They had all walked through the fire and come out wounded in one way or another, Llesho figured, and each had earned a place at his side at cost to heart or mind or body. Even Kaydu’s monkey-familiar, peering out of her pack at him, had served his quest, bringing help when they would have been murdered on the road without it. When the cadre sometimes overlooked his newly acknowledged status and treated him like a comrade-in-arms, he accepted their criticism or their teasing, grateful for the momentary forgetfulness. With the death of Chimbai-Khan and the elevation of his wary brother, Mergen, to rule the northern Harnish clans, however, no one was forgetting anything. They watched him like hawks—sometimesas a hawk, in Kaydu’s case. They were giving the Lady Chaiujin no chance to send Llesho after the khan into the underworld.
At the infirmary, Bixei and Stipes took up positions outside the door while Hmishi and Lling went round to the back. He would have questioned their fitness for duty so soon after their ordeal but Master Jaks had shown him long ago that a leader who wanted his orders obeyed didn’t give commands he knew would be ignored. The defiance in Hmishi’s still-awkward salute told him this time he didn’t want to challenge his friend’s determination. Kaydu shook her head, but followed him inside.
“You didn’t tell me it was a family meeting.” Llesho wondered why Shokar had failed to mention this important point. Adar lay upon his bed. Healers, everyone knew, made terrible patients, and this one was growing anxious to be up and about. Only Carina’s gentle insistence kept him in his place. He’d expected to find Adar, of course, but not Balar, who sat in the corner, one hand muting his lute at the neck while the fingers of his other spidered idly over the strings. Balar kept his eyes on his instrument when Llesho came in.
Lluka, however, stood away from his camp stool. “Blessed Husband,” he said with an ironic flourishing bow.
“You overstep,” Llesho warned him with a frown in Kaydu’s direction. He’d argued his status often enough with Kaydu and his cadre but that particular term was used only between husbands of the Great Goddess, and only at the exchange of most sacred oaths.
“Then don’t bring strangers to a family council.”
“Enough!” At Llesho’s sharp tone, Kaydu came to righting readiness, her hand on her sword.
The raised voices brought Bixei into the doorway, a pike held ready. “What?” he asked.
The company of princes gathered inside might fault the informality of his response; they did not doubt that his pike would find its mark in any one of them at Llesho’s least gesture. Balar looked shocked. But Shokar, who had ridden with Llesho’s witch-captain and his cadre, arched an eyebrow as if he watched the playing out of a game where the outcome was already clear on the board.
“You find humor in his threats now, Shokar?” Lluka demanded, his fury barely contained.
Shokar gave a little shrug. “His cadreis his family,” he explained with subtle patience. “They are his temple of worshipers and his first defense against the worlds arrayed to oppose him. If they perceive you as a threat to him, they will kill you. Given what I’ve seen of his captain, I’m surprised she hasn’t killed you already.”
“Llesho is supposed to findall his brothers.” Kaydu answered the question even though he hadn’t asked her. Since she couldn’t use her sword, she cut him with her words: “Not just the useful ones.”
“And what are we princes of the same father to him, if these ragpickers’ sons and daughters are his family?”
“Family again, someday, I hope,” Shokar suggested, “But right now we are his dim past and little more to him than the stones he picks up as he crosses the board his master set him.”
Not true,Llesho began to say, but it was more so than he wanted to admit, so he started again, with, “More than that.”
Lluka brushed aside his protest with a careless wave, his mind chasing a different conversational rabbit altogether. “And who would his master be?”
“Lleck, of course,” Llesho answered with an edge in his voice. “The ghost of our father’s minister. You know that.”
“Ah.” Lluka gave him a mocking nod. “Your adviser among the dead, and not the god of suds and linen who visited after prayer forms this morning, then?”
“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Llesho suggested with a tiny smile. He loved the trickster god best in his persona of laundryman, the hours they had spent together in the washtubs tipped with gold in his memory. But ChiChu, who went by the name Master Den in his mortal travels, suffered fools with little patience and malice not at all when directed at himself. Against others, he might give assistance, of course, which brought a laugh bubbling from Llesho’s throat. What a mad quest he pursued!
Lluka didn’t take kindly to his laughter, nor did he appreciate the weapons bristling in the tent.
“Oh, send them away. No one is going to hurt you here!”
“Pardon, Holy Excellence,” Kaydu begged permission to speak, directing her request at Llesho in the full title due the god-king of Thebin. She had grown up in the court of the mortal goddess of war and knew how to offer the camaraderie of a friend when it was needed and to turn any rough tent into a royal audience with a word and a shift of posture. Llesho followed her lead in this as he had so many times in battle. Drawing himself up with a regal tilt of his chin, he gave a slight nod for her to speak.
“We cannot, in conscience, leave the chosen husband of the Great Goddess unguarded.”
“Against his brothers?” Lluka gathered himself in a pose that mimicked deep offense.
Kaydu had grown up on easy terms with gods and emperors, however, and would not be cowed by a lesser brother. “Serpents are everywhere,” she reminded him with a pointed stare that challenged him to reveal the schemes bubbling beneath his public display of indignation.
Balar brought their arguments to an end with a discordant bleat of strings on his lute. “Adar is falling asleep.”
“No, I’m not,” Adar insisted around a yawn. “But I am heartily tired of the quarreling. Can we get to the point?”
“Which is?” Llesho demanded of his brothers. “You summoned me—I don’t know who called us together, or why.”
“Master Den has been in to visit,” Balar said, which explained much about Adar’s growing fretfulness.
“The old trickster exaggerates,” Llesho suggested.
It didn’t help his case that he offered the excuse before hearing the outcome of the visit. Even held to his bed by a broken bone and a wounded spirit, Adar wouldn’t be taken in by the lie. He said nothing, however, but waited for Llesho to continue.
“What has he told you?” Good start, Llesho applauded himself. Give away no advantage, but make the enemy come to you.
Adar refused to accept the role of enemy, however, and likewise refused to treat the discussion like a game. “That the Lady Chaiujin came to you with the offer of peace,” he said, “and you would have gone willingly to the underworld in her scaly embrace, had he not come along when he did.”
“That sounds more like a tale than you or Master Den talking.” They all knew he was stalling. He wondered if he should tell them what his dream-travel conversation with Shou had suggested—that the Lady Chaiujin never had made it to Chimbai-Khan’s great traveling city. The woman who counted herself the khan’s wife was no such thing, but a demon snake who had taken her place in the khan’s bed, and in his ulus. Before he could sort his thoughts, however, Lluka sucked in a breath to complain. Shokar took his lead from Adar and silenced their brother with a glare, but the moment had broken. Llesho decided to keep that bit of information to himself and watch, as Shou had advised him.
He wasn’t getting out of this conference without telling his brothers something, however. Balar looked up at him with a gentle smile, letting his fingers wander over the strings of his lute. “We’re not going anywhere,” he said, a reminder not only that they would wait out his silence, but also, perhaps, that he would not lose them by his answers.
With a little shrug,
Llesho decided to come clean, at least as far as his own experience went. “Carina gave me something to counteract the Lady Chaiujin’s love potion, but a trace still lingered. I could feel it, like an itch under the skin. It made me think about all the other mistakes I’d made since I started out. It was my fault Hmishi and Harlol and Master Jaks were dead. Tsu-tan might have killed Adar, too, and all because Master Markko wanted me for some purpose I still don’t understand. Now I seemed to have another enemy.
“And I was thinking about Shou and Lady SeinMa.”
Adar’s face had gone very bland through all of this, and Llesho should have worried about that. But the question, “Love potion?” gently asked, slipped right under his defenses. His brothers were holding out on the injured healer.
“She didn’t want me.” He’d been sure of that even when he’d wanted her. “I would have embarrassed our cause and made a complete fool of myself.”
“And you know this because?”
“You know the wedding cup I carry, that Lady SienMa returned to me at the beginning of my quest?”
Adar nodded to indicate he knew the cup, but didn’t speak. Llesho knew that was a trap, to draw him out, but he fell into it anyway.
“She served me in another, its match except for a symbol carved at the bottom, like a coiled snake. I was supposed to accuse the khan of stealing it from my pack, I think, but I recognized that the lip was thicker than my own cup. So instead of accusing her, I mentioned both the similarity and the differences.”
She’d made him a gift of it; he had it in his pack, carefully kept separate from his wedding cup. Unfortunately, she’d also had a backup plan.
“When I didn’t fall for the cup, she fed me the potion in the tea. That one did work, sort of.”
He’d enough experience with potions to know when he’d been dosed with one, and managed to get out of the lady’s presence before he committed a serious breach of etiquette, though the khan and those closest to him had seen the sudden longing in Llesho’s eyes. They hadn’t, he recalled, blamed him for his reaction to their queen, but allowed him his escape with good grace.
“Carina figured it out quickly enough and gave me an antidote that cleared most of the potion. But there was a bit of a residual effect I hadn’t counted on. I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”
“I figured that much.” His brothers seemed content to let Adar carry the gentle interrogation. Even Lluka had settled back into his chair and watched Llesho with eyes wide and nervous as Adar suggested another question: “Shou and the Lady SeinMa?”
“I wanted to see the emperor, so I asked my totem self where he was. I found him in Guynm Province. The Lady SeinMa had joined Shou in the old governor’s palace at Durnhag. And, well, they weren’t exactly interested in company when I showed up.”
He kept to himself his most recent visit, which had left him more confused than ever.
“You’ve been getting quite an education while I’ve been away.” Adar twitched his lips as if he had the bitter taste of unripe plums in his mouth.
“Oh, yeah. I’m learning to dream travel.” That qualified, without going into areas he shouldn’t have brought up at all. With any luck he’d divert their attention enough that they wouldn’t ask him any more questions about Shou or his love life. “Of course, you can’t guarantee what you’ll find when you travel in the dream world anymore than you can in the waking one.”
“I suppose the emperor of Shan tucked away with his lover surpassed the guarantee,” Balar commented under his breath. Llesho could see his brother plotting more than chord progressions in his head and wished he remembered how much Balar knew about the Lady SeinMa. It wasn’t any surprise that the emperor of Shan had a mistress, or even that he loved her. But the mortal goddess of war scared him more than Lady Chaiujin did, and with good reason. She was the embodiment in human form of all the chaos and bitter pain of war. Its strategy and gamesmanship, its sweep of courage and valor as well, but Llesho remembered mostly the chaos and the pain. He could not imagine loving that.
“So,” Adar summed up the high points for him, “with a love potion in your veins, and worry for your companions mixing with thoughts of lovers—disturbing lovers—in your head, you wandered off without a word to anyone, right into the arms of the Khan’s murderous wife.”
When put that way, it seemed pretty stupid—even Little Brother had sneaked back out of his pack to grin his disapproval—but Llesho had his defense ready. “I didn’t know about the murderous part, or the serpent part, then. Even Carina wasn’t sure why Lady Chaiujin dosed me with the love potion. It seemed like a political move to discredit our party in front of the khan. Chimbai-Khan might have ordered me killed for the insult to his wife, I suppose, but Bolghai is a friend of Carina’s mother and had trained Carina in the ways of a Harnish shaman. Master Den is pretty good at getting me out of the permanent kind of trouble and, on balance, it seemed more likely that the lady just wanted me to look foolish in front of her husband.”
“You were wrong.”
“Yeah,” Llesho admitted. “Still. She didn’t ask Mergen’s swordmaster if he wanted to die when she bit him, and I suspect she didn’t ask Chimbai-Khan if he was ready for the underworld either. So why did she ask me?”
“Not out of any romantic attachment,” Adar suggested dryly.
“She didn’t wantme, ” Llesho agreed, “Not in that way, at least.” He wasn’t ready to offer his suspicion that the mix of powerful emotions he had scarcely been able to contain had drawn her like a jackal to the smell of blood.
Adar seemed to understand what Llesho was thinking without being told, however. His mouth, already drawn in pain, tightened into a thinner line.
“Don’t wander out alone,” he said. “She’ll try again.”
Llesho was on the point of objecting that he wasn’t that foolish, but on second thought, wasn’t sure anyone, including his own cadre, would believe him. A mission from the newly elected Mergen-Khan saved him from further debate on the issue.
“Prince Tayyichiut, of the Qubal clan, to speak with his Holy Excellence King Llesho of Thebin,” Bixei announced just ahead of the Harnish prince.
Chapter Six
“TAYY,” LLESHO greeted the prince informally with a bow, as between equals.
“Llesho,” Tayyichiut returned the bow, but with a distracted air. The dogs had not accompanied him, so his visit must be official, or secret. “My uncle the khan would speak with you on a matter of some urgency for your quest.”
“I’ll come right away.” He’d have taken any excuse to escape his brothers’ disapproval, but Mergen had been questioning the prisoners captured during the recent battle.
They’d seized a handful of survivors. As a guest, Llesho had no choice but to put their disposition in the hands of Mergen-Khan. From what he had heard from Tayy, they’d talked quickly enough. Tsu-tan, the witch-finder, had scared even these hardened bandits, who told tales of possession by an evil demon of the underworld. They’d have been even more frightened if they knew how close to the truth they really were, but the khan hadn’t found anyone who had any useful information until now. Mergen-Khan’s summons must mean that he’d uncovered something important.
“I have horses waiting Up Top,” Prince Tayy added as they made their withdrawal from the unhappy brothers.
They had taken to referring to the two camps by their locations: the tent city of the Qubal clans “Up Top,” on the grassy plain, and “Down Below” in the dell through which the narrowed Onga flowed, the camp of Llesho’s small force. Yesugei called it Llesho’s honor guard, though at the moment it was the only army he had. Horses could manage the slope between the camps at a pitched run, but for convenience they gathered the animals Up Top, where the grazing and exercise were plentiful.
Llesho would have walked the easy distance between the infirmary tent Down Below and the ger-tent of the khan Up Top. Prince Tayy, however, considered it demeaning to go on foot. “Only slaves and servants would approach the
khan on foot,” he insisted. “Mergen-Khan will ask your opinion, but you will have to convince him that your words are worth hearing. To persuade him, your suggestions must carry the full weight of your own position as a king. At the least that means a horse.”
The Harn in their traveling cities of felt and lattice were more exacting in the formalities than the emperor of Shan with all of his stone palaces. Or perhaps, it was that those you didn’t trust had to announce themselves with their approach and stand inspection before they reached the seat of power. Llesho had come gift wrapped to the emperor, and after a trial run. In the camp of the khan, he hadn’t yet proved himself, so Llesho readily agreed to Prince Tayyichiut’s conditions.
With the prince at his side and his cadre at his back, Llesho crossed the beaten common. As he passed, soldiers of Thebin and mercenary volunteers from north of Farshore bowed in salute. Out of the corner of his eye, Llesho noted that he’d picked up his Thebin corporal and the Wastrel Sawghar again, pacing his cadre like outriders, ready to cut off any assassins hidden within bow range.
“I thought the prisoners had turned out to be a dry well,” Llesho commented, meaning no source of information. He hoped to draw Tayy out about the summons of his uncle, but the Harnish prince wasn’t filling his bucket any more than the prisoners had.
“They did,” he said. “My uncle the khan figured that out pretty quickly and gave them to his guardsmen as spoils of war.”
“Oh.”
Enslaving the prisoners made sense according to Harnish justice. The khan wouldn’t put a warrior to death for following the orders of his captain, but he couldn’t free him to fight again either. Slavery offered each captive some freedom of movement natural to the nomadic people while charging each slaveholder to control his new property with punishments as necessary. Llesho figured that he ought to be glad for anything the khan did to the witch-finder’s followers. After all, Harnish raiders—perhaps some among these very captives—had laid waste to his country, killed his mother and father and his little sister, and sold him into slavery as a child. In spite of all his arguments to himself, however, the fate of the prisoners reminded Llesho too much of his own.
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