Curt Benjamin - Seven Brothers 1 - Prince of Shadows

Prince of Shadows

Volume One of the Seven Brothers Trilogy

Curt Benjamin

PART ONE

PEARLISLAND

Chapter One

LlESHO! Has anyone seen Llesho!“

The healer Kwan-ti stuck her head out of the thatch-and-bamboo longhouse and scanned the slave

compound. Waves of pale gold sand lapped the shed where the pearl washers worked to the pounded

rhythm of their feet on the wood floor and some chantey song of lovers and pearls, but Llesho’s voice

was not among them. At the edge of the sandy clearing where the camp was raised, pearl sorters

crouched under the broad fronds of palm trees, shaking their baskets in a steady circular motion, but

Llesho did not sit among them. He was not abed in the longhouse, nor did she see him in line for his lunch

with the cooks and their cauldrons.

No Llesho. Old Lleck lay dying on his pallet in the longhouse, calling for the boy in his fever, and Llesho

was nowhere to be found. She rested her strained eyes on the distant but ever present cloud bank where

sky met the bay, but the murky slate of the rain-drenched horizon offered no solutions. Lord Chin-shi

didn’t bother to shackle his slaves, which made him a better master than many, but sometimes she would

have made an exception for Llesho, who could disappear faster than a magician when the rent was due.

Still, the boy couldn’t have gone far. Pearl Island was not much more than a handful of palm trees and

scrub that covered the gentle hill of crumbling coral at its center, but no slave had ever escaped it. The

sea, dark and cruel, brooded just beyond the bay that cradled the wealth from which Pearl Island took

its name. An arm of that great sea separated the island from the mainland to the West, the vast,

unreachable sweep of the empire nothing more than a thin line of darker gray on the horizon at the

farthest limit of a sailor’s eye. Even a Thebin like Llesho would drown before he reached that shore.

Kwan-ti knew that some desperate souls sought rest in the jaws of the great sea dragon, but Llesho, for

all his difficult arrogance, would never choose the dark path of death and rebirth this early in his life. He

had seen only fifteen summers, and cruelty still had the power to surprise him.

Figuring where Llesho was not didn’t help find him, however, so Kwan-ti tucked a lock of faded hair

back into its knot and stepped out into the drizzle. “Have you seen him, Tsu-tan?” she asked the man

squatting under the protective shelter of a coconut palm with a pearl basket in front of him.

“He’s tending the beds, old woman.” Tsu-tan didn’t bother to look up from the flat basket in which he

was sorting pearls by size. “You won’t see Llesho on dry land until his quarter-shift is done.”

“That will be too late.” Kwan-ti smoothed her tapa-printed skirts with worried hands. Although the pearl

beds lay well beyond sight, Kwan-ti stared in their direction as if she could conjure them—and the boy,

Llesho. Which perhaps she could, if she wanted to take a swim with an anvil chained to her neck.

Chin-shi, the Lord of Pearl Island, frowned on conjuration, however, so no one knew for certain whether

Kwan-ti had such powers or simply followed her mother’s recipes for medicines like a good Islander.

“Always too late,” she muttered under her breath.

Tsu-tan, shaking his basket in gentle circles, paid close attention to Kwan-ti’s muttering even though he

pretended otherwise. He did not know what she meant, what other time Llesho had been too late, or if

the old woman thought that she had come too late to call the boy, or to cure the old man’s fever. Still, it

was one more clue. He hid it away with the others in the puzzle box of his mind he reserved for

witch-finding, which was his true calling.

Returning to the longhouse that served as slave quarters for the pearl fisheries, Kwan-ti made her way to

the low pallet she had set up in the corner for the old man. The boy would be too late, of course. Already

the old man’s skin had grown ashen and powdery with the dry heat that burned him up inside. He picked

fretfully at his blanket and his eyes, long glazed over with the hard white shells of cataracts, wandered in

his head as if they could find the boy and see him one more time before he exchanged this life for his next

on the wheel.

“Llesho?” Lleck’s voice rattled in his throat. He gasped for breath, exhausted by the effort it took him to

call for the boy. As soon as he was able, he called again, “Llesho! You must find them!”

“Who, Lleck?” Kwan-ti asked him softly. “Tell me who I must find.” Llesho’s voice had not fully

deepened yet; she hoped that the old man might mistake her own voice for the boy he called so

piteously.

“Your brothers.” Lleck grasped her hand and pushed it away again, seeking the longer fingers and

callused fingertips of the boy. “You must find your brothers.”

“I will, old friend.” Kwan-ti took his hand in a firm clasp and stilled its seeking, stroked the forehead

burning with dry heat. “Rest easy. I will find them.”

“Goddess go with you.” With a last whispered breath, the old one cast aside the shell of his worn-out

body, leaving Kwan-ti to wonder, what brothers had the boy Llesho, and what mischief might she

unwittingly set in motion if she gave the boy his mentor’s message?

The two had not arrived in the camp together. Thebin, high in the mountains of the mainland, bred a

short, sturdy people accustomed to the thin cold air of the heights. The children, if carefully trained in the

richer atmosphere near the sea, had the breath to remain underwater for up to half an hour without

surfacing to refill their lungs. To the ignorant, the skill was a sign that the children had magical powers

born of a sea that the gods had raised higher than the mountains of Shan to make the door to heaven.

Pearlers knew the Thebins to be as human as any man, but with a skill for breathing that made them

efficient at scooping pearl oysters out of the bay.

Llesho had come to Pearl Island in a shipment of Thebin children bought from Harn slave traders for

training as divers. The boy had been seven summers in age then, with a dazed expression that soon

marked him as soft in the head. He never spoke, and though he followed directions well enough, he could

not even feed himself without being told to lift his spoon, and again, lift his spoon. From the start he

walked the bay without fear, however, so Foreman Shen-shu considered him worth the effort to train.

Gradually, awareness of his surroundings had returned to Llesho’s eyes. Then, one day he laughed at one

of Lling’s jokes, and his recovery from whatever had stunned his brain seemed complete. If he held his

head at too arrogant a tilt or his eyes sometimes glittered with a light too hard and bleak for his youth, a

joke or a curse would remind him of his place. Over time he passed out of notice, just another Thebin

slave child with salt water in his hair and sand between his toes.

When Llesho reached the age of ten, Lleck appeared. Chin-shi had purchased the aging Thebin for his

claims to understand the special ailments of the pearl divers. Lleck quickly made himself useful about the

camp, tending to the needs not only of the Thebins, but of those Pearl Islanders willing to accept the

advice of one who, it was whispered, had trained in the secret knowledge of eternal life to be found in the

far mountains. From his first day in the camp, Lleck had taken a special interest in the boy Llesho,

teaching him to read and write using a stick in the damp sand, and showing him the way of herbs in

Thebin healing. Some felt that Llesho must pay for this attention with his body, but the longhouse offered

no privacy, and pairings of every kind were both visible and audible to whoever had a bed nearby. No

one had ever seen Lleck visit the boy Llesho in the dark, nor had Llesho ever been seen to make

nighttime visits to Lleck.

The women, for the most part, felt that Lleck must be the boy’s true father. Lleck, they reasoned, had

followed his son into slavery to protect and raise the boy even at the cost of his own freedom. They

admired such devotion of father and son, and while some grew jealous of the two, for the most part the

connection between them remained hidden, one of the small conspiracies that all slave compounds

nurture in defiance of their masters. And now, Lleck was dead. Kwan-ti remembered the arrogance and

the bitterness that lay dormant at the heart of young Llesho, and a shudder of foreboding rippled through

her. “Find your brothers.” What was the old man unleashing with his message? How could the boy, tied

for life to the pearl beds and the island, obey his mentor’s strange command?

At that very moment, Llesho had finished his half hour of rest in the pearl harvesting boat, and was

returning to the bay for his next half hour in the water. Naked, as were all the pearl-divers, he sat on the

red-painted deck of the harvest boat and snapped the iron shackles around his ankles. The collar chain

that tethered him to the boat never came off during his quarter-shift, but the shackles around his ankles

were his own choice. The extra weight helped to steady him when he walked the floor of the bay. At the

end of his half-hour shift underwater, when he had not enough air in his lungs to swim to the surface under

his own power, he would run the chain through the shackles and let the winch draw him up by his feet.

On his first day in the bay Llesho had scorned the shackles, but he’d only needed to be dragged onto the

boat by his neck once to realize the wisdom of using the ankle chain.

With the shackles in place, he stood at the edge of the boat and waited for the foreman to hand him the

tool he would use this shift. A bag would mean he was collecting the oysters most likely to hide pearls,

but this time Shen-shu handed him a muck rake. With the implement in his hand, he took one, two, three

deep breaths, and stepped off the side of the boat. When his feet touched water, he raised his arms over

his head, the rake held close to his side, and plunged like an arrow to the bottom of the bay. Lling was

already there, staking out their piece of the oyster beds and protecting it from the encroaching teams that

worked about them. She raked up the muck so that the nutrients filled the water with a roiling cloud.

Hmishi followed after, landing almost on top of Lling’s shoulders. Soon Llesho’s two companions had

turned the chore into a game of tridents, clashing their rakes together in mock battle while Llesho

watched from just enough distance to set him apart from the game. Early in his training his watchful, quiet

nature had earned him the fear and suspicion of his fellow slaves.

But he spoke to the foreman and guards no more than he did to his fellow divers, and eventually they

accepted the distance he kept as part of his personality. Better that than question the dark shadows in his

eyes that occasionally blotted out the here and now. The growing acceptance of his fellow captives

seemed to creep into Llesho’s bones and make him over as a part of them.

The mock contest of trident-rakes stirred up as much of a silty cloud as if the combatants had applied

themselves to their task with all the seriousness they showed when the foreman Shen-shu dove into the

bay to check on them. Today, however, Shen-shu had worn a fresh white robe and shoes on his feet, a

sure sign that the workers in the water below would have no surprise inspections on this quarter-shift.

That left the Thebin slaves to their contest, and to the more difficult task of making Llesho laugh.

Hmishi had taken the offensive and tangled the teeth of his rake in those of the tool Lling flung about as a

weapon. Lling lost control of her rake and waved her hand in submission for this round. Her eyes burned

with the curses bursting to explode from her lips. Llesho winked, giving her the advantage in the second

contest: he wanted to laugh, but fought the impulse for the same reasons Lling fought her desire to

swear—they needed to conserve air, and Hmishi would not have heard them anyway through the

bubbles they would release in the attempt.

Still struggling against the urge to laugh, Llesho turned away from the antics of his friends. He was

shocked to see an old man drifting toward him over the low mounds of pearl oysters. The old man wore

many layers of robes and gowns that floated about him like a school of multicolored fish. He had dark

hair and clear blue eyes that reminded Llesho of a distant sky, as unlike the sky over Pearl Island as

those blue eyes were unlike the hard white marbles of Lleck’s cataracts. That he was Lleck, or some

transformed apparition of Lleck, was~certain, however, and Llesho gasped in horror.

The sudden breath should have killed him, since both he and the ghost were floating underwater. Instead

of the terrifying pain of drowning, however, Llesho felt only crisp, clean air. Thinner than he had grown

accustomed to at sea level, the breath that invigorated him reminded him of home—the mountains, the

snow, the overwhelming cold. The spirit in the water drew closer, and Llesho shook his head, refusing to

believe the truth this apparition forced upon him: Lleck was dead.

“Forgive me for leaving you, my prince.” The youthful spirit addressed him in Lleck’s voice, using the title

Llesho had not heard since the Harn had invaded Thebin and sold the princeling child into slavery. Llesho

heard the words clearly, as if he stood on Thebin’s high plateau, taking his lessons in the queen’s garden

and not among the sea creatures of the bay. He wondered if he, too, had passed into the kingdom of the

dead.

“I had hoped to live to see you grown, to know that you had been returned to your rightful place. But age

and fever have no respect for an old man’s wishes.” Did the spirits of the dead feel remorse? It sounded

as if the king’s minister might, but Lleck was smiling at him, a wry acknowledgment that life and all its

hopes and concerns were behind him now.

“I have no rightful place,” Llesho answered bitterly, his words as clear as the spirit’s, and he felt no lack

of air to argue further. “I am the last of an old and broken house, destined to die at the bottom of the

bay.”

“Not the last,” Lleck told him. “Your father they killed, yes. But your brothers still live, carried into

distant provinces and sold into slavery, each told the others had been slain.”

Since that described Llesho’s own fate, he found his mentor’s words difficult to deny. A new feeling

kindled in his breast, so alien to his experience that Llesho did not recognize it for hope.

“My sister?” He could not look the spirit of the minister in the eye, for fear of what he would see there.

As a small and spoiled prince he had hated Ping, the infant who had taken his place in his mother’s lap.

When Llesho was five, he had created an uproar in the court by stealing out of the Palace of the Sun with

the intent, he informed the gatekeeper, of setting the newborn princess on the mountainside as a gift for

the gods. When the guard had advised him that tigers were more common than gods on the mountain,

Llesho had informed him that a tiger would do. Ping had been two years old when the invasion had

come, of little use to the Harn as a slave or a hostage. With the wisdom that comes of being fifteen,

however, Llesho would have given his life to keep her safe.

Lleck-the-spirit shook his head. “Beaten, and thrown on the rubbish heap is what I heard,” he said, “I do

not find her spirit in the kingdom of the dead, but I know not in what shape or country she has been

reborn.”

It was an old grief, but Llesho found it could still hurt, and the more because he had in that same moment

learned to hope. “My mother?”

Again Lleck-the-spirit shook his head, but his brow creased in some question. “Your mother, the queen,

is not among the spirits of the dead,” he said. “She was taken in the raid that killed your father, but no

report of her came to me after. They say that she ascended into heaven as a living being to beg the mercy

of the gods on her country, but that her beauty so entranced the heavenly creatures that they would not

let her depart again.

“I think this is good storytelling, but bad history. If she has not crossed into a new life, she must be a

prisoner still.”

Llesho said nothing. He was far too old to cry about his dead, had never given his enemies that

satisfaction even as a small child.

“Find your brothers, Llesho,” the spirit pleaded with him. “Save Thebin. The land itself is dying, and the

few of her people who remain are dying with her.” Sorrow ran from Lleck’s dead eyes, salt tears

returning to the salty bay. “I would have stood at your side if I could. Now, I have only this to offer—”

The spirit held out to him a pearl as big as a walnut and as black as Foreman Shen-shu’s eyes. “The

pearl has magical properties of long life and various protections. Keep it with you, but use it only at most

dire need.”

At this, Llesho wondered if the spirit in front of him was not Lleck after all, but an imp sent to trick him

into witchcraft. “A good trick,” he taunted the spirit, “but Lleck would know that I can’t possibly carry a

pearl out of the bay—I have no place to hide it.” He gestured to his own naked body. “And Foreman

Shen-shu will search the cavities of our bodies for stolen treasure with as much vigilance today as he

does after every quarter shift in the pearl beds. As for swallowing a pearl that big, if it were possible to

do so without choking to death, even Lord Chin-shi’s guards would notice a slave from the pearl bay

searching through the privy trench!”

“Have some trust, young prince.”

The reminder of his former state from the lips of his teacher’s spirit raised tears that stung the corners of

Llesho’s eyes, but he refused to shed them. He found little to trust in a world that had taken this last and

only comfort from him. “How can I trust what you say, old man?” In the pain of his heartache, Llesho

knew only to attack its source. “You said you would stay with me, and protect me. Now you are dead,

and if we are truly having this conversation at all. I must be dying as well!”

Lling and Hmishi had long since tugged on their chains and returned to the surface. Llesho knew he could

have no air left in his lungs, could not breathe or speak underwater, and yet he did have air, was both

breathing and speaking. Surely, he must be dead, or in that stage of drowning when the mind plays tricks

on the body.

“Trust,” the old man said, with tears glittering in his eyes. He put one ghostly hand on Llesho’s neck and

with the other hand he held up the black pearl. Using thumb and forefinger, he squeezed the pearl until it

was no larger than a tooth.

“Open,” he instructed, and when Llesho opened his mouth, Lleck popped the pearl into the empty

socket where Llesho had lost a back tooth. “You should have that seen to one of these days,” he said,

and then he disappeared, like a cloud dispersing in the water.

Watching the cloud spin away in eddies of disturbed currents, Llesho’s mouth was suddenly filled with all

the things he wanted to say to the old man, all the words of gratitude and love that he had taken for

granted all the years of their captivity together.

“Come back,” he cried, but only bubbles formed in the water around him, and he realized that his lungs

were ready to burst, and that his fingers had gotten clumsy. Somewhere he had dropped his rake, but he

could not see it in the swirling muck. He struggled against panic and his own awkwardness to link the

neck chain to his ankles, and tugged, hard, to alert the slave at the winch to pull him up. He would have

given a sigh of relief when he felt the slack tighten and his body turn upside down, but to vent his emotion

now would invite death at the very moment of his rescue. Then he was out of the water, hanging naked

and upside down above the boat, coughing and choking, sneezing to clear the water from his nose.

“Where’s your rake?” Shen-shu, the foreman, asked. Llesho pointed below him, to the bay. He saw the

pinched, anguished expressions on the faces of his shift-mates, and then the winch was lowering him

again.

“Find it. You are wasting time,” Shen-shu warned him, and then he was plunging headfirst into the bay

almost before he could grab a breath, dropping, dropping. There it was. He had the rake in his hands,

but he was exhausted, and hanging upside down, and he could not reach up to take hold of the chain

above his feet, nor had he slack to tug on. Llesho wondered how long the foreman would leave him in the

bay, and if he would survive. Black specks filled his vision, and the laughter of spirits in the kingdom of

the dead filled his ears.

Then Lling was beside him, and Hmishi, and they held his shoulders, trying to lift him. Hmishi pried the

rake from his numb ringers and swam for the surface, and the winch grabbed his chain. Llesho was rising.

Lling, at his side, breathed air from her mouth into his own, until finally they broke the surface.

“Don’t fling him about!” Lling shouted as she clambered over the side of the boat. She and Hmishi took

his shoulders again, as the winch released his chain. He fell, feetfirst, to the deck.

“What did you see down there?” Lling whispered, but Llesho could only gasp like a landed fish. Rolling

to his stomach, he vomited salt water over the side of the boat, and hung there, draped across the

gunwales, gathering his strength with each choked breath and trying to see his future in the gentle ripples

of the bay. He was so exhausted that he hardly noticed when the foreman searched his body, probing in

his mouth for hidden pearls after he had done the same to the other cavities for the pleasure of a minor

cruelty. “Rotten teeth!” he grunted, and Llesho realized that yes, the black pearl was real, and that

perhaps the spirit had told the truth after all. His brothers were alive somewhere on the mainland. But

how was he to find them?

Chapter Two

“WAKE up. You need to get off the boat.” Lling shook him by the shoulder, rousing Llesho from the

questions going around in his head.

“I’m coming.” He bestirred himself, but found he could not control his arms or legs. The boat rocking

gently beneath him seemed distant, his body not quite real except for the tight buzzing in his head.

Hmishi offered a hand, and pulled him to his feet, but Llesho’s legs seemed to have turned to water. He

stumbled, grateful for the shoulder propping him up while he made his wobbling way to the shore.

Familiar hands reached for him and hauled him into the slat-sided wagon for the ride back to the slave

compound. Llesho found an empty corner on the flat bottom of the wagon and curled in on himself. Lling

followed, and then Hmishi, each taking up their post to either side of him. Secure in their protection, he

let his eyelids fall, lulled into a shallow sleep where the afternoon puzzled itself out in his drifting mind.

Sometimes, he knew, divers who had suffered enchantment of the deep and survived to tell of it

described vivid waking dreams that came- to them as consciousness fled. Llesho had not felt like he was

losing consciousness while he talked to the spirit under the bay, but his mind must have been starved to

convince him Lleck had appeared to him and that he had spoken with the spirit of his old mentor. His

heart told him otherwise.

Desperately he wanted to confide in someone, to ask if any of it could be true, but he knew better than to

take such a risk, even with Lling or Hmishi. The Harn hadn’t always needed to steal Thebin children for

the slave trade. The Thebin pearl divers on his quarter-shift all came from small-claim farms scratching

out a marginal living on the fringes of the Thebin landhold. Harn raiding parties had robbed their homes

and burned their crops, leaving them with nothing but their children and an agonizing decision. They

needed the money that selling their children would bring just to feed the younger ones until they, too,

were old enough to send to market. He once asked Lleck why the king did nothing to help his people.

“In some ages, the gods favor their people, and in others they turn their backs.” The minister had wept

softly after that. Llesho hadn’t understood, but he’d started a list right there of questions he would ask

when he met the gods.

For the children trained to dive for pearls, however, slavery was little worse than the devastation they left

behind them in the mountains. They knew nothing of kings or princes or palaces laid waste in that last

great and terrible invasion. How could they understand his need to rescue his brothers when they could

not imagine any rescue for themselves, or any reason to expect one? If they did not believe Llesho mad,

they would believe him a danger. It surprised him to realize that he could not bear to lose the only

companions he had left in the world.

“Kwan-ti will know how to help you.” Lling touched his“ arm, for comfort and for strength. The jokes

and challenges that usually marked the trip home from the bay were silenced today, the pearl fishers

watching him somberly. Llesho remembered the first time he had seen a drowning, when Zetch, a diver

well past the age at which most had fed the pigs, had stayed below for almost an hour. When they

brought him up, his sack was full of pearls, but so were his mouth, his nostrils, his ears, and he had

jabbed mother-of-pearl shells into his eyes. Gone mad, the foreman had announced, but the Thebins

knew better. The pearls in Zetch’s body would pay his rent in the kingdom of the dead, and buy him a

new body—a free body—for his next turn on the wheel.

“I had a dream,” Llesho said, but gave no description of his conversation with the spirit. Lord Chin-shi, it

was said, feared witches, and dreamers could sometimes fall within the web of his superstition. For his

part, Llesho wondered if he must be a witch, to have the dead visit him in waking dreams, but he dared

not ask. The question alone would be enough to send him to the flames. So he only said, “I didn’t mean

to frighten you. I must have let my mind wander.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Lling answered. “Kwan-ti will know what to do.”

Llesho knew her to mean that he should say nothing more in the crowded wagon. Good advice, and easy

to follow. He leaned his head against her shoulder and closed his eyes.

“Be careful with him. We could lose him yet.”

Kwan-ti, that was, and with a tone of command she only assumed when real trouble threatened. For a

moment, Llesho wondered what had happened. As his companions jostled him awake, however, he

realized that he must be the emergency.

“I’m all right,” he protested, struggling to disentangle the hands that reached to gather“ him up.

“No, you are not,” Lling contradicted in tones almost as commanding as those of Kwan-ti. “His mind

drifted down below, during quarter-shift,” Lling explained to the healer, her voice shrill with her anger.

“Then, because he’d dropped his rake when he was fading, Shen-shu lowered him back into the bay to

find it. If I had not breathed into his mouth, he would have died with his head stuck in the mire.”

“Lleck would have saved me,” Llesho objected.

Lling took this as a sign of his condition. “See,” she said, “He thought he saw his father below.” Like

many of the women in the camp, Lling believed that Lleck was the true father of the slave Llesho. And

what would be more natural than that the son, dying, should see a vision of his father come to save him?

But Kwan-ti had gone very still; Llesho could feel her tension, like the fizz of lightning about to strike.

“When did this happen?” she asked.

“On second quarter-shift,” Hmishi gave the answer. “The second hour of the quarter.

“I see.” Something of the tension faded, but Llesho felt, though he could not explain why, that Kwan-ti

still listened for something the rest of them could not hear. “Bring him inside,” she finally said, and Llesho

found himself tumbled out of the wagon into the arms of his Thebin shift-mates.

“I can walk,” he said, and squirmed out of their grasp. He nearly sank to his knees when his legs would

not quite bear his weight.

Kwan-ti raised him by the elbow. “I see you can,” she said tartly, and then turned to his companions. “I’ll

take care of him. You may come by to see him after you have dressed and had dinner.”

Hmishi took her at her word, and turned toward his own bed and the clothes basket at its foot, but Lling

was not so easy to convince.

“Are you sure?” She touched his arm again, the question in her eyes for Llesho and not for the healer.

“About the clothes? I’m sure.” Llesho tried to lighten the worry in her eyes. “It’s hard to forget you are a

girl when we are on dry land.”

“Hard seems to be the operative word,” Lling admitted with a teasing glance at places on his body girls

were not supposed to look. “I suppose you will live after all.”

“Reassure his shift-mates in that regard. Unless he decides not to follow orders, of course.” Kwan-ti

smiled to take the sting out of the mock threat.

Lling turned to do as she was bid, but swayed her naked hips like an invitation when she walked. After a

few choice paces she looked back at Llesho with a little laugh before running to find her clothes.

When Kwan-ti was sure that the girl had turned her attention elsewhere, she sighed heavily. “Come on,

boy. We have to talk.”

Llesho allowed her to lead him to the corner of the longhouse where she isolated the sick, but he would

wait no longer for news. “Lleck is dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” Kwan-ti pushed him down onto a fresh bed just a short distance from the one where Lleck had

died. “He wanted to see you very badly before he died, but I don’t have the authority to interrupt a work

shift, unless a diver is at risk. Now I wish I had tried anyway. I might at least have spared you from

drowning.”

The healer covered him in his bed with a light cloth. “You’re shivering,” she said, and added a blanket.

Llesho realized that it was true, but he seemed less to feel it than to observe it from a distance.

“Rest,” she ordered. “You can explain it all to me after you’ve had some sleep; you’re too tired to make

sense now.”

Llesho stopped her before she could leave him alone. “He left a message for me, didn’t he?”

“Yes.” She said nothing else, and hesitated even before saying that much.

Kwan-ti had always made Llesho nervous, though not as an enemy might. She had a way of going

completely still and looking at him with eyes as sharp as a hawk’s that made him think she was reading

his soul. In some ways Kwan-ti reminded him of the way his mother had looked at him when he was six

and he had sworn he hadn’t broken the vase in the great hall. It had comforted him, as a child, to feel in

her gaze that his mother could see everything, and love him in spite of his crime. Kwan-ti did not love

him, however. He closed his eyes to hide his soul, afraid that it was too late, but with no strength to do

more.

“Your secrets are safe with me, Llesho,” she whispered. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

Fear had kept his mouth shut and his identity hidden all the years of his slavery. Lleck had made it clear

that only his secrecy kept him alive. But he wanted to believe the healer, and he wondered, as he drifted

into sleep, if it could hurt him, just this once, to trust someone.

That night Lling and Hmishi did come to visit, with others from their shift, but Llesho was sleeping, so

they went away again with a promise to return. In the morning Llesho still slept, and Kwan-ti sent word

to Foreman Shen-shu that her charge had suffered enchantment of the deep, that state in which a diver

forgot the difference between air and water, and became a danger to himself and his shift-mates.

Foreman Shen-shu sent a message back that Lord Chin-shi had no use for a pearl fisher who could no

longer walk the oyster beds, but Kwan-ti ignored the threat, for now at least. With his dying words,

Lleck had convinced her that the young Llesho had more pressing business to attend than plucking pearls

from their homes in the mouths of shellfish.

When Llesho finally awoke, it was to sunlight breaking through the clouds high overhead. He could count

on one hand the days when full sunshine parted the clouds over Pearl Island. What this portended, he did

not want to consider, but he knew it was time to talk with Kwan-ti.

“May I have my clothes, please?”

“Of course.” Kwan-ti handed him a set of bleached and faded trousers and shirt, and politely turned

away while he pulled them on. Llesho piled into his clothes as fast as he could.

“You can turn around now,” Llesho called, and Kwan-ti rejoined him, taking a seat on the bed next to

his.

“You said he left a message. . . .” When Llesho thought of Lleck, so many conflicting emotions filled

him—anger and sadness and wonder—that his throat tightened on the name. But of course, Kwan-ti

knew what he meant.

“Your father loved you very much,” she began, but Llesho stopped her with a gesture. “My father is

dead.”

“Yes—”

“No,” he contradicted her. “My father was dead before Chin-shi’s men ever brought me here.” She had

to know that his father would not have permitted a single day to pass with his sons in slavery if he’d lived.

“Lleck was a family servant. I loved him, but he was not my father.” He’d said too much and now he

tried to keep the panic off his face. She would know that Thebin hardscrabble farmers didn’t have

servants. “And he loved you,” Kwan-ti said slowly, seeming to ignore the second part of his statement.

She looked into his eyes with that hawklike gaze. Then, as if the sun had touched her, she seemed to

open up in front of him, her eyes wide with sudden insight, a tiny sigh escaping her lips before she

clamped them closed again, lest she say something out loud that should not be spoken at all.

“I have to find my brothers,” Llesho said tentatively. Kwan-ti nodded. “So he said to me on his

deathbed.”

“So he said to me in a dream beneath the bay.” he agreed.

“You cannot go back to the oyster beds now.”

“What am I to do?” he asked; this conversation with the healer felt more like a dream than the one he

had with the spirit under the bay. Something about Kwan-ti’s eyes, the gentle touch of her fingers on the

back of his hand, slowed time to a walk.

“For the present, you must consider what you can do that will not kill your soul in the doing,” she

answered, and the spell was broken. She rose and spoke to someone behind Llesho in the longhouse.

“Are you feeling ill, Tsu-tan?”

“Not at all.” The hopeful witch-finder bowed his head over the pearl basket he carried. “I just came to

see how the young diver was faring. Shen-shu will want him back on the boat tomorrow.”

“Then Shen-shu can speak to me tomorrow. Now, we must permit young Llesho to rest.”

“Of course, of course,” Tsu-tan bowed and scraped his way out of the longhouse. He returned to his

place beneath the coconut palm and took up again the pearl sorting basket never long out of his hands.

He could see all the comings and goings of the longhouse from there, Kwan-ti knew, as she also knew he

was watching her for evidence of witchcraft. She feared that Tsu-tan would now turn his attention on the

young Llesho as well.

For himself, Llesho felt no inclination to rest. He had not regained his full strength, but he felt well enough

to take a walk on the shore and watch for the red harvest boats to come in from the bay. So he left the

longhouse while Kwan-ti was occupied in bandaging the cut foot of the cook’s assistant, and wandered

out past the cookhouse, onto the road.

Few slaves traveled the road at midday, but those he passed had heard about Llesho’s double tragedy,

the loss of Lleck and his own near drowning, and did not interrupt his brooding with idle conversation.

Llesho had not quite told the truth about Lleck who, as minister of arts and education, was more a

servant of the Thebin people than to the family of the king. Lleck had found him in captivity and joined

him there, had taught the young prince not only reading and writing, but the arts of strategy that had come

too late to save a king. As he walked, Llesho made good use of those lessons, setting evidence against

probability, and examining methods to reach his goal.

If the apparition had been a dream concocted by his own starved mind, how had he known the minister

had died? And if it was a dream, how could he explain the same message delivered to Kwan-ti? It must

be true then: his brothers still lived, in servitude as he did himself. Llesho had to rescue them and together

the brothers must free Thebin from the killing grasp of the Harn. If their mother still lived, languishing in

the dungeons of her own palace—The thought stuttered out. Llesho could not imagine his beautiful

mother reduced to squalor and filth, but the image of his battered sister bleeding into the refuse heap

struck him to the heart. He hadn’t wanted her dead, not really, he’d just wanted his mother back. By the

time Ping had turned two, however, the little princess had adored him. He couldn’t help but love her

Curt Benjamin - Seven Brothers 1 - Prince of Shadows

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