The Prince of Shadow (24 page)

Somehow, Master Jaks saw where his mind had taken him. “It appears that Llesho has other plans,” he said, but the set of his mouth and the hard determination in his eyes promised more.

“And Bixei?” Llesho asked.

“That boy is going nowhere,” Little Phoenix complained. “He has dressings to change, and wounds that need healing.”

“We don't know who we can safely trust here,” Bixei seemed to be weighing something in the way Master Jaks centered all his attention on Llesho. Finally he decided. “Somebody's got to watch the pearl diver's behind out there.”

So. Friends, then. Something settled quietly into place for Llesho. He gave the other boy a mock frown and a tart, “Keep your eyes
off
my behind.”

Then he grinned. With Bixei at his back, and his Thebin friends around him, he could ignore for a time the sense of powers closing in on him. “
Girls
fight in the governor's army,” he said with glee.

“No boys?” Bixei demanded, even as Master Jaks was advising, “They are women. I'd suggest you remember that if you want to finish your training with all your parts in working order.”

Little Phoenix took pity on him. “Yes, Bixei, there are men in the guards as well, but you will have to ask for the first date.” She ruffled his hair affectionately. “The rules of the governor's house don't permit active guardsmen to take advantage of the novices.”

“Kaydu can take advantage of me if she wants,” Llesho volunteered just to make his teacher take that playful swat at his ear. Bixei looked doubtful.

Jaks seemed to understand his hesitation. “I've never seen a will that didn't find a way,” he offered. Something seemed to pass between them then, assurance and warning, and acceptance of both. Then Bixei gave one sharp nod.

“All right, then. I'm ready to leave.”

Little Phoenix glared at Master Jaks, blaming him for the flight of her charges.

“Not a bit of sense if you put all your brains together. Well, take him if you must, but bring him back in the morning to check those wounds. Habiba will have all our heads if we bring infection into this house.”

“Yes, Mistress Little Phoenix.” Llesho knew when he had gotten off more lightly than he deserved, and he bowed deeply. Even Master Jaks at the window gave a respectful nod of his head.

Bixei could not bend without pain in his leg, but he dropped his eyes in an appropriate display of submission. With Llesho supporting him under one arm, he walked slowly back to the novice house they would share with the Thebin pearl divers turned provincial guards.

“I've never seen anything like this,” Bixei said as he looked around the water gardens. Llesho didn't say anything. He was thinking about his mother's gardens, hardy plants that defied the winter and the hard land that ran with water only during the spring thaw. Jaks said nothing, but set his lips in a grim line. Llesho wondered what gardens the teacher saw in his head, and if he missed wherever his home had been before slavery and the arena brought him to Farshore.

“Where are you from?” Llesho asked his teacher, filling the silence. The question broke half a dozen taboos between slaves, but the infirmary seemed a place out of time somehow, and made many impossible things seem reasonable—like asking a weaponmaster a personal question.

“Farshore.”

Bixei gasped, but Llesho met his gaze levelly and said nothing more. Slaves came from three sources: conquest, prisons, and birth to a slave. Bixei had been born into slavery. He struggled to better his condition in the arena, but none of his actions revealed any fragments of a lost past. He'd assumed that Master Jaks, like himself, had been captured in a battle or raid, but Farshore had been a part of the empire since before Llesho's grandparents were born. That left prison.

There were hundreds of laws that could lead to indenture or slavery, including treachery and treason. Unbidden, speculation tickled at Llesho's mind. He looked at the six tattooed rings on Master Jaks' arm, visible marks on his body that warned all who saw him of the six men he had murdered as an assassin. Her ladyship had shown no sign of disapproval when she spoke of Master Jaks' kills. Nor did murderers find their way to the slave markets, being considered too dangerous. So how had the man come to be a slave and a weaponmaster? Why had Llesho trusted him from the first moment he set eyes upon him? That wasn't even a question. He had known Jaks, not personally or for the skill that named him master, but by the uniform he wore and even the rings on his arm. The king of Thebin had trusted his family and his nation to this man's kind, of course, and had lost it all—nation, family, life itself. Could Llesho afford to trust again?

Jaks said nothing, daring him to ask. Not today, he decided. Not until I understand what plots the governor's lady is scheming and how a mercenary assassin turned weapons teacher fit into them. Knowing might make the asking easier, but Llesho thought it might just make the trusting harder. So he waited.

Chapter Fourteen

WITH Llesho awake, and Bixei added to the novice house, alliances shifted and clashed in ways that drove Llesho out into the night just to avoid the quarreling. Bixei, in his usual way, wanted to lord it over the house because he was older by a year, and bigger than the Thebins. Hmishi looked to Lling for direction. Lling wanted them all to shut up so that Llesho could rest, but Bixei wouldn't listen to a girl even if he knew she was right. Llesho left them to bicker among themselves, hoping they'd come to some sort of agreement before he came back. Putting the din of his housemates behind him, he drifted down the flagged path toward the practice field, silent and empty at this time of night. Perfect for thinking.

The fight with Kaydu had shaken him. If Master Jaks hadn't stopped him, he would have maimed or even killed her. It wasn't her fault, or even her failure of skill. Kaydu, after all, had thought they were sparring, and did not fight as she might in a battle to the death. That mistake had almost ended her life. Until the fight with Kaydu, Llesho hadn't realized how completely focused on killing his knife training had been. He had heard the warnings, but Master Den and Master Jaks both had taken care never to let him get the upper hand in their sparring practice. Just when he thought he was getting close to a win, one or the other of them would disarm him before he could do any damage. He hadn't realized that the only follow-through he had was deadly. Jaks believed that Llesho had already killed. If it was true, he was glad he didn't remember.

He shivered at the reminder, but something rattled loose in his mind in spite of his heartfelt prayer to forget: a guard, dressed like Master Jaks in figured leathers and a beaten brass belt and wrist guards, but with a bloody smile where his throat should have been. A Harn raider lay across the body, his eyes wide and glassy, Llesho's knife buried in his back. The guard's name was Khri, and he'd shoved Llesho behind a wall hanging that draped soft folds across a window overlooking the palace gardens. Beside the window was one of the fragile chairs scattered about the halls for the convenience of the old men and women who advised the king. Hidden by the draping of the wall hanging, Llesho had climbed up on the chair. He drew his knife from the soft belt where his scabbard always hung, and waited until the battle for the hall had turned its back on him. Then he'd struck.

At seven summers he hadn't had the strength to stab a raider through his heavy clothing, not even with a knife as sharp as the Thebin blade he had carried. But the chair had slipped and sent him flying after the knife. With trained instinct, he'd turned the blade sideways and felt it slide between the raider's ribs. The man had died, blood bubbling from between his lips. Too late to save Khri. Too late to save his father. Or his sister. Maybe too late to save his mother. The memory got all mixed up in his head with Lleck, floating in front of him in the bay, telling him to find his brothers. Not too late to save them, maybe.

When Master Jaks said that he had killed, Llesho had wanted to deny it, to separate himself from all the violence and mayhem that had marked his life, right up to the Blood Tide and Master Markko's poisons and Lord Chin-shi, who had treated him kindly one night and then died at his own hand. With the new memory, however, had come the tactile recall of blood slick on his knife, his fingers, and the pure fire of rage that had lit his young heart. If he'd been older, if he'd been trained in all the weapons of a warrior, he would have raged through the palace with the wrath of the ages, cutting down the Harn raiders like wheat in a storm. After all these years, the desire to fight his way to the throne room and stop the slaughter returned to him so powerfully that he pulled the knife from his garments and slashed around him in a wide swath, imagining the necks of raiders in its path.

“Whoa.”

He stumbled, didn't recognize the voice until Kaydu added, “It's only me!” Then he dropped the hand that held the knife like it was made of stone.

“I'm sorry,” he said, and bowed low to her. “I didn't know anyone else was out.”

“I'll leave you alone if you want.”

He shook his head and Kaydu walked past him to the center of the footbridge that led to the practice field. Dropping to its wooden surface, she let her feet dangle almost to the water.

“Where is your monkey?”

Kaydu gave a soft laugh. “He would say that he keeps guard over my possessions, if he could speak. Actually, though, he is sleeping in the rafters of the guardhouse, enjoying his monkey dreams.”

Llesho thought it would be impolite to let his relief show. Little Brother had not, so far, made a favorable impression on him. He sat down next to Kaydu on the bridge, but kept his feet tucked up under him while he watched the carp come up and nibble at her toes.

“I'm not supposed to feed them,” she said, aiming a bread crumb at the head of the largest fish. Distracted, the carp chased after the bread, as did his fellows. Llesho said nothing, but took the bit of loaf Kaydu offered him and sent a crumb after the fish as well. Kaydu clucked at him and mockingly chastised, “You will make that old fellow fat as fat if you don't stop that. I'll have to dig him a new pond!”

“I can't imagine your father saying such a thing!” Llesho chuckled in spite of himself.

“Nor can I,” she admitted. “He is more likely to say, ‘Actions have consequences, daughter. Decide if you can live with the last step before you take the first step.' The governor, however, is more down to earth, and cares more about his fish than philosophy.”

“But you don't agree with him?”

“Oh, his excellency is right, as always. The old carp
will
get too fat. And we will need to deepen and widen the pond to keep him.” She grinned at Llesho. “It's a game between the two of them, carp and governor. I am on the carp's side.”

“You are very strange,” Llesho pointed out to her. But he threw another bit of bread at the carp, making his own allegiance known.

“Comes of being the daughter of the governor's witch,” she said, a reminder that he didn't need, then asked him, “What were you doing when I came along?”

“Avoiding my housemates,” he admitted. “I am hoping that by the time I return, the trumpeting and beating of chests will have ended, they will have decided on a winner and a loser, and I can sleep in peace.”

“You're supposed to be getting rest, not running away from quarrels. Little Phoenix will have their heads if she finds out.”

“But she won't. Find out, I mean. Will she?”

Kaydu studied his face for a moment before she shrugged. “Not from me. That isn't what I meant anyway. What were you doing with your knife?”

“Remembering.” He pulled it back out of its scabbard and weighed the heft of it in his palm. “Master Jaks was right. I killed the Harn raider who murdered my guard. Khri was a lot like Master Jaks. Looked sort of like him, wore the same decorations on his wrist guards. No tattoos on his arms, though.”

“Master Jaks is a very dangerous man,” Kaydu pointed out.

Assassinations. He wondered if she knew. “So was Khri. I couldn't save him, but he gave me time to save myself. Since that's what he was dying for, I guess it was enough.

“I was only seven,” he added. “I couldn't save anyone but myself. They assassinated my father, killed my sister, and threw her body on a rubbish heap. The rest of us they separated and sold. Still—” he held the Thebin knife up, watched moonlight play along its blade—“it could have been worse.” It had been, for Khri. “If the governor's lady keeps her word, next summer I will leave here a free man, a warrior.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

Llesho blushed and dropped his head. For eight summers he'd kept his secrets to himself, but he couldn't remember to keep his guard up around her. Now he'd said too much, and he couldn't figure a way out of what he'd revealed.