of your reticence when it comes to speaking of her!”
“She as good as raised me from a sprog,” Alcibiades finally said, though he spoke as though the words were being dragged from him by torturer’s hooks. “After my parents were carried off, what with one thing or another.”
“Carried off by one thing or another?” I asked. “Were they eaten by mountain birds?”
Alcibiades gave me a filthy look. Perhaps my excitement over discovering Yana had caused me to overstep my bounds, and I attempted to look appropriately apologetic. “My mother had bad lungs,” Alcibiades ground out at last, “and my father had a wound from a threshing accident that he never quite got over. After that it was just Yana to look after my brothers and sisters and me. We never did quite figure out what country she hailed from, but my mother had her in to help with the twins when they were born, and she never left.”
“How ghastly!” I said, imagining Alcibiades as a chubby young man crouched in a hovel with an army of brothers and sisters around him, all clamoring for food. It was very clear the lady was foreign from the way she wrote, but possibly he hadn’t also noticed that she’d taken leave of her senses. “I didn’t know you were a farmer.”
Alcibiades looked at me sharply. “Didn’t say I was.”
“Well, I assumed,” I clarified. “From the accident with the thresher.”
“That was my father,” Alcibiades said. “I’ve been a soldier since I was old enough to leave home, and I haven’t looked back.”
“Ah, of course,” I said. “That explains a great deal.”
Alcibiades gave me another dirty look. “Not every one of us can be raised like th’Esar’s little lapdog,” he said, a bit more unkindly than he ought. After all, I’d presumed that we were only having a bit of fun.
“I am sorry about your parents,” I managed, very generously. Perhaps that would placate him. “Here, would you like your letter back?”
I held it out to him, as a peace offering between us. After a moment of staring warily at my hand, he snatched it back. I noticed, with a touch of affection, that he smoothed out one of the crumpled edges when he thought I wasn’t looking.
“Well, that was fun,” I continued, when he showed no signs of replying. “We ought to do that more often. Have you told our dear Yana about me yet? I am, after all, a significant part of your life here during the Important Diplomatic Mission.”
“I’ve told her I’m being driven insane by a tiny madman named Caius Greylace,” Alcibiades replied.
That would have to suffice. “I do hope she approves of me,” I said helpfully. Alcibiades merely shook his head and sighed, as though he were afflicted by some incurable disease.
That was when the Ke-Han guards burst into our room.
Alcibiades, ever the soldier, nearly killed one with his chair, and there was a great deal of shouting from all parties in their respective languages, and pointing, and more chair brandishing, while I stood behind Alcibiades and offered words of encouragement and tried to decipher what the guards were saying, before we were able to determine what was going on. My ability to speak their language was shaky at best, and with all of them yelling at once it was impossible to understand half of what they were saying.
Thankfully, Lord Temur arrived to sort things out. He did so in an extremely dashing manner, stepping into the room with one hand held up palm forward, and roaring a command loud enough to make the sliding doors shake in their grooves.
The guards stopped shouting. Alcibiades almost put the chair down, but then thought the better of it. I remained where I was, although I waved to Lord Temur over Alcibiades’ shoulder.
“Now,” Lord Temur said. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“We’re being attacked, that’s what the trouble is!” Alcibiades growled.
“Well, that is,” I explained, translating from Alcibiades into more common speech—the sort that human beings employed when successfully communicating with one another—“we were having a bit of a romp, you see, and then all of a sudden there were guards everywhere, can you imagine?”
Lord Temur paused to make a careful assessment of the situation. His eyes flicked over the room, surveying the ink spot on the wall and the shattered inkwell beneath it, the overturned chairs, the desk perched on the stool and the sleeping mat barricade by the door separating Alcibiades’ room from mine. At length, he turned to one of