“In the guest quarters, until I have read the contract.”

Habiba gave them the blank smile of officials everywhere. “If you choose to accept the contract,” he said, “this will be yours.” He handed Master Jaks a slim gold chain like the one he wore around his own neck. “It marks one as being in his excellency the governor’s service, and should be worn at official functions and when representing the household in a formal capacity.” The overseer’s smile seemed more genuine when he added, “Her ladyship does ask that you leave it at home if you decide to go pleasure-seeking in the city, so that no scandal may fall upon his lordship. At any other time, you may wear it as you choose for the protection this house may afford you.”

Master Jaks took the gold chain and slipped it into the leather case where his prize-book had rested. “I will keep that in mind,“ he said, and bowed his thanks for the papers he now held in his hand.

So the gold chain had not marked Habiba as a slave in this household, as Llesho had believed. He wondered how much difference there truly was between a free man who acted the slave, and the slave he pretended to be, but Habiba did not look like he invited the question.

“As for the boys,” Habiba continued, “her ladyship faces a dilemma and must, for a time, bow her head to the decree of the land. His divinity, the Celestial Emperor, has foreseen the possibility that the unwanted infants of slaves may be cast upon the mercy of the empire for their upkeep. The empire has enough prostitutes and thieves already, and further has no wish to act as nursemaid to the castoffs of its lords and nobles. The law therefore requires that children born or bought into slavery must remain the property of the slaveholder, with all the responsibilities that entail to property ownership, until the youthful slave has developed the skills to sustain his or her own life at no expense to the empire.”

“I don’t understand,” Llesho said, though it terrified him to speak up in front of the governor’s witch. “What does all of that mean?”

The witch, Habiba, leveled the full power of his gaze on Llesho, and Llesho quaked on the inside but held his ground. He had a destiny, and had better start acting like it or he’d spend the rest of his life hiding like a rabbit.

“It means, Llesho, that in the eyes of the law, you and your friend will remain the private property of her ladyship until you pass your seventeenth summer. During that time you will each choose a trade according to your talents and needs, and at the end of that time, when you have proved to the governor, in accordance with the laws of the empire, that you can provide for your own needs, you will receive these—” he lifted from his desk two packets sealed with blue ribbons. Manumission papers. Freedom. And already signed, or they would not have the governor’s seal on them.

“What do you want to do with your life, Llesho?”

Llesho met the witch’s gaze. The man would think him a fool if he told him the truth, or he would think him a spy and a traitor. By law, the entrails of a spy were torn out in the public square, their place in the spy’s body filled with hot coals, and the flesh sewn together around the coals with whipcord. The coals cauterized the wounds while they burned the hidden flesh; it took a long time to die. Llesho had already seen the witch’s idea of mercy—Madon was dead—so he said nothing about his quest.

“I only wish to serve,” he said.

Habiba studied his face for a long moment. He must have seen the color disappear, the life fading behind the stone of Llesho’s eyes, because he sighed and broke the contact to glance over to Bixei, including him in the questions to follow.

“Can you read and write?” he asked, and Llesho answered, “Yes,” while Bixei shook his head.

“Sums?”

“A little bit,” Llesho said, and Bixei shook his head again. No one trained slaves destined for the arena in the arts of the nobility, and Llesho little knew how much he had given away about himself with his simple assertions of truth.

But Master Jaks did understand. “An educated slave, a prisoner taken in battle from the same land as Llesho, took an interest in the boy when he worked in the oyster beds. He taught the boy a little of reading and arithmetic.”

    Which gave scant credit to Llesho’s palace tutors, and shied the truth a bit about Lleck’s captivity—not a battle, but an invasion, the few left alive dragged into captivity behind the horses of the conquerors.

Llesho kept his mouth shut about that, too. He liked his guts exactly where they were, thank you. Liked his head in its current position, too, though beheading as an enemy of the state was preferable to the end of a spy.

Habiba accepted Master Jaks’ explanation with a wry twist of his mouth around the sour taste of doubt.

“Can you fight?” he asked. Bixei, from his litter on the floor, answered “Yes!” while Llesho shrugged his shoulders and said, “A little.”

“Spells? Incantations?”

“NO!” both boys answered in unison. Bixei responded with the usual horror of the unknown, but Llesho could not hide the shuddering dread of the months he had spent chained in Markko’s workroom. Suddenly, it was too much for him, and his traitorous legs betrayed him. He sank to the floor in front of the governor’s witch, and covered his face to hide his shame. “I don’t know anything,” he cried. “Nothing!”

Cringing at the humiliation, he did not at first feel the gentle hand on his shoulder, the man reaching to draw his palms away from his eyes. Habiba, the governor’s witch, knelt before him, all the irony and formal distance fled from his eyes, which were warm, and sorrowful, and full of understanding that ran deeper than Llesho understood himself.

“It’s all right,” Habiba said. “Mistakes were made with you, but no one will hurt you here.”

When the witch rose to his feet, he seemed more tired, older than he had just moments ago, and when he shook his head, Master Jaks looked stricken and guilty, though why, Llesho didn’t know.

“Maybe later, when we gain his trust,” Habiba said. “We’ll see what Kaydu can work with him, but he may never realize his potential.”

“Her ladyship will be disappointed,” Master Jaks pointed out, and Habiba sighed again.

“Before we make any decisions, let’s see what Kaydu can accomplish. Have you thought enough about her ladyship’s offer of employment?“

“I haven’t read the contract yet,” Master Jaks replied, with a bitter laugh. He gave Llesho a long, thoughtful look. “But, yes, I agree to her terms. Whatever they are.” He drew out the packet and opened it, took the pen Habiba offered, and quickly sketched the characters of his name.

Habiba smiled, gracious in victory. “I’ll have the servants put you in guards’ quarters after all. As your first duty, you will work with Kaydu on training.”

Master Jaks nodded. “I suppose I’ll have to keep her chain, now.”

“In time, you will find that it weighs lightly at the throat,” Habiba replied. “It is the chains you cannot see that bind you.

“For the boys, silver.” He held out a chain to Bixei, who set it around his neck as if it had been a gift, and not a symbol of his servitude. He did not offer the chain to Llesho’s hand, but settled it himself around the neck of the boy. And something in his eyes told Llesho that the last words to Master Jaks had been meant for him as well. Not the chains he could see, but the ones he couldn’t. Still, the one he could see was coming off just as soon as he was out of the overseer’s office.

“Bixei,” the overseer asked, “does the life of a warrior suit you?” and Bixei answered, “Yes, sir,” with speed and a bit of arrogance considering that he could not, at that moment, stand under his own power. “I am a fighter by trade, sir.”

“Perhaps not yet,” the overseer commented, “But with time. I think you have, indeed, found your calling. Take him to the infirmary,” he said to Master Jaks. “When he is healed of his wounds, we will decide where to put him.”

“Yes, sir.” Master Jaks managed to make his bow ironic. Llesho wished he could do that, and decided that he was in enough trouble as it was.

“As for you.” He studied Llesho’s closed face with a serious frown. “I have been led to believe that you will be pleased with your accommodations. You can train with the guards, and then come here for scribal training with the clerks. Once you settle in, we’ll see.”

Llesho didn’t like the sound of that “We’ll see.” Habiba had said nothing about sending him off to decorate his lordship’s bed or chaining him with the poisons in an alchemist’s workroom, which meant he was already ahead of where he’d been. With an effort, therefore, he subdued his panic, determined to wait and see where this next step would take him. In the meantime, he would learn all he could. But he seriously wondered how this put him any closer to his goal.

C HAPTER T WELVE

HABIBA summoned the litter bearers and instructed them to take Bixei to the infirmary. As they left the overseer’s office with their burden of objecting gladiator-in-training, a young woman with dirt streaking her nose and sweat beading at her temples squeezed past them in the doorway and bowed carelessly. Then she wrapped her arms around Habiba’s neck for a quick hug. Presently she released his neck, but held onto his arm while she gave Llesho a swift glance that inventoried him down to his toes

“So you found him,” she said, and grinned.

Llesho stared at her like she’d sprouted a second head, while the color rose in his face.

“Let me introduce my daughter,” Habiba said, “Kaydu, Master Jaks. I believe you have already met our young friend.”

“Yes, indeed,” she said. “I’d put my money on his skill in a blooding fight, but in a fight to the death, I would bet on his opponent even if it was my great aunt Silla.”

As a slave, Llesho realized he shouldn’t have been surprised that what seemed to be a courtesy introduction quickly turned into an analysis of his potential in the ring, but it rankled. He straightened his spine with a bit of the regal tilt to his chin he reserved for humiliating situations. Master Jaks shot him a warning glance, though, and he lowered his eyes, chastised. Until he decided for himself whether he was among friends or foes, he knew it wasn’t safe to give the sharp-eyed witch and his daughter any more to study about him than they already had. But Master Jaks rolled his eyes with a slight shake of the head. Too late, then. Habiba had already seen, and had already drawn his own silent conclusions behind sharp, hooded eyes.

“You think he won’t kill?” the witch asked his daughter, as if Llesho weren’t even in the room.

“I can hear, and speak,” Llesho reminded them. “If you want to know something, ask me.”

“Llesho—” Jaks began with a stern frown. Habiba raised a hand to stop the teacher, and turned the blazing intensity of his scrutiny upon Llesho for a moment before the naked calculation disappeared behind a blandly polite facade. He tsked a reprimand, but did ask, “Have you ever killed a man, Llesho?”

“No, but—”

“Then you don’t know how you will react when the time comes.”

“Neither does she—”

At Habiba’s silent command Master Jaks had stood a little apart from the verbal skirmish, his arms crossed over his chest as if to hold in check his own worried response to the questioning, but he spoke up now. “Kaydu is right, of course. At least, he would not kill in the games—I am sure of it.”

“We don’t train gladiators here, as you well know, Jaks. We need to know if he could kill in battle, or to save his life, or the life of his charge against assassins.”

Llesho would have objected again that they were still talking about him as if he weren’t there, but Habiba’s words robbed him of anything to say. Assassins?

“I don’t think he would kill at all, for any reason, now,” Kaydu continued her assessment. “Certainly not to save his own life—he’s been taught he’s worthless for more than half of it. Maybe, though, to save someone else, but it might destroy him if he had to do it.”

“You haven’t seen him work with a knife,” Jaks said. “He only knows one way to handle the traditional Thebin blade; I suspect he was lethal even at seven. And I’m not sure he hasn’t killed before, though he certainly hasn’t since he came to Pearl Island.”

“If he has, the memory is buried deep,” Kaydu said. “I saw no evidence of the knowledge of death by his hand when we fought.”

Without warning, Master Jaks reached back with his right hand and slipped a Thebin blade from a sheath at the back of his neck. He threw, his aim perfect and centered on Llesho’s heart. Instinctively, Llesho adjusted his stance, and when the knife approached, he had turned his side to it and stepped out of its way. In the same motion, he plucked the knife out of the air and sent it spinning back at the thrower. Jaks was prepared for the move, but still the blade nicked him midway up his bicep before embedding itself in a wooden beam in the wall. If Jaks had not moved when he had, the knife would have pierced his heart, the same target he had aimed at himself.

He clenched the fingers of his left hand over the wound in his right arm. “Den’s been working with him,” he said, “But he came to us with that and other equally deadly moves for close work in his bag of tricks. As far as I can tell, with a knife he knows only how to kill.”

Aghast, Llesho stared at the blood dripping from his teacher’s arm. Never, in all the weeks of Den’s instructions, had he ever drawn blood with the blade. He had become so secure in practice that he had stopped thinking of it as weapons training at all; he had worked the knife as a pure form, like prayer, to be perfected for its own sake. Killing was the part of being a gladiator that he hadn’t taken into consideration when he’d decided to follow this course to freedom. And Master Jaks could have paid with his life for the oversight. Llesho’s mind rejected the nagging insistence that Master Jaks’ thrown blade might have killed him instead. The teacher had known what would happen, and still, he had put his life in Llesho’s hands. And Llesho had almost taken it from him.

“I’m sorry,” he stammered, and clamped his hand over his mouth. “I am going to be sick.”

“Don’t!” Kaydu took his arm and ran with him out of the overseer’s office, to a corner of the house crowded with green growing things. “Now, you can go ahead—no one will see you, and you won’t be the first to honor these bushes. You don’t ever defile his house, though. It would take weeks to purify it again, and the time could cost us dearly.”

She spoke to him more as an equal now, and he wondered if he’d somehow won her respect under false pretenses. He hadn’t killed, and even the thought of doing so left him squatting in the bushes bringing up his tonsils like a baby. But she crouched beside him and shook his arm to get his attention.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed about,” she gestured with a shift of her shoulder at the bushes he had poured his graces out on, “I won’t fight with a man who could come that close to killing a friend and remain unmoved.”

Llesho supposed that she meant to comfort him, but her words had the opposite effect. He had come within inches of killing Master Jaks; only the fact that the teacher knew he would react with a deadly counterattack had kept Jaks alive. Llesho started to shake. His teeth clicked with the spasmodic clenching of his jaw that caught his tongue and bit to the quick.

“No,” he said, rocking himself to ease the trembling while his arms wrapped his belly, which threatened to turn itself inside out again. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“Shock,” Kaydu informed him, and dragged him to his feet. He managed to follow her, putting one foot in front of the other even though he couldn’t feel his arms or legs anymore. She led him to the door of the overseer’s office again, but did not go in.

“He needs something hot to drink, and about ten hours of sleep,” she informed the two men inside.

“Take him, by all means, and get him settled,” Hab-iba said. “I’ll explain his absence from the formal audience with the governor somehow.” .

Master Jaks said nothing, but he lowered his eyes when Llesho caught his glance. Before he’d hidden his feelings Llesho caught regret but not apology in the teacher’s eyes. From somewhere in the terrified fragments of his past, a Thebin teaching surfaced in his mind. “You can’t force self-knowledge. You can only make an opportunity for the seeker to find himself.” Was that what Master Jaks had been doing with that little trick? Making an opportunity for Llesho to know himself as a killer, trained to be so from the cradle— the murderer of a friend? He did not want this knowledge, refused to embrace it as part of himself. He did not, would not, kill. Kaydu had said it, and Habiba had agreed with his daughter. Only his teacher marked him as a taker of life. Only the man who had trained him, and watched him, and knew him.

If the pond beneath the bridge they crossed had been deep enough, he would have thrown himself in and drowned. The water was shallow and reed-clogged, however; he would only succeed in humiliating himself and ruining the only clothing he had. So he followed Kaydu to a low house on short stilts with a green curled roof and paper windows propped open to the fading light. The house had one room and little furnishing: four narrow beds, four chairs, a small cook-ing hearth gone cold in the afternoon, and an assortment of hanging baskets with the various linens and supplies of the household.

Two of the chairs were occupied when Llesho came in. Their occupants looked up from what appeared to be a cheerful argument over mending, and let out twin squeals of surprise and joy. “Llesho!”

Lling was the first to jump up and come to him, giving him a hug before wrinkling her nose. “You need a bath.”

Hmishi followed her to crowd around him. “They said in the cookhouse today that you bested Kaydu with the trident!” he said, and Kaydu cuffed him in the head. “Because I let him,” she answered back with a laugh.

“No, she didn’t.” Llesho managed a smile. “I taught her a thing or two of my own devising, and we called it a draw.”

“Actually, he won,” Kaydu contradicted, “But a little thing like victory shouldn’t impress you. It was a lucky break.”

Llesho knew she was teasing, that she meant his friends to know that he had conducted himself well in the arena, but he was too tired to trade banter, and the part of his mind that was processing the afternoon in the overseer’s office was demanding greater and greater amounts of his attention.

“I have to lie down,” he said. “Which beds are taken?”

“You are to have that one,” Kaydu said, and pointed to the bed farthest from the door and set away from the wall.

He nodded and shambled over to it, unbuckled his belt, and pulled his leather tunic over his head. Since he didn’t know where to stow his gear yet, he dropped it on the foot of the bed and followed after it, pitching into a darkness thicker than tree sap.

When he awoke again, the light had a sweeter taste to it. Morning filtered through the fall of weeping willow branches swaying in the breeze outside the window and painted dappled shadows on the walls. Even the air smelled of renewal. And soap. Someone had washed him while he slept, and covered him with a soft blanket. Off in the center of the room he heard the shuffle of sandaled feet, and the clink of crockery, the sound of water pouring, and then the pungent vapors of tea rising on the sunlight. When he pushed himself up on his elbows, Lling was squatting next to his bed with a worried frown crinkling her brow.

“He’s awake,” she called to her companion, and when Llesho croaked, “Tea, please,” she smiled and amended her news to, “and alive.”

“We wondered if you were ever going to wake up.” Hmishi handed him a steaming cup of tea, then steadied it with a supporting hand when it trembled in Llesho’s fingers. He waited until Llesho had drunk, then answered the curious frown with a relieved smile. “You’ve slept the day around, and another night. You didn’t even wake up when Habiba washed you. He’s the healer around here, as well as the overseer. He told us to let you sleep, that you needed to heal, though neither Lling nor I could see anything wrong with you on the outside.”

“I figured it must be something like enchantment of the deep,” Lling said. “It takes a healer to see it because the wound is so deep that it’s hidden on the inside. Habiba’s been in to check on you a dozen times at least, and Kaydu, his daughter, almost as often.” Lling’s voice seemed to etch the name of her rival in acid on the air.

Hmishi interrupted her then with a warning glance, and Llesho wondered if they had been told not to trouble the patient. “A man who said his name was Jaks spent a long time watching you from the corner of the room. He didn’t move much or say anything once he’d introduced himself, but he waited through most of the day, and a good part of the night before he finally left.”

“I don’t think he would have left at all,” Lling added, “except that we made it clear we were watching him as long as he watched you. When the moon had nearly set, he gave a funny little sigh—”

“He laughed at us!” Hmishi interrupted, remembering the indignity.

“—and he told us to get some sleep. Then he left.” Lling finished on a yawn.

“I expect he won’t be gone long,” Hmishi added. “If you want to get dressed, visit the outhouse before he gets here—”

“Tell us who he is—”

“I’ll help you up—”

Llesho realized that he was naked, and flinched when Hmishi reached to lift his blanket. “Lling, perhaps I could eat a fresh bun from the cookhouse.” He gave her a wan smile, and she was up, bouncing on the balls of her feet, almost before the words were out.

“I’ll leave you two to make Llesho decent,” she agreed, and Llesho knew he’d hidden none of his embarrassment from her. “But first, I want to know if we have a problem with that man Jaks.”

“He’s my teacher.”

Lling accepted that, though only Llesho knew how little that explanation answered her question. Jaks had his own agenda for Llesho, as, apparently, did the governor’s lady and his witch. How closely that tied into Llesho’s own task set for him by the ghost of his father’s minister, he did not yet know.

“First, clothes.” Hmishi brought his mind back to the present, holding out a pair of loose trousers. “We each have an extra set here. These are mine, but you can borrow them until they’ve fitted you out. The shirt is Lling’s; we thought it would fit, but your shoulders are bigger than they used to be. It looks like you’ll have to settle for the trousers.”

Llesho took them from his friend’s hand and slipped into them. “Outhouse?” he asked, and Hmishi pointed the way. When he returned, Master Jaks was waiting for him, and so was Habiba.

“You are looking better.” Habiba smiled at him, and Llesho wondered what he looked better than. He hadn’t been wounded, or sick. But he realized that the tight knots between his shoulder blades were gone, and that the tension had smoothed away from his forehead. He did feel better, though he could couldn’t quite figure out how the unclenching of muscles all through his body had been accomplished, or why the mere fact of it made him feel so much freer when he still wore the governor’s silver chain around his neck.

“Yesterday was rest-day,” Habiba continued, “But you missed it. Her ladyship wishes me to inform you that she grants this one day of celebration for, your safe delivery. Use it well.” He smiled then. “And give her ladyship’s announcement to your companion, Lling, when she comes in.” He left then, with a little bow in Llesho’s direction that drew a warning frown from Jaks and sent a pained look across his face. Hmishi turned to him in amazement. “I don’t get it,” he said. Llesho shrugged, unwilling to trust his secrets to voice and air.

Master Jaks watched the healer leave and then came forward himself. “Here in her ladyship’s gardens, you are as safe as you can be in Farshore Province,” he said. “But soon it won’t be safe anywhere. Learn what you can in the time you have, but if it comes to a choice, choose to heal.”

“Tell that to Kaydu,” Hmishi interrupted.

Kaydu picked that moment to enter the low house with Lling in tow and a white-faced monkey with soft brown fur on her shoulder. The monkey wore a practice shirt tied with a warrior’s knot and a tiny wizard’s hat upon his head. The monkey’s hands wrapped around Kaydu’s chin, and his long, supple tail curled over her opposite shoulder.

“He doesn’t have to tell me,” she said, “Habiba already has.”

The monkey shrieked and jumped up and down on Kaydu’s shoulder. Master Jaks gave her a pained expression, but ignored the monkey. “Will that stop you?” he asked her, and she laughed.

“Nope. I’ll push him until he cries uncle or until he pushes back. That’s my job.

“Oh, and by the way, I caught a spy.” Kaydu reached behind her and dragged Lling into the room, causing the monkey to screech again and lunge for Lling’s hair.

“I’m not a spy!” Lling twisted her arm out of Kaydu’s grip with a glare of special loathing for the monkey. “I was keeping watch. And you didn’t catch me; that horrible creature did.”

“No better a guard than a spy, to let Little Brother find you out!” Kaydu taunted.

“If you’d meant Llesho harm, I’d have killed you with my bare hands, and your stupid monkey, too.”

The monkey seemed to understand, because he screamed at her again and jumped up and down on Kaydu’s shoulder in a flurry of agitation. Llesho figured Little Brother still wasn’t safe from Lling’s wrath.

Kaydu studied her intently, then smiled. “This one will kill.”

“Kill?” Hmishi whispered.

    Kaydu raised a scornful eyebrow. “His excellency wasted his money on that one, should have left him to Yueh.”

“Not if you want anything out of me,” Lling warned, and moved to stand at Hmishi’s left shoulder.

Llesho didn’t understand the argument, but he knew where he stood on it. “Nor me,” he said, and took up his position at Hmishi’s right. “We are a team.”

Exasperated, Kaydu looked to Master Jaks for support, but he shrugged. “As familiars go, a pearl diver is at least one step up from a monkey.” A smile tried to escape his tightly pursed lips, and he didn’t work very hard to suppress it. With a last nod to Llesho’s companions, he ducked out of the house, leaving Kaydu and her monkey to level matching glares at Hmishi.

“If you screw up,” she said, “I will feed you to Lord Yueh’s men on a platter.” The monkey screeched his own disdain before leaping from Kaydu’s shoulder and scuttling away through the open window. Secure in having had the last word, Kaydu followed Master Jaks out the door.

To Llesho’s surprise, Hmishi was the first to collect his wits about him. “What have you got us into, Llesho?”

They were both looking at him now. Llesho considered telling them the truth: who he was, what Master Jaks thought he had done, and even the vow he had made to Lleck’s ghost in that terrifying hour in Pearl Bay. But he still hadn’t figured out why he was here, or how much any of those who wove their plots around him actually knew. So he threw himself on the bed, sat cross-legged with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and shrugged. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“Well, that’s just great.” Hmishi sat beside him, his own hands clapped to his forehead. Lling joined them, so they were like three monkeys sitting in a row. “But if you need anyone killed, it seems I am your girl.”

The two boys grunted their indignation. But none of them could think of anything else to say.

C HAPTER T HIRTEEN

WHEN the three friends were alone again with the promise of a day off, Hmishi turned to Llesho with a crooked smile. “Time for the grand tour,” he said. “Lling can protect us both if we come across any assassins in the cookhouse.”

Lling cocked her head at a superior angle, but followed Hmishi out of the wooden house. They wandered along a flagstone path that snaked between ferns and clumps of bamboo, winding beside one of the narrow canals that threaded the compound. First they took Llesho to the cookhouse. A lean tyrant with a stick in his hand ordered his undercooks with the precision of a military review while the Thebin friends raided his pantry for cinnamon buns. They found no assassins, though Llesho wondered about the cook.

Juggling the hot buns from hand to hand between bites, Hmishi and Lling showed their companion the practice yard, a small island cut off from the rest of the compound by dreamy pools of dark water adrift with water lilies and lotus blossoms. Two small footbridges gave access to the island, where a cadre of the governor’s guard were drilling spear exercises. Llesho recognized the forms, and his muscles jumped in sym-pathetic flexure to the grunts and curses of the fighters.

“Jaks taught us to do that one a little differently,” Llesho commented, watching the guards go through their passes, “though I work better with the trident than with the spear.”

Hmishi snorted around a mouthful of sticky bun. “Kaydu says I’d be better off with a rake and a hoe, but she’s trying to teach me trident and spear. Lling is the one you have to watch out for. She fights like a demon.”

“Only compared to you,” she parried with a sniff of derision. Then she asked Llesho, “What was it like to actually fight in the arena?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Llesho tried to sound more superior than he felt about his demonstration bout.

“No, we won’t,” Lling corrected him. “Only slaves fight in the arena. Since the governor’s house keeps no slaves, it fields no stable of gladiators.”

“I fought Kaydu in the ring myself,” Llesho reminded them, licking the last of the sticky cinnamon from his fingers.

Hmishi shrugged. “That was a demonstration bout. At some point she tests us all. I don’t think it is just a fighting test, though, or I wouldn’t be here. She’s a witch, like her father.”

Llesho hadn’t needed anyone to tell him that. But he wasn’t convinced about Her Ladyship’s good intentions. He lifted the silver chain he wore at his throat. “What about this?”

Hmishi shrugged. He didn’t need more explanation of Llesho’s question—he had a similar chain around his own neck, as did Lling. “Something to do with the law, and that we need a legal guardian or owner until we are of an age of independence.”

“There was a big argument when they first brought us here,” Lling added, her attention bent on catching a raisin that had leaped from her bun when she bit into it. “Her ladyship wanted an adoption contract or a guardianship for another couple of summers. The governor wouldn’t hear of it, of course. He made a few pointed remarks about dragging every pig farmer and dirt scrabbler from Thebin over his threshold to stain the honor of his house. Habiba was on the governor’s side for that one, and her ladyship seems to take his advice more often than not.”

“He’s the governor’s witch,” Llesho stated, referring to Habiba, who hadn’t seemed that frightening except in the power he wielded. “Even the governor’s lady must be afraid he’ll put a spell on her if she opposes him.” But he didn’t believe that for some reason. Nothing about the lady testing him in the weapons room led him to believe she would back down from anyone, not even a witch. Lling seemed to read his mind.

“I think maybe he’s her ladyship’s witch, actually,” Lling said. “She’s not afraid of him, that’s clear.”

She thought about the question for a moment before she gave a further explanation. “It is more like she understands that bringing her father’s position against slavery to Farshore is a political weakness that leaves her husband vulnerable. Habiba doesn’t like slavery either, but he doesn’t let that cloud his judgment. There is more going on than philosophy between them—get your mind out of the outhouse, I don’t mean that.”

Hmishi gave her a less than chastened nod. They hadn’t spent months in Markko’s back room, or a night in Lord Chin-shi’s bed while the lord struggled with the Blood Tide destroying Pearl Island, however. They hadn’t taken weapons testing under her ladyship’s cold eye, or watched Habiba kill a good man with sorrow in his eyes but no hesitation in his hands.

“Her ladyship is playing a deeper game than we know, I think,” he advised his companions, uncertain whether he helped or hurt them with the knowledge. “I suspect that Farshore doesn’t matter much in her plans at all. So I wonder why we do matter, and why we remain slaves if our freedom was important enough to bring three fairly useless pearl divers into the governor’s house guard.”

“Slaves in name only,” Hmishi objected. “His excellency showed us the papers, already signed, but dated for our seventeenth summers.”

He could have argued that the governor could tear up those papers as if they had never existed. When He thought about it, though, he had to admit that whatever plots her ladyship wove with her witch, she was still alive, and so was Llesho, which was more than he expected.

Markko would have burned Kwan-ti to death in the training compound at Pearl Island, and Lord Chin-shi would have let him. Now Lord Chin-shi was dead and Kwan-ti was gone, vanished like a god from the roadside. If Llesho had to choose, he’d take the witch over the poisoner. It still left them with the governor’s silver chains around their necks, however, and the governor’s lady laying her plots around them.

“Whatever we will become at seventeen, we are slaves now,” Llesho argued. “They can use us, or throw us away in the arena any time they want.”

“Not the arena,” Lling insisted. “Kaydu is training us to be soldiers. I heard her talking to her father when they brought you in; the governor bought the freedom of the man you call Master Jaks because he wants to hire him on contract to train us. Kaydu doesn’t have the time to train novices; she is needed to run the standing guard through its paces.”

She didn’t volunteer how she had heard this, and Llesho carefully didn’t ask, but let her distract him with a finger pointed at the fighters now divided into pairs and thrashing at each other with swords. Some of them, Llesho noticed, were women, though all were older than he and his companions. Their swords were curved differently than the one Llesho was used to, and they worked with a buckler on the weaker arm rather than a knife in hand, but the stances and motions seemed familiar, if combined strangely.

Curious, he rose from his place beside his friends and slipped over the narrow footbridge, sliding around the perimeter of the combat area, until he came to the thing he was looking for, a rack of swords and bucklers, and a smaller collection of knives. He picked up a knife and a sword, and danced them through their paces. He became so lost in the motion and the weapons in his hands that he did not notice the experienced house guards falling still around him. Finally, no sound could be heard in the practice yard except for the frenzied dance of thrust and parry and underhand, overhand, sidewise slashing strokes of Llesho’s knife.

He ended his exercise up on the ball of his right foot, his left poised like a crane about to take flight, the sword held high over his head for a downward penetrating strike while the knife flicked at the end of a curved sweep that protected his belly. Going still at the apex of his thrust, he blinked as the silence filtered into his consciousness. Six months ago, this sudden awareness of the rapt audience would have sent him scurrying in embarrassment for anonymity at the back of the crowd. Or, he would have pulled about him the dignity of his father, the tilt of his chin and the cold stare he had perfected by seven. Six months of training with Masters Den and Jaks had set new instincts into his muscles, however; he looked about him with the flinty challenge of a warrior in his eyes.

At first, it appeared that he had no takers, and he began to relax his stance. But then, Kaydu herself came forward, armed as he was with knife and sword and the same look in her eyes. She threw down the sword like a dare and he did likewise, shifting his stance, curving his spine to draw his gut as far from the reach of her arm as possible, his knife held in a horizontal line like a fence between himself and his foe. Then his wrist turned and his body shifted around the axis of his knife arm to present a narrow sliver of a target. His knife snaked forward, curved under her guard, and rested with the point wedged beneath her chin.

Kaydu stared at him, wide-eyed, while her knife hand opened of its own volition, to offer the knife on the flat of her palm. Llesho flicked his eyes once, groundward, and she let her knife drop. Only when she stood unarmed before him did he shift his own knife from its threatening position, but then her hand was flashing again, coming at him with a knife she had secreted in the cuff of her wrist guard, and his own knife flashed up, in reflex, and he would have severed the hand from her body and followed up on her throat without thought. Master Jaks stopped him—slapped his arm down and held on when Llesho would have twisted the knife into his teacher’s gut.

“Llesho!” Jaks called to him, and Llesho became aware that the silence had given way to a low rumble, that his friends stared at him with mouths agape, and that Jaks was gazing deeply into his eyes, as if checking him for fever. Then he realized that he still held the knife in his cramped fist, and he dropped it with a dazed grunt.

“She tried to kill me,” he explained shakily, fighting the urge to vomit.

“I was testing you.” Kaydu rubbed at her own wrist, shaking as much as he was. Jaks glared at her.

“I told you not to test him on the knife,” Jaks reminded her with a warning in his voice. “He cannot overcome the reflexes trained into him. You would have been lucky to lose a hand. He might not have been able to stop even after you were disabled.”

Kaydu studied him through adrenaline nerves. Llesho recognized the feeling; he had it himself. “What did you do to me?” he asked, stunned at what he had almost done, at what Jaks intimated he would have done. Jaks shook his head slowly. “Not our doing,” he said. “We couldn’t reverse the early training, so we honed it. Your knife battles will still be to the death, but we wanted to give you a fair chance of being the one standing at the end of them.”

“It seems you succeeded,” Kaydu said, more matter-of-factly than Llesho could manage under the circumstances. “Can you teach it to me?”

“I wouldn’t,” Jaks told her, “even if I could. And your father would have me killed if I tried.”

“Why?” She almost seemed to be sniffing at the scent of the secret, but Jaks smiled knowingly and shook his head.

“Ask your father,” he said, with a warning glance at the fighters watching them in their various stages of arrested sparring. She relaxed into a gesture of submission then, and bowed to Llesho with the time-honored formula of respect. “The teacher becomes the student.”

Llesho gave Master Jaks a look that told him he would not settle for nonanswers. But first, he had to ease the fears of the guards who had seen the fight, and would now hesitate to engage with him in his own practice sessions. “However,” he said, “the student handles the trident and the spear like a rake and a hoe.”

Somewhere in the crowd someone snickered, remembering the insult to the skills of the Thebin pearl divers. He smiled, with deliberate mischief in the grin, and bowed to the guards in their training class and to their teacher. When he looked around, Master Jaks had disappeared. From across the narrow watercourse, Hmishi and Lling were watching him with solemn, dark eyes. Llesho didn’t bother to smile at them—no point in it, since he had no consolation to give them, not even the secrets that would only have made them more afraid. With a last bow, he withdrew across the footbridge and rejoined his companions.

“Where is the infirmary?” he asked.

“That way.” Lling pointed to an airy building with white cloths blowing at the windows, down another path and across another tiny bridge. Llesho decided that, pretty as it was, he could quickly get quite sick of all the water standing in the way of a straight line to anywhere.

“Do you want us to go with you?” Hmishi asked, but he had taken a protective stance at Lling’s shoulder, and Llesho could see the hesitation, the stubbornness in the set of Hmishi’s chin.

It hurt that his old friends looked at him with fear and mystery in their eyes, but he could think of nothing to say that would make things the way they were before. He shook his head, and answered with an effort, “No. I just want to visit a friend.”

They did not ask him who that friend was, or how he came to have friends other than themselves in the governor’s compound, when he had been there just two days and had spent all of that sleeping. He wondered if they were afraid he only had unearthly answers for all their questions now, but watched them go without a word. Then he headed for the infirmary.

The infirmary reminded him of his brother’s clinic, and almost he could remember the feel of the cold mountain air on his cheeks and the awkward weight of a too-large broom in his hands. Adar had taken a very literal approach to serving his people. There were no mountains in Farshore, of course, and the breeze blew warm and thick with green and growing things. But each place showed the hand of a healer of the soul as well as the body. The floor and walls were pale, scrubbed wood, the screens left open to the light and the air. The bitter tang of healing herbs and the sweet smells of soothing medicines mixed with the smell of scrubbed wood and boiled linen. He half expected to see Adar himself at the polished workbench, and the reminder of how impossible that was pricked tears at the back of his eyes.

Bixei was sitting up in bed, Kaydu’s monkey asleep in the circle of his legs, when Llesho found him.

“There you are!” he said when Llesho poked his head through the open window. “I was beginning to think you were dead!”

“Not dead, just sleeping.” Llesho popped through the window, not bothering to look for the door, and flung himself at the foot of the bed. Bixei winced, and the monkey leaped away as if it had been shot from a springboard, screaming monkey obscenities down at them from his new perch on a crossbeam in the rafters.

“Sorry,” Llesho said.

“No big deal,” Bixei answered. “But you will have to apologize to Little Brother if you don’t want him throwing excrement through your window at night.”

“Manners like his mistress,” Llesho commented.

Bixei was holding onto his bandage protectively. After a moment during which Llesho ignored his questioning frown, Bixei shrugged. “Habiba has a woman apprentice and all her potions smell like flowers,” he complained, wrinkling his nose.

“She’s not likely to poison you, though, which is an improvement,” Llesho said, and Bixei laughed in agreement. “Her cures don’t hurt as much as Markko’s, that’s for sure. But she has a temper. I heard her peeling the bark off Master Jaks. He was meek as a babe while she blistered him with her tongue. When she was done, he slunk away like his knuckles were smarting. Wouldn’t give you up to her, though, no matter what.”

Llesho heard the question in the gossip, but he didn’t know what to say. “I was just sleeping.” Didn’t seem worth fighting about to him.

“Little Phoenix—that’s Habiba’s apprentice—said that you’d been badly mistreated, that you needed care. Jaks said you needed your Thebin friends more, that you would need them around you if you were ever going to feel normal and safe again.”

Bixei was watching him for a reaction. When he didn’t get one, he pushed a little more. “So where are they, your Thebin friends?”

“They’re around.”

Oh, hell. He’d kept it together, hadn’t thought about it or let it tear him down until now, but suddenly he couldn’t stop the shaking. He wrapped his arms tightly around his stomach and glared out into the infirmary while he fought the tears under control.

“What did he do to you?” They both knew Bixei meant Markko, and the months spent in his workroom.

Llesho shook his head, embarrassed enough for one day. He still wasn’t sure if they were friends or enemies, or if Bixei would believe him. After all that had happened to him, the months in Markko’s workroom were such a little thing. . . .

In spite of his effort at control, Llesho started to cry, tears falling silently and unstoppably down his copper cheeks. “I was afraid all the time. That he would misjudge the dose and kill me with his poisons, or that he wouldn’t, and I’d have to go through it all again, puking up my guts on his floor while he took notes on how long it took for my legs to uncurl from the back of my head.

“Sometimes, he threatened to burn me for a witch if I didn’t give him the healer Kwan-ti, but I didn’t know where she had gone.”

He never would have given the healer up to Markko. Not ever.

“Sometimes I wondered,” he said to the distance, as if he could see the past like a play acted out on the surface of his eyes. “If Markko himself did not invent the Blood Tide, for his own purposes. Maybe it was all a game to destroy Lord Chin-shi from the start and Kwan-ti never mattered to him at all, except as a name to burden with his own crimes. ”

“I was afraid of him, too,” Bixei admitted, offering what comfort he could, though the shock that widened his eyes made it clear he had never guessed how bad it was for Llesho. “I don’t think that makes either of us weak.”

The image of Lord Chin-shi dead by his own hand in the dirt of the arena filled Llesho’s mind with questions, and a warning. “I think that makes us smart.”

Jaks chose that moment to make his presence known at the same window Llesho had entered through earner. “I think you are right,” the teacher said. He rested his forearms on the windowsill, but did not pull himself through as his student had done. “Has Bixei been telling tales again?”

“Half the compound must be telling tales about your arguments with Little Phoenix,” Bixei returned. “You were loud enough that I’m surprised you didn’t wake Llesho out of his trance.”

Jaks looked uneasy. “Trance may be more than a joke, so don’t repeat it, please.”

Bixei hung his head, though Llesho wasn’t sure whether he did so out of submission to his teacher’s will or out of resentment. Jaks held out a bit of news as a peace offering: “Master Markko has disappeared.”

“Was he a spy for Lord Yueh?” Llesho asked.

“Yueh may think so,” Jaks answered, “but I doubt Markko considers himself a servant to any man. Lady Chin-shi has also disappeared. It is unlikely she still lives.”

Llesho knew what that meant. Lady Chin-shi had been Markko’s champion, against her husband. But Markko returned no feelings of loyalty to his patron, who would have become an inconvenience and an impediment to his escape once his mischief had been done.

“There’s my other patient. You have brought him to me after all, Master Jaks?”

A small golden woman with straight dark hair entered the infirmary through the door and tsked at the monkey chattering in the rafters. She wore the plain coat of an apprentice healer, so he wasn’t surprised when Master Jaks introduced her.

“This is Little Phoenix. She assists Habiba in the matter of cures and potions in the governor’s house.”

“I won’t hurt you.” She took his face in her hands and stared into his eyes. “I hadn’t heard that Lord Chin-shi used torture on his slaves,” she commented to the weaponmaster, who had dropped back as if he wished to escape this part of the conversation. For Llesho’s benefit, she added, “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.”

Llesho clenched his jaw around the black pearl caught between his teeth, but Master Jaks twitched an uncomfortable acknowledgment. “His lordship learned, to his regret, that one welcomes such as Master Markko to the bosom of his home at the peril of all he holds dear.

Llesho paid attention with both ears to the healer’s question and Master Jaks’ answer. He’d only thought of it as misery when he’d been going through Master Markko’s torment, hadn’t given it a name or known that it showed.

“Perhaps, if he is fortunate, he will carry the lesson into his next life, where it may do him some good— your tongue, boy.” She managed to scowl at both of them while tapping her foot impatiently. Llesho slid his tongue out, but kept his teeth as close together as he could. He opened wide when she took advantage of the small opening to insert a wooden wedge and press his mouth open wide.

“You’re lucky he has a brain or a heart, or can stand on his legs at all, Master Jaks. The monster has been feeding him poisons; you can see by the discoloration here, and on the roof of his mouth.” She gestured with the stick in his mouth, but withdrew it before Jaks could take a look. “Fortunately, he comes to us with protections of his own. Den’s work?”

Jaks shook his head. “Not until the very end.”

“Someone, then, has done you a favor. If he relied on the protection of his master, he’d be dead by now. I don’t know what Markko was thinking, but this boy should be dead.” Taking the stick out of his mouth, she nudged his chin up with the palm of her hand, asking Llesho neither for an explanation of Markko’s thinking nor for the source of the pearl between his teeth.

“He needs pure food and warmth and rest, maybe a tincture to leech the poisons from his bones. And I want him here, under observation, for tonight at the least.”

“No. I’m going home.” Llesho stopped breathing, brought up short as he surprised himself. He did not see in his mind’s eye the house he now shared with Lling and Hmishi when he said, “home.” Didn’t see the barracks at Pearl Island, or the longhouse where the pearl divers slept. He saw Thebin’s high, sere plain, its stunted trees twisted in the thin cold wind, and the snow, drifting to the roofs of the scattered farms and cottages. In memory he looked out at the city from the balcony of state at the Palace of the Sun. He saw temples to the gods of a hundred different faiths. The largest, devoted to the Goddess of the Moon and the symbolic home of his mother the queen, glowed in the rose of a sunrise spearing through the mountain passes to the east.

Somehow, Master Jaks saw where his mind had taken him. “It appears that Llesho has other plans,” he said, but the set of his mouth and the hard determination in his eyes promised more.

“And Bixei?” Llesho asked.

“That boy is going nowhere,” Little Phoenix complained. “He has dressings to change, and wounds that need healing.”

“We don’t know who we can safely trust here,” Bixei seemed to be weighing something in the way Master Jaks centered all his attention on Llesho. Finally he decided. “Somebody’s got to watch the pearl diver’s behind out there.”

So. Friends, then. Something settled quietly into place for Llesho. He gave the other boy a mock frown and a tart, “Keep your eyes off my behind.”

Then he grinned. With Bixei at his back, and his Thebin friends around him, he could ignore for a time the sense of powers closing in on him. “Girls fight in the governor’s army,” he said with glee.

“No boys?” Bixei demanded, even as Master Jaks was advising, “They are women. I’d suggest you remember that if you want to finish your training with all your parts in working order.”

Little Phoenix took pity on him. “Yes, Bixei, there are men in the guards as well, but you will have to ask for the first date.” She ruffled his hair affectionately. “The rules of the governor’s house don’t permit active guardsmen to take advantage of the novices.”

“Kaydu can take advantage of me if she wants,” Llesho volunteered just to make his teacher take that playful swat at his ear. Bixei looked doubtful.

Jaks seemed to understand his hesitation. “I’ve never seen a will that didn’t find a way,” he offered. Something seemed to pass between them then, assurance and warning, and acceptance of both. Then Bixei gave one sharp nod.

“All right, then. I’m ready to leave.”

Little Phoenix glared at Master Jaks, blaming him for the flight of her charges.

“Not a bit of sense if you put all your brains together. Well, take him if you must, but bring him back in the morning to check those wounds. Habiba will have all our heads if we bring infection into this house.”

“Yes, Mistress Little Phoenix.” Llesho knew when he had gotten off more lightly than he deserved, and he bowed deeply. Even Master Jaks at the window gave a respectful nod of his head.

Bixei could not bend without pain in his leg, but he dropped his eyes in an appropriate display of submission. With Llesho supporting him under one arm, he walked slowly back to the novice house they would share with the Thebin pearl divers turned provincial guards.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bixei said as he looked around the water gardens. Llesho didn’t say anything. He was thinking about his mother’s gardens, hardy plants that defied the winter and the hard land that ran with water only during the spring thaw. Jaks said nothing, but set his lips in a grim line. Llesho wondered what gardens the teacher saw in his head, and if he missed wherever his home had been before slavery and the arena brought him to Farshore.

“Where are you from?” Llesho asked his teacher, filling the silence. The question broke half a dozen taboos between slaves, but the infirmary seemed a place out of time somehow, and made many impossible things seem reasonable—like asking a weapon-master a personal question. “Farshore.”

Bixei gasped, but Llesho met his gaze levelly and said nothing more. Slaves came from three sources: conquest, prisons, and birth to a slave. Bixei had been born into slavery. He struggled to better his condition in the arena, but none of his actions revealed any fragments of a lost past. He’d assumed that Master Jaks, like himself, had been captured in a battle or raid, but Farshore had been a part of the empire since before Llesho’s grandparents were born. That left prison.

There were hundreds of laws that could lead to indenture or slavery, including treachery and treason. Unbidden, speculation tickled at Llesho’s mind. He looked at the six tattooed rings on Master Jaks’ arm, visible marks on his body that warned all who saw him of the six men he had murdered as an assassin. Her ladyship had shown no sign of disapproval when she spoke of Master Jaks’ kills. Nor did murderers find their way to the slave markets, being considered too dangerous. So how had the man come to be a slave and a weaponmaster? Why had Llesho trusted him from the first moment he set eyes upon him? That wasn’t even a question. He had known Jaks, not personally or for the skill that named him master, but by the uniform he wore and even the rings on his arm. The king of Thebin had trusted his family and his nation to this man’s kind, of course, and had lost it all—nation, family, life itself. Could Llesho afford to trust again?

Jaks said nothing, daring him to ask. Not today, he decided. Not until I understand what plots the governor’s lady is scheming and how a mercenary assassin turned weapons teacher fit into them. Knowing might make the asking easier, but Llesho thought it might just make the trusting harder. So he waited.

C HAPTER F OURTEEN

WITH Llesho awake, and Bixei added to the novice house, alliances shifted and clashed in ways that drove Llesho out into the night just to avoid the quarreling. Bixei, in his usual way, wanted to lord it over the house because he was older by a year, and bigger than the Thebins. Hmishi looked to Lling for direction. Lling wanted them all to shut up so that Llesho could rest, but Bixei wouldn’t listen to a girl even if he knew she was right. Llesho left them to bicker among themselves, hoping they’d come to some sort of agreement before he came back. Putting the din of his housemates behind him, he drifted down the flagged path toward the practice field, silent and empty at this time of night. Perfect for thinking.

The fight with Kaydu had shaken him. If Master Jaks hadn’t stopped him, he would have maimed or even killed her. It wasn’t her fault, or even her failure of skill. Kaydu, after all, had thought they were sparring, and did not fight as she might in a battle to the death. That mistake had almost ended her life. Until the fight with Kaydu, Llesho hadn’t realized how completely focused on killing his knife training had been. He had heard the warnings, but Master Den and Master Jaks both had taken care never to let him get the upper hand in their sparring practice. Just when he thought he was getting close to a win, one or the other of them would disarm him before he could do any damage. He hadn’t realized that the only follow-through he had was deadly. Jaks believed that Llesho had already killed. If it was true, he was glad he didn’t remember.

He shivered at the reminder, but something rattled loose in his mind in spite of his heartfelt prayer to forget: a guard, dressed like Master Jaks in figured leathers and a beaten brass belt and wrist guards, but with a bloody smile where his throat should have been. A Harn raider lay across the body, his eyes wide and glassy, Llesho’s knife buried in his back. The guard’s name was Khri, and he’d shoved Llesho behind a wall hanging that draped soft folds across a window overlooking the palace gardens. Beside the window was one of the fragile chairs scattered about the halls for the convenience of the old men and women who advised the king. Hidden by the draping of the wall hanging, Llesho had climbed up on the chair. He drew his knife from the soft belt where his scabbard always hung, and waited until the battle for the hall had turned its back on him. Then he’d struck.

At seven summers he hadn’t had the strength to stab a raider through his heavy clothing, not even with a knife as sharp as the Thebin blade he had carried. But the chair had slipped and sent him flying after the knife. With trained instinct, he’d turned the blade sideways and felt it slide between the raider’s ribs. The man had died, blood bubbling from between his lips. Too late to save Khri. Too late to save his father. Or his sister. Maybe too late to save his mother. The memory got all mixed up in his head with Lleck, floating in front of him in the bay, telling him to find his brothers. Not too late to save them, maybe.

When Master Jaks said that he had killed, Llesho had wanted to deny it, to separate himself from all the violence and mayhem that had marked his life, right up to the Blood Tide and Master Markko’s poisons and Lord Chin-shi, who had treated him kindly one night and then died at his own hand. With the new memory, however, had come the tactile recall of blood slick on his knife, his fingers, and the pure fire of rage that had lit his young heart. If he’d been older, if he’d been trained in all the weapons of a warrior, he would have raged through the palace with the wrath of the ages, cutting down the Harn raiders like wheat in a storm. After all these years, the desire to fight his way to the throne room and stop the slaughter returned to him so powerfully that he pulled the knife from his garments and slashed around him in a wide swath, imagining the necks of raiders in its path.

“Whoa.”

He stumbled, didn’t recognize the voice until Kaydu added, “It’s only me!” Then he dropped the hand that held the knife like it was made of stone.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and bowed low to her. “I didn’t know anyone else was out.”

“I’ll leave you alone if you want.”

He shook his head and Kaydu walked past him to the center of the footbridge that led to the practice field. Dropping to its wooden surface, she let her feet dangle almost to the water.

“Where is your monkey?”

Kaydu gave a soft laugh. “He would say that he keeps guard over my possessions, if he could speak. Actually, though, he is sleeping in the rafters of the guardhouse, enjoying his monkey dreams.”

Llesho thought it would be impolite to let his relief show. Little Brother had not, so far, made a favorable impression on him. He sat down next to Kaydu on the bridge, but kept his feet tucked up under him while he watched the carp come up and nibble at her toes.

“I’m not supposed to feed them,” she said, aiming a bread crumb at the head of the largest fish. Distracted, the carp chased after the bread, as did his fellows. Llesho said nothing, but took the bit of loaf Kaydu offered him and sent a crumb after the fish as well. Kaydu clucked at him and mockingly chastised, “You will make that old fellow fat as fat if you don’t stop that. I’ll have to dig him a new pond!”

“I can’t imagine your father saying such a thing!” Llesho chuckled in spite of himself.

“Nor can I,” she admitted. “He is more likely to say, ‘Actions have consequences, daughter. Decide if you can live with the last step before you take the first step.’ The governor, however, is more down to earth, and cares more about his fish than philosophy.”

“But you don’t agree with him?”

“Oh, his excellency is right, as always. The old carp will get too fat. And we will need to deepen and widen the pond to keep him.” She grinned at Llesho. “It’s a game between the two of them, carp and governor. I am on the carp’s side.”

“You are very strange,” Llesho pointed out to her. But he threw another bit of bread at the carp, making his own allegiance known.

“Comes of being the daughter of the governor’s witch,” she said, a reminder that he didn’t need, then asked him, “What were you doing when I came along?”

“Avoiding my housemates,” he admitted. “I am hoping that by the time I return, the trumpeting and beating of chests will have ended, they will have decided on a winner and a loser, and I can sleep in peace.”

    “You’re supposed to be getting rest, not running away from quarrels. Little Phoenix will have their heads if she finds out.”

“But she won’t. Find out, I mean. Will she?”

Kaydu studied his face for a moment before she shrugged. “Not from me. That isn’t what I meant anyway. What were you doing with your knife?”

“Remembering.” He pulled it back out of its scabbard and weighed the heft of it in his palm. “Master Jaks was right. I killed the Harn raider who murdered my guard. Khri was a lot like Master Jaks. Looked sort of like him, wore the same decorations on his wrist guards. No tattoos on his arms, though.”

“Master Jaks is a very dangerous man,” Kaydu pointed out.

Assassinations. He wondered if she knew. “So was Khri. I couldn’t save him, but he gave me time to save myself. Since that’s what he was dying for, I guess it was enough.

“I was only seven,” he added. “I couldn’t save anyone but myself. They assassinated my father, killed my sister, and threw her body on a rubbish heap. The rest of us they separated and sold. Still—” he held the Thebin knife up, watched moonlight play along its blade—“it could have been worse.” It had been, for Khri. “If the governor’s lady keeps her word, next summer I will leave here a free man, a warrior.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

Llesho blushed and dropped his head. For eight summers he’d kept his secrets to himself, but he couldn’t remember to keep his guard up around her. Now he’d said too much, and he couldn’t figure a way out of what he’d revealed.

“Nobody,” he said.

“I don’t think so.” She rejected that with a skeptical eyebrow, raised and waiting for a better answer. Too late, he remembered what Lleck had always said, that lips once opened could be shut, but the words couldn’t be stuffed back inside and forgotten. Words always had consequences. Seemed like the old minister had a lot in common with Habiba, the governor’s witch. Both were better at philosophy than practical advice, like what did you do when a pretty girl who could beat you at tridents set the words tumbling like rose petals offered at her feet.

“Once, maybe I was something,” he admitted. “Now just another Champion of the Goddess.” Even here in Farshore they knew about the Champions, half priest, half knight, and all mad, who wandered the length and breadth of four empires committing strange acts of chivalry and daring in the name of the goddess. It was considered a sin to send a Champion hungry from your door, but no one sent out invitations, and they were considered well rid of when they went on their way. Kaydu laughed, as she was meant to do, but she hadn’t stopped thinking.

“Thebin’s Deliverer,” she said. “That’s what my father calls you. Master Jaks tells him not to count his worms and call them fishes.”

Llesho’s head dropped. From the moment the governor’s lady had appeared disguised as a peasant in the weapons room at Pearl Island to watch him with the knife, his secrets had belonged to others. Perhaps not all of them, however. He met Kaydu’s serious gaze with one more dire. “Retribution,” he said. He slid the knife home and met her curious gaze, held it. “Don’t tell.”

“I won’t.”

She got up and left so quickly that he didn’t register what direction she had gone. With a deep sigh he did the same, turning toward the novice house with considerably slower feet. When he arrived, peace had descended; his three companions waited for him in the dull glow of the stove.

“We talked,” Bixei said, but Llesho noticed that Hmishi had a puffy wedge under his eye that was growing darker by the minute, and blood dampened Bixei’s bandages.

Lling had no signs of bodily damage, but she watched Hmishi with that short-leash expression that meant she wasn’t taking any more nonsense from the males in this group, not even from her own. “We figured out that you are the only thing we have in common,” she said, and he didn’t like the way she said it.

“I won’t—” he began, but just then Kaydu popped her head in the door, and followed it with a bedroll and a small bundle that chimed out of tune like the bell of a clapper wrapped in cloth.

“Who’s she?” Bixei asked. Hmishi and Lling were passing horrified glances as if they thought the others in the room couldn’t see them.

“I’m Kaydu,” she said, unrolling the bundle and taking out a wind chime, which she hung in the open window. “And I’m moving in with you.” The wind stirred the chimes, and she gave them a satisfied nod before spreading her bedroll on the floor by the door.

“I suggest we all get some sleep now. The morning will be hard enough on you babies.” She gave the Thebins a grin with too many teeth showing, but no one moved. Instead, they looked to Llesho, who stared belligerently back at them.

“I’m tired,” he said, and dropped into his bunk with a sulk coming on strong. He did not ask for this, did not want this, and didn’t even know why it was happening to him. But he’d be damned if he’d let worrying about it keep him awake. He closed his eyes with stubborn determination. For all his display of resting, however, he was the last left awake, long after the glow in the stove had dimmed to gray ash. Eventually, however, his body gave in to the orders his brain was sending, and he slept to the peaceful sound of the wind chime in the night.

Llesho spent a restless night haunted by the specters of Harn raiders drifting like shadows through the halls of the Palace of the Sun, their horsetail decorations hanging motionless down their backs. In his dreams, Llesho walked the same halls with blood on his hands, looking for water to wash them in. At each stop he came upon the body of someone he loved or knew— his mother, Master Den, his guard, Khri, his brothers— and knelt and tried to wash his hands in their blood, like a ritual that never ended. He did not know if he washed away his sins, or bathed in the guilt of surviving when all about him had died. Huddled at the base of the East Gate he found his companions, Lling and Hmishi, Bixei and Kaydu, all dead with the marks of their wounds drying in the harsh wind. The governor’s lady stood over them with a terrible fire in her eyes.

He moaned and pulled out of sleep to find his companions still alive and gathered around his bed in the chill dawn light.

“You were calling out in your sleep,” Kaydu told him. Little Brother had found her, and he lay curled in her arms, watching Llesho out of deep, dark, accusing eyes.

Bixei fixed a sharp look on him. “What language was that?”

Llesho glared at him. “I don’t know,” he said, “I was asleep at the time.”

    “High Thebin,” Lling said. She stood her ground, though her voice shook. Hmishi had already dropped to his knees, his head to the floor, where he set up a low keening that seemed to wrench from his throat. Even Kaydu bowed her head to him, though Bixei looked from one to the other with the growing anger with which he always met confusion.

“You must be mistaken,” Llesho objected. His Thebin companions would not meet his gaze. Kaydu twisted an eyebrow in a show of ironic disbelief, although he was actually telling the truth as far as he knew it.

High Thebin. The language of priests and the law. The language of his Thebin gods, of prophecy. No one used High Thebin for normal conversation, not even in the palace, though his companions wouldn’t know that. Llesho had forgotten all of it he’d ever known years ago in the pearl beds. Lleck, perhaps, would have continued his education in the high language, except that it had been too dangerous with a witch-finder in the longhouse and politics in the overseer’s cottage. He wondered what had dredged the language from the back of his mind, and didn’t like the only answer he could think of: the gods were angry that he had not yet rescued his brothers. Pointless to ask what he had said, though; no one else in the room spoke the language. Llesho was considering what the governor would do to him if he escaped the compound when a servant appeared and bowed in the doorway. For a moment Llesho wondered if his excellency, or his witch, read minds, but he shuddered the notion out of his thoughts. Coincidence.

“His excellency the governor wishes the presence of the young gentleman Llesho at his convenience,” the servant said, and waited patiently for Llesho to dig himself out from under his blanket.

“I will follow in ten minutes,” he assured the servant in a less than steady voice. The servant bowed again and departed with his message.

“I don’t know what you are thinking,” Llesho said to his companions, who continued to watch him as if he might sprout wings and fly. “But it will have to wait.” He pushed through them, grabbing his clothes as he passed, and headed for the outhouse and the baths in that order. Maybe he’d learn something in his audience with the governor that would clear up why he was here. And why he had suddenly started dreaming in High Thebin.

When he arrived in the audience chamber, Llesho saw that Kaydu had arrived ahead of him. She stood beside her father’s chair at the left hand of the governor.

Master Jaks stood a little to the right, watchful but not participating in the debate at the center of the room. The governor and his lady had abandoned their high platform seats of state for straight-backed chairs set in front of a large table on which maps were spread. The governor looked up absently when Llesho was announced and motioned to him to come forward and study the map.

“Tell us all you can about the Harn,” he said without any warning, and Llesho felt his mouth drop open.

“Bumpkin,” he chided himself, and stood a little straighter. He sneaked a sideways look at Master Jaks, who seemed impassively approving, so he took a chance and put on his “royal” mien: spine stretched, shoulders back, chin out, and rested his fingers splayed over the map. “What do you want to know?” he asked, and added, to qualify his answers, “I was very young when the raiders came, and I don’t remember much of what I did see.”

Habiba, the governor’s witch, spoke up then. “You will,” he said. Llesho caught his level gaze, and could not look away. This, he thought, is what it must be like to meet the cobra. With a purposeful gesture at the map, Habiba released him, and Llesho discovered that he could breathe again.

Her ladyship interceded with a mild reproof for the witch. She smiled at Llesho, and he trusted that less than he had the stern-faced judge she had shown him in the weapons room. “Start with what you know, child.”

He let out a deep sigh, ordering his thoughts, then pulled himself together again to address the company. “They are evil.”

He thought about the evil he had encountered since then, great evil in the slave market, and petty evil in Tsu-tan the witch-finder, and the evil of a grasping poisonous spider in overseer Markko, and they all shared the same feel, like slime on the eyeballs just from looking at them.

“They live out on the plains, in tents, and raise horses. They hate cities. They hate beauty. They measure their worth against each other—who has the most wealth, the most horses, the most kills. When they kill, they cut off the hair of their victim, and tie it like a horsetail, and sew it to their battle dress.” Llesho’s mind had passed out of the governor’s audience chamber at Farshore, and wandered again the halls of the Palace of the Sun, echoing with the terrified screams of the victims and the lust-filled cries of triumph of the Harn raiders, who shouted with joy and exultation when they killed. “I saw a Harn raider kill my lady’s first attendant in the throne room. He cut off the braid of her hair with its jeweled decorations still in it. Then he sat himself on the throne—” Llesho stumbled, almost said, “my father’s throne,” but kept that part of his secret. They knew he came from the palace, but perhaps they did not know on what pillow his head had lain. “He sat on the throne, stitching the braid to his chest while the lady herself lay dying at his feet.”

When he looked up, the governor flinched, but her ladyship met Llesho’s ravaged shock with the cold calculation he remembered. This time he found it comforting; she did not shy away from the horror of his story, but took it in, and measured his worth in his survival. He remembered the look on Khri’s face when his guard had tucked him behind the curtain with a warning to be still, and he found something of that same determined acceptance of the deadly battle in her ladyship’s eyes. Oddly, she reminded him of Kwan-ti for a moment. But Kwan-ti was gone, along with everything that had ever given the young prince comfort in exile, including now friends and shift-mates, driven away by the strange language that escaped him in his dreams.

Her ladyship acknowledged all his losses in the tilt of her head, but gave him no pity, and so he was able to go on.

“They killed anyone who opposed them and stripped the palace to the bare mud walls. Then they gathered together everyone who was left. The babies and the very old—anyone who could not walk to the slave markets on their own feet—they murdered in the square, and threw their bodies in piles like garbage. The rest of us they herded like their horses to market.”

Habiba slipped a quiet question into his reverie: “I thought that Thebin had no slave markets.”

Llesho nodded. “Thebin was free, ruled in the name of the gods of the earth and the goddess in heaven. We walked to Shan.”

Kaydu answered his claim with a snort. “That’s impossible. Shan is thousands of li from Thebin. No child could walk that far.”

“Not impossible.” Habiba set his elbows carefully on the edges of the map and buried his face in his hands for a moment, as if to wash away all expression. “Most Thebin slaves are seized out in the provinces and brought to market in carts or by river. To the Ham, they’re just property and receive the care necessary to bring a profit. They didn’t really care if anyone from the holy city survived to reach the market, however. The Long March served as a warning to others who would oppose them.

“We were ten thousand when we left Kungol, the holy city,” Llesho continued, “and fewer than a thousand when we came to market in Shan. Of those, the Harn decided half were unfit, and slit their throats. The rest of us, they sold, dispersed throughout the empire as a reminder as much as for the money, I think.”

“But you survived,” Habiba prodded, though he would not meet Llesho’s eyes.

“Yes. I survived.” Llesho kept his chin high as a prince of Thebin must, even when his heart was shivering into pieces at memories he could not bear. He would not tell them how, though he figured they could guess. Must have guessed, because the governor looked away, and Master Jaks had disappeared completely somewhere inside his own head. Kaydu still stared at him as if she did not yet believe him. Only her ladyship met his glance without flinching or looking away. It felt like he was falling into her eyes, swimming in depths as dark and hidden as the sea. She did not ask, and he did not offer, that he had lived on the lives of others, eating their food when his own ration would not keep a flea alive, and passed from hand to hand, carried when the guards could be distracted to other parts of the long trail of dying Thebins. He deserved no credit for surviving, buying his own life as he did each day with the lives of his people.

Her ladyship did not condemn him, though he saw in her eyes all the deaths his life had cost. “If you wish to be a general,” she said to Kaydu, though Llesho knew the message was for him, “learn this lesson. When everything is lost, down to the last hope of the soul, a good leader will lay down his life for his people. A great leader will continue to live, to give the people hope in spite of the despair that may have seized him.”

He would have told her that he had earned no praise for surviving for his people, since they had not let him die. But her ladyship set a hand upon her husband’s sleeve.

“Yes, dear.” He wiped a tear from his gray face. “That is enough for now, I think. You may go.”

Llesho bowed low to depart, but her ladyship detained him. “Meet me at the dinner hour, in the grove,” she said. “It is time you learned the art of archery.”

Llesho wondered if she meant before or after dinner, she seemed to read his expression if not his mind, because she smiled and added, “We will dine on peaches from the orchard.” With a final obeisance, Llesho took his leave.

C HAPTER F IFTEEN

HE grove where Llesho met with the governor’s lady smelled of peaches and ripe plums in the late afternoon sun. Since he had neither bow nor arrows, he came with empty hands and waited, watching the golden coins of sunlight dapple the grass beneath the trees. He did not wait long, however, before the sound of chimes reached him, and the lady entered the grove carrying an empty bowl. One servant came ahead of her, ringing the bells that heralded her arrival, and four servants followed. Two carried bows as proudly unbent and almost as tall as the lady herself, and two bore elaborately embroidered quivers, each with twelve arrows in it. The lady set the bowl on the ground beneath a tree and smiled at him.

“We will work for our supper tonight,” she said with a smile. Then she motioned forward the servants. “You will learn the Way of the Goddess with the bow.”

Llesho blushed a deep crimson. The Way was sacred to his people, the path of the goddess known only to her handmaidens and her chosen consorts. As a prince of the sacred blood, his own life belonged to the goddess, who might accept or reject him as her consort during the vigil celebration of his sixteenth natal day. That day approached, but he had not yet offered his manhood as husband in heaven, nor did he know how he would do so when the time came.

As an unfledged prince, he had no right to anticipate the pleasure of his goddess by learning her Way, and it shocked him to find the secrets of his own culture in a Farshore orchard. “I did not know the people of Farshore followed the goddess.”

“My lord the governor allows me a small shrine at the back of his gardens, as he wishes in all things to please me.” Her ladyship spoke as if this will to her pleasure came as her due. Her explanation left more questions than answers between them, not the least of which was how one who knew the sacred Way of his culture could offer the knowledge to him as if it were no more than gladiator training for the arena. Therefore, he bowed his head very low, and his voice shook with terror when he objected, “If you worship the goddess, then you must know that what you suggest is improper for me to learn.”

“The Way belongs to all people who believe,” she chided him, “Don’t let the ignorance of priests who crave their own power blind you to the truth.” As a slave, her remote glance reminded him, he had no right to question his master’s wishes.

“As you wish.” He bowed to her again, in proper submission, and offered his silent repentance to the dead priests of the Temple of the Moon, and to the goddess whom they served.

Her ladyship returned his bow with a nod of acknowledgment, and began her instruction.

“The bow is like the will. The man who does not bend, who cannot yield, stands alone and apart from nature. He is powerful only when he bends his will to the string.”

She took the first bow in her hands and pulled a coil of twisted gut from a deep pocket in her outer coat. “Choose your bow as you would choose a war-horse,” she said. “It must be strong and sure, and yet, must bend to your will.”

She showed him how to string the bow she held and then handed him the second bow and a second coil of gut. “Likewise, the man must bend his will to the bow, become the yielding string that subdues the bow to its flexible strength.”

Llesho fumbled the task. No bolts of lightning descended from the blue sky to strike him dead, so he let himself relax into the bow, bending his own soul to the will of the goddess as the bow bent to the string.

Next, her ladyship took an arrow from the quiver offered by a waiting servant and held it out on her extended palm.

“The point, or head of the arrow,” she said, making a graceful gesture with her free hand to draw his attention to the stone chip affixed to one end of the arrow, “must be cunning and sharp. Making arrow- • heads requires rare skill. You may develop the knack, but it is better to acquire them from a maker than settle for second best, even if they are your own. The true archer never pollutes his arrow with spell or potion, but trusts to the well-cut stone, the clear eye, and the strong arm.

“The shaft—” She ran a finger along the wooden length of the arrow. “It must be perfectly straight. Learn to carve your own, for only then can you be certain that your arrow will follow the flight of your heart. Be careful what prayer you carve into its woody flesh; your heart should be as straight and uncompromising as the shaft of your arrow.

“Fletching—” She held up the arrow between two fingers and directed his attention to the feathers at the nether end. “It stabilizes the arrow and gives it flight. Learn the language that the fletching speaks: hawk feathers for war; dove for peace. Fletching of swan’s feathers swear the true love of the archer.

“Think of the completed arrow as an egg. All that the bird will become in flight is contained in its birth. If the wings are unformed, the bird will not fly. If it is too easily buffeted by the wind and turned off its course, it will never reach its destination. If its beak does not harden, it cannot crack open seeds, and it will die. So you must ensure that each arrow is perfect, like the egg, so that the arrow’s flight will be perfect, like the bird’s.”

She did not demand that he learn to construct arrows on the spot, fortunately, but moved on to the next step. Putting the strung bow in his right hand and an arrow in Llesho’s left hand, she stood at his back and wrapped her arms around his arms, her hands around his hands, so that they clasped the curved wood before them with their entwined fingers. “You can fight the bow,” she said, “or you can be the bow,” And she fitted the arrow to the notch of the string and pulled.

“You can let the arrow go, or you can release your heart with the arrow, and be its flight—” He could feel her smile skim his ear as she let the arrow fly into the tree beneath which her bowl was positioned. And into the bowl fell a peach, freed by the arrow. “Try it.”

Llesho took his own bow in his hand, and set an arrow, pulling back on the string. He felt as if he were pulling against his own weight in the bow; it did not yield.

“You are trying to force the bow,” her ladyship corrected him. “You must caress it, not overpower it. Become the bow and find it in your will to want to bend. . . .”

She did not touch him, but her voice caressed him like fingers on his spine. Llesho took a deep breath, let it out again, and let the feel of smooth wood bow and taut gut string sink into his being. “Like the willow,” he thought, “bending before the storm, en-folding the stream—” and as he thought, he drew back on the string until the arrow poised on a line with his eye, and he felt the goal in his nerves and his being, the stem of a ripe peach high in the lady’s tree. Fly, he thought, and felt his spirit fly, spin unerringly out into the universe, twanging by the stem of the peach which fell as he passed it, reaching out to the top of his flight, and curving back to earth.

When he returned to himself, the bowl held a second peach, and the governor’s lady had fixed a sharp but approving eye on him. “Can you tell me where the arrow fell?” she asked.

Llesho nodded and closed his eyes. “There,” he said, and pointed to the place where the arrow had plunged to earth, its head buried in the ground, its fletching upright like a banner.

“Again?” she asked, and he nodded, unable to form thoughts into sentences while he lived the graceful curve of wood and the teasing tension of the string. Carefully he set the arrow, and studied the tree. Then he closed his eyes, pulled back on the string with two fingers bracketing his arrow—his heart—and let himself fly. His body did not relax back into itself until the peach hit the bowl with a soft thunk, and the lady at his side laughed.

“Tomorrow, on horseback,” she said. Llesho could not tell her that he had never ridden a warhorse, but only the shaggy, ill-tempered Thebin pony that had hated its caparisons as much as Llesho had hated the thin beaten plates of his child’s armor. They had been but poor reminders of an ancient time when the Harn would not have dared to cross the Thebin border.

He’d cross that bridge tomorrow—an apt metaphor, he realized, given the number of bridges scattered about the governor’s compound. Her ladyship walked over to the peach tree and sat beside her bowl of peaches.

“Tell me about Pearl Island,” she said, holding a peach out to him. He sat beside her, his legs crossed in front of him, thinking he might be falling under a spell she cast over the orchard. Then he remembered the cold, sharp expression she had worn when Master Jaks had tested him on the Thebin knife. He took the peach, therefore, but decided to remember that she was, after all, the governor’s lady, and a dangerous person by any lights.

“What do you want to know?” He bit into the peach, so sweet and ripe that the juices spurted on his chin, and he ducked his head and wiped his face with his sleeve.

She spoke casually when she answered, as if she hadn’t seen the sticky juice decorating his chin.

“Tell me about your life. How you came to be in training as a gladiator.” She did not ask him about Thebin, and Llesho was grateful for that. The governor’s questions had felt like poking at unhealed wounds, and he wanted to think of anything but the bloody body of his dead father, his sister bleeding out her life on a pile of refuse.

“I don’t know.” Llesho shrugged his shoulders, almost! as embarrassed at the question as at the mess he was making of the peach. “At first, I lived in the longhouse with Lling and Hmishi, and the others who worked in the pearl beds. We aren’t from the same part of Thebin, but we got along once Hmishi and I fought over who would be leader.”

“Who won?”

“Lling, of course.” He laughed. “She is smarter than both of us, and she fights dirty. And winning really mattered to her; she wouldn’t give up until we admitted she had won.”

“Good for Lling,” her ladyship said softly, but with real admiration in her voice. “What happened to the pearl beds?”

Llesho shrugged, but he felt his entire body grow cold. “I don’t know,” he said, “I was gone by then, into the training compound to be a gladiator. Sometimes, when a diver stays below too long, he begins seeing visions, If he survives the first time, he is likely to do it again, and again, trying to get the visions back, until he drowns—”

“And you saw visions?”

He nodded.

“And were they the figments of an oxygen-deprived mind?” she asked him, and he stared at her, afraid to answer the question. She would think he was mad, or a witch, if he gave her the truth, and know he was lying if he didn’t. While admitting to being a witch didn’t seem as deadly in the governor’s compound as it would on Pearl Island, he was no Habiba, and didn’t want her getting funny ideas about him. She honored his privacy, or accepted his silence for her own reasons, and brought him back to the original question: “Even in the training compound, you must have heard rumors about the pearl beds.”

When she looked into his eyes, Llesho remembered what she had said about the feathers on the arrow: her glance pierced him, like a hawk, and he wondered what war he had stumbled into.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Lord Chin-shi, they said, was afraid of witches. Master Markko, the overseer, convinced his lordship that our healer, Kwan-ti, was a witch, but she disappeared before he could gather evidence to prove any crime. Soon after that the Blood Tide came and killed everything in the surrounding sea. Master Markko declared that Kwan-ti had created the Blood Tide to punish Lord Chin-shi for his actions against her.”

“Kwan-ti disappeared before the Blood Tide?”

Llesho nodded. “The Blood Tide came soon after. But I never saw her commit an evil act. I don’t think she was able to do evil, even to save herself.”

“I think you are right. But if not Kwan-ti, who ruined Lord Chin-shi with the deadly tide?”

“Did it have to be a person?” he asked in return, “Might it not have been a freak of the sea itself?”

    “No, Llesho,” she answered carefully, and he wondered if she thought the truth would frighten him or turn him against her. “The sea behaves in certain ways, according to its nature and the seasons. To create the Blood Tide, someone had to change the nature of the very sea—to poison it with devouring life that does not occur naturally in these waters—where it touched upon Pearl Island. Who do you think would have wanted to do something like that?”

Llesho remembered Lord Chin-shi’s chambers, his lordship’s pressing questions and his own regret that he had no answers to give. He had fallen asleep while Lord Chin-shi struggled through the night to find an antidote for the poisoned bay. Lord Chin-shi had failed, losing everything, and had died by his own hand. Llesho could not help feeling that the failure was somehow his own. “I think Lord Chin-shi believed I might be a witch, or that if Kwan-ti was truly a witch, she had taught me her spells, and that perhaps I could stop the Blood Tide,” he said. “But I’m not, and I couldn’t.”

“You could have, Llesho,” she said, and touched a tentative hand to his cheek. “You are the favored of the goddess, had you but known to entreat her.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, denying it to himself as much as correcting her ladyship’s misunderstanding. “My only talent seems to be surviving disasters; I can’t do a thing to prevent them, and for all I know, something about me calls disasters down on my head. But I don’t have anything to do with it. It just happens.”

    “Surviving is perhaps the greatest talent of all, child. But if not Kwan-ti, who killed Chin-shi’s pearl beds?”

Her explanation of the tide had shed a different light on Lord Chin-shi’s fall. If fate and the sea had set the plague on the oyster beds, the worst any of them had done was let it happen. He knew that Kwan-ti had not seeded the plague when she left, but she might have been healing the bay, holding off disaster until staying even a day longer meant her death. Freed of her restraining touch, the poison had quickly taken hold. And Llesho knew about poisons.

“Master Markko,” he said. “His workroom smelled of poisons and rot, and dead things.” He truly didn’t want to think about Markko, or the workroom where the overseer had chained him to the floor. He didn’t want to see Lord Chin-shi dead in the sand of the arena, either, but that had happened, too.

“I think Lord Chin-shi was himself a witch,” Llesho ventured, “but he couldn’t find the cure for the pearl beds.”

“Not a witch,” the lady corrected him, “but certainly an alchemist, which is much the same thing and probably what your Kwan-ti was, more or less.” She stood up then, and handed the peach bowl to a servant while Llesho jumped to his feet.

“Master Markko has passed to Lord Yueh, who held many of Lord Chin-shi’s debts,” she added.

It made sense, all except for why she was telling him, which he asked her pointedly.

“Because you need to know,” she answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, though he couldn’t imagine why. “I hope we are not already too late.”

She left him there with one of the bows, and a quiver of arrows. He watched her go, unable to drive from his mind either their conversation or the fear that seemed to grip her at the last. Too late for what?

In the weeks that followed, the novices trained together in weapons and in unarmed combat. Her ladyship herself led them in archery on many days, and Llesho found that he excelled at the weapon. As he grew in skill he found his thoughts moving more deeply and more slowly, whereas his reflexes reacted like lightning. Kaydu taught a sharper, faster, dirtier form of hand-to-hand than Master Den had done, and she included deadly moves that grew out of forms that assumed a larger opponent with intent to kill.

Master Jaks took up the teaching of armed combat without the rules of engagement that governed the arena, but that was suited to working in pairs and groups to attain one goal. Extraction and infiltration became a part of the training, skills that no gladiator would need, but that turned them into soldiers capable of moving at the forefront of a massed troop, or running and fighting in small bursts of guerrilla action. Or working as assassins in the enemy camp.

It seemed natural that the novices should train together. They soon learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and forged a purpose with Llesho at its center. Kaydu joined them when she could free herself from her own teaching duties, acting as student and as teacher under Master Jaks’ instruction. Llesho grew confident in wielding his small cadre as a force, sending Bixei to the front with a glance when strength and intimidation might avoid bloodshed, unleashing Kaydu for stealth attacks; she could move soundlessly through dry reeds, and her combat skills fit her like her skin. Lling he begged with his eyes to talk them out of trouble, or to hold ground if talk did not work.

Hmishi, it turned out, was the fiercest fighter of them all, but only if the life of a companion was at risk. In practice his moves were hesitant and laden with apologies and the wounded pain of doing harm to others. When, in exasperation, Master Jaks pulled him in front of the troops at practice and told him to fight or die, Hmishi had stumbled and mumbled, absorbing the jeers of the guards and the curses of his teacher. Then a knife caught him in a deep downward slash across the cheek, and he realized that Master Jaks had meant every word. They weren’t playing at tridents with their muck rakes anymore, and Master Jaks would kill him dead where he stood rather than let him be a burden on his team.

Kaydu said later that Hmishi would probably have died rather than hurt his teacher in that artificial setting of make-believe combat, but Llesho had refused, utterly, to lose a friend to that sort of game. He would not let them make enemies of each other, and he knew he could never trust Master Jaks again if Hmishi died at his hand. So he lunged at the master, latching on to his knife arm, and clinging to it while he shouted to Hmishi to run, to get away. Master Jaks had shaken Llesho loose and turned on him, a dreadful light in his eyes. Growling deep in his throat, Hmishi had attacked with a savagery that almost took the master down before he tumbled out of the way and set himself for defense. They battled then in earnest, Master Jaks’ years of experience and cunning matched against the force of Hmishi’s will focused on the death of his opponent. Master Jaks would have died in that battle if three hefty guards had not risked Hmishi’s blade to knock him down and hold him while a fourth disarmed him.

“I don’t care who you are,” Hmishi had screamed, straining against the arms that held him down. “If you hurt him, I will kill you. Anywhere. Anytime. I will kill you.”

For Llesho, time slowed to a frozen agony. Nothing moved but the blood dripping from the cut on Hmishi’s face, and from another, shallower mark under Master Jaks’ ear. Llesho thought he might walk unseen among them, like a wraith among mortals, tasting their blood and choosing who would live and who would die. He wanted to kill Master Jaks himself then, for what they both had done to his friend. But Master Jaks was watching Hmishi with relief touching the edges of a tension that had become a part of him over the weeks of training.

“You’re ready,” he said. “Have your face seen to, and be prepared to march. All of you. We leave for Thousand Lakes Province in the morning.”

Ready. Tomorrow would be Llesho’s sixteenth birthday. In Thebin, he realized, he would be going to his purification rites now. The eve of his natal day would have been spent in silent meditation and prayer, fasting and offerings of incense and fruit in the Temple of the Moon. His brothers had told stories of how the scent of the fruit would come to fill the world as the night lengthened and their hollow stomachs complained. And he’d heard the servants laughing at the bites in the plums they found after Adar passed the eve of his sixteenth birthday sampling the offerings.

But the jokes and the ceremony were only the surface of the rite. During the long night, the betrothed prince became the true husband of the goddess in all ways, and received from her hand the bridegroom gifts of the spirit that would mark his soul forever. Those gifts brought with them powers of sight and the shared dominion over the living realm. Or the goddess would pass over him, and he would leave the temple in the morning changed only from a boy to mortal man.

Llesho had no expectation that the goddess would choose him as her husband, but he did not want to enter into this new phase of hardship in his life still a boy. Tonight, therefore, he would observe the rites of the god-king to prepare for both journeys: into manhood, and then into the unknown. He left his companions on their way to the cookhouse, and followed one of the compound’s many pathways, over several of the ethereal bridges, to the small shrine deep in her ladyship’s gardens. Bowing low to the gods who lingered about the place, he drew his Thebin knife and lay it on the altar, the length of the blade stretching from knee to knee of the seated goddess. With an abject kowtow that she might accept him in his unwor-thiness, Llesho settled himself in the proper form for meditation, and began his long watch alone.

C HAPTER S IXTEEN

IT'S the darkness settled around him, Llesho’s doubts seemed to curl themselves in the corners of the shrine, peeping out at him with hot, fierce eyes. The priests were dead, none left to call the goddess to her husband with their prayers, and her ladyship’s shrine was small and far from the gates of heaven where the goddess dwelt. How would she find her betrothed, how would she even know to look for him, so far away and with none to herald his time?

With an effort he set aside his misgivings. Only rats lurked in the corners, attracted to the cool shelter of the stone altar. Like them, he must put his life in the hands of the goddess and trust to her decision. Sitting cross-legged in front of her stone image, Llesho had lost himself in the silent meditation of his past life that made up the long night of passage for a young man entering manhood. His mother in her library in the Temple of the Moon, holding him on her lap, and his father, sitting in judgment on his throne in the Palace of the Sun, the two sides of heaven always in each other’s gaze across the city. The Long March, and slavery, Lleck speaking to him from beyond the grave, and Lord Chin-shi desperate to heal the dying sea, and spilling the blood of his regret upon the sand. Her ladyship, watching him at weapons, questioning him at the side of her husband, teaching him the forbidden secrets of the Way.

Sinking deeply into his own mind, he sifted through the details of his life. Where had he failed, and where had he striven to serve with all he had to give Her whom he worshiped? In the balance, did he prove wanting, or would the goddess cast her favor upon him? At midnight he was disturbed by the presence of another in the shrine: her ladyship, come with gifts of fresh peaches for the goddess.

“Peace is the most precious gift the goddess may offer us,” she said, holding up a piece of the fruit so that it glowed a rich gold in the candlelight: “Some say it is the one gift that man only appreciates when looking back in longing after he has rejected it. Others say the gift has no value except as a reward for strife. What do you believe, Llesho?”

She offered the peach and he took it, considering its soft richness, so unlike the cold white woman who offered it. “I believe,” he said, “that each gift is a test, and with each test met we go a little farther upon the Way of the Goddess. And we cannot know what the purpose of the gift or the test is until we reach the end of the Way.”

“Even peace?” she asked him.

Remembering the Harn descending upon Thebin, Llesho nodded his certainty. “Especially peace,” he answered.

Her ladyship studied him for a long moment, with eyes as sharp as Llesho’s Thebin knife. Then she let out a sigh, so gently that Llesho almost could believe he hadn’t heard it at all.

“Know the goddess loves you,” she said, and rested a cold hand over his heart. Llesho bowed his head, and heard but did not see when she stood and departed.

Alone again with the night and the rats with their glowing red eyes, he tried to settle into his meditations again, but the lady’s words had disturbed him. The goddess might love him, as she loved all that lived within her dominion, but the night grew long, and she did not come.

In the deepest dark, when even the moon had set, meditation turned to memory and turned back on itself to mingle past and present in troubled patterns. He was grown, as now, but at home in the holy city of Kungol, alone and lost in the twisting mazes of the Temple of the Moon. From every wall remembered images of the goddess smiled down at him, but now they wore the face of her ladyship, the governor’s wife. Somewhere in the distance, he heard his mother cry out, but when he tried to reach her, her cries seemed to grow more distant instead of closer, and the images on the walls seemed to grow colder. Through the dream-laced memories wove the screams of the dying, and the smell of smoke from the burning marketplace in the city.

“No!” His own voice broke the self-imposed spell of his meditation, but the sounds of pain and anger remained. The shouts of the watch summoning the guard and the slap of running feet were real. Here, now, in the governor’s own gardens, it was happening again.

Llesho rose awkwardly to his feet, knees and ankles protesting the hours spent in their strained position. Grabbing his knife from the altar of the goddess, he hobbled to the door of the shrine.

Fire glinted from the rooftops of the wooden houses of the compound closest to the road. A soldier wearing the neck chain and wrist guards of the governor’s house guard ran by, stopping long enough to push him back from the open door with a hand to his chest.

“Get back inside,” she ordered him. “We’re under attack!”

    “I can fight!” Llesho returned, and raised his knife to show that he was armed. An arrow whipped past his ear and he ducked as it embedded itself in the thick lintel.

“Find your squad, then,” she said, and ran to join the fray.

Llesho slipped out of the shrine, keeping low, his knife held lightly in his steady fist. This time he was not a child; he had both the skills and the strength to defend himself. But the guard had been right: he had to find his squad. Master Jaks had trained them to fight as a unit, and he felt naked without his friends at his side.

Crouching in the shadows of the reeds and low plant life that bordered the lawns and canals, he made his way back to the house he shared with the other novices. Before he could pull himself over the threshold, however, a voice he dreaded sounded nearby.

“Search everywhere—I want the Thebin!” Overseer Markko’s insistent shout came from a more solid mass of shadow just steps away, silhouetted by the rising flames. “He’s here somewhere!”

    Llesho froze, paralyzed by that voice. Master Markko had gone to Lord Yueh at the death of Lord Chin-shi, but what had driven Yueh’s army to attack the governor’s compound? Why was Master Markko looking for him? To kill him outright, or to throw him into chains again? What did the overseer, or his new lord, know or suspect about Llesho’s true identity that they would seek him out in the midst of battle?

Llesho had no time to ponder the answers to his questions; the sounds of fighting were getting closer. Suddenly, a hand snaked out of the window of his house, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him into the large room. Bixei. Lling and Hmishi stood back to back in the center of the room with their knives drawn. Kaydu was missing.

“Where have you been?” Bixei hissed.

“The shrine in the garden,” Llesho hissed back. “Where did you think I was? Opening the gates for Lord Yueh?”

Bixei didn’t have to say anything; it was clear on his face that the accusation shocked and offended him. “What, then?” he asked.

They looked at each other, and it was clear they each had unanswered questions. Lord Yueh’s armed guard wouldn’t be tearing the governor’s compound apart to find a common slave, but they had all heard Master Markko order his troops to look for Llesho.

“Who are you?” Bixei pushed for an explanation in spite of the danger they were in, “What does Markko want?”

Llesho uttered a single Thebin curse. He didn’t want to know what kind of rumors had spread. “We can talk about this later.” If there was no later, explanations wouldn’t matter anyway. “If you want to live, we are going to have to fight or run now.”

The attack had come through the main gate, the only way in or out that Llesho knew. “Where is Kaydu?”

Little Brother chose that moment to swing from the roof by his tail and pop through the open window with a cluttering rebuke for their tardiness. Their young instructor followed him. “I’m right here. Let’s go. Jaks has horses waiting.” She disappeared again.

Llesho ran for the window and would have been first out, but Bixei held him back. “In case of ambush,” he said, and darted out the window after Kaydu. Llesho followed, and turned around as Lling, and then Hmishi spilled out of the novice house. Kaydu said nothing, but gestured for them to keep low as they crept along the side of the house, hidden by the reeds and bushes.

Kaydu moved so silently that Llesho was surprised to hear the clatter of heavier feet when Bixei followed her over the footbridge. He tried to imitate Kaydu’s silence with no success, but had to turn around to be certain Lling was still behind him. She was, and Hmishi next to her. Hmishi stumbled and came up again with a sword in his hand. Already a battle had passed through here, leaving its scattered dead and their weapons behind. Lling hunted around until she, too, had a sword in her right hand, switching her knife to her left. Bixei gathered up a spear, and a short sword which he wedged into his belt.

Llesho remembered his own knife in his hand, and realized—damn!—he’d left his scabbard by his bed, along with the few possessions he had acquired while at the governor’s compound. Once again, he was starting out with nothing. But he was starting out alive. Llesho scrounged among the dead as well, and found a short spear that he took up in his free hand. He had begun to think that they would make their way clear when a sound to his right was followed by the flare of torches.

The oiled parchment screens of a small house burst into flame. A shout rose from the fire, and shadows formed around it, resolved in the light into men on foot. Yueh’s men, dark against the fire that backlit them, had seen Llesho’s squad. Soldiers ran toward them brandishing weapons. Bixei caught the first across the ribs with the staff end of his spear, turned the long weapon quickly and finished his man with a lunging stab to the breast.

Lling and Hmishi slid to either side of Llesho, swords poised high, knives pointed low. They joined the battle with a flurry of clashing swords, vanquishing their attackers, who fled with screams on their lips that they had been bested by demons. Llesho gave a grim laugh, but did not count his victory too soon. A horse loomed out of the darkness. Its tall rider urged the beast up on its hind legs to lash out at the Thebins with its sharp front hooves.

With an enraged howl, Hmishi leaped to the defense, driving his sword into the rider. The sword passed through the man, who tossed him aside and laughed with the sound of ice breaking in his voice. Master Markko—Llesho recognized him even in the dark—bled from no wound, though Hmishi’s thrust should have sliced him in two.

“You are mine, Thebin!” The magician pointed a short spear at Llesho, and cold terror pierced his heart. Frozen, he could not have moved, except for the warmth radiating from the short spear he held in his own hand. He raised the weapon between them, and it seemed to glow in the light of the silver moon. “Never again, witch!” he shouted, and Markko’s spear burned and shattered. The magician growled his wordless rage and brought his horse around to attack, but the animal bucked and fell, screaming, with the point of a spear buried in its flank.

“Move!” Bixei shouted, and Hmishi was pushing him, and Lling was pulling her knife out of the gullet of a soldier who stared up at the sky with blank, dead eyes.

Kaydu ghosted up to Llesho and whispered, “This way—Jaks has the horses.” They had entered the peach gTove, the smell of the ripe fruit cloying over the sickening reek of blood and burning flesh and sweat and fear. Llesho followed the direction she pointed, moving deep into the darkest corner of the grove.

Around them, troops were mounting up, too many for Llesho to judge in the dark, but it felt as if the whole household must be saddling to fly. Shadowed by a thick growth of trees and hedges, Master Jaks awaited them with their mounts. Fortunately, their warhorses were intelligent and trained to battle; the creatures stirred restlessly at the smell of blood on the hands and clothes of Llesho’s squad but did not balk when they gathered their reins and mounted. Llesho noticed with satisfaction that someone had strapped his cavalry-style short bow and a quiver of arrows to his saddle. The governor’s lady had been as good as her word, and his squad could ride now, and shoot from the saddle as well as on foot. They might need to before this night was out.

Kaydu took the lead of their small party, finding their place at the center of a longer train of mounts and pack animals moving quietly in single file through the grove. Llesho allowed his horse to fall in step behind her, with his three companions following. When he saw where they were heading—toward a place of thicker shadows in the garden wall—he wondered if it were a trap.

“Master Jaks!” Llesho turned around in his saddle to throw a whisper into the black on black murk, but he received no answer. There had been no sixth horse waiting; Jaks was staying behind. Llesho smelled blood, and saw the face of his teacher on the dead corpse of his bodyguard, and he knew that Jaks would die if he did not come now. Unthinking, he communicated his distress to his horse, which quaked under him in fear of the night and its shadows, and the dark emotions of its rider. Llesho rested a calming hand on the horse’s neck while his thoughts spun in turmoil. He knew right to the core of his being that the memory-vision was true. Time itself skittered out of control, the past and future colliding in the vision of Master Jaks, dead. The house guard could not hold the compound against the fires of the attackers, and Master Jaks would give his life to hold the attackers at bay for their escape.

“I’m not through with you yet,” he muttered to himself. Turning his mount out of the column, Llesho headed back toward the low fires that marked where graceful houses had dotted the watery space.

“Where are you going, boy?” An outrider caught his horse by the bridle and stopped him, staring hard into his face until it registered who Llesho was. “The midnight gate is the other way!” He turned his horse around to lead Llesho back the way he had come, but Llesho pulled back on his reins to bring his horse to a stop.

“Where is Master Jaks?” he said, using his best imitation of his father.

The outrider jerked his head in the direction of the burning compound but continued to urge Llesho’s horse toward the bottom of the orchard.

Llesho dug in his heels and refused to be moved. “I am not leaving without him.” He kept his jaw firm and hoped the man couldn’t see the shaking of his hajids in the dark.

“The lady will have my head,” the outrider muttered, but he turned his horse. “He went this way— I’ll take you.” They rode back, into the chaos and the fire, toward a tight knot of grunting bodies and clanging swords. The fighting was on foot and the outrider made quick work of it. He swept into the fray with a blood-curdling battle cry, cutting down one attacker and sweeping another under the hooves of his charger. Then he angled his horse between Master Jaks and the fires lighting a hundred battles like the one he had just fought.

The outrider slipped from his horse and held out the reins. “His excellency wants that boy out of here, and the boy says he won’t go without you.” With that he was gone, lost to sight in the fray.

Jaks lifted himself into the saddle, swearing softly under his breath. “Now, Your Highness?” he asked. The words dripped with sarcasm, but even so they served as a reminder to both of them.

Llesho tilted his chin at the exact angle to receive his title, letting Master Jaks know in the doing of it that he read all the levels of anger and submission in his words. If they were going to use him for their own secret agenda, however, they would have to accept him at his rank, and not as just another stone in their game. He would not go quietly to anybody’s slaughter.

Master Jaks dropped his head. “I know,” he said, and Llesho thought that maybe he did, too.

Together they entered the shadows at the bottom of the peach grove, and passed through a hidden gate that opened to the country northwest of the city. Outriders galloped up and down the line now, and when the last of their party had come through the gate, the order to ride hard came with the slaps of the outriders on the rumps of the trailing horses. For a moment Llesho felt wrenched in time, a small boy again, and Jaks was wearing the bloody uniform of his dead bodyguard and the travel stained clothes of the long march.

But the horses stirred restlessly, reminding him that he was not alone, and not helpless. He had an army at his back. And, if they were fleeing by dead of night, at least they were running toward help, and not into greater danger. Llesho kicked his own horse to a faster gait and quickly found his squad again.

“We ride for Thousand Lakes Province,” Kaydu informed them, “Pray that we are not too late.”

Gradually, the outriders herded the refugees into a tighter, more defensible group plodding slowly toward the inner provinces. Llesho fretted anxiously about their pace. Once the decision to flee had been made and acted upon, he wanted to put as much distance as possible between their makeshift caravan and Lord Yueh’s troops. But the outriders kept them at a pace that protected the mass of the household and the servants who had fled on foot. Gradually, however, fatigue ate away the desperate compulsion to run that coursed through his bloodstream.

Farshore lay on a sandy flat, but beyond the city limits, to the west, the foothills stretched north and south as far as the eye could see. Llesho felt the road angle upward into the hills and fell forward over the neck of his horse to balance himself into the ascent. His legs were sore from riding, and his horse was setting down its feet with the heavy indifference that spoke of exhaustion louder than any words of its human rider could do.

“How far to Thousand Lakes Province?” he asked Kaydu.

She shook her head, eyes grim, and curled one hand around Little Brother, who rode tucked close to his mistress’ body, his arms clinging to the rise of her saddle. “Too far. More than five hundred li.”

Llesho looked around them at the shuffling horde pressing into a narrow line again on the mountain road. His nose wrinkled, assaulted by the moist warmth of animals and humans, fear mixed with the dust of the road in a pungent taunt at his sinuses. He remembered another long march, staggering through the night until strange arms swept him up, passed him on, as the road stretched in a neverending blur of light and dark, hunger and thirst. Out of memories he’d long tried to submerge, images arose of bodies dropping by the wayside, beaten into the dirt by the hooves of the Harnish horses. So powerful were the old feelings that Llesho braced his body for the staggering jolt of a horse stumbling over a human obstacle in its march.

/ can’t do it again, he thought. But he said, “When Yueh realizes that the governor has escaped, his army will follow us.”

“The governor didn’t escape,” Kaydu said, and her voice choked on the words. “He stayed behind, to keep Yueh occupied in the capital. Her ladyship leads us.”

Llesho wondered if her father had stayed behind as well. Kaydu’s set face did not invite the question, and Bixei was looking at him as though he’d been struck. “What makes you think it was Lord Yueh who attacked?”

“I heard Master Markko call out—” Llesho began his answer just as Kaydu interrupted. “There is a resting place beyond this pass, with grass for the horses and a stream for water. The hills will hide us from Yueh’s scouts and spies. Her ladyship will stop for the night when we reach it, and we can talk there.”

Lling was riding at Llesho’s shoulder, listening quietly to their conversation. At the mention of rest, she sighed, but didn’t relax the watch she kept on the road and the hill that rose at its shoulder. “He’ll know that at least some of the governor’s household escaped. Will he send an army after us?”

“Probably,” Kaydu admitted. She did not say aloud what Llesho already knew from past experience: they could not escape at their present rate of travel. Already the very young and the less hardened among the household suffered from the journey. “But enough of the house guard stayed behind that Yueh may not realize we have escaped until he has searched among the dead for our bodies. With any luck, they’ve bought us some time to regroup and make plans. If our scouts report back that we are followed, we may have to run, but her ladyship will want everyone to rest while they can.”

If it came to a midnight scramble, those on horseback might have a chance, but Llesho knew about being frightened and weak and on foot. Most of the people who slept tonight at the resting place in the hills would die tomorrow or the next day or the next, running from certain capture into the arms of exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. Armies did not march with children and the sick in tow. Those who did had no chance of outrunning trained and hardened fighters.

When the outriders passed the word that they were stopping ahead, Llesho wanted to urge his own companions to continue, to outstrip the reach of Yueh’s army. He had his own purpose set upon him by the ghost in the pearl beds: his brothers to find, and his country to save. But a child stumbled as he passed, and he scooped her up and set her in front of him on the horse, and when the outrider called a halt and directed them down into a hollow cradled in a circle of hills rich with the scent of pine trees, he set the child down with her mother and followed his companions to a grassy plot they chose for their camp. They dismounted and led their horses to the bottom of the hollow where they found the stream Kaydu had promised. Hmishi took the reins from his companions, and followed them as they made their own way to the stream and water. When they had drunk their fill, he staked the animals in a soft stand of grass and began to unbuckle their saddles.

After a moment in which they all stared dumbly as Hmishi worked, Lling sighed and offered, “I’ll get wood for a fire.” Bixei dragged himself to his feet and followed her into the nearby forest to help her look for fallen branches. Kaydu tucked her sleeping pet into a sling she wore around her neck and hunted for stones to ring their fire pit. Llesho sat, thinking. He was deep in the puzzle of their survival when Kaydu interrupted.

“Anything I can do for you, Your Highness?”

“No, thank you,” he said, so caught up in wrestling with the problem in his head that he didn’t notice her sarcasm, or the pointed hint that he should rouse himself to help set up the camp.

“Would you mind explaining that answer?” Bixei asked the question. Kaydu looked uncomfortably like she was just confirming what she already knew, but she silently dropped down beside him on the grass. Lling and Hmishi had also finished their self-appointed chores, and they, too, watched him, more frightened than they had been when they fought Master Markko and Yueh’s provincial guard for him.

Not now, he silently begged. He was too tired to deal with questions, too tired to stand and face them but unwilling to try to explain while they were looking down on him—it felt too symbolic.

“I’m nobody, just Llesho,” he said.

“Where were you when Master Markko attacked?” Bixei demanded, but Lling stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Not selling out the governor to my worst enemy,” Llesho answered sarcastically. He stared down at the grass between his feet, pulled up a leaf, and twisted it around his finger, contemplating how quickly friends became strangers in the presence of a secret. “Tonight is the eve of my sixteenth summer.” He tried to sound as if it meant nothing when he added, “By custom, that time belongs to the goddess.”

In Kungol, the royal family had played out its most intimate existence for the honor of the people: the royal chambermaids would hang the first marked sheets of prince or princess from the celebrant’s bedroom balcony. Royal couples consummated their marriages while a choir of monks at the bedside intoned the heavenly praise of the families brought together in the union. If he had grown to face the eve of his manhood in the Palace of the Sun, like his brothers, all the males of the royal family and their priests and retainers would have escorted him to the Temple of the Moon for his vigil. They would have sung ribald songs of his prowess with the goddess. In the morning trumpets would have sounded with the gay dances of the wedding feast while he rode through the streets to his breakfast at the right hand of his father. All of Thebin would acknowledge him as the husband of the goddess, or jest about his luck as a free man, ungifted and unwed, but a man nonetheless.

In his captivity, Llesho’s determination to complete the sacred rites of adulthood in her ladyship’s garden shrine seemed foolish and self-important. Certainly the goddess had not come to him in the night, had not accepted him as a man and a husband of the Thebin royal line. With Kungol a thousand or more li away and Thebin in the hands of the enemy, he didn’t want to share the ceremony of meditation and fasting, or his failure, with strangers. It embarrassed him now to think that he had tried to complete his ritual of manhood alone and in a foreign land that still saw him as a boy and the property of another. No wonder he had been found lacking—the body he offered to his goddess was not his to give. But he had already said too much. To his Thebin companions, the ritual identified him as a prince of the Royal House more completely than anything else he could have said. Lling and Hmishi understood at once the import of his words, and dropped to their knees with bent heads. Just exactly what Llesho did not want in the middle of a crisis.

He gave vent to a disgusted sigh before he ordered, “Get up! The Harn rule Thebin now; I have no claim on your allegiance.”

“What are they doing?” Bixei crinkled his nose in confusion, but he was determined to understand what everyone else seemed already to know.

“He’s the king of Thebin,” Kaydu answered for him, and looked at Llesho with a newfound uneasiness.

“I was a prince,” he answered, exasperated, “more recently a slave, and soon to be dead if Yueh’s troops catch us here.”

“But the old king is dead, they say,” Lling dared to correct him; Hmishi still trembled at his feet.

“I have six brothers, all older than me,” he answered, grateful to see that Bixei had finally sunk down beside them. He seemed unconvinced, but he was listening. “And any one of them may be the chosen of the goddess.” He did not add that he had not been so chosen.

Bixei fed a branch to the fire. “The deadfall is dry enough- We shouldn’t lack for a fire,” he said, and added, when Llesho had begun to think he had escaped the conversation, “Is it true? About being a king?”

“A prince,” Llesho corrected him. “And not that since my seventh summer. Now I am a slave like any other.”

“It could be true.” Lling gave him a disapproving frown that for some reason reminded him of his mother, though the two looked nothing alike.

“There was a Prince Llesho, seventh son of the king and the lady-goddess in the capital. Half the babies born that year were named in his honor.”

“She’s right,” Hmishi explained to Kaydu and Bixei. He still watched Llesho carefully as if he might turn into a dragon and fly away, but Llesho hadn’t struck anyone dead yet, so he risked the conversation. “I always figured Llesho was one of the namesakes, but I suppose he could just as well be the prince as a farmer’s son with a name above his station.”

“Is that why Yueh is after us?” Bixei asked. “Did he know about the prince thing already?”

Kaydu shrugged. “Maybe. Markko must have suspected. Llesho made himself as obvious as the lighthouse on Farshore Point when he had visions in the deep and then petitioned to be a gladiator. Something was going on, and he’d want to get his hands on it, whatever it was.”

“Do you think we brought any food? I’m starved.” Hmishi distracted their companions with a more immediate concern. He rummaged in the blanket roll he’d taken from his horse and drew out a flat spiral of chewy bread. “Food. Somebody knew we were going to be on the run.”

“Her ladyship knew,” Llesho told them.

Hmishi frowned, not quite following. “That Yueh would attack the governor’s compound?”

“I think so,” Llesho agreed. “And I think she knew who I was before anyone else did. She came to Pearl Island for my first weapons test.”

Bixei’s eyes grew wider. “She did?”

Kaydu nodded. “It makes sense. My father said she was most particular about keeping Llesho out of Yueh’s hands. And she is always very cunning at knowing what to keep hidden.”

Llesho didn’t question the comment. The governor’s lady had many faces, and more people than Llesho knew it. “Jaks was expecting an attack. He told me to be ready to ride.”

“The governor knew what Yueh was up to,” Kaydu confirmed. “He just didn’t expect Yueh to make his move so soon. Father thinks that Lord Yueh subverted Master Markko years ago, waiting for his chance to strike. Lord Chin-shi already had gambling debts, and Lord Yueh bought them up and demanded payment. Markko’s witch-hunt was to cover his own evil magic; he probably created the plague that killed the pearl beds himself, so that Lord Chin-shi would have no way to pay the debts.

“Lord Yueh seized Pearl Island and its properties in payment; Habiba anticipated him, though, and made his purchases in the governor’s name before the contest.”

Bixei was still troubled. “No one would start a war over one slave, even the former prince of someplace I’ve never heard of.”

“I don’t know why her ladyship wants him,” Kaydu said, “or even if she wants him. But she won’t let Yueh have him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Llesho protested grimly. He didn’t like the conclusions he’d drawn, but he was pretty sure he was right.

“If it doesn’t matter,” Bixei pointed out, “you can raise the tent.”

“You don’t get it,” Llesho snapped. “I’ve done the Long March before. I know how fast we can move, even when the pace is forced with whips and jackals. We can’t escape a trained army, and I don’t see her ladyship imposing a death march on her people with torture.”

“But if the governor is still in Farshore—” Lling objected, remembering the conversation on the road.

“Yueh can’t let her ladyship reach Thousand Lakes Province. She would report his treachery, and her father would have to offer his own guard to rescue his daughter’s husband. From Thousand Lakes Province she can send messengers to the Emperor and beg him to come to the governor’s aid as well.” He looked into the eyes of each of his companions in turn, until he was certain that he had their full attention. “Lord Yueh won’t be safe until we are dead, or returned to him in captivity. And I, for one, don’t intend to let Master Markko get his hands on me again.”

“What can we do?” Hmishi asked him.

Run, Llesho thought, run now, as fast as we can, and don’t stop, ever. But he dropped his head back against the saddle he leaned on and shut his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said, because he could not admit to the cowardice that whispered, “Run,” into his ear. “I don’t know. But I’ve done the Long March before, and I won’t do it again. I’ll make him kill me first.” He didn’t open his eyes, but felt the tension of his companions.

“It’s better to be alive,” Kaydu objected. Kaydu, the daughter of a witch, who had never been a slave. If Master Markko had any say in it, she would see her father burned alive in the same marketplace where Yueh sold her body.

He did open his eyes then, dark with bleak memory. “No,” he said, “It’s not.” He closed the coffins of his soul, let them think he was sleeping. Let them think what they wanted as long as they didn’t require his presence in their schemes. But they fell quiet, and Llesho found himself lulled by the crackle of the fire and the scents of the night—grass and horse and pine, human sweat and exhaustion blunting the pungent odor of fear.

C HAPTER S EVENTEEN

HE must have slept, because the sky was gray and the grass was damp when a hand shook him. “Llesho!” Master Jaks shook him again. “Find yourself a bush, and then follow me.”

“What?” Mornings made him stupid, but Master Jaks answered as if it had been a real question.

“Her ladyship requests an audience.”

Llesho figured he must be stupider than he thought, because he couldn’t detect any irony at all in his teacher’s voice.

“Just a minute.” He rolled over, cracked open his eyes enough to see that his companions still slept soundly. Lling and Hmishi had moved closer to each other in their sleep, and foolish as it was to let it happen, the sight twisted in his heart a little bit. At first, out of the modesty that grew between diving mates, he’d worked hard to keep Lling from intruding on his thoughts. Later, after the ghost of Lleck had appeared to him with a reminder of his duty, he’d determined to go to his vigil night with a clear heart to offer his goddess. Now, when he found himself free of every obstacle between them, Lling herself was turning to another.

Master Jaks followed the direction of his thoughts with a wry quirk to his mouth. Llesho answered with a pointed glare. Maybe someday, when he was as old as his teacher, he’d be philosophical about it, but right now he didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to be up before it was time either. Even Little Brother still slept, his tiny paws curled under his chin, his tail curled lightly around his mistress’ throat. Not an immediate threat, or a general call out to mount and ride, then; a more personal disaster pulled him out of his bedroll.

Wondering why catastrophe seemed never to arrive in the wake of a full stomach and a good night’s rest, Llesho staggered out of the sleeping camp to water the bushes. He returned a moment later, only slightly more awake, to follow Master Jaks between the ragged knots of sleeping refugees to her ladyship’s tent.

Someone, he realized, had been preparing for their flight long before they had actually left Farshore. The tent was as large as the governor’s audience hall, with yellow silk walls and a red and blue striped awning for a roof. Inside, the floor was covered in thick carpets. Graceful hangings separated the private parts of the tent from the public area where her ladyship sat upon a high seat, surrounded by her generals. He wasn’t overly surprised to see Master Jaks take his place at their head. Minions of less determined station, with the opaque eyes of spies, hovered nearby, in shadowed corners. In her ladyship’s right hand, resting across her lap, she held the ancient spear that Llesho had last seen on Pearl Island.

As it had then, the spear sent a chill through him, and he felt a faint dislocation when he looked at it: nausea, like the way he felt in the pearl boat on a stormy sea. At her feet he saw a map he had at first mistaken for a carpet. He tried to focus on the map instead of the spear, and found that his stomach settled and the map stayed where it was without troubling his vision.

Tall, narrow tables scattered at her ladyship’s left and right held the remnants of a meal: a teapot and cups, and various ornaments that the lady fondled thoughtfully before turning the sword’s point of her gaze upon Llesho.

“Tea?” she asked.

When he answered, “Yes, please,” she put the short spear aside and poured with her own hands from the pot into two unmatched bowls. One was of jadeite, so thin that the light of early morning shone through its intricately carved design, laying patterns of light and shadow on the table. The other was of finely thrown porcelain, with gilt around its rim and decorated on the bowl with a portrait of a lady in a garden.

Her ladyship waited, as if she expected something of him, and Llesho hesitated, his hand poised over the porcelain cup. But the jadeite bowl called to his touch with the whisper of old memories he knew were not his own. Slowly he let his hand drift over to it, and gently he traced with his fingertips its carved designs.

“I know this cup,” he said. The smile that stretched his lips felt alien to his mouth. He could not know it was the smile of a man long dead, but when her ladyship looked into his eyes, her wistful sigh fell strangely on his ears, as if for that moment she saw in him a memory he did not share.

When he had finished his tea, she gestured for a servant to wrap the jadeite cup safely for the journey. Then, taking the package, she held it out to him. “Take it with you. Keep it safe for your children.”

“I couldn’t,” he answered, and left it sitting on her outstretched palm.

“It is yours. It always has been.” She tucked the bundle carefully into the folds of his shirt. “The governor is dead,” she informed him, and Llesho wondered at her control, to drink tea with a fallen princeling with the wound of her husband’s death still fresh on her soul. “Yueh moves on Thousand Lakes Province, with Master Markko at his right hand. Habiba rides before us, to warn my father of the coming storm. I wish we had more time, but our fortune is cast, and we can but play out the fall of the rods.”

Taking up the spear she had set aside, she looked at him out of eyes grown cold with the baleful mystery that made him cower within the shell of his own body. He let himself relax only a little when she turned to the map between them.

“Tell me again about the Harn.”

His throat went dry. He had thought the lady would ask him about Lord Chin-shi, or Yueh, or Overseer Markko, but instead she studied the map before her avidly for the more distant danger. Llesho darted a glance at Master Jaks, who said nothing but showed no surprise at her question, either. There would be no escape from that direction.

“I was just a child.” What could he know of value to the governor’s lady? “I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

“You are a prince, and the beloved of the goddess.” She touched a single finger to his breast, and he burned there, falling into eyes large and dark as the pearl Lleck had pressed on him in the bay.

As if thinking of it woke the pearl from its hiding place, it throbbed as if it were trying to regain its original size. The small pain distracted him and he pulled back, disturbed by how easily he fell under the spell of her gaze.

The lady nodded, as if something in his response settled the doubts in her mind. “When the time comes, you will act according to your birth and nature.”

He knew by her actions that the tense was not a mistake, that she didn’t speak to the pearl diver or the novice gladiator, but addressed the scion of a house as noble as her own. In spite of his exhaustion, his spine straightened, his chin came up, and he returned her level glance, aware only at a distance that the ache in his jaw had subsided.

“They use promises of riches and shared power to lure their spies.” He didn’t know why he told her that first of all the things about the Harn he knew or guessed. When she closed her eyes and bowed her head, he saw that it was what she feared but had expected. Yueh. It made sense. The Harn were a plains people who went on horseback more often than afoot and had no temperament for cities. They ruled by indirection, putting the traitors of one captive people in positions of power in the captured lands of another, so no fellow feeling would grow between the conquered and their overseers. The Harn themselves came and went at wilL.took what they wanted in lives and wealth, and returned to the smooth round tents that sprouted like leather-cased mushrooms wherever they passed.

Her ladyship gestured to the map at their feet. Llesho fell to his knees to study it more closely, and he felt the breath of Master Jaks leaning close over his shoulder, following the play of Llesho’s fingers across the map. He recognized bits of it from school in Thebin, but that had been years ago, and much of what he hadn’t forgotten had changed.

“Thebin,” she gestured with the point of the short spear in her hand to a dusky orange blotch scarcely bigger than his two fists set side by side. “Harn proper—” a large sweep of green for grasslands, Llesho supposed, lapped around Thebin on the north and swept up to a yellow square, perhaps a little bit larger, to the east. Yellow dominated the eastern portion of the map all the way to the blue that Llesho figured must represent the sea. “And the Shan Empire,” he supplied.

Shan was the name of the capital city and the empire it directed. Trade routes, he knew, had always run along the length of the yellow—the Shan Empire— through Thebin, and into the red that represented the unknown kingdoms at the end of the trade roads to the West. Trade passed up and down the road for the three months of summer and stopped again when snow blocked the mountain passes through Thebin for the ten months of winter. Llesho had lived seven summers in Kungol, the Thebin capital and holy city, and he still counted the years of his life by the imagined ebb and flow of caravans through the passes.

Sixteen summers, and most of them spent far from home. But the sights and smells of the caravans, and the bustle of the trade centers, remained with him still. The mountain passes had made Thebin rich, but that all changed when the Harn came. Now the horsemen controlled the western end of the trade route. And he saw what he had not realized before. Marked on the map, the city of Shan rested not a hundred li from the border between Harn and the Shan Empire. As far south of Shan as it was west of Farshore, the Thousand Lakes Province, outlined in red stitching on the map, lay like a glistening jewel set above the Thousand Peaks Mountains. And on the western side of those mountains, lay the green of Harn.

Somewhere behind him, Llesho heard the grunts of servants and the rumpling of silk being taken down and folded, the denser sound of rugs being rolled. The sun must be up. The thought slipped through his mind, and with it the knowledge that they must ride soon, or die. But he could not take his eyes off the map. He reached for it, slid from his chair to kneel, and touched his fingertips to the line of embroidered mountains curving in a crescent along the western edge of the Shan Empire. He stopped when his fingers came to the dusky orange of Thebin. The map could not show how high the mountains thrust into the clouds, or how airless those highest peaks were—how no man but a Thebin born could travel them. Children of Heaven they called themselves, who alone could reach for the garden palaces of the gods whose seed had set in the soil of the Thebin people. Outlanders stayed to the relative lower altitudes of the capital city, following the three major passes through the mountains. Llesho longed for the heights.

“You look like you are seeing God,” her ladyship whispered, and Llesho looked up at her with a tiny smile, sharing the secret.

“I am god.” Or should have been. He could not meet her eyes at the thought. His ritual had failed.

Master Jaks didn’t bother to hide his skeptical snort, but her ladyship nodded, as if his words hadn’t surprised her.

“Can you save us?” she asked.

Llesho shook his head. “I cannot even save myself. The goddess did not come.” He didn’t think she would understand his explanation, but she took his chin in the curve of her fingers and lifted his head, kissed each eyelid closed against her piercing gaze.

“Yes,” her ladyship said. “She did. You are alive.”

Cool as a goddess, she terrified him. But her kiss sparked fire in his body, desire rising at the touch of her lips. He reached a hand to stroke her skin, and blushed with embarrassment when she withdrew into her chair. “I’m sorry,” he said after a long silence. / am not a man. I don’t know what to do. He didn’t say it, didn’t know himself which of the myriad things he had to regret he meant: for the death of her husband, or because he could not save her from her own fate? For reaching out to her, or for not knowing what to do about it if she had moved into his touch instead of away?

Llesho could feel the army of Lord Yueh entering the foothills in pursuit of the weary refugees, could hear the beat of distant hooves on the grasslands, and he knew what troubled her ladyship because it had started the same way in Thebin. Travelers harried on the road, minor raids on outlying farms, spies bribed with promises. Yueh pressing from the east, the Harn pressing from the west, and Thousand Lakes Province between them, peaceful, fertile, free. But none of those things for long. He turned to leave her ladyship with her knowledge of doom, but she stopped him with a word.

“Take this.” She held out the short spear to him. He shuddered but did not take it. “Like the cup, it belongs to you.”

“It killed me once,” Llesho objected, though he didn’t know how he knew. His arms wrapped instinctively around his middle, feeling the jade cup nestled in its wrappings under his coat. “I think it means to kill me again.”

“I cannot keep it for you any longer.” She held it out, watching him through eyes that held no hope, but endless calculation, and he took it from her, though he believed he would have been safer accepting a viper from her hand. Then she offered him what he wanted most in the world: “You are free now, of all but your own quest. Find your brothers.”

He didn’t ask—she saw the need in his face, and gave him this prize with no promises in exchange.

“The records are in Shan and so is the one they call Adar.” Adar. Llesho bowed. Adar. The name slid through his mind like sunlight and peace, and he wanted his past back so much it hurt to think of it. But he let none of that show.

The servants had taken the tent down around them, had packed up most of the rugs and waited for her ladyship to finish the audience so they could pack the last of her furnishings. “Our paths divide here.” She physically withdrew, hiding her hands in the sleeves of her robe. “Go now. Take my prayers with you, and my general, Master Jaks, for guidance and protection on the road.”

Llesho left them together, to find the camp in an equal state of hurried preparation. When he reached his own companions, they had packed his blanket roll and saddled his horse.

“We are ready to ride as soon as we receive the signal,” Bixei told him, but Llesho shook his head.

“We ride now,” he said. And to Kaydu, “Can you guide us to Shan?”

“I’ve never been that far,” Kaydu objected. “My father had hoped that Master Jaks would ride with us as our guide.”

“I don’t intend to give him that option.”

“Why not?” Kaydu studied him for a long minute. “Master Jaks has sworn on his honor to see you home. The governor accepted this debt of honor in his contract—to deny him would be to dishonor him.”

“The governor is dead,” Llesho informed his companions. “And Master Jaks owes the greater debt to his lordship to keep his lady safe. Either way he chooses, Master Jaks must sacrifice his honor. Unless we take the decision out of his hands.”

Kaydu closed her eyes to hide her sorrow, but a tear leaked from under her lids and ran down the side of her nose unhindered. “I see.” She nodded and pulled herself lightly into her saddle, but Hmishi took the reins of Llesho’s mount and refused to move. “What is in Shan?” he asked.

“Prince Adar.”

Lling’s eyes opened wide. “The healer prince?”

“My brother. I ride to find him, and the others.”

Hmishi stood out of the way then, and cupped his hands to help his prince into the saddle. Lling scrambled onto her horse without another objection, but Bixei stayed where he was. “I can’t leave,” he said, “Stipes . . .”

“I know,” Llesho agreed. Yueh had purchased Stipes for the arena, but he would use every trained fighter he had to invade Thousand Lakes Province.

Bixei would not leave Stipes to the enemy. “Tell Master Jaks that if he delivers her ladyship safely to her father, then all his debts of honor are paid. My own fate is in the hands of the goddess. Good luck.”

Llesho set the short spear from the lady at his back, though it made him tremble to touch it, and turned his horse. Kaydu nudged her own mount with her knees, urging him to the front of their little band.

“This way,” she said, and guided them to the bottom of the clearing. Little Brother caught up with them at the stream, chattering indignantly to be taken up with his mistress. Kaydu pulled the sling from her pack and wrapped it over her shoulder, holding it open for the monkey to scramble in and make himself comfortable for the journey. When he had settled, they crossed the stream and entered the forest that rose on the other side.

PART THREE
THE ROAD TO SHAFI

C HAPTER E IGHTEEN

THROUGHOUT the morning Llesho’s tiny band pressed more deeply into the forest, making brief stops only to water and graze the horses in the occasional grassy breaks in the trees. When the path grew too steep for them to ride, they walked alongside their animals, leading them by the reins. By midafternoon, however, the horses were stumbling with exhaustion and the humans were doing no better. Llesho would have urged them to continue, staggering until he dropped, but Kaydu pulled him up short with a tug on his arm.

“Enough,” she said. “We will rest here, and eat. The horses need a break as badly as we do.”

Llesho stared at her, not understanding. He had only one model for such a journey—walking until his legs gave out then going on, carried in the arms of another until that one dropped in the dust of their passage.

“If we stop now, we can travel again for a few hours before the sun sets, and make better time for the rest.” Kaydu was watching him for some sign that he understood, so he nodded and dropped to his knees.

Only then did he hear the rush of water over rocks. A stream, and fresh, from the sound of it.

Rest. Why hadn’t he thought of that himself? He wasn’t, after all, a Harn raider. Not a very good prince either, apparently, but he’d have to pretend for a few minutes longer. His three companions—four, if you counted Little Brother peeking out of his sling—were watching him expectantly. Lling spoke up in the silence.

“Should we scout the area, post a guard in case Lord Yueh’s men have followed us?” she asked.

Kaydu took the suggestion for a call to informal council, and shook her head. “We can take turns at guard duty,” she said. “We can fight if we have to, but we’d do better to run if Markko has sent a party to track us.” She looked at Llesho. They were all weary, but they could probably push on, except for him. He was the only one of them carrying a child’s memories of the Long March on his back. Once again others were making decisions based on his survival above their own.

“We have to know if Master Markko is following.” Llesho hardened his voice to keep the words from shaking on his lips. “And if he is, we run until we fall, and then fight until we die.”

The looked their unspoken questions at him, and he returned their gaze with his own bleak glare. “I will not be his prisoner again.”

Hmishi tipped his head in silent obedience to his prince and slipped away, into the trees. Lling needed more convincing. She was Thebin, and she would follow wherever her prince led. Her analytical mind, however, craved reasons.

“He’s a powerful magician,” Llesho explained, “with a particular interest in poisons.”

Her eyes went wide. Wordlessly she picked up her bow and a quiver of arrows. Scouting for a secure lookout point, she picked a tree and climbed high into its branches.

“What did he do to you?” Kaydu asked.

“Terrible things,” Llesho answered with a shudder. “But if that were all, it was nothing so bad that I would risk your lives over it.”

“Then why?” Kaydu persisted.

He wished Lling was there to do the explaining. From Llesho himself, to someone who did not know the ways of Thebin, it sounded ... he didn’t know how it sounded, but he didn’t want to see the disbelief on her face.

“Tell me.”

He shrugged as if it were nothing—only my life, the life of my people, he thought—and struggled to find a way to tell the outlander the most private secrets of Thebin’s theocracy. That somehow, the governor’s lady had already known.

“I am Thebin’s seventh prince of my father’s body,” he said, and Kaydu waited.

“In Thebin, princes are wedded to the goddess on their sixteenth birthday. The prince is then considered a man full grown, but he is also a godling. If the wedding night goes well, the goddess may reward her new husband with gifts.”

Kaydu waited still, expecting something more. When it didn’t come, she offered, hesitantly, “According to my father, many lands have rituals of symbolic union with their gods and goddesses—”

“Not symbolic,” Llesho blushed. He would explain in words even an outlander could understand if he had to, but he could not, would not look at her.

“The prince takes his vigil in the temple, and the goddess comes to him. Dressed in the flesh he most covets. And they ... she ... if he pleases her body, he will find himself changed in the morning. Not that anyone can see, at first,” he rushed to explain, “but gradually, he develops some gift, a skill or power from the goddess. Adar is a healer. Balar centers the universe. Lluka sees the past and the future.” He laughed a short, familiar snort. “Three of my brothers fell asleep and did not please the goddess. They are ordinary men. They say, of course, that they pleased Her best of all, and their gift is to live in peace within their own heads.”

He wondered what peace his brothers had found in the years since the fall of Thebin, but Kaydu stirred restlessly.

“What do the religious beliefs of Thebin have to do with Lord Yueh’s traitorous magician?”

“ ‘The seventh prince is blessed beyond measure,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘most favored of the goddess, his gifts are beyond compare.’ Yesterday was my natal day. I was in the shrine when the attack began, but there wasn’t enough time to complete my vigil.” He pleaded with her to understand, “The goddess did not come! Or I thought not, but her ladyship says she did, and that she was pleased with me, though I did not give her pleasure as a prince must. But if she has given me the powers of the seventh prince, then better that you kill me now than Master Markko have the shaping of them. Because he is evil, and everything he touches he bends out of true. I don’t know who he serves— not Lord Chin-shi, who is dead, or Lord Yueh, who carries the serpent at his breast and believes he is the master when he is just another servant of Master Markko’s ambition.

“Somehow, Markko knows what I am. If he captures me alive, he will wield my soul like a weapon, and my people will die. Your people will die as well. Better to kill me here, now, than let that happen.”

He let himself fall back against his saddle and shut his eyes, recognizing the light-headed drift away from his body that he felt in times of greatest weariness. In that state of separation from his surroundings he didn’t really care that she didn’t believe him. As long as she let him sleep. He didn’t mention the promise he had made to the ghost, though, figuring one shock at a time was all either of them could handle.

“Damn!” Kaydu’s voice, drifting out of dreamy distance, surprised him. “My father knew Master Markko was powerful,” she explained when he cracked a heavy eyelid to look at her; and even from the far place where he floated he could see the worry in her frown. “How strong is he?”

Llesho thought about that. “In Thebin, there is a saying. ‘Apprentices do magic. Around masters, things just happen.’ Also, ‘A good magician leaves no tracks on dry ground. A bad magician leaves no tracks in the snow.’ To a Thebin, magic you can see is poorly done. It is difficult to tell a great Thebin magician from someone with no gifts at all who stands, by some coincidence, near the center of great moments.

    “Markko isn’t Thebin, of course, but if he knows what I think he does, and if he has set in motion the deaths of Lord Chin-shi and the governor, and her ladyship’s flight for Thousand Lakes Province, as I think he has, then he is very, very strong.”

“Stronger than my father?” she asked him, and Llesho saw the fear within the question.

He shrugged, his shoulders rubbing against the leather of the saddle propping his head. “I don’t know, I’m not a magician myself, I just know the sayings.”

“Among the witches of Shan, there is also a saying,” Kaydu told him. “A good witch should always wear a bell around her neck.”

“The question is,” Llesho suggested, “how much between them is difference of philosophy, and how much a difference of art?”

“My father should wear a bigger bell,” she admitted, and he figured that meant that he didn’t let all his so, maybe they had a chance, too. The thought gave him some comfort.

“Wake me in an hour to take my turn at guard duty,” he mumbled, then rolled on his side and fell soundly asleep.

Llesho woke to the snuffling of hot breath against his neck. “Stop it,” he insisted. Still more asleep than awake, he took a random swipe at the direction from which the annoyance seemed to come. His hand connected with a hard snout, slid down over long, sharp teeth. Not Kaydu, then. He opened one eye, and gulped. A bear stood over him, its muzzle wet and its fangs still colored with the blood of its last kill.

“Don’t move,” Lling instructed in hushed tones. She stood next to the tree she’d been sitting in, her bow drawn taut, arrow seated, waiting for a clear shot. Standing over Llesho’s terror-frozen body, the bear shook its head at her. Opening its bloody maw wide, it roared a challenge across the grassy clearing. Kaydu jerked awake at the deep-voiced growl. She rolled away from the bear, coming to her feet with a short sword in her hand.

The bear pushed at Llesho’s shoulder with its nose, whoofing a mournful tone in his ear. It was a very small bear, he realized, scarcely more than a cub; he wondered if the mother was around somewhere.

“Lleee-sshoo!” the creature sneezed. It sounded like his name, in spite of the bear spittle running down his neck. Looking into the glowing coals of the ferocious creature’s eyes, Llesho found an ageless wisdom there, and perhaps a hint of rueful humor as well.

“Where is Little Brother?” Kaydu drew their attention to the fact that the monkey would have awakened them with his own high shrieks if he’d still been alive. Lling pulled her bowstring a little tauter.

Llesho sat up, his arms outstretched protectively.

“Wait!” he cried to his companions, and the bear raised its head, gargling a high-pitched growl of gratitude.

“Let me kill it,” Kaydu whispered, though Llesho figured the bear had better hearing than any of them. Nobody moved, especially not Llesho, and she could not reach the bear without endangering its protector.

The bear sneezed again: “Lrlrl-eck!” it spewed at Llesho, and took a swat at his head with the pads of its paw.

“He could have taken your head off, Llesho,” Lling hissed at him.

Llesho shook his head. “Could have, maybe. But he didn’t. He retracted his claws before he hit me.” He reached out and touched the bear. “Lleck?”

The bear tossed his head in a semblance of an affirmative, and emitted another high gargle of support before nuzzling at Llesho’s hand with his nose.

“See! He knows me!” Llesho reached up to scritch behind the bear’s ear. “He’s just a baby,” he said, and added, for Lling’s benefit. “It’s Lleck. I don’t know what he is doing here in the body of a bear, but I know it’s him.”

The cub howled his agreement, bobbing his head up and down to emphasize the truth of Llesho’s explanation. “Ll-üüing!” he said, and the sound of her name, coming from the wide open jaws of the bear, so startled her that Lling let the bow fall to her side, and gaped at him.

“Is it really Lleck?” she asked Llesho.

Released from the immediate threat of death from his allies, the bear who had been Lleck lumbered across the clearing in the direction from which they had come, then galloped back again. He repeated this dance several times, honking a series of high, panicky tones answered by the hysterical chattering of a monkey high in the walnut tree where Lling had been hiding. At least for the moment, Lleck was freed of suspicion of eating Little Brother for lunch, but the horses tossed their heads and added their nervous whickering to the clamor. Something was coming.

Llesho jumped to his feet, reaching for the knife and sword fastened to his saddle, just as Hmishi crashed through the low brush around them.

“Yueh’s ... men ...” Hmishi gasped. “One of his forward scouts, dead, back there, mauled by an animal—” He pointed back in the direction he’d come from, then stooped with his hands on his knees, whooping for breath. The bear cub who had once been Lleck the minister joined his noisy warning to Hmishi’s.

“Goddess!” Hmishi swore and reached for his knife, but Kaydu shook her head.

“Llesho has strange allies.” She shrugged, as if the explanation made no sense to her either, but was nevertheless the only one she had, and started toward the horses.

“No time to run.” Hmishi pulled her up short with the warning. He drew his bow and arrows and turned toward the sound of men on horseback shouting to each other and to their animals as they crashed through the forest. Lling moved up to Hmishi’s right flank and Kaydu stood at his left. Lleck the bear ran awkwardly across the clearing and disappeared into the afternoon shadows creeping over the forest.

Llesho stood a little apart from his companions, his knife and sword both drawn and held at the ready. A scream arrowed through the clearing, and another, despair and terror gurgling to a wet end that sent a chill through the lonely young defenders. Then a horse broke from the forest, an ax swinging from the fist of its rider. Llesho ducked and raised his sword, but the rider was already falling, Lling’s arrow in his throat. The horse, a roan bred for battle on flat open territory, reared up in terror, froth flying from her nostrils, her eyes rolling with her panic. Hmishi reached for her dragging reins, but she tossed him aside and crashed away into the forest again. They heard an animal scream of terror, and the fading sound of her hooves growing more distant.

Then the next and the next of Yueh’s soldiers were upon them, and Llesho had cut the legs from under the horse that thundered by him, and finished off the fallen rider with a knife to his breast. Kaydu dragged the next from his seat and crushed his windpipe under her foot as she swung a sword in the path of the soldier who followed him.

Llesho heard the high battle cry of the bear cub at his side, darted a quick look to where the creature stood at the center of the clearing, blood dripping from his muzzle and bits of flesh and hair and cloth hanging from the claws of his outstretched forepaws. A mad light shone in his beady black animal eyes and the straggling few soldiers left alive turned and fled in terror at the sight of the savage beast fighting at the side of the magician’s enemies. They were trained to fight and kill human beings, with capabilities no greater than their own. Only the fear of their master, following hard after them, could have induced the soldiers to confront the young witch and her Thebin team.

The bear was more than their terror could endure, and so they ran, not back to report to their master, but scattering for escape in every direction, the bear cub snapping at their heels. It seemed as good a plan as any to Llesho, who rapped out his order, “Mount up, we move now!” and reached for his own saddle. His hand slid on the pommel, and he gave the wet red smear an annoyed frown for a moment, before checking his hand for the source of the blood.

“Llesho!”

He turned at Lling’s call, and noted her sudden pallor. She reached a hand to him across the clearing. “You’re hurt,” she said, and ran to his side. He didn’t remember being wounded, but an arrow pierced his breast. Lling’s words seemed to cut through the fog of adrenaline and shock, and Llesho realized that it hurt, deep in his chest. Suddenly, it hurt a lot.

“Lling?” The clearing tilted, trees turning sideways in his vision. What was happening to him? He fell to his knees, sat back on his heels with a grunt as the jolt shivered pain through the arrow jutting out of his chest. His comrades gathered in a claustrophobic circle around him, and Llesho glared up at them. “Stop it,” he said, “I’m not ready to have my throat cut yet.”

“Nobody’s going to cut your throat,” Lling responded tartly. Llesho didn’t notice what Kaydu was about until the pressure against the arrow brought him back to himself.

“We can’t take it out now; you would bleed to death before we could find help for you.” Kaydu snapped the shaft off an inch or so from where it entered Llesho’s tunic. He screamed, a high shrill sound that tore at his throat. A part of his mind that stood outside his body wondered what animal was being slaughtered in the forest. A prince, the part of him in agony answered himself. A prince is dying. The daylight dimmed, and he fought unconsciousness while the pain thrummed in him like the arrow was a live thing, digging its way through muscle and bone.

“Lord Yueh, or his servant, won’t be far behind his scouts. He’ll send a bigger force when the patrol doesn’t come back,” Kaydu said. He knew what that meant: ride or die.

“We ride,” Llesho gasped. “Help me to my horse.”

Hmishi and Lling each slipped under an arm and grabbed hold of Llesho’s belt.

“One, two, three,” Lling counted, and on the mark of three, they hoisted him to his feet, then to his stirrup. He managed to swing his own leg over the horse’s back, and Kaydu settled his foot on the other side.

When he was set, Kaydu teased Little Brother from his walnut tree but did not tuck him back into his sling. Instead, she took his hat and coat so that he would look like the wild monkeys that populated the forest, and slipped a thin band around his body, under his arms. “Find Father,” she instructed. “Give him this message.”

She tried to lift him from her shoulder to a low branch of his hiding tree, but Little Brother clung to her neck, his little face grave and fearful. Kaydu sighed heavily, but she untangled the monkey arms from around her neck and chirped at him in the strange language they shared.

“Llesho is hurt,” she murmured, “Find Father, bring him,” and this time Little Brother leaped into the tree with a shrill stream of monkey curses. As they watched, he scurried out to the edge of his branch and flung himself into the next tree, and the next, his cries disappearing into the answers of the wild monkeys shaking their branches as he passed.

Llesho peered into the forest. His vision blurred, and sweat ran down his brow into his eyes. Something within him was drawing him farther away from his surroundings. He hoped to see the bear cub that had warned them of their danger but he didn’t have the strength, and his companions lacked the time, to search for the cub.

Kaydu took the reins of his horse and led them out of the clearing. After a while, when their camp had fallen behind and only the deep woods surrounded them, Llesho thought he heard the sounds of an animal in the underbrush. He could see nothing but the occasional sway of a branch in the windless air, however, and gradually his sight faded to a twilit gray tunnel down which he staggered for an eternal afternoon. When he felt himself falling into the darkness, he called out to his old teacher, Lleck, though he had no idea how much of Lleck remained alive in the mind of the bear cub, or how much of his teacher had reverted to the wild nature of the bear. In the clearing they’d needed the savagery of the bear, but now, with his own life fading with the daylight, he missed the wise teacher.

“Help me, Lleck,” he called, and the sound of his voice reminded him of other times, another march. When his horse stumbled, and he fell from his saddle, he struggled to rise lest he be trampled underfoot. “Mama,” he thought at first, but remembered she was dead, “Adar!” he called for the brother who had soothed his fever when Llesho was a child. Healer king. Adar, where are you?

C HAPTER N INETEEN

UNTIL their flight from the governor’s compound at Farshore, Llesho had never seen a mountain or a forest. There had been the tangle of sand-loving trees and vines that crowned the hill at the center of Pearl Island, of course, and Llesho had once thought of that as a jungle or wood. But nothing had prepared him for the cycle of life and death played out in tones of black and gray in the night forest. Vaguely, through the fever that radiated from the arrowhead lodged in his chest, Llesho remembered that he’d once thought the forest must be silent at night, not this rackety clatter of birds calling and monkeys chittering and a thousand different kinds of insects chirping to each other with the clicking of their wings.

The sounds at a distance were a comfort. Those same creatures had fallen silent where they passed; that they resumed their nightly concert meant Master Markko’s soldiers were not following yet, would not be looking for them until morning when his patrol did not return.

But the skulking hiss of predators keeping pace with their party over the leaf fall on the floor of the forest, and slinking from tree to tree overhead, raised the hackles of Llesho’s neck. He sweated hot and cold by turns, fear and the oppressive heat of the forest confusing his damaged body. The creatures knew by smell that he was weak and waited only for his companions to let down their guard, and then the jaws of some huge cat or flying monster would seize him. Llesho could feel the prickle of anticipation in his legs, his shoulders, his neck. His flesh seemed to reach for the tooth and the beak in the eager rise of the hairs on his body.

As his fever rose, the sounds blurred, changed, and he heard skirts brushing through the grass, the cough and wheeze of old men driven beyond their strength. In Llesho’s mind, the wail of a predator celebrating its kill mingled with the death cry of its prey, and he heard it as the curses of the guards and the death of another child strangled for its misery on the Long March. A keening wail for his mother and his father, dead and lost to him forever, started in the back of his throat. He wanted his brothers to hold him and tell him it was a bad dream, but no one came. He pressed onward through the night, through the pain and the numbness that was creeping across his shoulder and down his arm, and through the terrible, terrible grief of a seven-year-old child with the blood of his first murder still on his hands.

He knew he must not let his screams out, that if he started screaming the guards would come and they would stop him with their huge hands wrapped around his throat, and his eyes would bug out, and his tongue would turn purple, and they would throw him by the wayside to appease the jackals that fought with each other and yapped their selfish demands for the carrion left in the wake of the Long March. He did not want to be set upon his own feet, gradually to drift to the rear, where the lions who paced the human herd roared their challenge and watched for the weak, the small, the sickly, to fall behind. He had seen a lioness attack a child fallen on the trail, how quickly the tawny cat sneaked up on them and snatched the child away before its mother rightly knew her precious burden was gone.

“The lions,” he whispered to his companions. Better prey than carrion. “The lions, not the jackals.” And then he fell.

“Llesho!” A voice he recognized—Lling—called to him, too late. He heard the sound of horses, and cringed within himself. The guards would take him, and they would strangle him for the jackals. “The lions,” he murmured in his fever.

“Llesho, it’s me, Lling. Can you hear me?”

Small hands with hard calluses brushed the hair from his forehead. “He’s really sick, Kaydu. I don’t care how much daylight we have, he can’t go any farther.”

Daylight? “Dark,” Llesho objected, “Adar?”

He wanted Adar, wanted his brother, the healer prince, to hold him and tell him it was just a dream, a nothing fever that he would bathe in herbs and whisper gentle prayers over. But Adar’s hands were soft as were none of the hands that touched him now, and the air was too thick to breathe, not the cool, sharp air of Adar’s dispensary, tucked into the high mountains overlooking the Great Pass to the west. He coughed and felt liquid bubbles shift in his chest, coughed harder and couldn’t stop. Another voice in the darkness—not Adar, but male, and scared, muttered, “He’s coughing up blood, prop him up so that he doesn’t choke to death.”

They moved him, and he screamed. He couldn’t help it, though he knew it was dangerous, and the guards would come. A breathy “Shhh” warned him, but he couldn’t hold it in, couldn’t even form the thought to fight it, and the scream went on endlessly, until even Thebin lungs held no more. Llesho gasped and struggled for air that he sucked in with desperate rattling wheezes, but his blood was filling up his chest cavity faster than his indrawn breath could replace itself. He coughed and choked and vomited blood on himself until the hands on his shoulders rolled him onto his side and a voice above him swore softly. “Oh, Goddess, what are we going to do?”

“Make him drink,” Kaydu said, and something fell next to him, was picked up and offered, and he reached for it with his lips like an infant reaches for his mother and the water poured over his mouth, and he tried to swallow, but felt the water coming back up thicker than it went in. Oh, Goddess. If this was her favor, then Llesho did not ever want to anger her.

“I’ll go for help,” Lling’s voice, close to him, said, and he muttered, “Adar,” through the chattering of his teeth. He was so cold all of a sudden; he felt his body shiver convulsively, and he grasped at the tunic of the person who held him. “Cold,” he managed, and Kaydu was arguing with Lling, “Where will you go? Who do you expect to find out here but Master Markko’s men? You know what he said about being taken again—he’d rather be dead.”

“That doesn’t mean he wants to be dead. I’ll ride ahead. We’re on a path, there must be a village somewhere.”

Lling went away then, and someone put a blanket over him. The blanket smelled like horses, and he tried to cringe away from the hands that held it there, but the voice he knew as Hmishi hushed him with soothing words, and the words turned into a song, the prayer song for a sick child. He knew the words:

Free this child of his pain, Let him laugh and sing again. Lady of the crimson west, From his fever give him rest.

It was a simple prayer; Adar knew much better ones, with harmonies sung with the lower throat voice while the upper nose voice sang the rhythms, broken by the ring of finger cymbals between the choruses. For state occasions, the birth of a prince or princess, or a plague, prayer wheels and gongs would join the song, and the entire order of healers would sing together in polytonal synchrony. Llesho had listened with wonder as his brother led the healing monks in petitioning the goddess to ease the birth of their sister. They’d been too successful for Llesho’s young taste, and the little princess had been stubborn and loud from the moment of her birth. Llesho didn’t want to think about that, though, because then he would have to remember that she was dead on a garbage heap somewhere and not even given the honor of a funeral. How would she ever find her way back to the world if she didn’t know how much she was missed, how they had mourned her?

Why hadn’t Adar saved her, if he was alive? He was a healer, after all, and knew all the chants and songs, and all the ways of herbs and the power of touch that only the most gifted healers practiced. Why hadn’t he saved their sister? “Adar! Adar!” he called, while the voice over him broke from its song to whisper, “Hush, hush, hush.”

“Hot,” Llesho fretted, and pushed at the blanket.

“Take it off him,” the voice of Kaydu said, and he could see her, standing over him with a sour frown on her face.

“But he was cold a minute ago,” Hmishi objected.

“Fevers do that sometimes, if they are high enough,” Kaydu answered, still frowning, but she didn’t sound as severe as she had a few moments ago, and Llesho was grateful when the blanket was taken away. He was still too hot, but without the blanket to hinder him, his restless limbs could move. “He’ll complain that he is cold soon enough,” she continued. “When he does, use this—” she handed over a head-cloth so fine he could see her face through it. “Drape it over his shoulders, to comfort him, but don’t cover him for warmth. Let the air cool his skin.”

But neither of them was Adar, and as the chills seized him again, he called out for his brother, gasping his cry, “Cold, Adar, cold.”

Hands that were not his brother’s covered him with a wisp of cloth and he wrapped his hands in it and curled himself around it, trying to warm himself in its folds, but he couldn’t get warm, couldn’t get warm, and he rocked himself, and the arrow bit deeper when he moved.

“Lions,” he said, “lions, lions, lions,” and he would have shouted if he could, because they would not understand. He wanted to go to the lions now, not wait until he was food for the jackals, and he heard the wind in the grass, and the moans of the women and the old men driven beyond endurance in the Long March. And he heard the crying of the children, and knew he was one of them, but he was a prince and must not cry, must not cry, but his face was wet, not a prince after all, but a slave. Were slaves allowed to cry?

Horses then, and Lling, saying: “There is a village about a mile down this track. I found a healer. She said she would come.”

Then Llesho heard the robes of a woman stirring the underbrush, the smell of herbs and sunshine on her hem.

“The boy is sick?” she asked. Kwan-ti. He looked up at her and smiled. “I knew you would come,” he said, and closed his eyes. He was safe now, though she was not Adar, and he had thought her dead.

“Are you a healer?” Hmishi asked, and Llesho would have laughed at him if he could have. Didn’t he recognize Kwan-ti, their old healer from Pearl Island? But Lling did not correct him, and Kaydu was explaining Llesho’s wound as if to a stranger.

“An arrow, here.” Kaydu gestured to her own body, to a spot just above her left breast. “We did not take it out, afraid that he would bleed to death, but the wound has sickened, and he has fever and coughs up blood.”

“He’s conscious some of the time,” Hmishi said. “But he makes no sense when he talks.”

“We’ll see what we can do.” The healer knelt down at his side and touched the stub of arrow jutting from his chest. It should have hurt like fire piercing his heart, but it didn’t. All he could think about was the cool touch of her fingers, and the scent of mint and honeysuckle that clung to her like a perfume.

“The village is more than a li distant, his condition too serious to carry him so far,” she said, “But I have a small house here in the wood that I use when I need to replenish my supplies. It’s just this way—”

Llesho did not open his eyes to see what she did, but her hand disappeared from his chest, and he guessed she must have pointed, for she added, “The first bit is uphill, but it is only a short hike, and then the way is level. Lift him onto a blanket, and we will each take a corner. You can come back for the horses when we have a roof over his head.”

Hmishi’s hand on his shoulder tightened, and he heard his friend say, “You did not ask who we are, or how our companion came to have an arrow in him.”

Why did Hmishi sound so suspicious? Surely he knew the healer as well as any of them. “Kwan-ti,” Llesho called out to her.

“She’s not Kwan-ti,” Hmishi murmured a quiet warning, but the healer contradicted him with a mild rebuke:

“It will not hurt to let him think I am someone he knows, and if he wishes for her presence, perhaps it will help him. Come, before it rains, or worse. Your attackers may have reinforcements nearby.”

She moved away briefly, but after a moment returned. “We have to lift you now,” she whispered. “It will hurt, but just for a few minutes, and then we will try to make you more comfortable, yes?”

He nodded to signal he was ready, and she favored him with a smile in reply. “Now,” she said, and his companions lifted him and set him on the blanket. He gasped, still shocked at how much the wound could hurt when he moved, but he stuffed his fist in his mouth to stifle the scream. He would not give their position away to the guards. But he couldn’t quite remember what guards he was watching out for, so he let his head fall to the side, and escaped the pain into a dark well of oblivion.

C HAPTER T WENTY

YOU’RE going to be all right, Llesho, but this will hurt. I’m sorry.“

Kwan-ti’s voice reached him from somewhere in the fog that dimmed his eyes and clogged all his thought processes. He thought she was wrong, though. He could feel Master Markko’s poison burning in his veins, and he knew he was dying. Llesho smiled at her anyway. The bed was soft and smelled of sweet grasses, and when she spoke, her voice held the dark at bay. The paste she smeared around the arrow jutting from his chest chilled him to the bone, but with that icy contact, the pain went away.

“Kaydu, Hmishi,” Kwan-ti called to his companions in the voice that demanded instant obedience. “Tie these.”

Soft clothes wrapped Llesho’s wrists and upper arms, wrapped his legs and his torso so that he couldn’t move.

“No!” He started to panic, but Kwan-ti settled him with a hand on his forehead.

“I have to take the arrowhead out, Llesho.

“Lling, bring the knife from the fire, and plenty of cloths. Kaydu, bring the tub of hot water, and Hmishi, bring the jar, there in the window.” She never stopped stroking his brow, but Llesho heard the scurry of footsteps away from his bed and back again, felt cloths draped over his shoulder, heard the hiss of a hot knife in water.

“Hold him,” she said, and the knife pierced Llesho’s breast, cut deep, past the blessed ice of the surface, into the pocket of infected, rotting flesh, and deeper, until the tip of the knife scraped bone, and Llesho was straining against the restraints that held him, screaming as if his throat would turn itself inside out. Oh, Goddess, what had he done to deserve this? Why wouldn’t she just let him die in peace?

Hands left him. He heard footsteps running, and a door opened and banged shut again. The hands that remained still held him immobilized for the healer’s knife, but they shook. It must have been Lling who sobbed at his feet, because he recognized Kaydu’s voice growling prayers and imprecations at his head, subsiding after a while into a muttered string of words, “Finish it, finish it,” over and over like a mantra. So Hmishi must have run from the house.

Then the arrowhead was out, lifted away, and Kwan-ti called for boiled cloths and stroked the weeping shme from his body, dipping into the wound itself to clean out the poison.

“Could be worse,” she muttered through gritted teeth. “Just a bit of fecal matter smeared on the tip of the arrow. A soldier’s trick, not the work of a magician. Deadly enough if left untreated any longer, but we caught it in time, I think. Now, hand me that jar.”

Kwan-ti’s hands went away. Llesho heard the grind of a stopper being pulled from the jar in question. Kwan-ti smeared something into the wound that crawled over his flesh like jackals over carrion. With a sick moan, Lling followed Hmishi out the door.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “What is it?”

Llesho squirmed while she pasted a cool mash of leaves and moss over the mess and wrapped a bandage tightly over the whole strange patch in his flesh.

“Something to help clean away the dead flesh,” she answered, the cool humor in her voice at odds with her earlier tension. “We’ll leave the packing in until the maggots have done their work, and then we’ll see what we have.”

Maggots! If he’d had the strength, Llesho would have been beside his friends outside, vomiting his disgust along with his dinner. But he hadn’t the strength to lift his head nor had he had any dinner. When he reached to tear away the bandages and their foul infestation, the soft ties still held his arms trapped at his sides.

“Relax, Llesho.” Kwan-ti’s fingers left cool traces where she touched his forehead, and he found himself sinking back into the bed of sweet grass and herbs. “Your own dead flesh was producing the poisons that were killing you,” she explained. “My little ones will eat the corruption and leave the healthy flesh to grow strong again. They are less painful and more sure than my knife, and they will not injure the living body as the knife has done.”

As she spoke, Kwan-ti bathed his side, his arm, his neck. The feel of the damp cloth against his skin distracted him from the crawling sensation beneath the bandage. When she had finished and left him to rest, Llesho lay awake, waiting for the sensation of fat white maggots to gnaw through to his heart. It seemed like an eternity before he decided to let the terror go. If he had come so far only to die hideously at the hands of a friend, he’d rather not know. So he gave in to the pull of exhaustion and fell into a deep sleep haunted by dreams of Harn raiders storming through the palace and the Long March. In his dreams he heard the mocking cries of the jackals drawing near.

When he woke again, sunlight cast soft beams through the pollen that floated in the air of the little house. His companions had carried him here in the dark of night, he seemed to remember. He didn’t know if the house looked east or west, if it was morning or afternoon. He had no idea how long he had lain between normal sleep and fevered delirium in the healer’s house, or how long it had been since he had eaten. He heard the murmur of soft voices nearby, and the chink of cups on saucers, however, which triggered the juices on his tongue. He was hungry. Starving, in fact. He could eat a bear.

Which reminded him that he hadn’t seen the bear cub since their battle with Master Markko’s scouts in the woods. Had something happened to him? Was it really the spirit of Master Lleck, his old teacher and his father’s minister, or was that just another of his fevered dreams? Very little seemed real to him right now. Not his life as a pearl diver or as a novice gladiator, or his training as a soldier in the governor’s compound. His recent experience with the infected wound seemed to have stripped everything away but the Long March. He wondered if that meant he was dead, or that his whole life had been a dream while he marched across an endless grassland in the arms of his dying people.

If the bandage still covered his left side, he bargained with himself, that would prove with the evidence of his own body that he was alive. He didn’t know how he was going to test this theory, since Kwan-ti had ordered his arms tied down and Kaydu had tied the knots. When he lifted his right hand experimentally, it moved freely—in fact, it seemed to float above him of its own accord. Llesho had to speak sternly to it in the privacy of his mind before it would settle over the bandage.

The cloth was still there, bound tightly around the place where Kwan-ti had carved out the arrowhead, so, perhaps he was still alive. The crawly feeling of flesh-eating vermin was gone, however, that could mean they had transformed into some other form of creature now invading his body for the kill, or that Kwan-ti had removed them while he had slept. He wasn’t sure he cared which was true, so long as he could keep this feeling of floating free of his body and its pain.

“You finally decided to rejoin us!” The healer had noticed his hand drifting above his eyes. She filled a cup from a kettle that simmered over a three-legged brazier by the window and carried it over to him.

“Drink, boy. You need the nourishment.”

She gave him an encouraging smile, but Llesho could not hide his disappointment when he took the cup from her hands. She wasn’t Kwan-ti at all, but a stranger. With his head cleared of the fever, Llesho wondered how he could have mistaken her for the healer on Pearl Island. This woman was much older, her face seamed with the effects of weather and time. Her gait was steady and quick, but her back was bent forward so that she seemed always to be getting a little bit ahead of herself, as if her head could not wait to arrive where her feet were taking her. She had a cheerful smile, and eyes . . . she had Kwan-ti’s eyes as surely as Llesho breathed air and drank tea.

“Kwan-ti?” He barely breathed the question, though he knew, logically, that it couldn’t be true.

“If that is who you wish me to be, young princeling.” There was more to her answer than the wry humoring of a sick patient, but he couldn’t read the truth of it, or why a woman of the Celestial Empire of Shan would call him by his title, even as a pet name.

The dusty, unused sound of his voice had drawn the attention of his companions. Lling reached his bed first, with Hmishi close behind, exclaiming their surprise and encouragement so that he could not dwell on his questions.

“Llesho!”

“You finally woke up!”

“I thought you were going to sleep forever!”

Llesho smiled, drunk with that haze of good feeling between the breaking of a fever and the measuring, in the ache of movement, the losses the body had suffered.

“Give him space to breathe,” the healer warned. “Don’t get him excited; he’s still weak.”

His two old companions withdrew a few steps, punching each other in the shoulder and bobbing on the balls of their feet. But he did not see Kaydu anywhere in the cottage.

“Where’s Kaydu?”

Lling shrugged her shoulder. “She was afraid that we might be trapped in this cabin if Lord Yueh sent reinforcements after us. So she left, late last night, to scout the area.”

“When I went out to tend to the horses this morning, I thought I saw dragons in the distance—two of them, flying too high for me to be certain. Mara says that she will be safe enough, since the local dragons haven’t eaten people for several generations.” Hmishi twitched a shoulder in a companion gesture to Lling’s shrug. Neither wanted to think about what might have happened to Kaydu alone in the forest with dragons in flight and enemy soldiers on the ground.

Only the healer seemed unconcerned. “I am Mara. I would have introduced myself when we met, but you seemed to need someone else in my place, and I didn’t want to disturb your recovery with a little thing like a name.”

She eased herself down onto a low three-legged stool beside his bed and urged the cup to his mouth. “Don’t forget to drink,” she ordered him, but Llesho put up a hand to stop the cup from coming any closer.

“Kaydu,” he said.

“Will be fine. She’s a smart girl, and full of tricks. Don’t you worry.” Mara, the healer, held out the cup again, more insistently, and this time Llesho drank as he was told.

He expected something sharp and smelling of io-dine, as Kwan-ti’s potions often did on Pearl Island, but this was sweet and light and smelled of flowers good enough to eat. When he would have drunk too fast she tilted the cup away from him with a warning, “Slowly, princeling, your body isn’t used to taking nourishment any more.”

By the time she had spoken her warning and he had nodded understanding he really didn’t have, he was ready to drink again. When she offered the cup, he slurped noisily, trying to take in as much as he could before she took it away. His childlike cunning made her laugh.

“Definitely improved,” she decided. “And well enough that I can afford to leave you in the care of your traveling party for a few hours. I have patients I need to see in the village, and they will have missed me by now.”

“What do you want us to do?” Lling stood between the healer and Llesho’s bed, looking down at him with concern hunching her shoulders.

The healer offered her the cup. “Get as much of this into him as you can, slowly at first, then let him set his own pace. If I am not back by evening, he can have some of the boiled fowl from the icehouse.”

She stood up and stretched out her back. Hmishi drifted over to listen as she gave her instructions. “He should sleep most of the day, but if he gets restless, you can prop him up on pillows—don’t let him try to sit on his own. When he needs to relieve himself, bring him the jar—he is not to get out of this bed until I say so!

“If he isn’t careful, he will tear the healing flesh.” She smiled to take the sting out of the warning. When she was certain she would be obeyed, she untied her apron and hung it on a hook. She put on her bonnet and tied it under her chin. Then, taking a cloak of mottled green from the peg beside it, she issued her final warning, “Don’t chatter too much, you will tire him. Remember, a relapse is always harder to treat than the original fever.”

With that she opened the door and went out, closing it softly behind her.

When the healer had gone, Lling moved purposefully out of his range of sight, and Llesho heard a clatter on a staircase he could not see, followed by footsteps overhead. Lling soon returned with a huge bolster full of goose feathers, and Hmishi lifted him up so that she could put the bolster under his shoulders. When his two companions had settled Llesho against the bolster, they sat cross-legged on the floor next to his bed. They could talk this way without looking down at him, and Llesho could see them without craning his neck.

He knew they were waiting for his questions, but first he gave a luxurious sigh and took stock of his surroundings. The house appeared to be small but comfortable for its occupant. He dismissed the upper loft, which he could not explore in his present condition, and which must contain few dangers to concern him if Lling could root around up there without setting a guard. The main floor was one tidy room with a single door and one large window with its shutter propped open with a stick. When he was sitting up like this, he could see most of the room. A fireplace and a table and chairs stood at one end, with shelves knocked into the wall next to the fireplace. In the corner by the door sat a three-legged stool and the low, grass-filled bed. Through the window, sunlight filled the space and left the silhouettes of pine boughs brushing the floor.

The light troubled him. He’d been awake for long enough that the quality and direction of it should have changed, but it stayed bright and soft as early morning. He didn’t want to let go of the delicious weightlessness he felt basking in the warmth of it, but they had been running from danger, and he didn’t think that danger had gone away just because he needed time to heal.

“Where are we?” he asked. “How long have we been here?”

Lling took the first question. “We’ve come about seventy li from Farshore. We were moving away from her Ladyship’s party at an angle, but we are still a hundred or so li from the outer border of Thousand Lakes Province, more than twice that far from the provincial capital. If her ladyship kept ahead of Lord Yueh, the refugees should have passed the border two days ago, and by now her ladyship’s father must have sent his own troops to escort her home. They may be watching for us along the frontier, but Thousand Lakes Province can’t do much for us unless we cross its border, which we don’t plan on doing if we can help it.”

If the refugees had already covered more than seventy li, he’d been asleep too long. Hmishi confirmed that assessment as he answered the second question. “We brought you here three days ago, I think. It’s hard to keep track.” The tremor in his voice gave him away. They had given up hope that Llesho would ever awaken. He wondered what had kept him asleep so long, but could remember only the fading dreams of another life. Which was real? he wondered. Was he sleeping now, dreaming of friends and feather pillows? Would he waken again to the Long March when he hit the ground, another Thebin subject dead beneath him, another taking him up in her arms and walking on?

He thought he could hear the whisper of the long grass in the distance, and shuddered. This was real: Lling and Hmishi, Kaydu gone to scout for trouble, and the sunshine casting bars of bough-patterned light against the old and weathered floor of the house in the woods. But this reality, he remembered, had a monkey in a coat and hat in it, and a bear cub that said his name, which sounded as unreal as any dream. He closed his eyes, too confused to take it in, too frightened of the alternative if this world wasn’t real. He’d almost died in this world, too, of course, and he wondered if the goddess left any path open for him on which he lived to reach his majority. She must have been really pissed off at him for the interruption of his birthday vigil.

Lling gave him a moment to regain his composure, then laid out their choices. “Our next step depends on what Kaydu finds during her reconnoiter. If Lord Yueh was pursuing the refugees and the scouting party stumbled upon us by accident, his army may not have stopped at the border. Thousand Lakes Province may be under attack even now, and we will find no sanctuary there. If the scouts were looking for us—” she did not say it, but they all knew she meant Llesho—“it is unlikely that we can outrun a trained army.”

Again, Llesho knew he was the obstacle to their escape. The others could run, or hide, but Llesho couldn’t sit up under his own power, let alone escape a pursuing army.

“Sky Bridge Province is closer,” Hmishi continued, “not more than thirty li to the south, but the mountain passes are more difficult there. We would have to trade the horses for donkeys, and any spy who learned of it would know immediately that we had changed our route.”

“We’d be moving away from Shan and not toward it,” Llesho objected, still determined to reach the capital city and find Adar as soon as possible.

“But we’d be heading toward Thebin. Whatever plan we make will have to wait on Kaydu’s report.”

Llesho nodded his agreement, though what he expected to accomplish with just the four of them, all too young for legal freedom and Llesho with a hole in his chest, he didn’t rightly know.

Lling focused her gaze on the edge of Llesho’s bandaged side where it had escaped the blanket. “We don’t have to decide yet,” she said, “not until Kaydu finds out whether Master Markko is still looking for us, or if Lord Yueh has pulled off all his men to attack Thousand Lakes Province. In the meantime, Llesho needs to heal.”

Waiting sounded like a good idea to Llesho; he needed his friends working and thinking together when they went after Adar. He didn’t have the energy to persuade them to go to the capital city of Shan anyway—didn’t think he’d have much luck trying when he couldn’t stand up under his own power. But he wasn’t sure that they could stay where they were either.

“Do you think Kaydu is coming back?” he asked, and meant not, Has she betrayed us to our enemies? but, Has she been captured? and, Do we have to run now, before her captors find us, and while I am not yet sure which world I live in let alone what route we should take to freedom?

Lling frowned in a way that made Llesho think she had figured out the shades of meaning in the questions he was really asking.

“We’re as safe as we can be,” she said. “Or we have been, until now.”