"I know. You won't sleep with me. I've got that memorized—it's not very long. That wasn't what I asked you. I just told you I've never liked that name. Saukendar is a damn fool. A story. Tinsel and air. Shoka is who I am, who I've been since I was a boy. Saukendar was what my mother used to call me when I was late to supper."
She gave a strange little breath. It might have been a laugh. She did not look up from her hands and her lap.
"I had a mother," he said. "Unlikely as it seems. Her name was Jeisai. She died of a fever. When I was twelve. After that my father had just house-servants."
She did not look at him.
"An uncle, an aunt, two cousins," he said. "I was late in my father's life. I missed my grandparents on his side. I do remember my mother's family. More cousins. Some of them may still be alive."
There was still no response.
"Even in court," he said, "we had kinfolk. It's not the sole prerogative of Hua."
No answer still.
"Damn, girl. —Taizu. If I haven't jumped on you in a year and a half, do you expect I'm getting too friendly because I talk about my relatives? I'm not a damn statue."
"No, master Saukendar."
"Shoka, dammit. You could at least call me by my right name."
"Master Shoka, then."
He sighed and leaned his elbow on his knee, hand behind his neck. "Gods."
She got up and fled to her mat, her side of the room, and sat there, not looking at him.
In a moment more she found use for her hands, braiding the rope she had been working at, the length of it pegged to the wall at the end of her mat.
"Girl. Taizu."
The fingers flew. The braid lengthened like magic. Never a look in his direction.
"You really try me," he said. "Dammit, I could come over there and be as rude. Where are your manners? You act like a damn rabbit!"
The braid lengthened another palm's-length. And her fingers stopped. "I respect you too much," she said without looking at him. "I want to do what makes you happy. But I don't want to sleep with you. I won't. That's all."
"Thank you," he said coldly. And then thought, with a little pain in the gut, that it was the first time she had ever confessed any fondness for him. And it was not the sort he had hoped to foster.
It was better than hatred.
It still made a cold bed that night.
They had practiced in the snow; they had practiced on the porch and up and down the steps, for practice with bad footing.
It was the yard by the old tree again, breath frosting on the air, and mud up to the knee.
Taizu went down, messily. He followed up with the sword while she slipped a second time on her recovery.
She had a handful of mud ready with hers. But she did not throw it.
He tilted his head to one side, looking down at her. "You should have," he said. "In your position nothing can be worse."
"I'd have to wash two shirts."
He laughed and offered his hand. "Up. Try it again."
She gave him her sword-arm and he pulled, helped her up, himself muddy to the knee. Helping her, he got it on his hands. And she contemplated the handful she had, shook it off and wiped her fingers on his shirt.
It took boiling to get their clothes clean. But he cherished that day, that he saw Taizu laugh.
There was still hope, he thought.
"Master Shoka," she said the next day, "can I have this?"
Holding the hide of the wild pig they had shot.
"Of course. For what?"
"For a shirt," she said. And laid a hand on her shoulders. "If I double-sew it, it gives me some protection. Without the weight. I think, after yesterday, I'd do better to have it."
He said nothing for a moment. Then he nodded grimly.
"All right," he said, and went and got the deer-skin, that was the finest of the skins they had. "No sense doing a patch-together."
So of evenings he carved small plates of bone, none above the size of a finger-joint, to fit the double-sewn lining of the armor he intended for her: pigskin outside, on the shoulders, soft deerskin inside, and little lozenges of bone sewn into the lining of the shoulders, down the back, and around the ribs and on the skirtings.
A woman's armor, light and flexible, to protect against grazing blows without sacrificing agility.
In the case of bandits, he told himself. Even if she might not go, it was worth having, in case the brigands from over in Hoishi ever tried them.
Damn.
Jiro grunted and rocked to the strokes of the brush, great fat lump that he had grown to be, well-fed and comfortable, and Shoka brushed til the winter hair flew in clouds in the sunlight that filtered in through the cracks of the stable walls.
Another year on the old fellow. There was more white around his muzzle, and Shoka tried not to see that. But when he was done he leaned on the horse's neck and patted him hard and wished—
Gods, for time to stop.
For death not to happen.
"I've got a fool on my hands," he said to the horse. Foolish to be talking to the horse. But he had, for years, because otherwise he never used his voice.
Until she came. And his whole life began to turn on that point.
"I teach her," he told the horse, who turned back a sympathetic ear, "because it's the only thing that keeps her here. Make her armor to keep her from killing herself. What else can I do? Eh?"
Jiro curved his neck around and lipped the hem of his shirt.
"Woman's a damn fool," he said, and scrubbed and curried with a vengeance. "She's not ready yet. Not near. She's finally getting the common sense to know it. At least she's come that far. Men are her problem. It's not Gitu gives her nightmares. It's every damn man who might look at her. Go out on that road. Looking for bandits. Gods!"
Horse and rider came rumbling up the rise of the summer pasture, and Shoka watched from the fence, elbows on knees, as Jiro took the crooked course toward the two men of straw and rags, as the sword came up, Taizu leaned from the saddle and hit one, Jiro veering about again—
Lazy horse, Shoka thought, seeing Jiro had gotten into a rut. He knew straw figures when he saw them. School exercises.
But the sword strokes came very precisely on one or other of the lines of dye they had painted on the figures.
Back and forth, back and forth, from the straw-men at this end of the pasture to the straw-man at the other, till his rump grew tired with sitting and Jiro was lathered and hard-breathing.
"Suppertime!" Shoka yelled at her as she passed him and turned about again for the far end. "Walk him down!"
She drew in, Jiro bouncing and snorting and still ready to go for the targets. She got him down to a walk, and walked him down to the targets at the end, and to the rail, and reined in again.
A little space for breathing, he thought. There was a view from that vantage, out over all the valley, the whole of the mountain-skirts laid out to the west, toward the sunset and the gilded clouds.
But it was only that for the moment. He saw her gazing east, toward the dull, dark end of the sky; just sitting there for a while, facing that ill-omened direction.
He slipped from the rail, distressed, and waited until she finally reined about again. Then he wanted to seem not to have noticed, not to make any notice of it.
But she slowed Jiro again and turned him and looked back a moment more before she came back to the stable.
And she looked at him the same strange way, from the height of Jiro's back.
So he knew then that it was leaving she was thinking of. That the sun had begun to turn south again from its northerly wandering; and the fall was coming.
On a day like this she had come here. On an evening like this, with the sunlight gilding the edges of things. He remembered.