“And if I stop agreeing, what then?” Tasia asked. “You send another assassin after me? Such impressive loyalty.”
Evrart bowed his head. “I have apologized for that already. Norix deceived me just as he deceived your father. He told me he would take the threat of the Shadowlands seriously if I agreed to help pressure your father into ending the War in the East.”
“‘Pressuring’ is a rather polite way to describe an assassination.”
“It was a last resort. We had already tried to convince your father in other ways, but he was a stubborn man.” Evrart paused. “The only thing Emperor Andreth truly feared was another rebellion coming from the West. Our intention was to make your death seem as if it was the opening salvo in a Western uprising.”
“Yet I foiled everyone’s plans by surviving.”
“And then your father named you heir, which none of us expected,” Evrart said. “If it softens your opinion any, Empress, when Norix initially tried to enlist my help to have you killed and frame the Western lords, I refused him.”
“It doesn’t soften my opinion,” Tasia retorted. “Had you confessed your crimes and reported Norix’s treachery at that time, perhaps my opinion would be softer. Instead, you conspired to kill me and then held your tongue when Norix murdered my father.”
“I didn’t hold my tongue. I didn’t know he’d planned that.”
“You should have stopped him.”
“Norix would have exposed the Brotherhood if I had opposed him,” Evrart said.
Tasia slammed a fist on the table, making the small bowl of melon pieces jump. “Then you should have let it be exposed! Look at us.” She swept her hand out to indicate the open-air kitchen with its two clay ovens, teetering stacks of pots, and slaves. “My father is dead, Norix is Regent, and my sister is being forced to marry our cousin. All while you and I cower in Terinto in the home of a merchant-lord who wants Gods-only-know-what in return for his hospitality. Surely stopping that would have been worth a sacrifice or two from the Brotherhood.”
She spat the last word out, hoping every droplet of her contempt would be audible.
But Evrart only raised his chin defiantly. “The Brotherhood’s mission is too important to allow it to be compromised, even to protect the House of Dorsa. Had I known how far Norix planned to go in his machinations against the Emperor, maybe I could have stopped him. But as it was, I didn’t have enough information to make risking the Brotherhood’s anonymity worthwhile.”
I hope you’re happy with the results of your cowardice was what Tasia had planned on saying, but before she could get the words out of her mouth, Halia, the younger of Lord M’Tongliss’s two wives, rushed into the kitchen, her eyes wide with panic. She spoke in rapid Terintan to two of the kitchen slaves, who nodded and ran in different directions, then she approached Tasia and Evrart.
“Your Majesty, Brother Evrart,” she said. “The magistrates are here, searching for you. We must hide you both immediately.”
Tasia turned to Evrart, a question in her eyes.
“No,” he said, answering her unspoken question with a shake of his head. “There are none left. I used the last of my herbs sneaking us through Paratheen.”
Angry as Tasia still was with Evrart, she had to admit that his strange Brotherhood ability to render people and objects temporarily invisible with nothing but a selection of herbs and a few words muttered in the Old Tongue had proven itself to be useful more than once. An illusionist, he’d called himself when Tasia had asked about it. The lowest-ranking form of the shadow arts the Brothers trained in. Tasia had witnessed Evrart make not only her disappear on a few occasions, but once had seen him make their entire ship slip by an Imperial warship unnoticed during their escape to Paratheen. Which made her wonder what else the Brotherhood was capable of if their illusionists were considered the least powerful of them all.
“Alright,” Tasia said, resigning herself to the fact that they would not be rendered invisible this time. “Time for a game of hide-and-find. Where would you have us go?” Tasia asked Halia.
Halia hesitated, her eyes darting from Evrart and Tasia to one of the kitchen slaves, who had returned with a bundle of clothes in his hands.
“It is not so much where we would have you hide, your Majesty,” Halia said, her tone apologetic, “but how.”
3
~ THEN ~
“Again,” said Ku-sai.
Joslyn stood up more slowly this time, brushing dirt from her knees. She said nothing, though her blood boiled with frustration. She chanced a glance at her ku-sai’s face, found it inscrutable. If he was growing impatient with her, he didn’t let it show. If he thought she was improving, he didn’t let that show, either.
She reset her feet — right slightly before left, toes turned out just so, knees soft. As he had taught her, she took a long breath in through her nose, then held it, imagining the air and its attendant energy traveling down through her torso, into her legs, out through the soles of her feet, anchoring her to the ground before she let an exhalation escape slowly from her mouth.
Mountain, he’d called it.
Standing was what she called it.
Ku-sai’s foot flicked out, and before Joslyn had even had a chance to register its touch against her ankle, both her feet had lost contact with the ground, and she was crashing into the dirt.
Again.
She wondered if that was what he meant when he said the word “again,” if “again” meant “Fall on your arse at least once more, kuna-shi.”
This time she reached back instinctively with her right hand to brace her fall, only to scrape her palm and feel an uncomfortable twinge in her wrist.
“Again,” he said. “A mountain is immovable, rooted to the earth.”
She leaned back on both hands, staring at him. “I am not a mountain.”
“Which is the problem,” he said. “Again.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “How am I supposed to be rooted to the earth?”
He adopted the mountain stance himself, placing his calloused bare feet as wide apart as his hips, right foot just ahead of the left, toes slightly out, knees soft.
He breathed in, nostrils flaring, chest expanding. A few seconds later, his lips parted and his chest returned to normal.
“Push,” he commanded.
Joslyn hesitated. Gave him a tentative shove.
“Push,” he repeated.
She pushed harder this time, planting both hands on his chest and adding some weight to her push. Ku-sai was bigger than Joslyn by a head, but now that she wasn’t living the underfed life of an abused slave, the fourteen-year-old suspected she would outgrow her teacher within a year or two.
It made her nervous to push him too hard. Shoving a man with authority over her grated against every survival instinct she had.
But he shouted, “Push, kuna-shi!”, and, startled into a knee-jerk obedience, Joslyn stepped back and shoved as hard as she could.
He might as well have been a stone wall. Instead of moving, it was Joslyn who stumbled backwards, barely catching her balance before landing on her arse once again.
She looked up at him with wide eyes.