The rest of the night passed with no appearances from Border or anyone else. Karish began stirring as the fore-light of the sun began creeping up in the east. He dragged himself out of the tent, looking a sorry sight. His black hair was sleep mussed and not in an attractive way. He had slept in his clothes. His left eye was puffy and bruising.

  My poor boy.

  He gasped when he saw me, lifting a finger to my face but withdrawing before contact could be made. “Shall I go back and kill him?”

  “Don’t be silly.” There were far better reasons for killing Border than my banged-up face.

  He looked back into the tent, then looked at me, raising his eyebrows in inquiry.

  I shrugged in response. I had no idea what to think of Aryne.

  “We should start getting ready to go,” he said.

  I agreed. “Aryne,” I called into the tent. “Time to get up.”

  Her answer was a groan.

  “I’ll dig out something to eat,” I said.

  “And I’ll load up the cowlike thing.”

  Steer, I thought.

  I pulled out some cold rice and clumsily wrapped it in dried seaweed. It was fare I was getting really sick of, but it was filling and portable. “I mean it, Aryne. You have to get up. We don’t want to give Border a chance to catch up.”

  She grumbled and crawled out of the tent, looking as much a mess as Karish. I shoved one of the rice balls into her hands and rooted around for something to put on her chafed wrists. They looked even worse in the light of day.

  “So what he said about the Empress sending him to look for me,” Aryne mumbled around a mouthful of rice. “That true?”

  “Swallow, then speak,” I chided as I rubbed some cool green gel on Aryne’s ankles. “I have no idea whether it’s true or not.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Kai, you do.”

  “Never met the man before coming here.”

  “Doesn’t mean you don’t know what he was talking about.”

  I was really tempted to tell her to just be quiet. I was surprised by the impulse. This was all about her. Of course she had the right to know what was going on. Why did I think I could tell her to shut up? Was it because she was a child?

  On the other hand, I, too, was under orders from the Empress. I looked at Taro, to see if he was listening. I wanted to make sure he knew exactly what I was saying to her, in case she talked to him about it, too. He looked up at me briefly. “The woman who sent us wasn’t looking for a member of her own family, but a member of someone else’s,” I said.

  “Who was this woman?” Aryne demanded.

  “The Empress.”

  Aryne barked in laughter.

  I shrugged. “There’s no real need for you to believe me. Especially since you’re a Source.”

  “What does she want with me?”

  “She didn’t tell us.”

  “So all that stuff about finding some heir…”

  “We made that up.”

  “You lied,” she accused me.

  “That is another way to put it,” I agreed blandly.

  “So am I this person you’re supposed ta be looking for?”

  “I don’t know.” But I might as well embrace the opportunity. “We’ve been told that a lot of people on this island are tattooed with the mark of their family. Do you have a mark like that?”

  Her eyes widened in shock. “He said it was a slave mark!” she exclaimed.

  “Border?”

  “The bastard.”

  It really couldn’t be this easy. “What does it look like?”

  Her answer was to flip up her skirt with no thought to modesty. “Aryne!” Karish blurted out, holding his hands over his eyes.

  And there it was. The same tattoo the Empress had shown me. Much darker lines, thicker and more crudely done, and the gut-wrenching image of some kind of blade digging into the tender flesh of an infant made an unwelcome appearance into my brain. But that was definitely the same kind of flower. “Please put your skirt back down, Aryne.”

  “That the mark you were looking for?”

  I hesitated before answering. If I said no, I’d have to come up with a reason why we were leaving the island without the person we were looking for, which I had no doubt Aryne would see as another lie. I certainly wasn’t able to think of a decent excuse right then. And we were leaving the island. I wasn’t wandering around it any longer than I had to, just to attempt to convince Aryne that she wasn’t anything special. “Kai,” I said.

  Taro frowned, but he didn’t jump in.

  Aryne stared at me. “I’m a heiress!” she crowed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, kid,” I said with as much of a sneer as I could muster. “I have no idea why they want you, but you can bet if you were someone important, they wouldn’t have sent the likes of us to find you. Do you really think they’d have an heiress subjected to the kind of travel we’ve been doing?”

  Hell. She was a princess. And we were subjecting her to bad food and harsh conditions. Taro and I were going to be in so much trouble.

  It was too, too bizarre. Aryne was a descendant of the Empress. And both a Source and a Shield. How could one person be so many extraordinary things?

  What was that going to mean? Which role was she going to play? Technically, a Source had to go to the Source Academy, regardless of title. Even if she didn’t act as a Source once she’d bonded, she needed the training and protection the Source Academy would give her. But if she became the chosen heir of the Empress, would the rules be bent for her? Had that ever happened before? While in history there had been members of the royal family who’d had talent, they had never been any of the ruling members.

  It was too early to worry about that.

  A part of me was hugely relieved. I’d really had no idea how we were going to go about finding these people. Now we had at least one person to bring back with us. We hadn’t failed.

  But she was a princess. Did this mean I had to watch what I said for the months it would take us to get back home? She could decide to cut my head off because she didn’t like what we’d had her eat for breakfast.

  I’d worry about it all when we got off the island.

  We packed up the tent, piled the bags and Aryne on the steer, and got moving. That was when we realized we had no idea where we were. We’d gotten totally turned around while following Border. On Aryne’s advice, we kept an eye out for a stream and followed it once we found one.

  I was worried about Border finding us again. The steer was so damned slow, and the medicine man would know his way around much better than Karish and I. There were two of us against him, to fight him off, but he, I assumed, would be trained to fight. And if he killed one of us, the Pair bond would kill the other. We were very vulnerable. And he, being a Northerner, would know that.

  We followed the stream for two days with no sign of Border or anyone else. They were a hard two days. I kept imagining I could hear someone following us, and that was a good way to go insane. Taro and I slept the nights in shifts, and during the day we didn’t stop unless we absolutely had to.

  On the third day we finally, finally reached a settlement. We traded the damned steer and just about everything else of Border’s for a handful of coins. The tiny settlement was called Silk Purse, and we learned that in following Border we’d been traveling in the opposite direction from where we now wanted to go, which was Promise Harbor. I couldn’t raise the energy to be annoyed. That was just the kind of luck we were having.

  We rented a single room in a bunker for a night so we could dry out everything that was still damp from the rain and eat some hot food. I took the first watch that night, standing by the door just outside the room, bored out of my mind while still managing to jump at every unexpected noise.

  All I could do was think. Sometimes I got so tired of thinking. But so much had gone on that hadn’t made sense, and I hadn’t been able to talk about it to anyone. Talking was the best way to void one’s mind of unwanted thoughts. So when Taro slipped out of the room to relieve me, I asked him in a whisper, “Is she asleep?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  He shrugged.

  Good enough. “What do you think Border was playing at, keeping her all those years?”

  “I can’t be sure,” he whispered back. “But I’m thinking he came here and realized she was cut off from everyone who might know who she really is. He thinks if he takes her back immediately, all he gets is a slap on the back and a job well done. If he raises her, makes her loyal to him, he has a future”—he hesitated—“you know, in his debt. Who knows what kind of power and wealth that could bring him, in time?”

  Seemed a pretty long-term plan with an uncertain outcome to me, but lots of people did things that made no sense. “He might have tried a better job at garnering her loyalty.”

  “Probably felt saving her from slavery was all he really needed to do.”

  Zaire. What a bastard.

  This poor girl. A third generation victim of politics she knew nothing about. And it wasn’t going to end, either. We were going to deliver her to the Empress and then Aryne was going to become some kind of pawn between the Empress and the Crown Prince. And neither of them were going to be thinking about her, at all, or her best interests. She was going to be completely on her own.

  I slipped into the room. Karish had left the lantern on, the flame turned low, and I could see the girl sprawled on the mat by the wall farthest from the door. She had kicked off all the sheets, and her sleeping gown was bunched up under her armpits. It’d be delivering her into a life of material ease. I couldn’t say with any confidence that it was going to be a life that was any better.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I learned a great many things on the way from Silk Purse to Promise Harbor.

  One was that three people moved much faster than thirty. I wouldn’t have thought so, because human legs could only travel so fast, and the troupe had never given the impression of dallying. But Aryne looked at me like I was some kind of idiot, and told me the wagon hampered movement more than anything, and thirty could travel only as fast as the slowest individual, which, for the troupe, had included children.

  Two, Taro could gamble. He really could. I’d seen evidence of it, but before I could never quite believe it, because I could beat him, and if I could beat him, surely everyone else could. But he was the one who enabled us to eat and find shelter during our hard hike through the jungle. He took small portions from our stash, and played cards every night, and sometimes he lost, but usually he won something.

  Three, children needed a scary amount of food. And it was really difficult for me not to say anything when the food disappeared into Aryne’s mouth. I was not about to let her go hungry; she’d obviously been underfed most of her life. But it was hard, and there were times when Taro and I didn’t eat, to make sure she did.

  Four, being hungry made me irritable. And kind of irrational. I’d get angry at the most stupid things, like the laces of my sandals becoming untied while I was walking down the street.

  When we finally reached the harbor, I was almost ready to kiss the dirt in relief. It had been hard to believe we would ever get there. I’d really been expecting something to stop us, certain we were going to die on that Zaire-neglected island.

  I had little experience with harbors. Just the one on the mainland, from which Taro and I had left. This one was smaller, quieter, less overwhelming. Less of an appalling assault on the senses, especially one’s sense of smell. I was delighted to be there, because it meant soon we’d be on our way home. I tried to restrain my excitement, because Taro was stiff with the apprehension of a poor sea traveler, and Aryne was silent in apparent terror.

  Crews were loading supplies for their boats. One appeared to be largely Northern, so I approached the person of that crew who appeared to be doing nothing more than watching the others work. I figured she was in charge. I asked where the boat was going, then showed her the clothes I would be wearing on the boat—with the white braid—and the pass I’d managed to hang on to from the Empress. She warned me that the ship, the Wave Crusher, wasn’t really suitable for passengers, but I ignored the stomachs of my companions and assured her we didn’t care. Her boat was going to the right place. Her name was Ellen Furt, and I was inclined to kiss her feet simply for existing.

  I was elated. We were going home. Finally.

  “How much money have we got left?” Taro asked.

  “Why? What do you need?”

  “Nothing.” He grinned. “But you’ve arranged for passage, yes?”

  “Aye.”

  “And we’re leaving?”

  “In a few hours.”

  “For a place where we don’t need money.”

  “Ah.” I was starting to get the point. “I don’t want to spend the last of the coin.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Lee…”

  “Call me paranoid all you like, I’m not going to spend everything we have just because it’s our last day. We don’t know what might happen. We might somehow be prevented from getting to the boat. The boat itself might sink. The crew might turn unscrupulous once we’re on board. Who knows? I’m holding on to what money we’ve got left.” It wasn’t like we had that much, anyway.

  “Fine,” he muttered, the word ending in a growl. “Mother.”

  “I am nothing like your mother,” I snapped out.

  “Thank Zaire.”

  “And where the hell is Aryne?” She’d been right there a moment ago.

  “Damn. I told her not to disappear.”

  I scanned the crowd around us, but all I could see were a lot of backs. Damn it.

  “She knows when to be—Hey!” And suddenly, Taro darted off.

  I hurried to follow him. “What?” I demanded.

  “Border!”

  I swore under my breath. “He’s got her?”

  “I don’t know. I can only see him. Hurry!”

  It was a nightmare, trying to run through a crowd of people who were carrying bags and dragging boxes. I ended up colliding with more than a couple, and ignoring the curses that were sent my way. Leavy the Flame Dancer, indeed.

  And then Taro just kind of bellowed—a sound I’d never heard from him before—and charged ahead. The next time I could see anything relevant, he and the medicine man were on the ground, Taro struggling to dislodge the medicine man from his chest.

  Aryne was nowhere in sight.

  I shoved my way to them in time to hear Border shout, “Get me the port master! This man is a thief!” He saw me, then, and he pointed as he shouted again, “She is, too! They work together!” And I found my arms gripped by a multitude of hands.

  Hell. Wasn’t this a total nightmare? I’d really thought that the fact that we hadn’t seen Border in all this time meant we were free of him. How did he reach Promise Harbor before us, anyway?

  “I can’t be a thief, you idiot!” Taro snapped, managing to sound like an affronted aristocrat even while lying in the dirt. “I’m a Source. And she’s a Shield.”

  Nice try, Karish, but I would wager that half the people surrounding us didn’t really know what Sources and Shields were, or what it meant to be one. And aye, we’d stolen Border’s stuff. I hadn’t felt bad about it at the time. I did right then, though.

  Border snorted. “Oh, kai. Believing your own myths, now, are you? Despite what the stories say, I know Sources and Shields are as deviant and as villainous as the next person. Someone get the port master. I want these two arrested.”

  “I don’t believe the gentleman claimed that he and his Shield weren’t deviant or villainous,” a new voice called out. Not an islander, by the accent, and while it took a moment of wriggling for me to get a good view of her, I could see it was the woman who had booked our passage on the Wave Crusher. “He said they couldn’t be thieves.”

  “Same thing,” Border sneered.

  “Not at all. Sources and Shields are legally incapable of theft, as everything they need is to be provided to them upon request. It is required by law.”

  “What law?” one of the men holding my left arm demanded.

  For a second, I wondered if it would help at all if I told these people I was Leavy the Flame Dancer.

  Then I nearly died of shame.

  “The law of the Empress,” Furt answered.

  There was a lot of laughter at that, and not the kind of laughter that sounded pleasant to the ear. “The Empress doesn’t rule here!” a woman called out with a chuckle.

  “True enough,” Furt drawled. “She doesn’t send her tax collectors here. She doesn’t demand that you house her soldiers. She probably doesn’t care if you engage in behaviors that in other people would be deemed treasonous. If fact, you’re left completely free to go about your business, without giving the slightest thought to the Empress. As she doesn’t give the slightest thought to you. It’s almost as though she has forgotten you exist at all.”

  There was a bit of a silence in reaction to that. I would have been offended by the suggestion that I was so insignificant, if I were an islander. The silence was broken by a young man claiming, “Never ways what the Empress knows or thinks or remembers. She’s got no rights here.”

  That, I thought, was really overstating the case.

  “Only because she chooses not to exercise them,” said Furt. “If she does remember you all are down here, breaking laws, engaging in trade without paying for it, she might decide it’s time to start enforcing her rights. With swords and bows. And she has more soldiers just guarding her palace than you have people on this whole island.”

  Was that true?

  “Now, I’m under order from the Empress to give these people passage,” Furt continued. “Do you have any idea what kind of mess you all are going to create for yourselves if I have to go to the Empress and tell her I couldn’t follow orders because you lot decided to hang a Source and a Shield, something the law strictly forbids, for theft, a crime Sources and Shields are literally incapable of committing? Even when regulars refuse to provide them with the goods they need which is, in itself, a crime?”