Shadowplay

Qi

"Nira, isn't it?" a scratchy voice asked.

Startled, Qi

"It's me, Losa. I thought that was you when I saw you across the room. And is this your little brother?"

Pigeon was looking at the old woman with mistrust, his usual expression with strangers. "Yes, his name is Nonem."

"Ah, lovely. I didn't mean to bother you, child, I was just…"

At that moment, just to add to the madcap air of sudden festivity, Yazi approached, followed by a young girl in a very fine dress-the kind of dress the laundrywomen only saw when they were called upon to clean things from the upper apartments of the citadel.

"Nira, I just…" Yazi saw the old woman. "Losa! What are you doing here?"

The woman smiled, then quickly pulled her lips together to hide her ru¬ined teeth. "Oh, I couldn't get out the gate to get home. All kinds of sol¬diers coming in, and such a fuss! Wagons, oxen, people shouting. Someone said they were Sessians hired by the lord protector. I thought I'd ask if I could stay here."

"We'll talk to the dormitory mistress," said Yazi, "but I'm sure she wouldn't mind." At any ordinary time Yazi would have pressed the old woman for details and it would have been the subject of the evening's con¬versation all over the dormitory, but now something even more exciting was clearly pressing on her. "Nira, there's someone here to see you."

Qi

"Yes?"

"I am to take you to my mistress," the girl said. "You are… Nira?"

Qi

"She will tell you herself. Come with me, please." Beneath the formal ma

"Oh, that is too bad," old Losa said. "I was looking forward to a chat."

"You'd better go," Yazi told Qi

you, in case he has trouble making himself understood when he proposes to you?"

"Stop, Yazi." Qi

"She is to come alone," said the girl in the blue dress.

"But what about… my brother?" Qi

"I'll watch him," Yazi said. "We'll have fun, won't we, Nonem?"

Pigeon liked Yazi, but he clearly didn't like the idea of letting Qi

She felt in the pocket of her smock for Pigeon's carving knife and held it tightly as they walked back across the tiled immensity of the Echoing Mall.

"Who is your… mistress?" she asked the girl again.

"She will tell you what she wishes to tell you," the little girl in the blue dress said, and would say no more.

"I am not happy," said her father. Pelaya knew it was the truth. Count Perivos was not the sort of man who liked surprises, and all this had obvi¬ously come as just that. "Bad enough that a foreign prisoner should bribe my daughter to send messages to me when I already have so much else to worry on-using her as a… a go-between. But to find he also expects her to arrange some sort of assignation for him…!"

"It's not an assignation and he didn't bribe me." Pelaya stroked his sleeve. The cuff needed mending, which made her heart ache a little-he worked so hard! "Please, Babba, don't be difficult. Was there anything bad in his let¬ter to you?"

Her father raised his eyebrow. "Babba? I haven't heard that since the last time you wanted something. No, his thoughts are at least interesting, per¬haps useful, and all he asks in return is any news I can give him about his home or his family. There's nothing wrong with the letter, except that he knows too much. How could a foreign prisoner have so much to say about our castle defenses?"

"He told mo he fought here twenty years ago against the Tuan pirates. That lie wis a guest of the Temple Council."

"I remember those days, but he remembers where every tower stairway is and how many steps it has, I swear! He must have a memory like a man-tisery library." Count Perivos frowned. "Still, some of his warnings and sug¬gestions show wisdom, and I am willing to believe he meant them in good faith. But what is this madness about a serving girl?"

"I don't know, Babba. He said she reminded him of someone." Pelaya spotted her servant coming across the garden with the dark-haired girl walking slowly behind her. "Look-here they come now."

"Madness," her father said, but sighed as if weak protest were all he was allowed.

Seeing the laundry maid up close, Pelaya was both relieved and confused. Relieved, without quite understanding why, to see that this girl was only a year or two older than she was, and that while she was by no means ugly, she was not astoundingly pretty, either. But something else about this laun¬dry servant put her on edge, although Pelaya could not say what it was- something in the quality of the girl's watchfulness, in the cool and measured way she looked around the torchlit garden, was not what the stewards daughter expected from someone who spent every day up to her elbows in the citadel's washing tubs.

Now the girl turned that dark-eyed gaze onto Pelaya and her father, ex¬amining them as carefully as she had the surroundings, which was strange in itself: should she not have been looking first at the nobles who had sum¬moned her? Pelaya found the inspection a little u

"Your name is Nira, is it not?" she asked the girl. "Someone wants to meet you. Do you understand me?"

The girl nodded. "Yes, Nira. Understand." Either she had not been in Hierosol long or she was far more stupid than she looked, because her ac¬cent was barbarous.

Not for the first time that day, Pelaya wondered what she had stumbled into. A simple friendship had become something larger and much less com¬fortable. She was reassured that her father and his bodyguard were here to ensure that nothing was passed between the prisoner and this servant girl and that no tricks were attempted.

Now Perivos stepped forward. He spent a moment examining the girl Nira as thoroughly as she herself had inspected everything and everyone else. "So this is her?"

"Yes, Father."

"I wish Olin Eddon would hasten himself. I have better things to do…"

"Yes, Father. I know." She took a breath. "Please, be kind to him."

He turned on her with a look of surprise and a