Bickering meant the crisis was over. Kaydu cut them short with an abrupt nod, and gave the signal to move out.

THE ground rose gently before falling away again to the Onga River beside which Tsu-tan had pitched his tents. Kaydu signed for a halt while the terrain was still rising. Another hand-signaled command followed, and the combined force of Thebin recruits, mercenaries, and the remaining Wastrels dismounted and broke into small, tight bands. At their backs, the Harnish warriors spread out in a thin line that ringed in the valley below. Llesho's troops would find the captives and spirit them away while Tayy's Harnish riders distracted the raiders with a "lake" formation assault.

Promotion had broken his own cadre as much as the capture of Hmishi and Lling had. Llesho found himself alone at the head of a squad of Shokar's Thebins; nearby, his brother led another. He'd considered Shokar more of a frontal assault sort of person, too straightforward for his own good sometimes, and grimly distasteful of battle. But he'd taken the same training from Bixei and Stipes that his recruits received. Crouched low to take cover in the undergrowth, he ran with a smooth, soundless grace copied by the squad that followed him. Half of them were women, like Lling.

Llesho hadn't taken the time to find out who his fighters were, and he regretted that now, when he was leading his own small band into the camp of the enemy. They moved together as a single organism, however, sensitive to his every gesture, and Llesho quickly adapted, trusting in Bixei's training and the strength and courage of his own people. He followed Shokar's example, crouched into a swift glide, and slipped among the clumps of undergrowth. Tsu-tan, or his captain, had posted guards, but they had grown lax with inattention as the days had passed and they grew more secure, thinking that no attack would come. A Thebin farmer-turned-soldier ghosted ahead and took out the man nearest their position, slicing his throat from side to side in one smooth, quick pass-a barnyard skill as much as a soldierly one. He let the body fall, and wiped his knife on the grass.

Llesho gave him a nod to acknowledge the service, and led his band around the smaller tents, targeting the largest, where he knew Hmishi lay with the healer-prince Adar in attendance. Off to one side, Bixei crept as silently with his mercenaries, and farther around the bowl of the river valley, Kaydu led the Wastrels. They had come to know her through Harlol, who would have led them if he'd lived.

Don't think about that, he warned himself. Don't think about the dead he'd already lost, or those who would die today or tomorrow or the next day in his battles. The black command tent was ahead, and he dropped silently to his knees and pulled out his knife while his squad followed, snugging in close under the shadows of evening. He could hear the murmur of voices inside; carefully he cut into the felt at the bottom of the tent and slid the small flap aside to peer in between the crosspieces of the lathing. Tsu-tan was there, squared off against Adar, who stood between the witch-finder and the bed on which the wounded Hmishi lay. he warned himself. Don't think about the dead he'd already lost, or those who would die today or tomorrow or the next day in his battles. The black command tent was ahead, and he dropped silently to his knees and pulled out his knife while his squad followed, snugging in close under the shadows of evening. He could hear the murmur of voices inside; carefully he cut into the felt at the bottom of the tent and slid the small flap aside to peer in between the crosspieces of the lathing. Tsu-tan was there, squared off against Adar, who stood between the witch-finder and the bed on which the wounded Hmishi lay.

"He can't take anymore. He's going to die. Can't you get that through your head? He's a human being, and can only take so much abuse before the ability to heal is exhausted. He's already passed that point-"

"Then it doesn't really matter what I do to him, does it?" Tsu-tan picked up the iron rod he had used when Llesho had visited here in a dream. Adar moved to intercept the blow, and took the weight of the rod on his shoulder. Llesho heard the crack of bone, and his brother fell, groaning, to his knees.

Enough. Llesho would kill him with his bare hands and stomp his bones into powder. He started to his feet, but a hand, reaching out of the shadows, stopped him with a touch at his elbow. He thought his heart would fail at the shock, but training kept him moving until his brain could catch up. He rolled and twisted, shifting his knife from a sawing to a stabbing hold and poised, the point quivering at her throat.

"Lling!" soundlessly he mouthed her name, and she nodded, drugged hypnosis still cloudy in her eyes. She was fighting it. He could see that, and her own knife had come into her hand, as he had seen in his dream travels.

She held a finger to her lips, signaling him to keep silent, and rose lithely to her feet, folding her own knife down at her side as she did so. Then she was gone, slipping through the murk that shrouded Tsu-tan's tent.

Llesho's small squad watched him worriedly. They were supposed to wait for Tayy's lake assault before going in. Lling wasn't part of that plan, however, and Adar didn't have that much time. Llesho gestured for them to stay, and followed Lling, his knife and sword both at the ready in the deadly tradition of Thebin royalty. At the door to the tent, however, he waited. In the confusion of the coming attack, he could take Tsu-tan without fear of discovery. Now, Lling had the advantage-as long as she could fight off Master Markko's control.

Tsu-tan glanced over when Lling entered his tent, but gave her no more notice than that, his attention focused entirely on Adar. Llesho, hidden on the other side of the door flap, saw the sweat beading over the witch-finder's lip, the rapid rise and fall of his chest as the argument excited his breathing. "Do you want to take his punishment, healer?"

"Your master says no." Adar made no move to protect himself. His tone and expression made it a token protest. Like his patient, Tsu-tan had drifted over an invisible line, and there was no pulling him back now. Adar observed the forms, but did not raise a hand to protect himself. As a healer and as a husband of the goddess, he had taken an oath and would protect his patient at any cost to himself.

The witch-finder's hands tightened rhythmically on the weapon, but the reminder of his master stopped him short of raising it again. A Thebin peasant was one thing, but Markko wanted the princes for his own uses.

"Perhaps the girl, then?" he grabbed Lling by her hair and swung her body close to his. "My master will understand if I can take her instead-" He leered down into her trance-dazed face and raised the iron rod to strike another blow.

Not Lling, Llesho thought. In his seventh summer he'd lost his bodyguard to the Harnish raiders. He was older now, better trained, and Lling was still alive. It didn't have to end that way again. "Not one more blow against my people-" Llesho thought. In his seventh summer he'd lost his bodyguard to the Harnish raiders. He was older now, better trained, and Lling was still alive. It didn't have to end that way again. "Not one more blow against my people-"

Recklessly he moved the door flap aside, ready to come to her rescue even if it did bring the witch-finder's guards. As he stepped into view, Tsu-tan whipped around, Lling held close as a shield. "You!" he smirked. "Is this another trick of your dreams, beggar prince?"

"No dream," Llesho assured him, and raised his ready-drawn sword.

"I assume you're not alone?" Adar asked faintly. Llesho figured he knew what was on his brother's mind. It was easier to get into a prison than to get out of one, even if it was made of tents.

Before he could answer, he heard the sound he'd been waiting for: the war cry of the Harnish riders rising over the pounding of their horses. Tayy had begun the attack. Llesho heard the hiss of arrows in flight and the clatter and snick as they found their marks in bodies and tents. Some, he knew, carried barbed points, some carried flames.

The thunder of their galloping horses shook the ground as they made their descent. Raiders would be spilling out of their tents, gathering on horseback to repel the invaders while Llesho's ambush troops took their signal to slip into the abandoned tents to search for prisoners. They would find few, he knew, and join the attack so that the enemy was hemmed in on all sides and within its own ranks.

"That's your rescue party now," he said, watching Tsu-tan all the while.

"Guards!" the witch-finder called, and paled when the Thebin faces of Llesho's squad appeared in his doorway.

"Excellency?" Llesho's corporal inquired. She was tall for a Thebin, approaching middle age, and the scar over her right eye made her look as dangerous as she was.

Llesho acknowledged her salute. "Don't let anyone in until I tell you."

The woman frowned uneasily at the tableau before her. She knew her job, however, and bowed her way out. No one would pass while his squad lived.

"Let her go." Llesho gestured at Lling with his sword. "You know it's over for you now."

Screams rose in the camp, muffled by the black felt that surrounded them, but the witch-finder glanced nervously at the doorway, calculating, Llesho could see, his chances for escape. So caught up was he in the threat from outside that he almost missed the life glinting suddenly in Lling's eyes.

The flash of recognition wasn't enough to save him. Tsu-tan dropped the iron rod, freeing his hands to throw her away from him. Lling held on with her free hand and with the other she rested the point of her knife neatly at the base of his sternum.

"Die," she whispered, and plunged her knife into his heart. "Die crawling on your belly, snake." She took a step back and let him fall.

"I guess you didn't need me after all." Llesho pointed his sword at the ground, but kept his knife at the ready. The sounds of battle were close, and he didn't want to get overconfident.

"Actually, I did need you." Lling glanced up at him with a curious frown knotting her brow. "I think more clearly when you're around."

"Glad to oblige. How are you thinking now?"

"Good." She stared down at Tsu-tan, absently wiping her knife on her sleeve. "Good."

The witch-finder didn't hear. Blood frothed at his lips, and slowly his eyes filmed over. When the blood stopped, he was dead. Across the body, Llesho and Lling shared a little smile. He thought perhaps he shouldn't feel that way, but his heart felt lighter.

"Let me look at him," Adar whispered. His strength was almost gone, but still he held on. "Maybe I can do something-"

"It's too late. He's dead."

Llesho turned away from the body of his enemy and knelt beside his brother. Adar was going to fall on his face if they didn't do something, but any movement would drive more of the jagged bone fragments through the skin or deeper into his body.

The idea of his brother lying on the same floor as the man who had tormented him raised Llesho's gorge, but he didn't see any choice. He pulled off his coat and flung it on the carpets well clear of the blood that soaked through nearby, then eased Adar down, holding him while he screamed with the agony of shifting bone. He could hear the grinding of shards against each other, but had nothing to offer other than soft words of encouragement.

"Carina is with us. She'll be here soon. You just have to hold on a little longer."

Gritting his teeth against another cry that might bring the battle down on them, Adar grunted in pain, but he was down now. Panting through pursed lips, he held onto consciousness with the techniques that had worked on his patients in the past and would keep him awake now.

"Scream if it helps." Lling advised him while she pulled open drawers and pawed through dressing gowns until she found one that didn't reek of Tsu-tan's scent. "Llesho's people have the door covered."

"Fainting is okay, too," Llesho added. Fainting is good, Fainting is good, he thought, he thought, you can't feel the pain that way. you can't feel the pain that way. He couldn't help but notice that, in all the commotion of Adar's injury and Tsu-tan's murder, Hmishi hadn't awakened at all. He couldn't help but notice that, in all the commotion of Adar's injury and Tsu-tan's murder, Hmishi hadn't awakened at all. Fainting is good, Fainting is good, he reminded himself, but secretly he knew it was much worse than that. Adar had said Hmishi'd gone too far. he reminded himself, but secretly he knew it was much worse than that. Adar had said Hmishi'd gone too far.

He needed Carina, and that wouldn't happen until they'd taken the camp.

"Stay with them," he requested. When Lling nodded assent, he slipped out to join his squad.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.

INTO chaos. He'd been in a battle like this before, the other side of the Harnlands, but this time, they had more than the advantage of the high ground. Raiders would fight fiercely if they saw a profit at the end of it, or if a harsh master drove them from behind. But Tsu-tan was dead, his prisoners already taken. Llesho's bands of am-bushers rose up to harry Tsu-tan's guard from their supper and fire the tents. The arrows from Tayy's ring of warriors cut off escape, pushing the enemy deeper into their own camp so that they had nowhere to go but the commons, where they were easily cut down by spear and sword.

Llesho led his own small squad into the thick of the fighting, swords bristling. He slashed and parried, stabbed and slew until his arm ached. When he could no longer lift his sword, he drew the spear from his back. Old skills learned for the arena shifted his balance and he leaped and jabbed, twirled under the guard of a raider and tore up through the muscle that wrapped his opponent's rib cage. Not opponent, Not opponent, he reminded himself. he reminded himself. Enemy. Enemy.

The raider fell screaming; his blood hissed and steamed as it pooled on the ground, sizzling at the touch of old magics leaking from the spear. Llesho whirled to defend a squad-mate whose name he didn't know, and when he surfaced from the battle rage, the raiders had broken. Fierce against the weak, the very savagery of the Harnishmen's own raids added fuel to their terror of the mighty. They dreaded the retribution of their enemies, who they imagined were as merciless as they were themselves. At that moment, Llesho didn't blame them. He was feeling merciless indeed, but Yesugei had taken charge of the Uulgar captives who flung themselves to their knees in surrender. The remains of the battle moved off toward the river, pursued by Tayyichiut with a band made up of equal parts of his own warriors and Bixei's mercenaries. Llesho left them to it- -he had more pressing business.

"Shokar?" he asked of his corporal, who watched him with uneasy wonder as she struggled to steady her labored breath. She nodded in the direction of a burning tent.

Shokar stood with the point of his sword on the ground and his weight resting on the hilt. His eyes had the glassy look of shock about them.

"Are you hurt?" Llesho touched a finger to the back of his hand, careful not to startle battle nerves.

"I'm fine." Shokar brought his vision back from the middle distance to rest on his brother. "You're all bloody-"

"Not mine. Tsu-tan's dead. Lling killed him." He didn't say that he'd been glad, or that he would have done it himself, but Lling beat him to it. Shokar wouldn't understand the feelings that knotted his stomach. Wrong feelings, he would have thought, the satisfaction mixing with the grief. Tsu-tan was dead, Hmishi was dying, and Llesho didn't want to look at what his journey was turning him into. "Am I becoming like him?" he asked.

They both knew he meant Master Markko. He hadn't planned to say it out loud. Now that he had, he held his breath, afraid of hearing his brother's judgment but needing it all the same.

"You're becoming a king," Shokar told him. "I'm glad it's not me. Really. If I try to guide you, it's because I don't want to see you hurt. The Harnish boy's right, though. If we protect you too much, from the fighting or the decisions, you won't be fit to rule. If we don't protect you enough-"

He'd be dead, or turned into the enemy he despised. Llesho looked out over the battleground, where his small army was doing clean up. Moving from tent to tent, they entered with weapons at the ready and came out again with the captives Tsu- tan's forces had taken as servants. Along the way they gathered prisoners of their own, the Uulgar raiders of the South, who had hidden among the slaves. He'd leave that part of the campaign under Ye-sugei's command, he decided. His own concerns had narrowed to the handful of lives he had carried out of Shan. "Don't let me be a danger to my people."

"This is conversation for philosophers. Or the gods." Shokar refused the responsibility. "If you are brooding over the death of a villain like Tsu-tan, you need the priests or that old shaman, not a judge."

"I'm glad the witch-finder's dead-this blood is Adar's. Tsu-tan had tired of beating a dying soldier, and had begun on our brother."

"How bad?"

"Not as bad as Hmishi. He needs the bones set in his shoulder."

Shokar nodded, understanding the brooding now. "You'll want Carina for that; I saw her on the banks of the Onga. Tsu-tan's guard tried to run, but they were hemmed in at the river. Some jumped. The lucky ones were pulled out by their fellows, the less lucky washed up drowned at a bend a little way downstream. Where's Adar?"

"The command tent. Like his master, Tsu-tan liked to keep his toys close." Llesho turned away to find the healer, but Shokar's warm hand firm on his shoulder stopped him.

"You're a good man, Llesho," he said.

He wasn't sure of that anymore, but it warmed him to hear his brother say it. Shokar didn't wait for an answer, but went to attend their wounded brother while Llesho searched out the healer.

He found her among the dead who lay tumbled on the beaten grass that grew between the clumps of tall thin trees on the banks of the Onga. She wore the costume of a shaman and flitted from one to the next of the dead with the darting hops of a jerboa. With a prayer over each, she closed their staring dead eyes before moving on. At first, Llesho thought they were all Southern casualties. Then he recognized a boy among the bodies, and realized that he couldn't tell them apart. North and South, the Harnish wore the same long woolen shirts above wide leather trousers, with long coats over all. Some of the veteran Southerners wore hanks of hair sewn to their coats, trophies of their human kills as he remembered. Mostly, they looked younger than he'd expected.

Death, he had realized long ago, cured every face of its intentions. He didn't begrudge Carina's tears, but the living needed her more.

"I've found him. Adar. He needs you."

"He's hurt?" That surprised her. Which surprised him. Her mother didn't read minds, exactly, but Mara had known what he was thinking, and Carina's father was a dragon. Still, she moved fast enough when she knew there was trouble. "Please, lead me to him."

They met a party of Tayyichiut's veterans heading toward the river as Llesho and Carina left it. Among them they carried the body of Tsu-tan, taking him down to be burned with the others. Carina stopped them a moment for a prayer over their enemy. The hard-eyed warriors gave her the respect due a shaman, but they didn't encourage her to linger.

"Whoever killed him will need my attentions as well, when I have seen to Adar."

She looked at Llesho as if she expected him to confess, but he just gave her a weary nod. "I'll tell her. Adar said that Hmishi was too far gone, but I thought if you would look at him-"

"Of course. At the very least, I can intercede with the spirits of the underworld to gentle his passing."

That wasn't what he had in mind; Carina warned him away from a petition she mustn't honor with a frown. "Soldiers die," she said, "Kaydu knew that. Lling does. So do you."

They had reached Tsu-tan's command tent, so he didn't have to answer. Didn't want to have that conversation. He'd have taken it to avoid facing the inside of that tent again, but that wasn't a choice. The tent smelled of blood and other taints, but at Shokar's instruction, his squad had rolled the tent walls up halfway and had taken out the blood-soaked carpets.

Hmishi's spirit had not returned from the place where it waited for the journey to end. There was no part of his body that remained unbroken, but Lling sat with his shattered hand on a pillow in her lap, afraid to touch lest she return him to the pain of the waking world. Suddenly, the thick air in the tent was choking him, and Llesho knew he had to get out, away, before it killed him. So he ran.

Tayyichiut found him at the river. Still flushed from the battle, the Harnish prince fidgeted with flat stones he scrounged from the banks, skipping them over the water where his enemies had lately drowned.

"They sent me to find you," he said, and skipped a stone the color of a stormy sky once, twice, three times before it sank. "I told them to send a servant, but they pointed out that as a king, you had no obligation to obey a servant. As a guest, however, you must agree with your host or have the manners of your house cast in doubt. Shokar assured me you would never do that. So here I am."

Llesho sat with his back against the bark of a convenient tree and his knees tucked under his chin. Tayy was right; he owed his host not only for the protection of his camp and the training of his shaman, but also for the aid he had given in battle. Still, he found it impossible to move.

"They want you to come back. Kaydu said to make it an order if I thought it would work. Won't, though, will it?" Throwing himself to the ground next to Llesho, Tay-yichiut curled his leg under him and let the couple of stones left in his hand dribble to the ground. "I didn't think so.

"Otchigin is dead, and Yurki died right over there-" he pointed to a place of rusty stains on broken grass, "-and I don't know what I am going to tell my uncle, or my father, or Yurki's father, for that matter. I always knew that people could die in battle. Mergen taught me not to value life more than honor, and Yesugei warned us all to expect death and welcome life at the end of it. But nobody told me about the big holes it left in the world when you lived but your friends didn't."

Tayy's distress held a mirror to Llesho's own pain. When the first tear slipped from the corner of the prince's eye, Llesho found an answering tear in his own.

"Since Kungol fell, you can count the seasons I've spent with my brothers on your thumbs," Llesho said. He didn't look at his companion but stared out at the river, thinking back to Pearl Island. "I met Bixei and Stipes and Master Den when I went to the arena in my fifteenth summer, and Kaydu I met when we fought each other in my first and only bout as a gladiator. But all the life that I remember has Hmishi and Lling in it. We trained together for the pearl beds, and worked together as a team until my quest pulled me out of Pearl Bay. I thought I'd lost them for good then, but fate and the Lady SienMa brought us back together again in service to the governor of Farshore Province.

"Lling was always the best soldier. Hmishi only came along because we had all been together for so long we didn't know any other way to be. He didn't want to be left behind, and now I've got him killed."

"It wasn't just you," Tayy suggested. "From what I've heard, he loved Lling, and she loved him. He couldn't have stopped her from going, and wouldn't have let her go without him."

"Now you're saying it's Lling's fault?"

"Seems to me it's this Tsu-tan's fault, and his master's."

Llesho did look at him then, locked gazes, making very sure that Tayyichiut understood. "It doesn't matter whose fault it is. He's still dead."

"Not yet." Tayyichiut dragged himself to his feet. He wobbled a little, and Llesho could almost feel the shifting of balance in his own legs. Battle fatigue was hitting, leaving muscles limp as rope and bones shaking like a newborn foal, but he managed to right himself with the dignity of a warrior prince. "He will be soon, though. Lling thought you would want to say good-bye."

"Lling knows I am bad at good-byes." He'd nearly dragged Master Jaks back from the dead, were it not for the protest of the corpse itself. He knew better now, or thought he did. Nevertheless, he doubted Lling would leave him alone with her dead lover. Who still clung to life with each ragged breath. Giving a last empty glance at the river, he clambered to his feet and turned to follow Tayyichiut.

The prince reached out and rubbed his thumb across Llesho's cheek, first one, then the other. "My father says that a khan must never show weakness," he said, and Llesho saw the tears glistening on the fleshy pad just before he wiped them dry against the side of his coat. Together, they made their way back to the camp.

Shokar was efficient, and so was Yesugei. The Harn raised their camp on the plains above the little valley where the Onga River flowed. Their wounded needed to be close to water and protected from the wind, however. As healer and shaman in the camp, Carina chose the valley where Tsu-tan had made his camp. First she had the troops clear the black tents of the enemy, then the square red ones of Llesho's army and round white ones of the khan's troops were set in their places. As much as they needed shelter, their wounded needed the clean air of their own tents.

Hmishi was still alive, though he had not roused when they moved him to the shelter of a red tent. Lling had insisted that if he wake, it must be to the red light of his own tents, to convince him that he had indeed been saved. Though all his bones were broken, Carina set only his left arm, so that Lling could hold his hand on a pillow without the ends of the long bones grinding against each other with each small shift of her position.

"He made me break Hmishi's hand," she whispered through her tears. "He controlled my movements, but not my sensations. I raised Tsu-tan's iron rod, and felt the bones break beneath it when it fell."

Her eyes had a distant look, grim and deadly, so that Llesho wondered if the magician still controlled her from afar. "Something broke inside me, too. Then you came. Slowly the spell he cast lost its hold over my thoughts."

When she smiled, Llesho realized that she was slipping into madness. His quest, it seemed, had that effect on even the most competent of those who surrounded him.