The Leopard (Marakand) by K.V. Johansen Page B

Catairanach’s word and his own failure to deny it, a city merchant’s hireling, that was all he was . . . and everything he had said was true but hurt threefold because it was unjust. She wasn’t a bard; she hadn’t taken on the pretence to claim undue honours but as a shield for the road. She looked back and the assassin was in the garden, watching her, arms folded, with the naked sword tucked in against his body, the hilt against his cheek.
    A bare-legged peasant come in muddy from the struggle for his daily meal. The hem of his tunic was ragged, and the sun was gold in his hair. She blinked and swallowed and looked away, straightened her shoulders. He didn’t look someone to creep up walls and murder fat old merchant-lords in their beds on behalf of impatient nephews.
    He looked some king’s champion, awaiting the summons to enter the circle, with the judgement of the Old Great Gods to prove in the outcome of battle, and his own death waiting.
    Deyandara hardly noticed the height of the cliff, the waves that crashed and the flying spray. Her hands were shaking as she knelt to Badger’s greeting and rested her head on the dog’s shoulder, blinking. She shouldn’t be ashamed that the assassin was right and she was no bard, for all she could sing, and play the komuz and the harp. She knew she would never be one; she loved the music, but the long years of study, the secret alphabet of the trees, the true histories that lay behind the songs, the long, so long chants of the kings—she didn’t have the mind for it. Like her mother, shallow and inconstant. She had tried to learn all that Yselly was willing to teach, being no true apprentice and so cut off from many secrets, but Yselly must have known, too, that she was fit to be a tramp-singer, nothing more. A princess could be nothing so commonplace, not if her brother knew. All she really wanted was a dog and a horse and place by the fire, the feel of the strings beneath her fingers, her voice rising.
    “Come on,” she told Badger, freeing Cricket from the thorn bush. “They’re waiting for us at the tavern.”
    In the rough-cobbled yard under the grape arbours by the smith’s house, all the tavern the village offered, the story of the last queen of the land before the ships came from Nabban fled her, came out ragged and stiff and lifeless. She hurried it to its end for her restless hosts, put away her komuz for the drum, and gave them the old comic tale of the fox-demon and the shepherd’s daughter instead. A clown’s wedding.
    Ahjvar sat on the garden wall, watching the sea.
    Ghu vaulted over to sit cross-legged at his feet. “You weren’t very kind,” he pointed out, leaning back, head against Ahjvar’s leg.
    “She was too full of her own worth, unearned.”
    “You don’t know what she may have earned.”
    Ahjvar shrugged. “I don’t like red-haired girls, and that child was over-stuffed with her own importance. Let her go away and think about whether she’s to be a bard or her brother’s sister.”
    “She never mentioned it till you did.”
    “It was in every word she spoke and every glance down her little upturned nose.”
    “If you hadn’t left her standing, she wouldn’t have had to look down on you.”
    “She’s not old enough to have earned those ribbons she wears. And I didn’t like her face.”
    “I thought it was her hair. And it was a rather pretty face.”
    “I don’t think there’ve been any marriages between the royal lines of the Duina Catairna and the Duina Andara. Though there was some rumour about a Catairnan bard, that wild brother of the queen of the Duina Catairna . . . I don’t know. The king’s wife of the Duina Andara was sent back to her own people after her last child, this girl, was born.” Ahjvar’s mouth twisted. “It almost caused a war with the Duina Lellandi, I think.”
    “But that there was once rumour of a bard of the royal Catairnans doesn’t make the lady his daughter, even if she does have