The Hidden Blade (42 page)

There were, however, Bactrian camels, a train of them just outside the courtyard of the open-air restaurant, feasting on grass and oats. Inside the courtyard, beneath the shade of grapevines growing on overhead trellises—he wondered what the French would think of the
terroir
—the clientele consisted mostly of traders and travelers, lured by the sizzling fragrance of spiced mutton grilling over an open fire and the yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread.

Once, great caravans had teemed on these routes, carrying precious bolts of Chinese silk across the vast steppes of central Asia to the coast of the Caspian Sea, to Antioch, and finally to Rome, to feed the empire’s ever ravenous desire for luxury fabrics.

The rise of great ocean-faring vessels had rendered the land courses obsolete hundreds of years ago. The caravans that still plied the route were small, sometimes no more than a few camels, trading between towns. And most of the legendary cities of yore were either lost or reduced to mere shadows of their former glory.

Yet a sense of continuity still lingered in the air. Marco Polo had drunk the same sweet, cool wine as that in Leighton’s cup, made from oasis-grown white grapes. A thousand years before that, Buddhist missionaries from India had braved the same perilous paths, carrying the teachings of the Tathagata into the western provinces of China.

Leighton, too, had traveled to China once—alone, with almost nothing in his pocket, and little more than an irrational hope in his heart.

Now he was again in China, at least technically. But Chinese Turkestan, currently controlled by the Ch’ing Dynasty, was of a different character altogether, a place of endless desert, vast blue skies, and snowcapped mountain ranges.

A new customer walked into the courtyard, a young Kazakh dressed in a knee-length robe and a fur-lined, long-flapped hat. They were in a predominantly Uyghur part of Tarim Basin, but one encountered Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Han Chinese, and even Mongols on the road. The diners looked up for only a moment before returning to their food and conversation. Leighton popped another chickpea into his mouth.

“Bring me soup and bread,” the young Kazakh ordered as he sat down. “Mind you skim the fat off the soup. And the bread had better be still warm.”

Leighton cast another glance at the Kazakh. Why did he think he had seen that face before?

The Kazakh now had a dagger in hand, scraping at the dirt underneath his nails. The weapon was six inches of deadly, gleaming blade, and he wielded it with no more care than if it were a toothpick. A man seated close to the entrance of the courtyard, who had been looking at the Kazakh with the interest of a pickpocket, turned back to his stew of sheep’s brain.

The Kazakh’s food arrived. He sheathed his dagger and attacked the round disk of bread, pausing only to wash it down with soup. Halfway through his meal, he flicked Leighton a hard look.

All at once it came to Leighton. Not when or where he had seen the Kazakh, but that last time he saw the face, it had belonged to a
girl
.

The memory was hazy, almost dreamlike, the kind of recollection that felt more imagined than real. Add to it the Kazakh’s unfriendly bearing, grimy appearance, and affinity for sharp objects—Leighton was inclined to dismiss the notion out of hand.

And yet, now that the idea had arisen, he couldn’t help but notice that the Kazakh was a tad too old to have such a perfectly smooth face. And wasn’t his wrist, when it peeked out from his sleeve, a bit delicate in size for a man?

Not to mention his thick robe and close-collared shirt. At the edge of the desert, temperatures plunged directly after sunset. But now it was high noon on a spring day; the sun seared, the air hot and heavy even in the shade. Most of the other travelers had loosened their outer garments, but the Kazakh kept his closed and belted, even though he must be perspiring underneath.

She stopped eating—Leighton realized that he had changed the pronoun he used to think about the Kazakh. Instead she watched him, her gaze frosty. Her dagger, which had never left the table, was now once again unsheathed, the naked blade pointed directly at him.

He was not in Chinese Turkestan to make trouble. The goal of the British was to pass entirely unnoticed on their intelligence-gathering mission. In fact, he was already leaving, on his way to meet his colleagues in Yarkand. There they would debate whether to brave the Karakoram Pass directly into Kashmir, or tackle the relatively easier Baroghil Pass, still two miles above sea level, for a more circuitous route back to the raj.

The wise choice would be to stop gawking at the girl, finish his meal, and ride out. Until he was on Indian soil, he was not entirely safe—the Ch’ing authority, who had recovered control over the territory only recently, was not kind to spies. And anything that could delay his return added to the risk of being found out.

Yet he could not shake the feeling that his seemingly unreliable memory of having seen her before was not something to be ignored. That it had not been a case of two random strangers passing each other, but an encounter of significance.

The nature of which significance just happened to elude him entirely.

He drank from his wine, then stood up, jug in hand, and seated himself opposite her—the unwise choice it was, then.

The people of these parts were by and large friendly and hospitable. It was not uncommon for strangers to sit down together and chat. “You look hot, friend,” he said in Turkic. “Have some of this wine.”

Up close, her eyes were the color of a desolate sea, charcoal grey tinged with blue. Her lips, greasy from lunch, were the dark red of aged claret.

Without a word, she picked up the wine jug he had pushed across the table at her, held it above her head, and poured a fine stream straight down her throat.

The grace and precision of her action, the way her throat moved as she swallowed—his awareness of her was suddenly the sort to elevate his heart rate.

“Good wine,” she said, sliding the jug back to him. “Many thanks.”

When he glanced down at the wine, he saw that the dagger had also found its way across the table, its tip no more than two inches from his chest. He turned it around, and with a flick at the pommel, sent it skidding directly back into its scabbard.

“Good blade,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed. She slapped the table from underneath. The sheathed dagger leaped up a foot off the table, still perfectly horizontal. She knocked the dagger with her soup spoon. It flew directly at him.

He barely deflected it with the wine jug. The dagger fell to the table with a loud clatter.

One thing was clear: The show of force removed any doubt of her gender. Only a young woman traveling by herself would be so wary of being approached by a man, offering wine and friendship.

“Is this how the Kazakhs repay hospitality?” he asked.

She glanced around at the startled diners. Quickly, eating and talking recommenced on the part of the latter. She turned back to him. “What do you want, stranger?”

“Am I a stranger to you?”

“I’ve never laid eyes on you before. Of course you are a stranger to me,” she said scornfully. But she did return the dagger to her belt.

“But I have seen you. I don’t remember when or where, except that I have seen you.”

“So what?” Her small teeth sank into a piece of carrot from the soup. “I have seen a thousand strangers on these roads. Passed them without a backward glance.”

She was full of thorns, and just short of loutish. But strangely enough, he felt more at ease with her than with a roomful of eminently proper English misses.

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

He wasn’t usually so loquacious. Though he absorbed languages with the ease of white cloth in a vat of dyes, he rarely spoke unless spoken to, in any of those languages.

“West,” she answered tersely. “You?”

She was studying his face. There were places in the world where his green eyes would be a dead giveaway of his racial origin. But fortunately, in the heart of Asia, there existed natives with eyes of sky and forest, and every color in between. And he was now sufficiently tanned to pass for one of them.

“West, too.” Then he surprised himself by telling something close to the truth. “Kashmir is my eventual destination.”

“Lucky you.”

“Have you been to Kashmir?” And was that where he might have met her?

She shook her head. “No, but I’ve heard it’s a nice place.”

There was an odd wistfulness to her voice, the way an invalid stuck at home might speak of the world outside. She lifted the wine and drank as she did before, her fragile-looking wrist remarkably steady as she suspended the heavy jug above her mouth.

He swallowed. There was nothing retiring, modest, or pliant about her. Yet for reasons he couldn’t fathom, he found her blatantly, ragingly feminine, like a pearl at the tip of a knife.

She set down the jug. Their gazes met—and held. She had been wary and hostile, but now she was tense in a way that seemed not entirely related to her earlier distrust of him.

Pushing away what was left of her soup, she asked, “Where are
you
from?”

She knew, the thought came to him. She knew that he had seen through her disguise.

“Persia.” He gave his standard answer—Parsi was one of his strongest languages.

“You are far from home.”

There was an accent to her Turkic, and not a Kazakh one—the only thing Kazakh about her, as far as he could see, was her clothes. Perhaps Turkic wasn’t her mother tongue. But so many different variations of the language were spoken over such a large territory by so many different people, it was quite possible that she hailed from an area or a tribe unfamiliar to him.

“Some of us are not meant to grow old where we are born,” he said. “You, my friend, are you also far from home?”

A shadow passed over her face, something almost like pain, as if home was so distant as to be beyond reach. Then she shrugged. “Home is wherever I am.”

Oddly enough, he felt an answering pang of longing. Not so much for the mortar and bricks of home, but for the idea of it, that safe, happy place he had once known. “Where will you be making your home next?”

She thought for a moment. “Kashgar.”

He would reach Yarkand much more conveniently by turning south a hundred miles or so before Kashgar and following the course of the Yarkand River upstream. But he found himself reluctant to contemplate that faster path. He did not want them to part so soon, still strangers.

“Perhaps we can share the road for a few days, if you are traveling alone.”

After having traversed the territory all the way to the Altai Mountains and back, another hundred miles or two hardly mattered.

If, that was, she agreed to it.

Surely she must understand the average criminal would gravitate toward an easier quarry. And she was a poor target if one were out for gold: Her blue tunic was frayed at the cuffs and the hem, the embroidery along the lapels long ago soiled into squiggles of greasy black.

She popped the last piece of bread into her mouth. A desire to kiss her, bread crumbs and all, shot through him like a bullet.

“Well, the road does get lonely,” she said.

She did not move—or at least he could swear she did not move. Yet all at once she twirled a palm-size grape leaf by its stem. It was early yet in the year; the vine that spread on the trellis overhead was not weighed down by ripe clusters of fruit. He would have to stand with an arm stretched to pluck a leaf. Yet she had done it while remaining perfectly still in her seat.

As a warning, it was far more sobering than a rattling of the dagger. She was stating, quite plainly, that she could cut his throat before he even knew what happened.

He smiled, thoroughly impressed. “So you will permit me to accompany you?”

She, too, smiled, now that she had established she needed barely lift a finger to take his life—a smile as sharp as her blade. “Yes, do come along.”

For your copy of
My Beautiful Enemy
, click
here
.

More Books by Sherry Thomas

***

Young Adult Fiction

The Burning Sky
, Book 1 of the Elemental Trilogy

The story of a girl who fooled a thousand boys, a boy who fooled an entire country, a partnership that would change the fate of realms, and a power to challenge the greatest tyrant the world had ever known. Expect magic.

“Thomas weaves a lush, intricate fantasy world around a gorgeous romance that kept me riveted until the very last page. What a breathtaking journey!”—Marie Lu, New York Times bestselling author of the Legend series

The Perilous Sea
, Book 2 of the Elemental Trilogy

Available September 16, 2014.

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The Luckiest Lady in London

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