She seemed surprised. "Please, Faro, I'm trying to do the right thing. Please tell me the truth."
"Don't ask me,tell me!" he snapped.
She smiled, faintly. "Tell me the truth about your feelings, Faro."
So he started talking, unmasking himself as she had unmasked herself. "When you chose me to fight, I knew I had to kill you, or be killed by you. I hated you as the representative of Mazonia, and the barrier to my freedom. But there was a faint doubt. Then we met in the arena, and you beat me-but you didn't kill me. I was ready to die, but you gave me the alternative I had not planned on. My hate had nowhere to go-except the opposite way. I had no neutral setting."
"I don't understand."
He smiled. "I hardly understand it myself. But I think if I can't hate you, I must love you."
"Love me!" she said, startled.
"As a servant," he said quickly. "I would never-"
"Oh. Of course. So you really don't want to go?"
"I really don't. I want to serve you and help you to be the great lady you can be."
She gazed at him. Then her eyes overflowed again. "Oh, Faro, thank you."
"Don't thank a slave!" he said, but this time not harshly. She was incorrigible in this respect.
"Then just hold me, Faro," she said. She smiled briefly through her tears. "I won't tell if you don't."
He held her, not speaking further. What else was there to do?
Eventually, she fell asleep in his arms. He suspected that she had somehow confused him with that long-dead confidant of hers called "Marcus," for he was quite sure she would never have wanted him to know the things she had poured out to him in her bewilderment and long-pent grief. The loss of her mother-the deaths of everyone she knew-the gradual wearing down of her spirit by ever-increasing poverty. The incredible nonsense of the curse-and behind it all, something that he was fairly sure she had not recognized. The signs of a steady conspiracy of harassment, meant to break her further.
They had that in common too, then, for surely all the world was ranged against him, and had been from the moment he grew too large for the comfort of his mistress.
Once again, his world realigned. Now it was two against the world-himself, and this battered but still-valiant child.
He rose, took her back into her tiny house, and put her to bed as tenderly as if she were his own child, then took himself back out into the night to stare up at the stars and think. He sat on the warm earth of the courtyard, put his back against the stone wall, and stared at the bright points in the sky.
Small wonder that she had wanted to die. How not, when all the world seemed ranged against her?
He hoped that he had done something concrete about that particular desire; in her exhaustion and near to sleep, still confusing him with Marcus, she had begged him to promise not to leave her again. He had promised- extracting from her the promise not to court death again. She had seemed willing enough to give that pledge, but then had begun to realize what had happened, forcing him to respond more personally. He had done so-and now was glad of it. For himself as well as for her.
He leaned his weight against the wall of the house and contemplated the stars above, wondering now at himself, and not so much about her. He, who had sworn to hate all Mazonites, suddenly found his loyalty bound to one small woman. Was it her amazing mercy in the arena, as he had told her, or was there more? He still wasn't sure. Was it pity? Perhaps in part-and he chuckled a little as he recognized the irony of a slave pitying his mistress. But how could he not pity someone who had suffered such a crushing burden of loneliness for so long?
But it was partly admiration as well. Under that soft exterior, there was a soul of tempered steel. She had not broken under all her misfortune; she had adapted and survived. He could admire that. She was smart, and capable, and possessed of phenomenal magic. With a little help, mostly information that she simply did not have, she could become a formidable power in her land.
She could even aspire to the throne, he realized after a moment. And suddenly his thoughts took a whole new turn.
After all, their prosperity was linked. The more wealth she acquired, the more comfort he would enjoy. And if he could somehow get her to take his careful advice, he might be able to guide her to more than just prosperity. Dared he make an arrow of her, aimed at the Queen? Her ability to conjure was certainly formidable enough. That would be no bad thing-to be chief counselor to the Queen....
Few slaves ever had the opportunities that had just presented themselves to him.
In fact, this might just be preferable to freedom, even for one who had not suffered a conversion of emotion. He had been cursing his fates-but now, he wondered. If he had been set free, it would have been to eke out his way as best he could in the lands outside the borders of Mazonia. Was there any need for scribes outside the lands he knew? He had no idea. He might well have wound up scratching out a brutal sort of existence like a barbarian, hunting and scavenging his food, fighting to stay alive. He had spoken from the passion of the moment when he asked her not to free him, but the matter stood up to more dispassionate scrutiny.
Now-he had fallen into the hands of someone who treated her slaves with courtesy and consideration, who listened to his advice and would probably act on it. Someone who valued his training and his intelligence.
In short, Xylina was perhaps the only woman in all of Mazonia who would treat him as a person, and not as a possession; the only one he could serve with a whole soul.
He pondered that for a while, before the demands of his weary body drove him back to his bed, still marveling at how his life had changed.
• Chapter 3
Xylina woke late the next morning, with sun beaming down onto the pale brown, hard-packed dirt of the court outside her room. She felt curiously at peace for the first time since Marcus had died. And why not, after all?
Stretching her arms over her head and enjoying the cool, silken softness of her conjured bed-coverings against her skin, she felt as if some huge burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Or as if she had been ill for a long time, and suddenly woke up healed.
This morning could not possibly have been more different from yesterday morning. She had passed her woman-triaclass="underline" she was a full woman, and a full citizen. She had a pouch full of coins, she had a slave of her own.
Faro was a good man; that was what was so unbelievable, like something out of a fable. Another like Marcus-someone she could trust to advise her. They had begun as enemies, the deadliest of enemies, but within the course of a day and a night, they had somehow become allies, even friends.
Last night, when she had come so close to finally ending her miserable life, he had convinced her that her life was only beginning. He was the first person ever to show any concern for her since Marcus had died; the first to show her that she had a future. Granted-as an arena slave, his life was tied to hers, and he had a vested interest in keeping her from killing herself. But there was something more there- a concern that had surprised her, for she had not thought anyone would ever care whether she lived or died again. She had offered to free him, and he had refused: that was a key test. This was the kind of empathy, the kind of friendship, she had with Marcus.
And he had convinced her, with hours of careful conversation and persuasion, that Marcus had not "left" her. Her friend had not abandoned her-not of his own will, at any rate. He pulled out of her memory many recollections of her friend and slave's despair at knowing his days were numbered-and recollections of how he had tried to prepare her for a life alone. Things she had totally forgotten, lost as she was in her own loneliness. Things she was ashamed that she had forgotten.