Page 17 of The Summer Pass

He got the wet clothes from the saddlebags and strolled over to return them. A woman and another man with a monkey on his shoulder came hurrying up to fuss over the girl. The woman took the clothes from Vanu with a nervous curtsey.

“My daughter tells me you saved her life,” said the father to Vanu. “I owe you a great debt.”

Vanu smiled and shook his head, holding up a hand. He took his horse’s reins and swung back into the saddle.

Zaraz and Shan were more worried about the approach of the Great King’s army than Lill would have expected, considering that they were Zashian subjects themselves. But their experience on the road had evidently made them fearful of soldiers. And there was more to it; they explained that they had been working at the hostel on the Torakand road the last time the king’s army tried to take the Summer Pass, and the soldiers had made trouble for them both coming and going. They didn’t say exactly what kind of trouble, but somehow Lill got the impression, as he often did with them, that each had been worried about the other in different ways. Maybe the soldiers had made various kinds of trouble.

They decided they wanted to stay put in the village until they knew the roads would be safe, and they asked Lill what they could do to be useful.

“If so many of the villagers are deaf, I don’t suppose there will be much call for our trade up here,” said Zaraz.

“There’s music in the village,” said Lill, “and I’m sure they’d like to hear you play. There aren’t so many deaf that you’d have no audience. But it’s not like the city, where they’ll pay you to perform. The people up here aren’t poor, but they’re … self-sufficient. They’re used to entertaining themselves. I thought about this when I first came here. I used to get my living as a street performer in Torakand.”

“Really? What did you do?”

Why had he brought that up? Now he would have to tell them.

“I throw knives. I … can show you sometime.”

“Oh, we would love that—wouldn’t we, Shan?”

“Absolutely. I didn’t realize you were an entertainer too, Lill.”

“Probably explains why we get on so well with him,” said Zaraz. “There’s something about being a performer—it’s not just wanting people to like you. You think a lot about the impression you’re making.”

“That’s the sort of thing you like to think about,” Shan teased. “Me, I do just want people to like me. But Lill—why don’t we team up? We could go over to that castle on the other side of the pass, and⁠—”

They were interrupted then by Firuduna calling out plaintively from the bedroom; they were sitting outside, so they heard him through the window, and Lill hopped up immediately with the guilty fear that he might not have heard an earlier summons.

But Firuduna didn’t seem to be in a bad temper when Lill came in. He wanted water, which was easily provided, and to have his pillows adjusted, which was also not difficult—so much so, in fact, that Lill thought he might have done it himself. The shaman had said his wounds were healing well, and Lill didn’t see that he should really have been so incapacitated at this point as to require the amount of help he was asking for. But he leaned over the big man’s chest to tweak the pillows to his specifications and said, “No trouble at all,” when Firuduna thanked him as if he’d done him a significant service.

“Anything else you need?”

Firuduna looked at him pensively for a moment—or Lill guessed it was a pensive expression. Maybe he was just sleepy.

“Do you really work in my cousin’s forge?” Firuduna said finally. “I think I could fit my thumb and forefinger around your wrist with room to spare.”

He made a movement of his hand toward Lill’s wrist, but stopped short. Lill realized there was no need to step out of reach.

“I’m sure you could,” Lill said. “I do work in the forge, though.”

“Marvellous,” said Firuduna, as if he really thought it was.

They’d had several of these conversations now, where Firuduna would start off saying something that Lill knew very well was the preamble to an insult of some kind—you’re so little, you have such smooth skin—and then it wouldn’t be, it would just be an observation. It kept throwing Lill off balance.

Having established that Firuduna didn’t need anything else—except company, probably, but Lill wasn’t feeling generous enough to offer that without being specifically asked—he went back out to rejoin Shan and Zaraz.

“You might think of telling him you’re married,” said Shan.

Lill blinked at him, confused. “Oh?”

Shan smiled wryly. “I can’t understand what he says to you, but he is trying to flirt with you, isn’t he?”

“Oh. Yes, he is. I … ” Of course that’s what it was. How could he admit that he hadn’t noticed?

“He’s probably not doing it very well.” Shan came to his aid. “I don’t think he has a lot of experience flirting with male-type people.”

“I don’t have a lot of experience being flirted with,” said Lill.