The Prince of Shadow (34 page)

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

“Drink, boy. You need the nourishment.”

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

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

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

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

“Llesho!”

“You finally woke up!”

“I thought you were going to sleep forever!”

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

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

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

“Where's Kaydu?”

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

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

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

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

“Kaydu,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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