The Prince of Shadow

by Curt Benjamin

  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—ho
w 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.

  “We are ready to ride as soon as we receive the signal,” Bixei told him, but Llesho shook his head.

  “We ride now,” he said. And to Kaydu, “Can you guide us to Shan?”

  “I’ve never been that far,” Kaydu objected. “My father had hoped that Master Jaks would ride with us as our guide.”

  “I don’t intend to give him that option.”

  “Why not?” Kaydu studied him for a long minute. “Master Jaks has sworn on his honor to see you home. The governor accepted this debt of honor in his contract—to deny him would be to dishonor him.”

  “The governor is dead,” Llesho informed his companions. “And Master Jaks owes the greater debt to his lordship to keep his lady safe. Either way he chooses, Master Jaks must sacrifice his honor. Unless we take the decision out of his hands.”

  Kaydu closed her eyes to hide her sorrow, but a tear leaked from under her lids and ran down the side of her nose unhindered. “I see.” She nodded and pulled herself lightly into her saddle, but Hmishi took the reins of Llesho’s mount and refused to move. “What is in Shan?” he asked.

  “Prince Adar.”

  Lling’s eyes opened wide. “The healer prince?”

  “My brother. I ride to find him, and the others.”

  Hmishi stood out of the way then, and cupped his hands to help his prince into the saddle. Lling scrambled onto her horse without another objection, but Bixei stayed where he was. “I can’t leave,” he said, “Stipes . . .”

  “I know,” Llesho agreed. Yueh had purchased Stipes for the arena, but he would use every trained fighter he had to invade Thousand Lakes Province. Bixei would not leave Stipes to the enemy. “Tell Master Jaks that if he delivers her ladyship safely to her father, then all his debts of honor are paid. My own fate is in the hands of the goddess. Good luck.”

  Llesho set the short spear from the lady at his back, though it made him tremble to touch it, and turned his horse. Kaydu nudged her own mount with her knees, urging him to the front of their little band.

  “This way,” she said, and guided them to the bottom of the clearing. Little Brother caught up with them at the stream, chattering indignantly to be taken up with his mistress. Kaydu pulled the sling from her pack and wrapped it over her shoulder, holding it open for the monkey to scramble in and make himself comfortable for the journey. When he had settled, they crossed the stream and entered the forest that rose on the other side.

  PART THREE

  THE ROAD TO SHAN

  Chapter Eighteen

  THROUGHOUT the morning Llesho’s tiny band pressed more deeply into the forest, making brief stops only to water and graze the horses in the occasional grassy breaks in the trees. When the path grew too steep for them to ride, they walked alongside their animals, leading them by the reins. By midafternoon, however, the horses were stumbling with exhaustion and the humans were doing no better. Llesho would have urged them to continue, staggering until he dropped, but Kaydu pulled him up short with a tug on his arm.

  “Enough,” she said. “We will rest here, and eat. The horses need a break as badly as we do.”

  Llesho stared at her, not understanding. He had only one model for such a journey—walking until his legs gave out then going on, carried in the arms of another until that one dropped in the dust of their passage.

  “If we stop now, we can travel again for a few hours before the sun sets, and make better time for the rest.” Kaydu was watching him for some sign that he understood, so he nodded and dropped to his knees. Only then did he hear the rush of water over rocks. A stream, and fresh, from the sound of it.

  Rest. Why hadn’t he thought of that himself? He wasn’t, after all, a Harn raider. Not a very good prince either, apparently, but he’d have to pretend for a few minutes longer. His three companions—four, if you counted Little Brother peeking out of his sling—were watching him expectantly. Lling spoke up in the silence.

  “Should we scout the area, post a guard in case Lord Yueh’s men have followed us?” she asked.

  Kaydu took the suggestion for a call to informal council, and shook her head. “We can take turns at guard duty,” she said. “We can fight if we have to, but we’d do better to run if Markko has sent a pa
rty to track us.” She looked at Llesho. They were all weary, but they could probably push on, except for him. He was the only one of them carrying a child’s memories of the Long March on his back. Once again others were making decisions based on his survival above their own.

  “We have to know if Master Markko is following.” Llesho hardened his voice to keep the words from shaking on his lips. “And if he is, we run until we fall, and then fight until we die.”

  The looked their unspoken questions at him, and he returned their gaze with his own bleak glare. “I will not be his prisoner again.”

  Hmishi tipped his head in silent obedience to his prince and slipped away, into the trees. Lling needed more convincing. She was Thebin, and she would follow wherever her prince led. Her analytical mind, however, craved reasons.

  “He’s a powerful magician,” Llesho explained, “with a particular interest in poisons.”

  Her eyes went wide. Wordlessly she picked up her bow and a quiver of arrows. Scouting for a secure lookout point, she picked a tree and climbed high into its branches.

  “What did he do to you?” Kaydu asked.

  “Terrible things,” Llesho answered with a shudder. “But if that were all, it was nothing so bad that I would risk your lives over it.”

  “Then why?” Kaydu persisted.

  He wished Lling was there to do the explaining. From Llesho himself, to someone who did not know the ways of Thebin, it sounded . . . he didn’t know how it sounded, but he didn’t want to see the disbelief on her face.

  “Tell me.”

  He shrugged as if it were nothing—only my life, the life of my people, he thought—and struggled to find a way to tell the outlander the most private secrets of Thebin’s theocracy. That somehow, the governor’s lady had already known.

  “I am Thebin’s seventh prince of my father’s body,” he said, and Kaydu waited.

  “In Thebin, princes are wedded to the goddess on their sixteenth birthday. The prince is then considered a man full grown, but he is also a godling. If the wedding night goes well, the goddess may reward her new husband with gifts.”