Shadow Magic (49 page)

When was the last time I slept? I had no memory of it, nor indeed of what sleep felt like. In my altered, dizzied state, I imagined all those shadows that had been haunting us closing in on their prey at last, owls upon two field mice.

I covered Mamoru’s mouth with one hand, muffling his cries, and steered the horse with the other. There was only one place along the plains that we could go where we wouldn’t be revealed to the open sky when the sun rose: the mountains. And if my feelings were right, and Iseul had finally shown his hand in using blood magic once again, then there was only one direction we could head for help and sanctuary. I jerked the reins, perhaps too hard, and the horse tore off across the river, away from Honganje. Water flew up around us in an ice-cold spray, and Mamoru tried to bite at my palm.

“Hold tight, my lord,” I said, knowing full well I spoke to someone who was no longer there.

I rode on.

If we could only reach the foothills before the sun began to rise. I
had no way of telling whether the men who’d answered my lord’s fevered call had been mounted on horseback, but if they were not, that would surely give us the head start we so desperately needed.

Mamoru pitched forward, his fingers twisted in the horse’s mane as though he meant to bring us down, and I snaked an arm around his chest, pulling him back. He whimpered, then fought against my hold, while I did my damnedest to steer the horse one-handed toward the looming dark of the mountains ahead of us. It didn’t work very well, and I was forced to let my hand fall.

“You’re not making things very easy for me,” I said, because my lord couldn’t hear me.

“You’re so
cruel,”
he moaned.

I ignored that, as one ignored everything brought on by a fever, and dug my heels in harder. I do not think that I took the time or space to breathe until the ground turned rockier and began to slant upward.

It was then that I began to realize we were going to have to dismount in order to continue. There were footpaths in the Cobalts—secret winding ways that we’d used in the war against Volstov and her dragons. It wouldn’t be safe to ride along them—especially not with my lord in such a state—but one might lead a horse along them efficiently enough.

I just didn’t have any idea how I was going to coax Mamoru into walking. More than that, I didn’t know how I was going to coax him into the sudden change of plans.

Best to confront those problems head-on instead of worrying about them, though. I urged our horse onward, looking for a familiar marking, etched into stone by a simple blade, that would tell me where one of the hidden paths started. They were much harder to spot in the moonlight. I took heart from the fact that Mamoru had not tried to leap from the horse since I’d grabbed hold of him, as though whatever had possessed him had been exorcised by my own sheer stubbornness.

I didn’t flatter myself that I was capable of such things, of course. I was merely glad that whatever it had been seemed to have passed. The fever was opponent enough for me. I was just a man and no figure of legend.

Finally I recognized a marking, a symbol scratched into the rock for soldiers to follow. It would do well enough for my lord and me. I pulled
Mamoru from the horse when I myself dismounted, and held him in front of me like a bundle of reeds wrapped in silk.

“Walking,” Mamoru sighed, as though it was an unimaginable burden.

“I’ll help you,” I promised, maneuvering around him to take the horse by the reins.

There was a moment, thankfully brief, when the world spun beneath my feet, and the bright blue of the rocks swirled together with the dark ground. Then, the horse tossed its head impatiently and broke my attention. I was freed from the vortex. I didn’t think it was anything more serious than my own exhaustion, but it was yet another thing to watch for.

There were more causes for a fever than I could count. If I fell prey to illness because of my own exhaustion, then everything fell to the gods.

We traveled in relative silence, Mamoru struggling to put one foot in front of the other, while high above us over the mountains, the sun began to rise. He clutched at his robes with thin, pale fingers, as though the silk gave him comfort against the strain of walking. At least, I thought, we could be thankful that losing the cover of darkness would mean losing the worst of the fever for the day as well. It left him weak, though, and leaning heavily on me in order to keep one foot following the other. I pushed from my mind any thought of what might happen if I weakened too—such a turn of events was unacceptable; I refused it—and we pressed on.

The mountains were brightly colored even in the faint hazy light of dawn, blue as the very heart of the country. For one as devoted as I, it was difficult to see the land as a danger, potentially housing enemies at every turn. The fourteenth pass, the one we were using, was unoccupied these days because of its extreme proximity to the Volstov capital. Clearing it out had been one of the first agreed-upon provisions of the treaty, or so my lord had told me, in the weeks after the war had ended.

We moved deeper into the mountains, while memory blurred with my thoughts and the sound of each ragged breath—my own mingling with my lord’s.

At the heat of midday we stopped to rest, and Mamoru slept so deeply I checked his breath with my palm in front of his mouth more
than once to reassure myself. He was still breathing though more quietly.

Even the horse sensed our troubles, and he was restless in the sunlight. I soothed both beast and my lord with alternating hands, let Mamoru drink from a skin dangerously low on water, while the horse whinnied in chastisement. We were both beasts of burden—perhaps, at last, we’d come to appreciate one another. Even if the horse was himself a foreigner.

Just on the other side of the range was Volstov, a country less our enemy than our own Emperor was. It was dragon country no more. From our position, twinkling faintly in the far distance, were the jeweled rooftops of Lapis, like a little toy city, as easily scattered by a child’s hand as it had been by the dragonfire.

I turned to show Mamoru, but his eyes were shut against the sunlight, and I thought the better of it. Instead, I whispered his name against his temple and gently led him on.

It had been nearly a week since Josette, Alcibiades, and I had shared our tête-à-tête in the general’s room, and we had yet to find an opportunity in which to get Lord Temur by himself.

The man was simply impossible!

“Of course, we would have to pick one of the more popular lords.” I sighed, murmuring my complaint to Alcibiades behind the fall of my sleeve. “He’s much too sociable for a Ke-Han warlord.”

“I thought that was what you liked about him,” Alcibiades countered in a maddening fashion.

He reached over me to spear one of the fried dumplings that had somehow begun cropping up at our table. Alcibiades did well enough with his sticks, even if he
did
use them as if they were weapons instead of eating utensils. I couldn’t help but think that his improved mood had a great deal to do with the fare, though that in turn was doubtless more to do with my helpful little suggestions to Lord Temur—all of them exquisitely tactful—than any hint the cooks might have taken from Alcibiades’ plates of fish going back untouched.

Josette, on my left, took a sip of her tea, watching our quarry with an expression that I might have termed intimate concern were I feeling more romantic about the whole thing. Really, she almost made it
too
easy for me. She was much like Alcibiades in that fashion, poor thing. Some people just couldn’t keep anything to themselves.

“Are we sure this is the proper way to go about things?” Josette asked.

“Oh, surely not proper,” I said, unable to keep the smile from my lips, “but it will be simplest. And it’s dreadfully efficient. I’m a bit out of practice since the war ended, and unlike Alcibiades, I haven’t had
any
opportunity for fun.”

“Fun,” Alcibiades snorted. “I wouldn’t call it
that
, exactly.”

I was starting to take the impression that my companions were experiencing what amounted to a softening of the heart. It was not quite a
change
of heart, since Alcibiades at the very least could be counted on to stick to a decision once he’d made it, but I could still tell that the poor dears were having doubts. Even to men such as Alcibiades, hardened on the battlefield, my Talent was a questionable force. When asked directly, the most explanation that people could manage was that it didn’t seem “quite fair,” all things considered.

That was all right. It was an attitude I’d grown rather used to in my eighteen years of living at the palace, and subsequently in exile. I was an ally, but not trusted—a necessary weapon, whose means were considered underhanded and whose actions left a considerably sour taste in most people’s mouths. The fact that I enjoyed my work seemed to be what distressed them the most, but I
was
good at it, and I made it a point always to enjoy the things I was good at.

So I was quite prepared to go through with our plan, even if it meant losing the friendships I’d cultivated there. I held no real illusions about the strength of such relationships, anyway, knowing full well that Josette only put up with me because my good general did, and that
Alcibiades
only put up with me because he was, bless him, an endearingly simple creature to baffle, and I thrust myself into his company more often than not.

That, and I considered us friends. He would simply have to forgive me my transgressions. And he would, given enough time.

Besides, it was terribly cumbersome living beholden to the whims and expectations of other people. I’d gone dreadfully overboard in my enthusiasm on first arriving within the Ke-Han capital, and it was time to prune back what had bloomed.

Everyone made their jokes about the instability on my mother’s
side of the family, but the truth was it made things
very
difficult when one came out of a spell of madness to find one’s life all askew. It had happened once, just before my period of exile, but I was grateful for that one—it meant I had to recall very little of my first few weeks therein. I sometimes felt as though I spent at least half my time putting things to right again. It could be exhausting, but there were moments that made it quite worthwhile.

Getting the chance to exercise my powers was certainly one of those moments, and in the week that followed our decision, I confess that I trailed Lord Temur like a lynx, lithe and hungry.

It had been
so
long since my last prey.

As luck would have it, my opportunity came just as I was nearly ready to give up altogether and ask Alcibiades’ aid in knocking Lord Temur over the head.

I was sitting at my vanity table, unhooking the clever wooden fastenings of the hair ornaments I’d borrowed from Josette without permission, when the door connecting mine to Alcibiades’ slid open, and the general himself appeared.

If I hadn’t already been sitting, I’d have fallen over with shock.

“My dear!” I said, rising at once and casting the little lacquered butterflies onto the desk. “If I’d known you were coming, I might have waited to undo myself. Come in, come in.”

I rushed over to take him by the arm, lest he change his mind before entering and duck out again straightaway. To my continuing shock, he allowed himself not only to be pulled into the room proper, but pressed into a nearby chair as well.

“You’ve got a bug in your hair,” he said, staring up at me.

“Oh!” I said foolishly, running a hand through my hair for the stray clasp. There it was, caught at the back. I fished it out, careful not to let it snag. “Well, fancy that. I completely missed it. Have you come to be helpful? Because there’s a knot in this sash that I can never seem to quite—”

“Josette says we’re doing it tomorrow,” he blurted out, interrupting me in the middle of turning around.

“Are we?” I asked, whirling around again at once to face him. I hadn’t meant to look so eager, but the fact remained that I had begun to think we’d never have an opportunity at all.

“You don’t have to look like it’s your birthday come early,”
Alcibiades grunted, but there was a small, hard smile on his face that I hadn’t seen before.

“But you couldn’t have planned it better if it
had
been my birthday,” I told him earnestly, clasping my hands together.

“You’re an odd bird,” Alcibiades said, in a way that made me think that perhaps it was a compliment, coming from him.

“The very finest of peacocks, my dear,” I said. “Now I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave, I’ve a great deal of preparation to do for tomorrow.”

If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought the look on Alcibiades’ face was almost disappointed.

“All right,” he said, rising to his feet. “Just so long as we can get this over with.”

“I do hope it doesn’t bother you, my dear,” I said, softening considerably. “As I know how traditional you like to be about things.”

“If it were up to me,” Alcibiades began, then cut off, shaking his head. “Doesn’t matter, does it? Since it’s not.”