“You finally woke up!”
“I thought you were going to sleep forever!”
Llesho smiled, drunk with that haze of good feeling between the breaking of a fever and the measuring, in the ache of movement, the losses the body had suffered.
“Give him space to breathe,” the healer warned. “Don’t get him excited; he’s still weak.”
His two old companions withdrew a few steps, punching each other in the shoulder and bobbing on the balls of their feet. But he did not see Kaydu anywhere in the cottage.
“Where’s Kaydu?”
Lling shrugged her shoulder. “She was afraid that we might be trapped in this cabin if Lord Yueh sent reinforcements after us. So she left, late last night, to scout the area.”
“When I went out to tend to the horses this morning, I thought I saw dragons in the distance—two of them, flying too high for me to be certain. Mara says that she will be safe enough, since the local dragons haven’t eaten people for several generations.” Hmishi twitched a shoulder in a companion gesture to Lling’s shrug. Neither wanted to think about what might have happened to Kaydu alone in the forest with dragons in flight and enemy soldiers on the ground.
Only the healer seemed unconcerned. “I am Mara. I would have introduced myself when we met, but you seemed to need someone else in my place, and I didn’t want to disturb your recovery with a little thing like a name.”
She eased herself down onto a low three-legged stool beside his bed and urged the cup to his mouth. “Don’t forget to drink,” she ordered him, but Llesho put up a hand to stop the cup from coming any closer.
“Kaydu,” he said.
“Will be fine. She’s a smart girl, and full of tricks. Don’t you worry.” Mara, the healer, held out the cup again, more insistently, and this time Llesho drank as he was told.
He expected something sharp and smelling of iodine, as Kwan-ti’s potions often did on Pearl Island, but this was sweet and light and smelled of flowers good enough to eat. When he would have drunk too fast she tilted the cup away from him with a warning, “Slowly, princeling, your body isn’t used to taking nourishment any more.”
By the time she had spoken her warning and he had nodded understanding he really didn’t have, he was ready to drink again. When she offered the cup, he slurped noisily, trying to take in as much as he could before she took it away. His childlike cunning made her laugh.
“Definitely improved,” she decided. “And well enough that I can afford to leave you in the care of your traveling party for a few hours. I have patients I need to see in the village, and they will have missed me by now.”
“What do you want us to do?” Lling stood between the healer and Llesho’s bed, looking down at him with concern hunching her shoulders.
The healer offered her the cup. “Get as much of this into him as you can, slowly at first, then let him set his own pace. If I am not back by evening, he can have some of the boiled fowl from the icehouse.”
She stood up and stretched out her back. Hmishi drifted over to listen as she gave her instructions. “He should sleep most of the day, but if he gets restless, you can prop him up on pillows—don’t let him try to sit on his own. When he needs to relieve himself, bring him the jar—he is not to get out of this bed until I say so!
“If he isn’t careful, he will tear the healing flesh.” She smiled to take the sting out of the warning. When she was certain she would be obeyed, she untied her apron and hung it on a hook. She put on her bonnet and tied it under her chin. Then, taking a cloak of mottled green from the peg beside it, she issued her final warning, “Don’t chatter too much, you will tire him. Remember, a relapse is always harder to treat than the original fever.”
With that she opened the door and went out, closing it softly behind her.
When the healer had gone, Lling moved purposefully out of his range of sight, and Llesho heard a clatter on a staircase he could not see, followed by footsteps overhead. Lling soon returned with a huge bolster full of goose feathers, and Hmishi lifted him up so that she could put the bolster under his shoulders. When his two companions had settled Llesho against the bolster, they sat cross-legged on the floor next to his bed. They could talk this way without looking down at him, and Llesho could see them without craning his neck.
He knew they were waiting for his questions, but first he gave a luxurious sigh and took stock of his surroundings. The house appeared to be small but comfortable for its occupant. He dismissed the upper loft, which he could not explore in his present condition, and which must contain few dangers to concern him if Lling could root around up there without setting a guard. The main floor was one tidy room with a single door and one large window with its shutter propped open with a stick. When he was sitting up like this, he could see most of the room. A fireplace and a table and chairs stood at one end, with shelves knocked into the wall next to the fireplace. In the corner by the door sat a three-legged stool and the low, grass-filled bed. Through the window, sunlight filled the space and left the silhouettes of pine boughs brushing the floor.
The light troubled him. He’d been awake for long enough that the quality and direction of it should have changed, but it stayed bright and soft as early morning. He didn’t want to let go of the delicious weightlessness he felt basking in the warmth of it, but they had been running from danger, and he didn’t think that danger had gone away just because he needed time to heal.
“Where are we?” he asked. “How long have we been here?”
Lling took the first question. “We’ve come about seventy li from Farshore. We were moving away from her Ladyship’s party at an angle, but we are still a hundred or so li from the outer border of Thousand Lakes Province, more than twice that far from the provincial capital. If her ladyship kept ahead of Lord Yueh, the refugees should have passed the border two days ago, and by now her ladyship’s father must have sent his own troops to escort her home. They may be watching for us along the frontier, but Thousand Lakes Province can’t do much for us unless we cross its border, which we don’t plan on doing if we can help it.”
If the refugees had already covered more than seventy li, he’d been asleep too long. Hmishi confirmed that assessment as he answered the second question. “We brought you here three days ago, I think. It’s hard to keep track.” The tremor in his voice gave him away. They had given up hope that Llesho would ever awaken. He wondered what had kept him asleep so long, but could remember only the fading dreams of another life. Which was real? he wondered. Was he sleeping now, dreaming of friends and feather pillows? Would he waken again to the Long March when he hit the ground, another Thebin subject dead beneath him, another taking him up in her arms and walking on?
He thought he could hear the whisper of the long grass in the distance, and shuddered. This was real: Lling and Hmishi, Kaydu gone to scout for trouble, and the sunshine casting bars of bough-patterned light against the old and weathered floor of the house in the woods. But this reality, he remembered, had a monkey in a coat and hat in it, and a bear cub that said his name, which sounded as unreal as any dream. He closed his eyes, too confused to take it in, too frightened of the alternative if this world wasn’t real. He’d almost died in this world, too, of course, and he wondered if the goddess left any path open for him on which he lived to reach his majority. She must have been really pissed off at him for the interruption of his birthday vigil.
Lling gave him a moment to regain his composure, then laid out their choices. “Our next step depends on what Kaydu finds during her reconnoiter. If Lord Yueh was pursuing the refugees and the scouting party stumbled upon us by accident, his army may not have stopped at the border. Thousand Lakes Province may be under attack even now, and we will find no sanctuary there. If the scouts were looking for us—” she did not say it, but they all knew she meant Llesho—“it is unlikely that we can outrun a trained army.”
Again, Llesho knew he was the obstacle to their escape. The others could run, or hide, but Llesho couldn
’t sit up under his own power, let alone escape a pursuing army.
“Sky Bridge Province is closer,” Hmishi continued, “not more than thirty li to the south, but the mountain passes are more difficult there. We would have to trade the horses for donkeys, and any spy who learned of it would know immediately that we had changed our route.”
“We’d be moving away from Shan and not toward it,” Llesho objected, still determined to reach the capital city and find Adar as soon as possible.
“But we’d be heading toward Thebin. Whatever plan we make will have to wait on Kaydu’s report.”
Llesho nodded his agreement, though what he expected to accomplish with just the four of them, all too young for legal freedom and Llesho with a hole in his chest, he didn’t rightly know.
Lling focused her gaze on the edge of Llesho’s bandaged side where it had escaped the blanket. “We don’t have to decide yet,” she said, “not until Kaydu finds out whether Master Markko is still looking for us, or if Lord Yueh has pulled off all his men to attack Thousand Lakes Province. In the meantime, Llesho needs to heal.”
Waiting sounded like a good idea to Llesho; he needed his friends working and thinking together when they went after Adar. He didn’t have the energy to persuade them to go to the capital city of Shan anyway—didn’t think he’d have much luck trying when he couldn’t stand up under his own power. But he wasn’t sure that they could stay where they were either.
“Do you think Kaydu is coming back?” he asked, and meant not, Has she betrayed us to our enemies? but, Has she been captured? and, Do we have to run now, before her captors find us, and while I am not yet sure which world I live in let alone what route we should take to freedom?
Lling frowned in a way that made Llesho think she had figured out the shades of meaning in the questions he was really asking.
“We’re as safe as we can be,” she said. “Or we have been, until now.”
Until now. Llesho wondered about that. Lling answered his frown without waiting for the next question: “We are still free, more or less, though Mara—the lady healer—hasn’t had much chance to betray us to Lord Yueh. She has stayed with you night and day since she brought us here.”
Thus the “until.” Whatever Kaydu’s fate, Lling didn’t think she’d give them up to Master Markko or Lord Yueh. The healer, Mara, however, could be reporting them to authorities in the village at this very minute. Those local officials might hand them over to anyone happening by with a provincial government badge on his cap.
“You don’t trust her?” They both knew which “her” he meant. Llesho wasn’t sure he could ride yet, but he could send his companions on ahead, out of harm’s reach, if he had to, and find his own way out of Lord Yueh’s trap. There was always the one final escape open to him, though he regretted the pain and exhaustion he had already invested in recovering from his injury.
Lling wouldn’t meet his eyes, but raised her eyebrows in question at Hmishi, who hesitantly took up the answer.
“I think she would do anything in her power to keep you from harm,” Hmishi began, “but she’s not Kwan-ti.”
The first part of Hmishi’s answer surprised him. Llesho had already figured out the second part for himself. “Has she told you who she is?” He didn’t mean the name, of course, but Hmishi repeated it anyway.
“Her name is Mara, and she says she is local to the village, and only uses this house when she is foraging in the wood for herbs and fungi to use in her medicines.”
“But the house had all the signs that someone had been living in it recently,” Lling observed. “No dust on the tables, the bed made with grasses still green from the plucking when we arrived. And there were fresh fruits and vegetables in the bins.”
“She had the medicines she needed for your wound right to hand,” Lling added.
Llesho did not look happy, but he admitted, “I know it doesn’t make sense, and you’ve both seen a lot more of the healer than I have, but I trust her.” He glared at his companions, defying them to contradict him. “It was something about her touch—I could feel it. I think that’s why I mistook her for Kwan-ti. There was something about her touch that just felt like a true healer.” They couldn’t object, however; they had all grown to like her, and for many of the same reasons.
“At first, when she cut out the arrowhead, I thought we’d made a mistake,” Hmishi said. “She seemed as cold as her blade, and even more unbending. I couldn’t even watch, but she didn’t flinch once, not even when you screamed that horrible scream and only the cloths tying you down kept you from rising right out of the bed.”
Llesho remembered that part, dimly, and it still had the power to turn his stomach. His companions seemed to feel the same way, for they had turned matching shades of green.
“And when she did that thing with the—” Hmishi couldn’t finish, just shuddered in revulsion, and gestured loosely at the bandages. Llesho remembered that part, too, and was regretting that he’d drunk so much of the healer’s potion so recently. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be pleasant on the return trip.
“I’d heard Little Phoenix mention the use of the carrion eaters as a battlefield treatment for rotting wounds,” Lling interrupted, “but I’d never actually seen it done. Hope I don’t again.”
Hmishi shook his head. “I don’t have to like it, but I can accept that it was necessary.”
Llesho knew he wasn’t in the best shape for logic, but even he could see that Hmishi was making a better argument for distrusting Mara than for trusting her. “So you like her, even though you don’t trust her and think she might be trying to kill me?”
He didn’t like the sound of that, but it was how his tired brain chose to phrase it.
“It was afterward,” Hmishi said. “She bandaged you and then gave us all instructions for keeping you cool. She told us what to say if you cried out in your sleep, and asked us to watch you while she cleared her mind. And then she went outside.
“We were all nervous then,” Lling said, “because we thought she had gone to find Lord Yueh’s men, to hand us over.”
“So I followed her,” Hmishi admitted. “I would have killed her before she gave away the location of this house, but she only went as far as the trail. She brushed away the marks of our boots and the horses’ hooves, and scattered fresh branches to erase all the signs of our camp. She was angry. It took me a few minutes to realize that she was praying while she worked, and that she was addressing heaven in that tone of voice mothers use when you leave the gate open and the goats get loose in the vegetable garden.
“She was furious because you’d been so hurt—I’ve never seen a healer threaten the gods before, but that’s what she seemed to be doing. So, I don’t think she is going to turn us over to Master Markko, or to Lord Yueh’s soldiers.”
Hmishi shrugged, unwilling it seemed to explain why he would trust their safety to the curses of a madwoman. “I wasn’t sure of her skills as a healer until yesterday. Your fever broke, and today you woke up. I don’t think she is likely to poison us, not after spending so much time on making you better. But I don’t know how safe she will be, or us, if the villagers tell Lord Yueh’s men about this house.”
Llesho could feel the smile stealing over his face. The sunlight would never make sense, but perhaps there was a reason for the eternal morning. “I don’t think anyone will find this place unless she wants them to.” Still smiling, Llesho drifted into a peaceful sleep.
Chapter Twenty-one
LLESHO rose out of troubled dreams to find that the sunlight had faded into evening. He’d missed another afternoon and so, apparently, had his companions. Hmishi and Lling lay asleep on the rug by the fireplace, tucked up close to each other as if to ward away the cold.
“What time is it?” he called. “Is anybody here?” It gave him a moment of satisfaction when the sleepers started up with foggy expressions of guilt on their faces.
“Sorry. Fell asleep.” Hmishi rubbed his eyes in an effort to look more al
ert. “Do you need something?”
“Have you noticed something strange about this place?”
Lling gave him a slow smile. “I like it here,” she said around a yawn and a stretch. “It’s warm, smells nice—”
“Nobody whacking at us with swords or pikes,” Hmishi added.
“What about the missing afternoons?” Llesho would have asked the question but a commotion at the door drew all three Thebins to their feet.
“Home! And not before time, as I see.” Mara entered the cottage trailing a dirty and bedraggled Kaydu, who looked around the little house with suspicious, darted glances out of eyes that seemed charged with feral nerves. Little Brother crouched on her shoulder, his arms wrapped around her neck, but made no sound.
“Kaydu—” Llesho began, just as the healer spoke up, chiding him with a “tsk” in her voice.
“You should be resting. I thought you two had sense enough to keep him lying quietly.”
“We did.”
Llesho slumped back on his feather bolster, more wary than ever but resigned to wait until they were alone again to discuss this matter of lost time. It seemed more important now to find out why Kaydu looked like she’d been on the Long March and why she slumped onto the three-legged stool with relief when her glance fell upon him propped up in his bed.
“I couldn’t find you! I thought you must be gone, or dead—”
“None of that!” The healer interrupted Kaydu’s stammered plea with a sharp order, “Out! Your father taught you better than to track mud into a house where the injured are healing.”
Kaydu took a deep breath, as if she wanted to argue the point, but no words came. Taking belated notice of her disarray, she shuffled out the door again, Little Brother still clinging to her neck, while the old woman’s tart promise followed: “You can talk all you want when you’ve had a wash at the pump.”
When Kaydu had gone, Mara shook her head, as if in disapproval of the returned scout, or at some news from the village that troubled her. She hung her bonnet on its hook and took up her apron with a reverent hand, stretching and sighing with a shake of her head as if she was setting her day aside with her cap. After completing the little homecoming ritual, she dragged the three-legged stool over to Llesho’s bed and dropped down onto it. Her smile couldn’t hide the weariness that deepened the lines between her eyes, but she seemed genuinely pleased at his condition. “You look better, Llesho. Did you behave yourself today?”
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