Page 21 of The Boy Bride

Well, if he did, Lill would have to try Khatu and Barda’s plan. He’d have to try to convince Vanu to let him stay, by appealing to the Lion’s lust. The thought made his stomach turn over horribly. It was one thing to imagine the prospect far away at Shawa House in Torakand, but he was tied up, bruised, aching, and his strength hadn’t fully returned after falling off the wall. He could not face it. He could not.

He crept around the perimeter of the sleeping platform, avoiding the bed as if it might put out a tendril and catch him by the ankle if he got too close. As soon as he had that thought, he felt a suicidal impulse to laugh out loud at the image. He shook with the effort of suppressing it as he inched along.

What was the matter with him? It wasn’t even that funny. Not as funny as Barda and Khatu trying to heave him in the window while the shaman ran after them shouting that he would tell their father. That, in retrospect, was funny.

This wasn’t helpful. He had to focus. He needed a knife. Surely the Lion of the Summer Pass kept a knife or two by his bed somewhere.

On the far side of the bed was a shallow basket with a few items in it. There was a rolled-up, Western-style book, a small glass bottle with a stopper, and a couple of leather thongs, much stretched and worn, that Vanu had probably used to tie back his hair. But no knife.

Perhaps he slept with one under his pillow. Lill eyed the bed warily, willing himself not to start giggling again. There were two pillows at the head. If he knelt on the bed, he should be able to grasp one with his fingertips and move it enough to check underneath. He let himself down as gently as he could onto one knee on the edge of the mattress and caught the first pillow on the second try. There was nothing under it. He pushed it laboriously back into place and shuffled forward on his knees to try the other pillow. This one was harder to grasp, and when he had ascertained that there was nothing under it either and was replacing it, he lost his balance and fell forward across the bed.

At the same moment there was a noise from downstairs: someone whistling. Lill lay frozen on the bed, face down, listening to the sad, haunting tune unspooling below.

But there were no other sounds. No shouts of “Who’s there?” or pounding feet on the stairs. After all, he had made very little noise falling on the bed. A shiver chased down his back. Was it not ill-omened to whistle in the house up here in the mountains, as it was in Akramarra?

He gathered himself up and slid off the bed, trying not to disarrange the blanket noticeably—though it was already untidy. He got back to his feet.

If there was no knife by the bed, maybe there was a razor somewhere that Vanu used to shave his beard. Like most of the Mountain Pass men, he had been clean-shaven when Lill saw him. A razor might be down the steps in the lower part of the room with its cupboards and storage chest. Lill padded over to the steps and went down carefully.

And then he saw it. Hung up on a nail on the wall like a trophy—which is what it was—a dagger with a distinctive, snake-shaped ivory handle. It was protected by a plain black sheath with a dangling strap made of mountain-style braid, but that handle was unmistakable. It was White Viper’s dagger, hanging up in the bedchamber of the man who had killed him.

Even the dangling strap was out of reach of Lill’s pinioned hands, but he could get it between his teeth, and by stepping carefully back he was able to pull the dagger off the nail so that it swung down and bumped soundlessly against his leg. He knelt and let it drop gently to the rug, where he could lean over and pick it up with his right hand. Then he froze with the knife in his grasp. The whistling was getting louder, and he heard footsteps.

The door of the room was open, and Lill could see the landing of the stairs outside. Anyone coming up the stairs would see him before entering the room. They might even be able to see his shadow from the bottom of the stairs, but he had no choice; he had to move.

The cupboard in the wall to his left was his only option. If it wasn’t full, it would be big enough for him to fit inside.

There wasn’t time to struggle to his feet. He shuffled sideways on his knees. Time slowed to a crawl. The footsteps were definitely ascending the stairs now. Lill reached the cupboard and slid the door open. The dark interior seemed nearly empty. He ducked and rolled inside, tucking his legs to his chest. He managed to slide the door almost closed with his knee before the footsteps stopped.

Looking out through the crack, he saw a man’s pale, high-arched bare feet. His gaze travelled up, past loose black trousers decorated with red braid, a red shirt, its long sleeves rolled up to the elbows on muscular arms marked with lines of faded scarring and sheened with fine, gold hair. That was all Lill could see from this angle.

What had Vanu come to his bedroom for? Several possibilities flickered through Lill’s mind, as if there were any strategic use to predicting the enemy’s movements when you were tied up in a cupboard.

He could have come for White Viper’s dagger, in which case he would notice it missing and look for it. He could have come to put something away in the cupboard. The door would slide open in a moment. He could have come to take a nap, or to sit in the window and read that book in the basket. Lill couldn’t see the sleeping platform from here, so if Vanu went there he would have no way of knowing what he was doing.

He was whistling again, softer now, a less melancholy tune, as he moved purposefully around the room. He was putting things away, but seemingly in the chest against the opposite wall. He hadn’t come near Lill’s cupboard.

Lill held himself stone-still, breathing shallowly. He imagined Vanu lying down on that big bed on the platform and falling asleep. He was on the other side of the room now, so Lill could see more of him: his broad back under the red shirt, his light hair that fell just past his shoulders, the top layer pulled neatly back and tied with a red leather thong like the ones Lill had seen by his bed.

If he did go to sleep, if he slept long enough, Lill would have time to free himself from the rope. He’d already eased the dagger out of its sheath, working by feel with both hands behind his back. Then he would be in Vanu Urártu’s bedchamber with a blade.

Even if Vanu didn’t go to sleep now, he would return eventually, after dark. Lill could wait in the cupboard until then.

Vanu turned toward the window, and Lill saw his face from the side. He had a strong, forbidding profile, like a king on a silver coin from the West, except you always assumed the king didn’t really look like that, with such a straight nose and sharp, immaculate jaw. A scar sliced across his cheekbone just under his right eye, and he wasn’t quite clean-shaven; it was just that the stubble of his beard was the same colour as his hair, so it showed only as a kind of glint, like the hair on his arms.

Even knowing who the man was, Lill could not see him as other than beautiful. It gave him a cold, unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Vanu tugged the thong out of his hair and ran his fingers through the pale strands while he yawned hugely. For a moment, “Lion” seemed like a plain description of his physical presence. Then he scraped his hair back and retied it at the base of his skull.

“Da?” someone called from downstairs. “Are you in?”

Vanu turned, still fixing his hair, and was out of the room in a couple of strides.

The Book of Stratagems said, “You must know your enemy better than he knows himself.” Lill was becoming painfully aware that he didn’t know Vanu Urártu at all. He’d thought he did, thought he had sorted the wild rumours from the facts. He hadn’t come here expecting to find Vanu half beast, except in a strictly metaphorical sense. But the rest of the people in the mountains were equally human, and he hadn’t stopped to consider what traits the Lion of the Summer Pass must possess in order to lead them.

Master Dumuz always used to say, “Good looks do nothing for a man.” Lill wondered if that was true, after all. He thought Vanu Urártu’s appearance was not irrelevant. He’d been able to unite the mountain villages like no one before; maybe he done it in the same way that Zish in the Order had made everyone want to be his friend. There was a word for it, that quality. Charisma. Maybe Vanu Urártu had charisma.

The scroll by his bed suggested that he could read, and probably also that he knew Zashian, since Lill had never heard that there were any books written in the language of the mountains. But there were a lot of things about the mountains that he had never heard, apparently. He wondered what the book by Vanu’s bed was. One of the famous war manuals, maybe? There were certainly some things in The Book of Stratagems that Vanu could have used in defence of his villages, and his knowledge of pitched battles must have come from somewhere. Maybe Ten Thousand Rivers or Master Moon.