Fifth Quarter (31 page)

"And what do I look like?" Gyhard asked dryly, deeply irritated by his flash of weakness.
It
must be love; only love leads to such blatant stupidity
.

"Like a young man, late teens, early twenties. Attractive. Arrogant. You act, however, like a man much older. A man accustomed to command, certain of being obeyed. I hear a man who has spent a lifetime learning to control everything around him." She half smiled, enjoying his discomfort. "Now and then I hear a man who is finding that control slipping through his fingers. Callused fingers, working class fingers. The body doesn't go with the voice or the attitudes the voice expresses."

"You should tell fortunes."

A quick gesture dismissed his facetious statement. "The body does, however, go with Vree. Not only do you share the same features, but your musculature is almost identical; those bodies were meant to do the same thing. Your kigh and your body are not fully meshed. Somehow, Vree's body holds both her kigh and her brother's." She paused and turned to face him. "Your name is Shkodan, not Imperial. I don't know how it happened. The mere fact that it happened at all would terrify me under other circumstances, but you, Gyhard i'Stevana, are wearing Bannon's body."

All at once, Karlene found it very difficult to breathe. It was one thing to spout incredible speculations in the middle of the night, and another entirely to have them confirmed. "I don't know," she managed at last, amazed at how composed she sounded. "Is this the first time it's happened?"

He rubbed at the fine triangle of hair in the center of his bare chest. Bannon; Aralt; a caravan guard; a chance-met stranger in the foothills of the border mountains; the young man with beautiful eyes who'd loved a crippled bard; the bandit… After a moment he said, "No."

"What? Who?"

"What am I? Who am I?" He spread his arms. "Just a man who doesn't intend to die."

Eyes wide, Karlene stepped away from him. Everything died. By refusing to accept that, Gyhard had taken himself out of the Circle and that alone made him as much an abomination as the dead men they followed. When she finally found her tongue, she could only manage a strangled, "How?"

Shaking his head, Gyhard exhaled noisily. "I warned Vree that bards ask a great many intrusive questions. How do I do it? That is none of your business. How do I happen to be in this body? That is Vree's business. If she wants you to know, she'll tell you herself."

"But know this: whatever the situation is, or becomes, between Vree and myself, you can affect it only in small ways." Memory laid his hand over the ridged muscles of his stomach. The point where Vree's fist had connected was still tender. "You can't change anything."

"I Sing the kigh. Maybe I can."

Suddenly exhausted, Gyhard pushed himself up off the fence. "Don't threaten me," he said quietly. "As long as I'm in her brother's body, Vree will do whatever she must in order to keep him alive. I think she's amply proved that."

"Are you warning me…"

"No." He stopped, halfway to the inn and looked back at her over his shoulder, the night wrapped around him like a black velvet cloak. "You were warned this afternoon."

"She'll kill anyone who gets in her way."

"What were you staring at?"

The guard swallowed a painful lump in her throat, snapped to attention, and locked her gaze a hand's span to the right of the slender man's left ear. Although the voice had barely risen above a whisper, the question crackled with menace. "You, you look familiar, sir."

Commander Neegan's brows drew in. He'd had too long and infuriating a day to put up with an open-mouthed inspection by a lowly member of the city guard. There were no laws against an Imperial citizen walking the streets of the Capital after dark. "Familiar?" he growled. "In what way?"

Even without the uniform, she'd have known he was an officer the moment he opened his mouth, and not a guard officer either. Only Imperial Army officers could stare in such a way that the person on the receiving end felt like they'd just been scraped out of a public privy. Back ramrod straight, one hand clutching the haft of her pike, the other pressed against the side pleats of her kilt, she breathed a silent prayer to Doyu, the god of fools, that she wouldn't end up on the wrong end of an army lash before morning. "You look like, well, I mean you move like someone I saw night before last. Sir."

The change in his expression almost made the idea of a flogging the lesser of two evils.

"Tell me."

So she did. Everything she could remember of what happened—and she found that under the circumstances she could remember the details with incredible clarity—and everything she'd told the man and woman who'd accosted her.

Neegan nodded slowly, one hand rising to stroke the scar on his throat. He didn't understand how Bannon could so quickly throw off years of training and no longer move like an assassin. He didn't understand why they'd be interested in the foreign singer. But it seemed obvious that if the singer was gone… "And I see no reason to doubt your brother's partner's nephew," he muttered aloud.

If the singer was gone, then Vree and Bannon were gone with her. But rumor implicated the singer in the kidnapping of His Imperial Highness Prince Otavas.

The guard had seen an old man with two dead men in the tombs along the East Road. The singer had said an old man and two dead men took the prince. Neegan didn't for a moment believe that the men were dead. "But I don't expect there are
four
dead men roaming the city."

Her jaw dropped. Up until that moment, she hadn't believed that sort of thing actually happened. "Of the First Army, sir?"

"Yes. Of the First Army." He pulled a leather square out of his belt pouch and stuffed it into her hand as she seemed incapable of taking it from him. "Tell them that Commander Neegan says they should look for His Highness along the East Road."

"Yes, sir. But why tomorrow morning, sir?"

"Because I want to catch up to them
first
." In spite of the heat, the guard shivered. She remained at attention until the commander disappeared into the night, then she moved out away from the buildings to give the moonlight a chance to illuminate the piece of leather in her hand. The black sunburst, stamped with the Imperial seal, stared up at her like a single, dark eye in the center of her palm.

Chapter Eleven

"Still sane?"

Vree yanked the shirt over her head, glanced down at Karlene asleep with her mouth open, then back to Gyhard. "Why should you care?"

Gyhard frowned and slowly stood. He tried to get a look at her face, but too little of the dawn light seeped through the slats of the shutters. It was the first time in all the mornings they'd shared that she hadn't simply spat a defiant yes back at him. "I used to ask," he said slowly, almost answering her question, "because I was amazed that against all odds you
were
still sane…"

"And now you ask because you think I'm not?" Her whole posture suggested she dared him to challenge her. "
Go on! "
exclaimed the line of her jaw and the set of her shoulders. "
I'm not afraid. "

"And now I ask because…"…
I'm afraid you're not
. He suddenly realized it himself. Since the night in the Healers' Hall, her movements had lost much of their fluidity, her eyes were shadowed, and she'd begun to do things—little things—he'd never seen her do before. He'd be willing to bet that Bannon, in his own body, had rubbed his palms together while he thought. All at once, he became aware that she was waiting for him to finish, and under her defiance he could sense apprehension. His belief in her sanity might easily be what maintained it. Wasn't it enough that he would be responsible for her madness? Apparently not. He finished the sentence as fatuously as he could. "… an insane assassin would not be a comfortable companion."

"If I go crazy, you'll be able to kill me—us—and it'll be over."

Would it? "If you go crazy, you'd be more likely to kill me, forgetting or not caring about whose body I'm in."

She balanced a throwing dagger on the ball of her index finger, flicked it into the air, and caught it. "You're probably right." A burgundy drop of blood marked the place where the point had pierced the skin.

Gyhard couldn't take his eyes off her as she sucked the finger clean. That her action was more fatalistic than sexual didn't seem to matter at all. He shrugged into his clothes, needing their camouflage. "You haven't answered my question."

"Am I still sane?" She moved close enough to bring her features out of shadow. For an instant, Gyhard thought he could see the storm breaking behind the surface calm in her eyes. "I'll trade you. Why are you going after this old man? And don't tell me it's because of the prince; His Highness is no good to you dead."

I don't know.

Because Prince Otavas was mine and I won't have him taken from me. Because Kars shouldn't be an old man, he should be dead and he's lived emotionally crippled far longer than he should have and I'm responsible because I taught him about the fifth kigh. Because chasing a ghost from my past delays the moment when I have to deal with the present. Because I find that loving you makes it impossible to continue to deny that I loved him and abandoned him to madness.

I don't know
.

Morning moved a little farther into the room.

Vree nodded as if his silence was all she'd expected. "I'm going down to the stableyard to loosen up. All this riding is twisting me into knots."

"I know the feeling."

"I thought you might."

He closed his eyes as she left the room, but he wasn't able to hear her footsteps on the stairs.
If she does decide to kill me, to sacrifice all three of us just to see me dead, I won't even know she's coming
. Once he'd been sure that Vree would never harm her brother's body. He wondered if it would please her to know how little he was sure of now.

"You know that there's no way you'll find a happy ending in all of this."

Gyhard glared down at Karlene, who raised herself up on one elbow and stared levelly back at him. "I thought you were asleep."

"You were supposed to. I don't want to know what you'd intended to do with His Highness were he alive…" Her tone quite clearly said that she thought she did know and had no intention of admitting it. "But why
are
you going after the old man?"

He squatted beside her pallet, forearms balanced on his thighs, careful not to meet her gaze too directly. "I'm going to tell you something that Vree said to me once. It always struck me as succinct and to the point."

The bard lifted a heavy strand of hair back off her face and waited.

"Sod off."