Page 68 of The Boy Bride

What was he supposed to do? Was Vanu talking about going alone to his room and leaving Lill to retire alone to his?

He was. He led the way up the stairs to the balcony along the side of his house and opened the shutters to Lill’s room.

“Good night,” he signed, and he lifted Lill’s hand to his lips before letting it go.

“Do you … want to come in?” Lill asked uncertainly.

“Not tonight,” said Vanu, already moving away down the balcony.

Vanu’s own room had shutters onto the balcony like Lill’s, and he opened them and disappeared inside. Lill stepped up into his room and closed the shutters behind him. He collapsed face-down on his bed with its rumpled blue coverlet. He was tired, but not in the right way, his body weary, his mind alert, and he knew another sleepless night awaited him.

* * *

When he got to Torakand he had a sort of plan. He left the carter at the hostel on the edge of the city where they had stopped, and he took the road into the heart of Torakand. The buildings on either side of the street leered at him, and every person he passed, every single one, looked at him with suspicion and atavistic fear. He was becoming almost used to it.

Torakand was a sprawling, unimpressive city, situated in a valley, with no royal palace or temple rising above the houses, no hilltop monument or harbour, just a sluggish river looping through the centre of it. Lill remembered how to find his way to the square near Lord Xshaka’s house. Perhaps it was not the best place to revisit; he had tricked the night watch and killed a rich man in this neighbourhood, but that was nearly four years ago now. And what he remembered about this square was that there had always been entertainers here, playing to the passersby or waiting for invitations to the noblemen’s houses that lined the nearby streets.

He would pretend he was on a mission, which would make it easier to think of what to say and how to act. He would find a troupe which needed a new member and ask for a job. The troupe would have a leader who would tell him what to do, and that would feel familiar. He didn’t need to make much money; he was accustomed to sleeping on a thin mattress, to eating plain food and little of it, to bearing cold and discomfort without complaint.

There were no street entertainers in the square when he arrived that morning. It was deserted. Lill didn’t know what that might mean. He found a corner out of the strong sun and sat down on the pavement to wait.

Chapter 21

Waiting

Six months after his arrival in Torakand, Lill was still waiting. He drifted from place to place in the city. Sometimes he stole food to eat; sometimes he stole other things to trade for food. Sometimes he earned coins by carrying messages, although as his clothes became more ragged and dirty, fewer people wanted to hire him. Sometimes he worked for the travelling entertainers, but no troupe wanted to take him on permanently. No one would give him orders. He was still waiting for orders.

One night he devised a plan and carried it out. He had seen a set of knives for sale in the market where he was currently staying: small, light, well-made throwing knives, with a holster for carrying them strapped to your thigh. If he had a set of knives like that, and something to serve as a target, he could set up a show in one of the city squares, on his own, without waiting for any of the other entertainers to take him on. He hadn’t been able to do that until now because he’d had no knives.

He didn’t bother finding out how much the merchant selling the knives wanted for them; whatever it was, he didn’t have it, and he didn’t want the man to remember his face. His plan was to wait until after dark and break into the knife shop and take them.

Getting into the knife merchant’s shop was not difficult. It was only a matter of scaling one wall, dropping down the other side onto a flat roof, and from there a short run across rooftops deserted because it was too cold to sleep outside, to reach the yard behind the shop. He knew the technique for releasing barred shutters from the outside without making a sound, and although it was undeniably more difficult to do it with a sharpened stick than with a blade, he managed it, got the back window of the shop open, and climbed inside.

He stood in the dark back room of the shop with the gleam of iron all around, and as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he realized that it was not just knives that the merchant stocked. Back here there were swords: curved Zashian blades with tassels hanging from their hilts, straight Chiddang swords, even a couple of strange, foreign-looking swords whose origins Lill could not place in the darkness.

He moved purposefully toward the front room, found the throwing knives which he had seen on display from the street, and rolled them up into a bundle in their leather holster for easy transport. But that room full of swords kept nagging at him, and when he went back into it on his way to the open window, he paused, tempted.

Swords were expensive. If he took one, he might be able to sell it. He could tell a story about how it had belonged to his father, how the family had fallen on hard times and his widowed mother had finally been forced, with tears in her eyes, to send him out to sell it. He would choose one of the plainer Chiddang swords so the story would not seem outrageous. He had some idea of how much such a weapon was worth and thought he could avoid being too badly cheated.

And that was when it hit him, the shame of what he was contemplating. He had been trained in stealth-craft to serve the Great King, not to break into shops and steal swords in the marketplace. How far he had already sunk into dishonour by using the skills that Master Hadda had taught him to sneak in here and take the throwing knives so that he could earn his bread as a common street entertainer! If he took a sword to sell, with a false story, for his own gain, how much further he would sink.

He could see the way that Master Hadda would frown, the cold look in his eyes, if he heard that Lill had done such a thing. Not that Master Hadda ever would hear. He would not allow Lill’s name to be spoken in his presence, these days. It had been the same way with Zish, after he—after what had happened to Zish. And Zish, like Lill, had been one of Master Hadda’s best pupils. But you no longer existed, even as a memory, once you had failed.

Lill was halfway back out the window when he realized that he had let his thoughts distract him from maintaining proper vigilance. There was someone in the yard.

It was a big man in labourer’s clothes, a servant or tenant of the knife merchant, come out into the yard to relieve himself. He had just finished and was tucking himself back into his trousers when he looked up and saw Lill.

Still Lill should have been able to get away; he had only to swarm up the wall to the roof. Instead, as he reached up to begin the ascent, his foot slipped on the window sill, and he fell down into the yard. He landed well, scrambled up, and bolted for the back wall, but the man caught him before he got there, a huge hand coming down on the back of his neck.

Lill twisted in his grasp and tried slip out of it, but the man was ridiculously strong. He was balling up a massive fist to strike Lill, and it was going to hurt.

“Caught in the act, little thief,” the man rumbled.

It was the last thing he said. Before he could land a blow, before he could yell and rouse the neighbourhood, he was choking and crumpling to his knees, loosing his hold on Lill, because Lill had slid the straight, plain Chiddang blade that he’d taken from the knife merchant’s shop into his heart.

In the end, Lill wasn’t able to sell the sword because he had to leave it behind, stuck in the man’s body. He didn’t try very hard to pull it out; he’d have had to step on the dead man’s chest for leverage, and he felt shame enough at what he’d done without that. He got away over the wall with the knives he’d come for.

* * *