He made a face, as if he could barely interpret the words emerging from her mouth. “Why?”

“Because you’re Avat Havec anKebbal. Being the living housing for that thing is considered a noble calling. You’re the last, secret disciple of a man loved far and wide, whatever he may have been in the privacy of his home.” A thought struck her, and she said more to herself, “It would have caused a panic when they found him dead. No one outside that house knew he had an heir for his Legacy, it had been years since there was a student in his school. I wonder…” She stuffed a last handful of dried cranberries into her mouth and chewed them thoughtfully.

“What?”

“Oh, if they haven’t already realized you must exist. The moment they discovered him dead, the Beztliathe would have been scrying frantically, trying to figure out where Kebbal went. Trying to find some way to contain it again before it put the entire Empire at war. When they couldn’t locate it, they would have to have realized that either he had a candidate for his Legacy and just never told anyone—”

“Or a troupe of assassins invaded his home and killed him in order to steal it, knowing he was alone,” Havec interrupted, eyes narrowed in thought. It was a moment before his gaze refocused on her. “There’s some reason I’m not still the prime suspect?”

Qanath shrugged, feeling helpless in the face of his cynicism. “Because? Because he actually trained you and you can prove it? All the academies have different styles of fighting, people who know about that kind of thing would be able to confirm that you were Kebbal-trained. Anyway, I don’t pretend our society doesn’t have flaws, but secrets haven’t done you any favors, Havec. Isn’t it time to come out of the shadows and take a stand?”

He had nothing to say to that, and they didn’t speak again. They huddled together beneath their blanket, each of them curled around a hot rock. Qanath glanced at her companion only once before the exhaustion finally took her. It was hard to be certain in the spooky blue light of moon-on-snow, but she almost thought he was smiling as he drifted off.

A Perfect Bullseye

Havec woke at dawn with a neck so stiff he couldn’t straighten his head. The rock clutched to his belly still had some residual heat and he savored that for a minute while he twisted his head cautiously, trying to get blood back into his neck. Once he had it moving again, he set his rock aside regretfully.

Qanath had fallen into him while she slept, and he took her by the shoulders carefully in order to move her away. As he positioned her on the ground of their tiny dirt-floored hollow, he noticed the sharpness of her cheekbones beneath her skin. They hadn’t been nearly so pronounced when he met her. So that was great: she was losing weight. With Qanath, any weight lost was more than she could spare.

As he stepped into the snow, he recalled with a pang that he had told her Xar’s assessment of her looks. Qanath had loved him in spite of himself long before he understood how badly he needed a friend, and he had repaid her with pointless cruelty. What end did beauty serve? It was Qanath’s hard-won knowledge that had kept them alive through the night, not his pretty face.

Not that he was about to apologize for having a pretty face, not after yesterday. The memory of washing his makeup off just because some shepherd made fun of him returned to him, warming his chilly cheeks. It had been wrong to let these people’s judgments affect his actions or make him doubt himself. His father had thought he was good enough to follow in his footsteps, but if the rest of them didn’t, so be it. Qanath seemed convinced Tabbis who had never laid eyes on him would be inclined to assume the best. Hard to credit, but trusting Qanath had yet to lead him astray.

He hadn’t realized she was up, but heard her raised voice from somewhere off to his right: “I never envied men before.”

“Oh?” he called.

“Then I had to pee in the snow.”

This made him laugh. “Maybe this is why my people are so judging. Maybe it’s all down to climate.”

They reconvened at the boulder, where the girl gave him a puzzled frown.

“Oh, you know. Since I’m not man enough to be king…”

Her baffled gaze drifted onto his groin before she realized she was doing it and jerked her eyes away. She didn’t seem to understand what he meant, and after half a second’s cogitation, he realized he didn’t want her to. Hastily, he pointed out, “It doesn’t matter what these people think. We’re leaving, right?”

“Please,” she said fervently.

While she dug out the last of their food, Havec got the horses ready. In the length of twenty minutes, they were mounted again and heading south. He tried to steer them in an easterly direction, hoping to find that town they bypassed at the border. If Qanath thought her people would protect them, it was worth a try. And there was nothing but wilderness south and west; that was the route his mother’s agents took when they carried him out of the country, in order to avoid human eyes.

Once he finished eating the meager handful of crackers that was the last of their food, he asked, “What do Avatethura Masters do? Do I have to go around righting wrongs on Kebbal’s behalf?”

The girl shot him a surprised look. “I don’t think so. I think you just mostly have to be.”

“How can I be something I don’t even understand?” he demanded, torn between frustration and a swelling hope that everything she said was true. “If this is such a big deal, shouldn’t I have training or something?”

“What do you think you were doing the last six years?”

“Learning how to throw a punch?”

“Along with discipline, patience, fortitude, and probably a hundred other noble things. There’s a reason my people decided the Avatethura Masters ought to be warriors, not scholars or priests.”

They were silent for the length of several minutes while the day that had dawned brightly sunny began to grow overcast. Havec squinted up into the clouds massing overheard, noting their heaviness, a warning that they carried more snow. He had been unsure when first they started up into the mountains, but the longer this went on, the more certain he was that this weather was unusual at this time of year. As he thought it, a lone flake of snow drifted down and landed on his nose.

The girl had been thinking about something less troubling. “At some point, people will expect you to open a school. Even if you don’t want to go back to his house, the property is yours.”

“Of course I don’t want to go back!”

“Well, people are going to start sending you their children. You’ll want somewhere to put them, I would think.”

“People will send me their children?” he repeated incredulously.

“The prestige of being taught by you will mean a lot. It will help your students get ahead. People will compete for the privilege to learn at your feet.”

Havec stared into the pine forest, amazed. He had been aware that Xar’s big empty house had once been a school and had tried on many occasions to imagine the place fully populated. He had been picturing himself as one of the students, though, one face among many, fantasizing that he wasn’t so alone. That he hadn’t been singled out and had companions his own age. He had never once considered what it would be like to be the person who was master of what would be a bustling, chaotic household full of energetic young people. He was only just old enough to have graduated and couldn’t decide whether to be intrigued or alarmed.

“People will trust their children to me? Even though I can’t prove I didn’t murder my predecessor?”

“If you tell the authorities the truth, they will want to believe you.”

“And when they ask what we’re doing out here?”

“Havec.” He could tell she was scraping together her last reserves of patience. “Let me set this up for you. You, Havec anKebbal, contain within you, tethered to your flesh and bounded by your will, a being of primal power older than mortal life. You can only care for your supernatural tenant if you channel its desires along the best possible paths and treat it with respect. There will be times when pacifying the appalling force of nature you carry inside you means letting it have its way. It’s a price my people are happy to pay.”

“Huh.”

He could feel Qanath’s sidelong gaze on his face, wondering if he finally understood. Apparently she decided that he didn’t, because she added, “We shouldn’t have run after the attack, and no one’s going to care that you thought we might be blamed. But you had to come back here and learn the truth. No one’s going to question that.”

“I have to tell them my story.” He felt a sinking sensation in his gut.

“You don’t have to tell anyone you spent six years in an older man’s bed with your hair in curls,” she said bluntly. Havec turned to stare at her; she had never alluded to that so directly, not since they became friends. She caught the look but didn’t retreat. “What? You can tell people as much or as little as you want, but they’re going to be extremely curious how a foreigner became an Avatethura Master. People are going to ask how he found you. They’re going to assume the relationship was straightforward and amicable unless you choose to share. No one but me will ever know the truth if you want to keep it to yourself.”

“You said there would be an investigation. You said they would go through the house.”

She heaved a sigh. “I don’t know, Havec, maybe the politzqa who got called in found the jewelry and sexy clothes and guessed he had a lover. Maybe, when they hear about you, they’ll put two and two together. Anyone who gossips about you will do so quietly behind closed doors. Badmouthing an Avatethura Master makes you look like trash.”

They didn’t speak again as the morning wore on and the heavens drew closer, the snow coming heavier than ever and piling deep around their horses’ legs. Havec had only just caught a promising whiff of wood smoke when they got caught. The smell was there and gone again, and he drew rein, casting his eyes about fruitlessly. It was in that still moment when he heard the shouts.

He could just make out the forms of as many as a dozen mounted men on the slope of the valley they were climbing down into from the northwest. The men were coming in from a different angle, due north. He stared at them, struggling to make it make sense, baffled that his mother would send her entire search party out en masse instead of putting out hunters in pairs to look for their trail.

Then he took in the way the trees fell away from the men where they had begun to gallop down the rise, the narrow stripe of bald snow cutting across the valley’s center. The scene rearranged itself, transmuting from wilderness to countryside: those men were on a road he hadn’t realized was there. A broad, straight road that must lead from somewhere to somewhere. They had come this way because his mother had guessed where he was going and was trying to cut him off.

Shouting to Qanath, he surged forward, making for the road he couldn’t see but now knew was there. The girl balked, leaning back in the saddle in fear, but her horse had already figured out Havec was the one to follow and threw itself courageously into the snow. They fought forward, snow flying from their legs like sea spray. As the men off to their left hit the level valley floor and sped up, the two of them reached the hard surface of the road.

Turning their heads south, Havec leaned low on his horse’s neck and shouted encouragements in its ear. He was icily aware that the road beneath the snow was no Tabbaqeran highway, designed by the finest engineers in the world and regularly maintained: there would be ruts and potholes aplenty.

They were forced to slow as they climbed the hill at the southern face, their mounts thrusting themselves into deepening drifts. He could hear the shouts of the men behind them growing triumphant as the distance closed. His shoulders twitched as he recalled those Tabbi soldiers with their bows, and he couldn’t remember whether his people trained to shoot from horseback. He could practically feel the spear driving into his back and forced his horse to draw up slightly, putting the girl in the fore.