The sun was beginning to set by the time Min La made his way back to the marketplace of Rensoth. He walked with his hand gripping his bag lest the gold within clink too audibly. It had been a long time since he’d carried this much on him. Two winters ago in Ímonok1 he had been carrying a purse full of silver when a pack of Houseless bandits had dragged him into an alley, beaten him half to death and taken everything, even the clothes he had been wearing. All because they had heard the clink clink clink of his hidden silver.
A furious, thrumming anxiety had settled behind the thin, weak muscles of his chest. Sweat cooled on the back of his neck and between his shoulders. Yet he shivered, and his arms trembled and his teeth chattered. A panic had begun to slowly envelop his mind. A panic he couldn’t entirely account for.
He wondered if the city patrol had found the three bodies by now. Sen Rin had told him to arrange things to look like the three of them had simply attacked and killed each other so Rensoth’s patrol would not feel the need to pursue the matter.
Three dead men in this small city, however, would cause quite a stir. But the market was as calm as it had been yesterday morning. This despite the fact that Min La had done nothing to hide the bodies.
He had not told this detail to the prince’s two remaining bodyswords. At the time he had been aware that he was trying to spare them the knowledge that their friend’s body had been left in the dirt like a dead animal.
He moved through the shaded parts of the square as the sun cast its red evening glow. The bakery where the beggar boys had stolen the woman’s purse yesterday morning was nearly out of its afternoon supply of sweet cakes. He could smell cream and fried dough and was suddenly aware of how hungry he was.
With a shaky breath he sat hard on a bench near a cart where an old man was selling pork stewed with potatoes and what smelled like radishes. The fragrance of it was at once making his mouth water and his stomach turn.
“Can you pay, boy?”
Min La turned. The old man stood over him, the setting sun behind him making him little more than a black shape with a hard red halo.
“What?”
“Can you pay for the food?”
Min La looked at the steaming pot of stewed meat. A pile of fried buns glistened next to it. “How much for the bread?”
“Buy a bowl of pork and it comes with the bread.”
“Just the bread.”
The old man regarded him for a moment. Then he put one of the steaming buns in a little paper sack and handed it to him.
“How much?” Min La asked, before he moved to take it.
The man just placed it in his hands and then gently patted his thin shoulder. “Just the one,” he said. “I need to go home early tonight anyway.”
With an awkward stutter, Min La thanked him. Clutching the bread, he began to stand but the man turned back and pushed him back onto the bench.
“You look like a strong wind might knock you clean out of the city, my boy.” And he laughed. “Sit there quietly and eat your bread. Don’t move from this spot till it’s done. Do you hear me?”
Min La had to squint to look at him. He still glowed a warm red in the setting sun, lit like a colored glass lantern or a low fire, but he believed he could hear him smile. He nodded and the man patted his shoulder again before turning back to his cart.
His fingers shook as he attempted to tear little bites off the bun. It tasted strongly of onions and butter, but it was warm. It felt good in his throat, but soured immediately in his stomach. He knew he ought to eat something, so he tried to force a few more bites.
No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t bring himself to be as happy at his sudden wealth as he should have been. He had given up his silver and his chance at going south before winter arrived, and then before the sun had set he had found himself in possession of gold. Gold. He should be dancing in the market. He should be buying a new coat, at the very least. But something was nagging at him that he couldn’t quite understand. An anxiety deep in his heart that refused to settle.
An ache had settled into his weak muscles from the brief fight in the alley. His head pounded, his bag dug into his shoulder. Every smell turned his stomach, until he couldn’t tolerate another bite of the bread. Wrapping it tightly in the paper, he stuffed it into the inner pocket of his golt — he dared not open his bag. His priority now was sleep. He needed a good night’s sleep or he would be useless tomorrow.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would leave as he had originally planned. He would go south with his new gold.
But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t shake the sense that it wouldn’t work, that it was the wrong choice, the wrong path.
The second he had abandoned his efforts to leave Sona Gen, a crisp new path had unfurled before him. All he had had to do was move his feet. It was like some other force had been pushing him where he was meant to go. Surely all of that hadn’t been just to get a purse of gold so he could get back onto his old path. That didn’t make sense.
Breathing deeply he wished for water. And just as he was about to go find the city well, a familiar sight crossed in front of him, a man in a simple black golt with a long gray cloak. It was yet another of those Houseless mercenaries.
For just one second, Min La believed that it was one of the men he had killed in the alley. That he had not died, but had pulled himself up and was now here to seek revenge. Min La’s heart began to hammer so fast that his vision darkened a little. He clutched his chest and forced himself to breathe deeply.
“Calm down,” he whispered to himself. “He is dead, you fool. You killed him.”
Moreover, there was no reason to suspect that those dead mercenaries’ comrades would know who he was or what he had done. He had no need to panic. He was safe.
As he watched, the gray-cloaked man strode across the road where another like him was waiting.
The two mercenaries were tall and built like warriors, like Min La’s brother had been. Broad shoulders and chests, long legs in a wide stance, thick arms, thick torsos. Men as hard as boulders, trained to hunt and kill for days without rest. It was strange to look at them and think of his brother, who had been noble, generous, and deeply loyal. Min La found himself wondering how much these men were being paid to hunt the crown prince. Did they know he was the crown prince?
The two stood shoulder to shoulder idly regarding the wares of a basket weaver who seemed to be half-asleep. Min La still sat at the bench where the old man had had his stewed pork cart. Though at some point the man had left with his cart. He took out the paper-wrapped bread and began to make a casual show of eating little bites while he listened.
“Who was it?” one of the mercenaries said to the other.
From where he sat, the two seemed almost identical. Their clothing was clearly a uniform of some kind — a strange enough sight among the Houseless — and both wore their hair long, like tolibins. One seemed, perhaps, a few years older as a strand or two of his hair was gray. It was the older one who spoke.
The younger one answered, “Sen Rin Hŏnol.”
Min La almost bit his tongue, but managed, somehow, to maintain his composure.
“He killed two of ours,” the younger one went on. “But he didn’t survive.”
The older one paled and the two looked at each other. “Who?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Tínok?”
The younger one nodded once. They were both silent for a moment. Then the older one said, “We will have to tell his brother.”
“I will do it.”
“No, I will.”
The look that passed between them was almost identical to the one that had passed between the two bodyswords in the little abandoned farmhouse. A brief, stolen moment of grief. The breath caught in Min La’s throat as he remembered the feeling of the sword in his hands puncturing through the flesh of those men. Tínok and Hon Voloth, the two men he had killed, leaving behind at least one grieving brother. Min La, having been made to understand what these Houseless mercenaries were doing in Rensoth, was not inclined to feel pity for their fallen. But it nevertheless surprised him to observe in these Houseless mercenaries a more humane culture than he was accustomed to finding among the barbarous bandits who roamed Houseless in the hills and forests of unsettled Láokoth.
“I took care of them,” the younger one said.
“The bodysword, too?”
“The city patrol won’t find them.”
Min La took a slow, shaky breath. That explained that, at least.
“What about the boy?”
“There’s been no sign of him in the whole city.”
“Sen Rin must have stashed him with what was left of his guard. What was he doing in Rensoth?”
“Sen Rin? We don’t know. We assume he was trying to get food. I don’t think they’ve eaten since they left—” he paused, glanced around, then whispered, “since they left the Palace.”
“They can kill a rabbit in the woods. Why risk Rensoth?”
“There was nothing on him. No money. Nothing.”
“What about his martial seal?”
The younger one shook his head. The other squinted at the baskets in front of him. “Regardless,” he said finally. “He wouldn’t have left the boy very far away.”
“Is he really…?” The young mercenary trailed off and the older one looked at him.
“Táno Gín4 said it didn’t matter. His orders are all four have to be eliminated. And this one’s the last. Keep men on the roads but get a group together to search the woods around Rensoth. I’m sure he’s close by.”
The younger one nodded, gave a small bow, and then hastened away. The other lingered in front of the basket weaver for a time, then he glanced around the street cautiously before he, too, walked away.
All four had to be eliminated. That is what they had said, they had had orders to kill all four.
It was common knowledge that after the assassinations in the Palace nine years ago the king had given his last child, his son, three body doubles: the Four Little Princes in their Four Little Palaces. Who was to say that the little prince in the abandoned farmhouse was even the true prince? His guards had referred to the king as his father, but of course they would. No one but the king and the prince himself knew which one was the true prince. All his servants and his tutors, even his bodyswords, were made to believe that their prince was the true prince. That was why the mercenaries had to kill all four. To be sure that the true prince was dead.
Was it true that they had already killed the other three little princes? What kind of army could overpower the combined swords of all four Little Palaces? Not to mention the king’s own bodyswords? For that matter, what kind of army could penetrate the walls of the Palace itself? And why was there no news of it? How could this thing have happened and yet no one seemed to be aware of it?
Min La had been in Rensoth for days now and there had been no news about violence in the capital. And had there been, Rensoth would have received it within a day. According to Sen Rin, they had been on the run for three days, driven from the Palace grounds by a veritable army. And yet there was no news of such an attack. The king had not issued decrees condemning the outlaws, he had not sent the full weight of his own royal bodyswords to find and protect his son. He had, by all appearances, done nothing.
Maybe the prince in the farmhouse hadn’t been the true prince and so the full strength of the king’s attention was not concerned with him, but only with protecting his true heir, who was, perhaps, already dead. But if that was the case, if the king had thrown all his protection behind his true heir and then withdrawn it when that prince had died, the mercenaries would already know that they had succeeded and they would not have bothered to continue hunting the prince who was hiding now in that farmhouse.
Yet, here they were in Rensoth doggedly pursuing the sickly young man.
The more Min La thought about it, the more convinced he became that the boy in the farmhouse had, in fact, been the true crown prince. Yet, if that was true, if he was really the king’s son, where were the rest of the king’s men?
Min La rubbed his face violently, as if he could wipe away the day and the confusion and the unbreakable sense that something significant was happening that he didn’t yet understand.
With his head in his hands, he stared fixedly at the cold remains of the fried bread resting on his knees and told himself over and over that none of this concerned him. It did not matter if the boy in the farmhouse was the crown prince. It did not matter if the Palace had been attacked. It did not matter if the army that had attacked it was now hunting that prince like a pack of patient wolves stalking a wounded deer. It didn’t matter that his last two bodyswords only had two good legs between them and that they knew very little about survival outside the walls of the Palace. It didn’t matter that the prince was unlikely to live out the night.
A pair of Rensoth’s city patrol guards walked past the bench and Min La tensed.
If the mercenaries had really done what they said and had hidden the bodies that Min La had left in the alley, then he had nothing to fear from the city patrol. He was safe. He could take his gold and resume his life as if nothing had happened. He could return to his little stone house near the city wall with a full feast and still have gold enough to take him as far south as he cared to go. And then buy a farm when he got there. And marry a local girl and start a family, and leave all of this behind. None of it concerned him. This was not his path. His path was south.
But his thoughts returned to the Houseless mercenaries, an army in black and gray that had been large enough, bold enough, powerful enough to attack the Palace and then to hunt at least one of the little princes in broad daylight not twenty miles from the walls of the capital. Min La didn’t believe there was any chance that the prince would make it safely back to his father’s side. The crown prince of Láokoth would probably die tonight less than a mile from Min La’s little stone house while he was sleeping there soundly with his gold tucked under his arm.
“And there is nothing you can do about it,” he whispered to himself.
He touched the edges of his brother’s martial seal and thought of the sickly young man huddled in a corner in that rundown old farmhouse. He had not eaten in three days, his guards were dying all around him, and an army of terrifying, capable mercenaries was hunting him tirelessly.
But Min La had already fulfilled his obligation to Sen Rin Hŏnol. The medicine had been delivered, he had even prepared it and seen it administered. He had done more than enough. And then he had been paid.
He had done enough.
IY-moh-nohk
TIY-nohk
HOHN-vohl-oth
Tay-noh-GINE