The Prince of Shadow

by Curt Benjamin

  The infirmary reminded him of his brother’s clinic, and almost he could remember the feel of the cold mountain air on his cheeks and the awkward weight of a too-large broom in his hands. Adar had taken a very literal approach to serving his people. There were no mountains in Farshore, of course, and the breeze blew warm and thick with green and growing things. But each place showed the hand of a healer of the soul as well as the body. The floor and walls were pale, scrubbed wood, the screens left open to the light and the air. The bitter tang of healing herbs and the sweet smells of soothing medicines mixed with the smell of scrubbed wood and boiled linen. He half expected to see Adar himself at the polished workbench, and the reminder of how impossible that was pricked tears at the back of his eyes.

  Bixei was sitting up in bed, Kaydu’s monkey asleep in the circle of his legs, when Llesho found him.

  “There you are!” he said when Llesho poked his head through the open window. “I was beginning to think you were dead!”

  “Not dead, just sleeping.” Llesho popped through the window, not bothering to look for the door, and flung himself at the foot of the bed. Bixei winced, and the monkey leaped away as if it had been shot from a springboard, screaming monkey obscenities down at them from his new perch on a crossbeam in the rafters.

  “Sorry,” Llesho said.

  “No big deal,” Bixei answered. “But you will have to apologize to Little Brother if you don’t want him throwing excrement through your window at night.”

  “Manners like his mistress,” Llesho commented.

  Bixei was holding onto his bandage protectively. After a moment during which Llesho ignored his questioning frown, Bixei shrugged. “Habiba has a woman apprentice and all her potions smell like flowers,” he complained, wrinkling his nose.

  “She’s not likely to poison you, though, which is an improvement,” Llesho said, and Bixei laughed in agreement. “Her cures don’t hurt as much as Markko’s, that’s for sure. But she has a temper. I heard her peeling the bark off Master Jaks. He was meek as a babe while she blistered him with her tongue. When she was done, he slunk away like his knuckles were smarting. Wouldn’t give you up to her, though, no matter what.”

  Llesho heard the question in the gossip, but he didn’t know what to say. “I was just sleeping.” Didn’t seem worth fighting about to him.

  “Little Phoenix—that’s Habiba’s apprentice—said that you’d been badly mistreated, that you needed care. Jaks said you needed your Thebin friends more, that you would need them around you if you were ever going to feel normal and safe again.”

  Bixei was watching him for a reaction. When he didn’t get one, he pushed a little more. “So where are they, your Thebin friends?”

  “They’re around.”

  Oh, hell. He’d kept it together, hadn’t thought about it or let it tear him down until now, but suddenly he couldn’t stop the shaking. He wrapped his arms tightly around his stomach and glared out into the infirmary while he fought the tears under control.

  “What did he do to you?” They both knew Bixei meant Markko, and the months spent in his workroom.

  Llesho shook his head, embarrassed enough for one day. He still wasn’t sure if they were friends or enemies, or if Bixei would believe him. After all that had happened to him, the months in Markko’s workroom were such a little thing. . . .

  In spite of his effort at control, Llesho started to cry, tears falling silently and unstoppably down his copper cheeks. “I was afraid all the time. That he would misjudge the dose and kill me with his poisons, or that he wouldn’t, and I’d have to go through it all again, puking up my guts on his floor while he took notes on how long it took for my legs to uncurl from the back of my head.

  “Sometimes, he threatened to burn me for a witch if I didn’t give him the healer Kwan-ti, but I didn’t know where she had gone.”

  He never would have given the healer up to Markko. Not ever.

  “Sometimes I wondered,” he said to the distance, as if he could see the past like a play acted out on the surface of his eyes. “If Markko himself did not invent the Blood Tide, for his own purposes. Maybe it was all a game to destroy Lord Chin-shi from the start and Kwan-ti never mattered to him at all, except as a name to burden with his own crimes. “

  “I was afraid of him, too,” Bixei admitted, offering what comfort he could, though the shock that widened his eyes made it clear he had never guessed how bad it was for Llesho. “I don’t think that makes either of us weak.”

  The image of Lord Chin-shi dead by his own hand in the dirt of the arena filled Llesho’s mind with questions, and a warning. “I think that makes us smart.”

  Jaks chose that moment to make his presence known at the same window Llesho had entered through earlier. “I think you are right,” the teacher said. He rested his forearms on the windowsill, but did not pull himself through as his student had done. “Has Bixei been telling tales again?”

  “Half the compound must be telling tales about your arguments with Little Phoenix,” Bixei returned. “You were loud enough that I’m surprised you didn’t wake Llesho out of his trance.”

  Jaks looked uneasy. “Trance may be more than a joke, so don’t repeat it, please.”

  Bixei hung his head, though Llesho wasn’t sure whether he did so out of submission to his teacher’s will or out of resentment. Jaks held out a bit of news as a peace offering: “Master Markko has disappeared.”

  “Was he a spy for Lord Yueh?” Llesho asked.

  “Yueh may think so,” Jaks answered, “but I doubt Markko considers himself a servant to any man. Lady Chin-shi has also disappeared. It is unlikely she still lives.”

  Llesho knew what that meant. Lady Chin-shi had been Markko’s champion, against her husband. But Markko returned no feelings of loyalty to his patron, who would have become an inconvenience and an impediment to his escape once his mischief had been done.

  “There’s my other patient. You have brought him to me after all, Master Jaks?”

  A small golden woman with straight dark hair entered the infirmary through the door and tsked at the monkey chattering in the rafters. She wore the plain coat of an apprentice healer, so he wasn’t surprised when Master Jaks introduced her.

  “This is Little Phoenix. She assists Habiba in the matter of cures and potions in the governor’s house.”

  “I won’t hurt you.” She took his face in her hands and stared into his eyes. “I hadn’t heard that Lord Chin-shi used torture on his slaves,” she commented to the weaponmaster, who had dropped back as if he wished to escape this part of the conversation. For Llesho’s benefit, she added, “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.”

  Llesho clenched his jaw around the black pearl caught between his teeth, but Master Jaks twitched an uncomfortable acknowledgment. “His lordship learned, to his regret, that one welcomes such as Master Markko to the bosom of his home at the peril of all he holds dear.

  Llesho paid attention with both ears to the healer’s question and Master Jaks’ answer. He’d only thought of it as misery when he’d been going through Master Markko’s torment, hadn’t given it a name or known that it showed.

  “Perhaps, if he is fortunate, he will carry the lesson into his next life, where it may do him some good—your tongue, boy.” She managed to scowl at both of them while tapping her foot impatiently. Llesho slid his tongue out, but kept his teeth as close together as he could. He opened wide when she took advantage of the small opening to insert a wooden wedge and press his mouth open wide.

  “You’re lucky he has a brain or a heart, or can stand on his legs at all, Master Jaks. The monster has been feeding him poisons; you can see by the discoloration here, and on the roof of his mouth.” She gestured with the stick in his mouth, but withdrew it before Jaks could take a look. “Fortunately, he comes to us with protections of his own. Den’s work?”

  Jaks shook his head. “Not until the very end.”

  “Someone, then, has done you a favor. If he relied on the pro
tection of his master, he’d be dead by now. I don’t know what Markko was thinking, but this boy should be dead.” Taking the stick out of his mouth, she nudged his chin up with the palm of her hand, asking Llesho neither for an explanation of Markko’s thinking nor for the source of the pearl between his teeth.

  “He needs pure food and warmth and rest, maybe a tincture to leech the poisons from his bones. And I want him here, under observation, for tonight at the least.”

  “No. I’m going home.” Llesho stopped breathing, brought up short as he surprised himself. He did not see in his mind’s eye the house he now shared with Lling and Hmishi when he said, “home.” Didn’t see the barracks at Pearl Island, or the longhouse where the pearl divers slept. He saw Thebin’s high, sere plain, its stunted trees twisted in the thin cold wind, and the snow, drifting to the roofs of the scattered farms and cottages. In memory he looked out at the city from the balcony of state at the Palace of the Sun. He saw temples to the gods of a hundred different faiths. The largest, devoted to the Goddess of the Moon and the symbolic home of his mother the queen, glowed in the rose of a sunrise spearing through the mountain passes to the east.

  Somehow, Master Jaks saw where his mind had taken him. “It appears that Llesho has other plans,” he said, but the set of his mouth and the hard determination in his eyes promised more.

  “And Bixei?” Llesho asked.

  “That boy is going nowhere,” Little Phoenix complained. “He has dressings to change, and wounds that need healing.”

  “We don’t know who we can safely trust here,” Bixei seemed to be weighing something in the way Master Jaks centered all his attention on Llesho. Finally he decided. “Somebody’s got to watch the pearl diver’s behind out there.”

  So. Friends, then. Something settled quietly into place for Llesho. He gave the other boy a mock frown and a tart, “Keep your eyes off my behind.”

  Then he grinned. With Bixei at his back, and his Thebin friends around him, he could ignore for a time the sense of powers closing in on him. “Girls fight in the governor’s army,” he said with glee.

  “No boys?” Bixei demanded, even as Master Jaks was advising, “They are women. I’d suggest you remember that if you want to finish your training with all your parts in working order.”

  Little Phoenix took pity on him. “Yes, Bixei, there are men in the guards as well, but you will have to ask for the first date.” She ruffled his hair affectionately. “The rules of the governor’s house don’t permit active guardsmen to take advantage of the novices.”

  “Kaydu can take advantage of me if she wants,” Llesho volunteered just to make his teacher take that playful swat at his ear. Bixei looked doubtful.

  Jaks seemed to understand his hesitation. “I’ve never seen a will that didn’t find a way,” he offered. Something seemed to pass between them then, assurance and warning, and acceptance of both. Then Bixei gave one sharp nod.

  “All right, then. I’m ready to leave.”

  Little Phoenix glared at Master Jaks, blaming him for the flight of her charges.

  “Not a bit of sense if you put all your brains together. Well, take him if you must, but bring him back in the morning to check those wounds. Habiba will have all our heads if we bring infection into this house.”

  “Yes, Mistress Little Phoenix.” Llesho knew when he had gotten off more lightly than he deserved, and he bowed deeply. Even Master Jaks at the window gave a respectful nod of his head.

  Bixei could not bend without pain in his leg, but he dropped his eyes in an appropriate display of submission. With Llesho supporting him under one arm, he walked slowly back to the novice house they would share with the Thebin pearl divers turned provincial guards.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bixei said as he looked around the water gardens. Llesho didn’t say anything. He was thinking about his mother’s gardens, hardy plants that defied the winter and the hard land that ran with water only during the spring thaw. Jaks said nothing, but set his lips in a grim line. Llesho wondered what gardens the teacher saw in his head, and if he missed wherever his home had been before slavery and the arena brought him to Farshore.

  “Where are you from?” Llesho asked his teacher, filling the silence. The question broke half a dozen taboos between slaves, but the infirmary seemed a place out of time somehow, and made many impossible things seem reasonable—like asking a weaponmaster a personal question.

  “Farshore.”

  Bixei gasped, but Llesho met his gaze levelly and said nothing more. Slaves came from three sources: conquest, prisons, and birth to a slave. Bixei had been born into slavery. He struggled to better his condition in the arena, but none of his actions revealed any fragments of a lost past. He’d assumed that Master Jaks, like himself, had been captured in a battle or raid, but Farshore had been a part of the empire since before Llesho’s grandparents were born. That left prison.

  There were hundreds of laws that could lead to indenture or slavery, including treachery and treason. Unbidden, speculation tickled at Llesho’s mind. He looked at the six tattooed rings on Master Jaks’ arm, visible marks on his body that warned all who saw him of the six men he had murdered as an assassin. Her ladyship had shown no sign of disapproval when she spoke of Master Jaks’ kills. Nor did murderers find their way to the slave markets, being considered too dangerous. So how had the man come to be a slave and a weaponmaster? Why had Llesho trusted him from the first moment he set eyes upon him? That wasn’t even a question. He had known Jaks, not personally or for the skill that named him master, but by the uniform he wore and even the rings on his arm. The king of Thebin had trusted his family and his nation to this man’s kind, of course, and had lost it all—nation, family, life itself. Could Llesho afford to trust again?

  Jaks said nothing, daring him to ask. Not today, he decided. Not until I understand what plots the governor’s lady is scheming and how a mercenary assassin turned weapons teacher fit into them. Knowing might make the asking easier, but Llesho thought it might just make the trusting harder. So he waited.

  Chapter Fourteen

  WITH Llesho awake, and Bixei added to the novice house, alliances shifted and clashed in ways that drove Llesho out into the night just to avoid the quarreling. Bixei, in his usual way, wanted to lord it over the house because he was older by a year, and bigger than the Thebins. Hmishi looked to Lling for direction. Lling wanted them all to shut up so that Llesho could rest, but Bixei wouldn’t listen to a girl even if he knew she was right. Llesho left them to bicker among themselves, hoping they’d come to some sort of agreement before he came back. Putting the din of his housemates behind him, he drifted down the flagged path toward the practice field, silent and empty at this time of night. Perfect for thinking.

  The fight with Kaydu had shaken him. If Master Jaks hadn’t stopped him, he would have maimed or even killed her. It wasn’t her fault, or even her failure of skill. Kaydu, after all, had thought they were sparring, and did not fight as she might in a battle to the death. That mistake had almost ended her life. Until the fight with Kaydu, Llesho hadn’t realized how completely focused on killing his knife training had been. He had heard the warnings, but Master Den and Master Jaks both had taken care never to let him get the upper hand in their sparring practice. Just when he thought he was getting close to a win, one or the other of them would disarm him before he could do any damage. He hadn’t realized that the only follow-through he had was deadly. Jaks believed that Llesho had already killed. If it was true, he was glad he didn’t remember.

  He shivered at the reminder, but something rattled loose in his mind in spite of his heartfelt prayer to forget: a guard, dressed like Master Jaks in figured leathers and a beaten brass belt and wrist guards, but with a bloody smile where his throat should have been. A Harn raider lay across the body, his eyes wide and glassy, Llesho’s knife buried in his back. The guard’s name was Khri, and he’d shoved Llesho behind a wall hanging that draped soft folds across a window overlooking the pal
ace gardens. Beside the window was one of the fragile chairs scattered about the halls for the convenience of the old men and women who advised the king. Hidden by the draping of the wall hanging, Llesho had climbed up on the chair. He drew his knife from the soft belt where his scabbard always hung, and waited until the battle for the hall had turned its back on him. Then he’d struck.

  At seven summers he hadn’t had the strength to stab a raider through his heavy clothing, not even with a knife as sharp as the Thebin blade he had carried. But the chair had slipped and sent him flying after the knife. With trained instinct, he’d turned the blade sideways and felt it slide between the raider’s ribs. The man had died, blood bubbling from between his lips. Too late to save Khri. Too late to save his father. Or his sister. Maybe too late to save his mother. The memory got all mixed up in his head with Lleck, floating in front of him in the bay, telling him to find his brothers. Not too late to save them, maybe.

  When Master Jaks said that he had killed, Llesho had wanted to deny it, to separate himself from all the violence and mayhem that had marked his life, right up to the Blood Tide and Master Markko’s poisons and Lord Chin-shi, who had treated him kindly one night and then died at his own hand. With the new memory, however, had come the tactile recall of blood slick on his knife, his fingers, and the pure fire of rage that had lit his young heart. If he’d been older, if he’d been trained in all the weapons of a warrior, he would have raged through the palace with the wrath of the ages, cutting down the Harn raiders like wheat in a storm. After all these years, the desire to fight his way to the throne room and stop the slaughter returned to him so powerfully that he pulled the knife from his garments and slashed around him in a wide swath, imagining the necks of raiders in its path.

  “Whoa.”