'I?' He sounded genuinely surprised. 'Of my mother's bearing, certainly not. Of my father's siring, I couldn't say. I had one half brother older and four younger the year I made twelve. How many had been born, or died, before and after I cannot know. Why do you ask?'
'An outlander will save us. Are you that outlander, Commander Anji?'
'It is not my place to answer such a question.'
She knew how to coax a man on. In the temple she'd helped along men afflicted by youth or age or hard luck or certain physical ailments that embarrassed them. This man was crippled by none of those things. She wondered idly if he had pleasured his young wife in the bed or merely taken what he desired. Not a question to ask now!
'You're surely correct in believing there remains more thunder and lightning and battering winds in store. Why have you
approached me tonight? For unless you've come to worship the Devourer, I'm not sure why we're talking.'
'Your Hieros and I have discussed at length that order serves the Hundred better than disruption. Order serves farmers, who must plant and tend. Order serves merchants, who desire safe roads and markets. Order serves the temples, who wish folk to have peace for prayer and tithing. The Hieros, and Olo'osson's council, agreed I must do what is necessary to restore order. The wrong choices now will have terrible repercussions. They already have had.'
Now she saw where this was going.
'Commander, if you're not here to devour me, then I must assume you are here to ask me to kill someone. Your mother, perhaps?'
'My mother!' To catch him off his guard — when she knew as well as he did that out in the evening shadows his guards stood with bows at the ready — surprised her. 'The woman who birthed me! Raised me! Taught me to ride. Rescued me from death at the cost of her own freedom. Why would I want my mother dead?' He shut his eyes, too choked to speak. Then he recovered, although his voice was hoarse. 'She did what she thought was necessary.'
'Obviously I've misunderstood. Anyhow, I can undertake no such commission unless the hieros of whatever temple I'm assigned to orders me to carry out an assassination.'
'The Hieros in Olossi told me to do whatever I thought necessary, with whatever weapons I had at hand.' He nodded at her. 'You are a sword of finest steel, Zubaidit.'
He wasn't a man who flattered. Even so, the comment made her uneasy.
He went on. 'It is the danger the cloaked demons represent that will prove hardest to vanquish. Maybe there are some people who would interfere out of a sentimental attachment to an illusion — what you might call a lilu.'
'A lilu? Speak plainly.'
For the first time, he hesitated. 'You have not heard that one of the cloaks appeared to Reeve Joss as a lilu in the guise of his old lover, a reeve who was murdered twenty years ago by men believed to be in the employ of Lord Radas?'
Handsome Joss! His name spoken in the same breath as the mention of an old lover, twenty years dead, no doubt the woman
whose death, like best-quality silk, draped him with that aura of being one laugh away from tears, an aura whose reckless lure had caught many a woman. Anyhow, what demon would not choose to appear before Joss in a guise that might encourage him to a bout of devouring? She could take men or leave them — she'd been trained to hold herself detached — and yet there he walked, the only man who really tempted her. Thoughts of him plagued her like mosks, swarming, biting, impossible. He was provoking and annoying, and too convinced of his charm's ability to get him out of any situation. He drank too much, and his smile was a cursed yoke, dragging her into endless thoughts of what it would be like to have him close and hot and wild.
The hells!
Was it actually possible Joss was a threat to their hopes for peace in the Hundred? That he was in league with the remaining Guardians, all of whom were corrupt or bound to become corrupt, if Anji was right? Or could it be Anji was just a jealous man who wanted to rid himself of a rival as in an old and tedious tale? But if so, why would it matter now that his beautiful wife had been murdered by his own mother, whose crime he could so coldly forgive as necessity?
Necessity for whom?
'Is there a point to this?' she asked, hearing the irritation she ought to have strangled before its thorny hide crawled out in her words.
'You have a brother whose life you value, do you not?' he asked.
She'd been trained from an early age in a hard school to show no emotion that might betray her thoughts. The tremor that raced through her muscles, that sliced her heart and knotted in her gut, she subsumed, but even so it hit with such force that she shifted from one foot to the other to bleed off its power, and he tensed as if expecting an attack. In the shadows, soldiers tensed as well, their movements like a whisper of thunder on a still day.
Beware.
'Keshad is safe in your household. You assured me of this yesterday when we met on the bridge. Or is he dead, too, in the attack that killed Mai? Is that what you came to tell me?'
'He wasn't there. He's alive.'
She had not wept for years. She'd forgotten how tears stung.
'I sent Mai to Merciful Valley to keep her safe,' Anji continued. 'We all want those we love to remain safe. Even a man as experienced as Reeve Joss wants to protect a demon because she appears to him as a woman he once — that he still — loves.' He gestured sharply toward the flutter of the awning where lamps burned and Chief Tuvi walked back and forth with the baby asleep on his shoulder. Never letting go. Anji's grief emerged like a kroke from the murky waters of the swamp, ready to snap. 'Just as I want to protect my son, who is all I have left of her.'
The tears dried up. Her heart hardened as Anji's threat emerged. 'A handsome baby, indeed. I don't think I've seen a more beautiful child.'
The teeth of his anger closed; if a tone had color, his would have waxed bright with the shiny hard surface of a gemstone, brilliance without warmth. 'I will not let anyone or anything stand in the way of making this land safe for him. So tell me, Zubaidit, how much do you love your brother? Who is confined in my custody. Enough to kill to keep him alive?'
43
Couldn't a man get some sleep? Joss hadn't realized how exhausted he was until the first slug of cordial left him reeling. He might as well have downed ten cups as one, for the way his head spun. A kind soul found him a blanket, and he lay down in the midst of the camp, yet twice just as he'd dozed off some cursed reveler tripped over him, and then that flirting Naya Hall reeve had to drag a young Copper Hall reeve almost next to him and get noisy. Had these young people no respect for others? Couldn't they be bothered to seek out a little decent privacy?
Had he suddenly turned into an elder, rapping his cane on his porch and ranting at high-spirited children to get out of his orchard?
He hauled the blanket up to the berm and shook it out before lying down, on his back, to face the stars. There trundled the Carter and his Barking Dog, materializing to the southwest as the last glow faded. Low in the east, the Oxen trudged on their steady path, rising. There were always two, yoked together. How was it possible Mai was dead?
The Ox is always beautiful.
Peddonon sank down cross-legged beside him. 'Do I smell tears?'
'She was a lovely woman, but I think that her physical features weren't her true beauty. If she talked to you, she talked to you, as if you were all that mattered to her in the wide world. I don't know how confused or frightened she might have been, to walk into the Hundred as an outlander, but she never faltered. She's the one who overthrew the Greater Houses in Olossi. That settlement in the Barrens flourished because of her, didn't it?'
'I wouldn't know. I'm sorry anyone with a kind heart is dead. If you're going to sleep out here, mind if I share your blanket? Kesta stole mine to go sneak off with Nallo, and even as filthy and sweaty as I am, I just don't want to lie smash on the ground.'