The Prince of Shadow (30 page)

Chapter Seventeen

HE must have slept, because the sky was gray and the grass was damp when a hand shook him. “Llesho!” Master Jaks shook him again. “Find yourself a bush, and then follow me.”

“What?” Mornings made him stupid, but Master Jaks answered as if it had been a real question.

“Her ladyship requests an audience.”

Llesho figured he must be stupider than he thought, because he couldn't detect any irony at all in his teacher's voice.

“Just a minute.” He rolled over, cracked open his eyes enough to see that his companions still slept soundly. Lling and Hmishi had moved closer to each other in their sleep, and foolish as it was to let it happen, the sight twisted in his heart a little bit. At first, out of the modesty that grew between diving mates, he'd worked hard to keep Lling from intruding on his thoughts. Later, after the ghost of Lleck had appeared to him with a reminder of his duty, he'd determined to go to his vigil night with a clear heart to offer his goddess. Now, when he found himself free of every obstacle between them, Lling herself was turning to another.

Master Jaks followed the direction of his thoughts with a wry quirk to his mouth. Llesho answered with a pointed glare. Maybe someday, when he was as old as his teacher, he'd be philosophical about it, but right now he didn't want to hear it. Didn't want to be up before it was time either. Even Little Brother still slept, his tiny paws curled under his chin, his tail curled lightly around his mistress' throat. Not an immediate threat, or a general call out to mount and ride, then; a more personal disaster pulled him out of his bedroll.

Wondering why catastrophe seemed never to arrive in the wake of a full stomach and a good night's rest, Llesho staggered out of the sleeping camp to water the bushes. He returned a moment later, only slightly more awake, to follow Master Jaks between the ragged knots of sleeping refugees to her ladyship's tent.

Someone, he realized, had been preparing for their flight long before they had actually left Farshore. The tent was as large as the governor's audience hall, with yellow silk walls and a red and blue striped awning for a roof. Inside, the floor was covered in thick carpets. Graceful hangings separated the private parts of the tent from the public area where her ladyship sat upon a high seat, surrounded by her generals. He wasn't overly surprised to see Master Jaks take his place at their head. Minions of less determined station, with the opaque eyes of spies, hovered nearby, in shadowed corners. In her ladyship's right hand, resting across her lap, she held the ancient spear that Llesho had last seen on Pearl Island.

As it had then, the spear sent a chill through him, and he felt a faint dislocation when he looked at it: nausea, like the way he felt in the pearl boat on a stormy sea. At her feet he saw a map he had at first mistaken for a carpet. He tried to focus on the map instead of the spear, and found that his stomach settled and the map stayed where it was without troubling his vision.

Tall, narrow tables scattered at her ladyship's left and right held the remnants of a meal: a teapot and cups, and various ornaments that the lady fondled thoughtfully before turning the sword's point of her gaze upon Llesho.

“Tea?” she asked.

When he answered, “Yes, please,” she put the short spear aside and poured with her own hands from the pot into two unmatched bowls. One was of jadeite, so thin that the light of early morning shone through its intricately carved design, laying patterns of light and shadow on the table. The other was of finely thrown porcelain, with gilt around its rim and decorated on the bowl with a portrait of a lady in a garden.

Her ladyship waited, as if she expected something of him, and Llesho hesitated, his hand poised over the porcelain cup. But the jadeite bowl called to his touch with the whisper of old memories he knew were not his own. Slowly he let his hand drift over to it, and gently he traced with his fingertips its carved designs.

“I know this cup,” he said. The smile that stretched his lips felt alien to his mouth. He could not know it was the smile of a man long dead, but when her ladyship looked into his eyes, her wistful sigh fell strangely on his ears, as if for that moment she saw in him a memory he did not share.

When he had finished his tea, she gestured for a servant to wrap the jadeite cup safely for the journey. Then, taking the package, she held it out to him. “Take it with you. Keep it safe for your children.”

“I couldn't,” he answered, and left it sitting on her outstretched palm.

“It is yours. It always has been.” She tucked the bundle carefully into the folds of his shirt. “The governor is dead,” she informed him, and Llesho wondered at her control, to drink tea with a fallen princeling with the wound of her husband's death still fresh on her soul. “Yueh moves on Thousand Lakes Province, with Master Markko at his right hand. Habiba rides before us, to warn my father of the coming storm. I wish we had more time, but our fortune is cast, and we can but play out the fall of the rods.”

Taking up the spear she had set aside, she looked at him out of eyes grown cold with the baleful mystery that made him cower within the shell of his own body. He let himself relax only a little when she turned to the map between them.

“Tell me again about the Harn.”

His throat went dry. He had thought the lady would ask him about Lord Chin-shi, or Yueh, or Overseer Markko, but instead she studied the map before her avidly for the more distant danger. Llesho darted a glance at Master Jaks, who said nothing but showed no surprise at her question, either. There would be no escape from that direction.

“I was just a child.” What could he know of value to the governor's lady? “I don't understand what you want me to do.”

“You are a prince, and the beloved of the goddess.” She touched a single finger to his breast, and he burned there, falling into eyes large and dark as the pearl Lleck had pressed on him in the bay.

As if thinking of it woke the pearl from its hiding place, it throbbed as if it were trying to regain its original size. The small pain distracted him and he pulled back, disturbed by how easily he fell under the spell of her gaze.

The lady nodded, as if something in his response settled the doubts in her mind. “When the time comes, you will act according to your birth and nature.”

He knew by her actions that the tense was not a mistake, that she didn't speak to the pearl diver or the novice gladiator, but addressed the scion of a house as noble as her own. In spite of his exhaustion, his spine straightened, his chin came up, and he returned her level glance, aware only at a distance that the ache in his jaw had subsided.

“They use promises of riches and shared power to lure their spies.” He didn't know why he told her that first of all the things about the Harn he knew or guessed. When she closed her eyes and bowed her head, he saw that it was what she feared but had expected. Yueh. It made sense. The Harn were a plains people who went on horseback more often than afoot and had no temperament for cities. They ruled by indi rection, putting the traitors of one captive people in positions of power in the captured lands of another, so no fellow feeling would grow between the conquered and their overseers. The Harn themselves came and went at will, took what they wanted in lives and wealth, and returned to the smooth round tents that sprouted like leather-cased mushrooms wherever they passed.

Her ladyship gestured to the map at their feet. Llesho fell to his knees to study it more closely, and he felt the breath of Master Jaks leaning close over his shoulder, following the play of Llesho's fingers across the map. He recognized bits of it from school in Thebin, but that had been years ago, and much of what he hadn't forgotten had changed.

“Thebin,” she gestured with the point of the short spear in her hand to a dusky orange blotch scarcely bigger than his two fists set side by side. “Harn proper—” a large sweep of green for grasslands, Llesho supposed, lapped around Thebin on the north and swept up to a yellow square, perhaps a little bit larger, to the east. Yellow dominated the eastern portion of the map all the way to the blue that Llesho figured must represent the sea. “And the Shan Empire,” he supplied.

Shan was the name of the capital city and the empire it directed. Trade routes, he knew, had always run along the length of the yellow—the Shan Empire—through Thebin, and into the red that represented the unknown kingdoms at the end of the trade roads to the West. Trade passed up and down the road for the three months of summer and stopped again when snow blocked the mountain passes through Thebin for the ten months of winter. Llesho had lived seven summers in Kungol, the Thebin capital and holy city, and he still counted the years of his life by the imagined ebb and flow of caravans through the passes.

Sixteen summers, and most of them spent far from home. But the sights and smells of the caravans, and the bustle of the trade centers, remained with him still. The mountain passes had made Thebin rich, but that all changed when the Harn came. Now the horsemen controlled the western end of the trade route. And he saw what he had not realized before. Marked on the map, the city of Shan rested not a hundred li from the border between Harn and the Shan Empire. As far south of Shan as it was west of Farshore, the Thousand Lakes Province, outlined in red stitching on the map, lay like a glistening jewel set above the Thousand Peaks Mountains. And on the western side of those mountains, lay the green of Harn.

Somewhere behind him, Llesho heard the grunts of servants and the rumpling of silk being taken down and folded, the denser sound of rugs being rolled. The sun must be up. The thought slipped through his mind, and with it the knowledge that they must ride soon, or die. But he could not take his eyes off the map. He reached for it, slid from his chair to kneel, and touched his fingertips to the line of embroidered mountains curving in a crescent along the western edge of the Shan Empire. He stopped when his fingers came to the dusky orange of Thebin. The map could not show how high the mountains thrust into the clouds, or how airless those highest peaks were—how no man but a Thebin born could travel them. Children of Heaven they called themselves, who alone could reach for the garden palaces of the gods whose seed had set in the soil of the Thebin people. Outlanders stayed to the relative lower altitudes of the capital city, following the three major passes through the mountains. Llesho longed for the heights.

“You look like you are seeing God,” her ladyship whispered, and Llesho looked up at her with a tiny smile, sharing the secret.

“I am god.” Or should have been. He could not meet her eyes at the thought. His ritual had failed.

Master Jaks didn't bother to hide his skeptical snort, but her ladyship nodded, as if his words hadn't surprised her.

“Can you save us?” she asked.

Llesho shook his head. “I cannot even save myself. The goddess did not come.” He didn't think she would understand his explanation, but she took his chin in the curve of her fingers and lifted his head, kissed each eyelid closed against her piercing gaze.

“Yes,” her ladyship said. “She did. You are alive.”

Cool as a goddess, she terrified him. But her kiss sparked fire in his body, desire rising at the touch of her lips. He reached a hand to stroke her skin, and blushed with embarrassment when she withdrew into her chair. “I'm sorry,” he said after a long silence.
I am not a man. I don't know what to do.
He didn't say it, didn't know himself which of the myriad things he had to regret he meant: for the death of her husband, or because he could not save her from her own fate? For reaching out to her, or for not knowing what to do about it if she had moved into his touch instead of away?

Llesho could feel the army of Lord Yueh entering the foothills in pursuit of the weary refugees, could hear the beat of distant hooves on the grasslands, and he knew what troubled her ladyship because it had started the same way in Thebin. Travelers harried on the road, minor raids on outlying farms, spies bribed with promises. Yueh pressing from the east, the Harn pressing from the west, and Thousand Lakes Province between them, peaceful, fertile, free. But none of those things for long. He turned to leave her ladyship with her knowledge of doom, but she stopped him with a word.

“Take this.” She held out the short spear to him. He shuddered but did not take it. “Like the cup, it belongs to you.”

“It killed me once,” Llesho objected, though he didn't know how he knew. His arms wrapped instinctively around his middle, feeling the jade cup nestled in its wrappings under his coat. “I think it means to kill me again.”

“I cannot keep it for you any longer.” She held it out, watching him through eyes that held no hope, but endless calculation, and he took it from her, though he believed he would have been safer accepting a viper from her hand. Then she offered him what he wanted most in the world: “You are free now, of all but your own quest. Find your brothers.”

He didn't ask—she saw the need in his face, and gave him this prize with no promises in exchange.

“The records are in Shan and so is the one they call Adar.” Adar. Llesho bowed. Adar. The name slid through his mind like sunlight and peace, and he wanted his past back so much it hurt to think of it. But he let none of that show.

The servants had taken the tent down around them, had packed up most of the rugs and waited for her ladyship to finish the audience so they could pack the last of her furnishings. “Our paths divide here.” She physically withdrew, hiding her hands in the sleeves of her robe. “Go now. Take my prayers with you, and my general, Master Jaks, for guidance and protection on the road.”

Master Jaks protested with a deep bow and a request for a word with her ladyship. Llesho left them together, to find the camp in an equal state of hurried preparation. When he reached his own companions, they had packed his blanket roll and saddled his horse.