The Golden Tablet
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8
The Keshig, to their considerable credit, found somewhere else to be.
Not obviously. Not with the theatrical discretion of people making a point. They simply redistributed themselves around the camp with the natural ease of soldiers who have learned that certain situations are not their business and have the good sense to recognize one when it develops in front of them.
Within ten minutes Niccolò and Khutulun were alone at the edge of the hot spring with the steam rising between them and the mountains going dark above the meadow and the sounds of camp a comfortable distance away.
She was looking at the water.
He was looking at her.
“You kissed me in front of your entire Keshig,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Deliberately.”
“I don’t do things accidentally,” she replied.
“What does it mean? For them — what they saw—”
“It means what it means,” she said. She turned and looked at him with the directness that was simply how she was built. “They follow me. Not the other way.”
He absorbed this. “And Kaidu’s men on the ridge.”
“Are on the ridge,” she said. “Not here.”
“And the Khan.”
She was quiet for a moment. The water moved and the steam drifted and somewhere above them a night bird made its claim on the dark.
“My father,” she said carefully, “has been trying to marry me off since I was sixteen.” A pause. “I have prevented this on one hundred and forty-two occasions.”
“One hundred and forty-three now,” he said. “If we’re counting.”
She looked at him. “You didn’t lose.”
“I went to the ground.”
“After making me feel something I hadn’t felt before,” she said. The words landing with a precision that suggested she had thought about them since he’d said them and had decided they were accurate. “That is not losing.”
He looked at her in the mountain dusk — the firelight from the camp reaching just far enough to find the planes of her face, the dark eyes steady on his — and felt the ground under this conversation the way he felt the ground under difficult terrain. Solid in some places. Not in others. Worth mapping carefully.
“Khutulun,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What happens now.”
Not what do you want, not what should we do, not the Venetian diplomatic formulation that left room for retreat. What happens now. The mapmaker’s question. What is the actual territory.
She turned fully toward him. “Now,” she said, “we are in the mountains. Kaidu’s men are on a ridge. We have a route to complete and passes to survive and a Khan waiting for maps at the end of it.” She paused. “And now you are not something I am indifferent to.”
“That’s a considerable understatement,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “It is.”
He reached out slowly and tucked a strand of hair back from her face, the way the wind had been doing it all day without permission, and she went still under his hand the way she’d gone still in the wrestling — not frozen, just entirely present, all of her attention collected into the single point of contact.
“I’m not indifferent to you either,” he said. “In case that wasn’t clear.”
“It was clear,” she replied, “approximately four days ago.”
“Four days,” he said. “That early.”
“You looked at me,” she said simply. “The way you look at things you’re trying to understand. Nobody looks at me that way.” She paused. “They look at the Paiza. The bow. The lineage.” A beat. “You looked at my face.”
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