“Did my father . . . did he hire you to kill me?” She needed to know.
His eyes were hard stones. His jaw quivered with the chills and suppressed emotion. “Yes.”
Maia closed her eyes, feeling weariness and pain. “I thought so.”
“Only if you were caught. If you were abducted by the Dahomeyjans or the Dochte Mandar, I was ordered to kill you lest you fall into their hands and be used against him.”
She opened her eyes again, feeling the sweet temptation of sleep. She rubbed her forearms with her chin. “Thank you for answering truthfully.”
“I have told you before, Maia. I do not deserve your pity. I still have no qualms about killing you if the need arises.”
“I imagine one cannot be a kishion if one has too many qualms,” she said. She looked him firmly in the eye. “There may come a day when you are called upon to fulfill your duty.” She paused. “Perhaps I will even be the one who asks you to do it.”
He looked at her with confusion.
She stared down into the fire and began stroking Argus’s head. “Something happened to me at the lost abbey. Something I had not expected. Do you remember when I came out of the tunnels? You were fighting off the wolves.”
“I remember,” he said.
“One of the soldiers tried to strangle me and I unloosed the magic of the kystrel. I fell unconscious. I do not know how long it lasted, but I fear it was quite a while. When I awoke, you were watching over me and had already tended your wounds.” She stared at the fire. “When I am asleep . . . I am not myself. Am I?”
The fire crackled and snapped, sending off a plume of fiery sparks.
He was quiet for several moments, though he still shivered fitfully. Finally, his words came out as a whisper. “It is at night when I fear you the most.”
“Why is that?” she asked, continuing to stroke the boarhound.
He was cautious in his answer. “I have seen you rise in your sleep. Your eyes are open, but you do not respond to anyone. At first I thought you were sleepwalking, but it is different. You mumble in your sleep in many languages. Mostly gibberish to me. You walk the camp, gazing around as if everything is strange to you. Even your walk is different. You examine your arms as if they are not yours. You stare at the sky and smile . . . in a dangerous way. The Dochte Mandar teach that we, each of us, is reborn from a past life. Seems to be some color of truth in that when I see the changes that come over you at night. In truth, you frighten me more than the Fear Liath.”
The sleepiness fled from Maia’s eyes. She knew about the Dochte Mandar’s preoccupation with past lives. She had read about it in their tomes. They believed souls were endlessly born and reborn. A king in the past could become a peasant in the future. But more interesting, at least to her, was the fact that their doctrine was a corruption of the legends of the Myriad Ones—spirit creatures who so longed for a body, they would take any form they could get, even an animal’s. She rested her cheek against her arm again and said nothing more to the man her father had sent to kill her.
The mountains were vast and endless. Had Maia not been so utterly exhausted, she would have relished the climbing and descents. Jon Tayt had pointed out to her the vast variety of plant life and vegetation that existed on the high mountain trail. There were occasional majestic waterfalls that poured never-ending cascades down jagged bluffs. The trees were dark green and towering, but they could not overtake the size and stone of the peaks.
Maia and Jon Tayt helped the kishion walk, each of them taking one of his arms around their necks to bolster him up. When he grew too weary or sick to walk, they dragged him. His skin was flushed with fever, the wounds oozed putrid smells, and ghastly coloring showed how much his body was ravaged by his injuries.