The Prince of Shadow

by Curt Benjamin

  “If you mean did I sleep the day away, yes. I didn’t have much choice about it.”

  “I don’t suppose you did. But you needed the rest, and I wanted to take no chances that you would do something foolhardy while I was away.”

  Until she said that, Llesho had not suspected the delicious drink his friends had pressed on him all day. When he realized that she had drugged him, he blushed, a little angry at her for tricking him, but more at himself for not suspecting the potion. Adar had taught him long ago how foolish it was to judge a medicine by its sweetness. But Kaydu’s anxious glances needed his attention now.

  “What happened to Kaydu?” He asked. “Have Yueh’s soldiers found us?” His companions, at least, might escape—

  “You are safe for the time being.” The healer made a sour face. “No one has seen any soldiers in the village yet, though some of my patients reported strangers creeping around asking questions about comings and goings at the crossroads. I didn’t tell anybody you were here with me, however, not that they would have talked to the spies if they knew. We are not a trusting people hereabouts.”

  Llesho kept to himself the reminder that Lling had gone into the village to seek help in the first place, and that Mara herself had trusted his companions enough to bring them into her home and heal his wound without question. He figured she had ways to protect herself.

  Something had unsettled Kaydu’s mind, which not even Yueh’s surprise attack and their flight under cover of darkness had managed to do in the past. He didn’t want to know what had put her in this state, but suspected that, in the absence of the enemy, she’d run afoul of the protections of the healer. She had left to find the pump easily enough once she’d assured herself that Llesho was safe, though. He didn’t think she would have done that if Mara posed a threat to them, but he wasn’t quite ready to give up his own suspicions yet.

  “I did hear a strange tale about a bear cub,” Mara continued. “The villagers say that the creature takes careful nibbles of food offered from the hands of small children, and that he says, ‘Thank you’ when he is done, but one can’t believe everything one hears.”

  She tilted her head in a question, giving him the opportunity to come clean with his story, but he wasn’t ready to grant her Lleck’s secret yet.

  When he said nothing, she added, “The village elders didn’t believe the story either, having their own experience with bears. They were gathering a hunting party to find him and kill him.” She saw his look of dismay and her smile developed a wry pucker. “Fortu nately, this particular children’s story followed me home.”

  Llesho tried to rise from his bed, torn between chagrin and the need to see his teacher, even in his new form. But the healer pushed him down again. “He’s outside. Master Lleck’s manners, like those of your guide, currently leave much to be desired. You must trust to the forest to keep him safe, at least until tomorrow.”

  “You don’t mean Kaydu to sleep outside as well!” he demanded.

  “Of course not, child! I am sure she will be her usual self as soon as she has had a good wash, and then she may come in and visit you and sleep by the fireplace or in the loft as she chooses.”

  Only then did Llesho realize that not one of his three human companions remained in the house.

  “They are having a chat with your furry brown friend.” Mara seemed to read his mind, although the question, and the fear, had marked themselves pretty clearly on Llesho’s face.

  Fortunately for his peace of mind, he didn’t have to rely on her assurance about their safety for long; the door opened onto growing shadows, from which Kaydu tumbled, looking more herself with the mud washed away and fresh clothes replacing her damaged ones. Hmishi and then Lling followed, with Little Brother chattering in her arms. They all talked at once, in a shorthand that left unspoken the experiences they had shared while Llesho had lain unconscious from the effects of the tainted arrow. He felt a sudden pang of jealousy, that they had formed a unit while he slept. They had seen and talked with Lleck while he lay on his bed like a wet noodle. Mara seemed greatly distracted by the sudden clamor, but she focused keenly enough on the door when Lleck tried to sneak past under cover of their commotion.

  The healer was on her feet faster than Llesho could see her move, elbows akimbo, her hands in tight fists perched on her hips. “Not in my house, master bear!” She glared at him, tapping her foot all the while.

  The bear cub uttered a mournful cry and ducked his head so that he could cover his eyes with a forepaw.

  “That won’t work on me, you old reprobate. We settled that on the way home.”

  “Please?” Llesho asked weakly from his bed. He needed to know that, however changed, his old mentor was still safe and whole.

  The healer turned her glare on him, but Llesho didn’t flinch or look away. He had to see Lleck. If he couldn’t do it in the cottage, he would get out of bed and sleep in the forest, whatever it did to the wound healing under his bandages.

  “Stubborn,” she remarked. “I almost feel sorry for him.”

  She measured the determination in Llesho’s face a moment longer before throwing her hands in the air and leaving his bedside. “Just a quick hello,” she insisted. “Then it is outside for him. He’ll be more useful as a guard if he can roam a bit, and I’m not cleaning up after a bear in here. Bad enough with the four of you.”

  Embarrassed that she had seen through their covering commotion so easily, his companions likewise moved away from the door.

  “Kaydu, please bring the chicken from the ice-house.”

  Kaydu dropped her gaze and backed nervously out the door as Mara gave further instructions, “Lling, there are carrots and potatoes in the root bin in the cellar; would you please fill this sack with equal numbers of each.” She held out the sack, and when Lling had taken it, picked up the water bucket. “Hmishi, you may bring water from the pump.”

  Lleck waited until his human companions left the cottage to do the healer’s bidding, then he lumbered in over the doorstep.

  “Llle-sshhooo!” he wailed, and Llesho held out a hand to him.

  “Lleck!”

  The cub neared him suspiciously and sniffed his hand. Lleck’s muzzle was cool and moist, his fur soft. Llesho pulled himself up in his bed enough to wrap his arms around the bear’s neck. “Lleck,” he sighed, and dropped his head on top of the bear’s low skull, resting his forehead between the laid-back ears. After a long minute he raised his head and let the cub lick the salt from his cheek, whuffling in his ear.

  “I’m not heartless, you know,” Mara commented while she set two lamps on the table. She trimmed the wicks, then lit them. One she hung from a hook near the bed, and the other from a similar hook above the table.

  “A house is no place for a bear. He really will be more comfortable out-of-doors.” She cast him a chiding look, then shifted her attention to the shelf by the fireplace, from which she selected first a handful of herbs dried in jars and then some spices twisted in little packets.

  “I need to know he is not just a dream,” Llesho tried to explain how he felt about the miracle that had brought his dead teacher to his aid in the forest. Even with his arms around the bear cub’s neck he could not shake the fear that none of it was real. What if he hadn’t wakened from his delirium at all, but still lay dying by the roadside?

  “I know, boy.” Mara sighed. “That’s why the old reprobate is sitting by your bedside and not outside as he ought to be.”

  Kaydu returned with the fowl, already plucked and boiled and waiting for dish-cooking, and Lling returned with the carrots and potatoes.

  “But bears are solitary creatures by nature; to keep him near, you must not hold him too close.” Mara took down her big, sharp knife and talked while she energetically chopped the vegetables.

  Returning in time to hear this last comment, Hmishi set down his filled bucket. “He’s not really a bear, though,” he insisted, with a doubtful glance in the direction of Llesho’s animal companion.r />
  “You’re wrong, Hmishi.” Mara’s expression seemed more sad than anything else when she corrected him. “In this lifetime, he is a bear. He fights the impulses natural to this new form because his spirit still yearns to protect the princeling as he could not protect the king in his former life.”

  “If you can make the afternoons disappear, why can’t you change him back into Lleck?” He had determined not to speak out about his suspicions until he was alone with his companions, but Lleck’s presence at his side gave Llesho the courage to confront the healer with her magic.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Llesho,” Mara answered. “Sleep is the only thief of time in this house. Sick people often take strange fancies, however, and I recommend that you put this one right out of your mind.” She stirred some broth into the pot, filling the room with delicious odors that went right to the heart and warmed the body from the inside.

  Kaydu sat up straighter. “He’s right,” she said. Her voice had grown stronger now that she had cleaned her face and put on fresh clothes, as if the whole weight of civilization shored up her flagging courage. “You are doing something to our minds, or to the flow of time. How many days have passed in this house while I have been gone? Far less than for me out there, I’ll warrant, or you would have shown more surprise when I turned up on your doorstep. Instead you greeted me as if I had stepped out that door just yesterday.”

  “It was just yesterday,” Hmishi pointed out.

  No one was listening to him, however, because they were watching Mara, who wiped her hands on her apron and directed a sorrowful frown not on Kaydu, but on Lleck, the bear.

  “I have some small powers, to aid in healing, or to give rest. I did not shape the mysteries of this glen, but I have the power to enter into them and to protect those in my care by use of them. Even here, day passes into night, however, and no matter how he might wish it otherwise, Lleck will live out this turn of the wheel as a bear is meant to do.”

  “But not today?” Llesho objected, his arm still tight around Lleck’s neck.

  “Yes, Llesho, today. He will catch and kill his own dinner, and sleep in the arms of the trees tonight. But no harm will come to you as long as he is nearby.”

  Lleck dropped his head, accepting Mara’s words with a low cry, “Lleee-sho!” He gave his pupil’s face a farewell lick and walked slowly to the door.

  When he was gone, Lling wrinkled her nose, a question in the gaze she passed from the healer to Kaydu. “Lleck must think we are safe or he wouldn’t leave Llesho for anything. I trust him, if not you. But how long was Kaydu gone?”

  “Time doesn’t mean much in these woods,” Mara returned to her cooking with a smack for Hmishi, who plunked himself down at the table and snatched a bit of carrot that escaped her flashing knife. “One day is very like another, just as one tree looks very like another if you aren’t familiar with the forest.”

  “Six days.” Kaydu had returned to the three-legged stool, her arms dangling between her knees. “I found my father.”

  “And Little Brother.” That still bothered Llesho.

  “And Little Brother. Habiba said that Master Jaks is furious with us, and is likely to blister our hides for sneaking away without him, but that Lord Yueh caught up with them before night on the day we sneaked away. We were probably safer alone than we would have been if we’d stayed behind. Master Jaks led the counterstrike and saved her ladyship, which he could not have done if he had come with us, so Father is not as mad as Master Jaks. They are on their way, but they can only travel as fast as their horses. Father said not to wait, but to run as soon as we can.”

  Hmishi held out a bit of carrot that had escaped the pot. Kaydu’s pet abandoned Lling to take it from his fingers. “Maybe they should leave their horses behind. You seem to have made better time without one.”

  Lling sidled closer to Llesho’s pallet, her hand falling to her belt, where her sword usually hung. “That would only work for Habiba. Master Jaks can’t travel the witch’s road, can he?”

  “I am beginning to think you are fools, the lot of you,” Mara waved her stirring spoon at them to emphasize her anger.

  “You may not understand Habiba’s gifts to his daughter, but you still need them. Didn’t you ever wonder why Master Markko wanted so badly to rid Pearl Island of witches?”

  Llesho didn’t have to wonder. “The Blood Tide,” he said. “A witch might have saved the pearl beds.”

  “Very likely one did, until it became more than her life was worth. As graceless a thank you as I’ve ever heard, but accepted. Can we return to the matter of escaping Master Markko’s clutches now? Have you anything else to tell us?”

  Llesho wondered at the pronoun. When had Mara become a part of their quest? But Kaydu looked worried, and not about the healer.

  “Lord Yueh went after her ladyship, but Master Markko followed us. I saw him at the crossroad, trying to pick up our trail. He almost caught me, but I hid in a fox’s abandoned den until they had searched the area and moved on. Then I reported back to Habiba and returned here, but I couldn’t find the clearing or this house. I would still be stumbling around in the woods, except that I hid myself to watch by the road, and when Mara left the village, I followed her.

  “You’ll feel better with a good meal in you.”

  He’d recognized everything she’d put in the pot by its smell if nothing else: rosemary and thyme, and a bit of lemon-flavored grass that made the whole dish smell like a country garden. Still, he hesitated, wondered if the healer had drugged the food as she had the potion.

  “Come now,” the healer reminded them, “if I wished you harm, I had only to leave you where I found you.”

  “Or you may have your own reasons for keeping me here,” Llesho suggested.

  “I might. But since I must fatten you up if you are to make an attempt to escape my clutches, it would seem that our immediate goals are the same.”

  She was making fun of him. He might have resisted the food anyway, with a thought to self-preservation in the presence of magics he did not understand, but his nose overruled him. It tasted even better than it smelled—fowl braised with the vegetables in a thin broth of the herbs with a dash of spice. Mara brought a chunk of bread out for dipping in the broth so that not a drop of the delicious flavor was wasted. In spite of his stomach’s uneasiness with solid food, Llesho felt better. He sank into the now-familiar curves and dips in his grassy bed with a full stomach, jostled only slightly when Lling sat down beside him and leaned against his pallet for support. Hmishi remained at the table, his head resting on his arms, and Kaydu sat on the three-legged stool, staring thoughtfully into the fire. He was too comfortable, he decided, to work up a suitable terror about Mara’s intentions, and closed his eyes. He had almost fallen asleep when the mournful cry of a bear rose from the forest. Lleck, defending the little house, he thought with a smile. But the tone of the bear’s complaint changed, grew more angry and more desperate.

  Llesho tossed in his bed, aware that he had in fact been sleeping, and that Mara tended him with cold compresses. “You are safe, Llesho,” she crooned. “No one will find you here.”

  The cry of the bear cub subsided into whuffling plaints of curiosity, and then faded entirely.

  “No one can hurt you under this roof; you are in the land of dreams now.”

  With Mara’s words echoing softly in his last fading thoughts, Llesho drifted off again. When he awoke, his companions had disappeared.

  Mara was standing over the table with her arms sunk to the elbows in a bowl of yeasty dough the color of butter. He knew that for sure because a pale yellow brick of the stuff sat on a plate beside the kneading board.

  “Your friends are out with Lleck, scouting. They will be back soon, looking for breakfast.” She extracted one hand and peeled the dough from her fingers, then reached for a jar of raisins, sprinkling in a generous handful before punching the dough back down and covering the bowl.

  “Do you think you can stand?” She
gave him her full attention, fists braced on hips, a measuring frown on her face.

  “I think so.” The wound itched more than it hurt under its clean white bandages, but lifting his head was an effort. His limbs, too, seemed to have developed a will of their own while he’d slept.

  Mara nodded. “Time you tried, at least.” She wiped her hands and arms clean with a damp cloth and walked briskly to his bedside. “Let’s see what you can do.”

  Llesho sat up and swung his body around so that his back rested on the wall and his legs dangled off the side of bed. He stopped there, dizzy for a moment, and closed his eyes. When the room stopped spinning, he opened them again. Mara watched him calmly, evaluating his progress. Llesho figured he wasn’t supposed to see the urgency lurking behind the calm, but it goaded him forward anyway. He pushed off the bed with his arms and stood up under his own power, though he swayed on his feet, almost overcome by nausea.

  “Good. Let’s try for the door, shall we?”

  Llesho wondered if the healer had lost her mind. He was disoriented and dizzy; he couldn’t imagine lifting a foot off the ground and not replacing it with his butt. The healer had already taken a step backward, however, and she had a tight grip on his elbow, which didn’t leave him a lot of choice in the matter. One step, then another, and Llesho reached the open door, where the sun shone on his face and the scent of pine sap and morning fizzed in his nose. He smiled in spite of himself. It was a beautiful day.

  “Outhouse?” he asked.

  The healer quirked an eyebrow at him but pointed at the little cabin a few yards away at the edge of the clearing. “Do you want help?”