Read Online The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay - Free Book Online Page B

father as well, on nights when Ishak would be preparing to rush outside to a patient’s summons without properly clothing himself against rain or wind, or without finishing his meal, or when he drove himself too hard, reading late into the night by candlelight.
    She was doing a little bit more than staying up too late, and the frightened concern in Velaz’s voice was going to erode her confidence if she let him go on. Besides which, she had a more difficult confrontation waiting at home.
    â€œThis has nothing to do with us,” Velaz was saying urgently, in step with her and not behind, which was completely uncharacteristic, the surest sign of his agitation. “Except if they find a way to blame the Kindath for it, which I wouldn’t be surprised if—”
    â€œVelaz. Enough. Please. We are more than Kindath. We are people who live in Fezana, and have for many years. This is our home. We pay taxes, we pay our share of the filthy parias to Valledo, we shelter from danger behind these walls, and we suffer with others if Cartada’s hand—or any other hand—falls too heavily on this city. What happened here today does matter to us.”
    â€œWe will suffer no matter what they do to each other, Jehane.” He was as stubborn as she was and, after years with Ishak, as versed in argument. His normally mild blue eyes were intense. “This is Asharite killing Asharite. Why let it throw our own lives into chaos? Think what you are doing to those who love you. Think—”
    Again she had to interrupt. He sounded too much like her mother for comfort now. “Don’t exaggerate,” she said, though he wasn’t, actually. “I am a physician. I am going to look for work outside the city. To expand my knowledge. To make a name. My father did that for years and years, riding with the khalif’s armies some seasons, signing contracts at different courts after Silvenes fell. That’s how he ended up in Cartada. You know that. You were with him.”
    â€œAnd I know what happened there,” Velaz shot back.
    Jehane stopped dead in the street. Someone running behind them almost crashed into her. It was a woman, Jehane saw, her face blank, a mask, as at the spring Processional. But this was a real face, and what lay behind the appearance of a mask was horror.
    Velaz was forced to stop as well. He looked at her, his expression angry and afraid. A small man, and not young; nearly sixty years of age now, Jehane knew. He had been with her parents for a long time before her own birth. A Waleskan slave, bought as a young man in the market at Lonza; freed after ten years, which was the Kindath practice.
    He could have gone anywhere then. Fluent in five languages after the years abroad with Ishak in Batiara and Ferrieres, and at the khalifs’ courts in Silvenes itself, trained flawlessly as a physician’s aide, more knowledgeable than most doctors were. Discreet, fiercely intelligent, Velaz would have had opportunities all over the peninsula or beyond the mountains east. The Al-Fontina of the khalifs, in those days, had been largely staffed and run by former slaves from the north, few of them as clever or versed in nuances of diplomacy as Velaz had been after ten years with Ishak ben Yonannon.
    Such a course seemed never even to have been contemplated. Perhaps he lacked ambition, perhaps he was simply happy. He had converted to the Kindath faith immediately after being freed. Had willingly shouldered the difficult weight of their history. He prayed after that to the white and blue moons—the two sisters of the god—rather than invoking the images of Jad from his boyhood in Waleska or the stars of Ashar painted on the domed temple ceilings of Al-Rassan.
    He had stayed with Ishak and Eliane and their small child from that day until this one, and if anyone in the world besides her parents truly loved her, Jehane knew it was this man.
    Which made it harder to look at