The Brazen Gambit (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 1)

"Are you Pavek's friend now?"

"You should've told us, Pavek," Ruari said through clenched teeth and looking at Pavek, not Zvain. "Once you knew we were safe in-" He blinked and cocked his head; Telhami had worked her mind-bending spellcraft on him, too, leaving that gray hole in his memory where the name of that safety should lie.

"Safe?-Where?" Zvain asked, looking from Ruari to him. "Where've you been. You weren't in Urik. I know. I looked everywhere."

"Once we were safe at home," Ruari finished. The interruption gave Pavek a necessary half-moment to think. "Where have you been?" He looked down into the open, trusting face, which blinked once and returned to the wariness he remembered. "Not here. No one's been in this room since I left. And you've changed, Zvain-"

Ruari seized his shirt again. "Of course the boy's changed! You left him. He couldn't live here, not alone. You should rejoice that he survived and that he doesn't hate you for abandoning him. You should swear that you won't leave him behind ever again. -Ever!"

Pavek supposed Ruari was right, supposed he should swear the very oath Ruari was suggesting. He wanted to. Zvain's face was guileless again, offering him a new beginning, if he'd take it. And he wanted to take it. Wanted to believe the boyish candor.

Akashia. For the first time since Zvain had entered the room, he looked to the far side of the room where he'd last seen Akashia staring blank-eyed and listless.

But no longer.

She was crouched on the bed, flattened against the dirt wall, her mouth working silently, while her hands wrung the linen sheet that trailed down in front of her. Yohan and Ruari leapt past him to her assistance.

"What's wrong with her?" Zvain asked, and pressed tighter still against Pavek, forcing him to stand there, helpless. "Has she been eating Laq?"

It was a possibility Pavek hadn't considered. Escrissar was capable of feeding her poison with the meals that kept her strength up for his interrogations. But Laq was a poison that some people-Zvain's father among them-ate willingly until it killed them. Kashi would starve in the condition she was in, and he could see, as her mouth moved, that her tongue wasn't black.

"No," he answered Zvain distractedly, "but bad things have happened to her-"

"She's not a Laq-seller, is she?" The boy's voice shook ever-so-slightly.

Pavek glanced down into eyes wide with contained fear, and suddenly, his ingratiating affection no longer seemed inexplicable: the boy didn't want to be left behind again. He'd turn himself inside-out to avoid that happening again.

Even the unchanged emptiness of the bolt-hole itself could be explained, along with Zvain's appearance this morning. There were, after all, other families living in the catacombs, families that had known Zvain's family and might have been willing to take him in.

"Is she?" Zvain repeated. "Is she someone you're trying to rescue?"

"In a way." Pavek found the tension sliding down his spine, found he could ruffle Zvain's hair and squeeze the narrow shoulders with a smile on his face-a sincere smile, not a templar's sneer that set the scar throbbing. "She's a friend-"

Keeping his arm around the boy's shoulders, he guided Zvain toward the bed where Yohan and Ruari had gotten Akashia calmed and sitting again. It seemed understandable to Pavek that, after what she'd been through among strangers, any strange face could push her to the edge of hysteria, but once she saw Zvain, learned to recognize him for the youth he was, he thought she'd be able to see him as a friend. She seemed to have ample patience for Ruari.

But before they reached her, Akashia's eyes locked onto Zvain's face, and she began to scream. Zvain shrugged free of Pavek's arm and got behind him instead, where Akashia couldn't see him.

"It is Laq! It is!" he shouted into the din. "She's

seeing things that aren't there-just like my father did when the light was in his eyes!"

Things that aren't there. Perhaps Zvain was right. Perhaps it wasn't the boy at all. Sunlight beamed through the isinglass in the ceiling and struck the bed like so many arrows, and Zvain was an appealing youth with a warm smile when he chose to use it.

"You should cover her eyes 'til she gets better," Zvain said with the confidence born of experience. "That's what we did with my father, when we could, until he couldn't see us at all."

And he proceeded to tear at the hem of his own shirt, a generous gesture Pavek interrupted by wrapping him in a hug. But the notion itself was sound, and he told Yohan: "Try it. The boy knows what he's talking about, and I wouldn't put it past Escrissar to put Laq in the food he fed her."

The idea momentarily overwhelmed Yohan, whose face froze in a raging grimace, while his arms shook. Ruari, however, closed Akashia's eyes with his hands. At first that made her more frantic, then slowly, as Ruari whispered softly into her ear, she relaxed, though tears seeped between the half-elfs fingers. He lowered his hands, and sheltered her face against his shirt. Her arm worked its way across his back, holding on to him as she sobbed his name repeatedly.

Zvain went to work on his shirt-seams again. "We've got to keep the light from her eyes," he insisted. "It's the light that makes her see things."

Yohan had recovered. "We can use this," he said, tearing off a strip from the linen bedding.

"No!" Zvain lunged forward and pulled the cloth from the dwarf's hands. "It's dirty! Filthy! Let me rinse it out."

And Pavek, suddenly remembering the slops bucket Zvain had once emptied on that linen, was inclined to agree. The boy darted past him and carried the linen out of the room- once again the clever, impulsive, and willful boy Pavek had remembered.

He sheathed the sword he'd been holding all this time. Yohan, who had dropped his obsidian knife when Akashia first screamed, retrieved it as well.