Page 46 of The Boy Bride

He heard Khatu’s loud voice from down below. “Why no, my lord! I haven’t seen him all this day!”

He sounded like he was putting on a voice, playing a part. Lill had to see this. He got to his feet, gathering up his skirts, and leaned out across the wall to look down toward where Khatu’s voice had come from. Sure enough, he spotted Khatu standing in the doorway of one of the ruined houses, hands on his hips, wearing an apron and headscarf that he had probably borrowed from his mother. He twisted a lock of his hair around a finger and said, “I wish I could help, by Earth’s bosom, my lord!”

Mikhi, transformed by a dress and neatly braided hair, was doubled over with laughter. Lill couldn’t see Vanu’s expression from this vantage, though the Lion of the Summer Pass was there all right, wearing a long black coat with a red sash and two braids in his hair, pinned together at the back, exactly the same style Gurti had put Lill’s hair in, though it looked different on him because his hair was much shorter. When she said it was a wedding hairstyle, had she meant for the groom?

“Here, let me do one!” Barda clamoured, trying to take the apron and scarf away from his brother.

“Stop it! Play your own part, brother.” Khatu had bundled up the elements of his costume and was holding them out of Barda’s reach and backing away. Then he turned and sprinted toward the next house. Someone began singing and shaking a tambourine. It was Halza, following Vanu and forming part of his small retinue.

Lill rested his elbows on the stone wall and his chin on his hands and watched their progress from house to house, Khatu clowning around in the role of different imaginary villagers, Halza singing, Mikhi laughing, Barda becoming increasingly impatient until he finally stole Khatu’s apron and did a very overdone performance as a sultry village woman trying to flirt with Vanu.

It was hard to tell, from up here, what Vanu was making of any of this. Lill never heard him speak, though he could hear the voices and laughter of the others clearly enough. Vanu seemed just to be putting up with it all; if Lill had to guess, he’d say he was tolerating it because the others were having fun. Maybe this was how a groom in the mountains usually approached this strange bit of playacting on his wedding day.

Normally, it had been explained to Lill, a bride in Hawakhurta hid with relatives on the morning of the wedding, and the groom went through a ritual of asking everyone in the village where she was, at the request of her father. If he was a fighting man, her male relatives might challenge him when he got to the right house, but of course it would be a sham fight.

Sure enough, when they reached the storehouse where Lill was waiting, Khatu had discarded the apron and headscarf and was playing a very different character. Lill had found a hole in the wall through which he could peek out at the scene in front of the storehouse while remaining hidden from view. He watched as Vanu approached the door, flanked by Barda and Mikhi, with Halza bringing up the rear. For some reason it was Mikhi who spoke, repeating a formula which Lill had heard her say before: “We are seeking Riru, who has gone missing!” Maybe she was acting as a herald or something.

“He is here, but I will never hand him over to you!” Khatu declared with relish.

Vanu made a gesture of impatience, but he didn’t look genuinely annoyed. He said nothing. He unknotted and unwound the red sash that held his coat closed and handed it to Barda. He shrugged off the coat and handed it to Mikhi. He motioned for the two of them to step aside, and they did. He raised a hand and beckoned to Khatu: Come at me.

It should have been the other way around; Khatu was the defender and should have stood his ground waiting for an attack. But Vanu very clearly would not have attacked him. He’d just have pushed him out of the way. Khatu was the one who wanted a fight, and Vanu was letting him have it.

They were about the same size; Khatu was maybe a shade bulkier, a hair shorter. A decade younger. They circled each other, Khatu prowling like an animal, Vanu nonchalant. Lill saw no sign of weapons. Did they practice wrestling up here?

Clearly they did. Khatu attacked with what Lill would have called an immaculate Eagle From a Branch, and Vanu slipped easily out of his grasp. Again Lill was impressed by how fast he moved, catlike, light on his feet. Dodging attacks was something of a specialty of Lill’s, and he judged it very well done for such a big man. Khatu stumbled and roared with affront, but he recovered quickly and made a second attack.

This time Khatu clamped onto Vanu, gripping handfuls of his black shirt. They grappled for a moment, arms locked and heads together, booted feet braced in the dirt. Then Vanu slipped a hand free, seized the front of Khatu’s shirt, spun around, and tossed Khatu forward over his shoulder. Khatu’s huge body flew flailing through the air. He tried to drag Vanu down with him as he fell; Vanu went neatly to one knee as Khatu landed like a felled tree, then shook free of Khatu’s grip and sprang back to his feet, dusting himself off.

Mikhi and Barda whooped. Lill put his fingers to his lips because he’d felt a fleeting impulse to join them. It had been such an impressive display of skill. He only wished the fight could have gone on longer. But of course Vanu had been impatient to end it. He had other things to do.

For a moment, enthralled by the match, Lill had forgotten that too. It came back to him with a nauseating lurch in his stomach.

“Hsst, Lill!”

He whipped around to see Halza’s head poking out of the hatch from the lower floor.

“What are you doing?” Lill demanded in a whisper. He flapped a hand. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

“It’s all right, they won’t notice!” Halza whispered back boldly. “I wanted to tell you we’ve thought of a way to help—Tirtu and I. We saw how bad you were looking in the house earlier. We’ve got something—I can’t say more now. You’ll see. I only wish there were some way I could help her.”

“Who?”

“Her.” There was something about the way he said it that Lill didn’t like at all. “I have to go!”

He disappeared down the ladder with a faint jingling of his tambourine. Looking back through the chink in the wall, Lill saw Vanu retying his sash and patting his braided hair to check if it had been disarranged by the fight. Khatu was dusting himself off and grinning like a man who had won the match instead of suffering an ignominious defeat. Lill could understand that. He used to feel something like that sometimes when Master Hadda caught him unawares in one of their stealth-craft training sessions. It was satisfying to provoke a master to show off his skill, sometimes, even if you’d been trying to show off your own.

* * *

Vanu’s bride was sitting on the floor of the lookout platform, against the far wall, his blue and silver dress spread out around him like a glittering pool of water, his hands folded in his lap, the veil on his headdress pulled forward to conceal his face. As Vanu stood at the top of the ladder looking at him, he was thinking of the last time they had faced one another, Lill snarling and lunging for White Viper’s dagger under the trees. The ring Vanu had sent to him winked on the slender middle finger of his left hand. It had belonged to Vanu’s mother, one of the few things of hers he had, exactly the sort of thing one would give to one’s bride—unlike the necklaces and bracelets he was wearing, which Tirtu had brought up from Sakka. Vanu’s mother had been killed by her own husband, so perhaps the ring was ill omened. Vanu had not expected Lill to accept it.

He climbed up the last couple of rungs of the ladder and stood towering over his bride. Here the ritual deserted him, and he wasn’t sure what to do or whether there were words that should be spoken. He held out a hand. Lill gathered his skirts in a graceful motion and reached up to take his hand. He weighed almost nothing and popped up to his feet without the slightest effort from Vanu. His dark eyes were just visible through the veil. They had been decorated with paint when he came to Umtúshta but were bare now. They bored into Vanu, giving nothing away.

Vanu slipped his arm around Lill’s waist and scooped him up. He felt the slight body tense, but the boy let himself be carried down the ladders to the ground floor and out the door. Vanu would have liked to carry him all the way back to the feast in the gathering place, and it would have been fitting, since he didn’t have a horse to seat his bride on in front of himself. But he thought Lill wasn’t entirely comfortable with it—and why should he be?—so he set him on his feet once they were outside the door and instead offered his hand again. Lill hesitated a moment before putting his own slim hand in Vanu’s.

They walked back to the gathering place side by side, the rest of the party following them. Whether anyone talked on the way back or the lowland guide took up singing again, Vanu honestly did not notice. He had attention only for the quiet, tense figure walking beside him.

Madurasha’s youngest son. At the very least, it must seem strange to him that he was pledging his life and his loyalty to his father’s killer. Maybe it seemed monstrous. There had been such ferocity in his eyes when Vanu took that dagger away from him. But Vanu would swear that had not been specific to him. That had been a reaction to being cornered and captured, and thinking Vanu wanted him dead. That had been because however small and pretty he was, Madurasha’s youngest son was very, very fierce.