all of these concepts were present. And they all spoke to him in a way that was beyond intimate. It was as though he’d painted it himself, with a brush carved from the wood of his first home and bristled with the lashes of his first love.

       “What is it that draws you to this painting, Father? What do you see?”
“Hush yourself, boy!”
       A lifetime of scheming. Pledges of fealty, plotting, betrayal, and murder. The worst kind. I see, mirrored there in black amongst the painted stones, my own greed and ambition.

       He saw his firstborn son, too, dead on the shores of the Korean Peninsula, wrapped in a cloak of foolish patriotism. A lovely daughter, an empire that would live for a thousand years, a...

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