The Secrets of Jin-shei Read online

  Xaforn didn’t know about that remark, but she trained as though she was trying to live up to it. She trained as though she was preparing for some imminent war that only she could see coming.

  Her only vanity was her hair. Most of the women in the Guard cut theirs short; it fit better under helmets and took less care. Xaforn’s was in a long braid which she usually wore wrapped tightly around her small head; but sometimes, when practicing alone, it was left to hang down her back and it whipped as she whirled and kicked and rolled her way through the fight exercises. For some reason this made her look even more dangerous. She was due to turn ten at the end of this long, hot summer, and already they were talking about promoting her up to yet another level in the coming autumn. She would be training with the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, the class only a year away from full induction into the Guard.

  She fully intended to join the Guard at the first opportunity offered to her. When she was fourteen, maybe; thirteen, even. There could be uses for someone as young and light on her feet as Xaforn was.

  But, for now, she was still young, she was still a trainee, she was still fair game for chores and message-running if someone more senior managed to collar her before she gave them the slip. Leaving the practice yard, braid swinging, mopping the sweat glistening in the hollow of her throat, an equally sweaty and flushed Guardsman stopped her at the entrance to the compound.

  “Ah. Good. You can run the errand for me, and I can get back to my business,” he said pleasantly. “Captain Aric is needed at the Palace. See that the message reaches him.”

  “Where is he?” Xaforn shouted at the Guardsman’s retreating back.

  “How should I know? That’s why I’m sending you,” he retorted, trotting away back to the group fencing with sword and dagger out in the yard.

  Muttering imprecations under her breath, Xaforn broke into a jog and made for the inner compound where the living quarters were. She didn’t like that part of the compound—perhaps it reminded her too much of all that she had never known. Foundlings and orphans, the children left to the Guard to raise, were housed separately in their own dormitories; the closest they came to experiencing actual family life was observing the family compound, watching children sired or borne by individual guards tumbling around the inner courts while the women of the household squabbled and cooked and chased toddlers intent on finding trouble. There was a part of Xaforn that fiercely desired the closeness, the sense of belonging, that seemed to cling to these walls—and another part of her despised it for its weakness, its vulnerability, for being the soft underbelly of the Imperial Guard. For Xaforn, family meant only the cadre—the group of warriors that she had been raised to become a part of. She had never known a mother or a sibling; her life had been lived under discipline, not affection. She was incorruptible, unbribable, there was nobody whose welfare mattered to her enough to tempt her into betraying her calling—and she could see a Guardsman father hesitating at the threat of a knife held to the throat of one of these cherished children.

  At a cursory glance the courtyard appeared to be full of only the vulnerable ones, just the women, the children, the families. But then she noticed Aric’s daughter, Qiaan of the long face—few people could lay claim to ever having seen that girl smile—and veered off to intercept her.

  “I’ve been sent to look for Captain Aric,” Xaforn said without preamble. “Do you know where he is to be found?”

  “He was here earlier,” Qiaan said, with studied unhelpfulness. Her eyes were hooded, her expression carefully blank. As a child of an Imperial Guard captain, she was steeped in Guard traditions—but Xaforn, the foundling, belonged to the Guard far more comprehensively than Qiaan, its daughter, had ever done. Qiaan could not, had never been able to, understand the devotion to duty, to being a honed weapon. She didn’t know what she was, but she knew what she wasn’t—and she wasn’t Xaforn’s kind of animal at all.

  Xaforn would have been tearing the eyes out of anyone who would attempt to make the grave error of turning her into a lady who wore silks and reclined gracefully in Palace luxury; Qiaan had likewise snarled at the merest suggestion that she might consider the Guard as her path in life. All the children were asked; only a few of them accepted, but even those who did not were still Guard enough to admire or at least appreciate the Guard and the lineage it gave them.

  Qiaan, however, was different.

  Qiaan’s father was a high-ranking Guard captain, and his duties frequently kept him away from his family, but at least he was affectionate to his daughter when he was with her. But her mother, Rochanaa, veered between a kind of despairing affection and an inexplicable coolness; sometimes it seemed that it was all she could bear to just look on Qiaan’s face. Bounced between these reactions, the child had never known what reception her overtures to her mother would receive, and had, in the end, stopped making any. By the time Qiaan turned eleven her relationship with her mother had soured and solidified into something scrupulously correct and curiously formal. With her father all too often physically absent, and her mother abdicating emotional closeness, Qiaan was adrift, detached from her own immediate kin and incapable of belonging to the often insular “family” of the Imperial Guard. If anyone had asked her, she would have dismissed the idea of ever having wanted to achieve this distance from the Guard and all that the Guard meant—but she was reminded of her failures, her possible inadequacies, when she met up with someone who truly belonged, like Xaforn.

  The two of them reacted to each other like two explosively opposite chemicals in an alchemist’s alembic, aching to absorb the best they saw the other as possessing. They were still too young to understand the reasons why.

  Face to face in the courtyard, Xaforn, the younger by fully a year, managed to draw herself up and give every impression of looking down on Qiaan as someone clearly younger or inferior. “The captain is wanted at the Palace,” she said, “and I will go in search of him myself. But you ought to have enough respect for his position and his duty to make sure the message reaches him as soon as possible, if I do not find him.”

  “Oh, I know all about duty,” said Qiaan, a little acidly. “Good hunting, Xaforn.”

  “Soft,” hissed Xaforn, just before she swept out of earshot.

  “Besotted,” Qiaan returned, making sure she had the last word. She was rather good at that.

  Both girls departed, pursuing their own errands, equally stung. It was the summer, it was the heat. Tempers were frayed everywhere.

  But this was the summer of trial for both of them.

  Xaforn was intent on becoming. All her life she had been a chrysalis, and this was the last summer she would have to wait for her metamorphosis. If she was good, if she stayed ahead of the pack, autumn would bring promotion, and the next year would, maybe, bring more than that. Xaforn knew, knew with a passion born of yearning, that once she was a full-fledged Guard she would always have a place to belong, she would know who she was, she would have a home.

  Qiaan was equally focused on being. She was cast in a role, but one which she found it difficult to interpret. She was young, but she was not unobservant—and there was a coolness between her parents, a coolness which she could sense deepen when she entered the presence of both of them at the same time, a coolness which her mother then passed on to her when her father departed once again to take up his duties at the compound and the Palace. Qiaan was an unwitting pawn in some adult game—but that was just an instinct, not a knowledge, and she had no idea how to act in order to lessen the impact of the situation on her own life. She tried to be a dutiful daughter, to the best of her ability. When her mother, a transplanted Southerner who was sometimes fiercely homesick for her own people, thawed far enough to share some aspect of her childhood or her culture with Qiaan, the child tried to listen, to learn—but those times were rare, and it was more common by far to be rebuffed by a cool word or a refusal of a touch. Rochanaa did her duty and passed on to Qiaan all that a mother should teach a daughter—but no more th
an that.

  They were both, Guard foundling and Guard daughter, fiercely lonely.

  In the third week of Chanain, with summer coming to a boil and the skies bleached white with the heat within city walls, Xaforn turned a corner in the Guard compound and discovered four boys surrounding a hissing and bedraggled cat. They appeared to be passing something from one to another, laughing, keeping it from the cat which was trying to get at whatever it was, ears flat, fangs bared, howling.

  The boys were all three or four years older than Xaforn, and at least two of them were Guard family. Ordinarily she would have left them to their hijinks—what business was it of hers what they were doing to the cat? But then she distinctly heard the thing being tossed from hand to hand whimper softly, and caught a glimpse of a spread-eagled kitten tied to a pair of crossed sticks.

  The Guards were just, fair, honorable. This was part of the training, the foundation of Xaforn’s “family.” Wanton cruelty had no place here. Besides—although that had nothing to do with it, of course—she rather liked cats.

  “Put it down.”

  The timber of her voice took even her by surprise. It was low, level, dangerous.

  One of the boys turned—not one of the Guard ones—and obviously failed to recognize her. He saw a girl, long braid swinging forward over her shoulder, dressed in wide trousers and summer over-tunic, bare feet thrust into a pair of rope-soled sandals.

  “Sure,” he said. “You want to play? Ow!” Distracted, he’d allowed the mother cat a free swipe, and she had caught him squarely across the shin. He kicked, hard, swearing first at the cat and then, turning, at the girl who had been the indirect cause of his wound—and who had not moved.

  “Put it down,” Xaforn repeated, taking on the kitten’s cause. One of the other boys did recognize her, and tugged at the scratched one’s sleeve.

  “Dump it,” he advised his friend, eyes flickering over Xaforn. “Not that one.”

  “You afraid of a girl!”

  “That girl, yes. She’s a Guard.”

  The other boy snickered. “A trainee Guard kid. I got me a trainee Guard kid. Let’s see what they teach them in classes.”

  Both the Guard boys were now hanging on the arms of the young show-off, but advising caution merely seemed to inflame his desire to make trouble. It had been he who had been holding the spread-eagled and weakly meowing kitten in his hands; now he tossed it to his fourth companion, who stood looking indecisive as to whether to listen to his gang leader or the two insiders who seemed to have information that the leader lacked.

  Xaforn was a head shorter and much lighter than her opponent, and all the boy saw was a thin girl who had challenged his authority. One good blow, and it would be over—she’d be across the courtyard, in a heap in the corner, and there would be good blue bruises all over her face the next morning—or at least that was the plan. He swung, and he never knew what hit him. Xaforn ducked under his arm, pivoted on the ball of her foot, came up behind him and landed a blow on the small of his back and across the kidneys which felled him to his knees, and then drove the edge of her hand into his solar plexus as he tried to rise. He swayed for a moment, his eyes crossed and focused on the tip of his nose, and then fell face first into the cobbles.

  The rest, throwing down the kitten, fled.

  It had taken a fraction of a second. Xaforn was left in possession of the field, triumphant, a little guilty.

  “You aren’t supposed to beat up the general population,” a voice said, apparently giving tongue to her guilt.

  Xaforn looked down. On her knees on the dusty courtyard cobbles, heedless of a pretty silk robe, Qiaan was extracting the kitten from its torture apparatus.

  The mother cat had retreated a few steps and now stood growling softly deep in its throat, but making no sudden movements.

  “What are you doing here?” Xaforn said waspishly

  “Just passing through, same as you,” Qiaan said. The kitten fell into her hands, freed at last, barely breathing. Its eyes were still closed. “I don’t even know if it’s old enough to be weaned yet.”

  “Will she take it back?” Xaforn said, coming down on one knee beside Qiaan to have a closer look at their prize. Both girls were completely ignoring the erstwhile bully, who was still on the ground, groaning.

  “Even if she did,” Qiaan said, “it might die. It’s so tiny. I wonder where those bullies found it.”

  “They probably killed the rest.”

  The mother cat snarled, but when they looked up at the sound she was gone, melted away into the shimmer of heat. Xaforn sighed.

  “Well, that’s that.”

  “Do you want it?”

  “What would I do with it?” Xaforn snapped. She’d been caught in a moment of softness and it rankled—especially because it had been Qiaan, of all people, who had been the one to see her succumb to it.

  “Then why did you save it?”

  “Because they were Guard,” said Xaforn. As though that made all the necessary sense in the world. In her world, it did.

  Qiaan could even understand it. But her understanding didn’t change matters. “It’s dead anyway, then,” she shrugged. But she tied her sleeve into a makeshift sling and cradled the weakly mewling kitten into it. It quested with its tiny nose until it found her finger, and then it started sucking on the fingertip, hard, making tiny complaining noises when it refused to yield any sustenance.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ll take it home,” Qiaan said. “See if I can’t find something. Milk going to waste. Something.”

  “Sappy.”

  “Mad,” countered Qiaan.

  They got to their feet, spun apart. Behind them, the poleaxed young bully was only just beginning to sit up and shake his head in confusion. The girls stalked off in opposite directions, and then Qiaan turned to look at Xaforn’s stiff, retreating back.

  “You can come see her if you like,” she called softly.

  Xaforn paused, half turned her head. “Why would I want to do that?”

  Qiaan shrugged. “To see if she survives the Guard.”

  Xaforn’s braid snapped like a whip as she turned. “It wasn’t Guard did that to it!”

  “To her,” Qiaan said. “And if they hadn’t you would never have interfered. I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Witch,” muttered Xaforn.

  “Bruiser,” came floating back, just as Qiaan passed out of sight.

  Xaforn turned away. She tried to scowl, but however hard she schooled her features her mouth kept on coming up into a twisted little grin instead. Of all the people …

  But she had an awful feeling that she could not resist going to see the cat. She. That pathetic little bundle of ragged fur, bloodied and weak and barely flickering with life. How did Qiaan know it was a female?

  Four

  Xaforn shared a dormitory room with three other Guard foundlings. She had a utilitarian relationship with her roommates—she did not have anything much in common with any of them. She had both given and received bruises from sparring sessions with all of them, but they shared the space amicably even if Xaforn didn’t join in with the giggles and the compound gossip the other three girls were prone to. The single Guard members were given to transient and shifting flings with others in their cadre, and Xaforn’s roommates always seemed to know who was attached to whom any given week. Xaforn did not particularly care to know, and had developed a habit of generally tuning out specific conversations, those spiced with heavy doses of titters and whispers. But gossip was also a mine of information about the general day-to-day lives in the compound and Xaforn did not dismiss everything that found its way into her room through her chatty bunkmates.

  She was sitting on her bed fixing a broken sandal barely a week after the incident with the kitten when a comment involving ‘cats’ found its way past her defenses, and she lifted her head fractionally, starting to listen without giving the least impression that her attention was suddenly on things other than the half-comp
leted repair job in her lap.

  “… adorable,” one of the girls was saying. “It must be only a few weeks old, and it must have suffered something terrible, there are still marks on it where it had been tortured.”

  “Where did Qiaan get hold of it?” asked another.

  “She won’t say, she says nothing of where she found it or how she got it,” the first one said. “But I think it’s going to make it. She still feeds it four, five times a day; it suckles on her finger like a baby, An told me.”

  So. The kitten lived. Xaforn bent over her sandal, obscurely pleased at the news. She made a mental note to keep an ear open for news of it—of her—her lips quirked again, remembering Qiaan’s quiet insistence on that point. She toyed briefly, as she had done a number of times already in the past week, with the idea of visiting the cat—the cat, not Qiaan—and then dismissed it, as she always did, staunchly resisting the impulse. There was nothing for her in the inner compound, with its teeming children, its squabbling women, its families, its cats.

  She muttered a soft curse under her breath. The kitten’s tiny, vulnerable face, the delicate suckling on Qiaan’s finger, the scrabbling little wounded paws … Xaforn jabbed a repair hook too deeply into the rope sole of her broken sandal, annoyed at the kitten’s insistent hold on her mind’s eye. She had interfered because two of the torturers had been Guard, damn it all, not because she was a bleeding heart for waifs and strays. She didn’t care what happened to it, after. She didn’t. She could swear she didn’t. She was glad the little thing had clung to life, but she’d tried to dismiss the creature from her orbit and she had every intention of forgetting about it. Especially now that she knew it had survived.

  But the cat incident seemed intent on coming back to haunt her. The day after she had overheard the conversation about the kitten’s well-being, Xaforn was summoned into her cadre leader’s presence.