“Not exactly.” Den introduced him to the pump handle and showed how, when he worked it up and down, hot water from an underground spring gushed out of a curved spout, bubbling and steaming as it filled the vat. Mesmerized by the waves that lapped away from the point where the water fell, Llesho’s thoughts drifted back to the pearl beds and the long-house. The hiss and roar of the tide as it rose and fell with the crossing of the moons had underscored his every move, every thought since coming to Pearl Island. Now the sound, in small, reminded him of Kwan-ti, and the death of Minister Lleck.

Lleck had trusted Kwan-ti, had known the healer would protect his secrets and the boy in his care. He wondered if he could do the same. Could he trust Master Den with this secret, that he knew who Tsu-tan, the witch-finder, sought? When he realized that he was hesitating not out of concern for Kwan-ti, but for fear that he would draw Markko’s attention to himself, Llesho knew what he had to do.

As if reading his mind, Master Den dropped a heavy hand on Llesho’s shoulder. “I have broad shoulders, if you need help with that burden,” Den said, and Llesho understood that the washerman did not refer to the sacks of laundry waiting to be tumbled into the washing vats.

“I have to get outside the palisade.” Llesho sat on the edge of the washing vat, his brow drawn down in a worried crease. “I have to warn—someone—that they are in danger.”

“From the witch-finder?” Den asked. He sat heavily next to Llesho and nodded for emphasis. “Tsu-tan has been creeping around again; I wondered if you had seen him, or knew what he was about.”

“I have to warn her,” Llesho insisted, “I owe a debt of trust.”

“Have you considered, Llesho, that the charge against your friend may be true?” Den seemed to be looking for more than he said in the question, but Llesho had enough of puzzles and secrets of his own.

“She is no witch,” he said. “I have known her for all my seasons on Pearl Island.”

The washerman did not remind him that his seasons measured very few in the schemes of witches and spirit demons, but pointed out what must be obvious to a pearl diver:

“Think, Llesho. If she is guilty of witchcraft, her magic puts her beyond the power of the likes of Tsu-tan and Master Markko. But if she is innocent, she is trapped already: there is no way off Pearl Island without Lord Chin-shi’s blessing—or his boats.”

It hurt to realize Den was right. He would risk ev-ervthine—his life, even his kingdom—in a pointless display of misplaced chivalry that could have no good outcome. It hurt even more to know he was going to do it, or die trying, anyway. Master Den saw the decision harden the expression in Llesho’s eyes, and seemed himself to come to a decision.

“I have a message for the healer, Kwan-ti,” Den said, and pulled himself upright. He left the washroom for a moment and returned with a small parchment, tightly rolled and tied with a ribbon and seal. “Show the seal at the gates, it will give you safe passage. But come back as soon as the message is delivered. No dawdling.”

“Thank you, Master Den.” Llesho bowed low in gratitude, and Den sighed.

“In the long run, it may comfort you to know that you did your best to help your friend. But learn this lesson well: only a warrior who suffers failure with fortitude can accept the accolades of success with grace and humility.”

“Yes, Master.” Llesho bowed again, but in his heart he admitted no possibility of failure. Then he turned and ran, through the laundry and the leather works, across the practice yard, and to the first gate, where the guard looked at him with suspicion and inspected the rolled parchment from every angle to assure himself that the seal was authentic and had not been tampered with.

The outer gate was easier. Madon was on duty, and waved Llesho through with a cursory glance at the seal. Madon was no fool, and if he had any suspicions about the message, he kept them to himself. He merely pointed to a less worn path leading away from the compound, suggesting, “You could take the long run, but this is a shortcut to the bay.”

The shortcut required greater concentration, since it was less well tended and air roots and trailing vines frequently snaked across the path to trip up the unwary. Llesho had to make a few incautious leaps to avoid a twisted ankle, but he reached the longhouse in short order, and unseen. To his dismay, however, he could not find Kwan-ti. His own quarter-shift mates were at work in the bay, but he asked the divers on quarter-rest, and the old men who fished and the old women who gathered fruits and vegetables to flavor the grain food Lord Chin-shi supplied for the cookhouse. No one had seen Kwan-ti since the night before. All the boats were accounted for, so she could not have left the island, but still, no one could find her.

Finally, taking his courage in his hands, Llesho approached the witch-finder, who curled in a brooding huddle beneath his palm tree.

“I have a message from Master Den for the healer,” he said, pretending not to know of Tsu-tan’s nocturnal visits to Master Markko. “Did you see where she went?”

“I did not,” Tsu-tan snapped. “And if you don’t want to roast on a spit yourself, you will mind your own business, pig food.”

Llesho thought the witch-finder’s voice shook a little. If Tsu-tan was afraid, so much the better. But Llesho refused to believe what he heard whispered in the longhouse: the witch had gone, called a dragon from the sea to take her away from the Island and the witch-finder and his virtuous Lord, Chin-shi. Once, a water dragon had rescued Llesho, convincing him without words to cling to life and to his faith. The creature had laughed her joy with him, a human sound, with the voice of the healer. He could believe no evil of Kwan-ti, but he could not deny that she was gone, and by her own power, not spirited away to await death at the hands of the witch-finder and his employers. How or why, he refused to think, for fear of where his own evidence would take him.

Still carrying Master Den’s message, Llesho returned to the compound. Madon still guarded the gate and waved him in with a smile. A new man sat at the inner turnstile, however, someone he knew by sight, who delivered a message of his own.

“Overseer Markko wants to see you as soon as you return.”

Llesho nodded to acknowledge the order, but his heart froze. What did the overseer know of his errand, and what would he do about it?

“I have done nothing wrong,” Llesho reminded himself, “I only acted as a messenger, as befits my station, to deliver Den’s message—” He would be lying to himself as well as the overseer, he realized: was this what Den had meant about suffering failure? He knocked on the door to the stone cottage, determined to answer truthfully any question the overseer asked of him.

Master Markko was at his desk, as usual, with Bixei standing at attention while the overseer sprinkled sand on his writing and tapped it clean. He rolled and sealed it, and handed it to Bixei, who left them with a last cold glare at Llesho. Llesho ignored the animosity of the other boy; Markko was looking up at him with false concern oiling his frown.

“Let me see it, boy.” Markko held out his hand. “You had a message from Master Den for the witch. I want to see it.”

In a cold sweat, Llesho wondered if he could withhold the parchment roll. Kwan-ti was lost to him, but perhaps he could save Master Den from the stake if he took responsibility for his actions. “It was my fault,” he said, “I wanted to see Kwan-ti. Master Den tried to persuade me not to go, but I persisted, and so he made it possible for me to visit the longhouse.”

“And did you see the witch?”

“I have never seen a witch,” Llesho answered with precise honesty. No one had ever identified themselves to him as a witch. If required, he might have guessed the woman who had watched him that first afternoon in the weapons room practiced the evil arts. He would have offered his own life, however, as surety that Kwan-ti had no evil in her.

“I see.” Master Markko considered him thoughtfully. “But I would still like to see the message Master Den gave you for the woman.”

“Yes, Master.” Shivering, though the day was warm, Llesho held out the parchment. He paled when Markko took a small knife and carefully lifted the seal. Unrolled, the parchment revealed only a request for a simple poultice. Markko frowned at it, then he lit the candle on his desk and held the parchment over it. The edges began to curl and smoke, but still no words appeared on the parchment. Flicking the false message at Llesho, he asked, “What do you make of this?”

    “I don’t understand.” Which was true, except that Llesho thought he might be figuring it out, though he wished he had Lleck at his side to guide him through the twists of what began to take on the outlines of a game of Go played by masters. He knew he wasn’t up to the mettle of the players, but he suspected it would prove no easier to be a stone.

The overseer carefully brushed the burned edges off the parchment and rolled it again. Markko picked up the seal, which he had lifted whole with his knife, and held it over the candle.

“If you feel ill again, come to me,” Markko said as he watched the wax of the seal soften. “You are too valuable to our lord—as a gladiator in training, you understand?—to rely on superstitious old women for your care.”

    A scent like illness, but with more of death in it, clung to the air in the overseer’s cottage. It tickled a warning at the back of his nose, and Llesho determined he would have to remain very healthy from now on_%He nodded, willing to agree to anything if it would get him out of the cottage.

“Just so we understand each other.” The overseer nressed the seal back into place over the ribbon on the roll of parchment and handed it back to Llesho. “You never stopped here,” he instructed, “and I never saw this.”

Shaking, Llesho took the scroll. “But, honored sir, Bixei has seen me. Won’t he tell the others?”

“You needn’t worry about Bixei. At least,” Markko added with a sly smile, “in the matter of my secrets.” Dismissed, Llesho bowed and made his escape to the practice yard. With a deep breath to settle the trembling that had started in his whole body, he tried to set his mind to the promise he had made to the ghost of Thebin’s minister, Lleck.

As the youngest prince of Thebin, Llesho knew he’d been born a stone in a game whose board spanned whole kingdoms. He’d been swept from the board once already, and he didn’t relish the idea that he’d been put into play again without knowing if he was cast as the white or the black. He wished, badly, to rest his fears and questions and promises on those broad shoulders Master Den had offered. Even a stone in a game he does not understand wishes to survive, he figured, but the people Llesho trusted were disappearing at a rate that did not bode well for any new advisers he might adopt. For now he would keep what secrets he possessed.

When he put the scroll into Den’s hands, therefore, he told him only that no one had seen Kwan-ti, and did not mention his audience with Overseer Markko. Master Den did not speak of his errand, or what the healer’s absence must mean. He returned the scroll to its place among the clean shirts without looking at it, and picked up a rake that looked very much like the muck rake that Llesho had used in the pearl beds. This one had smoother, rounded ends to the tines. “You use this to agitate the water and stir up the shirts,” Master Den explained. “Not too energetically, or you will tear the fabric, but enough to keep the cloth moving, so the dirt doesn’t settle back again.”

The technique was easy to pick up after seasons in the oyster beds, and gradually, Llesho relaxed into the work. Almost, he could believe that the interview with the overseer had not happened. Almost, he could believe that Kwan-ti the healer was not a witch.

C HAPTER S EVEN

LLESHO discovered that he actually enjoyed laundry duty. Den taught him the simple tasks of washing and hanging and darning and sizing with a wellspring of patience that reminded him of Adar, who had been much thinner, but who shared the love of humble work. “If a digger of ditches receives a ”pittance for his service to the land, how much more must a king serve his people to merit the honors they bestow on him?“ Adar had asked. When Llesho was six, spending a chill afternoon in the mountain clinic, the answer had included a broom.

Master Den had lessons for him as well, which he taught through the stories he told as they worked: stories with a moral Llesho was supposed to understand but usually didn’t. Neither of them minded much, since the stories were interesting anyway. When the time came that he needed the lessons, they both knew Llesho would figure it out, like he’d learned the mopping and the laundering, and the prayer forms before breakfast.

Den himself was a puzzle. Everyone in the training compound bowed to the washerman and called him master. He led prayer forms every morning, and the most skilled among the fighters came to Master Den for instruction. None of his stories touched on the master’s own history, although the names of many famous gladiators wandered through the tales. Master Den told his tales with an air of authority, as one who had seen the events and knew their actors, which Llesho supposed he must have done. After all, when the compound emptied for the competitions on the mainland each month, Master Den disappeared with the fighters. He wasn’t doing laundry at the games; that came back in stinking bales to be cleaned and mended on Pearl Island.

Llesho could not imagine anyone of Master Den’s girth fighting in the arenas, but he’d never seen the man bested at hand-to-hand either. When Llesho asked about his master’s place in the stories, however, the launderer would shake his head and insist, “They are only tall tales, boy,” as if Llesho had let the famous names distract him from the purpose of the story. Which, he eventually figured out, he had.

For all his skill, Den worked at one of the lowliest jobs. So had Adar, of course, cleaning up the slops of his patients with his own hands. And Shokar, eldest of the princes, had worked the land as a farmer when their father had not needed him for statecraft. That Master Den was involved in Pearl Island‘s own narrow struggles of statecraft seemed clear. Before the old minister, Lleck, had died, he had taught his young prince enough of strategy to understand that Overseer Markko played some game of power and nerves with the humble teacher, but why or with what stakes he could not guess.

In a lot of ways, Master Den reminded Llesho of Lleck, though the old minister, like most Thebins, was short and slight with a round bronze face and Master Den was tall and pale as the belly of a whale, with a shape like a mountain. Like the minister, though, Master Den spoke most softly when his words were most valuable and taught using stories that meant more than they appeared on the surface to be. Over the months he spent in the laundry, Llesho came to believe that, like the minister in the longhouse, Master Den hid a whole life and identity beyond the washing vats and drying lines. When he asked the older gladiators questions about the master, however, he discovered that no one knew anything about his past. Den had always been a part of Lord Chin-shi’s stable of fighting men, according to the oldest of the active gladiators. Master Jaks might know more of the washerman’s history, but when Llesho considered asking the weaponmaster, he decided that his answers might cost him more than he could pay for them.

In spite of his unsatisfied curiosity, Llesho found that he actually enjoyed the three months he spent in the laundry. His lessons in combat kept his mind £s well as his body sharp, and during their time in the steaming washroom, Master Den was starting to fill the great gaping hole in Llesho’s defenses where Minister Lleck used to stand. Llesho didn’t fool himself that his teacher felt the same devotion to Thebin and its prince that old Lleck had. If it hadn’t been for hand-to-hand practice, Llesho would have believed Master Den liked him.

Standing in the shade of a billowing length of cloth on the drying lines with Bixei and the other novices, however, Llesho concluded that the teacher must surely hate him, and simply hid it well during laundry duty. If he could have figured out the problem Master Den had with him, Llesho would have changed it. But the harder he tried, and the better his skills became, the more he met with the sharp side of Den’s tongue.

“Don’t think, boy! Move! A decent opponent will have you on your arse before you decide to hit him at all.” A shift of his weight, a flip of one wrist, and Master Den had demonstrated the fault by dropping Llesho to his knees. Then he moved on to Bixei. and his tone softened; Master Den played out the same move, but slowed many times so that the students could see how the wrist twisted and how a nudge with the side of one foot brought the man down. “Good,” Den said, and slapped Bixei on the back while Llesho seethed.

He had thought that his swift improvement would win him the praise of his teacher, but in fact Master Den ignored him much of the time, except to correct him for imperceptible flaws in his technique, while calling upon Bixei to partner him when the master wished to demonstrate a new combination. Llesho had stopped trying to impress his teacher weeks ago, and found that the forms came even more easily now, when he didn’t think. If Master Den had shown some appreciation of his skill, the students might have shaped their attitude toward him around their teacher’s good opinion. But as Master Den became more disapproving, his classmates became more distant. Llesho could have ignored the others, except for Bixei.

Bixei had two things which Llesho did not: Stipes, and his work assignment as Markko’s messenger and servant. He protected both against the newcomer, and Llesho could not convince him, no matter what he said or did, that he wanted neither Stipes’ attentions nor the favorable eye of the overseer. The laundry suited him just fine, and he preferred girls.

His move to the laundry had come to him with deceptive casualness, just a word at the end of a practice session as if nothing important had happened at all. Llesho was therefore unprepared for the way his whole life seemed to shudder and tilt on its axis when Bixei arrived late for instruction with the announcement, “His Honor the overseer wishes to summon the novice Llesho to serve him for the coming cycle.”

Expressionlessly, Den bowed to acknowledge the command, which Llesho himself heard with dread. Llesho would take Bixei’s position with the overseer, while Bixei himself would rotate to weapons. With one announcement, Llesho made two enemies: Bixei, who had already passed through weapons repair, resented his loss of position. And Radimus, who should have rotated to the overseer’s office, likewise resented his return to mop duty.

“I am content to work in the laundry,” Llesho said with a humble bow, his eyes downcast to hide his very real fear at the change. Since his first days in the compound he had avoided the overseer’s cottage, which had terrified him from the start with its vague sense of watchful evil. Since he had seen the witch-finder skulking around it, he’d put a face and a reason to his dread. And it was Bixei’s task assignment, or had been. The other boy was not pleased.

However much of this Master Den understood, he said nothing, but pointed out with an arched eyebrow, “Lord Chin-shi is not in the habit of giving slaves their choice of assignments. One does, however, have the option of taking up one’s task with a beating or without one.”

“Without, Master. I apologize for my pride.” Llesho fell to his knees and knocked his head into the sawdust of the practice area. Master Den accepted the apology with a small bow and broke the class into partners to practice the most recent lesson, Llesho found himself alone and staring into the face of the golden boy, Bixei, who glared back with a cold glitter in his eye. It was worse even than Llesho had guessed.

“Are you going to strike me down with your witchcraft, pearl diver, or will you pretend to use the arts Master Den teaches?” Bixei asked, his arms folded across his chest. So much for the overseer’s opinion of him.

“I am no witch,” Llesho stood up to face his accuser.

“Witch,” Bixei repeated. “Everyone knows you consorted with a witch who now stands accused, and that you use the magical powers she taught you to conquer your opponents rather than fight fairly.” Bixei meant more than the training exercises: he was furious to have lost his position in the overseer’s office. Llesho thought he might even believe the charge, which frightened him more than his opponent’s jealous fury.

Witchcraft had an evil reputation in the camp. Llesho had attempted to warn a hunted witch and had spoken to spirits. But his own present danger meant nothing: Llesho reacted to the taunt with all the rage and the pain of a lifetime of losses knotting his hands into fists. His home was gone, his brothers scattered, his sister murdered. And Lleck was dead, nothing left of him but his demanding spirit. Kwan-ti was gone, disappeared just ahead of the witch-finder, though only the gods knew how she had escaped. Without realizing it, Llesho had reached out to Master Den for the kindness he had lost, but his teacher watched him as if he was one of Master Markko’s experiments, and said nothing in his defense.

“Lord Chin-shi has put a bounty on her head, and you will be next. You will burn in her place.”

“No!”

Technique fled in the face of Bixei’s shattering denouncement. Looking into the eyes of his opponent, Llesho felt in his blood that it had come to a killing moment between them. He reached for his accuser with his fists, not to knock Bixei down or control him or even kill him with one clean blow. He wanted to tear the golden boy apart with tooth and claw, to stomp his flesh into a pulpy stew in the sawdust and rip the pieces into shreds when he was done. But his rage made him clumsy; Bixei deflected his blows, though he had to struggle to match the insane speed with which Llesho attacked.

“She’s not a witch,” he growled, and landed a blow that knocked the wind out of his opponent.

Bixei had been waiting for the moment, luring him in, and even while Llesho was glorying in the feel of his fist impacting on the body of his foe, Bixei grabbed the extended hand and twisted his arm, flipping him on his back with an elbow in his throat.

Llesho thrashed on the ground, ignoring the pressure on his throat and trying to get a purchase on his enemy.

“What is she, then—your lover?” Bixei taunted while the students, and Master Den himself, looked on. Llesho shook his head, though the motion ground sawdust into his hair and brought Bixei’s elbow closer to strangling him. “Teacher,” he gasped, and Bixei smiled as though his teeth were a trap that was about to close on its prey. “Are you her sorcerer’s apprentice, then?”

“She was good,” Llesho insisted. He knew Bixei would consider him a fool if he said any more, and probably the other boy would be right, but he had to try and make him understand. More important, he had to make Master Den understand. “She taught me that goodness could still exist in a world I thought the gods had abandoned.” He looked into Bixei’s eyes when he said it, willing the other to understand something he didn’t quite understand himself.

“It’s a shame she didn’t teach you how to fight.” Bixei pressed his elbow tighter against Llesho’s throat, so that he stopped his opponent’s breathing altogether. Then, having won his point, he released Llesho and offered him a hand up. “She tricked you. Evil rules the world now, and she is part of it.”

It was hard not to believe, with Thebin under the power of the Harn and everyone he had ever loved dead or lost to him. But the spirit of his mentor had given him hope. So he took the hand Bixei offered, and kept hold of it when he was on his feet again.

“First we take the world back,” he said, “and then we see who helps us and who tries to stop us.” It felt like a pledge, and Bixei met his level gaze uneasily.

But he offered his other hand, and they clasped, their wrists crossed in the age-old symbol of allegiance. Neither knew exactly where it would take them, nor how soon the unspoken pact would be tested. They both knew in their hearts, however, that this was something slaves did not do. Llesho expected Master Den to stop them with a lecture on humility, but their teacher watched them with the look of a merchant toting up a trade in his eyes.

Where success had earned him fear and envy, Llesho’s failed attack on Bixei had created a wedge of sympathy that Llesho was quick enough to foster with occasional well-timed lapses in his performance. Master Den no longer watched him with faint disapproval, and even pulled him out of the class on occasion to demonstrate a new move or an improvement on an old one for his classmates. Llesho hated his new assignment in the overseer’s service, but even that worked to his advantage. If Bixei was still jealous, at least he didn’t blame Llesho for his lost status. They might never be friends, but Bixei seemed to have abandoned the feud he’d waged since Llesho arrived at the compound. He could imagine their uneasy alliance more easily in moments like this, however, when Bixei was not present.

Llesho was sitting on the covered porch with Radi-mus and Stipes and others from his bachelor group and dinner bench. His chair was tilted on two legs so that the narrow, slatted back rested against the coral blocks of the barracks wall. Bixei was still at work in the weapons room, so Llesho had relaxed more than usual, listening to the others trade stories when Radi-mus, who leaned against the railing to watch him, asked, “Why a trident? That’s a tall man’s weapon, like the pike.” Radimus, who preferred the pike, pulled himself away from the railing and straightened to his full height as a demonstration.

He’d let his guard down too soon, Llesho realized, setting his chair down on its four legs with a thump. He knew, without being told, that the story of his choice of arms in the weapons room must remain secret. Llesho had never again seen the woman who watched him there, nor, since that day, had he seen a knife like the one she had slipped up her sleeve. But he remembered the tension that had clenched in his stomach, and it was doing a return appearance under the curious eyes of his companions. Better to offer a lesser truth, he decided.

“The food the pearls like best tends to settle to the bottom. You use a long-handled rake to stir it up.” He twitched a shoulder to acknowledge that they would surely find his story foolish.

“My quarter-shift mates and I would imagine our rakes were tridents, and would wage mock battles in the water. We stirred up the bottom enough with our scrabbling feet, and had more fun than applying the rake head to the muck. When Master Jaks told me to choose my weapon, I felt awkward with a sword, but the weight of the trident isn’t much different from a muck rake, and it didn’t feel all that different to my hand, after I got used to being on dry land.”

“I’m sure Master Jaks can find you a muck rake if you really want one,” Stipes suggested.

The gladiators laughed companionably at the story and Llesho wondered if they each had an equally harmless tale to tell—a sword that reminded one of a cooking knife, or a stave that felt to the hand like a drover’s prod. Llesho’s explanation quickly turned into the story of how his friends saved his life, though he didn’t mention the spirit of his old mentor—

“And I came out of the water dangling from my ankles like a pig on its way to slaughter. Foreman Shen-shu took one look at me and said. ‘Where’s vour rake, boy?’ and down I went again, sputtering with water up my nose to look for the damned rake.”

“I’d think after that you would avoid the trident like it had a pox on it,” Stipes remarked.

Radimus laughed. “Master Jaks probably assigned him the trident because he knew it was the one weapon that Llesho wouldn’t ever lose.”

Llesho expected the joke when he told the story, but this was close enough to the truth that Llesho flushed when he heard it—not because the rake was the reason he chose the trident, but because Jaks had directed him to the weapon and away from the knife that went to his hand like an extension“ of his body. He laughed quickly enough that his companions took the blush for embarrassment, except for Stipes, whose sharp gaze seemed to be looking for a chink in the face Llesho wore. He wouldn’t find one, Llesho determined. The trick to keeping secrets, he had learned from Master Den himself, was in not appearing to have secrets at all. So Llesho smiled blandly at the gladiator and greeted Bixei when he joined them on the porch.

“ ‘Lo, Bixei,” he said. “You just missed the story of my heroic rescue from the briny deep.”

Stipes kicked a chair over to where his partner stood, but Bixei rejected the offer, while giving Llesho a warning about his tale: “Don’t tell Master Den, or he will start having practice in the bay,” he said, rubbing at a bruise the size of a coconut on his backside. Finding a support post to lean on, he grumbled his complaint, “That would make as much sense as hand-to-hand combat practice.”

Madon, who still worked with the novices at weapons exercises, heard the complaint as he passed on his way to a group of senior gladiators spending their rest time with similar stories on the other side of the porch. “We can all see that you have a deep-seated aversion to unarmed combat. Bixei,” he drawled. “Something Master Den really should get to the bottom of, before it interferes with your training.“

Llesho tried to keep a straight face, but even Stipes was snickering, and Bixei’s face turned so red it seemed to glow of its own light.

“I don’t mind taking an injury in practice if it teaches me something useful,” he complained heatedly, and Llesho wondered which injury angered Bixei more: the one to his fundament, or the one to his pride. Since he was the only person on the porch who was smaller in build than Bixei, and had also been present when Master Den dumped Bixei in the dust, he decided not to ask. Bixei wasn’t giving anyone a chance to interrupt him, however.

“Weapons practice makes sense, even equipment I don’t plan to compete with. A gladiator has to understand his opposition and use that experience to devise a counterattack. If a fighter should lose his own weapon during a battle, he has to be able to pick up his enemy’s and take the day with it. But an unarmed man cannot compete against a trident or a pike, or a sword. So why does he waste our time with something that will never serve us in the arena?”

“You think you cannot save your life with your own hands?” Madon rolled up the right sleeve of his shirt to reveal a jagged scar that tore across his biceps. “The shaft of my pike had a flaw in the wood and broke with the first thrust of my opponent’s sword. His second thrust did this.”

“See—” Bixei tried to interrupt, but Madon silenced him with a look.

“I lured him inside my guard, and when he was committed to the strike, I did this—” with his left hand Madon lashed out in the “striking snake” move, stopping with the curved knuckles a whisper of air away from Bixei’s throat—“I suffered a wound, but the swordsman died.”

Llesho stared at the man in wonder. Madon looked like a hero out of legend, so he didn’t know why it surprised him to discover that the gladiator was a hero in fact. Bixei, however.had turned deathly pale in contrast to the recent angry blush.

“Of course, that was pure luck.” Madon relaxed his striking hand and examined his knuckles as a warrior checks his weapons for nicks or damage from the damp. “Master Den teaches hand-to-hand as an exercise in concentration and control; I wouldn’t depend on it to save my life against a trident. Unless, of course—” he gave the younger group a sly smirk— “Llesho here was holding the trident!” Laughing, he left them to return to his own bench where more laughter soon rippled out from the senior warriors.

Bixei was seething, but Llesho gave him a smug grin. “We’ll get him,” he said. “Just give it time.”

Bixei didn’t want to listen, but with Stipes to tease him out of his brooding, he soon entered into the outrageous plans for taking down the hero. Mud featured in many of their plans, as did pig slop. The night ended in laughter. Llesho would not hear that sound again for a very long time.

C HAPTER E IGHT

HE new assignment worried Llesho. Bixei had run errands to Lord Chin-shi’s house, fetched and carried about the compound, and he’d even been sent to bring Llesho himself from the pearl fishery, all tasks for someone who had earned Master Markko’s trust. In the first week of his new service, the overseer hadn’t said anything about Kwan-ti, or witchcraft, but he hadn’t sent Llesho out of the compound with messages either. Instead, Llesho swept out the workroom and the front office, then, up the narrow staircase, he scrubbed the loft room under the steeply sloping roof where Master Markko slept.

The sleeping chamber held a single bed and two chests. The larger held the robes and breeches that Llesho was forbidden to touch; a servant came daily to tend Master Markko’s personal needs, and disappeared again to whence he came before the minor sun had joined its fellow in the sky. The second, smaller chest, was covered in a thick layer of grime and stuffed in a dark corner under the slanted eaves, as if forgotten. But when Llesho had tried to explore it, he found the chest bound with straps and locked with a complex mechanism he had never seen before and could not open.

Llesho brought his master breakfast and a midday meal from the cookhouse, and sat in a corner when he wasn’t needed, trying to fight the boredom that pulled at his eyelids. With an occasional bland smile that didn’t help at all to hide the calculation in his eyes, Master Markko watched for Llesho to slip up and reveal himself as a witch. Since he knew nothing of magic, he couldn’t very well slip up there, which was almost a relief after his trial in the weapons room. So he wasn’t prepared for the day when everything changed.

The overseer was not in his office when Llesho arrived, so he called out, “Master Markko, sir?” as humbly as he could.

“In here, boy.”

Llesho followed the answering summons to the back room, where he found Master Markko setting tightly lidded jars on a shelf over the worktable, marking each one off on a list in front of him. Llesho recognized some of the herbs hanging in bunches from the beamed ceiling, but others were foreign to him. He remembered Kwan-ti’s warning about touching the unknown plants in her healer’s pouch—the cure for one person might prove to be a poison to another—so he kept his hands clasped behind his back.

“You have finally honored us with your presence,” Markko said, his voice dripping sarcasm.

They spent the day mixing compounds that Llesho did not recognize. While Master Markko had his midday meal, Llesho cleaned the noxious herbs and powders from the worktable with a basin of pure water and a soft cloth. After weapons practice, Llesho took instruction from Master Markko in the storing of the various potions they had prepared that day, and then learned how to bury the cloths they had used in a patch of dead weeds behind the privy. Poisons, then, and likely no use for healing any sickness but that of life itself. When he had carefully cleaned his hands, Llesho returned to the workroom and presented himself to the overseer, his head bent in due humility.

“I am finished, Master, if there is nothing more?” He sincerely hoped the overseer would find no late tasks for him to do before he left for his dinner and a well earned bed. On this day, however, Master Markko measured Llesho from top to toe with his cold, cold eyes.

“Your predecessor in the post was born of slaves, and knows nothing but Pearl Island,” Markko said. “And, of course, he does not consort with witches. He valued the small freedoms his work with me afforded, and his gratitude made us friends as well as slave and master.”

The overseer gestured at the shelves crowded with jars full of potions and herbs. “I had hoped that if I revealed to you our mutual interest, we would likewise become friends. But that hasn’t happened, has it?”

Llesho said nothing, but he had begun to tremble, fine tremors that shook him from his heart to his fingertips. He knew the identity of Lord Chin-shi’s witch now: Master Markko could kill him for that knowledge at any time.

“I am sorry, but if you are going to be of any use to my real work, I will have to be more cautious with you.” As he said this, Markko set an iron collar around Llesho’s neck, and clipped a chain to a link at the throat. Then he took the other end of the chain and snapped it into a ring newly set into the floor in the corner of his workroom.

“I have informed Master Jaks that I will need more of your time than I found necessary when Bixei worked for me. I did not accuse you of malingering at your tasks, of course. But it must be understood that one so new to my needs would not work as quickly or as efficiently as another more experienced in the ways of this compound. You will, therefore, make your bed here.”

Llesho felt the protest well up in his throat, but he clamped his jaw and refused to let the words escape. He was, after all, in the power of a master poisoner and a witch. And so he waited to see what Master Markko had in store for him.

“Good.” The overseer noted the wary question in his eyes and smiled. “You are learning already.

“I have sent word to the washerman that you have withdrawn from unarmed combat training to spend more time learning your duties.” He sneered when he mentioned Master Den. “You may, of course, continue weapons training for the arena, provided you keep silent about all that passes in this house. If you say a single word that does not relate to the weapon in your hand, however, you will remain here, tethered like a dog the day and night together, until you have given me what I want from you.”

Llesho didn’t have what Markko wanted—the whereabouts of Kwan-ti and the secrets of her witchcraft— but he could die of Markko’s efforts to extract them, and he had truths of his own he could not share with this man. So he obediently dropped his gaze, letting none of his terror show. The overseer gave him a cold, cold smile, and abandoned him to his chains and the darkness that would become his whole existence.

As days passed into weeks, Llesho’s silence deepened. When Markko grew tired of his stubborn refusal to speak, he would beat Llesho with the chains that bound him to the workroom. The beatings grew less insistent as he learned to perform each task to the overseer’s satisfaction, however, and Llesho began to hope that Markko was tiring of him. Then he woke drenched in sweat from a terrifying dream he could not remember, his muscles in knots and his guts heaving.

“How does that feel?” Markko crouched down beside him, tapping with a stylus a muscle in his thigh that lifted in a rigid band at the touch. Llesho could not answer, could not breathe, could not catalog the ways and places that he hurt.

    “Good.” Markko tapped the stylus on Llesho’s belly, triggering a spasm that twisted the body beneath it in wrenching knots of agony. “We’ll just see how this goes.”

He sent word to the practice yard that Llesho had fallen too ill for prayer forms or weapons practice. When the worst of the pain had subsided, he ordered delicate food from the cookhouse which he fed to Llesho by hand, all the while asking, “Was it undetect-able, boy? Did you taste the bitterness in the brew?”

His voice a rusty whisper, Llesho broke his silence to confirm what he already suspected: “What did you do to me?”

Master Markko shrugged a mock apology. “You were never in danger. I gave you a small dose, so that I might judge the efficacy of the intended measure. On the whole, I think our client will be well pleased with our work.”

No less than he had imagined, the overseer worked a side business as a poisoner. It made no sense to Llesho that a man who feared a simple healer, as Lord Chin-shi seemed to do, would keep a man of Master Markko’s trade in his service. He suspected that as a poisoner’s test subject, he would not live long enough to puzzle out an answer to the question.

Markko let him recover before trying out any new compounds on him, but Llesho grew wary of eating any food from the overseer’s hand. He weakened, but feared murder if he told anyone the dark secrets of the overseer’s back room. Weapons practice might have tested his resolve, but the apprentices now worked with the general population. Llesho often found himself matched with men he did not know, who were not inclined to talk if he had wanted to.

Most of his day he spent bound to the workroom, tending to his master while he mixed the potions for which strangers called at the back window after the suns had fallen. When the day’s work was done, Llesho lay in silence, waiting to discover if another poison from Markko’s bench had found its way into his food. Exhaustion warred with fear of the vaporous creatures of twisted evil that had come to inhabit his dreams, but his body could not long endure the strain, and he slept despite his fervent desire to remain on guard for his own sleepless rest.

The dream began with the memory of white light: the sun rising through the gates of heaven, pierced the eye of the needle atop the Temple of the Moon and shed its light on the gleaming mud walls of the Palace of the Sun. Along the path of light walked the goddess with the face of his mother, her smile as warm as the sunbeams she trod upon. Llesho reached for her, and fell into a garden rich with fruits and flowers.

“What are you doing on your bum, little brother?” Shokar strode between rows of plum trees, a rake over one shoulder, and stopped to lend him a hand to rise.

“I thought you were dead,” Llesho told him.

The dream Shokar dropped his shaggy head so that his chin almost rested on his broad chest. “I thought the same of you.”

“The rest of our brothers—are they here with you?”

“Where is here?” Shokar’s voice remained, but his thick farmer’s body faded like a mist, and behind him Adar and Balar, Lluka and Ghrisz, and Menar, who was a poet, stood together, straining their eyes, as if they were searching, but couldn’t see him.

“Adar!” he called out in his sleep; and, “Menar! I’m here!” But his brothers broke into a mist and tangled milky strands among the plum trees.

“Adar!” He woke with a start, tugging on the chain that ran from the collar around his neck to the ring in the floor. His brothers were gone, and Llesho was alone again with the terrors of the night and the worse nightmare of the waking world.

Llesho’s body shook all the time now, and waking to another day in Master Markko’s clutches, he wished that he had died beneath the bay, following old Lleck to a new life in the great cycles of creation. When he thought of the spirit that had come to him in the bay, the black pearl in Llesho’s mouth throbbed like an aching tooth. Lleck and his gift both had been real, though neither offered much in the way of comfort. Llesho might buy his way free with that pearl, but Markko would doubtless take it from him if he knew about it. If he reported Llesho for theft, Lord Chin-shi would have Llesho’s hands cut off. Or the overseer might use it for proof of witchcraft; Llesho would find himself burning on the pyre the overseer had planned for Kwan-ti.

It seemed that, with the pearl, Lleck had given him one more torment and Llesho wondered how much he was supposed to endure. He did not want to imagine a greater need from which the pearl was sent to rescue him, when the overseer was killing him hourly and by inches. Surrounded by Markko’s poisons and the tools of his loathsome trade, he knew only that he could not reach any one of them to end his misery.

Markko had seen to that and Lleck, in his own way, had bound Llesho to this wretched life with the hope of an impossible quest. He wasn’t alone in the world. He would find his brothers, if Markko didn’t kill him first. Llesho wept until the tears had wrung out his heart, and when he slept again, the monsters came and pulled him down with them into the darkness.

Worning began like all the others since he had come to Markko’s service. The overseer rattled his chain as he unlocked the collar. “Go,” Markko said, the only word they shared before noon, and Llesho bowed deeply as he had been taught. When the overseer left the workroom, Llesho slipped into his shirt and pants to fetch his master’s breakfast, a few dry rolls and a pot of green tea, which he placed on the desk where Markko was working.

Prayer forms had been his one comfort, leaving his mind blank and his body free among men he had come to count as friends and under the bright sun. As he weakened, however, his technique faltered. Llesho stumbled on the simple Flowing water form; in the weeks he had served the overseer his forms had become increasingly clumsy, as if the burden on his soul tripped him up at each move. Frustration brought him close to tears again, but no one laughed now. Radimus pulled him up from where he had fallen and brushed the sawdust off his back with reassuring pressure, but said nothing as his eyes slid away from the iron collar around Llesho’s throat. Bixei, who had resented his own rotation out of the overseer’s service, watched him with confusion, and even guilt in his eyes.

Llesho turned away; almost, he would rather remain chained in Markko’s workroom than suffer the public exhibition of his humiliation. But Lleck was counting on him to find his brothers and win back his country from its conquerors, so he struggled to regain his sense of balance, and pushed through to the end, grateful when Master Den let his arms drift to his side in completion of the final form.

“Llesho—” Master Den called as Llesho turned toward the overseer’s cottage. Llesho stopped, but did not turn around, and finally, with a deep sigh, Master Den released him. “Go. bov. Don’t let me keen vou.”

“I wish I could,” Llesho thought to himself. He risked a deep breath, thick with the smells of sawdust and sweat and sunshine, and a tension that grew more pungent each day, like monsoon weather crackling in the air. Bad times were coming for all of them, he figured, and he longed for the storm when everything would be overturned. For him at least, any change had to be better than what he had.

With a last gaze into the sky soft with morning haze, he ducked back into the stone cottage. Markko awaited him in the workroom, where he crushed some noxious element that released a sickening smell of rot into the air.

“I have to go out,” he said, never stopping his slow, patient grinding. “But I will return before weapons practice is over, and I will want to speak to you.”

A tremor passed through Llesho’s body at that— more questions he could not answer, more threats. Markko would beat him, as he had in the past. But Llesho would tell him nothing.

Markko cocked an eyebrow at him. “You think you won’t talk now, but you will.” With a brush prepared for the purpose, he scraped the yellow powder into a shallow cup that rested on a tripod over a brazier filled with hot coals. Then he stirred the mixture gently with a silver wand for a moment before putting a lid on the cup. “Pour for me,” he said, and Llesho picked up the pitcher of clear water and poured it over Markko’s hands. The water ran into a basin that discolored in pinpricks of corrosion as the few stray grains of powder sank to the bottom. As Markko dried his hands carefully on a clean white cloth, Llesho noticed that the skin had mottled patches where the powder had found it, but the overseer ignored the tainted spots. “Dispose of these in the dead garden,” he said, tossing the cloth over Llesho’s arm.

Llesho cringed away from the cloth. The dead garden. Only the most perilous of Markko’s elixirs went to the dead garden. Llesho took a second cloth and carefully wiped off the mortar and pestle that Markko had used to grind his ingredients, and set them aside to purify. He took both cloths and the bowl into a patch of garden where even the rankest weeds wilted in deathlike colors. A short-handled shovel set with its point in the ground marked the most recent burial place. Llesho took the shovel in hand and moved two paces, and then he dug a deep hole. First the cloths went in, and then the water. Then he scrubbed out the bowl using the freshly turned earth to absorb the corrosives that pitted the glazed surface already. When all of the poisoned materials had disappeared into the hole, Llesho rubbed his hands thoroughly with the dirt before shoveling it back into the hole again. When he was finished, he stamped on the ground to level it.

His work in the dead garden meant that Llesho was running late. He had a choice—food or weapons practice—that he’d had to make too often since Markko had called him into his service. As usual, he chose practice. Llesho ran as fast as he could and reached the weapons room just as the last group of gladiators filed through to select their weapons. Llesho knew them all. It surprised him a bit until Stipes passed him a small loaf of bread instead of his trident. No words passed between them; they might not know why, but his fellows had come to understand that Llesho’s safety depended upon his terrible silence. Stipes’ anger was clear, however, and tears that Llesho feared to shed choked him as he tried to swallow the bread.

Jaks watched him with eyes of stone, but a decision had been made; the master looked down at the small arms table, and Llesho followed the glance. For the first time since that day when the masters had tested him in the presence of the mysterious woman, Llesho saw the strangely shaped knife lying among the swords. He picked it up, feeling his body settle around the weapon, become a part of the weapon. Jaks nodded with a satisfaction so grim that Llesho shuddered.

Bixei looked at him with surprise. “You should have picked the knife before,” he said, but Stipes put a hand on his partner’s shoulder, his eyes wide with a question turning to certainty.

“You never saw the knife,” Stipes told him. “Come on, Madon will be waiting. I’ll spar with you today.”

“Madon?” Bixei started to ask the question, but stopped, frowning, when Stipes increased the pressure on his shoulder. “Everybody else knows what is going on. Why not me?” he grumbled.

Llesho sighed, letting some of the tension go with the breath. “Not everybody,” he said. “I don’t understand it either.”

Bixei seemed to accept that for the moment. He shook his head and muttered something halfhearted about favorites that brought a blush to his face when he looked at Llesho. Then he took up his own weapon and followed Stipes into the practice yard.

“Sit down.” Jaks pushed a three-legged stool toward him, and Llesho absently tucked the knife into the cloth belt that tied his shirt. The belt split and fell at his feet along with the knife.

“Sorry.” He flopped down on the stool and put his free hand over his eyes. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“I can.” Jaks didn’t smile. “A long time ago, you carried a knife like that in a scabbard at your belt.”

“I did?” Llesho took a bite of his bread and chewed without thinking about it, giving his teacher his full attention. When he had swallowed, he asked, “So why don’t I remember it?”

“I don’t know.” Jaks kicked another stool over and sat so that he faced Llesho, locking gazes with the youth. “It might hurt too much to remember.”

Llesho gave him the snort that deserved. He remembered the Harn soldiers coming for him, his bodyguard dying, the weeping of women in the corridors as his captor carried him out of the palace. He remembered his father, dead with a crossbow bolt in his throat. How could the knowledge that he once carried a knife hurt more than that?

“You were very young when you were taken to the slave markets, weren’t you?” Jaks asked him.

    “Seven summers.” He’d used the Thebin measure— trading seasons rather than the cycles of the lesser sun. Master Jaks seemed to understand anyway.

“And yet, you wore a knife—not just any knife but the ceremonial knife of Thebin. Someone trained you well in its use, too.”

That scared Llesho more than Markko had managed to do. He wouldn’t ask the question that terrified him—do you know who, what, I am?—but he thought maybe Jaks knew the answer to that better than he did himself.

“I think someone hid the knowledge from you, to protect you,” Jaks said. “When it is time, you will probably remember it.”

“Do you know what it is I’ve forgotten?” It took more courage to ask than he’d ever summoned in his too eventful life, but he held his teacher’s gaze, implying the question: “Am I safe with this knowledge in your hands?”

As answer, Jaks took a sword from the weapons table and knelt on one knee before Llesho. He bowed his head, and when he looked into Llesho’s eyes, his own burned with a fire of regret that stunned the young prince.

“We will not fail again,” he said. He started to reach out, then withdrew his hand, veiling with downcast lashes something fierce and personal in his declaration.

“You were there,” Llesho whispered, but when Jaks spoke again, he had set the question aside.

“Master Den has missed you. Let him take a look at you, get a new belt, and come back here when he is done with you.”

Llesho blinked, trying to catch up to the shifting conversation, but Jaks was speaking again, warning him, “Don’t tell anyone what you know, or what you suspect. And watch yourself around Markko.”

Llesho didn’t need Jaks to tell him that. But Jaks was gone, into the practice yard where he snapped an order for Bixei to pick up his pike, and not to treat the weapon like a plow.

Llesho found Master Den in the laundry. The washerman took one look at the shirt hanging from his shoulders like the clothes on a scarecrow and sighed. “Eat your bread,” he said, and pulled a band of cloth from a cubby. “Then wrap this around your waist.” When he had done as he was told, Llesho followed Master Den into the private area where Den had taught unarmed combat to the novices. A wide sword rested against the fence; Master Den picked it up and took an attack stance.

“I’m taller than you are, and my weapon’s got reach on you—what do you do?”

“Run?” Llesho suggested.

“Try it.”

Llesho turned to escape, but before he could take a step, the flat of Master Den’s sword came down on his shoulder. Den wouldn’t hurt him. Llesho knew that instinctively. But the touch of the sword on his shoulder snapped him into the past, swords flashing, blood spurting. Llesho wanted to curl into a screaming ball, but a memory moved within him and he snarled, slipped under the sword and inside its guard, brought the knife up. He came to himself with the sword on the ground and Master Den’s hand tight around his wrist.

“A loneer reach is onlv useful when the opponent stays outside of it.” Den gestured approvingly to where Llesho’s knife rested just below his own sternum, pointing upward. “To counter, move inside the reach.”

A killing stroke. When Llesho realized what he had almost done, he dropped the knife into the sawdust and drew his arms tight against his chest. His face crumpled, but he’d learned not to weep in the daylight, so he waited with his eyes grown huge and glittering with shock.

“It’s all right, child.” Master Den wrapped him in a huge hug that soaked the trembling out of him like a warm blanket.

“No damage done,” Den whispered. “We had to find out how much you had learned before you came to us.” He pulled Llesho away just far enough so that he could look into his student’s eyes. “Trust me. I won’t let you hurt anyone by accident.”

That last was said with an ironic twist of a smile, and Llesho wondered who the teacher expected him to hurt on purpose. But he’d leave that for another day. He was simply too exhausted to think about it now. Den read the droop of Llesho’s shoulders, and tousled his hair.

“Clean the knife,” he said, “and we’ll have a little visit.” Den did not seem to mind that Llesho said nothing; the teacher had enough stories, and when he finally heaved himself back onto his feet with the announcement, “Weapons practice is over; you’d best get back before you are missed,” Llesho returned to the overseer’s cottage with a lightened heart.

His mood sank almost immediately. Markko stood behind a thin, narrow-eyed man in the robes of a noble who had taken the overseer’s place behind the desk. In an elaborate chair that Llesho had never seen before sat a woman, much older but with robes as elaborate as the man’s. Had they come to expose him?

Llesho wondered. Markko smirked, fawning over the seated noble, but said nothing about his suspicions.

“Lord Chin-shi and his consort have come to ask you some questions of their own about the witch, boy.”

“No one is going to hurt you, boy.” Lord Chin-shi sat forward with his forearms crossed in front of him on the desk and his hands tucked into his wide sleeves. “Can you tell us your name?”

Behind their lord, Master Markko nodded his head, signaling his permission for Llesho to speak. Briefly, Llesho wondered if Lord Chin-shi would recognize him by his name, or if he knew it and was waiting only to trap him in an untruth. But Markko knew already, so lying wouldn’t help.

“Llesho, of Thebin, my lord,” he answered and bowed low, first to the lord behind the desk, and then to his lady in her chair.

His lordship nodded encouragingly. “That didn’t hurt, did it?” he asked with a thin smile. “Did you know that Thebin is infamous for its witches, Llesho?”

“It is not so in Thebin, my lord. Or was not when I was taken away.” Llesho looked at him curiously. “Perhaps it is the Harn witches who give Thebin its reputation?”

Lady Chin-shi frowned at him. “Don’t be impertinent, boy. You can still be hanged for treason.”

“I am sorry, my lady.” Llesho bowed deeply again, “But I don’t see how I can be of any help. I know nothing of witches or witchcraft.” And he would have sooner believed that Master Markko was a witch than Kwan-ti.

Markko himself made a bow, and spread his hands as if to demonstrate a point. “I beg your indulgence, my lady, but I did mention that the boy was soft in the head. He is small, but physically quick, and Theb-ins are known for their endurance, which will make him an asset in the arena. But Llesho had a mishap in the pearl beds, and it addled his brain. He can answer simple, direct questions, but he has little subtlety of wit.”

“If you can do better with the boy, please do so.” Lady Chin-shi waved a hand impatiently. “I plan to watch unarmed combat practice this afternoon, and wish this matter disposed of.”

“I presume that means I will be spending the evening alone?” Lord Chin-shi asked her, and Llesho ducked his head, trying to pretend he wasn’t there. But Markko walked over to him and lifted his chin. “The boy is quite innocent,” he commented over his shoulder. “It comes of a simple mind. Perhaps his lordship would like to question him at his convenience—alone?”

“A good idea.” Lord Chin-shi rose from his chair, and beckoned with long fingers. “Come with me. We will leave my good wife to her shopping.”

C HAPTER N INE

OUTSIDE the palisade a sumptuous sedan chair and its six bearers waited for Lord Chin-shi. The bearers stood in rigid silence until their lord had entered the chair and arranged its brocaded curtains to keep out the dust. Then, in one smooth motion, they lifted him to their shoulders and carried him up the hill. Llesho followed: through the last of the dense wild vegetation on the hillside, across the wide lawn smooth as a knotted silk carpet, to the gracious house of three levels that rose above the island on the hilltop. The procession stopped at an entrance overhung by elaborately curled eaves and flanked by two guards of stony countenance and ready weapon. A house servant ran forward to open the curtains of the sedan chair, and Lord Chin-shi alighted.

Llesho followed his master into a hall decorated in mother-of-pearl and pale-veined jadeite, with characters painted on the elaborately carved ceiling. The palace at Kungol had looked very different, but the sense of quiet power was much the same. So were the guards. He could have warned Lord Chin-shi how fragile such peace could be, that his guards would serve little purpose if he found his palace overrun by the Ham. His experiences since the slave market had shown him that no one listened to a child and a slave, however, and that he was safe as long as they didn’t notice him.

A servant dressed as elegantly as a duke came forward and bowed low. “My lord,” he murmured softly.

“I will show our guest the way myself,” Lord Chin-shi said, “We will be in my apartments—send someone with a tray, and then make certain I’m not disturbed.” He dismissed the servant, who bowed low over a smirk that made Llesho squirm.

Up a broad flight of stairs, down a corridor, and up again, this time they climbed a more modest staircase, each level flanked by its set of matching guards. Lord Chin-shi finally stopped at a room with a bed that looked big enough to sleep the entire barracks in the gladiators’ compound. Llesho dug in his heels. He knew how little choice a slave had in matters of his personal disposal, but if he made himself inconvenient—

Lord Chin-shi did not stop at the bed, but went through the room to a door in a corner. “Come along,” he said, and slid the inner door open before motioning Llesho forward with a distracted wave of his hand. Llesho obeyed, and found himself in a workroom like Markko’s but brighter, and with a fresher scent that reminded him of Kwan-ti. He smiled without realizing that he had done it.

“Sit.” Lord Chin-shi pointed to a chair in the corner, by an open window with wildflowers drying in the breeze. Llesho studied the floor, but found no iron rings for chaining slaves, so he sat, and found himself relaxing into the pleasure of the sun on his face, and the soft wind carrying the fragrance of the drying flowers on the air. Lord Chin-shi himself pulled up a three-legged stool and sat, his elbows propped on his knees and his chin resting on the arch made by his clasped hands. He studied Llesho with a thoughtful, but not threatening, frown. It reminded him of Master Jaks, and their conversation in the weapons room. Llesho suspected that it would be too easy to forget that he was a slave and in danger if his identity were known to this man. He tried blinking stupidly, but Lord Chin-shi just laughed softly.

“Who are you?” he muttered to himself, not waiting for an answer he would not receive. “A slave from the pearl beds who sits as comfortably in a nobleman’s laboratory as he does on a gladiators’ bench. A boy smart enough to know that playing the idiot is better protection than the wisdom of the sages.”

“I don’t play at the idiot.” He felt the need to defend himself on that one, even if it did mean he was talking. “People who ask stupid questions should not blame others if the answers they receive are stupid as well.”

“Fair enough.” Lord Chin-shi stood up and wandered over to a clean table on which a beaker full of a red liquid stood. “I shall try not to ask any stupid questions.”

Llesho blushed with embarrassment, and no little fear. He hadn’t meant to insult Lord Chin-shi, but knew his lordship might easily have taken it that way. The lord laughed, softly again, as if at a private joke, however. It seemed strange that the lord of the island should need to dissemble in front of his own slave, which Markko was as surely as Llesho or Master Den. Before he could set to serious work on the question, however, Lord Chin-shi had returned, carrying the beaker, and all humor was gone.

“Do you know what this is?” He handed Llesho the beaker with deadly seriousness.

“Blood?” Llesho waved a hand over the beaker to waft a safe measure of the fumes under his nose. “Not blood,” he corrected himself. “It smells like seaweed.”

“Not stupid,” Lord Chin-shi commented. “It is called the Blood Tide in the Chronicles.” He took the beaker into his own hands then, and stared at it with the grim fascination that Llesho reserved for the soldiers of his enemies. “It invades the living sea like a goiter and smothers everything that lives there. Already, the pearl beds are dying. Strange creatures of the deep wash onto the bloody shore and gasp their dying breath out on the land.”

Lord Chin-shi’s voice dropped, thick with sorrow. Llesho remembered the water dragon that had saved his life, and imagined her lying dead upon the beach. He bowed his head, sharing a new grief with his master. So the lord’s next words slipped under his guard like a knife:

“Master Markko swears that the Blood Tide is the curse of the witch, Kwan-ti. He says we must find her, and burn her, to restore the balance of heaven and earth. Only then will the sea flourish again.”

“If you are looking for curses,” Llesho snapped, “I suggest you seek closer to home and leave your healers to their work.”

“Master Markko also says that you disappeared from the compound on the day the witch vanished, and that you know where she has gone.”

Lord Chin-shi’s fingers had gone white where they wrapped around the beaker of red death. Llesho winced, and the lord frowned in concentration, carefully easing his grip on the beaker and setting it on the floor between them. “Tell me where she has gone, boy.”

Llesho grew dizzy with sudden fear. He had forgotten his position; lured by his master’s calm, and a sense of well-being that rested lightly in the sunny room, he had forgotten how dangerous the man in front of him was. Lord Chin-shi could have him put to death with a word, and no one would deny his right to do so. But the pain for the dying sea in the man’s eyes was real. Llesho reached for that fact: Lord Chin-shi loved the sea, and it was dying, and Lord Markko had told him that Llesho could make it stop. The only problem was, he couldn’t.

“I don’t know where she is,” he said. “I did try to warn her, that’s true, but she was gone before I left the compound. No one saw her escape, or would tell me anything about it.” He sat up straighter in his chair as he had seen his father do countless times in the palace at Kungol, though he scarcely remembered that now, and willed his lord to listen and believe him. “Kwan-ti is no more a witch than you are, and she would no more hurt the sea.”

Lord Chin-shi gave a guilty start at that and Llesho followed his glance to the beaker on the floor. He did not comment on the similarities he saw, but added, “Kwan-ti is a healer. And you need a living healer a lot more than you need a dead witch.”

“It seems, however, that I shall have neither.” Lord Chin-shi picked up the beaker and rose from his footstool. He led Llesho to the bedroom, where a tray waited on a carved and lacquered table. “You must be hungry—take what you want. For your personal safety, you will spend the night in these apartments and return to the compound in the morning. Rest— no one will disturb you. Do you read?” Llesho nodded, though he realized afterward that he had given too much away with that admission. Lord Chin-shi did not seem to notice Llesho’s sudden unease, but pointed to a third door in the bedroom. “There is a library through that door if you are bored.” With that the lord took a small plate of fruit from the tray and returned to his workroom. Llesho found himself alone with the food-laden table and the big, big bed.

He succumbed first to the lure of the food: thin pancakes filled with scallions and herbs, cold dumplings and hot ones, rice and millet and pig flesh in half a dozen different sauces, fruits that grew wild on the island, and fruits carried down the long trade roads from far inland. Tea, and a liquor that burned and made him cough and his nose run.

    With his stomach full, he wandered around the bedroom for a while, examining the country scenes lacquered into the doors of the wardrobes and running fingers lightly over the carved figures of jade and crystal and ivory scattered on fragile tables about the room. He avoided the big bed in his explorations, turning to the library when he had exhausted all the other niches and alcoves in the master’s chamber.

He had resisted the pull of the library, because the memory of books always brought with it the image of his mother, and he did not want Lord Chin-shi to find him weeping over some philosophical text. But it was still early in the night, and only the one door remained. He slid it open along its groaning track, and stepped inside while an invisible hand seemed to wrap cold fingers around his throat. A desk filled the center of the room, with a low bench behind it and a soft, thick carpet in front. Beneath the room’s single window, shaded with an oiled parchment screen, a low, cushioned divan sat next to a table with an oil lamp on it. Shelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling of a narrow gallery that wrapped the room and continued the shelves right up to the roof, where a square of tiles had been removed for a wide glass pane. A stout wooden pole propped open a trapdoor that would cover the sky window to protect the contents of the library during storms.

The shelves on the floor of the library were divided into wedges and stuffed with scrolls of parchment and rolled bamboo and heavy silk. A room in his mother’s library had likewise been fitted for rolled documents. Thebin stood at the top of the world, where heaven and hell touched on the heights of the mountains that held the capital city of Kungol. Through its mountain passes all the trade of the living world traveled, most especially that of learning. His mother had loved knowledge. To the king’s mock astonishment, she had asked only gifts of writing from the many travelers who stopped in the capital city to rest on their journeys to foreign lands. Like his mother, Llesho had prized the books and scrolls and rolls that came to them from distant lands. He’d loved to touch them, despite the many attendants who shooed him away while they polished and dusted.

Someday, his mother had promised, he would learn to read them all, as Adar and Menar had done. A healer and a poet, those brothers had teased that he must be the mathematician, since their mother was the priest, to make the set of scholars complete. Time had seemed limitless then, of course, and he had looked forward to many years of study with his mother and his brothers. Then the Ham came.

Llesho took down a rolled bamboo and spread it out on the desk. Lord Chin-shi’s library, he decided, had too much dust, too much light. Perhaps he would warn his master of the damage the elements could do to fragile materials: already, the images were fading. In the upper right-hand corner, in pale shades of blue and green, the artist had depicted a mountain waterfall, with a deity sitting cross-legged at its foot. A small tripod stood in. front of the deity. In one hand, he held a short wand over the tripod and in the other hand he held a vial of pills. Ancient characters filled the scroll beneath the image, as beautifully painted as the work of art. Unconsciously he curled his fingers away from the surface, however. He could not read the text, but he recognized the symbols of an alchemist in the painted decoration, and took it for a warning. No one was what they seemed, Lord Chin-shi least of all. With a wistful sigh he rolled the bamboo up again and replaced it in its place on the shelf. Had the Lord of Pearl Island read every one, he wondered, or merely hoarded them like a drason on a heao of bones?

Up an open wooden stair he found the gallery ranged with codices: books with wooden covers or leather ones, with long sheets of paper folded between them like a fan. Llesho took one down, then another, but the letters ran together, foreign and impenetrable. Another, another. A low shelf in the far corner of the gallery held some dusty books and Llesho went to them with a noise of disgust in his throat for their shabby treatment. When he reached to take one in his hands, his fingers tingled, and when he lifted it from the shelf, he saw the dust clung only to the parts that one could see from the ground. In all other respects, it appeared that someone had treated the “codex with great care, oiling the leather-covered boards and cleaning its pages.

Its pages. Opening the codex, Llesho wept. The writing was Thebin. At first, he could not read it at all, for he had forgotten what he had learned before the raid, and the letters looked different on paper than they did scratched into wet sand on a beach. But gradually, the shapes came into focus on a prayer his mother had taught him when he was a baby, and had recited over him every night before he left her side for bed, until the day his world had ended.

Mother Goddess watch this child Protect his eyes from cruelty His fingers from mischief His heart from sorrow.

Let him grow in courage Search with wisdom Find his destiny.

The book had many prayers, which he read with his fingers as well as his eyes, touching each page with reverence and love. A few he knew, most he did not, for they concerned matters of an adult nature unsuited for the child who had lived that life of temple and palace. Prayers for a lover, a dying parent, to bring children or the thaw. As he read each one, he heard his mother’s voice, softly just for his ears, or ringing to fill the Temple of the Moon, where the goddess dwelt. And he remembered her in her robes and glory, looking out across the city square to the Palace of the Sun where her husband waited for her to come to him in darkness.

It hurt too much to remember, but he could not bring himself to return the book to its shelf. Curled over it, his fingers caressing the prayers he found there, he fell asleep. Sometime in the night, he felt hands lift him and arms carry him down the wooden stairs. When he was settled on the thick mattress, those hands covered him in blankets of silk, and went away again. The comfort seemed to leech the last bit of strength from his bones, and he let himself sink back into nothingness. For the first time since Markko had dragged him out of the barracks to spend his nights on the workroom floor, Llesho slept long and deeply, without nightmares.

When he awoke, the sun was shining in his face and he felt more at peace than he had since the Harn raid. Then he realized that he was no longer alone. Lord Chin-shi slept like the dead on the far side of the bed. More to the point, however, the lord’s consort stood with her face inches from his own. Startled, Llesho jumped to a crouch in the middle of the bed, cursing himself silently for letting his guard down. From that position he could see that Madon, his face completely blank of expression, stood in the center of the room, while Radimus lingered in the hall with a smirk on his face and a small but weighty money pouch swinging from his outstretched fingers.

The disturbance must have awakened Lord Chin-shi, who rolled over, muzzy-lidded and bumped into Llesho, who leaped again, this time for the foot of the bed and escape.

“Don’t let him send you back without your tip, Llesho.” Radimus gestured with the swinging purse, and Lady Chin-shi followed this advice with a cackling laugh that set Llesho’s teeth on edge. He looked to Madon for an explanation, but the gladiator turned his head and pretended not to see.

“Fighting and dying you do for nothing, because they own you,” Radimus explained. “Anything else, they pay for. It’s tradition.”

A system that paid a slave for eating and sleeping, but not for the hard work he did every day seemed strange to Llesho, but Lord Chin-shi reached over and picked something up from the floor next to the bed.

“Don’t ask questions,” he said. “Just take it and go.” And he thrust four silver coins into Llesho’s palm.

Llesho scrambled from the bed, grateful for the permission to leave more than he appreciated the coins. Even as he was heading for the outer hall, however, he yearned to turn and enter the workroom behind the far door instead. Madon was watching him carefully, but said only, “You haven’t had breakfast.”

Before Llesho could speak, Lord Chin-shi’s voice interrupted from the bed. “Take whatever you want.”

Madon bowed. “Thank you, my lord,” he said, and filled his hands with pieces of fruit and bread, which he passed to Llesho as they walked. When they were halfway down the hillside, and well away from anyone who might overhear, Madon asked him, “Are you all right?”

Llesho thought for several minutes before he answered. Finally, he had to admit, “I don’t know. I wish Kwan-ti was here.”

“The witch?” Radimus asked him, and Llesho shook his head. “Not a witch—” and he was getting tired of saying it—“but she may be the only one who can help us.”

“Don’t say that around Master Markko, unless you want to take the witch’s place at the stake,” Madon warned, and gave him a sharp smack on the back of his head for emphasis.

“I know,” Llesho answered. But he still wished for the healer. He was not so blinded by Lord Chin-shi’s kind manner that he put his owner’s interests in the dying pearl beds ahead of his own survival, but he knew that the healer would not allow the sea to die if she knew about it. He kept his mouth shut around the news of the Blood Tide, however, adding it to the well of secrets he carried about with him.

In the afternoon, as Llesho joined the gladiators in armed contest, training with the trident, word came down from Lady Chin-shi. The school would travel to Farshore on the mainland for the next competition. And at Farshore, the school must be broken up, its competitors and students sold to pay his lordship’s debts. The pearl beds, men whispered to one another, had given up no pearls since the witch, Kwan-ti, had set her curse upon them before disappearing into the wind.

Llesho was going to the mainland. He would win his freedom there, and find his brothers, and free Thebin, as Minister Lleck had bid him. He did not know how he would do all this, nor how he would reach Thebin, at the end of the thousand-li road, but here, today, he had silver in his pocket, and he took his first step.

PART TWO
FARSHORE

C HAPTER T EN

LLESHO watched the shoreline grow closer as Lord Chin-shi’s yacht cut through the Blood Tide. When he began his training, he had thought only of what would come after, reaching the mainland and searching for his brothers as a lowly freelance. He hadn’t known how terrified and proud he would be to don his own first set of leathers: tunic and leg wraps and cuffs to protect his wrists. This was his first step on the road to freedom and to the salvation of his people and his country. And all he had to do was kill other men, slaves like himself, for the pleasure of their masters. Someday soon it would come to that, he knew; he would kill or die for the money in his purse. As a novice with but the rudiments of his training, however, Llesho would not fight in this, his first competition, but would participate in a demonstration of armed combat forms with the trident. But he knew he was saying good-bye to the only life he had known since his seventh summer, when the Harn had sold him in the marketplace. Until he had come under Overseer Markko’s scrutiny, he’d had a hard life, but not a bad one. He’d had friends, and work, and the security of a guiding hand, first in Minister Lleck and Kwan-ti the healer, and later in Master Den, and even Master Jaks.

Now all of that was changing. Lleck was dead, Kwan-ti vanished. The pearl fishers had gone to market weeks before, unable to earn their keep in the dying oyster beds. He could smell the rot rising from the dead fish and the bodies of larger creatures floating on the surface of the sea, and he prayed the Flowing Water form in memory of the water dragon that had saved his life so long ago it seemed, though it had been less than a full turn of the seasons.

Alone on the polished aft deck, he moved into the prayer forms that evoked the earth to calm him. Today, Lord Chin-shi would offer his gladiators for sale in the arena. They would compete, and Lord Chin-shi would take home purses or lose them on the contests, but he would return to Pearl Island without his gladiators. Some of the men he thought of as friends would die today, and others would find themselves traded far away. Llesho wondered who would waste their money on an untrained boy with no prospects of height or weight ahead of him. He remembered the lady in servant’s clothing, who had watched while he revealed too much of himself with the short spear and the knife, and shivered. Whatever her interest in him, he hoped it did not include his performance in the arena.

“You will do fine, you know.” Master Jaks wandered up from belowdecks and braced himself with both hands on the guardrail. Looking out toward the land, so that Llesho didn’t have to meet his eyes, he added. “Lord Chin-shi will make sure of that.”

“I don’t understand him,” Llesho acknowledged. “He did not bed with me, although he wanted the others to think it.”

He stole a glance at Master Jaks, who did not look surprised at this revelation.

“He was kind to me.” Which had confused him, after weeks as the overseer’s prisoner.

Master Jaks nodded sagely, but did not turn his head to look at Llesho. “As kind as a man can be who would burn a witch, and who sets his slaves to fight and die in the arena for his pleasure.”

“I thought that was Lady Chin-shi’s doing,” Llesho admitted. The Lord of Pearl Island had fed him gentle foods, and put him to bed when he had fallen asleep on the floor among the books. His workroom had none of the smell of death that soaked into the very walls of the overseer’s cottage. He could not reconcile in his head the man who had shown him such mercy with the buyer and seller of children in the marketplace.

But Jaks shook his head. “Lady Chin-shi certainly takes an interest in the gladiators,” he said, “but she is less interested in the arena of combat. Lord Chin-shi would not, perhaps, wish to see his people come to harm, but like many good men he has a weakness for the display of martial skill, and too much liking for a wager.”

“Is he really afraid of witches?” Llesho wondered what had drawn the lord’s attention to him, he who had little skill as a warrior and none at all for magic.

Jaks’s answer didn’t help. “I think his lordship knows that there are wicked practitioners of the dark arts in the world, and would protect his home and lands from them. But if you mean, did he believe Kwan-ti to be a witch, I think not.”

“Then why did he summon me?” Llesho knew why Lady Chin-shi had wanted Madon and Radimus delivered to her quarters, and he figured most of the servants in the lord’s house thought his lordship had the same kind of interest in him. Except he hadn’t—he’d asked some questions, and then left Llesho to his own devices while he worked.

Master Jaks turned away from the sea to study Llesho’s puzzled features. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps he has learned that you are more than you appear. But if that is so, I don’t know why he didn’t sell you to your enemies, or kill you for the threat you pose.”

Llesho said nothing. He knew what lay in wait for him if the enemies of Thebin knew he was alive and planning to take back his homeland. If Lord Chin-shi meant him harm, or even wished to squeeze the greatest profit out of him, there were simpler ways than putting him in the arena. Jaks might be able to tell him, but in all the summers since the Ham had invaded Thebin, he had never spoken aloud his identity. Whatever his masters knew or guessed of his origins, he could not relax the habits of caution to confide in them. So he looked out across the water, where his future drew nearer with each surge of tide and wind. A hundred questions bubbled up behind his tongue: How did you come here? What do you know about me, about Thebin? What am I to you, and to the lady who watched too closely in the weapons room? And who is she, and what is she to me? But he could not ask. With no choice that he could see, he kept his silence and waited for a moment when the questions might be taken out and examined in safety.

“The city is called Farshore,” Jaks told him, accepting that their personal conversation had ended. “Shan, the capital province of the Shan Empire, is almost as far inland as Thebin. Generations ago, when the first emperor reached out across the land, his grasp ended here, at the place they called Farshore. It was thought then that the world ended at the sea, which must go on forever, since no eyes could see a farther shore. The sight so terrified the emperor’s armies that the generals had to stand behind them with spears and swords, and cut down their own men who tried to flee. Later, of course, the empire learned to build boats that could dare the ocean crossings. But the city still carries the legacy of those old times in its name.

“How far is it to Thebin from Farshore?” Llesho asked him, and Jaks gave him a warning glower.

“Too far. Don’t even think of escaping.”

Llesho didn’t tell him that he thought of nothing else, and had since the ghost of Minister Lleck had appeared to him in the pearl beds. Everything since that day seemed to conspire to move Llesho farther along the path to Lleck’s goal. He had no doubt that he would go home, and felt the presence of the gods at his back, like the wind in the ship’s sails, with each step toward his objective. But he still wondered how long the journey would be.

“It’s like a dream,” he noted, looking out toward the many-tiered city. The sharply steeped roofs and elaborately curled eaves grew more solid as they approached.

“Shan is bigger,” Jaks said, and Llesho wondered if he realized that he was revealing himself in his words. “The palace there is one of the great wonders of the world. But Farshore has the courage of its contradictions. The tallest buildings you can see are its temples— see the roofs, rising like umbrellas over the city to protect it from the might of the sea, while to the west, the city huddles beneath the walls that protect it from the invasions that invaders always fear. In all the years of the empire, Farshore has never relaxed its vigilant watch on the West.”

Thebin lay to the south while Shan, the jewel at the heart of the empire, lay to the north. Both were west of the easternmost city of the imperial expansion, and between them lay the Harn. Llesho wondered if the Farshore walls were meant to beat back an invasion from the Harn, or were a reminder to the conquerors who had come out of the north. Who did Farshore fear most?

The yacht nudged its way into its berth at the bustling docks, and Llesho found himself suddenly surrounded by the gladiators come above decks to watch the boat reach shore. Jaks was nowhere to be seen, but Master Den moved among the gladiators, dressed, for a change, in loose breeches that came to his calves and an equally loose white shirt crossed over his ample stomach and held in place by a wide cloth belt woven in the colors of Lord Chin-shi’s house. Master Mar-kko, in the long robes of his rank, commanded the forward deck to sort out his gladiators and begin the procession to the arena, setting the cymbal players and the drummers at the front, and ranking the fighters from foremost to least, where Llesho found himself paired with Bixei.

“Good luck,” Llesho said as they stepped onto dry land. Bixei nodded his acknowledgment, but said nothing.

He, too, was wearing his first set of leathers, but today Bixei would participate in his first true fight in the arena, an equal match, and specified to first blood rather than to the death. Both boys knew that accidents happened in the heat of battle, and sometimes not accidents but old scores found themselves settled on the bodies of the fighters. Llesho did not speak anymore, busy trying to maintain the stern features and fierce demeanor that the marching gladiators affected to draw the poorer audience to the upper decks. As they paraded, they left the warehouses and docks behind them, and wound their way through narrow streets with ramshackle houses pressing over them, lined with cheering and jeering mainlanders. Finally, they came to a wide thoroughfare that crossed the city like an arrow, smooth and straight, and lined with trees laden with fragrant blossoms. Bixei jabbed him in the ribs when his eyes grew too wide, but Llesho could not tear his gaze from the riches spread out before them on the thoroughfare. On each side, set back as if the road were not worthy to touch the hem of the rich garments on either side, tall iron gates barred high walls. Inside the private barricades, the wealthy of Farshore waited out the heat of the day and defended themselves from their own poor at night.

At the city limits farthest from the sea, the thoroughfare ended at the arena, an open area of sand and sawdust, with tiers of benches rising on both sides, and boxes for the owners and wealthy patrons ranked at each end. The Governor’s box, and the Mayor’s box, at the center of the long north axis were covered with bunting of red and yellow and the whole was ranked around with banners on poles like soldiers standing at attention. Jaks led the procession of Lord Chin-shi’s house to the eastern rank of benches, where a wooden door both tall and wide lay open to admit them. Under the seats, Llesho discovered, were benches for the fighters, and barrels of water, and heaps of bandages. Against the wall next to the open door rested a stack of leather slings stretched on long poles, to carry the wounded and the dead of their house off the field. Llesho’s stomach clenched at these reminders that the arena was a game only to the spectators: to the men who fought, it meant life or death.

Once they had stowed their small bits of personal gear under the benches, Master Den led them out onto the field where the contests would be held later in the afternoon. Lifting his arms in an offering to heaven, he began the prayer forms, and the gladiators fell into their ranks and followed through the cycle of prayers to water and air and earth and fire, to sun and moon and rain and falling snow, to the growing millet and the rice floating in paddies of water, to the lotus rising out of the muck, and the snail on its belly and the butterfly, sacred among gladiators who likewise grew in secret to burst forth in glory for one day, and die.

When they were done, and Master Den had dismissed them with a low bow, Master Jaks broke them up into pairs and teams to practice weapons forms. Llesho went through the exercises with his trident, leaping and stabbing, twirling somersaults over the axis of the staff of his weapon. After the workout, Master Jaks gathered the gladiators together for the blessing of the warriors, and then he led them under the stands again, where a trestle table had been set up and laden with the most blessed foods to sustain a man in combat. Llesho had no appetite. His terror at all that was strange and new around him clenched his stomach tight, but he filled his plate anyway, like the others, so that no one would know that he was afraid.

Bixei sat alone, looking out onto the playing field with grim determination setting his jaw. Llesho would have shared his own plate with his sometime enemy, but Stipes already carried an extra for his partner. So he followed, and took a seat on Bixei’s left, leaving the right side for Stipes while putting himself at a distance from the object of Bixei’s jealousy.

“You’ll be fine, Bixei. The cooks say that we will compete against the house of Lord Yueh today.” Stipes ate for a moment. “Lord Yueh lost many of his best men to disease last season. He wishes to make a number of purchases from Lord Chin-shi, and has wagered each match to the first blood only, as he does not want the merchandise too badly damaged.” He noted Bixei’s glum face and added, “Of course, as a novice, the rules of your own competition already demanded blood only. But it means I don’t have to win my own bout to keep my head.”

Bixei nibbled on his bread, but finally threw it down in disgust. “Lord Yueh is not the only buyer in attendance, and he needs experienced fighters to rebuild his ranks, not a novice fresh from his first fight.” He sighed deeply. “I knew, even before Lord Chin-shi lost his fortune, that one or the other of us might be sold or that in some future bout one of us might have to watch the other die. But Master Jaks sets all of his lordship’s bouts, and he never sets old partners against each other in the arena. Lord Yueh is known to do so to increase his sport.”

“I won’t ever kill you in the arena, boy.” Stipes cupped a hand around the back of Bixei’s neck and gave it a companionable shake. “And you’ll never be good enough to take me, so we are safe as can be.”

Bixei didn’t snap at the bait offered in that taunt, but abandoned his plate to stand by the open door and watch the audience filing in. Llesho watched him go, so intent on the tension screaming from every muscle that he forgot Stipes until he dropped a hand on Llesho’s shoulder. “It will be all right,” he said, but Llesho could tell from the pensive frown that the gladiator didn’t believe his own words. Overhead, the sound of eager feet and the settling of benches marked the presence of the growing crowd.

“Lord Yueh wants to buy Master Jaks,” Stipes said. “He must believe that Lord Chin-shi’s trainers are better than his own. We must prove to him that they are.”

With that last word of encouragement, he dropped his half empty plate on the trestle table and went to join Bixei at the open door. They argued for a moment, and then wandered away together into the shadows. Llesho watched them go, then he put his own plate back and strolled outside to watch the crowd pour in. Soon, the riser in front of each bench was filled with stamping feet as the crowd clapped and shouted for the games to begin.

Suddenly, a hush fell, and a dozen trumpeters at the entrance to the arena heralded the coming of the governor. Master Markko called to Llesho to take his place in the grand march around the arena, the crowd’s last chance to view the competitors before betting closed. He responded in a daze. Thebin did not have such games, and Llesho had not, in his entire life, seen so many people gathered together in one place for anything. Soon he would be a part of it. He took his place at the end of a line. At a tone that Master Markko had been waiting to hear, the gladiators of Lord Chin-shi’s house strode out into the sunlight and the sawdust.

A shout went up from the crowd, and colorful banners waved at them. At Master Markko’s command, the gladiators all raised their right hands over their heads and shook their fists in the air as they circled the arena. The competing houses of Farshore’s lords did likewise, some marching in the same direction and some parading counter to them. The two lines met at the center of the arena, and spread out to face each other. A fanfare sounded again, and the gladiators dropped to the ground and kowtowed deeply, with their forelocks in the dust, forming a living promenade of backs offered to the master’s lash. As he passed, the governor flicked the ceremonial willow switch above the fighters with words like “courageous,” and “valiant,” and “dauntless” to exhort them in their battles. In this manner the governor made his way to the official box, with his consort following.

By tradition, the youngest gladiator to be blooded on that day would receive the favor of the governor’s consort. Accordingly, the lady lifted Bixei to his feet; with a smile, she set her ribbon upon his right-hand sword and a kiss upon his lips. “Win for me, today,” she said.

Llesho recognized that voice, and when he looked up from his ceremonial kowtow, a woman with a cool face and eyes much older than her years was offering a smile of the mouth only to Bixei, who blushed red under the attention. It was the woman who had tested Llesho with the spear and the knife in the weapons room on Pearl Island. She showed no recognition of Llesho, but returned to the side of her husband, who invited the audience to rise and meet their new hero, Bixei of the house of Lord Chin-shi. The governor bowed graciously to the young champion of his lady, who held out her hand to him. Bixei touched his forehead to her fingers in the ceremonial pledge, to fight valiantly in defense of her favor. The couple bowed to the mayor and his guests, and ascended the carpeted risers to the official box. Together the governor and his lady took their places beneath a silk umbrella with many tiers in recognition of their rank.

The trumpeters again blew their fanfare, and the directors of the bout met between the two mock armies to assign each man to his predetermined foe. Llesho had only a moment to see Bixei drawn away to face a boy much the same age and build, but carrying a pike. “Fight inside his reach,” Llesho thought to himself, but then he was called to attend to his own demonstration. He would go through the motions of a bout, while his opponent would do the same. Because of their youth and limited training, however, they would not engage each other with their weapons, but perform the exercises that would display their skill level at a distance of a few paces from each other.

His opponent carried her knife and sword far differently than Llesho did in his own training, but he quickly picked up the rhythm of it, and moved to counter and attack with his trident. She was good, and Llesho wondered again why Lord Chin-shi trained no women fighters. She came at him, a little close on the next pass, and he could see that she knew his attention had wandered, and that it annoyed her. “Like dance,” he thought, and picked up the tempo of his action, meeting her next slash with the move of his own devising he had practiced to smoothness—using the staff of his trident to support his vault, he leaped high over the sword and landed lightly behind her swing. Her right side was exposed to the blades of the trident he brought to bear with lightning swiftness.

A ripple of applause followed the move and Llesho looked around, to see who of the more experienced fighters had landed the admired blow, but his opponent was bowing respect to his strike, before taking her stance again. This time, she moved inside his reach, and rested her knife lightly against his gullet. “Not so pretty a move,” she conceded, “But you would be dead, and not merely blooded, if I chose to press my advantage.” She did put a little more pressure behind the knife, and Llesho froze, immobilized by the surprise, and his fear that she would truly slit his throat if he should move.

But her arm seemed to sag a little, and so he knocked her hand aside, feeling the burn as the point of the knife scratched its way across his throat, and when he felt the metal clear of his body, he brought the trident up, set to skewer her on its three sharp blades. When he stepped back to clear her reach, she followed him in; she twisted and ducked under his weapon and swept one foot in a low circle in front of her, taking Llesho off his feet. He bounced back again before she could immobilize him with her sword, grateful for Master Den’s lessons in unarmed combat. The hand-to-hand forms worked just as well, he realized, in combination with his weapons training.

Their bout came to a halt when a monitor blew the whistle. Llesho analyzed his bout as he had been taught. His opponent sucked in air harshly, in broken gasps, while Llesho still breathed normally, if perhaps a little faster than he would at rest. Clearly, if the monitor hadn’t stopped the bout, he would have won it, thanks to his Thebin capacity to control his breathing. But in a true bout, the results would have been less certain. He would have had first blood when he caught her by surprise with his trident leap, but she would have taken the prize in a fight to the death.

He thought that, as he had tricked her with a move she had never seen, she had also tricked him with her sex. He didn’t expect a woman to be able to fight, and had not guessed that her fight would be different from a man’s, going for the quick kill rather than a wearing down and wounding over the course of an extended bout. Her strategy made sense, but he knew he would have to work hard at making up for his lack if he wanted to survive in competition to the death. And his plans called for staying alive long enough to win his freedom.

He bowed respect for his opponent’s skill, as she bowed to his. Then she shocked him to the core of his being when she turned to the monitor and said, “I’ll take him. Lord Chin-shi may have his price; have him cleaned up and delivered before the victory banquet tonight.”

The monitor bowed low and she departed, not toward the staging area under the benches, but up the carpeted risers to the governor’s box, where she took a seat behind the governor and his consort. Llesho could see that she was still breathing heavily, and she wiped her arm across her brow to clear the sweat streaking it, but the governor made no comment, just raised a sardonic eyebrow at her and leaned over the balustrade to examine her purchase. Llesho stared up at them, dumbly, until the monitor of his bout took him by the arm.

“Come on, boy, you are in the way here,” he said, and nudged Llesho in the direction of the door that would take him into the staging area below the eastern benches. “Wait with your own house; someone will be down to fetch you soon enough.”

The smell of blood under the benches almost covered the smell of sweat and the body’s fighting humors discharging in vapors off the skin of the gladiators. Bixei lay on the trestle table. A bandage already wrapped his forehead, with an extra thickness over his right eye and a piece of leather clenched tightly in his teeth. He grimaced as Master Den cheerfully bound up a wound on his thigh. “That pretty face of yours will heal clean,” Master Den commented as he wrapped the thigh with bandages, “But your new master will enjoy playing ‘find the scar’ with this one. And I hear that he tips very well.”

Stipes, with no sign of injury on him, was glaring at Master Den, but before the bandaging was done, a guard poked his head through the open doorway to announce the arrival of Lord Chin-shi with Lord Yueh. Lord Yueh entered with the boastful swagger of a man who judges his own courage and skill by the success of his gladiators, and who has thus proved himself victor. Lord Chin-shi followed with the desperate look of a man who has lost everything on the toss of a coin, and now asks himself how he could have been so foolish as to gamble against a crooked house.

Their two very different consorts followed behind: Lady Chin-shi boldly examined the gladiators in their various states of nakedness and coverings of bandages, while the much younger Lady Yueh trembled in the wake of the party, her sad eyes downcast and her cheeks red with embarrassment. She looked, Llesho thought, like a slave newly brought to market, shamed by her newfound station in life and unsure what that station would bring. Her husband was pointing among Lord Chin-shi’s gladiators. Master Markko took his place at the side of his lord to record the sales.

“Madon, of course.” Lord Yueh pointed to the gladiator, who sat resting his weight on the table. The wound on his chest had not yet been tended; it leaked a red trail down his naked torso, but he did not seem to notice it. “He is mine by the rules of the contest,” Lord Yueh added with a smirk. He seemed to enjoy Lord Chin-shi’s discomfiture.

Madon stared at his new owner with predatory aggression stamped upon his jaw, the reek of battle and blood stinking on his damaged muscles, and Llesho permitted himself a tiny shudder. The rules of gladiatorial combat were clear. If, in a fight to the blood only, a competitor should kill his opponent, his own person was forfeited to the offended lord, whose property had been taken from him in the unfair contest. In such cases, the primary owner had the right to punish his slave for the damage he did to the honor of his house, and for the cost to his house of the gladiator’s flesh and skill. It was not unusual for the offending gladiator to die of his chastisement, with his dead body presented to the holder in payment of the blood debt.

It made no sense. Madon, rumor had it, had refused all deadly combat since a lord with too many gambling debts had shifted the order of his own gladiators to give Madon a battle to the death with his old lover. They were both good, and his lover had not died quickly of her wounds. After days had passed, when Madon had realized that she could not recover, he had sneaked into his opponent’s encampment at the outskirts of the city and had slit her throat while she thrashed in the fever nightmares that boiled her brain. Madon had returned half mad, the barracks story was whispered, and had recovered slowly. He had made a vow that he would not kill again, and it was said that Lord Chin-shi had honored his vow. As little as he knew Madon, Llesho was sure that he had not broken his vow deliberately. Lord Yueh, it seemed, had found a way to break it. And now Madon belonged to Lord Yueh.

His lordship, however, had passed on from an examination of his prize. “That one,” he said, pointing at Stipes. He skipped over Pei and Bixei, seemed not to notice Llesho at first, and gestured at Radimus. He sorted out the rest of the stable in a manner that seemed unthought but left him with the most experienced of Lord Chin-shi’s stable, and Radimus, whom he chose with a thoughtful gleam in his eye. Of his selections, only Madon had a wound.

Lord Chin-shi examined the list, and nodded his head in agreement. “Radimus will need further training before he is ready for a fight to the death,” he said. “He is full grown, but new to the arena. Madon should do well as a teacher, he has studied with Master Jaks and Master Den for many years, and knows their techniques well. And in terms of skill, he is the equal of Jaks, and inferior only to Master Den in hand-to-hand.”

“I intend to fight Madon in the arena for at least another year or two, if he survives,” Lord Yueh said with a twisted leer. He clearly expected Lord Chin-shi to kill the man who may have ruined his chances at financial recovery with the deathblow in the arena. “I had hoped to purchase the teacher, Master Jaks, to replace the trainer I lost to the fever.”

“You should have spoken sooner,” Lord Chin-shi bowed apologetically. “Another bidder made an offer, and the contract has already been signed.”

“Am I come at an inopportune time, honored sirs?” A stranger dressed in the sumptuous layers of a lord, but with a thin gold chain around his throat that marked him as the personal slave of some great house, joined the lords at their negotiations.“

“Not at all,” Lord Chin-shi gave the stranger a thin smile. “I was just explaining to Lord Yueh why Master Jaks is not available for his purchase.”

Lord Yueh bowed deeply to the newcomer, and his face when he straightened had grown very pale. “I understand completely, my lord.”

“Still and all,” the stranger said with a pointed glance in Madon’s direction, “you seem to have done well enough for yourself today, Yueh.”

“Yes, my lord.” To Llesho’s astonishment, Yueh bowed again, almost groveling at the feet of the wealthy house slave.

“Who is he?” Llesho whispered to Stipes, who answered, “With luck, you will never find out.”

If luck were involved, Llesho thought, he was in trouble. Lord Yueh, who had ignored him in his first hunt through the ranks, had returned to face Llesho. He was now looking at him with the hungry eyes of a wolf. “Throw the boy in and we will call all debts canceled,” he said. “Not worth the value of the debt, of course, but he appeals to me.”

The stranger cast a careless glance at Llesho in his corner. “I think he’s mine as well,” he said, and with a last look around caught sight of Bixei with his wounds newly dressed on the table. “And I’ll take this one on his excellency’s authority. We can arrange the fee at your convenience.”

Bixei started to rise, but Master Den pushed him back down again. “The boys are much in need of further training before they will be of use to you,” Den said.

The stranger gave him a soft smile. “And they don’t like each other much, do they?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“Time will change that.” The stranger bowed to Master Den, but gave only the slightest tilt of his head to the lords, who returned the gesture of respect.

Lord Yueh hesitated, as if he was hoping the other man would leave first, but the stranger waited patiently. Finally, Lord Yueh made another bow.

“Send my property along before nightfall,” he said of his purchases. With a last furtive glance at Llesho, he darted out from under the benches and made his way to his box, leaving his consort to follow as best she could.

Lord Chin-shi’s competitions were over, his house crashed about his head, but other houses remained, offering higher stakes. Lord Yueh was well known for betting death matches.

When Yueh had gone, Madon leaned heavily on the table for a moment before pushing off and presenting himself to his lord. He fell to his knees, his eyes round as copper coins with the shock, and bowed his head, waiting for his fate.

“His man was drugged to induce madness, you know.” The stranger addressed Madon, who made no move to rise or answer the stranger.

“On balance,” the stranger continued, “his excellency decided that the lives of two men could not stand in the way of peace in the provinces.”

Lord Chin-shi set his hand on Madon’s shoulder, but addressed the stranger: “The Blood Tide?” Llesho recognized that soft tone, saw the wheels within wheels in Lord Chin-shi’s eyes and the ironic half-smile that accompanied the stranger’s shrug.

“The source of that plague, like the source of fever in Yueh’s compound, remains hidden to us.”

“It was none of my doing,” Lord Chin-shi assured him, and the stranger shook his head. “I thought not. Had it been so, of course, the peace would have been broken, and we would be at war, and not sharing entertainments together.” He spoke ironically, his eyes fixed on the back of Madon’s head, but his false smile held a warning. The governor had weighed the life of an honorable gladiator and the fortunes of one lord against the threat of war in the province, and he had decided. He put out his hand, and into it Lord Chin-shi placed the strangling rope.

“Relax,” the stranger said, and tipped Madon’s head back to rest upon his leg. Then with a movement Llesho could hardly follow, the cord was around Madon’s throat, and the harsh “snap” of bone cracking cut the air like an ax. “I’m sorry,” the stranger said, and when he released the cord, Madon fell dead at his feet. “Have him delivered to Lord Yueh with my regards.”

He strode to the open doorway without looking at the body on the ground, but turned to Master Jaks almost as an afterthought.

“Bring the boys,” he said, and for a moment he was nothing but an absence in the light of the doorway. Then he was gone.

“Who is he?” Llesho whispered to Stipes in the frozen silence that followed, but it was Master Jaks who answered the question. “His name is Habiba. He is the governor’s witch.”

Lord Chin-shi shivered in his heavy robes. In the corner, his consort wept silently, her arms around Radimus’ neck. “We are ruined,” she moaned into the sweaty leather that covered his chest, “Ruined. And that Yueh is to blame.”

“Not Yueh,” Lord Chin-shi corrected her carefully, his attention fixed on the body at his feet. “But fate. What man can wage war against his fate?”

“A true man,” his wife taunted him. She let her arms slip from Radimus’ neck, trailed questing fingers down his arm until she could catch his hand in hers, and led the gladiator deeper into the shadows.

Lord Chin-shi did not look away from Madon’s body. “You’d better go,” he said, with a vague gesture at Master Jaks. The teacher bowed, though his lordship did not see him or anything beyond the inward vision of his eyes as he walked «way, into the sunlight of the arena.

“Damn,” Stipes muttered. He helped Bixei to stand and supported him to the door, where Master Jaks commanded a leather sling and two servants to carry him. Llesho followed through a silence that had grown thick in the air, like a coming storm.

As he moved from under the benches and into the sun, he saw a splash of brightly colored silk crumpled in a scarlet pool that was quickly soaking into the dust. Lord Chin-shi lay dead, his own knife buried in his heart. Master Jaks did not stop, or even slow his small procession, but stepped past his former lord without looking down. Llesho swallowed hard, and tightened his hands into fists, but followed the lead of his teacher. Bixei gritted his teeth, but the tears leaked from his eyes anyway. Llesho didn’t know if he cried for Stipes, gone from his life forever, or for his lord, now dead at his own hand, or for the fate that awaited them in the wake of the governor’s witch.

Llesho almost felt guilty that he still had Master Jaks, his teacher, while Bixei had nothing. But Minister Lleck had taught him to plot his course and then take one step toward it at a time, focused on that one step completely until the next. He was a gladiator, more or less, and off Pearl Island—steps one and two on his path—but an empire’s reach from Thebin. Before he could decide his next move, he had to figure out where this last one had taken him. With Lord Chin-shi dead, there was certainly no way back.

C HAPTER E LEVEN

HE stranger, Habiba, led them to a door in the thick wall that circled the arena. He handed Llesho a torch and, with a snap of his fingers, set the fuel-soaked end of it on fire. The bearers carrying Bixei followed, then Master Jaks, who closed the door before lighting his own torch at Llesho’s flame. They were in a long tunnel that sloped gently until Llesho was sure they were no longer inside the wall, but were under the arena itself. The roar of the crowd was muted here, though the pounding of so many feet thundered over their heads and shook dirt into their hair. Llesho wondered if the roof of the tunnel would hold, but neither Habiba nor Jaks seemed concerned, so he turned his attention to figuring out where they were going. Away from the main entrance, that was clear. Since he hadn’t seen anything beyond the arena at the outskirts of the city, he couldn’t tell much other than that they were heading away from the direction in which they had come.

They passed other tunnels feeding into the one they followed. One, with a heavy door barring their entrance, Llesho thought must lead from the official boxes of the governor and mayor of Farshore province and city. Just as he had started to wonder if the whole trip would be taken underground, the floor of the tunnel began to rise again, until they faced a closed door and nowhere else to go. The door had no handle. Llesho pushed, but the door didn’t budge.

“Locked,” he said, and Habiba moved past him with a tight little smile.

“Aren’t we lucky we have the key?” he asked, though he carried nothing but a lit torch.

Habiba waved his hand over the door and muttered a phrase that Llesho couldn’t hear. Then he gave the door a light tap. It opened inward and Llesho jumped back, crashing into Bixei’s litter in his effort to avoid being hit by the door.

“Get off me!” Panic edged Bixei’s sharp voice, and he gave Llesho a shove that overbalanced the already precarious bearers and propelled Llesho out into the gloomy light of the minor sun. He was standing alone in a wood of low, gnarled ginkgo trees that stank of fallen fruit in the quickening breeze of nightfall. A moment later, Jaks exited the tunnel, followed by Bixei on his litter. Habiba came last; when they had all assembled outside the secret passage, he turned to secure the door with another wave of his hand. Again he accompanied the flourish with a muttered charm, but Llesho wondered if it wasn’t really the tap on the door itself, at the center of a coiled dragon carved into its surface, that sealed the tunnel.

Jaks seemed to know the way; he led their little band no more than a quarter li to a lane canopied by the twisted branches of ancient trees on each side. The lane’s deep, sinuous curves snaking through the forest hid them from anyone coming up from behind, but likewise hid from their sight anything waiting for them ahead. At first, when Llesho could see no houses or temples, he thought they must be leaving the city. Then the stranger rounded a bend and disappeared between two ordinary looking trees at the side of the road. Master Jaks followed, with the sling carrying Bixei right behind him, and Llesho took a deep breath and slipped between the same trees.

He found himself on a carefully manicured path set with flagstones of varying sizes that artfully mimicked the meandering flow of a stream. The flagstone walk led them to a series of low-roofed structures. A network of ponds and waterways separated the buildings from each other while a series of gracefully arched bridges connected them again. The dim light of the minor sun wrapped the whole in a soft green slumber. Dumbfounded, Llesho stared back the way he had come and saw behind him a stone wall rising higher than his head. From the lane that wall had been invisible. Not just out of sight, he realized, but invisible, hidden by some spell that buried the quiet garden in deeper privacy than even the high stone wall. Bixei had likewise looked back, and he met Llesho’s astonishment with an attempt to look worldly, but missed.

“What have we got into?” Bixei asked him with a look, and Llesho’s answering glance said, “Trouble.”

That Master Jaks showed no surprise at all only made matters worse, as far as Llesho was concerned. The governor’s witch: Llesho wanted to know what his teacher knew about witches and witchcraft, and why he had let Llesho suffer through months of Overseer Markko’s torment in search of answers Master Jaks could have given him for the asking. But they were crossing one of those fragile looking bridges, over a pond on which pink-and-white lotus flowers rose on stems above the water, swaying in the slight breeze.

On the other side, they passed under the roof of a gatehouse that led them into a private garden where a pale, cold woman waited to greet them. Llesho recognized her. She had tested him with the short spear and the knife in the weapons rooms on Pearl Island, and she had accompanied the governor when he greeted the gladiators in the arena. Master Jaks bowed with bland courtesy, as if to a stranger, so Llesho did the same. He trusted Jaks, though he was beginning to wonder why, as he worried about what plot not of his choosing he had unwittingly fallen into.

The woman opened her arms to greet them with a calculated smile that warred with something darker in her eyes. “The governor of Farshore Province welcomes you to his service,” she said. “You will need rest, of course—especially the young one with the wounds. Habiba will take care of your papers and show you to your quarters. And he will answer your questions.”

The governor’s lady gave a slight nod of dismissal, then she turned and entered one of the low wooden houses that surrounded the garden. When the door slid into place behind her, Llesho could not tell where it had been.

The stranger, Habiba, bowed to Master Jaks and smiled at the boys. “This way,” he said, and gestured toward another bridge, leading deeper into the complex of houses and waterways. Over the bridge, down a path between two slightly larger buildings with two tiers of curled roofs they followed him, to a small house with fragile, greased parchment screens for walls. Habiba slid a screen aside, and they entered the office of an overseer. The bearers of Bixei’s litter set him down and departed, leaving the novices alone with their teacher and the governor’s witch.

Habiba went to the elegantly fragile desk and pulled out a sheaf of papers, turning first to Master Jaks. “Do you have your prize-book?”

Jaks reached into his leather tunic and pulled out a worked leather case that hung by a cord around his neck. From the case he pulled a small book, which he handed to the overseer.

Habiba opened Jaks’ prize-book and studied it for a moment. “You were close to winning your freedom when Lord Chin-shi put an end to your aspirations, Master Jaks.”

“Lord Chin-shi pulled me from the arena before I had earned my price,” he confirmed. “His lordship valued my skill as a teacher, and did not wish to lose my services to death or manumission.” Master Jaks recited his history in a flat voice, but Llesho saw the muscles in his teacher’s throat tighten with restraint. Manumission: the freeing of a slave. What emotions the master hid, Llesho could not see, but he imagined them much as his own at his captivity: a helpless rage more suited to a child than the powerful man-at-arms.

“Some day you must tell the tale of how a hero with the bands of an assassin on his arm landed himself in the arena at all,” Habiba commented, “and how it was that your kin allowed the slight to remain on their honor for so long.”

“I have no clan,” Master Jaks answered with a voice like stone falling on stone. “My family all lie dead.”

Llesho remembered the bodyguard who had died to keep him safe. Was he your brother? he wanted to ask. Your family, did they all die fighting at Kungol, too few against the invading horde? But he could say nothing in front of Bixei or the governor’s witch, who flitted an expressionless glance over Llesho before returning his attention to Master Jaks in front of him.

“So I have heard.” Habiba reached for a chop and an inkstone, as if the conversation had revealed the likelihood of rain, not the destruction of a clan of mercenaries and assassins.

“Her ladyship’s family rules, in the emperor’s grace, at Thousand Lakes Province, where slavery is outlawed,” Habiba explained, his voice soft but commanding, and terrible in its quiet anger. There was no comfort in his voice—a warrior would acknowledge no need of comfort—but Llesho felt the softness of his words tame some hurt he felt in his own breast.

Master Jaks inclined his head, an acceptance of comradeship if not peace.

“According to her marriage contract with his grace, the governor of Farshore Province, her ladyship’s household shall always be a mirror in which she may see the Thousand Lakes reflected. No one serves here as a slave.”

He stamped Master Jaks’ prize-book with the governor’s chop and returned it solemnly. “The gift to his lady of your freedom has cost his excellency very little.”

Habiba then held out the contract with its blue seal. “Your manumission papers,” he said, andadded, “her ladyship would like to hire you, Freeman Jaks, to train the warriors for her house. The contract is here,” he offered a second folded packet. “If you need someone to read it to you, a scribe will be supplied for you.”

“I can read,” Jaks informed him.

Habiba nodded. “In that case,” he said, “shall I offer you rest in the guards’ quarters, or in the guest quarters?”