The Prince of Shadow (29 page)

I can't do it again,
he thought. But he said, “When Yueh realizes that the governor has escaped, his army will follow us.”

“The governor didn't escape,” Kaydu said, and her voice choked on the words. “He stayed behind, to keep Yueh occupied in the capital. Her ladyship leads us.”

Llesho wondered if her father had stayed behind as well. Kaydu's set face did not invite the question, and Bixei was looking at him as though he'd been struck. “What makes you think it was Lord Yueh who attacked?”

“I heard Master Markko call out—” Llesho began his answer just as Kaydu interrupted. “There is a resting place beyond this pass, with grass for the horses and a stream for water. The hills will hide us from Yueh's scouts and spies. Her ladyship will stop for the night when we reach it, and we can talk there.”

Lling was riding at Llesho's shoulder, listening quietly to their conversation. At the mention of rest, she sighed, but didn't relax the watch she kept on the road and the hill that rose at its shoulder. “He'll know that at least some of the governor's household escaped. Will he send an army after us?”

“Probably,” Kaydu admitted. She did not say aloud what Llesho already knew from past experience: they could not escape at their present rate of travel. Already the very young and the less hardened among the household suffered from the journey. “But enough of the house guard stayed behind that Yueh may not realize we have escaped until he has searched among the dead for our bodies. With any luck, they've bought us some time to regroup and make plans. If our scouts report back that we are followed, we may have to run, but her ladyship will want everyone to rest while they can.”

If it came to a midnight scramble, those on horseback might have a chance, but Llesho knew about being frightened and weak and on foot. Most of the people who slept tonight at the resting place in the hills would die tomorrow or the next day or the next, running from certain capture into the arms of exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. Armies did not march with children and the sick in tow. Those who did had no chance of outrunning trained and hardened fighters.

When the outriders passed the word that they were stopping ahead, Llesho wanted to urge his own companions to continue, to outstrip the reach of Yueh's army. He had his own purpose set upon him by the ghost in the pearl beds: his brothers to find, and his country to save. But a child stumbled as he passed, and he scooped her up and set her in front of him on the horse, and when the outrider called a halt and directed them down into a hollow cradled in a circle of hills rich with the scent of pine trees, he set the child down with her mother and followed his companions to a grassy plot they chose for their camp. They dismounted and led their horses to the bottom of the hollow where they found the stream Kaydu had promised. Hmishi took the reins from his companions, and followed them as they made their own way to the stream and water. When they had drunk their fill, he staked the animals in a soft stand of grass and began to unbuckle their saddles.

After a moment in which they all stared dumbly as Hmishi worked, Lling sighed and offered, “I'll get wood for a fire.” Bixei dragged himself to his feet and followed her into the nearby forest to help her look for fallen branches. Kaydu tucked her sleeping pet into a sling she wore around her neck and hunted for stones to ring their fire pit. Llesho sat, thinking. He was deep in the puzzle of their survival when Kaydu interrupted.

“Anything I can do for you, Your Highness?”

“No, thank you,” he said, so caught up in wrestling with the problem in his head that he didn't notice her sarcasm, or the pointed hint that he should rouse himself to help set up the camp.

“Would you mind explaining that answer?” Bixei asked the question. Kaydu looked uncomfortably like she was just confirming what she already knew, but she silently dropped down beside him on the grass. Lling and Hmishi had also finished their self-appointed chores, and they, too, watched him, more frightened than they had been when they fought Master Markko and Yueh's provincial guard for him.

Not now,
he silently begged. He was too tired to deal with questions, too tired to stand and face them but unwilling to try to explain while they were looking down on him—it felt too symbolic.

“I'm nobody, just Llesho,” he said.

“Where were you when Master Markko attacked?” Bixei demanded, but Lling stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Not selling out the governor to my worst enemy,” Llesho answered sarcastically. He stared down at the grass between his feet, pulled up a leaf, and twisted it around his finger, contemplating how quickly friends became strangers in the presence of a secret. “Tonight is the eve of my sixteenth summer.” He tried to sound as if it meant nothing when he added, “By custom, that time belongs to the goddess.”

In Kungol, the royal family had played out its most intimate existence for the honor of the people: the royal chambermaids would hang the first marked sheets of prince or princess from the celebrant's bedroom balcony. Royal couples consummated their marriages while a choir of monks at the bedside intoned the heavenly praise of the families brought together in the union. If he had grown to face the eve of his manhood in the Palace of the Sun, like his brothers, all the males of the royal family and their priests and retainers would have escorted him to the Temple of the Moon for his vigil. They would have sung ribald songs of his prowess with the goddess. In the morning trumpets would have sounded with the gay dances of the wedding feast while he rode through the streets to his breakfast at the right hand of his father. All of Thebin would acknowledge him as the husband of the goddess, or jest about his luck as a free man, ungifted and unwed, but a man nonetheless.

In his captivity, Llesho's determination to complete the sacred rites of adulthood in her ladyship's garden shrine seemed foolish and self-important. Certainly the goddess had not come to him in the night, had not accepted him as a man and a husband of the Thebin royal line. With Kungol a thousand or more li away and Thebin in the hands of the enemy, he didn't want to share the ceremony of meditation and fasting, or his failure, with strangers. It embarrassed him now to think that he had tried to complete his ritual of manhood alone and in a foreign land that still saw him as a boy and the property of another. No wonder he had been found lacking—the body he offered to his goddess was not his to give. But he had already said too much. To his Thebin companions, the ritual identified him as a prince of the Royal House more completely than anything else he could have said. Lling and Hmishi understood at once the import of his words, and dropped to their knees with bent heads. Just exactly what Llesho did not want in the middle of a crisis.

He gave vent to a disgusted sigh before he ordered, “Get up! The Harn rule Thebin now; I have no claim on your allegiance.”

“What are they doing?” Bixei crinkled his nose in confusion, but he was determined to understand what everyone else seemed already to know.

“He's the king of Thebin,” Kaydu answered for him, and looked at Llesho with a newfound uneasiness.

“I
was
a prince,” he answered, exasperated, “more recently a slave, and soon to be dead if Yueh's troops catch us here.”

“But the old king is dead, they say,” Lling dared to correct him; Hmishi still trembled at his feet.

“I have six brothers, all older than me,” he answered, grateful to see that Bixei had finally sunk down beside them. He seemed unconvinced, but he was listening. “And any one of them may be the chosen of the goddess.” He did not add that he had not been so chosen.

Bixei fed a branch to the fire. “The deadfall is dry enough. We shouldn't lack for a fire,” he said, and added, when Llesho had begun to think he had escaped the conversation, “Is it true? About being a king?”

“A prince,” Llesho corrected him. “And not that since my seventh summer. Now I am a slave like any other.”

“It could be true.” Lling gave him a disapproving frown that for some reason reminded him of his mother, though the two looked nothing alike.

“There
was
a Prince Llesho, seventh son of the king and the lady-goddess in the capital. Half the babies born that year were named in his honor.”

“She's right,” Hmishi explained to Kaydu and Bixei. He still watched Llesho carefully as if he might turn into a dragon and fly away, but Llesho hadn't struck anyone dead yet, so he risked the conversation. “I always figured Llesho was one of the namesakes, but I suppose he could just as well be the prince as a farmer's son with a name above his station.”

“Is that why Yueh is after us?” Bixei asked. “Did he know about the prince thing already?”

Kaydu shrugged. “Maybe. Markko must have suspected. Llesho made himself as obvious as the light-house on Farshore Point when he had visions in the deep and then petitioned to be a gladiator. Something was going on, and he'd want to get his hands on it, whatever it was.”

“Do you think we brought any food? I'm starved.” Hmishi distracted their companions with a more immediate concern. He rummaged in the blanket roll he'd taken from his horse and drew out a flat spiral of chewy bread. “Food. Somebody knew we were going to be on the run.”

“Her ladyship knew,” Llesho told them.

Hmishi frowned, not quite following. “That Yueh would attack the governor's compound?”

“I think so,” Llesho agreed. “And I think she knew who I was before anyone else did. She came to Pearl Island for my first weapons test.”

Bixei's eyes grew wider. “She did?”

Kaydu nodded. “It makes sense. My father said she was most particular about keeping Llesho out of Yueh's hands. And she is always very cunning at knowing what to keep hidden.”

Llesho didn't question the comment. The governor's lady had many faces, and more people than Llesho knew it. “Jaks was expecting an attack. He told me to be ready to ride.”

“The governor knew what Yueh was up to,” Kaydu confirmed. “He just didn't expect Yueh to make his move so soon. Father thinks that Lord Yueh subverted Master Markko years ago, waiting for his chance to strike. Lord Chin-shi already had gambling debts, and Lord Yueh bought them up and demanded payment. Markko's witch-hunt was to cover his own evil magic; he probably created the plague that killed the pearl beds himself, so that Lord Chin-shi would have no way to pay the debts.

“Lord Yueh seized Pearl Island and its properties in payment; Habiba anticipated him, though, and made his purchases in the governor's name before the contest.”

Bixei was still troubled. “No one would start a war over one slave, even the former prince of someplace I've never heard of.”

“I don't know why her ladyship wants him,” Kaydu said, “or even
if
she wants him. But she won't let Yueh have him.”

“It doesn't matter,” Llesho protested grimly. He didn't like the conclusions he'd drawn, but he was pretty sure he was right.

“If it doesn't matter,” Bixei pointed out, “you can raise the tent.”

“You don't get it,” Llesho snapped. “I've done the Long March before. I know how fast we can move, even when the pace is forced with whips and jackals. We can't escape a trained army, and I don't see her ladyship imposing a death march on her people with torture.”

“But if the governor is still in Farshore—” Lling objected, remembering the conversation on the road.

“Yueh can't let her ladyship reach Thousand Lakes Province. She would report his treachery, and her father would have to offer his own guard to rescue his daughter's husband. From Thousand Lakes Province she can send messengers to the Emperor and beg him to come to the governor's aid as well.” He looked into the eyes of each of his companions in turn, until he was certain that he had their full attention. “Lord Yueh won't be safe until we are dead, or returned to him in captivity. And I, for one, don't intend to let Master Markko get his hands on me again.”

“What can we do?” Hmishi asked him.

Run,
Llesho thought,
run now, as fast as we can, and don't stop, ever.
But he dropped his head back against the saddle he leaned on and shut his eyes.

“I don't know,” he said, because he could not admit to the cowardice that whispered, “Run,” into his ear. “I don't know. But I've done the Long March before, and I won't do it again. I'll make him kill me first.” He didn't open his eyes, but felt the tension of his companions.

“It's better to be alive,” Kaydu objected. Kaydu, the daughter of a witch, who had never been a slave. If Master Markko had any say in it, she would see her father burned alive in the same marketplace where Yueh sold her body.

He did open his eyes then, dark with bleak memory. “No,” he said, “It's not.” He closed the coffins of his soul, let them think he was sleeping. Let them think what they wanted as long as they didn't require his presence in their schemes. But they fell quiet, and Llesho found himself lulled by the crackle of the fire and the scents of the night—grass and horse and pine, human sweat and exhaustion blunting the pungent odor of fear.