It was this that he was thinking of as he approached the darkened shell in which he passed the evenings. Sometime earlier he had taken the packet of mist threads from his breast pocket and walked, caressing the fibers with his fingers. Once inside it would only take a few minutes’ preparation, and then he would inhale and inhale and inhale…
Leeka stopped in his tracks and stilled himself. He sensed something, another breathing thing, close but hidden. He thought of the predators of the mountain night and knew that if this be one of those, he was likely dead on his feet.
“Forgive me,” a voice said. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.” A hooded figure peeled away from the shadows beside his hut and stepped into the moonlight, arms raised in a gesture of innocence. “In fact, you surprised me, coming so quietly.”
The man’s tone was kindly, but Leeka had a particular dislike for speaking to people wearing hoods, especially ones who stepped out of the shadows of his hovel late at night and blocked his path. He sought to convey as much with the full intensity of his glare.
“Are you Leeka Alain?” the hooded man asked.
The question caught Leeka off guard. His first thought was that the man must have heard him speaking on the outcropping, but that was scarcely possible. He tucked his mist threads back into his pocket.
“Are you Leeka Alain, he who commanded Leodan’s army in the Mein? Leeka Alain that some call Beast Rider?”
The man’s Acacian was fluid and spoken like a native of the island itself. Leeka had not heard the language uttered so perfectly in some time. Who would ask such a thing in such a tongue? Probably only a man who wished to hear his identity confirmed before killing him.
“Are you he that claims to have been the first to kill a Numrek?”
“No,” Leeka said, speaking the mountain dialect of the area, “I am not that man.”
The hooded figure did not move. He was a statue that almost blended into the features of the night. For a moment Leeka wondered if he was hallucinating. Perhaps this statue had always stood just there, but he had forgotten it. Or perhaps it was no statue at all but just a trick his mist-hungry mind played with the light.
The stranger spoke again, still in Acacian. “This news pains me. I had need of Leeka Alain’s services. It is true that you do not look much like him. Perhaps I was mistaken. I am sorry to have disturbed you. Let me offer you something to pay for my mistake. Here…”
The figure’s hand came up, from it stretched the flickering, tumbling progress of a tossed coin, flaring each time its face caught the moonlight. Leeka’s eyes could not help but follow it. A thief’s trick, and he fell for it. Because of this he would not afterward be able to say that he really saw the man move. But he did feel the impact of something driving up into his abdomen with force enough to have run him through. A pinprick sensation at his neck released a flash of pain that scorched all the way through him like a fire across dry brush. Ignited, and then extinguished in the next moment. As it went, so did his hold of consciousness.
He opened his eyes knowing that time had passed and his placement on the world had changed. He remembered the figure in the shadows, his voice, the airborne coin, the impact that lifted him. He lay with all this in his mind a moment, watching as his eyes gained clarity, focusing on the rough-hewn beams of a wooden ceiling. They were lit by the flickering glow of the fireplace. He knew the ceiling well, every irregularity in it, the knot that disfigured one beam, the lacework of ancient cobwebs hanging from another. He was on his cot, in his hovel, looking up at his ceiling. How very strange…
A man’s form leaned over him. “You lied to me, Leeka Alain. I do not claim to be surprised by it. This is not an easy time to speak forthrightly to strangers, but I might have thought you would be more convincing.”
The man brought a candle up near his face. Leeka stared at him, thoroughly confused. He saw an old man, skin creviced like tree bark, his hair gray, his beard-sparse thing that it was-woven into braids in the Senivalian fashion. If his body was a twin to his face he’d be a thin wisp of a man like any beggar he might pass without acknowledging on the street. How had this aged shell of a man even touched him? Had he fallen so very far from what he had once been?
The old man seemed to read what he was thinking. “I am not as decrepit as I look. Nor are you. In a fair fight I would have no chance against you. This thing that happened here…let it not bruise your soldier’s vanity.” He paused a moment. “Look at my face, Leeka. Tell me if you recognize me. It may be that you remember me, for we did meet once, in a different time and place, in what seems like another world, really.”
The realization that he did recognize him came to Leeka as the words left him. “You are the chancellor…Thaddeus Clegg.”
The older man smiled. “Good,” he said. “There is hope for you yet.”
CHAPTER
Yes, Corinn finally conceded to herself one afternoon as she rode horseback along the high trail that followed the serpentine ridgeline toward Haven’s Rock, Meinish women did have the potential for beauty. One just had to grow accustomed to the hard-edged angularity of their features. They had about them a similar bone structure and temperament as men of their race, but what looked chiseled, rugged, and handsome on their men was somewhat awkward on their women. Or so Corinn had thought for most of the years she had spent in their company. Only lately did she realize that she often measured herself against them. When this shift in her feelings had begun she could not say, but the rides she had lately been taking with an entourage of young Meinish women had done much to stir the feelings to the surface.
It began as an order. Hanish Mein, a messenger told her, requested that Princess Corinn spend fair afternoons with his cousin, Rhrenna, and her entourage of young noblewomen, friends, and maids. The messenger used the word requested, although they both knew commanded would have suited the reality more precisely. And he had called her princess. Everyone called her princess, though in fact she was a prisoner on the island that had once been her father’s. She was being held in a lingering purgatory by the very man who had orchestrated her father’s assassination and the ruin of the Acacian Empire and Akaran family. She walked the same hallways now as she had all her life. She took in the same views down from the palace toward the lower town and out to the sea. Many evenings she dined at the great table in the central hall. But she was no longer of the host family. Another man sat in the place that had been her father’s. The invocation over dinner was spoken in a different tongue, and it called for the blessing of a menacing collective force Corinn had no true understanding of. Her daily life was a balance between what had been and what now was, the edges of each blurred by present reality, warped by memory. It was her own particular, uncomfortable circumstance, unique to her of all people in the world.
This afternoon Rhrenna rode a chestnut mount she must have chosen to compliment her outfit: a vest of pastel blue and tan, with a split skirt that looked almost like a dress when she stood, but which split when she mounted. She was a pale, slim-boned girl composed of imperfect features that, fortunately for her, somehow combined to pleasant effect. She wore her hair long, in a braided fashion that took Corinn some time to separate from that of the men.
For the first couple of years of the occupation, few Meinish women had ventured out of Tahalian. Meinish men, it could be said, were possessive and protective of their women. The Mein were not fond of mixing their blood with other races and could think of few greater sins than one of their women giving birth to a half-breed child. It was not much better when women of the newly conquered empire began to mother children paler than themselves, gray eyed and sharp featured. Though frowned on, such miscegenation proved impossible to prevent. No matter the praise they constantly heaped on their own women, Meinish men still mixed with foreign women. They seemed to love the taste and feel and shape of the skin tones and features they claimed indifference to. Even Maeander, Hanish’s brother, was said to have fathered a small tribe of children. Gradually more and more Meinish women journeyed down to fill roles as wives and concubines, to add a greater domestic normalcy to life both in the palace and among common soldiers, most of whom were now living uncommonly luxurious lives.