Sasharia En Garde (26 page)

“Including you?”

He looked away again. Then back. “Will you listen to my side
of things?” His eyes narrowed. “But you won’t believe me, will you?” He moved
suddenly, not toward me—though I braced for it—but away, to the little alcove
at the point of the cabin. The bulkhead below the tiny table had been adapted
into a kind of desk that reminded me of a rolltop, with a lot of little
drawers.

He opened one and drew out a packet of heavy linen paper.

“You want to read my correspondence with your father?” He
held out the letters.

“How do I know those are real?” I felt not so much angry as
sick and miserable. “I wouldn’t recognize his handwriting. I wouldn’t even know
his style. I was ten, the last time I saw him.”

He dropped the letters back into the drawer and leaned there
with hands on the desk, the silken shirt laces swinging, their golden leaves
winking with tiny reflected flames in the light of the lantern. I was staring
again.

He turned his head slightly, his white hair drifting over
his shoulder. His gaze met mine, and fireworks lit off right behind my ribs.
I hate chemistry.
I jerked my head away,
half expecting my eyes to make popping sounds like cartoon tentacles. Argh! I
scowled at the carved racing horses in the wood panels.

“Why won’t you listen? Do you really think I’d go to all
this trouble if I was my father’s tool?”

I said to the chocolate pot, “Why didn’t you answer me when
I asked why I’m here, but you let the Ebans go free?” A quick glance, to see
the effect of my words. “You are good at deflecting awkward questions, aren’t
you?”

I could feel him regarding me steadily, trying to read my
reactions. “They don’t hold the key to the kingdom. You do. I really did mean
to let you go, but that was before I found Randart and all his guards right
here in Ellir, and then there was Elba shadowing Owl. Elba’s mother is under
arrest; if Elba, in dashing out to expose me for a fraud had revealed her own
name—and you know she would have—Randart would have snatched her. Do you really
want to know what Randart would do to her to get whatever she knew out of her?”

“No.” I breathed out the word.

Jehan said quickly, “Then we come to you. There are orders
to grab you on sight. I don’t know why yet, except that everyone believes that
you know where Prince Math is.” He got up and put his hand on the latch to the
cabin door. “I should mention that your mother followed you through the World
Gate. And unfortunately my father has her as well as Kreki Eban. No, don’t say
it.” He raised his hand as I drew in a deep breath. “Whatever you believe me
capable of, I can promise you this. If my father gets his hands on you, you can
absolutely count on him using your lives against one another in order to get
what he wants. Chocolate? Yes? No?”

“Lost my appetite,” I said wearily.

He took the tray and left. Locking the door behind him.

Pretty soon I heard through the open windows the noises of
the booms being used to lower a small boat. I peered down at an angle as a
silhouette descended.

I recognized Jehan by the way he moved. He had confined that
moon-pale hair in some sort of knitted sailor cap. That and the dark clothing
made him unremarkable, one of many people plying little boats to and fro on the
dark waters between the boats all lit by strings of lanterns.

Unremarkable if your eyes hadn’t memorized the contours of
his arms, the line from shoulder to slim hip, the way the light played over the
angles in his face. The arch of his brow. The shape of his lips.

I watched until he and his boat blended into the crown of
lights made by the market street and the torchlit castle above, and then I
dropped onto the bunk and put my head in my hands.

Yeah, that was definitely one of my worst moments.

o0o

Up in the Ellir Academy commander’s suite, War Commander
Randart longed for sleep. He was getting too old for all-night rides and
all-day inspections, distractions, orders, and logistics.

He glared at his nephew, gabbling away to Orthan as if he
had never heard of sleep, and finished the rest of his ale. At least that was
good. He’d have to make certain a few barrels of Old Gold were included in the
commander’s stores when he took ship.

“. . . and they were watching him arrest some
cutpurse. I never heard of him doing that before. Must have been his followers
who actually did the work.”

Orthan laughed.

“Red says, maybe he was trying to teach the thief some
poetry and the thief surrendered only to get away.”

Orthan guffawed louder, making the war commander’s head
hurt. “What’s that? They didn’t tell me Jehan took the cutpurse arrested
today.”

Orthan and Damedran turned twin expressions of surprise his
way. “He didn’t. I told you that earlier,” Orthan exclaimed, and his brow began
to lower. “Two of our fellows did—”

The war commander ignored his brother’s long-suffering
You don’t listen to me
. They’d been
through that too many times. Dannath only listened when Orthan’s gibble-gabble
was to a purpose. He got to his feet. “All I know is, if he’s not here at the
start of the games tomorrow, I’ll strangle him myself.” He pointed at his
nephew. “You! Go get some rest. You have one order: to win tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’ll win,” Damedran predicted, stretching as he swung
to his feet. “I can thrash anyone I know on the list, one handed.” He snapped a
fist into the opposite palm, muscles bunching. “I got Captain Traneg to show me
the roster before I came up here. Some locals have signed up, but we haven’t
seen any locals win for years.”

“People can sign on until the trumpets tomorrow,” Orthan
warned, knowing his son would ignore him, but it was better to endorse his
brother’s order when Dannath was looking so irritable. “You never know, but
some day a good one might show up, like the old days, before Siamis came. You
do your best when you’re rested.”

Damedran snorted. “The back of my hand to locals. I don’t
see why you don’t close the games to them anyway. Yes, I know that’s how we
recruited in the past, but maybe it’s time to change all that. Better cadets
from the better families.”

“Shut up and go to bed,” the war commander ordered.

When he used that voice, it was best to obey. Damedran and
his uncle slammed through opposite doors, leaving Orthan to finish the ale
alone and then douse the light.

After a sleepless night during which Jehan’s brain
insisted on reviewing, with remorseless repetition, every single mistake he’d
made in deed or speech with Sasharia, he got up, drank the hottest, strongest
coffee the innkeeper could brew, then left the humble dockside inn where he’d
thought to get overdue rest.

He stopped at the bathhouse and paid to use their cleaning
frame. No time for a real bath, and anyway it was going to be far too hot, he
thought, staring at the knife-edged shafts of yellow early morning sunlight
painting the wooden wall dividing the men’s side from the women’s.

The sun was climbing into midsummer brilliance when he
crossed up an old pathway behind the ruins of a castle long forgotten, and now
used mainly for its stone. There, in the shade of a web-clogged alcove he
paused to change out of the plain clothes and hat, pulling on his brown velvet.

He rolled up his old outfit, tucked it under his arm, and
started up the back trail used by locals who hired on as stable and maintenance
support staff at the guard barracks and academy. A few steps up past some
flowering shrubs, his shoulder blades prickled. Unseen eyes? He stepped to the
side, hand going to his sword, then dropping when he saw four cadet-aged young
fellows walking behind him single file.

Three walked and one sauntered, a tall fellow with black
hair and pale brown eyes of a distinctive shade—flecked with gold—that evoked
flame in that strong summer light. His features were sharp, his gaze sharper;
memory stirred from somewhere way back years ago, on the other side of the
world.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

The tall one grinned, but did not speak.

“Not really,” another one murmured, and when Jehan looked
his way his breath caught. He was about to exclaim, “Senrid?” when he realized
that this fellow was not Senrid Montredaun-An, king of Marloven Hess—and head
of the academy to which Jehan had gone to learn war skills so long ago.

Senrid never wore this sort of thoughtful, almost scholarly
expression, nor had he grown as tall. Most tellingly, this fellow’s eyes were
brown, an ordinary light brown, and King Senrid’s were grayish blue. And their
spoken accents were completely different. The resemblance was nothing more than
a slender build, curly short blond hair . . . and the brain
fatigue of a hot summer’s day.

“I’m David,” the fellow said, pronouncing it not Sartoran
DAUF-ed, but Marlovan-style, DAY-vid. David gestured at the three others.
“We’re here to play in your games.”

Jehan took in the two unfamiliar ones. First, a tallish,
thin fellow with a dreamy expression, wide-set brown eyes and an unkempt mat of
curly light brown hair that brought Prince Math instantly and forcibly to mind.
The last was a mere boy, scarcely cadet age from the looks of him. He seemed an
everyday small boy, dressed in homespun shirt and riding trousers, brown hair
clipped back from a high brow, though Jehan almost immediately began observing
subtle anomalies, beginning with his stillness, and the steady, observant hazel
gaze that seemed far older than you ever saw in any child’s face.

“And the rest of you are?” He suspected he would not get a
real answer.

Nor did he. “Competitors,” David said, and then, with an air
of absent courtesy, “You have no objection to a little roustabout, perhaps?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jehan recognized that they
knew who he was. Where
had
he seen
that tall one before? Now it seemed important.

“Nothing untoward,” David soothed. “Shall we meet after the
day’s entertainment?”

“I suspect”—Jehan eyed the tall one again—“that I will want
very much to do that. Where have I seen you before?”

“Here and there.” The tall one grinned briefly, no more than
a flash of teeth. His voice was lower than you’d expect from someone that lean.
Low, husky—and again familiar.

Sweat trickled down Jehan’s forehead. The morning air had
gone from warm to hot, and the sun was still low. “Go on. Sign up. Do whatever
it is you’re going to do.”
Things could
hardly get worse
.

The tall one laughed softly as they passed on by.

The small one was last. As he drew near Jehan he said in
Sartoran, “Stay your path.”

He dashed after his companions and they vanished around the
mossy old wall of the ruined castle, reappearing halfway up the trail at a dead
run.

Jehan veered between amusement and annoyance at some urchin
advising him how to get to his own academy. As if he was likely to stray off
the—

Path
. In Sartoran.
He listened to the words again, thinking in Sartoran instead of just mentally
translating the words.

Stay. Your. Path.

In Sartoran, the connotation was closer to
You’re doing the right thing.

Now, that was strange. He paused to peer upward against the
rising sun as the four mystery visitors vanished over the lip of the hill
toward the public path. He forgot about the heat, his headache, even his
hunger, and began to lope up the trail toward the back way into the old,
abandoned storage rooms where he usually left his change of clothes. Maybe the
day that had promised a long stretch of annoyance might yield some surprises
after all.

Lesi Valleg wept for joy, shaking her head impatiently so
her vision would not blur. She stood with a cluster of seniors at the sideline
of the archery butts, and watched the little boy in homespun lift his bow, pull
back, and aim in the same fluid motion so he was one line from thumb to the
back elbow, and when he let fly his arm snapped out so his arms were a straight
line, thumb to thumb. And then his shooting hand swept down, as smooth and
unthinking as the folding wings of a swan.

It was effortless, graceful, expert—and the best shot of the
day, despite his age, despite the distance and oh, oh, oh, despite Damedran
leaning against the wall on the other side of the butts, his bruised face
expressionless.

“See that? Arm all the way back,” she muttered, wiping her
eyes. “It really does make a difference.” And the other seniors standing near
her, instead of rolling their eyes or sneering or yawning as they always had in
the past, agreed with mutters of wonder.

Once Prince Jehan had told her that this was the way he’d
been taught to shoot by that academy on the other side of the continent. But
that fact had only earned scoffing. Every cadet knew he was a cloud-brain. And
everyone knew the Marlovens were mere horse riders, they didn’t train on water
as well as land.

If you want to shoot
you need first to learn form. Aim will then come
, she remembered her old
teacher saying. It wouldn’t do to remind everyone. She’d be accused of swagger.
And anyway, that boy had carried off the silver cup. She didn’t
need
to remind them.

She followed the crowd, hoping she could talk to him. She
wanted to tell him it was a pleasure to watch him. It would have been a
pleasure to shoot against him, no matter who won, if only her arm hadn’t been
broken.

But the trumpet blew the signal to change events, and most
of the competitors, locals as well as cadets, swarmed to the tables to get some
water before lining up for the last and favorite event of the land games: the
relay race, which took all afternoon.

“You don’t have to go,” Ban said to Damedran as they
followed more slowly. He regretted his earlier triumph when Damedran was
summarily thumped in the last grappling match, though he’d enjoyed it
thoroughly (and privately) at the time.