The Prince of Shadow (23 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where is the infirmary?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

“Sorry,” Llesho said.

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

“Manners like his mistress,” Llesho commented.

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

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

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

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

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

“They're around.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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