— from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One
BRIONY SUPPOSED IT WAS POSSIBLE for a person to feel more exhausted than she did at this moment, dirtier, more sodden with sweat, and less ladylike, but she could not quite imagine it. I wanted to be treated like a boy, didn't I? At the moment she was sitting on the ground sucking air, watching Shaso drink from a jar of watered wine. The old man had recovered some of his old bowstring-taut muscle during the days upon days they had been practicing; the sinews of his forearms writhed like snakes as he lifted the heavy jar. I didn't want to be forced to wear confining dresses, or to be treated like a fragile blossom. Well, I've got my wish.
Thank you, Zoria, she prayed with only the smallest tinge of irony. Every day you teach me something new.
"Are you ready?" Shaso demanded, wiping his bearded mouth with the back of his hand. After keeping himself shaved and carefully trimmed all Briony's life he had now let his whiskers and hair grow wild, and looked
more than ever like some ancient oracle, the kind that had sailed across the sea on rafts to found the gods' temples when Hierosol was little more than a fishing village.
She groaned and sat up. No doubt the old oracles had been just as hard minded as Shaso. It explained a lot. "Ready, I suppose."
"You have learned much," he said when she was standing again. "But wooden sticks are poor weapons in many ways, and there are tricks that can only be learned with a true blade." He squatted down and unfolded the leather bundle from which he had withdrawn the wooden dowels each day. Inside it lay four more objects, each wrapped in its own piece of oiled leather. "The first day we came here," Shaso said, "I asked the boon of Effir dan-Mozan that I could choose among some of his trade goods. These were the best pieces he had." He flipped open the wrappings, revealing four daggers, one pair larger than the other. The larger had curved crosspieces, the smaller barely any crosspieces at all. "They are Sanian steel, of excellent quality."
Her hand stole toward the knives, but stopped. "Sanian?"
"Sania is a country in the west of Xand. The Yisti metalworkers there are of Funderling stock, and make weapons that all Xandians covet. These four would cost you the price of a pair of warhorses."
"That much?"
"Yisti weapons are said to be charmed." He reached down and took one of the larger daggers in his big hand, balancing it on his palm. He pointed at the simple, elegant hilt. "Polished tortoiseshell," he said. "Sacred to their god."
"Are they really magic?"
He looked up at her with amusement in his eyes. "No weapon can make a fighter out of a clumsy dolt, but a fine piece of steel will do what its wielder needs it to do. If it saves your life or takes the life from another, that is as powerful a magic as you could hope for, do you not think?"
Briony was a little breathless, and having taciturn Shaso turn poetic on her did not help. She reached out her finger and traced the length of one of the smaller, needle-sharp daggers. "Beautiful."
"And deadly." He picked up two of the knives, one large and one small, then took out their sheaths as well, hard, tanned leather with cords that could be tied around a waist or a leg. He scabbarded the two blades, then used the cords to secure the sheaths to the daggers' hilts. "Do that with yours, too," he said. "That way, we will not cut off any of each other's im¬portant parts as we work."
They worked for another hour at least as the sun slid down behind the walls and the courtyard filled with soothing shadows. Briony, who had thought she could not lift her arm one more time, instead found herself re¬vived by the fascination of sparring with actual blades, of the weight and balance of them, the new shapes they made in her hand. She was delighted to find she could block Shaso's own blade with the crosshaft of her larger knife and then disarm him with no more than a flick of the wrist. When she had managed the trick a few times, he showed her how to move in below that sudden flick with the small knife, stabbing underneath her op¬ponent's arm. It was strangely intimate, and as the point of the leather-clad blade bounced against his rib she pulled back, suddenly queasy. For the first time she truly felt what she was doing, learning how to stab someone to death, to cut skin and pierce eyes, to let out a man's guts while she stared him in the face.
The old man looked at her for a long moment. "Yes, you must get close to kill with a knife-close enough to kiss, almost. Umeyana, the blood-kiss, we call it. It takes courage. If you fail to land a deadly blow your enemy will be able to grab and hold. Most will be bigger than you." He frowned, then sank to his knees and began putting his blades back in their oilcloth wrap¬ping. "That is enough for today. You have done well, Highness."
She tried to hand him the knives she had been using but he shook his head. "They are yours, Princess. From now on, I do not want you apart from them. Examine your clothes and find places you can keep them and then draw them without snagging. Many a soldier has died with his knife or sword-hilt caught in his belt, useless."
"They… they're mine?"
He nodded, eyes cold and bright. "The responsibility for one's own safety is no gift," he said. "It is much more pleasant to be a child and let someone else bear the burden. But you do not have that luxury anymore, Briony Eddon. You lost that with your castle."
That stung. For a moment she thought he was being intentionally cruel to her, humbling her further so she would be easier for him to mold. Then she realized that he meant every word he said: Briony, offspring of a royal family, was used to people who gave gifts with the idea of being remem¬bered and needed-to make themselves indispensable. Shaso was giving her the only kind of gift he trusted, one that would make her better able to sur¬vive without Shaso's own help. He wanted to be unnecessary.
"Thank you," she said.
"Go now and get something to eat." Suddenly lie would not meet her eye. "It has been a long day's exercise."
Strange, stubborn, sour old man! The only way he knows how to show low is by teaching me how to kill people.
The thought arrested her, and she stopped to watch the Tuani walk away. It is love, she thought. /t must be. And after all we did to him.
She sat in the growing twilight for some time, thinking.
"How well do you know Lord Shaso?" she asked Idite. As much as she had been offended at first by not eating with the men of the house, she had come to enjoy these quiet evenings with the hadar's female inhabitants. She still could not speak the women's tongue and doubted she ever would, but some of the others beside Idite had proved able to speak Briony's once they had got over their initial shyness.
"Oh, not at all, Briony-zisaya." Idite always made the name sound like a child's counting game, one-two-three, one-two-three. "I have never met him before you came to our door twelve nights ago."
"But you speak of him as though you had known him all your life."
"It is true that I have, in some ways." Idite allowed a delicate frown to crease her lips as she considered. One of the young women whispered a translation to the others. "He is as famous as any man who ever lived, ex¬cept for of course the Great Tuan, his cousin. I mean the old Great Tuan, of course. Where his eldest son is, the new Tuan, no one knows. He escaped before the autarch's armies reached Nyoru, and some say he is hiding in the desert, waiting to return and lift the autarch's cruel hand from our home¬land. But he has waited a long time already." She forced a little laugh. "But listen to me, talking and talking and saying nothing, croaking like an ibis. Lord Shaso's name is known to every Tuani, his deeds spoken of around the cooking-fire. People still argue over Shaso's Choice, of course-so much so that the old Tuan made it a crime to discuss it, because people died from the arguments."