Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(151)

The taller of the two wore full plate armor, burnished steel shining so brightly Kaden wanted to avert his eyes. The golden sun of the imperial throne gleamed from his breastplate as well as from the massive shield that rested at his feet. The grip and pommel of the largest broadblade Kaden had ever seen extended up behind the man’s head. He carried his helmet beneath one arm, a single concession to the heat of the day. Even from a distance, Kaden could make out deep blue eyes in a face that might have been hammered out on an anvil, not a handsome face, but a familiar one. Micijah Ut, he realized, a small smile creeping onto his face.

“Aedolian,” Tan said softly.

Kaden looked over at the other monk, wondering for the thousandth time about the life he had led before arriving at the monastery. The golden knots on Ut’s shoulders identified him clearly as a member of the Emperor’s personal bodyguard, of course, but the Aedolian Guard rarely left the capital. How would Tan recognize the insignia?

“The commander,” Tan added.

Kaden glanced back to those knots. Four, he realized with a start. When he left the Dawn Palace, Crenchan Xaw had been First Shield, and though Xaw seemed almost as old as the empire itself, he had run the guard with unerring competence since well before Kaden was born. Whenever Kaden and Valyn tried to slip away on one of their childish adventures, it was Xaw who caught them, Xaw who harangued them about their responsibility to the empire, and Xaw who turned them over a chair and caned them, heedless of their demands to be set free, of their protestations that they were princes, that he had to obey them. Once, when the brothers were still very young, they had foolishly complained to their father about his First Shield’s treatment. Sanlitun had only laughed and resolved to pay Crenchen Xaw an extra stipend “for educating as well as guarding his sons.” The old man was dead now; the fact that Micijah Ut wore the four golden knots of the First Shield could mean nothing else. Although Kaden had spent almost all his young childhood at war with the old commander, he felt a hollowness in the pit of his stomach, a dull ache that the Shin would dismiss as illusion but that he still recognized as sorrow.

When Kaden departed from the capital, Micijah Ut had been one of four commanders directly beneath Crenchen Xaw. As leader of the Dark Guard, he was charged with watching over the royal family between the midnight bell and dawn. Kaden remembered him well, a stiff, formal man who lacked the charm of many of the other Aedolians. He walked his nightly rounds in full armor, even inside the Dawn Palace, his face turned down in a perpetual frown, barely illuminated in the lamplight. Valyn and Kaden had always found him intimidating, despite the fact that he was there to protect them.

After eight years at Ashk’lan, however, Kaden was a child no longer, and in all that time, Micijah Ut was the first person he had seen from his old life. Despite Tan’s admonition to wait and observe, Kaden felt an itching to step outside and batter the block of a man with his questions. In fact, he could hardly have asked for a better emissary than his father’s own First Shield to clear up whatever was happening back in the Dawn Palace. Whatever secrets Pyrre Lakatur was keeping, they wouldn’t last long now that Ut was here. Kaden turned toward the door of the hall, but Tan held him back, redirecting his attention to the scene outside.

With his free hand, the Aedolian was gesturing firmly at the abbot, almost poking him in the chest with his finger. When the wind fell, Kaden could hear his voice, an iron monotone that sounded more accustomed to command than negotiation. “… irrelevant. He is here because of the needs of the Unhewn Throne, and now the Unhewn Throne is…” A gust snatched away the end of the sentence.

Kaden frowned. The Ut he knew had been distant and difficult to know, hard as cast iron in his convictions, but never rude, never bullying. Whatever brought him here had both strained and hardened him.

The second man appeared content to let his companion do the talking. Kaden couldn’t see his face, but long dark hair tied with red silk hung loosely down his back. Despite the rigors of travel and the unpredictable weather of the mountains, he wore a finely tailored red silk coat, buttoned up the center in the style of the highest-ranking imperial ministers, a low collar ringing his neck. Sunlight flashed on the man’s golden cuffs, and Kaden blinked. Only the Mizran Councillor, the highest ranking nonmilitary minister, wore gold at both his cuffs and his collar. This man was one of a half dozen in the entire empire who outranked the Aedolian at his side.

Suddenly the councillor turned his head, and Kaden drew in his breath in surprise. The strip he had taken for a band to hold back hair was, in fact, a thick blindfold completely covering the man’s eyes. In spite of it, he looked directly at the window where Kaden stood, then put a hand on the soldier’s arm, as though to calm him. Unlike Ut, the Mizran was a complete stranger—he must have been extremely talented to have risen through the baffling ranks of the imperial bureaucracy in the eight short years since Kaden had left Annur. Once again the wind died, and this time Kaden could hear the councillor’s voice, smooth as the silk he wore.