NYATENERI

I was praying that it would be anyone but him. Anyone. I would have welcomed that third assassin, right then, sword hand no good and the rest of me feeling in much the same shape as those two stiffening underground. Just not him, not now, if it please any interested deity. I am exhausted and afraid, and I cannot tell what will happen. I am afraid to see him now.

Lal rose to open the door. I said, “Don’t,” not meaning to say it. Lal looked at me. I stood up myself then.

LAL

When I stood, the room pulsed in and out around me, and I had to close my eyes because the blurry throb of the candles made me dizzy. For that moment I could not even see Nyateneri clearly as she moved to the door. But my mind was knife-cold. I braced myself with the back of the chair, and I thought, Stupid, stupid, I should not have touched the wine again, not after the bathhouse. Whoever is on the other side of that door, killer or drover or pot-boy, could slaughter the stupid three of us as we stand. What is happening, what have I let myself come to? I put Lukassa behind me. My hands were sweating so that the swordcane slipped and slipped between them, and would not come open.

THE FOX

Yesyesyesyes, I smell him. I smell them all. Pigeons, too.

ROSSETH

The actors came in late and quarrelsome, but they didn’t wake Tikat. They didn’t wake me, either, for I hadn’t even tried to sleep. I was sitting up in the loft, watching the moon start down and Tikat trying to claw his way through the straw pallet I had fixed for him. Lisonje, the one I always liked, climbed the ladder and popped her bewigged head through the trapdoor to ask me, “How fares our sylvan swain?”

“Well enough, so’t please you, madam,” I answered, “in the body.” Every time the troupe came to stay with us—two or three weeks of every summer I could remember—I would be talking like them by the time they left again, and Karsh would spend the next week at least growling and grinding it out of me. I told Lisonje what had happened when Lukassa returned—no more than that—and she leaned on her elbows and regarded Tikat for a while without saying anything. She was still in her paint and costume as the wicked Lord Hassidanya’s mistress, and she looked like a child who has been up very late with grown people.

“Once,” she said finally, “and not too long ago, either, I would have shooed you down this ladder and lain down in that straw with him, for comfort’s sake. And I might even now, if he were someone else and would not hate me and himself so stupidly afterward.“ She thought about it a moment longer, then shook her head briskly and said, ”No, not even then, no, I wouldn’t. I’m done with comforting, must remember that.“ Patting my hand, she started back down, but she put her head in again to say, ”Rosseth, be watchful with him. I’ve seen that kind of heartbreak sleep before. If I were you, I’d wake him every so often. He doesn’t want ever to wake again.”

She slept quickly, as did the others. I did not move until I could identify every snore from every stall, from old Dardis’ whinnying blasts to Lisonje’s dainty chirpings. Then, as she had bid me, I shook Tikat by the shoulder until he blinked at me, whispering to him, “Something worrying the hogs, I must see to them. Go back to sleep.” He cursed me clearly and healthily, and was asleep again before he had turned over in the straw.

I had no choice. I know perfectly well that most people who say that mean only that they have no excuse for the choice, and more than likely I was no different. But I was truly anxious about Nyateneri—where else might she be bloodlessly wounded besides her sword hand?—and it seemed to me that it would do no harm to ask whether I could be of any further aid. As for what Lal had said to me, where had Lal been when Nyateneri and I were at grips with those laughing little men in the bathhouse? We had shared a battle and a kiss, we had faced death together—not shoulder to shoulder, perhaps, but together—and I was entitled, obliged, to see to my comrade’s comfort. Such reasoning it was that took me barefoot down the ladder, all the way to the inn and up the stairs to that room without waking so much as an actor, a hog, or Karsh snoring in the empty taproom, cheek pillowed in the crook of his elbow.

And yes, of course, so many years gone, of course I can say now that I stole up there for one reason alone, and that the old, blind, stamping one that’s had you chuckling so dryly and knowingly to yourself all this time. What else could it have been, eh, at his age? Yet there was more, it was more than only that, even at my age, if not at yours. Let it be. Her mouth and her round brown breasts—let it be that, for now.

NYATENERI

If there is one thing in this world that I was raised and trained to know, it is that there is only so much you may ask of the gods. Victory in battle is their lightest gift; a quiet heart is your own concern. Even before I opened the door, I was already lowering my eyes to the point where they would meet his eyes. I think I may already have said his name.

“I was worried,” he said, so low that I could hardly hear him. He said, “Your hand. Is your hand better? I was worried.” There was straw chaff in his hair.

I did not invite him in. That I will swear until my last day. Whatever I may have mumbled, as thick-voiced as he, it was bloody drunken Lal who called behind me, “Welcome, Rosseth—welcome, come and join us, come meet the Dragon’s Daughter.” Bloody Lal, not me. I swear I would have sent him away.

LAL

What does it matter? From the moment we saw him on the threshold, we all knew what was going to happen. Well, no, not everything—at least I didn’t. If I had known? I can’t say. Whether or not it was I invited him in, the real choice was Nyateneri’s. Nyateneri knows that.

Yes, I was drunk—though not nearly drunk enough, by my reckoning—and yes, I was adrift between old, old aches and furies, as I had not been for a very long time. But I do not love out of pain, and I do not desire out of need or fear, no matter how far off my course I am. What went to my heart about Rosseth that midnight—short, square, tangle-headed Rosseth the stable boy—was the way he looked at Nyateneri, somehow seeing her real injury through all the innocently selfish dreams that clouded his eyes. No one has ever looked at me like that; no one ever will; nor do I want to be seen so now, truly, it’s far too late. But just then, just then.

I hope I was the one. I hope it was I who said it: “Oh, come in, Rosseth, come in and welcome.” But I honestly don’t remember.