particularly adept at this. As his knee improved, the monks found themselves relying on him to erect the blue temple tent every morning.

Inside the tent, just under the blue canopy, they hung the pilgrim tapestry of Ávoth. Cushions were placed throughout where the monks could sit. Silver bowls shone in the winter sun as the pilgrims placed their dead inside. Usually these were simple folded papers, but sometimes they were sealed with wax, or even tied with ribbon. Just outside the tent hung dozens of blue lanterns — these also decorated the deck of the Nal Dor. Boxes of candles were set out for the pilgrims to use. Of all the supplies carried by the monks on the River Voyage, candles took up most of their storage space. These were short, fat candles which required no holder. Lighted by pilgrims, they could be placed on the ground. In time the path to the monks’ blue tent would be lined with fire. The monks would always use these candles to maintain the lanterns on the Nal Dor as a way of keeping Ávoth’s fires lit. The rest were left on the ground when the tent was taken down and the boat moved on. Many would come to use them to light their own household candles and lanterns for their Inner Rooms. Despite the enormous quantity they carried, the candle boxes were still carefully rationed to ensure that the monks didn’t run out before the end of the River Voyage.

On the morning of the sixth day, Min La had sat quietly in his borrowed blue monk’s robes after erecting the tent. So Ga was still sleeping below deck and he was waiting for him to wake to eat with him. He sat with his hood drawn low and his back to the tapestry of Ávoth. He didn’t even seem to notice when the pilgrims began to arrive.

Presently, a rising whisper moved through the quiet crowd on the bank of the river. The people started and turned, each straining to see behind them without behaving in a way that was inappropriate for the setting. Ŏnin, from his cushion near the front of the tent, watched with interest as the crowd parted and a tall man appeared wearing a blue golt and a coat of pale green, the color of the Koda House. The man’s long face was severe but calm, his long hair moved in the chill winter breeze. He rested his hand upon the pommel of his sword, the other behind his back.

Ŏnin knew him at once. This was Tá Nom, the heir to the Koda Housemaster, the shrewd and wise Gin Ja Koda. Tá Nom was her eldest son, the one most like his noble father. Several men were with him, but no women. It seemed Gin Ja had not come herself, but had sent her son to deliver the Koda dead.

Tá Nom and his House had earned a reputation in this part of the Osa Len Mountains. There was, of course, the prestige of being given charge of the royal silver mines, but they were also known to guard closely their roads and villages. Koda lands were among the safest in Sona Gen. Their new villages were prosperous and their dealings with other Houses were fair. As a result, Tá Nom was admired and respected. Ŏnin was not surprised to see him. Many of the noble Houses chose to deliver their dead with pomp and ostentation, as a display of their piety. Others chose to do so quietly in an effort to avoid the same. Tá Nom Koda, as usual, did neither. He made a point of approaching the River Voyage as any man would. But he also made a point of being seen. This would be the influence of Gin Ja, Ŏnin knew. Tá Nom’s behavior reflected on their House. And if their House maintained a noble, respected reputation they could more easily keep their power. If they remained powerful, they could continue to govern their lands well enough to benefit all who lived upon them. There was no room for false modesty in the court of Koda.

Ŏnin gestured as Tá Nom approached, inviting him to kneel before him so that he could receive the Koda heir’s dead. Tá Nom bowed — together will all his men — and then knelt.

Though Ŏnin arranged his blue robes in order to receive Tá Nom Koda’s dead according to the rites, the man instead spent a moment looking about the tent and even at the Nal Dor behind them. Ŏnin waited.

“It gladdens my heart to see that there are still young men in this world who wish to devote themselves to the service of the Ădol.” Tá Nom bowed his head as he spoke, his gaze alighting briefly on Min La where he sat behind the row of monks, his blue hood casting a deep indigo shadow across his face.

“As long as there are Ădol,” the old monk replied, also bowing, “there will be men willing to serve them.”

Tá Nom bowed again and Ŏnin again moved to receive his supplication.

“It is a striking resemblance,” Tá Nom said. Ŏnin started slightly and opened his eyes. The young Koda heir was still staring at Min La, a small smile on his long, inscrutable face.

“Resemblance, my lord?”

“This young monk.” He nodded at Min La. “The way he is sitting and the way his cloak falls, his youth and his long hair. Does he not remind you a great deal of the very Ădol whom you serve?”

Ŏnin turned then, surprised to have his anxious tension allayed by such an observation. He looked behind Min La — who was doing an admirable job maintaining the air of a contemplative young monk in the face of so many onlookers — at the woven tapestry from the Om Lun era that had been gifted to their little temple two centuries ago. This was a pilgrimage tapestry, intended for this very purpose, to be hung for veneration at every stop along the annual River Voyage.

Like most pilgrimage tapestries, the design was ornate but simple. Meant to provide sacred imagery for the people visiting the pilgrimage, the primary depiction was always, of course, Ávoth. Most depictions of the young Ădol showed him standing ankle-deep in one of his beloved rivers, arms open to welcome the recently deceased. Always with a blue hood and a long blue cloak. Always with long hair and always with his eyes closed. And usually his hair was white, like his father’s.

In the pilgrimage tapestry that the monks had displayed, however, Ávoth was not standing, but sitting cross-legged on the far bank of a narrow river. His long hair, instead of being white, was the same gray as the river water. His pale hands were open on his knees, palms up. In the background the moon and sun shared the sky. A section of Ávoth’s fluid blue robes had stretched across the river creating a kind of bridge.

Ŏnin had always favored this depiction for pilgrimages, as it suggested that the young Ădol was receiving the supplicants who would come in droves to offer the names of their deceased loved ones to the passing monks.

Looking at it now, with Min La sitting idly in front of it in the dim yellow light of late morning, he too was struck by the similarity.

The blue cloaks they had given to Min La and So Ga had been ample enough, the old monk had hoped, to hide the young men’s identities. But the way Min La sat wrapped and almost cocooned in it, the deep blue fabric had stretched around his shoulders and draped across his lap to almost exactly resemble to robes of the Ădol on the tapestry behind him. Min La had drawn his hood low to conceal his face, but his hair fell long across his chest and blew slightly in the autumn breeze like lengths of tangled black ribbon. His eyes were closed in what could have been contemplative prayer. But the old monk had come to understand the boy well enough to know that he was more than likely just trying not to fall asleep.

At that moment, however, Ŏnin could distinguish no difference between the young man wrapped tightly in borrowed blue robes and the melancholy Ădol on the tapestry behind him. The image, he perceived, had been doubled. It filled him with a certain mournful dread to see such mirroring and he wondered if perhaps he had committed some grave error by putting Min La in the robes of Ávoth. Would the mournful Ădol be drawn to his own image accidentally duplicated in the living world? Would the gloom of Ávoth haunt the shadow of Min La from this moment on? It seldom brought good fortune to be among the beloved of Ávoth.

“Brother?”

Ŏnin started. He had entirely forgotten about Tá Nom Koda who still knelt before him, still wearing that unreadable smile.

“Yes, my son?”

“Would you permit me to present my dead to this young monk? Perhaps it is foolish, but I entreat you to humor me, if it is within your power.” He held up his blue envelope, which had been wrapped in white string and sealed with the wax seal of the Koda House. It was the more formal means of delivering supplications, but was quite common among the wealthier Houses. The Kodas had also left an offering of food. No donations were accepted along the River Journey save what was needed for the journey itself. Monks of Ávoth did not eat fish and so offerings of meat and grain were most common. The Kodas being wealthy had also given fruit.

Ŏnin bowed slowly and made a great production of standing, his arms tucked into the heavy blue sleeves of his worn robes. The Koda heir waited on his knees while the monk approached Min La and knelt next to him.

Min La stirred when he heard his voice whispering in his ear. Then he nodded.

Ŏnin positioned himself by the young man’s side and then motioned for Tá Nom to approach. Min La had recognized him immediately but kept his eyes down.

“This is our little brother’s first River Voyage,” Ŏnin said to Tá Nom. “I will help him receive your dead.”

Tá Nom bowed to both of them. “Thank you.”

With Ŏnin’s practiced help, Min La extended his arms until the vast lengths of blue cloth had unfolded from his lap, then he held his arms out to Tá Nom, who did not move. Slowly, Min La pulled his hands back inside his sleeves, leaving a pool of blue fabric stretched all the way across the narrow divide between him and Tá Nom, with the edge of it just touching Tá Nom’s knees.

The Koda heir placed his blue envelope on top of this pool of blue cloth. Min La reached forth with one hand wrapped entirely in his sleeve and folded the envelope into the fabric, like a wave of water swallowing the sealed envelope. The length of fabric that had bridged the divide between them disappeared, and with it, Tá Nom’s dead. Following Ŏnin’s whispered instruction, Min La bowed deeply, his chest almost touching his knees. Tá Nom mirrored his bow and they both remained in that position for some time.

Ŏnin could not make out what the Koda heir whispered to Min La then, but the message was lengthy. When he was done, he stood up. With the same unmoved smile on his face, he bowed to both of them and, together with his men, he took his leave.

Ŏnin studied Min La’s face as he straightened from his bow. The boy did not seem troubled, not any more than before. He didn’t think the boy’s face could get any paler than it already was, and though he seemed calm, Ŏnin had only seen his calm broken when his brother had been in danger. Whatever message the Koda heir had carried, then, it could not have been a dangerous one. The monk wondered if it had been the opposite, if the dignified and unreadable heir of the Koda House had perhaps come here specifically to provide some aid to the pair of them. Had he done this out of the kindness of his heart, Ŏnin wondered, or because it would benefit his House in some way?

But he shook his head. Such speculations were not for an old man. And certainly not for an old monk.

Another monk came from the row in front of them to take the sealed envelope. Min La used his fabric-wrapped hands to place it in the silver dish that the monk held out to him. Relieved of their burden, his hands stretched out from the sleeves and Ŏnin saw that they trembled slightly.

“My son?” the old monk said.

Min La shook his head. “Where is he?” he whispered, referring, of course, to his frail brother.

“Sleeping in the cabin.”

“We will leave after he wakes.”

“Another day on the river will get you closer to your destination.”

“Another day in the pilgrimage might attract too much attention.” He turned to look at Ŏnin. His pale young face framed as it was by the blue cloth was so like Ávoth’s that it made the old monk a little afraid. “We have already invited too much danger into your lives.”

Ŏnin knew it was useless to argue. And, in truth, the young man was not wrong. Clearly the Koda heir had recognized him. Perhaps the blue robes and the company of the monks were not enough to hide them after all.

“Tomorrow night,” the old monk agreed. “After we burn the dead.”

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1

Ban Lo Sonen endured the tense silence in his carriage as it carried him back to his father’s estate. Tense because, as usual, his wife made repeated efforts to speak to him or to pry into his private thoughts and he was forced to ignore her.

Nă Nen2 was a small woman with long chestnut hair and pale cheeks that glowed rosy pink even in the carriage’s dim lantern light. Her thin brows were down-turned and her large eyes always shone when she looked at him, as if she was constantly on the verge of tears. He found himself treating her delicately, in spite of his indifference. A thing which required energy and care so he resented it and he resented her.

As the wife of a clerk and the daughter-in-law of still another clerk, Nă Nen had no social obligation to dress herself in finery. Still, her brown silk golt was elegantly made and embroidered all over with tiny white flowers. Her own handiwork, he assumed. Over this she wore a thick velvet coat of pale violet which suited her complexion and shone amber in the lantern light. He sat beside her in the small carriage, with her warmth and the sweet fragrance of her perfume distracting his already unsettled mind. Once, she reached out to hold his arm, but he flinched away from her outstretched fingers.

Tucking her small hands into the sleeves of her velvet coat, she said, “You were longer in leaving the Palace today.”

Despite the fact that she had not meant it, he heard in this an accusation.

“I was summoned to speak to the king,” he answered sharply.

She stared at him with her large eyes. “Meet with the king?”

“I cannot tell you what about.”

“Of course, I know you—”

“I do not know why you insisted on coming with me.” Reaching over he pulled one of her hands from her sleeve and squeezed her icy fingers. “I cannot concentrate on my duties if I am forced to care for a sick wife. You’ve seen how distracted it has made my father to care for my mother.”

Nă Nen pulled her hand away and slipped it back inside her sleeve. With a bow of her head she said, “I’m sorry, my lord. Next time I will stay at the estate. Perhaps I can do more to care for mother and lessen the burden on father.”

“Yes,” he answered, distracted. “You probably can.”

Ban Lo’s father was waiting just inside the estate’s gate. Wrapped in a wool cloak, pacing furiously across the paving stones, he appeared to have been waiting for his son since he had arrived home. When he and Nă Nen stepped inside and the servants closed the gate behind them, he stopped in his tracks and turned his flashing eyes upon them.

“Ah, you’re back,” he said, as if he hadn’t been waiting for them. Then he turned to his daughter-in-law and added, “Your mother-in-law has been asking for you. Perhaps you should go to her.”

Nă Nen bowed delicately to her husband and quickly went inside, moving so smoothly that she almost seemed to float. Ban Lo watched her go. The maids of the household brightened when they saw her, and then closed the door after she had stepped inside.

Balo had also turned to watch her go, his hands clasped behind his back. Turning back to his son he said, almost in passing, “I see your wife is still not with child.”

Ban Lo tensed and clamped his jaw shut tightly lest his foul mood cause a slip of the tongue.

“How many years have you been married and not even one baby. The first of the three who came before you was born a year after your mother and I were married. Do I need to send for physicians?”

Ban Lo bowed slightly. “It is my own matter, father. I will handle it.”

“See that you do. There is already talk among the other courtiers. My only son still without any children of his own. It’s embarrassing.”

“I’m sorry, father.”

“I know she isn’t the one you wanted. But because of her we were able—”

“I know, father.”

Balo twisted his lips into something like a thoughtful grimace as he studied his son.

“Anyway,” he said at last and Ban Lo turned slightly to avoid making eye contact. “Anyway, you were summoned by the king.”

“Yes, father.”

“And what did the king want, my boy? Stand up straight, will you, by the Ădol.”

Ban Lo pushed his shoulders back and took a few steps to the side. He was never sure which was more likely to irritate his father, that he was slouching or that he was much taller than him when he wasn’t. Standing a ways from him seemed to mask the latter.

“His Majesty has begun to grow annoyed at the frequent absences of my master and—”

“Your what?” Balo interrupted.

Ban Lo took a quiet breath and bowed. “He has begun to notice that the Minister of Defense might not be capable of doing his duties any longer.”

Balo nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that’s to be expected. It doesn’t matter anyway, his time is almost finished.” Then he offered his son a thin, forced smile. “And then you will be able to take his place as we planned. Yes, all is going well. What else did he say?”

“He suspected that I had manufactured the report you wrote about the Lăsoth House.”

“The one about their issues at the border?”

Ban Lo nodded and his father grunted.

“He probably knows by now that half the things that are stamped with the seal of that senile old bastard were written by me. Not that he can do anything about it.”

“I think he was trying to protect Bo Han Lăsoth, given that he is his brother-in-law.”

“Well, he can’t,” Balo snapped. “The Housemaster of Lăsoth is a fool. By the time I have destroyed his House he won’t even know what happened. The cleverness of the Lăsoth House has long been dead. Did the fool defend himself?”

“Bo Han Lăsoth?”

“Yes, him.”

“No. He admitted that the report was true. But the king didn’t seem concerned. He seems to have a great deal of faith in Bo Han Lăsoth.”

“He is also a fool. The only sense in this city is here in this estate.”

Ban Lo looked away, unsure if he should go on. His father was in a mood and he worried that telling him the rest of what the king had said would anger him even more.

“What is it?” Balo asked. “Was there more?”

Ban Lo licked his lips. He did not notice that his shoulders had rolled forward again and he was slouching.

“Straighten your back, damn you. What else did the king say?”

“I do not know why, exactly, but he was asking about the royal officers.”

Balo narrowed his eyes and walked closer to his son. “What about them?”

“He seemed to think that they were your idea. He seemed to be trying to ask me this without being direct.”

“Was there anyone else there when he asked you this?”

“No. Just… that servant. The woman.”

“And what did you say?”

“Nothing. I answered as you told me to answer.”

“Very good.” He turned and took several steps in the other direction before stopping and staring up at the afternoon sky. “You’re sure he said nothing about Osa Gate?”

“Osa Gate, father?”

“Yes. Think carefully.”

“I’m sure, father. He never mentioned it.”

“Or Ko Gŏth Enlin?”

“The king’s Iron Hand? No, he never mentioned him.”

Balo nodded and his shoulders seemed to relax. “Very good,” he said again.

“Why would he have spoken to me of the Iron Hand? Is there something I should know?”

Turning, Balo said, “We need to watch Osa Gate very closely.”

“‘We’?”

“I am not sure I trust Ko Gŏth Enlin. His behavior these last weeks has been most strange.”

“These last weeks?” Ban Lo stared at his father in open shock. “You’ve been in communication with the royal officer at Osa Gate?”

Balo looked at him evenly. “And if I have?”

“Father, I am responsible for the royal officer at Osa Gate. That was my—”

“And if it was? This plan has been in motion for over a decade. There are some parts of it that I only trust myself to oversee. Or is your pride too great for that?”

Ban Lo took a sharp breath, exhaling a crisp white cloud of steam in the chill afternoon air. “You have put me in my position so that I can help you. But still you treat me like a child.”

Balo laughed lightly and then glanced back at the door through which Nă Nen had entered the residence. “Perhaps if you started acting like a man I would treat you like one.”

Ban Lo, struggling to maintain his composure, turned to leave and make his way to his residence. But his father called him back.

“Will you not even visit your own mother?” he said, his lips curled into a twisted smile.

His anger only contained in his throbbing chest, Ban Lo pushed past his smiling father and then through the doors of his parents’ residence, startling the maids who bowed as he entered and then timidly watched him march down the narrow corridor to his mother’s bedchamber with his shoes still on.

Pushing open the thin wooden door he found the dimly lit room where his mother had been confined to her bed for weeks. He knew that his father believed she would not survive this illness. Ban Lo thought in that moment that his father was probably disappointed at how tightly she clung to life.

The room was at the center of the residence and so had no windows except the thin colored panes in the wall that overlooked the corridor. Colorful frescoes covered the walls in flowers, as if the room was actually a garden, an illusion that was aided by the presence of several bouquets of silk flowers which his mother had made herself, a hobby she used to occupy herself during the long, dark winter months.

Her bed stood at the center of the room, adjacent to a large porcelain stove that had been painted with vines. Flues sent the heat into the bed’s stone base. The entire room was stiflingly hot.

Nă Nen sat on a small cushioned bench by the bedside. Her embroidered brown silk shone in the light of dozens of candles and her long, loose hair seemed to be woven with gold. She was leaning on the bed, her face very close to her mother-in-law, their hands clasped together in a knot of small, delicate fingers.

Her maid stood nearby, smiling warmly at the scene.

When Ban Lo entered, his mother looked up with a start. Her hair, like her son’s was light brown, though hers was streaked with white. Her fine face was ashen, her eyes bloodshot and weak, and her thin body trembled as she tried to sit up. Nă Nen stood and held her hands to help her.

“My son,” his mother said, her tired eyes shining. “It is good of you to visit me when you are so busy.”

The sight of her pale and haggard face and her thin, shivering body made him even angrier and he struggled to control his temper. Everywhere he turned in this wretched estate he found only misery. Offering her a stiff bow he said, “I am busy, mother. And we must go now.”

His mother tried to conceal her disappointment with a pained smile. “Oh, do leave Nă Nen here, she is such a comfort to me.”

Nă Nen turned to her husband. “I would like to stay,” she said timidly.

“I said we are leaving.” And he turned to go.

“But—”

Turning back, Ban Lo took his wife by the arm and pulled her away from his mother’s bedside. Their hands were still joined and his mother would not let go, so the force of Ban Lo’s motion pulled her from her bed.

She cried out, and Nă Nen gasped, but Ban Lo did not let go of her. His heart trembled in his hot chest when he saw his mother struggle to pull herself back into her bed. But then her maid was there lifting her gently and soothing her as she struggled to catch her breath.

Ban Lo gave another bow and then, turning, pulled his wife from the room.

As nightfall spread blackly over the capital, Balo stole from his estate in secret and made his way to the Palace.

The wall that surrounded and contained the royal woods had been scorched by the fire and the gate itself had had to be repaired. But the repairs were poor and the entire Spring Courtyard — together with its little forest — was empty by the king’s order.

Or, Balo thought with a grimace, by her order.

It had once been easy to meet with her there. A pathway from the queen consort’s residence led to the same little forest and had not been walled given that, at the time the Spring Courtyard had been built there was no queen consort and access to her residence had been forbidden to all. An oversight, Balo knew, that she had facilitated.

Balo knew that no one else in the Palace knew of that pathway. No one, of course, but her. In the past, that was how they had met; she would take the queen’s passage to the gate and he would take his black carriage to the wall.

But it had been weeks since she had arranged a meeting. By their agreement only she could summon him. He was not permitted to call for her. Ever since the attack and the fire he had waited, but no word had come.

He was tired of waiting. For some weeks now he had begun to fear that Éna Lí, having achieved her goal of control over the Palace House, was casting him aside. And, like it or not, he still needed her in order to maintain control over the king and ensure his plan’s success. He had no choice but to seek her out, especially now.

Balo left the blacked-out carriage some ways from the avenue that led to the Palace’s back wall and went the rest of the way on foot. He wasn’t sure what his plan was. Would he enter the Palace using the queen’s passageway and find Éna Lí? Did he hope to spy on her, or even confront her?

Before he could determine his own mind, he was distracted by the sudden awareness that he was not the only person walking to the back of the Palace. Before him, at quite a distance, walked another figure. A man, by the size of him, wearing a black cloak with the hood drawn low. He walked with purpose to the very same spot where Éna Lí had once instructed him to meet her. Balo tucked himself behind a large oak and watched with rapt attention, curiosity mingled with anger.

The cloaked figure knocked once and then waited, just as Balo usually did. And in time the little wooden door next to the fire-scarred gates opened soundlessly.

And there she stood.

Éna Lí’s black silk gleamed in the moonlight. Her pale face glowed as she smiled and offered a bow. It seemed that the procedure was precisely the same with this stranger as it had been with him all these long months.

Straining, he tried to hear them, but not even a single word of their whispered conversation reached his ears. They spoke for several minutes; Balo’s legs seemed about to cramp.

He noticed presently that she seemed to treat this cloaked stranger with greater affection that she did him. She touched his arm and clasped his hand. Once, just as they were about to part, she reached out one hand and touched his shadowed face. Then the man took her hand and kissed it and she smiled as she watched him go.

Balo tried to see who it was as he left. But the man was very careful and Balo didn’t want to risk moving from his hiding spot. Éna Lí watched until the figure was gone, then she leaned against the Palace wall and stared up at the moon for some time. Balo watched as her lips moved, as if she was uttering some prayer. Then she went back inside and closed the little door.

It was then, when the cloaked figure was long gone and right after Éna Lí had disappeared, that Balo came out. He rushed to the little door and knocked as he always had. The door opened quickly, as if she’d been waiting for her visitor to come back. Her honey-sweet smile disappeared as soon as she saw Balo.

“I had worried you were perhaps unwell,” he said evenly, clasping his hands behind his back. “I am relieved that you were here to answer.”

“How long have you been here?” she demanded. He found himself feeling pleased at her anxiety and decided it might be better not to reveal that he had seen her visitor.

“I’ve only just arrived,” he said. “Were you expecting me? Perhaps my son forgot to give me a message.”

She collected herself quickly. The smile returned to her porcelain face, her white teeth shining in the moonlight. She gathered her thin cloak around her shoulders, covering the black silk.

“You wish to speak with me?” she said, her voice warm and musical.

“I have for some time. Ever since you did what you did.”

She smiled coyly and tilted her head. “Whatever can you mean?”

“Don’t play with me, Éna Lí. We both know you were the one who sent word to the Housemaster of Orin Han, who then sent his pet mercenaries into the Palace, of all the unthinkable things. We both know that you were the one who ordered the attack on the princes. And that you did so in my name.”

Her smile remained unchanged. “My lord,” she said, her voice almost purring. “It is my duty to anticipate the desires of my master.”

“Your master,” he scoffed. “You know I wanted the prince alive. I cannot control a king who has no heir. I cannot put a prince on the throne when he is dead.”

She blinked her large eyes. “I have heard that he is still alive. Perhaps there is hope yet. Is he not on his way to Osa Gate? Do you not control Osa Gate, or are you still having some troubles with Ko Gŏth Enlin?”

“Stop meddling in matters that do not concern you,” he snapped. “I will handle the prince. If you ever send another order to Orin Han in my name, I will end our relationship in the most absolute way possible.”

She blinked again, with sweetly feigned ignorance that enraged him.

Leaning forward he added, “Do not forget which of us is the servant and which the master.”

Stepping back inside the Palace, Éna Lí closed and tightly locked the wooden door. A girl stood nearby waiting, a look of concern on her round little face.

“How dare he speak to you like that, my lady,” she said.

Éna Lí made a soothing sound and stroked the girl’s cheek.

“Never mind him,” she said. “He is a buffoon, but he is still quite useful.”

“But do you think he can really save the last prince?”

Éna Lí laughed lightly. “Of course not. Táno Gín has never failed a mission. He will see the prince dead or that mad fool in Orin Han will put an end to his pathetic brother.” She took the girl’s hand and patted it gently. “No, my dear, despite all the futile efforts of Balo Sonen, soon the last little prince will be dead.”

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It was nearly nightfall before Sen Lí arrived at the Lăsoth estate. He came in a carriage, accompanied by five swords and his own bodyservant, a small man of about sixty.

Sen Lan had spent the hours before sundown pacing across the central room of the residence that Bo Han had given to her and her husband on the occasion of their wedding. Ŏvor watched her drift restlessly back and forth across the tile floor, her hands clasped before her, then clutching the skirts of her golt, then massaging the back of her neck.

Ŏvor did not know his wife’s brother well. He had met Sen Lí several times while working under his father in the north, but he had not seen him since marrying Sen Lan. He had not attended his sister’s wedding as he had been waylaid by a snowstorm in a Lăsoth village along the Kí Len River. She had been grieved by his absence that day. But Ŏvor had noticed that she had also seemed a little relieved, though he never understood why.

Sen Lí shared his sister’s brilliance, a trait that seemed to run in the family, but he did not have her short temper. Where Sen Lan was sharp-tongued, her brother was prone to silence. Where she was inclined to fly into a rage, he was more likely to withdraw into himself. It was said that Sen Lan could not hold her tongue but that Sen Lí always held a grudge. Ŏvor had never had cause to learn if this was true. He knew that his wife cherished her younger brother. He knew, too, that she was nervous about his arrival.

She had tried to shield her brother from Bo Han’s disappointment, but the Housemaster had known that Sen Lí had not misunderstood his orders; he was returning to the capital instead of seeking out the missing prince despite Bo Han’s wishes. Why he was doing so Ŏvor did not know He wondered if Sen Lan did.

Just as he was about to tell her to sit and drink her tea, one of her maids came in and, with a bow, informed her that Sen Lí had at last arrived and was on his way to greet the Housemaster.

Ŏvor watched as Sen Lan touched her chest. Then she thanked the maid and rushed from the room.

Hurrying to catch up with her, Ŏvor followed Sen Lan across the covered porch of their residence until it met the narrow stone path that connected it to the central structure of the Lăsoth estate, where the Housemaster would no doubt be sitting in his study. The dark blue evening shone with a dusting of starlight. Thin clouds caught the silver light of the moon and, in the distance, an owl’s call echoed across the quiet estate.

As they entered through the open door of the main structure they were met by several servants and maids. All were moving in a soundless rhythm of activity, sorting the belongings of Sen Lí and his men, preparing quarters for each of them, readying baths, carrying trays of food.

They all paused when they saw Sen Lan and Ŏvor, offering slight bows before continuing with their work. Bo Han preferred quiet in the hours after the evening meal and so they spoke to each other in whispers and went about their various tasks almost without any sound at all. Sen Lan stood still and watched them for a moment, distracted or perhaps hesitating. Ŏvor could not entirely understand why she was nervous. But then, he didn’t know Sen Lí as she did.

Gently, he touched her back. She flinched and looked up at him, then she smiled and took a deep breath. Turning to one of the maids, she asked, “Where is my brother?”

The girl — who bore a small tray laden with tea for three — bowed and answered softly, “My lord Sen Lí has gone directly to greet Master Bo Han.”

“In his study?”

“Yes, my lady.”

Sen Lan dismissed her and the girl returned to her duties. Then, with a passing glance at Ŏvor, she turned to make her way to her cousin’s study.

This part of the Lăsoth estate was understood to be the public portion, the only structure open to visitors and the one in which Bo Han spent most of his time and did most of his work. The Housemaster’s Hall was in the center while a wing of rooms stretched all around it, like a horseshoe, connected by a narrow, curving corridor.

Bo Han’s study emitted a warm glow in the dimly lit hall. They heard low voices even as they neared it. These grew louder as they approached and Sen Lan quickened her pace.

“Cousin,” the voice of Sen Lí said loudly, “we both know it isn’t as simple as one prince in the wild.”

“What it is or isn’t is not yours to decide.”

“The king’s son is as good as dead and you know it. We need to be consolidating our strength in the capital.”

“To what end?” Bo Han asked sharply. “What do you plan, exactly?”

Before Sen Lí could answer, Sen Lan pushed open the heavy, carved wooden door and said with a glowing smile, “Brother!”

Bo Han’s study was wide with a ceiling almost as tall as the Hall. The walls were covered in simple patterns of mosaic tiles, paths intersecting across the four walls of the large room. Several brass stands covered in candles lit the space and also warmed it, though the majority of the warmth came from a small porcelain stove near the wall which seemed to be connected to the larger stove in the Hall.

The Housemaster sat at his desk, Tova stood just behind him. He had been in the middle of finishing a letter which he was sealing carefully with a large pool of black wax and the Housemaster’s seal on the back of the gíth medallion that dangled from his belt. Ŏvor watched as he blew softly on the wax-heated metal and then let the medallion dangle again from its chain. The gíth caught the candlelight while it swung and shone pink and red. While brother and sister greeted each other, Bo Han handed the sealed letter to Tova and whispered to him at length. The bodysword set his jaw, his eyes flickering while he listened. But then Bo Han reached out and touched his wrist with a reassuring nod.

Tova took a deep breath, bowed, and then quickly left, closing the heavy door behind him.

Bo Han had removed his usual heavy gray golt and wore only his blue inner golt and a loosely tied coat of dark blue wool. His face was pale and his eyes dark from fatigue. While he watched Tova leave, he took out a handkerchief and coughed into it quietly. Ŏvor observed this with concern. Now was not the time for the Housemaster to fall ill.

Bo Han put away his handkerchief and sipped his tea. Ŏvor couldn’t read him, but still he had the distinct impression that he was angry. Something else, too. When Bo Han turned to look at his cousins, his dark eyes shone in the candle light. Tears, Ŏvor observed, stunned.

Sen Lan laughed as she embraced her brother. It was a musical if slightly nervous sound. The silence that had filled the room as soon as they had entered had been thick and suffocating and this sound alone broke it. Sen Lí said nothing at first, he wrapped his sister in his arms and patted her back with his large hands.

He stood much taller than Sen Lan, despite being younger. They had the same black hair and the same sparkling gray eyes. Sen Lan’s beauty was in her warmth and in the soft pink glow of her full cheeks. But Sen Lí was decidedly colder. His face — darker and without the warm glow that softened Sen Lan — was harshly carved; a sharp brow cast heavy shadows over his narrow eyes, sharp cheekbones gave him a hollow look, and a sharp nose brought his entire countenance to a fine point. When he smiled at his sister, it softened him somewhat. But looking at him in the naked glow of the candlelight, Ŏvor had the impression that Sen Lí almost seemed like a man who had been starved all his life and now glanced greedily about the world for any morsel.

Ŏvor remained near the door while his wife greeted her brother. He watched as she whispered something to him that made him smile and laugh lightly. Then, letting go of her, Sen Lí saw Ŏvor.

“Brother,” he said, greeting him with a bow. Ŏvor returned his bow but said nothing.

“How long will you stay?” Sen Lan asked him. “Before setting out, I mean?”

Bo Han glanced up from his tea and Sen Lí made an effort not to look at him.

“I do not think—”

“I know you will probably want to leave quickly. But you should rest. At least one night.” She clasped her hands before her and took a step back. Ŏvor sensed her unease and moved to stand behind her.

Sen Lí motioned to Bo Han. “I was just discussing with our cousin—”

“Your brother has been wondering if there is any merit in finding the prince.” Bo Han put his tea cup back on his desk. He did not look at them.

Sen Lan’s breath quickened. Ŏvor put his hand on her back.

She said, “I’m sure he means only what you yourself meant, cousin.” Bo Han raised his eyebrows. “That Lăsoth has no business meddling in the politics of the royal House.”

“Sen Lan,” Sen Lí murmured, rubbing his hands nervously with the hem of his gray cloak.

“And I’m sure that he would rather return to the border but will, of course, fulfill the Housemaster’s wishes.”

“Sen Lan,” her brother repeated. “I don’t—”

“Quiet,” she snapped.

Sen Lí stared darkly at her flashing eyes. “The prince is beyond hope,” he said quietly.

Ŏvor felt Sen Lan tense. She glanced at Bo Han who gripped his knee tightly, knuckles white.

“I am needed here,” Sen Lí went on. “Lăsoth is being threatened. Our cousin cannot—”

“Cannot what?” she asked, breathless. “Cannot defend his own House?”

He looked taken aback. “I would never say that. I only wish to aid him, to support him.”

“And you will. The Housemaster has asked you to do a simple thing. Will you stubbornly disobey as you did when we were children?”

Ŏvor slid his hand around his wife’s waist, gripping gently in an effort to signal her to calm herself. It would not do for her reunion with her brother to be marred by harsh words spoken in anger.

Glancing at Sen Lí, Ŏvor watched as a pained look moved over his face. It lessened the shadows around his eyes, softened the sharpness of his cheeks. Ŏvor sensed in Sen Lí a genuine wish to be of service to Bo Han. He might have gone about it in the wrong way, but like many proud young men, he believed resolutely in his own opinions and so had taken it upon himself to convince his Housemaster. But Sen Lan would have no patience for anything short of simple obedience. Neither of them, Ŏvor feared, would budge. He realized then that brother and sister were identical in stubbornness above all else.

“I do not need you here.” Bo Han spoke quietly but the firmness of his tone silenced the quarreling siblings and, Ŏvor observed, made both shrink a little, like children. He wondered if this was at all similar to their upbringing, when their cousin had taken them in after their parents had died. Ŏvor tried to imagine the siblings as children, he tried to imagine Bo Han scolding them as a father would. There was something very natural about this image.

Sen Lí turned and bowed. “My lord, I can be of more use to you here,” he said, a slight shake in his voice. Ŏvor thought this strange as he had never known either Sen Lan or Sen Lí to fear their cousin. “I do not understand why you wish to waste valuable resources looking for a boy who is certainly already dead.”

When Bo Han flinched at these words Ŏvor suddenly remembered that the prince who was missing, the crown prince of Láokoth and the king’s son, was also the last living child of Bo Han’s sister. He was, in point of fact, Bo Han’s nephew. Ŏvor was surprised once again to find how easy it was to forget the Housemaster’s connection to the royal family, or what was left of it.

Sen Lan opened her mouth to speak, taking a sudden step forward, but Ŏvor held her fast. Turning, she looked up at him, simmering anger on her confused face.

“It is not often,” Bo Han answered, massaging his temples with the tips of his fingers, “that I take it upon myself to explain the orders I have given and which are being disregarded. But as you are my cousin, I will make an exception.”

Standing, he walked across the room to the little stove. With his back to them he opened the stove door and stared into the orange flames. Then he tossed a small square of folded paper into the fire and again closed the door. With his hands behind his back and his eyes still on the fire’s contained glow, he went on, “Very soon rumors will begin to whisper through the most powerful Houses in Láokoth about the boy who is being hunted by mercenaries and the fire that ravaged the Palace grounds. Many will try to learn who he is. Some will succeed. All who do will try to claim him. Any House who possesses the prince will be able to wield significant power over the king and his court. The very foundations of Láokoth will be compromised. Some of these Houses might be trustworthy. But perhaps none of them will be able to resist the temptation to use the prince. As it is, that boy is the most powerful living thing on this entire peninsula. But powerful only if he is in someone’s possession. He is nothing if he is dead.”

He paused and again turned his back. His hands, still clasped behind him, shook slightly.

“And because they cannot be trusted,” Sen Lí ventured carefully, “you will do what they want to do, in order to stop them from doing it?”

Bo Han turned. “Yes,” he said simply.

Sen Lan relaxed a little and so Ŏvor loosened his grip, though he still let his hand rest against her back. She had leaned against him and so he understood that this seemed to have given her a sense of comfort.

“If I find him,” Sen Lí said, “what if we—”

“No.” Bo Han’s voice struck the walls and ceiling of the room in a way that startled them. He took a step closer to Sen Lí and repeated, “No. He is to be brought back to the Palace.”

“But, cousin,” Sen Lan said carefully. “If the Palace is really as dangerous as you say…”

Bo Han turned his gaze on her and she quieted. Then he looked over her shoulder at Ŏvor.

“What do you think?” Bo Han asked him.

Sen Lan tensed again. Ŏvor was not sure how to answer. His wife had made a good point. More than once he had seen for himself the strange, hostile air of the Palace. And, indeed, had not the Palace House orchestrated the attack on the four little princes? Would the king’s son really be safe if he was returned to the Palace?

Finally, Ŏvor said, “They are separate matters. Protecting the prince needs to happen regardless of the situation in the Palace.”

Sen Lí turned sharply and looked at him, his eyes almost entirely obscured by shadow. “And how do you propose we handle the situation in the Palace?”

Ŏvor bowed and said, “That is not for me to decide.”

Sen Lí opened his mouth to answer but Bo Han stopped him.

“Ŏvor is right, they are indeed separate matters. And regardless of what happens with the Palace, the prince must be protected.”

Walking back to his desk, he sat and drew his coat tighter, tucking his arms into the wide sleeves. “You will leave tomorrow to find him,” he said to Sen Lí.

“And if he is already dead?”

But Bo Han didn’t answer.

Standing in the corridor outside Bo Han’s study, Sen Lan took her brother’s hands.

“You should rest. Tomorrow we will have breakfast together before you go.”

He smiled warmly. “I would like that. It feels like many years since last I saw you.” He touched her cheek. “And you have greatly changed.”

“Nonsense.” She swatted his hand away. “Now go, before I have the maids come and lock you in your bed like when you were young.”

Sen Lí laughed quietly, his face suddenly dulled by the gray pallor of fatigue and disquiet. Then he bowed to both of them and disappeared in the darkness of the dim hallway.

Sen Lan turned and looked at Ŏvor. “You see,” she said with a tired smile. “I can hold my tongue.”

He nearly laughed. But instead he kissed her. When he did, he was surprised to find her cold lips trembling.

“What is it?” he asked her, touching the crease of tension between her eyebrows.

But she shook her head, gazing into his eyes, her own darkened by the strain of some weight he could not see. Perhaps it was worry for her brother that had so changed her usual bright countenance. Or perhaps it was the sight of her brother and her cousin at odds with eachother. But whatever the cause, the sudden alteration to her face grieved him; she looked at her husband as if she feared she would never see him again. He wrapped his arms around her waist and held her tightly.

She said, “I worry sometimes.”

“What do you worry about?”

“I worry that Sen Lí doesn’t like you.” She dropped her eyes and pulled away from him. “I worry because Bo Han does like you.”

This made Ŏvor laugh all the more. He kissed her again, holding her fair face.

“Come,” he said in a soothing whisper. “Let’s go to bed.”

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Sources on some of the topics discussed in the video:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16201459/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1754073917709940
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8477683/
https://oaks.kent.edu/_flysystem/ojs/journals/4/articles/169/submission/169-37-593-1-2-20200103.pdf
https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/223/2/jeb212365/223648/Sexual-dimorphism-in-human-arm-power-and-force
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17186303/

(I apologize if I sound a little sick, I've been battling a persistent cold for a while.)

Chapters as they appear on Youtube:

0:00 - Intro
5:04 - Stella Gibson: Making Women Worse Men
7:57 - "Strength" Man vs. Woman
12:10 - Feminine Women as Strong Women
15:04 - The Most Important Female "Strength"
19:30 - AGENCY
27:19 - Femininity Is Weakness (Apparently)
34:24 - Hyper-sexuality is Feminine (Apparently)
38:44 - Real Strength in Real Women
49:42 - Masculine Strength as Moral Strength
52:46 - Feminine Weaknesses and Negative Traits
54:24 - Conclusion (and Disclaimers)

Modern moral thought is needlessly complex. Complexity has taken the place of nuance, presenting a state of moral grayness which, though purporting to be complex, is actually childishly simple: It’s mean to say that someone is bad.

Within the realm of criminal matters, this takes a more specific form:

It’s mean to punish people.

This attitude — both morally and judicially — has, naturally, permeated storytelling. Films and series in which criminals are either shown to have been more morally upright than the heroes, or in which the criminals are given a second, third, fourth chance to Do The Right Thing are far more common these days than stories in which criminals are punished, roll credits. And while it might seem harmless — and even socially beneficial — to portray bad guys reforming, the issue arises not in this itself, but in how the reformation occurs. More often than not, a villain experiences a change of heart only when someone is nice to him. Anyone who has ever come face to face with evil understands that this is painfully childish. Yet, the repeated fictional reinforcement of this idea instills in people the idea that kindness is morally superior because it delivers results while avoiding the barbarism of harsh punishment.

Because for writers to whom punishment is simply too mean, any system that avoids the prickly act of meting out uncomfortable justice must be shown to be not only successful but superior. It must be presented as morally more progressive, psychologically less barbaric, and socially more effective than “mere punishment”.

In the 2013 Japanese film The Brain Man (based on the Edogawa Rampo award-winning novel of the same name by Urio Shudo1) the full reality of this needless complexity is presented with disturbing clarity.

This story functions as a mystery tale, but is, in reality, an ambitious philosophical examination of the following social observation: “we’ve made society so morally complex that when we need to access the simple solution to a simple problem, we’re no longer capable of it”.

As such, it isn’t well-suited to a mere film and so the various threads of these ambitious themes are occasionally knotted or aren’t entirely followed through to the end. However, this isn’t meant to be a review of this flawed film, but an essay about the fascinating moral landscape it painted within its uncomfortable story. As such, there will be spoilers.

There are three entire plots at work here. The first is a simple cop drama in which the police are hunting a mysterious serial bomber. The second is a tangent examining the background and formation of a man who was one of the chief suspects in the aforementioned plague of bombings. The third is a sociological fairy tale in which a psychiatrist basks in the success of her life’s goal: reformation through pure compassion.

Thematically, these three stories coincide and interweave quite well. In a sense, they represent three different modern approaches to moral justice.

The first storyline presents the standard police approach, represented by Detective Chaya, a grizzled, irritable police detective who has been working tirelessly to find and stop a serial bomber using primarily old-fashioned means: investigation, legwork, and gallons of bad coffee. He serves The Law and believes staunchly in a rigid judicial system by which criminals are captured, tried, and then sentenced according to established laws and overseen by established authorities.

The second storyline offers a very modern approach, both in terms of technological advancement and in terms of modern society’s philosophical and emotional mindset towards morality and criminals. In this one, a psychiatrist has been attempting to establish widespread implementation of her criminal reform methods, which consist in, primarily, the use of total compassion and empathy to emotionally break down and then rebuild hardened criminals. Her approach to justice eschews the entire concept of “punishment” in favor of empathy and love.

In the third storyline we are shown a system of justice that has probably experienced the longest lifespan of any of the three. It is absolute. Horrible criminals are met with simple death. The eponymous “brain man” is a (seemingly) emotionless weapon aimed at criminality. If he finds a murderer, he kills him. There is no room for nuance, no space for negotiation, no interest in reform. He doesn’t hesitate, and, because he is brilliant beyond any analyst’s ability to measure, he is also never wrong.

The film effectively puts these three philosophies of justice in the arena of the real world — film real world, but you get the idea — to see which does the most good.

Perhaps you can guess the outcome.

When we say “does the most good”, there are two primary “goods” which need to be considered. The first is obvious: which method prevents the most crime? The second is a bit less obvious, but still a very real factor: which method is most able to provide healing and closure to victims?

The focus of this essay is primarily going to be on the latter two methods of justice: the psychiatrist — and champion of kindness — Mariko Washiya, and the emotionless “brain man” Ichiro Suzuki.

Dr. Washiya is a woman living constantly on the edge of an annihilating blade, who has made it her life’s work to embrace the knife’s edge by refusing to acknowledge its existence. She is a woman tortured by a tremendous need for justice, for closure, but who has, for reasons we will examine, chosen to hinge her survival on its refusal.

One of the more compelling periphery details about Dr. Mariko Washiya is a thread of intense selfishness, but one which is the perpetuation of a cycle. Herself the victim of selfishness — she is forced to care for her morbidly obese mother whose maternal concern for her daughter is limited to the hope that she’s always around to tend to her many needs — she is herself now motivated mainly be selfishness. Her motivations when it comes to criminal reform and justice are exclusively self-serving.

Dr. Washiya’s desire to implement a program by which criminals can be reformed by pure compassion seems, even in the first scene in which she appears, to be motivated not by a desire to actually reform criminals, but rather by a desire to mitigate the trauma and depression suffered by the surviving family members of the victims. That is to say: herself.

Several years prior to the events of the film, she had lost her much younger brother. He had been tortured, sexually assaulted, and then murdered by a pedophile who was himself a juvenile. The trauma and grief of this loss consumed and controlled her. But, despite her flaws, she was a resilient woman, and so she redirected that trauma and grief into a kind of monumental denial. For several years she had been undertaking to prove that the worst criminals imaginable — pedophile murderers, for instance — could be reformed by pure kindness. Her glowing test case, her proud success story, was the reformation of the very man who had killed her brother.

As the story began, this young, remade man was about to be released and was, by all accounts a completely different person from the monster who murdered a child in the most horrific way imaginable; he stood as the living proof that her method works. He was proof to all of society that punishment itself is barbaric and unnecessary, because kindness can actually mend the broken morality of a hardened monster.

And, she insisted again and again, overcoming the emotional urge for justice was a far more effective balm for healing than any kind of judicial or extra-judicial retribution. She had transcended her grief and her hatred in her god-like reshaping of the monster who had destroyed her and destroyed her family.

Yet, she was a woman living in muted agony, every day a battle for survival. Her darkened home was occupied by the growing, malignant hatred of her depressed mother. Her own darkened mind was occupied by the horror of what had befallen her brother and the daily retraumatizing she inflicted upon herself by attempting to reform his murderer.

In a sense, Mariko Washiya was the horrific final form of suicidal empathy.

Let’s step away from Dr. Washiya and her shining success case for a moment and look at her mirror opposite, her social and philosophical counter, Ichiro Suzuki.

Ichiro Suzuki was wholly other from anyone else in the cast, and even from most other people in existence. As a character, he was difficult to analyze mainly because he himself never felt the need to explain himself. All we could know about him was the combined observations of the people with whom he interacted.

As a child he had been found to be quite out of the ordinary. Called by his doctor “an abandoned doll”, he appeared to be a kind of blank slate. Resistant to pain, seemingly devoid of emotion, indifferent to stimuli, and perfectly obedient, he would do nothing without instruction, not even use the bathroom or eat. Taken in by his wealthy grandfather after the deaths of his parents in a hit-and-run, his upbringing was meticulous and thorough. In the course of his education, Ichiro’s grandfather recognized that the boy had a seemingly infinite capacity for intelligence in addition to his infinite docility and resistance to pain.

However, the relative peace of this childhood was shrouded always by the pall of grief. The man who had killed Ichiro’s parents in a hit-and-run had never been brought to justice and so for his grandfather the wound remained always open and raw. As the pain grew more intense, he decided to refocus his unusual grandson’s education to provide him with a particular set of skills.

His grandfather recognized in Ichiro an unusual and particular combination of traits that seemed to have cosmically aligned to create the ideal warrior for justice: His unusual strength, agility, and resistance to pain made him uniquely suited to physical combat; his photographic memory and incredible intelligence gave him sharp observation skills and keen instincts; his perfect obedience and docility made him capable of carrying out difficult and unsavory tasks without hesitation; and his lack of emotions made the strain of killing relatively easy for him to endure.

The old man’s grief or madness had convinced him that his strange, but somehow angelic grandson had been formed into the ideal soul to become the perfect arbiter of justice. Ichiro was, his grandfather told him, meant to rid the world of filth and evil. And so he began to focus his education on making him an efficient killer while also instilling in him a sense of duty and of right and wrong.

It’s here that we recognize the first major point of digression between Ichiro and Dr. Washiya. Ichiro had been taught that dispatching horrible criminals was an aspect of morality. More than that, he was taught that it was controlled by morality. That is, it was actually immoral to overlook injustice.

Dr. Washiya, on the other hand, had convinced herself that it was immoral not to overlook injustice.

Ichiro’s first justice-driven execution was somehow ironic. After years of hoping and praying that his grandson would choose to take up the crusade for justice, the old man was shockingly, even coincidentally, killed during a home invasion robbery.

Ichiro calmly killed the robber.

And then he disappeared entirely.

Some years later, Ichiro entered the film’s story as a suspect arrested by Detective Chaya on suspicion of being one of the serial bombers he and the rest of the police force had been trying to find.

Once in custody, Ichiro was a baffling prisoner; he wouldn’t speak except to give his name and other incidentals, he wouldn’t explain himself, he wouldn’t answer questions or even acknowledge the officers questioning him. He was unmoved when threatened with the death penalty, uninterested in the gawking eyes of the press. Given the overall strangeness of his behavior and the nationwide publicity of the case, the police decided to preemptively have Ichiro assessed for mental fitness to stand trial. For this, he was taken to a hospital where Dr. Mariko Washiya was placed in charge of his evaluation.

And thus our two mirror opposites, our two wholly different approaches to justice and the entire concept of moral reform, found themselves sitting across a table from each other.

Ichiro Suzuki’s evaluation period was an interesting one. He behaved in ways that couldn’t be comprehended by anyone. Docile and polite most of the time, at other random moments he seemed to snap. On one occasion he brutally attacked a fellow prisoner. What the police — and Dr. Washiya — did not know was that the prisoner attacked by Ichiro had been a violent, unrepentant murderer whose crimes had gone undetected.

After the attack, Ichiro immediately went back to being a polite, docile inmate.

Dr. Washiya, fascinated by the juxtaposition, spent a decent amount of time making an honest effort to understand her unusual patient. Eventually she found a clue to his identity and began to pursue it in an effort to learn more about his past. For this, she enlisted the help of Detective Chaya.

They tracked his background all the way to some of the teachers who had been hired by his grandfather, who told them what they knew all the way up to Ichiro’s disappearance after the death of his grandfather.

Detective Chaya then took up the threads of the investigation. Soon after, he discovered a pattern of murders: horrible criminals who had escaped justice had been summarily killed. Perpetrator unknown.

Ichiro had indeed chosen to take up his grandfather’s crusade. Why he chose to do so was never explained, almost entirely because Ichiro never seemed to feel the need to explain himself. He had no interest in “reputation” or in the opinions of others. But whatever the reason, his finely-honed skills and innate intelligence had combined to give him almost psychic instincts by which he could identify a murderer by little more than body language. And he was never wrong. He was a walking, talking one-man judicial department: investigator, judge, and executioner.

It was around this time that the police realized that Ichiro was not the serial bomber, but had actually been hunting the serial bomber.

Thereafter, Detective Chaya — to his credit — found himself struggling with his assessment of Ichiro’s morality. He was a murderer. But he was killing the worst criminals imaginable, criminals who could not be caught or tried due to some judicial loophole or shortcoming. His inability to formulate a solid opinion regarding Ichiro’s rightness or wrongness unsettled him for the rest of the story.

Dr. Washiya’s reaction to everything they had learned about Ichiro was very different. She experienced a kind of deep, aching horror to learn of the young man’s particular formation. How awful, she thought, to have been formed into a murderer, someone forced to kill criminals. Perhaps, she thought, she could save him from that terrible, terrible fate.

Her tendency to project her emotional reality onto others had been demonstrated throughout the film. Even when Detective Chaya expressed an impassioned desire to see the serial bomber punished to the fullest legal extent, she accused him of letting his emotions get the better of him. This is a common argument of the clinically kind: that kindness is inherently non-emotional, while all other reactions are excessively emotional.

The reality, which I’m sure most of you know, is that kindness is exclusively emotional, but it is also, by far, the easiest emotion. Kindness does not even necessitate forgiveness, as forgiveness presupposes some kind of judgement. Kindness exists and thrives best in an environment in which moral judgements simply are not made. Anger, rage, forgiveness, even mercy all require moral judgement. Kindness does not.

She had been kind and therefore superior when she had taken it upon herself to reform the young man who had killed her brother. She couldn’t understand the mentality of a person who was choosing not to be kind. Surely, she seemed to think, if Ichiro had the choice to not kill, he would prefer that. After all, isn’t it nicer, more pleasant, less horrible, to just be kind? And, too, she seemed to say, being kind works.

On the last day of their contact with each other, in an effort to “break through” to Ichiro, Dr. Washiya told him the truth about her brother and about the young reformed pedophile. In this final conversation, in the course of her startling revelation, she presented to him what she believed to be an unsolvable moral quandary: she couldn’t bring herself to kill the boy who had killed her younger brother; could he kill a child who had killed a child?

To her, the acts were identical. Killing a juvenile pedophile was the exact same act as a pedophile killing a young boy. To her, the idea that Ichiro had been “forcibly” made into something that would do the former made him effectively no better than the latter. And as she had already saved one of those, now she could just as easily save another, surely.

Furiously, desperately, frantically she tried to convince him. “You don’t have to do it anymore. You don’t have to kill anymore.” Her desperation in this moment is profoundly telling.

In storytelling we learn that in all conversations — especially major, climactic conversations — each person in the conversation must have some goal they’re trying to accomplish. Listening to Dr. Washiya, it was clear that there were two goals at work in her mind: the goal she thought was motivating her, but then beneath that simmered the truth.

To her, she was desperately trying to save Ichiro from a life as a murderer.

But simmering beneath that was her desire to pull him into her moral fantasyland, like the crabs in the bucket who stop their fellow crabs when they try to escape. It was clear to her, on an instinctive level, that Ichiro had tapped into a more primal, more true understanding of human nature, and that knowledge had allowed him the kind of mental and spiritual freedom she simply could not access.

She perceived in him a strength greater than her own. But she also perceived something else: he had the courage and the will to kill violent, monstrous criminals, including the one who had killed his grandfather, and the one who had killed his parents in the hit-and-run. He had had the will to exact justice. For him, the ledger was easy to balance. For her, there was no closing of accounts. The way she clung to kindness, the way she refused to pass judgment, the way she, in a sense, clung to the killer who had murdered her brother kept the wounds open both for her and for her depressed mother. She knew this and yet couldn’t make herself alter course. To her, it wasn’t fair that he was permitted simple justice while she had to toil under the weight of society’s mandated law of kindness. This was particularly evident when she admitted to having desired to kill the boy who had killed her brother.

“But,” she added automatically, almost like a programmed response, “killing him won’t make any of the wounds we suffered disappear.”

Which brings us to the second issue in all talks of justice: which method makes us feel the best? Another hallmark of the modern approach to morality, the most important element is how it makes everyone feel. If vengeance doesn’t make us feel better then it is inherently worthless. That is, to her and many like her, the fact that harsh justice can’t erase trauma meant it had no social or moral value.

Yet, she (and many like her) had convinced themselves that kindness could erase trauma. But everything about her was proof that this simply was not true. She was a woman imprisoned by her trauma, imprisoned by the faux-moral laws she had set for herself and by which alone she was permitted to find peace.

And when Ichiro refused to answer or even acknowledge any of her claims to moral superiority, she continued by congratulating herself. She had counseled the murdering boy. She had reformed him. She had fixed him. Earlier in the film, she had smiled when she had been compared to God.

But then Ichiro, still without answering, was led away and Dr. Washiya was left behind.

Not long after, the reformed pedophile was released and sent happily on his way, eager to start his life over again. The action of the film then focused on Ichiro’s escape and the final showdown between him and the serial bomber.

But at the very end of the film, Dr. Washiya was contacted by Ichiro who informed her that he was going to kill her reformed pedophile. Why he bothered to tell her was not posited by the writers or the characters, but my assumption is that however little emotion Ichiro might have had, he did have reason. And his reason told him that Dr. Washiya needed to understand that her method did not work.

He forced her to see this for herself when he sent her to the reformed pedophile’s house where she found, next to the young man’s dead body, a little boy tied up naked in a cabinet.

No, Dr. Washiya. Kindness cannot fix a pedophile. Pretending it can in order to make oneself feel better is the epitome of barbaric cruelty.

In a pitch-perfect twist to her entire philosophy, Ichiro informed her that he had corrected her mistake — by killing the released pedophile — as an act of kindness to her to repay her for treating him with compassion.

The kindness of Dr. Washiya would have brought about the horrific death of yet another innocent child. The “barbaric” cruelty of Ichiro Suzuki saved his life. This is the paradox of kindness; more often than not, its fruits are far crueler than those of cruelty itself.

And so, after years of labor and pain and denial and cognitive dissonance, Mariko Washiya’s life’s work was put in a body bag and she was left even more hollowed out than she had been on the day they showed her her brother’s dead body.

After, Dr. Washiya railed at Ichiro: “You’re not God! What kind of evil merits death? No one gets to decide good and evil; nor do they have the power to pass judgement.” But after all of this useless, moralistic cope, in the end she said weakly: “You destroyed everything I built.”

But what had she built?

Earlier in the film, in a moment of naked rage, she had admitted that she had not treated the pedophile in an effort to reform him, but because she had wanted to make herself feel better.

The “everything” that Ichiro had destroyed was, very simply, the house of cards she had been using as a scaffolding for her own coping mechanism. Ichiro had showed her, had forced her to really see, that her profoundly selfish adherence to kindness had been worse than fake, it had been criminally malicious.

This is not a difficult matter to a mind unhindered by the social complexity of moral “nuance”, a useless word in this instance, which does not indicate nuance but only cowardice or idiocy. Ichiro Suzuki — and the writers of this film — knew instinctively that compassion does not cure evil. Most of us know this. Kindness cannot fix something broken. Kindness and compassion are rooted in emotion and thus are fleeting, as are their effects. A bit of brief remorse brought on by emotion is not enough to mend the broken moral foundation of someone who abuses and murders children. Ichiro knew this, because Ichiro did not face evil with emotion, but with the simple logic of right and wrong, cause and effect.

Yes, it’s mean to kill a killer. But to Ichiro the arithmetic was simple: kill the killer, or let him go so he can kill more innocent people. Which of these is truly mean?

There is a subset of law-abiding citizens of every nation and culture who find it fundamentally impossible to accept that some people are just bad. Perhaps something could have prevented that outcome, but nothing can change that state once it’s reached. There is a newer and growing subset of law-abiding citizens who find it barbarous to mete out any punishment, as if we are somehow “better” than the criminals over whom we stand in judgment and to punish them would make us “no different”. Perhaps we are better than them, perhaps we aren’t. But Ichiro Suzuki would argue — if he even bothered to argue at all — that kindness has nothing at all to do with this equation.

However, this strange philosophical precept has made it into modern storytelling on such a wide scale that it seems like people at large have begun to take this fallacy for granted.

The simple, uncomfortable reality was that Ichiro’s sense of right and wrong was much, much stronger than Mariko Washiya’s. And that of most of the civilized world.

While all the rest was going on, the story of the teenage terrorist added yet another layer to the idea of kindness.

This young woman, introduced at the very beginning of the film, was a sadist. A deeply sick person who reveled in the pain of others and believed it was her God-given right to kill and maim as much as she possibly could. She believed she was a higher being and so exerted her superiority by inflicting pain.

Presented as a double of Ichiro Suzuki, her existence asked a different set of uncomfortable questions. In time it was learned that she had had a very similar upbringing to his. Raised in wealth, surrounded by softness, kindness, attention, devoid of most emotions, and unusually intelligent, she actually had a distinct advantage: her upbringing had not been peppered by profound loss, as had Ichiro’s with the loss of his parents and grandfather. By all accounts, she should have just as easily become another crusader for justice, instead of descending into sadistic, chaotic psychopathy. But this was not the case. Reveling in her detachment from morality and consequences, she deemed herself superior to Ichiro who was beholden to a moral code.

Which, in a sense, made her much more similar to Dr. Washiya who also believed herself superior to Ichiro’s difficult, strict moral code.

After everything seen and heard, Dr. Washiya still begged Ichiro Suzuki not to kill this sadistic serial bomber, even after she had tortured both of them at length and killed countless people by bombing a hospital, laughing all the while.

The thing is, if Ichiro Suzuki had “won” by killing the teenage terrorist, that victory would have torn down the lies Dr. Washiya had spent years using to protect herself. Justice actually meant nothing to her. Nor did the feelings of Ichiro Suzuki. The only thing that mattered was her own feelings. Stopping a sadist from continuing her reign of terror was not important. Had the girl escaped and continued to kill, Dr. Washiya would not have had any difficulty sleeping at night.

But letting Ichiro kill the girl, letting him prove that there really was a simple solution to problems like these — legality or illegality aside — meant that all the pain she had put herself through after the murder of her little brother had been pointless.

In the end it was Detective Chaya who both executed the teenage bomber and let Ichiro Suzuki go. The grizzled servant of The Law had at last come to understand and accept the reality of human nature and society.

This reality, which he and Ichiro knew and which Dr. Washiya refused to acknowledge, was that her desire to “save” Ichiro from a life of hunting and killing was not noble or morally superior, but that it was something she wanted for herself.

Ichiro understood that his work was necessary. Detective Chaya understood that his work was necessary. Dr. Washiya couldn’t endure that because it flew in the face of her belief that kindness was the only way to make the pain go away.

Ironically, after Ichiro Suzuki killed the pedophile who had murdered Dr. Washiya’s brother, her mother finally decided to unearth herself from her prison of depression. In the end, ugly, mean, absolute justice did make some of the pain go away.

Is this essay nothing more than five thousand words on the merits of vigilante justice? Not at all. The great thing about difficult, challenging storytelling is that it makes us consider difficult, challenging things.

Dr. Washiya is not the only person in the world who was raised to believe that being kind and compassionate were good things. Many modern societies are overrun with this supposition. And while it is true that kindness is good and compassion is a virtue, their merits are often so overstated that we, as human beings living together in communities, no longer accept the fact that other options might be better in some situations.

A good story well told can force us to take a step back from ideas that we have spent our entire lives taking for granted. This is, in some ways, the entire point of literature. A million other books and movies have been published that present situations in which kindness and compassion won the day. But the writers of The Brain Man (book and film) sought to challenge that idea in a way that made their audiences think.

So, tell me: what do you think?

1

Éna Lí stood just to the left of the beam of morning sunlight lancing across the king’s antechamber. The light pierced the room’s darkness while the dust that swirled in the air sparkled as it crossed the beam. Absently she put her pale fingers in the light’s path, blocking it with the shadow of her hand. The silvery beam flickered against her trembling fingers and she quickly pulled her hand away. The maids saw her flashing eyes and moved about their tasks with pale timidity.

The king’s antechamber was part of the old Palace. A room in a stone structure adjacent to the king’s Hall, with walls that had been covered in frescoes before Éna Lí had ordered them painted over with a dark, somber rose color. That had been over five years ago. Time, she observed stepping back from the lance of sunlight, seemed to be moving faster these days.

A porcelain white stove poured heat into the chamber in a thin wave that left the air with enough bite to please her. Heat had always disquieted her. As had the presence of light.

Though Éna Lí had already been disquieted. She had been agitated ever since returning from the Grand Steward’s residence. Her messengers had been sent out for news under cover of night while she had paced across the Palace grounds awaiting their return. And each report had made her angrier than the last. The fourth messenger, a boy who had brought his report at dawn this morning and delivered it upon his knees, had been beaten by Éna Lí in a furious rage. None dared ask what news had so angered her, but all the Palace House labored in tense fear.

Meanwhile, the Grand Steward’s residence had been sealed, and her meals reduced to broth and water. The physicians had been forbidden from visiting her. Any who had failed to prevent the escape of the servant had been taken to the cellars of Éna Lí’s residence. A sharp decline in the Palace House’s numbers would no doubt soon be noticed.

While Éna Lí watched, the maids misted the king’s ceremonial golt with rose water; the perfumed fragrance filled the room quickly and tickled her nose. Turning, she glanced at the little door from which the king would enter, but he still had not arrived. He seemed to move more slowly every day.

At last she heard the distant swishing rhythm of his stocking feet and his thick cotton inner golt. With a click of her tongue, the majority of the maids were dismissed.

The king came through the little door accompanied by two elderly servants who bowed at the threshold and went no further. Éna Lí dismissed them with a wave of her hand and they disappeared. The king observed all this with indifference, as he did the chill, dark air in his antechamber. He was accustomed to the cold and the dark, as these were the conditions Éna Lí preferred. Most of his life had been lived on her terms and according to her rules and preferences. Resistance had never won him anything but pain and immeasurable loss.

Éna Lí said nothing as she, with the help of one other maid, helped the king don his heavy ceremonial golt. Made of black silk, trimmed in gold and embroidered all over with the falcons and hemlock of the Sona House, it was only worn in court. The thick, layered weight of it pressed against his shoulders and back, but he was glad for the heavy garment. Lately it had become more and more difficult to stay warm in the Palace.

Éna Lí busied herself fastening the complex golden clasp at the king’s waist. It featured a braided chain and a long pin which looped through a hook and then again through a dangling catch. Her long, fair fingers worked clumsily, the king observed; twice she dropped the golden pin, which dangled on the braided chain and brushed against his knee. But he said nothing, and instead turned his head to look at the recess in the chamber wall where a locked golden door secured the precious white crown of Láokoth.

The king never wore the Láokoth crown to court; the delicate porcelain crown was reserved only for coronations. The last time he had worn it was on the day his son had been made the crown prince. Immediately after, So Ga had been taken to the Spring Courtyard and locked, together with his three body doubles, in the Four Little Palaces.

Éna Lí followed the king’s gaze as she finished fastening the clasp. Her beautiful face warped into an ugly smirk.

“Your Majesty is feeling nostalgic, perhaps?” she said in a voice thick with sweet derision.

“I will never wear the crown again, will I?” he said. The directness of his question startled her, but she collected herself quickly.

“I’m sure Your Majesty will find many occasions in the future on which it will be appropriate to wear the crown.”

“Will I?” He turned and looked into her shining eyes. “Perhaps when I crown a new heir for you?”

She flinched, her arm drawing back as if to strike him. But then she collected herself again and clasped her hands at her waist. The king was surprised to see her so on edge. He wondered if the cause for her rage should give him any hope.

The morning court meeting proceeded without incident. Éna Lí’s servants had positioned themselves throughout the king’s Hall to be able to observe and overhear. This way she would know of any possible new alliances or whispered rumors that could be dangerous to her plan.

The ministers were arranged in clusters in the great open space of the king’s Hall. Each had a desk behind which he stood and from which he could speak — or any of his people could speak if permitted to do so by the king — but the others in his retinue had only small stools on which they sat. The minister had no stool and was required to stand for the duration of the meeting.

Balo Sonen, on a little stool in the company of the prime minister’s people, to the right of the raised platform on which rested the king’s throne, seemed to be avoiding Éna Lí’s gaze, and that of her various servants. This almost pleased her. More and more Balo worried her. He was not formidable enough to be a threat to her plans, but he believed himself to be, and that was almost as troublesome.

His son, however…

From her position behind the king’s throne, she turned to look upon the tall, slender figure of Ban Lo Sonen, sitting upright behind the desk of the Minister of Defense. The aged minister, Heno Vona Lí, had been absent frequently and was said to be growing senile in his old age. As his master’s chosen representative in the king’s Hall, Ban Lo Sonen was permitted to stand in the minister’s place. As he was merely a second clerk, he could not speak on his master’s behalf, but was permitted to answer when addressed by other ministers or by the king. Today, he had little to say beyond the occasional polite agreement.

Ban Lo Sonen was a man quite unlike his father. Handsome, amiable, and charming. All traits, it was said, inherited from his mother, a woman who now lay dying in the Sonen estate.

But as the son of Balo, Ban Lo had also his father’s ambition and his taste for the delicate work of long, slow schemes. Éna Lí had long suspected that Ban Lo was superior to his father in this. However, like all proud sons of bad fathers, Ban Lo was hindered by this fatal flaw: he wanted both to please his father and to outshine him and so remained trapped in perpetual paralysis. For some time Éna Lí had been contemplating how she might use this flaw to her advantage.

As she gazed at Ban Lo — whose pale face shone in the morning sunlight filtering through the high windows of the king’s Hall — the young man turned and glanced to his left. Éna Lí followed this glance and nearly started when she saw Kío En Tolen, leaning against his own desk, hidden somewhat by the slope of the ornate podium.

How had she failed to see the entrance of the prime minister? Turning, she looked at the king. He was hiding a smile of relief as he looked upon his Oak Hand.

For days the prime minister had avoided entering the Palace. She knew why, of course. Her messengers had confirmed it; Kío En Tolen harbored the surviving servant — in his estate or some other secret location — and he feared discovery. Looking upon him now Éna Lí could see that that fear had begun to gnaw at him; his face was thin and had aged considerably, he looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Did he know enough to fear her specifically?

Why hadn’t he acted? If he had the servant in his possession, then he must have learned from him the secret Éna Lí had worked so hard to protect.

Perhaps the servant hadn’t told him. Perhaps the boy was smart enough to know that the secret he carried was of immeasurable value and he was waiting for the right moment to use it.

Perhaps he didn’t know what he knew.

No, she couldn’t rely on luck to save her. If the servant hadn’t yet told the prime minister what he knew, she still had time.

She couldn’t send her men to force their way into the estate of the prime minister. Her actions could never be so obvious, nor could they so easily be traced back to her. No matter what, her hands had to remain clean, at least to the world outside the Palace walls. But if she didn’t find that little servant and kill him with her own two hands, if she didn’t silence him forever, years of careful planning would potentially be upended. And what if she was discovered? What if she was forced to flee, to return empty-handed to him…

Éna Lí’s wretched brother used to taunt her when they played, saying that her childhood schemes against him always failed because she insisted on holding the sword with her own two hands.

“Put the sword into someone else’s hands,” Amalnaroth would say with a sneer. “Then, when the job is done, your enemy will be dead and your ally will be punished in your place. And you won’t have lifted a finger.”

Bastard, she thought tightening her hands into fists. What was the use of winning if you didn’t do it with your own two hands? But what did Amalnaroth know about losing? He was the favorite of their master, chosen to stay by his side while she labored tirelessly and alone in the petty court of the Láokoth king.

But as she thought it, her eyes went from the face of Kío En Tolen, to that of tall, proud Ban Lo Sonen, standing at the desk of the absent Minister of Defense. And she smiled.

The king requested that Bo Han Lăsoth and Ban Lo Sonen meet with him in his chambers after the other ministers had been dismissed. This surprised Éna Lí, but the beginnings of the plan that had begun to formulate in her mind had lifted her mood, so she allowed it with passive amusement. With a smile, she offered that Kío En Tolen ought to join them, given his recent absence. Secretly, she wanted some time to observe the prime minister closely and to make him nervous. It would take some time to find the right way to use Ban Lo against him, but in the meantime perhaps she could toy with him a little.

The king, with a look of surprise, agreed. No doubt he thought that perhaps she would allow the prime minister to resume his usual favored position.

To Éna Lí’s added amusement, Balo had to be reminded, rather curtly, by one of her servants, that he had not been invited to this private audience and should exit the Hall at once. He glanced at her with a look of childish irritation, and then puffed his chest a bit before bowing and turning to march out of the king’s Hall.

The audience took place in the king’s antechamber, the same room where the king had dressed for court. While he spoke, the king directed Éna Lí and the other two maids to remove the heavy ceremonial golt.

Bo Han Lăsoth, accompanied by his man Ŏvor, Ban Lo Sonen, and Kío En Tolen stood on the other side of a short, painted black screen during this operation. Éna Lí watched the king’s face closely, curious as to his motives, but she was otherwise unconcerned.

“My lord Sonen,” the king said to Ban Lo while Éna Lí worked on the clasp at his waist, “Your master is again absent from court.”

The young Sonen bowed deeply and answered, “Your Majesty, the Minister of Defense has been ill for some days. But I have been relating to him in detail all the matters—”

“I have several reports that I have received from him in recent days. If he is too ill to attend court, how is it that he is not too ill to spend the hours necessary to write these reports?”

Ban Lo fell silent and slipped into a bow from which he did not rise. Even Kío En Tolen tensed, lifting his shoulders.

Éna Lí hid a small smile. The king had a commanding presence and a unique ability to arouse fear in other men. Were the circumstances different she would, perhaps, find something in him to which she could be attracted.

“Your Majesty—” Ban Lo began.

“Surely it is no less taxing to labor over a pen and a pot of ink than it is to stand at his desk in my Hall.”

The clasp undone, two servants came to help Éna Lí slip the golt off the king’s shoulders. They took the heavy garment to its wooden stand while Éna Lí retrieved a golt of thin black silk, without trim or embroidery, and helped the king put his tired, trembling arms in the sleeves. She was pleased to see signs of fatigue.

Ban Lo answered, still bowing, “Your Majesty, the Minister of Defense dictates his reports. I— we write only the words he tells us to write. We would never presume—”

“No indeed,” the king said while Éna Lí fastened the woven black ties of the simple silk golt into the style of knot that he preferred. Having finished, she retrieved a white velvet cloak and draped it around his shoulders. Two servants came then and took the painted screen away.

“No,” the king repeated, turning to face them while he adjusted his arms in the black golt’s sleeves. “No, you would never presume.”

Ban Lo continued to bow while the king walked across the antechamber to a little table near the glowing white porcelain stove. He rifled through a stack of papers until he found what he was looking for.

“This, for instance,” he said, bringing the page to Ban Lo so he could see it. “This report in which you detail the shortcomings of Lord Lăsoth at the Ŭthol Na border. This was written by your master?”

Bo Han Lăsoth, without moving his head, cast a sidelong glance at the bowing shape of Ban Lo Sonen.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Ban Lo replied. “He dictated the words. I wrote them.”

“You wrote them?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“What of it, My Lord Lăsoth? Is this true?” The king handed the report to Bo Han, who bowed and took it with both hands. Then he straightened and read it quickly. Éna Lí watched him closely.

She knew that Balo considered Bo Han Lăsoth an enemy. It would not surprise her if he had attempted to use his son’s position in the Ministry of Defense to undermine him subtly. She was curious, however, to see if the legendary cleverness of the Lăsoth Housemaster could withstand the schemes of Balo Sonen.

“It is true, Your Majesty,” Bo Han answered simply and, bowing, returned the report.

The king’s face flickered with surprise. Éna Lí smiled to herself. He had hoped that Bo Han would contradict the report Ban Lo Sonen had written. He had hoped that he could then use Ban Lo’s attempt at a scheme to remove Balo’s son from his valuable position. This would then weaken Balo’s control over the court which, he no doubt hoped, would in turn weaken her grip on him. She knew that the king believed that she served Balo Sonen, and not the other way around.

But he had failed to see that Bo Han had been trapped by his question. Had he answered that the report was untrue, that his Houseswords were able to guard the Lăsoth trade routes without difficulty — which would have been a lie — that would have placed him in a position in which he would have had to prove what he’d said. This would have then made his difficulty in the north — and his attempt to conceal it — a matter of court record.

If he merely admitted to the king here and now that the matter was true, it would go no further than this chamber. In either case, he was forced to reveal his situation, an embarrassment to the proud Housemaster of noble Lăsoth. But answering as he did was the only way he could avoid involving himself in court politics. A direct reply was Bo Han’s only option. Even if it did harm him a little.

In any case, the king had failed. Éna Lí watched as he rubbed his wrists and studied his hands.

Turning again to Ban Lo Sonen, he said, “If your master continues to suffer, perhaps he should consider removing himself from his position.”

Ban Lo’s bow deepened. “He lives only to serve Your Majesty.”

“Perhaps. But he is serving no one at the moment.” He waited while Ban Lo stood up from his bow, then he took a step closer to him and looked hard into his dark eyes. “He is my Minister of Defense. Not Ban Lo Sonen.”

Ban Lo bowed his head. “Of course, Your Majesty.”

Turning to Bo Han again, the king reached out suddenly and grasped his hands. The Lăsoth Housemaster did not seem surprised. He allowed the king to stroke and pat his hands as a doting father would.

Éna Lí did not see the king slip a bit of folded paper into Bo Han’s sleeve. No one saw, not even Ŏvor, who was watching his Housemaster’s hands in an effort to avoid looking at the frightening face of Éna Lí.

“You are a good and wise Housemaster,” the king said with open affection. “You will see to the matters in the north.”

“I will, Your Majesty.”

The king nodded and released his hands. “You may go,” he said abruptly. Then he also gestured to Kío En Tolen. “And you too. I’m not even sure why you’re here.” He turned to Éna Lí. “Why is he here?”

She bowed. “My lord the prime minister has recently returned from a long illness. He is greeting Your Majesty.”

“He is greeting me, indeed. My entire court has been stricken by long illnesses.” He turned back to Kío En Tolen. “See to your household,” he said sharply. “Your fair daughter is quite frail. It would be a great loss if she were to fall ill as well. Go, I have no need of you here.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.” The prime minister bowed and, together with the Lăsoths, took his leave.

Once they were gone, the king returned his attention to Ban Lo Sonen. “Your father did you a great favor by having you placed in the Ministry of Defense,” he said to him.

Ban Lo only bowed, uncertain what to say.

With his back to him, the king went on, “What does your father think of the Minister’s decision? No doubt he offers you advice.”

Ban Lo lifted his head. “Which decision, Your Majesty?”

“The decision made many years ago, sometime after you began to work for him.” Turning, he said, “The decision to place a royal officer in each of my barracks.”

Éna Lí flinched in surprise. Though the question startled her, it was clear what the king was doing. He was trying to determine how closely the son served the father. Did Ban Lo Sonen obey the Minister of Defense? Or did he obey his father?

Or, Éna Lí wondered, did he serve himself? She found that she was just as interested in the outcome of this conversation as the king was.

Ban Lo bowed his head again and answered, “Minister Vona Lí’s decision regarding the use of the royal officer ensures efficiency and reinforces Your Majesty’s—”

“Are these Heno Vona Lí’s words? Or yours?” The king took a step closer. “Or are they your father’s?”

“My father, like all those who serve in Your Majesty’s court, supports every decision Your Majesty makes.”

Éna Lí smiled to herself. The boy was certainly quick on his feet. No doubt nine years in the king’s court had taught him how to speak carefully and at length, but without saying anything at all.

But then Ban Lo’s eyes snapped up. He looked directly into the king’s face and, with a small smile on his lips, he said, “My father thought it a wise decision.”

The king took a step back. He studied Ban Lo’s face, unhindered by the cool directness of the young Sonen’s gaze. Éna Lí studied him as well. Ban Lo seemed, perhaps, to be doing little more than to express his awareness of the relationship between his father and the king. He had removed a layer of appropriate deference from his behavior, just enough to suggest that he did not entirely respect the authority of the monarch who stood before him. But not enough to reveal whose authority he did respect. Éna Lí wondered what outcome the king had hoped for. Had he hoped to use the son of Balo? Had he hoped for support from a young, capable courtier? To what end?

The king, clasping his hands behind his back, said. “I understand your mother is unwell.”

Ban Lo said nothing.

“I hope that she soon recovers.”

Ban Lo bowed slightly. And after a long, tense pause, the king dismissed him.

Éna Lí followed the young Sonen to the door of the king’s antechamber, dismissing the servants who were escorting him.

“My lord Sonen,” she said.

Turning to face her, he bowed.

“My lord Sonen,” she repeated. “The king has asked me to escort you.” Then she took a step closer and reached for Ban Lo’s hand. “Your father is much on His Majesty’s mind.”

“Yes,” Ban Lo Sonen replied. “I’m sure he is.” His hand was tense in hers, closed in a tight fist. Gently she worked his fingers open and placed her cool palm against his warm skin.

“Because of your mother,” she added.

“Of course.”

“I am sure that Minister Vona Lí relies upon you heavily. And now your father, too. The king sees this. He understands.”

“Understands?”

“The position you hold, my lord, it is more significant that many realize. But His Majesty sees.”

Ban Lo Sonen tried to pull his hand away from hers but she closed it inside hers and squeezed gently. As she did so, he looked into her shining green eyes with an expression of open disdain. It pleased her to see it.

With his free hand, Ban Lo gripped Éna Lí’a wrist and twisted until she was forced to release him. She tried not to smile while he did this; his behavior was exactly what she had hoped it would be.

“Like the rest of His Majesty’s court,” he said, “I serve where I am ordered and do as I am told.” Then, still holding her wrist in his tightening grip, he leaned closer to her and whispered, “Unlike my father, I will not demean myself by serving the king’s whores.”

When he left her at the door of the king’s Hall, she watched him descend the stone steps while she massaged her wrist. One of her maids appeared at her side.

“My lady?” she whispered, watching her hands with wide-eyed concern.

“It’s nothing,” Éna Lí replied with a smile. “It’s perfect. He’s perfect.”

“Who is, my lady?”

“Watch closely, my child, and soon you will see how I will destroy two Houses. And I won’t have lifted a finger.”

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Ŏnin and the other monks pulled Min La away from the slumped form of So Ga whose thin, pale arms sprawled motionless on the cold tile floor, while the rest of his body was still folded inside the little room.

Min La had nearly destroyed the door trying to open it. It turned out that the secret rooms had never been intended for human occupation and so the mechanism that opened them only worked from the outside. By the time Ŏnin had managed to open it, Min La had been nearly frantic.

“Help him!” he had cried.

Ŏnin had examined the white face of So Ga, brow creased in concern.

“You must help him!” Min La had cried again. “Help him!”

Quieting him had taken three of the other monks, who took him by the arms and pulled him out of the little room. Min La had tried to grasp Ŏnin’s sleeves, repeating his plea again and again, so they had had to hold his arms while they spoke to him soothingly.

Ŏnin brought the boy out gently and set his head upon a length of blue fabric that had been placed there by one of the other monks. Then he leaned close, putting his ear to his gray lips. Faintly, he heard the whisper of breath. Then he pressed his ear against his chest and heard there the steady rhythm of a strong heart.

“It’s alright,” he said. “He’s breathing, but weakly.”

“You have to help him,” Min La repeated.

Ŏnin turned and looked at him. Min La’s face was almost as pale as his brother’s, his eyes wide and bright, both hands clenched into fists.

He motioned to the other monks to take the unconscious young man away. Letting go of Min La, they went to So Ga and gently lifted him.

“Wait,” Min La called, reaching out. But Ŏnin caught his arms.

“Be still, child.”

“You must help him.”

“We are helping him. My brothers are skilled; they know what he needs. He is safe and he will recover.”

The expression on the young man’s face was strange. The familial bond between the two seemed apparent enough, but this one — Min San, as he called himself and Min La as his brother called him — he seemed to carry the other together with a far heavier burden. One of duty, perhaps.

“Come,” Ŏnin said. “Let us see to your knee.”

Min La glanced down at his legs. Both knees were bare upon the tile floor. He seemed to only rediscover the pain in that moment and grimaced as he eased his weight off the bad knee. The bandage with the poultice was still inside the little room.

“But—”

“I will take you to your brother but we must also see to your bandage.” When Min La still hesitated, the monk added, “He is in very safe hands. We must let them treat him.”

“He has difficulty with his lungs,” he said in a hoarse voice.

Ŏnin smiled and nodded. “Yes, that’s apparent. Don’t worry, they know what they’re doing.”

Ŏnin helped him leave the lighted chamber and walk slowly down the quiet corridors to a small cell near the front of the temple. Ŏnin’s, Min La realized. Each step sent a spasm of pain down into his toes and up his spine to his skull. He breathed through his teeth and said nothing.

The inside of the cell was lit by a single lantern hanging from a frame in one corner. But in the wall next to the monk’s simple wooden bed there was a curtained doorway that glowed with profuse lighting. The curtain was slightly open and Min La could see the monks there working to treat So Ga. Candles and lanterns lit the room while they stirred herbs into a pot of steaming water. So Ga was propped against one of the monks, an elderly man with strong, leathery hands. Already, Min La saw, So Ga was beginning to stir.

“You see?” Ŏnin said. “He is in good hands.” Then, gently but firmly, he led Min La away and pushed him into a little wooden chair next to the bed.

While the monk worked on his knee, Min La leaned his head against the cold stone wall and covered his face with trembling hands. At last, he took a deep, steadying breath and reached for his bag, realizing only then that he didn’t have it.

“Where is—?”

“There.” Ŏnin pointed to a stool next to the door. One of the other monks had brought the bag when he had carried in So Ga and left it there. Min La moved to stand, but Ŏnin grasped his arm.

“You do not need it,” he said firmly.

Min La’s breathing had quickened again. He stared at the monk. “What if they come back?”

“They won’t.”

“We should leave. We aren’t safe. We’ve put you and the other monks in—”

“We are in a temple,” Ŏnin said, tightening the bandage around Min La’s knee. “We are in no danger.”

Standing, he went to a basin and washed his hands, drying them upon a blue towel. “Besides,” he added. “They have already searched this place and found nothing. You are safer here than anywhere else in the village.”

The monk had a point. And anyway, neither of them was in any condition to run. Min La took another steadying breath. And as his heart calmed, the pain in his knee returned. He grimaced and reached for it.

“Would you like something for the pain? We keep a supply of gindun.”

Min La shook his head. He needed to keep his head clear.

“It might help you sleep.”

He shook his head again.

The monk sighed. “You won’t be able to protect your brother if you’re fainting from exhaustion.”

“I said no,” Min La snapped, his voice echoing slightly against the stone. The room grew silent, even the murmuring of the monks next door quieted.

Slowly, Min La worked himself to his feet — balancing on one foot — and then, as Ŏnin watched astonished, he bowed deeply.

“I am sorry,” he said. “My brother and I have put your temple in danger. We are the reason the hidden door was damaged. I am sorry, I—”

Ŏnin crossed the room and took Min La by the shoulders, lifting him upright and then helping him back into his chair.

“What use is a temple,” he said with a gentle smile, “if we cannot help those in need?”

Min La’s body trembled. Exhaustion and terror collapsed inside him and he struggled to catch his breath. Hot tears stung the corners of his eyes. With shaking gasps he choked them back.

“And anyway,” Ŏnin said, sitting upon the bed nearby. “The door will be easy to fix. Brother Mon Rin will probably have it as good as new by tomorrow.”

Confused, Min La stared at him.

Ŏnin laughed lightly and leaned forward. “I might have told a little white lie,” he said in a whisper. “The walls were indeed painted ninety years ago, but the doors were designed by Mon Rin, one of the young brothers here — you met him when you first arrived. This will not be the first time he’s had to repair them.”

His eyes were twinkling when he smiled and tucked his hands into his sleeves.

But Min La did not feel relief. All he could think of was the sight of So Ga slumped lifeless in the dark little room. He had done that, he knew. He had smothered him in an attempt to keep him quiet. He had nearly killed the prince he had promised to protect. So Ga would fear him now as much as he feared the mercenaries who hunted them.

More than that. Min La shivered and rubbed his fingers violently, the knuckles cracking as he tugged.

More than that, it had become clear to him. The truth he had feared before he had even decided to leave Rensoth with So Ga: he could not keep him safe. Just as he had failed to save his sister and niece, he would not be able to save So Ga. He knew this now.

Unaware of his surroundings, he heard himself whisper breathlessly, “I can’t…”

The fragrant steam of the monk’s medicinal herbs filtered through the curtained doorway and lent its crisp, clean odor to the monk’s dark cell. It smelled the same as So Ga’s usual medicine. He could not escape it, the constant reminders of So Ga’s frailty.

Glancing up at the ceiling above him, then over at the stone wall, and to the other side to the wooden door and the lightly glowing hallway beyond, he shook his head. “I can’t.”

Ŏnin, who had been watching him with growing concern, understood precisely the nature of the battle the boy now fought. Standing, he retrieved the little stool — leaving the bag on the floor — and brought it over to where Min La sat clenching and unclenching his fists against his thighs.

He sat quietly and leaned close to him.

“If you don’t,” he said in a whisper, “who will?”

Min La started, then he covered his pale face with one hand, while he clenched the other into a white-knuckled fist. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“Perhaps not. Or maybe I do understand better than you think.”

“If I continue, I will lead him to his death,” the young man gasped in a barely audible whisper.

“You’ve brought him this far. That he is alive now is your doing.”

Min La shook his head. Then he turned and looked at Ŏnin. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, the skin around them pale as snow. Ŏnin was filled with pity.

“I could leave him here, with you,” Min La said. “You and—”

“You can do that.” Ŏnin nodded. “You can, yes. That is one choice. But that won’t change the fact that his fate is in your hands. We cannot protect him. We can barely hide him.”

“You don’t know— you don’t know who—”

“It doesn’t matter who he is or who you are. He is your responsibility. And I think we both know that he would rather be in danger with you than be in danger alone.”

“It’s because of me that he’s in danger.”

“We both know that isn’t true.”

“If I leave him here—”

“You will have to live with that choice for the rest of your life.”

“But if he dies, if I fail him and he dies, I will also have to live with that for the rest of my life.”

Ŏnin nodded. “Indeed.”

Min La’s breath caught in his throat. He clamped his eyes shut and bent over, his face aimed at his lap.

“I might have a solution,” Ŏnin whispered, putting his hand on Min La’s trembling shoulder.

He sat upright immediately and looked at him, eyes wide.

“My brothers and I are monks of Ávoth and so are required, every year, to make the River Voyage. Do you know it?”

Min La nodded once.

Once a year every temple of Ávoth sent their monks by boat over the nearest river — all temples of Ávoth were built near rivers — during which pilgrims would visit along the journey, bringing the names of their dead. These were burned on every night of the River Voyage with rites that were particular to the sacred journey.

“This village and our temple use the Osa Lí River, which goes down the mountain a ways. It flows alongside the mountain road until it turns to the northwest to join the Kí Len River and flow north to the border. If I am not mistaken, some of this path overlaps with your own. My brothers and I will take our River Voyage now, instead of in spring as we usually do. You and your brother may accompany us as long as you’d like.”

Min La stared at him, unblinking. His mind swirled through a hundred considerations, too many, until it had coiled itself into a tight knot.

“But how—?”

“We will disguise you both as monks.” With a smile, Ŏnin tugged at the sleeve of Min La’s blue robes. “We have already done so.”

Abruptly, the monk stood and went across the room, ducking inside the curtained chamber from which he called, “You should not decide right now. You should rest and think. And, when he wakes up, discuss it with your brother.”

Returning from the room, he carried a little clay cup to Min La and pushed it into his hands. Min La stared at it, then sniffed it. The contents smelled sweet, almost like figs.

“It is a tonic for the swelling,” the monk said, tucking his arms into his sleeves. “If you don’t drink it I will have them come and hold you down and—”

Min La swallowed the sweet liquid in a single gulp. The monk watched, an amused smile on his face.

“And now,” Ŏnin said, his eyes still sparkling. “I must ask you to forgive me. But I fear there was no other way to convince you to rest.”

Min La felt the tingling in his fingertips first, and then a great wave of dizziness came over him, like a shroud of dense cotton around his head.

“This—?” he slurred. “This is…”

“Gindun,” the monk said and took him gently by the arm. “Here, you can use my bed tonight while I keep watch over your brother. By the time you wake, you will feel better. You will see.”

“But I…” Min La’s legs trembled as Ŏnin helped him shift from the chair to the bed. His bloodshot eyes opened and closed slowly. “But I…”

“Quiet now. Your path has led you to this temple for a reason. Trust Héothenin. Trust Ávoth. Trust me.”

Min La had no time to answer. As soon as his head touched the thin linen pillow, he was already asleep.

The capital, Ŏno Soth

Bo Han Lăsoth watched dawn break across the capital from the window of his carriage. The liquid glow of it outlined the houses and the towers, cast them thickly in blue shadow. He squinted into the east where the sun rose red and pink, tinting the gray winter morning like ink across wet cotton.

Closing the shade, he put his hands on his knees and closed his eyes.

At court this morning he hoped he would see Kío En Tolen. The prime minister had been absent from the king’s meetings for several days now given an illness that had befallen his estate. This was what he had reported to the king, anyway. Bo Han also knew that Kío En Tolen had dismissed most of his servants and that he had not called for any physicians. Bo Han feared that he was not the only one who knew this. He needed to speak to Kío En, but he could not risk calling attention to it.

He took out a silk handkerchief and coughed into it soundlessly.

As usual he was accompanied by Ŏvor. Sen Lí had sent word through Sen Lan using their childhood code that he would return to the estate this morning. His sister, Sen Lan, had been busy making arrangements since yesterday. It had been over a year since either of them had seen Sen Lí and Bo Han knew that his cousin was eager to be reunited with her younger brother. Bo Han, however, was disappointed that Sen Lí had returned to the capital instead of going east to find the prince, as he had been ordered. Sen Lan had explained that she had not been able to be very clear using their code. She knew Bo Han was disappointed and was doing what she could to smooth things between her cousin and her brother.

Ŏvor, as usual, had not shared his thoughts on Sen Lí’s impending return. Bo Han tucked his handkerchief back into his golt and glanced at him. Ŏvor had his arms crossed over his chest while he stared fixedly at the corner of the carriage window.

Few in the Lăsoth House were unaware that Sen Lí expected to be named Bo Han’s heir. Every two years the Lăsoth council, Bo Han’s Inner Room, came together to vote on who should be named heir of the Housemaster. The last vote had named Ŏv Onol, Ŏvor’s father. A new vote had not been held since his death. But now that Sen Lí had taken over Ŏv Onol’s position as the head of the Lăsoth border estate — albeit unofficially — it was assumed that he would be voted to replace Ŏv Onol as Bo Han’s heir.

Bo Han himself was not granted a vote. But his opinion carried significant weight. If he treated Sen Lí with favor, he was more likely to be chosen. If, however, he seemed to favor another…

Bo Han wondered if any of this had entered the mind of Ŏvor, if that was what had so distracted him this morning.

Abruptly, Ŏvor drew in a sharp breath.

“My lord?” he said.

“Yes?”

“There’s something I’ve been considering.”

“Considering?”

“Yes, regarding what you said, about Balo Sonen and his son and the Minister of Defense.”

Bo Han watched him closely.

“If I am not mistaken, my lord, you believe that the Palace House had something to do with what happened to the four little princes.”

“I do.”

“And we have observed that Balo Sonen is an ally of the Palace House. We have also observed that his son Ban Lo Sonen might very well have some control over the Minister of Defense, which, in turns, suggests that Balo has some control over the Minister of Defense, which means that the Palace House, who might have attacked the four little princes, also has control over the Minister of Defense.”

Bo Han said nothing. He watched as Ŏvor turned again to stare at the glowing corner of the window shade.

At last, Ŏvor went on, “When Balo Sonen had his son placed in the service of the Minister of Defense, it was a reward that had been granted to him by the king because he had successfully concluded the investigation into the assassination of the royal family nine years ago.”

Bo Han smiled grimly and closed his eyes.

“Do you think it’s possible—?”

“Yes, Ŏvor. I do.”

When Bo Han took Ŏvor’s arm and alighted their carriage at the Palace wall, he immediately saw Kío En Tolen, standing in the shadow of the Palace, like a toy figure forgotten outside. It struck him how small the prime minister seemed. In that moment, Bo Han knew that his decision regarding Kío En was the right one.

“Ah,” he said to Ŏvor. “It seems the prime minister has, at last, recovered. Let us go and greet him.”

Ŏvor bowed and fell into step behind the Lăsoth Housemaster — leaving Tova to stand next to the carriage — as they made their way across the dusty stone road.

Kío En Tolen had wrapped himself tightly in a long, fur-lined cloak. He stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, very near his attendant Nălo, who watched Bo Han and Ŏvor closely as they approached.

Bo Han bowed, and Ŏvor followed. “My lord Tolen,” he said warmly. “I had nearly decided to send my own physician to your estate. It is a great relief to see you today.”

Kío En turned to him. His narrow eyes shone darkly, his face a map of shadows and fatigue, as if he had not slept in days. He opened and closed his mouth several times.

“I trust you have recovered?”

“I- I have, yes,” the Oak Hand stammered. “I- my household is not entirely well, however.”

“It isn’t your daughter, I hope?” And Bo Han took a step closer.

Nălo flinched, but then he glanced over Bo Han’s shoulder and saw his bodysword, Tova, who did not even have his hand upon the hilt of his sword.

Bo Han took yet another step toward Kío En, and then he reached out with one hand and gripped his shoulder. Nălo’s hand went to his sword, but the prime minister gestured subtly to stop him. Nălo bowed and took a step back.

Bo Han said, “Your daughter is still unwell? I am indeed sorry to hear that.”

Kío En stared at him. He studied the smooth plains of the Lăsoth Housemaster’s expressionless face.

“Have you considered taking her and her maid and that new bodysword of hers to your House’s estate in Enlin?”

“Her new—?” And then his eyes snapped open with realization. Bo Han squeezed his shoulder and Kío En took a shaking breath. The prime minister had never been stupid; he understood precisely that Bo Han Lăsoth had discovered who he had hidden in his estate. Bo Han had no wish to frighten him. But if he could learn that much, others could as well. If the Palace House learned of it…

“The king cannot spare me,” Kío En said, looking at the Palace wall. “I cannot leave the capital. And I will not—” He paused and took another trembling breath. “And I will not send my daughter out of the capital unprotected.”

“If I may, my lord. Perhaps my own man, Ŏvor, can escort them and see to it that they arrive safely.”

Ŏvor turned to look at his Housemaster with wide, surprised eyes. Then he bowed with a quickly stammered, “Y-yes, my lord. I would be happy to see her there safely.”

Kío En Tolen stared from one Lăsoth to the other.

“If I had a daughter,” Bo Han said, “I would trust Ŏvor Lăsoth with her life, that I can assure you. He is, you remember, married to my cousin.” Bo Han let go of the prime minister’s arm and tucked his hands inside his cloak. He said, “The capital is a harsh place in the winter. And the coming winter will be particularly cruel, I think.”

Kío En took a heavy breath. “Winter is always cruel.” Then he nodded once, and bowed. “Thank you, my lord Lăsoth. I will gladly accept your aid.”

Bo Han smiled. “We will see it arranged when we are done here. But first, let us go meet with the king.”

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