“If you really want to get into your role as the Woodwork Prince, you should wipe the spark of intelligence from your eyes. Instead of ignoring what people say to you, you should smile like an idiot and nod along. And one more thing.” He thrust the brush forward, as if to emphasize that this was the most important part. “You shouldn’t play instruments in other people’s napping spots when you think no one is around.”
Genyou was as surprised as anyone that he managed to keep his mouth shut after that. His secret was out. Someone knew that he kept a qin hidden in the deserted mausoleum and played it from time to time.
“Consider me impressed. Wasn’t that ‘Song of Everlasting Sorrow’? The instructor played hard to get and refused to hand out the sheet music for it, and here you remembered it after hearing it performed at a single banquet. Now that I think about it, don’t the characters of your given name mean ‘the radiant sound of a string’?”
The crown prince had even managed to guess the name of the song and where Genyou had heard it. Genyou said nothing. If word got around that the youngest prince could remember a difficult song after hearing it just the once, his days as the Woodwork Prince would be numbered.
Upon noting how Genyou’s frown had deepened, Gomei shrugged and backed off. “None of my business, huh? Sorry for overstepping.” Still, as he walked past Genyou, he gave his little brother an encouraging clap on the shoulder. “I really do like your music, though. I’d love to hear a proper performance someday.”
Once Genyou was left alone, he stood rooted to the spot for quite some time. A slew of emotions roiled within him, and none were so heartwarming as appreciation or bashful embarrassment. He felt the shame and chagrin of someone looking down at him from on high and reading him like a book, as well as an agitation that sent sickening butterflies loose in his stomach.
Gomei wasn’t the first of his elders to act understanding of the youngest prince and his obstinate silence. As far as Genyou was concerned, however, they were all self-absorbed narcissists. Each believed themselves the only one who could see through to his true self and extend a helping hand—and that superiority complex was the real reason they could smile at him like some sort of fascinating curiosity.
He’s infuriating.
It was with an unusually clear-cut repugnance that the eleven-year-old Genyou watched the crown prince leave. Gomei walked down the sunlit path without suspecting a thing. A man always looking toward the light would never notice the shadow stretching behind him.
A year later, the twelve-year-old Genyou found himself locked in a lightless dungeon. The reason was simple: The other princes had framed him for poisoning the emperor’s favorite horse.
One day, someone had hidden Genyou’s personal belongings and called him out to the stable, where evidence had been fabricated against him. Before he could even make sense of what was happening, he’d wound up tossed in a cell.
In recent days, the fourth prince and his cronies had stopped getting their jollies by beating up Genyou. They had switched to framing him as the assailant instead of the victim, slowly but surely setting the stage for him to be executed by someone else’s hand. It had long since passed the level of bullying; they were definitively out to get rid of him. One of the reasons for this was that having a flawless crown prince like Gomei around was keeping them out of the spotlight, and they wanted to vent their frustrations. The other was that Gomei would shower Genyou with attention at every opportunity.
“Hello there, Genyou! Any interest in playing the qin for me today? I was hoping to accompany you on my flute.”
“Say, Genyou, how would you interpret these lyrics?”
Gomei, the crown prince celebrated for his martial and literary prowess, would disregard every single one of his other brothers to accost the youngest prince. From the others’ perspective, this alone was enough to jeopardize their positions, and it was hard to stomach their ostensible failure of a little brother getting all the attention. Although they dreamed of one day dragging the crown prince off his throne, they also craved his recognition as long as he still held the title.
This is all his fault.
Genyou stared down at his rope bindings in the pitch-dark cell, overcome with frustration. At first he had assumed his mother would fly into a rage and storm the dungeons, but he was now half a day into his imprisonment and there was still no sign of her. She was likely taking a wait-and-see approach.
In a complete departure from her once-smothering love, Souen had recently taken a more calculating view of her son. The reason for this lay in the academically brilliant ninth prince slowly working his way into her good graces. He was the son of a patronless court lady, not a consort, but that made it all the easier for the empress to effectively adopt him. For Souen’s part, she had gone from scorning him as “the son of a plebeian” to lauding him as her “precious child” upon realizing how gifted he actually was.
She often seemed to be weighing her options of who would make the better pawn: her mute biological son or her quick-witted adopted child. The ideal outcome would have been for her to wash her hands of Genyou and be done with it, but alas, Gomei’s unwelcome pestering had given her a glimmer of hope that Genyou was hiding some sort of dormant talent.