The Shadow and the Star (28 page)

Here where there was no one to see, Dojun openly carried a sword in a long scabbard. By his own custom, Samuel favored a less conspicuous knife, though he'd trained with the sword as a weapon and as a tool for prying and cutting, even as a convenient prop for an extra boost in climbing. He knew the secret chambers in the deceptive scabbard—his knife's sheath had the same, filled with blinding powder and poison.

"Rest," Dojun said, halting at the foot of a long slope that led up to the round mouth of a cinder cone. They had been following a bridle trail that wound across the desolation, but Dojun suddenly left it, walking out over the unbroken stretches of gravel toward the hill.

Samuel stood still, watching. As the minutes passed, Dojun's figure seemed to become tiny; the cinder cone grew bigger in perspective until it was huge and Dojun nothing but a dark speck moving up the slope. He disappeared over the concave lip.

The silence was a physical presence, a humming in Samuel's ears. If he shifted his feet, the magnified grate of stone made a loud crackle. This place played tricks on the senses, causing small things to seem large and huge things to seem insignificantly sized.

He savored the nothingness of it. The empty space, the fearsome isolation—he felt it as a respite in his heart from things he had not known troubled him. He was even glad that Dojun had left him. He was thoroughly safe; there was no weapon that could reach him, no shame that could touch him here.

He knelt, waiting. When the clouds came down it was glacially cold. For years he hadn't felt this kind of cold. He remembered, for the first time in a long time, wintry rooms and frigid water, his hands swollen from it and his wrists bands of freezing fire where he'd jerked against the cords that held him. He hadn't jerked to escape; he'd never even thought of flight; he'd only flinched each time he was hit or touched, because he couldn't help it, and that was what rubbed his wrists raw.

There were some he could remember who had not survived; who grew ill and faded, who cried until someone tired of hearing it. He'd been stronger, but not strong enough or smart enough to know life could be different.

Lady Tess had done that, freed him, and now he was here, breathing clean, high, sterile air—so clean and empty and unsoiled; even the cinder beneath him was pure. He swept up a handful of it and rolled the chinkery black angles between his palms. The ebony facets glittered, ugly and beautiful at once, like the volcanic crater that had spawned them.

He opened a length of drab cloth and scooped a small pile of the sparkling gravel into the center to take as a gift for her. As he tied it, a sensation of darkness swept over him.

The world seemed to collapse in on itself; he came out of a sideways roll with the whoosh of steel passing, the high-pitched whine singing close to his ear. The sword flashed down even as he escaped it, unleashed power that sliced without hesitation in a full killing arc, the point biting into the ground in a three-inch gash that buried the tip in black cinders.

Dojun let go of the hilt with both hands, and the sword stood alone in the earth.

Samuel stood balanced, washed in menace; when Dojun walked toward him a shadow seemed to drift past—Samuel leaped to the outside of the driving hand that came at his neck, brought up his crossed wrists and ducked the following kick that would have struck with an impact meant to smash bone. The strikes pounded one after another; Samuel floated in the shadow, evading, arresting, his conscious mind blank, amazed at the situation—Dojun was assaulting him, all-out, the quality of each motion full and deadly with that black intent casting a shade before it came.

Samuel didn't attack in return; in the end he only twisted and bowed to the shadow, lowering his shoulder to invite it in as Dojun kicked through his guard, hit the ground on one leg, and followed the invitation, his body fully committed to a driving lunge that took him where Samuel had been, over Samuel's ducked shoulder as if he'd been thrown, though Samuel never touched him.

Dojun struck the ground with his hands and rolled, springing up in a patch of dusty sunlight, the shadow fading with the mist as if it had never been.

Samuel stood panting, staring at him, trying to believe the earth had crumbled, the sun gone to ashes and the sea to dry rock: that Dojun had broken his vow.

"
So
," Dojun grunted, resting his hands on his hips. "Make promise you. No hit Samua-san, eh?"

Samuel's lip curled. He could see the sword from the corner of his eye, buried point-deep in the ground where he'd sat.
You bastard
, he wanted to shout.
I trusted you
!

Dojun shrugged as if he'd spoken. "Been try hard. Damn hard. No can do."

Samuel sucked the thin purity of the air into his lungs, looking down at the sword. He remembered Dojun's vow as if it were engraved upon a wall in his mind.

I pledge to you, I will never strike you by intent for any reason.

Dojun had tried to hit him.

Tried.
Been try hard. Damn hard
.

And had not succeeded.

Samuel lifted his eyes, with shock and the truth dawning. "You couldn't do it," he said slowly. "You knew you couldn't do it."

"You more young, eh?" Dojun, too, was breathing heavily. "Got small-little edge."

Samuel clenched his teeth together, pulling cold air through them. He found himself laughing. He tilted his head back and laughed without sound at the sky.

" 'Assa madda you?" Dojun asked grumpily. "Think you number-one man now?"

But he was smiling as he said it. He went and jerked the sword free of the ground. He looked up sideways at Samuel.

"Good song you got, Samua-san. Lucky me, yeah? This sword kill you, what I gonna do?"

It could have killed. There had been no safety catch in that lethal sweeping downswing.

Dojun spoke in his own language. "In the training halls, there are tests. There are forms and patterns they teach you. There is
kyujutsu
, the art of the bow and arrow. There is
jiujutsu
, the art of yielding. There is
kenjutsu
, the art of the sword. There is first
dan
, second
dan
, third
dan
, up the ladder." He sheathed the blade. "The art I teach has no ladder. There is no training hall. You live. Or you die. That is the only test."

Mr. Gerard had a true talent for contriving to have his
own way. Before Leda's eyes, he suddenly became a most recalcitrant invalid, snapping peevishly at Sheppard when the butler arrived at his summons, complaining that his leg hurt him, refusing the medication that the doctor had left, and insisting that he needed some fresh air and exercise.

A small crisis ensued, in which an open window, a chair on the terrace overlooking Park Lane, a bench in the back garden, and finally a sedate ride round the park in the victoria were pettishly refused. He wanted exercise. He wasn't accustomed to confinement and inactivity. In short, he wanted to walk.

Since he'd been up and walking about the house for three days, no one could seem to convince him that he could not perfectly well walk outside. He wished to ask Lady Catherine to accompany him. Sheppard murmured that Her Ladyship and her brother were out bicycling with a party of young ladies and gentlemen. A note was sent to find Lady Ashland wherever she might be in the house�the reply came back that she would lend herself to no such nonsense as Samuel walking in the park. Mr. Gerard then scowled at Leda and said that the two of them would go; and no, he did not wish for a footman or a maid or a damned bath chair—it was only across the street, for God's sake.

The descent of his language into the gutter seemed to shock Sheppard into compliance. Leda did not feel it appropriate to correct her employer in the presence of servants, but she gave him a thin, eyebrows-raised, Miss Myrtle look.

Beyond the fact of his injury, she could not feel that it was perfectly appropriate for her to be walking out with a bachelor in the park, unaccompanied. However, when she ventured to mention this, she received such an expression of palpable menace from him that even Sheppard agreed that perhaps Miss Etoile could look out for him well enough on a short jaunt.

So Leda and Mr. Gerard went for a walk in the park. They walked in one gate, Mr. Gerard moving briskly on his crutches, and out the very next, where he hailed a four-wheeled growler from the cab stand on the corner.

It took her that long to realize it had been a performance the entire time—that he cared nothing for a walk at all. With a sense of impending doom, she heard him give directions to the cabbie. The old clarence rumbled and rattled along Piccadilly, avoiding the crowds at Buckingham Palace, rocking amid the traffic in the Strand. As they crossed the bridge, the familiar smells of river and vinegar crept into Leda's nose, stronger even than the stale smoke and perspiration scent of the cab.

Mr. Gerard was watching her. She could see his face as he sat across from her, profiled by the faint, steady light from the grubby window that intensified to a rush of golden color over his features as the cab crossed an intersection where the afternoon sun shone down between buildings.

"You don't like coming back here," he said, breaking the silence that had held them.

Leda pressed her gloved fingertips together. "Not really."

He turned to look out the window. Light fell fully on his face, burning ethereal icy fire. "I need you," he said. "I'm sorry."

She didn't want him to apologize. She rather wanted to be needed by him.

He pulled the check strap. As the growler slowed to a halt, there seemed to be a challenge and a question in his expression; Leda glanced aside and realized that they were stopping in front of the police station. She caught the edge of the seat as the vehicle swayed to a standstill.

"Ready?" he asked.

Her fingers curled hard into the cushion. "What must I do?"

"Keep breathing," he said with a half-smile, "and do what seems best."

"You've no plan?"

"How could I?" The question was soft. "I don't know what's going to happen."

"But surely—" She spread her hands and clenched them again nervously.

"Think of us as two cats," he said. "Maybe we'll be tigers. Maybe we'll just be house cats. It doesn't matter. When the time comes, we'll know."

"Mr. Gerard," she whispered, "you are as mad as a hatter."

She wished he had chosen some other location to leave the cab. But it was obvious that in this neighborhood, the safest place to let it stand was directly opposite the station. Mr. Gerard made no explanations or excuses as the cabbie held the door open, only giving directions to wait with the simple certainty of the ruling class—if he chose to linger in such a locale, it was of no interest to him what the driver thought.

She was horrified, however, when he slipped the cab man a bill and sent him into the station with instructions to bring back an officer. She'd cherished some small hope that she might slip out the opposite side of the clarence cab without being seen—but Mr. Gerard was leaning forward, holding open the door and motioning her out. She stepped down to the street just in time to look up into Sergeant MacDonald's astonished face.