Under Heaven. Guy Gavriel Kay

her laughter. “I have been retained by people who saw little distinction.”

      “I am not one of those.”

      “Ah. I shall light an ancestor candle in gratitude.”

      Gods above! He wasn’t ready for this.

      “Go to sleep,” Tai said. “We start early.”

      Laughter again. “I’ll be awake,” she said. “But if you can’t sleep because of fears tonight, you’ll slow us down tomorrow.”

      He really wasn’t ready for this.

      There was a silence. Tai was acutely aware of her presence out there. After a moment he heard her say, “Forgive me, that was presumptuous. Accept that I am bowing to you. Respectfully, however, might you have declined the princess’s gift?”

      He had been thinking the same thing for three days. That didn’t make it easier to hear someone else ask it.

      “I couldn’t,” he said.

      It was odd, talking through door and wall. Someone could be listening, easily enough. He doubted it, however. Not here. “They were offered to me by royalty. You can’t refuse.”

      “I wouldn’t know. Her gift will probably kill you.”

      “I am aware of that,” Tai said.

      “It is a terrible thing to do to someone.”

      Youth in the voice now, in that aggrieved sense of injustice, but her words were true, after a fashion. The princess would not have meant for that to happen. It would not even have occurred to her that it might.

      “They know nothing of balance,” Wei Song said from the corridor. She was Kanlin: balance was the essence of their teaching.

      “The Tagurans, you mean?”

      “No. Royalty. Everywhere.”

      He thought about it. “I think being royal means you need not think that way.”

      Another silence. He had a sense of her working it through. She said, “We are taught that the emperor in Xinan echoes heaven, rules with its mandate. Balance above echoed below, or the empire falls. No?”

      His own thought, from moments before.

      There were women in the North District—not many, but a few—who could talk this way over wine or after lovemaking. He hadn’t expected it here, in a Kanlin guard.

      He said, “I mean it differently. About how they think. Why should our princess in Rygyal, or any prince, have an idea what might happen to a common man if he is given a gift this extravagant? What in their lives allows them to imagine that?”

      “Oh. Yes.”

      He found himself waiting. She said, “Well, for one thing, that means the gift is about them, not you.”

      He nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see him.

      “Go to sleep,” he said again, a bit abruptly.

      He heard her laugh, a richness in the dark.

      He pictured her as he’d first seen her, hair down her back in the morning courtyard, just risen from her bed. Pushed that image away. There would be women and music in Chenyao, he thought. Five days from now.

      Perhaps four? If they went quickly?

      He lay down again on the hard pillow.

      The door opened.

      Tai sat up, much more abruptly than the first time. He gathered the bed linens to cover his nakedness, though it was dark in the room. No light came in with her from the corridor. He sensed rather than saw her bowing. That was proper, nothing else about this was.

      “You should bar your door,” she said quietly.

      Her voice seemed to have altered, or was that his imagination?

      “I’m out of the habit.” He cleared his throat. “What is this? A guard’s sweep of the chamber? Am I to expect it every night?”

      She didn’t laugh. “No. I…have something to tell you.”

      “We were talking.”

      “This is private.”

      “You think someone is listening? Here? In the middle of the night?”

      “I don’t know. The army does use spies. You need not fear for your virtue, Master Shen.” A hint of asperity, tartness returning.

      “You don’t fear for yours?”

      “I’m the one with a blade.”

      He knew what bawdy jokes would have been made in the North District as an immediate response to that. He could almost hear Yan’s voice. He kept silent, waiting. He was aroused, distracted by that.

      She said, softly, “You haven’t asked who paid me to follow the assassin.”

      Suddenly he wasn’t distracted any more.

      “Kanlins don’t tell who pays them.”

      “We will if instructed when hired. You know that.”

      He didn’t, actually. He hadn’t reached that level in twenty months with them. He cleared his throat again. He heard her move nearer the bed, a shape against darkness, the sound of her breathing and a scent in the room now that she was closer. He wondered if her hair was down. He wished there were a candle, then decided it was better that there wasn’t.

      She said, “I was to catch up to the two of them and kill her, then bring your friend to you. I followed their path to your home. We didn’t know where you were, or I’d have come directly on the imperial road and waited for them here.”

      “You went to my father’s house?”

      “Yes, but I was too many days behind.”

      Tai heard the words falling in the black, like drops of water from broad leaves after rain. He felt a very odd tingling at his fingertips, imagined he heard a different sound: a far-off temple bell among pines.

      He said slowly, “No one in Xinan knew where I was. Who told you?”

      “Your mother, and your younger brother.”

      “Not Liu?”

      “He wasn’t there,” she said.

      The bell seemed to have become a clear sound in his head; he wondered if she could hear it. A childish thought.

      “I’m sorry,” the woman said.

      He thought of his older brother. It was time to begin doing that.

      “It can’t be Liu,” he said, a little desperately. “If he was behind this, he knew where I’d gone. He could have had the assassin and Yan go straight to Kuala Nor.”

      “Not if he didn’t want it known he was behind this.” She’d had more time to sort this through, he realized. “And in any case…” She hesitated.

      “Yes?” His voice really did sound strange now.

      “I am to tell you that it isn’t certain your brother hired the assassin. He may have only given information, others acting upon it.”

       I am to tell you.

      “Very well. Who hired you, then? I am asking. Who told you all of this?”

      And so, speaking formally now, almost invisible in the room, a voice in blackness, she said, “I was instructed to convey to you the respect and the humble greetings of the newest concubine in the household of the illustrious Wen Zhou, first minister of Kitai.”

      He closed his eyes. Spring Rain.

      It had happened. She had thought it might. She had talked to him about it. If Zhou offered the demanded price to her