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THE DINING HALL IS bustling. I pause in the doorway to observe them, taking advantage of the fact that no one has noticed my arrival yet.
A row of servants in coarse jubah line a wall, holding trays laden with steaming, hot food; others circulate around the tables with jugs of wine and juice. Nobles in finely embroidered jubah or silky handmade batik talk and laugh in cliques. Many of them wear various shades of blue, though none are deep enough to imitate the royal Bayangan blue I’m draped in.
At the main table, my Ayah frowns at some papers, unable to stop working even for a formal dinner. Beside me, my Ibu notices and makes a soft sound of annoyance. A few seats down, Azman Tuah looks up and sees us. He dips his chin in acknowledgement, nudges his great-aunt’s arm. Che Carla Tuah stops talking to look over.
Facing the main table, the visiting troupe has set a stage—coconut trees, painted rocks, tall grass, sand?—likely a folktale, then. Han, the troupe leader, leans forward and signals to a cluster of waiting dancers in green and brown. They disperse to their ready positions, muscles taut. Their nervous energy washes over me, a state of heightened senses, like time has slowed.
Han’s fingers form a shape—the first note sounds, a hush falls.
“Announcing the arrival of Baginda Paduka Raja of Bayangan, Raja Yosua ayell Garett—”
I tune out the rest of the announcement, a string of meaningless words I’ve heard too many times over the last two years. Take a deep breath.
Walk.
Everyone rises, heads bowed. Everything stills.
My feet falter at the weight of their gazes. A moment later, there’s a warm hand on the small of my back. Ibu, steadying me.
You can do this, Yos.
I smile—fake, so fake, is this who you are?—and stride across the hall to my seat at the head of the main table. When I sit, so does everyone else—and the bustle starts up again. The servants step forward, laying their mouth-watering charges—mutton rendang, peppery beef soup, chicken curry, to name a few—on the tables before us.
Ayah puts his papers aside before Ibu can snatch them from him. She laughs, he grimaces. I roll my eyes at my parents’ antics—which good son wouldn’t? That at least makes me feel a little more normal, less on display.
The music soars as the entertainment starts and I let it wash over me, ignoring the buzz of conversation. For a short moment, I’m drawn back to older, simpler times. The rhythm of our bare feet on the ground, the leader’s beat, the soft wail of the seruling, the twanging gambus, the pounding of the kompang. We speak in unison, echoing in chorus to our leader’s call. Call and return, call and return.
Ibu’s hand on my forearm brings me back to the present.
“Where were you today, Yosua?” Ayah asks. “We were looking for you.”
“I was out. With Azman,” I reply, picking at the food on my plate.
He frowns as Ibu says with fond exasperation, “At the old port. In the rain. Alone. Really, Yosua.” She turns to Ayah. “You’d think he’d know better by now.”
“How was I to know it was going to rain?” I grumble.
“The rain doesn’t matter,” Ayah admonishes. “It’s not safe for you to disappear like that with no one knowing where you are. What happened to your honour guard?”
I shrug. “I wasn’t alone. Az was with me.”
Ayah glances down to where Azman sits watching the troupe play with rapt attention and sighs. “The port again? What were you doing there?”
Nothing. I stood there, remembering Mikal sailing back to Maha, watching the ship shrink into a speck, imagining I can see it dock across the straits. In these waking dreams, Ayah lets me wait until there’s nothing left on the horizon; in reality, he herded me back into the city once the ship had shrunk to the size of his palm. “I just...needed a break. Some fresh air.”
Ayah looks like he wants to say something further, but then he shakes his head and turns to watch the show.
According to the Bayangans, the dinner theatre show is an affectation I’ve brought over from my foreign upbringing in the enemy’s court. The late Sultan Simson of Terang used to have a troupe play in the Mahan Palace every night, cycling through a stock of standard performances that spanned the history and legends of the Terang Sultanate. Here in Bayangan though, the troupes avoid Terang’s religious stories, replacing them with our own folktales.
Tonight, they play a comedic piece about two frogs who go everywhere together until they are separated by a terrible storm.
Azman looks over at me and sniggers.
One frog takes shelter under a large tempurung with some other frogs. When the storm abates, the frog prepares to go out and look for his friend, but his new friends convince him to stay a little longer because of the dangers outside. So, the frog stays. Every time the frog tries to go out, the others persuade him to stay a little longer until eventually, he stops trying to leave.
Are you still trying to leave?
The second frog manages to get home through the heavy rain. Drenched through, he catches a cold that nearly kills him. Once recovered, the frog keeps putting off going out to find his friend every time there’s even one cloud in the sky. In this way, both frogs delay going out to look for each other until they die of old age, never having reunited.
The troupe’s performance is hilarious, playing up the comedy of the situation. Laughter rings out across the hall and by the time the show—and dinner—ends, the audience is full and at ease, and the ever-present tension in Bayangan Castle seems to dissipate.
Only my father has a strange look on his face.
“Ayah? Is something wrong?” I ask in a low voice. There’s a hum of conversation around us, mixed with laughter. Nothing threatening.
“Nothing that needs to worry you.”
I scowl at him. “What are you hiding from me?”
“Nothing.” His face goes blank, as unreadable as ever.
“I can order you to answer, you know.”
“Will you?” he snaps. “And what would you do if I refuse?”
“Ayah, please.”
He sighs. “Sorry. The meeting today didn’t go well. And with this play...”
“What’s wrong with the play? I thought it was pretty funny.”
“Did you?” He gives me that look, the one that says he’s disappointed in me.
I think back over the story, trying to see what he saw. It’s something he’s drilled me to do since I was a boy. Read the room, find the hidden messages: What are they saying without saying? They were frogs for goodness’ sake, caught in an improbable scenario.
It still spoke to you.
If this had been Maha, I would have considered who picked the story and why—nobles often requested specific stories, either a favourite to mark a special occasion or as a way to deliver a statement to someone. But the nobles in Bayangan rarely ever make requests. I don’t think they know they can.
There were no political undertones—not even sly messages between the performers, the way we used to signal to each other when we knew the audience didn’t know our finger code. They hadn’t even used the standard stock of hand signals that every dancer is drilled in—and every intellectual knows—to enhance the message. It was all very straightforward, no subtlety.
As if we were idiots.
Ayah must have seen a change in my expression, because he gives me a tight smile. “They were mocking us.”
“Why would Han do that? You know Han. We used to perform together.” Those were the easiest years of my life, when the children of Bayangan captives—including me—made up at least half of the Mahan Palace troupes. Before I was assigned to Mikal’s service at twelve and everything became complicated.
Ayah just gives me an irritated grunt, inclining his head to someone behind me. I turn to see Han approaching our table.
Han makes a flourishing bow as he steps close. “Tuanku, it is our honour to perform before you and your family.” He greets my parents formally as well. It all seems a little over-exaggerated, given what my father has been implying.
“Han,” I greet him, “it has been a while since you graced us with your presence.”
“Ah, Tuanku, it is a long journey to Maha and back.”
My heart races. Does he have a message for me? It’s been months since the last troupe came from Maha. “Did you perform for Mikal as well?”
“We had a three-day run there, Tuanku. Baginda Paduka did not want to let us leave.”
Those sitting nearby turn as Han’s strident voice rings out throughout the dining hall, addressing the sultan of our supposed enemy as his sovereign. Ayah’s face starts to pinch.
“And how long will you stay and perform for us?” I ask before Han can continue.
“For as long as you would like, Tuanku.”
“Four days, maybe? Stay and perform at the Regent’s Festival.”
Han’s eyes widen. I’ve never asked him to stay more than two days before. Then again, with the festival approaching, we cannot seem to be less hospitable than the Mahans. His eyes flick around the room, sweeping over my fingers without seeming to.
‘Not here,’ I signal with my fingers.
An easy smile falls over his face. “Of course. We will rearrange our commitments in the kampungs to allow us to stay.”
“Wonderful! Now, have your fill—I’m sure there’s plenty of food and drink for you and your troupe,” I say. ‘Come by later.’
“Thank you, Tuanku,” he replies, then signs back, ‘Yes. Have message.’ He bows again with a salam, holding his right hand over his heart, then backs away three steps before he turns to go. It’s a very Mahan practice for royalty, not something that the Bayangans practice.
Han turns and is swallowed up in a crowd of admiring nobles.
I let out a nervous huff of breath, gripping the table to steady myself. I want to run back to my room and wait for Mikal’s message, but that would be undignified.
I am halfway across the hall when Azman intercepts me.
“You know, of all your Mahan ideas, Yosua, I think this one is the best,” he says, waving his glass in a circle.
“This one?”
“Dinner entertainment! Do you know how boring it is to just sit and talk politics all the time? At least this way, you bring some culture to the nobility. Some of them are such boors.”
I grin. “That’s not a nice thing to say about your peers, Az.”
He pretends to be solemn. “Ampun, Tuanku.”
For a moment, Azman’s apology sounds almost jeering. Ayah’s mood is setting me on edge. I look over to where he’s back to looking at his papers, Ibu clucking her tongue in exasperation.
Stop taking offense where there is none.
“They’re still calling you the Mahan Raja behind your back, you know,” Azman lowers his voice, “but maybe we can build you up to be a patron of the arts. ‘The Cultured Raja.’ Do you think that sounds good?”
“How do you plan on doing that?” It’s an interesting idea—if it works. If it ends up improving instead of worsening my public image.
Mikal used to be irked at not being officially recognised as the Raja Muda of Terang because he hadn’t received the Mahan gift of the Amok Strength. Yet here I am, officially crowned as Raja of Bayangan—and I still have to worry about how the people perceive me. Right before Mikal left, he acknowledged my bloodline, addressed me by my title, as uncertain as it was then—shaky as it still is now. He addressed me as an equal for the first time: Raja of Bayangan. It feels strange, this title, like I’m wearing a skin not mine, jubah tailored to another’s measurements.
Still, it’s not those last words that echo in my thoughts. It’s what he said before that that loops in my head: I hope you discover who you need to be.
Who do I need to be?
I miss what Azman is saying. He looks a bit disgruntled when he realises I haven’t registered a word he said.
“I’m sorry, Az,” I say, faking a yawn. “I think our little adventure this afternoon has tired me out. I haven’t been able to concentrate.”
“I hope I didn’t make you ill by letting you ride in the rain,” he says with immediate concern.
“You? Letting me? If anything, I should apologise for dragging you out in the rain.”
“We’re lucky we didn’t get separated, like those frogs.” Azman laughs and I laugh along with him, ignoring the tension that’s coursing through my body.
Why did he bring that up? I can’t tell if he’s trying to say something about the play or if it was just an innocent comment.
“You should stop, you know.” There is a rare gentleness in his tone. “These trips to the beach are not doing you any good. I’m saying this as a friend.”
It’s not even to the new port, where I can pretend it’s an official inspection of sorts. Azman knows I go there to mope. “I know. Maybe one day.”
“Come on, Yosua. It’s your ex-slave you’re talking about, not your ex-lover.”
What were we? Owner and slave? Master and servant? Best friends and enemies? Azman doesn’t understand who Mikal really is to me, how he’d been my lord and master for all my seventeen years in Maha. All he knows is what came after: that the current Sultan of Maha had once been granted to me as spoils of war by my aunt, our late Permaisuri Layla. Azman wasn’t living in the castle then, doesn’t know the wild rumours that spread as I tried to protect Mikal, tried to help him escape. Our lives were turned upside down and inside out multiple times in the span of a year. In less than a year. It felt like a decade.
I don’t know what we are now, almost three years later, rulers of our respective kingdoms. Colleagues, Ayah suggests, or peers.
Azman grumbles at my silence. “You can’t be pining for him. Honestly!”
I don’t know how to explain it to him, to anyone, even my father. There’s a chain binding us, Mikal and I, a thrum of something unexplainable. A heavy chain of light. It’s dormant now, but it weighs on me all the same. It’s blinding in its brightness, but it coils about my heart, chaining me down. It reminds me of oaths I have never given, promises I’ve made only to myself. But I’d whispered them in the dark silence and Kudus heard me. I don’t want to think about it—or what it means—now.
The yawn that escapes me is real. “I’m not. That said, I do think I should have an early night. Thank you, Az, for your company.”
“The pleasure is mine, Tuanku,” he replies with a bow. It’s straightforward, precise, almost military in its execution. Just a straight bending of his body at the waist, no unnecessary flourishes or waving about of his hands.
It reminds me that he used to be a soldier—that he is still a high-ranking soldier with troops under his command, despite the fact that he’s barely a year my senior. The second son, not expected to inherit, though maybe...
My gaze passes over his grand-aunt—Che Carla Tuah is the oldest member of the Majlis DiRaja and she has no heir. Azman’s older brother, Azett, was marked to take her place in the Majlis, but no one knows where he is or what has happened to him—he’d disappeared during the chaos surrounding Aunt Layla’s death. So now Azman is staying with his grand-aunt in the Bayangan Castle as his family’s representative at court, and my personal guard of sorts, even if it’s self-appointed. Rather like what Uncle Jeffett had been to my father when they were young.
I have hopes that just as their relationship had blossomed into a close friendship, our friendship will keep going from strength to strength.