Page 56 of The Boy Bride

Lill’s first job, when their performance at Lord Xshaka’s house was finished, was similar to the last mission: he was to infiltrate the women’s quarters and gather intelligence about the lord’s routine. Specifically, where would he be sleeping that night? It wasn’t a difficult assignment; he’d done it before and had a good hiding spot already picked out. But he was looking forward to it, in a guilty way that he would never have revealed to anyone.

He liked watching the women. There were a dozen of them in Xshaka’s house, plus a handful of children and three eunuchs who served them. The first mission to Torakand, when Lill had spent a whole day and most of a night spying on Xshaka’s women’s quarters, had been a revelation to him. He’d never spent so long observing women, not since he was a child barely old enough to remember, in the days when he’d inhabited the women’s quarters with his own mother. He’d lived among men and boys for so long since then that the women of Xshaka’s household were like creatures of myth to him. And yet …

There was something about the way they moved, the way they arranged their limbs when they sat down or tilted their heads when they talked and laughed. Something in the cadence of their voices. Something about their way of being, of moving through the world, that seemed to him not just familiar but right.

He liked their clothes, too, and the thought had crept up on him last time, as unwelcome as it was persuasive, that he could wear clothes like that—not just wear them, in fact, but inhabit them, in the way Xshaka’s women did. Look good—right—in them.

It should not have felt like a revelation, because he had heard it often enough: practically a girl, might as well be a girl, better off being a girl. He’d thought they were referring to his size, his face—he hadn’t realized there was more to it than that, probably more than the boys and men who said those things were aware themselves. Lill doubted they had broken it down the way he did as he sat in his hiding place watching Xshaka’s women.

He watched one of the servant girls picking up pomegranates that had spilled from a basket and recognized the way he would naturally have knelt to pick something up from the floor, knees tucked to one side—before he had deliberately altered his movements after noticing that none of the other boys did it that way. The way one of the concubines gestured when she talked made him flinch because it reminded him of an episode of prolonged mockery that he had endured after being caught “talking with his hands” in a very similar way.

“His lordship will visit Utautha tonight,” one of the eunuchs told the servant who had been picking up the pomegranates, and Lill realized with regret that his task was complete. He knew where Utautha’s room was. It was time to return and report to Master Hadda.

Chapter 18

Ordinary Sisters

“Your report,” said Master Hadda, squatting on the packed-earth floor of the hut that was serving as their base of operations.

“He abandoned me,” Zish spat furiously. “He disobeyed orders and left me to fend for myself.”

“You appear uninjured,” Master Hadda remarked. “Was the objective accomplished?”

Zish clenched his fists at his sides and said nothing. He had nothing to say; he hadn’t been there. Master Hadda looked at Lill.

“Yes, sir, it was,” Lill said. “Xshaka is dead.”

His back and side throbbed from where Zish had kicked him after knocking him down. His hands had been scraped raw in the climb back over the wall of the compound, and his tunic was stiff with dried blood. Not his blood.

“And?” Master Hadda prompted.

“We were spotted going over the wall,” said Zish. “We were attempting to gain entry over the wall from the alley, following your orders, sir, but he was too slow, and two watchmen saw us. They were able to seize us because they took us by surprise in a blind alley. They had a lantern which they shone in our faces to dazzle us. Then he played an unmanly trick and⁠—”

“What trick?” Master Hadda demanded.

“It was disgusting, sir,” Zish sneered. “He played a part—he made himself seem a woman. I thought he was using witchcraft.”

“Were you?” The stealth-craft master looked at Lill, stone-faced.

“No, sir. I altered my voice and behaviour slightly. I resemble a woman already.” At fourteen, shamefully, he hadn’t even needed to disguise his voice much. It had been quite easy.

“And to what end did you do this?”

“In order to gain entry into Xshaka’s house and complete the mission, sir. I told the watchmen that I was a woman of Xshaka’s household who had snuck out in boy’s clothes for a tryst with my lover and was attempting to return undetected.”

“He implicated me in his disgraceful story!” Zish protested. Master Hadda ignored him.

“I claimed that I had intended to elope but had experienced second thoughts.” He’d thought that this story would gain the guards’ sympathy and make sense of the scene which they had witnessed of him and Zish arguing in the alley. “I asked for their assistance in returning to the women’s quarters in secret.”

“He came onto them like a whore,” said Zish. “They set on me with their truncheons after he abandoned me—I had to run for my life.”

“What happened then?” Master Hadda asked.

“I got away and⁠—”

“Not to you.”

“The men of the watch assisted me in getting over the wall of the women’s quarters,” said Lill. “I found my way undetected to the chamber where Xshaka and his wife were asleep. I slit Xshaka’s throat and departed.”