The Last Warrior (15 page)

Beck's throat bobbed and, although his expression was unrepentant, he said nothing.

“So go on, Colonel,” Markam coaxed quietly. “Make your arrests. Incur the Kurel's wrath.”

“Enough!” Xim glowered at them, his dismay even more pronounced than Beck's. “I hereby rescind the order to bar Kurel workers from the palace. They can
come back, all of them. Better to keep the charlatans happy and busy than to have them bored and concocting curses and spells. Markam, send out messengers. This will take effect at suns-up.” The king dismissed his men with a careless wave of his hand.

 

T
HE DAY DAWNED COLDER
and overcast, the strongest hint yet to the waning of summer. Elsabeth had donned a dress of soft, well-worn wool the color of rust, pinning back only her bangs to allow the rest of her hair to flow freely, an informal style she'd never worn to the palace. She double-checked her appearance in the mirror before climbing down to the living room, giving her cheeks a pinch for color, biting her lower lip to add more plumpness, tucking away a stray curl only to release it to soften her look. She frowned at her reflection. For a girl who'd given nary a thought to primping her entire life, she'd certainly become preoccupied with it.

Downstairs Tao was getting ready for the day. His shirt stretched taut across his back as he leaned over a basin. His belt dangled, unfastened. His charcoal trousers ended in bare feet. To her the floor was too cold to prance around with no stockings. The general was made of stronger stuff when it came to discomfort, having become accustomed in his years living in the wilds.

“Good morning, Elsabeth.” His smile flashed in the
mirror. No shame filled her at being caught watching him. It had happened too many times already.

She smiled back, smoothing her dress as she saw him sweep his admiring gaze over it. “Good morning.” She set a kettle to heating on the stove and pulled out plates for their morning meal.

“Will we have another day with no news?” Tao grumbled, using a towel to blot moisture from his freshly shaved jaw. “Surely Markam realizes he's our only source of information.”

The chief of the palace guards was alive and well—there had been several sightings of him on horseback, patrolling the streets of the capital, as reported by lookouts in the spy nest on the ghetto's tallest windmill—yet Markam had sent them nothing since the red flag.
Stay away.

That information was not enough for Tao, apparently. “It's been more than a week,” he said, his impatience obvious. “What kind of game is he playing? Have you checked for messages yet?”

When he got like this it reminded her that he didn't want to be here. He wanted to return to his people and the life for which he was destined in the capital. A life where he'd not have spared her a second thought outside perhaps a stray compliment or two about her hair, which she knew he admired, or a passing acknowledgment that she was the palace tutor. He wasn't a pet to keep close for companionship and protection like the
Tassagon “dog” she'd once accused him of being. He was a man with responsibilities, most of which she'd foisted on his shoulders when she sprang him loose from the dungeon.

You have to give him back once you're done with him.

“I'll check.” She left a pot of rice and chicken breakfast congee simmering on the stove and climbed up to the aviary under the eaves.

The ladder shook beneath her. “I'll join you,” Tao said.

She stopped. “But the muscle cramps…”

“An aftereffect of gator venom. Gone. No spasms last night and all day yesterday.”

True, he was healing so quickly he'd all but stopped limping. There'd be no more persuading him to stay at ground level now. She had a new warrior in her household, one who had the strength to do anything he cared to try. “Come on. You can learn the care and feeding of our valiant messengers.”

They climbed up to the snug area under the roof. Tao had to bend over slightly to fit.

Cuh-choo-coo, cuh-choo-coo.

The pigeons were clustered in a boiling mass of rustling, feathered bodies, making her and Tao the focus of their red-rimmed, black-bead eyes. “Shake this,” she said, reaching for the can and handing it to
Tao. The dry peas inside rattled. “A couple of times will do.”

He reacted with a curious smile and gave the can a brisk few shakes. More pigeons roosting out on the roof flew in with a loud flapping of wings, jumping into the fray. “You've trained them to know the sound, obviously.”

“Everyone's voices and whistles are different but peas in a can—always the same, no matter who shakes it. Otherwise, if someone new were to take over their care, and everything changed, it would upset them. The birds might not eat, and sicken and die.” She reached for the bags of feed and grit. She turned to the birds. “Who's hungry?”

“I am,” Tao said hopefully.

She'd thought his appetite would have leveled off after his body caught up from the deprivation of his first days back, but apparently he had the strenuous march home to account for, as well. He'd been eating her out of house and home, but she knew he wouldn't be if he sensed it was a hardship. Chun had been craftily accepting donations of food and steering them her way. “Be glad you're not a pigeon. The food can't collect on the floor of the aviary—it will soil, a sure source of illness—so I'd feed you only what you could clean up in about ten minutes.”

“I take no more than five minutes to eat,” he boasted. “Even with your tiny spoons.”

“Pigeons can't be fed before a flight. It makes the birds heavy and lazy, and prone not to return promptly.”

“Much like soldiers.”

“I put grit in with the feed to aid in digestion.”

He laughed. “That's where the differences between pigeons and soldiers diverge. Grit was a staple of our diet in the Hinterlands—but I never noticed any benefits.”

Cuh-choo, cuh-choo-coo.

“They sound like the hill doves,” he said, seeming to fall into a memory. “In the vineyards. I always liked the sound. Mournful…”

“The sound reminds me of my mother. The morning after she was killed, I had to come up here and do what she always did, as if nothing had happened.” As if her quiet, predictable, happy life hadn't been upended, everything destroyed. “Every morning and night, I'd come up and shake the can—during the grief, after the funeral and so on. To the birds, I was just another shaking can, calling them to feed. Perhaps this shaker took care of them a little differently, a little less confidently, but nothing that upset them. That's when I learned the true meaning of ‘life goes on.' Even though it was a lesson I didn't want to learn at the time.”

“It does go on,” he agreed. “It's both the hardest and the most welcome aftermath of loss.”

She threw him a look. Why did it always surprise
her that this warrior could have deep, introspective feelings about the loss of life?
Because it makes it more difficult to accept he's spent years taking other's lives.
“My mother tended the aviary for all of Kurel Town, so I couldn't skip even one day.”

“For what purpose—messages to and from the palace?”

“Uhrth, no. In those days we didn't speak to the palace at all. It was all between us and the Barrier Peaks.”

He peered out the hatch in the wall at the first sun rising over the distant, jagged mountains. “That's a week's worth of hard, steady travel.”

“As the bird flies, mere days.”

“What kind of information do you exchange with the guardians of the passes?” His green eyes were vivid, searching. She felt the sudden, keen interest of the battlefield general, instinct driving him to uncover useful intelligence.

“Anything of importance,” she said vaguely, and saw his mouth tighten in reaction. Hadn't he expressed the shared desire for an alliance between their people? Hadn't she agreed to help? “For instance, we knew when your army was on the way home long before the palace did.”

“We employ messengers on horseback, but these pigeons would have saved me time and men.” His
brow furrowed. “But pigeons easily fall to hawks, or a hunter's snare.”

“Didn't any of your messengers ever ride too close to a Gorr den? Or wind up stranded by a horse with a broken leg? The birds are very reliable. Few have ever failed to deliver their messages. But we do send out pairs, mated pairs, on the longer journeys.”

“Hmm,” he said. He was thinking, plotting, coming up with ways her pigeons could benefit his army.

Be careful, Beth, or he'll exploit all your peaceful ways for use in war.

“What's that powder you're mixing into the water?” he asked.

“Vitamins—nutrients—to keep them healthy and strong—and antibiotics. Even when the aviary is kept scrupulously clean, they're prone to infection.”

“Potions and spells, even for your pigeons.”

She spun toward him, the water jug in her hand sloshing, only to see a look of mischief: sparkling hazel-green eyes and the hint of a boyish grin. But he was only half joking. He still distrusted Kurel methods.

“But unlike me, they can come and go as they please?” he asked.

She filled the water dishes. “Except in foul weather, when rain or snow is likely to blow in, I lower the wooden flaps.”

He reached over to one of swinging boards, rapping
it against the outside wall. “By the arks, Elsabeth. That's what I've been hearing at night when the wind picks up. This, hitting the side of the house.”

“One of the dowels broke in the last storm of winter. I never got around to having it repaired.” She'd been consumed with the disappearances of several Kurel charged with sorcery, and then, midsummer, news of Tao's returning army had kept her preoccupied. “There's been no time…”

Now the flap leaned against the house like a drunken old man, scraping the wall in an east wind, as it had last night. “I woke three times last night, thinking an intruder had come inside the boundaries,” Tao said. She thought, just maybe, it sounded as if he was sharing some secret.

“Boundaries?”

“We'd keep a ring of torches blazing around the encampment to keep the Gorr away.” He moved the flap back and forth, testing the flexibility. “It wasn't a hundred percent effective.”

She couldn't imagine the strain of years on end of closing your eyes at night, never knowing if you'd wake to the sight of your killer's eyes. A strain that apparently still robbed him of sleep.

But Tao had moved on, preventing her from questioning him further, as she'd noticed he often did. “All these men around you,” he said, “and yet no one to fix what is broken in your house?”

“None offer.”

“That's what happens from eating with spoons. I'll fix this,” he said in a no-arguments tone. “Is there a place I can procure the supplies?”

“The market.”

“Consider it done.”

Much like releasing a pigeon for its first flight, she worried about Tao venturing out in Kurel Town amongst those who'd see him as the enemy. “Chun or Navi will go with you, and show you what you'll need.”

A brilliant blue bird strutted by. Slowly and smoothly, she raised her hands above the bird and then swooped them downward, bringing both hands together over the creature. “This is how you can catch them, even if they try to take to the air.” She settled it in her palm; her thumb and fingers encircled the body. “Meet Prometheus, my best flier. He's made many trips back and forth to the Barrier Peaks.”

“Do you know all of them by name?”

She laughed. “You sound the same way as when you asked if I'd read all the books in my library.

“Do you?”

“Yes. But I have only twenty-six pigeons, and hundreds of books. You do have to get to know each bird, their individual fears, their quirks, to help them overcome them.” Her free hand smoothed over the pigeon's folded wings. “Never frighten a bird in its home. Never
trick a bird—it will never trust you again.” She soothed Prometheus until he'd utterly relaxed in her palm. “For instance, trapping a bird while it's eating from your hand. And never handle a pigeon roughly, or it will fear you always.” Tao's eyes followed her hand, stroking Prometheus as she murmured, “You want them to learn that you're their friend, that their food, water and all their comforts will come through you.”

The bird's lids were blinking shut. “It works well, this technique of yours,” Tao said, smiling gently as she met his eyes. “In a short amount of time, I've come to rely on you for all my comforts, Kurel girl.”

She didn't expect the shiver his quiet tone sent through her, nor could she hide the fact that it did. Damn if his smile didn't turn smug.

She released Prometheus. “That concludes your first lesson in the care and feeding of our messenger pigeons. Breakfast?” Wiping her hands on her apron, she'd all but fled to the ladder when a tremendous beating of wings called her attention back to the hatch. A white-and-ginger-colored female she hadn't seen in weeks had arrived—with a message secured to its leg.

O
NE DAY AFTER THE PIGEON
had brought a green flag from Markam, the Home Guard patrolled the streets, providing an ominous escort for the Kurel leaving for their jobs in the city, released to do so by the elders who had relented when the king lifted his ban, and only because he had. It marked a victory for the ghetto after too many years of defeats, albeit a psychological one.

The guards called out and stopped several groups of workers, delaying them with silly demands in the name of security that were meant only to harass and slow them down. Uhr-Beck himself trotted by once, his eye sharp, searching the crowd.
For Tao.
Elsabeth kept hidden in the midst of others destined for the palace, doing her best not to look nervous.

Navi was at her side. She couldn't have shaken him if she'd wanted to; Tao had given the accountant strict orders not to let her out of his sight until they reached the palace. Even then, the general had not liked the
idea of her reporting to the classroom alone, despite their receipt of the green flag.

“The queen has no need for an accountant,” Elsabeth had tried to convince him. “It will draw too much attention. Navi has to do his duties, and I mine.”

The memory of Tao's stonelike, disapproving face, his muscled arms folded across his chest as she'd ducked out the door remained with her. He was upset that he couldn't provide protection. But he had to accept that she'd been doing rebel work long before he'd met her. When she returned later with worthy intelligence gleaned from overheard palace conversations, hopefully he'd feel better about her working. He had no doubts about her courage and capabilities after the escape and the elders meeting. His reservations had more to do with her jeopardizing her safety. She'd have to prove she was essential to their plans, not just capable.

A line of Kurel had formed on the upper bailey. “The bastards are checking each one of us,” said Leif, a royal supply clerk and rebel with a disturbing desire to see the rebellion turn violent. It was why she'd not chosen him for the dungeon mission. “What do they think—that we've got the general hidden in Kurel Town?”

Her laugh sounded false but he seemed not to notice. Tao had stayed close to home the past week and out of public sight. To heal, they'd agreed, but to her that
was only part of it. The man she'd begun to consider a friend her neighbors would view as an enemy.

Elsabeth kept her eyes down and her ears tuned to danger until she finally reached the entrance. A couple of palace guards stood watch, armed and solemn. Their crisp white-and-blue uniforms reminded her how much she missed Markam. There was no sign of him. Bearing the crushing weight of his dual roles, he'd had to make himself scarce, she imagined.

A Home Guard soldier stood with them. Beck's man. Wrapped around his fist were the leashes of three, straining, muscular brown dogs. “Next,” he said.

She stepped forward and submitted to the guard's scrutiny and the dogs' glistening, twitching noses. Did they smell the scent of a Tassagon on her Kurel clothing? Were they able to sense her lies and the treachery of her actions against their king? Could they hear how hard her heart pounded against her ribs? She nearly sagged to her knees when the dogs were pulled back and she was allowed to pass.

“Thank Uhrth,” she murmured, entering the grand foyer without incident. She expected Markam to appear out of nowhere as he always did. “I'll look for you in the Kurel Canteen,” Navi said.

She nodded. They'd return to the ghetto together as well.

Still no sign of Markam as she pressed on toward the nursery classroom. It felt as if it had been a lifetime
since she'd last navigated these hallways of marble and plaster, since she'd last slid her fingers about the lever to open the classroom door and let herself inside.

The pleasure of familiar smells was immediate—the sun-warmed wooden shelves, paper and ink for drawing—but there was Aza's floral perfume, too, and the sweet powdery scent of the children.

“Miss Elsabeth! Miss Elsabeth!” Prince Maxim and Princess Sofia dropped their toys and ran to her with exuberance. Elsabeth laughed, gathering the squirming pair close, her heart wrenching with joy and sorrow. How much she'd missed the little prince and princess.

Max snatched her hand. “Come and hear Mother!” His fingers were moist and sticky. Elsabeth smiled. Someone had already gotten into the plate of little iced cakes this early in the morning.

“Mama reading!” Sofia breathed, her golden-green eyes wide and full of wonder.
Tao's eyes.
“Look!”

Dressed in black, and as pale as the marble floor, Aza sat in her favorite chair, a book open on her lap, or rather what was left of her lap. Her stomach had grown even larger in one short week. Only a couple of months remained before the babe arrived.

The two children took their places on each side of her.

Elsabeth sat on the couch opposite the trio.

The queen did not take her steady, questioning gaze
off Elsabeth. “The children don't know,” Aza murmured to her with a warning glance. “They think their uncle went away.” Her regard sharpened. “Maybe, he did.”

Elsabeth remained neutral. “Maybe so.”

Aza nodded, her eyes threatening to fill with tears of relief. Then she inhaled, seeming to perk up. “He always thinks of me. He'd want to know that I'm holding up. And, how much less crowded it is around here now that all those soldiers have started moving west. They are, Elsabeth. With their officers, the fine men who once served with my brother. They're building a city of tents, taking women with them, too. Soon there will be no soldiers in the city at all.”

Tao's officers were alive. The army was intact. Elsabeth sent her silent thanks for the information.

“Mama.” Sofia poked the book cover with her little finger. “Read.”

Aza returned her attention to the book. “I wasn't sure when you would be able to return to teach the children, Miss Elsabeth, so I thought I'd best brush up on my reading.”

Shyly, the queen lifted the children's storybook in her lap.
“The Starry Ark,”
she said, pausing to wink at Elsabeth. “I have memorized that much, at least.”

Elsabeth nodded along with Aza's halting phonetic pronunciations, smiling when the children pitched in
to shout out the words that they'd already memorized from Elsabeth's prior readings.

The classroom door swung open with a crash. Sofia's tiny body visibly stiffened with fear as her father lurched into the room. King Xim was frozen at first, his handsome face pulled back in a mask of unpleasant shock. Elsabeth shot to her feet, aware at how casual and far too cozy the scene would look. “Your Highness,” she said, curtsying.

His outraged glare swung from her to Aza. “How did this get in here?” He marched forward and snatched the book from Aza's fingers. “It's a book, Aza. A damned book!”

For a horrified moment, Elsabeth feared he might strike his wife with it, but the queen's gaze was steady, unafraid, and he changed his mind, grabbing Elsabeth's arm instead.

“No,”
Aza bit out through clenched teeth.

Xim's fingers dug into Elsabeth's upper arm. “You brought this curse here, Kurel! The books. Poisoning my family—my children—with your sorcery, year after year. This is the end of it. The end!”

“I took the book out, Xim.” Aza pleaded, clutching her stomach as if in pain. “I'm to blame. I was reading it. Not Elsabeth.”

Xim's fury—and his grip on Elsabeth's arm—ratcheted up another notch. “You took the book out of where? Are you keeping books in here? In the presence
of my children? In my palace?” With a crashing of thrown toys, the king swiped the top of a trunk clear and lifted the lid, looking for more books. One lid after another, he slammed his way through the children's belongings, forcing Elsabeth to walk along with him.

“Where are they, Kurel?” he seethed. “Where have you stashed them?”

“There are no other books, Xim. I swear to you.” Aza's ability to remain calm was challenged, yet she kept her self-control. Jerked along in the king's painful grip, Elsabeth fought to maintain the same commendable restraint.

“From now on Kurels are forbidden in this nursery!” Xim bellowed at her. “None will be allowed near my children. And none will be allowed near you!”

The children were crying. Elsabeth only now realized the volume of the chaos in the classroom, so loud was her pulse.

Xim turned to leave, propelling Elsabeth ahead of him.
Will he kill me?
Not if she could help it, but without protest she allowed the monarch to push her toward the open door. Whatever was to happen to her on the other side of it, she'd not let the children see the violence.

 

T
AO BROODED LIKE A HOODED
hunting falcon after Elsabeth departed for the palace. He felt more helpless now than he had when he'd depended on his crutches
to walk. What kind of world had he entered where his woman went off to do battle, and he remained safely behind?

His
woman?

“Furs,”
he spat. Elsabeth was no more his than the throne upon which she wanted to install him, but that wasn't the point. She was out gathering intelligence and he was stuck at home.

He couldn't simply sit around. He had to do something, be productive. The entire blasted day loomed ahead of him like an impassable canyon.
Cuh-choo-coo. Cuh-choo.
The cooing of the pigeons drew his attention back to a periodic, muffled banging noise. That hatch needed fixing.

Tao retrieved his boots, a cap and the money pouch. It was bad enough he'd put himself at Elsabeth's mercy. Now he had to use her money. His funds were far from his grasp for now, but he'd pay back Elsabeth and all the Kurel for their aid.

At the clinic next door, he found Chun. The man greeted him with surprise. An apparatus called a stethoscope hung around his neck.

“Direct me to a shop where I can procure wood, a dowel and a handful of nails,” Tao said.

“Are you remodeling Elsabeth's house?”

“Only repairing her aviary. It has long been broken.” Surely the medicine man could use his hands for something besides administering potions.

Rather than looking chagrined, Chun pointed in the direction of the south wall. “South Wall Market. Look for the sign for Eisengard's Hardware.” After a brief pause, the doctor added, “It's written in red letters on a white background. You'll see it.”

Tao fought a sense of shame. Irritating, this sense of being a lesser man for his inability to decipher their marks.
Book readers.
Men who could scribble but didn't offer to repair a woman's house.

With his best imitation of a dour Kurel demeanor, hunching over to pretend frailty—a slight and genuine limp adding to the effect—he tugged the cap low over his eyes and set out. The air was crisp and the sunshine fine. Having lived the majority of his life outside until this past week, he felt as if he were emerging like a pale grub from the ground after hibernation. The houses were taller than they were wide, reaching so far above that they blocked the suns in some places and threw everything into shadow. He likened the ghetto's busy streets to dark, noisy canyons filled with sights and smells foreign to him. A different world, Tao couldn't help thinking. A world he'd never known existed and yet it had been within the confines of his home city the entire time.

But he was very aware of whom he passed and who might have noticed him. The danger of a Kurel turning him in to the Tassagon authorities without consulting the elders first was almost nonexistent, but he'd
not risk the chance of attracting the notice of a Kurel who might hate Tassagon soldiers enough to defy the elders.

As Elsabeth had.

Few gave him a second glance as he walked along. He took it to mean he looked like any other Kurel. Except that barely a week ago he'd commanded the planet's largest army, a vast legion that was feared throughout the Hinterlands. Barely a week ago he also would have refused any of the medications that he now credited with speeding his healing. And, barely a week ago he'd not have believed a Kurel girl would have filled his head with thoughts of making love to her, or that he'd be planning to spend his afternoon fixing her birdcage rather than perfecting his aim at the firing range.

Later she would be pleased, though, with his handiwork.

In the shadow of the towering southern fortress of the city was a busy market. So this was where the Kurel shopped—and this was why Tassagons could see a glow coming from this area into the wee hours. The strange, globular glasses that contained that light by night were dormant now, hanging from cords or mounted on poles. Of all the ominous possibilities behind that strange glow, shopping had never been suggested by any Tassagon he knew.

Unlike any market he'd visited before, the stores
were clean and tidy, and gave little hint as to the products sold inside them. Signs were propped on easels or mounted on the storefronts, apparently to be associated with the purpose of each shop, but the markings were of no use to him. Some marks he recognized as depictions of figures, but the rest might as well be the pigeon tracks in the grit in Elsabeth's aviary.

Eisengard's Hardware. He saw nothing to hint at such a name. Red letters, Chun had said. That narrowed it down. Some. If he were to step inside each door to confirm the name of the business, he'd be seen as a fool.
You are—to the Kurel. A savage brute.

A kernel of frustration in his gut heated into anger as he prowled the storefronts, peering inside. Looks of suspicion were beginning to come his way. If he asked directions, he'd all but advertise he was a stranger. How long before someone observant remembered him from the homecoming march through the city?

He'd find the store on his own. That one sold various sundries. Another seemed to be filled with shoes. Why couldn't hawkers be screaming the nature of the wares out front like in Tassagon markets? It was loud, but effective. He stopped by a shop with brooms and brushes for sale out front. The sign above his head was lettered in red. He knew not what the marks depicted,
LINGERIE,
but judging by the merchandise out front, it was likely the hardware store.