A Home with Me #2
He turned away, because Lill was staring at the lettering in the bowl as if he were on a battlefield, nerving himself up to face the foe.
Or maybe it was Vanu’s imagination, and his look meant something entirely different.
It was just that he’d seen a look like that so many times before.
He’d never seen anyone look that way at a wooden bowl.
“Thank you,” said Lill, his voice low, stripped of emotion. “You’ve done a very nice job of the carving.”
Vanu smiled. “Something to pass the time. Might have to stop talking … ”
He did, in fact, right then. His throat had seized up like a dead man’s fist. He wouldn’t be getting any sound out of it for a day or two, if his experience was anything to go by.
It had been years—a lot of years—since this had happened, and it had never been because he just wanted to talk too much.
“Oh no!” Lill exclaimed. “You shouldn’t have … But no, it’s my fault. If I’d found out sooner, I could have spent the last week practicing hand language, and you wouldn’t have had to use your voice so much.” He winced. “I should have done better.”
He seemed seriously to blame himself, which Vanu thought was odd. He didn’t say, “If only someone had told me,” the way most people would have. He said, “If I’d found out,” and “I should have done better,” and he seemed to really mean it.
“It is not your fault,” Vanu signed.
“That is kind of you to say,” Lill replied aloud. He yawned suddenly, rather elegantly, behind his hand. “I’m tired. I might—could I—sleep for a little?”
Vanu nodded readily. He got up from the cushions.
Lill was scooting back into his corner, still holding the bowl, as if he planned to sleep right there, and he looked up in surprise as Vanu stood and gestured toward the door to his room.
“Oh. Oh, I could sleep in that—in my room. Yes, that makes sense.”
He popped up and accepted Vanu’s offered hand to climb back up through the doorway.
Vanu stood outside, watching him set the bowl carefully down on the table by his bed, rearranging things slightly to accommodate it.
Then he folded back the quilt on the bed, moving a little tentatively, slipped under it, and curled up with his back to Vanu. He looked back over his shoulder.
“Thank you for everything,” he said, then turned away again. Vanu had assumed the sudden need to take a nap was put on, but he did sound sleepy.
Vanu remained looking in at him for a minute, but there was not much to see: just the little shape that he made under the quilt, the pool of long black hair on the pillow.
Vanu rolled his shoulders and stretched and lay down across the cushions on the balcony, hands behind his head.
Birds were singing in the yard, and the remnants of the storm were dripping off the eaves of the roof.
He was beginning to fall asleep himself when a thought floated through his mind that made his eyes pop open. What if Lill didn’t know …
Vanu sat up, pushing his hands through his hair. He should have thought of this before. He had been selfish, unforgivably selfish, not to think of this before.
The order, when it came, was not to deliver a warning to the nobleman they had spied on before, but to eliminate him. Lill would have thought it unwarranted, if it had been his place to question an order, which it was not.
They travelled to Torakand again, the same group as before, posing again as entertainers.
Zish as the acrobat, Kush as the clown, Master Hadda as the leader of the troupe, and Lill as the knife-thrower.
They had to hire musicians in the city, because no one from the Order was trained in that kind of thing.
Lill thought that for the security of this type of mission, at least one of them should have learned to play some sort of instrument or sing, but when he’d suggested this after the last mission, Master Hadda had thought he was trying to offer an excuse for himself to indulge in unmanly arts—and maybe he had been, though he’d tried to cover his shame by saying he wasn’t suggesting it should be him.
Kush would have been a good candidate, Lill privately thought.
He couldn’t be any worse as a musician than he was as a clown.
Lill’s first job, when their performance at Lord Xshaka’s house was finished, was similar to the last mission: he was to infiltrate the women’s quarters and gather intelligence about the lord’s routine.
Specifically, where would he be sleeping that night?
It wasn’t a difficult assignment; he’d done it before and had a good hiding spot already picked out.
But he was looking forward to it, in a guilty way that he would never have revealed to anyone.
He liked watching the women. There were a dozen of them in Xshaka’s house, plus a handful of children and three eunuchs who served them.
The first mission to Torakand, when Lill had spent a whole day and most of a night spying on Xshaka’s women’s quarters, had been a revelation to him.
He’d never spent so long observing women, not since he was a child barely old enough to remember, in the days when he’d inhabited the women’s quarters with his own mother.
He’d lived among men and boys for so long since then that the women of Xshaka’s household were like creatures of myth to him. And yet …
There was something about the way they moved, the way they arranged their limbs when they sat down or tilted their heads when they talked and laughed.
Something in the cadence of their voices.
Something about their way of being, of moving through the world, that seemed to him not just familiar but right.
He liked their clothes, too, and the thought had crept up on him last time, as unwelcome as it was persuasive, that he could wear clothes like that—not just wear them, in fact, but inhabit them, in the way Xshaka’s women did. Look good—right—in them.
It should not have felt like a revelation, because he had heard it often enough: practically a girl, might as well be a girl, better off being a girl.
He’d thought they were referring to his size, his face—he hadn’t realized there was more to it than that, probably more than the boys and men who said those things were aware themselves.
Lill doubted they had broken it down the way he did as he sat in his hiding place watching Xshaka’s women.
He watched one of the servant girls picking up pomegranates that had spilled from a basket and recognized the way he would naturally have knelt to pick something up from the floor, knees tucked to one side—before he had deliberately altered his movements after noticing that none of the other boys did it that way.
The way one of the concubines gestured when she talked made him flinch because it reminded him of an episode of prolonged mockery that he had endured after being caught “talking with his hands” in a very similar way.
“His lordship will visit Utautha tonight,” one of the eunuchs told the servant who had been picking up the pomegranates, and Lill realized with regret that his task was complete. He knew where Utautha’s room was. It was time to return and report to Master Hadda.