The first five chapters of Soldier of Dorsa!

Without further adieu…

Part I:

The Lengthening Shadows

“How the Shadowlands came to be is a mystery that the Brotherhood, in all its exploration, has never been able to answer.  Did the Shadowlands always exist, as some histories state, or was it, along with its inhabitants, created by mankind?  There is an oft-recited but apocryphal account that states it was created by a particularly powerful Sorceress as a place to safely contain the creatures threatening her tribe.  Modern scholars are more apt to believe that the tale is an example of superstition attempting to explain away the paradox of two worlds that exist side by side and yet remain invisible to one another, and the further paradox of some shadows — and some men — who can exist in both places at once.”

— Brother Remon of Gifford, 

A Primer on the Shadowlands and Wielding Its Power for Aspiring Brothers

Prologue

~ THEN ~

“What is the art of the sword master?” the ku-sai asked.

Joslyn did not know.  But she was afraid to admit she did not know.  She stood in the little clearing in front of his hut, a short sword dangling loosely from one hand.

“The art of… fighting,” she said at last.

“Wrong.”

He attacked — a blur of whirring steel that came so quickly she scarcely had time to lift her sword before he disarmed her.  Her short sword clattered to the ground.  The hand that had been holding it vibrated painfully from the shockwave his blade had sent through hers.  She reached for the dagger at her other hip, but the flat of his blade came down on her wrist so hard that she was sure he’d shattered it at first.  Instinctively she pulled her hand back with a sharp breath, and with a fast flick of the tip of his great curved sword, he caught the hilt of the dagger and flung it out of her sheath and ten feet behind him.

Joslyn bent to retrieve her sword from the ground, only to feel the cold edge of the ku-sai’s blade against her throat.  It barely touched her, yet she knew that if she moved even half an inch, it would slice into the artery that pulsed just beneath her skin.

“I have killed you,” said the ku-sai.  “Come back tomorrow when you have the answer.”

He tossed his sword into the air.  It spun end over end, a spinning killing machine glinting in the sun.  Then he snatched it by the hilt midair and sheathed it at his waist.  Without another word, he turned his back on Joslyn and walked away.

Hot tears threatened, but Joslyn wouldn’t let them fall.  She hadn’t come all this way just to cry like a little girl when the ku-sai turned her away.

She didn’t pick up her own rust-spotted sword from the ground until he disappeared into the hut and closed the door behind him. 

What is the art of the sword master? she asked herself.  What is the art of the sword master? 

Joslyn looked down at her pitiful short sword.  It was completely unlike the ku-sai’s sword:  His was a broad, curved scimitar, polished so well that it shone like a mirror, brilliant as a magic sword from one of the Terintan tall tales told around the evening campfire.  

To say her sword was “common” was a compliment it didn’t deserve.  It looked older than the ku-sai himself, with the steel blade notched in places and dotted with circular spots of tarnish.  She’d stolen it off a drunken foot soldier of the Imperial Army that she’d met on her journey north.  

As best as Joslyn could figure, she was about fourteen.  It was an age that might still be considered “young” for more privileged girls, but Joslyn’s fourteen years had made her old enough and hard enough that she knew the drunken soldier had intended to rape her as soon as he got the chance.  

She’d slipped away from him before a workable plan could blossom in his mind, watched from the shadows of the tavern as he drank more and more with his mates.  Then she followed him into the alleyway and hung back as his speech slurred and his mates disappeared one by one with women they might or might not pay at the end of the night.  Finally, the soldier passed out in the alleyway, a pile of garbage serving as a makeshift pillow, his feet dangling dangerously close to the small gully that carried the neighborhood’s sewage.  Joslyn kicked him lightly to make sure he was really asleep, then stole the sword as a punishment for so much as having the mere thought of asserting himself over her.

She examined what had been the drunken soldier’s short sword as she remembered how she’d acquired it, used a fingernail to scratch at one of the tarnished spots.  The spot came off without too much effort, leaving a smudge of black grime beneath her nail.  Joslyn retrieved the dagger next, the only item she’d managed to take with her from her former master when she ran away.  It, too, was tarnished.  The blade was dull, hardly good enough to slice bread.  Perhaps the ku-sai would show her how to make it sharp again.

If the ku-sai would show her anything at all.

Joslyn sighed heavily.  

What is the art of the sword master?

She sat down cross-legged on the ground, opposite the ku-sai’s wooden hut.  She sat far enough from the hut to be respectful, close enough to show she would not leave.  Beyond the hut, the sun had begun to disappear behind the mountains, the last oranges and reds of the day melting into the sky.

Joslyn rested the sword across her lap, and with a tattered corner of her tattered brizat, she started to scrub at the tarnished spots.  When she saw the ku-sai tomorrow — if she saw him — he would see that her sword gleamed as brightly as his own.  Perhaps then he would know that she was serious about learning his craft, the art of the sword master.

She fell asleep a few hours later in the same spot, curled like a comma against the cold earth.  She clutched the short sword to her chest in the same way other girls a little younger than herself might have clung to their dollies.  

Joslyn had never had a dolly.  But she had this sword, and that was enough.

It would have to be enough, since she had nothing else.

#

Joslyn woke with the toe of a soft-soled boot nudging her side.  She struggled to open bleary eyes.  The cold had kept her from sleeping most of the night; she’d only finally fallen asleep in the hours just before dawn.  Now she was groggy and stiff as the unwelcome toe prodded her awake.

“What is the art of the sword master?” asked the ku-sai.

He looked bigger than he really was from her prone position against the earth.  In reality, the ku-sai was a small man, only a few inches taller than Joslyn and almost as skinny.  The rising sun was directly behind him, making his white beard and bald head glow unnaturally.  When she was little, the tinker’s wife used to entertain Joslyn and her older sister with tales of desert angels who would descend from the clouds and grant water to the righteous, and that was what the ku-sai made Joslyn think of now — an angel who had walked out of her dreams and become manifest.

“What is the art of the sword master?” repeated the ku-sai angel.

Joslyn lifted a hand halfway, though she didn’t know what she was reaching for.  “Please…” she said, though she didn’t know what she was pleading for.

He only stared at her, face hard and severe.

“The art of the sword master is…” she said, groping through her bleary mind for something that might satisfy him.  “Defense?”

“No,” he said, and walked away.

Joslyn spent the day foraging around the hut for what little food she could find, since the ku-sai had offered her none.  Behind his hut was a smokehouse that gave off a mouth-watering smell of meat, but she knew better than to enter there, just as she knew better than to disturb the ku-sai’s clucking hens or the fat eggs that probably laid in their hen house.  The ku-sai came out to feed the hens at one point late in the morning, speaking to them in a cooing, soothing voice that contrasted so sharply with the tone he used for her that he seemed a different man.  She couldn’t quite understand what he told the hens; he addressed them in a rough, northern Terintan dialect that she didn’t entirely understand.

In the forest behind the hut, Joslyn found some half-rotten acorns, which she dined on with enthusiasm, squatting beside the small game trail and digging out the acorn meat with her increasingly grimy fingers.  She needed to backtrack today, find the stream she had crossed on the way up the mountain, and refill her water skin.  Maybe she would take a bath while she was there.  If she could smell herself, so could whatever animals roamed the mountainside at night — lions, most like.  Maybe wolves, too.  Certainly foxes, though they probably wouldn’t bother her.  But as long as she was sleeping outside, it would be better not to attract their attention.

Nevertheless, she dreaded the necessary dip into the mountain stream.  It was spring, and the mountain’s daytime temperature was warm enough for her, but once night fell, she was likely to freeze to death if any part of her was still wet.

Best to do it sooner rather than later, then.  While the sun was still strong.

Joslyn sighed and got to her feet, brushing the crumbs of the acorns on her dirty trousers.  Her stomach rumbled, protesting that the business with the acorns was already over.  Maybe she would find more on her walk to the stream.  She adjusted the short sword in its makeshift sheath at her hip and headed down the trail.

What is the art of the sword master? she wondered as she walked.

#

The third day was not unlike the first two:  She woke up cold and stiff, confronted with an empty stomach and the ku-sai’s question.  

“What is the art of the sword master?”

“Protecting others,” she said on that third morning.

“No,” he said.

“Disarming the opponent,” she said the fourth day.

“Strength,” she said the fifth day.

“Agility,” she said on the sixth.

“Perseverance,” she said on the seventh.

“Why does it matter?” she asked the ku-sai on the eighth day.  She was cranky and exhausted from lack of sleep, emaciated from lack of food.  At least she was clean, had fresh water, and a polished short sword.  She’d torn off a corner of her brizat and used it now to scrub the sword clean and bright every morning.

But she couldn’t eat the sword.  Nor could she use it well enough to kill anything she could eat.  Joslyn despaired that she would starve to death before the ku-sai ever accepted her as an apprentice.  When he asked his question on the ninth morning, she said simply:

“I don’t know.  Teach me the answer.  Please.”

And finally he said something besides “No” or “Wrong.”

“I will teach you nothing until you answer my question correctly,” he said, and walked back into the hut.

Joslyn sat cross-legged on the ground, finally permitting her tears to fall.

#

Between her own foraging and the local squirrels, all the acorns within a reasonable radius of the hut were gone by the end of the ninth day.  She’d tried eating bark a few days before but found it impossible to get down.  She’d also had the smallest bite of a mushroom, worried that it might be poisonous, and sure enough, she felt immediately light-headed and spent her afternoon nauseated and dry-heaving after she’d emptied her stomach of water.

When the toe came into her ribs the morning of the tenth day, it seemed to take all of her energy simply to open her eyes.

“What is the art of the sword master?” the ku-sai asked.

“I don’t know,” Joslyn whispered.  “I don’t know what the art of the sword master is.”

He walked away.  Joslyn laid her head back onto the earth and fell asleep.

#

She needed a bath again, but couldn’t summon the energy to make it to the stream on the eleventh day.  She needed to go there; there was nothing left in her water skin, and water was the only thing fooling her belly into thinking she had eaten.

I have come all this way only to starve to death on the side of a mountain, she thought bitterly.

The ku-sai had been her last hope, a myth whose thread she had followed north, across deserts and savannas and the foothills of the Zaris Mountains.  She’d stopped in the village at the foot of the ku-sai’s mountain twelve days ago, seeking to barter one of her meager possessions for a little food and a little information.  She’d managed only a crust of moldy bread and the instruction that there was an odd, grumpy old hermit who lived in the saddleback between this mountain and the next.  He might be the one she sought.  

Or he might just be an odd, grumpy old hermit.  

Not that it mattered, they said.  Finding his hut wouldn’t be hard, but he wouldn’t teach her.  Many who were certainly more worthy than she had tried before, and he had refused each of them.  Some of them were even highborn young men who’d taken their lives into their hands by traveling south or east or west from the Empire in the days when Terinto was even wilder than it was now. 

The villagers looked Joslyn up and down, and she knew what they saw:  A girl.  A runt, undernourished and small for her age.  And if she was unlucky, they saw a runaway slave.

Joslyn only spent a day in the village, thanked the tavern owner who’d given her the scrap of bread, and headed up the mountain with only her dull dagger and tarnished sword, angling for the saddleback where the hut was supposed to be.

She would find the ku-sai.  He would train her to be a sword master, like he was.  She would do this, because what else was there left for her to do?  She could not go to any place with people; the slave hunters might find her.  She would die before she would be a slave again.  There had been a light of hope, for a moment, a promise of a very different destiny.  One with laughter and love and security with her Anaís, but Anaís had left her for the stable boy, leaving Joslyn only with a flower by way of apology.

The ku-sai would accept her as a pupil.  Or she would die on his doorstep.  

“What is the art of the sword master?”

“I don’t know.”

#

“What is the art of the sword master?” asked the ku-sai on the twelfth morning.

Joslyn somehow managed to push herself up into a sitting position.  Her eyes had sunken into her skull; the skin around her cheeks clung to the hollows; her lips were thin and chapped and stretched into a perpetual grimace.

Nothing but skin and bones.  People had said that to her before, of her before, but they had always been wrong.  She’d been hungry all her life, but this was actual starvation.  Real starvation.  Her skin and her bones were truly all she had left.

Her heavy head wobbled on her weak neck, but she looked straight into the ku-sai’s golden-brown eyes and croaked out:  

“Death.  The art of the sword master is death.”

The ku-sai did not move for a moment.  He said nothing.  Then he walked back into his hut, and Joslyn collapsed onto the ground.

A few minutes later, the ku-sai returned.  He carried a wooden plate of scrambled eggs in one hand, in the other was a thick woolen blanket, its color the same green as the budding trees.  He dropped the blanket next to her and rested the plate of eggs on top of it.

“Eat slowly, young kuna-shi,” he instructed.  “If you eat too fast, you will only throw it all up again.”

Then he walked back inside the hut.

Joslyn didn’t understand what was happening.  Had the old man taken pity on her?  Why had he brought her the eggs?  Was it a trick?  Did the eggs contain a poison that would finally kill her?

Kuna-shi.  Again, there was that Terintan dialect she didn’t quite understand.  “Shi” meant child.  What was kuna?

She sat up again, glancing suspiciously at the eggs.  In the end, she couldn’t fight her hunger.  She picked up the plate and shoveled the eggs into her mouth, slowly at first, then faster and faster.  She’d eaten half of the eggs before her stomach cramped and she remembered the instruction about not eating too fast.

She put the plate on the ground, forced herself to rest for what she guessed was an hour, then ate the rest of the eggs.

Her stomach tried to reject the meal.  She could feel it working, clenching around the eggs as it tried to remember how to perform the task of digestion.  She wanted to throw up, but she didn’t know when she would get a meal again.  She clenched her jaw and managed to keep it down.  When she was sure she wouldn’t lose the eggs, she wrapped the blanket around her and fell back asleep.

Death was the right answer, she thought as she drifted off.  Of course.  What is the art of the sword master?  The art of death.

No wonder the sword master had not taken on a pupil before.  None of them had been willing to stay until the brink of starvation, when the word “death” was the only correct answer to any question asked.

1

~ NOW ~

In faint grey light tinted pink by the rising sun, two women in two different places worked through a series of movements.  Filled with leaps and crouches, the sweeping of arms and legs in great arcs and tight thrusts, sidesteps, dodges, and spins, an outside observer might have taken each woman to be engauged in a kind of unusual, exotic dance.

“What is she doing?” the observer watching from the shadows may have asked himself.  “Is she imitating the mountain men, dancing to bring the rain?”

But no one watched either woman.  Each had made sure of that, because their dance was a secret one.

One woman danced on floorboards so worn that years of footsteps had etched visible pathways into them.  These floorboards rolled and shifted beneath her feet, for she was belowdecks in a merchant carrack sailing from Reit in the East to Paratheen in Terinto.  Trade goods surrounded her, primarily in the form of sheep and cattle, and, although the men who hired her on as a cook thought she did not know, she also knew that a hidden compartment contained two barrels filled with meravin mushrooms — heavily taxed delicacies that were easily worth twice or even three times the cost of all the livestock.

Despite the unstable surface upon which she danced, her movements were fluid and graceful.  The ship bucked and rocked, but she did not.  Any warrior of the Seven Cities, who might have recognized her dance for what it was, would have also called her deadly.

The woman on the ship was known as Joslyn of Terinto.  Only a few weeks earlier, she had been dead.  But she made a bargain to a dark creature in a dark world to gain one more year of life in order to protect the woman she loved.

The second woman danced on an opulent rooftop courtyard.  She had pushed the furniture to the edges of the patio to make room for her dance, and as she moved, she silently recited the names of each part, lips forming the words as she went:

Mountain.  She planted her feet; she changed her breathing.

River.  She dodged left, then right, then forward, then back, never letting her feet leave the ground.

Rising sun.  She crossed imaginary daggers before her — because the movements were meant to be done without one’s weapons — and parried against an invisible foe, moving his weapon above and then behind her.

The woman on the rooftop was an amateur — but a well-trained amateur, if only she would stop mouthing the names of the movements like a child learning to read.

Her name was Natasia of House Dorsa — the Traitor Princess to some, the heir to Emperor Andreth and rightful Empress to others.  Only a few weeks earlier, Tasia had watched the woman she loved die before her eyes.  Tasia, by all rights, should be dead, too, but somehow here she was, a royal in exile, taking refuge with a strange lord in a strange land.

But this strange land was the land where her love had been born.  Being here in Paratheen, Terinto’s largest city, made her feel closer to Joslyn, even as it underscored her absence.

Wind through wheat, Tasia mouthed, leaning backwards with as much flexibility as she could muster, though she knew her version of the movement was hardly even a decent imitation of her dead lover’s version.

Tiger’s fury, Joslyn thought (without thinking) on the ship sailing for Paratheen many hundreds of miles away.  The ship lurched, but Joslyn completed her short charge and tigress-like swipe with her dominant hand effortlessly, even as the Adessian Sea boiled like a cauldron.

Diving falcon, Tasia mouthed on her rooftop, remembering the way Joslyn had made her watch hawks and falcons diving for their prey for nearly an hour before she had consented to teach this move.  Once Tasia had finished the sharp duck, she hesitated, one knee on the ground.

“Gods be damned,” she muttered to herself, because she had forgotten the next move of the dance.  The next several moves, actually.

But Joslyn had not forgotten.  Several hundred miles away, in the belly of the ship, diving falcon morphed into scorpion sting, scorpion sting became light on water, and light on water transformed into heron’s wing.

On the rooftop in Paratheen, Tasia used a shirtsleeve to mop the sweat from her brow, thinking she might as well stop for the morning and break her fast.  A flicker of movement caught her attention.  Tasia spun.  Defensively, she placed her back against the waist-high wall that marked the edge of the roof.  One hand went to a dagger sheathed at her hip.

A hanging plant, its long arms and spiky fat leaves cascading nearly to the ground, swayed gently upon the line.  It swayed, despite the fact that the wind was still this morning — there was no sandy breeze tripping southwards off the dunes, and no cooling salt breeze traveling north from the sea.

Tasia leaned forward, squinting.  Then she smiled, taking her hand from the hilt of the dagger.  

“It’s alright,” she said, aiming her comment in the direction of the swaying plant.  “You can come see if you want.”

But the plant stopped swaying on its own without anyone appearing, and Tasia sighed.  She slipped Halia’s leather sandals onto her feet once more and pushed the furniture back into place.

Maybe tomorrow, Tasia thought.  Maybe tomorrow morning, the girl would come again, and this time she would be brave enough to show herself.  

Tasia hoped she would.  She’d like to have someone to talk to besides Evrart, Halia, and Lord M’Tongliss.

But after nearly being caught in her voyeurism, Tasia doubted the girl would even come to the rooftop tomorrow morning, let alone reveal herself.  The differences between “slave” and “Empress” were too great, ingrained into the girl’s head since birth.  They had been ingrained into Tasia’s head, too, but Joslyn had changed that.

Joslyn.  Even thinking the name produced a hollow ache in her chest.

Tasia sighed and headed for the stairs.  She might as well break her fast.  

#

In the ship’s hold, Joslyn also wiped sweat from her brow.  She put her shabby leather armor on, strapped her sword to her back, checked that her daggers were all hidden where they ought to be, and headed up the stairs towards the faint morning sun.

The deck wasn’t as empty as she’d expected.  The sailors’ work was never done, that was true, but at this early hour, she’d expected to see no more than a skeleton crew on the deck — the remnants of the night crew as they traded places with their morning replacements.  

Instead, crewmen ran in every direction, the Captain’s voice echoed across the main deck, and the first mate was handing something out.  Three of the sailors stood on the starboard side near the place where Joslyn had emerged from belowdecks.  They each stood with a hand shading their eyes, staring transfixed at the open sea.  Joslyn followed their gaze and spotted a black smudge on the horizon.

“What’s happening?” she asked the closest sailor.

He glanced over his shoulder at her.  “Pirates is what’s happening,” he grumbled.  “Cap’n should’ve known this would happen.  Hardly any Imperial ships in these waters anymore, what with the war.”

The sailor beside him, who didn’t look as if he could be any older than fifteen summers, let out a plaintive moan.  “Mother Moon spare us all,” he said.  “We’re goin’ t’die.”

“Don’t talk like that,” the first sailor said gruffly.  “We have an Adessian captain.  If anyone will know how to negotiate, he will.”

“We’re goin’ t’die,” the young sailor said, louder this time.  “We’re all goin’ t’die!”

“Shut up,” said the first sailor.

“Why should he?” asked the third.  “It’s death or slavery, since Adessian pirates have a better market for slaves than silks these days.  They’ll kill us or sell us.  We’ll be lucky if they kill us.”

The boy began to whimper.

“Cap’n will handle it,” said the first, but there was doubt in his voice this time.  “If he can’t negotiate, he’ll fight.  He won’t let his ship go — or his men go — without a fight.”

The other sailor scoffed.  “Fight?  With what?  Sheep?  The Cap’n won’t fight.  He’s Adessian, like them.  He’d sell us before he’d die for us.”

Joslyn had heard enough.  She followed the Captain’s voice to the far side of the ship, bracing herself for an argument she knew she had to win.

The first mate saw her approaching first.

“Why aren’t you working?” he growled at Joslyn.  “Go help the men hide what we can while we still have the chance.”

“Hiding won’t help,” Joslyn said.

The Captain whirled to face her, the stars tattooed around his left eye crinkling as he scowled.  “He gave you an order, woman.  Now stop your insolence and go help.”

“We can beat the pirates,” Joslyn said.  “I’m a veteran of the Imperial Army, and — ”  She’d been about to add that she had been a member of the palace guard, but they wouldn’t believe that.  Women weren’t palace guards.  Especially not Terintan women.  “Give me a handful of fighting men to organize, and I promise we will beat them.”

The first mate cocked his head thoughtfully.  But the Captain huffed impatiently.

Joslyn had told them that she was a veteran heading home from the Eastern front to Paratheen when they’d hired her on at Reit.  It had been her intention to sell her services as a guard, but they hadn’t accepted that.  Instead, they’d offered free passage and quarter (in the ship’s hold, it turned out, with the livestock) in exchange for being a “seaman’s assistant.”

“Seaman’s assistant,” apparently, meant that Joslyn was obligated to clear the waste of both livestock and sailors each day, scrub the decks when requested, and join the other “assistants” in pumping out the stinking bilge water.

It was alright.  Joslyn had been a slave before.  She could be a slave again, so long as her internment ended the moment they docked in Paratheen.

“We can beat them,” Joslyn told the ship’s captain for the third time.  Her tone was placid — soothing, even.

“No,” the Captain said.  He turned seaward again, gazing at the rapidly approaching longship.  When he spoke again, it was more to himself than to Joslyn or the first mate.  “I know their type.  If we negotiate, their Rizalt will take what he wants and send us on our way.  If we fight, he will show no mercy.”

“You’re right,” Joslyn said to the Captain’s back, her voice still calm and unhurried.  “The Rizalt will take what he wants.  But what he wants isn’t mushrooms, Captain.  Imperial slaves fetch high prices on the Islands.”  She paused.  “You know this to be true.  You know it better than most of the other men on this ship.”

The first mate, still facing Joslyn beside the Captain, shifted uncomfortably at this.  He was an Empire native, probably a Port Lorsiner, and Joslyn guessed he hadn’t thought about the possibility of the pirates demanding slaves.  The first mate’s eyes darted skeptically from Joslyn, to the Captain, to the crewmen behind them.  

A slave raid would leave any Adessians untouched — that was the unwritten rule.  But Empire men?

“Captain?” the first mate said warily.  “Maybe she’s right.  Maybe we’re better off taking our chances in a fight.”

The Captain squinted at the rising sun.  The longship, though still only a smudge on the horizon, had grown noticeably closer, close enough that Joslyn could see the longship’s oars moving up and down in the water.

“Eight men,” Joslyn said.  “Give me eight men who can hold their own in a fight, and I will make sure that this ship retains both its cargo and its crew.  And I will make sure their Rizalt ends this day at the bottom of the sea.”

“Please, Captain,” said the first mate, putting a hand on the Captain’s shoulder.  “I promised me wife I’d come home again.  I don’t want to leave her with a son and baby girl to raise by ’erself.”

The Captain hesitated.  Then he spat over the railing.  “Very well,” he said.  He jabbed a sausage-thick finger in Joslyn’s direction.  “But if we lose, you’re the first one I’m giving to the pirates.”  He looked her up and down.  “I’m sure they’ll enjoy a fresh piece of desert arse.  Especially if you don’t make it easy for them.”

Like an ocean swell, fury rose from deep within Joslyn, and for a moment she thought she might make the ship’s captain the first one to flail like a speared fish on the end of her sword.  But the wave of her anger dissipated, and Joslyn only lifted her chin.

“We won’t lose,” she said.

2

~ THEN ~

“…Nineteen.  Twenty.  Twenty-one.  Ready or not, here I come!” Mylla called.

Beside her big sister, Adela squirmed and pressed a hand to her mouth, suppressing a giggle.  Tasia grabbed the girl’s free hand and squeezed it, put a finger to her lips.  They certainly had a good hiding place, a narrow closet in Adela’s bedchamber hidden by a false panel that Tasia’s new handmaid was unlikely to detect.  The palace was full of secret places like this one — closets that were invisible unless you knew where to look, passageways that wormed their way between bedchambers and beneath kitchens, entire rooms built by long-dead monarchs whose existence even the Wise Men didn’t know about.

But Tasia knew them.  Before Nik died, he and Tasia had drawn up their own maps of the palace and its grounds.  Now Tasia would pass on her knowledge to little Adela, even if the only way the girl, who didn’t share Tasia and Nik’s passion for exploring, could be convinced to learn them was through playing endless rounds of hide-and-find.

Thinking of Nik brought tears to her eyes, and she squeezed her sister’s hand tighter.  Tasia still had Adela.  Her mother was gone.  Nik was gone.  But she still had Adela, and she would not lose her.  No matter what.

“Oww, Tasia,” Adela hissed in the darkness, shaking her hand loose from Tasia’s.  “Too hard.”

Through the narrow crack of the panel Tasia had left open, she saw Mylla cross first this way, then that way.  At the sound of Adela’s whisper, she stopped, rotated in the center of the room.

Tasia cocked her head, watching the handmaid.  She liked being able to watch the girl without her staring being seen.  Two days earlier, on the one-year anniversary of Nik’s death, Mylla had kissed her.  Tasia had been sitting at her vanity, and Mylla had been seated just behind, brushing out her hair.  Tasia’s thoughts turned towards her brother, turned towards the way Father hadn’t even mentioned the anniversary, and silent tears had fallen from her eyes, rolled down her cheeks, hung, then fell, from her chin.  Mylla must have seen it all in the mirror, because she set the brush down and began to undress the Princess.  It was a normal enough ritual, for a handmaid to undress her mistress.  But there was something loaded in the careful movements of Mylla’s fingers as they loosened the ties of Tasia’s brassiere.  A few seconds later, to Tasia’s breathless surprise, Mylla had bent to catch one of Tasia’s exposed nipples between her teeth.  After releasing it, the handmaid had taken Tasia’s chin in one hand, turned her face, and kissed her.

They hadn’t spoken about it, afterwards.  But now, watching Mylla through the crack in the hidden closet inside Adela’s room, Tasia’s hand floated to her lips, touching the places where Mylla’s mouth had been two days before.  An unfamiliar, but not entirely unpleasant, feeling warmed Tasia’s insides, centered at a spot a few inches down from her belly button.  

On the other side of the sliding panel, Mylla stopped, stepped closer to their hiding place.  Adela squirmed.  Hands reached towards the crack in the wall, and seconds later, the crack widened as Mylla figured out how to open it.

Full of gleeful giggles, Adela erupted from the hidden closet and careened into the handmaid.  “You found us, you found us!” she squealed.  

Mylla proved herself to be a good playmate, tickling the young princess and chasing her in a circle around the bed.  

Tasia stepped out and slid the false panel closed behind her, glancing back at it once to make sure it was invisible once again.  “Quite the hide-and-find companion you make, Adela.  You do realize the goal is not to be found, don’t you?”

But Adela was too busy laughing and running from Mylla to answer.

Mylla caught Tasia’s gaze.  She smiled, and the heat inside Tasia intensified.  

Maybe later tonight, Tasia would ask the girl to brush her hair out again.  Maybe there could be another kiss, and she would come to understand what this feeling deep inside her gut meant.     

~ NOW ~

“Well, you’re up early, aren’t you?” Tasia said.

Evrart sat at one of the tall round tables in Lord M’Tongliss’s open-air kitchen, looking even more dour than usual, if such a thing was possible.

Kitchens and dining halls, she’d learned, were odd things here in Terinto.  In the palace — in any stately house in the Capital Lands outside Terinto — the dining hall was at the very heart of the home, usually with the kitchen located a floor beneath it.  But Lord M’Tongliss’s kitchen was outside at the back of the home.  It had an overhanging roof and two adjacent walls where the kitchen connected to the rest of his mansion, but the other two walls were absent.  Where those walls should have been, two huge clay ovens, which to Tasia looked like upside-down funnels, gave off tremendous heat.  This was the reason the kitchen wasn’t inside, where the desert sun often made the heat stifling as it was, and it was also the reason why two of the walls were missing.  In a land where daytime winter temperatures reached levels that could be considered comfortable, and where daytime summers were downright unbearable, a closed-in kitchen with ovens of that size would be hard to even enter, let alone to work in.

Beyond the kitchen was a partition wall, and beyond that was an open-air dining hall, lined with marble pillars and covered only loosely with flapping lengths of silk draped between the pillars.

Tasia had decided she liked the open-air kitchen and dining hall.  The kitchen in particular was a pleasant place to take her meals when she wasn’t being officially entertained by Lord M’Tongliss or one of his two wives, and it was a better place than most within the mansion to disappear for an hour or two when she needed some privacy.  Kitchen slaves came and went here, but almost none of them spoke the common tongue, and they had clearly been trained not to approach the free members of the household.

But she could never manage to hide for long.  Especially not from Evrart.  

“We were supposed to meet this morning,” he said.

“I know.  But I wanted to do my training first,” Tasia said, accepting a bowl of freshly cut melon from one of the kitchen slaves with an appreciative smile.

Evrart scratched at the half-formed black beard that was growing in patchily along his cheeks.  The hair on his head was also growing back in patches — he’d shorn off his bowl-like cut on the sea voyage to Paratheen, because the Imperial magistrates searching for them would be looking for a Wise Man, not a scruffy Port Lorsiner who’d washed up in Terinto.  The ratty beard and shaved head were a good start, as were the tunic, trousers, and tattered brizat he’d exchanged for his Wise Man’s robes, but there was something so inescapably officious and prim about the man that Tasia doubted he would ever truly pass for a common sailor or ex-soldier or laborer.

You can take the robes off a Wise Man, she thought, but you can never take the Wise Man off.

Although… now that she knew Evrart had been in the Brotherhood of Culo all the time, had he ever really been a Wise Man?  Or had he been a Brother masquerading as a Wise Man the whole time?

The thought made her shiver.  She was less fond of games of deception than she ever had been.

“I would have thought our meeting would take precedent over your training,” said the former Wise Man.  “After all, it is only the future of the entire Empire that is at stake.”

Tasia was careful to roll her eyes while her back still faced him.  When she turned and approached his table, she extended the small dish of melon chunks towards him with the grace and good manners expected from a royal.  “Have some.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s just the right amount of sweet.”

He held up a hand and shook his head.  She sat down on the stool across from him.

“How is your arm?” she asked, nodding to the arm that had been broken during their escape from the palace three weeks earlier.  It wasn’t in a sling any longer, and based on the way he was moving, it appeared to have healed completely.

“I saw the healer again yesterday,” he said.  “It is as if the break never occurred.”

Tasia raised her eyebrows.  “How exactly does that work again?  The healing?”

“It… would take too long to explain,” he said.  “But I do want to discuss the Brotherhood and how you keep ignoring them.  Along with a number of other important things we need to address.”

“The important things can wait long enough for me to finish my breakfast,” Tasia said, popping another piece of melon into her mouth.

Evrart closed his eyes for a moment as if gathering the strength he needed to be patient.  “Empress,” he said, exhaling the word as if it was a sigh.

“‘Empress,’ what?” Tasia snapped.  She was growing tired of his daily admonishments, his patronizing, his attempts to push her in the direction he thought would be best.  “You use that word so freely, yet you act as if I am the one who should be bowing to you.”

“That is far from the truth.” 

“Is it?  You are loyal to your precious Brotherhood, first and foremost.”

He opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again.

A Wise Man disloyal to both the House of Dorsa and the House of Wisdom, and who prefers to be called “Brother,” as my senior counselor, Tasia thought to herself, staring down at her dish of melon instead of the severe-looking man across from her.  And a Terintan lord who gained his title and lands by betraying all his comrades during the Terintan War for Independence as my generous host and only noble ally.  Quite the “Empress” I’m making so far.

“Empress,” Evrart said at last, his tone soothing this time.  “I am loyal to the Brotherhood because the Brotherhood is loyal — and has always been loyal — to a single, simple purpose:  the preservation of mankind.  Before the Empire even existed, the Brotherhood was there, keeping the shadows in the Shadowlands and pushing them back whenever they threatened to spill into our world.”  He held up a single finger.  “One injury.  One injury from a shadow-infected will spread the infection further.  We’ve stopped the spread of the shadows before, winning battles over the centuries without ordinary people even knowing there was a battle to be fought.  But this time, the threat is so great that we need the might of the Empire behind us.  As long as you understand that and agree, then you have my loyalty.  And the loyalty of the entire Brotherhood.”

“And if I stop agreeing, what then?” Tasia asked.  “You send another assassin after me?  Such impressive loyalty.”

Evrart bowed his head.  “I have apologized for that already.  Norix deceived me just as he deceived your father.  He told me he would take the threat of the Shadowlands seriously if I agreed to help pressure your father into ending the War in the East.”

“‘Pressuring’ is a rather polite way to describe an assassination.”

“It was a last resort.  We had already tried to convince your father in other ways, but he was a stubborn man.”  Evrart paused.  “The only thing Emperor Andreth truly feared was another rebellion coming from the West.  Our intention was to make your death seem as if it was the opening salvo in a Western uprising.”

“Yet I foiled everyone’s plans by surviving.”

“And then your father named you heir, which none of us expected,” Evrart said.  “If it softens your opinion any, Empress, when Norix initially tried to enlist my help to have you killed and frame the Western lords, I refused him.”

“It doesn’t soften my opinion,” Tasia retorted.  “Had you confessed your crimes and reported Norix’s treachery at that time, perhaps my opinion would be softer.  Instead, you conspired to kill me and then held your tongue when Norix murdered my father.”

“I didn’t hold my tongue.  I didn’t know he’d planned that.”

“You should have stopped him.”

“Norix would have exposed the Brotherhood if I had opposed him,” Evrart said.

Tasia slammed a fist on the table, making the small bowl of melon pieces jump.  “Then you should have let it be exposed!  Look at us.”  She swept her hand out to indicate the open-air kitchen with its two clay ovens, teetering stacks of pots, and slaves.  “My father is dead, Norix is Regent, and my sister is being forced to marry our cousin.  All while you and I cower in Terinto in the home of a merchant-lord who wants Gods-only-know-what in return for his hospitality.  Surely stopping that would have been worth a sacrifice or two from the Brotherhood.”

She spat the last word out, hoping every droplet of her contempt would be audible.

But Evrart only raised his chin defiantly.  “The Brotherhood’s mission is too important to allow it to be compromised, even to protect the House of Dorsa.  Had I known how far Norix planned to go in his machinations against the Emperor, maybe I could have stopped him.  But as it was, I didn’t have enough information to make risking the Brotherhood’s anonymity worthwhile.”

I hope you’re happy with the results of your cowardice was what Tasia had planned on saying, but before she could get the words out of her mouth, Halia, the younger of Lord M’Tongliss’s two wives, rushed into the kitchen, her eyes wide with panic.  She spoke in rapid Terintan to two of the kitchen slaves, who nodded and ran in different directions, then she approached Tasia and Evrart.

“Your Majesty, Brother Evrart,” she said.  “The magistrates are here, searching for you.  We must hide you both immediately.”

Tasia turned to Evrart, a question in her eyes.

“No,” he said, answering her unspoken question with a shake of his head.  “There are none left.  I used the last of my herbs sneaking us through Paratheen.”

Angry as Tasia still was with Evrart, she had to admit that his strange Brotherhood ability to render people and objects temporarily invisible with nothing but a selection of herbs and a few words muttered in the Old Tongue had proven itself to be useful more than once.  An illusionist, he’d called himself when Tasia had asked about it.  The lowest-ranking form of the shadow arts the Brothers trained in.  Tasia had witnessed Evrart make not only her disappear on a few occasions, but once had seen him make their entire ship slip by an Imperial warship unnoticed during their escape to Paratheen.  Which made her wonder what else the Brotherhood was capable of if their illusionists were considered the least powerful of them all.

“Alright,” Tasia said, resigning herself to the fact that they would not be rendered invisible this time.  “Time for a game of hide-and-find.  Where would you have us go?” Tasia asked Halia.

Halia hesitated, her eyes darting from Evrart and Tasia to one of the kitchen slaves, who had returned with a bundle of clothes in his hands.

“It is not so much where we would have you hide, your Majesty,” Halia said, her tone apologetic, “but how.”

3

~ THEN ~

“Again,” said Ku-sai.

Joslyn stood up more slowly this time, brushing dirt from her knees.  She said nothing, though her blood boiled with frustration.  She chanced a glance at her ku-sai’s face, found it inscrutable.  If he was growing impatient with her, he didn’t let it show.  If he thought she was improving, he didn’t let that show, either. 

She reset her feet — right slightly before left, toes turned out just so, knees soft.  As he had taught her, she took a long breath in through her nose, then held it, imagining the air and its attendant energy traveling down through her torso, into her legs, out through the soles of her feet, anchoring her to the ground before she let an exhalation escape slowly from her mouth.

Mountain, he’d called it.

Standing was what she called it.

Ku-sai’s foot flicked out, and before Joslyn had even had a chance to register its touch against her ankle, both her feet had lost contact with the ground, and she was crashing into the dirt.

Again.

She wondered if that was what he meant when he said the word “again,” if “again” meant “Fall on your arse at least once more, kuna-shi.”

This time she reached back instinctively with her right hand to brace her fall, only to scrape her palm and feel an uncomfortable twinge in her wrist.

“Again,” he said.  “A mountain is immovable, rooted to the earth.”

She leaned back on both hands, staring at him.  “I am not a mountain.”

“Which is the problem,” he said.  “Again.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.  “How am I supposed to be rooted to the earth?”

He adopted the mountain stance himself, placing his calloused bare feet as wide apart as his hips, right foot just ahead of the left, toes slightly out, knees soft.

He breathed in, nostrils flaring, chest expanding.  A few seconds later, his lips parted and his chest returned to normal.

“Push,” he commanded.

Joslyn hesitated.  Gave him a tentative shove.

“Push,” he repeated.  

She pushed harder this time, planting both hands on his chest and adding some weight to her push.  Ku-sai was bigger than Joslyn by a head, but now that she wasn’t living the underfed life of an abused slave, the fourteen-year-old suspected she would outgrow her teacher within a year or two.  

It made her nervous to push him too hard.  Shoving a man with authority over her grated against every survival instinct she had.

But he shouted, “Push, kuna-shi!”, and, startled into a knee-jerk obedience, Joslyn stepped back and shoved as hard as she could.

He might as well have been a stone wall.  Instead of moving, it was Joslyn who stumbled backwards, barely catching her balance before landing on her arse once again.

She looked up at him with wide eyes.

His face was as placid as ever.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

“A mountain is rooted to the earth,” he answered.

“But… how?”

He drew in another long inhalation, held it, let it out slowly through his mouth.

Joslyn balled her hands into fists.  That didn’t answer her question.  She wanted to tell him that, too, but she thought better of it.

She mimed his stance. Mimed his breath — 

“No,” he said sharply.  He came out of mountain, took a step towards her.  He tapped a big toe against the top of her foot.  “You are trying to form mountain from here, with your feet.  With your legs.”  He reached out a hand, and Joslyn shrunk back automatically before forcing herself to relax.  Gently, he placed the palm of his hand on her sternum.  “Mountain forms from here.”

“From my chest?” Joslyn said, confused.

He shook his head, tapped her chest with a gnarled finger.  “Inside.  From the energy you draw in, the energy all around you.  The energy is what forms mountain.  Not the chest.  Not the feet.”

Joslyn’s brow wrinkled in confusion.  He’d said all of this before, and she’d heard him.  She heard everything her ku-sai said; she hung on each word.  But she was beginning to realize that although she could hear his words, it didn’t mean she understood them.

“Again,” he said.  “Connect to the energy.”

Energy, energy.  He always spoke of connecting to the energy, but Joslyn didn’t feel any “energy.”  She just felt the cool, crisp mountain air as it stirred the leaves on the birch trees that surrounded his hut.  She felt the sun falling and evening approaching.  After evening would come night, and another futile attempt to rest soundly in the nest of blankets that served as her bed on the hard ground outside her ku-sai’s cozy, warm-looking hut.

But frustration didn’t mean Joslyn was anywhere close to giving up.  So she put her right foot in front of her left, turned her toes out, closed her eyes, took a deep breath in…

And felt something.  It was subtle, like the electrical charge in the air before a summer rainstorm, like the heat that radiated off a person’s body after a dip in a stream.

Joslyn’s eyes flew open in astonishment just as Ku-sai swept her feet out from beneath her.  She crashed to the ground.

“Better,” he said.  “Again.”

~ NOW ~

Joslyn assumed the position of mountain as the pirate captain walked up and down the line of the ship’s assembled men.  The rolling ship made it harder for the energy she sent through her body to anchor itself to anything, so she kept her feet stationary but switched her breath back to the more fluid, flexible stance of panther prepares to spring.

The eight fighting men chosen by the Captain all stood in a line to Joslyn’s right.  Normally, she would prefer to be in the center of such a group, with four fighting men on either side of her.  But a woman in the center of a group of sailors would seem odd.  It would stand out.  And standing out was the last thing any of them wanted at the moment.

Which was why Joslyn lowered her gaze and put the tension of anxiety into her face as the pirate captain slowly inspected the ship’s crew.  

“You have a sorry lot and a sorry ship,” he said in a thick Adessian accent.

The Captain merely nodded.

“Three pigs, eight sheep, two horses, and a handful of chickens below decks, Rizalt,” a pirate said, hopping down the stairs from the quarterdeck and onto the main deck where the sailors stood assembled.

Rizalt was the Adessian word for captain, and one of the few Adessian words Joslyn knew.  The pirates spoke mainly in the Empire’s common tongue, though, probably in the hopes of intimidating the ship’s crew.

The Rizalt quirked a skeptical eyebrow at the Captain, stroking his short, braided goatee.  The goatee was the only hair on the massive man’s head; everything else had been shaved down to the scalp.  It made the lines of the blue-black star tattoos around his left eye stand out even more.  

Joslyn assessed the Rizalt with a sidelong glance as he stood before the Captain.  He was a broad wall of muscle, with more tattoos rippling across his bare, coffee-colored chest and arms to indicate the fights he had won, the lives he had taken.  Joslyn didn’t know enough about Adessian tattoos to read their specifics, but she understood the general drift:  This man was a lethal killer.

But in wearing only loose, ankle-length trousers, bare feet, and with heavy golden rings pulling down each earlobe, Joslyn understood other things about the Rizalt.  He was arrogant, for one.  No warrior would enter a potential battle free of armor and wearing his wealth in his ears.  Such carelessness betrayed overconfidence, confidence that his presence alone would end any resistance from the carrack.  The sword whose curved blade hung casually from one hand was mainly for show; he didn’t plan to use it.

Another pirate emerged from belowdecks.  “Five barrels of meravin mushrooms, Rizalt,” he called cheerfully.  “We found them in a hidden compartment.”  

This caught not just the Rizalt’s attention, but the attention of all the other pirates still above decks.  They paused in their respective duties and turned as one body towards the pirate who’d mentioned the mushrooms.  Two of them laughed.  The Rizalt let out a long whistle.

“Hidden meravin mushrooms!” he said to the Captain.  He reached out, pinched the Captain’s cheek as if the man was a favorite nephew.  “So you have a bit of the pirate in you after all, Captain.  And something of value to give me besides your sailors.”  He added something else in Adessian and patted the man’s cheek.

The Captain pressed his lips together, and it pleased Joslyn to see him following her command to say nothing, even though it was clear he itched to respond.  The more the crew appeared to be cowed, the greater the advantage of surprise they would have when they attacked.

The news of the mushrooms, combined with the silence of the Captain, considerably brightened the pirates’ mood.  

Joslyn counted them discreetly.  Eight pirates stood at the ready behind the Rizalt; the other seven who had boarded the ship had been sent to inventory their loot.  The last seven of the twenty-two had stayed aboard their longship, watching the slaves and waiting in reserve.

The cargo ship’s crew numbered thirty-six, and Joslyn couldn’t help but feel disdain for the fact that they could outnumber the pirates on board by nearly two-to-one and still be so prepared to surrender.

Joslyn waited for the pirates who had reported in to their Rizalt to move back towards the ladders that would take them below decks to continue their inspection.  When the Rizalt turned to talk to one of the men behind him, she shouted “Now!”

The crew was ready.  The non-fighting men scattered, scampering up the ship’s three masts like monkeys, so fast that most of them were a third of the way up the masts before the unsuspecting pirates even realized what was happening.  The ship’s nine fighting men pulled forth the knives and daggers they’d hidden in their trousers and boots before the pirates had boarded; three of them, including the Captain, grabbed short swords they’d hidden in a barrel lashed to the main mast.

Some of these sailors would die today, Joslyn knew.  But not all of them.  And she took comfort in that.

The art of the sword master is death.

In the single, fluid motion of rising stork, Joslyn snatched the throwing knife from her boot and flung it into the back of the Rizalt.  He jerked, then bellowed in pain and fury.  The dagger wouldn’t be enough to take him down, she knew, but it would cost him blood, and it would weaken and slow him.  More importantly, because his back was turned when she threw it, he wouldn’t guess that it came from her, the crew’s sole woman.  She wanted him to be as arrogant and overconfident as ever when they finally faced off.

Leaping backwards with a mighty reverse frog, Joslyn grabbed the last sword from the barrel — her own.

The pirates were probably better fighters than the sailors, but the element of surprise was on their side.  One pirate had already fallen.  And even as she pulled her sword free from its scabbard, the Captain felled another.  

Two down.  Thirteen to go.

She charged past the Rizalt and his line of men, letting the ship’s crew stall them.  Joslyn had a more important target:  the five grappling hooks that connected the carrack to the pirate longship below.  Joslyn felt relatively confident that the fifteen pirates currently on board could be defeated, especially since she would have the help of the ship’s fighters.  But she needed to cut the grappling hooks before the seven pirates still on the longship decided to come to the aid of their companions.

She severed the rope attaching the first grappling hook, spun to parry a dagger from an oncoming pirate with dancer’s grace, then drove her sword into his belly with viper striking.  He moaned and crumpled to the deck.  He wasn’t dead, but Joslyn knew he would be before the battle ended.

Three down.

Joslyn cut free the second grappling, spun again to slit the throats of two more pirates with one arcing swing of her sword, then turned back to the grappling hooks and cut another free.  

Five pirates dead or incapacitated.

A cry drew her attention away from the hooks, and in her peripheral vision, she saw the Captain collapse to his knees under the weight of the Rizalt’s hacking sword blows.  The Captain was not a weak man, but the Rizalt was a brute.

The Captain was not going to last much longer against the Rizalt.  Joslyn hesitated for the briefest of moments, doing a quick warrior’s math as she glanced between the pirates in the longship below, the carrack’s sailors atop the masts, and the Captain who’d been driven to his knees.

With a mighty, axe-like chop of her sword, she severed the remaining two grappling hooks, sending the pirates who had started to scramble up them towards the carrack into the sea with yelps of surprise.  Once the last grappling hook had been cut free, the carrack’s sailors, the non-fighters who had scrambled up the masts, freed the ship’s sails.  They unravelled with a whoosh of snapping canvas, and, like a gift from from the sea gods, a puff of wind inflated the sails a second later.  The wind was no mighty gust, but it was enough to make the ship lurch, and the ship’s lurch was enough that the Rizalt’s kill stroke against the Captain faltered.

Thrown off-balance by the unanticipated movement of the ship, the downward arc of the Rizalt’s sword jumped six inches to the left.  Instead of splitting the Captain’s skull in two, the Rizalt’s sword cleaved through his weapon arm, taking the hand off at the wrist.

The Captain’s sword, along with the hand that had been gripping it firmly, both clanged to the deck.

The Captain screamed in pain, the keening sound of it so shrill and panicked that it reminded Joslyn unpleasantly of the pig Cookie had made her slaughter some five days earlier.  The Captain immediately seized his wounded wrist, desperately trying to stem the fountain of blood gushing forth from it.  The Rizalt was merely annoyed that his first blow hadn’t landed, and lifted his sword for another attempt at the kill stroke.

But Joslyn was faster than the Rizalt.  She charged forward, side-stepping one pirate’s blade, dropping to both knees and throwing her torso backwards like a Negustan contortionist when a second blade tried to take off her head.  She sprang back up in the next instant, and with the quick flick of reverse swooping hawk, her sword sliced through the back of the Rizalt’s legs, hamstringing him.

This time, the bellow of pain came from the Rizalt himself.  The arrogant pirate toppled forward, nearly bowling over the Captain as he did.  

The sound of their leader’s scream, combined with the sight of him falling incapacitated to the carrack’s deck was too much for the pirates who still fought.  Two of them dropped their weapons and fled at the sight of the Rizalt’s fall, dashing to the starboard railing and leaping over it, splashing into the waves that waited below.  Another pirate hesitated a moment at the sound of the Rizalt’s fall, and the hesitation gave the sailor fighting him the opening he needed to drive his sword into the man’s chest.

Eight down.    

With ruthless efficiency, Joslyn plunged her sword into the Rizalt’s throat, freeing her blade from his flesh just in time to slam it into another man’s side who had rushed over to help his leader.

Ten down.  Five more to go.

Joslyn kicked the dying man off her blade, not caring where or how he fell to the deck.  Blade dripping red, the ship’s deck rolling with waves beneath her, she paused long enough to assess the battle’s current condition.  She heard the sound of fighting coming from the quarterdeck, and turned to see two sailors trying to take down a single pirate.  The pirate held his own, but Joslyn knew what a fighter looked like when he was exhausted.  He wouldn’t outlast the assault of his two assailants.

Where were her last four opponents?

A yell and a cry of pain behind her answered the question.  She whirled around in time to see two pirates cutting through a group of sailors like farmers scything through wheat.  Joslyn rushed to their defense, but three sailors fell to the deck before she arrived.  She took off the arm of one pirate near the shoulder (eleven), parried a blow from the second, then spun with dancer’s grace to slice at the third.  But the third pirate was nimble, and Joslyn’s sword refused to cut deeply.  He jabbed out with a counter strike, forcing Joslyn to leap backwards, and then he charged before Joslyn could properly regain her footing.  She threw herself down, barely avoiding his wild swing at her head before regaining her feet behind him with inhuman speed.  At last she downed him, thrusting her sword into his back and through his heart (twelve).  The remaining pirate on the quarterdeck gawked at Joslyn and his downed companions with wide eyes, then promptly hopped to the quarterdeck’s railing and dove into the sea (thirteen).

Two sailors remained with Joslyn on the quarterdeck, panting, blood-spattered.  Their eyes rolled white like panicked horses.

“It’s too late for them,” she said calmly.  “But there are two more pirates somewhere on this ship.  You avenge your friends by finding them and killing them.”

One of the sailors set his jaw and nodded curtly.  The man beside him glanced first at him, then at Joslyn, and swallowed.

“They’re probably belowdecks,” the nervous one said, but he didn’t move towards the ladder.  He probably didn’t enjoy the prospect of fighting a skilled pirate warrior in the dark, cramped quarters of the carrack’s bowels.  

“Then let’s go,” she said, and turned to descend the quarterdeck’s ladder.

After a tense search, they found the last two pirates hiding in the ship’s hold.  One was bleeding badly from a gash in his arm, the other appeared uninjured.  Joslyn prepared for a final battle in the dark, dank hold, but the uninjured pirate dropped his sword and lifted his hands in the air.

“We surrender,” he said in a thick Adessian accent.

His bleeding friend hesitated a moment, then dropped his own sword.  He said nothing.  Joslyn and the two sailors walked them back up to the main deck, but still kept their swords at the ready.

“Execute them,” the Captain snarled when she presented the last two pirates to him.  He sat on the ship’s deck with his legs splayed out like a child’s.  Beside him, Cookie and another sailor were bandaging the bleeding stump of his wrist.  

Joslyn saw the Captain’s severed hand still curled around his sword a few feet off, and stepped between it and the Captain’s gaze.  All around them, the surviving crew members had begun the grizzly business of heaving the corpses of both pirates and sailors into the hungry mouth of the ocean. 

“Wait,” Joslyn said.  The art of the sword master was death, but Joslyn did not abide by executing weaponless men who had surrendered.  “Keep them as prisoners,” she told the Captain.  “Turn them into a magistrate when we arrive in Paratheen.  The Wise Men will want to gain what information they can on the movements of other pirates in the area.”

The Captain squinted at her, thinking.

“The Empire pays well for knowledge of its enemies,” she said.

“Alright.”  To the sailors, the Captain added, “Strip them bare and tie them up to the mast foot.”  

The sailors nodded and led their captives away.

The Captain turned back to Joslyn, studying her.  “You fight like a gladiator of Fesul and carry yourself like an Imperial noble.”  

Joslyn said nothing.

“Who are you?” the Captain asked.

“I told you,” Joslyn said.  “I am a veteran of the Imperial Army.”

He shook his head.  “No.  I’ve taken on ex-soldiers as guards before.  They fight like regular men.  You… you are something different.”

Joslyn only shrugged.

“Gather your things from the hold,” he commanded.  “For the rest of the voyage, you sleep in the first mate’s quarters.  He can take one of the dead men’s hammocks.”

4

~ THEN ~ 

“Don’t.  Breathe,” Tasia whispered without turning her face.  In her peripheral vision, she could see Nik’s outstretched hand twitch just slightly.

The sun was setting over the palace gardens, and the two of them had finished their supper in a hurry so that they could run outside while there was still a little bit of light left.  This time of the evening, while there was still some sun remaining, and while the early warmth of summer did not yet carry the stifling weight it would a few months hence, was the best time to see the rabbits.  They liked to come out at this time of day to hop around the edge of the pond to have a meal of clover and grass.

Burke, one of the palace gardeners, hated the rabbits.  He complained that they were little better than rats with long ears, and that they had a habit of nibbling at his favorite flowers, which, in his estimation, made them even worse than rats.  Burke could often be seen tramping about this part of the gardens, cursing the rabbits in a colorful and creative litany, trying to disperse piles of their droppings so that no highborn man or woman would happen to step on one, and spreading poisoned vegetable scraps that he hoped the rabbits would eat.

Tasia and Nik, ages nine and seven, could also be seen tramping around the same part of the gardens, finding Burke’s poisoned vegetables and removing them carefully with a hearth shovel they had “borrowed” from the kitchens.

For the past three weeks, they’d been trying to tame the rabbits, crouching in the short grass with handfuls of (unpoisoned) vegetables, hoping to tempt the animals near enough that they might eventually eat directly from their hands.

Tonight, Tasia feared the thundering of her heart would surely give her away.  With those long, silky ears constantly flitting back and forth, big brown eyes enormous and fearful, the rabbits could probably hear Tasia’s nervous excitement from ten yards away.

But the children had been out in this part of the garden almost every evening since the sun started to last beyond supper time, and the rabbits had apparently grown used to their presence.  One particularly courageous fellow hopped forward a few paces, sniffing at the air between him and Nik while Tasia held her breath for so long that it was a wonder she didn’t pass out.

The one getting closer to Nik flicked its ears, trying to detect anything amiss.  In the breezeless evening air, the drone of insects, the chorus of tree frogs, and the sound of Tasia’s heart were the only things the rabbits could likely hear; all three of them were familiar sounds.  Nik’s lips were pressed together so tightly that it seemed it took every bit of energy he had not to shout,

“Look, Tasia!  This one’s getting closer!  He’s finally going to do it — he’s finally going to eat out from my hand!” 

Out of irrepressible excitement, Nik had shouted something just like that last week, terrifying all of the rabbits and sending them diving into the safety of the bushes.  This week, he had learned his lesson.  He did not speak and, like his big sister, looked like he was holding his breath.

So it was not Nik’s voice that crashed through the silence, clanging dissonantly against the frogs and insects and Tasia’s heart.  It was a different, deeper voice, one that made Tasia’s pulse spike even higher than a rabbit eating from her palm could have.

“Children!  What are you doing?” the voice of their father boomed from the other side of the pond.  Like a rabbit, Nik leapt from his crouch straight into the air, spilling bits of celery and broccoli and clover as he did.  The bunnies scattered immediately, racing away from the children and the Emperor’s voice as fast as they could manage.

Tasia dumped her own handful of rabbit treats and stood more slowly, brushing her palms together before looking at Nik, then at her father.

Nik was breathing hard, as if he had been running, and gazing at his father with a guilty expression.  

Tasia sighed.  Why did Nik always let himself get so scared of Father like this?  They hadn’t been doing anything wrong.  Earlier in the week, when they’d been caught tossing Burke’s poisoned vegetable scraps into one of the kitchen fires, that had been… well, if not “wrong,” then not exactly “right,” either.  But this?  Just making friends with the rabbits?  Why did Father always have to be so stern about everything?

“Nikhost.  Natasia,” he said from his place on the other side of the pond.  “Come here.”

Nik trotted in Father’s direction obediently.  Tasia walked without hurrying.

“What were you doing?” Father asked again when they were both close enough.

“We were… feeding the rabbits,” Nik said, lowering his gaze.  “Or trying to.”

Tasia nodded her agreement.

“You cannot do that.”

“Why?” Tasia challenged.  “Because Burke doesn’t like them?  Because they eat his flowers and get into the vegetable garden?”

“No,” Father said.  “Not because of that.”

“Then why?”

Tasia desperately wanted to stamp her foot and cross her arms against her chest, but the last time she’d done that in front of father, he’d had one of the chambermaids spank her with a willow switch.

“Because,” Father said, “wild creatures need their fear of mankind.  If you take that away from them, they are defenseless.  You don’t want Burke to kill them, do you?”

Tasia narrowed her eyes, suspecting a trick.

“Well?” Father said.

“No,” Nik said, shaking his head vigorously.  “We tried to tell Burke not to.  We’ve been scooping up his poisoned vegetables with the ash shovel — ”

Tasia shot her younger brother a deadly glance, and his mouth snapped shut.

“If you teach them to trust you,” Father said, “then they will trust all humans, including Burke.  You feed them your kitchen scraps; sooner or later they will start trusting his kitchen scraps, even if they reek of poison.”

“But they know we’re not Burke,” Tasia objected.

“Do they?”

Neither the Prince nor the Princess responded.

“You think you have created friends of those rabbits, but all you’ve done is create victims.”  Father gazed across the pond, studying the bushes where the rabbits had run for cover, and frowned.  “Rabbits are not unlike commoners, children.  They need to know their place, and they need to know that they should fear us, at least a little.  Otherwise, order breaks down, highborn and commoner alike becomes unsafe, and chaos rules all.”

He delivered the whole speech still gazing across the pond, his dark eyes both stormy and distant.

Tasia glanced at Nik.  Was Father still talking about rabbits?  Or something else?

“Now go inside and prepare for bed,” Father said.

“Yes, Father,” Nik said.

“Yes, Father,” Tasia said half a moment later.

She glanced over her shoulder as they neared the entrance to the palace.  Father still stood there, gazing across the pond, even though all the rabbits were gone.

~ NOW ~

“No, ma’am,” the girl said patiently.  “It goes like this.”

Rather than attempt to demonstrate again, the girl reached over and wrapped the trouser’s top around Tasia herself.

It turned out that the slave girl who had been spying on her in the mornings, the same girl who ran meals and messages for Halia, spoke the common tongue.  Not just common tongue, either, but common tongue with an accent so light that it was barely detectable.  She must be one of the only slaves in Lord M’Tongliss’s house to speak the Empire’s primary language fluently.

Tasia studied the girl while she wrapped what looked almost like a cummerbund around Tasia’s waist, holding up the loose, Terintan-style trousers.  Men and women alike in Terinto wore trousers.  In fact, long skirts were more a sign of rank amongst men than they were amongst women.  But Tasia had been wearing the Empire-style gowns provided to her by Lord M’Tongliss.  This was her first time trying to figure out how to put on Terintan trousers.

“What’s your name?” Tasia asked the slave girl.

The girl looked up from her work like a startled bird, black eyes wary.  

Mother Moon.  She could be the baby sister of Joslyn, the way she looks, Tasia thought, and at the remembrance of her dead guard and lover, Tasia felt a familiar stab of grief.  Most days, she kept busy enough to avoid the grief, but every now and then, something would remind her of Joslyn — like the girl’s expressive black eyes — and unbidden memories would flood in on Tasia, lingering within her heart until she could find something else to occupy her mind again.

The girl’s resemblance to Joslyn didn’t end with her eyes.  Her hair was also midnight-black, her cheekbones high and broad, her skin the color of tea after milk had been stirred in.

“L’Linna,” the girl said, who Tasia guessed was about thirteen or fourteen summers.  “Most call me Linna.”

“I am pleased to finally know what to call you, Linna,” Tasia said.  “My name is Natasia.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Linna said, standing back to inspect her work on Tasia’s trousers.  “I know.  You are the Empress Natasia of House Dorsa.”

“Or you can just call me Tasia.”

The wary bird eyes darted up to Tasia’s face again, but when she saw Tasia’s smile, she offered up a shy grin of her own.

Voices echoed from outside Tasia’s bedchamber, and Linna snatched the headscarf still lying on Tasia’s canopy bed.

“Put this on, ma’am,” she whispered urgently.  “Make sure it covers all your hair.  And don’t look up.  If they see your hair or your green eyes, they will know you right off.”

Linna inspected the headscarf swiftly, ensuring that not a single strand of red-blonde hair had escaped it.

“We are straightening the bed chamber,” Linna whispered urgently to Tasia.  “And don’t make eye contact with them, no matter what.”  And with the deft speed and nimble agility of a rabbit running for cover, Linna vaulted over the mattress and yanked down the covers just as the door opened.

Tasia bowed her head and fussed with her now unmade bed as the morning sunlight filtered through the high windows and turned the room’s newest members into long shadows.

“What room is this, then?” asked a man behind Tasia in a gruff voice, his accent unmistakably Western.

“This is a guest chamber, my Lord Magistrate,” Halia answered.

“The House of Wisdom has no lords,” said a second man.  “Call us ‘Wise Man’ or ‘Magistrate,’ nothing more.”

“Of course, Magistrate.” Halia said.

Footsteps behind Tasia.  She dared to look up long enough to meet Linna’s eyes on the other side of the bed.  Linna’s gaze flicked down to the cotton blanket, then back up again.

Ah, right.  They were making the bed.  Tasia took the cue, and together they pulled up the sheet.

“Awfully fine guest chamber,” said the first magistrate, his heavy footsteps pacing across the tile floor.  “Who’s been using it?”

“No one at the moment,” Halia said.  “But one of my husband’s brothers, his wife, and their children were here with us only recently.  They used this room for about a week.”

“And when did they leave?” asked the second magistrate.

“Yesterday.”  Halia cleared her throat, then coughed.

Tasia tensed, wondering if the cough was some sort of signal she was supposed to remember or interpret.  They hadn’t discussed a cough meaning anything special, had they?

Fabric tugged loose from her fingers, and she glanced across the bed again.  Linna shot her a stern look.  Behind her, Halia coughed again.

“Tell your girls to come here,” said the magistrate from the West.  “I want to take a look at them.”

“Alright,” Halia said.  She directed a string of unintelligible Terintan towards Linna and Tasia.  Still looking down at the cotton blanket, Tasia glimpsed Linna moving around from the far side of the bed at Halia’s command.

“Say it in the common tongue,” growled the Western magistrate.  “I want to know what you’re saying.”

“I beg your pardon, Magistrate, but only two of our household slaves know any of the common tongue,” Halia said.  “They are almost all from the desert tribes.  These two only speak Terintan.”

Linna stood beside Tasia now, her head bowed like Tasia’s.  Subtly, she nudged Tasia to turn around and face the men.  

Tasia turned slowly, keeping her gaze fixed firmly to the floor.  All she could see was the bottom of two grey Wise Men robes and two pairs of feet wearing Terintan-style sandals.  Inside the sandals, one pair of feet was plump and hairy; the other pair was long, bony, and tanned.  Out of the corner of her eye, Tasia could also see Halia’s dainty, manicured feet resting in two jeweled leather sandals.

Panic seized her then:  Tasia was still wearing Halia’s sandals.  They were an older pair that she only wore in the mornings to traipse up to the rooftop courtyard for her training and then down to the kitchen for breakfast, but they were still far finer than the sandals of a common slave.

Tasia’s heart thundrered.  It was so loud that she was sure it would give her away.

Should she find a way to slip the sandals off, and then use a foot to push them beneath the bed?  She looked at Linna’s feet.  She also wore sandals, but hers were distinctly worn, and one of the straps had been sewn back on with thread a different color than the rest of the sandals.  

Which was more suspicious:  A slave wearing a noble woman’s sandals, or a bare-footed slave?  Tasia racked her mind, desperate to pull up a memory of seeing even a single slave on Lord M’Tongliss’s estate in bare feet.  She couldn’t remember seeing any of them with bare feet… but then again, she couldn’t remember seeing any of them with sandals, either.  Until a moment earlier, it hadn’t occurred to Tasia to look at the feet of any of the Lord’s slaves.

Fool, fool, fool, Tasia chastised herself.  

Observation was always to precede defense.  Had she learned nothing from Joslyn’s patient self-defense lessons?

“No common tongue, eh?” asked the second magistrate, the owner of the long and bony feet.  “Very well.”  He said something in Terintan.  But Linna did not move even an eyelid, so neither did Tasia.

Halia coughed again.  “Excuse me,” she said when she finished.  “It seems my brother-in-law left us with more than a messy room; one of his children had a cough while they were here, and it seems I have picked it up.”

The Western magistrate of the fat feet let out a derisive snort.  “That is nothing but a superstition of the uneducated, Lady Halia.  Coughs cannot be ‘caught’ from another person; their fundamental causes are solely internal, having to do with the humours, the circulation of dirty blood, and — well, no doubt it would be too complex for you to grasp.”

“No doubt, Wise Man,” Halia agreed, and despite the Terintan accent, Tasia thought she detected a wryness to the woman’s tone.

“Your girls did not answer my question,” said the bony-footed Wise Man.

“Yes, Magistrate,” said Halia.  “They are sisters from a tribe just south of the Seven Cities.  Their dialect is rather different from ours.”  She said something else in Terintan.

“L’Linna,” the girl beside Tasia said, her voice barely above a whisper.

Tasia had to commend her acting job.  Had she been a magistrate instead of a co-conspirator, she would have been convinced that Linna was nothing more than a frightened, cowed slave girl offering the magistrates her name.

A finger poked Tasia’s leg.  

“Joslyn,” Tasia breathed, saying the first female Terintan name that came to mind.  

She cursed herself.  How many Wise Men knew the name of the palace guard hand-picked by Cole of Easthook who had later helped the traitorous Princess Natasia to flee from those who would bring her to justice?

A better question was probably, How many Wise Men did not know the name of Joslyn of Terinto?

“Hmm,” said the bony magistrate.  “L’Linna and Joslyn.”

His grey robes rustled as he stepped in front of Linna.  Leaning down, he put a hand under the girl’s chin, tipping her face upwards.  Tasia’s gaze slid to the side, studying him as best she could through her peripheral vision.  Pock-marked with a hooked nose, his mouth hung halfway open as he inspected Linna.  The scent of onion coming from his breath was nearly overpowering.

“How old is she?” the Wise Man asked Halia.

“Fourteen summers, Magistrate.”  Halia added a cough.

The Wise Man, his fingers still under Linna’s chin, turned her face this way and that.  “This one is a little scrawny for her age,” he said, as dispassionately as if he was inspecting a horse or a hunting dog.  He looked over at Halia.  “You do realize, don’t you, that while the Empire does permit slavery, there are strict laws against their abuse or neglect?”

Halia coughed a few times before answering.  “Yes, Magistrate.”

He gave a satisfied nod and stood up, turning towards Tasia.  She dropped her head even further, placing her chin upon her chest.

“This one, on the other hand — this Joslyn — she looks hale and hardy,” he said.  “How old is she?”

“Twenty summers, Magistrate.”

“Fair-skinned for being a Terintan,” said the first magistrate, the fat Western one.

“She is only half-Terintan, sir,” said Halia.  “Her father was an Imperial soldier of the Northeast.  Her mother was a woman of the night in Hebil.”

“Ah, yes,” said the bony magistrate.  “That explains quite a bit.  But better a slave in Paratheen than a whore in Hebil, eh?”

The bony magistrate reached out.  Tasia felt two fingers upon her chin.  She resisted the tug he gave her, not wanting to lift her face to his.  Then she realized a slave would not resist a magistrate, and she looked up.  But she kept her eyes lightly closed, hiding her distinctive green eyes from him.

“Why won’t this one open her — ”

The magistrate’s question was interrupted by a violent fit of coughing from Halia.  Tasia dropped her chin again and opened her eyes just enough to see what was happening.

Halia was doubled over a few feet away, coughing uncontrollably.  Both Wise Men turned towards her.

“You!” the fat one said, pointing at Linna.  “Fetch help!  This woman needs water!”

But Linna did not move.

“They do not speak the common tongue,” the bony magistrate reminded his friend.  “Come, let’s walk her out of here.  Poor woman.  She requires some fresh air to re-settle her humours.”

Halia let herself be half-lifted by the men, not resisting when they supported her and walked her from Tasia’s guest room.

Linna waited until they had disappeared from sight, then grabbed Tasia’s hand, tugging her towards one of the room’s tall windows.

“This way, ma’am,” she said.  “Quickly, now.”  She threw open the window.  “Do you climb well?”

Tasia thought briefly of her childhood with Nik as they explored every corner of the palace and its grounds, including the high corners.

“Reasonably well,” she answered.

Linna hopped onto the window sill.  “The climb is not too difficult at this corner.  And if you fall, you probably will not die.”

With that lukewarm reassurance, Linna extended a hand and a foot around the outside of the window.  A moment later, she was climbing with a spider’s grace up the side of the building.

Tasia glanced over her shoulder, wondering how long it would take the magistrates to return to this room — or if they would return at all.  Maybe she would be better off taking her chances sneaking out into the hallway and into another part of the house.

Or she would walk outside the room and run directly into them.

“Mother Moon,” she muttered, then headed to the open window.

5

~ THEN ~

Joslyn had never seen a place like Paratheen, and following a few feet behind Master’s cart, she couldn’t stop herself from looking in every direction and gawking.  Low, dust-colored stucco buildings sprawled everywhere, butting up one against the other — and sometimes one atop the other — like cells in a honeycomb.  Many of them were dome-shaped, reminding Joslyn of the rounded bliva tents used both by the desert nomads and by tinkers like Master and Mistress, who owned Joslyn and her older sister Tasmyn.  

Paratheen wasn’t fascinating just because it was a large and crowded city; traveling with Master, Mistress, and Tasmyn, Joslyn was already well-traveled for a child of only seven summers and she had seen plenty of bustling cities.  Paratheen fascinated Joslyn because it was unlike any of the other cities in the Empire, like one of the magical djinn cities from the tales Mistress sometimes told at night, a city conjured from nothing in the middle of the desert.  

The thought of Paratheen as a city of the djinn — those shadowy servants of the Gods whose mood and actions could flip from benevolent to malevolent at the slightest provocation — made Joslyn shiver, and she gripped Tasmyn’s hand with more force.

“Ow, Joz,” Tasmyn complained.  “Not so hard.”

“Sorry,” Joslyn mumbled.

Both girls moved sideways to avoid a collision with a tall, severe looking man with a black beard and high red turban.  He held a rope that connected him to a small herd of at least a half-dozen bleating apa-apa calves.  They followed him dutifully, as a child follows a parent… or as slave girls followed their master’s cart.  But the fate of the young apa-apas, Joslyn feared, was far darker than hers and Tasmyn’s.  The meat of young apa-apa was considered far more desirable than old apa-apa.  

Joslyn tore her eyes away from the unfortunate creatures, deciding it was preferable to study the city’s strange buildings than its stranger inhabitants, even though looking up at the tall buildings lining either side of the narrow streets made her feel somewhat dizzy and claustrophobic.

Not all the buildings were topped with a dome, she noticed.  Some of them were rectangles reaching up in perilous, asymmetric fingers towards the sky, which only made Joslyn feel nervous that they might topple down into the street at any moment.  To Joslyn, it looked as if a giant had made a game of stacking boxes, trying to see how high he could make his uneven stacks before they toppled.

Scarcely a single foot of the winding dirt streets went unoccupied.  Merchants barked out facts about their wares at passerbys; men in turbans of various colors argued loudly on street corners; tired apa-apa herdsmen in dusty sandals swatted their beasts forward with switches; women in long, brightly colored sarongs floated by gracefully with baskets of fruits and vegetables balanced on their heads; and ragged, grimy children even younger than Joslyn scampered past all the others, weaving in and out of the crowd, between legs, beneath wagons, behind fruit stands, laughing maniacally even as adults shouted at them.  

Joslyn watched one of the children disappear into the crowd, a pilfered handful of grapes in one of his hands. For a moment, she imagined what it must be like to be a child here, to feel as much at home running barefoot through the dusty streets between the honeycombed, giant-stacked buildings as Joslyn felt at home amongst the wide open dunes of the high desert, traveling the Emperor’s Road.

She shook her head to herself, as if answering a question posed.  No, she would never belong in a place like Paratheen.  At least Father had sold her and Tasmyn to a tinker family.  With their donkeys and their jangling, awkward, overstuffed covered carts, the tinkers certainly didn’t belong in the desert the way the tribesmen did, but at least they didn’t belong to places like Paratheen, either.  Joslyn knew by the look on Master’s face that he didn’t want to stay in this loud, smelly, crowded, surreal place any longer than he had to.  At sundown, once his goods had been sold and his trading for the day was finished, the donkeys would pull the cart outside the city gates and the tinkers would set up their bliva in an open space beneath the stars, as they always did.

Still innocent at the age of seven, Joslyn had no way of knowing that one day she would be the good to be traded by the tinker, and she would end up spending two and a half brutal years in Paratheen, years during which the crowded streets would become her refuge and the street children her only companions.

~ NOW ~

Joslyn stood at the crest of a hill.  Paratheen’s harbor spread out below and behind her, sun glinting off the placid azure waters of the Adessian Sea.  The city of Paratheen itself spread out in a semicircle around the harbor, perching on a series of hills and cliffs overlooking the sea.

Despite the blazing sun, the lack of shade, and the way her leather armor trapped the heat and sweat close to her skin, Joslyn shivered in the same way she had as a child on her first visit here, when she was half-convinced that the city had been crafted by the djinn.  

She hadn’t been back to Paratheen since she ran away from her second master somewhere between the ages of thirteen or fourteen.  She’d never thought she would be here again, standing on the hill above the harbor.

He’s not here anymore, she reminded herself.  He can’t hurt you again.

She sighed, irritated at herself for her hesitancy.  She was a grown woman, an accomplished warrior.  How could he hold so much power over her even now, in death?

Her second master had been the first man Joslyn had ever killed.  

At the time, she’d assumed he would be the last.  But Father Mezzu, the god of the blue sky who gazed down on all the world’s creatures and wrote their fates at birth, had a different destiny in mind for her.

Joslyn adjusted the sword strapped to her back and began to walk.

Her possessions still consisted only of the shabby leather armor on her back (she’d traded her conspicuous palace blacks long ago in Reit), her sword, daggers, and boots, but at least she had a coin purse again.  The weight of the eight Imperial silver pennies the Captain had given to her was a comforting presence beneath her tunic.  He hadn’t intended to pay her at all, but she had saved his crew (most of them, anyway), ship, and cargo, and gained two prisoners for him.  He would earn back those silver pennies and then some when he handed the prisoners over to the magistrates.  In reality, he probably should have given her a full gold regal for the services she’d rendered.  But Joslyn couldn’t quibble.  Eight silver pennies were more than she had hoped for, anyway.

Unlike the villages she’d traveled through in the East on her way to the port city of Reit, where the combination of her Terintan features and her soldier’s dress made wary visitors stop and stare, she attracted almost no attention walking through the streets of Paratheen.  Long a crossroads for goods flowing east and west through the Empire, not to mention a favorite watering hole for the Adessian traders, smugglers, and pirates from the south, along with the only place within traveling distance where the high desert nomads could reliably find buyers for their apa-apa wool, milk, and meat, Paratheen was filled with far too many different kinds of people for anyone to take much notice of Joslyn, which was how she liked it.   

It would be freeing, almost, if not for the fact that the task ahead of her was so daunting.

The wick of a candle clock burned continuously inside her head.  Seven weeks had passed already since she woke in a burned-out hut at the foot of the Sunrise Mountains.  Seven weeks in which she had heard no news of Tasia.  Seven weeks that brought her closer to the end of the single year she had borrowed from the undatai.

Joslyn had traveled as far west as fast as she could because she knew that they would have taken the Princess that way once they captured her.  She’d hoped to find a ship to Port Lorsin, but Paratheen had been the closest she could come.

Part of her wanted to rush to Port Lorsin as swiftly as possible, to find another ship or a caravan traveling that way and attach herself to them, but a more rational part of her mind, the part, perhaps, that represented the wisdom of her ku-sai, reminded her that she didn’t yet know if the Princess even lived.

She needed to answer that question first, before she rushed towards Port Lorsin with her sword drawn.

So her first errand was to a moneylender, where she exchanged one of her silver pennies for fifty copper ones, less the lender’s fee.  Two thuggish men with heavy wooden clubs hanging at their belts eyed Joslyn’s Imperial Army uniform with suspicion until the transaction was complete.  Imperial soldiers were recruited with a single gold regal, and after they had earned that regal with two years of service, they were paid in copper pennies, not silver ones.  Which was part of the reason she needed to make the exchange.  Paratheen had provided anonymity so far, but if she began paying for things with silver pennies, word of the woman soldier with a purse full of silver would spread far too quickly through the city’s more unscrupulous quarters.

With the copper pennies clinking inside her coin purse, Joslyn headed for the town’s central market square, where she knew she would find a ring of cafés beyond the vendor carts.  Paratheen’s cafés were watering holes for Terintan merchants and other locals, which made them not quite as rough as the taverns closer to the docks and a much better place to hear gossip and news. 

She found the kind of café she’d been looking for on the far side of the horseshoe-shaped market square and took an outdoor seat that placed her back against the sun-warmed adobe wall.  A red-and-white striped awning sheltered the seat from the worst of the midday sun, its canvas flapping gently in a breeze that carried the faint, mingled scents of the ocean, strong coffee, and apa-apa dung.

“May Mother Eirenna bless you,” said a serving girl in Terintan as she approached Joslyn with a tray of pickles, olives, and small triangles of flat bread.

“May rain cool your days,” Joslyn replied automatically. 

Both the language and the traditional Terintan greeting warmed Joslyn nearly as much as the uncompromising sun above.  And like the sun, after being gone from her homeland for so long, the warmth was both pleasant and jarring at the same time. 

Joslyn looked the serving girl over.  The yellow dress the girl wore was simple and frayed at the edges, but clean, as was the cream-colored headscarf that hid most of her black hair.  Was she a slave? Joslyn wondered.  Or the café owner’s daughter?  Joslyn supposed it didn’t matter; it wasn’t as if she had returned to Paratheen to liberate more of the city’s slaves.

“Do you serve kuzyn?” Joslyn asked.  It had been at least ten years since she’d had the fermented, mildly alcoholic apa-apa milk.  Something about the nostalgia Paratheen was evoking in her made Joslyn suddenly crave it.

“Of course, Madame Soldier,” said the girl in a grammar meant to denote polite respect.

“I will take that,” Joslyn said, despite the flash of surprise the formal grammar had given her.  She was fairly certain that no one had ever spoken to her in formal Terintan.  “And a dish of oranges, if you have them.”

The girl frowned slightly, probably because it was customary to order something more than just fruit with one’s kuzyn, something more like a goat stew, or at least fried shrimp over mashed corn.  

Seeing the girl’s discomfort with the order, Joslyn took out six copper pennies from her coin purse and opened her palm to show them to the girl before sliding them back into a trouser pocket.  “I will be here for some time,” she told the serving girl.  “I promise that I will order more later.”

That seemed to reassure the girl.  She nodded again and hustled away to fetch the kuzyn.  

Joslyn nibbled absent-mindedly on a pickle while she waited for the girl to come back with her drink and her oranges, leaning back again against the adobe wall behind her.  

Joslyn shut her eyes halfway as she opened her ears, spreading out her sense of hearing the way Ku-sai had taught her to do, unfurling it like one of the rolled up rugs the desert people carried to line the floors of their tents.

The café she sat at was one of several surrounding the busy market.  The one in the corner of the square, a hundred feet or so from where she sat, seemed to be the busiest.  Like the café where Joslyn had taken up her vigil, almost every café had its kitchen inside and its seating for patrons outside, which made eavesdropping easier.  At the busy café across from her, a group of finely dressed merchants had gathered in chairs set on a raised outdoor patio, bantering boisterously in Terintan as they sipped their kuzyn and their coffee.  Joslyn gradually tuned into their conversation.

“…prices going up and up and up,” one merchant said, lifting his palms skyward for emphasis with each up.  He was a wiry, birdlike man who looked as if he might take off mid sentence.

“What do you expect?” asked a heavyset, slouching merchant.  “Andreth loved his war.  Every Emperor loves a good war.”

“War isn’t always bad for business,” said a third merchant.  “This one’s been good for me.  The soldiers who flee to Paratheen, they stay so long at my brothels that I’m thinking of renting them rooms.”

“You and your brothels,” said the birdlike one with a hint of disdain.  “You’re happy and the mushroom men are happy, while those of us selling silk hardly have any customers left.  No highborn to buy in the East — half of them are dead.  But no one to buy in the West, either — that damned Emperor raised his taxes too high.”  He sighed, seeming to deflate.  

The slouching merchant shook his head.  “You’re looking at it the wrong way, my friend.  Meravin mushrooms are even rarer than silk, and the mushroom men are making more money than ever.”

Their conversation turned to meravin mushrooms, which grew only in the dense forests located between the Northeast and the rest of the East, and Joslyn let her ears roam on, floating from the merchants to a group of horse traders on the eastern edge of the square, to a gang of teenage street urchins squabbling over a game of knucklebones. 

None of them gossiped about what Joslyn cared about the most — the death of the Emperor and the trial of his daughter for the murder. 

The serving girl arrived with Joslyn’s kuzyn and peeled orange slices.

“Thank you,” Joslyn said.

The girl turned to go, but Joslyn reached a hand out to stop her.

“What news in Paratheen?” she asked the girl as casually as she could.  “I’ve been traveling by sea for some time and am hungry to hear something more than sailors’ rumors.”

The girl shrugged.  “I don’t know if I’m the best source for news, Madame Soldier.  All I hear is the talk of merchants and herders all day long, along with whatever my papa says about grain prices.  They’re high because of the war being worse, you know,” she added sagely.

“The talk of merchants and herders is more than what I know,” Joslyn said.

“Well,” said the girl, fingering her headscarf thoughtfully.  “They say the Emperor is dead.”

“I heard that.  Who rules now?”

“His Wise Man,” said the girl.  “They say he is old and ugly and hunchbacked and cast an evil spell so he could marry the Emperor’s daughter, even though she’s not even marriageable yet.”

Joslyn lifted an eyebrow.  His Wise Man could only mean Norix.  But Norix wouldn’t have taken a wife; Wise Men never married.  

“Which daughter of the Emperor did he cast the spell on?” Joslyn asked, still keeping her tone light and curious.

But the girl tilted her head to the side and gave Joslyn a puzzled look.  “The Emperor had more than one daughter?”

“The Emperor had two daughters,” Joslyn said.

“Really?” said the girl.

Joslyn nodded again.

“Oh, then I guess I don’t know which daughter.”  The girl glanced over her shoulder.  “I should get back before Papa gets angry,” she said apologetically.

Joslyn smiled.  “Of course.  Will you bring me some stew when you get a moment?”

The girl nodded and disappeared inside the café, and Joslyn went back to her kuzyn and the business of eavesdropping.  

The afternoon wore on.

Joslyn leaned her head back against the sun-warmed adobe and halfway closed her eyes.  The merchants at the neighboring café had gone back to debating whether or not the War in the East was good for business or bad for business, and the melodic drone of their Terintan lulled her.

“Madame Soldier?”

Joslyn started awake.  She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but given the hues of orange and yellow bleeding into the sky, she realized she’d done more than simply doze for a few minutes.  The sun was going down; the merchants were gone; the stew she had ordered sat cold and untouched before her.  She must have slept for at least two hours.

The kuzyn, she realized, chastising herself.  She hadn’t had any alcohol in months — no, years — and it had fogged her mind and put her to sleep.

“I apologize,” Joslyn told the girl.  “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.  Is the café closing?”

“No,” said the girl.  She shifted her weight and looked down.  “But Papa says you must pay before you order anything else.”

Joslyn gave the girl two copper pennies, hesitated, and added a third.  “That should be enough, yes?”

The girl only took the coins and headed back inside.

Joslyn rubbed her forehead, feeling the dull ache of a headache coming on.  That would be the kuzyn, too.

Careless, said Ku-sai in the back of her mind.  Reckless.

“Heyyyy, comrade,” said a low voice in the Empire’s common tongue.  The words originated from the shadows that reached from the corner of the café into the dusty market square.

Joslyn’s hand flew to the dagger at her waist as she twisted in her wooden chair to find the speaker.

A ragged veteran soldier came into view, his leather armor even shabbier than the set that Joslyn wore.  He held up his hands defensively.  One hand was bound in dirty rags.  

“I mean no harm,” he said in a scratchy Port Lorsin accent.  “I just thought ye might help a brother in need.”

“I have no brothers,” Joslyn said, though it was not technically true.

“Aye, of course ye do,” said the man.  “All soldiers are brothers and sisters.”

Joslyn looked the man over.  He had the stench of one who had been living outdoors for at least several weeks.  Grime, sand, and dust coated every crevice of his sunburnt skin.  

His left hand was not the only thing bound in rags.  His left leg was wrapped tightly in dirty bandages in several different places.

“What is it you need, soldier?” Joslyn asked.

“Only a bit of coin,” he said.  “A penny or two.  Or, barring that, perhaps ye could spare me a meal and some whiskey…?”  He cleared his throat.  “Terintan whiskey, that is.”

Joslyn frowned.  Terintan whiskey was far stronger than the whiskey found in other parts of the Empire.  She typically carried some with her, but used it only for cleaning wounds; it was much too strong to drink for all but the most dedicated of drinkers.  The last time Joslyn had drunk any Terintan whiskey had been after she killed her master and realized that Anaís was not going to flee Paratheen with her.

“Drinking Terintan whiskey?  Is that what you’ve been doing?” Joslyn said harshly.  “Living on the streets, begging for coins just to drink?  That is no way for one of the Emperor’s men to behave.”

“Aye, but the Emperor’s dead, innit he?”  Bitterness laced the soldier’s words.  “He left me in the East to die.  He left a lot of us to die.  And Terintan whiskey’s the only thing strong enough to keep the demons out o’me head.”

Joslyn opened her mouth to refuse him, but then she hesitated.  “Demons?”

“Aye.”  He shuffled his feet and looked away with an air of self-consciousness.

She looked again at the way the soldier had bandaged himself in strips of cloth, including his right hand.

Joslyn hadn’t forgotten the strange tale that Alric told her and Tasia just before Tasia had been arrested, the tale about the survivors of Fox Battalion.  

One moment they were normal men, pleading to be let out, promising they could control themselves, Alric had reported to them with a haunted expression.  But then… something would happen to them.  Hatred filled their eyes, they would begin to shout and snarl and… and their hands transformed into flames.

Their hands transformed into flames.

“Sit,” Joslyn commanded, pointing the chair across from hers.  

The soldier obeyed, but shrank back when the serving girl returned carrying a candle.  She stopped a few feet short of Joslyn’s table, glancing from Joslyn to the tattered soldier.

“Madame Soldier,” she said in hushed Terintan, “this man is crazy.  The children of Hyena plague him.”

Hyena was one of the Terintan gods.  Like the god Raven, Hyena was a trickster, but unlike Raven, who played his tricks for innocent fun, Hyena had a malicious streak about him.  When Raven hurt others, it was because a prank had gone too far.  When Hyena hurt others, it was because he took pleasure in their pain.  

The children of Hyena were said to be the desert hyenas he had possessed and driven mad.  Deep in the Great Desert of Terinto, the manic, eerie laughter of the children of Hyena could be heard outside the ring of campfires that protected the tribesmen each night, their barking laughter tempting susceptible men and women to join them in madness.  The unstable men and women of the tribes, the ones who talked to themselves, who yelled or swung their arms at invisible tormenters, or who laughed for no reason, were said to be plagued by the children of Hyena.

“It’s alright,” Joslyn said to the girl quietly.  “I know of his type.  Would you bring us both more stew and more kuzyn?”  She hesitated.  “And a tumbler of whiskey.”

The girl nodded, but she didn’t take her eyes off the soldier, who stared at his feet, embarrassed.  The girl inched forward, set the lit candle down on Joslyn’s table, then turned and practically sprinted back to the safety of the café.

“Now, brother,” Joslyn said to the soldier in a gentle voice.  “Tell me about the demons in your head.”

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