Not All There
It felt inevitable, as if there was nothing Lill could have done to stop it.
Vanu Urártu covered the space between them in a couple of strides.
He was twice Lill’s size, but he pounced like a cat.
Lill felt pinioned by his gaze, the searing blue of his eyes.
The man didn’t look angry; there was no hostility in his expression, just that strangely gentle intensity.
He caught Lill’s wrist, holding the dagger away from the hostage’s throat, his grip like a vice, like something not made of flesh and bone. Lill felt himself propelled backward.
He hit the trunk of the tree behind him, hard. It jarred his bones; it knocked his breath out of his lungs. It took him a moment to register what had not happened. His head had not hit the tree.
He was sliding down to the ground, gasping, he had dropped the dagger, and his hostage was being pulled out of his limp arms. But he hadn’t hit his head.
Vanu stood looming over Lill. Tirtu, released, backed away, huffing and gasping.
There was blood on the knuckles of Vanu’s right hand.
He flicked the fingers of his other hand across them, brushing off bits of bark that had clung to his skin when he cradled the back of Lill’s head to prevent it hitting the tree.
That was, unquestionably, what he had done. Why had he done that?
Lill lunged for White Viper’s dagger. Vanu got there before him and put a booted foot on it. He dropped to a crouch and caught Lill’s wrist in his implacable grip again. He still did not look angry. Worse. He was smiling.
Lill wrenched at his arm as if he might be able to pull off his hand to free himself.
He yelled the wordless battle cry of the Sworn Defenders into Vanu’s face.
Vanu rocked back on his heels, pale eyebrows rising, but his grip on Lill’s wrist did not loosen even slightly.
He swung Lill around like a doll—yet not roughly—and grabbed Lill’s other wrist so that he held Lill immobile at arm’s length.
Instinctively, Lill kicked. His heel hit an abdomen hard as rock, and he got virtually no reaction from Vanu.
Lill caught himself before he struggled further. It could do no good and could only serve to anger his captor. So far, through all of this, Vanu had not spoken a single word, had not even made a sound.
Khatu and Barda appeared behind Vanu, and Tirtu, recovered from his shock, was giving orders, telling them to take Lill away, don’t just stand there, by the Blue Heaven!
Lill let himself be passed into the brothers’ hands unresisting. Still Vanu didn’t speak; but he didn’t take his eyes off Lill, either. Lill couldn’t look away from him and didn’t quite understand why. Was this part of the man’s power?
His face was scarred on both sides: a horizontal slash under his right eye and a longer, vertical scar on the left, where a blade had nicked his eyebrow and bitten deep into his cheek below, just missing his eye.
Still he didn’t speak. Lill faced him, flanked by Khatu and Barda, who each had hold of one of his arms. He stared up into Vanu’s face, meeting his blue eyes, sure that when he did speak, it would be to pronounce a sentence of doom.
“Shall I have him taken back to the round house, my lord?” Tirtu was asking.
Vanu blinked and looked at Tirtu as if mildly startled. He nodded and turned away.
Lill swayed on his feet, the blow he had been braced for not landing. He felt light-headed; his vision swam.
Khatu and Barda marched him back to the infirmary, badgering him all the way about why he’d escaped from Vanu’s house, marvelling at how he’d dropped out of the tree, and scolding him for threatening Tirtu. Lill let it wash over him without attempting a response.
When he was inside the infirmary—the round house, they’d called it—he collapsed onto his bed and lay face down until he heard them leave and bar the door behind them.
Were they throwing Halza over the wall even now? He could not guess; he had expected to hear the order to be thrown over the wall himself, and it had not come.
Perhaps it would have been better if he’d stayed in his hiding spot on the roof where he’d been when he heard them bringing Halza to the well yard.
He hadn’t achieved anything by trying to save Halza.
Honour had demanded that he do it, but wasn’t he dishonoured now, if Halza was thrown over the wall anyway and Lill had lost his chance at escape?
“How was it?” Rami asked as he took his seat on the flat roof of the training hall next to Deru and Lill. “Your first mission!”
“You’re lucky, getting to go out like that.” Deru nudged Lill with a large elbow.
Lill weighed his response, not wanting to diminish the accomplishment by sounding too nonchalant, nor wishing to be thought boastful.
“It was good,” he said. “Three of us went with Master Hadda, but he stayed outside the city while we went in. We posed as entertainers—Zish had done it before, so he instructed us—and we went to perform at a lord’s house and gathered information.”
“What kind of information?”
“Our orders were to find out whether he’s still loyal to the Great King.”
“Oooh. And is he?”
“Yes, but only just. I overheard him saying things to one of his wives … ” He left it at that.
“And that was it?” Rami seemed nonplussed.
Lill shrugged. “That’s stealth-craft. If you do it properly, it’s not very exciting.”
“What kind of entertainers were you? Dancers?” Deru shimmied his shoulders in a way that, if he’d had breasts, would have made them jiggle.
“No, of course not. Acrobats. I was a knife-thrower.”
“Oh, that would be perfect for you.” Rami smiled.
He was sitting with one hand planted on the roof behind Lill’s back, and when he smiled at Lill, he looked directly into his eyes.
Lill waited for him to say something more, to finish the thought: “That would be perfect for you because knives are the only thing you’re good at.
” But he didn’t. Lill wasn’t sure how to respond.
“There were dancers,” he offered finally. “They performed before us.”
Deru hissed enviously. “Were they makha?”
They were speaking Hawada, as they usually did; Rami and Deru, having come to the Order comparatively older, and from the mountains, were not comfortable speaking in Zashian all the time. For Lill it was good practice. There were fewer and fewer words he didn’t know.
“Were they what?”
“Beautiful,” Rami supplied in Zashian.
“Nah, it’s more like … ” Deru frowned thoughtfully. He repeated the word Lill didn’t know, with a sensuous emphasis that made its meaning pretty clear. “Deliciously beautiful. Were they?”
Lill was fourteen that summer. Rami was his age, Deru a little older.
He talked like this sometimes, and though Rami seemed to understand what he meant by it, he usually rolled his eyes.
Lill was about to say that he didn’t know how “delicious” could apply to a person, when quite suddenly he realized that he did.
It hadn’t been one of the dancers. They had been beautiful, but in the same way that the curtains and wall-paintings in the lord’s house had been beautiful. Not in a way that made you want to consume them.
It had been—shamefully—Zish who had looked that way to Lill, for a moment, when he was performing before the lord’s guests.
He had been tumbling, showing off the supple strength of his body just for the sake of it, no weapons in hand, not attacking or defending, and he’d looked lovely, in a way that affected Lill strangely.
Delicious? Maybe it wasn’t quite the right word, but it was close.
“You might have thought so,” he replied to Deru. “I didn’t.”
The brothers laughed. “Laughter should not be ignored,” Master Hadda had said once. “It is useful to know how to make people laugh.”
“Was it strange to be outside the Order for so long?” Rami asked, tipping back his head to look up at the dark sky. “I remember you said you thought it would be.”
“Yeah,” said Deru. “You were worried about that stuff they always talk about—the angels coming after you for worshipping the king and all that.”
Had he revealed that to them? He was displeased with himself. It sounded too much like weakness. It was weakness.
“There is nothing in that to be worried about,” he said sternly. “So long as you follow orders, you remain safe.”
“Right,” said Rami after a moment. “Are you going to go out again?”
Lill nodded. “Master Hadda thinks that we will be tasked with delivering a warning to the same lord, sometime soon. That will be a different kind of mission, but he has said I would be suited to it.”
“Of course you would,” said Rami. “You’re the best in the stealth-craft cohort, aren’t you?”
“One of the best,” Lill allowed.
Master Hadda didn’t give out praise, exactly, but it was like the way that your eyes adjusted to the moonlight after you put out a lamp; at first it seemed too dark to see, but soon enough you found the light that was there enough.
Lill knew when he was doing well, even when no one congratulated him.
And he did well in stealth-craft. He was one of the best.
He left the roof before Deru and Rami, and on the way down the stairs, out of habit, took the opportunity to practice the technique of descending audibly then sneaking back halfway in silence, often useful to overhear conversations.
He wasn’t really trying to spy on Deru and Rami; he didn’t think they would be talking about him after he left, but they were.
It was Deru’s voice that he heard first, low but clear: “He’s never going to like you back, Rami. Not the way you want.”
“Shut up. I don’t want him to like me some way. I just want to be his friend.”
Deru sighed. “I don’t know if he’s even going to do that. He’s not like us—he grew up here. He believes all this shit. You heard him just now.”
“I know.” Rami’s voice sounded miserable.
“It’s like they took something out of him. It’s like he’s not all there.”
They said nothing for a little while after that, and Lill crept back down the stairs and returned to the dormitory.