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 than 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, honourable. 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 timbre 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