The Prince of Shadow (31 page)

“We are ready to ride as soon as we receive the signal,” Bixei told him, but Llesho shook his head.

“We ride now,” he said. And to Kaydu, “Can you guide us to Shan?”

“I've never been that far,” Kaydu objected. “My father had hoped that Master Jaks would ride with us as our guide.”

“I don't intend to give him that option.”

“Why not?” Kaydu studied him for a long minute. “Master Jaks has sworn on his honor to see you home. The governor accepted this debt of honor in his contract—to deny him would be to dishonor him.”

“The governor is dead,” Llesho informed his companions. “And Master Jaks owes the greater debt to his lordship to keep his lady safe. Either way he chooses, Master Jaks must sacrifice his honor. Unless we take the decision out of his hands.”

Kaydu closed her eyes to hide her sorrow, but a tear leaked from under her lids and ran down the side of her nose unhindered. “I see.” She nodded and pulled herself lightly into her saddle, but Hmishi took the reins of Llesho's mount and refused to move. “What is in Shan?” he asked.

“Prince Adar.”

Lling's eyes opened wide. “The healer prince?”

“My brother. I ride to find him, and the others.”

Hmishi stood out of the way then, and cupped his hands to help his prince into the saddle. Lling scrambled onto her horse without another objection, but Bixei stayed where he was. “I can't leave,” he said, “Stipes . . .”

“I know,” Llesho agreed. Yueh had purchased Stipes for the arena, but he would use every trained fighter he had to invade Thousand Lakes Province. Bixei would not leave Stipes to the enemy. “Tell Master Jaks that if he delivers her ladyship safely to her father, then all his debts of honor are paid. My own fate is in the hands of the goddess. Good luck.”

Llesho set the short spear from the lady at his back, though it made him tremble to touch it, and turned his horse. Kaydu nudged her own mount with her knees, urging him to the front of their little band.

“This way,” she said, and guided them to the bottom of the clearing. Little Brother caught up with them at the stream, chattering indignantly to be taken up with his mistress. Kaydu pulled the sling from her pack and wrapped it over her shoulder, holding it open for the monkey to scramble in and make himself comfortable for the journey. When he had settled, they crossed the stream and entered the forest that rose on the other side.

PART THREE

THE ROAD TO SHAN

Chapter Eighteen

THROUGHOUT the morning Llesho's tiny band pressed more deeply into the forest, making brief stops only to water and graze the horses in the occasional grassy breaks in the trees. When the path grew too steep for them to ride, they walked alongside their animals, leading them by the reins. By midafternoon, however, the horses were stumbling with exhaustion and the humans were doing no better. Llesho would have urged them to continue, staggering until he dropped, but Kaydu pulled him up short with a tug on his arm.

“Enough,” she said. “We will rest here, and eat. The horses need a break as badly as we do.”

Llesho stared at her, not understanding. He had only one model for such a journey—walking until his legs gave out then going on, carried in the arms of another until that one dropped in the dust of their passage.

“If we stop now, we can travel again for a few hours before the sun sets, and make better time for the rest.” Kaydu was watching him for some sign that he understood, so he nodded and dropped to his knees. Only then did he hear the rush of water over rocks. A stream, and fresh, from the sound of it.

Rest. Why hadn't he thought of that himself? He wasn't, after all, a Harn raider. Not a very good prince either, apparently, but he'd have to pretend for a few minutes longer. His three companions—four, if you counted Little Brother peeking out of his sling—were watching him expectantly. Lling spoke up in the silence.

“Should we scout the area, post a guard in case Lord Yueh's men have followed us?” she asked.

Kaydu took the suggestion for a call to informal council, and shook her head. “We can take turns at guard duty,” she said. “We can fight if we have to, but we'd do better to run if Markko has sent a party to track us.” She looked at Llesho. They were all weary, but they could probably push on, except for him. He was the only one of them carrying a child's memories of the Long March on his back. Once again others were making decisions based on his survival above their own.

“We have to know if Master Markko is following.” Llesho hardened his voice to keep the words from shaking on his lips. “And if he is, we run until we fall, and then fight until we die.”

The looked their unspoken questions at him, and he returned their gaze with his own bleak glare. “I will not be his prisoner again.”

Hmishi tipped his head in silent obedience to his prince and slipped away, into the trees. Lling needed more convincing. She was Thebin, and she would follow wherever her prince led. Her analytical mind, however, craved reasons.

“He's a powerful magician,” Llesho explained, “with a particular interest in poisons.”

Her eyes went wide. Wordlessly she picked up her bow and a quiver of arrows. Scouting for a secure lookout point, she picked a tree and climbed high into its branches.

“What did he do to you?” Kaydu asked.

“Terrible things,” Llesho answered with a shudder. “But if that were all, it was nothing so bad that I would risk your lives over it.”

“Then why?” Kaydu persisted.

He wished Lling was there to do the explaining. From Llesho himself, to someone who did not know the ways of Thebin, it sounded . . . he didn't know how it sounded, but he didn't want to see the disbelief on her face.

“Tell me.”

He shrugged as if it were nothing—only my life, the life of my people, he thought—and struggled to find a way to tell the outlander the most private secrets of Thebin's theocracy. That somehow, the governor's lady had already known.

“I am Thebin's seventh prince of my father's body,” he said, and Kaydu waited.

“In Thebin, princes are wedded to the goddess on their sixteenth birthday. The prince is then considered a man full grown, but he is also a godling. If the wedding night goes well, the goddess may reward her new husband with gifts.”

Kaydu waited still, expecting something more. When it didn't come, she offered, hesitantly, “Ac cording to my father, many lands have rituals of symbolic union with their gods and goddesses—”

“Not symbolic,” Llesho blushed. He would explain in words even an outlander could understand if he had to, but he could not, would not look at her.

“The prince takes his vigil in the temple, and the goddess comes to him. Dressed in the flesh he most covets. And they . . . she . . . if he pleases her body, he will find himself changed in the morning. Not that anyone can see, at first,” he rushed to explain, “but gradually, he develops some gift, a skill or power from the goddess. Adar is a healer. Balar centers the universe. Lluka sees the past and the future.” He laughed a short, familiar snort. “Three of my brothers fell asleep and did not please the goddess. They are ordinary men. They say, of course, that they pleased Her best of all, and their gift is to live in peace within their own heads.”

He wondered what peace his brothers had found in the years since the fall of Thebin, but Kaydu stirred restlessly.

“What do the religious beliefs of Thebin have to do with Lord Yueh's traitorous magician?”

“ ‘The seventh prince is blessed beyond measure,' ” he quoted, “ ‘most favored of the goddess, his gifts are beyond compare.' Yesterday was my natal day. I was in the shrine when the attack began, but there wasn't enough time to complete my vigil.” He pleaded with her to understand, “The goddess did not come! Or I thought not, but her ladyship says she did, and that she was pleased with me, though I did not give her pleasure as a prince must. But if she has given me the powers of the seventh prince, then better that you kill me now than Master Markko have the shaping of them. Because he is evil, and everything he touches he bends out of true. I don't know who he serves—not Lord Chin-shi, who is dead, or Lord Yueh, who carries the serpent at his breast and believes he is the master when he is just another servant of Master Markko's ambition.

“Somehow, Markko knows what I am. If he captures me alive, he will wield my soul like a weapon, and my people will die. Your people will die as well. Better to kill me here, now, than let that happen.”

He let himself fall back against his saddle and shut his eyes, recognizing the light-headed drift away from his body that he felt in times of greatest weariness. In that state of separation from his surroundings he didn't really care that she didn't believe him. As long as she let him sleep. He didn't mention the promise he had made to the ghost, though, figuring one shock at a time was all either of them could handle.

“Damn!” Kaydu's voice, drifting out of dreamy distance, surprised him. “My father knew Master Markko was powerful,” she explained when he cracked a heavy eyelid to look at her; and even from the far place where he floated he could see the worry in her frown. “How strong
is
he?”

Llesho thought about that. “In Thebin, there is a saying. ‘Apprentices do magic. Around masters, things just happen.' Also, ‘A good magician leaves no tracks on dry ground. A bad magician leaves no tracks in the snow.' To a Thebin, magic you can see is poorly done. It is difficult to tell a great Thebin magician from someone with no gifts at all who stands, by some coincidence, near the center of great moments.

“Markko isn't Thebin, of course, but if he knows what I think he does, and if he has set in motion the deaths of Lord Chin-shi and the governor, and her ladyship's flight for Thousand Lakes Province, as I think he has, then he is very, very strong.”

“Stronger than my father?” she asked him, and Llesho saw the fear within the question.

He shrugged, his shoulders rubbing against the leather of the saddle propping his head. “I don't know, I'm not a magician myself, I just know the sayings.”

“Among the witches of Shan, there is also a saying,” Kaydu told him. “A good witch should always wear a bell around her neck.”

“The question is,” Llesho suggested, “how much between them is difference of philosophy, and how much a difference of art?”

“My father should wear a bigger bell,” she admitted, and he figured that meant that he didn't let all his workings show. Good. Maybe Habiba had a chance. If so, maybe they had a chance, too. The thought gave him some comfort.

“Wake me in an hour to take my turn at guard duty,” he mumbled, then rolled on his side and fell soundly asleep.

 

 

Llesho woke to the snuffling of hot breath against his neck. “Stop it,” he insisted. Still more asleep than awake, he took a random swipe at the direction from which the annoyance seemed to come. His hand connected with a hard snout, slid down over long, sharp teeth. Not Kaydu, then. He opened one eye, and gulped. A bear stood over him, its muzzle wet and its fangs still colored with the blood of its last kill.

“Don't move,” Lling instructed in hushed tones. She stood next to the tree she'd been sitting in, her bow drawn taut, arrow seated, waiting for a clear shot. Standing over Llesho's terror-frozen body, the bear shook its head at her. Opening its bloody maw wide, it roared a challenge across the grassy clearing. Kaydu jerked awake at the deep-voiced growl. She rolled away from the bear, coming to her feet with a short sword in her hand.

The bear pushed at Llesho's shoulder with its nose, whoofing a mournful tone in his ear. It was a very small bear, he realized, scarcely more than a cub; he wondered if the mother was around somewhere.