The medicine man suddenly disappeared, it seemed, for we no longer saw him at the villages at which we stopped. I had feared he would come after us, but Aryne claimed his traditional route branched west as we went east and that was one of the reasons she had chosen the time she had to come to us.

  Apparently, she had been planning to chase after us from the moment she had first encountered us. She claimed that at the market, she had noticed something different about us and had been determined to find out what it was.

  She was a driven little thing, for a child.

  She was skilled as well, for one so young. She had spent her life cleaning and repairing clothes, valuable talents for a troupe such as Atara’s. This was the source of the coin she had claimed when convincing us to take her with us, not the more nefarious routes my mind had leapt to.

  She also knew how to whip together medicines that looked good, felt effective, and accomplished nothing. She claimed they did no harm. I’d forbidden her to make them and had so far caught her selling them to Rinis twice. No one else would back me up on the snake oil ban, and Aryne purchased the ingredients with her own funds—acquired through the sales. I had to give up on it.

  She had settled in too easily, with too little disruption to everyone else. Something had to snap. It was inevitable. Waiting for it, however, was enough to make me snap.

  She did not appear to be a typical Source. Well, obviously she wasn’t, in that she didn’t need a Shield, but it was more than that. I witnessed no emotional extremes in her. She didn’t display any weird tricks with speech. She did, however, stumble too close to the fire and was a little slower about getting away from it than I liked. There was no noticeable expression of pain, either, as I spread on the burn the gel I got from Kahlia.

  We, Taro and I, were stunned by her reaction to music. One morning, after a performance, a shaken Taro briefly described having to drag an extremely amorous adolescent back to the tent. He refused to tell me of the other difficulties he had experienced, and teasing him about it had earned me nothing more than a very curt dismissal. He banned Aryne from attending any more of my performances. As he threatened to leave her tied up in the tent if she didn’t comply, that was a ban that stuck.

  I didn’t know what to think of our newly discovered Source displaying clearly Shield traits.

  She had taken to following me around, all day, every day. I couldn’t say I cared for it. “Run off. I have to go to the challenges.”

  “Can I come watch?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? There’s no proper music. Just the drums.”

  “I don’t want to be distracted.” And I didn’t want her stealing from such easy targets whom she’d likely never see again.

  “I should learn how to do this, if I’m going to be going to that school of yours.”

  “You won’t be going to my school. You’ll be going to the Source Academy, and they don’t dance the benches. Not much, anyway.”

  “Then I want to go to the Shield school. I want to do the dancing.”

  “You’re not a Shield.”

  “Aye, I am.”

  I looked at her curiously. “You’re a Source.”

  “I’m a Shield, too.”

  “You can’t be both.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s impossible.” I made an effort never to use that word. It was too uncompromising. But of course she wasn’t both Source and Shield. That was just…impossible.

  “I feel music like you do.”

  “Not like I do.” No one, it seemed, felt it like I did. “Most people are sensitive to music to some extent. Regulars, Sources and Shields.”

  “Not like me.” She grinned.

  “It’s nothing to be proud of.”

  “I want to go to the Shield school instead.”

  “Let’s say you were both Source and Shield, and could choose which school to go to. You’d want to go to the Source Academy. You’d want to be a Source.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—”

  And I froze. Because…why?

  I could say that Sources were rarer, and were more desperately needed, and that would be true. But that wouldn’t be the reason why I said what I said.

  I said what I said because I thought it was easier to be a Source. Because I thought Sources were treated better by everyone else. Because Sources didn’t seem to worry so much about things, about whether they did their tasks properly. No one really expected them to memorize the maps and read the reports and do anything, really, but channel forces. Whereas Shields had to do so much more than Shield.

  I liked being a Shield. I was too proud of it, and of how seriously I took it.

  But my automatic reaction to the possibility of being able to choose whether to be a Source or a Shield, was to suggest the choice be a Source.

  Was that what I really felt? Really?

  I didn’t want to think about it. I had enough to think about as it was. Shelve that.

  “Because why?” Aryne prodded.

  “Because there are fewer Sources, and we need more of them.” There was a sharpness to my voice that Aryne didn’t deserve. “You’ll be going to the Source Academy. You don’t need to learn how to dance.”

  “Dunleavy,” she whined.

  “This is not the proper way to be learning anyway. I’ll show you at a better time. Go find something to wash.”

  She scowled and stomped off with a sullen look.

  Well done, Lee.

  Zaire, I was always in a bad mood.

  Once the challenges were over, I hunted up Taro. He had been helping Leverett grease his drums and was in the process of scraping the clinging stuff off his hands. “I need to talk to you,” I said to him.

  He nicked a towel from Leverett’s pile, and followed me as I looked for a place where we could possibly speak without arousing anyone’s attention or being overheard. “Something wrong?” he asked after we’d crashed through a stretch of undergrowth to get away from the camp.

  “We’re getting close,” I said.

  “Close to what?”

  “Golden Fields.” He still looked blank. “Golden Fields. The whole reason for this whole thing. From what Atara says, we’ll get there in a little over a week.”

  His mouth opened on a silent “oh.” Then he closed it to a thin line. “We’re going to have to start thinking now, aren’t we?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “It may take us more than a week to…figure out what we want to figure out.”

  “Aye.”

  “I won’t be able to work while we’re looking. And you won’t be able to practice or perform.”

  “Aye.”

  “Are we leaving the troupe, then?”

  I didn’t like that idea. First, we still owed them a pile of money. Second, we still had to make our way from Golden Fields back to the harbor to catch a ship to the mainland. “We told Atara we were looking for family in Golden Fields. This won’t come as a surprise to her. We could ask her to be excused for a while, tell her we’ll catch up again after we’ve made our investigation.”

  “What do we do with them if we find them?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The line. What if there are dozens of them? The tent can get only so big.”

  I stared at him. “Hell. I never thought of that.”

  “How are we supposed to manage all of them?”

  “Maybe they won’t all want to go.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to bring them all?”

  “She didn’t say.” The Empress had said very little. For something that was so important—and it had damned well better be important if she sent us out there—she had given us precious little information. I would have hoped the ruler of our world would have been better at giving directions.

  “So, what do we do?”

  “Not panic until we know what all the problems are.”

  He scowled. “I am not panicking.”

  “I’m more worried about actually finding them, rather than their number.” I still had no idea how to begin, once we were there.

  “I told you. We go there. We ask what happened to the Bryant family. We move from there.”

  Right. Who cared about discretion?

  But what I thought in sarcasm was probably actually true. I doubted word of anything we did on the island would follow us back to the mainland.

  “So we have to tackle Atara.” Again. I hated having to account to her for everything. “Rather, you should.”

  “Me?”

  “Aye. You know. Lay on the Stallion charm.”

  He glared at me. “The people here are immune to my charm.”

  “Only because you haven’t really used it. And that’s dangerous. If you don’t keep it in use it’ll fade away altogether.”

  “Will you stop?”

  We found Atara in her tent, as usual. It seemed the woman never left it unless we were trudging somewhere. This time she was reading, however, instead of doing something discomforting. She had lit only two candles. Black, as usual.

  “Good afternoon, Atara,” said Taro. “You are looking particularly elegant, today.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “What do you need?”

  Huh. She could at least pretend to be charmed.

  “I believe Dunleavy spoke to you about Golden Fields?”

  Atara closed her book and set it aside. “We were discussing when we would arrive there.”

  “You may recall that when we first met, we told you we were looking for someone in Golden Fields.”

  “Did you?”

  Yes, we did.

  “We need to be free to look for them.”

  “What do you mean, free?”

  “Free from our obligations to the troupe for the time it takes to find these people.”

  “So you want to be able to benefit from our protection without having to contribute to it.”

  “Well—”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Karish looked at me, which transferred responsibility for this conversation over to me. Prat. Though I supposed that was my fault for opening my mouth in the first place.

  “This is the reason we came to the island in the first place.”

  “And if you find this person you’re looking for, you’ll leave Flatwell.”

  A statement, not a question. “We have every intention of paying off the debt we owe you,” I promised her.

  “That wasn’t what I asked.”

  Damn it, she wasn’t supposed to notice that. “Maybe not the words, but that’s the meaning.”

  “So what is your meaning?”

  “That the debt will be repaid.”

  “You seem to forget,” Atara drawled, “the reason I allowed you to join our troupe was because you were to be good omens. It is not merely a matter of the debt.”

  Oh for the love of—She felt we hadn’t performed adequately as good omens? How did you measure something like that?

  My performance was bringing additional coin to everyone, not just me. Taro saved her son’s life. What the hell more did she want?

  Well, here was an idea. “Good omens can’t lift your curse,” I told her.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Kahlia has been speaking to you.”

  Was she serious? Everyone had been speaking to me. “We’ll leave as much as we can behind as security. We need the tent, obviously, the cookware and our clothes. Anything else we can, we’ll leave behind.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “There is nothing else.”

  “You could leave Shintaro.”

  My mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “You value him.”

  “Not as security!” Besides, finding these people was his task. I was the one who was only along for the ride.

  She crossed her arms. “Then I see no way that this can be done.”

  “I can. Taro and I pick up and leave right now and do what we have to do, and your troupe be damned.” Please don’t make us do that.

  “You’d have to leave everything. What you have paid for would have to be left as payment for what you still owe.”

  “Understood.”

  She wasn’t expecting that. “You would be leaving with nothing more than the clothes you came with.”

  “Fine.” Not fine. Terrifying. But the whole reason we’d come to this Zaire-neglected island was to look for the Empress’s descendants. I wasn’t going to be controlled by this woman to the point that we couldn’t even do what we’d come to do. We’d be on this damned island forever.

  We’d manage. We’d figure out some way to manage. We’d already learned a lot about how to get on with these people. Maybe I could figure out some way to perform on my own, or challenge people to bench dancing in proper competition. Without having to worry about sparing feelings or fetching and carrying, Taro could get into some gambling and turn whatever I made into more. And Aryne—I’d forgotten about Aryne—maybe she could scrape together some coins with her laundering and tailoring.

  We’d figure out a way. We’d have to.

  “Fine,” Atara said back.

  “All right. Let’s go get our stuff, Taro.”

  “No!” she cried. Then she sighed. “Stupid child. Stubborn.”

  “You have no idea how stubborn,” I warned her. Just for effect. Secretly, I was extremely relieved.

  “What do you propose?”

  “What I said. We’ll leave whatever we can behind as security. You give us clear directions where you’re going to be. We’ll catch up with you as soon as we’re finished in Golden Fields.” I felt so bad about this. I was lying so very much.

  “How long do you think it would be?”

  “I have no idea.” I looked at Taro, who shrugged. “We really can’t afford to take too long. We don’t have the money. Maybe a couple of weeks?” Taro shrugged again.

  “That wouldn’t be too burdensome,” said Atara.

  And if we couldn’t find any of these descendants, we might as well just join the troupe forever. How could we go back with failure?

  I was not going to think that way.

  “I will perform while the troupe’s in Golden Fields, of course. We’d just remain behind after you leave, and catch up after.”

  She still didn’t like the idea, and she drew out her decision, to make us worry. But she had already given her answer away, and when she finally nodded it came as no surprise.

  So that was settled. Now we just had to worry about finding these people.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I wasn’t a light sleeper, and I’d been getting accustomed to the various noises one heard during the night while sleeping in a tent surrounded by other tents. So I wasn’t sure why I woke in the middle of that night. But I did wake, unusually alert, and I listened.

  I heard a rustling in our own tent.

  I rolled under the “wall” and clamped onto Aryne’s legs. She fell with a thud and a curse, trying to kick me off, but I held on to both feet. “Taro!”

  “What the—?” he muttered.

  “She’s trying to steal from us!”

  “I am not!” she hissed. “Let me go!”

  “Stay still!”

  “Bog off!”

  “Check her bag, Taro.”

  “Wait a moment.”

  I held the squirming child to the mat while Taro fumbled about. He lit one of the lanterns and yanked Aryne’s bag from her clutches, despite her fluid and colorful objections. He upended the bag and rifled through the contents. “Nothing of ours here.”

  “Told you!”

  I released Aryne and she began shoving the articles back into her bag. “Doesn’t mean you haven’t got anything of anyone else’s in there.”

  “I didn’t take anything! I’m not a thief.”

  “Then why are you sneaking out into the middle of the night like one?”

  “I’m tired of being your dogsbody. Work harder here than I did with Border.”

  The twinge of guilt those words inspired was totally inappropriate. “You mean because we don’t let you run around lifting from people like he did?”

  “Go to hell!”

  All right, so maybe that was a little harsh. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re leaving in the middle of the night.”

  She hugged the bag close to her. “Figured you’d try to stop me.”

  “If you could slip away from Border as easily as you did, you couldn’t feel you’d have any problem getting away from us.”

  She pouted mulishly.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “If you’re going to leave, why don’t you wait until morning?”

  She picked at a ragged thread on her bag. “Why’re you going to Golden Fields?”

  “The troupe is going to Golden Fields.”

  She glared at me. “You and him are leaving the troupe to stay in Golden Fields. I heard you.”

  Eavesdropping. Lovely. “We’re looking for people.”

  “To buy?”

  It was my turn to stare. “To buy? As in buy people?”

  She sneered. “That’s where the slave pens are. Everyone knows.”

  “Everyone knows? Who’s everyone? I’ve never heard of such a thing.” Slave pens? Was she serious? I’d never heard of any slaves in the Southern Islands, not at any time before coming to Flatwell, not at any time since. “I’ve never seen anyone who could be a slave.”

  “You ever asked?”

  “Of course not.” Why would I even think to?

  “There you are.”

  “What’s she saying?” Taro asked.

  He had pulled a shirt on over his head. His hair was wild and his eyes widened with the shock of being pulled out of a deep sleep in the middle of the night.

  He was stunning.

  “That there are slaves on the island. That they sell them in Golden Fields.”

  “I’ve never heard anything like that,” he said.

  “Why would you?” Aryne demanded scornfully. “You’re offlanders.”

  “Why would they bother hiding it?”

  She clearly didn’t have a response to that.