The Last Warrior Page 8

  Sedative and painkiller. It would act fast. “Better?” she asked the general, gently.

  Tao’s wary but surprised eyes found hers. In them she read clear relief, telling her the medication had helped some. “A magic potion.”

  If only magic did exist. She shook her head. “Medicine.”

  Tao’s eyelids drooped. He was too wrung out and now too drugged to argue their methods. “Elsabeth,” he whispered thickly, his speech slurring, causing her to move closer. It seemed jarringly intimate, her face this close to his, their hands so tightly clasped—this man, this stranger, this enemy of her people who was also to be their savior, if all went as planned. “If I die, watch over Aza. Don’t let her fight Xim over this.” Swallowing, he closed his eyes. “Over me.”

  “I will,” she whispered. Just as she’d promised the queen she’d protect Tao. Her life was becoming a web of promises; sticky and overlapping, they could very well entrap her.

  Only then did Tao surrender to the drugs, his fingers relaxing in hers. A conscious decision to let go.

  Maybe he trusts me.

  It would make everything easier.

  She sat back on her haunches, hanging on as the wagon bounced along. He’d looked so very noble in the homecoming parade, dignified and confident with his broad shoulders, perfect posture and lean athletic build. Even now, stripped of all the trappings of his profession, he looked no less noble lying on hay in muck-covered tatters.

  No less a warrior.

  “He’s got a lot to learn if he’s going to impress the elders,” she admitted to Chun. “Asking for straps to bite. Calling a painkiller ‘magic.’ He knows nothing about our ways.”

  “You’re a good teacher. He’ll pick it up fast.”

  She sighed. “He’ll have to.”

  Both of them fell silent, their minds full of what they’d done. Tassagonia’s greatest war hero lay wounded in the back of a mule-drawn produce wagon driven by a Kurel, sleeping off the effect of drugs he considered sinful. In all of history, nothing like this had happened. Not only was she witness to it, she was participating in it. She’d even instigated it.

  When she was a child, she’d hungered to be like the characters in the stories she loved, always out on another adventure, a circumstance far removed from the reality of the dull, quiet, studious life at which she’d constantly, secretly chafed.

  How things had changed.

  She’d wanted excitement. Well, Beth, now you’ve gotten it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  UNDER THE COVER OF THE predawn darkness, Elsabeth and the men helped Tao sit up in the back of the wagon. Despite his wounds and the sedating drugs, he was able to walk. Again, his sheer force of will kept him going when others would have given up.

  Tao became more lucid out in the night air, taking in his surroundings, the congested but squeaky-clean warren of shops and homes populated by people with an age-old, blood-deep distrust of Tassagons. He made no comment until she began unlocking the plain entrance to her parent’s house.

  “Is this where I’m to hide?” he asked, as she opened the front door and turned on a light, revealing the cozy interior.

  Perhaps he’d been expecting a hospital or a cell. “My home, yes. You’ll live with me.”

  His eyes found hers. No longer drowsy slits, they flickered with surprise and then speculation. She’d seen that look before when men in the palace sized up potential bedmates. No Tassagon had ever pondered her the way the general was now doing, but he clearly fancied she’d be his lover for the mere fact that they’d be sharing the same living space. Were Uhr-warriors truly that indiscriminate?

  “With no chaperone?” he asked, confirming her suspicions. Any valued Tassagon maiden had to be chaperoned, lest a warrior deflower her at the first opportunity. Kurel knew no such barbarity, so no Kurel maiden required a chaperone.

  Elsabeth almost laughed at the idea. “If anything, I am your chaperone in Kurel Town.”

  “Our staying alone together won’t cause a scandal?”

  Was he actually concerned he’d sully her reputation? Or were his doubts about his ability to control his impulses around her? Rumors about Uhr-warriors and their appetites aside, gut instinct told her the general wasn’t a man to take a woman by force. He had more honor than that, and this conversation proved it. “Your very presence in Kurel Town is scandalous. Whose home you occupy makes little difference.”

  They made it inside without rousing any of the neighbors. With shuddering relief, Elsabeth leaned back against the closed door, her hands flat against the cool dark wood, and inhaled the sweet scent of her living room.

  The detached row house had only one main living area, one bedroom and a tiny loft where she’d slept since childhood, tucked under the slope of the roof. The bedroom had belonged to her mother and father. No one had slept in it since their deaths. A Tassagon warrior wouldn’t be the first. “We’ll need an extra bed,” she told the men. “He can sleep here, in the living room.”

  She pushed away from the door to help. Some furniture rearranging allowed a bed to be brought from the clinic next door, and soon they had the general settled in a corner of the living room. A screen blocked a direct view from the front door, should anyone drop by unexpectedly.

  Chun approached the bed. Several needles and sutures sat in a sterilized pan. “Healer,” Tao mumbled. “Remember, you are not to take the legs.”

  “And if the choice is between death and amputation?”

  “When isn’t that the choice?” The general turned his gaze to the ceiling, and Elsabeth’s heart went out to him. “I will make my decision if I am required to. Until then, you will treat my legs as if I’m keeping them.”

  “You have my word.” Chun emptied another dose of mondosh and drowse into the man, knocking him out to administer the antivenin.

  While the general was stripped of his soiled uniform and washed by the men, Elsabeth climbed up to the aviary and lit a small lamp. Cuh-choo, cuh-choo-coo. Rustling and cooing met her as she cut a small square from a piece of green fabric. “I need a volunteer. Who will carry this to the palace? Where are my best night fliers?”

  Prometheus strutted by, tilting his head at her, one black bead of an eye searching hopefully for a few grains of feed. She cupped him in her hands. “Of course it’s you.” With the green flag rolled and tucked in a tube fastened to the bird’s leg, she released him into the night. A flutter of wings, and he was on the way to the palace aviary. The general is here and safe.

  By the time she’d washed up and returned to the main floor of her house, Tao was cleaned up, sutured and tucked in bed with an IV of antibiotics. The sheets were pulled midway up the general’s bare chest. His shoulders and arms were brown from the suns, the smooth skin marred here and there by puckered scars. The souvenirs of battle, she thought and shuddered. She hoped they’d given him pajama pants to wear. A Tassagon warrior in her living room was one thing. A naked Tassagon warrior was entirely another.

  But embarrass herself by expressing such a ridiculous concern? Clearly she’d gone soft in the years since Chun had taken over the clinic. After so long assisting her parents with patients, what Tao wore—or didn’t—shouldn’t concern her.

  But it did somehow.

  After setting a pot of stew on the stove to simmer for breakfast, Elsabeth stood over her unexpected houseguest’s side while he slept. A dark brown strip of leather circled his neck, threaded through a slender, polished silver rectangle. It was an odd item of jewelry, showcasing a piece of metal that hadn’t been crudely extracted from a mine and melted by a smithy, but created instead through advanced technology millennia ago on a world countless light-years away. Nothing she’d expect a Tassagon to own. Such pieces were usually remnants of the destroyed arks of old, but it was rare to find any traces larger than a pebble. A war prize, perhaps, removed from a Gorr corpse or found in some distant glade in the Hinterlands, one more item attesting to the fact that this man had roamed farther and wider than she’d ever have
the chance to go, except in her imagination and in the stories she read.

  The charm rose and fell with his steady, quiet breathing. “He’s going to be all right,” she said.

  “Yes. I think so.” Chun was at the sink, pumping well water into the basin. He and Navi would need to leave soon for their own homes, so they could begin their days as if nothing had happened during the night. “The problem was the venom, but the antidote is very effective.”

  Elsabeth held a lantern closer to Tao. Here was a gravely wounded man, too young to die, his utter vulnerability rendering him somehow incapable of the terrible things she knew he’d done. Yet, despite his unexpectedly boyish looks, the creases on his suntanned skin had been carved by stronger emotions, she knew. They, along with his many scars, attested to the viciousness of his years in the Hinterlands, a life that had very clearly taken its toll. She set the lantern down and crouched by his side. “You’re as much of a victim of Xim as any of us are,” she murmured. “You don’t deserve to die.”

  She caught a glimpse of green under his heavy lids, and it almost looked as if he’d smiled.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” he murmured. His voice was soft, playful, sleep-roughened and completely unnerving. She almost gasped at his audacity, shooting to her feet.

  “Sunshine?” Navi asked, trying to hide a smirk.

  Tao was already back asleep. “The general is drugged,” she said. Sunshine. My. What would it be like hearing that every morning from the pillow next to her? She cut off her imagination before it went any further. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  Navi shrugged. “It seemed like he did.”

  Chun listened as he washed his hands. “Agreed. Mondosh has no effect on reason, and the drowse just makes him sleepy.”

  She frowned at them, saying under her breath, “If he knows or he doesn’t, just pretend it didn’t happen and continue on with proper etiquette.” Clearly, his warrior’s thoughts fell into well-traveled grooves, like the mule wagon did on the merchant road. That’s why reacting with a nonreaction was best. Simple, neutral serenity. “Eventually, he can be trained to behave like a Kurel, and he’ll think he’s learned it himself.”

  “Rather like a dog.”

  They all jumped at the sound of Tao’s voice. Elsabeth winced. His eyes might have been closed, but the man behind them was very much awake.

  Elsabeth’s face burned. She’d underestimated him. Worse, she’d insulted him. Again. “I didn’t mean to imply that you were like a dog…” The rest of her sentence was lost when she turned to face him and saw how intensely he was concentrating on her, despite the mondosh in his system. It was as if he’d decided he’d will away the effects of the powerful drug as he had the agony of his injuries, dismissing them as mere fleabites. “Not at all like a dog.”

  “But stupid, yes?” Tao’s jaw was hard. “A brute.”

  “No. I don’t think you’re stupid.” It was true, she didn’t. “Or a brute.”

  “So she says, in an effort to salvage her credibility and my trust.”

  “My credibility isn’t in question. I got you out of a prison tonight. And of course, I want your trust.”

  “Want it, or need it?”

  “I need your trust. Are you satisfied? All of us do.”

  Chun warned her into silence with a frosty look in her direction. No arguing with the patient. He was right. She was supposed to offer sanctuary to the general, not bicker with him.

  Swallowing her pride, she again dropped to her knees at Tao’s bedside. Remember your vow. This man will help you achieve it.

  “Here is your first lesson in the ways of my people,” she said, softer. “Kurel don’t say those kinds of endearments to a woman they don’t know in front of others. I felt embarrassed. It was easier to pretend you didn’t know what you were saying than to accept that you did. But, I didn’t need to point out your unawareness with such disrespect.”

  A satisfied sound came from deep in his throat. He murmured, barely audible, “It seems we have something in common. I have as much to learn about your ways as you do mine.” He tried to hold his sagging eyelids open, but the effort proved too much. After a moment, his breathing deepened. It seemed this time he was really asleep.

  She rose, wiping her hands on her skirt, awkwardly meeting the men’s eyes. “He appears to be open to learning, at least.”

  “You, too,” Chun said. Before she could retort, he told her, “I’ll be back after first light. Two and one?”

  “Two and one,” she repeated, confirming their coded knock for the door. “Navi,” she pressed a note into the accountant’s hand, “deliver this to Elder Gwendolyn’s mailbox.” His brows lifted. “It says we’ve rescued a high-ranking Tassagon from the king’s clutches, and that he’s here, injured and under watch. I’ll be in touch with all the elders come morning regarding the request for sanctuary.” Elder Gwendolyn was one of the most junior of the ghetto’s ruling council, but as Elsabeth’s great-great aunt, she was family and thus was more likely to consider her appeal. “At the very least I hope they let him stay on humanitarian grounds until he’s healed.”

  The men left. She walked past the niche housing the chunk of charred wood saved from her parents’ funeral pyre, pausing to brush her fingers over its polished surface, then she plunged, exhausted, into a chair in sight of the bed. The house was finally silent but did not feel empty. General Tao filled the entire space with his presence: his scent, the sight of his unmoving bulk under the quilts, the unavoidable realization that he was there. Not just physically, but something else she could sense but not define. Whether washing the night’s grime from her hair or making stew, she’d felt it.

  No one had said this would be easy.

  A cup of cooling honey-tea sat on the lamp table next to a book she had no intention of opening. For once, real life was providing far more twists and turns than anything she could possibly encounter on those pages.

  I did it. The enormity of what she and Markam had achieved finally sank in. An Uhr-warrior in Kurel Town. The concept boggled. It could very well be the first occurrence of its kind since the Old Colony, when all the peoples of humanity had lived as one—before the Gorr invasion, before the near annihilation of both species, before they’d been reduced from the possessors of powerful, star-reaching arks and stunning weaponry to a bedraggled group of survivors, defending the last of humanity with little more than sticks and stones.

  The self-appointed first Tassagon king had banned advanced technology forevermore. The first Forbiddance had deemed it wicked, blaming technology for all the ills that had befallen the colony. Leaving those “responsible” with no choice but to leave and set up their own colony in the Barrier Peaks.

  Now the descendants of those outcasts had Tassagonia’s future in their control once again. Like the suns at summer solstice, Xim had reached his peak. From this point in time, from this moment in Colony history, he’d shine less and less until the day he was finally extinguished.

  Elsabeth returned her gaze to the sleeping form of Tao. So why did this feel more like a beginning than an end?

  “ALL HANDS! ALL HANDS!”

  The guard’s panicked cry pierced the foggy dawn air, rousing even the drunks scattered and sprawled across the bailey—those not lucky enough to have found a mattress inside and a willing wench.

  With a green square stuffed at the bottom of his pants pocket, Markam met the guard. “What happened?”

  “He’s gone,” the man said, trying to catch his breath. “General Tao. He escaped.”

  “How the hell did that happen?”

  “Don’t rightly know, sir, but I found this.” In the guard’s white-gloved hand was a flimsy shard of metal.

  Markam examined it. “The man fashioned one of his buttons into a key. That accounts for the cell door, but the barrier doors, were they not guarded?”

  “Guarded and intact, sir.”

  “How did he get out, then? Through the walls?”

  “Si
r, all I know is that he wasn’t there when I brought him a pot of gruel and a cup of water.”

  Markam paced, a finger pressed crossways under his chin. “There is access to the spillway from the cell block, a small opening, although I don’t believe it leads anywhere but into the moat.”

  “If he was desperate enough, sir…”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.” Markam glanced over at his second-in-command. “Bowers, sound the alert. All guards are to assemble in the barracks. Then send them out to scour every inch of this palace and the city. We’ll find Uhr-Tao. He can’t have gone far.”

  Across the bailey Markam spied Beck storming in his direction. He turned back to Bowers and said, “One more thing, the palace is off-limits to Kurel workers until further notice—security reasons.”

  “Do you suspect a Kurel role in the general’s escape, sir?” Bowers asked.

  “The Kurel? Turning aggressive, actually plotting and carrying out a dangerous extraction mission to save an Uhr-warrior?” Markam laughed.

  Bowers snickered. “I guess you’re right, sir.”

  “Now, go deal with Beck. I’ll be with the king.” Markam set out in the direction of the royal residences to put himself through the particularly unpleasant experience of having to rouse Xim—from Aza’s bed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TAO WAS UNDERWATER, swimming to the surface glimmering above him. For all his effort, he could swim no closer to it. He kicked harder but his legs seemed to be caught in mud. He’d drown unless he got free. Running out of air. He swept his arms, powerful strokes, but his left was caught—an eel had tangled itself around it!

  He jerked awake, dragging in air, his heart slamming like a broken door in a windstorm. Something was tangled around his left arm like in the dream, stinging, like a bee bite—a clear vine. He tracked it to where it dangled from an upside-down bottle all the way back to the inside of his elbow. The head was buried under the bandages. And in his flesh!