Until now. Llesho wondered about that. Lling answered his frown without waiting for the next question: “We are still free, more or less, though Mara— the lady healer—hasn’t had much chance to betray us to Lord Yueh. She has stayed with you night and day since she brought us here.”

Thus the “until.” Whatever Kaydu’s fate, Lling didn’t think she’d give them up to Master Markko or Lord Yueh. The healer, Mara, however, could be reporting them to authorities in the village at this very minute. Those local officials might hand them over to anyone happening by with a provincial government badge on his cap.

“You don’t trust her?” They both knew which “her” he meant. Llesho wasn’t sure he could ride yet, but he could send his companions on ahead, out of harm’s reach, if he had to, and find his own way out of Lord Yueh’s trap. There was always the one final escape open to him, though he regretted the pain and exhaustion he had already invested in recovering from his injury.

Lling wouldn’t meet his eyes, but raised her eyebrows in question at Hmishi, who hesitantly took up the answer.

“I think she would do anything in her power to keep you from harm,” Hmishi began, “but she’s not Kwan-ti.”

The first part of Hmishi’s answer surprised him. Llesho had already figured out the second part for himself. “Has she told you who she is?” He didn’t mean the name, of course, but Hmishi repeated it anyway.

“Her name is Mara, and she says she is local to the village, and only uses this house when she is foraging in the wood for herbs and fungi to use in her medicines.”

“But the house had all the signs that someone had been living in it recently,” Lling observed. “No dust on the tables, the bed made with grasses still green from the plucking when we arrived. And there were fresh fruits and vegetables in the bins.”

“She had the medicines she needed for your wound right to hand,” Lling added.

Llesho did not look happy, but he admitted, “I know it doesn’t make sense, and you’ve both seen a lot more of the healer than I have, but I trust her.” He glared at his companions, defying them to contradict him. “It was something about her touch—I could feel it. I think that’s why I mistook her for Kwan-ti. There was something about her touch that just felt like a true healer.” They couldn’t object, however; they had all grown to like her, and for many of the same reasons.

“At first, when she cut out the arrowhead, I thought we’d made a mistake,” Hmishi said. “She seemed as cold as her blade, and even more unbending. I couldn’t even watch, but she didn’t flinch once, not even when you screamed that horrible scream and only the cloths tying you down kept you from rising right out of the bed.”

Llesho remembered that part, dimly, and it still had the power to turn his stomach. His companions seemed to feel the same way, for they had turned matching shades of green.

“And when she did that thing with the—” Hmishi couldn’t finish, just shuddered in revulsion, and gestured loosely at the bandages. Llesho remembered that part, too, and was regretting that he’d drunk so much of the healer’s potion so recently. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be pleasant on the return trip.

“I’d heard Little Phoenix mention the use of the carrion eaters as a battlefield treatment for rotting wounds,” Lling interrupted, “but I’d never actually seen it done. Hope I don’t again.”

Hmishi shook his head. “I don’t have to like it, but I can accept that it was necessary.”

Llesho knew he wasn’t in the best shape for logic, but even he could see that Hmishi was making a better argument for distrusting Mara than for trusting her. “So you like her, even though you don’t trust her and think she might be trying to kUl me?”

He didn’t like the sound of that, but it was how his tired brain chose to phrase it.

“It was afterward,” Hmishi said. “She bandaged you and then gave us all instructions for keeping you cool. She told us what to say if you cried out in your sleep, and asked us to watch you while she cleared her mind. And then she went outside.

“We were all nervous then,” Lling said, “because we thought she had gone to find Lord Yueh’s men, to hand us over.”

“So I followed her,” Hmishi admitted. “I would have killed her before she gave away the location of this house, but she only went as far as the trail. She brushed away the marks of our boots and the horses’ hooves, and scattered fresh branches to erase all the signs of our camp. She was angry. It took me a few minutes to realize that she was praying while she worked, and that she was addressing heaven in that tone of voice mothers use when you leave the gate open and the goats get loose in the vegetable garden.

“She was furious because you’d been so hurt—I’ve never seen a healer threaten the gods before, but that’s what she seemed to be doing. So, I don’t think she is going to turn us over to Master Markko, or to Lord Yueh’s soldiers.”

Hmishi shrugged, unwilling it seemed to explain why he would trust their safety to the curses of a madwoman. “I wasn’t sure of her skills as a healer until yesterday. Your fever broke, and today you woke up. I don’t think she is likely to poison us, not after spending so much time on making you better. But I don’t know how safe she will be, or us, if the villagers tell Lord Yueh’s men about this house.”

Llesho could feel the smile stealing over his face. The sunlight would never make sense, but perhaps there was a reason for the eternal morning. “I don’t think anyone will find this place unless she wants them to.” Still smiling, Llesho drifted into a peaceful sleep.

C HAPTER T WENTY-ONE

LLESHO rose out of troubled dreams to find that the sunlight had faded into evening. He’d missed another afternoon and so, apparently, had his companions. Hmishi and Lling lay asleep on the rug by the fireplace, tucked up close to each other as if to ward away the cold.

“What time is it?” he called. “Is anybody here?” It gave him a moment of satisfaction when the sleepers started up with foggy expressions of guilt on their faces.

“Sorry. Fell asleep.” Hmishi rubbed his eyes in an effort to look more alert. “Do you need something?”

“Have you noticed something strange about this place?”

Lling gave him a slow smile. “I like it here,” she said around a yawn and a stretch. “It’s warm, smells nice—”

“Nobody whacking at us with swords or pikes,” Hmishi added.

“What about the missing afternoons?” Llesho would have asked the question but a commotion at the door drew all three Thebins to their feet.

“Home! And not before time, as I see.” Mara entered the cottage trailing a dirty and bedraggled Kaydu, who looked around the little house with suspicious, darted glances out of eyes that seemed charged with feral nerves. Little Brother crouched on her shoulder, his arms wrapped around her neck, but made no sound.

“Kaydu—” Llesho began, just as the healer spoke up, chiding him with a “tsk” in her voice.

“You should be resting. I thought you two had sense enough to keep him lying quietly.”

“We did.”

Llesho slumped back on his feather bolster, more wary than ever but resigned to wait until they were alone again to discuss this matter of lost time. It seemed more important now to find out why Kaydu looked like she’d been on the Long March and why she slumped onto the three-legged stool with relief when her glance fell upon him propped up in his bed.

“I couldn’t find you! I thought you must be gone, or dead—”

“None of that!” The healer interrupted Kaydu’s stammered plea with a sharp order, “Out! Your father taught you better than to track mud into a house where the injured are healing.”

Kaydu took a deep breath, as if she wanted to argue the point, but no words came. Taking belated notice of her disarray, she shuffled out the door again, Little Brother still clinging to her neck, while the old woman’s tart promise followed: “You can talk all you want when you’ve had a wash at the pump.”

When Kaydu had gone, Mara shook her head, as if in disapproval of the returned scout, or at some news from the village that troubled her. She hung her bonnet on its hook and took up her apron with a reverent hand, stretching and sighing with a shake of her head as if she was setting her day aside with her cap. After completing the little homecoming ritual, she dragged the three-legged stool over to Llesho’s bed and dropped down onto it. Her smile couldn’t hide the weariness that deepened the lines between her eyes, but she seemed genuinely pleased at his condition. “You look better, Llesho. Did you behave yourself today?”

“If you mean did I sleep the day away, yes. I didn’t have much choice about it.”

“I don’t suppose you did. But you needed the rest, and I wanted to take no chances that you would do something foolhardy while I was away.”

Until she said that, Llesho had not suspected the delicious drink his friends had pressed on him all day. When he realized that she had drugged him, he blushed, a little angry at her for tricking him, but more at himself for not suspecting the potion. Adar had taught him long ago how foolish it was to judge a medicine by its sweetness. But Kaydu’s anxious glances needed his attention now.

“What happened to Kaydu?” He asked. “Have Yueh’s soldiers found us?” His companions, at least, might escape—

“You are safe for the time being.” The healer made a sour face. “No one has seen any soldiers in the village yet, though some of my patients reported strangers creeping around asking questions about comings and goings at the crossroads. I didn’t tell anybody you were here with me, however, not that they would have talked to the spies if they knew. We are not a trusting people hereabouts.”

Llesho kept to himself the reminder that Lling had gone into the village to seek help in the first place, and that Mara herself had trusted his companions enough to bring them into her home and heal his wound without question. He figured she had ways to protect herself.

Something had unsettled Kaydu’s mind, which not even Yueh’s surprise attack and their flight under cover of darkness had managed to do in the past. He didn’t want to know what had put her in this state, but suspected that, in the absence of the enemy, she’d run afoul of the protections of the healer. She had left to find the pump easily enough once she’d assured herself that Llesho was safe, though. He didn’t think she would have done that if Mara posed a threat to them, but he wasn’t quite ready to give up his own suspicions yet.

“I did hear a strange tale about a bear cub,” Mara continued. “The villagers say that the creature takes careful nibbles of food offered from the hands of small children, and that he says, ‘Thank you’ when he is done, but one can’t believe everything one hears.”

She tilted her head in a question, giving him the opportunity to come clean with his story, but he wasn’t ready to grant her Lleck’s secret yet.

When he said nothing, she added, “The village elders didn’t believe the story either, having their own experience with bears. They were gathering a hunting party to find him and kill him.” She saw his look of dismay and her smile developed a wry pucker. “Fortunately, this particular children’s story followed me home.”

Llesho tried to rise from his bed, torn between chagrin and the need to see his teacher, even in his new form. But the healer pushed him down again. “He’s outside. Master Lleck’s manners, like those of your guide, currently leave much to be desired. You must trust to the forest to keep him safe, at least until tomorrow.”

“You don’t mean Kaydu to sleep outside as well!” he demanded.

    “Of course not, child! I am sure she will be her usual self as soon as she has had a good wash, and then she may come in and visit you and sleep by the fireplace or in the loft as she chooses.”

Only then did Llesho realize that not one of his three human companions remained in the house.

“They are having a chat with your furry brown friend.” Mara seemed to read his mind, although the question, and the fear, had marked themselves pretty clearly on Llesho’s face.

Fortunately for his peace of mind, he didn’t have to rely on her assurance about their safety for long; the door opened onto growing shadows, from which Kaydu tumbled, looking more herself with the mud washed away and fresh clothes replacing her damaged ones. Hmishi and then Lling followed, with Little Brother chattering in her arms. They all talked at once, in a shorthand that left unspoken the experiences they had shared while Llesho had lain unconscious from the effects of the tainted arrow. He felt a sudden pang of jealousy, that they had formed a unit while he slept. They had seen and talked with Lleck while he lay on his bed like a wet noodle. Mara seemed greatly distracted by the sudden clamor, but she focused keenly enough on the door when Lleck tried to sneak past under cover of their commotion.

The healer was on her feet faster than Llesho could see her move, elbows akimbo, her hands in tight fists perched on her hips. “Not in my house, master bear!” She glared at him, tapping her foot all the while.

The bear cub uttered a mournful cry and ducked his head so that he could cover his eyes with a forepaw.

“That won’t work on me, you old reprobate. We settled that on the way home.”

“Please?” Llesho asked weakly from his bed. He needed to know that, however changed, his old mentor was still safe and whole.

The healer turned her glare on him, but Llesho didn’t flinch or look away. He had to see Lleck. If he couldn’t do it in the cottage, he would get out of bed and sleep in the forest, whatever it did to the wound healing under his bandages.

“Stubborn,” she remarked. “I almost feel sorry for him.”

She measured the determination in Llesho’s face a moment longer before throwing her hands in the air and leaving his bedside. “Just a quick hello,” she insisted. “Then it is outside for him. He’ll be more useful as a guard if he can roam a bit, and I’m not cleaning up after a bear in here. Bad enough with the four of you.”

Embarrassed that she had seen through their covering commotion so easily, his companions likewise moved away from the door.

“Kaydu, please bring the chicken from the icehouse.”

Kaydu dropped her gaze and backed nervously out the door as Mara gave further instructions, “Lling, there are carrots and potatoes in the root bin in the cellar; would you please fill this sack with equal numbers of each.” She held out the sack, and when Lling had taken it, picked up the water bucket. “Hmishi, you may bring water from the pump.”

Lleck waited until his human companions left the cottage to do the healer’s bidding, then he lumbered in over the doorstep.

“Llle-sshhooo!” he wailed, and Llesho held out a hand to him.

“Lleck!”

The cub neared him suspiciously and sniffed his hand. Lleck’s muzzle was cool and moist, his fur soft. Llesho pulled himself up in his bed enough to wrap his arms around the bear’s neck. “Lleck,” he sighed, and dropped his head on top of the bear’s low skull, resting his forehead between the laid-back ears. After a long minute he raised his head and let the cub lick the salt from his cheek, whuffling in his ear.

“I’m not heartless, you know,” Mara commented while she set two lamps on the table. She trimmed the wicks, then lit them. One she hung from a hook near the bed, and the other from a similar hook above the table.

“A house is no place for a bear. He really will be more comfortable out-of-doors.” She cast him a chid-ing look, then shifted her attention to the shelf by the fireplace, from which she selected first a handful of herbs dried in jars and then some spices twisted in little packets.

“I need to know he is not just a dream,” Llesho tried to explain how he felt about the miracle that had brought his dead teacher to his aid in the forest. Even with his arms around the bear cub’s neck he could not shake the fear that none of it was real. What if he hadn’t wakened from his delirium at all, but still lay dying by the roadside?

“I know, boy.” Mara sighed. “That’s why the old reprobate is sitting by your bedside and not outside as he ought to be.”

Kaydu returned with the fowl, already plucked and boiled and waiting for dish-cooking, and Lling returned with the carrots and potatoes.

“But bears are solitary creatures by nature; to keep him near, you must not hold him too close.” Mara took down her big, sharp knife and talked while she energetically chopped the vegetables.

Returning in time to hear this last comment, Hmishi set down his filled bucket. “He’s not really a bear, though,” he insisted, with a doubtful glance in the direction of Llesho’s animal companion.

“You’re wrong, Hmishi.” Mara’s expression seemed more sad than anything else when she corrected him. “In this lifetime, he is a bear. He fights the impulses natural to this new form because his spirit still yearns to protect the princeling as he could not protect the king in his former life.”

“If you can make the afternoons disappear, why can’t you change him back into Lleck?” He had determined not to speak out about his suspicions until he was alone with his companions, but Lleck’s presence at his side gave Llesho the courage to confront the healer with her magic.

“I don’t know what you mean, Llesho,” Mara an-swered. “Sleep is the only thief of time in this house. Sick people often take strange fancies, however, and I recommend that you put this one right out of your mind.” She stirred some broth into the pot, filling the room with delicious odors that went right to the heart and warmed the body from the inside.

Kaydu sat up straighter. “He’s right,” she said. Her voice had grown stronger now that she had cleaned her face and put on fresh clothes, as if the whole weight of civilization shored up her flagging courage. “You are doing something to our minds, or to the flow of time. How many days have passed in this house while I have been gone? Far less than for me out there, I’ll warrant, or you would have shown more surprise when I turned up on your doorstep. Instead you greeted me as if I had stepped out that door just yesterday.”

“It was just yesterday,” Hmishi pointed out.

No one was listening to him, however, because they were watching Mara, who wiped her hands on her apron and directed a sorrowful frown not on Kaydu, ! but on Lleck, the bear.

“I have some small powers, to aid in healing, or to give rest. I did not shape the mysteries of this glen, but I have the power to enter into them and to protect those in my care by use of them. Even here, day passes into night, however, and no matter how he might wish it otherwise, Lleck will live out this turn of the wheel as a bear is meant to do.”

“But not today?” Llesho objected, his arm still tight around Lleck’s neck.

“Yes, Llesho, today. He will catch and kill his own dinner, and sleep in the arms of the trees tonight. But no harm will come to you as long as he is nearby.”

Lleck dropped his head, accepting Mara’s words with a low cry, “Lleee-sho!” He gave his pupil’s face a farewell lick and walked slowly to the door.

When he was gone, Lling wrinkled her nose, a ques-tion in the gaze she passed from the healer to Kaydu. “Lleck must think we are safe or he wouldn’t leave Llesho for anything. I trust him, if not you. But how long was Kaydu gone?”

“Time doesn’t mean much in these woods,” Mara returned to her cooking with a smack for Hmishi, who plunked himself down at the table and snatched a bit of carrot that escaped her flashing knife. “One day is very like another, just as one tree looks very like another if you aren’t familiar with the forest.”

“Six days.” Kaydu had returned to the three-legged stool, her arms dangling between her knees. “I found my father.”

“And Little Brother.” That still bothered Llesho.

“And Little Brother. Habiba said that Master Jaks is furious with us, and is likely to blister our hides for sneaking away without him, but that Lord Yueh caught up with them before night on the day we sneaked away. We were probably safer alone than we would have been if we’d stayed behind. Master Jaks led the counterstrike and saved her ladyship, which he could not have done if he had come with us, so Father is not as mad as Master Jaks. They are on their way, but they can only travel as fast as their horses. Father said not to wait, but to run as soon as we can.”

Hmishi held out a bit of carrot that had escaped the pot. Kaydu’s pet abandoned Lling to take it from his fingers. “Maybe they should leave their horses behind. You seem to have made better time without one.”

Lling sidled closer to Llesho’s pallet, her hand falling to her belt, where her sword usually hung. “That would only work for Habiba. Master Jaks can’t travel the witch’s road, can he?”

“I am beginning to think you are fools, the lot of you,” Mara waved her stirring spoon at them to emphasize her anger.

“You may not understand Habiba’s gifts to his daughter, but you still need them. Didn’t you ever wonder why Master Markko wanted so badly to rid Pearl Island of witches?”

Llesho didn’t have to wonder. “The Blood Tide,” he said. “A witch might have saved the pearl beds.”

“Very likely one did, until it became more than her life was worth. As graceless a thank you as I’ve ever heard, but accepted. Can we return to the matter of escaping Master Markko’s clutches now? Have you anything else to tell us?”

Llesho wondered at the pronoun. When had Mara become a part of their quest? But Kaydu looked worried, and not about the healer.

“Lord Yueh went after her ladyship, but Master Markko followed us. I saw him at the crossroad, trying to pick up our trail. He almost caught me, but I hid in a fox’s abandoned den until they had searched the area and moved on. Then I reported back to Habiba and returned here, but I couldn’t find the clearing or this house. I would still be stumbling around in the woods, except that I hid myself to watch by the road, and when Mara left the village, I followed her.

“You’ll feel better with a good meal in you.”

He’d recognized everything she’d put in the pot by its smell if nothing else: rosemary and thyme, and a bit of lemon-flavored grass that made the whole dish smell like a country garden. Still, he hesitated, wondered if the healer had drugged the food as she had the potion.

“Come now,” the healer reminded them, “if I wished you harm, I had only to leave you where I found you.”

“Or you may have your own reasons for keeping me here,” Llesho suggested.

“I might. But since I must fatten you up if you are to make an attempt to escape my clutches, it would seem that our immediate goals are the same.”

She was making fun of him. He might have resisted the food anyway, with a thought to self-preservation in the presence of magics he did not understand, but his nose overruled him. It tasted even better than it smelled—fowl braised with the vegetables in a thin broth of the herbs with a dash of spice. Mara brought a chunk of bread out for dipping in the broth so that not a drop of the delicious flavor was wasted. In spite of his stomach’s uneasiness with solid food, Llesho felt better. He sank into the now-familiar curves and dips in his grassy bed with a full stomach, jostled only slightly when Lling sat down beside him and leaned against his pallet for support. Hmishi remained at the table, his head resting on his arms, and Kaydu sat on the three-legged stool, staring thoughtfully into the fire. He was too comfortable, he decided, to work up a suitable terror about Mara’s intentions, and closed his eyes. He had almost fallen asleep when the mournful cry of a bear rose from the forest. Lleck, defending the little house, he thought with a smile. But the tone of the bear’s complaint changed, grew more angry and more desperate.

Llesho tossed in his bed, aware that he had in fact been sleeping, and that Mara tended him with cold compresses. “You are safe, Llesho,” she crooned. “No one will find you here.”

The cry of the bear cub subsided into whuffling plaints of curiosity, and then faded entirely.

“No one can hurt you under this roof; you are in the land of dreams now.”

With Mara’s words echoing softly in his last fading thoughts, Llesho drifted off again. When he awoke, his companions had disappeared.

Ifllara was standing over the table with her arms sunk to the elbows in a bowl of yeasty dough the color of butter. He knew that for sure because a pale yellow brick of the stuff sat on a plate beside the kneading board.

“Your friends are out with Lleck, scouting. They will be back soon, looking for breakfast.” She extracted one hand and peeled the dough from her fingers, then reached for a jar of raisins, sprinkling in a generous handful before punching the dough back down and covering the bowl.

“Do you think you can stand?” She gave him her full attention, fists braced on hips, a measuring frown on her face.

“I think so.” The wound itched more than it hurt under its clean white bandages, but lifting his head was an effort. His limbs, too, seemed to have developed a will of their own while he’d slept.

Mara nodded. “Time you tried, at least.” She wiped her hands and arms clean with a damp cloth and walked briskly to his bedside. “Let’s see what you can do.”

Llesho sat up and swung his body around so that his back rested on the wall and his legs dangled off the side of bed. He stopped there, dizzy for a moment, and closed his eyes. When the room stopped spinning, he opened them again. Mara watched him calmly, evaluating his progress. Llesho figured he wasn’t supposed to see the urgency lurking behind the calm, but it goaded him forward anyway. He pushed off the bed with his arms and stood up under his own power, though he swayed on his feet, almost overcome by nausea.

“Good. Let’s try for the door, shall we?”

Llesho wondered if the healer had lost her mind. He was disoriented and dizzy; he couldn’t imagine lifting a foot off the ground and not replacing it with his butt. The healer had already taken a step backward, however, and she had a tight grip on his elbow, which didn’t leave him a lot of choice in the matter. One step, then another, and Llesho reached the open door, where the sun shone on his face and the scent of pine sap and morning fizzed in his nose. He smiled in spite of himself. It was a beautiful day.

“Outhouse?” he asked.

The healer quirked an eyebrow at him but pointed at the little cabin a few yards away at the edge of the clearing. “Do you want help?”

He didn’t dare shake his head, or he’d be on his face at that instant, but he said, “No. I can manage.”

She released his elbow and Llesho set off. The outhouse seemed to get farther away as he staggered toward it, but finally he made it, and without falling in the process. It took almost more courage than he possessed to let go of the door when he was done and totter back to the cottage. In spite of his misgivings, he made the return trip successfully, with less vertigo, but no breath left to spare. When he finally dropped onto his bed again, he felt as if he had run all the way from Farshore, but he felt vaguely proud of himself as well. Mara hadn’t expected him to manage this much on his own, but he’d proved himself stronger and more determined than she thought. He wasn’t certain why that was important to him, except that she seemed to expect greatness of him and he was pretty sure he’d disappointed her so far.

Mara hadn’t been idle during his trek to the edge of the clearing. She had prepared a tray of buns with raisins enticingly bursting from the dough and had pulled open the door to a bake oven over the fireplace. She slid the tray into the brick cavern and closed the door again before acknowledging his prowess: “You’ll be keeping up with Master Lleck in no time.”

“Do we have even that much time?” Llesho asked.

She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Not as much as I had hoped. But maybe, enough.” Mara grinned at him, all teeth, with a warrior’s glint in her eye. “The Ham underestimated you once, and so did Lord Yueh. I hope I am not counted in their number when the day is done.”

“I could say the same,” Llesho pointed out. The healer knew far too much about him and his business, and he wondered who she really was and what side she was on. He also wondered where his companions had got to, but a commotion at the door answered the second question.

“The same about what?” Lling asked. She entered the little house with an arrow held as far from her body as she could reach. Hmishi and Kaydu followed, keeping their own careful distance from the arrow while Lling finished her report.

“We found this in the bushes at the edge of the clearing. It looks like whoever shot it came upon Lleck while he was sleeping.”

Mara took the arrow with equal care and sniffed at the tip. “Did it break his skin?” she asked.

“He says not,” Hmishi answered. “He had blood on his muzzle, but I got the impression it wasn’t his blood. I expect whoever shot the arrow is limping today.”

“Can Lord Yueh’s men find us here?” Kaydu asked with a darted glance at the door. “I thought they gave up and went away.”

Mara set the arrow on a shelf with great care. She looked worried. “I would say Lord Yueh’s lackeys could not find this place,” she said slowly. “But if they have Master Markko with them, and if it is the magician’s intent to find Llesho, then I can’t be sure. Markko’s power is strong, and not always predictable.”

“Then we ride,” Llesho decided. Kaydu frowned at him. “You’re not strong enough.” “I’m not strong enough to stand against him, and I won’t be his slave again. Ever.” Llesho turned Kay-du’s objection around on itself. He couldn’t fight yet, but maybe he could ride. If the choice was that or capture, he would take his chances with a horse, even if it meant he would die.

After a long minute spent studying his face, Mara nodded her reluctant agreement. “But tomorrow is soon enough.” She went to the window and whistled a strange, quavering note. Then she waited. Soon a bright-eyed swift fluttered into the room and came to rest on her outstretched finger. She whistled again, and the swift pecked at her knuckle. Then it took to wing with a warbling cascade of notes to which Mara listened sharply before she turned away with a sigh. “Let’s see what the wind turns up first. In the meantime, there are warm buns to eat.”

Llesho took a deep breath, and a smile bloomed on his face without conscious thought. The rich scent of raisins and cinnamon filled the air, and his mouth watered. His stomach wanted filling, and as Mara reached into the oven with a heavy cloth to remove the buns, Llesho’s fingers itched for the drippy feel of hot butter and soft bread. Hmishi did more than yearn, however, and his darting theft earned him a cuff on the ear.

“Sit and eat like a civilized being, Hmishi, or I’ll send you out to forage with Master Lleck.”

Hmishi dropped the bun onto the plate as if it had burned his fingers, which it probably had. Then the healer turned to Llesho with a question, “Would you care to join us?”

Hot buns in front of him was an even better incentive than Yueh’s magician behind him. He pushed himself off of the bed and tottered to the table to the applause of his companions.

“How long have you been able to do that?” Lling asked him, and Llesho blushed. “Just since this morning,” he said. But he’d resisted temptation long enough and abandoned discussion for the more serious work of putting as many buns inside his stomach as he could comfortably hold, and then finding space for a last greedy mouthful.

“That much effort deserves a nap,” Mara observed. Her tone was broadly disapproving, though her smile told him that she didn’t disapprove at all.

Llesho did need a nap, though. He made it back to his bed with no help, but was glad to lie down at the end of the short walk. When he woke up again, night had fallen. The fire in the fireplace had dropped to ashes and embers, and his companions had found their own temporary beds. All but Mara, who stood at the window in secret conversation with an owl. Llesho couldn’t make out what she said, but he could hear the terrible sorrow in her voice. He sat up, uncomfortable at the thought that she might think he was spying on her, and wished he could help with whatever had upset her so.

“Mara?” he asked when the owl had flown away.

“Shh,” she turned from the window. “Sleep now. You will need ”all your strength in the morning.“

The healer passed a hand over his eyes, and Llesho felt a heavy weight pulling his eyelids down, down, until the darkness was complete.

C HAPTER T WENTY-TWO

LLESHO had awakened to the sound of birdsong while the sky still closed its darkest night around the cottage. Mara stood at the window, a jar forgotten in her hand while she listened intently to the shrill cries of a swift that had lit on the sill. After a moment the healer trilled a reply and the bird flew away.

“Kaydu! Wake your company, and hurry!”

She resumed her search of shelves and cupboards with renewed urgency, reaching with more speed than care for a jar of salve, a twist of paper filled with a yellow powder, a small bottle of oil with cloves and peppers floating in it, half a dozen pouches of drying herbs that crinkled when she thrust them into her pack.

“What?” Kaydu rolled from her mat into a defensive crouch with a knife in her hand. “What is it?”

“What’s all the noise?” Hmishi struggled upright, with Lling right beside him. Llesho said nothing about the single blanket that had covered them.

“Your Master Markko is on the outskirts of the village. Privy, and pack. Hmishi, get the horses.” She thrust another packet into the pouch at her waist. “Llesho, can you ride? There are branches and tarps for a drag travois if you don’t think you can manage.”

They both knew there was more to the answer than pride. If he slowed them down, he gave Master Mar-kko an advantage. And Master Markko would kill them. So he said, “I’ll ride.”

Hmishi ran for the horses, with Kaydu to help him, while Lling threw their few possessions into a pack. The healer stood in the doorway of the house, her pack over her shoulder and her eyes pinched as if she were trying to see through the trees to the threat beyond. Lleck poked his nose past her skirt in a thwarted effort to reach Llesho, but subsided with a moan when she did not let him pass.

“You can’t mean to travel with us, healer!” Lling glanced up from her packing with a worried frown. “We are riding into danger, and you don’t even have a horse.”

“One finds danger staying or going.” Mara straightened under her pack and pinned the Thebin with a ferocious glare. “I choose to find it in Shan, where my daughter now lives.

“As for a horse, we will be traveling difficult terrain today; I will keep up well enough on foot. And tomorrow, Master Lleck’s paw will be healed enough that he can carry me.”

The bear cub moaned his objection to this plan, but Mara ignored him. It was more difficult to ignore his prince.

“How bad is it?” Llesho asked—no, commanded— pinning her with his sharpest, most imperious gaze. He thought she might put him off, or lie, but she didn’t. “Lord Yueh’s men attacked the village last night,” she said. “There may be survivors scattered in the woods, but the carrion birds are feasting today.”

“Then it isn’t any safer to stay behind.” Master Markko had powers of his own. He would penetrate the mysteries of the glen for his new lord, perhaps already had.

“It seems your small war party continues to grow.”

“I didn’t know that’s what we were.”

“Oh, yes.” A long staff rested against the doorjamb, and she wrapped a hand around its middle, leaning into it to take some of the weight of her pack off her feet. She seemed more substantial with the wooden shaft in her hand, and the house seemed less so. Llesho shook his head with a silent warning not to let his imagination run off with him, but he couldn*t quite shake the queazy sensation that the ground had tilted. He still felt light-headed, but decided, wisely or not, to keep that to himself.

Hmishi drew up next to the cottage with the horses saddled and ready. Mara gave him a satisfied nod before setting off down the path that led away from the cottage. “We can eat when we are well away.”

When they came to a turning in the path, Llesho looked back. The clearing was there, more tangled and thorn-shrouded than it had seemed when they had ridden through it. He could not see the little house at all, and wondered if it had ever really been there.

The road wound steeply through the mountains with dark forest pressing in on either side. By Farshore standards it was little more than a glorified trail and only wide enough for two to ride abreast. Two wagons could not pass each other, but one must withdraw to a lay-by carved out of the dark woods until the other had gone past. The authorities in each district took their responsibility to maintain the route seriously, however. The road was smooth and clear of encroaching underbrush, and the company made good progress. Llesho wondered what would happen now, with the governor dead and his ladyship put to flight, but order still held out here where news traveled slowly.

By late morning the party had settled into a steady pace. Lling and Hmishi led the way on foot, walking the horses that needed resting in rotation. Llesho followed on horseback, accompanied by Mara, who walked at his side to watch him for signs of exhaustion or weakness. Kaydu rode behind, bow strung and arrows at the ready. They all knew a single bow would not protect them if Lord Yueh’s army came upon them, but it might give the party the moment they needed to scatter into the forest. With Little Brother riding on his back, Lleck tracked them from the shelter of the trees that overhung the road. He barked the signal for friendly travelers once or twice but had no cause to howl a warning of enemy soldiers on the road.

With more bravado than sense, Llesho had assured his friends that he was strong enough to travel. Mara had seen through his claim. She’d bound his upper arm to his side and tied his forearm in a sling against his middle to support his wounded side. It was enough to dull his awareness to a throbbing discomfort. Llesho reminded himself that he didn’t trust her, really. He wouldn’t be surprised when it turned out that she had saved his life for her own purposes, much as Master Markko had kept him alive only to poison him again and again. Until she showed her true intentions, however, it wouldn’t hurt to take advantage of whatever comfort she afforded him. So he surrendered himself to his exhaustion, drifting in and out of a light doze while his horse plodded on, his reins in the hands of the healer.

The sun had nearly set when Llesho slid out of his saddle with the thought that he’d had it good when he didn’t remember the afternoons. Mara had insisted they halt for the night after Llesho had nearly fallen from his saddle as she strode beside him. She’d led them to a stopping place with fresh water and enough cover to protect them from any but a determined search. As he dropped numbly to the mossy ground, Llesho had to admit that the problem wasn’t his companions or the mysterious healer, or even the forces of Lord Yueh. Llesho was the problem: a relatively useless former and completely unnecessary prince of a vanquished country. All he had to do was surrender and his companions would be free.

Hmishi cast him a concerned frown as he unsaddled Llesho’s horse.

“I’m sorry I got you into this,” Llesho told him.

“My father sold me to the Harn for the price of a loaf of bread when you were six years old,” Hmishi answered. “I don’t see how even you can take credit for that.”

“But—”

“Did you kill the pearl beds or cause Lord Chin-shi to take his own life? Did you attack the governor’s compound in the dead of night? You were not the cause of my problems when I was six years old, and you are not the cause of them now. Or do princes tax evil the way they tax grain?”

With a skeptical smirk on his round dark face, Hmishi dared him to agree, but he was too tired to explain. He didn’t think Hmishi would listen anyway. It didn’t seem worth the effort it was taking to keep his eyes open, so Llesho let his eyelids slide shut.

“Do you need Mara?”

“I’m fine.”

After a long pause, Hmishi led the horse to the little stream that flowed nearby. Llesho was almost asleep when a boot nudged him gently in the side.

“What now?” he asked with more snap in his voice than seemed appropriate, given his remorse a few short minutes ago. He opened his eyes with an apology ready, but Hmishi just winked, a rueful grin plastered on his face. Sort of like the mud plastered all over his boots and leggings.

“Boggy springs,” Hmishi explained with chagrin as he rubbed at his leggings with a fistful of spongy moss. “Lling and Kaydu are going to mark them out so we can move about safely. Just don’t go wandering in the dark.”

That explained why Mara had seemed so sure when she announced that she had found them a perfect campsite for the night. Anyone trying to sneak up on them was likely to sink knee-deep into quicksand. The warning seemed irrelevant, though.

“Do I look like I plan on taking a moonlit stroll?” he muttered. He rolled over onto his strong arm and closed his eyes, putting an end to the discussion.

Cradled in soft moss rooted in a rich mulch smelling of green woody things, his exhausted body began to relax, only to discover a new set of discomforts. He realized that he had a full bladder and an empty stomach, and he’d have to do something about both before he could sleep. Neither seemed urgent enough to force movement back into his leaden muscles, however.

“He’s not moving!”

Hmishi’s call drew the attention of the healer as it was meant to. Llesho heard the swish of her skirts, then felt a cool dry hand on his forehead.

“Can you move, Llesho?” she asked him softly, brushing the hair from his eyes with a gentle fingertip.

He would have told her “No,” but he couldn’t open his mouth, or move his tongue to form the word.

Her hand left his head, and he heard more rustling about as she searched her bag of medicines. “You can rest soon,” she promised him. He would have told her that he was resting already, but she crushed a pinch of leaf between her fingers and waved it beneath his nose. Tears sprang to his eyes, and his nose twitched at the pungent odor that assailed him, but he found he could move his head again, and after a moment could uncurl his whole body and drag himself back to his feet. He swayed between them until Mara gave him a nudge in Hmishi’s direction.

“Find him a tree,” she ordered Hmishi. “We’ll be ready to eat when you come back.”

Llesho had to admit he felt much better when he returned to the camp, but the gnawing at the pit of his stomach had turned into a determined demand for food. He sat with his back against his saddle, and Lling handed him a bun and a thick slice of cheese while Kaydu portioned out some fat berries she had picked in the forest.

“Cold collation tonight,” Mara explained as each drank his or her fill from a pot of fresh springwater she handed around.

Kaydu nodded her agreement. “We light no fire and set guards, two and two, until morning.”

“I would offer to serve first watch, but Llesho is not the only one whose heart outpaces his body.” Mara smiled, giving Kaydu the point. “I must have sleep now, I am afraid, if I am to be any use later.”

Llesho wondered if the healer referred only to her turn at watch, or to other uses of her powers that might sap her hoarded energy. When he would have asked, however, Mara had disappeared into a blanket the color of the forest floor, shades of green and black that changed as she moved in her sleep. Only the low snore that punctuated her rest gave her presence away.

Sleep seemed a really good idea, and Llesho slid down where he sat, embarrassed when Lling drew a blanket over him. Not too embarrassed to smile his thanks before he closed his eyes, though. He pulled the blanket up tight around his ears, curled on his good side in the moss again, and felt the tension flow out of his muscles. Tomorrow would be better. He could feel it in the clean exhaustion, so different from the fevered crash of his failing body a week ago. And if he lay really still, he could imagine that the moss that held him was a soft puddle of velvet, the hem of his mother’s gown. He used to curl close to rnh tbp soft fabric against his face and listen quietly to the murmur of her voice and the silver call of her laughter. The memory put a smile on his lips as he slipped into sleep.

Hard midnight held the forest in its dark hand when the whisper threaded its way into Llesho’s sleep. It nagged him out of dreams of winter in the palace, when the caravans had gone and a blanket of snow wrapped Thebin in a hushed, expectant peace. Llesho woke breathless from racing down the long hall in search of his brothers, but he could still hear Master Markko’s voice.

“I’m here, waiting for you, boy. We need each other, you and I. Together we will rule heaven and earth.”

The words made no sense. Llesho was a runaway slave. No one but Llesho and the spirit of his teacher knew that Llesho’s journey did not end at Shan, but truly began there. Most of the time he didn’t believe that he would succeed in his quest to regain Thebin. He couldn’t figure out why Master Markko would care about Thebin or its princes anyway. A thousand li and two imperial powers separated Llesho’s country from Farshore, and that didn’t count the seven li straight up the side of a mountain range to the plateau where Kungol stood.

His companions slept on, undisturbed by any sound, and Llesho wondered if he had imagined the voice in his dreams. But no, there it was again, sweeping over his mind like the mirrored flame of a beacon tower. “You are mine, body and soul, boy. You cannot escape your destiny. Didn’t I show you that on Pearl Island?”

Llesho shuddered. The voice was in his head, and he felt the iron collar on his neck, the chains that weighed him down with despair. He could never es-cape those chains; they drew him from his bed in the moss, choked him when he would have resisted, and he followed the voice, and the pull at his throat. One step, two, past the huddled lumps of his companions wrapped in their blankets. Dimly, Llesho recalled that they had agreed to keep a watch, but he counted four sleeping bodies. When he stumbled over the last, however, the pain in his toe made him gasp. A log! He wondered if all the rumpled blankets hid firewood, but one of them moved and snorted in its sleep. After a moment Llesho released the breath he held and moved again, quietly, toward the voice in the forest.

“Where are you going, Llesho?” Unyielding, Mara stood before him. She wore a shawl over her shabby dress, wrapped tightly around herself and held in place by both of her arms crossed firmly under her breasts. She looked younger in the moonlight, or ageless, and terrifying, as if she were living stone come to life in front of him.

“I need to find a tree.” He stammered out the lie and hung his head, unable to meet her eyes.

“The chains are gone, Llesho.”

He did look up then, and met her grim-faced challenge: “He cannot make you come to him, he can only hope that you are fool enough to heed him when he calls.”

“I’m not a fool.” He wasn’t sure of that, now that the voice was gone from his head and he thought about what he’d almost done. But it still made a terrible sense. “If I go to him, he’ll leave the rest of you alone. If I try to escape him, he will kill you all, and take me back anyway.

“Only if he catches you.” She smiled at him, and he took no comfort from it at all. “Give us tomorrow, at least. Until we reach the river.”

“I can’t,” Llesho pleaded with her to understand. “He’s in my head.” He hadn’t realized that he’d raised his voice until his companions stirred and begin to sit up in their bedrolls, guilty to be caught sleeping when they had agreed to post a double guard. Llesho figured that was Markko’s doing as well, but he kept his conclusions to himself, like a guilty secret.

Hmishi and Lling came to him and took up guard positions. Hmishi stood slightly in front of him and to his right with a sword bared in his hand. Lling settled behind his left shoulder, an arrow nocked below his ear.

“Are we being attacked?” Kaydu wanted to know.

“Not anymore.” Mara was looking into Llesho’s eyes when she spoke: Master Markko would not disturb his sleep again this night. The healer believed she could protect them from the mental assault of his pursuers. In the moonlight her dark eyes seemed to reflect infinity, and Llesho was tempted to trust that she was right. He gave her the barest hint of a nod, enough to know that he would take her advice for now.

She accepted his decision with an equally subtle nod. “Get a few more hours’ sleep,” she said to his companions. “We ride before daybreak.”

Hmishi and Lling followed him back into the camp, but Kaydu joined Mara on guard, her face still troubled by her failure to fulfill her duty. He’d have to explain that it wasn’t her fault. They were all easy prey for dark thoughts at midnight, and Markko had taken advantage of that. The magician had seized their wills before they knew what was happening. Given that her father had been the governor’s witch all of her life, he didn’t think Kaydu would have much trouble accepting as fact what Markko had done. He just wasn’t sure what she would decide to do about it. And he was too tired to deal with it now.

“Sleep,” he muttered to himself, and reached for the soft comfort of his mossy bed again.

Why is Master Markko so determined to get you back?“ Kaydu wrinkled up her nose in displeasure, and Llesho understood why. During the night he had tossed and turned under the burden of his secrets, until he finally decided that they couldn’t afford to hide things from each other if they hoped to survive. While they prepared for the morning’s trek, he’d told his companions everything, starting with who Lleck was in Thebin and his apparition as a ghost in the pearl bay, how Master Markko had poisoned the bay with the Blood Tide and set the blame onto the healer Kwan-ti. He told them about the terrible months when the overseer had beaten him and held him in chains and used him as an experiment to test his poisons on. He admitted the sick dread he had of ever being returned to the master’s evil workroom. Hmishi and Lling had known some of it, Kaydu a little as well, and Mara, they thought, none at all. Only the healer was not surprised to learn that Master Markko had come to him in his dreams last night, however. Mara had nodded her gray head to confirm his suspicion that Markko had affected them all, putting them to sleep when they should have kept watch.

By the time he was finished, Mara was stamping with impatience, but ignorance of Master Markko’s power, and of his intent, could kill them more surely than an hour’s delay. Llesho stared levelly into her eyes and then went back to stringing his bow and checking his arrows. He knew why they had fallen so quickly back to sleep after the midnight call, and he knew why Markko had made no return in his later sleep. He had no evidence, not even logic to back his intuition, however, so he accepted her silent command that he keep his guesswork to himself.

Kaydu had spoken aloud the question that had bothered him since he realized that Master Markko was still looking for him: Why? When she didn’t get an answer, she offered her reasoning. “I mean, I know you were once a prince and all, but it’s not like anybody is offering to pay a ransom for you.”

Strategically, it made no sense, and she tried to explain that to Llesho without hurting his feelings, he was sure. She couldn’t know that Llesho had asked himself the same questions ever since Markko had first snapped an iron collar around his neck. “Can you do magic or anything like that?”

    “I can hold my breath underwater,” he said with a perfectly straight face. “And I can, or could, execute a nearly flawless Wind Over the Mountaintops prayer form, though I tend to stumble in the middle of the related fighting stances.”

Mara choked and made a display of holding her hands over her head and pointing to her throat. But she hadn’t been eating at the time, so Llesho wondered. When she had settled a bit, she motioned to them to go on, and walked purposefully into the trees.

Lling jabbed him companionably with her elbow just then, declaring, “I don’t know anything about prayer forms, but I’ve seen you fall over in the middle of a fight sequence.”

Llesho nudged her back; neither of them let the moment turn into a full roll-and-tumble play session, but the momentary distraction relieved the tension. It couldn’t drive out the feeling that someone was drilling holes between his shoulder blades with their eyes, though; he sobered quickly.

“I don’t get it either,” he said. “If I had completed the vigil on my birthday, maybe I would have some influence with the goddess. But I didn’t.”

“Maybe that was part of his plan,” Kaydu suggested, “He may have feared he couldn’t control you once you had successfully completed your vigil.”

Her ladyship said that he had gained the favor of the goddess. Llesho didn’t think that was a secret in the real sense, since he personally didn’t think it was true. He squirmed a bit when he evaded the question, though. “For all I know, he just likes the idea that he has a prince on a leash instead of one of those fluffy dogs Lady Chin-shi was so fond of. I don’t really care why he’s after me. I just want to make sure he doesn’t catch me.”

“Then we had better get moving.” Mara had returned with Lleck following her and she gestured in the direction from which she had come. “We are not far from the Golden Dragon River where the Dragon Bridge crosses. Markko is likely to know about the crossing himself, and he will make for it just as we do, so we shouldn’t return to the road. I noticed this track, however—” she pointed to the ground near her feet where the grass seemed beaten down but otherwise no different from its surroundings “—and followed it to where it comes out on the riverbank just a stone’s toss away from the bridge. Once we break from cover of the forest, we must mount and ride as fast as we can. It will be a run for our lives if we are to reach the river ahead of him, but reach it we must.”

The forest growth was close on either side, with branches hanging to form a low canopy overhead and undergrowth grabbing at their legs as they passed. The company led their horses in single file, with Mara in the lead, and Lleck rumbling behind. In spite of their danger, Llesho found himself enjoying the stretch and pull of his muscles, the feel of his body doing work again. The sense of being watched had passed; Llesho wondered if Mara had something to do with that as well. He also wondered what good it would do them to cross the river if Master Markko was following right behind.

Determined to confront the healer, he dropped the reins. Horses were stupid, but they would follow where they were led, and there wasn’t really anyplace but forward a horse could go in the thick wood. Before he had taken two steps, however, Kaydu had raised her arm to signal a halt.

“Mount up,” she said.

Mara had slipped into the woods. She would wait until Lleck came up to her position, then ride on his shoulders. Llesho set his foot in his stirrup and slung his free leg over the back of the horse, keeping his head bent low over the animal’s neck. He darted a nervous glance around him, then took his bow in his hand, ready to run or to fight. They broke into the clearing.

C HAPTER T WENTY-THREE

HE sun had not yet appeared over the treetops, but when the companions broke from the shelter of the forest they discovered the riverbank was already bathed in a golden wash of sunlight. Llesho winced at the sudden shock of bright light, but he had little time to adjust. Kaydu’s voice rang in the still morning air:

“Ride!”

She kneed her horse into motion, and Llesho did the same, snapped into action at the familiar command in her voice. Lord Yueh’s troops, about fifty men on foot and a dozen on horseback, waited for them no more than a hundred paces up the riverbank. At first Llesho wondered why they did not leap to the attack, and then he saw that they were staring with amazement at the bridge that rose up in front of them. Llesho would have done the same if he’d had the time: Golden Dragon Bridge arched in glory high over the churning water below.

Ancient artisans had carved it in the shape of the legendary dragon from which the muddy yellow river took its name. They had given the bridge two ridges of scales across its back to keep men from falling off in dark or windy weather, with space enough for four men walking, or a good sized wagon, to pass between them. True to its name, Golden Dragon Bridge glittered its burnished glory in the sunlight. But the bridge shouldn’t have been there at all.

According to legend, a war between the giants had, in an earlier age, destroyed the wondrous bridge. No man living had seen the broken remains. Supposedly, no one even remembered where the bridge had stood. Some stories said that when giants walked the earth again, the bridge would rise out of the mist of the river and the past glory of that age would return. Llesho didn’t see any giants. The carved head of the dragon bridge, however, rested on the near shore, submerged to the realistically carved nostrils. Huge fringed lids shuttered its eyes, as if the masons and carvers had known that to portray in stone the living gaze of the dragon was to risk conjuring the creature itself out of myth.

The legend hadn’t been completely wrong, however. Some great cataclysm of a former age had torn the bridge loose from its moorings on the far side of the river, because the arch disappeared under the water an arm’s reach from the shore.

Mara crouched below a carved nostril of the sleeping dragon. She beckoned them to hurry when they would have frozen where they stood, in the same stupefied amazement that ensorceled Lord Yueh’s troops. Llesho kicked his horse into a gallop; someone in the enemy ranks shouted, and he faltered, trembling, as Yueh’s men parted. Master Markko made his way on horseback through the troops, looking for something. Me, Llesho figured. Their eyes met; he could not break that contact, but his body responded to his training even when his mind did not. As her ladyship had taught them, he fastened the reins to his saddle, controlling his horse with his knees, and drew his bow and an arrow from the quiver at his back.

Arrow nocked, he stood in his stirrups, body turning to hold the gaze of his target. Steady, steady. Allow for the gallop of the horse—the changing distance and the uncertain elevation. He let the arrow fly, watched as Master Markko reached out and snatched it out of the air inches from his breast. Markko smiled, and the arrow burst into flames in his hand.

Bad move, Llesho saw. That sudden whoosh of fire had startled his horse into a faster gallop, but it had terrified Lord Yueh’s soldiers, who scattered as if Markko had dropped the burning arrow among them. Those nearest their leader surged forward to overtake the fugitives, but those out of the direct line of the magician’s fierce glare ran back into the forest from which they had come.

No point in wasting another arrow; Llesho tucked his bow into the strap of his quiver. He bent low over the neck of his sturdy little horse and urged it to close on the bridge that frightened the animal as much as it awed him.

But Mara was standing now, still dwarfed by the massive size of the dragon, but urging them to cross. Kaydu stormed onto the bridge first, Little Brother tucked into a pack strapped to her back. Hmishi and Lling followed right behind her, the hooves of their horses ringing like a demented carillon on the gold paving stones, and Llesho came next, pounding up the steeply sloped spine of the bridge until he was high over the river, looking straight ahead because he didn’t have the nerve to check behind him for pursuit. And then he was on the downward slope, horse stretching out over the last broken arm’s length, and there was water under them, no bridge at all.

The jolt of solid ground shuddered through him. A stone wall lay in front of them, with the twisted branches of fruit trees rising above it. A perfect place for an ambush, but they were out of choices. Whooping a battle challenge, Kaydu bent into the jump, and her horse leaped, leaped, and was over the wall.

Hmishi and Lling jumped next. Llesho gave his horse its head and it soared, cleared the wall, and ran out its momentum between the rows of fruit trees. When it stopped, Llesho saw that he was surrounded, with hundreds of soldiers closing in on him.

Llesho’s stomach clenched like someone had reached inside with a fist and squeezed. He reached for his bow, but a hand stayed him: Master Jak’s. Llesho hadn’t seen or heard him, and he shivered, knowing that if the assassin-soldier had wanted it, he’d be dead. The six tattooed rings around Jaks’ arm told their own story about that, but Llesho hadn’t and still didn’t want to think of his teacher as a man who sneaked up on people and murdered them for cash. Someday he would press the man for his stories, but not now. Now he would be grateful for this man’s skills.

“How did you find us?” Llesho didn’t need to ask how they knew to come. Kaydu was a few feet away, wrapped in the arms of her father. Little Brother chit-tered and screamed from a branch over their heads.

“How did you find the bridge?”

“A little bird told us.” Jaks followed his gaze with a wry smile.

Llesho nodded. Mara had known and sent word by the swift he’d seen at her window. He wanted to thank her, but he couldn’t find her among his companions or the soldiers who had come to greet them. “Where is she?”

Master Jaks looked back, toward the river.

“Alone? Markko will kill her!” He turned his horse and Jaks grabbed hold of his bridle.

“I can’t leave her to face Master Markko alone.”

“If Habiba isn’t worried, doubtless she can take care of herself,” Jaks reasoned quietly.

“Maybe.” Llesho figured the magician would sacrifice the old woman to protect the surprise of his ambush: Habiba didn’t owe the healer a life-debt, after all. Breaking his teacher’s hold on his reins, he headed back the way he had come, hunching over the neck of his horse to absorb the jolt of the landing on the other side of the wall.

In mid leap, a warning stabbed through his head. The pain disappeared almost as soon as it had come, but he had already lost his concentration on the jump. The horse skittered under him, unsettled by his uncertainty. It bucked and rolled, and Llesho was falling, hitting the ground like a sack of rice. Master Markko’s soldiers didn’t notice their prey lying helpless on the far shore, however. They had their own problem. And Mara clearly didn’t need his help.

With their leader driving them forward from atop his massive warhorse, Markko’s troops had begun to cross the bridge. As they reached the very top of the arch, Mara had stepped out from the shadows by the carved eye and climbed up on the wide snout. She called something Llesho couldn’t hear, and the great eyelid opened to reveal an emerald as tall as Mara herself. The bridge blinked, and then it writhed and contracted. Straight-backed and terrible as he had never seen her, the healer Mara stood at the center of the great golden head, her gaze locked with the magician’s as the neck of the dragon raised her high above the river, higher than the arch of its great worm body. The loop of its back twisted and sank, tumbling screaming, terrified soldiers together with their panicked horses into the rushing river. Gradually the cries of the dying faded out of reach. Mara lifted her right arm straight ahead of her and pointed at Master Markko.

“You owe me a debt, Magician, but I will not collect it now. Consider yourself fortunate that I have business with this worm, or we would decide right here who of us is the stronger.”

“My lady.” Master Markko gave her a mocking bow and turned his horse. Before he rode away, however, he turned in his saddle and addressed her one last time, as if with an afterthought. “Caring is a weakness, my lady. Each delay finds you more encumbered than the last. And I grow stronger.”

Mara did not answer him, and he settled himself in the saddle with a final laugh before setting heels to the flanks of his horse. When the magician was no more than a speck on the horizon, Mara signaled the dragon to carry her to the other side of the river and set her down on the riverbank.

Llesho remained where he had fallen, lying in the grass by the river. He was close enough to observe all that transpired, but both Mara and the dragon seemed too preoccupied with their own business to notice one insignificant Thebin in the dirt. In this he was mistaken, not counting on the sensitivity of a dragon’s sense of smell.

The golden river dragon opened his mouth just enough for his long serpentine tongue to flick out and lick his massive chops.

“It’s been a long time since I received payment in virgin blood.” An occasional wisp of smoke escaped the worm’s nostrils when it spoke, while his tongue explored the air for the taste of a scent. Llesho blushed to the roots of his hair when the dragon added, “I prefer girls, you know, though they’ve become more scarce than dragons. One wonders where the virgin boys come from.”

“They grow a little more slowly,” Mara answered with the same humor that the dragon offered in the question. “But they do grow, or there would be no young ones for you to ask about. As for this one— Llesho, stand up and bow to your benefactor. Dragons insist on good manners always—I still need him.”

Llesho stood and bowed low as the dragon turned an emerald eye to study him. “Does he know?” the dragon asked. The great worm ignored Llesho to direct his question at the healer. This suited Llesho just fine, as he was shaking in his boots and didn’t think he could utter an answer even if he had understood the question.

“That is not your concern,” Mara answered him tartly. “Shall we get on with this?”

“Oh, very well. But wouldn’t you rather owe me something less personal to be collected at a later date?”

“Life-debts must be paid in life,” she said, and opened her arms to the dragon’s tooth.

“NO!” Llesho cried, as the dragon opened his mouth and nipped at the healer. Revulsion released him from the paralysis of his fear and he dashed forward, sword drawn, but too late. The golden worm pierced the heart of the healer with his poisoned fang. She fell between them, dead, and Llesho followed her to his knees, reaching for her bloody corpse. With great delicacy the worm nudged him with his snout and Llesho tumbled in the grass. Even such a gentle push, for a dragon, felt like a tree had fallen on him. Then the dragon opened his mouth wide and swallowed the healer whole.

Llesho tried to scream, but the sound caught in his throat would not come out. He could not breathe, could not see for the darkness that seemed to cover the sun; he could only kneel where he had fallen and rock himself painfully, his sword forgotten at his side, his arms wrapped tight around his gut.

“Noooo!” The scream finally escaped its prison in his chest. “No, no, no, no.” He moved his arms so that he could cover his eyes with his clenched fists, rocking and screaming, “No, no, no!”

“What are you going on about, boy?” Still licking his chops, the dragon loomed over him, and Llesho wanted to kill the creature, but he couldn’t move. He noted that the thin tongue had missed a spot, and his gut turned over when he realized he was looking at the healer’s blood.

“I loved her,” he moaned, still rocking himself like an out of control cradle. That wasn’t what he intended to say, and he wasn’t even sure how he meant it. As a mother, perhaps, or even as a grandmother. She had reminded him of Kwan-ti and even Adar, his brother, a little, and he’d lost every one of them.

Llesho’s declaration didn’t seem to surprise the golden dragon nearly as much as it had surprised Llesho himself, but the creature had little patience with his continued distress. The dragon snorted, and Llesho felt the touch of heat, the smell of ash, on the breath of the great worm.

“No need for hysterics,” the creature pointed out. “She’ll be back.”

Lleck had come back as well, but Llesho could take little comfort and less counsel from a bear cub with a tendency to forget his charge and wander off into the woods to hunt. “I don’t need another bear or a monkey or a parrot or crocodile; I need Mara, herself.”

“You don’t have much faith in her, do you, boy?” The creature eyed him thoughtfully, as though he was deciding which morsel to take next from the platter at dinnertime. Llesho bowed his head, waiting for the devouring mouth to descend, but the dragon merely gave a pained sigh and belched smoke and greasy fire. Something the worm had eaten clearly did not agree with him. With a last sniff of disdain, the creature abandoned him; Llesho looked up in time to see its gleaming coils ripple the surface of the river and then it disappeared beneath the swiftly running current.

Long after the dragon had gone, Llesho stared at the place where he had disappeared, but the youth’s thoughts were not on the worm that had only acted according to his nature. Disaster seemed to follow Llesho wherever he went, and he stood up, walked to the river’s edge with a calculating question: if he threw himself in, let the river take him, would the rest of his friends have a better chance at survival? Perhaps no other governments would fall if he were gone. The world would turn as if he had never existed, which would probably be a good thing for the world. If he could be sure it wasn’t already too late.

The brush of cloth sweeping across grass alerted him to a presence nearby and he turned. Habiba approached. The governor’s witch, except that the governor was dead for buying Llesho away from Master Markko’s control. Llesho wondered if the witch still had a job, but figured he’d always been her ladyship’s anyway. Kaydu’s father, and Llesho had almost gotten her killed today, with her father close enough to watch on the wrong damned side of the river. Llesho would have thrown himself at Habiba’s feet, except that Habiba had come as close as he seemed to want, and then had dropped to one knee, his head bowed.

“You have given me two great gifts today, my prince,” he said. “How does a man pay a debt greater than the value of his life?”

“I am not your prince. And you owe me nothing.” Llesho did not look away from the river; he hoped the witch mistook his hopeless anger for strength of purpose. How could Habiba honor him? “Your daughter, Kaydu, could have died here today.”

“But she didn’t. You saved her. For that alone I would give you my life.”

“I put your daughter in danger. Mara saved her, saved all of us, at the price of her own life.”

“Kaydu is a soldier. She did her job. As her commander, you saw her safely home, at great cost to your own peace of mind.”

Habiba paused, and Llesho thought he would get up and leave now that he had said his piece. But the witch spoke again, more wistfully. “All my life I have wished to see one of the great worms. Almost, it had become easier to believe they no longer existed than to accept that I was unworthy. Today you have shown me wonders I thought lost to the world forever.”

“Mara did that. And Mara is dead.” Llesho faced the witch with all the truth of his guilt. His eyes burned, and Habiba flinched, was himself the first to turn away. He watched the river as if he expected the golden dragon to surface again and invite him to tea.

“We live in an age of wonders, Llesho. Something died here today, but I think, whatever she was, that it was not your healer. You will see her again, if you don’t do something really stupid like drown yourself out of self-pity.”

“What can you know about it?” Llesho demanded, though he couldn’t work up much fight. He didn’t really want to die. It wasn’t very heroic, but mostly he wanted to lie down where he was and sleep for a very long time. Maybe, if he slept long enough, the storm would have passed him by.

Habiba seemed to know what he was thinking, though. “You are, yourself, the eye of the storm,” he said softly, and Llesho saw compassion in his eyes. “If you sleep, the storm sleeps with you, when you awake, the storm is with you still.” He shrugged, a gesture of submission to the fates. “Some of those who ride in the wake of the storm always suffer, but without it we have no rain, no rivers, no life.”

“I’m not strong enough,” Llesho whispered. He wondered if he could have given his life in the healer’s place, and had no answer.

Habiba put a hand on his shoulder. “Then today, the storm will sleep.” In the sanctuary of the arm curved around his shoulder, Llesho permitted the witch to guide him back to the wall. He looked for a break to enter by, but Habiba used one hand as a balance, and vaulted over with the agility of a youth. Llesho clambered after him with a great deal more effort and considerably less grace.

C HAPTER T WENTY-FOUR

LLESHO slid over the low stone wall. He would have fallen, but Bixei was there, waiting for him, and propped a shoulder under his arm to hold him up.

“Is he all right?”

That was Stipes, and Llesho wondered what the gladiator was doing here in the camp with the governor’s witch. But Lling was tearing at his shirt, her fingers gentle but her tongue a good deal sharper. “Fool! If you’ve opened your wound again, Mara will have your guts on a platter.”

Habiba put a hand on Lling’s wrist, stilling her fingers on Llesho’s bandages. “That can wait until we are more comfortable.”

“No, it can’t—”

“Mara’s dead,” Llesho gritted between clenched teeth. He pulled away from Bixei’s support before he added, “The dragon ate her.”

Lling’s hand fell, her face going white with shock.

Bixei gave the newcomers a cautious frown. “What dragon?” he asked, as Hmishi objected, “I saw her at the bridge—”

Llesho sighed. “There is no bridge over the Golden Draeon River.”

“No bridge. Then what—”

“Our enemies have spies everywhere.” Habiba stopped the argument with a glare that cut like a knife. “Let’s take this conversation under shelter.”

They walked in silence after that. Llesho glanced sidelong at Stipes who strode with familiar ease at Bixei’s side, but no one else seemed surprised at his presence. Stipes dipped his head in acknowledgment of Llesho’s unspoken questions, but answers would have to wait, as Habiba had commanded. Any of the myriad birds calling overhead or the small creatures skittering in the grass might be under Markko’s spell. Even the wind might carry their words away to the magician.

Master Jaks had set up camp in the orchard. Habiba led their party past lines of red felt tents tucked between the gnarled trunks of fruit trees. At the center of the camp a larger tent was stretched over stout poles. Its sides were furled, and under its shade Llesho counted half a dozen silent guards whose presence warned away accidental trespassers. Their drawn swords offered more persuasive arguments in the event of unfriendly approach. Master Jaks waited for them at a folding table strewn with maps. Two secretaries in the robes of their office hovered in the background.

Master Jaks spared the newcomers a brief smile, which Llesho did not return, and gestured to chairs set up in a rough circle around the table. By some unspoken agreement the others left the most comfortable chair for Llesho, who only realized what they had done after he had seated himself and planted his elbows on the chair’s smooth wooden arms.

When they had all settled in, Habiba spoke in his most formal tones. “The governor of Thousand Lakes Province sends his regards to Prince Llesho of Thebin, Lord of the Eastern Passages and Wizard-King of the High Mountains. His lordship regrets that he could not deliver his respects in person, but begs the prince’s understanding, as he must prepare the defense of his own people. The soldiers you see about you, however, he offers at your disposal, with most fervent prayers for success in your endeavor.”

“Thank him for me, please, though I wonder if the emperor would recognize the right of the governor of Thousand Lakes Province to offer his protection here.”

“I do not understand you.” Habiba smoothed a hand down his coat, a weak effort at distraction.

“I think you do, Habiba.” Llesho moved forward in his chair, leaning over the table to better read the message in the witch’s eyes. “Where are we?” It wasn’t the most important question on his mind, but the answer would shade all the others.

“The Golden Dragon River,” Master Jaks replied. The faces of Llesho’s companions hardened with the reminder of their loss, but Llesho refused to give in to the remorse he felt.

“It’s a long river,” Llesho pointed out. “I just lost another healer on it, so I am not in the mood to play geography games. Are we in Farshore Province, or Thousand Lakes?” He thought they’d strayed too far north to have crossed into Sky Bridge Province, but he couldn’t be certain.

“I told you, she’ll be back,” Habiba objected softly. “It isn’t always about you.”

Llesho stared down the governor’s witch. He felt a door open in his soul, to one of those caverns darker than he cared to look at, and he didn’t bother trying to hide it. Habiba pulled back, frowning as if he’d been given something tough to chew. “Lately, it may seem so, I’ll grant you that. But under cover of the storm, many agenda are at work. Including Mara’s own, and her business with Golden Dragon.”

“But still we play geography games. What province do we out to the storm todav. Master Witch?”

Master Jaks gusted a heavy breath. “Until a month ago, this land was part of Farshore Province.”

Whatever was bothering him, Habiba had put it aside, and he took up the explanation in terms of an imperial memorial:

“His lordship, the governor of Thousand Lakes Province, has extended his protection to the lands that border his own, and to the household of his daughter, who has come to him for refuge. Think of this orchard as a provincial mission of the governor of Thousand Lakes Province, sanctuary to all who ask it in the name of her ladyship, wife of the murdered governor of Farshore. Until the Celestial Emperor himself assigns a new governor to Farshore, it is within the lady’s right to request the aid of her father, and within the duties and obligations of her father to fulfill her request wherever her ladyship’s interests may find themselves.”

Habiba extended his hand in a gesture that took in the orchard and the surrounding camp, demonstrating the unstated. The army that held it possessed the land they stood upon and that army owed its loyalty to Thousand Lakes Province.

“And Lord Yueh?” Llesho asked. “Master Markko did not pursue us to offer safe passage to the borders of her ladyship’s lands. What claim has Lord Yueh made?”

“Yueh is dead.” Stipes answered that one, which surprised Llesho. He’d wondered why Stipes had joined their counsel; now he knew. “Poison, I think, in his wine.

“I had already decided that I would run, if I could find Bixei, but I didn’t kill Lord Yueh,” he added when all eyes turned on him. The penalty for a slave who killed his master was skinning alive, a painstaking process in which the skin was removed slowly beginning at the feet and moving up his legs to his torso before the verv eves of the horrified victim. There were stories of executioners who could peel the skin off a man in one piece, toes to crown, and leave his victim still alive and bleeding in the sawdust when he was done. The sun got any survivors soon enough, or the cold. Or the vultures and the bugs.

Knowing her ladyship’s feelings on the matter of slavery and adding that to what she must feel at the murder of her husband, Llesho didn’t believe she would condemn Stipes to a horrible death for killing Yueh. Still, he could not suppress the shudder that passed through him at the thought of the terrible execution that awaited one who would commit such a crime.

Fortunately, Llesho was pretty sure the man was telling the truth and hadn’t killed his master. “Did Markko have access to Lord Yueh’s wine?” he asked. Master Jaks must know the story, and Habiba, if they had permitted the gladiator to join them, but Llesho looked to Stipes, who had been there, to tell it.

“Not that night. Markko learned from his spies that you had split from the main party. He took a couple of foot units and a few horse to find you, and Lord Yueh followed her ladyship’s train. Her ladyship traveled slowly, with the aged and the young in her care, and we were soldiers on a forced march. We caught up to her easily enough, but Yueh hadn’t counted on Master Jaks.

“He stood us off after the first attack failed, waiting for Master Markko to return with you. I think he planned to put her champions to the sword and take her husband’s place as governor and as mate, but he fell ill soon after he dined, and never left his bed. In the morning, Yueh was delirious, his army in disarray. Few among Lord Yueh’s forces fought for him willingly, and many surrendered without raising a weapon that day. I was lucky to find Bixei; he took me to Master Jaks, and I offered my weapons and* my service.”

There was something left unsaid in that last, and Llesho wanted it, down to the last promise: “To whom?”

Stipes dipped his head, acknowledging the hit. “To Master Jaks, actually. Don’t know much about lords and such, but that Chin-shi was a foolish one and Yueh a bad one. And yours was a dead one,” he added sullenly when Habiba turned a threatening eye on him. “By then, Yueh was a dead one, too; the healers could do nothing.

“But I trusted Master Jaks, had done so for more years than I care to consider. And Master Jaks says you are a king, so here we are.” He shrugged, admitting he didn’t understand what had gone on while they had belonged to different camps, but that he was willing to take some things—even outlandish things like a skinny pearl diver being a long-lost king—on faith from the right person.

Llesho turned thoughtfully to Master Jaks, who returned his level gaze from across the table. Master Jaks was his teacher, and he had trusted the man just as Stipes had. But Llesho had grown wary since the poison arrow had felled him. Master Jaks had served Lord Chin-shi, who was dead, under the direction of Overseer Markko, who now sought to capture or kill Llesho. Master Jaks had followed Llesho to Farshore, but now took into his escort Stipes, who was Lord Yueh’s man, or had been until his lordship’s timely death. Most damning, Jaks was an assassin; Llesho’s eyes returned again to the six rings tattooed on Jaks’ upper arm. Why was an assassin so interested in an exiled prince of Thebin?

Master Jaks followed the gaze. “They trouble you?” he asked, nodding his chin at the rings on his arm.

Llesho waited, while the assassin returned his study, looking for a crack in the stone of Llesho’s eyes and finding none. With a little shrug, a tiny smile that Llesho did not understand, Master Jaks rested his arm on the table, palm up, the gesture of surrender. “If my arm offends you,” he said, “cut it off.”

Not what Llesho had expected. He turned to Habiba for an explanation, or advice, but the witch said nothing, merely gestured to a guard who raised his unsheathed sword and set it lightly across the muscle, just above the first, and oldest, ring.

“Why?” Llesho asked.

“I wasn’t always an assassin,” Master Jaks answered, and gave the rings on his own arm a look of such loathing and hunger that Llesho would have drawn his own Thebin knife had a guard not already held the man in check with a sword resting on flesh. “A long time ago, I served Thebin as a hired defender.”

“A mercenary,” Llesho corrected. He had seen the device on Master Jaks’ wrist guards long ago, that time with blood splashed on them from the Harn. Mercenaries, yes, but his guard had died like a Thebin to protect a young prince.

    “A mercenary.” Master Jaks accepted the correction. “My clan is poor; her sons serve others for pay. The less skilled take contracts as foot troops in the border wars of strangers. Those of breeding and skill hold positions in the great houses of the wealthy. My own squad served the Royal House of Kungol. My brother swore his life to the protection of the young prince, but could not save him.”

He met Llesho’s stony gaze with fire in his eyes— grim, grim fire. “I was, myself, sworn to the young prince’s mother. I lay as the dead on the floor of her temple while the men of Harn tormented her and dragged her away. To my shame, I did not die of my wounds that day.”

“You loved my mother.”

It wasn’t in the words but in the longing when Master Jaks said them, and in the despair that crossed the landscape behind his eyes when he spoke of her torment.

“Everyone loved her. How could they not?”

Llesho saw in the rueful smile that Master Jaks had never overstepped his place at the foot of his mistress: no dishonor to the queen or her husband had ever been contemplated. The self-loathing at his failure would have been the greater for his feelings, however. Llesho understood about failure and regret. He didn’t understand how one could honor the holy queen of Thebin with the rings of an assassin on his arm, and he said so.

“You prove your love of that holy woman of peace with the taking of lives for pay, as an assassin?”

Master Jaks flinched, as even the sword resting on his arm had not made him do. “There are few professions open to a member of the elite guard who has failed so disastrously in his charge. But I have kept myself alive, when I could wish only to join my brother in death, for the day when I might restore honor to my family and my clan, If I have dishonored my quest, I offer my death. Let my blood wash away the stain upon her pure honor that I served. You would be doing me a favor, one I have wished for many years. If you want to win in the coming battle, however, I can offer my service. With two arms or with one, I pledge my life, and the lives of those men who follow me, to restore her house to its rightful place, and for my brother’s honor to protect her son in all things.”

“You will do with one arm what you could not manage nine cycles ago with two?”

A glint behind the fire, a deepening of the lines around Master Jaks’ eyes, told more than the words: “I know more now.” He hadn’t been a paid assassin then. With rueful, dangerous humor, Master Jaks followed the length of the sword with his eyes. He’d abased himself enough with his confession. Llesho wasn’t ready to fight this war on his own, and he thought maybe the boy even knew it. “Better with two, of course.”

Llesho gave the slightest flick of dismissal with his fingers, and the sword lifted. No emotion broke the impassive obedience of the guard, but the man’s whole body eased. So it hadn’t been just for show. Some, though. And it wasn’t over yet.

“By the laws of Shan, I cannot take your pledge, ” Llesho pointed out with ice in his tone. “I am a slave.”

He had his manumission papers in his tunic, of course, but, until his seventeenth birthday, her ladyship could free him only by adopting him. When offered the opportunity, she had declined. Now, having recognized his lineage, any such act on the part of Thousand Lakes Province must appear as a first move in a political game neither her ladyship nor her father could afford. Shan itself would move against the province. And Llesho would be no closer to freeing his brothers than when he was diving for pearls off Pearl Island.

Too much had happened. Llesho knew, in his head, that he had come a long way in more than physical distance from the bay where the spirit of Lleck, his teacher, had appeared to him and sent him to free his home. But he was no wizard-king, and in his heart, he felt only the weight of his losses. Given his track record on this quest, he doubted he’d live long enough to see Kungol and his beloved mountains again.

“His lordship the governor has interpreted the manumission status of a young royal under the law that governs the succession to the governorship.” Habiba reached out a hand and a secretary set a sheaf of papers into it. “If a governor should die before his orphaned heir reaches the legal age of majority, the law allows for the appointment of a regent.

“His lordshio did not wish to be seen as motivated by political ambitions in the appointment of the young prince’s regent. Accordingly, he has charged me to invite your own recommendations for the role of your adviser.”

No one stirred at the table. The silence was so complete that Llesho could imagine no one stirred in the whole camp. He studied the faces of his companions, but each kept his eyes downcast and his counsel to himself. He could have wished for Kwan-ti then, or Mara, or Master Den, or Lleck—any one of the people he had grown to depend on for their wisdom who had died or disappeared from his life, leaving him storm-tossed without an anchor. He sorely needed their advice now; if any one of them had beep at the conference table, he would have landed the regency in their laps and been done with it. But they weren’t— even Lleck the bear had not followed him to this camp—and Habiba, while clever and deep, was too much her ladyship’s creature. And Master Jaks. Master Jaks, with the six rings tattooed on his upper arm, one for each paid murder he’d committed, would be no fit regent for the spiritual leader of the Thebin people, even if Llesho never had another spiritual thought in his life. Stipes was a fighter, not a thinker, and he was Yueh’s anyway, or Bixei’s, if he had his choice. The rest of them were no older than he was, or not by much, and no smarter.

The more he thought about it, though, the more he rejected the notion of anyone making his decisions for him, law or no law. It was his quest, his country he had promised to free. The decision was easy after all.

“Adar,” he said. “My brother.”

Habiba smiled and handed him the papers. “Her ladyship thought you would decide as much. She persuaded her father to complete the appropriate forms appointing Adar as your regent in absentia.”

Adar. Llesho brushed the sheaf of papers with his Hp needed tn find his hrother. to nrove to himself that he was on the true path to the liberation of his people and not on a fool’s journey. The papers appointing his brother regent until succession should be decided at Kungol reminded Llesho of Farshore’s own problems.

“His lordship the governor left no heir, did he?”

“He did not,” Habiba answered. “His family line having failed, the emperor will appoint a new governor in his place. Lord Yueh would have petitioned for the post if he had lived, I am sure.”

Llesho nodded, thinking. The emperor, far away in Shan and with only the word of easily bribed advisers to guide him, had awarded Lord Yueh the governorship of Pearl Island. Yueh had received clear title to all the holdings that belonged to the island, including the dying oyster beds of Pearl Bay, in payment of debts left owing after the death of Lord Chin-shi. With Lord Chin-shi’s overseer Markko as his adviser, Lord Yueh had attacked Farshore. Now Lord Yueh was dead, and Markko had turned back after his defeat at the jaws of the dragon on Golden Dragon River. Llesho didn’t think the deaths of three governors were coincidence.

“Lord Yueh had a young son, did he not?”

“Still does,” Stipes confirmed. “At least, the son still lives, though just a babe.”

“Will the Emperor name his mother regent?” Llesho directed his question to Habiba. As the adviser to a murdered governor himself, the witch would know better than any of them what would happen next in the matter of continued government.

“I doubt it.” Habiba considered his answer. “Her ladyship of Farshore produced no heir for the governor. If Markko acts true to form, he will lay a claim against Farshore in the name of Lord Yuen’s young son, and petition to be named regent under the guidance of the boy’s mother. Everyone knows that Lady Yueh was much younger than her husband, and that she was a quiet, shy creature. Markko’s deference to her wishes will be seen for what it is: an opportunity offered the mother to visit her child upon state occasions. She will have no say in his upbringing, and certainly none in the rule of Farshore, which Markko will want to consolidate with Pearl Island in his own name.”

“And how long will the boy live?”

“At least a year,” Master Jaks suggested. “It will take Markko that long to marry the widow and get her with child. Then Yueh’s child will die, and Markko will petition to claim the post in his own name, for the son his wife carries.”

Between them Habiba and Master Jaks had outlined Llesho’s own conclusions. It left one question unanswered, however. “What does he want with me?”

“The trade routes through the passes above Kun-gol?” Master Jaks guessed.

Llesho shrugged a shoulder. “Then he’d do better attacking the Harn. I couldn’t give him Kungol if I wanted to.”

“He may wish to control your power of persuasion with the goddess,” Habiba suggested.

Llesho snorted an unpretty laugh. “He’d have done better to wait a day to attack Farshore if that’s what he wanted. The goddess didn’t come. I didn’t see her. I’d rather believe that the attack came before I had a chance to finish the ritual than that the goddess did not choose me. If she was able to find me at all so far from home, however, it’s more likely the goddess found me wanting and rejected me. No special influence there.”

Habiba looked at him strangely, but didn’t say anything. There seemed little left to say. Llesho had his own quest, but Thebin seemed very far away and his enemies formidable. He wasn’t smart enough to defeat Markko, wasn’t strong enough, and his so-called “mystical powers” weren’t going to impress the magician. Aside from having a ghost tell him what to do and a dragon eat his healer, he didn’t have any magic. And like his luck, it seemed that if it weren’t for bad magic, he’d have none at all.

He did know that he was too tired to think about it now. He rose from his chair, but when he turned to bow politely to Habiba, he found the witch on one knee before him again, along with Master Jaks and the secretaries and Stipes. Bixei had moved to stand next to Kaydu, and together with Hmishi and Lling the four companions stood to attention, his personal guard awaiting his next order.

“I need to rest.” He was also hungry, he realized, and in no condition to make more difficult decisions. Given his current temper, he was lucky Master Jaks still had two arms.

Habiba took that as permission to rise, as did his companions. “Kaydu can show you to your tent,” he said. It was accepted that his companions, who once again included Bixei, would not leave his side, and equally clearly understood that no other company was welcome at this time. Except for one person, who wasn’t available.

“I wish Master Den were here,” Llesho said.

“Who is Master Den?” Lling wanted to know. Before Llesho could answer, Bixei volunteered the information, “He is here. Don’t know why he didn’t attend the meeting just now, but you can probably find him in the laundry after you’ve had something to eat.”

“The laundry? Here?”

Bixei laughed. “He brought two huge cauldrons with him on a supply wagon, and he’s had Gryphon Squad hauling water from the river all morning. By now he’s probably knee-deep in soap suds!”

A darkness at the edge of vision that Llesho hadn’t even noticed until now suddenly lifted. He smiled: a real, full smile, for the first time in so long he couldn’t even remember when it had last happened. Den was here. Maybe he had a chance after all.

C HAPTER T WENTY-FIVE

THEY’VE assigned us one of the large command tents.“ Kaydu led them through the bivouac lines. When the smells of food warned them that they were passing close by the cook tent, Bixei left the group with a murmured promise to bring something to eat for them.

“Something hot,” Llesho requested absently. He felt cold from the inside out, the chill escaping in fine tremors that shook him in waves, like a fever. He followed Kaydu along a row of round felt tents.

Men and women in the leather and brass of fighters stopped in their mending and polishing to stare as they passed. Kaydu glared, sending them back to their tasks with unanswered questions still lurking in their eyes, but no great desire for answers. Llesho was just as glad; what few answers he had satisfied no one, least of all himself. He wasn’t up to sharing them, but turned his thoughts inward, fighting the cold that crept over his heart. Mara was dead in his place, though Habiba seemed to think she had survived the dragon’s poison tooth and fiery gullet somehow. The other deaths, and Kwan-ti’s disappearance, he could blame on events that flowed around him but were not themselves a part of his own story. Local politics, far from the eye of Thebin and no fight of Llesho’s, took their toll, and he could do little more than survive them. But Mara had called up a dragon to rescue him, and then had offered her life to the creature in exchange for his own. He should have—

“Stop it.” Lling punched him in the arm, and he realized that she’d been talking to him, and he hadn’t heard a word.

“It wasn’t your fault.” She called him on his guilt-ridden brooding, angry at him for it. “According to Habiba, she isn’t dead anyway.”

“He said she’d be back, not that she wasn’t dead.” Llesho emphasized the distinction. “Lleck is back, too. Does that mean he didn’t die of the fever on Pearl Island?”

“Where is Lleck?” Hmishi thought to ask just then. “I didn’t see him cross the bridge ... Or ... Dragon . . . Something.”

“He clearly had better sense than to cross a rushing river on the back of a legend,” Llesho suggested.

“I didn’t think kings had temper tantrums,” Lling snapped.

Llesho looked at her, too tired for any of this. He wanted to escape, to dig a deep, deep hole, and crawl in and hide. But they weren’t going to leave him alone; Master Jaks had made sure of that. “They probably don’t,” he agreed, thinking about his father, who had often laughed, and sometimes cried, and in court would stroke his beard in thought before handing down a wise and balanced ruling. “But since I will never be a king, I don’t see your point.”

“But Jaks said—”

“A thousand li of Harn grassland, filled with Harn raiders, stand between me and a crown,” he pointed out. “And somewhere between here and there, I have six brothers, each of them older than I am and more suited to the throne. So I am still just a minor prince in exile, as I told you before.”

“You are the seventh son of the king of Thebin, though,” Hmishi pressed him.

“Favored of the gods,” Llesho quoted. “Is that how it seems to you?”

“Well.” Lling put an arm through his, and Hmishi took the other. Together they leaned into him. “You’ve got us. I’d say that counts as blessed.” She grinned at him, daring him to contradict her.

He tried to laugh but could only manage a tight smile, until the smell of soap bubbles hit his nose.

“This is it,” Kaydu said, tugging him toward a command tent, red like the others, but bigger, and tall enough to stand up in.

“Later.” Llesho followed the sound and the smell he had grown to love because they reminded him of Master Den.

He found the washerman, loins bound up and knee-deep in a steaming vat of soapy water. The traveling washtub was made of knee-high oaken staves bound in a circle as wide across as a spear, with an oaken floor in sections set clinker-style, one board overlapping another to make the whole watertight, on the grass. Long strips of bandages hung from lines that festooned the fruit trees, and bright red tent cloths lay spread upon the grass to dry. Llesho stood beneath a cherry tree, letting the smell and the sound ease into his soul and loosen the rock-hard tension in his muscles. He realized suddenly that it didn’t hurt to smile and let his lips have their way, skinning back in a toothy grin he’d forgotten was ever a part of him.

“Kick your sandals off and get in here, boy, or have you forgotten all I’ve taught you?” Den set his fists atop his broad hips and huffed a steamy breath for emphasis.

“I’m a prince now,” Llesho reminded him with a haughty sniff. He was toeing off his sandals when he said it.

“You were always a prince,” Master Den corrected him with an answering grin. “You had to learn to be a washerman.”

Llesho dragged his leggings off and dropped them in a heap over his sandals, and followed with his tunic. The washerman’s grin faltered, and Llesho was suddenly self-conscious about the wound still raw on his breast. But Master Den taunted him with another mock challenge, “Unless you’ve forgotten everything I taught you.”

In nothing but his own smallclothes, Llesho climbed into the vat. “I haven’t forgotten a thing,” he promised, and meant much more than how to stir up the wash.

“And well you shouldn’t, young prince.” Master Den gave a meaningful look to the Thebin knife hanging in its sheath from a cord around Llesho’s neck. He gave a broad smile then, and opened his arms. “It’s good to see you again, boy.”

Llesho gave his teacher a hug. “I thought you must be dead, too,” he whispered, and Den set him at arm’s length so that he could look deep into his eyes. “I am not dead. Hold onto your faith, Llesho. The world is a more wondrous place than you can yet imagine.”

“I could do with a few less wonders. The last one ate my healer.”

“Perhaps she is a wonder, too.” Master Den gave him a nod to signal the end of meaningful conversation, or perhaps the beginning of a lesson, Llesho could never quite tell when the washerman was teaching and when he was making small talk. “But now we have bandages to clean, and then boil, and tent cloths to prepare for the hospital.”

He stepped out of the vat, and Llesho followed; each took a coarse rake and began to dredge the soaking cloths. Working in comfortable unison they draped the waterlogged bandages over the spokes of a wheel, the axle of which ended in a crank. When each spoke was lined with long bandage cloths, Llesho grabbed their loose ends, and Den turned the crank, twisting the bandages and wringing out the dirty water. Then each bit went into a bubbling cauldron for a brief but important boiling to kill any putridity that might still inhabit the weave, and onto the lines it went.

Llesho bent and stretched, thinking of nothing but the regular motions of duties he remembered from a time when his road seemed clear and the risks belonged to him alone. While he worked, the hot water of the vat and the steam from the cauldrons loosened the muscles that had grown rigid with a soul-deep cold. He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, and felt his shoulders uncurl from their customary hunch around his wound and his heart.

“Father says you need rest,” Kaydu insisted, her frown expressing the disapproval of his humble toil that she hesitated to speak out loud.

“Are you scolding the prince, or the washerman for detaining him?” Master Den asked with laughter barely restrained in his voice. Kaydu didn’t know Master Den, of course, and she didn’t like that tone of voice from a stranger.

“He’s been wounded,” she snapped back. “He shouldn’t be pulling at that shoulder.”

Master Den acknowledged her with a wise nod, a twinkle hidden in his eye. “His wounds run deep, but even the deepest wounds heal, give the opportunity to do so.”

While Den and Kaydu challenged each other for the right to determine his well-being, Llesho scratched idly at his damp belly. His damp, empty belly. “Is there anything to eat?”

“Bixei brought your dinner. It’s getting cold in your tent right now.”

“Cold is good,” Llesho decided, “unless it is fish heads in porridge.” He shuddered a little, and Den laughed.

“No fish heads,” the washerman said. “The fish are known to curse the fishermen in their own tongue hereabouts.”

Llesho figured he meant the Golden Dragon River, which had already shown itself to harbor stranger creatures than he had ever wanted to meet. No, he wouldn’t want to fish in that river.

“Do you have any cheese?” he asked. “And a bit of bread?”

“Llesho!” Kaydu snapped.

She wanted to protect him. Llesho figured he was making that difficult for her, and that at the least he owed it to his friends to make it as easy as possible for them to keep him alive.

He raised his head, instinctively setting his shoulders and tilting his chin with the quiet poise of a prince. In his eyes lingered the fear of a terrible pain waiting to claim him if he gave himself time to think. Kaydu dropped her gaze, suddenly embarrassed to be ordering him about, and guilty for reminding him of that pain that lay in wait for him.

“You do that very well.” Den might have been mocking him, or ... something.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized to Kaydu, “but I need this.” He had missed his old master more than he was willing to say in front of his companions.

She nodded, not looking at him, and turned to go.

“I’ll watch him, Kaydu.” Den made his own peace offering. “He won’t come to any harm tonight.”

“I know,” she said, and turned to Llesho. “But one of us will be on guard anyway. Just in case. Bixei wants to talk to you. He’s been really worried since we parted with her ladyship’s train. He has asked for first watch. I’ll send your dinner up with him.”

“Thank you.” The debate had drained much of the warmth out of his bones, and Llesho felt his muscles tightening up again.

“Cover up; we’ve done enough for one day.” Den threw him a patched linen shirt and a pair of coarse breeches, reminders of another time. “Perhaps you would like to do prayer forms with me?”

Llesho nodded, then realized Master Den couldn’t see him with his head under his shirt. He found the open neck, popped his head through, and answered, “Yes, Master, very much,” while punching his arms into sleeves, and pulled on the breeches just as Bixei showed up with his dinner.

“Dinner can wait.” Den bowed, his hands clasped. Bixei grinned in answer and set himself next to Llesho, their old positions in the training yard on Pearl Island. Following Den’s lead, they performed the Flowing River form, to thank the Seven Gods for their timely rescue across the Golden Dragon River, and the Twining Branches form to honor the orchard that sheltered them. Somehow, Jaks had joined them, and Stipes. For a brief span of minutes, they fell into old routines that were, Llesho reminded himself, no less dangerous for their familiarity. A gladiator was called to die as often as a soldier in battle, for the price of a wager or the whim of an audience.

But in the forms, Llesho could forget all the dangerous roads that had brought him here. The pieces of his heart tumbled, found their proper places, and clicked together in the moment. Body and mind, motion and a soaring heart joined in the fading sunlight. Llesho reached through the forms, became the twisted shadows of laden branches, honored the grass that bruised beneath feet in Wind through Millet. The grass offered itself in answer to the prayer forms, releasing its sharp green scent around his legs, its touch a reminder of life infinitely renewing all around them. Fingertip breezes soft with the oerfume of rioe oeaches kissed his cheek and whispered through the strands of his hair. The earth rocked them gently, the universe cradled them, and the evening flowed with his muscles, one with all the living men and gods.

Llesho offered plums to the lady goddess in his mind. She was his bride, and he felt her kiss in the kiss of the breeze, her touch in the warmth that flowed through his body. He knew that he could wait for her, as she waited for him. When he finally came to rest, with a bow to his master, he noticed that his companions were staring at him with guarded wonder.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asked, ducking his head in embarrassment. He meant by that, Did I do something strange to call attention to myself. It was one thing to have a private moment with the universe, and quite another to share that moment with all one’s closest companions.

Den shook his head, his own little smile accompanied by a shrug of the shoulder. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” he promised. “But it is becoming more and more difficult to forget you are a prince.”

“Does that mean I can’t join you in the washing anymore?” he asked, the first thing that came to mind. Master Den said nothing, just watched him with the same gentle smile, but Master Jaks sat down hard on the ground, laughing till the tears ran down his face. “You scared the hell out of me, boy.” Jaks shuddered at a memory Llesho didn’t share. “I thought you would die on that river.” He shrugged, helpless to explain away the feelings that had escaped him. “Didn’t realize you had influence with the local river dragon.”

“Not my influence.” Llesho winced at the thought of Mara facing the dragon. But Habiba didn’t seem disturbed. And there were all those missing afternoons. ... “I don’t think I’m meant to die yet.” He reached for the bread Bixei had left under the nearest peach tree and tore off a chewv bite, erabbed the slab of cheese resting beside it, and munched thoughtfully, leaning back against the tree trunk. Llesho had always understood the responsibility a king owed his subjects. Not since Khri had died to protect him from the Harn raiders, however, had Llesho felt the weight of responsibility a prince owed his protectors. He had to stay alive or the sacrifices of Khri, and of the Long March, and of Mara were for nothing. If he had died on the river, Khri’s brother would have gone to his grave with a blood-debt unpaid. Llesho understood about brothers. Looking at Master Jaks that way was a revelation.

“You will have your chance to complete your contract.” This time he meant it, in the full knowledge that he owed his debtor as much as the mercenary-assassin owed him. With a single dip of his head, Jaks acknowledged the solemn promise in Llesho’s demeanor.

Done. Llesho returned the bow with a jerk of his chin, and blinked. Thinking took as much energy as running from Master Markko, and he’d had more than enough of both to last him a while.

“You need a bed, and rest,” Bixei took his arm.

Llesho struggled to his feet and let Bixei lead him to his tent. The clothes he wore were soft enough that he didn’t worry about taking them off, just let himself drop on the pallet prepared for him and fell into the welcoming darkness.

I’lorning came with the sunlight spilling red through the tent cloth and the smell of fresh bread and hot porridge rich with peaches. Llesho opened his eyes and found Bixei kneeling by his bed with a steaming bowl of breakfast in his hands. “I told you this would wake him up,” Bixei said to someone behind him.

Llesho sat up and craned his neck. Kaydu sat cross-legged on her blanket with a bowl of her own in front of her. “Llesho liking his breakfast is not exactly news,” she answered with a sniff.

“Who likes breakfast?” Lling popped into the tent, followed by Hmishi, both with steaming bowls in their hands.

“I do,” Llesho took the bowl from Bixei while the two newcomers settled themselves on the floor of the tent.

They ate in silence for a while, then Bixei cleared his throat. “We’re going on to Shan?” he asked.

Llesho shrugged. “I promised Lleck that I’d find my brothers. Adar may be in Shan, so that is where I will start the search. But no one is obliged to follow me.”

“Who’s Lleck?”

Hmishi finished his porridge and set down his bowl. “Lleck was Llesho’s teacher. Now he’s a bear.”

“A what?”

“Never mind that.” Llesho waved aside the discussion. Whatever Lleck was now, he’d exacted a promise from Llesho, one he intended to keep. “I think we’d all be better off if I did this on my own.”

“Like that would work!” Kaydu gave him a crinkled frown over her porridge. “We barely made it this far with the four of us. If it hadn’t been for Mara, we’d be Master Markko’s prisoners right now.”

Llesho didn’t need reminding. Mara was dead and wouldn’t be coming to their rescue any time soon.

“If you act like you’re unbeatable, you usually don’t have to fight,” Bixei added. “I learned that when we defeated Lord Yueh on the road.”

Lling finished her porridge and flicked out a dainty tongue to lick her fingers clean. “Habiba said we are to go in state,” she reminded them with a waggle of her eyebrows. “That sounds a lot more comfortable than straggling into the capital with my clothes in rags and my hair in snarls.”

“And we’ll have more time with Master Den.” Bixei had assumed his place among them again, but he darted an uncomfortable glance at Llesho. He was hiding something, and Llesho wondered if he could trust Bixei now. “Out with it,” he demanded, unwilling to wait until whatever it was bit him in the backside.

“It’s Stipes.” Bixei dropped his head. “He knows it won’t be like the old times. This is war, not the arena, but he asked me to remind you that he was first to befriend you in the practice yard, and he would be at your side to see the end of the story, if you would permit it. He had no choice but to serve Lord Yueh. He was a slave. But he never spied for Markko, and he has never compromised his honor for personal gain. He says.” Bixei looked up at Llesho, pleading: “All that I have known of Stipes tells me that he speaks the truth. And I have missed him.”

Perhaps he should have doubted more, but Llesho did trust Stipes. He wondered, though, about Bixei. “If you had to choose,” he asked, “to let Stipes fall, or to give your comrades into Markko’s hands, what would you do?”

Bixei hesitated, as Llesho expected he would. In a matter of Stipes’ life or Llesho’s, Bixei would choose to honor his sworn oath to protect the prince of Thebin. Given what appeared, on the surface, an equal choice, the outcome was not so certain. But Bixei had already chosen Stipes over his comrades once. Llesho couldn’t leave decisions of loyalty to the field.

    “Stipes will remain in Habiba’s guard, under Jaks’ command,” Llesho decided. “You, Bixei, will act as liaison between Habiba’s camp and ours here. Where will you bivouac?”

Bixei stared at him, stricken, then slowly processed the question. Not Where will you sleep while we are in camp, as it appeared on the surface, but, show here, now, where your allegiance lies.

“I’ll bivouac with my comrades, and take my turn at sentry duty with the others.” He acknowledged Llesho’s purpose in asking the question with a rueful smile. “Stipes will understand.”

Llesho set his empty bowl on the pallet beside him and rubbed at his head. He knew he was just postponing the day of reckoning with Bixei, but with any luck none of them would ever have to choose. In the meantime, he was pretty sure he’d awakened late and missed prayer forms, but it wouldn’t hurt to wander down to the temporary laundry and say hello to Master Den. Stipes, on the way to Llesho’s tent, met Llesho himself on the way out.

“Pardon, Your Highness, but Habiba has ordered that we strike camp and be ready to move by mid-morning. And Master Jaks asks if he can be of service.”

“It’s a little late to be throwing titles around, Stipes. I’m the same person I always was.”

“Begging your pardon, Your Highness, but you’re not,” Stipes objected.

Llesho had turned back to his tent, but Kaydu shooed him away with a scornful whoosh. “Time you learned how to act like a prince,” she said in support of Stipes. “And princes don’t strike their own tents. Go, find Master Den, or Jaks, or whoever, and do what princes do in the morning.”

Weapons practice. “Ask Master Jaks if we will have time on the journey to renew our study of the martial arts, if you please. At his leisure, of course.”

When Stipes had made his deferential bow and departed, Llesho left his companions to pack their new wealth and went in search of Master Den. He found the washerman under the same trees, his tubs and cauldron empty around him and the last of the tent cloths and bandages spread out to dry.

“Llesho! Come here, boy. You’re the very thing. Would you take that end—there you go.”

Llesho picked up the trailing ends of the tent cover that Master Den was folding and mirrored the washerman’s moves, coming toward him when Den moved forward, and away when Den pulled back, until the tent cloth was no more than a dense square the size of a dinner plate. They went on to the next, comfortably working together, while Llesho wondered if this, too, would soon change. Would Master Den, like Habiba and Master Jaks, soon press him to behave more like a prince, and less like a washerman. Not knowing just made him more and more tense, so he took a deep breath and plunged in.

“You aren’t treating me any differently . . .” And let Master Den make of that what he would.

“Would you like me to?” Den returned the question with one of his own, but then offered an answer that unwound a bit of the tension pulling Llesho’s mouth into a frown.

“I thought you would have had enough of that from the rest of the camp. Would you prefer that I treat you like a hero, or like a prince?”

“Like an apprentice washerman, if it is all right with Habiba,” he answered, and began rolling the strips of clean bandages with a will.

“It is not for Habiba to say,” Den reminded him. “And when you are finished with that roll of bandages, I need your help to break down this washtub.”

“Yes, Master,” Llesho answered the washerman, who himself hid secrets of his identity. He joined Master Den in pulling up the floor of the tub in three pieces, and discovered that the rim of barrel staves folded into a bundle and stowed snugly in the wagon alongside the cauldron. They had just finished loading the various tent cloths and Master Den’s own bedroll when a boy just a bit younger than Llesho brought round the cart horses to lead into harness.

“Your own mount will be waiting for you,” Master Den reminded Llesho, who bowed to take his leave.

“Would it be all right if I joined you tomorrow morning for prayer forms?” he asked before he left.

“Who can say what tomorrow will bring?” Master Den mused. “But if I rise in the morning, and a certain young man should happen to be near, he might, if he had a mind, perform his prayer forms in company rather than alone.”

In his weakened state after his wounding and later, in the confusion of running from Markko and his men, Llesho had forgotten the comforting ritual of prayer forms. He bowed, in part to hide the deep wine color pulsing in his cheeks. Torn between guilt and embarrassment, he resolved to make up for his negligence, starting the very next morning. And for once, he was glad to abandon his teacher.

C HAPTER T WENTY-SIX

AFTER the council held on their arrival, Llesho expected that his squad would join Habiba and Jaks at the head of the massed guard. But Habiba had wisely explained that marching on the capital of the Shan Empire with a deposed prince in their company might stir up more concern than they were prepared to face on the journey. Instead, he set them somewhat forward of the center in the order of march, an anonymous cluster of very young soldiers lost among the horse guards.

As they left the orchard behind them, Llesho turned for a last glance back at the Golden Dragon River to his left, imprinting the memory of the sun sparking off the tiny frothed peaks of the swiftly running current. He’d seen wonders on the river, but would have traded the dragon in all its glory for one more glimpse of the old healer, Mara, sound and scolding him to be still so that his wound would heal. His flesh scarcely twinged at all now, but the newer wound of Mara’s loss was a deeper, sharper hurt.

They advanced at an easy pace that maddened Llesho. He didn’t think Master Markko had given up the pursuit; the magician would find a way to cross the river, perhaps already had, and then he’d be after Llesho and his band of friends again. Llesho had an army with him now, and they had a witch of their own, of course. He wasn’t sure who practiced the stronger magic between the two, but thought perhaps Markko would hesitate before attacking if he knew Habiba had ridden against him. He had enough grudging respect for Master Markko’s skills, however, that he wanted as many li between them as possible.

Ahead lay Shan, the imperial city. Caravans from the north had brought stories of Shan to Thebin. The gods might set Kungol down in its entirety in the emperor’s gardens and have room left over for his tiger preserves. Llesho didn’t know how he was going to find Adar or their five remaining siblings when he got there, but Habiba had them going in the right direction at last. He wanted to move faster. If he had magic of his own, he would make the li disappear, and they’d be walking through the mighty gates of the capital city by nightfall. But he didn’t have magic of his own, and Habiba didn’t seem inclined to use the skills he had, or to press the company to haste.

Kaydu rode ahead of him, and Lling and Hmishi guarded his flanks. Bixei rode behind. When Llesho had reminded him that his liaison should travel with the leaders of their force, Bixei had responded that Stipes would serve as their link to Habiba and Jaks; for himself, Bixei would stand ready to ferry messages from Llesho to the commanders at the head of the column. And until there were messages to carry, he would keep his place and guard his companions’ backs.

The column had taken up a journey song. Llesho didn’t know the words, but his companions picked up at the chorus and the mournful plaint wove its lines of home and sorrow into his dark thoughts.

As I march from the home I am leaving by the cottage door, holding our babe.

my sweetheart is quietly weeping

for the sweet boy she sends to the grave.

As I march from the home I am leaving, by the fence post, clutching her shawl, my mother stands quietly grieving her sons, she has given them all.

As I march from the home I am leaving, in the cornfield, swinging his scythe, my father stands anxiously yearning like his son, he would follow the fife.

But the drums and the pipes now are silent and the tunic of red turns to rust and the fields are now sown with the fallen in the twilight, in blood, and in dust.

And I long for the home of my fathers, for the smiles of my sweetheart and babe, to bring home the sons of my mother, let our leaders, and gods, point the way.

The mood of the song reflected his own dark thoughts, but the rhythm kept the measured pace of the march. Slowly, however, the meaning of the song found its way into his heart. He’d lost mother and father, brothers and home, and much of his own innocence when he was little more than a babe. Since he’d taken on the burden of Lleck’s oath, he’d lost comrades-in-arms. But he wasn’t alone anymore. He traveled with an army, and with the promise that his brothers were alive.

While the marching song reminded him of the grief of parting, it also reminded him of his goal: he was going home. He would rescue his brothers, and together they would free Thebin from the Harn. They would do it. He found his head tilting upward, out of his moody slump and seeking the sunshine. His shoulders drew back, as if a weight were not lifted, but had settled properly where it belonged. As the words of the song said, he would return the sons of his mother to their home. Markko was an obstacle, but he wasn’t the goal, and Llesho couldn’t let his fear of the magician take over his thinking so that he forgot what he’d set out to do. That didn’t mean he could forget the forces pursuing them, but he had to let go of the dread he’d built up of the magician over the months he’d spent as his captive. To do that he had to know more about the overseer.

He pulled his horse up slightly and fell in step next to Bixei. “Back when I first entered the gladiators’ compound on Pearl Island, you were Markko’s assistant.”

“I was not in league with him, nor did he tell me any of his secrets.” Bixei looked sideways at him, uneasiness crossing his features. “I carried messages, nothing more.”

“You were afraid that I would take your place.”

“As a messenger, I could leave the compound pretty much whenever I wanted. I’d just tell the guard at the gate that I was carrying a secret message, and they’d let me go.” Bixei looked down, and Llesho wondered if he was hiding some guilt about his actions, but Bix-ei’s eyes were as clear and true as they had ever been when he met Llesho’s gaze again across the necks of their horses. “I would never betray you. You annoyed the piss out of me when you first showed up. You were too short and too skinny, ridiculous for the arena, and I couldn’t imagine why Markko had accepted you for training. I thought perhaps he found you pretty, though he never seemed interested in boys before. I was afraid that, if you were his favorite, Markko would give you my place, and I’d be stuck behind the palisades again. But even then, I would not have betrayed you.”

Llesho had never thought much about how others saw him. He’d been born a prince, and had taken the devotion of his people and his large and loving family for granted. Then he’d lost it all and hadn’t cared what anyone thought of Llesho the slave—that wasn’t him, and the people whose opinions mattered weren’t there anymore. Whether he wished it or not, however, it seemed that he was about to learn as much about himself as he was about Markko. He found himself cringing at Bixei’s word-picture of him.

“But you learned fast,” Bixei continued, “like you’d been born to the forms, and sometimes, in weapons practice, especially with the sword and the knife, it was hard to tell where the weapon in your hand left off and your body began. Master Den had that skill, and sometimes Jaks. Madon, too, if sorely pressed. I thought it was odd that you didn’t practice in the yard with your born weapons more often, but I figured Jaks wanted to raise your skills in a broader range of weapons.”

Bixei shrugged. “I suppose I should have been more jealous when you proved you could hold your own in the practice yard, but Stipes said you were all right, and I didn’t envy you having Master Den breathing down your neck. And, sometimes, when you were using the knife and the sword, you would have a look on your face that. . . well, just say that I never wanted to find out what put it there. And I never wanted to be your practice partner when I saw it.”

“Master Den never let anyone but himself practice knife with me,” Llesho admitted. “Not even Master Jaks. When Habiba took me to the governor’s compound at Farshore, I nearly killed someone in practice. That’s when Master Jaks explained that I only knew how to kill with the knife, not to wound or to hold back for a practice match, and that to try and change that would ruin me. Since then, I sometimes dream that I killed Master Den in practice. It gives me the cold sweats just thinking about it.”

“How did you get that way?”

Llesho shrugged. “Goddess knows. Master Den says I was trained to it as a child, but I have no memory of it. Lately I’ve begun remembering more. I was only seven, but I remember killing a man with my knife, so I guess Master Den is right.”

“Is that why you were sold into slavery?” Bixei asked. “I mean, you were a prince and all, but . . .”

“The man had just killed my personal bodyguard, and would have killed me if he’d seen me first. He was a Harn raider. They attacked the palace, killed my mother and father and my sister, and sold the rest of us into slavery. I don’t feel guilty about killing him, exactly, but I want to throw up when I remember how it felt to drive a Thebin war-knife between a man’s ribs.”

Bixei nodded. “You were different when you began weapons practice—”

“I’d forgotten a lot about the attack on Kungol, our capital city, until I held a war-knife again. Then it all came back.” Llesho didn’t mention that her ladyship had watched-him in the weapons room that day, that she had known even then who he was.

Bixei nodded. That made sense. “By then, I realized that you weren’t interested in taking my place in the team; you had a plan of your own, and whatever it was, it worried Master Jaks.

“I don’t know why Markko treated you the way he did—he never was cruel with me, never interfered with my life or with Stipes. I knew about his workroom, of course, but other than carrying a potion to a patient now and then, I had nothing to do with that part of his business.”

They both fell silent for a few moments, listening to the song of the soldiers as they marched. Then Bixei went on. “I’m not saying that Markko was ever a decent overseer. But a lot of things changed when you showed up, Llesho. You spent years diving for pearls on the same island, but I don’t think anyone in the training compound knew you existed. And then suddenly Master Markko wants you, and you are making Master Jaks nervous, and Master Den is alternating between treating you like the village idiot and like his most prized chick.

“I never saw Master Den take weapons practice with anyone until you showed up, and suddenly he is a master at the knife and sword. I never, I mean never, saw anyone handle them like Master Den did, not even you, and until you came, I would have guessed he didn’t even know how to hold a sword.”

“I think his stories are all true,” Llesho offered. “I just don’t know how he managed to do all those things, or how he came to be the washerman in a stable of gladiators.”

“Me neither,” Bixei admitted. “But I just wanted you to know that things were different before you showed up. So part of what Master Markko has become was always in him, but part, somehow, has to do with you. And I think, I think that he sees a power in you—whatever it is that has Master Jaks and Master Den and her ladyship and Habiba in a stew.”

“It’s the prince thing.” Llesho tried to convince himself as well as Bixei that was all there was to it. “If today the Harn can take Thebin and hold the passage to the West hostage, tomorrow they may decide to take Shan and the eastern end of the trade route.”

Bixei, unfortunately, didn’t take the bait. “That might explain Master Jaks, and even her ladyship,” he agreed, “but not Habiba or Markko. Markko wanted to study you and use whatever power he saw in you, but he couldn’t figure out how to reach it. And I think it finally got to be too much for him. Chin-shi wasn’t the greatest lord in the empire, but he wasn’t the sort to let his overseer dissect the slaves for his own education. I think that’s why Master Markko made the deal with Lord Yueh.”

“There’s just one problem with that theory.” Llesho shuddered. He could too easily imagine himself spread out on the long, sturdy table in Markko’s workroom, his guts revealed to the curiosity of the poisoner. “I don’t have any power. If I did, Mara would be alive. Madon would be alive. I wouldn’t have taken an arrow in my chest, and I wouldn’t have spent weeks recovering from the fever.”

He didn’t add, We wouldn’t be in this mess if the lady goddess had found me pleasing in her sight, but said, “Master Markko has what he was looking for. With the governor murdered by Lord Yueh’s soldiers, and Lord Yueh himself now dead, Markko will hold Pearl Island and Farshore. He has all the power he can possibly want.”

“Not all,” Bixei pointed out. “And it’s not me you have to convince. Markko isn’t likely to believe you don’t have some mysterious powers, because he’s already committed everything to capture them.”

“I don’t understand.” Llesho muttered the comment to himself, but Bixei picked it up and answered: “Ask Master Den. If you can make any sense of what he says. Whatever Master Markko sees in you, Master Den saw it first.”

With that, Bixei dropped back to take the rear again, leaving Llesho with his thoughts.

C HAPTER T WENTY-SEVEN

IF someone had asked which of his companions Llesho expected to unsettle his thinking the least, he would have answered, “Bixei,” without a moment’s hesitation. Which just proved once again that he’d taken on this quest thing with his eyes half shut, and hadn’t opened them yet. Half the company he traveled with apparently considered him a magical talisman of some sort, while the other half—probably thought the same thing by now, except that they hadn’t yet told him so. It made him wonder if they weren’t right, and he was just too stupid to realize it. He was smart enough to know that he didn’t want Master Markko to be the one to unlock his mysteries, though.

The magician was following them, he was sure of it. Habiba had to know it, but he held their pace to a slow and steady advance, as if no danger followed them nor anything of importance awaited them ahead. Habiba wasn’t riding beside him, but Kaydu made a handy substitute, so he complained to her.

“Can’t we move any faster?” Llesho pressed when Kaydu dropped back to ride beside him.

“Not if we want the wagons to keep up,” she answered. “Father will not risk the waeon teams to an attack on an undefended rear. He doesn’t want you to greet the emperor’s ministers with anything less than the full honors of your position, and the tents and supplies are carried in the wagons.”

“I’d rather arrive without the tents, but within this lifetime,” Llesho grumped. An image flashed in his mind, of himself, in a cage lashed to the back of a wagon, with Master Markko riding beside him, gloating. He didn’t think it was his own imagination, but how had Markko got into his head?

Without thinking about it, he’d been urging his sturdy mount forward with insistent pressure from his knees. When the horse obediently picked up the pace, he tugged impatiently on the reins, holding their place in the line. The horse, which had coped patiently with Llesho’s nervous energy to this point, gave a frustrated snort and a little sidestep, bucking as if he’d been bitten by a fat green fly. Llesho sailed into the air and crashed down hard on his tailbone.

“Ouch!” he shouted, and grunted a humiliated complaint, “I can’t feel my butt!” The images of himself in chains were gone, though, pushed out by the sudden awareness of the pain in his backside, for which he was grateful at least. Now all he had to do was figure out how to manage it without falling off his horse.

Hmishi snorted, but he slid off his horse and offered a hand. “Your butt’s still there,” he assured Llesho, “though you may regret it by the time we stop for the night!”

Llesho glared at him and remounted, gritting his teeth as his nether regions renewed their acquaintance with his horse.

“More stubborn than a packhorse,” the voice of a soldier snickered behind them. His wounded expression earned Llesho no support from his companions, however. Lling sniffed scornfully instead, and muttered, “It’s only the truth.” Embarrassment reddened his dusky skin to the color of an aged wine. “I have to find Master Jaks,” he said, and urged his horse out of the line.

His companions surely knew he had no more business with the officers at the front now than he’d had just minutes ago, when he’d argued the pace with Kaydu. But it gave him an excuse to escape their knowing glances, and his horse needed to work off some of the nerves it shared with its rider.

Master Jaks was not to be found, and Habiba, riding at the head of the line of soldiers with Stipes at his flank, greeted him with a polite nod, and a sympathetic smile that for some reason made Llesho even angrier than he was already. Muttering some courtesy he did not mean and forgot as soon as he’d finished saying it, Llesho turned his horse and headed back down the line. Without quite realizing it, he found himself moving toward the rear where Master Den followed with the wagons, willing to trade the watchful attention of his guard for the curious glances of the men of the line. He had not gone far, however, when Stipes caught up with him, a wrathful glare on his face, and a sharp word on his tongue.

“Your guard is responsible for your safety,” he began. “They can’t protect you if you insist on running off like an irresponsible child.”

“There are a thousand troopers on this march, Stipes. If the whole of Habiba’s forces cannot keep one man from snatching me away, I don’t think the five of you will make much difference.”

“And you don’t want to see us dead like your bodyguard in Kungol Palace,” Stipes snapped back at him. “But Lling and Hmishi would die to save you from nicking your finger on your dinner knife, and Kaydu and Bixei aren’t far behind, for their honor if not for love of you.”

It hurt to hear the words said aloud. He hadn’t understood it as a child—his people falling dead by the wayside so that he would live. Now he carried the guilt as a warning as well as a memory.

/ don’t want anyone dead for me. No point in saying it, since Stipes already had, so he glared back at the man. “And you? What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?” Stipes shrugged. “Habiba and that girl, Kaydu, have fixed it so that the only way I can keep Bixei safe is to keep you alive. So I’m doing it, even if I have to drag you over my horse’s rump like a saddle pack and haul your ass back to your place in the line.”

Think cold thoughts, Llesho told himself. But the hurt still sneaked onto his downcast face. He didn’t want that responsibility. He heard a sigh from above him—Stipes, taller to begin with and riding a bigger horse.

“You’ve got friends, Llesho, whether you want them or not. Give them a break.”

That was the problem. Llesho grabbed the reins of Stipes’ horse close by the bit. When the two horses settled, closer than either of the animals would have liked, Llesho met Stipes’ gaze and held it. “Friends die,” he said.

“Remember that the next time you decide to do something reckless.” Nodding an end to the conversation, Stipes tugged his reins out of Llesho’s hand and turned his horse.

Neither said anything when they slipped back into place with their companions, although Llesho, even deep in his own thoughts, could not ignore the silent communication going on around him. “I won’t go off on my own again,” he growled when it had gone on long enough. “Far be it from me to permit my death to get in the way of true love.”

He’d used as much sarcasm as he could summon, and Bixei responded with his usual sneer. Llesho hadn’t expected the furious blushes that heated the faces of his two Thebin companions. He remembered them lying close together in the healer’s cottage, and it made him unaccountably angry, in an unfocused way—left out more than wanting Lling for himself. He’d kept himself as a gift to the goddess, who didn’t want him, and now he found himself on the outside in his own company. He wondered if he was supposed to start plying Kaydu with poetry and sighs now.

She answered his curious look with a disdainful tilt of her head. “Don’t even think it.”

She seemed to have read his mind. Since the others were snickering, however, he figured his speculation must have been pretty obvious. He hoped his relief wasn’t as easy for everyone to read, but Kaydu’s indignation, and the renewed laughter around him told him it probably was. Tucking his head into his collar like a defensive turtle, Llesho turned his attention forward, wishing he hadn’t just promised not to run off on his own. Stipes gave him an encouraging slap on the shoulder before cutting out of the line to return to Habiba’s side. Llesho’d done something right, apparently. He didn’t know what it was, but he was glad to know the humiliation wasn’t for nothing. Even embarrassment passed the time, however, and soon the troops ahead were breaking formation, spreading across a field of beaten grass to make camp. That night his companions held Llesho close to their own campfire.

They could not stop him when he rose at dawn to take his place at prayer forms before breakfast, however. Master Den led the exercises as he had in the training compound on Pearl Island, and each day that passed found more of Habiba’s army joining them. Most were strangers, but Bixei and Stipes were there, standing next to each other as they had in the practice yard of old, and Master Jaks took his place in the line close to Hmishi and Lling. Gradually, Llesho’s newly healed body relearned how to sketch the forms on the wind, muscles acting in harmony with each other and the earth, wind, fire, and water.

He should, perhaps, have helped with the eager recruits from among the Farshore troops, but he felt a selfish need to experience the separation from thought the exercises could bring. The forms flowed through him, shaped him as they had not done since Markko had made a prisoner of him.

Master Den called out the forms: “Red sun.”

Llesho closed his eyes and lifted his face to greet the newborn day. Muscle moved against muscle, action against action; his arms stretched to meet the first light bathing the meadow, filling his mind with physical sensations.

“Wind through Millet.” Master Den moved with the words, and Llesho followed. Feet touched grass, became grass, the sharp scent of green life rising in the wind that touched him, parted for the blade of his arm.

“Flowing River.” Llesho’s body moved with the breeze that flowed around him, with him, like a river. In the Way of the Goddess, all life flowed the great river, Llesho, and the earth he stood upon, and the gods he worshiped, were all a part of each other. Markko’s chains, her ladyship’s plots, could not break him if he flowed with the river of all life. “Butterfly,” and Llesho moved free of the flight in darkness and the arrow searing his flesh and all the other horrors he relived in his dreams at night and in his waking reveries.

His escape from his own dark thoughts ended when Master Den completed the last of the forms and performed his bow of respect to the assembled company. Instead of leaving, as he usually did, before Llesho could free himself of his comrades and ask for a private word. Master Den remained behind as the com-pany broke up. Master Jaks stood by him, and Llesho waited impatiently for the two teachers to finish their low conversation. Neither of his masters looked at him, but—sensitized by the prayer forms—Llesho felt the hairs on his neck prickling the way they did when others made him the focus of their secret attention. The conversation ended, but before Llesho could speak up, both men had departed, leaving him feeling foolish. Bixei and Stipes said nothing, but followed him to breakfast with their own silent conversation of eyebrows and frowns.

When he returned with his companions to their tent, Llesho found that Kaydu had already started to break camp. Together they made quick work of it and distributed their light gear among the five horses. Kaydu held his bridle as Llesho mounted up. “Stay close today,” she warned him. “There are rumors in the camp that make me nervous.”

“What does your father want you to tell me?” Llesho’s temper was already short and he didn’t like being kept in the dark, or fed information in tidbits, like a child. Kaydu’s father was leading this march, after all. Her intelligence could hardly be called rumor.

“My father has told me to keep you alive,” Kaydu snapped back at him. “It would help if you didn’t make it so hard to follow orders!”

Before Llesho could decide how to answer, he was distracted by the forceful “Uhum!” of a throat being cleared behind him.

“Do you mind if I join you?” Master Den asked with a bland smile. He wore a travel robe and carried a light pack on his back and an ironshod stave in his hand.

“Yes,” Llesho could have bitten his tongue when he heard his ill-considered answer. He’d been wanting to talk to Master Den for days, and now that the opportunity presented itself, he was rejecting it out of temper.

However, Den didn’t go away. He ignored the hasty answer with a wink, though his smile remained as meaninglessly polite as ever. “I felt the need of a bit of exercise; thought I’d walk a bit today.”

Llesho glared at him. “It will be a dusty walk so far back among the troops,” he pointed out. “You might want to travel with Master Jaks at the head of the line.”

The soldiers ahead of them began to move, and Llesho nudged his horse into motion. “I think I’ll be comfortable here.” Master Den clasped the bridle and walked beside him.

“Your sudden desire for exercise has nothing to do with the mysterious rumors Kaydu was about to explain, I suppose?”

“Rumors? Must a man find nothing but questions and suspicion just because he takes a walk with old friends of a morning?” Master Den grinned at him as if he hadn’t expected Llesho to believe him, but wished to invite his pupil into the conspiracy.

Llesho declined the invitation. He figured at the rate he was going, he’d be lucky if his companions didn’t tie him up and toss him to the wolves before the day was out. But he wasn’t seven years old anymore; if Master Den was going to be there, Llesho had a whole list of questions, and he wasn’t waiting any longer for answers. “I assume you will have no trouble talking as you walk?”

“What do you want to know?” Master Den spoke as if he had not been avoiding Llesho for days, as if the answers were always his for the asking. Llesho shook his head, but determined not to waste this opportunity on pointless arguing, especially now that Kaydu had posed him a new question.

“What is the truth behind the rumors Kaydu talks of?” Llesho shook his head when Master Den took a deep breath, a sign that Den was going to tell one of his long tales in which his answer might or might not appear in some form Llesho would spend the whole day trying to untangle. “You are here, beside me today, when I haven’t been able to get a word with you since we left the Golden Dragon River. Why now?” ‘

“Habiba’s spies have seen Markko following, and he is traveling fast.”

“And we still move as if we were on parade?”

“You have heard the proverb, ‘to the swift go the spoils’?”

Llesho nodded. That was the point, wasn’t it?

“It isn’t always true.” Master Den smiled, the kind that twinkled in his eyes as well as tilting his mouth. “Did I ever tell you the story about the falcon and the turtle?”

Habiba called a halt at noon to rest the horses and feed the troops on cold rations at their stations. During the pause, Master Jaks appeared on a large battle steed with armor plates attached to its chest and withers. Jaks tried to make light of his appearance at the middle of the line, but his eyes remained watchful and grim. When the line moved again, he fell into place next to Llesho, offering the defense of his person on the exposed flank. Master Den took the more defended side, walking at the head of Llesho’s smaller horse with a pace that never faltered. Stipes had joined Bixei guarding their rear. Kaydu, with Little Brother peering nervously out of the pack where he’d tucked himself to hide, rode at the head of Llesho’s guard, Hmishi and Lling to either side of her.

“How long?” Llesho asked Master Den. He didn’t need to explain himself. The question was obvious, and Den did not pretend to misunderstand.

“Soon.” His glance flicked to Master Jaks, who nodded agreement.

The shadow of a low-flying bird passed over them, and Master Jaks amended his answer: “Now.”

Calls passed through the line as sergeants brought their squads to a halt and gave the command for battle formation. Kaydu glanced at Master Jaks, who directed the formation of a circle of pikemen around Llesho’s squad. He called for archers to take their positions inside the circle, prepared to shoot over the shoulders of the pikemen, ranged a double line here, and here, where he expected the greatest pressure from Markko’s attack. Llesho’s own guard set themselves at the fore of the line of archers, their horses protected inside the circle. When all was in readiness, Master Jaks returned to Llesho’s side and drew his sword. Llesho considered his choice of weapons, and decided on his bow and arrow.

They had scarcely taken their places when a dark line appeared over a low rise in the landscape. An army, no bigger than their own but driven by fear of their leader, plunged forward, battle cries shouted as they ran. Llesho tensed and focused his gaze on the rise, where a figure sat astride a restless warhorse. Master Markko, proclaiming himself in the horned helmet of a warlord.

Llesho shivered. He sensed the sharp gaze of the magician pass over him and halt, then turn back again. If an arrow could have reached so far, Llesho would have turned away that searching gaze with a well-fired bolt, but at this range he could only call attention to himself.

“Hold on, boy,” Master Jaks muttered at his side, and Master Den held the head of Llesho’s horse, quieting the animal’s nervous dance.

Markko was flying down the hill then, his charger striking sparks off the ground beneath its feet, and a bird, huge and lethal, flew over their heads to meet the enemy. It circled overhead, calling encouragement in the deep-voiced cry of a roc. Kaydu shouted a salute to the bird, a magical creature, and would have followed him, Llesho thought, but Master Jaks called out a reminder, “Hold your post.”

Then Markko’s forces were upon them. The defensive circle Jaks had ordered bristled with pikes, their staffs planted firmly in the ground and their blades tilted out at the horsemen thundering toward them. They had only seconds to wait. The cavalry reached the circle, but the horsemen could not force their mounts to close with the sharp-toothed fence of pikes. Turned aside, the horsemen met the harrying arrows as Habiba’s cavalry darted in for the kill and moved away again. Markko’s foot troops followed the scattering horsemen; driven mad by their master, they flung themselves upon the pikes to clear the path for their fellows. Llesho set an arrow and fired. Fired. Fired again, until his quiver was empty. The bird was gone from the sky, but Lling was at his side, one arm tied with a makeshift bandage, the other flinging a fistful of replacement bolts into his hand. She had gathered the arrows falling into their circle from the enemies’ bows; Llesho recognized the strange devices marked upon them as he shot again, again.

And then the circle was breached, and the fight turned inward. Llesho dropped his bow and slid from his horse, drawing his sword from its saddle scabbard and his Thebin knife from where it rested at his breast. On foot he moved like a demon, protecting his own belly with the knife in his left hand while he carved at the enemy with the sword in his right. Master Jaks, still on horseback, whirled his sword over his head, striking terror into all who saw him, while his battle horse fought under its master with tooth and hoof. Careful as a mother the mare picked her way around Llesho, snapping at Markko’s soldiers, kicking out at them and beating at them with her frantic feet when they fell.

Master Den held his position to Llesho’s right flank, warded off an attack with his stave, cracked a head like an egg, and swung around to brush the legs out from under the nearest attacker while knocking the breath from a third with the rising end of the stave.

Bixei was down, Stipes standing over him with a two-handed sword held out in front of him, Hmishi at his back slashing with a long knife and jabbing with a short-handled trident.

“Close up! Close up!” Master Jaks ordered, shoring up their broken circle and drawing it more tightly around Llesho and his guard. Master Den accepted the surrender of Markko’s troops left inside the newly re-formed circle. When they had been disarmed and placed on good conduct, Jaks called for retreat: “Back!” He whirled his sword once overhead, and pointed to the fallback position with his blade. Stipes got a shoulder under Bixei’s arm and they moved, the pikemen holding their defensive formation. When they met the circle behind them, their numbers swelled, the two circles interlaced, filling in the weak places around Llesho without leaving a break for the enemy to exploit.

Markko was driving his army in a wedge directly at Llesho’s circle. If he succeeded, he would divide Habiba’s army in two parts. As the circle fell back, Markko pressed forward, until he faced his prey down an alley of his own troops. “I will have you, boy,” he said, a snarling grimace of a smile contorting his face.

Llesho froze, aware suddenly how thin his defense was, just a single band of pikemen between them, and Markko dug his heels into the flanks of his horse, lowered his head over the animal’s armored neck, and charged.

The pikemen set their pikes and braced for the onslaught, but at the last moment, Markko urged his horse faster, up, higher than a horse could jump, and the warlord flew over the blades bristling beneath the belly of his steed and landed lightly inside the circle.

Master Markko raised a strange weapon of his own devising, a tube shooting sparks of fire and smoke and tiny slivers of crystal sharp as knives from the end. In confusion the defensive circle broke. A picked squad of Markko’s followed and joined him in the fray.

“Get down!” Hmishi called.

Under cover of the billowing smoke, Lling knocked Llesho to his knees.

“Pretend you are dead!” she demanded, and pushed him to land with his face in the dirt. Then she fell on top of him, her bandage convincingly stained rust and crimson from her reopened wound. Llesho wondered what had happened to Kaydu, if she’d managed to escape, but a vulture landed on his shoulder and gave the back of his head an imperious peck.

“Cawuuuiet!” the bird squawked, and Llesho wondered if he had gone mad, or if the bird had really told him to be quiet.

“Wha—” he began, but the bird snapped up a strand of his hair and gave it a warning tug.

The smoke was beginning to clear. Through closely lidded eyes, Llesho saw that Master Den had suffered a myriad of tiny cuts which he seemed to be ignoring as he scrambled among the fallen. Stipes had dropped Bixei to the ground only to fall after him, clutching at his eye while blood gushed from between his clenched fingers. Master Jaks was down, on his back beneath his horse, his eyes wide and unseeing. The horse stood quivering but steadfast over her master.

Hmishi crouched at the side of his Thebin companions. His knife lashed out, not at the warlord, but at the legs of his battle horse. The animal screamed and fell to its front knees. Mad with its pain, the horse struggled to rise again, its eyes reddened and rolling wildly in its head. Master Markko sprang free of the animal as it crashed to its side, thrashing with its legs as it tried to rise. Hmishi struck quickly and the animal was dead, its throat cut, the blood splashing the fallen Thebins.

It could as easily have been human blood. Llesho had to remind himself that he was unhurt, and ought to do something more than lie about playing dead. Like stand up and be dead, he figured, and stayed where he was. Somehow, Master Markko seemed to have turned the day in his favor, and Llesho could only hope that he would be overlooked in the carnage. A faint hope, with Markko seeking him, but it was enough to keep him facedown in the dirt.

Above him, Llesho heard a terrible cry, and he cringed where he lay, afraid to open his eyes. A deep growl from closer by answered the first cry, and Llesho felt a weight suddenly lift from his heart. Freed of his terrible fear, he turned his head and peered over his shoulder, into the sky, where two beasts—he knew for a fact such beasts did not exist in nature—fought tooth and claw in the air overhead. One was a huge bird, a roc, if such a thing could actually exist. It uttered a challenge, the most desolate sound Llesho had ever heard, as if it contained within itself all the grief of the battle and its losses, and called them forth in a mourner’s wailing cry. The other, a creature out of night terrors, was a rodent-faced monster with the haunches of a horse and stiff gray hair instead of feathers covering its broad leathery wings. A long naked rat’s tail whipped out behind it. The creature had clawed feet and claws at the joints of its wings, long, fanged teeth and angry red eyes. When it opened its mouth to answer the roc’s cry, Llesho had to cover his ears to stop the piercing pain it released instead of sound.

The creatures tangled overhead, the fanged monster grappling the bird with its tail while its claws ripped at the roc’s breast. The roc darted its razor-sharp beak at the monster, and when it pulled back, the ends of a bit of flesh dangled from its mouth. The monster emitted another of its soundless screams and began to tumble from the sky, its shape blurring as it fell: now it was a creature out of nightmares with the hands, the face of a man, now it became a man with leathery wings covered in gray hair, now a creature with the hindquarters of a beast and the arms and breast of a human, its human mouth open in a scream that did not stop through all its transformations, until it had fallen to earth.

The roc followed it down, transforming as it did into the witch Habiba, dressed in robes the colors of the bird’s plumage. But Markko was gone; no sign of him remained except for a splash of steaming blood where he had fallen, and the remnants of his scattered army.

“You can get up now. And you did well, my daughter.” Habiba tapped the vulture on its long, curved beak, and the bird unfolded, grew arms and legs, and a familiar face.

“Thank you, Father.” Kaydu did not have the success of her father in transforming her clothes with her body. She gathered her discarded uniform that had fallen on the battleground while Habiba bent over the heap of Thebins.

Llesho didn’t notice until Habiba started to sort them out that Hmishi had joined them on the pile. “I’m all right,” Hmishi insisted, but his eyes darted wildly in his head, unable to fix on anything.

“Concussion,” Habiba informed him. “Lie still until I can spare someone to escort you to the hospital tent.”

The magician raised Lling with his own hands, and examined her arm before he declared her serviceable if damaged, and able to make her own way to the hospital tent.

With the weight of his companions removed from his back, Llesho was able to rise on his own power and survey the damage. Markko had disappeared and left behind his army—the fallen where they lay, and the defeated wandering the battlefield in confusion and terror.

The field was silent now except for the cries of the wounded, but the ground was muddied with the blood of the dead and churned by the hooves of the horses into a thick black muck. Squads of her ladyship’s army passed back and forth over the sucking mire, searching for their own wounded, and marking out the dead for burial.

Closer to hand, Stipes sat cross-legged in the dirt, Bixei’s head in his lap. He still held a hand to his damaged eye, but his blood had caked and rusted his fingers in place so that he could not have comfortably moved them if he chose to, or if he’d even remembered that he held them there. Bixei’s eyes were closed, but his chest rose and fell in rhythmic breathing.

His own wounds forgotten, Master Den sat quietly at Jaks’ side. Jaks’ eyes were open, fixed on a distance living eyes could not reach. Whatever the soldier-assassin was seeing in the afterlife, it did not seem to frighten or dismay him. Tenderly Master Den wrapped a cold hand in his broad, warm grasp.

Llesho wanted to pound at Habiba with his fists, to scream at the man and curse him for the devastation that surrounded him, but he found he could not break through the hard, numb shell that separated his bleeding emotions from the outside world.

“What happened?” Llesho demanded an answer from Habiba with the cold authority of a prince. He didn’t feel the tears leaving trails in the dust on his face, so he didn’t try to hide them.

Habiba looked at him for a long minute. Then he picked up the splintered remains of an arrow and drew two parallel lines in the bloody dirt, added a few lateral lines between them.

“Our column,” he said, and put a circle midway between the front and rear. “Kavdu’s squad.”

Next he drew a triangle, its apex driving at the circle. “Markko sent his army at your position—we knew he used birds for spies and would have your location pinpointed. When he attacked, we knew he would try to divide our army and pluck you out of the middle. So we let him try.”

He drew two more lines, showing how the column had not truly broken at Llesho’s position, but had bent toward the flanks of Markko’s army like the blades of a scissor closing. “The emperor could not authorize imperial troops to take part in the battle without consulting his advisers and considering the messages sent to him by either side of the conflict. Fortunately, in his capacity as governor of Shan Province, the Celestial Emperor has no such limitations. Shan provincial troops moved in to close off Markko’s escape—”

Habiba added a final line to his drawing in the blood-soaked mud, joining the two halves of the column at their widest separation to mark out the base of a triangle enclosing Markko’s wedge. Then he threw the bit of shattered arrow away from him and stared at Master Jaks, lying motionless on the ground. “He knew your position was the key. Markko must be lured in, but he could not be permitted to break through. Master Jaks chose to hold the position himself.”

“Did the others know?”

Habiba brought his gaze back from the dead assassin, but settled his focus inward, as if he could not face Llesho with the answer. “Kaydu, yes.”

She had put her clothes back on, but when Llesho glanced up at her, she turned away as if she still were naked.

“Anyone else?”

“Stipes may have guessed. As for Master Den—” Habiba shrugged one shoulder, an admission of helplessness Llesho did not credit. “The question should be, perhaps, ‘did he choose to know?’ I don’t have an answer, though.”

Stretcher bearers had reached them at last, grim-faced men who looked at Habiba nervously and then waited while he gave directions for the care of his charges: Bixei and Stipes, and Hmishi, to the hospital on stretchers. Lling might follow on foot, but should have her arm seen to. Master Jaks should not go to the mass grave of the line soldiers; the bearers must return him to his tent, where he would be prepared for the burial due his courage and his station. Llesho wondered what rank a former slave and assassin might command. Master Den would not leave the body, although Habiba asked him to go to the hospital to have his own wounds tended.

When the stretchers had moved away, trailing their walking wounded, Habiba put a hand on Llesho’s left shoulder. “And now, there is someone you should meet.”

Kaydu joined them, walking a little behind, still unwilling to intrude herself on Llesho’s grief or ask his forgiveness.

“You should have told me,” Llesho stated.

“Perhaps.” Habiba accepted the reproach, but his tone held no real agreement in it. Llesho was a pawn. He’d always known that—why else would her ladyship take such an interest in a deposed and rather pathetic princeling with some hint of magic about him, but no clue how to use it? Why else would Markko chain him like a dog for his amusement? He had not, until now, however, understood how dangerous a pawn he was.

Habiba interrupted his brooding. “General Shou,” the witch said as he pulled back the cloth that covered the entrance to his own tent. The general stood in the glorious armor of his rank, but the splendor of his appearance was marred by a streak of dirt smeared across one cheekbone and ending on the bridge of his nose. More smudges of dusty sweat marked the arm he offered. Llesho clasped it, felt the firm grip of the general’s hand above his own wrist.

“The emperor offers his grief for your losses this day, but extends his joy that you have survived the battle.” The general released Llesho’s arm after he delivered his message.

“We can only hope that the gain will be worthy of the loss,” Llesho answered.

The general raised an eyebrow. “We can, perhaps, do more than hope.” He turned on his heel and left the tent.

Kaydu had not entered with them, so Llesho found himself alone with Habiba, who was the first to break the tense silence between them.

“Kaydu will have a tent prepared for you. Clean up and rest as much as you can. We petition for an audience with the emperor tomorrow morning.”

“I have to go to the hospital,” Llesho answered. “And I must see Master Jaks.” His voice broke on the last.

Habiba, thankfully, did not comment upon his loss of control, but only said, “He would not be sorry to die protecting you. If he regretted anything, it was that he could not see you safely home.”

Llesho nodded, but could not speak. He brushed by Kaydu, afraid that she would want to offer her own apologies and demand his forgiveness when he only wanted to weep for the blood of his teacher on his hands.

“We did what we had to do,” Kaydu shouted after him. She did not sound apologetic at all, and Llesho did not stop to challenge her on it. If he opened his mouth, he would scream, and he wasn’t sure he would ever stop.

C HAPTER T WENTY-EIGHT

HIS first impulse was to find the tent where Master Jaks lay and give the dead man a piece of his mind. A prince owed his life to the living, however. Llesho knew he shouldn’t have yelled at Kaydu, who had done her duty and deserved better for it. Much as the drama of the gesture might appeal to him, he also knew that he would not rather be dead in Master Jaks’ place. Nor would the man have thanked him if he were, any more than his brother, Khri, would have seen Llesho dead at seven summers to save his own skin. He had a mission to complete, a people to free, and Master Jaks was just one of many who had already died and would die in the future to make that happen.

He had to stop thinking of them as friends. They were tools, weapons in his battle. A prince took care of his sword because his life depended on its readiness. Only a fool sacrificed the battle to save the sword. His heart didn’t buy his argument, but he pulled the reins in on his anger and changed direction for the pale blue of the hospital tent. First the living.

Stipes had lost the eye. He lay on a woven rush mat rolled out on the blue canvas floor, a cloth soaked in a potion to ease the pain held in place by a bandage tied around his head. Bixei lay on the next mat over, still unconscious, but breathing steadily.

“He took a nasty bump on the head.” Hmishi sat cross-legged on a nearby pallet, a cup of some sweet medicine in his hand, and continued the healer’s report, “But his eyes are clear behind his lids. If he wakes, his brain should not be addled.”

If. The healers offered hope and took it away in the same breath. Lling stood nearby, leaning on a well-tethered tent pole. Her arm rested in a proper sling now, with a clean bandage on the wound. She glared at him, measuring her anger against his own. “Are we going home?” she asked him.

Llesho knew what she meant, and so did Hmishi, who watched them both over his potion. Not Pearl Island or Farshore or Thousand Lakes Province, but Thebin. Had the pain and the death been worth giving to his cause? He nodded once. “We are going home.”

“All right, then.” She walked away, and Llesho watched her go.

“She’s worried about Bixei,” Hmishi tried to explain away her anger. “He should be awake by now. The healers believe that the mist from Markko’s weapon may contain a slow-acting poison, and that Bixei somehow took a greater dose than the rest of us. They call for Master Den, but he doesn’t come,” Hmishi continued with a shrug. “I don’t know what they think the laundryman can do. . . .”

Llesho sometimes forgot that his Thebin companions had not met Master Den until Habiba’s forces came to their aid at Golden Dragon River. They could not be expected to see him as Llesho did. But even those who had worked with him in the gladiator days couldn’t be said to know Master. Den. Perhaps Jaks had, but he wouldn’t be telling anyone now. Habiba guessed something, as the healers did. But Llesho figured even they underestimated the teacher.

“He won’t leave Master Jaks.” Laundrymen, in that, had more freedom than princes. Which explained much about Master Den’s choice of rank in the world.

“Not even if the living need him?”

Llesho stole a glance at the unconscious form on the nearby sleeping mat. He tried to see Bixei as a tool, but his memory played tricks on him, fed him images of the training yard and the cookhouse. If Mar-kko had poisoned them, Lling might be unconscious by nightfall. Hmishi, too, and Stipes, who had already lost an eye in Llesho’s battle, for a country he’d never heard of. Llesho might never see Thebin again, except in misty dreams the dead clung to.

“He wouldn’t leave us here to die while he wept over his dead,” Llesho assured him, though he wasn’t certain it was true.

“He might tell that to the healers,” Hmishi complained.

“He will.” Now that he had satisfied himself about the condition of his living, Llesho’s mind had turned, Like Master Den’s, to his dead. “I’ll be back later.”

Jvlaster Den looked up when Llesho entered the un-floored tent—white for mourning, with the grass still green underfoot—and gestured for him to come forward.

“Jaks is waiting for you,” Den said. For a moment Llesho’s heart beat faster in anticipation. It was all a mistake, and Master Jaks had merely been stunned and found the premature grief at his death a sorry joke, but nothing more.

No. Not alive. The body lay still and cold beneath a winding sheet of cloth white and fragile as chestnut blossoms in the spring. Den had removed the soldier’s bloodied leathers and washed away the dirt and sweat of battle with water in which sweet herbs and flowers had been steeoed. Master Jaks mieht have been sleeoine.

Llesho thought, but no hint of breath animated the peaceful shell of flesh.

Teacher and slave, gladiator and assassin, soldier: what other words identified this man who lay so silent on the pallet before him? Did any of the names matter now that the man was dead? Only the wounds hidden beneath the white cloth and the six bands of the assassin on his arm remained to tell the harsh tale.

“He loved you as his liege and lord,” Master Den said.

Llesho nodded. How could he explain how angry that made him? Jaks was gone before Llesho rightly understood him, and for what?

“I’d rather be a slave with a live friend than a free man with a dead servant,” he said.

“It wasn’t up to you. That’s a price kings—and princes—have to pay.”

“What would a washerman know about being a prince?” Llesho snapped. He didn’t need that kind of pointless drivel from one who was grieving more than any of them.

“Nothing,” Master Den answered with a sour smile. “Nothing at all.”

“The healers think Markko used a poisoned vapor during the battle.” Llesho did not look away from the dead soldier, but still he was aware of Master Den nearby.

“You look well enough to me,” Den answered. Llesho waited, and finally, the master bowed his agreement. “If you stay with him, I will go to your comrades.”

“It would ease their minds.” Llesho added, not quite as a plea, “Bixei is still unconscious.”

“He’ll wake up.” Den reassured him. Not like Master Jaks, who would never wake in this life. Llesho heard the sound of the tent flap pushed aside, and then he was alone with Master Jaks.

“I did nnt oive. von leave to on” I.lesho said to the absent spirit of his master, and found his anger rising again, becoming a white hot rage. “If I have to stay and see this through, what right have you to abandon me just when the fight begins? What am I suppose to do now? Who can I trust—”

Llesho’s gaze fell upon the six bands around the arm of his teacher. Assassin. He reached a hesitant finger to stroke the first dull blue band, remembering his early doubts. Six times this man had murdered for pay. Llesho wondered who those souls were. What had they done to deserve such a fate, and how had Master Jaks justified his actions with his honor? Did all men walk such a tangled path from birth to death as Master Jaks had done?

“Fate has taken everything from me.” Foolish, Llesho knew, to blame Master Jaks for that, but he did. “Home and family, Lleck and Kwan-ti, Mara, and now you, are all gone. And I am left with lesser folk who look to me for answers I do not have. What am I supposed to learn from this?

“Tell me, damn it!” he screamed at the corpse. Horrified at his own actions but unable to stop himself, he curled his fist and slammed it down upon the breast of the dead man. Again. “Tell me!”

A sudden gasp spasmed under Llesho’s fist, and the eyes of his dead teacher flew open, animated with fear and confusion and pain. The dead mouth dragged air down a dead throat, and the dead chest, so mortally wounded, rose and fell unevenly.

“Master Jaks?” Llesho froze, paralyzed by his own conflicting feelings. It had all been a mistake. Jaks was alive.

The blue lips struggled to shape a word, and Llesho bent low to hear what Master Jaks wanted to say to him.

“What . . . have . . . you . . . done?” the voice, so near death, whispered.

Looking into those clouded eyes, Llesho saw agony, not only for the wound that once again bled freely, staining the pure white sheet, but for something only those eyes could see, that now was lost.

“I don’t know.” Llesho fell to his knees, lay his head upon the heaving breast, and wept. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he cried.

“I ... can’t . . . stay . . . here ...,!” Master Jaks’ tortured whisper cut Llesho to the heart. He had not meant to cause his teacher pain, only to demand recognition of his own anguish. But it was too late, to late for any of it. And he realized how selfish his desire to hold his teacher in this world past the time appointed for him was.

“I know,” he said. He opened his fist, lay his outstretched fingers on the wound in Master Jaks’ chest, but already the bleeding had slowed, cooled. When he looked up, the eyes were fixed again, and he realized Master Jaks had stopped breathing.

“Tell the goddess for me that I love her still,” Llesho asked of his departed teacher. “But I do not understand what any of this was meant to teach me.” Gently he closed the staring eyes.

“Llesho?” Master Den had returned, and now he dropped a heavy hand on Llesho’s shoulder.

“He’s dead,” Llesho said.

It seemed a pointless statement, but Master Den looked from the body, soiled with fresh blood, to the princeling with tear tracks marking the battle stains on his face, and gave a deep and mournful sigh.

“Yes, he is. Bixei is awake, however, and demanding food and an accounting of what followed his own fall. The rest of you will survive this time as well: Markko’s poison was not strong enough to kill in the open air of battle.”

“He will fix that the next time,” Llesho said, allowing Den to push his thoughts to surviving. “Mar-kko never makes the same mistake twice.”

“If it was a mistake. He wants you alive.”

Llesho remembered the image of himself, a captive in a cage, that had come to him on the battlefield, and he shuddered.

“Is any of that blood yours?” Den asked.

Llesho shook his head. “I wasn’t injured at all.”

“That is a matter for debate,” Master Den observed. “But it appears you will live. At least, you will if I let you get some sleep. Kaydu is waiting for you outside. Clean yourself up and let her take you to your tent. Eat. Rest. Visit with your friends if you must, but leave tomorrow to Habiba and the new day. It will get better.”

Llesho wasn’t sure if the last was true, but he found Kaydu waiting for him as Master Den had said. He ate what she handed him, though he didn’t notice what it was. When she took him down the row of red tents and opened the flap into the one assigned to him, he followed her in and fell on his camp bed without complaint. Then he pretended to sleep so that he wouldn’t have to talk while she kept guard.

Gradually the campfires faltered, until he could no longer see the peak of his own tent above him. He was surprised to find that his mind did not replay the day’s battle in the darkness. In fact, while they would not let him sleep, neither did his thoughts circle endlessly on the memory of his losses. His mind was quite, quite blank, and he felt grateful for the emptiness until the sun grayed the corners of his tent.

In the morning, Jaks was gone, buried secretly somewhere on the field of battle. Llesho could not make out one freshly turned grave among so many in the churned ground. Kaydu, still at his side, said nothing; Llesho did not guess at what she saw on the bloody field. Or under it.

“If his friends can’t find him, neither will his enemies,” Master Den explained. “And they won’t be able to desecrate his body if they can’t find it.”

Llesho shrugged. Once the spirit abandoned it, the body meant nothing. A soldier deserved freedom at death: not dirt in his face, but the high mountains overlooking Kungol, where his bones might be picked by the birds and his spirit might begin its journey that much closer to heaven. He would have taken Jaks to the passes in the West, but Thebin and her mountains were a thousand li away. Lowlanders had different customs anyway. So he accepted Master Den’s assurance that all had been done as Master Jaks would have wanted, and followed him to the command tent. Habiba waited for him inside. .

“Good morning.” Habiba gestured to a folding seat open for Llesho at his right hand. He addressed the teacher with an ironic smile. “The yarrow sticks are in the air, Master Den. Have you come to see how they fall?”

Master Den eased himself into a solidly built chair that seemed designed for his personal use, a luxury Llesho had never seen his teacher indulge in. “The Changes can only reflect what rests within us already,” he reminded their host, offering the words with his own subdued challenge.

Kaydu frowned at Master Den and wrapped her arms around her father’s neck as if she would protect him from the washerman’s barbed tongue.

Habiba patted her arm. “We’ll keep it civilized, I promise,” he said. She hesitated, but took her father’s frown as dismissal and joined the watchful guards who stood at the entrance to the tent.

When they had all settled in their places, Habiba returned his attention to Llesho.

“Have something to eat.” He gestured at the low camp table in front of him, where a map lay, held in place at one end by a bowl of plums and figs, and at the other by a plate of biscuits. Llesho did as he was directed, accepting a biscuit.

“We are here—” Habiba waited for Llesho to settle himself, and went on, “—at the border where Thousand Lakes Province meets the frontier of Shan Province.” He drew an imaginary line with his finger on the Thousand Lakes side of the border. “Scouts report a large force of imperial guards await us on the Shan side of this line.”

“You sound worried about that.” Llesho took a bite of his biscuit to cover his surprise and gain himself a moment to think. “Would the Emperor direct General Shou and his provincial guard to help us, and then send his imperial forces against us the next morning?”

“If he wanted Markko and her ladyship both off the board,” Habiba conceded with a curious smile. “In his capacity as provincial governor of Shan Province, the emperor might assist us to defeat the greater threat. Calling upon his power as Emperor, he might choose to send his imperial troops against the survivor while he was weakened from battle.”

“But we aren’t preparing for battle,” Llesho noted. The whole of Habiba’s forces seemed to be catching their breath, tending to their wounded and their dead, collecting undamaged arrows from the field of battle, and otherwise healing the injuries to men and equipment inflicted in Markko’s recent attack.

“Of course not,” Habiba acknowledged. “Her ladyship and the governor of Thousand Lakes Province remain the loyal servants of his supreme excellency, the Celestial Emperor of Shan and Its Provinces.”

Llesho detected irony in Habiba’s representation of his master’s position, but couldn’t figure out what was behind it. Not treason. Habiba did not act like a man engaged in a desperate conspiracy; rather, he looked like he had a secret that brought him some reassurance.

“I have sent an emissary to the commander of the Emperor’s force,” Habiba went on, “begging his protection for our small band, which comes to petition for the safety of Thousand Lakes Province.”

Master Den nodded solemnly, a gesture that belied his ironic answer: “A message that has the advantage of being true on the face of it. Markko has already murdered three lords in his bid for control of all the eastern provinces, and has attacked our party on the very border of Shan Province itself.”

“The emperor already knows this, of course,” Hab-iba agreed. “His spies have been busy on all sides of the border. But he also knows that Markko has left the consolidation of his conquests to pursue a boy who has declared himself a missing prince of the mysterious kingdom of the West.”

“I have done no such thing,” Llesho objected.

“Others have done it for you,” Den said. “And now, his imperial highness will have his look at you, and determine for himself whether he will risk his empire to acknowledge the claim.”

Habiba agreed. “With the Harn harrying his borders . on the west, and Markko gobbling up the provinces to the east, and both declared enemies of this newly discovered prince, I don’t think he can afford to help directly. He may, however, conclude that a boy who still lives in spite of such powerful enemies is not to be tampered with. So you will ride at the front today, and in attire suited for a traveling prince.”

“I have the clothes I stand up in, and not much else,” Llesho pointed out to him.

“We had hoped to rescue you with less trouble,” Habiba admitted, “but we left Thousand Lakes Province with this part of the plan in place. Master Den has, in his supply wagon, the necessary garments for an audience with a provincial representative to the emperor.”

“We can fix you up, no problem there,” Den agreed.

Llesho was beginning to feel like a puppet, and he wondered if it was safe to let Habiba pull his strings. Without Habiba, of course, he’d be dead now, or in Markko’s hands, but Llesho still didn’t trust the man or his motives. Oh, he was sure that Habiba served her ladyship honorably and well. From the first, however, Llesho had wondered why her ladyship took such an interest in him.

As Habiba himself had just pointed out, allies could quickly become enemies when one didn’t understand the politics that bound one to the other. Llesho was on the point of asking Habiba directly what her ladyship wanted of him when Kaydu joined them, followed by a stranger in the uniform of an imperial messenger.

The messenger shook out her hair and gave a short bow to Habiba, then a deeper bow to Master Den. Of Llesho she gave no formal recognition at all, although he noticed that she examined him minutely out of the corner of her eye.

“Lord Habiba,” she said, “in the name of the Celestial Emperor, Ambassador Huang HoLun invites you to a parley to discuss matters of great import to you both. Will you attend upon him for tea?”

“I am, as ever, the humble servant of his divinity, the emperor. Please tell Ambassador Huang that I shall attend upon him within the hour. And I bring gifts from the West.” Habiba tilted his chin in Llesho’s direction.

Betrayal. Habiba’s words struck like a bolt of lightning and Llesho clung to his calm. Habiba couldn’t mean what he seemed to say. As a slave Llesho figured he was fairly useless; he had some training as a gladiator, a bit more as a soldier, and some experience * as a decent pearl diver, for which there was little call in the inland capital. The Harn had sold him once, but they might be inclined to cut off his head if the emperor returned him to them. He figured that her ladyship hadn’t put her witch to all the trouble of getting him this far alive if she intended to hand Llesho over to assassins, though. Much easier to whack off his head at Farshore and send it off in a box. Less likely to attract the attention of Master Mar-kko that way as well. He was pretty sure, however, that Master Den wouldn’t let anything happen to him so early in whatever game of nations the powers about him played.

As if thinking his name could conjure his attention, Master Den chose that moment to speak. “Please convey my respect to your master. Tell him for me that he chooses his envoy well.” He smiled at the girl. And she smiled back.

Oh. Den knew this girl. Liked her. And she knew him. Llesho had never fooled himself into thinking he was the only student Master Den had ever mentored, but he’d thought the others had been men like Stipes, fighting on the side where he found himself. The girl bowed and departed, leaving Llesho to wonder whether Master Den would defend old loyalties or new ones.

“It is time,” Habiba said, “to put the pieces in play. Llesho will ride in the place of honor, at my side. That will give Ambassador Huang pause. And Master Den—”

“I need no guard, of honor or otherwise,” Den cut him off. “Huang HoLun knows that I am a simple man, and he will expect nothing more.”

“Then we will overset his expectations. I want Kaydu where I can see her as well, and any of the young prince’s guard who are well enough to ride. We depart at noon.”

“As you say.” Master Den made much of pulling himself out of his chair, grunting and huffing in a way that alarmed Llesho. So when he called, “Give me your arm,” Llesho came willingly to offer his support.

When they were out of the command tent, however, Den straightened up, and he set a finger to his lips, warning Llesho to silence. Llesho watched the shifting tensions in Den’s face, trying to read some explanation for his strange behavior, but Den signaled, “Wait.”

Suddenly, two crows flew from the command tent: the witch and his daughter. As birds, the two wheeled in a great arc across the sky, then turned in the direction the messenger had gone and quickly disappeared.

When the two were well and truly out of sight, Master Den urged Llesho forward. As they walked between the rows of low red tents, Den let him ask his questions. To Llesho’s own surprise, they did not start with Habiba.

“What am I?”

“You are Llesho, seventh prince of Thebin. Beloved of the goddess,” Master Den answered as if he were reading from a scroll. It wasn’t what Llesho wanted to hear.

“That’s nothing but titles, of no interest to anyone outside of Thebin, and of little concern to most Theb-ins either. I want to know why Markko wants me so badly. He’s not interested in Thebin or the route to the West; he wants me, the way he would want a particularly poisonous root. Why?”

“You will have to ask him.”

Llesho gasped with the shock of that answer, pierced through with a terrible chill. “Is that what Habiba plans? To hand me over to his enemies after expending so much effort to keep me out of Markko’s hands?”

“No, boy.” Master Den softened his tone. “No one here will hand you over to anyone willingly. But the emperor may have some purpose in seeing you publicly declared, or he may wish to see you quietly, in secret. That choice Habiba can give him. If it comes to more than that, rest easy. I would put my own life between you and a danger such as Master Markko, no less than Master Jaks has done.”

Llesho didn’t feel reassured by that speech. He didn’t want the responsibility of Master Den’s life any more than he wanted to risk his own life on Habiba’s good intentions.

Master Den hadn’t finished with Llesho’s question, though. “As for the rest, how does an evil man turn something precious and good to his own twisted use? I don’t know. Only Master Markko himself, or someone as evil as he, can answer your questions. So you must decide, either to forgo this understanding, or to confront Master Markko when the time comes, and ask him.

“I do know that you are good, that you are the beloved of the goddess, and that you have felt her touch on all your long journey.” He put up a hand to stop Llesho when he would have interrupted.

“The goddess can be a terrible mistress to one she loves. The hearts of those who rule above see into the past and the future as no man can. They see more deeply into the hearts and souls of their creatures. And their reasons—we who are only human cannot fathom their reasons. We can only trust that, harsh as their judgment may seem, their love is true, and their purpose just.”

“You mean, it will all turn out in the end? That’s not enough. Too many people have died for a vague hope that our struggle has meaning, somewhere. If the goddess truly loves me, why doesn’t she tell me what I am supposed to do?”

“Perhaps she has.” Den sighed again. “It will have to be enough. The Way of the Goddess is seldom simple, least so in times such as these.” He turned without another word and walked away, but his step was heavier than it had been.

Llesho followed. He thought perhaps he had hurt his old mentor, but he couldn’t figure out how, or what he had done. They went first to the hospital tent, where Bixei was up and about, offering attentive care to Stipes one minute, and fretting the healers to distraction the next. When Master Den appeared, the healers were of one mind: “Take him!”