Curt Benjamin [Seven Brothers The Prince of Shadow (retail) (

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.She looked into his eyes with that hawklike gaze.Then, as if the sun had touched her, she seemed to open up in front of him, her eyes wide with sudden insight, a tiny sigh escaping her lips before she clamped them closed again, lest she say something out loud that should not be spoken at all.“I have to find my brothers,” Llesho said tentatively.Kwan-ti nodded.“So he said to me on his deathbed.”“So he said to me in a dream beneath the bay,” he agreed.“You cannot go back to the oyster beds now.”“What am I to do?” he asked; this conversation with the healer felt more like a dream than the one he had with the spirit under the bay.Something about Kwan-ti’s eyes, the gentle touch of her fingers on the back of his hand, slowed time to a walk.“For the present, you must consider what you can do that will not kill your soul in the doing,” she answered, and the spell was broken.She rose and spoke to someone behind Llesho in the longhouse.“Are you feeling ill, Tsu-tan?”“Not at all.” The hopeful witch-finder bowed his head over the pearl basket he carried.“I just came to see how the young diver was faring.Shen-shu will want him back on the boat tomorrow.”“Then Shen-shu can speak to me tomorrow.Now, we must permit young Llesho to rest.”“Of course, of course,” Tsu-tan bowed and scraped his way out of the longhouse.He returned to his place beneath the coconut palm and took up again the pearl sorting basket never long out of his hands.He could see all the comings and goings of the longhouse from there, Kwan-ti knew, as she also knew he was watching her for evidence of witchcraft.She feared that Tsu-tan would now turn his attention on the young Llesho as well.For himself, Llesho felt no inclination to rest.He had not regained his full strength, but he felt well enough to take a walk on the shore and watch for the red harvest boats to come in from the bay.So he left the longhouse while Kwan-ti was occupied in bandaging the cut foot of the cook’s assistant, and wandered out past the cookhouse, onto the road.Few slaves traveled the road at midday, but those he passed had heard about Llesho’s double tragedy, the loss of Lleck and his own near drowning, and did not interrupt his brooding with idle conversation.Llesho had not quite told the truth about Lleck who, as minister of arts and education, was more a servant of the Thebin people than to the family of the king.Lleck had found him in captivity and joined him there, had taught the young prince not only reading and writing, but the arts of strategy that had come too late to save a king.As he walked, Llesho made good use of those lessons, setting evidence against probability, and examining methods to reach his goal.If the apparition had been a dream concocted by his own starved mind, how had he known the minister had died? And if it was a dream, how could he explain the same message delivered to Kwan-ti? It must be true then: his brothers still lived, in servitude as he did himself.Llesho had to rescue them and together the brothers must free Thebin from the killing grasp of the Harn.If their mother still lived, languishing in the dungeons of her own palace—The thought stuttered out.Llesho could not imagine his beautiful mother reduced to squalor and filth, but the image of his battered sister bleeding into the refuse heap struck him to the heart.He hadn’t wanted her dead, not really, he’d just wanted his mother back.By the time Ping had turned two, however, the little princess had adored him.He couldn’t help but love her back.Couldn’t—wouldn’t—imagine her dead.Since he had arrived on Pearl Island, he had been no farther from the slave compound than the oyster beds.There were no days off for good behavior, no visits to market or the city for a play or pageant.Once he had hated the duties that lined him up, smallest of seven brothers, to wave, nod, and bow at the side of his mother and father.He had longed for the day he was old enough to follow his brothers into the city for stolen pleasure in the night.That had all ended before Llesho even knew what pleasures his brothers found in the city.So why had Lleck come looking for the youngest and weakest, who was stuck on an island nobody ever got off of? Why hadn’t he found one of Llesho’s older brothers, who could actually do something about his deathbed revelation?Trying to figure out Lleck’s reasons wasn’t helping him decide what to do.Llesho had walked all the way to the docks without even seeing the road he trod upon, but had only confirmed the impossibility of ever completing the spirit’s quest.Who left the island, ever? Lord Chin-shi, of course, and his wife and daughters.Lord Chin-shi’s son had not been seen on the island since before Llesho had arrived.The foremen, Kon of first quarter and Shen-shu of second quarter, sometimes accompanied their master to the slave markets to acquire new pearl fishers.But Shen-shu was the older of the two, and he was scarcely thirty.Neither was likely to give up their privileged position any time soon.Pearl fishers never left the island, not living or dead.If they died of disease, they were cremated immediately to curtail the spread of infection.Rumor had it they did not always wait for death before feeding the fire with the struggling remains.When they drowned, or grew too old to work at all, they were fed to the pigs.Kwan-ti had been right, though, he could not go back to the oyster beds.His lungs were fine, he could survive underwater as long as he ever could.But if he were visited by a vision again, he would surely drown while he argued with the demon who accosted him.He needed a second skill, one that would keep him out of the pig trough and get him off the island.While he sat on the dock, thinking, the sun had dropped low, and he heard the taunting challenges of the pearl fishers returning home from the quarter-shift [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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