The Prince of Shadow by Benjamin Curt

Author:Benjamin Curt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy - Epic, Epic, Magic, Llesho, Fantasy, Fantasy fiction, Fiction - Fantasy, Fiction, Imaginary places, Fantasy - Series, Prince (Fictitious character), General
ISBN: 9780756400545
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2009-12-16T08:00:00+00:00

C HAPTER N INETEEN

UNTIL their flight from the governor’s compound at Farshore, Llesho had never seen a mountain or a forest. There had been the tangle of sand-loving trees and vines that crowned the hill at the center of Pearl Island, of course, and Llesho had once thought of that as a jungle or wood. But nothing had prepared him for the cycle of life and death played out in tones of black and gray in the night forest. Vaguely, through the fever that radiated from the arrowhead lodged in his chest, Llesho remembered that he’d once thought the forest must be silent at night, not this rackety clatter of birds calling and monkeys chittering and a thousand different kinds of insects chirping to each other with the clicking of their wings.

The sounds at a distance were a comfort. Those same creatures had fallen silent where they passed; that they resumed their nightly concert meant Master Markko’s soldiers were not following yet, would not be looking for them until morning when his patrol did not return.

But the skulking hiss of predators keeping pace with their party over the leaf fall on the floor of the forest, and slinking from tree to tree overhead, raised the hackles of Llesho’s neck. He sweated hot and cold by turns, fear and the oppressive heat of the forest confusing his damaged body. The creatures knew by smell that he was weak and waited only for his companions to let down their guard, and then the jaws of some huge cat or flying monster would seize him. Llesho could feel the prickle of anticipation in his legs, his shoulders, his neck. His flesh seemed to reach for the tooth and the beak in the eager rise of the hairs on his body.

As his fever rose, the sounds blurred, changed, and he heard skirts brushing through the grass, the cough and wheeze of old men driven beyond their strength. In Llesho’s mind, the wail of a predator celebrating its kill mingled with the death cry of its prey, and he heard it as the curses of the guards and the death of another child strangled for its misery on the Long March. A keening wail for his mother and his father, dead and lost to him forever, started in the back of his throat. He wanted his brothers to hold him and tell him it was a bad dream, but no one came. He pressed onward through the night, through the pain and the numbness that was creeping across his shoulder and down his arm, and through the terrible, terrible grief of a seven-year-old child with the blood of his first murder still on his hands.

He knew he must not let his screams out, that if he started screaming the guards would come and they would stop him with their huge hands wrapped around his throat, and his eyes would bug out, and his tongue would turn purple, and they would throw him by the wayside

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