He looked down, and red seeped across his cheeks. “I’m not a boy, Miz. I’m a—”
I caught my breath realizing my mistake. “A girl. Of course,” I said, trying to find a way to take away her embarrassment. “I just woke up. I haven’t quite brushed the sleep from my eyes yet.”
She reached up and rubbed her short uneven hair. “Nah, it’s the buggy hair. You can’t work in the Sanctum if you’ve got vermin, and I ain’t much good with a knife.” She was willow thin, certainly not more than twelve, with no bloom of womanhood yet. Her shirt and trousers were the same drab brown as the rest of the boys’. “But one day, I’m going to grow it real long like yours, all pretty and braided like.” She shifted from foot to foot, rubbing her skinny arms.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Aster.”
“Aster,” I repeated. The same name as the powerful angel of destruction. But she looked more like a forlorn angel with badly clipped wings.
I listened to her distorted assessment of the angel Aster, clearly not what the Morrighese Holy Text revealed. “My bapa says Mama named me for an angel right before she drew her last breath. He said she smiled all full of the last glow, then called me Aster. That’s the angel who showed Venda the way through the gates to the city. The saving angel, she’s called. That’s what—” She suddenly straightened, clamping her lips to a firm line. “I was warned not to prattle. I’m sorry, Miz. Here are your boots.” She stepped forward formally, set them down in front of me, then took a stiff step back again.
“Where I’m from, Aster, sharing a few words isn’t prattle. It’s the polite and friendly thing to do. I hope you’ll come and prattle with me every day.” She grinned and skimmed her head again self-consciously. I looked at my boots, cleaned and neatly laced. “How did you come by them?” I asked.
I was pleased to learn that silence was not Aster’s strength either. We had something in common. She told me she got them from Eben. He grabbed them just before they were being sent off to market. My clothes were already gone, but he snuck the boots out of the pile and cleaned them for me. He’d be whipped if anyone found out, but Eben was good at being sly, and she promised I didn’t need to worry. “As far as those boots are concerned, they got up and walked off by themselves.”
“Will you be whipped for bringing them to me?” I asked.
She looked down, the pink tingeing her cheeks again. “I’m not that brave, Miz. Sorry. I brought them on orders from the Assassin.”
I knelt so I was eye to eye with her. “If you insist I call you Aster, then I insist you call me Lia. That’s short for Jezelia. Can you do that, Aster?”
She nodded. And then for the first time, I noticed the ring on her thumb, so loose she had to hold her hand in a fist to keep from losing it. It was the ring of a Morrighese pageantry guard. She had taken a ring from the carts.
She saw me staring at it, and her mouth fell open. “It was my pick,” she explained. “I won’t keep it. I’ll sell it at market, but just for overnight I wanted to feel its goldness all smooth on my skin. I rubbed that red stone all night, making wishes.”
“What do you mean, Aster, your pick?”
“The Komizar always gives the barrow runners first pick of the booty.”
“The governors pick after you?”
She nodded. “The whole Council goes after us. The Komizar makes sure of that. My bapa will be happy for my pick. The quarterlords, they love rings. This might fetch us a whole sack of grain, and bapa can stretch a sack for a month.”
I listened to the way she talked of the Komizar, more like a benefactor than a tyrant. “You said always. Are there many carts brought into the Sanctum?”
“No,” she said. “Used to be just goods from the trading caravans every few months, but now there’s war bounty. We’ve had six loads this month, but this was the biggest one. The others were only three or four barrowfuls.”
War bounty. The patrols were being slaughtered. Small companies of men were riding to their deaths with no idea that the game had changed. They weren’t chasing a few barbarians back behind borders any longer. They were being stalked by organized brigades. For what? Rings to give to servants? No, there was something else to it. Something important enough to send an assassin to kill me.
“Did I say something wrong, Miz?”
I looked back at Aster, still feeling dazed. She bit her lip, intent on my answer.
A sudden voice startled us. “The door’s wide open. How long does it take to drop off one pair of boots?”
Neither of us had heard Kaden approaching. He stood in the doorway looking sternly at Aster.
“Not long,” she gasped. “I just got here. Truly I did. I wasn’t prattling.” She squeezed past him, worried as a mouse with a cat on her tail, and we heard the echo of her footsteps running down the hall. Kaden smiled.
“You frightened her. Did you have to be so stern?” I asked.
His eyebrows rose, and he looked down at my hand. “I’m not the one holding a sword.”
He closed the door behind him and walked across the room, setting a flask and basket down on one of the trunks. “I brought you some food so you don’t have to dine in the hall. Eat and get dressed, and we’ll go. The Komizar’s expecting us.”
“Get dressed? In what?”
He looked at the sack dress balled up on the floor.
“No,” I said. “I’ll wear the shirt I have on and a pair of your trousers.”
“I’ll talk to him, Lia, I promise, but for now just do what I—”
“He said I had to earn luxuries like clothes, but he didn’t say how. I’ll fight you for them.” I waved the sword in circles at the floor, taunting him.
He shook his head. “No, Lia. That isn’t a toy. You’d only end up getting hurt. Put it away.” He spoke to me like I was Aster, a child who had no understanding of consequences. No, worse, like a royal who hadn’t a grasp of anything. His tone was superior and dismissive and more Vendan than ever. Heat bristled at my temples.
“I’ve swung a stick before,” I said. “What else is there to know?” I pursed my lips and looked at the sword with wide-eyed wonderment. “And this is the hilt, right?” I asked, touching the cross wood. “I played with these with my brothers when I was a child.” I looked back at him, my jaw set. “Afraid?”
He grinned. “I warned you.” He reached for the other sword leaning against the wall, and I lunged, whacking his shin.
“What are you doing?” he yelled, grimacing. He hopped on one leg while he clutched the injured one. “We haven’t started yet!”
“Yes, we have! You started this months ago!” I said and swung again, hitting the same leg from the side. He seized the other sword and held it out to defend himself, hobbling in obvious pain. “You can’t just—”
“Let me explain something to you, Kaden!” I said, circling around him. He limped around, trying to keep me in sight. “If this were a real sword, you’d already be bleeding out. You’d be faint, if you could stand at all, because my second strike would have cut your calf muscles and tendons and opened vital veins. All I’d have to do is keep you moving, and your heart would do the rest, pumping your blood out until you collapsed, which would be right about now.”
He winced, holding his shin and at the same time keeping his sword ready to block other lunges. “Dammit, Lia!”
“You see, Kaden, maybe I lied. Maybe I wasn’t just a child when I used one of these last, and maybe it wasn’t play. Maybe my brothers taught me to fight dirty, to gain the advantage. Maybe they taught me to understand my weaknesses and strengths. I know I may not have the reach or the sheer power of someone like you, but I can easily beat you in other ways. And it seems I already have.”