by Tanya Huff
His voice quavering just a little, the bard Sang a gratitude and sent the air kigh on its way. Although the salt breeze was cool, he wiped a dribble of sweat from his brow before he turned to face his guest. Guests. “We won’t get an answer for a while,” he explained. “Would you like some, well, lunch?”
*Well, would I?*
She could feel Gyhard’s approval. *Lunch is good.*
*Lunch is all. I don’t care how friendly we need him.*
*Having touched Bannon’s mind, I can see how you might have gotten this impression, but not all men think about sex all the time.*
“And if it’s all right, I’d like my partner to look at you,” Tomas continued, taking her silence for assent. “He hasn’t a full healer’s talent, but he’s a good diagnostic and I’d like to show him proof that the fifth kigh exists. That is, if you and, uh …”
“Gyhard,” Vree prompted.
*He has the worst memory of any bard I’ve ever met.*
*I don’t think he wants to remember.*
“Yes. Gyhard. If the two of you don’t, well, mind?”
“No.” When his face fell, Vree frowned. “Yes?” When he only looked confused, she sighed. “The words in your language get … mixed.” Hands spread, she said very slowly, “You may bring your healer.”
“Good.” The bard finally managed a smile. “I hope you like fish.”
*What do you man, he doesn’t want to remember?*
*Isn’t it obvious? This whole slaughtering fifth kigh thing, you being here in my body, has screwed up everything he thought he could be sure about in his entire life.* Vree perched on the edge of a huge fan-backed wicker chair and, out of habit, adjusted her daggers. *You’re good at that.*
*Vree, are you about to begin your flows? You seem unreasonably angry.*
*Jiir forbid I should be angry at you for destroying my life? For nearly killing my brother? For deciding what I do and do not need to know about potential danger?*
*For loving you?*
*Yes. No.* She sagged into the chair. *I wish you’d quit bringing that up. It doesn’t have anything to do with …*
*You?*
*Oh, shut up.*
Gyhard tried to remember how close they were to the next dark of the moon. There were aspects of occupying a woman’s body that had never occurred to him during the previous six lives he’d lived. He thanked all the gods the Circle contained that he wasn’t facing those complications alone. If Vree had made it to his/Aralt’s chamber before her brother and he’d taken over her body … He shuddered.
* * * *
Brow furrowed, Tomas listened to the message the kigh brought out of the Empire and tried to keep from glancing over his shoulder to where Vree—“No, Vree and Gyhard,” he corrected himself silently—sat talking quietly with Adamec. His partner had been first skeptical and then, after laying on his hands, ecstatic. He’d had a thousand questions. Tomas only had one.
“You can trust Vree completely,” Karlene told him through the kigh. “She’ll kill to survive, but I believe that’s it. Ignoring for the moment the implication I would’ve even considered sending a maniacal murderer to Shkoder—Imperial assassins don’t work that way. If anything, they’re too controlled. All she wants is to talk to our healers and see if there’s anything they can do to find Gyhard a separate life.” The kigh paused and their ethereal noncolor seemed to darken. “Gyhard, on the other hand, you can’t trust. He’s spent over a hundred years jumping from body to body—I don’t know how he does it; I wish I did—and this is the first time he’s been in a willing host. It’s also only the second time he hasn’t killed the host and the first time with Vree’s brother Bannon was, as I understand it, a fluke. He says he loves her, but I personally am not sure I believe him.”
Tomas grinned a little at that as the emotional nuance the kigh gave to the words indicated that Karlene herself had an intimate interest in the tiny, Southern woman.
“Even if he does love her, I doubt it would be enough to change his basically amoral nature. This is, after all, a man who has removed himself from the Circle. We can’t do anything about justice as long as he’s sharing Vree’s body but he seemed to believe Gabris and me when we explained that if yet another host died because of him, that would be it. I explained the whole thing to Captain Liene, and if I’d known Vree’d be stopping at Pitesti, I’d have let you know as well. Final chorus—as long as it’s Vree in control of her body, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“You wouldn’t worry about it,” Tomas muttered after Singing a gratitude and dismissing the kigh. How was he supposed to tell who was in control of the assassin’s body? With two kigh in a place where there should be only one, all nets came up empty. Why did he have to be the first bard to deal with this situation? “All right, third bard,” he amended, granting first and second place to Gabris and Karlene. Not for the first time, he felt completely inadequate. Although most bards who anchored the country at a Bardic Hall Sang all four quarters, he’d been given Pitesti because he Sang the two most common, air and water, very strongly and because King Theron and the Bardic Captain had agreed that a returning native might be more acceptable to the Broken Islanders than a perceived foreigner.
As he turned, he heard Adamec say, “I wish you could stay! There’s so much we could learn from you! So much we could learn to do deliberately instead of instinctively.”
“Trained instincts,” the young woman replied, “can be a powerful … tool.”
Crossing toward them, Tomas wondered what she’d intended to say. What had been discarded in that pause? Weapon, perhaps? She doesn’t look dangerous, he mused. With that pointy little face she looks almost fragile. Then she stood and the way she moved suddenly made him think of several deadly predators. It took him a moment to find his voice. “If we’re going to be on time for the trial,” he managed at last. “We’ll have to leave now.”
Vree nodded but remained where she was. “What did the air spirits, the kigh, tell you?”
“Well …” He weighed the information and separated what he thought he should pass on. “Karlene says I should trust you.”
“Are you going to?”
Meeting her steady gaze, Tomas saw strength and vulnerability about equally mixed and found himself in sudden sympathy with this strange young foreigner. “Yes,” he said, a little surprised by his reaction. “I am.”
*I wonder what Karlene told him about me,* Gyhard muttered.
Vree snorted. *I think you already know.*
* * * *
“Bertic a’Karlis step forward.”
Vree watched in horror as the armsmaster obeyed the bard’s command.
“Bertic a’Karlis, you will speak only the truth.”
*Are they going to do that to me?* She remembered the terrifying feeling of being held by an invisible fist the night they’d broken into Karlene’s chamber at the Healers’ Hall in the Capital. She’d broken the spell by having Bannon take over her body, but she didn’t have Bannon with her now.
*Calm down, Vree. They just want to make sure they’re getting at the whole truth. People’s lives are at stake here. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt.*
*I wasn’t worried about it hurting,* she snapped. *I don’t want anyone controlling my body ever again.*
*He won’t be controlling your body. In a minor way he’ll be controlling your mind.*
*That makes me feel so much better.*
*They don’t need your testimony as such, but if you refuse, you’ll be playing right into whatever rumors those merchants started.*
They’d definitely started something. Vree could feel the hostility rising from whispering clusters scattered through the crowd and wrapping around her like a dark fog. She’d seen mobs work before and couldn’t ignore the danger.
* * * *
“Vireyda Magaly, step forward.”
It wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be, but without Gyhard’s constant murmur of comfort, she doubted she’d have been able to stand
it. When it finally ended, she was covered in a clammy film of cold sweat.
As Gyhard predicted, her cooperation, combined with the apparent approval of Tomas and his partner, returned the hero status the Imperial merchants had nearly managed to destroy.
* * * *
The Raven’s carpenter and sail maker, impressed from captured ships and tortured to maintain their compliance, were set free. Unfortunately, the sail maker was no longer exactly sane. Three women in the early stages of pregnancy were taken aside—their sentences commuted until their babies were born. The rest, condemned out of their own mouths, stood bound on the beach before the council. Most of them looked numb, a few cursed softly, a couple wept. They all wore the marks of rotten eggs and fruit. The crowd had stopped throwing things only after the council had threatened to move to the privacy of the council chamber.
From her central seat in the semicircle of driftwood chairs, it was clear that Ilka’s position as eldest not only allowed her to run the council but also everyone on it. “You’re lucky we’re not on the mainland,” she declared, looking as though she considered them lucky indeed. “On the mainland you’d have to go through all this again before the king at a Death Judgment. Fortunately for us, our distance from His Majesty ensures a certain autonomy in dealing with the sort of people who have, over a period of some years, slaughtered, individually and collectively, upward of two hundred men, women, and children. In short, in dealing with scum like you.” She stood, accepted a staff carved with an entwined pattern of kelp and crowned with a leaping dolphin, and slammed its metal-bound butt three times into the smooth stones of the beach, “By the power invested in this council by Theron, King of Shkoder, High Captain of the Broken Islands, lord of a whole bunch of places that don’t mean fish shit out here, I pronounce sentence—hang them.”
The crowd released a collective, satisfied sigh and Vree thought she saw Tomas wince as he said, “Witnessed.”
* * * *
“Of course she’s dangerous. She just put an end to the most vicious crew of mass murderers we’ve had in these waters since my grandfather’s time.” Ilka nodded in satisfaction as the seventh pirate was hoisted kicking and writhing into the air at the other end of the beach, then turned her attention again to the pair of Imperial merchants. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Honored Councillor, you don’t understand.” Although he spoke Shkoden fluently, the merchant’s accent put strange inflections on the words. “Assassins are trained only to kill or be killed, for them there is no middle ground and they are never away from the army. For this one to be as she is, deciding to kill as she has, is wrong.”
“Very wrong,” affirmed his companion. “It is as though a sword moved through the world, striking and killing with no hand wielding it.”
The elderly councillor studied them, weighing their fear. “How do you know there’s no hand wielding her?” she asked at last. “Perhaps she’s been sent to kill someone in Shkoder, no one saw fit to tell the two of you, and you’ve just blown her cover to the other side. That’s treason, isn’t it?”
The young man paled. Frowning, the woman shook her head. “Assassins travel only as part of an army. They are targeted and released by the army. The Empire is not at war with Shkoder, nor do we wish them to be. War is very bad for trade.”
“It is that.” Hand disappearing into her robe, Ilka scratched at the white line of an old scar, received the day Pitesti fell. “So what do you want me to do about this wild sword of yours? If she’s too dangerous for Shkoder, she’s an unenclosed sight too dangerous to hold here. Even if we had a reason to hold her. Which we don’t. And besides, she spent the morning with the bard and if she was any kind of a threat, he’d have told me.”
“We know nothing of bards, Honored Councillor, we merely thought that someone should be told what we know of assassins.”
“Well, someone’s been told. In fact …” The sudden shrieking of a pirate brought face-to-face with his own imminent death cut her off. She waited until the noise stopped before continuing. “In fact, from the whispering I’ve been hearing, hasn’t just about everyone been told? Didn’t it occur to you that she could get annoyed about that and, if she’s as dangerous as you say, maybe you’d be better off not attracting her attention? You think on that, and I’ll think on what you’ve told me. Ass-kissing bottom feeders,” she added after the two recognized a dismissal, bowed, and scurried away.
“Still,” she sighed, a pair of pirates later, “personal admiration probably shouldn’t stand in the way of national security. Kaspar!”
A balding fisherman hurried over to her chair. “Yes, Grandmother?”
“Wasn’t there a Shkoden diplomat of some kind on the Fancy?”
“I think so, Grandmother.”
“Go find him, and tell him I want to talk to him.”
* * * *
Imrich i’Iduska a’Krisus, diplomatic courier between the Shkoden ambassador to the Empire and King Theron, stroked the point of his beard and frowned. “We’ve been on the same ship for nine days; I wonder why they didn’t bring this information directly to me.”
“Because you’re an officer of the Shkoden court, and I’m a sweet, approachable old lady.” She threw up her hands. “How in the Circle should I know? The point is, you have the information now. Forget it or pass it on, it’s all the same to me.”
* * * *
Vree stood out on the bard’s deck and watched the dark silhouettes of the hanged pirate crew swinging in the night. Although the air was warm, she shuddered.
Tomas, who’d been about to ask if she wanted something to eat before Adamec started in on her again, saw the movement and asked instead, “It bothers you?”
She shrugged without turning. “It is a slow, painful, messy way to kill.”
“You’re saying you could’ve done it better?” He couldn’t stop the incredulous question, recognized how insulting it sounded, and hoped Karlene’s assessment of the assassin’s temperament was correct.
“I am not … an executioner. I say, it is a slow, painful, messy way to die. And, yes, it bothers me.”
The bard swallowed and risked touching her gently on one shoulder. “It bothers me, too.”
When Vree turned to face him, her face was carefully expressionless and her tone matter-of-fact. “But they expect it to bother you. Please tell Adamec I will be in … soon.”
He could possibly have Sung his way past the barriers, but he suspected he wouldn’t have known what to do with what he found, so he merely nodded and went back inside.
*Vree? What’s wrong?*
*I’m in a strange country, speaking a language I barely understand, and I want to go home.*
*We can.*
*No.* She stared at the harbor without really seeing it. *I miss the army.* Her fingers dug into the soft wood of the railing. *I miss Bannon. I have no one around me I can trust.*
He didn’t so much understand her pain, as share in it. *You can trust me.*
The sound of the rope rubbing against wooden cross beams drifted up clearly from the beach.
*Vree?*
Two
“Vireyda Magaly.”
Vree turned and, even in the midst of the chaos on the docks, easily identified the woman who’d spoken her name. It almost seemed as though she could see a line drawn in the air between them.
*Bard,* Gyhard murmured.
*That would explain the robe.* But his single word had sounded nervous and Vree regretted the sarcasm. All at once, she found herself wondering how Gyhard felt about returning to Shkoder. He hadn’t asked for her interference back when he’d left Bannon’s body. She’d just grabbed him out of nothingness and since then she hadn’t once considered that he might have feelings that didn’t involve her—for all that she refused to acknowledge his feelings that did. The sudden realization froze her in place.
*Go on. She’s waiting.*
*Gyhard, I …*
*Not now.* Something in his tone suggested h
e could read the direction of her thoughts and found himself mildly amused by them.
If he didn’t want to come here, he should’ve said something before we left the Empire. Less easily defined emotions lost in irritation, Vree gritted her teeth and made her way toward the bard. The quartered robe covered a stocky body, condensed by age but far from frail. Above the robe, deep lines bracketed eyes and mouth in a well-weathered face and her hair hugged the angles of her head like a steel cap. She leaned on a heavy, no-nonsense cane that to Vree’s practiced eye had enough heft to make an effective club. Amidst the seemingly formless pandemonium that surged back and forth against the harborfront of Elbasan, the elderly bard stood surrounded by a nearly visible circle of competence and calm.
This is someone, Vree thought with relief as she ducked under a swinging net of cargo being unloaded from the Fancy’s hold, who can tell me what to do.
* * * *
Weight on her cane, fingers drumming against the quartered pattern carved into the handle, the Bardic Captain dragged her attention from the pair of kigh the young woman carried—despite the urge to begin investigating them immediately—to the young woman herself. She was younger than Liene had expected. But then again, these days, the captain grunted silently, everyone is. She was also smaller than expected and her lack of height, combined with her youth and the pointed features, resulted in an almost fragile appearance.
But there was nothing fragile in how she moved through the confusion on the docks. She used exactly the space available, sliding from opening to opening, never in anyone’s way, never allowing anyone to be in hers.
Assassin. Liene turned the word over in her mind. She’d never met a person who’d taken a life who hadn’t been, at least for that instant, insane. Karlene had insisted that the Empire had turned this young woman into a weapon without destroying her. Perhaps. Karlene had also insisted that her personal feelings had nothing to do with that analysis. Not likely.
Now this assassin was in Shkoder, asking for help; offering in return a chance for bards and healers to study the suddenly impossible to ignore fifth kigh. And it had to be done in Shkoder not the Empire where an assassin would be no more than a part of the military infrastructure for, in spite of the evidence, the citizens of the Empire barely believed in the original four kigh.