But none of that makes him trustworthy. Her voice flat, she says, “You just happen to be here at the same time I am. And you just happen to come to my rescue.”
“I wouldn’t call it a rescue,” he says, self-deprecating. “You were doing just fine. But I saw those things swarming you, and I thought it would be rude to leave you to fight them on your own.”
It’s a disarming answer—which only makes her more suspicious. On an island where cliffs can vanish and the moon can change phase on a whim, any help is not to be trusted. “So you acted out of the kindness of your heart?”
“Can I put my hands down?”
She considers it. Then she says, “Move back.” When he does, she’ll kick his knives out of reach. She can probably take him even if he’s armed, but why make it any harder for herself than she has to?
Apparently he’s making the same calculation, because he hesitates. “Look—I gave you the benefit of the doubt, coming to your aid. I figure, if the Lhian wants to play a trick like that, she’ll send a poor damsel in distress. Not a perfectly capable swordswoman. But I’m not quite so certain that I want to make myself helpless, you understand?”
His choice of term for her makes her think of the sabre she holds, and how it came to be there. She wonders if he saw that part: how her hand closed on a shaft of moonlight, and the light became curved steel. That’s twice now the island has given her something, and she still doesn’t know why. She ought to throw both gifts away. Nothing so far in this endless night has led her to believe the Lhian is generous.
It’s clear this man knows more about the Lhian than she does—starting with the fact that the Lhian is female. She’s willing to play along for a while, to learn what she can. “Fine. You can put your hands down.”
He does. Then, moving slowly, he picks up the knives and sheathes them at his waist. Only when that is finished does he stand and extend one hand. “Aadet Temini.”
It takes her a moment to realize it’s his name. And that puts her in a bad position, because the last thing she wants to do is admit that she doesn’t remember her own. She takes refuge in hostility. “Give me one reason I should trust you.”
“We aren’t in competition,” he says. “I’ve never heard that the Lhian will only deal with one person at a time. There are stories of people coming in groups—the Surasim come to mind. There were three of them, two sisters and a brother, and the Lhian struck deals with them all. You won’t lose anything by traveling with me.”
“Unless you aren’t what you claim to be. How do I know you aren’t another test?”
He smiles wryly. “How do you know the test isn’t whether you’ll be courteous to a stranger who came to your aid?”
Irritatingly, he has a point. But she’s achieved her goal, distracting him from introductions; he drops his hand. In return, she sheathes the sabre as best she can, sliding it under her sash and hoping the blade won’t slice through the cloth at an inopportune moment. Pity the island couldn’t give me a proper scabbard, too. Though for all she knows, that will show up later.
“You want to travel together,” she says. “Why?”
He turns to regard the mountain looming overhead. “Well, we have to get up there somehow. And you may not have noticed, but this island is a treacherous place. I figure we stand a better chance if we each have someone to watch our back.”
That presumes she trusts him, which she still doesn’t. But trust isn’t necessary. She’ll watch her own back, and in the meanwhile get what use she can out of him. “I don’t suppose you know exactly where the cave is?”
Aadet snorts. “I was hoping you could tell me that.”
His ignorance eases the tension between her shoulder blades. If he’d given her the answer, she would have been sure this was a trap. She studies the landscape, then points off to the right. “It looks like that ridge leads a fair way up before it peters out.”
He nods, but doesn’t move yet. “I didn’t get your name.”
Damn it. Not so distracted after all. She says, “I only give my name to people I trust,” and sets off for the ridge without looking back. In the privacy of her mind, she adds, And apparently I don’t trust myself.
They start the climb in silence, but it doesn’t last for long. Aadet is garrulous, and as she hopes, the occasional laconic comment of her own is enough to keep him talking for a good stretch of time. “I think I’ve been on the island for three days,” he says to her. “As near as I can tell, anyway, judging by the meals I’ve eaten. But every time I go to sleep, I wake up with no idea how long I’ve been out. It could be an hour or a month, for all I know.”
He’s carrying a pack, which he retrieved from where he’d left it before charging into the fray. She saw him notice her own lack of gear, but he hasn’t said anything about it yet. When she considers her stomach, she feels like she could eat. She isn’t really hungry, though. It’s an advantage of a sort. She wonders if she’ll start to feel sleepy any time soon.
None of these thoughts are the sort of thing she wants to share with him. “How did you get here?”
“Stole a boat,” he says, which makes her think of her conversation with Therdiad. “Well, kind of. I left some money, but I don’t really know how much boats are worth around here. I made the mistake of telling the people in Dunrist that I wanted to get to the Lhian’s island, and after that, nobody would even talk to me, let alone help. I guess they think it’s an ill omen.”
“I can’t imagine why,” she says, not even trying to sound sincere.
Aadet shrugs. “She’s not as bad as some. All the stories say she only interferes with people who come to her island—doesn’t go looking for trouble, the way others do.”
“And the stories, of course, are true.”
“They generally are,” he says. “I mean, I’m not saying people never exaggerate, or forget details. But if it isn’t in her nature to go after people, then she won’t. She has to follow her own rules.” He falls silent, looking troubled. “Unless she changes aspects, maybe. Who knows.”
His words itch, deep in the recesses of her mind. Of course the stories are true. She spoke sarcastically before, but now she believes it, and doesn’t know why.
She wants to encourage him to keep talking, to explain the things she can’t ask about without revealing the depths of her ignorance. But before she can think of a subtle way to approach it, he adds, “I can’t blame the people in Dunrist. It makes people’s skin crawl, looking out over the water and seeing an island that wasn’t there yesterday.”
So it isn’t just the cliffs that appear and disappear without warning. And it explains the secrecy: if the locals don’t want any dealings with the Lhian, then no wonder the Cruais’s people have to sneak about. She doesn’t think they came a very long distance, though. The name of Dunrist sounds like it comes from the same language as their own names—which is different from the language she’s been speaking. Aadet, on the other hand . . . she’s pretty sure he came from farther away.
Memory whispers. There are other languages in there, she thinks. But she can’t imagine what good those would do her right now, so she grits her teeth and focuses on the terrain. There might be more of those creatures out there, or something worse.
“What about you?” he asks, before she can divert him with another comment. “How did you get here?”
She considers a variety of replies. Refusing to answer the question would be easiest, but she has a suspicion that if she does that too often, he’ll stop talking entirely. Then her one source of information will dry up. No, better to save her refusals for important matters. “Someone else rowed me over,” she says. “Left me on the beach.”
“A friend?”
“Not exactly.”
He pauses to wipe moisture from his brow. It might be sweat, or it might be the mist, which has thickened around them again. At least it isn’t quite as cold as before. “I’d ask where you come from, but you won’t tell me, will you?”
Not even if
I knew the answer. She just passes him and keeps moving.
They’re partway up the ridge now, not quite walking, not quite climbing. Her hands ache whenever she has to pull herself up a steep bit; the rush of the fight kept her from feeling it at the time, but her sliced palms and fingers haven’t miraculously turned back into healthy skin. The blade of her sabre keeps clanging against the rocks, catching in crevices or snagging in the branches of a ragged bush. It hasn’t yet cut through her sash, though, and that’s something.
For a while the slope takes enough of Aadet’s breath that he stops talking. She doesn’t mind the challenge; it gives her something to think about, besides all her unanswered questions. When they attain the top of the ridge, the ground flattens out, giving a nice view of the landscape below. She thinks she might even see the waters of the bay, in between bands of mist, but Aadet distracts her from it. “I could be cagey too, I suppose,” he says, his panting interrupting the words. “But what’s the point? I don’t see that it hurts me, telling you things about myself. And maybe you’ll learn from my open and friendly example.”
“Not bloody likely,” she says, before she can think better of it.
But Aadet only grins. “I’ll take that as a challenge. Mind if we rest for a moment? I could use a bite to eat.”
She hesitates, but the hook in her soul doesn’t drag her too forcefully onward. She shrugs and sits down on a flat bit of boulder.
Aadet slings his pack off his back and drops cross-legged to the ground. “Really, it’s pure luck that I’m here,” he says as he pulls out a loaf of bread and breaks off a chunk. It tears easily, though if he’s been here for days it ought to be stale. To her surprise, he offers the chunk to her.
When she reaches for it, he jerks like he’s been hit. “Your hands.”
Most of the blood has worn off by now, but not all of it, and the cuts are easy to see. “I found some cliffs,” she says, by way of explanation.
He reaches into his pack. “I have bandages. I can—”
“No.” The refusal is instinctive. Letting him trap her hands like that . . . in theory he’s her ally, at least a little, but theory dies with a knife in its back the moment she thinks about making herself vulnerable.
Aadet is staring at her. She says, “They’ll be fine. Doesn’t even hurt much any more. The bread?” She’s less interested in the food than in distracting him.
She’s also curious. The bread proves to be dry and not very flavorful, but nothing unusual happens when she swallows her first bite. So she says, “Luck?” and eats more. While she chews, she tugs off her boots and examines her feet. The leather is still damp, but it hasn’t rubbed any blisters into her skin.
He’s taken a second piece of bread for himself, and put the remainder back in his pack. “Luck . . . oh. Yes. The island being here—I wasn’t looking for it. I did a couple of years ago, but I’d given up. Seems like that’s the way it is in the stories: people who look for the Lhian don’t find her.”
I sure as hell wasn’t looking for her. Aadet offers a canteen; when she takes a sip, it proves to be water. I wonder if the Cruais was.
Testing his willingness to talk, she asks, “Where are you from, then?”
“Solaike,” Aadet says. “And if I’m lucky again—if I can find the cave and make a deal with the Lhian—I’ll have a reason to go back.”
A note in his voice leaves her feeling hollow inside. It’s the sound of a man hoping to see home again, after too long away. When she looks inside herself for that same hope, though, all she finds is emptiness. Not just an inability to remember home—which would be bad enough—but a certainty that there isn’t one.
She hasn’t really thought about where she’ll go after this is done, because she doesn’t truly believe the Cruais will let her go like he promised. Or that she’ll even live to give him the chance. But the sense that she doesn’t have anywhere to go to cuts deeply all the same.
Intending it to be cruel, she says, “You mean, if trailing along after me means I lead you to what you can’t find on your own.”
His fingers dig into the canteen. Their scraps of bread are long gone; she wonders how much more there is in that pack of his. The leather sack doesn’t look very full or heavy. But he makes his voice light, saying, “I wouldn’t complain. Who knows, though—maybe I’ll be the one to lead you there.”
She doubts it. But it isn’t the hook that makes her get up and start walking again.
They’re unquestionably on the slopes of the mountain now, which means the cave could be anywhere. She pauses, left hand resting comfortably on the hilt of her sabre, and looks up at the peak with a speculative eye. When Aadet reaches her side, she says, “What’s happened to you so far? Since you got to the island.”
“Are you asking what the Lhian has done to me?” She nods, and he blows his breath out in a long gust. “I thought I saw somebody early on, and kept trying to catch up with her, only I never could.”
By the way he says it, she would lay a bet the woman he thought he saw was someone specific, and important to him. But he doesn’t volunteer details, and she doesn’t ask for any.
“Chasing that,” Aadet says, “I nearly drowned in a bog, that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there until I was in the middle of it. And then later I found myself going back toward the shore—but that might have been an honest mistake.”
She wonders if the obstacles are tailored to each visitor, or whether the Lhian merely follows her own whimsy. She can’t really ask for Aadet’s opinion, though, not without describing what’s happened to her—and he hasn’t said anything about winding up with keepsakes from his experiences. She can, however, say what she was thinking before. “Getting to the cave is clearly meant to be hard.”
He follows her reasoning, and her line of vision. “You want to go straight up the mountain, rather than circling the lower slopes.”
She shrugs. “Whatever choice we make first is likely to be wrong. If the Lhian can change things here, then she can put the cave wherever she damn well pleases, and make us fumble around until we’ve satisfied whatever arbitrary criteria she’s set. But I’m betting it’s higher up.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Aadet grinning. Scowling, she says, “What?”
“You said ‘we,’” he says, and claps her on the shoulder as he goes by, committing himself to the upward path.
As much as it galls her to admit it, she’d have had a hell of a time getting up the mountain alone.
Not that she accepts Aadet’s help when he offers it. Every time she thinks about taking his hand, she imagines what will happen if he lets go. Up here, she’d be lucky to get away with a broken leg; more likely she’d break everything, and not even badly enough that it would mean a quick death. But there are times when her grip fails or her boot slips, and Aadet’s swift catch is the only thing that stops her from falling.
“You’re used to doing this,” she says through gritted teeth, inspecting her newly bruised elbow.
“We had to hide out in the mountains for a good two years before I was exiled,” he answers. “And the only reason we lasted that long was, we were better at climbing than the soldiers were.”
Better, but not perfect. He tires, as she does not. Eventually it happens that she scales a tall boulder, but his strength fails him. She looks down at him, and he up at her; she knows he’s wondering the same thing she is. Whether she’ll leave him there, and continue on her own.
If he hadn’t caught her before, she might. But he did, and so she lays her sabre down, unties her sash. When she stretches out across the boulder’s crown and lowers the cloth, he’s able to climb high enough to grab it, and that little bit of assistance is enough to get him to the top.
He sprawls on the stone in much the same way she did when she cleared the cliffs. “Thank you,” he says, breathing heavily. “And I’m sorry. I just—I need to rest.”
There’s apprehension in his voice. She can guess why. But if she was going to abandon him
, she would have done it when he was at the base of the boulder. “Fine,” she says, and goes looking for wood.
Her sabre isn’t very well suited to chopping bushes, but she gathers enough to make a small fire, in an alcove she foolishly thought might be the cave entrance when she first saw it. Out of the wind, Aadet produces a striker from his pack and persuades the brush to burn, though it smokes foully from the damp. Once the fire is going, he huddles so close to it, she half-expects him to choke on the fumes.
She says, “I’m guessing Solaike is a warm land.”
He shoots her an odd glance, but nods. “Very. I had a warmer shirt, but someone stole it—I’d washed it and left it out to dry, and then I dozed off.” He shivers and hunches more tightly into himself. “I should have stolen another shirt, to go with that boat.”
She studies him for a moment. He’s the very picture of misery, exhausted and freezing, but she hasn’t heard him say one word about giving up. “What are you hoping to accomplish, that’s worth going through this?”
Aadet stares into the fire and doesn’t answer.
After weighing the cost, she offers up another fragment of truth. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be. I was sent here. Against my will.”
As she predicted, it coaxes him into talking more. “My land needs a revolution. That’s what I was trying to do—that’s why I got exiled.” He tucks his chin toward his chest. “I call it ‘exile.’ I should call it running away. Kaistun convinced me I had to go, had to get out of the country before they killed me. I used to think I should have stayed. Now . . . now I think that maybe this is why I left, though I didn’t know it. Maybe the gods sent me out into the world so I could find the Lhian.”
“You think she’ll give you a revolution?”
“I think she’ll give me the inspiration I need to start one, yes.” Aadet is more animated now, the passion of his words warming him from within. “A generation ago, there was a military coup. This man named Valtaja, he’d been a general in the army, and he made himself king. We couldn’t touch him—though we tried. The army was too loyal to him. But now he’s dead, and it’s his son who’s holding the staff, and the soldiers aren’t loyal to him the way they were to his father. He’s vulnerable, I know it. The problem is, people these days are too used to knuckling under. I’m going to ask the Lhian for the words I need to make them stand up and fight back.”