Wen cupped her trembling hand against his jaw. “The clan is my blood,” she whispered, her voice thick with emotion, but perfectly steady. She bowed her head and pressed her mouth to the hollow of his throat. “And the Pillar is its master.”
FIRST INTERLUDE
The Long Judgment
The last king of Kekon, Eon II, presided over the darkest period of his nation’s history and died as an ignominious failure. Kekon had been relatively peaceful and prosperous for three hundred years following the unification of the nation under the royal family of Jan, but by the time Eon II ascended to the throne at the age of nineteen, the country was facing political upheaval. Foreign entities had established a presence on Kekon. The merchant Bramsko Explorers Guild from Stepenland, the Tun Empire, which controlled the port city of Toshon in Kekon’s southern peninsula, and the Shotarian navy that ruled the East Amaric Ocean were increasingly in conflict with each other and with the local population.
In the wake of several violent incidents and allegations of foreign bribes paid to the royal family, the country’s numerous Green Bone clan families began to take sides against one another, with some remaining loyal to the beleaguered monarchy and others supporting its overthrow. When the Empire of Shotar invaded Kekon with the full might of its modern military, it faced a defending force of jade warriors who possessed exceptional abilities but no comparable organization or unity.
Despite this, the fighting was so fierce and casualties so high that documents later revealed Shotarian military commanders were prepared to burn the city of Janloon to the ground, arguing that otherwise every last Green Bone on the island would die fighting, each taking hundreds of enemy soldiers down with him. King Eon II was advised by his counselors to flee the country and continue the war in exile. Instead, the monarch commanded the clans to retreat. He surrendered to Shotar and abdicated the throne. The Shotarian government kept the former king in comfortable captivity, making his eventual death by poison at the hands of foreign overseers appear to be from natural causes.
The Kekonese so widely reviled King Eon II as a coward and a weakling that when the monarchy was symbolically if not functionally reestablished fifty years later, Eon’s grandnephew Ioan III reigned under the title of prince to distance himself from his hated relative. More recent historical scholarship has been kinder to Eon II. His seemingly premature capitulation is estimated to have saved millions of lives and enabled the country’s remaining Green Bone warriors to regroup and form the One Mountain Society—the indomitable national resistance network that would end Shotarian rule and be the precursor to today’s modern clans. During his captivity, the former monarch urged peace and citizen cooperation with the foreign governors, but was later discovered to have sold off most of the royal family’s possessions and secretly funneled the money to Green Bone guerillas via Lantern Men intermediaries. A Shotarian bodyguard who wrote a memoir about Eon II described him as private, bookish, and especially softhearted toward animals—the antithesis of the fierce and brutish Kekonese stereotype widely depicted by Shotarian propaganda.
On his deathbed, the disgraced king is said to have lamented, “I’ll be remembered not for who I was, but for what I wasn’t. Perhaps it’s for the best. Let the gods judge me for what I did not do.”
CHAPTER
15
Skeptics
the thirteenth year, sixth month
As the most junior physician on staff in the Paw-Paw district medical clinic, Anden was stuck with the least desirable working hours—late nights, early mornings, holidays. Out of the eighteen doctors, only three were Green Bones. Anden often worked even longer than his assigned shifts, or was called in outside of them. His reputation as a jade prodigy and his status as a member of the Kaul family meant that Fists and Fingers of the clan sought him out specifically, so he was always in demand. Also, Paw-Paw was a poor and violent neighborhood; there were often urgent cases to deal with. One evening, he was summoned to treat a patient with a collapsed lung and internal bleeding. He was surprised to see that the man on the bed was Lott Jin, his former classmate from Kaul Du Academy, now the No Peak clan’s First Fist of Janloon.
“Lott-jen,” Anden exclaimed, “how did this happen to you?” Lott’s injuries were the result of blunt trauma. Remarkably, none of his bones were broken and the multiple knife wounds were shallow—clearly, Lott’s Steel was excellent, but blood vessels and soft organs were difficult to protect even with good jade abilities.
“Barukan,” Lott answered grimly, as if that was the only explanation required. Later, the two Fingers anxiously waiting in the reception area to hear of their captain’s condition would explain that Lott had been ambushed by men with pipes, crowbars, and cleavers during a stakeout of a barukan gang hideout. The First Fist had killed four attackers before falling off a third-story fire escape. Some barukan gang members possessed enough self-taught jade ability to make them dangerous even against Green Bones, especially when they had an advantage of numbers. Most of them were originally from the Matyos gang in Shotar and claimed vague allegiance to the Mountain clan, which denounced and punished their illegal activities but also used them to do low-level work and to attack No Peak without getting directly involved themselves. Keeping the criminal class under heel while manipulating it against their rivals was a long-standing tradition of the clans.