“Hardly,” Larken said. “I hear you, though. I would not be the first to have a change of heart like that. But it’s not…a way of being that suits me. I’ve cast my lot with the Meins, and I’m quite happy with it. You should see my villa in Manil. I have servants for every purpose, Mena. Every purpose. I live a life I would never have achieved as a Marah guard. When Hanish or Maeander calls for me, I come and serve, but most days I am no different from the richest of nobles.”
“You care only about yourself, then?”
“Who else is there to care about? I am only myself…”
“Change yourself to something better, then! You have only to do it, and it will be done. This is something I’ve discovered for myself.”
Instead of answering directly, Larken asked her if she had ever heard the Meinish legend of the bear giant Thallach. This Thallach was an enormous northern bear, he said, against whom the first men of the Mein tested their valor. They went one after another into the mouth of his den and did single combat with him. They died one after another, such a steady feast that Thallach never even had to leave his den. His food came to him instead. This went on for many years. Many men died. One day a holy man convinced the people to try another way. Why send their best and strongest and most beloved to their deaths time and again? Why not make peace with the bear? The people, weakened and fearful, believed there was wisdom in this. The holy man went at the head of a delegation, offering Thallach a feather of peace, promising him that they would feed and care for him and worship him as a god from that day forward. “Do you know what Thallach said to them in answer?”
Larken had moved his stool up close to Mena’s bench. He let the question hang a moment, although from his pleased expression he obviously did not mean for her to answer. “Thallach said-” he leaned forward, bared his teeth, and growled, a long, low rumble of sound and vibration and the heat of his breath on her ear. “Then he devoured them, one and all, just as he had done all the others. What else, really, would you expect a bear to say or to do? Thallach could not be anything but what he was. Nor can I. Nor do I wish to be! So don’t try to make me something that I am not. I’ll tell you something you don’t know about me. I’ll ask you afterward if you still think I can be redeemed.”
He explained his role in handing Corinn over to Hanish. He wanted her to understand that he had not just switched sides from the standpoint of a defeated soldier. He had not just sworn loyalty to a new master. He had lived his life in preparation for just such a betrayal. He had behaved in such a way as to gain the highest degree of trust within the Marah hierarchy. He had been a perfect soldier, without a blemish on his record. He had honed his sword skills with a drive his teachers always commented on. He had withstood anything training threw at him without so much as a whimper of protest, and he had willingly put himself forward as a candidate for special assignments. But he had done all of this so that if the opportunity ever came to grasp for something grander, he would.
He had watched Hanish Mein rampage into the world, and he knew fighting against him was a losing proposition. He got his hands on Corinn with joy in his heart. She had been so easy to trap. You can believe in me. I live only to protect you, was all he had to say. When he turned her over, he felt not the slightest remorse. He would have done the same with any of the rest of them, even with Mena herself, if she’d had the misfortune of falling into his hands.
“I have had that misfortune,” Mena said, a joke spoken without mirth.
She spent the night examining a thought that she had not considered before. What if Larken had captured her all those years before? What if she had grown up in the palace just as Corinn had? Would she be the same person she now was? Impossible. Might it be a better thing to have grown into something different? Of course not. She could not imagine that to be true. She could not conceive of not having grown to maturity on Vumu, with the villagers around her. She could not imagine never having become Maeben on earth. It was so much a part of her. Even though she had to break with the goddess, even though she had found her out as a fraud and cast her down to her death, she still would not want to be anybody but who she was now: the Mena who emerged from Maeben’s shadow.
The destiny their father had intended for Corinn had been curtailed and warped even more than Mena’s had. Larken had robbed her of the challenge to become herself in a world away from Acacia. That was the gift their father had given them, but only now-an adult inside herself, just beginning to learn what her siblings had become in their respective exiles-did she begin to understand the gift for what it was. Because of Larken, Corinn had been denied it. Mena, who had not felt an emotion she could name for the man throughout their discussions, named one now. She hated him. She spent the night deciding what she would do about it.
The next morning four Punisari guards gathered her. Larken stood waiting for her near the bow. He was in full military dress, his torso wrapped in a thalba, two swords of differing length at his waist, a small dagger sheathed horizontally across his flat abdomen. Her eyes were quick in studying him. If he noticed, it was only with a certain amount of vanity. “So, you’ve had the night to consider it,” he said. “Do you still think I’m redeemable?”
“Yes,” Mena said, continuing toward him, “in a manner of speaking, you are.”
“What manner is that?”
Her strides were steady, unhurried. It took great effort to keep her eyes on his in the brilliance of the morning light and to block out the bombardment of motion and sound of a ship at sail. “It would not do to explain it to you now,” she said. “You may understand when it happens or you may not. It doesn’t really matter.”
“You’ve become resigned. That’s almost sad, Princess. Almost sad-”
Mena arrived before him. She stepped so close one might have thought she was about to kiss him. Instead, she reached forward and grasped the hilt of his long sword. The fingers of Larken’s sword hand twitched, but he did not reach to wrest her hand away. Even this he found amusing. “That’s an intimate touch, Mena. You should take care what you grasp hold of.”
The blade sang free in one smooth pull.
Larken held his arms up in a gesture of mock alarm. “Impressive, Mena. Do you know that drawing another man’s sword isn’t an easy thing? It’s the type of move one often botches: angle of pull wrong, the motion hasty or jerky-you know, that sort of thing…”
Mena backed a few steps, testing the feel of the blade, weighing it. She knew guards rimmed the deck behind her, but Larken had stopped any attack with a motion of his fingers. She had calculated he would. She could feel their eyes pinned to her, but she also knew that the Talayan crewmen and Acacian servants watched her.
“What now?” Larken said. “What do you mean to do with that?”
“To kill you.”
“I’m affronted, but that’s very unlikely. You have guts, Mena. I would never say otherwise. Your problem is that swordsmen don’t get much better than me. I don’t think a girl raised as a Vumu priestess has much of a chance. I’m just being honest with you. I could have stopped your hand before you ever drew. You know that, don’t you? And as you can see, you are surrounded by my guards and by an entire ship’s crew.”
She said, “I’ll take care of them after.”
Larken could not help but grin. “I wonder if your brothers are equally bold.” Motioning toward his companion sword, a blade shorter than the other but just as deadly in its own right, he said, “I also have another weapon.”
Mena positioned herself as if to begin the First Form. “That’s why I took but one.”
Larken drew his sword as Mena began toward him. Slack wristed, he swept his sword low, from right to left in the motion to counter Edifus’s unusually low opening attack. It was a disdainful gesture on Larken’s part, and it was the last motion he was ever entirely in easy control of.