Chapter Text
The ground ahead was pockmarked with potholes, and the carriage gave a feverish shiver as they lurched around their latest fork in this latest road. The air was heavy with winter, but heavier still with the disease that seemed to cling so burr-like to the land; every tree they passed seemed skeletal, the sky overcast with pallor. Confined as he was to his corner seat, though, all Gaara could do was thin his lips. He had seen many disasters in his day – caused a few, himself – but the blight to this land still managed to seem foreign.
Across from him, Gaara could see his sister Temari had no such reservations. Her glass-green eyes were wide, made brighter still by the flush dancing across her cheeks. “Oh, it’s always so gorgeous,” she was cooing. “Isn’t it just?”
“I don’t suppose I’ve ever – urk! – ever, ah, seen much quite like it.” The only thing green about Kankuro was his complexion, and his own eyes swam with tears. Gaara knew his brother had never been one for strenuous motion of any sort, and they had been riding for a fortnight.
“Is that all you have to say?” Temari quirked an eyebrow, and Kankuro rolled his eyes. She had avarice in her gaze as she whirled on Gaara. “What about you? What are your thoughts on Konoha?”
“Of course it’s beautiful,” Gaara lied. “Just . . . ” His voice caught, slightly, and Gaara imagined the collar of his tunic strangling the hesitance from his tone. When he spoke again, he’d settled as neatly into diplomacy as the embroidery had his sleeves. “It’s just not as beautiful as home.”
“Nothing is.”
For the first time in a long while, Gaara agreed with his sister. In Suna, the sky shone like sapphires against the pearly brilliance of the sun and moon, and the desert rolled across the horizon like a sheet of hammered gold. The mottled shadows of these sick forests paled in comparison, in more ways than one.
A racking cough from the head of the carriage came to jolt Gaara from his reverie, though it served in equal measure as punctuation to his thoughts. “We’re – hff! hff! – we’re coming up on the castle gatehouse, Your Highnesses.”
Gaara couldn’t tell if their driver’s voice was stiff with disdain or with cough. He was a wiry man with a mess of dark hair, and though he was heading a four-horse carriage, he still smelled like wet dog. Dimly, Gaara remembered his manners.
“Thank you, Mr. Inuzuka.” That was what Father said, right? “Kiba Inuzuka?” Gaara tried for a smile as he rose from his seat, and he was sure to draw his collar higher before he paid Mr. Maybe Kiba Possibly Inuzuka for the ride. He saw Kankuro do the same, and Temari tugged her gloves higher before she, too, crossed the driver’s palm with silver. The plague had yet to ravage Konoha as it had the lands further South – as it had Kumo and Oto, or even Suna, with all their medical advancements – but it was doing its darnedest. They’d suffered a weak harvest and a harsh winter, as well; as the racking cough and staggering fever began working its way over northern borders, Konoha’s people were set to wither.
Good, thought Gaara. The voice wasn’t necessarily his own, but it was not an unfamiliar one. Good. They’ll be ripe for the taking.
As ripe as anything was in the North, anyhow.
He pretended not to notice the dirty look on the steward’s face as she drudged forward to bid them welcome, or how the cloudy sky seemed to darken as a gaggle of servants came to help them with their bags. Though the border was calm, and the snow fell unimpeded by trebuchets or flaming arrows, the war was far from over. Even the sick earth beneath his feet seemed to hold a grudge: when Gaara closed his eyes, reaching his energy into the flagstones, he could feel them push up against him. The nation didn’t want them here.
But their father did. And, perhaps more importantly, King Shamon did. He’d been the one to request a peace summit with the warlords of Konoha in the first place, in a desperate bid to end generations of war . . . before it ended him. At eighty-odd winters, the old man was stretched thin across the kingdom’s borders and family ties; his age, his stress, and the plague itself were locked in a fervent race against one another to see which would be the one to end him. And so while he had called for a peace summit – a last-bid effort to heal Suna before he passed – it was well-known he was in no fit state to attend it. Instead, he would send his heirs: the triplet (bastard) children of his only cousin, now that his own children and siblings had been laid to wretched rest by that sweeping sickness.
(Sometimes, Gaara wondered just how sick poor Duchess Chiyo or Baron Sasori had been. On those occasions, he thought of his father’s – the royal alchemist’s – laboratories, and wondered just what lay in those countless little bottles or behind those iron screens. But then His Alchemical Excellency, Lord Rasa would appear, and Gaara would be set back to his duties.)
“ . . . be here shortly.” The steward was a statuesque sort of blonde with a smoky voice, and her eyes blazed like amber under heavy-knit brows and set against deep violet shadows. There was a small purple tattoo set into her forehead, and Gaara wondered, absentmindedly, which of the North’s thousand conquered tribes she must have come from. There was blood soaked deep into the soil beneath his feet. Gaara didn’t need his magic to sense that.
“Thank you, miss.” Temari, at least, had been following along. She was the only one out of all of them to ever have visited Konoha. It was, after all, the home of her—
“Lord Shikamaru!”
—her . . . him, thought Gaara, dumbly. Her “Shikamaru.”
The eldest of the three Konohan warlords was no further out of childhood than any of them were, but he moved with a tired dignity all the same. He wore his dark hair long, plaits peaking out from beneath the hood of an old woollen cloak. There was no crown, no regalia – the only real sign of his status was the fine leather of his boots.
“My princess,” said Lord Shikamaru Nara. For a moment, his dark eyes shone, real affection tugging at his weathered features – but then it was gone. He pressed a chaste kiss to the back of Temari’s hand, before turning to Gaara and Kankuro. “Your Highnesses. I’ve heard . . . ” Ghost stories. Bloody murder. The very worst things. “ . . . so very much about you.”
“I’ve written about you two,” said Temari, unnecessarily. “In our letters.”
“Indeed.” Shikamaru turned stiffly on his heel, and he turned a wary gaze on Gaara, black eyes meeting icy blue. He seemed to be searching for the words, but in the end, all to come out was a tiny sigh. “I . . . we just . . . huh.” He folded his hands behind his back, and Gaara pretended not to notice how his stare strayed to the dirk at his belt. “You’re powerful,” he said, in the end. “I can feel it.”
This time, it was fear that flickered across the impassive planes of his features, and Gaara watched the sky grow slightly dimmer as Lord Shikamaru’s shadow warped instinctively beneath him. He was an infamous spymaster, even beyond Konoha’s borders, and Gaara knew how literally he cloaked himself in shadows. Still, this was little more than a trick of the light. That was the thing, he liked to think, about Konoha. There was magic here, too, of course: it was sprinkled like sand or gravel over the snowy hills; it took the form of warriors’ battlefield quirks or the odd two-headed cow. But the old magics ran like ravines through Sunan sands, and catastrophic power gathered in pockets and pools throughout the land. In sinkholes that travelled to the centre of the earth, or in storms of locusts and toads. In rivers of blood and . . .
This time, the earth had reacted to Gaara’s anxieties without him realising it, and for a moment, all he could do was dully watch. The courtyard was silent as a flagstone crumbled to sand at his feet, the stones of the gatehouse groaning in protest. Gaara grit his teeth, willing the great plates of magma leagues below them to still – and they did. He could feel it in his bones as easily as he could feel it below them: the earth was calm once more (which meant soon enough, he would be too, heart rate slowing like a rolling stone).
For that was where much of Suna’s old magic had ended up: in the hands of those who didn’t always know what to do with it. Once, it had been a true mark of power. Before the reformation, the people worshipped their kind as gods, and the House of Life had risen from the riverbanks to bring magic to the people through language. Now, they were known as freaks of nature – or, in the case of their father, Lord Rasa, conquests to be taken. Most people went their whole lives without even meeting a djinn. Rasa had not just captured one, and bound it to a bottle, like the myths of old. He’d bedded it, and sired the only three half-human, half-djinn childrenin the world.
“So it’s true.”
The steward spoke without Gaara quite hearing her, but he could feel the flagstones shift beneath her feet as she steadied herself. She looked more regal than any of them – than Lord Shikamaru and his mundane clothes, than Kankuro in his roadsickness, than even Temari, who was dressed in jewels and fineries. “It’s true,” she said again, looking down her nose at the four of them. “They are not just ‘powerful.’ They are the dhampir who—”
“They are our guests, Tsunade.” Shikamaru’s glare was a warning, though his tone was tired as ever. “Now, will you show the princes to their quarters? Her Highness and I have some matters of state to discuss.”
Gaara fought back a smile as Kankuro shot him a look, all arched eyebrows and twitching lips. He was quite sure that their sister’s and their host’s “matters of state” concerned no borders other than those of their tunics, and that the treaties passed between them would read more like sappy poetry. But did it matter? Gaara would have given all the magic in the world to see his siblings free of their courtly duties for once – to get to act their ages, free to explore the sprawling stone fortress and sky-scraping firs of this foreign land.
But then he turned to the steward, Tsunade, and saw her glare had only hardened, ill-disguised contempt pulling at her features as she bade her lord farewell. “Dhampir,” she muttered, again. Gaara felt a shiver run down his spine. He was diplomat and polyglot enough to know what it meant – and he was human enough to know she meant it as a curse.
At the edge of the road, some twenty paces ahead of them, a wall of white had shot into the heavy air. It took Gaara a moment to realise it was steam, and sure enough, when it had cleared, a perfect square had been melted into the snow where one of Kankuro’s travelling trunks lay. Ghostly black flames licked at its surface, and the serving girl who’d been tended to it had leapt back, cradling a hand that the protective spells must have burnt. Gaara could only sigh. “Dhampir” was right, really. The people had reason to be scared.
The castle gates swung shut behind them with a resounding “clang,” and Gaara could feel the echo deep in his bones.
Castle Konohagakure had come to life by nightfall, streams of servants and staff coursing floodlike down the halls, and shouts far below them shaking the windows in their wrought-iron panes. Beeswax candles made the wall sconces glow a deep, burnished gold, and the harsh divides between bricks and mortar were soft and nonthreatening in the firelight. To be sure, the old stone fortress showed its age: the red carpet to run like a gold vein down the corridor was threadbare, and there were gouges and scratches in each heavy oak door Gaara happened past. Even so, Gaara stood a little straighter as he wandered down the West Wing. Konoha may have been sick, but its court was defiant.
Their quarters occupied the better part of the westernmost turret, and Gaara could hardly help but marvel as he came to the zenith of the hall’s winding curve. He knew glass was expensive this far north, and it made the spectacle before him all the more impressive. The window stretched ten paces to either side of him, and the snow below them shone along a thousand facets in the fine-cut crystal. But the further up he looked, the harder, he found, it was to see the landscape. Instead, the glass was stained in a spray of vibrant colours, and long lines of lead stretched across its surface like ivy to paint an intricate picture. Even in the dim, Gaara knew what it was, and he whispered it in half-hewn reverence:
“The grail of the Fisher King.”
“Quite the quarry.”
Off the road, Kankuro might as well have been a different person. His craggy features had shifted into an angular smirk, and his dark eyes danced in the candlelight. “Funny how something so little can cause so much trouble,” he went on to muse. When his lips twitched higher, Gaara saw the markings on his face dance, too. He’d wiped off the smudgy kohl he’d been stuck in all week to draw a fresh wedjat across either eye, and a glyph Gaara didn’t recognise on his chin. Unlike his siblings, Kankuro did not rely on his djinn blood to leave his mark on the world around him. He’d taken apprenticeships with artisans and toymakers alike to follow in the footsteps of one of the most infamous magicians of the old House: Imhotep, the puppetmaster.
Sure enough, when he opened a white-knuckled hand, a legion of tiny statues lay in his palm. “Ilen en-mar,” whispered Kankuro. “Get the hell up.”
The clay figurines were no larger than spiders, but when Gaara focused, he could see tiny hinges, hear the dull clacking of minuscule gears. “Is it my turn?” he asked, turning narrowed eyes on his brother. Kankuro gave a stiff shrug, and Gaara dug deep.
This was an old trick of theirs. Tiny puppets were innocuous enough, of course – but they’d grown up in the northeastern pockets of Suna, whose bitter, dry steppes made a stark contrast to the lavish riverbanks of the capital. There, people were on high alert when it came to spiders and scorpions, so the two of them had to get creative. Gaara would coat Kankuro’s spies in sand, or fragments of stone. He could change the crystalline structures of even dust if he tried hard enough, ensuring the target would be all but invisible against any earthen background. From, there, all Kankuro had to do was listen to the echoes passing through his statues, and the brothers could spy on most anything.
Of course, the stone halls of the Konohan stronghold were a far cry from their childhood home, and they had concerns beyond birthday presents, now. Gaara finished his work with a tight-lipped frown, and he hoped nobody noticed how he nearly jumped from his skin when a delicate “ahem!” sounded behind them.
“Practicing sihr, are we, boys?”
Kankuro, at least, was quick to snipe back. “Oh, because you’re so afraid of the Good Book.”
Temari shrugged, and lifted a ring-laden hand to toy with the embroidered edge of her hijab. She didn’t wear one often, and she’d made sure, tonight, that this one was pinned just so – just low enough to show the Konohan court the rich gold waves of her hair. Their father liked to reprimand her for her lack of piety, but (this, she would often crow, once she’d ensured he was out of earshot) what should she care? What was some out-of-date God to someone who could create cyclones in her hands?
Gaara didn’t know if he agreed, but he appreciated his sister’s verve. Still, his own kaftan was buttoned high, and he’d opted to leave the jewels and makeup to his siblings. “Shall we?” he asked, after a beat. “We don’t want to keep our own welcome party waiting.”
The grand hall of Castle Konohagakure had little in common with the mosaics and ballrooms of Sunan palaces, but Gaara could not deny it had a unique brand of splendour. The stone ceiling loomed two, three storeys above them, so high they were nearly lost to gloom – Gaara doubted he would have been able to even see those huge, iron chandeliers had it not been for the legions of flickering embers in their crowns. There was no stained glass, no storybook scenes in these windows, but the thick blue glass and heavy black frames made an imposing sight nonetheless; a stark reminder that for every lit candle or torch, the winter still crouched around them, a hungry, patient animal.
But the Konohans laughed and sang anyway, and the chorus of their foreign voices echoed through their grand hall, fiercely jubilant. Even the bitter steward had plastered a smile to her face, calling the hall to attention to herald their arrival. “We welcome the emissaries of Sultan Shamon of Suna,” she announced. “Their Royal Highnesses, Princess Temari, Prince Kankuro, and Prince Gaara!”
“Hear, hear!”
They’d barely been seated before Gaara had the wind knocked out of him, a hamlike hand slamming into his back with force that could have shattered stone. He felt his bones creak in protest as he turned to meet a wide, scarred smile, and the thundering voice’s echo reached deep into their honeycomb cracks. All Gaara could think to do was bow, and hoped his siblings would do the same. The man, red-haired and red-faced, only guffawed, before he was cut off by a sniff.
“Oh, have some decorum, Choji.”
This next speaker was an icy blonde with cruelly pretty features, and as she sneered, Gaara felt his lips twist into a frown. Logically, he’d known they’d be rubbing elbows with the warlords, but the scramble behind the hall’s high table hardly seemed the time! He’d come expecting a heist, after all, and a war colder than the winter.
Still, the blonde was staring, and Gaara scrambled to match dossiers to people. “Lady Ino,” he choked out, and hastened to bow once more. Ino Yamanaka, the assassin, did not seem impressed. She took her seat with another slight sniff, and left her companion (who could only have been the warrior, Choji Akimichi) to fend for himself.
Their first course was a soup that tasted largely of nothing, and Gaara had barely made it three bland spoonfuls in before the banquet erupted in chaos. In a hall this size, he knew, an echo was more than a sound; sure enough, as a great crash rang off the polished stone floors and long wood tables, Gaara could feel it vibrating deep in his core. All the same, an echo was little explanation. He craned his neck upward, scanning the room in narrow-eyed confusion. Though those attending the high table had materialised from dumbwaiters behind them, there were three lines of servers working on the floor, weaving past the two long tables set up for lesser guests. Rather, there had been three orderly lines there – Gaara had looked up just in time to see a fourth tureen of watery soup tumble to the floor, and the servers scattered like ants as they broke ranks.
“Blast!” Lady Ino’s voice took on a shrill edge in her frustration, and she shouted to nobody and everybody all at once. “We have guests!”
“Oh, it’s quite all right, my lady,” Kankuro cooed. He was grinning like a cat that had moved up from canaries to children, his dark eyes gleaming. “Really, no harm done. We all make mistakes.”
A great screech rang through the room as Lord Choji pushed from the table, rushing to help Tsunade shepherd the cleaners pouring from the side entrances. On either side of him, Gaara saw the other two warlords rubbing at their temples, Lord Shikamaru muttering and Lady Ino silently fuming. But neither held his interest for long – he’d caught his brother’s eye, and Kankuro’s smirk stretched even wider as he tucked a tiny figurine into the heavy folds of his galabeya. “Go,” he whispered, fixing Gaara with a pointed look. “I want to know if any of my shabti found the grail yet.”
“We’ve barely been here two hours—”
“And I’d rather not stay. Go on! Git!”
There were all manner of choice words Gaara could think to say to that, but he held his tongue – twisting it hard into his cheek, hoping the dull ache would dispel the din around him. It didn’t work. Curses, both whispered and cried, shot through the hall like crossbow bolts, and the scraping of chairs against stone sent chills down his spine. He could feel a headache building like a sandstorm at the back of his mind, and he found himself taking the first exit he could find: the dumbwaiter behind his seat.
Gaara wasn’t very tall, and he erred on the side of “scrawny,” but he still dropped like a stone. He’d heard rumours of servants and bandits alike using dumbwaiters to sneak around manors and palaces, but surely, he thought now, surely that couldn’t have been true. After all, who would willingly subject themselves to this? To slamming, pell-mell, into stone walls as they crept ever inward; to hurtling through the dark and—
“Oof!”
Any thoughts he might have had were knocked from him with the last of his breath as he tumbled from the dumbwaiter, coherence ebbing away with every flagstone he skidded over. Though he’d spent his childhood falling from horses (princes had to learn to ride, of course, but most horses weren’t keen on djinn) it had done little to prepare him for this. Even as he ground to a halt – his knees slamming into the leg of a table – there was little Gaara could do but try to shake the dizziness from his head.
He was soon to find it wouldn’t dissipate.
“Are you all— oh, my!”
Actually, he might very well have been getting dizzier.
Gaara saw, rather than felt, a pair of strong hands close around his, brown skin gleaming copper in the warm candlelight of the basement he’d fallen into. He’d been searching desperately for his breath, but it had caught in his chest once more, and stars still swam in his eyes. Growing up in the grasslands, and with so much time spent in the desert, Gaara thought he knew the sun, knew blinding light. But he was met now by a smile so dazzling he could scarcely focus: it was all gleaming teeth and starry dark eyes, infinitely brighter than any of the candles dotted around them.
Gaara managed, at last, to blink. It seemed a good first step.
“My lord! Er, your . . . Your Highness!”
Dimly, Gaara registered the words as they came to him, stringing syllables into sentences some part of his addled mind could comprehend. He felt his centre of gravity jostle once more as the foreign hands dropped his, and saw the brilliant smile thin into a flustered frown. Slowly but surely, the shapes hovering in front of him coalesced into a person: a young man – a gorgeous young man – with glossy dark hair and a fighter’s lithe build. His voice was high and earnest; absently, Gaara wondered if his was the kind of voice Temari might have said was “coloured by smiles.” Then he blinked once more, willing his mind to follow along.
“Thank you,” he managed, at last. Fragments of explanations, of diplomatic half-lies, came fluttering into his mind, and Gaara forced a sheepish smile. “I was looking for the dining hall,” he decided to say, tugging at his sleeve. “I must have gotten a bit turned around. Forgive me.”
“A bit!” The young man let out a startled laugh, before clapping his hand over his mouth. “Oh, no, my lord. Your Highness! Er, it is, um, I who should ask for . . . for your forgiveness . . . ”
His hands were never still, straying from the worried lines of his mouth, to his stiff tunic, to his hair, brushed in neat waves over his forehead. There was a part of Gaara that wanted to stop the analysis there: to let himself revel, for a moment, in his face, symmetrical as a summoners’ circle, or his eyes, sparkling in the light like diamonds against jeweller’s velvet. But the real world was coming back to him, in bits in pieces. The floor was gritty and sticky beneath his feet, the air rich with the scent of spices that certainly hadn’t made it into that soup. Voices, unpolished and rude – so different from the nobles’ sniffy remarks – were thrown blindly across the room:
“What do you mean they don’t eat pork? We cooked pork!”
“They can have chicken!”
“Chicken doesn’t go with the wine—”
“They don’t drink wine—”
“And, we don’t have chicken, either—”
“Mushrooms!”
“Mushrooms!”
Gaara didn’t realise he was grinning until he felt a faint laugh ghost across his lips. “Are they talking about us? My siblings and I?” he wanted to know.
The young man gave a bashful smile, ducking his head low. His features reminded Gaara of a charcoal sketch, all heavy lines and smooth shadows. “We thought we had an extra day to prepare,” he explained. “Steward got the dates mixed up.”
“It’s quite all right. No harm done.” Kankuro’s sugary lie felt clumsy on his tongue, but Gaara knew his brother was better with words than he was. And he needed that, now: needed to pull the strings as expertly as Kankuro did, in desperate hopes he’d bring the curtains down on this stilted conversation.
But the young man only straightened, and he gave that first smile again, full and bright. “Thank you for your patience, Your Highness,” he said. This time, when he bobbed his head, the rest of him followed in a sweeping bow. “Would you do me the honour of allowing me to escort you to the banquet hall?”
“On one condition.” Gaara spoke without realising it, but when the young man caught his eye, he decided he’d stick to it: folding his arms defensively across chest.
“Of course, your Highness.”
Ahead of them – and above them, probably, and in every eave and rafter of the great stone palace – the staff moved like clockwork, ticking past each other with precision even Kankuro couldn’t disrupt for long. Gaara was struck, suddenly, by the fact that he was in another world. The switch from Suna to Konoha hadn’t, in the end, been that bad, but this . . . this shadow world, this labyrinth beneath the ballroom, was one he’d never even imagined before.
The young man – the serving boy, Gaara might have called him, any other day – was hovering, uneasily, in front of him, and Gaara thrust out his hand. “You call me by name,” he insisted, words tumbling as raucously as the snowfall. “I’m . . . ” Prince Gaara of the Holy Kingdom of Suna, first of his name, son to— “I’m Gaara.”
Gaara started once more when the man’s rough hand brushed his, but he tried to match that sunny smile as he felt his hand jerk up and down (this handshake a great deal more enthusiastic than most diplomats’). “Lee,” he said. “It’s an honour, Your— uh, Gaara.”
The rest of dinner went off without a hitch, unassuming and only sort of bland. When Kankuro asked if the puppets had picked up any news, Gaara fed him some nonsense story about the commotion in the kitchens interfering with any magical signals he could pick up. And when a stream of servants materialised behind them to set out the main course, and Gaara watched Lee give that blinding smile once more, he realised it wasn’t wholly a lie: he had been distracted.
The next day, though, the only thing to blind Gaara was the sun – the real sun – as it glinted off the fresh snowfall, white and cold and unforgiving . . . and as it glared through that great stained glass window, mythical scenes of a long forgotten-treasure shining with burning, lurid light. Every time Gaara closed his eyes, those images remained: burned into his coronas; a steady reminder. And so when chipper, beaming Lee came to his side once more during breakfast, Gaara could manage little more than a genial nod, and a determined stare in his siblings’ direction.
After all, they had work to do.