The Prince of Shadow (42 page)

Between them Habiba and Master Jaks had outlined Llesho's own conclusions. It left one question unanswered, however. “What does he want with me?”

“The trade routes through the passes above Kungol?” Master Jaks guessed.

Llesho shrugged a shoulder. “Then he'd do better attacking the Harn. I couldn't give him Kungol if I wanted to.”

“He may wish to control your power of persuasion with the goddess,” Habiba suggested.

Llesho snorted an unpretty laugh. “He'd have done better to wait a day to attack Farshore if that's what he wanted. The goddess didn't come. I didn't see her. I'd rather believe that the attack came before I had a chance to finish the ritual than that the goddess did not choose me. If she was able to find me at all so far from home, however, it's more likely the goddess found me wanting and rejected me. No special influence there.”

Habiba looked at him strangely, but didn't say anything. There seemed little left
to
say. Llesho had his own quest, but Thebin seemed very far away and his enemies formidable. He wasn't smart enough to defeat Markko, wasn't strong enough, and his so-called “mys tical powers” weren't going to impress the magician. Aside from having a ghost tell him what to do and a dragon eat his healer, he didn't have any magic. And like his luck, it seemed that if it weren't for bad magic, he'd have none at all.

He did know that he was too tired to think about it now. He rose from his chair, but when he turned to bow politely to Habiba, he found the witch on one knee before him again, along with Master Jaks and the secretaries and Stipes. Bixei had moved to stand next to Kaydu, and together with Hmishi and Lling the four companions stood to attention, his personal guard awaiting his next order.

“I need to rest.” He was also hungry, he realized, and in no condition to make more difficult decisions. Given his current temper, he was lucky Master Jaks still had two arms.

Habiba took that as permission to rise, as did his companions. “Kaydu can show you to your tent,” he said. It was accepted that his companions, who once again included Bixei, would not leave his side, and equally clearly understood that no other company was welcome at this time. Except for one person, who wasn't available.

“I wish Master Den were here,” Llesho said.

“Who is Master Den?” Lling wanted to know. Before Llesho could answer, Bixei volunteered the information, “He is here. Don't know why he didn't attend the meeting just now, but you can probably find him in the laundry after you've had something to eat.”

“The laundry? Here?”

Bixei laughed. “He brought two huge cauldrons with him on a supply wagon, and he's had Gryphon Squad hauling water from the river all morning. By now he's probably knee-deep in soap suds!”

A darkness at the edge of vision that Llesho hadn't even noticed until now suddenly lifted. He smiled: a real, full smile, for the first time in so long he couldn't even remember when it had last happened. Den was here. Maybe he had a chance after all.

Chapter Twenty-five

“THEY'VE assigned us one of the large command tents.” Kaydu led them through the bivouac lines. When the smells of food warned them that they were passing close by the cook tent, Bixei left the group with a murmured promise to bring something to eat for them.

“Something hot,” Llesho requested absently. He felt cold from the inside out, the chill escaping in fine tremors that shook him in waves, like a fever. He followed Kaydu along a row of round felt tents.

Men and women in the leather and brass of fighters stopped in their mending and polishing to stare as they passed. Kaydu glared, sending them back to their tasks with unanswered questions still lurking in their eyes, but no great desire for answers. Llesho was just as glad; what few answers he had satisfied no one, least of all himself. He wasn't up to sharing them, but turned his thoughts inward, fighting the cold that crept over his heart. Mara was dead in his place, though Habiba seemed to think she had survived the dragon's poison tooth and fiery gullet somehow. The other deaths, and Kwan-ti's disappearance, he could blame on events that flowed around him but were not themselves a part of his own story. Local politics, far from the eye of Thebin and no fight of Llesho's, took their toll, and he could do little more than survive them. But Mara had called up a dragon to rescue him, and then had offered her life to the creature in exchange for his own. He should have—

“Stop it.” Lling punched him in the arm, and he realized that she'd been talking to him, and he hadn't heard a word.

“It wasn't your fault.” She called him on his guilt-ridden brooding, angry at him for it. “According to Habiba, she isn't dead anyway.”

“He said she'd be back, not that she wasn't dead.” Llesho emphasized the distinction. “Lleck is back, too. Does that mean he didn't die of the fever on Pearl Island?”

“Where is Lleck?” Hmishi thought to ask just then. “I didn't see him cross the bridge . . . Or . . . Dragon . . . Something.”

“He clearly had better sense than to cross a rushing river on the back of a legend,” Llesho suggested.

“I didn't think kings
had
temper tantrums,” Lling snapped.

Llesho looked at her, too tired for any of this. He wanted to escape, to dig a deep, deep hole, and crawl in and hide. But they weren't going to leave him alone; Master Jaks had made sure of that. “They probably don't,” he agreed, thinking about his father, who had often laughed, and sometimes cried, and in court would stroke his beard in thought before handing down a wise and balanced ruling. “But since I will never be a king, I don't see your point.”

“But Jaks said—”

“A thousand li of Harn grassland, filled with Harn raiders, stand between me and a crown,” he pointed out. “And somewhere between here and there, I have six brothers, each of them older than I am and more suited to the throne. So I am still just a minor prince in exile, as I told you before.”

“You are the seventh son of the king of Thebin, though,” Hmishi pressed him.

“Favored of the gods,” Llesho quoted. “Is that how it seems to you?”

“Well.” Lling put an arm through his, and Hmishi took the other. Together they leaned into him. “You've got us. I'd say that counts as blessed.” She grinned at him, daring him to contradict her.

He tried to laugh but could only manage a tight smile, until the smell of soap bubbles hit his nose.

“This is it,” Kaydu said, tugging him toward a command tent, red like the others, but bigger, and tall enough to stand up in.

“Later.” Llesho followed the sound and the smell he had grown to love because they reminded him of Master Den.

He found the washerman, loins bound up and knee-deep in a steaming vat of soapy water. The traveling washtub was made of knee-high oaken staves bound in a circle as wide across as a spear, with an oaken floor in sections set clinker-style, one board overlapping another to make the whole watertight, on the grass. Long strips of bandages hung from lines that festooned the fruit trees, and bright red tent cloths lay spread upon the grass to dry. Llesho stood beneath a cherry tree, letting the smell and the sound ease into his soul and loosen the rock-hard tension in his muscles. He realized suddenly that it didn't hurt to smile and let his lips have their way, skinning back in a toothy grin he'd forgotten was ever a part of him.

“Kick your sandals off and get in here, boy, or have you forgotten all I've taught you?” Den set his fists atop his broad hips and huffed a steamy breath for emphasis.

“I'm a prince now,” Llesho reminded him with a haughty sniff. He was toeing off his sandals when he said it.

“You were always a prince,” Master Den corrected him with an answering grin. “You had to learn to be a washerman.”

Llesho dragged his leggings off and dropped them in a heap over his sandals, and followed with his tunic. The washerman's grin faltered, and Llesho was suddenly self-conscious about the wound still raw on his breast. But Master Den taunted him with another mock challenge, “Unless you've forgotten everything I taught you.”

In nothing but his own smallclothes, Llesho climbed into the vat. “I haven't forgotten a thing,” he promised, and meant much more than how to stir up the wash.

“And well you shouldn't, young prince.” Master Den gave a meaningful look to the Thebin knife hanging in its sheath from a cord around Llesho's neck. He gave a broad smile then, and opened his arms. “It's good to see you again, boy.”

Llesho gave his teacher a hug. “I thought you must be dead, too,” he whispered, and Den set him at arm's length so that he could look deep into his eyes. “I am not dead. Hold onto your faith, Llesho. The world is a more wondrous place than you can yet imagine.”

“I could do with a few less wonders. The last one ate my healer.”

“Perhaps she is a wonder, too.” Master Den gave him a nod to signal the end of meaningful conversation, or perhaps the beginning of a lesson, Llesho could never quite tell when the washerman was teaching and when he was making small talk. “But now we have bandages to clean, and then boil, and tent cloths to prepare for the hospital.”

He stepped out of the vat, and Llesho followed; each took a coarse rake and began to dredge the soaking cloths. Working in comfortable unison they draped the waterlogged bandages over the spokes of a wheel, the axle of which ended in a crank. When each spoke was lined with long bandage cloths, Llesho grabbed their loose ends, and Den turned the crank, twisting the bandages and wringing out the dirty water. Then each bit went into a bubbling cauldron for a brief but important boiling to kill any putridity that might still inhabit the weave, and onto the lines it went.

Llesho bent and stretched, thinking of nothing but the regular motions of duties he remembered from a time when his road seemed clear and the risks belonged to him alone. While he worked, the hot water of the vat and the steam from the cauldrons loosened the muscles that had grown rigid with a soul-deep cold. He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, and felt his shoulders uncurl from their customary hunch around his wound and his heart.

“Father says you need rest,” Kaydu insisted, her frown expressing the disapproval of his humble toil that she hesitated to speak out loud.

“Are you scolding the prince, or the washerman for detaining him?” Master Den asked with laughter barely restrained in his voice. Kaydu didn't know Master Den, of course, and she didn't like that tone of voice from a stranger.

“He's been wounded,” she snapped back. “He shouldn't be pulling at that shoulder.”

Master Den acknowledged her with a wise nod, a twinkle hidden in his eye. “His wounds run deep, but even the deepest wounds heal, give the opportunity to do so.”

While Den and Kaydu challenged each other for the right to determine his well-being, Llesho scratched idly at his damp belly. His damp, empty belly. “Is there anything to eat?”

“Bixei brought your dinner. It's getting cold in your tent right now.”

“Cold is good,” Llesho decided, “unless it is fish heads in porridge.” He shuddered a little, and Den laughed.

“No fish heads,” the washerman said. “The fish are known to curse the fishermen in their own tongue hereabouts.”

Llesho figured he meant the Golden Dragon River, which had already shown itself to harbor stranger creatures than he had ever wanted to meet. No, he wouldn't want to fish in that river.

“Do you have any cheese?” he asked. “And a bit of bread?”

“Llesho!” Kaydu snapped.

She wanted to protect him. Llesho figured he was making that difficult for her, and that at the least he owed it to his friends to make it as easy as possible for them to keep him alive.

He raised his head, instinctively setting his shoulders and tilting his chin with the quiet poise of a prince. In his eyes lingered the fear of a terrible pain waiting to claim him if he gave himself time to think. Kaydu dropped her gaze, suddenly embarrassed to be ordering him about, and guilty for reminding him of that pain that lay in wait for him.

“You do that very well.” Den might have been mocking him, or . . . something.

“I'm sorry,” he apologized to Kaydu, “but I need this.” He had missed his old master more than he was willing to say in front of his companions.

She nodded, not looking at him, and turned to go.

“I'll watch him, Kaydu.” Den made his own peace offering. “He won't come to any harm tonight.”

“I know,” she said, and turned to Llesho. “But one of us will be on guard anyway. Just in case. Bixei wants to talk to you. He's been really worried since we parted with her ladyship's train. He has asked for first watch. I'll send your dinner up with him.”