Page 120 of The Boy Bride

Vanu had made plasinta for dinner again, cheese ones with fresh mint. And there was salad with the greens that Gurti had brought by after things had cooled off at the great house. At least Lill assumed things had cooled off. She’d only said vaguely that all the men were gone, and Lill, who had answered the door while Vanu was making the dough for the plasinta, hadn’t asked for further details.

“Da said you sparred with him this afternoon,” said Mikhi. “He said you’re really good. You’ll spar with me next, right? I would love to have an opponent my own size.”

“He used your practice sword,” said Vanu. “I’ll have to make him his own.”

Before that afternoon, Lill thought, he would have flinched inwardly when Vanu said something like that. The way it suggested that Lill was part of the family, needing his own wooden sword to lean in the rack between Vanu’s and Mikhi’s—it was still daunting and strange, but it was no longer unwelcome. Of course Vanu didn’t know that. He didn’t know that Lill had only that afternoon discovered his own heart and realized that he was going to stay in Umtúshta. He should know—Lill needed to tell him—but that would require more courage than Lill currently possessed.

“I’d like that,” he said, swallowing the urge to start crying again, which had been bobbing up at intervals all afternoon.

“You can make him a spindle, too,” said Susami.

“Don’t be silly!” Mikhi huffed. “He doesn’t want to spin.”

“He said he’d be willing to learn.”

“I did,” Lill admitted. “It looks … ” He didn’t know the sign or the Hawada word. “Meditative?” he said out loud.

Vanu shrugged; he didn’t know the Zashian word. He signed something about “thinking.”

“You do too much thinking already,” Mikhi signed at Lill. “I can tell.”

“Better too much than too little. And it’s not thinking that I mean, exactly. It’s … ”

Lill spelled the Zashian word out for Atari, and the two of them tried to explain meditation to the others. Behind the mountain peaks that defined their skyline, the sun began going down.

After dinner, when they were almost finished washing the dishes, Vanu disappeared somewhere and returned with a rolled-up bundle that Lill didn’t recognize at first. It wasn’t until Vanu handed it to him that he realized with a jolt it was his holster of throwing knives.

“Talking about sparring and spindles,” said Vanu aloud. Mikhi was too far away to hear. “Remembered those. Thought you should have them back, considering.”

“Considering … what?” Lill looked from the rolled-up holster back to Vanu’s face, off-balance.

“Business down the mountain. Faru’s bullshit.”

“Oh, oh yes.”

There was a moment’s silence that Lill knew he should fill with an explanation: You see, the reason I had these knives is …

But Vanu had taken the knives from him and had them all this time. He knew.

And even that wasn’t a surprise, somehow. Of course it was Vanu who’d had the knives. Of course he knew.

Lill remembered when he’d felt desperate to get these knives back, how he’d felt the lack of them like nakedness, like missing one of his senses. Now he wanted to hand them back to Vanu and say he didn’t need them anymore. But Vanu was right; if they had to defend the stronghold, he should be armed.

“Too dark for a demonstration?” Vanu said with a little sidelong smile.

Lill looked toward the archery butt at the far side of the garden, which was still lit by the rays of the sinking sun. Not that he couldn’t have hit it even if it had been dark, but possibly his audience wouldn’t have been able to appreciate his aim if they could barely see the target.

“Of course not,” he said.

He wrapped the holster around his thigh and buckled it on. The weight of it, once so familiar, felt odd. He walked toward the end of the archery range, and Vanu beckoned to the girls to come watch.

“Throwing knives!” Mikhi signed excitedly. “Where’d you get those?”

“I gave them to him,” said Vanu.

Lill began the way he always had when he performed on the squares a lifetime—a few weeks—ago in Torakand. An acrobat he’d worked beside for a time had explained how you had to get people’s attention at the beginning of a performance with something flashy. So what he used to do was gather four knives in his hand—the maximum number he could hold at once—and start out facing away from the target before spinning to release them all one after another. Then he’d grab the two remaining blades from his holster and throw two-handed.

In Torakand he used to do all this fairly close to his target, because it was dangerous otherwise; you couldn’t fling knives in public without being quite sure the space between yourself and your target was clear. Here, with his spectators all accounted for and safely behind him, he could throw from much further away, so he did. The setting sun flashed on the blades where they landed in a tight cluster at the centre of the target.