“Oh heavens help me,” he muttered under his breath. It seemed like the deck beneath his feet could give way at any moment. Sending him hurtling to the uneven ground below, tumbling over jagged rocks and splintered wood down towards the river.

“There, there,” Gaori said and tapped him in the same dithering way he had tried to comfort the frightened boy.

“The child’s been born. They’ll be coming after me next,”

“You don’t know that,” Gaori grabbed his arm and started guiding him towards the main house. Rae didn’t have the strength to argue, but he didn’t see any point in rushing to hear the news that would spell his end.

“And even if the hag has had her son, she has no power here. She can’t kill you just like that,”
Oh, no she couldn’t. She’d have her assassins infiltrate the camp and wait for Rae’s guard to falter. They might slip a little poison into his drink, or sneak up on him in the bathtub and stab him in his heart till his blood was drained.

If they decided to garrote him in his sleep, they’d need to kill Gaori too. Otherwise, they’d be discovered and it would be war. But maybe the Shana would prefer it that way. An excuse to wipe the whole Kaolin clan off the map. His home. His mother’s home. Gaori, Auntie and Uncle.

“Come on Rae, I’m not going to carry you,” Gaori said.

Rae found the strength to ascend the steps, and Gaori dragged him inside.

Rae’s Aunt and uncle were sat at the table, feeding an eagle nuts. It must have been the bird that had carried the heaven-forsaken letter from the Shak’s camp.

“Darlings,” the Duchess Kaolin said, glancing at Rae.

Don’t worry Auntie, I won’t let anything terrible happen to you because of me. Rae was already planning how he was going to fake his death, sneak past the imperial barracks and start a new life among the plains-people. If not that, he could brave the evil spirits and venture so deep into the forest that no assassins would ever find him.

“We’ve got some sad news, come sit down,” Duke Kaolin, Goari’s father, said. The cough he had that morning had subsided, but his cheeks looked more ashen and sunken than Rae had ever seen them.

“Has the Shana had her son?” Rae asked, his voice quiet.

“What? No,” the Duke said, then paused and studied Rae. When he found whatever he was searching for, he sighed, and continued, “It’s not the Shana. It’s the Shak,”

“What’s happened to father?”

The Shana having a son was something that had been a foundation of Rae’s nightmares for more than ten years. It made his blood freeze, unleashed a swarm of bees in his brain, felt like an arrow through his stomach. But it was something he had spent many a sleepless night planning and preparing for.

Whatever misfortune might befall his father, Rae was ashamed to admit had never crossed his mind. It was even more shameful that the news came almost as a relief.

“Sit down, my child,” the Duke said.

It wasn’t the news he was hoping for. His father would not want him to return to his side. Even if he did, Rae would be a fool to go. Not while the Shana was there, possibly carrying a future shakje.

“His majesty passed away in his sleep last night,”

“Passed…” Rae wasn’t sure he’d heard right. His father wasn’t young, he was older than uncle. But he had never been frail or sickly like Rae was, like uncle was, like mother had been. He was big, broad, and blustering. Not the sort of man who would so…

“Could it be-“

“She had nothing to do with it, “ the Duke cut Rae off, “It wouldn’t make sense for the Shana and her clan to make any unsavoury moves until after the baby is born,”

He was trying to comfort his panicked nephew, reassure him that his father wasn’t murdered. But was the alternative any more reassuring? That his father had just dropped dead with no forewarning? Or perhaps his father had been sick for years now, but had never cared to write to his only son, ask to see him just one more time.

“What do the healers think?” Rae asked.

“Duke Bejuk had personally been attending to him. He was the one who wrote. He suspects his majesty’s heart gave out,” Duke Kaolin explained.

So that was it.

His heart, what heart? No heart for his son. He used his final days to call the best healers from Camp Bejuk but never sent so much as a word to his flesh and blood.

Rae stamped those thoughts down like they were coals still smouldering.

“Uncle, what happens now?” Rae said in his this-isn’t-affecting-me voice. In his periphery, he could see the tears in his auntie’s eyes.

“You will need to prepare to return to the Shak’s camp, your camp now,”

Rae didn’t know which protest to voice first. He couldn’t go to the Shak’s camp. Not while the Shana was there! Waiting, like a spider in a web, to deliver the machine of his destruction.

“Son, you must go, and protect your cousin. Our clan will need to be represented, when he becomes the Shak, and Rae will need an ally by his side,”

“Baba, don’t tell me you’re not coming! You’re the Duke!” Goari said.

Caught out, Duke Kaolin started his first coughing fit of the evening. When he was finished, his voice came out weaker than before.

“You know my health is fragile, and you must be prepared to take on my duties whenever needed. An old, fragile soul like me can do little to protect Rae, and there are our people here who depend on our leadership…”

By the time he finished, he had paled considerably, and his gaze was hazy. Duchess Kaolin stroked his hair with one hand, and wiped her tears with the other, as if this wasn’t an act he put on every other day.

Seeing his uncle play his usual games to get out of performing his duties shouldn’t have been comforting. But to Rae, it was a mundane cure to his overwhelmed mind, and to a simple man like Gaori, being told he was depended on was the greatest motivator he knew.

“Baba, Mama, I’ll protect our Rae with everything I have!”

Rae had little insight to offer to the planning of their journey to the Shak’s camp. While his uncle, auntie and Gaori talked in circles about the safest routes, the coming weather, and essential supplies, Rae munched on a goat’s cheese and blackberry flatbread. Rather than allow him to stay up all night sulking, Duchess Kaolin gently encouraged him to get an early night.

“Would you like some wine, to help you sleep?” Duchess Kaolin asked. Rae shook his head. Wine had once helped him relax when his memories of home had become overwhelming, but he had built up a tolerance strong enough that his fears still niggled at him when he drank himself silly. His stomach was already hurting enough.

“Don’t wake me up when you stumble in later,” he said to Gaori, smiling as casually as he could. Annoyingly, his cousin didn’t argue that he was as light on his feet. He smiled so gently that it turned Rae’s stomach.

“I won’t. Go get some rest,”

Rae had no recourse other than to stomp off to his room, seething. Gaori had to choose this of all times to act the big brother figure he often professed to be. The nerve!

Being angry at Gaori was a balm. It kept Rae calm as he left the main house, and crossed the bridge to the little adjoined tree-houses the Duke had built for them when Rae came of age.
Rae’s annoyance was still simmering, as he threw off his hunting tunic and boots, splashed some water from the basin over his torso, and clambered up to his loft and under a dozen blankets.

Rae had lived with his aunt and uncle for twelve years, and in the early years, he took ill several times a year. Whenever he lay delirious with fever in the nursery in the main house, his auntie would crochet him a new blanket, or his uncle would come back from the hunt with new furs to throw over him. By the time he was an adult, Rae had grown out of his frailness but still liked to sleep all bundled up.

It was in his cocoon, that Rae’s frustration with Gaori finally gave way to grief.

“I don’t want to go,” he muttered to himself.

To leave this little loft, leave auntie and uncle, never hunt pheasants in these mountains again…
If his father had called him back, things would have been different. There wasn’t much in the Shak’s camp he yearned for but his father had once been something.

Now...

Well, there was nothing of him left to hope for, and Rae couldn’t spare a thought to grieve him.