She lets me go and I jerk away, gasping, stumbling up the bank and back toward the party as fast as my dress allows me.
When I make it back to the floating teahouse where I left the others, it’s empty, and at first I’m relieved that the party has ended. But then I notice movement ahead. Everyone seems to be gathered on one of the central platforms. The music that was playing earlier has stopped, and in its place is quiet—though not the good kind. The tense kind of quiet, when the air gets strange and taut, like elastic pulled too tightly. A few moments later, shouting rises up from the crowd.
“Hey!” A lone guard hurries along a gangplank toward me. “What’re you—oh.”
He falters. Rounded ears twitch as he recognizes me. It takes me a moment longer to recognize him as the bear-form guard outside the palace the night I arrived. The sweetness of his features doesn’t seem to fit with his soldier’s clothes, the sheathed sword at his waist.
“Mistress Lei-zhi,” he amends with a bow. “My sincerest apologies. I didn’t realize—”
“What’s happening?” I interrupt.
He looks up. “The—the King wants to add a new part to the celebrations,” he says, and I don’t miss the slight stumble in his words.
Jeers erupt in the distance.
“What new part?” I ask as a cold wave of dread creeps over me.
The guard opens his mouth. Then he gives a small shake of his head. “The King requests the presence of all his guests,” he says firmly, clearing his throat. He reasserts his grip on his sword. “Please come with me, Mistress.”
I follow him along the walkways to the center of the flotilla. Discarded objects—bowls and plates, silk napkins, the wind-loosened petals of flowers—are scattered among the abandoned platforms, the water around them also bobbing with debris. As we get nearer, I catch some of the words being tossed into the air.
Rotten Paper. Worthless.
Keeda.
“Maybe this is close enough,” the guard starts, holding out an arm. But I shove past him, elbowing my way through the crowd all the way to the front.
And freeze when I get there.
A memory, as vivid as the day it happened. A Paper caste woman with eyes full of hatred, and the swing of a club toward her skull.
The scene before me isn’t similar in the details, but the shape of it is there. Demon guards herding a group of Paper castes in place with swords and spiked axes. The looks on the men’s and women’s, the children’s faces, not anger this time, but fear. And the King, laughing as he paces back and forth to inspect them.
“… so I thought it only right that we give them a proper royal welcome!”
It’s hard to hear him over the crowd. His grin is wide and sharp, more canine than bovine, and I can tell the energy of his audience is emboldening him. From the way he’s swaggering, it’s clear he’s drunk. There’s a frenzy on his face, the same crazed sheen I saw a glimmer of earlier, but alcohol has loosened it, and it sits vivid on his features.
Dread crests inside me. I look round for Wren or Aoki. Instead, I spot Chenna a few rows ahead and push my way toward her.
“What is this?” I ask breathlessly.
She doesn’t turn. “The soldiers just got back from a raid in eastern Noei,” she says, and beneath her usual composure is something troubled. There’s hollowness to her voice, a constriction in her throat. Still staring ahead, she continues, “They’ve brought these Paper castes to the palace as slaves. The King is giving them away as presents to his guests.”
I gape at her. “What?”
Just then, one of the captives pushes to the front of the group. A dog-form guard swings out an arm to stop him, and the man struggles to get free.
“Please!” he shouts. He’s middle aged, dark hair fanning into grey. “Have mercy, Heavenly Master—”
“Ah,” the King interrupts. “So you recognize your master, do you, and yet you dare ask for his mercy?” His deep voice is slurred from drink. “My mercy is for my peers, old man. Not some worthless keeda.”
The word strikes me afresh coming from the King’s lips.
“My wife and children are here!” the man tries again, his arms outstretched, face contorted. “Please, Heavenly Master. Have mercy. We have been nothing but obedient, all these years, giving away more than we could spare of our crops to your soldiers, never protesting when our taxes increase. Even now with the Sickness, we comply with every demand. All we ask is to be left alone. Please, Heavenly Master. Let us go home—”
The King roars. “I will not take orders from a human!”
With a thunder of hooves, he charges forward. It’s unexpected, quicker than I’d thought him capable of. All of a sudden he seems more animal than human, driven by bovine instinct and rage. Swiping the guard aside, he seizes the man by the neck, lumbers to the edge of the platform and, with an effortless arc of his arm, flings the man into the river.
The crowd cheers, breaks into applause.
The balcony ringing the platform hides the man from view, but we hear him emerging in a splash of water, spluttering. A few of the other Paper castes try to break from the guards, but they are quickly forced back into place.
The King sweeps an arm toward the rest of the Paper caste slaves, a feral grin lighting his face. “Go ahead, friends. Choose as many slaves as you wish. The keeda should know now not to challenge their masters.”
The demons move forward in a rush of excited chatter.
“Kunih save them,” Chenna murmurs, making a quick motion across her brow that I’ve seen her make once or twice before. It must be a prayer ritual from where she’s from.
I have learnt not to put my trust in the gods. Especially not Kunih, who—like all earth gods—is favored in the South, but my parents taught me to be wary of, for what God of Redemption would not one day turn upon you?
Instead, I yell at myself. Go, Lei! Help!
But I don’t move.
A taloned hand lands on my shoulder. “Come, girls,” Madam Himura orders in her croaky voice. “Time for us to leave.”
My eyes flick back to the slaves, cowering as the King’s guests inspect them. “But—”
“Do you wish to join them, Lei-zhi?”
I falter, and Madam Himura’s smile is cutting, because she knows of course that I don’t. She can guess the struggle inside me, and which instinct is winning. Because no matter how brave I might try to seem, really the heart that beats within my rib cage is weak and broken and scared, and I am just a human girl kneeling before her demon King.
Dzarja. Traitor.
I drop my chin as we turn away and head back to where our carriages are waiting at the top of the bank, my belly churning.
The slave-woman was right.
That’s exactly what I am.
TWENTY-ONE
WHEN WE GET BACK FROM THE PARTY, sleep seems impossible. Even the concept of sleep: of rest, of peace, of—heavens forbid—dreaming. I’m on the verge of being sick. My mother’s absence from the Night Houses list, Aoki telling me the King will call for me soon, the former Paper Girl’s monstrous face, and the terror of the slaves as the demons circled in. Everything about this day has been horrible. And the worst part of it all is the hardest to ignore, because it is within me.