The Prince of Shadow (38 page)

 

 

The sun had nearly set when Llesho slid out of his saddle with the thought that he'd had it good when he didn't remember the afternoons. Mara had insisted they halt for the night after Llesho had nearly fallen from his saddle as she strode beside him. She'd led them to a stopping place with fresh water and enough cover to protect them from any but a determined search. As he dropped numbly to the mossy ground, Llesho had to admit that the problem wasn't his companions or the mysterious healer, or even the forces of Lord Yueh. Llesho was the problem: a relatively useless former and completely unnecessary prince of a vanquished country. All he had to do was surrender and his companions would be free.

Hmishi cast him a concerned frown as he unsaddled Llesho's horse.

“I'm sorry I got you into this,” Llesho told him.

“My father sold me to the Harn for the price of a loaf of bread when you were six years old,” Hmishi answered. “I don't see how even you can take credit for that.”

“But—”

“Did you kill the pearl beds or cause Lord Chin-shi to take his own life? Did you attack the governor's compound in the dead of night? You were not the cause of my problems when I was six years old, and you are not the cause of them now. Or do princes tax evil the way they tax grain?”

With a skeptical smirk on his round dark face, Hmishi dared him to agree, but he was too tired to explain. He didn't think Hmishi would listen anyway. It didn't seem worth the effort it was taking to keep his eyes open, so Llesho let his eyelids slide shut.

“Do you need Mara?”

“I'm fine.”

After a long pause, Hmishi led the horse to the little stream that flowed nearby. Llesho was almost asleep when a boot nudged him gently in the side.

“What now?” he asked with more snap in his voice than seemed appropriate, given his remorse a few short minutes ago. He opened his eyes with an apology ready, but Hmishi just winked, a rueful grin plastered on his face. Sort of like the mud plastered all over his boots and leggings.

“Boggy springs,” Hmishi explained with chagrin as he rubbed at his leggings with a fistful of spongy moss. “Lling and Kaydu are going to mark them out so we can move about safely. Just don't go wandering in the dark.”

That explained why Mara had seemed so sure when she announced that she had found them a perfect campsite for the night. Anyone trying to sneak up on them was likely to sink knee-deep into quicksand. The warning seemed irrelevant, though.

“Do I look like I plan on taking a moonlit stroll?” he muttered. He rolled over onto his strong arm and closed his eyes, putting an end to the discussion.

Cradled in soft moss rooted in a rich mulch smelling of green woody things, his exhausted body began to relax, only to discover a new set of discomforts. He realized that he had a full bladder and an empty stomach, and he'd have to do something about both before he could sleep. Neither seemed urgent enough to force movement back into his leaden muscles, however.

“He's not moving!”

Hmishi's call drew the attention of the healer as it was meant to. Llesho heard the swish of her skirts, then felt a cool dry hand on his forehead.

“Can you move, Llesho?” she asked him softly, brushing the hair from his eyes with a gentle fingertip.

He would have told her “No,” but he couldn't open his mouth, or move his tongue to form the word.

Her hand left his head, and he heard more rustling about as she searched her bag of medicines. “You can rest soon,” she promised him. He would have told her that he was resting already, but she crushed a pinch of leaf between her fingers and waved it beneath his nose. Tears sprang to his eyes, and his nose twitched at the pungent odor that assailed him, but he found he could move his head again, and after a moment could uncurl his whole body and drag himself back to his feet. He swayed between them until Mara gave him a nudge in Hmishi's direction.

“Find him a tree,” she ordered Hmishi. “We'll be ready to eat when you come back.”

Llesho had to admit he felt much better when he returned to the camp, but the gnawing at the pit of his stomach had turned into a determined demand for food. He sat with his back against his saddle, and Lling handed him a bun and a thick slice of cheese while Kaydu portioned out some fat berries she had picked in the forest.

“Cold collation tonight,” Mara explained as each drank his or her fill from a pot of fresh springwater she handed around.

Kaydu nodded her agreement. “We light no fire and set guards, two and two, until morning.”

“I would offer to serve first watch, but Llesho is not the only one whose heart outpaces his body.” Mara smiled, giving Kaydu the point. “I must have sleep now, I am afraid, if I am to be any use later.”

Llesho wondered if the healer referred only to her turn at watch, or to other uses of her powers that might sap her hoarded energy. When he would have asked, however, Mara had disappeared into a blanket the color of the forest floor, shades of green and black that changed as she moved in her sleep. Only the low snore that punctuated her rest gave her presence away.

Sleep seemed a really good idea, and Llesho slid down where he sat, embarrassed when Lling drew a blanket over him. Not too embarrassed to smile his thanks before he closed his eyes, though. He pulled the blanket up tight around his ears, curled on his good side in the moss again, and felt the tension flow out of his muscles. Tomorrow would be better. He could feel it in the clean exhaustion, so different from the fevered crash of his failing body a week ago. And if he lay really still, he could imagine that the moss that held him was a soft puddle of velvet, the hem of his mother's gown. He used to curl close to rub the soft fabric against his face and listen quietly to the murmur of her voice and the silver call of her laughter. The memory put a smile on his lips as he slipped into sleep.

 

 

Hard midnight held the forest in its dark hand when the whisper threaded its way into Llesho's sleep. It nagged him out of dreams of winter in the palace, when the caravans had gone and a blanket of snow wrapped Thebin in a hushed, expectant peace. Llesho woke breathless from racing down the long hall in search of his brothers, but he could still hear Master Markko's voice.

“I'm here, waiting for you, boy. We need each other, you and I. Together we will rule heaven and earth.”

The words made no sense. Llesho was a runaway slave. No one but Llesho and the spirit of his teacher knew that Llesho's journey did not end at Shan, but truly began there. Most of the time he didn't believe that he would succeed in his quest to regain Thebin. He couldn't figure out why Master Markko would care about Thebin or its princes anyway. A thousand li and two imperial powers separated Llesho's country from Farshore, and that didn't count the seven li straight up the side of a mountain range to the plateau where Kungol stood.

His companions slept on, undisturbed by any sound, and Llesho wondered if he had imagined the voice in his dreams. But no, there it was again, sweeping over his mind like the mirrored flame of a beacon tower. “You are mine, body and soul, boy. You cannot escape your destiny. Didn't I show you that on Pearl Island?”

Llesho shuddered. The voice was in his head, and he felt the iron collar on his neck, the chains that weighed him down with despair. He could never escape those chains; they drew him from his bed in the moss, choked him when he would have resisted, and he followed the voice, and the pull at his throat. One step, two, past the huddled lumps of his companions wrapped in their blankets. Dimly, Llesho recalled that they had agreed to keep a watch, but he counted four sleeping bodies. When he stumbled over the last, however, the pain in his toe made him gasp. A log! He wondered if all the rumpled blankets hid firewood, but one of them moved and snorted in its sleep. After a moment Llesho released the breath he held and moved again, quietly, toward the voice in the forest.

“Where are you going, Llesho?” Unyielding, Mara stood before him. She wore a shawl over her shabby dress, wrapped tightly around herself and held in place by both of her arms crossed firmly under her breasts. She looked younger in the moonlight, or ageless, and terrifying, as if she were living stone come to life in front of him.

“I need to find a tree.” He stammered out the lie and hung his head, unable to meet her eyes.

“The chains are gone, Llesho.”

He did look up then, and met her grim-faced challenge: “He cannot make you come to him, he can only hope that you are fool enough to heed him when he calls.”

“I'm not a fool.” He wasn't sure of that, now that the voice was gone from his head and he thought about what he'd almost done. But it still made a terrible sense. “If I go to him, he'll leave the rest of you alone. If I try to escape him, he will kill you all, and take me back anyway.

“Only if he catches you.” She smiled at him, and he took no comfort from it at all. “Give us tomorrow, at least. Until we reach the river.”

“I can't,” Llesho pleaded with her to understand. “He's in my head.” He hadn't realized that he'd raised his voice until his companions stirred and begin to sit up in their bedrolls, guilty to be caught sleeping when they had agreed to post a double guard. Llesho figured that was Markko's doing as well, but he kept his conclusions to himself, like a guilty secret.

Hmishi and Lling came to him and took up guard positions. Hmishi stood slightly in front of him and to his right with a sword bared in his hand. Lling settled behind his left shoulder, an arrow nocked below his ear.

“Are we being attacked?” Kaydu wanted to know.

“Not anymore.” Mara was looking into Llesho's eyes when she spoke: Master Markko would not disturb his sleep again this night. The healer believed she could protect them from the mental assault of his pursuers. In the moonlight her dark eyes seemed to reflect infinity, and Llesho was tempted to trust that she was right. He gave her the barest hint of a nod, enough to know that he would take her advice for now.

She accepted his decision with an equally subtle nod. “Get a few more hours' sleep,” she said to his companions. “We ride before daybreak.”

Hmishi and Lling followed him back into the camp, but Kaydu joined Mara on guard, her face still troubled by her failure to fulfill her duty. He'd have to explain that it wasn't her fault. They were all easy prey for dark thoughts at midnight, and Markko had taken advantage of that. The magician had seized their wills before they knew what was happening. Given that her father had been the governor's witch all of her life, he didn't think Kaydu would have much trouble accepting as fact what Markko had done. He just wasn't sure what she would decide to do about it. And he was too tired to deal with it now.

“Sleep,” he muttered to himself, and reached for the soft comfort of his mossy bed again.

 

 

Why is Master Markko so determined to get you back?” Kaydu wrinkled up her nose in displeasure, and Llesho understood why. During the night he had tossed and turned under the burden of his secrets, until he finally decided that they couldn't afford to hide things from each other if they hoped to survive. While they prepared for the morning's trek, he'd told his companions everything, starting with who Lleck was in Thebin and his apparition as a ghost in the pearl bay, how Master Markko had poisoned the bay with the Blood Tide and set the blame onto the healer Kwan-ti. He told them about the terrible months when the overseer had beaten him and held him in chains and used him as an experiment to test his poisons on. He admitted the sick dread he had of ever being returned to the master's evil workroom. Hmishi and Lling had known some of it, Kaydu a little as well, and Mara, they thought, none at all. Only the healer was not surprised to learn that Master Markko had come to him in his dreams last night, however. Mara had nodded her gray head to confirm his suspicion that Markko had affected them all, putting them to sleep when they should have kept watch.

By the time he was finished, Mara was stamping with impatience, but ignorance of Master Markko's power, and of his intent, could kill them more surely than an hour's delay. Llesho stared levelly into her eyes and then went back to stringing his bow and checking his arrows. He knew why they had fallen so quickly back to sleep after the midnight call, and he knew why Markko had made no return in his later sleep. He had no evidence, not even logic to back his intuition, however, so he accepted her silent command that he keep his guesswork to himself.

Kaydu had spoken aloud the question that had bothered him since he realized that Master Markko was still looking for him: Why? When she didn't get an answer, she offered her reasoning. “I mean, I know you were once a prince and all, but it's not like anybody is offering to pay a ransom for you.”

Strategically, it made no sense, and she tried to explain that to Llesho without hurting his feelings, he was sure. She couldn't know that Llesho had asked himself the same questions ever since Markko had first snapped an iron collar around his neck. “Can you do magic or anything like that?”

“I can hold my breath underwater,” he said with a perfectly straight face. “And I can, or could, execute a nearly flawless Wind Over the Mountaintops prayer form, though I tend to stumble in the middle of the related fighting stances.”

Mara choked and made a display of holding her hands over her head and pointing to her throat. But she hadn't been eating at the time, so Llesho wondered. When she had settled a bit, she motioned to them to go on, and walked purposefully into the trees.

Lling jabbed him companionably with her elbow just then, declaring, “I don't know anything about prayer forms, but I've seen you fall over in the middle of a fight sequence.”