The next afternoon, Daemon and Sora made their way to Tanoshi. It was on the way to Sora’s parents’ home on Samara Mountain, where they would spend the Autumn Festival. They figured they might as well get their mission out of the way first, so they could relax during the rest of the break.
Before the discovery of tiger pearls made Kichona prosperous, the island kingdom had been unremarkable, subsisting mostly on fishing and agriculture. Many of the villages, like Tanoshi, still reflected this history, made up of small, well-kept wooden buildings with curved ceramic tiles on the roofs. Every few blocks, there was another impromptu shrine for this minor god or another. And thousands of acres of vineyards and apple orchards around Tanoshi perfumed the air with sweetness, especially now during grape harvest season.
They left their horses—and their taiga uniforms—at a coaching inn. In order to blend in to assess the state of the town, they wore ordinary layman’s clothes, which was always a bit jarring. While taigas wore stark black, civilians in Kichona embraced color, and lots of it—the more vivacious, the better. Sora wore a silk blouse modeled after a violet—lighter purple at the collar and sleeves, deep plum closer to her stomach, and a vivid starburst of yellow in the center—and her trousers were green, like the stem of the flower. Daemon had on a turquoise tunic embroidered at the hem with a pink-and-orange coral reef. He drew the line, though, at garish pants, opting instead for a pair of narrow gray trousers. There was only so much he could stomach to blend in.
Nevertheless, it was good enough, for the townspeople walked past them without a second glance. Everywhere Daemon and Sora went, people were smiling, pausing to chat with each other under strings of orange Autumn Festival lanterns or in front of crates of muscat grapes. They bought each other cold bottles of freshly pressed pear juice—traditional in this region of Kichona in the fall—and drank them together on the sidewalk.
“This place is so peaceful,” Daemon said, but it was more of a complaint than a compliment.
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Sora asked. “This kind of life is what the Ora emperors and empresses have always wanted for Kichona.”
Daemon shrugged. She was right, of course. There were pirates roaming the ocean surrounding the kingdom, but the Imperial Navy worked diligently to keep them away from shore so the regular citizens of Kichona didn’t suffer. The Imperial Army kept posts throughout the island to ensure that traders from the mainland were really traders and not anything more nefarious. And there were also local police forces of taigas to keep the peace.
Even so, Daemon was jittery. “I just want something to do today, something to show for our work. If we’d been sent to a bigger ocean-side town, we could have investigated the harbors for suspicious ships. Maybe we would have found some pirates or smugglers or, I don’t know, a spy from another kingdom. But here in farm country . . . what are we even looking for?”
“Don’t worry,” Sora said. “As long as we’re thorough, we’ll get good marks.”
He knew it was hard for her to understand his need to prove himself. Sora was naturally good at magic. She had the luxury of not caring, because everyone knew that if she ever became ambitious, she’d blow them all out of the water. Daemon, however, constantly questioned whether Luna had made a mistake in marking him as a taiga.
But then Sora smiled at him, and he was momentarily dazed. She was tall and lean, all grace and muscle, and when the sun hit her just right—like it was doing now—he could see her curves silhouetted through the thin silk of her blouse. She had a spattering of freckles across her cheekbones, and her nose ended in a button that was an adorable contrast to her fierceness. He fought the urge to run his fingers through her hair, which fell like a painter’s brush along the edge of her jaw.
He touched his own hair. His blue roots were due to be colored soon. Technically, he didn’t have to dye it; it was dark enough in its natural state to comply with Society Code. But a genetic quirk gave him blue hair, and the strangeness meant he’d been teased mercilessly during their early years at the Society. As soon as he turned seven and became a taiga apprentice, he’d dyed his hair black and had kept it that way ever since. Daemon winced at the memory.
But Sora was still smiling, and his embarrassment faded away. Her mere presence made everything better.
“Should we check the north side of town first and make our way south?” she asked. They knew Tanoshi fairly well. Other than Shima, Tanoshi was where apprentices liked to go when they had weekend leave from the Citadel.
“You want to do the south side last because you’re hoping to end up at a restaurant there, huh?” Daemon smirked. “Always letting your stomach lead.”
“You know me so well.”
His heart skipped happily.
They started down the first street. This section of Tanoshi was all business, made up mostly of stern wooden buildings bereft of decoration, lined up on a straight grid of streets numbered one through five from north to south, and named by trade from east to west. There was Accounting Street, Bookbinder Way, Architect Road, and many others. It was quiet here, and Daemon and Sora finished sweeping through the streets quickly.
Next was the residential district. The buildings here had considerably more character than the ones in the business grid. Although the homes themselves were simple in architecture—compact wood structures with brown tile roofs—each door was painted brightly to express the family’s personality. One was rainbow striped. Another featured a fisherman catching an enormous fish, bigger than the sun. Another depicted the life cycle of a phoenix, from egg to bird to flames and ashes, in a never-ending circle.
In front of all this, a small group of children played in the middle of the dirt road, chasing after a ball and swatting at it with sticks.
“I wonder what it would be like to live in a place like this?” Daemon said.
“You’d go stir-crazy,” Sora said. “It’s lovely, but there wouldn’t be enough to occupy you.”
“Good point.” He never seemed to have enough outlets for his energy. It was part of the reason he was so good at combat; he spent extra hours in the sparring yard to attempt to wear himself out each day. It worked. Sort of.
Farther down the road, a woman poked her head out of a doorway decorated with a pink elephant. “Keni, time for homework!” she yelled at one of the boys playing in the road. “Your father will be home soon for dinner.”
Daemon quickly turned away and hurried onto the next block. If he stayed any longer, he’d start thinking again about life in a village like Tanoshi, with parents who cared about him. And then he’d wonder about knowing who his parents were at all.
As the mother’s voice receded behind Daemon, he slowed his steps. Sora caught up but didn’t say anything. She would know through their gemina bond how he was feeling. For years, he’d smothered his questions about who he was and where he’d come from.
But frankly, he was tired of it.
“It’s our last year before we graduate,” Daemon said. “After this, we won’t have as much time on our own because we won’t have school holidays. So I was thinking . . .”
Sora stopped in the middle of the road. “Yeah?”
He shook his head. “Never mind. It’s stupid.”
“Nothing you think is stupid, Daemon. What is it?”
He scrubbed his hand through his hair. That irritatingly black-but-actually-blue hair. “I was thinking that maybe I’d try this year to figure out who my parents are. Or were. I want to know where I came from, who I am.”
Sora smiled. “I think that’s a great idea.”
He brightened. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“Okay then.” The cloud over him dissipated, and knowing that Sora supported him allowed him to put the idea aside for now. It took only another minute for him to refocus on their mission. “Let’s wrap up the residential area and go downtown.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Sora said.
His steps lightened as they entered the noisier part of Tanoshi, full of shops and restaurants. There were artisan pottery stores, dry-goods shops carrying everything from rice to fishing rods, and stores for every other service the townspeople might need.
Daemon and Sora swept through the streets a little more slowly, since there was more to observe. But all was also in order here.
“Sorry we didn’t find any illegal warehouses full of opium,” Sora said.
“Guess we couldn’t be that lucky on our first mission.”
“Or maybe we can. A different kind of lucky.” She smiled broadly as she stopped in front of an enormous red lantern. It was the entrance to an iz, a tavern that specialized in skewers of all variety of meat, from chicken thighs to chicken livers to more acquired tastes, like gecko marinated in squid ink. Panels of blue cloth hung in the doorway, and raucous conversation wafted out of the iz along with the charcoal smoke of its tireless grills.
Sora’s stomach growled loud enough to be heard even over the street noise.
“Hungry?” Daemon asked.