Vansen closed his eyes for a moment, fighting back tears of his own. He put his hand on the young guardsman’s quivering shoulder. “The gods grant you made a good shot, Dab.”
*
So bleak and quiet was the company, so defeated, that when Vansen saw the moon again he didn’t speak of it, not wanting to raise hopes that had been so often dashed. But after an hour more trudging silently behind the girl he could not ignore the fact that the mists were clearing. The moon was not alone—there were stars, too, speckled across the sky as cold and bright as ice crystals.
They walked on through the high grass of wet hillside meadows and through thinning stands of trees, still alert to any sound, but after a while Vansen was certain that something truly had changed. The moon was far down in the sky now, a sky that had always before been blurry with fog and cloud.
They were all staggeringly tired, and for a few moments he considered stopping to build a fire so they could dry out wet clothes and snatch a little sleep, but he was afraid that if he closed his eyes he would open them again to find everything submerged in silvery nothingness again. Also, the girl was striding determinedly forward despite her weariness, like a horse on the path back to the barn at the end of a long day, and he didn’t want to disturb her. Now that the mists had thinned, he let go of her ragged smock and dropped back to walk for a little while with each of the men in turn, Southstead, Dawley, Balk, saying nothing unless they spoke to him, trying to turn his savaged company back into something whole again, or at least into something human. He couldn’t pretend that he was not overseeing a disaster, but he could make the best out of what he had.
They trooped on through shadowy glens and over moonlit hills.The sky began to change color, warming from black to a purple-tinted gray, and for the first time in days Vansen began to believe they might actually find their way out again.
But where? Into the middle of that fairy army? Or will we find that we have been wandering for a hundred years, like one of the old tales, and that all the world and the folk we knew are gone?
Still, even with these heavy thoughts in his head, he couldn’t help smiling when he saw the first gleam of sunrise on the horizon. His eyes welled up, so that for a moment the patch of bright sky smeared. There would be some kind of day after all. There would be east and west and north and south again.
The sun didn’t burn through the mist until it was high into the sky, but it was the real sun and the real sky, beyond doubt. No one wanted to stop now.
Most astonishingly of all, before the sun was halfway up the morning sky, they struck the Settland Road.
“Praise all the gods!” shouted Balk. He ran forward, did a clumsy dance on the rutted dirt that covered the ancient stones and timbers. “Praise them each and every one!”
As the other men tumbled down into the grass by the roadside, laughing and clapping each other on the back in joy,Vansen looked up and down the road, not completely ready to trust. It was the same road, but what arrested him was what part of the road it was.
“Perin Cloudwalker!” he murmured, half to himself. “She’s brought us back to the place where we met her. That’s miles from where we crossed over. And miles closer to Southmarch, thank the gods!” He staggered on aching legs to where the girl stood, smiling a little, staring around her in calm confusion. He grabbed her and kissed her cheek, lifted her up and put her down again. He had a sudden thought then and hurried eastward down the road with the men shouting questions after him. Sure enough, at the next long straight stretch he found a height where he could climb up and see that mists had enveloped the road not a mile away to the east. She’s brought us back to our side of the Shadowline, but also we’re now between the shadow-army and the city, bless her! But how could that be? He tried to understand what had happened but could only guess that the substance of the lands behind the Shadowline was different than that of other lands, and not just because of mists and monsters. Somehow the girl had managed to find her way across a fold of shadow and bring them back to the place where she herself first crossed over, long before they even found her.
He hurried back to the others. “We will rest for a short while,” he said, “but then we have to find horses and ride as fast as we can. Southmarch is ahead of us and the enemy is behind us, but who knows how long until they catch up? The girl has given us a precious gift—we must not waste it, or waste the lives of our comrades either.” He turned to Willow. “I may wind up in chains for my part in all this, but if Southmarch survives, I’ll see you dressed in silks and laden with gold first.You may have saved us all!”
24
Leopards and Gazelles
GROWING JOY:
The hives are full
The leaves fall and drift slowly
Death is agreeable now
—from The Bonefall Oracles
Qinnitan groaned. “Why do I feel so ill?”
“Get up, you!” Favored Luian slapped at one of her Tuam servants, who ducked with a practiced shrug so that the blow only grazed the girl’s black-haired head. “What are you doing, you lazy lizard?” Luian shrieked. “That cloth is dry as dust.” She reached out and gave the girl’s arm a cruel pinch. “Go and get Mistress Qinnitan some more water!”
The slave got up and refilled the bowl from the fountain splashing quietly in the corner of the room, then returned with it and resumed cooling Qinnitan’s forehead.
“I don’t know, my darling,” Luian said as if the outburst had not happened. “A touch of fever, perhaps. Nothing dreadful, I’m sure. You must say your prayers and drink dishflower tea.” She seemed distracted by something more than Qinnitan’s miseries, her eyes flicking from side to side as though she expected to be interrupted at any moment.
“It’s that potion they give me every day, I’m sure.” Qinnitan tried to sit straight, groaned, and gave up. It was not worth the expenditure of strength.
“Oh, Luian, I hate it. It makes me feel so wretched. Do you think they’re poisoning me?"
“Poisoning you?” For a moment Luian actually looked at her. Her laugh was harsh and a bit shrill. “My small sweet one, if the Golden One wished you dead, it would not be poison that killed you, it would be something much . . .” She paled a little, caught herself. “What a thing to say! As if our beloved autarch, praises to his name, would want you dead, in any case. You have done nothing to displease him. You have been a very good girl.”
Qinnitan sighed and tried to tell herself Luian must be right. It didn’t quite feel like being poisoned, anyway, or at least not how she imagined such a thing would feel. Nothing hurt, and she wasn’t exactly ill—in fact, generally her appetite was extremely good and she slept well, too, if a little too long and deeply sometimes—but something definitely felt strange. “You’re right, of course You’re always right, Luian.” She yawned. “In fact, I think I feel a little better now. I should go back to my room and have a nap instead of lolling around here and being in your way.”
“Oh, no, no!” Luian looked startled at the suggestion. “No, you . . . you should come for a walk with me Yes, let us take a walk in the Scented Garden. That would do you more good than anything. Just the thing to brush away those cobwebs.”
Qinnitan had been living in the Seclusion too long not to see that something was troubling Luian, and it was strange for her to suggest the Scented Garden, which was on the opposite side of the Seclusion, when it would have been much easier to stroll in the Garden of Queen Sodan. “I suppose I can bear a walk, yes. Are you certain? You must have things to do . . .”
“I can think of nothing more important than helping you feel better, my little dear one. Come.”
The Scented Garden was warmer than the halls of the Seclusion, but the canopies atop its high walls kept it cool enough to be bearable and its airs were very sweet and pleasant, suffused with myrtle and forest roses and snakeleaf after a short while Qinnitan began to feel a little stronger. As they walked, Luian spouted a litany of petty complaints and irritations in a breat
hless voice that made her seem far younger than she was. She was more sharp-tongued with her servants than usual, too, so savage in her scolding of one of the Tuanis when the girl bumped her elbow that several other people in the garden, wives and servants, looked up, and the usually expressionless slave girl curled her lip above her teeth, as though she were about to snarl or even bite.
“Oh, I’ve just remembered,” Luian said suddenly. “I left my nicest shawl in that little retiring room here yesterday—there, in the corner.” She pointed to a shadowed doorway far back between two rows of boxwood hedges. “But I’m so hot, I think I’ll just sit down on this bench. Will you be a dear and get it for me, Qinnitan? It’s rose-colored.You can’t miss it.”
Qinnitan hesitated. There was something strange about Luian’s face. She suddenly felt frightened. “Your shawl . . . ?”
“Yes. Go get it, please. In there.” She pointed again.
“You left it . . . ?” Luian almost never came to this garden, and it was famously warm. Why bring a shawl here?
Luian leaned close and said, in a strangled whisper, “Just go and get it, you silly little bitch!”
Qinnitan jumped up, startled and more fearful than ever. “Of course.”
As she approached the dark doorway, she could not help slowing her footsteps, listening for the breath of a hidden assassin behind the hedges. But why would Luian resort to something so crude? Unless it was the autarch himself who had decided it had all been a mistake, that Qinnitan was not the one he wanted. Perhaps the mute giant Mokor, his infamous chief strangler, was waiting for her inside the doorway. Or perhaps she wasn’t important enough and her death would be effected instead by someone like the so-called gardener, Tanyssa. Qinnitan looked back, but Luian was looking in another direction entirely, talking rapidly and a little too loudly with her slaves.
Her nerves now stretched tight as lute strings, Qinnitan let out a muffled shriek when the man stepped from the shadows.
“Quiet! I believe you are looking for this,” he said, holding out a shawl woven of fine silk. “Do not forget it when you go out again.”
“Jeddin!” She threw her hand over her mouth. “What are you doing here?” A whole man in the Seclusion—what would happen to him if they were caught? What would happen to her?
The Leopard captain quickly and easily moved between her and the door, cutting off her escape. She looked frantically around the small, dark room. There was nothing much in it but a low table and some cushions, and no other way out.
“I wished to see you. I wished to . . . speak with you.” Jeddin stepped up and caught her hand in his wide fingers, pulled her deeper into the room. Her heart was beating so quickly she could scarcely take a breath, but she could not entirely ignore the strength of his grip or the way it made her feel. If he wished, he could throw her over one of his broad shoulders and carry her away and there would be nothing she could do.
Except scream, of course, but who could guess what she would earn for herself if she did?
“Come, I will not keep you long,” he said. “I have put my life in your hands by coming here, Mistress. Surely you will not begrudge me a few moments.”
He was looking at her so searchingly, so intently, that she found she could not meet his eye. She felt hot and feverish again. Could this all be some mad dream? Could the priest’s elixir have driven her mad? Still, Jed-din looked disturbingly solid, huge and handsome as a temple carving. “What do you want with me?”
“What I cannot have, I know.” He let go of her hand, made his own into a fist. “I . . I cannot stop thinking of you, Qinnitan. My heart will not rest. You haunt my dreams, even. I drop things, I forget things . . .”
She shook her head, really frightened now. “No. No, that is . . .” She took a step toward him and then thought better of it—his arms had risen as if to pull her toward him, and she knew that more than his strength would make it hard to break away again. “This is all madness, Jeddin . . Captain. Even if . . . if we forget why I am here in the Seclusion, who has brought me here . . .” She froze at a noise from outside, but it was just two of the younger wives shrieking with laughter as they played some game. “Even if we forget that, you scarcely know me. You have seen me twice . !”
“No, Mistress, no I saw you every day that I was a child and you were a child. When we were children together. You were the only one who was kind to me.” The look on his face was so serious that it would have been comical if she had not been in terror for her life. “I know it is wrong, but I cannot bear to think that you will . . . that you are for . . . for him.”
She shook her head at this blasphemy, wanting only to be far away. There was something about the young Leopard chieftain that made her heart ache, made her want to comfort him, and there was no question she felt something for him that went beyond that, but she could not push away her growing fright. Each moment that passed she felt more like the quarry of some ruthless hunting pack. “All that will happen is that we will both be killed. Whatever you think, Jeddin, you scarcely know me.”
“Call me Jin, as you once did.”
“No! We were just children.You followed my brothers. They were cruel to you, perhaps, but I was no better. I was a girl, a shy girl. I said nothing to any of my brother’s friends to stop them.”
“You were kind. You liked me.”
She let out a murmured groan of frustration and anguish. “Jeddin! You must go away and never do this again!”
“Do you love him?”
“Who? You mean the . . . ?” She moved closer, so close she could feel his breath on her face. She put a hand on his broad chest to keep him from trying to embrace her. “Of course I don’t,” she said quietly. “I am nothing to our master, less than nothing—a chair, a rug, a bowl in which to clean his hands. But I would not steal a washing bowl from him, and neither would you. If you try to steal me, we’ll both be killed.” She took a breath. “I do care for you, Jeddin, at least a little.”
The anxious lines on his forehead disappeared. “Then there is hope. There is reason to live.”
“Quiet! You did not hear me out. I care for you, and in another life perhaps it could be more, but I don’t wish to die for any man. Do you understand? Go away. Never even think of me again.” She tried to pull away, but he caught her now in a grip she could not have broken in a thousand years. “Let go!” she whispered, looking in panic toward the doorway. “They will be wondering where I’ve gone.”
“Luian will distract them a while longer.” He leaned forward until she almost whimpered from the size and closeness of him. “You do not love him.”
“Let me go!”
“Ssshh. I am not long for this place. My enemies want to throw me down.”
“Enemies?”
“I am a peasant who became chieftain of the autarch’s own guards. The paramount minister Vash hates me. I amuse the Golden One—he calls me his rough watchdog and laughs when I use the wrong words—but Pinim-mon Vash and the others wish to see my head on a spike. I could kill any one of them with my bare hands, but in this palace it is the gazelles that rule, not the leopards.”
“Then why are you giving them this chance to destroy you? This is beyond foolishness—you’ll murder us both.”
“No. I will think of something. We will be together.” His eyes went distant and Qinnitan’s speeding heart bumped and seemed to miss a beat. In that moment he looked nearly as mad as the autarc.h.”We will be together,” he said again.
She took advantage of his distraction and yanked her wrist out of his grasp, then backed hurriedly toward the doorway. “Go away,Jeddin! Don’t be a fool!”
His eyes were suddenly shiny with tears. “Stop,” he said. “Don’t forget.” He threw her the rose-colored shawl. “I will come to you one night.”
Qinnitan almost choked. “You will do no such thing!” She turned and hurried out the door, back into the heavy air of the Scented Garden.
“Are you mad, too?” she whispered to Luian as she handed her t
he shawl. A few of the other wives were watching her, but with what she prayed was no more than a bored interest in the comings and goings of a fellow prisoner. “We will all be executed! Tortured!”
Luian did not look at her, but her face was mottled with red underneath the heavy face paint.”You do not understand.”
“Understand? What is there to understand? You are . . .”
“I am only one of the Favored. He is the chief of the autarch’s Leopards. He could have me arrested and killed on almost any pretext he chose— who would believe the word of a fat castrate in women’s clothes over the master of the Golden One’s muskets?”
“Jeddin wouldn’t do such a thing.”