The Prince of Shadow (25 page)

“Nobody,” he said.

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

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

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

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

“I won't.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

When he arrived in the audience chamber, Llesho saw that Kaydu had arrived ahead of him. She stood beside her father's chair at the left hand of the governor. Master Jaks stood a little to the right, watchful but not participating in the debate at the center of the room. The governor and his lady had abandoned their high platform seats of state for straight-backed chairs set in front of a large table on which maps were spread. The governor looked up absently when Llesho was announced and motioned to him to come forward and study the map.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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